Michael Dibdin - Dark Specter

“That supper just for you, honey, or should I fix a plate for your friend?”

“I’m OK,” said Russell quickly.

“He could use a little meat on his bones at that,” said the waitress, glancing at Pat’s skinny torso.

When she’d gone, Russell gave Pat a cold, hard look.

“You’re something else, you know that? We can’t even go to a fucking pizza house without you coming on like the most unforgettable person anyone’s ever met!”

Russ expected Pat to be crushed by this. Instead, he looked offended.

“Hey, what’s the problem? I’m hungry, OK?”

“I bet! You’ve been up all night slamming body with that ’ho you snared on the bus, right?”

Pat tried to speak, but Russell overrode him.

“You know the rules! No contact beyond what’s absolutely necessary. I took Andy to Kansas, we spoke maybe ten words to anyone the whole time we were out! But you? You meet some fresh nugs on the road, next thing you’re swapping spit in the middle of a crowded bus station! Then you take off in a cab together, and now she’s shacked up with you, right? Even the geeks at that dirtball motel are going to remember that!”

“Maintain, Russ,” Pat warned as the waitress approached with his Coke.

His patronizing tone was just about the last straw. The way he was talking, you’d think Russ was the one in danger of flipping out.

“I guess that scene at the bus station was maybe notso-hotso,” Pat resumed in a more conciliatory tone. “But you’re making way too big a deal of all this. Cindy doesn’t know a thing about me. My name, where I’m from, what I’m doing here-nothing.”

“Yeah, right! She only knows what you look like, when you arrived, where from, where you’ve been staying …”

Pat leaned across the table.

“Don’t be such a worrywart, Russ! We’re doing God’s will here. What can go wrong?”

Russell squirmed and looked away. The little shit had end-run him. Although he knew that the outcome was in God’s hands, Russell couldn’t help seeing the thing in human terms. They had a job to do, and his partner was acting like a flake. And one thing he’d learned from his previous two experiences was that you had to be able to depend absolutely on your partner. Because if he screwed up, it was your ass that was going to be in a sling. But he couldn’t admit that, and Pat knew he couldn’t, which is why he was sitting there giving him that slimy grin.

“I’ve been to the house,” Russell said shortly. “We go in tomorrow.”

That knocked some of the sass out of Pat.

“Tomorrow?”

He sounded shocked.

“No point in hanging around,” said Russell. “The sooner it’s done, the sooner we can get out of here.”

Pat nodded slowly two or three times.

“How many … How many are there?”

“No idea,” Russ replied brutally. “I didn’t see anyone home when I walked by. Maybe one, maybe a dozen. God will decide.”

He accompanied this final phrase with a telling glance.

“Sure,” said Pat. His voice was still unsteady. “Only I was expecting a little more time. I only just got here.”

The waitress came with Pat’s food. He sat there, picking at it idly. His appetite seemed to have deserted him.

“So where do we meet?” he asked.

Russell outlined times, routes and places. Then he went through it all again, and got Pat to repeat it back to him.

“There’s a discount clothing store one block north of the bus station,” he continued. “Go in there tomorrow morning and buy yourself a black suit, white shirt, dark necktie, pair of plain black shoes, nothing fancy. I’m handing you a hundred and fifty bucks under the table now.”

Pat reached down and took the roll of bills.

“What if it comes to more than that?” he asked.

“Then you bought the wrong outfit. We’re talking Dacron, Ohio, here. The cheap nerd look.”

“But what’s the deal?”

Russ gave him another of those looks. He was back in charge now.

“The deal is that you get to do what I say, when I say, and keep your mouth shut. OK?”

They went over the details once more, then Russell got up, leaving Pat to deal with his cooling pizza and soggy onion rings. He leaned back over the table.

“Oh, and this Cindy …”

“She’s history,” Pat said, a little too quickly. He had obviously been expecting the question for some time. But Russell knew better than to contest something he couldn’t control.

“Let’s hope she feels the same way about you,” he said.

Despite the implied threat, he had no serious doubts about this. The very fact that getting laid had acted like such a drug on Pat’s ego proved he was a wimp in the sack, Russ reckoned. Look at the way he dressed. The bigger the belt buckle, the smaller the dick.

Russell walked back up Peachtree, passing an old flatiron office block, the winos and addicts in the park, the chic strip with its convention hotels. The air was clammy and still. By this time tomorrow it would all be over. It’ll be all right, he told himself, just like the other two times. Neither of them had been a smooth ride either. The baby had been the worst. Russ thought he’d prepared himself for anything that might come up, but the idea he might have to do it to a baby had never entered his head.

Rick had seen him through that one. After what he’d seen and done in the war, to say nothing of his own uniquely challenging initiation, Rick had been able to talk him through the whole experience. The gooks were so different, he explained, you could learn to kill them easy. With specters it was a lot trickier, because they looked just like anyone else. You needed faith. That’s what the whole thing was about, a test of faith.

But it wasn’t until Dale Watson had failed that test that Russell realized just how lucky he’d been. In the end he’d done fine, put the gun to the kid’s head and pulled the trigger as sweet as if they were back in practice. Even that noise from the basement later, as they were leaving, hadn’t freaked him out. He’d been sure there was someone else in the house, but Rick kept real cool, told him to check downstairs, and sure enough it was just a piece of wood that had fallen off the furnace housing.

The next time out, he’d been in charge. That had been a whole lot tougher, but he’d still managed to justify Rick’s commendation after his initiation in Renton: “This guy is the real deal.” First of all they’d had to get there. Kansas City wasn’t as far as Atlanta, but it still meant days on buses. It wasn’t a question of the money. They could have taken a plane and stayed at the best hotel in town, but that would mean passing through the hands of endless service personnel, any of whom might remember them. It would mean presenting documents and credit cards, and ending up on a computer somewhere. It was safer to travel poor and anonymous, down in the uncharted, free-flowing depths where no one cared where you were coming from or what you were doing, or even whether the name you gave was your own.

The hotel Russell was staying at in Atlanta was far from being the best in town, and by midnight he began to wonder whether it might not have been better to take the slight risk involved, pay extra and get a good night’s sleep. Nothing too fancy, maybe a HoJo, something like that. He’d had a lot of trouble adjusting to the climate ever since he arrived, but so far he’d been able to dismiss this as a matter of no importance, a trivial local particularity like the way southerners spoke. Now it took its revenge.

The night was sticky, hot, damp and airless. In theory the hotel had air-conditioning, but all the unit in Russ’s room produced was a flimsy draft only slightly cooler than the air in the room itself. Being from the Northwest, Russ automatically opened the window. That was a big mistake. The whole room started throbbing with the noise of traffic on the interstate right below the hotel, while a syrupy influx of moisture-laden air instantly pushed the conditions from the uncomfortable to the unbearable. The electric fan did nothing but stir the miasma around.