Charlie Huston - My Dead Body

Sitting in the corner where they stuck me when the vehicles started rolling up the ramp, I remember something. I remember from the time I was on the Upper East a year ago, when I first came to the Cure house, I remember the parking garage just a few addresses west on the same block.

Lydia’s sense of what the Coalition will or will not shoot up on their own turf appears to be for shit.

I think about that some. Mostly I think about mastering the one-hand cigarette roll, but I think about a shoot-up some as well. There are just too many guns not to think about it a little. Still, the cigarette roll is pretty all consuming. The tobacco I keep spilling isn’t that big a deal, I just scoop it up and try again, but I’ve ripped a lot of papers trying to get this right. Those I’m running low on. Truthfully, it’s not a one-hand roll, it’s more a seven-finger roll. And after about ten shots at it I end up with something I can stick in my face and light on fire. It looks like a crooked Tootsie Roll more than a cigarette, but I can live with it.

I’m making do with that smoke when Predo comes over. He’s still in shirtsleeves, but he’s untucked his tie and gotten rid of the gloves. For now. I’m sure he could be ready to get back to work on my digits at a moment’s notice.

He takes a second to look at a phone one of his boys holds up for him, taps the screen a couple times, nods, and the guy with the phone and the enforcer who’s been watching me back off.

– We will be brief, Pitt.

I take a puff.

– Sure, I can see you have a set piece to coordinate here. Didn’t realize you’d gotten into the action movie business.

He’s not biting today.

– How do you know the young woman is in there?

– Digga’s man, Percy.

– He told you.

– He told me.

– Reliably?

– Dying words.

He ponders that one.

– Quote them.

– Best of my recall, he said they were in the Cure house. Said he sent them there and they sent word back they were inside.

He stops pondering, puts his eyes on me, focusing.

– They sent back word. To the Hood.

– What he said.

He stays on me.

It’s uncomfortable.

Those eyes of his, very old, staring out of that baby face, that skin kept taut and glowing by probably a pint a day. Those eyes have always been hard to meet. And with the years he’s had in the game, he’s seen about every tell any man’s lie can give. He’s sussed out most of my lies before they got past my lips. Half the lies I’ve told him, I got the idea to tell them from him in the first place. Because that’s what he wanted me to do. Sometimes when I talk to the man, I have to look at his fingers, to make sure I’m not wrapped around one of them. He plays me that well. Always has. Only way I’ve ever played him back is with a smart mouth and the truth. And they don’t stack up to much in the game he plays, not with the chips he’s piled on his side of the table.

Those old eyes. That young face. That blood.

Knowing. Knowing where the blood comes from that keeps him so fiddle fit, it does something. ‘Cause I scrabble out a living. I don’t turn down what comes to me on a plate, but it’s not offered too often. Mostly, I hustle or hunt for what I eat. It’s not raised in a cage for me. It’s not bred for me. It’s not slaughtered for me.

I kill for myself.

His eyes, they may or may not know if I’m lying, I just don’t fucking care anymore.

So I look right back into them, and let him play it how he wants.

He blinks. Which means fuckall. But he does it.

– I’d be interested in knowing through what channels that message was sent.

– Telephone.

– He told you that?

– He told me they picked up a phone when they were safe inside, called him, so he’d know.

– The girl, her unborn baby, and who?

– The baby daddy.

He turns, waves over the enforcer with the phone, takes it and looks at the screen again, taps, hands it back, looks at me.

– And they’ve not left?

I’m at the bottom of my skanky little smoke, the last drag burns my lips, but I take it anyway.

– You’re the one with the stakeout. You tell me.

He nods.

– Yes, but if they got in without our seeing.

– Yeah, sure, they might get out. But as far as I know? Inside.

His hands go in his pockets.

– And your interest in this?

I push myself off the concrete and stand.

– I know the girl’s dad. He asked me to find her.

– So you are a humanitarian.

– He offered me a shitload of money. Enough I thought I could maybe get off this rock and go find someplace new to hide.

He gives a little smile.

– New Jersey, perhaps.

I smile myself.

– Yeah, something like that.

He loses the smile.

– You can get inside?

– If your boys don’t shoot me first, I think maybe yeah.

His phone guy shows him the phone again.

– And you can get them out?

– Hell if I know.

– Some confidence would help your case, Pitt.

I’m doing a seven-finger roll.

– Some confidence would be a lie. I haven’t seen anyone in there for over a year. And things were tense. Sela could rip my head off on sight.

– But not the Horde girl.

– No. Maybe. Could be. I don’t know. Any case, she wouldn’t rip my head off herself, she’d have Sela do it.

He sends the phone guy away.

– It does sound very like a win-win for me. Either you come out with the girl and her baby, or Horde and Sela rip your head off.

I light up on another spavined reject from the cigarette family.

– Or I squat in there and you can go fuck off.

He nods.

– Well.

He gestures at the preparations going on around us.

– I wouldn’t count on squatting unmolested for very long.

– There are time issues.

– So I gather.

– But there would be advantages to having them out. The girl and the baby. The father I do not care about.

– Sure, I get it. You don’t want to see the symbol of the future accidentally shot.

He’s unrolling his sleeves.

– Symbol of the future. Indeed. I think it might be more apt to say that they are a symbol for the virtues of proper birth control practices. But not everyone is as clear-minded. The Coalition is purely socio-political in nature, but even here there have been whispers of the significance of the unborn. Until I can eliminate that whiff of mythology, I’d rather avoid any unfortunate mishaps that Bird might publicize to his advantage.

– Always best to minimize the potential collateral dead bodies before you go crashing through the windows.

– We will be using doors. It is not a spectacle we are performing here. It is an action. One made unavoidable by the untenable presence of the Cure house on Coalition territory. It has become hermetic. Information does not flow out. We cannot have a mystery box full of infected, lorded by a mad girl, in our midst. Not now. Not with tensions as they stand.

– Especially not when you don’t know if they’re secretly allied with the Society and the Hood.

He buttons his cuffs.

– Irrelevant.

I run a hand under my shirt and over my chest. I can feel a couple knobs of bone where the ribs have healed out of true. They don’t hurt, but they’ll be weak points that will snap easy the next time they take a shot.

I point at some of the action going on in the garage. Weapons being stripped, blueprints reviewed, a couple laptops set up in the back of one of the SUVs, a tiny mobile communications center.

– Pretty heavy action for irrelevant.

He reclaims his jacket from an enforcer.

– They have been starving for months. They possess no coordination as a military force. But in the absence of any knowledge to the contrary, we must assume they are a threat to expose themselves at any moment. However many of them are left inside, they must emerge sooner or later. When they do, they will not be in control of their appetites.