Greg Cox - Loose ends

Then, just when she'd pretty much convinced herself that this entire dreamwalk had been a dreadful mistake, she heard Morton snarling up ahead, not very far away. Holding her breath, she tiptoed up to the next curve in the alley and cautiously peeked around the corner. Trying hard not to touch anything, she gazed in alarm at the frightening drama unfolding before her eyes.

Morton had cornered the other man, who was even larger than the beefy gunman, in what appeared to be a dead end. A flickering red neon light, shining over the back entrance of the building to the right, cast a crimson glow over the tense confrontation, which had die biker backed up against a graffiti-covered brick wall, looking scared to death. The red neon made the sweat on his face glisten like blood. "Hold on, Joe!" he pleaded, his Adam's apple bobbing like the dopey antennae the waitresses wore at the Crashdown. "Don't do anything crazy, man! We're all on the same side, you know?"Morton loomed in front of the other man, his florid face only inches from his accomplice's, the muzzle of his pistol pressed up beneath the biker's bearded chin. "Shut up!" he barked savagely. "That was all your fault, back at that stupid sci-fi greasepit!" Isabel doubted that Liz or her parents would have appreciated Mortons sneering description of the family-owned diner. "What the hell did you think you were doing, going loco back there?"I just wanted my money," the muscular biker stammered. "I needed the cash now, you know. To cover my expenses." He squirmed against the unyielding brick wall. "I did my part, I hooked you up with that air force flyboy, the one with the expensive habits." Isabel guessed that was a reference to Lieutenant Ramirez, whom Morton apparently intended to bribe or blackmail. "All I wanted was the i money you promised me, that's all!"Morton jabbed the bigger man with his gun, forcing his chin up. "You would've got your money when your pilot \ buddy came through with the goods," he growled. Isabel frowned and dug her nails into her palms, frustrated by the gunman's overly cryptic references to whatever it was he J wanted from Ramirez, but Morton was too busy ragging on; the petrified biker to flesh out the details. "But not right away I'm still working on getting that pilot over a barrel. You can't rush this sort of thing. I need to give him more time to dig himself an even deeper hole, get him good and ready to do what he's told-or else."Yeah, right! Thats smart, Joe. I see what you mean." The big, bearded biker smiled weakly, trying to get Morton to put away his gun. He shrugged his apelike shoulders, in what he obviously hoped was an ingratiating manner. "I just wanted a little cash to tide me over, until you were ready to reel him in, you know?"So you almost blow the whole deal by blowing your top back at that space-case diner?" Morton snarled, outraged by the other man's stupidity. "Listen, jerk, you're playing in the major leagues now. My bosses have been trying for years to get their hands on this merchandise, and the last thing 1 need is some hotheaded punk messing things up, just when I'm about to make the biggest score of my life. You got that, butthead?"Hey, I didn't have to come to you with this deal," the bearded man reminded Morton defensively. He threw out his chest, attempting a show of bravado. "There are plenty of other people out there who'd pay good money for the dirt on that lieutenant."Morton nodded slowly, thinking it over. "You're right about that," he said craftily. "And the only thing I need less than a moronic screwup like you is competition where Ramirez is concerned." He looked the biker over coldly. "You're a security leak, mister, that needs plugging up."What-?" Comprehension heightened the panic in his bulging eyes. "No, wait, I-!"Blam! The pistol flared, and Isabel didn't look away in time as the gunshot blew away the top of the biker's head, splattering the dingy brown bricks with an explosion of blood and brains. Shocked by both the sudden blast and the bloodshed, Isabel thrust her knuckles into her mouth to keep from screaming and alerting Morton to her presence. She stared in numbing horror as the biker's body slid down slowly onto the pavement, leaving behind a gory trail on the crumbling brick wall.

Isabel had seen more death and violence in the past two years than any decent eighteen-year-old alien princess should ever behold-she had even been forced to kill in self-defense-but she still felt her stomach churn queasily, and she had to look away for a minute to keep from throwing up. Okay, she concluded, nauseous, I'm well and truly in Morton's head now, since he's the only one who would know about this murder, unless Liz Parker has a really gruesome imagination.

With a grunt of satisfaction, Morton stepped back from the grisly remains of his victim and, to Isabel's relief, put his handgun away. "That showed him," he congratulated himself smugly, before kneeling to rummage through the dead man's pockets. "Nobody shakes me down and gets away with it." He removed the biker's wallet, perhaps to make the killing look like a routine robbery, then kept searching until, grunting with satisfaction, he found a folded scrap of paper tucked in his victims back pocket. Morton's name and phone number? Isabel speculated. Or the lieutenant's? In any event, the meticulous killer set the scrap on fire with a lighted match, stomped the spent match beneath his boot, then scowled and spit on the ground by the dead man's body With a callous shrug, he stuffed the other man's wallet into his own back pocket. "So much for that loser," he muttered.

Leaving the biker's corpse bleeding on the pavement, Morton wiped his hands on his jeans and adjusted his cap. Then he swaggered over to the rusty metal door beneath the red neon light. Watching from around the corner, Isabel saw now that the fluorescent crimson letters spelled out the name of a bar: hanger 18.

She gulped nervously. According to popular UFO lore, and confirmed by Michael after his meeting with that old air force vet several months ago, Hanger 18 at the Roswell Army Air Field was where the authorities had originally stored the debris from the '47 Crash, including, briefly, before Nasedo rescued them from the inquisitive scalpels of the army scientists, the gestation pods holding the genetically-engineered fetuses of Max, Michael, Tess, and herself. Why that name? she worried anxiously. Why here, in this creepy back alley of Morton's mind? Seemingly untroubled by the pseudo-historical implications of the name, Morton knocked arrogantly on the rusty door. Moments later, the door opened just a crack, spilling a jagged shard of bluish light into the alley Isabel backed away from the light instinctively, but Morton wasn't looking in her direction. Instead he held a short, muttered conversation with someone on the other side of the door, who opened the door farther and let Morton in. Isabel heard loud music and harsh, strident laughter coming from within the building, until the door slammed shut, leaving her alone in the alley with a dead body and way too many rats.

She hesitated, uncertain what to do, where to go, next. More than anything else, she wanted to wake up, which would send her back to the motel room with Max and Alex, far from Morton's vile nightworld, but she also knew that she had not learned nearly enough yet about Morton's plot. What had the blackmailing gunman managed to extort out of Lieutenant Ramirez? She still had no idea.

Talk about a dreamwalk on the wild side! As much as she longed to exit this sordid nightmare, she realized she had to see what lay behind the flickering neon sign reading HANGAR 18.

Giving the grotesque corpse a wide berth, she crept up to the forbidding metal door. The fluorescent lights sput- tered and hummed, as though the glowing glass tubes were filled with angry hornets instead of ionized gas. Isabel summoned up all her courage and rapped upon the door, timidly at first, then louder and more forcefully. Let me in! she thought feverishly. The sooner she got inside, the sooner she could escape back to the waking world. Open up! She heard bolts being slid back and, moments later, the door opened a few inches. A sinister-looking guy, with greasy black hair and bad skin, leered at Isabel from the other side of a short length of chain that prevented the door from opening all the way. His leathery, mottled complexion hinted at too many years of drugs, booze, or both. Gaunt and emaciated, he wore a rumpled white tuxedo that hung slackly on his withered frame. "Yes?" he asked suspiciously, looking at Isabel as though she hardly belonged here. Can't argue with that, she thought.