Chapter06a

 

 

The screen split into four – only one of which came from the drone he had monitored from the start, although his screen showed markings at the bottom – the string of numbers to suggest coordinates others in the building were using for a potential strike.

The other three screens showed more down to earth images, one outside the hotel, two inside.

Others monitored other screens, but it was clear that all the operatives needed to see what the others saw – watching and waiting for the moment when the package appeared.

He knew what would happen then.

“What’s happening?” the voice said in his headset.

“Nothing yet,” he said, knowing that the voice saw what he saw, too, but wanted to know if he saw and perhaps even wanted him to venture an opinion. “He’s just sitting there.”

“Any idea why?”

He glanced at the screen that showed the front door to the building, and the army of police cars that still hogged space previously occupied by cabs.

“He might be afraid to move because of the police,” he said, although he and the voice knew that their target had eluded the police already, and could no doubt do so again.

How was still unclear, although monitored police reports and a cameras and other devices inside the hotel suggested he had used a service entrance no one – even the voice – had expected him to use.

This time, he knew to watch that part of the building if and when the subject moved towards the hotel again. When he moved. Even he needed to collect the package. Once that happened, all hell would break loose.

 

 

 

 

With the engine off, the cold crept back into the car, and into his bones – that old ache he had pledged long ago not to feel again – too much like death for his comfort, although that was not why he hated it most.

He could not think straight in the cold, his insides fogging up just as the windshield did with each exhaled breath. The steam of his breath making him think something important escaped him that he could never get back.

And he kept feeling like he didn’t want to move a muscle, and this made him think that if he did not move, he would turn into stone and not be able to.

He shuddered, cringed with the pain in his side the shudder caused, and then pulled up the handle opening the door. A still colder air washed over him from outside. He forced himself to move, lifting one foot out onto the icy surface of the street, then – with an even more intense twinge of pain – the old foot until he stood, shivering, and feeling as giddy as a drunk.

He didn’t even bother to lock the car door, just stepped around the bumper and over the soot-blackened snow and onto the curb, and then to the heavily salted concrete of the sidewalk itself and the narrow track footsteps had warn through the slick surface, the same track he had taken his last time here.

The service door stood open just within the boundary of the flapping yellow tape, guarded not by police, but two or three bored hotel workers shivering in their dark uniforms as they puffed cigarettes and stamped their feet. Two vanished back inside before Ponci reached the door, the other was facing away, staring over at the front door and the activity there and so did not see Ponci slip into the hotel behind him.

 

 

“He’s out!”

He heard it in the head piece, echoed from the other stations, and his own voice like a harmony.

“Where did he go?” the voice in his headpiece asked.

“In through the service door, like he did before.”

“Do we have any assets there?”

“People, not monitors. We didn’t have time to assign any.”

“Okay,” the voice said, and then spoke to someone else, and someone else said they have someone in the hall.

“Don’t stop him, just keep him in site,” the voice said. “We need to know he has the package first.”

Then the voice spoke to his station.

“I want you to lock onto the center of that building. If we’re going to strike, it will be quick.”

He mumbled a vague reply, watching all four screens, none of which showed the suspect, only the lobby, building front and the hall way to the soldier’s apartment.

The subject was like a ghost, condemned to haunt the same building. He chuckled.

“And they call us ghosts,” he thought.

 

 

About a half dozen people occupied the hall. But they didn’t seem to notice him either, their attention focused on the store room he had trapped the bell hop in earlier. One man dressed in a gold uniform, supposedly signifying rank among bell hops mumbled something about feeling unsafe. Two women, in maid black and white maids uniforms, nodded. He passed behind them quietly, but with an air of urgency as if he belonged there and was on some assignment, pausing only briefly to glance back at them when he reached another door farther down the hall.

This door had a small sign with red letters saying “staff.”

It did not open when he turned the handle. Ponci took out the bundle of keys he had taken earlier and after several tries, found one that opened the door. It swung in. He eased through the gap and then closed it again quickly, making sure he relocked it before he turned to look around.

This was a kind of locker room, a place where the staff got out of their street clothing and put on their uniforms. A few garments hung from a wooden dryer near one corner of the room.  A rectangular metal table sat at the center of the room, surrounded by chairs. A few paper coffee cups decorated its surface, but little else. Nearby, next to the door was a narrow counter with a microwave oven, small refrigerator and cupboards. Someone had recently made popcorn, leaving the remains of the bag and the unpopped kernels on the counter. The far wall was lined with lockers and Ponci quickly crossed the room to these.

 

 

Combination locks dangled from the handles of a few of the three dozen lockers. Ponci opened on of those without a lock, and when he found this empty, went onto a second and a third, coming to one with maids garments first, and then the uniforms of a male hotel worker – which turned out to be too small for him. He tried several more until he found a man’s uniform large enough for him to wear. Slowly, cringing with each movement, he stripped off the clothing he had acquired upstairs earlier, but not the shirt. This was soaked with blood, a lot of which had dried near the wound in his side, and though some red still oozed from it, the shirt and the bandage beneath, apparently kept the wound from heavier bleeding. Still the strain of movements over the last few hours had not enhanced healing, and he knew he would have to find a better remedy soon – redressing the wound some how before it got infected. But for now, he covered it over again with the uniform jacket, pulling on the striped pants to complete the disguise. He stepped in front of a full-length mirror that hung on the wall at the end of the lockers and examined himself.

“You don’t look at all right,” he mumbled. “But it’ll have to do.”

 

 

 

He felt less conspicuous when he slipped back out into the hall, and as he made his way deeper into the building, some of the other workers he passed even nodded at him, as if they recognized him: this gray haired man who must have been a supervisor of some sort. If they didn’t know him, they figured they should have. Then, near the door where he met the worker during his previous trip, a man who clearly was a supervisor glared at him and started to say, “Who the hell are...” when Ponci’s pistol spat twice, and the man dropped dead.

Ponci shoved the pistol back into his belt, glanced around to make sure no one had seen or heard anything, then bent and took up the dead man’s arms, dragging the body to a nearby door which turned out to be a utility closet. Struggling a little with the pain in his side, Ponci managed to dump the body into the pile of mops and buckets – his own blood mingling with the blood of his victim as he tried to close the door. He had to fold the arms back into the closet twice before he could lock it.

Then, he turned back in the direction he had been taking, stepping over the pool of blood the dead man’s body had spilled.

In the back of Ponci’s head, the dead man’s face joined the others, the harsh voice asking only one thing: “Why?”

“Because you got in my way,” Ponci said, and slipped back into the hall.

But he was not alone. A young man – late 20s maybe – tall with dark hair came down from the direction of the street door at a jog, and halted suddenly when he saw Ponci.

A panicked expression registered only briefly in his eyes, but before Ponci could lift his Mauser to fire, the figure vanished through some unlocked door.

For a brief instant, Ponci debated following him. This was no random meeting. This figure had expected to see Ponci, but not be seen by Ponci.

Yet time pressed, and Ponci had already pressed his luck in coming back. The sooner he left the better.

He did not see the flash of a silenced pistol or hear the fall of the young man’s body, or even the two dark figures that rushed passed the young man to pause and glimpse around the corner at Ponci headed towards the door to the lobby farther on.

 

 

The report echoed through the headset with the same dread at the previous report from The Bronx.

Asset down. Suspect on the move.

“Damn him,” he heard the voice say in his headset.

“It wasn’t him,” another voice said

“What do you mean it wasn’t him?”

“There are others in the building.”

“You mean like up on the roof tops in the Bronx?”

“Exactly”

“This is a fucking bloody mess! Hold on. Get another asset there.”

Another voice said, “None on that side of the building.”

“Then get someone there. And tell him to be careful. We got company in there.”

 

 

It took Ponci a moment to remember which door led to the lobby – a haze coming over him that made part of him angry.

He’d always seen himself as clear-headed and deliberate, and yet since the start of this he had bumbled through like an amateur, and could not blame it all on the cold, or the wound. Perhaps he was destined to end his career in the exact opposite way as he had started, like many of the careless, reckless teens he had seen busted or broken, leaving only the most lucky or the most talented to survive.

He never saw himself as lucky or talented, only deliberate, and now abandoning that, he felt doomed.

When he found the door, he pushed it open with his shoulder, keeping one hand on his pistol and the other against his side.

Little had changed from his earlier visits except for the presence of police officers near the front desk, some in uniform, others so obviously cops he could have picked them out of a crowd.

He made his way towards the brass doors of the elevators, seeing no point in trying to sneak around. He pressed the button, waited, and then when the doors opened to the empty car, he stepped in – with as much deliberation as his growing haze would allow.

 

 

“Got him!” a voice screamed in the headset from some distance, drawing his gaze back to the screen until he found the lobby shot and the slow advance of the figure across the room, the elevator doors closing.

“Where’s he going?” the supervisor voice asked.

“He pushed our floor,” another voice said.

“Finally, we’re getting lucky,” the supervisor said. “Keep sharp. I want to see it all, every move he makes. What about human assets?”

Still another voice peeped up, “On their way.”

“Well get them there quick,” the supervisor said. “We need eyeballs where we don’t have cameras.”

“And then what?” said a somewhat doubtful voice even more remote.

“Never mind what,” the supervisor said.

“Will we be able to get them out before…”

“Shut the fuck up!”

 

 

Ponci pressed the button for the sixth floor and waited again for the doors to close – the cops at the desk taking no notice of him.

The car did not stop until it reached the floor he wanted and the doors opened again.

With his fingers gripped firmly on the handle of his pistol at his belt, Ponci peered around the edge of the open door. Then, he cringed.

A police officer stood on guard in front of the apartment door down the hall.

In the other direction, a food cart sat ownerless in front of the service elevator, apparently waiting for delivery to another apartment on the flood.

Ponci, smoothing out the wrinkles of a uniform jacket that did not completely fit, staggered in the direction of the cart.

Each step, forced by some part of his brain beyond the agony, seemed to take forever, and exposed him all the more to the bored stare of the cop behind him. Ponci, his unkempt hair and hands clutching his gun and his side, looked as little like a hotel employee as a bum from the street – despite the uniform.

Ponci reached the cart just as the real delivery man popped out service elevator to retrieve it. He grabbed the delivery man’s forearm.

“I was told to take over for you,” Ponci said.

“Take over? By who?” the startled delivery man said, the lenses of his black rimmed glasses glinting with the hallway lights. The eyes looked startled, perhaps a little suspicious.

Glancing over his shoulder to see if the conversation had drawn the cop’s attention, Ponci shook his head.

“How the hell do I know?” he mumbled, fingers twitching on the pistol. “The kitchen tells me to take over, I take over.”

The delivery man’s expression changed, the mouth edges turning down. “Damn them,” he said. “It’s Mayes, isn’t it? He’s always complaining I move too slow. But I think he’s jealous about the tips I get.”

“You’d better go talk to him then,” Ponci said.

“You bet I will,” the delivery man said, and reentered the service elevator, jabbing at the button for the basement. The doors closed, leaving Ponci only with the memory of the man’s enraged face. His fingers eased off the handle of the pistol as he needed both hands to push the cart.

 

The hallway camera showed the suspect pushing the cart, coming towards the camera, then under it, and then the camera turned to watch him moving away again towards the police guard at the apartment doors.

Voices in the headset, while not completely in a panic, had a panicked tone as they demanded assets from elsewhere, and found the hotel had only one agent nearby while others raced to the site from more remote places.

“Keep vigilant,” the supervisor’s voice said. “We have adversaries on site. We’re all there is between them and our target.”

An on wheeled the target with his cart in an absurdist silent movie, a middle-aged mis-dressed man as comical as Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp, but many more times deadly,

 

 

One of the wheels rattled, and this rattled Ponci a little, as he leaned a little too heavily on the cart for support. But the cop didn’t seem to notice until Ponci stopped in front of him, and then the cop frowned.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“I was told to bring it up here,” Ponci said, shifting one hand to his belt. But he needn’t to bother. The cop, a tall man faced darkened from the need of a shave, only shrugged.

“I suppose she’s got to eat, too,” the cop mumbled.

“She?” Ponci asked.

“The witness. That’s why they sent you.”

“I don’t know why they sent me,” Ponci said, struggling to keep from shuttering. “I just go where I’m told.”

“Well, you’d better get in there before the Lieutenant gets back. He gets real annoyed when people wander around in his crime scene.”

The cop turned the door handle and opened the door, allowing Ponci to push the cart into the apartment beyond. Then he closed the door behind him, leaving Ponci to face the place he had visited twice already.

But it had changed. Yellow tape marked off portions of the room. Some surfaces showed the powder left from fingerprint people. Someone one had drawn a red circle around a bullet hole in the wall – from the shot that has grazed Ponci during his first visit. Another red circle showed in another wall where Ponci’s shot had gone astray.

But the activity that had caused all these changes had already ceased, and the investigators had moved on, having gathered all they could from the place.

Ponci pushed the cart aside, and was about to step around a white painted circle on the floor – where drops of his blood had spilt earlier and mostly dried – when he noticed that the room was not completely vacant.

A woman – the black woman Ponci had seen previously – sat on the couch in the middle of the disarray and turned in his direction, her expression puzzled at first, and then alarmed as he drew out his pistol.

“Where is it?” he asked, stepping closer to where she sat.

She studied him in his new array, although her gaze kept reverting to the pistol.

“Where’s what?”

“The stuff that was supposed to be in the briefcase I took.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, glancing towards the closed door behind which the cop stood in the hall.

“Don’t even think about calling for help,” Ponci said. “You’d be dead before he could get the door open. Tell me where the stuff is and I’ll let you live.”

The woman’s eyes opened wider. She was dark skinned but with Mediterranean features that suggested she had come from a mixing of races at some point in the past, her cheeks slender as her face came to a point at her chin. Her mouth was a little too wide, but the lips were the kind of lips glossy magazines use for advertising lipstick. And when she stood to face him, he noticed she was slender and relatively short – shorter than he was by about a half a foot.

“Are you the one who killed my brother?” she asked, her smooth voice lost into near hysteria.

“Just shut up, and tell me what I want to know,” Ponci said, then advanced quickly to grab her just when she was about to scream, his bloody free hand covering over her mouth. She struggled but he pressed the point of the pistol against her neck.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he whispered in her ear. “I got too many voices in my head without adding yours. Just tell me what you did with the stuff and I’ll get out of your life. You have the stuff don’t you?”

After a moment’s hesitation, she gave a stiff nod.

“Where is it?” Ponci asked, easing his fingers from over her mouth, but kept the pistol against her forehead.

“Downstairs,” she said.

“Where downstairs?”

“In my room.”

“You mean where you got off the elevator earlier? On the fifth floor?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Fine,” he said, pushing her in their direction of the door. “We’ll got get it.”

“What about the police officer?” she asked. “You’re not going to kill him, are you?”

Ponci glared at the door. He didn’t like killing cops. They never let up the few times he did. He sighed.

“Call him in,” Ponci told the woman.

“Only if you promise not to kill him.”

Ponci laughed bitterly. “How do you know my promise is any good?”

“I don’t,” the woman admitted. “But I want to hear it anyway.”

She gave him a defiant stare, her pointed jaw lifted, her feet separate as if ready fight him.

“All right,” Ponci said. “I promise. Now call him in.”

She moved towards the door; Ponci followed her step by step, his pistol still inches from her back – a strange and deadly dance step that neither he nor she wanted to engage in.

For some reason, he didn’t want to kill her; but not out of mercy or even kindness; he didn’t know why.

When she reached the door, he moved around her and grabbed the door handle, turning it slowly, and pulling open the door a few inches. He nudged her with the point of the pistol.

“Officer,” she said with a slight rise in her voice from the nudge.

The cop turned toward the gap.

“Yes, Ma’am?”

“Could you come in for a moment?”

“Sorry, Ma’am, I’m not supposed to leave my post.”

Ponci poked her again with the pistol.

“This is important,” she said. “I promise it’ll only take a moment.”

“Well, only for a minute,” the cop said, moving towards the door that Ponci opened gradually, keeping the door between him and the cop, until the cop was inside, then slamming it shut as he pressed the point of the barrel against the back of the cop’s head.

“Move an inch and I blow your brains out,” Ponci told him.

The cop’s shoulders stiffened. Ponci reached around with his bloody hand and removed the cop’s pistol from its holster, sticking this into the pocket of his hotel bell hop uniform.

 

The voices rose in the headset. The hallway camera showed the hallway where the cop had been. But the hall did not remain vacant long. A figure appeared beyond the doorway from the far end where the exit sign indicated a door to the stairs, a figure moving carefully along one wall with pistol drawn.

“Our man on the scene,” the supervisor’s voice said in the headset.

But then the figure stopped, fired his pistol at something behind the camera, which the camera could not see at first, a camera readjusted a second later to show two dark figures coming from the direction of the service elevator, firing back.

The long barrels of their weapons blunted by silencers, indicating that the exchange was as silent as the camera suggested, a spitting sound, he thought, nothing more, and the deadly hiss of the bullets passing thought the air, striking walls with splats.

But the fact that the hall was defended seemed to discourage the advisories and unable to make any advance on the apartment door, they retreated.

Meanwhile someone in the headset screamed for more assets.

Somewhere in this mix, talk of a listening device surfaced, something inside the apartment. There apparently had been others, but the police had found them.

This became the subject of fear and dispute in the voices, until the supervisor told everybody to shut up and instructed some technician to boost the volume of the one device that remained.

The sound rose, but it was thick with echoes, a mere backup device installed in the toilet area, that could not access the conversation elsewhere in the suite. Someone said they had heard noise on it earlier, but no conversation. What came across now was garbled. The only thing very clear from it was that among the voices it did pick up, one was that of a woman.

 

 

“Don’t hurt him,” the woman pleaded. “You promised not to hurt him.”

“Shut your mouth, or I’ll shoot you both,” Ponci said, twisting the cop around.

This was not an old cop, or experienced, and the young face with its five o’clock shadow looked angry and scared, and all the more angry for being scared.

“I’ll scream if you hurt him, and then you’ll never get what you came for,” the woman said.

The cop’s face grew paler as he glanced at the woman, then down at the gun, and finally into Ponci’s face, and clearly saw no sense of mercy in Ponci’s dark stare.

“What do you want me to do?” the cop asked.

“This woman is going to tie you up,” Ponci said. “Then we’re going to stick you in the bedroom. If you make a fuss, I’ll kill you. If you don’t, I’ll let you live. Someone will find you later.”

“I won’t make a fuss,” the cop promised.

“Fine,” Ponci said, then glanced in the direction of the woman, who was seething with rage. But she didn’t make a move. She just glared.

“Me, tie him up?” she said.

“Yes, so go find something to do it with,” Ponci said.

“What? Hotels like this usually don’t supply rope with the towels and linens.”

“Use the lamp cord and the extension from the TV. We don’t need to hog tie him, just enough to buy us some time.”

The woman moved towards the table with the lamp and yanked the plug out of the wall. From one of the drawers, she found a scissor, and cut it near the base. Then quickly, she cross to the TV and pulled out that cord from the wall and returned.

Ponci struggled to keep the pistol pointed at the cop, while holding his free hand against his side. His wound had started to ooze blood again, and hurt more than it had earlier – perhaps inspired by the warmth of the room. While Ponci hated the cold, the chill sometimes had its uses.
“Tie his hands first, behind his back,” Ponci said. “Then walk him to the bedroom.”

The woman’s hands shook as she tied the stiff wire, her sharp red nails looking as if they drew blood as she weaved. Yet somehow, she managed to get it done.

“Is it too tight?” she asked the cop.

“No,” he answered stiffly, but stared at Ponci and the pistol, not at her.

“Okay, in the bedroom,” Ponci said and nudged the cop with the pistol. The woman guided the officer, helping him up two steps. The cop moved with all of the animation of a poorly constructed robot, legs somehow getting him to the doorway and through it, as the Ponci followed.

This room showed the same signs of investigation as the previous room, powdery substance on various surfaces from the search for finger prints, circle of while paint marking those places where Ponci had left blood.

The woman started to put the cop down on the bed.

“Not there,” Ponci said. “In the chair. Sit him down. Get more wire. I want his leg and arms tied to the legs and arms of the chair.”

The woman did what she was told. The cop made no sound. But he did glare at Ponci – intending some mental revenge for later.

“Let him think it,” Ponci thought.

The woman stood up when she finished.

“And now?”

“Now you stand there while I change my clothing – no, better, you get them out of the closet for me. There’s a bunch in there. Not the uniforms. The civilian stuff. I don’t need to look like no soldier.”

“You want to wear my brother’s clothes?”

“I did before. It don’t quiet fit right. But it’ll do until I can get better. Hurry. Somebody’s bound to come back to check on you, and I don’t intend to be here when they do.”

 

 

The woman’s fingers parted the garments in the closet, sharp red fingernails separating the military from the civilian – although it both showed a surprising scarcity.

Billman had come in a hurry, and had not intended to stay longer than necessary, bringing only those things he thought might be necessary.

And since Ponci had already rifled through the civilian portion, he had a limited choice, and nodded for the woman to lay out the pants and shirt on the bed.

The closet did not have a second heavy overcoat, and so Ponci had to settle for a long rain coat with a relatively thin lining.

When the woman was done, Ponci motioned with the pistol for her to take her place in a corner of the room.

Then he laid the pistol on the bed next to the clothing, and began to undress, pealing off the bell hop jacket to reveal the blood soaked shirt he’d not had time to change downstairs.

The woman gasped when she saw this.

 

 

“You’re hurt,” she said, starting to move towards him, but Ponci held up his hand.

“I’m fine,” he said. “It was a parting gift from your brother before I plugged him.”

“You can’t go out like that,” the woman said, edging even closer. “Let me do something about it.”

“Not here; not now,” Ponci said, moving passed her to the edge of the bed, glancing briefly at the cop, who also stared at his wounded side. “Someone will come back soon and we can’t be here when they do.”

“I was just trying to help.”

“You can help me by taking me to the stuff you took out of the brief case,” he said, and then put on the clothing she had set aside, a cheap brown suit that made him look like a traveling salesman – something probably purchased in a hurry along the way from wherever it was Billman had come from.

Ponci glanced briefly at himself in the mirror. He looked bad despite his tan, aged, as if he had lived another decade over the last few hours, drained of whatever energy that had allowed him to venture back into this cold and forsaken part of the planet.

“Okay, let’s get,” he said, picking up his pistol again and motioning the woman towards the door back to the rest of the suite. The cop’s gaze followed them out, and ended only when Ponci shut the door.

Sloppy business leaving him behind like that, he thought. He should have plugged him, and for a moment, his fingers lingered on the door knob.

The woman guessed his thoughts.

“You promised,” she said.

“I know I promised, but this is sloppy, leaving a witness.”

“You also promised not to kill me,” she said. “Are you lying about that, too?”

“Just give me what I want and I’ll let you live,” Ponci said, then motioned her towards the door to the hall, pausing only to glance around. He didn’t want to forget anything else here. He had no intention of revisiting this place for a fourth time.

The plush hallway had a haze in it that had nothing to do with the lamp-like lights strung along either wall, a haze, Ponci realized, came from the suppressed pain of his wound and his desperate need for rest.

But he noticed something else, too, that alarmed him: the smell of fresh gun smoke with a linger mist still in air. A quick glance showed where bullets had struck the wall, leaving gashes in the wall paper.

“Shit,” he said in a low voice, clutching the woman’s arm.

“What is it?” Sara asked.

“We’re not alone.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean we got some mean company up here. Somebody’s been shooting, and it’s too much of a coincidence to believe it has nothing to do with us.”

Still the hallway remained vacant for the moment, free of the storm of police he expected to arrive again at any moment, and whom ever else had been here during the time he and she were in the apartment.

Somewhere – in one of the rooms perhaps or in the floor above or below – stern voices sounded, not loud so much as an insistent buzz, like ghosts, like the voices he heard all too often in his head, but not in his head this time, and this was a relief.

“Come on,” he told the woman, nudging her with the point of his pistol, heading left from the apartment door.

“This isn’t the way to the elevator,” she said.

“We’re not taking the elevator,” Ponci said, and swung the pistol point towards the sign near the end of the hall that marked the stairway exit. “The last thing I need is to be trapped in an elevator when the doors open up onto a pack of cops or…” he glanced around, “… anybody else.”

 

“They’re headed for the stairs,” the supervisor’s voice shouted. “Get our asset out of their way.”

“Does he have the package?” someone else asked.

“It doesn’t appear so,” a third voice chimed in.

“Don’t give me appearances,” the supervisor shouted.

“He’s bent over so much, I can’t tell. If we had more cameras.”

“Well we don’t.”

“Then maybe we can eyeball it when he gets to the lobby.”

“Okay, direct our asset to the lobby where we can use the camera and his eyeballs,” the supervisor said. “But I want more assets there in case the adversaries show up again.”

Then, the target and the woman vanished from the hallway camera, the door closing behind them.

 

The stairwell, not meant for guest use except in the case of emergency, had the same stark look at the service hallways downstairs, but lighted with dimmer lamps situated on each landing. This gave just enough light to make out the each step, all exposed concrete and metal, steeper than comfortable for Ponci for whom each step threatened to rip open his wound a little wider.

The air smelled of stale cigarette smoke. A number of crushed butts decorated the corners of each mid-floor landing as if part of some conspiracy of employees to avoid having to go outside where smoking was still legal.

One more reason Ponci had come to hate New York where Fascist mayors dictated every person’s way of life from where a person could smoke a cigarette to how large a container of soda he could drink – making life decisions from some high and mighty place in the clouds for ordinary people who still struggled with the day to day aspects of life. It always struck Ponci odd that very powerful claimed to have wisdom just because they had money or position.

Something blinked in the corner of Ponci’s eye and he glanced back up the way they’d come and saw the red light of a security camera, a tiny dot of a red eye that glared down at them.

“Damn it,” he said, and grabbed the woman by the arm, yanking her along, making her move more quickly even though he could barely move as quick as he wanted her to go.

“What is it?” she asked, trying to look passed him.

“Cameras,” he said. “I didn’t realize before. I bet the whole fucking place is loaded with them.”

“So?”

“So if they got cameras, then someone is looking at them or bound to be after all that’s been going on in this place, which means someone is looking for me. So the quicker we get to your place and I get my stuff, the better we’ll all be. Get my meaning?”

The woman looked at him, but she didn’t look afraid so much as puzzled, and maybe a little angry, too.
After all, I killed her brother, Ponci thought, and then heard the whisper of Billman’s voice in the back of his head, warning him not to hurt her.

“If she does what she’s told, she won’t get hurt,” Ponci said.

“What?” the woman asked, halting when they reached the door to the next flood.

“I’m just thinking out loud,” he said, and yanked open the door to the fifth floor, and the hall beyond, which looked exactly the same as the floor above only with the numbers to the apartments starting with the number five instead of six.

“Which room is yours?” Ponci asked.

She pointed down the hall to right.

He clutched her arm, almost more for support than to lead her. But he also pressed the point of the gun firmly into her side as they moved in that direction, one painful step after the other until they reached the apartment door.

“Open,” he said in a whisper, as voices rose from one of the other rooms, almost as haunting as the voices he heard in his head.

She fiddled in her small purse for the card and then when she found it, she slid it into the slot until the lock clicked open, and she turned the door handle and the door opened onto semi darkness inside.

He could smell her scent – the concentration of the sweet, fruit like perfume he’d noticed on her earlier, but built up inside the closed room as if percolating, growing ripe, and it made him feel a little drunk.

He pushed her inside despite the overwhelming smell, glanced back each way down the hall to see that it remained clear before he also stepped inside.

“Turn on some lights,” he said, although it was not completely dark. A glow came from the bedroom where she had left a light on.

This apartment was smaller than the one upstairs, more compact, although set up similarly, with the bed just visible through the door to the right. The time light was reflected in the bathroom mirror just through the door on the left – but the whole place had dark shadows that he did not trust.

The woman moved to the wall, her sharp red nails reaching ahead to where the switch was and with a click, the shadows vanished, and the glare made Ponci blink.

It too him a moment to see clearly, and when he could, he looked at her, and motioned her deeper into the room.

“Where is it?” he asked.

“In there,” the woman said, pointing to compact writing desk in the corner of the room. A laptop computer sat on top of an old fashioned green blotting pad that along with the green-shaded lamp tried to give the tiny space some eloquence with historic-like icons.

“In where?” Ponci asked, moving towards the desk and around a short couch that had been oddly placed in between for lack of room.

“The computer,” she said, “And some storage drives in the drawer.”

“Show me,” Ponci said, standing to one side as the woman pulled open the file drawer attached to the side of the desk, and drew out several small, thin black boxes – each about the size of a pack of cigarettes – from which short cables hung.

“These were in the brief case along with the computer,” she said.

“That was all?”

“There was a cell phone and note. I destroyed the phone.”

“Why?”

“Because the note told me to. The note was from my brother.”

“Show me the note,” Ponci said.

The woman reached into the pocket her sweater and handed over a folded white sheet of paper. Ponci shoved the pistol into his belt, and with bloody fingers unfolded the note

 

Sara:

If you’re reading this note, then I’m already dead.

This is not a joke. The computer and the storage drives included in the brief case have information that some in the government would not like to see made public.

If they killed me, then they will kill you to keep it from getting out.  You must get it to someone in the media. But don’t trust everyone. They own a lot of media people.

We know people we can trust. You must get it to them. And quickly. Before they get a chance to find you.

Don’t turn on the computer or access the storage drives until they are in safe hands. They had a way of tracking you. Don’t use phones or internet – of if you do, get rid of the phone and away from any computer you’ve used.

I’m sorry to lay this all on you, but if I can’t get to our people, then you will have to.

This is serious – as my death indicates.

God bless, and be safe

 

Your loving brother,

David

 

Ponci refolded the note and looked at the woman.

“You’re Sara?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“Good, find something to put this stuff into. We have to get out of here.”

“And go where?” Sara asked.

“Some place safer than this. We’ll figure out what to do next after that.”

“We?” Sara said, looking shocked, her eyes focusing in on his face, clearly thinking she misheard him. “I thought you said you were going to let me go once I gave you this.”

“I changed my mind,” Ponci said. “Until I know what this stuff is, I’m keeping you close.”

“But I don’t know anything,” she said. “Didn’t they pay you to bring it back to them after you killed my brother?”

“Lady, I don’t know who they are,” he said. “But whoever they are, they seem hot for this stuff, and so we’re going to keep it until I get the rest of my money.”

“Money for killing my brother?”

“Partly,” Ponci said, glancing away from her, looking vaguely into space, odd contradictory thoughts filling his head, not from the voices, but from some remote part of himself that he’d yet to come to terms with. “Killing your brother was nothing personal. Just business. It’s not like I enjoy doing it.”

“That seems kind of strange coming from a professional killer.”

Ponci looked at her, at the slender face and the accusing eyes – behind which rage and pain surged.

“Sometimes, it’s easy to fall into things and not so easy to fall out of them again,” he said, and then grew angry. “This is no time for questions and answers. I told you to get something to put the stuff in so we can get out of here.”

“Why should I help you if you’re going to kill me in the end?”

“I told you I wouldn’t if you cooperated.”

“You also said you would let me go if I got you this, and you changed your mind,” Sara said. “How do I know you won’t change your mind and decide to kill me after all?”

This riled Ponci more.

“Look, lady,” he said. “One thing is for sure. If you don’t come with me, I will kill you. So either stop talking and do what you’re told, or it all ends here and now.”

“You mean you’ll kill me?”

“I told you, lady. I just want the stuff. I don’t bring the man the stuff, I don’t get paid, and if I don’t get paid, I’m going to have to start killing people and I got enough goddamn  voices already in my head without adding more.”

“Voices?” Sara said, giving him an odd look, her head tilted slightly to one side. “You mean of people you’ve killed?”

“That’s the general idea,” Ponci said, moving away from the desk to look for something to put the computer in. “Is this yours?”

He pointed to a paisley overnight bag located on the floor near the foot of the desk.

“My brother’s voice?” she asked.

“Among others,” Ponci said, picking up the bag, unzipping it, and emptying the contents on the vacant part of the desk: some makeup, a hair net, a bottle of aspirin, and muscle rub, toothpaste and a brush. “To tell you the truth, you’re brother is a real pain in the ass.”

“Pain in the ass?” Sara said, her eyebrows rising a little as she glanced at Ponci, who was placing the computer and the external drives in the back. “In what way?”

“He keeps telling me not to do this.”

“Do what?”

“Bring this stuff to them.”

Sara blinked – and stared at Ponci for so long she seemed in a trance, when she finally spoke again, it came in a hoarse whisper: “Does my brother know I’m here?”

“Of course he fucking knows you’re here,” Ponci said, yanking closed the zipper of the bag. “He sees and hears everything I see and hear. He’s yelling for you all the time. I can’t shut him up.”

“Yelling for me?”

“Yeah?”

“What does he want?”

“For you to stop me.”

This time, Sara’s head turned slightly, giving him a queer look on an odd angle, startled, and ye something else, as if she half believed him.

“Is he talking to you now?” she asked finally.

“Yes.”

“What’s he’s saying? Is he shouting?”

“Not now,” Ponci said, hefting the bag, cringing at little with a pain in his side. “He’s gotten soppy. He’s telling me to tell you he loves you, and that you should stick with me, and for you to wait for a chance to steal this and follow his instructions to get it to your friends. But that ain’t going to happen. I’ve changed my mind about bringing you along.”

“You promised you wouldn’t kill me.”

“I won’t. I’m going to tie you up like we did the cop. I don’t need to know what’s on these,” Ponci said patting the soft side of the bag. “I just need to get it to the man who hired me.”

“You’re not leaving me here,” Sara said, feet parting in a sudden stern stance that suggested she would be willing to fight him.

Ponci’s face grew red.

Another bad sign, he thought, as a sudden urge to shoot her rose up in him, while in the back of his brain, her brother’s voice screamed “No!”

His fingers eased off the handle of his pistol as the rage eased out of his face.

“I don’t have time for this,” he said, glancing at the hall door, as if he expected the police to arrive here as well, hearing sounds of police radios rasping from somewhere beyond the door. “I ought to just put a bullet in your head and be done with it.”

“And have to put up with me in your head?” Sara said. “I promise, if you shoot me, I’ll haunt you forever.”

Ponci peered at her face. He could not tell how serious she was, if she believed what she said or was simply playing up to what he thought were his paranoid delusions.

But the threat worked; he knew she would keep true to the threat once she made it to the other side, and would not keep quiet.

He glanced around and spotted a telephone on the desk. He licked his dry lips.

“I can’t just go and deliver the stuff,” he mumbled. “I have to call first.”

“Then call,” she said.

Ponci circled the desk, as if to keep its bulk between him and the woman, sudden dread replacing the rage, as if she might do herself in by charging at him and filling up his head with her own rage. His gaze left hers only long enough for him to punch out the number he had memorized, and to lift the receiver to his ear.

He pressed his wounded side with his free hand and felt warm liquid ooze on his fingers, not a lot, but too much, he thought

The familiar voice sounded on the other end of what was clearly a poor connection, a typical in and out sound of a cellular phone.

“Yes?” the man on the other end said.

“I have what you want,” Ponci said.

“About fucking time.”

“We need to meet – provided you don’t try to kill me.”

“Okay,” the man said. “But not in Manhattan. You’re already hot there.”

“I have a plane ticket,” Ponci said.

“No planes. No buses. No public transportation. All that’s going to be watched, and not just by the police. We can’t risk having what you have fall into the wrong hands. Get a car.”

“I have a car.”

“Then drive to Jersey,” the man said, giving Ponci detailed directions before the line went dead.

Ponci replaced the receiver, then turned the pistol in Sara’s direction.

“Time to leave,” he said, waving her to pick up the bag from the top of the desk, and when she did this, he waved the gun towards the door.

“Where are we going?” she asked as she complied.

“Jersey,” he mumbled.