AREA 47

SECTION 89:

COURTNEY, Chapter 70

Byron Reed felt pretty good until he looked in the mirror.  He had a headache, yes, BUT HE HAD NO IDEA HE HAD A GUNSHOT WOUND IN HIS HEAD!

Motor-control of his rebel right side was returning.  He had a right arm that could move and touch things, and weakly hang onto the steering wheel.  His right leg had some feeling to it.  The right side of his mouth had stopped slurring words.  He didn’t see two of everything anymore, and could look at things without his right eye wandering off to peek over at irrelevant nonsense.  He could now blink his right eyelid again, and he could feel the sharp ache in his right eye, perhaps caused by the wind blowing and drying out his unblinking right eye.

BUT HE HAD NO IDEA HE HAD A GUNSHOT WOUND IN HIS HEAD!

The exit wound was a raw, gaping, grisly horror; there above his forehead.  It looked almost an inch in diameter.  Just above the hairline.  The thick dark hair that had been there was just . . . gone.  It was not a neat round hole, it was a jagged gash of caked blood.  Reed could see so far back in to his head that it was frightening!  One inch?  An inch and a half?

There was actually far less blood than he would have expected from such an awesome aperture.

His fingers charily touched around the top of his head, felt along the caked bloody hair, felt, touched further back, further back, tried to find, SHIT!  The tiny entrance hole was SO FAR BACK!  The bullet had traveled UNDER HIS SCALP!

Control of his right arm was returning quickly.  He touched, so softly it was almost not a touch at all, the edge of the wound in his forehead, frightening himself again with how far he could insert his pinky into the hole without touching anything.  With his other hand, he touched the only place that could be the entrance wound . . . connecting the points with an imaginary line . . . It had to be almost a half inch under his hair!

How thick was his skull?  All Reed could think of was the bullet tearing through his BRAIN!  His MIND!  Or maybe blasting splinters of his skull-bone down into his thinking machine.

Reed thought of going to a hospital, but drop-kicked that before he had completed the thought.  Doctors.  Diverting him from Courty.  No fucking way, Jose.

“How come you ain’t dead, gut-fucker!?” Liz asked.

Reed tilted the rearview mirror back to proper function.  “I don’t know how to die, puta!”

Two horns honked at the same time, in cars behind the BMW.

Liz laid it on him: “Drive, douche-dick!”

“Shut the fuck up, Tootsie.”

Reed put both hands on the wheel, used his right foot this time on the accelerator, and went through the motions of being a living human being in the driver’s seat.

A final sliver of self-doubt.  How do I feel?  Well, I’m driving the car OK . . .

He had a headache, but it wasn’t precisely located at the wound points.  It was just a headache headache.  It wasn’t a bullet-through-the-brain headache.

Time to do the macho get-your-act-together thing, Reed.

Shot in the head.  Shit, cops don’t shoot people in the head for running red lights.  That was no cop, it was an assassin.  Des Barres does have Courty!  And he’s playing for keeps.  But then, what all happened back there?

A whiff of something that was not Sapphic upchuck singed Reed’s nostrils.  “Hey Tootsie, what’s that you’re smoking, back there?”

“None o’ your biz, bullet-brain.”

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The smell of vomit, the smell of brains on the window, it smelled like success in the city!  Liz no longer felt half naked: she had her crack pipe in her fist.  She looked at it.  It was beautiful like a Christmas toy; car lights sparkling off the glass.  Liz was tickled pink.  She was purring proudly.  She zigged her butt across the leather backseat, and let loose with a war-whoop yell of joy right into Reed’s right ear.  “Hoooo-Woaaaaaah!  Aieeeeee-YAH!”

“That’s all I fucking need,” Reed said, “a lesbyterian crack, on crack.”

She laughed.  Laughter that cascaded like a waterfall out of her mouth and bounced along her bare boobies, and sent little giggling eddies down between her thighs, and finally splashed whitewater chortles down on her shoes, tickling her toes and cleaning the barf and washing away the whiffet of retch out to sea.  Between whoops, Liz lashed out with a jolly shout: “You need it like a hole in the head!”  And she was lost again in a buoyant crack elation of backseat chuckling and squealing.

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Liz liked the way Reed had solicited a random highway hooker; rested his right hand over his head wound, called her over for a talk, and then shoved his pistol in the girl’s startled face, told the braless bitch to strip, and then tossed the sparkling blouse into the back for Liz to wear.  She liked that.  And she liked the way the stumbling honey went off screaming, topless into the night, at the SIGHT of Reed’s head.  (First, she thought Reed was doing a gag, that he had a Hollywood/Halloween headwound.)

Liz liked Reed’s prep, the teamwork, the way he needed her.  Tootsie.  Kind of a cute nick-name, too.

She liked the wirecutters, ooooooh, and the way she cut off the guard’s balls——SNAP!——cinchy.  Reed hipped her to the scene: that the guy outside has a mic on his shoulder, wired to the radio on his belt, that all he has to do is say two numbers, and the voice-activated microphone broadcasts who he is and where he is and what the problem is to his earhead friends.  Liz liked that: Reed was a survivor on the edge.  Never would’a figured it.  He could move, cool and sleek, where others were locked out.  Like BJ.

Maybe pellet guns were pussy, but Liz liked the way Reed was right there for her, the way as soon as she had hooked up to the strolling guard, gave him the come-on with her eyes, and tripped on her heels, falling onto his shoulder, quickly cutting his microphone with her tiny wirecutters . . . Reed was right there with the zoo-gun, shooting the poison sleepy-time dart into the dude’s neck, and then running up from around the corner, fast before the guy could unsnap and unholster his handgun, and then bashing him to the sidewalk.  She liked that.

She liked the way Bullet-Brains had the building by the balls.  BB for short: hell, she could nick some names too.

She liked the way he had it all down.  Proper planning saves party points.  She liked the clean magic that zapped the security boobs.

She liked the way Reed put on the security coat and security hat and used his credit-card-key to Open-Sesame the electric after-hours door.  Yes, and she liked the way he laid the nap on the other two boobus useless guard dudes.

She liked the way he aimed her at the private guard’s John so she could do her do.

She liked the way he knew right where the telephone circuit-board was, and cut out the lines to the top floors: No more Dial-A-Porn for you, dudes.

She liked the way Reed climbed into a guard uniform hisself, blended with the scene, didn’t take all night at the First Aid cabinet, no, just fast-wound some bandage cloth around the hurt head, and hid most of the white under the guard hat, then said, “Let’s go,” as if he blew out his brains and broke into buildings on weekends for kicks.

She liked the way Reed snuck the two of them into the private elevator.

But, “Jesus Christ with a rat up his ass,” she yelled at him, “lemme have my gun!”

“Keep your voice down, Tootsie.  And go easy on the blasphemy, will ya?  We need all the help we can get.  Let’s not get the Man upstairs pissed off.”  While Reed worked on the elevator-innards, he was keeping her duffel bag next to Boyd’s briefcase, away from her and in his corner of the elevator.

The duffel bag, her duffel bag, with her gun in it!

No, she did not like that.

“There ain’t no Man upstairs, whiz-head,” Liz informed him.  She laughed when Reed Catholic-crossed himself.  “There couldn’t be.  ’Cause Christ was a nigger.”

“Cool it, you blasphemous bisexual bitch.  I don’t want to listen to this.  He doesn’t want to listen to this.  I’m going to close your mouth with my fist, if you don’t shut up.”

“Go lick a Tabasco twat.”

Reed gave her a hard look, not a hard hit.  Then it was back to work for Reed.

Liz added, “And get the Mexican squirts.”

“Shut up, clit-head.”

“Fuck-you, bullet-brain.”

“All right, Tootsie.  One more syllable out of you, and I turn into a woman beater.”  He held up his fist and waited for the peep.  But Liz was unsatisfyingly silent.

She watched him go back to work.  He had the elevator stopped between floors.  He was inside the guts of the electronic thing, with a multi-tester and alligator clips doing some kind of secret shit to the brains of the thing.

In his hand, he had a tiny keyboard with a liquid crystal display screen above it, which was plugged into something in the electrical panel behind the elevator’s push buttons for the different floors.

Reed did something that instantly killed all the power; everything went black.

“BB, I don’t like this!  Do some lights, or I’m leavin’.”

But a second later Reed had his flashlight out, and on.  “Hold this for me.  I know it’s shaped like a cock; just pretend it’s a pussy.”

“Sure thing, chicken queen.”

Reed held a booklet into the beam of the flashlight Liz was holding for him, and read parts of it, tried to figure out how to operate the programmer in his other hand.

“The way I figure it,” Liz said, “see, Jesus had no permanent address . . . and He called everyone His bro . . . and nobody would hire Him.  So He had to be a spade.”

Reed groaned and looked helplessly to the heavens.  “Is this going to go on forever?” he asked the Man upstairs.  “Have I died and gone to hell?  Am I stuck with her, for all eternity?  That’s mighty white of You!”  He bent back over the booklet and figured.

Reed was in a total and complete mess.  NOW HE HAD A HEADACHE!  A throbbing white-hot pulsing blast of pain.

But that was not the mess.

The mess was that he didn’t know what most of the variables on the LCD display meant.  He needed a template of operations for the chip.  The programmer in his hand could reprogram the chip to make the elevator go up to Eric’s floor and open without warning, without setting off any alarms, but he didn’t know how to do it.  What did the variables reference?  He could read off the sequence of activation on the LCD.  ‘B’ follows signal ‘A’ time delayed 0.5 seconds which then activates ‘F’ & ‘H’ and continues operation until signal ‘R’ interrupts or 12.5 seconds have elapsed, which then energizes relay ‘K’.  But what do the variables stand for?  What are ‘F’ and ‘K’?  What is ‘R’?

As he paged through the programmer, he knew that he had some of it.  He had them stopped between floors, and he could read out on his little screen a duplicate of the numerical display on each floor that indicated the position of the elevator.

It was insanely complicated.  The Mitsubishi was a multipurpose micro-brain that could be used for just about anything.  Robots in factories.  Satellites in outer space.  Tanks on the battlefield.  The house of the future (today).  To figure out how to control the elevator, to logically understand the programmer without a reference chart of the variables in the functions, Reed had to rethink everything all the way back to genesis; he had to reason it out: if he were the programming technician, how would he use the Mitsubishi to run an elevator?  Exactly what had to be controlled, and precisely in what sequence were the necessary operations?

Without any warning, Reed fell down onto his hands and knees.  It was quite a surprise: what am I doing down here?  He was suddenly so dizzy, he could hardly hold his head above the floor.  He could see the programmer down on the floor at the edge of his vision.

“Hey, Bullet-Brain, you OK?”

Reed tried to steady himself, reached his right hand forward for better balance, his palm came down on the programmer’s keyboard, pushing a cluster of numerical buttons, which reactivated the power & lights inside the elevator.  Then, Reed lost everything.  Total black-out.  His head pitched forward and smacked onto the floor, and his whole body went limp.

COURTNEY, Chapter 71
 

Copyright 2005 Area 47