AREA 47

SECTION 89:

COURTNEY, Chapter 74

Reed cleared the surface of unconsciousness.  He woke up fast, finding himself on a high-up narrow upper bunk inside a fair-sized windowless cabin.

He could hear someone below him, or in the room with him.  He turned his head without lifting it much, looked around a little from his perch about five feet off the deck.  It did not look like the internal architecture of a boat, but nevertheless he knew he was on a boat.  There was no window to the cabin.  The motion was slight, nothing definite beyond a sense of room restlessness.  Reed raised himself up.

There was Philip, standing in the doorway behind Reed, looking at him bleakly.  “Some people stub their toe on a pebble, and die of infection,” Phil said.  “Other people, you can’t kill ’em with an elephant gun.  You’re the luckiest bastard I’ve seen to date, by God.  The Doc says the bullet grooved under the left of your scalp, but didn’t penetrate your skull.  He thinks you outta be in a hospital for observation, but he doesn’t think it’s serious.  Shot in the head and he doesn’t think it’s serious; that’s a new one on me.”  Phil pause.  “You’re pumped full of antibiotics, boy.  Not that that means anything, if you catch my drift.”

Reed felt his head, gently, and discovered that it had been professionally bandaged.  He sat up and swung his feet over the edge of the bunk.  Only then did he realize that he was no longer chained and handcuffed.  He was wearing the same black guard shirt, still tucked into the same black guard pants.  He wondered if the knife, or whatever, was still inside his shirt or had been discovered.  He couldn’t feel it, and didn’t dare feel for it.

Philip crinkled his eyes with amusement.  “You don’t talk much, do ya?”  Pause.  “We got the girl’s story.  I’d like your story.  I don’t wanna have to get rough.  The girl’s bragging how she shot Morgan in the head——Jeez, everybody’s gettin’ shot in the head.”  A pause.  “Liz is a crackhead.  Getting her to sing was the easiest thing there is; we just gave her a little sniff o’ crack, and then held it back.  Hell, she couldn’t talk fast enough.  She sold you out so fast, we knew everything about your half-assed little plan before we could pop the torch on for her second rock.”

Reed took a deep breath.  “I’m not up on my TV shows, but I think this is where I rant and rave about how you can’t get away with all this.  You know: let me go, let Courty go; that stuff.  Consider it said.”

Phil was ruefully amused by Reed.  “Boy, I’m trying to keep you alive.  But you’re not helping any.  You can just drop all thoughts of romantic rescue right out of your brain; what little of your brain you’ve got left.  Nobody’s rescuing anybody.  Nobody wants to be rescued.  You saw, right?  Courty’s a convert.  I guess Eric was right all along and knew what he was doing.  So you can just drop the heroic bullshit.  It ain’t gonna happen.”

Reed dropped down onto the carpeted floor, half as a test of his own equilibrium.  He didn’t faint.  He didn’t fall over in shock at the raw pain of the jolt.  He stood there, more or less stable.  Slowslowslow smile, that he tried to shut down before it took over his whole face.  The sharp metal was still inside his shirt.

Phil said, “I don’t get you, Reed.  Your moves are half-pro, and half-shitfaced amateur night.  It don’t figure.  Christ, you come on with inside information, and you come in with fast-acting tranquilizer dart guns to put the guards right out.  But then you drag along that drug addict sewer-mouth whore.”

Reed didn’t say anything.

The ugly face became uglier.  “Tell me something specific.  How did you overpower Morgan?  She says she shot him from the backseat, same time as he shot you in the head.  But I don’t buy that.  I’ve never seen a teen-age girl yet who could shoot for shit.  And Morgan never would have botched a close-up shot.  What really happened?”

“Why is it so important to you?”

“Quit stalling.  They found Morgan in the Bronx, shot in the head outside his car . . . what was left of his car.  How’d you find out about him?  Did Morgan sell us out?  Did you kill him after he double-crossed us, to protect yourself?”

Reed snorted at the sheer unexpectedness of the questions.  “All I know is I was shot in the head.  When I came out of it, the guy who apparently shot me was dead.  You wanna fill in the blanks?  Go for it.  I didn’t even know I was shot.  I thought he just hit me over the head.  It was——”

“Shut up and listen!” Phil said.  “This is not a Manhattan skyline cruise, boy.  The crew hasn’t come aboard yet.  We’re in a very private berth.  I’m paintin’ you a picture, boy, pay attention!  When this ship sails, you ain’t going to be on it, that I guarantee.  You’ll be on shore alive, maybe; or, more likely, buried under the concrete pilings of the next Des Barres skyscraper.  You got a brain behind that gaping hole?  I’m going to ask some questions, and I want some straight up answers.  And don’t crapshoot me, boy——”

“I’m not——”

“Shut UP!” Phil shouted, angrily.  “I’ll tell you when to talk.”  The ugly man narrowed his eyes; his lips thinned to a line of contempt.  His powerful body was not leaning negligently against the doorframe now, it was poised, erect, ready for dirt.  “You frightened the man.  You got through his security system——my security system.  You made me look bad.  I don’t know what he’s going to want to do with you, but I DO know I’m going to find out how you did it.  Somebody told you way too much, ’cause you came in way too slick.  I want that who.”  Pause.  “Give me a name!  And I want proof!”

Uneasy pause.

Phil shouted: “Somebody sold us out, who was it?  Talk to me, you prick!  Was it Morgan, or some fucking servant?”

“Phil, I don’t know where you’re coming from, but I didn’t even know there was a Morgan, until he tried to kill me.  And I didn’t know what his name was, until you and Des Barres told me.  None of your employees sold out.  I didn’t take the chance of trying to buy a fink.  And there wasn’t time to try to set somebody up for blackmail or——”

“You’re singin’ outta tune, boy.  A Mitsubishi programmer for the elevator?  This is your last chance.  Then I hurt you.”

“Phil . . . the Mitsubishi . . . that’s public access!  One of the P-Eyes working for me checked out Eric’s building.  He tried to go up to Eric’s penthouse, and the elevator wouldn’t take him there, so he popped the front panel open with a screwdriver; he just jimmied it open and read the model number and serial number right off the microprocessor.  So I bought one.”

Philip came for Reed.  He just moved right in.  Reed knew right away that he wasn’t going to get a friendly pat on his shoulder, but there was nothing he could do about it.  He backed into the corner and talked fast.  “Phil!  I just called up Mitsubishi America and ordered one!  When you buy a brain, they send you a programmer!  Wait, man!  God Damn It!”

Reed was fast, faster than Phil expected.  He could see the flurry of karate activity coming his way.  He blocked the first kick at the cost of a broken left wrist.  He never saw the rest of it.  The hand-chop to his neck came out of nowhere.

It put Reed into a dull-gray fog of semi-consciousness, pain, dizziness, and nausea.  His eyes lolled around, they could not stay focused on any one thing for more than an instant.  He was being wounded, beat up in other ways, but it all melted together into an agony without any specifics; soft, tender spots blasting with pain——and he couldn’t do a thing about it . . .

Horizontal.

A crumpled heap of wounds approximately face down.

His vision blurred, the little Oriental patterns of different browns in front of his crossed eyes, they were all moving in a wild circle, his stomach was telling him to throw up, but he didn’t seem to have the necessary energy.  Phil didn’t seem to be hitting him anymore.

Then . . . motion . . .

His body was dumped over, and then rolled over near the two bunk beds.  Reed was on his side, he felt his metal weapon fall out of his shirt.  He fought against the pain and the nausea, and rolled over onto his stomach, hiding it, trying to feel for it, find it, grab it with his right hand, before Phil saw it and attacked him some more.  It was spoon shaped, the handle of the spoon somehow sharpened.

Had it!  He had it in his hand.  But he was so weak, his wimp-grip on it was feckless, useless.  He didn’t even consider using it now as a weapon; the solitary thought in his head was to hide it, preserve it for use as a weapon later.  He wanted to insert it into his right sock, but his feet were so far away!  They were way down there at the other end of his body.  It was an impossible destination.  He didn’t like putting it back inside his shirt, but he didn’t know what else to do with it.

Once that solitary thought was taken care of, another entered, and he wondered why he wasn’t being beat on some more.  He dragged his head up to look.

It seemed like Phil was making a bed——which was absurd, since he was nowhere near the bunks.  But there was the fuzzed-up image of Phil fluffing out a blue sheet into the air.  It didn’t make any sense at all.  Then Phil came over to him . . . Oh, shit . . . And Reed felt himself rolled onto the sheet that Phil had fluffed out into the air.  It had the sticky feel of plastic, it was a plastic tarp, Reed was on a plastic tarp.

Oh, now I get it.  It’s a karate mat.  We’re going to fight for points.  Great.  Where’s the judges?

He tried to pick himself up off the tarp . . . but it just wasn’t going to happen.  He could feel his left arm being tugged out straight and then dropped on the tarp, he could feel the pain in the wrist when it hit the tarp, hard on the thin carpeting underneath, and then something tickling his little finger——

Then came a sharp crisp new pain that leaped through his nervous system like a bolt of lightning from his left little finger straight to his brain.

Reed looked——the pain had revived him sufficiently——he looked and saw the heavy-duty red 18” bolt-cutters, saw his amputated little finger curled on the tarpaulin, the little red splats of blood on the blue surface, the thin, scarlet red that was pumping out of where his finger had been.

Reed reached with his right hand to gently hold his wounded left hand, quickly getting both hands slippery wet with the bright red blood.

Phil stood over him, holding the bolt-cutters in his hand.  “Piano player, you got nine fingers left.  I don’t feel like fucking around; I want some information here.  What’s with you and Morgan?  Did he sell us out?  Is that how you found out about him?”

Suddenly the plastic tarpaulin made sense.  It was the damn blood.  It was getting all over.  But it was not getting on any of The Lowlander.  Eric’s yacht was saved from such indignities as blood and vomit and tears and whatever else Byron Reed’s body happened to leak.  Reed was impressed.  It probably should have reduced Reed to a quivering jelly of cooperation, a gushy vocal desperate obedience.  But it didn’t.  It just pissed him off.  “Fuck you.”

Philip moved in on him again.  There was very little Reed could do.  Reed was wounded, and the man was a karate pro.  Reed squirmed, tried to block, tried to pull in his hands, tried to keep the spoon in his shirt in a way that wouldn’t cut him up, but he was battered into unconsciousness.

When he revived, the first thing he saw was blood, a LOT of blood.  The first thing he felt was pain, pain from many places, but most of all from two fingers that should have been there on his left hand, but weren’t.  The little finger and the one next to it.  Both cut completely off.

“You gettin’ the idea, Reed?  I want to know how you found out about Morgan.  Talk to me.”

Reed looked at his bloody-red mutilated left hand.  Half Of It Was Gone!  The stupid slime was asking questions that he didn’t know anything about!

It made Reed mad.  Murderously angry.  It inflamed his blood into a blaze, his teeth gnashed, his veins and cords stuck out on his neck like welts of steel cable.  The surface of his skin stung with the force of his passion, reviving his consciousness to a sharp clarity.

I’m going to kill you for that!  I’m going to gut you, rip out your lungs and piss on your heart!  I’m going to shove the shotgun up your ass and PULL!  Twelve-gauge unfriendly right up your ass!

“Talk to me, boy.  Or I cut off another finger.  Talk to me!  Talk to me, piano player!”

Reed remembered, more or less, something Liz had said.  His anger oozed out into words: “Fuck you up the ass and out the other end!”

COURTNEY, Chapter 75
 

Copyright 2005 Area 47