Internecine by David J. Schow Read Free Book Online

goddamn business. And you came with me of your own free will. So calm down. You want to stop for some herbal chai, or something?”
    “No.” Now my bladder was about to explode, from all the seltzer.
    “Okay, to continue. Our darling—what’d she say was her name?”
    “Celeste.”
    “Doesn’t matter; probably a pseudo. She got cocky and decided to terminate you with one of the guns from the hit-kit. But they were booby-trapped with firebacks.”
    “You mean backfires?”
    “No. Firebacks: burn charges designed to cripple and blind the shooter, not the shootee.”
    “Intended to hurt . . . you?”
    “Mm-hm. Except I would have stripped the rigs and checked them, and found out when I eyeballed the ammo. Hence, our Celeste was an amateur, probably a freelancer.”
    “From someone named Varga. A subcontractor.”
    “Glad to see you’re paying attention. Yep, I owe Mr. Varga a visit, and it might be ugly. But Celeste’s employers either didn’t know about the firebacks or neglected to tell her. Either way, that’s uglier. I’m beginning to think she was hired by Alicia Brandenberg, or possibly her creatures, to roadblock me. Which throws an uncomplimentary light on my contractors.”
    There were too many balls to juggle. “The people who hired you to . . . er, kill Alicia Brandenberg?”
    “Never use terms like that,” he said. “Too definitive. Could give people the wrong idea.”
    “About what? Assassination by contract?”
    “One of my friends used to call it ‘maximal demotion.’ It all means the same thing—to purge.”
    It was no worse than advertising argot, I thought. Vague terms designed to cloak and mislead. Potent adjectives, wrongly directed. The art of saying one thing and meaning another. Politician speak.
    “Are you some kind of black ops guy?” I said.
    “You seem to be a fairly literate man, considering your profession,” Dandine said. “Right now you’re thinking of terrorism, counterassassination, military coups, dirty tricks, Watergate, spy-spy, murky secret organizations, that sort of thing, am I right?”
    “Well . . .” I fumbled. “What would
you
think?”
    “It’d only be funny if you were wrong,” he said. “You’re in the ballpark. So I’ll skip the smoke screen. You know why? Because it might be fun trying to explain it to you. There’s a reason subterraneans call people like you the walking dead. You live blissfully unaware lives in an overworld that pays taxes. Sometimes you are collateral damage, and that almost
never
matters, in the scheme of the real world. But we’ll save that for later.”
    “Any special reason?”
    We had sailed north from the freeway and were now in the center of Hollywood. Dandine wheeled the car into a parking slot at a 24-hour drugstore.
    “Because, Conrad my lad, we have arrived.”
    It was absurdly like a stilted, chaperoned date. I waited in the car while Dandine picked up decongestants from the drugstore. He said his allergies were bugging him. I correctly interpreted this as another test of my trustworthiness. As if I had anywhere to flee. As if I had more pressing business to conduct.
    “If you do get out of the car,” he said, “do not, I repeat, do
not
phone anyone.
Anyone.
They had a pull sheet on everybody you know or work with, as soon as they had your face on camera. That’s important. I don’t care how remote you think they are, or how much they love you. No calls, no contact with anyone. Agreed?”
    I shrugged helplessly and concentrated on not pissing my pants.
    Pull sheet?
I confess I instantly wanted to know: (1) what was onmine, (2) what was on everyone else’s, and (3) how I could access it. What Dandine did not know, and what I was thinking about now, was that there was literally nobody I cared to SOS or shoot an emergency holler toward. Not Burt Kroeger, my boss, therefore an assumed ally. Not my ex-wife. Certainly not Katy or any other lady friend. Not often do I admit to myself that the way I