Read Internecine for Free Online

you the way I did the kindergartener over there. You have inadvertently stuck your weenie into a fan, but you may also have saved my life tonight. For that, I have to break tradition and discuss a couple of things with you. Hot button items. Like these fellows Jenks and Ripkin—who they might be, I mean beneath and behind all the schmooze and persona, and how that involves you, because according to the crap in the briefcase you’re part of their mix, in some mysterious switchback way. But in order to explore this like civilized human beings, we have to leave, like, five minutes ago. Unless you want to wait around for Celeste’s pals, who will probably be storming your lobby by the time the news comes on.”
    It was three minutes till 11 P.M.
    “You can stay here and try your luck with the, ahem, authorities, if you want. But I guarantee you won’t see any real police for days, during which time you’ll be detained by grim people who aren’t very giving. Like her.”
    “She gave me a hell of a headache,” I said.
    He snorted. “Hmm. I guess she did. So let’s you and me make like a tree and get the flock outta here. We have to dispose of
that.
”
    He meant the briefcase, not the corpse.
    And he had not mentioned Alica Brandenberg at all, not once.
    “Expect not to come back here for a while. Take some aspirin and we go.”
    I gulped some leftover Vicodin and killed another whole glass of bubble water. So much for my Katy fantasy. A brief vision of her, at home and safely asleep (alone, I hoped), made my sinuses throb. When I looked back, the gun was gone, the knife was gone, and my living visitor was holding the Halliburton.
    “Shall we? After you.”
    He had also removed his stocking mask. It was the guy whose photo was laminated onto the FBI card.
    There was a helicopter idly buzzing the building when we exited through the stairwell fire doors. It made me feel like a fugitive, already. My keeper pointed at a Pontiac Sebring parked in the visitor lot and keyed the doors open with a fob remote.
    I could run away, sure, but the point of that would be . . . what? I’d spend the rest of my life (however short) wondering what the bejeezus had just happened to me. I mean, what would
you
do?
    “What do I call you?” I said.
    “You can call me Dandine,” he said, as though he’d thought the name up on the fly.
    “Well, Mr. Dandine—please tell me what the hell is going on?”
    “In a minute.” He shrugged into a black jacket and fired up the car, identical to my airport rental, except this one was not a convertible but a black sedan, with a sunroof. “First, we get clear of the hot zone. Second, we lose that fucking case.”
    That seemed wrong to me. The mystery, the questions, were all tiedup in the briefcase. To get rid of it seemed somehow counterproductive.
    Dandine sensed this, apparently. “Here’s what you failed to know about that case. The center button, the one above the handle? It’s a microcamera about the size of a penny, with a 54-millimeter lens and a DC power supply that activates when you open the lid. The second you opened that thing, they had your face. How long after that did your killer girlfriend show up?”
    “About an hour?” I wasn’t sure. “She said her name was Celeste.”
    “Whatever.” He tooled us onto the eastbound 10 freeway. “Looks like one of Varga’s freelancers, which might explain a lot.”
    That didn’t track for me, but I behaved as expected. Waited for more.
    “Interesting thing about that model,” he said, meaning the briefcase. “The inside is a polymer sleeve designed to present a bogus profile to X-ray. Instead of guns and ammo, the scope sees a digitized representation of papers and folders as the contents of the case. That’s handy until some nosy baggage rat opens the case, but sometimes, it’s handy enough to get you to the next step.”
    “Does it blow up, too?” The damned thing was sitting on the seat right behind us.
    “Nah. Don’t