Table Of ContentZero at the Bone
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
INTERLUDE
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
EPILOGUE
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Published by
Dreamspinner Press
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Frisco, TX 75034
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either
are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any
resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events
or locales is entirely coincidental.
Zero at the Bone
Copyright © 2009 by Jane Seville
Cover art by Paul Richmond, www.paulrichmondstudio.com.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system
without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by
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Frisco,
TX
75034
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ISBN: 978-1-935192-80-0
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First Edition
April, 2009
eBook edition available
eBook ISBN: 978-1-935192-81-7
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Dedicated to every reader who has ever
offered me praise, criticism, support or just
acknowledgment. You know who you are. You have
helped keep me writing for many years, and
without that, I would not be the writer I am now,
nor would I ever be the writer I still hope to
become.
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A narrow fellow in the grass
Occasionally rides—
You may have met Him,—did you not,
His notice sudden is.
The Grass divides as with a Comb,
A spotted Shaft is seen,
And then it closes at your Feet
And opens further on—
He likes a Boggy Acre,
A Floor too cool for Corn—
But when a Boy, and Barefoot,
I more than once at noon,
Have passed, I thought, a Whip lash
Unbraiding in the Sun
When stooping to secure it
It wrinkled, and was gone—
Several of Nature's People
I know, and they know me—
I feel for them a transport
Of Cordiality—
But never met this Fellow
Attended or alone
Without a tighter Breathing
And zero at the bone.
—Emily Dickinson
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CHAPTER 1
The smell of cheap motel rooms was comforting to him, like his oldest,
rattiest T-shirt. Lysol, unwashed feet, and that sour tang of grime and
desperation that tried to dress up and look nice with laundered sheets and
those stiff bedspreads that felt like sandpaper on your ass, bargain basement
art on the walls and the cheap paper-wrapped chits that weren’t so much soap
as a suggestion of what soap might be like.
Motel rooms like this had known many men without names, but he
wondered if he was the first who’d let his go by choice. He signed a
meaningless pseudonym to the register and paid cash. He could afford to stay
in nicer places, but that would mean hauling out one of his impressive array
of fake identifications, and he didn’t use them unless absolutely necessary.
Each one, when used, left a shallow footprint in the shifting sand dunes of his
existence, which he preferred to keep pristine and featureless. Even if that
hadn’t been the case, he’d still prefer rooms like this. They fit around him
snugly with the comforting security of anonymity. Every time he’d stayed in
fancier digs he’d felt like he was rattling around in them like the last pea in
the can. The eyes of the world could see him in places like that. Places like
this, he could float through without leaving a trace, and the world’s eyes
looked away.
He shucked his jacket, smelling smoke and stale beer on himself from the
bar he’d spent the evening in. He didn’t know why he kept going. The bars,
like the motel rooms, were always the same. He didn’t go to the ones with
fancy neon and clever drinks at the bar. He liked the ones with gravel parking
lots and sagging roofs, the kind that sported hand-painted signs proclaiming
that this was Somebody’s-Name’s-Bar. Folks went to those places for two
reasons: to get drunk enough to forget their sorry-ass lives, or to pick up a
piece of tail. Neither interested him. He wouldn’t claim that his life couldn’t
stand some forgetting, but the booze had not yet been invented that could let
him, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to pick up a piece of tail.
Sometimes he thought he should, just to keep up the appearance of being
part of the human race. It wouldn’t have been hard. The skanks that hung out
at these bars usually homed in on him the minute he walked through the door,
sizing him up to see if he was good for a screw, a free meal, maybe shacking
up in a double-wide and paying the bills. They’d flap around on the dance
floor, presenting like monkeys at a zoo, and lean too close when they stood
next to him at the bar, wafting an unpleasant mixture of Love’s Baby Soft and
flop-sweat.
The occasional notion that maybe he shouldn’t sleep alone every single
night of his life wasn’t enough to actually make him take the initiative. It had
been a long time since anyone got that close to him. In his line of work, he
had to be careful. Close enough to fuck was close enough to shank him with a
dagger hidden in the crease of some chick’s jean shorts. Some part of his
mind that remembered civilization knew that it wasn’t normal to be this
paranoid. Couldn’t be helped. That ship had sailed.
So he went to the bars, had a beer or two, stayed quiet, watched the
people, and left. If he stayed any longer, the eyes on him became too much.
Always the eyes, looking at him sidelong, like they knew. What could they
know about some stranger having a beer in a bar? They didn’t know shit. But
the eyes were always on him, and whether they knew anything or not, the idea
that they might always drove him out.
He stretched out on top of the bedspread and lit a cigarette, staring at the
ceiling. He could tell Josey that it was just a precaution, he could tell himself
that it was paranoia, but here on the sandpaper bedspread where it was just
him and the bargain-basement art, he couldn’t deny that he was always alone
in these godforsaken motel rooms because the tits and ass on offer just
weren’t that interesting to him. He didn’t like to think about how far gone he
was into the abyss that even the humanness of lust was now foreign to him.
At least he still felt hunger, and cold, and the craving for nicotine. How
long until even those animal sensations left him? Would he eventually be left
with nothing but a set of skills that suited him for only one profession, and a
head full of things he didn’t want to know? Maybe he’d disconnect enough
that he would no longer sweat, or piss, or get stupid songs stuck in his head.
He’d been told over and over again that he’d have to become a machine, but
he hadn’t really believed that he would. He knew better now.
He stubbed out his cigarette and shut off the bedside lamp. He wondered
if he should try jerking off. It’d be nice if he were capable of even that level
of self-love, but he hadn’t managed to wring one out in a long time. Months?
Years? He couldn’t remember. The desert stripped most indicators of date and
season from his memories. Everything was always hot and bright and seared
crisp.
He set the alarm clock. He couldn’t be late for Josey tomorrow, and it still
was a long drive to Nevada.
Jack just wanted to wash the blood off his sleeves. It was ground into
the creases of his knuckles and clotted into the hair on his wrists. He was
elbow-deep in blood on a daily basis, but never without the shielding of
gown, gloves, sterility… sanity. He couldn’t stop staring at it, the edges of the
stain bleeding into the white of his shirt, the darker blotches on his hands. He
just wanted to be allowed to get up, leave the interview room, and wash it off.
Or change his shirt. Or go home and cry.
The odds of this happening seemed slim. “Let’s go over it again, Dr.
Francisco.”
He didn’t bother to look up to see which of the suits was talking to him.
They were all the same. They blended into one nameless entity of Suit With
Questions that surrounded him in navy blue polyblend and poked and prodded
and wouldn’t let him go home. “I told you already.”
“Tell us again.”
“I was on my way to my car.”
“In the parking garage.”
“Yes.”
“What floor?”
“The tenth.”
“Why’d you park way up there?”
“I got to work late today; that was the first spot I found.” He could hear
his own voice, flat and uninflected. This was what it had come down to: a rote
recitation of one of the worst days of his life. “I saw three people standing in
the empty spot next to the car.”
“What kind of car?”
“It was a black Escalade. I don’t know what year. Late model. I didn’t get
the plate number. The woman was up against the side. I looked over to see if
she needed help, then I saw the knife.” He felt the shame rising in his chest
again, wanting to choke off his words. “I should’ve helped her,” he said.
“It’s a good thing for you that you didn’t, or you’d be dead too. Then what
happened?”
“I ducked down behind a car. The tall one stabbed her. She didn’t scream.
There was this sucking noise, like a gasp. I heard her fall. The two men got in
the Escalade and drove off.” He gulped. “They didn’t see me.”
“And you saw the men clearly?” Jack nodded. “Then what’d you do?”
“I ran to her to see if I could help her. I tried to put pressure on the wound
while I called nine-one-one.” He swiped at his eyes. “She died before the
paramedics got there.”
Silence. Jack looked up. The suits were concerned. He glanced around.
The suits were waiting for something. He didn’t bother to ask what.
The door opened and another suit entered, carrying a folder. He didn’t
introduce himself or acknowledge the other suits; he just sat down next to
Jack. “Dr. Francisco, the woman you saw killed was Maria Dominguez. She
was scheduled to testify about her extensive knowledge of her ex-husband’s
drug-related activities.”
“So… those men were….”
“Yeah.” The new suit met his eyes. “I’m not going to bullshit you, Dr.
Francisco. You’re our winning lottery ticket here. We’ve never had a witness
who could identify any of the Dominguez family in the commission of a
crime.”
“You mean you haven’t had one that lived long enough to testify.”
The suit sighed. “You’ll live. I promise.”
Josey was waiting at the drive-in where they’d arranged to meet. The
place was straight out of the Twilight Zone. It looked like it had been
abandoned for years; everything was bleached white from the desert sun.
Listless brown weeds clumped around the bases of the empty posts that had
once held the speakers, planted in regular rows like grave markers. He
wouldn’t have been surprised if some of them were. Be a good place to bury
some bodies, he thought. No one watching except this big blank eye of a
movie screen.
She was sitting on the hood of her car. “You’re late, D,” she said as he
approached.
“Pick a meet site that ain’t in the middle a fuckin’ nowhere, then we’ll talk
about bein’ late. What ya got fer me?”
“Nothing you’ll take, probably.”
“Must have somethin’. Ya called me here.”
“I swear, I don’t know why I keep you on the list. So fucking picky.”
“Rules is rules.”
She sighed and opened her briefcase. “Biggest ticket today is this one,”
she said, handing him the folder. He glanced over the file and knew within
five lines that he wouldn’t be taking it. “D, it’s a hundred large,” Josey
beseeched him, as he handed the folder back to her. She always tried to palm
off a few up front on him, although he couldn’t imagine that after all this time
she’d think that just this once he’d cave in and take it.
“I ain’t doin’ no woman just cuz her asshole husband’s embarrassed that
she fucked the pool boy. Next.”
“This one?”
The second one only took two lines before he was handing it back. “Don’t
do cops.”
“Okay, Mr. Fucking Moral Superiority, how’s this one?”
He started reading, and kept going. This one was… possible. “Hmph.”
“Oh, you’re actually gonna consider this one? I might just piss my pants
for joy.”
“Never done no art dealer.”
“Oughta be a walk in the park. A guy like this thinks he’s untouchable.”
He sighed. “How much?”
“Fifty.”
He tucked the folder into his jacket. “Three days.” He started to walk
away.
“You know,” Josey said. “All these other ones that you won’t do? I just
give them to one of the others. They get done anyway.”
D stopped, but did not turn. “Yeah?”
“So if they’re gonna get done, why does it matter you’re not the one doing
them?”
He shook his head. “You gotta ask why it matters, I ain’t gonna bother
answerin’.”
Jack was sitting in his dim living room. Well, not his living room,
technically. It belonged to Jack Macintosh, whoever that was. He had Jack
Macintosh’s driver’s license in his pocket, and the mail in the hallway was
addressed to this mythical man, wherever he’d come from. Who was he?
What did he do for a living? Jack Macintosh was a professional at waiting.
Waiting for it to be time to take an oath and tell a jury what he’d seen. At the
moment, however, Jack Macintosh was scrolling through the cable guide,
looking for something interesting on TV. Dr. Jack Francisco wasn’t here just
now. But Jack Macintosh had all the time in the world to reflect on the events
that had led him here to this impersonal, pre-furnished home in Henderson,
Nevada.
You had to have a cookie.
A cookie had landed Jack here, thousands of miles away from his old life.
He’d been on his way out of the office when one of the nurses hailed him.
“Have a cookie, Dr. Francisco!” she’d said. He’d hesitated. It was possible
that this was just the latest assault in the ongoing campaign being waged by
various nurses and fellow doctors to seduce him via baked goods.
He hadn’t even been hungry. But mmm… cookies. So he’d had one. What
was his rush, anyway? To get home to his dark apartment where the
companion of his evening would probably be whatever was airing on TCM
that night?
If he hadn’t had that fateful cookie, he’d have missed Maria Dominguez’s
murder and he’d still be in that dark apartment, with his own furniture, and
his own books, watching Robert Osborne introduce a film from the oeuvre of
Bette Davis or Joseph Cotton. George Sanders, if Jack was very lucky.
Well, I still have Robert, Jack thought, changing the channel. If there was
one thing you could count on in this world, it was that at any given moment,
Robert Osborne would be talking about film from his fake living room at the
TCM studios.
The Dominguez brothers knew that the state had a witness. Lucky Jack
had seen Tommy Dominguez and Carlos Alvarez kill Maria. So now here he
was in Las Vegas, his driver’s license bearing a stranger’s last name. “No one
is from Las Vegas,” his contact had said. “It’s easy to hide there.”
He was hiding until it was his turn to testify. And after that, he’d have to
hide again. He was trying not to think too much about leaving his career
behind. The idea of no longer being a surgeon, of not being able to do what
he’d spent most of his adult life training to do, was heartbreaking. But what
choice did he have? He had to help convict these men. He might have to give
up everything he knew but he’d still be alive, which was more than could be
said for Maria or the dozens of others these men had killed or would kill in
the future if Jack didn’t help stop them. This was what he kept telling himself.
Sometimes it even worked. It wasn’t much comfort when he lay awake in the
middle of the night feeling sorry for himself, but it was all he had and he’d
stick to it.
He put down the remote and settled back. All About Eve was just starting.
Jack smiled. At least something was going his way tonight.
Josey had been right. The art dealer job was a walk in the park.
He waited in the man’s bedroom, the last guest this man would ever
entertain here. He sat on the bed, breathing evenly. It was a very nice
bedroom. He wondered if the art dealer ever had sex in it, or if he just jerked
off to his fancy art books. He wondered if what visitors there might have been
were men or women.
The contract was simple. Obtain photographic proof of this man’s
misdeeds, then dispose of him. He’d already found the workroom and
documented everything. It was a cold, bloodless little scam the man had going
on here. He wasn’t clear on the details, but from what he’d been able to
gather, the guy took art with a shady paper trail, mostly pieces that had been
looted by the Nazis, and laundered their histories so that collectors and art
dealers could make a fortune selling it out from under the survivors’ families.
That shit ain’t right. It was what he needed to make it okay. It was
enough… barely.
He heard the front door open and close. He waited. Patience was not a
problem for him.
It took the little man an hour to come into the bedroom. He was barely in
the door before D had the dart in his neck. He dragged him to the bed and laid
him out. “You ain’t gonna be able ta move,” he said, “but you’re sure gonna
be able ta talk.” He got out his iPod, plugged in the mike, and the man talked.
They always talked. They never knew that D didn’t care what they had to say.
They never knew that it wouldn’t help.
The man’s eyes rolled in his head. D was put in mind of a deer he’d had to
kill when his first shot hadn’t gotten him clean. His father had stood at his
shoulder, saying “Gotta finish what ya started.” He’d used a knife, right to the
animal’s heart. “Finish it, son. ’Til the blood ain’t pumpin’ no more.”
Sometimes he wondered about that, in light of his choice of profession.
Sometimes he dreamed about it too.
The art dealer started trying to bargain with him, as they often did. He
offered him double what he was being paid. He apologized for whatever he’d
done to piss D off. D didn’t bother to answer. It wouldn’t do the man any
favors to know that it wasn’t D that he’d pissed off.
Two shots to the heart. D never went for the head; it was too messy.
He went to a Starbucks around the corner; he hated their coffee, but loved
the Wi-Fi. He e-mailed Josey a blank message through an anonymous
remailer, with the subject line “Get BiggER TITTTS ASAP!!!” That meant
the job was done. The penis-enlarger subject line was for an abort, and the
Hot Asian Sluts were for a delay. He downloaded the photos and the MP3 of
the art dealer’s confession, then saved everything to a stick drive. He slipped
it into the envelope Josey had given him with the contract, then wiped the
laptop’s hard drive. He tossed the envelope into a mailbox on his way out,
then the laptop into a passing garbage truck. The camera and the iPod were
his; they went back into his pockets.
Walk in the park.
Josey wasn’t at the next meet. He waited for an hour, but she didn’t
show up. D felt a fluttering of uncharacteristic worry in his gut. Supposedly
such things had been trained out of him, but his rusty emotional core still sent
up the occasional signal flare. They weren’t exactly in a low-risk business,
and any one of a number of unpleasant fates could have befallen his only
compatriot.
He headed home to find an e-mail from her. The subject line was “Get
VIAGRA Cheap!!!” That meant something was wrong.
He loaded up and got in his car, headed to the safe house. If there was
trouble, Josey would meet him there.
There was, indeed, trouble, in the form of three large men who looked like
they’d stepped out of the Hired Muscle Weekly catalog. D was hardly in the
door before they were on him. He had a split second to wonder how they’d
found the place before they’d pinned his arms and were dragging him inside.
D whipped his head backward into a nose and heard a satisfying crunch. He
pushed against the one still holding him and kicked upward across the jaw of
the one in front of him. Clearly, they hadn’t been expecting him to put up a
fight.
Unfortunately, the element of surprise didn’t last very long, and within a
few seconds they had tossed him onto the living room couch. He stared up
into two gun barrels, and was forced to rethink his thoughts of resistance.
Josey was tied to a chair nearby, bruised and bloody. “You okay?” he asked.
She nodded. “I’m sorry, D,” she said. Her voice sounded scratchy, like
someone had been strangling her. “I don’t know how they found me.”
“Don’t say nothin’,” he reminded her. Probably unnecessary. Even beaten
up and bound as she was, Josey was likely thinking three steps ahead.
The shortest of their new friends, probably the brains of the outfit,
approached him. “We got a job for you,” he said.
“I pick my own jobs, asshole,” he snarled.
Brains tossed him a folder. “She says you wouldn’t take this one if you
had a choice. So we’re not giving you a choice. You’re taking it.” D started to
open the folder. “No need to open it,” Brains said. “All you need to know is
that you’re doing it.”
“Or what?” D said. It almost didn’t matter. They were now in a position to
threaten him in almost any way they chose. His own life, his identity, Josey’s
life, the target’s slow, painful death against the quick one D would mete out.
As it turned out, they’d come prepared. Brains tossed D another folder,
motioning for him to examine its contents. D opened it. “Fuck me,” he said,
clamping down on the dull horror that rose in his throat. The folder was full
of pictures. Of him. Coming and going from the scene of every job he’d done
in the past six months. All of them time stamped. He glanced over at Josey,
the thought occurring that she might have sold him up the river, but the look
on her face dispelled his doubts.
“You’ll take the contract. We have evidence to tie you to half a dozen
contract killings this year alone. You’ll get six months in the electric chair.”
Brains smiled, and D thought again of that deer he’d killed. “You’ve got one
week. After that, those photos and a number of other salient pieces of
documentation will find their way to the FBI.”
“And after it’s done? I ain’t gonna be your monkey forever,” he muttered.
“My employer has no interest in you. You can go back to your regular…
schedule. When it’s done, it’s done.” He arched one eyebrow; D knew at once
that this guy was one of those that was always imagining himself in a
Tarantino movie. He knew the type. Same kind of guys that thought it was
cool to hold their guns sideways, the way no one actually did in reality.
Brains and his pets left. D went to Josey and released her from her bonds.
“I’m sorry,” she repeated. “They made me bring them here and send you the
trouble message.”
