Federal Discipline (10 page)

“Our contacts have put us in touch with a man who goes by the name of Blaze,”
Mullaney briefed her in the van, which was parked down an alleyway in a not at all good area of town. “He thinks you're a runaway looking for a good time. And he likes to show runaways a good time.”

Jamie cringed inwardly, thankful for the fact she looked about as rundown as the neighborhood they found themselves in. Hopefully her appearance would save her from any untoward attentions.

“Here,” Jack cut in, placing what looked and felt like a small piece of putty behind her ear. “This will act as a coms device. You'll be able to hear me, and we'll be able to hear you.”

“If I can hear you, won't other people be able to hear you too?”

“There's a small risk,” Jack acknowledged, “but we won't talk much. Only when necessary. Remember, you say the safe word phrase and we get you out of there.”

“Fuck off, fuckers,” Jamie said, grinning. 

Jack nodded. “That's the one. Remember. This isn't a drugs bust. You're there to get information. As much as possible about where this stuff is coming from and who is supplying it.”

“I remember,” Jamie assured him.

“Okay, you're ready to go,” Mullaney said. “We'll drop you here, circle around and tail you. Good luck.”

With that, Jamie stepped out into the cool, clear light of day.
Or really, the dark, shadowy and fairly fetid air of a back alley. Her heart was beating about a million miles a minute as she walked towards the street, her shoulders slumped, feet dragging every now and then like a junkie down on her luck, yearning for a fix.

Reaching the corner of the alley, she leaned against the wall and waited. The van was long gone in the opposite direction. She was on her own.

It didn't take long for her contact to show up. He was a tall, gangly man in a black death metal tee shirt and enough rings and piercings in his face to set off all the detectors from there to Albuquerque. He didn't look evil, per se. He looked a little bit high and he smelled like personal hygiene took a back seat to the business of rolling in patchouli oil.

He nodded at her. “You
Jax?”

“Yeah,” she said, wiping her nose on the back of her jean jacket
sleeve. “You Blaze?”

“Yeah,” he said. He looked her up and down, and to Jamie's horror, seemed to like what he saw.

“You got the stuff?”

“
Naw baby, it doesn't work like that,” Blaze said. “This isn't some street score. This is a lifestyle.”

A lifestyle. Wow. They were really selling this shit. Jamie shrugged. “I heard it gets you pretty fucking high.”

“High. Low. All around,” Blaze said. “It changes everything. Better than any crystal you ever smoked, sweetie.”

Sweetie. The word sounded perverse falling from those chapped, metal plundered lips.

“Well, hook me up,” Jamie said. She didn't have to feign impatience. She wanted this shit over with. Blaze made her skin crawl. Something in his eyes, or rather, the absence of something in his eyes. He was looking at her like a lizard might look at a cricket

“We'll see if you're worthy
first. Come on.”

They walked a few blocks to the old manufacturing district. There hadn't been much in the way of production there in years and most of the old buildings were chained up, broken windows and broken doors occasionally boarded up, occasionally left to rot.

“This is the temple,” Blaze said. They were stopped outside an old factory of some kind, beside a rusting metal door with a pentagram sprayed not at all inconspicuously across the surface. The same as had been under Mrs. Brampton's chair. The same as had been in Jamie's own bathroom. Seeing that asymmetrical, poorly painted symbol brought it home to Jamie just how real it all was. She hoped like hell Jack really was not far behind.

“Come in, initiate.”

Blaze was laying it on thick as he pushed open the door and let Jamie inside. There wasn't much light in there, what little there was came through dirty windows and was supplemented by dripping candles which had been placed over every available surface. It would almost have been romantic, if it weren't for the faint whiff of human decay Jamie could taste in the back of her throat. Something or someone was dead.

She couldn't worry about dead people at that moment, because there were six live people sitting around on old couches. So that's what happened to the couches people left out on the roadside, Jamie thought to herself. They were dragged into old factories and turned into makeshift beds for the high and the insane.

“These are the Berserkers,” Blaze said. “These are the high priests.”

“Emphasis on high,” one guy said. He had a shaved head, a safety pin through his nose and h
e was wearing a Just Say No tee shirt. An ironic drug addict.

The others laughed at his joke, not with any real humor, with the pitchy whine of jackals
who have just spotted their next meal.

“You're about to be initiated,” Blaze said, producing a baggie full of ominous looking red powder. “You're about to take the sacrament.”

Someone had been teaching him big words.

“Where does this shit come from?” Jamie looked at it suspiciously. “Doesn't look like nothing I seen before.”

“Because it's nothing you have seen before,” Blaze said, tapping a line of the stuff out onto the back of a purloined road sign. He handed her a dirty cylinder of cardboard.  “Go on,” he said, his eyes lit up with a peculiar sort of intensity that was downright scary.  “Have a sniff. That's what you came here for, right? You came here to score? Well baby, you just scored.”

Jamie was beginning to have severe doubts. “And what if I do
n't want this nasty street shit? I wanna know where it comes from.”

She heard the sound of more than one gun being cocked. “Then that makes you either a rat or a coward, and we don't like rats or cowards.”

“Take a little, Jamie,” Jack whispered in her ear. “Just a very little. Pretend, if you can.”

The sound of Jack's voice let her know she was not alone and calmed her nerves considerably. Still, that powder didn't look good. Fuck. This was where the rubber met the road.

“This better be good shit,” she said, lifting the cylinder to her nose.

“Baby, this shit will change your religion,” Blaze said. Around her, the Berserkers laughed.

Jamie hesitated a moment, then cast caution to the wind and took a small snort. A small portion of the powder flew up the cylinder and into her nose, where it burned like the blazes.

“Fuck me!” s
he said, reeling back and pinching at her nose. It was already beginning to flow with discharge. For a second she was afraid it was blood, but a quick wipe with the back of her hand revealed that it was worse than that, it was snot mixed with the red stuff, a gooey mess that smeared like a sacrament across her skin.

She could feel a tingling in her scalp and in her fingers and toes. There was a sound, a hollow noise like the rushing of a train and then – the room was gone. She was standing in a dark space. For a moment, she thought she'd gone blind, but then she realized that it was much worse than that. She'd fallen off the planet entirely.

“Scum!” A rasping voice called in the darkness. A pinprick of red light danced before her eyes then grew larger and larger until she was looking into the awful visage of one of hell's very own angels. It was a daemon, wings and all. Its face was vaguely human, but it stank of death and decay and fangs protruded from its upper lip.

Jamie could not believe what she was seeing, but for the fact she was not just seeing it. She
was smelling it. She was having a full sense experience of a creature that almost certainly did not exist except in religious texts. And even then, she'd never read of anything so foul in her Bible.

“Scum? Are you referring to me?”

If one was to talk to a ten foot tall daemon, one may as well ensure that one was communicating clearly.

“You are filth!”

The daemon seemed to be rather preoccupied with her being dirty, which Jamie thought was a bit odd as she'd showered not three hours ago. She gave her underarm an experimental sniff and discovered that she still smelled floral fresh.

“You have trespassed....”

“You mean trespassed as in I shouldn't be here, or trespassed as in forgive those who trespass against us?”

“Silence!”

Jamie zipped her lip and waited to hear what else the daemon had to say. Maybe it would be enlightening or maybe it would eat her. Crunch crunch. For some reason, Jamie wasn't entirely worried about what would happen next. Once one was in the business of having the world fall away and conversing with mythical creatures, it was probably all over, bar the shouting, anyway.

“You have been arrogant, mortal. You have thought yourself the equal of a god.”

“I have not.”

“Silence!”

Jamie scowled at the daemon. “Now look,” she said. “If you're going to accuse me of all sorts of things, I'm going to have something to say about it.”

“Your words are lies!”

“So are yours!”

Jamie was getting really rather irritated with the daemon. It was rude. And that was unacceptable.

“Look here,” she said. “I didn't come here. You brought me here.”

“You tasted of my body. You stepped through the gate to my realm. It is you who have sought audience with me, mortal!” The daemon thundered. “I could consume your very soul, if I so chose. I could dash you into oblivion and force you to suffer the pains of a thousand deaths.”

Maybe he could. Jamie was starting to feel very queasy in her tummy at the very least. “What do you want from me?”

The daemon leered, its maw opening to reveal row after row of sharp teeth all hung with ragged, putrid flesh.

“I want blood. I want my symbol marked up on the world. I want disciples. Go forth and find me flesh, or sacrifice your own if you are too weak to take the essence of another.”

Jack was worried. The last coherent words he'd heard through the feed were Jamie objecting to trying the drug. Then there had been nothing but mumbling and words that were not words. They sounded as though they meant something, but not in any language Jack had ever heard before. Her voice had changed, become rasping and harsh. And in the background, the Berserkers' exultation at her taking of the drug had given way to what could almost be called a reverent hush.

“We're going in,” he said, checking his gun to make sure it was correctly loaded and ready to fire. If she was having a reaction to the drug, she could be dead within minutes. There was no time to sit about, waiting to hear something coherent.

He pushed open the back door of the van just as Jamie emerged out of the building and into the sunlight. She was alone and disheveled. Her clothing was filthy and shredded in places. The left front of her blouse had been ripped from the shoulder seam to the very hem, revealing her brassiere and trim stomach, but there was nothing sexual or sensual about her appearance. She looked like the walking dead. Her eyes were glazed and she moved with a fast, erratic, yet shambling gait. He'd seen one like it before, just before Mr. Brampton threw himself at a dozen police officers.

Wasting no time, Jack ran to her side and took her by the arm. Other officers were swarming into the building behind them, but Jack didn't care about that. He cared about Jamie. He wasn't even sure she was still in there.

“Jamie. Jamie, honey. It's me.”

She turned her head in an ominously slow fashion that sent a tremor of fear down his spine and looked at him with eyes that did not recognize him and were not hers.

“I'm wearing Jamie,” she said in that horrible rasp. “I'm wearing her pretty skin suit.”

Jack rarely felt fear, but in that moment there was a sensation of pure ice in his stomach. Jesus Christ, by all that was holy what the Hades had gone on in that warehouse?

“You took a drug,” he said, maintaining a professional demeanor. “That's all it is. You're feeling a bit strange, that's all. Come lay down and you'll feel better.”

Jamie laughed with a voice that was not her own. “Better? I have never felt better. I am powerful,” the thing that was not Jamie said. “I am...”

“Now you cut that out right this instant!” Jack scowled at her.

For a moment, the glazed look in her eyes pas
sed and he was looking at her, at Jamie. He breathed a deep sigh of relief. He did not truly believe in possession, but for a moment there, he had felt as though he were on the verge of revising that opinion.

“Now you listen to me, agent,” he said, taking her by the arm. “We're going to go back to the van and you're going to have a nice lie down and then you're going to debrief.”

Jamie pulled away, all flailing limbs and high-pitched screeches. “Lay not your hands upon me!”

Usually he would have had little trouble keeping a hold of her, but whatever was in the compound she had ingested was making her strong. Once she'd gotten away, she set to running about in circles, flailing her hands in the air and shouting about the imminent devouring of the world.

Two agents joined the chase and for a good three minutes the desolate location looked like something out of an old time comedy skit as Jamie displayed incredible agility in dipping, diving and generally dodging those who would restrain her.

She seemed to have endless energy, though Jack knew from past experiences that once the stimulant wore off, she would be in a very bad way.

He tensed as an agent threw himself at her in a diving tackle, thankfully missing her ankles.

“Careful!” Jack shouted. “She's one of ours, remember?”

It was very hard to remember that she was one of theirs. She was doing a fine impression of one of the street's worst kind of offenders. The curse words that were coming out of her mouth were as bizarre as they were archaic as they were disgusting.

Finally, she ran past him and he wound an arm about her waist, swinging her off her feet. A second later, another agent had wrapped his arms about her legs and the other agent was used the sleeve of his jacket as a gag.

Biting and squalling and cursing, Jamie struggled against her captors until she could struggle no more, at which point she passed out and became a gurgling dead weight in their arms.

*****

Bright lights. Angels. Jamie opened her eyes and sighed with relief to discover that she had been transported to heaven. She couldn't quite open her eyes all the way to the glory of the Lord, but she could sense the vague white outline of a ministering angel close by her side.

“Praise the lord,” she whispered between parched lips. “Give me the ambrosia of this holy land, that I might not return to the depths of hell.”

“You can have a glass of water in a minute,” the angel said. “I'm just checking your vital signs.”

Something soft and long was wrapped around Jamie's upper arm. It huffed and it puffed and it blew itself up into a nice tight hug.

“Awww, heaven kitty,” Jamie said, reaching over to pet its very short, almost non-existent fur.

The movement made whatever she was
lying on crinkle. Upon closer investigation, Jamie discovered that heaven apparently used plastic sheets under the linen. Interesting. She supposed it made sense, given the number of old people who were probably there.

“Jamie.”

She heard a familiar voice from somewhere near the yonder portal. Her vision was blurry, her eyes covered with a sort of angelic mucus. She'd never heard of angelic mucus before, but she'd never heard of heaven kitties either. These were probably the 'more' part of the more things in heaven and earth than dreamt of in old Horatio's philosophy.

“She's awake,” the angel said. “But it may be a while before she's fully coherent.”

The figure at the door moved forward and coalesced into a darkish blob in a seat beside Jamie's heavenly bed. It had something that smelled like coffee.

“They have coffee in heaven?”

“You're not dead, Jamie,” the angel who sounded like Jack said. “You got sick, but you're going to be fine.”

“I got sick,” Jamie repeated. It was hard to remember what had happened. Her mind was full of vague impressions of things, but that's all they were, just vague impressions of things that maybe were and maybe weren't and she still sort of felt as though she must be in heaven because she was so very comfortable.

The angel, who claimed to be a nurse, made a few notes on a chart and slipped it back into the holder at the end of Jamie's bed.

“Is that the book of life?” Jamie asked, gazing down between her toes. “Is the story of everything I ever did there?”

“Have a drink of water,” Jack said. “Your brain is like a dry sponge right now.”

He held a plastic cup to her lips. She licked his finger. It tasted like salt and man.

Jack chuckled. “Drink the water, brat.”

And then she knew she was alive. She knew she was alive because the zipping feelings that shot through her body in response to his gravelly words were
earthly in the extreme. Sipping the water, she took a few deep breaths and came to the logical conclusion. She was in the hospital.

“Did I get hurt?”

“No,” Jack said, running a tender hand through her hair. “It's just a reaction to the drug you took. It's clearly a strong psychoactive.”

“No kidding,” Jamie said, lying back on the bed. Her head was starting to pound. It felt as though her brain were grinding against her skull. “I went to hell.”

“Hell?”

She related her memories of what had happened.
The daemon demanding blood. The vicious evil that had pervaded her mind.

“I didn't feel myself.”

“You didn't look yourself,” Jack agreed. “Fortunately, you managed to snag a sample before going off to hell. The lab is analyzing it as we speak. We'll know precisely what it is soon enough, and with a little luck, we'll have a strong lead on our Einstein.”

“Good,” Jamie said. She was so pleased to see Jack. He was being so damn tender and sweet. She wanted to kiss him. So she did. Right there, in plain view of everybody she grabbed at his collar, pulled herself forward and planted a passionate kiss right on his lips.

Jack tried to look disapproving in the aftermath, but he couldn't quite pull it off. “Easy there, agent,” he said, stroking her arm.

“I'll be very easy where you're concerned,” Jamie said archly. “I'
ll ease myself around your c...”

The word was cut off as Jack pressed a hand over her mouth. “
Shh, you little minx,” he whispered. “That's not appropriate language. Understand?”

Jamie nodded. She didn't understand, but she did like the taste of his hand when she extended her tongue to lick his palm.

He snorted and moved his hand away, wiping it on his shirt. “Brat.”

A few minutes later, Jamie tried to sit up and found that she could. As the haze wore off and the fact that yes, she was in a hospital became more apparent, she found herself wanting to leave. Jamie did not like hospitals. Oddly, she didn't mind morgues. But hospitals, packed with the ill and with that omnipresent stench of disinfectant and hand sanitizer, were not places she liked to be if she had the choice. “Okay,” she said. “Let's go.”

“Hold on,” Jack said. “You haven't been discharged yet.”

“I'm discharging myself,” Jamie said. “I got high. I'm down now and I'm fine. I don't need to be here. I want to go and have a shower. I want to eat something that doesn't come in a little plastic tray. And I want to wear something that doesn't open in the back.”

“Okay,” Jack said. “As long as you come back to my place.”

“Where else would I go?
” Jamie shrugged. “I haven't been back to my apartment since it became a storage facility for the recently deceased.”

He smiled at her. Not a smile of amusement, but a warm expression that made
her heart feel all swollen and glad.

“I'm glad you're feeling better, Black,” he said, tousling her hair. “It's nice to have you back.”

“It's nice to be back,” she smiled. “Now please tell me I have something to wear out of here. What happened to my clothes?”

“Your clothes were... sacrificed, shall we say,” Jack said. “You were pretty far gone and lost control of several bodily functions.”

Jamie looked at him in horror. “You mean... I... in front of you... Oh my god.”

“Don't be embarrassed,” Jack said. “You took one for the team. I mean you really took one for the team.”

Abandoning all thoughts of leaving the hospital, Jamie instead decided to pull the covers over her head and die quietly of embarrassment. “Oh my god,” she groaned to herself. “I should have let that daemon eat me.”

A light tap to her bottom told her Jack was still there. “I'll grab you something from the gift shop,” he said. “Hold tight.”

And that was how Jamie ended up leaving the hospital wearing nothing but a tee shirt with a cartoon character on it and an oversized pair of Bermuda shorts. She knew she made a ridiculous sight, but it was hard to care when she had Jack by her side being the consummate gentleman. He ushered her to his car with all the courtly concern he would have used had she been in full evening attire.

“I'm really sorry I allowed you to be put in that position,” he said, settling her inside the vehicle.

“You didn't want me in it,” Jamie replied. “But it was my job, and I did it.”

“You did a great job,” he assured her as he got behind the wheel. “And now you're going to take a break.”

*****

The first thing Jamie did upon getting back to the place that had been Jack's, but was fast becoming theirs, was
grab a shower. She did not like the way the hospital made her feel both dirty and overly sterile. The hot water and foamy suds were a wonderful cleansing, which became even more wonderful when Jack stripped down and joined her in the hot, steamy space.

As his big, strong hands ran soft soap up her back, she sighed and leaned back against him, enjoying the water coursing over them both.

“Now this, is heaven,” she said, lifting her mouth to his kiss. He kissed her back and soaped her down, cleaning every inch of her body with tender care. She surrendered to the moment, to Jack's ministrations. It was nice to let go, to have Jack wash and then dry her, to be wrapped in soft fluffy towels and then taken to a comfortable bed.

“I'm sorry,” Jamie said, curled up naked next to Jack. “I didn't find out anything at all. I just got really fucking high.”

“It's okay,” Jack said. “It was a sloppy set up from the beginning. Besides, every single person in that place is under arrest and being interrogated as we speak. It won't be long before one of them cracks. And it won't be long after that before we have all the evidence we need to get this guy.”

“Good. Because that shit he's making... that's dangerous. I think I saw hell. I mean actually saw...” she shivered.

“What you saw wasn't real,” Jack said, settling her against his body. “You were given a stimulant and lead by suggestion.”

“But it was so real...”