The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories (24 page)

McKinney was beginning to blur. Klinger closed his eyes. 

“Now, you can’t go flying over cities with a mini-cannon, Klinger—that’s against every law there is—but we’ve got one assigned to whatever chopper we want as ‘Riot Control Study 14.’ ” McKinney laughed, the crow’s-feet crinkling at the corners of his eyes. “I take it out to Joshua every Saturday and do a little
controlling
of the jackrabbits there . . . How’s this Saturday look for you, Klinger?” 

“I don’t know, McKinney . . .” 

“Shit, Klinger! You
owe
me a Saturday. You keep stringing me along like this—” he laughed again, but it was serious “—and I’ll think you don’t love me. What about it?
Saturday.
The floor is covered with them. You’ll be the only fixer in candy-assed Justice who’s ever fired a Vulcan.” 

Klinger got up unsteadily, feeling he was going to throw up. 

“I’ll have to let you know . . . Something’s come up at Central and they’ve got me on call. Something’s been going down.” 

“You steal something?” McKinney was grinning. 

“Yeah. A Witness—” Klinger was smiling back. 

“—piece by piece,” McKinney finished for him. 

It was one of their jokes, Klinger remembered foggily.
If they don’t pay you enough, Klinger,
McKinney had said one day,
you can always steal a Witness
— 

—
piece by piece,
Klinger had said. 

“They hassle you too much, boy,” McKinney was saying, “you can always use the Vulcan on them.” He grinned. “Saturday?” 

“I’ll do my best, McKinney.” 

When he got back to the apartment, he looked around, saw nothing had been touched, and rolled a joint, smoking it on the porch and looking out at the sky high above the buildings. Then he went back in to clean the grease from the pink plastic of his prosthesis. The grease wouldn’t come off. He tried to cut his own hair in the bathroom mirror. It looked worse. Nothing was going right. Nothing at all. He put the backpack under the sink with the PC and the Osterizer in it and then flattened the hand-copied transmissions of her voice and the Xeroxes he’d made so that they would fit inside the pillowslip on the one pillow he used at night. 

That evening, he dreamed of touching her breasts, making her gasp and hold on to him hard, as if he could protect her from everything in the world. 

That night the men broke into his apartment. 

They began in his living room. He woke to the sound. While one kept at it, turning things over, the other one appeared in his bedroom doorway and kept the light on him, blinding him like some animal caught in headlights. Even in the stupor, even in the blinding light, he knew who they were. One found the backpack easily under the sink. The other one grabbed him, pulled him off the bed and laid him down on the floor, kneeling over him. This one—the one he could see—wore a dark leather jacket, the kind the LA gangs liked. The blinding light went away. The bedroom light came on. The man by the doorway wore a nice suit. Both of them were wearing goggles—not unlike the kind McKinney had shown him, the kind you wore for seeing in the dark, but smaller, lighter weight. 

He didn’t try to move, but the kneeling man hit him anyway, the blur of the hand passing into Klinger’s brain and making him cry out. He’d never be able to identify them with the goggles—which was the point. Or one of them. 

“What we want to know,” the man in the nice suit standing by the door said calmly, “is where the
duplicates
are and who exactly you’re making them for . . .” 

Before he could answer, the kneeling man hit him again, this time on the ear, and Klinger made another sound. 

“I don’t—” 

The hand came again—on the same ear—and he knew they weren’t going to let it go, that they didn’t need some voice-stress analyzer to feel sure they knew who had made the copies, and
why
. 

“So you don’t get paid enough. So someone approaches you one day and tells you how much he’s going to pay you to dupe some ID—” 

“I really don’t—” 

He was pulled from the floor and shoved against the wall. He was held with one forearm while the other arm, with its fist, broke his nose, then struck his left eye, then hit him just below where he imagined his heart was, moving lower and lower as he blurted: 

“Just . . . the handwritten stuff.” 

He had to repeat it because his mouth was a mess, because the man was hitting him even as he tried to get the words out. 

“What the fuck does that mean?” the man in the nice suit asked. 

Klinger didn’t know, so he thought hard. “I don’t have them here . . . I’ve got them at the Witness . . .” 

The man holding him let him fall, and as Klinger lay on the floor he felt—as if it were happening to someone else—his lungs pulling at wet air in a cage too small for them. The man by the door gave him a moment to catch his breath. 

“You haven’t made a delivery yet?” 

“No.” Something was drooling from his mouth. He wiped at it with his good hand. 

“We’re in a hurry, John,” the man in the suit said.
“You understand.”
Below the insectlike eyes of the goggles there was a grin. 

He couldn’t get up. He was sliding back down the wall, taking forever. 

“I . . . buried them,” he said. 

“We’d like you to dig them up.” 

What scared him most was that they might see the pillowslip, how fat it was, and he would get sick, and, as he got sick, having found what they wanted, they would simply kill him or put him in the hospital for a long time and he wouldn’t be able to do it. What he needed to do. 

He was sitting up at last. 

“There’s a pickup . . . the day after tomorrow.” 

“We don’t understand, John.” 

“At the station . . . the Mojave station . . . At ten A.M.” 

“The buyer will be alone?” 

“That’s . . . what he said.” 

“Who?” 

“I don’t . . . know. I was contacted by phone . . . by telephone.” 

The man with the leather jacket was moving toward him. 

“Jesus Christ,” Klinger heard himself say. “He told me he’d pay . . . I didn’t care
who he was.”
 

The man in the leather jacket looked at the man in the nice suit. 

The man in the nice suit sighed. The man in the leather jacket didn’t move. 

“We really hope,” the man in the suit said, “that you’re not
fucking
with us.” 

Klinger shook his head, the pain making pretty explosions. 

“If you can keep our little meeting a secret, John,” the man in the suit was saying, “we’ll have fewer problems, John.” 

They were turning to leave. 

“They teach you this in law school?” Klinger heard himself say. 

The man in the leather jacket looked at the man in the suit. The man in the suit looked back. The man in the leather jacket walked over to Klinger where he sat on the floor and hit him in the nose, which was suddenly heavy enough to pull him into a darkness where there was no woman, no blue eyes, no brush of his fingertips on her soft breasts to make her hold him tightly against the pain of the world. 

When he awoke, it was night. He didn’t want to move but he made himself get up, find the bathroom, and, fumbling, relieve himself. He took three extra-strength Excedrin IB—stuff with caffeine—and somehow got into his car and drove to the emergency room at Corona Community. 

When they asked him how he’d gotten it, he told them a mugger on Tyler Avenue. When they asked him if he’d filed a police report, he told them
yes
. They called his HMO for approval of the treatment and took two hours to bandage his nose. 

He filled the prescription for codeine in the pharmacy at the hospital and went home, setting the alarm for noon. 

His face felt huge, as if two people were wearing it. He drove to Sheriff’s Aviation fighting the edgy dreaminess of codeine, and when he arrived, McKinney took one look at him and laughed: 

“Jesus Christ, who worked
you
over?” 

“I need a gun, McKinney.” He could still taste the blood, though there shouldn’t be any. He wondered if his gums were bleeding, a tooth, a tooth turning gray as it died. “I drive out to the Witness last night because Davis asks me to and some ethnic asshole jumps me at the gas station.
I need a gun.”
 

“No reason we can’t arrange it, Klinger,” McKinney said at last. 

He had him in the snack bar, showing him off—bandage and all—over their usual cup of coffee. Everyone was looking, even the veterans who’d seen a lot worse. McKinney was having a great time. “God Almighty. The Justice Department of this fine nation tells us we’re supposed to give you boys whatever you need, and, as it happens, my boy, I’ve got a
personal weapon
—a beautiful Colt Phantom—sitting gathering dust in a case. No paperwork. No fuss. How does that sound? A gift from your old friend McKinney to his best friend Klinger . . .” Less loudly, he asked: “Did Davis see you like this?” 

“No . . . I phoned him.” 

The old man shook his head, whistling. “You got the Phantom as of fourteen hundred hours today, Klinger, but try not to grease anyone. Just wave it at them. When are you going to get that nose fixed?” 

“Davis gave me two days off.” 

“That was white of him.” 

“I want to see your mini-cannon do its thing, McKinney,” Klinger said. 

McKinney sat back and frowned. “You sure got a fucking weird sense of timing, Klinger.” He was quiet for a moment. “I don’t know . . .” 

“You’re always talking about it, McKinney. I’m in the mood,
now.”
 

McKinney squirmed a little. 

“Me and the old lady are supposed to go to Lake Perris with her brother’s six kids and I’m supposed to get off early. She’s
not
going to like this at all.” 

“Talk’s cheap, McKinney. You want to show me what it can do—I may not be in the mood later.” 

McKinney stared at him and grinned finally. “You want to get it out of your system, right? Every jackrabbit some ethnic son-of-a-bitch, right?” 

“Right.” 

“Okay. We take the Huey. And get that nose fixed. It’s enough to make a person puke.” 

McKinney laughed. Klinger laughed, too, though it hurt. 

The sky was clear as crystal and Klinger wasn’t paying much attention to the rabbits two hundred feet below. The distinctive sound of the Huey filled the air and the Vulcan was a mechanical belt-fed canister that fired a hundred M-60 rounds a second. When they weren’t knocking rabbits away like rag-dolls, the rounds were raising little plumes of dust, sand, and gravel. The rabbits kicked and kept kicking, lying on their sides, becoming specks as the Huey flew on. McKinney made him listen to stories about “the highlands,” the “offensive of ’68,” “armor at Lang Vei,” and “black syphilis.” Klinger asked him every question he could about the Vulcan, and McKinney answered every one. When Klinger asked if he could fly, McKinney said sure. When he asked if he could fire the Vulcan—why were they up here if he wasn’t supposed to fire the thing?—McKinney stalled, but said yes at last, and Klinger felt the gun roar like the biggest zipper in the world. He had to fly with his one good hand, but the grip and trigger for the Vulcan fit his prosthetic crab perfectly. Even McKinney was impressed. They got back at five on the button, Klinger took another codeine for his face, and McKinney handed him the Phantom proudly. Klinger thanked him and slapped him on the back with his good hand. The old man seemed sorry—truly sorry—that their little adventure was over. 

Driving ten miles up the Santa Ana wash, Klinger parked the Honda in a stand of eucalyptus, the backpack with its PC and Osterizer and the pillowslip full of its paper on the seat beside him. The sun would wake him at dawn. It always did in the desert. 

He didn’t dream about her. 

He knew he wouldn’t until it was over. 

He got to Sheriff’s Aviation at eight the next morning. McKinney never arrived until nine. The vehicle-release sergeant at the helipad looked at his nose as if wanting to ask, but only said: “You want the
Huey,
Klinger?” 

“Yes, sir. We took it out yesterday with the Vulcan. Someone in Bidwell’s office has this theory, McKinney’s supposedly testing it, but I don’t think his heart’s in it. He wants me to make the run for him today . . .” Klinger sighed—as if to say,
This is what you do for a good friend
—and forced a smile. 

The man nodded, unsure. He picked up the phone, pushed the buttons, waited, and set it back down slowly. “You’ll be needing a cartridge belt . . . ?” 

Time seemed to stop. It was the belt. McKinney and all his eccentricities were one thing, but a belt to a
kid?
Klinger sighed again and said: