The Stickmen (29 page)

“For the proof, Harlan. You really are
dense, aren’t you. That plastic bag in the freezer is coming with
me.”

Rage rose up in Garrett’s bones. “You’re not
taking my alien arm!”

Jessica tittered. “You can’t possibly
believe that you would be allowed to keep an extraterrestrial body
part. That really
is
proof, Harlan, and we can’t have the
world getting their hands on it.”

Garrett seethed. “Goddamn you, you—”

Save it, Harlan,” she said. “You know, for a
smart guy, you can be incredibly stupid. You’ve been my case
assignment for over a year.

“A sexual operative,” he realized. “Jesus.
So who do
you
work for? CIA, the Bureau, NSA?”

“You don’t need to know that, Harlan. Let’s
just say that I’m employed by a…compartmentalized cell.”

“Great. So it was you all along, making me
think you loved me.”

Jessica gave a thin smile. “I was the one
who put the direction-finder on your car when you were researching
the pay off at the Senate Select Committee. I was the one who
planted the electret bugs all over the apartment, and I was the one
who had your phones spiked. And that Nevatek job? Who else but me
could’ve possibly reported the break-in
before
it
happened?”

“You diabolical bitch…”

“I had to get our techs in here every couple
of months to break the passwords on your computers, but that takes
time, so every once in a while—”

Garrett realized the obvious. “You’d blow
the whistle on me to the cops, get me put in jail for a few nights
so your boys could come in here and copy all my files.”

“Um-hmm. You’re too trusting, Harlan, either
that or your brain takes a lot of vacations. But you were a
terrific case assignment—I’ll get promoted for this.”

“Congratulations, baby,” Garrett uttered,
“on a job well done.” This was just
too
embarrassing.
“Answer me one question. Did you ever love me at all, even just a
little?”

“No. But you are right about one thing.”

“Yeah?”

“You do possess pre-eminent skills as a
lover.”

“Thanks. I’ll put that on my resume.”

Jessica appraised him like an exotic trophy.
“I’ve got to take the arm and go now, Harlan, but I’ve got to tie
you up first. So let’s do this the easy way, okay. Turn around, get
on your knees, and put your hands behind your back.”

“Gee, you never wanted to do kinky stuff
before,” Garrett remarked.

“Let’s get this over with.” With her other
hand, she pulled a coil of rope from her back pocket. “Turn
around.”

Garrett paused. “I don’t guess you’d look if
I told you your shoe was untied, huh?”

Jessica was wearing sandals. “Come on,
Harlan. Give it up.”

“How about this: your fly is down.”

She frowned. “I’d except something more
original than those, Harlan.”

“All right,” he said, “how about this? A
tactical cop with a sound-suppressed submachine gun has just
rappelled down the side of my apartment and …I guess he’s about to
come through the window.”

A split-second later, the lights snapped
off.

Then the room seemed to explode in a rain of
broken glass. Garrett ducked; he couldn’t see very much, just bulky
quick-moving shape pounding in different directions across the
floor. Narrow flashlight beams darted back and forth.
A
raid?
Garrett could only guess. He hunched down, stepping
backward toward the corner of the room.

“Down! On the floor!,” a male voice
barked.

“Don’t move!” ordered another.

But Garrett knew they weren’t talking to
him.

Seconds later, the lights came back on, and
what Garrett saw astonished him. Three cops in black riot gear were
securing the room. They looked like robots in their kevlar vest,
black helmets, and ballistic visors. Jessica had already been
disarmed and was being hauled up off the floor and cuffed by one of
the cops. Garrett stood up from the corner, wearily noticing that
all of his windows had been busted in.

A second cop turned in silence, his
submachine gun poked at Garrett.

“Don’t shoot me. I’m only a writer.”

The cop ignored the comment, then raised a
walkie-talkie to his lips. “Alpha Unit, this is Extraction Team
One. The perimeter is clear.”

“Roger, Extraction Team One,” a voice
crackled back. “Commence standard SOP debark order.”

Garrett wasn’t sure, but the voice on the
other end of the walkie-talkie sounded vaguely familiar.

“What the hell’s going on here?” he
asked.

The cop ignored him again, as a third member
of the team brought Lynn—untied and ungagged now—from out of the
kitchen. Was she being arrested too?

“Who
are
these guys?” he asked
her.

“
Our
guys, Harlan.”

Garrett stared at her. The whole thing had
already started to stink—now it was stinking worse. Lynn extracted
a tiny thread from an edge of her tube top: a reversed-bias diode
microphone.

“You diabolical bitch!” he said for the
second time that night.

“Business is business,” she replied, making
no apologies. “It’s my job, Harlan.”

The front door clicked open, and in
walked—

“I should’ve known,” Garrett griped.

Myers, in his neat suit, surveyed the room
and glanced at Jessica. “Well, that was easy,” he said.

“You sure took your sweet time,” Lynn
complained.

“We had to wait for her to get to the middle
of the room to establish an optimum entry position.” Myers flicked
a hand at the cop who had Jessica. “Get her out of here.”

“Yes, sir.” Then Jessica was lugged out of
the room. The other two cops were—

“Hey!” Garrett yelled. “Stop that!”

—disconnecting Garrett’s computer.

“Myers! Tell them to stop!”

“Get that crap out of here,” Myers ordered
the other two men. One carried the computer out of the apartment;
the other followed with the old briefcase full of Swenson’s
files.

Garrett glared at Myers. “You motherf—”

“Good job on foiling that convenience store
robbery the other day,” Myers interrupted. “Too bad you’re not
real
FBI. They could use a man like you.” Then he spiked the
phony ID wallet off the desk and put it in his pocket.

This just keeps getting better and
better,
Garrett thought in useless rage. “Do I at least get an
explanation?”

“Not much to explain at this point,” Myers
replied.

“Gee, and at first I thought you sent in
your team just to save my ass.”

“Given the circumstances, Garrett, your ass
is very expendable, but we’re happy to have been able to save it
anyway.”

Garrett stroked his chin, thinking, then
looked to Lynn. “Jessica said that
you
were setting me
up.”

Lynn sighed. “Come on, Harlan. You gotta be
realistic about this. We had a pretty good idea what her move would
be, so I made a counter-move, that’s all.”

“What are you
talking
about?”

Myers went into the kitchen and returned a
moment later. “We’re talking about this.” He held up the plastic
bag which contained the alien forearm.

“Oh, so now
you’re
gonna steal my
alien arm!”

“Really, Garrett. Try to look at it from our
perspective.”

“I
can’t
look at it from your
perspective because I’m not a law-breaking truth-concealing
crypto-fascist Big Brother storm trooper like you!”

“Harlan, open your eyes,” Lynn said. “Even
Jessica was right about that part. The thing in that bag can never
be released to the public conscience. You know that.”

Myers again: “The ramifications would be
incalculable. It would change the very mechanics of human ideology.
It would change our governmental structures, our legislative
process, our economy, our morality. It would ravage every belief
system in the world.”

Garrett sputtered and lit a cigarette. “You
bastards. You’re taking my arm.”

“And life will go on just as it should,”
Myers continued. “The world goes on turning, we go on doing our
thing, and you go on writing your crackpot conspiracy articles that
mainstream America will never believe.”

“Because you Big Brother sons of bitches
keep concealing the proof by which they’d have no choice but to
believe!”

“Precisely.” Myers grinned. “And on that
note, I think we’ll make our exit.”

Lynn cast a sheepish glance at Garrett.
“‘Bye, Harlan. Take care of yourself.”

Bitch,
Garrett thought as she and
Myers headed for the door. The apartment lay in shambles, the
forearm confiscated.
Nothing left…
But then he remembered:
Wait a minute! They forgot to take the—

“Oops. We can’t be forgetting this, can we?”
Myers came back into the living room and picked the glove up off
the desk.

Garrett nearly keeled over. “First you take
my arm, and now you’re taking my glove!”

“’Fraid so.” Myers looked at the glove
excitedly. “The Sciences Branch will
love
this.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet they will,” Garrett
grumbled. He looked one last time at his ex-wife. “Can I call you
sometime?”

“Nope,” Lynn said. “But have a good life,
Harlan.”

Myers slapped him on the back. “And if you
ever grow a brain and decide to give up writing this conspiracy
bunk, let me know. I have a job for you.”

Garrett perked up. “Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah, I need a new yard boy. I’ll pay ya
six an hour.”

Myers and Lynn both laughed as they left the
apartment.

Garrett trudged to the kitchen and turned
off the stove. The t-bones were close to charcoal now, the mashed
potatoes cement.
Fuck.
He meandered back to his work room,
sat down at his ravaged, computerless desk. He lit another
cigarette and dejectedly spewed smoke out the broken window.

I’m ruined,
came the simple thought
like a pulse-beat in his head.

No one would believe the Nellis story any
more than they’d believe the others. No real proof. This was the
first time he’d every had it—the ultimate dream of any UFO
writer—but now it was gone as if it had never existed.

Add to that his computer was stolen and his
apartment trashed.

It felt as though he’d have to start his
entire professional life over again. Could tings get any worse?

An unconscious glance at the desk showed him
the day’s mail; he picked up the stack and wilted when he noted the
return address of the top letter.

Office of the Judge Advocate General

Legal Proceedings,

Washington, D.C., 20012

“Oh, gimme a break!” he bellowed allowed.
“What, now I’m being fined by the goddamn military?”

Guess I’ll have to move to Mexico,
he
thought.

Could things get any worse? It was certainly
looking like that. He tore open the letter and read:

Dear Mr. Harlan Garrett:

The JAG office of the Washington Military
District has just processed the Last Will and Testament of the late
General Norton T. Swenson. As the General had no legal heirs and no
surviving relative, his Will remains uncontested and names you as
the sole beneficiary of his estate.

Please call the above number at your
earliest convenience. The estimated worth of the General’s estate
include $2,500,000 in property and real estate and approximately
$6,000,000 in cash, bonds, and other liquid assets.

Garrett collapsed.

Yes, he would have to start his life over
again, but this looked like a pretty good start.

— | — | —

Edward Lee has had more than 40 books
published in the horror and suspense field, including CITY
INFERNAL, THE GOLEM, and BLACK TRAIN. His movie, HEADER was
released on DVD by Synapse Films, in June, 2009. Recent releases
include the stories, “You Are My Everything” and “The
Cyesologniac,” the Lovecraftian novella “Trolley No. 1852,” and the
hardcore novel HAUNTER OF THE THRESHOLD. Currently, Lee is working
on HEADER 3. Lee lives on Florida’s St. Pete Beach. Visit him
online at:

http://www.edwardleeonline.com