A Perfect Machine(49)

He asked for the apartment’s address, then told warehouse dispatch to call off the two guys Palermo’d put there. “On Palermo’s direct goddamn say-so,” Marcton said, when the dispatcher gave him grief. “Just fucking do it, or it’s your head when Palermo gets back.” He pressed the End Call button on the phone, handed it back to Cleve, said, “Put the warehouse on my Blocked Call list for now. I don’t want them able to call back and argue with me. With no other input – and no other recourse for input – they’ll do what I asked.”

Marcton put the Hummer back into gear, pulled out onto the road, headed again for the nurse’s apartment. He glanced in the rearview mirror. “You two redshirts ready for action back there?”

The Runners in the backseat – Bill Tremblay and Melvin Rowe – exchanged confused looks.

“Not big Star Trek fans? Well, hopefully it doesn’t come to that.”





F I F T E E N





One of the Runners assigned to watching Faye’s building sat in a beat-up old Omni, binoculars pressed to his face. He was going back and forth between the apartment he was supposed to be watching – second from the top – and a woman undressing on the floor directly above.

“This shit is fucking up our Run, ladygirl. We could be out there tonight with everyone else instead of sitting here with our dicks in our hands. Figuratively speaking.”

The other Runner pressed her walkie’s talk button from her position around back of the building, where she sat in a similarly beat-up Corolla. “You think there’s a Run tonight with all the shit that’s been going down? Ridiculous. We’re on lockdown, remember? Would be nice if there was, though, so that no one would fucking disappear, but I just can’t see this shit being resolved tonight. Also, what part of ‘radio silence’ don’t you get, fuckweed? Stop talking.”

The radio went dead for a moment, then crackled back to life.

“And quit calling me ‘ladygirl.’ Last time I tell you.”

Fuckweed and ladygirl – old friends who’d grown up together, real names Jim Lamb and Lindsay Kinzett, respectively – had gladly taken the fairly shitty assignment, trying to get into Palermo’s good books again after a monumental cockup a few weeks ago. They’d been sent in to clean up after a Run in the southern section of the city, and had left a ton of shell casings – and one severely injured Runner – on the street for any random passerby to find the next morning. It was one thing to rightfully expect that whoever found the guy would just call 911, then immediately begin to forget the experience; it was another entirely to be careless and start taking the effect for granted, essentially inviting enquiry where none was welcome.

They’d both been reamed out, and this was their penance. What neither of them knew was that after this assignment Palermo planned to kill them anyway, so they were the perfect pair to use, since it didn’t matter if they saw Kyllo or not. Palermo figured he might as well get one more use out of them.

The most recent fuckup wasn’t nearly their first – this had been a long time coming. They’d endangered the Inferne Cutis through their combined idiocy (they were trustworthy enough alone, but reverted to teenage behavior when in each other’s company) more times than Palermo cared to mention.

The last movement Lamb had seen inside the apartment was a few hours ago when someone appeared to be throwing all kinds of things in all kinds of directions. Plates, cups, and china dolls smashing everywhere. Neither Lamb nor Kinzett knew what to make of it, so they just radioed in the occurrence and waited for instructions. No one at the warehouse knew what to make of it either, so no instructions came – and in the intervening time, Palermo had been kidnapped and taken “fuck knows where,” as the Runner in charge at the warehouse had said, so they had a whole new set of problems to contend with on their end, effectively relegating Kinzett and Lamb’s babysitting assignment to the bottom of the priority list.

What was on both of their minds, though, was what had happened to the ambulance driver Kinzett had seen enter Faye’s apartment. Lamb’s sightline into the apartment was decent enough to see what was taking place in a certain section of the living room, where the drapes had been partially opened, but the apartment’s front door – and the surrounding area – was completely obscured. So Kinzett had seen him for only a moment as he came into view, but then lost sight of him, and never saw him again.

“Can an ambulance driver just fuck off with an ambulance all day, ladygirl?” Lamb had asked Kinzett.

“No, they’ll come looking for him eventually,” Kinzett had answered. “Might have to wait till the cops are alerted before we know what’s going on in there. For now, we just sit and wait, as ordered. Don’t go getting any bright ideas.”

“Oh, right, I forgot: you’re the smart one; I’m the idiot.”

“Nah, we’re both idiots, but you have that ridiculous penis, which clouds your judgement, so I get to be the leader.”

“Yeah, I’m definitely the dickhead. No argument there.”

They’d both laughed, then fallen into a comfortable silence – the kind of silence only old friends drew actual comfort from.

Now, the radio crackled again.

“How long we gotta do radio silence?”