Condtion zero, p.7
Condtion Zero, page 7
The dial in wasn’t so anonymous to her.
Her hands shook as she downed her coffee and lost a stare-down contest with a corned beef sandwich sitting before her insolently on a plate.
A hand touched her shoulder, and she flinched. This time, the Sig-Sauer was ready and waiting within the pocket of her overcoat. Her fingers squeezed the grip tightly, then released it.
Yonah.
Dressed smartly as usual; even his little knit yarmulke was tastefully bobby pinned back in such a way as to be barely noticeable.
“Jumpy, today are we, Kay?”
“Just look at the bandage on my head and think why.”
He ordered coffee from the waitress covering the counter—another young thing from Northeastern who gave him back the fisheye to counter his fleeting interest.
“You’re off your game, Kay. You should be home in bed.”
“You don’t know what my game is.”
“Maybe not, but I know enough from doing the cleanup on it.” He passed her an envelope under the counter. Boyd grabbed it and brought it up to the counter to read it.
“You don’t have to be so obvious.”
She laughed a brittle laugh. “What’s obvious here is considered discreet. This is Boston’s original don’t ask/don’t tell bistro. Everybody on the state is passing things back and forth they shouldn’t. This is just a death certificate, for Christ’s sake.”
“Okay. But I don’t know why you needed it. There was a whole file on this guy, Null, I mean one with guts to it. The file tells the whole story. I think the mystery isn’t so much how he died, but how he lived at all after the Family got their hands on him.”
“You mean before he was admitted to Boston City?”
“You know what happened. I’m not that forgetful, Kay. This man—they put him through a Khmer Rouge-style reeducation program. They burned him with acid, pulled out his fingernails, sliced him up and down slowly in every non-fatal way, burned him, broke his teeth, his tibia, electrocuted him scrotally, stuck a power-drill in his abdomen, hamstrung his left leg—from the post snaps, it had to have been over a long period. Months maybe. But the million-dollar question is, How did he ever make it even just to die at Boston City?”
“He’s not dead.”
“You have the certificate right there signed by the ME.”
“Sure, a sign off on an indigent at Southern Mortuary by a volunteer dermatologist from Wellesley.”
“Urologist,” said Shimmel. “From Newton.”
“Null is smart. He knew how to fake it somehow. He’s smart and he’s a sociopath.”
“Boyd, the dead lack affect because they’re dead. Not for any other reason.”
Kay’s eyes never left the certificate once as she spoke. “Sure, and Null was pretty much dead before he was dead so he could fake his death pretty easily, I think.”
Shimmel’s eyes showed disappointment in Boyd’s acumen. She had been drifting before this—the alcoholism was an open secret—but now she had gone off into some grim fantasy. He had the sinking feeling that she was not long for the job, which meant one less ally for him in an already shaky arrangement of criminalists, hack trainees and politicos.
“How do you fake complete arrest? How do you fake pneumonia?”
That’s what I want to know from you, Yonah. You’re the MIT guy, you’re the best we’ve got.”
Shimmel blushed. “In everything but name.”
“How could you do it?”
“You couldn’t. I’m telling you from the photos and the chart, this character is as dead as a Pet Rock.”
“Yonah, I’ve seen you tackle tougher problems without batting an eye. Just because I sustained a grade two concussion doesn’t mean I’m losing it, and stop thinking about the AA thing. Just because I’m through with those sanctimonious bastards doesn’t mean I’m sinking into an alcoholic wallow. You’ve never seen me take a drink on the job and you never will. Higher power my ass.”
“You’re rationalizing.”
“So what? It’s how we all get through the day. Even you, Yonah.”
“I’m not gay, Kay.”
“That’s another conversation. Now tell me, how would you do it?”
“Ask a Fakir, one of those magic trick beggars of India.”
“I don’t get it. You mean like a Buddhist monk?”
“Not Buddhist, Hindu. They can will their bodies to do almost anything. Control autonomic nervous system functions of the medulla oblongata just by will.”
“Heart rate, respiration, you mean.”
“Yeah.”
“Enough to fake death? Enough for an overworked part-time volunteer to buy it?”
“Enough for an attentive physician, too, I think. But Null isn’t a Fakir, Yogi or anything else like it. He’s just a dead guy.”
Boyd took him by the shoulders and looked gravely into his eyes. “No, Yonah. He’s the guy who gave me the concussion.”
Giorgio “Gomez” Gomelsky reclined in a smoking jacket on a Louis Quinze daybed with a cliché stripper blonde bodybuilder type massaging his withered shoulders. He was dragging on a Monte Cristo Cubano and smiling up at a lurid looking woman with large breast implants, dressed in leather. She was smiling back, fire-engine-red lips against milky pale skin, black crepe de chine blouse showcasing her jutting chest, tight leather pants accenting a figure hardened by genetics, drugs and persistent attention at a private gym.
She was Maureen “Morticia” O’Doyle, the only female captain of the Family but one of the shrewdest and most ruthless—Gomez’s right-hand woman. It was uncertain if there was anything sexual between them as was Gomez’s sexuality itself—whether he liked girls, men, boys, women, sheep or transsexuals was up in the air. The strangeness of whatever his orientation was, compounded by Gomez’s absolute stranglehold on power within the Family, made it a speculation that was squarely off the table for reasons of health and safety.
Morticia, like the blonde, tightly spandex-clad bodybuilder, was massaging someone’s shoulders, who also puffed steadily on a Monte Cristo.
Null.
“Harder, Gomez?”
“Mia, cara, you’re as hard as they come, but don’t break anything.”
“I’ll be careful.” Her powerful deltoids and thick veined biceps bulged beneath smooth tanned skin as she went to work.
“Good. Mr. Null, delighted you could see me.”
“I had every intention of seeing you.”
“I know, but these circumstances are better, yes?”
“They’re probably good. For now.”
“You always play it close to the vest, don’t you?”
“When that’s how life is lived, that’s how you play it.”
“We should have had you deeper-in a long time ago, Joey. Included you more on the better end. Bad mistake on our part. Cousin It saw this, I think, but too late.”
“It was an afterthought,” said Null almost seeming amused while puffing. It took extreme effort for him to emulate this sort of warmth.
“You had no choice but to kill him—I know this. Otherwise, I’d have soldiers and gypsy talent beating the streets for you hard.”
“You still can. Maybe you have Morticia here all set to off me.” Null stiffened visibly.
“I might try to off you, sure, but I think that effort has already presented too many repercussions. You might survive. Then I’m back with a worse version of my original problem. Sure, we’ll ultimately kill you, but I might be a casualty on the way. We’re making a deal here, and you got safe passage until we do it.”
“Your word is as good as a bet tip from the late Joey X.”
“Maybe. It’s a rough world.”
“I like it rough,” purred Morticia, squeezing his shoulders hard with her nails clawing to zero effect but unacknowledged blood.
“What’s this late stuff? You’re alive and kickin’. That’s the friggin’ problem. You bein’ dead would be a relief.”
“I am dead. I’m just a ghost of flesh.”
“You always were a sucker for the poetry, Joey. Better be careful or that shit’ll kill ya.”
“I don’t think I’m walking out of here alive, Gomez, or maybe you don’t think I am.”
“Nobody’s unarmed, Null. You want we should hold court here and get it done?”
“No Gomez, I think I’d like to sleep on your proposal.”
“Sleep could be permanent.”
“It’s an expression—I don’t need much sleep. Maybe what little I do need I can take out in trade—with Morticia.”
Gomez coughed and spat a fleck of tobacco in the air. “You always did like her, but you couldn’t get close. Now she wants it more than you do, don’t you, mia cara?
She leaned over Null from behind and let her vermillion taloned nails ride up and down his torso, reaching down for his crotch until she grabbed it. “Null’s an exciting man when you get to know him, I bet.”
“The ones got to know him recently got to visit the morgue to recoup. But that’s your thing, Maureen, ain’t it? You two are a match made in hell.” He chuckled. Morticia looked serene, still grabbing Null’s crotch.
“Why I don’t think that’s a knife in your pocket and you are glad to see me.”
“If it’s not too much trouble, I think we should get a room.”
Gomez was drooling just a little out of the corner of his mouth. He was a dry, bony man with hungry eyes, rat brown hair, and sunken cheeks, yet his attitude and carriage was that of a fat man. “And then what?”
“Then you’ll know.”
Gomez squinted up at the bodybuilder massaging his shoulders and neck. “Helle, take them up to my suite on the fourth, would you please?”
“Why don’t I just break his back instead?” She flexed vascular biceps and inflated her ribcage, still giving Gomez a controlled massage. A thick, brown medically marked bottle was on the floor in front of Gomez—veterinary grade Winstrol V suspended in alcohol. Obviously a tip.
“Because, my darling, Helle, I don’t think all the weights and human growth hormone you do could save you.”
She put on Type O as she undressed, and the body was impressive—the hard, lean curves of a Goth Girl workout chick. At her age, she was going for the ageless look, which was a good call, being that she was pushing forty. She exuded a sort of depraved health, an exuberant, cold-bloodedness; a lust of the laissez-faire.
She did a teasing dance for Null, who nodded as appreciatively as a plastic Halloween skull in the back window of a car. The attraction was in earnest and no sham for some other effect. Maureen “Morticia” O’Doyle was a power junkie and she sensed that the power was shifting to this strange, broken little man who was once the butt of her jokes. It didn’t upset her—this too carried an excitement, an enticement: that someone could turn things around so extremely and set them on their ear. The runt of litter who now would run the pack.
It wasn’t the look, the charm, or even the lack thereof, of the man. It was, for her, always the power. The power and what it would bring her.
Null sat still, frozen, as if in deep meditation.
Morticia squirmed toward him and captured his legs between hers, kneeling on the cushions of the sofa on which he sat and gazing into his glassy eyes. “Let me undress you.”
“You might not like what you see.”
“I’ll like it.”
Null jerkily cooperated with Morticia as she stripped him down, setting the Glock on the sofa so it would remain within easy reach. It was a body of scars and disproportioned muscle, lean and rippling with suppressed energy.
It was a broken body, with some freshly healing bullet wounds on the left shoulder, dressed with hastily taped pads of gauze. He stood lopsided and you could see why; the huge, snaking gash scar on the back of his thigh. The place where he had been hamstrung.
Morticia thought of the pain and licked her lips.
Null blinked, and sat back down, watching Morticia’s approach, her teasing mannerisms that to him amounted to little more than the jerky spasms of a victim, although these usually occurred after the encounter, not before.
The sight of his drying blood only seemed to warm Morticia to him more and Null faked a grisly smile.
“You always wanted me, and I tortured you.”
“Funny how that works, torture. Made me what I am today.”
“I heard.”
“You tasted it.”
“Did I?”
“You lapped the blood off my chest for fun. You laughed.”
“I was made to. I didn’t really feel that way. I started out as an actress, you know.”
“I know. You were always putting mooks like Joey X on.”
“But you’re Joey X.”
Null let the smile evaporate. “Not anymore.”
“You’re so scarred.”
“I needed to save money on plastic surgery.”
“And ripped.”
“I don’t like food very much so I keep that budget low too.”
“What do you like? Do you like this?” She was lilting, expert.
“I would have once, but now it doesn’t matter.”
Morticia gave a throaty laugh, forcing him down on the sofa, grabbing him firmly, straddling him as she did before. “I think it does. You know if I’d have known you were really big, I wouldn’t have waited till now.”
“You almost cut it off when I was on Cousin It’s table.” He pointed to the thick scar on the underside of his member.
“I don’t remember. You know the world as well as I do, Joey. Let’s not pretend.”
“Let’s not.”
“Just fuck me.”
“I will.”
Morticia, one silver tear streaming down her powdered cheek, kissed two fingers with swollen bee-stung, lipid-enhanced lips and placed them to Null’s slit mouth, raised herself up on the cushion until her vulva was at the level of his eyes, dismounted with a smirk of triumph.
It was always this way.
She went into the bathroom to take precautions.
Null began patiently rooting around for something in the armoire, the closet, and dresser. He found what he was looking for before Morticia was finished in the bathroom.
A toy.
Morticia emerged, having added little sparkles to her skin, makeup on the nipples. She was going for a look. What she saw didn’t faze her.
The set-up by the bed, the crooked, naked Null making adjustments.
“I knew you liked it this way—I do too.”
“Get on.”
“You have to be nimble to do this, you know. Good thing I was a dancer.”
“I’ll help you.”
She demonstrated a deft back flip, rubbed up against him, feeling the coarseness of his scars, the hardness of his half-starved form. “Do I look like I need help?”
She mounted the thing and Null strapped her waist and ankles into it. She grunted when the rubber coated rod in its penile molding was inserted into her, took it with a defiant smile.
“I have been paid thousands—ugh.”
“Yes?” queried Null.
“—Thousands of dollars to do this, and best of all I loved doing it for those impotent slobs.”
“Tell me how it felt.”
“You’ll see, but I don’t understand why you need this? From what I can see, you’re far from impotent. In fact, it’s surprising.”
“It’s like the twitching limb of an insect after it’s been crushed. Don’t pay any attention to it.”
“It’s hard not to.”
She spoke as Null finished lacing up the leather bondage sleeve behind her back, which both her arms had been gracefully extended into backwards. They were now being forced together as he finished, and she made it all look comfortable and alluring.
He stood as proudly as his damaged spine and hamstrung leg would allow him, examining his handiwork.
“All I have to do is lower this seat, and your weight pushes it in further, as far as I like. Maybe too far.”
“Easy, baby.”
“This pedal at the base fucks you hydraulically, up and down, when I put my foot on it.”
“Yes, it feels really good baby, but not so hard.” This had the taint of a growing desperation in it.
Null stamped down on it abruptly and she shrieked, then laughed. “Well—that was—a surprise.” Sweat beaded on her brow and above her exaggerated lips. A rivulet trickled between the implant ridges of her breasts.
Null stamped on the pedal again, both feet hard. Her body went rigid, legs strained and her scream was guttural.
Morticia, panting, believed she was still in control. She could take sexual pain anytime and never forget where a mark kept his wallet. “You can be my machine. I don’t need this piece of junk. Unstrap me?”
Null knelt down, examined the point of entry.
“What are you doing?” She was playful in the wake of the subsiding wave of pain.”
Null reached under the bed and produced a Phillips-head screwdriver. “Making an adjustment.”
“You’re removing the seat.”
“Yes.”
“But it’s supporting me so the center part doesn’t penetrate—”
Null punched the pedal to quiet her down and as the rod went up, her face clenched and her throat constricted.
“You mean fuck you all the way up through your mouth.”
“This isn’t funny! Let me out!”
“Well, if it were funny, I’d never know it. I suppose it could be, though. You know, ‘live by the sword, die by the sword?”
She added, screaming, “Gino, Alf, get the fuck in here!”
“Soundproofed for privacy. I rerouted the cameras earlier.” Null tugged hard and the plastic seat came off in his hands. “That’s better.”
“Better?” Frantic: “Do you realize that when the muscles of my legs give out, I’ll be dead?”
“Maybe before, if I do things right!”
“You’re a sick, dweeby, little asshole, fucking DQ!”
Null stomped the pedal hard. The rod forced up further.
“God help me!”
“He’s going to,” said Null. “Rest assured.”
Null began dancing a weird repetitive jig in the nude, hitting the pedal with both feet again and again.
