Lawless Sign Part Thirteen (Fiction)

Chapter 20: Provoked Movements

The house where Greg Armstrong lived was one block off of the intersection of Lake Street and another major avenue which divided Melrose Park into east and west portions. It was a four bedroom bi-level home with a peaked brown roof. A long blacktop driveway ran along the right property line and emptied into a gated backyard surrounded by a tall brown privacy fence.

Greg’s mother was looking out her kitchen window, in the direction of the beige brick garage that took up half of the yard. She had wrapped the cord of the phone she was talking on around her fist several times. Her voice was just below the level of a shout. “Don’t you dare use that tone of voice with me, Mr. Bernstein. They won’t let us bail him out. The people there said they could hold him for seventy-two hours without charging him. Now, they’re saying it’s murder. I’ve had it with you! We’re getting our own lawyer!”

Greg’s sister Angie was sitting on the stool across the breakfast bar from her mother, her black nylon sheathed legs dangling above the floor. She asked “Is Greg with him?”

Dana Garner, Greg’s mother, slanted the phone from her ear and pressed the receiver into the padded shoulder of her gold house coat. “I don’t think so. How long ago did Greg leave?”

“I don’t know. He was gone when I got up,” Angie said. She started digging through an oval vinyl purse on the counter.

“I’ve had it with you. Absolutely had it with you,” the middle aged blonde Dana snarled into the phone. “Enough with your lies. Hap didn’t kill anyone. He didn’t kill anyone. He didn’t kill this Pierre Colbert. That I know. He’s not going to jail for you. He’s seventy years old and he’s not going to jail again. Got that, fat ass?”

Angie had found her cell phone. She held it up in her mother’s direction and asked in a whisper “You want I should call Greg?”

Her mother held up a finger. After a brief pause, she continued her hissing with “Listen to me. He walks. He walks right out of there. Not on bail. Not on anything. Charges dropped and he walks. Or else. Use your imagination, Mr. Bernstein. Use your imagination. He walks. Today. Or else.”

Angie began wadding up tissues from a box into a ball.

“You better be right. You better be right,” Dana said before hanging up the receiver. She took the ball of tissues from her daughter’s hand and blotted her face with them.

“What’s his story?” Angie asked.

The doorbell rang.

“What the hell?” Angie blurted, softly.

Her mother whispered “If it’s the cops with a search warrant, we just stand around like we don’t know anything.”

“And if they get to the safe?”

“Game over. Until we can get at the accounts in Lichtenstein. Get the door.”

“I think I have like four hundred bucks in my car.”

“Answer the door, ding dong,” Dana said, as she receded into an adjoining bedroom.

The tall, slender Angie wove her way through the front room’s askew furniture and littered surfaces. One of her high heels pierced a patch of newspaper, which she attempted to shake off.

The Armstrong house was later described as ransacked. In reality, it was in its normal state.

Angie pushed aside her jet black bangs and squinted out the front door’s smudgy top window. She reported “It’s a delivery man.”

“Answer it,” Dana said.

After kicking away a polyester stuffed coat and an empty plastic bottle, Angie opened the door inward a wedge.

The figure on the other side of the door was a man dressed in head to toe brown. A brown utility van was backed into the driveway. An older woman, also dressed all in brown, was standing behind the van with a hand truck.

In the man’s hands was a grey plastic book-shaped device. He looked up from it and said “Greg Armstrong? It’s for the garage.”

“One second. I’ll get the gate,” she said, starting to close the door.

“I need a signature,” the man prompted.

Her black painted fingers snatched the stylist from his hand. Angie signed the pad by making a heart with an x through it. She asked “What is it?”

“It doesn’t say. It’s three feet on a side, eight feet tall. There’s two of them,” the man reported.

“I’ll get the gate,” she said, closing the door.

“What was it?” Dana asked, coming back into the kitchen. She plucked up her daughter’s bright yellow purse.

“More  boxes, like the others. This time they said they were for Greg instead of dad,” Angie said, weaving her way into the kitchen.

Her mother had again withdrawn into the bedroom. “I’ve got into the safe. I’m giving you half. When you’re done with that, I need you to pack.”

Angie pressed a pair of buttons on the wall. These activated the gate and garage door opener.  She asked “Should I call Greg?”

“If he doesn’t call, we worry then,” her mother answered.

Angie swung out the back door. The empty two car garage was now open. She found the two delivery people rolling the large box length wise.

The female delivery woman, Margo Pines, asked “How do you want this?”

“You can put it upright. The others were upright. I’ll show you where to put them,” Angie said, brushing past the male delivery person.

The man jabbed a steel prong into her back. After a moment of thorough convulsion, Angie sagged unconscious into his arms. Two seconds later she was in the box.

Margo entered the kitchen door with her henchman close behind. She breezed into the breakfast nook without noticing the open door to the bedroom directly to her right. Having heard something, her trailing companion held up.

Dana Garner got two steps into the kitchen when she too felt a metal prong in her back. The man dropped the prong and caught her as she fell backwards, witless. Margo grabbed Dana’s feet, saying “That was fast.”

Margo did go back for the purses, otherwise Angie and Dana might have complained more than they eventually did. The two woke up face to face in the box several minutes later.

Nedor Services had done what they said they would. As I had promised Greg, his mother and sister had been safely removed from the situation. Moreover, they had vanished without a trace. An hour later both were in a corporate jet heading for Panama.   

At about the same time as their plane’s landing gear was folding up, Miles Nasus entered the atrium of the Standard Oil Building. He had spent the morning at the offices of one of his charges, hearing their appeal of a slightly negative security assessment. That was the sort of sporadic activity Nasus had come to be used to prior to meeting me.

Feldman had sent Nasus an email requesting a meeting in the office. Prior to receiving that message, Nasus thought Feldman had left for Pasadena that morning. And Feldman had given Nasus the distinct impression that the entire issue was now clearly out of their hands. Nasus had been expecting to be contacted by someone, but not Feldman.

Nasus and Feldman were fairly low in the order of things. The issue had been escalated. Nasus was expecting some sort of debriefing, perhaps about the coverage of Pierre Colbert’s laboratory, perhaps about my crashing into the Allerton or perhaps about the disposition of the men from Nedor Services. In the mean time, he was keeping his mouth shut and carrying on as per normal.

Had Nasus been a bit more suspicious, he might have noticed that the time stamp on the emails he had received that morning were off by twenty minutes. His wife had sent him a text message which, per her, must have been delayed by an hour. But other than this, Nasus had no reason to anticipate anything out of the ordinary.

The atrium was home turf for Nasus. He had no prompting to look for anything out of the ordinary here. The space was an enclosed mall, complete with restaurants, a post office branch and even its own dry cleaners. At any time there were at least a hundred people moving through this area.

Ambient echoes coupled with the race of traffic right out the windows graced the place with a distinct permeating din. He got within five steps of the security desk when this din ended, suddenly and unnaturally. Nasus had been reaching into his suit coat pocket for a pass card. He froze.

Silence. No one around him was moving. People were halted mid stride.

Glaring at him from a standing position behind the security desk was a short man in a blue Air Force dress uniform. The man’s ashen face sported a half dollar sized wound above his right eye. His filthy uniform and dress shirt clung to him in uneven ridges. He had been soaked through. The uniform had since dried and frozen in places.

“Colonel Mustard, meet your successor, Colonel Zero.”

Nasus looked about. The man in the Air Force uniform hadn’t said anything. Other than the sound of his own movements, Nasus heard no other noises. He had no inkling of where the voice he had just heard came from, nor even a general direction. It sounded close, almost at intimate distance.

The voice continued “Slowly this time. And enunciate, marble mouth.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Colonel Mustard said. “Nice hair.”

“That’s it, fly boy? One second of perfect elocution. One second of polite comportment. Served concurrently,” the voice said. “Not everyone who leaves the service keeps shaving their head. I will admit Colonel Zero’s ‘Conan look’ is a bit much. His wife dyes it, too.”

Nasus said “Not my idea. I would go grey.”

“Then Mrs. Nasus would have a grey haired husband. That won’t go,” the voice said. “All in all, Colonel Zero is quite the upgrade. He looks like a business man, a defense contractor, even. He speaks entirely intelligibly—professionally, when prompted. For bonus points, he’s not a psychotic double dealer. Unlike some people.”

Mustard speed drawled “Fat-lot-of-good-it’ll-do-him, Yankee bitch.”

“Yankee bitch. That’s pretty much all he said. Par for the course. However, he does have a point,” the voice said. “Mustard, take Colonel Zero to the elevators.”

Mustard had drawn his black plastic gyrojet pistol. He said “Get.”

The voice said “I assure you Colonel Mustard’s weapon is just as inaccurate as it looks. But look around. Your options are bleak.”

Everything in the atrium was flash frozen, silent and unmoving. The cars outside were halted. It was as if he and Colonel Mustard were the only moving images in a photograph.

Mustard led Nasus around a large square shaft and to a bank of elevators. He positioned Nasus in front of one set of silver doors and then went to another, two sets away. Mustard told him “Stay.”

The doors folded away. There was no elevator. Nasus glanced down. At the bottom of the shaft was the sprawled and mangled body of Myron Feldman.

“Doctor Feldman won’t be joining us,” the voice explained. “There are some details I require your input to illuminate.”

Nasus next found himself upside down, being dragged up the elevator shaft by his left ankle. He was jerked in rapid, three foot yanks. There was a sensation of falling for a tiny moment between each surge. Beneath him the dim body of Myron Feldman became smaller and smaller. Looking up, Nasus could not see much past the tassels of metal wires that were bouncing off his leg.

He wasn’t counting the floors. After a few short yells of curses, Nasus decided to conserve his air. He was hyperventilating to the point of gulping, seeing spots. Whatever sense of time he may have had left him.

The ordeal ended with a set of doors shooting into their housings. Nasus was flung into a familiar hallway. He was face first on pink and brown carpet squares.

Ahead of Nasus, around where the hallway turned right, were the doors to his office quad. At his feet was the door to the elevators. He heard what he thought at first was disco music coming from inside the elevator.

“Take some time to get to know me. To become admirers or my enemies,” was the song’s chorus. The music was emanating from a male figure that Nasus saw from behind. The man was wearing a baggy grey pinstripe suit and a white straw hat.

“I am Osiris and I cannot take this call. Nothing. No response. How disobedient of you, Research In Motion thing,” the figure said. He pivoted to face Nasus and asked

“I really can’t take this call right now. Is there a button I can push to place this call on hold?”

Nasus sat up and leaned forward. He said “On a Blackberry? No.”

“No hold? I would be better off with a beeper,” he said. Royce Cole put the phone up to his mustache outlined lips and said “Leon, I can’t take this call right now. I really can’t. Well, what the hell do you expect her to say? Of course he’s not going to go to prison for us. He’s seventy years old. You’re over thinking this. No, do not decide. I’ll be right back with you.”

Another set of elevator doors opened and Colonel Mustard stepped out.

Cole immediately snapped at him. “I climbed up. I climbed up. It took you that long to figure out how to operate an elevator?”

Mustard responded with something truly unintelligible.

“Spit the marbles out. How did your ground crew ever understand you? I can’t believe you were ever entrusted with an F16,” Cole said.  Per Nasus, this version of Cole was not the middle aged man I had met in the pyramids, but rather a man in his late twenties. “Take Colonel Zero to his office.”

His gyrojet again drawn, Mustard advanced directly through Cole. Cole popped like a soap bubble. Not a trace of him remained. Mustard was unfazed. Upon gaining Nasus’s position, Mustard issued a quick “Up you.”

Mustard put a hand on Nasus’s back and guided him down the hall. At the turn, Mustard suddenly bolted left. He leveled his curious weapon. It hissed and spat a trail of whistling smoke. The rocket streaked down the hallway, glanced a wall and then erupted with a echoing hollow bang and small bright flash.

“They’re not moving. Incredible,” Cole’s voice emanated from a nowhere close by. “I guess we are going to have to leave your precious rocket pistol behind, too.”

Mustard muttered something under his breath. The people he had partially spotted down the hall were indeed frozen.

“Don’t give me that crap about being from Texas. I lived in Amarillo for one hundred years,” Cole said. “What you are, sir, is a degenerate: an example of evolution in retrograde motion. You are making this choice very easy for me.”

Mustard shoved Nasus down the hall. They headed for the frosted glass door of the office.

“Leon, I don’t like it. If Emile confesses, we lose her ability to write prescriptions. We’re already down the wholesale pharmacy. I’m working on that next, I think. Or I have to get to the hospital, unless we want to reset the Voliant Wave event. And think about it. It doesn’t gain us anything. We didn’t kill Pete. Pete? Pierre. Colbert. What do you think I’m talking about? I don’t call him that, he calls himself that. He’s probably not dead. Like the other fifteen people we’re missing at any given time, he’s probably wandering the forest preserve. Let’s look there. That’s where they always are.—So if he shows, Emile spontaneously remembers where she left Pete’s body. Then we dispose of Pete. Yeah, I got that. No, I don’t like it. I know the cops are all over their house and all of that. I don’t think this mitigates anything. No, I don’t. I will. It doesn’t have to be brilliant, it just has to be better than yours,” Cole said. His voice seemed to be coming from beyond the office doors.

“Keys,” Mustard ordered. Nasus began digging through his pants. Due to his journey up the elevator shaft, his pockets were empty.

“Try the knob, mush mouth. It’s open,” Cole said, his shadow appearing across the frosted glass.

When they opened the door a blink later, Cole’s shadow rode the window. But there was nothing present where the shadow’s subject should have been. Nasus took two steps into the reception area. Mustard closed the door behind them.

Cole’s disembodied voice explained “The receptionist had a flat tire and called off sick. Mister Phillips and Mister Neidermeir were easy enough to call away. Charles Evans, the independent media creative, is a workaholic, however.”

The light showing through the transom over Evans Promotions office went out.

“I’m not sure why you shot him three times,” Cole said. The door to Nasus Consulting came open. “Come in, Colonels.”

Mustard entered first, heading in the direction of the window. Nasus honed his attention on the youthful Cole, who was sitting on the edge of his desk.

Mustard asked “Where my files?”

“Your liquor collection? Colonel Zero doesn’t drink,” Cole said. “Otherwise it’s fairly much the way you left it.

Minus the double dealing and notes scrawled on envelopes in Morse code and Semaphore shorthand.”

“Neidermeir-still-owes-me-thirty-bucks,” Mustard said.

“Let it go,” Cole said to Mustard. He then waved Nasus forward with “Myron Feldman did something to the computers. See if you can undo it.”

The way Nasus told it, he wasn’t sure if he was dreaming or hallucinating. He didn’t feel involuntarily compelled to do anything. He later expressed regrets for not putting up more of a fuss. It wouldn’t have done him much good.

It was while Nasus was working with the cables under the credenza that he noticed that the ring finger on Cole’s left hand was sky blue. Nasus smelled something burnt near the power strip and could not get it to light up.

Cole was on his crackberry again. “Leon. Who do you think this is? Sparky. Listen—No, I don’t know into whose hands Nick has fallen. Right now, it’s still a mystery. Probably the same people Feldman tipped off. That’s a guess. Doing? There’s been a break in the space pirate issue. I’m trying to mollify the space pirate. Figure his angle, if he’s not just another thing Joe Blow has pulled out of his trunk. I need to know what Feldman got from Argonne. And you’ll never guess who I ran into. Three guesses and the first had better be Colonel Mustard. I have no idea. It may be the same thing powering the antennas on the tower. Bend time or not, I can only be in one place. At least currently. Whomever is playing with the tower, nothing is going to work. One would think Joe Blow knows that, but who knows. Another distraction. Perhaps that’s his entire aim. You got me off track here. Wait. Very well. Then call back when you are out of the hospital.”

Mustard said something else, which Cole conveyed as “He wants to know if Neidermeir ever hit you up for a fiver?”

“Every time he drives in. For the parking lot. I’m out about sixty-five,” Nasus said.

Cole asked “Any idea what Doctor Feldman might have done?”

“Tripped the circuit breaker?” Nasus guessed.

“Is that all? I am Osiris. Function,” Cole said, waving his hands in the direction of the three screens. The screens blinked to life and the computer booted up. Cole asked “Those are Dell computers, right?”

Nasus checked and responded “Yeah.”

“Noted,” Cole said, running his thumbs over the crackberry’s keyboard. “Please log in. The right passwords. Or else.”

Nasus settled in his chair and swung toward the credenza. Once he had put in the password, the three screens began displaying the diagrams Feldman had showed me in the elevator.

Cole asked “What the devil is this supposed to mean?”

It was probably a rhetorical question, but Nasus responded with “It’s supposed to prove that he’s from outer space.”

“It’s a space ship. Where else would it be from?” Cole said. “It’s not his, if that’s what he said. I suppose it is convincing, since it is for real.”

A white streak of smoke raced in the direction of Nasus and Cole. It was accompanied by an oscillating whistle, which hung on one flat note and then stopped. The tiny red pointed missile at the head of this trail also halted. It’s trail of smoke was stationary and did not dissipate.

Cole turned his head to Mustard, who was standing motionless with the gyrojet leveled at Nasus. After a moment’s reflection, Cole explained “I think he’s hard of hearing, on top of not being very sporting.”

Cole yanked open the desk’s middle drawer. Then Cole evaporated.

Nasus shot a glance into the drawer. He heard the missile’s whistle. Its smoking trail streaked inches from his eyes. A sharp report came from behind the chair.

Nasus dove under the desk. He pressed his hands up and came to a crouch. Hearing Mustard’s advancing footfalls, Nasus attempted to raise the desk, perhaps to use it as a battering ram.

The desk was far too heavy for that. Nasus wound up sprawling backwards out of the enclosure. Another missile hissed above him. It exploded against the cabinets on the far wall.

Nasus clawed his way into the chair. Mustard was at the edge of the desk, leveling his queer plastic weapon. It was then Miles spotted his own revolver in the drawer.

He leaned forward to grab the gun. Mustard fired from four feet away—and cleanly missed. The missile skittered off the ceiling and then exploded, toppling two of the computer screens on the credenza.

Aiming the revolver with a two hand grip, Nasus squeezed off a shot. The revolver’s muzzle kicked back as a thunderous cannonade reverberated off the window. Mustard lost his balance and arched back.

But he didn’t fall.

From nowhere Cole said “He’s wearing a bullet proof vest.”

Nasus did notice that Mustard was un-bloodied.

“And you only have two more shots,” Cole continued.

Mustard’s arms raised up. Two more lines of smoke converged quickly on Nasus. Nasus squeezed  his revolver, firing twice in rapid succession. Blood splattered the door. Mustard arched back and crashed to the floor.  

The missiles exploded behind the chair and behind the credenza. The smoking strings of their flight path began to descend and fall apart into diminishing small strings.

Cole reappeared steps from the fallen Mustard. He was back on his crackberry “Leon, you know this isn’t even a good quick fix. It has too many moving parts. I know you’re not one for mitigation, but this isn’t it. Tell Hap I will break him out of jail. Maybe next week. He just has to sit tight until then. That’s fine. Turn around and put Emile back. Why did you do that? Why did you tell the police that? The die is cast, then. No. Go the hell ahead. The space pirate? There’s a direct link to Joe Blow, so who knows. I am not one for underestimating anyone, but if it’s like the rest of Joe Blow’s tricks, there’s no second act. You act as if you’ve never dealt with a major disaster before, Leon. You do it every time you open your mouth to eat. Yes, I am breaking your balls about that. And why not now? You’ve defeated a stomach staple. Don’t you want to be like Hap and retire. That’s my going forward plan for Hap. He retires. I break him out of jail and he goes off with a dumpster full of cash to spend in his remaining years. That’s all most people want. You’re not going to get there. There are old men and there are fat men. There are no old fat men. I love you. I love you in the way only someone can love someone who is eating themselves to death. All of this skullduggery of yours will be for nothing.-- Is Emile still soaking wet? You’re going to have to take her to a hotel. Know anything about styling her hair? If she shows up like a drenched rat the police might not believe she’s in her right mind.—You’ve changed the subject. It isn’t Joe Blow that’s Death. It’s Dunkin Donuts.—Like that? I have no choice. This isn’t mitigation, it’s complication. Best of luck!”

Miles Nasus sagged into the chair. His eyes were fixed on the fallen form of Colonel Mustard. Nasus had never shot at anyone before, much less seen anyone shot.

Cole was unaffected by the grizzly sight. He casually slid his cell phone into one of the pockets of his baggy top coat. He said to Nasus “There was a choice. My apologies for not explaining this. One of you gets to be the corpse in the office. The other gets to take a wet nap until I can find the time to divine and divide the contents of their mini mind.”

“I aim to please,” Nasus said.

“I did have a rooting interest, if it’s any consolation. I’ve already been through Major Gonor’s mind several times. Dismal place. Still, I was hoping it wasn’t going to come to this with you, too,” Cole said.

Nasus said without inflection “I’m all broken up about it, myself.”

Cole said “You were very hard to recruit for. There are very few people with top security clearances who have your lack of intellectual curiosity, your lack of ambition, your seemingly low level of mental energy—“

“—And look where it got you,” Nasus said. “What the hell do you want?”

“It will all come to me. In due time. When I have the time. Every bit of it,” Cole said. “Since you’re so vocal now, why don’t we start with: What is Elvis the space pirate really after?”

Nasus could have sold me out, then and there. And he had every reason to believe that anything he knew Cole could soon find out. Maybe it was the first thing that came to mind or maybe it was a delaying action, but Nasus went with “He wants to know why you killed all of the people on Tiamore.”

Cole’s answer signed his death warrant, as far as I was concerned. He responded with an incredulous “The dog people? The dog people were besides the point!—“