For Blood or Money
29. Drifting
THEY SAY WHEN YOU DIE there is a white light at the end of a tunnel and you go toward the light. I could see the light, but it didn’t get any closer. I couldn’t figure out how to move toward it. Nothing seemed to work. I couldn’t walk. I didn’t know how to fly. I just drifted there seeing the light.
I was keeping time by counting my heartbeats. Somewhere around a thousand I lost track. How long is a thousand heartbeats?
Assuming I had a heart rate of around seventy beats per minute, I’d knock out a thousand pumps of my heart every fifteen minutes. I could still do math.
After the third thousand, I realized that being a human clock was a tedious thing.
I shut down and slept.
The light was back. Someone should tell hospitals that the beep that the machine sitting by your bed makes is not conducive to sound sleeping. But as the incessant beeping penetrated my mind, I realized what it meant. I was alive.
For all I knew, Bradley had escaped and was at this very moment getting ready to kill us all again. How did such an inept dolt get in the middle of all this? Bradley, who was laundering half a billion dollars for the mob, who had me put a laptop computer under a pile of ice in a public market. He really wasn’t smart enough for this job.
Who was? Riley could figure it out. Was she alive? I heard the beeps on the machine speed up with my heart rate. She had to be alive. I promised her. She wouldn’t have to be afraid when she was with me. I promised.
Angel. She was funneling money through her travel agency, but so were dozens of others, probably without even knowing what was happening. Angel just wanted to be with a rich, powerful man. So why did she bother with Davy Jones? Because he was strong?
Brenda. She owned the condo. Did she know? She collected pictures of herself with powerful people. Did she collect the rent from them as well?
Simon. Smart enough. Smarter than all of them. Smarter than me. Simon could manage that kind of money—change its form—put it into the economy under a legitimate guise. Simon was dead; wasn’t he?
I went back to sleep.
It was better than light the next time I woke up. Something soft and lingering touched my parched lips. Even through the cracked dryness the touch was arousing. My eyes flicked open of their own accord. Riley’s blonde mop was next to my face and her lips were caressing mine. She realized suddenly that I was awake and pulled away.
“Hey you,” I said with my best effort at a smile. Woken from death by a beautiful woman. This was becoming a cliché.
“Hey Sleeping Beauty,” she answered.
“Wakened by Princess Charming’s kiss,” I responded. “I didn’t know where I was for a while. Are you all right?”
“Me?” she asked. “I’m going to have a nice little scar under my arm, but it’s hardly more than a bandaid job.”
I raised my hand to her face. It was bruised almost black on one side, no matter how much foundation makeup she put over it. Her eye was swollen and her lip was cut. I gently drew my fingers across her cheek and her eyes fluttered closed in the stillness as I touched her.
“I let you down,” I said. “I let them hurt you.”
“You couldn’t have done more than you did, Dag,” she said. “I brought it on myself when I stole the disks from Brenda’s house.”
“You did what?”
“I broke into Brenda’s house a few days ago, while you were flying home from Atlanta. I searched the office for backup disks for Simon’s computer. There was too much information missing that should have been there when we examined the hard drive. I thought they might have backed it up before they erased it. So I went looking for backups and I found them. That’s how I found out that Brenda owned the condo.”
“That’s why you went to the party there Saturday night,” I said. “You were hoping to gather more evidence about what was going on.”
“You said Simon had outsmarted himself when he encrypted the jump-drive,” Riley said. “It looks like I was too smart for myself when I decided to wade into the condo. I slipped away from the other girls while they were playing a drinking game on pretense of going to the bathroom. I slipped into the office to look for records. I was too intent on what I was looking for to notice someone was already in the room. I didn’t realize it until I was falling face first into a vase of lilacs after being cracked on the back of the head.”
“Bradley hit you?” I said. “He’s got a lot to account for.”
“His accounting is over,” Riley said. “Jordan was here most of the night. He says that when the Refrigerator fell on Bradley and knocked him through the window, Bradley fell on the cut glass and was stabbed through the back. He was dead before the police got up to the condo. I’m sorry, Dag. It was my actions that killed him.”
“No, Riley,” I said straightening a lock of hair that jutted out from her head. You might as well say that he killed himself. He brought it all down on himself. What about the Refrigerator?”
“Jordan shot him,” Riley said simply. “There was no question that he was going to shoot you.”
“Dead?” I asked. She nodded her head. Poor Jordan. He wasn’t the kind of man to take killing even a criminal like Oksamma lightly. “What day is it?” I asked.
“It’s Monday night,” Riley said. “You’ve been mostly out of it for about thirty hours. I was discharged this morning. Stevie brought me a wig she was cleaning for me and Teri stopped by my apartment to bring me clothes. I ran to the office to make sure Mrs. Prior had picked up Maizie and grabbed your computer. I needed something to do while I sat here.”
“How did you get into my computer?”
“Same as last time,” she said. “You only have so many fingers, you know.”
I took the computer from her and opened up a “new user” screen. I reached over and took her hand and placed her index finger on the scanner, then logged out.
“There,” I said, “now I have ten more to choose from.”
She looked at me and bent over the bed to kiss me again. Not passionate, but soft.
“Dag, I was so afraid,” she said.
“Those guys would scare anybody, kiddo.”
“I wasn’t scared of them. I was afraid I’d lost you. What would I do without you?”
There were a lot of things I could have told her. A lot I wanted to say. But overwhelming lethargy was taking its toll on me again. All I could say was, “Don’t worry. We’re safe now.” Then I drifted off to sleep again.
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