Part 3: Final Boss / Chapter 28
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For a guy who claimed to be concerned with doing things by the book, Detective Chazworth had been pretty sloppy in letting slip where the Russian mob hangs out.
Then again, my plan to rescue Darla by myself was admittedly brash and he certainly wouldn’t have seen it coming. Anyway, I was bound for 99 Whipple.
The internet told me that there was a 99 Whipple Avenue in Bakersfield California. It was a diner called Al’s Place that served a variety of American comfort fare, including their self-proclaimed “world’s greatest milkshake”. But I was pretty confident the place I was looking for was the second 99 Whipple served up by the Internet: 99 Whipple Street. That was on Treasure Island—and it housed a waterfront warehouse, which seemed to serve the needs of an “import/export” business better than a diner, no matter how good the diner’s milkshakes were.
Treasure Island is a 400-acre lump of land perched in the bay, between San Francisco and Oakland—about thirty minutes South from where I was in San Rafael. My Corolla was still out of the picture so I ordered up another rideshare, which arrived within a couple of minutes.
The driver’s name was Decklan and he flashed me a smile as soon as I got in the car.
“You Henry?”
“Yup.”
“You want a mint?”
“No thanks.”
“Let me know if you change your mind. Or if you want me to hit the AC. Or the heat. Or put on a particular radio station.”
“Thanks, I’m good.”
“Anything to make you comfy! I’m all about the five-star ratings.”
I nodded and settled in. Like any decent human being, I’d give him a five-star rating as long as he didn’t yell something about the Hale-Bopp comet and veer into on-coming traffic. But I knew there was very little he could do to make me “comfy”, what with my ever-present anxiety about my nephew’s condition, the inexplicable supernatural events befalling me every few hours, and my newly-discovered soul mate being kidnapped by the Russian mob. Not to mention the sudden throbbing in my forearm.
“Ow!” I groaned.
“You okay?” Decklan asked, peering at me in the rear view.
“Yeah,” I assured him. “I’m good. Just uh . . . sore muscle.”
“Hitting the gym hard core, huh?” he smiled again. “Right on. No pain, no gain.”
I nodded. But I didn’t share his optimistic take on pain. I’d had a lot of it lately, and it hadn’t come with a whole lot of gain. To wit, looking down at my arm as the throbbing subsided, I found a fresh tattoo. It was a weird one and it spelled trouble. A new set of numbers had appeared in my Quest Summary, wedged beside my most recently-completed objective and my next scheduled objective. A caret symbol next to the new entry pointed to the space between the other two—the final touch in a sloppy bid to say “Ooh, forgot this one!”
Apparently, the game had just corrected its cadence and added a minion encounter before the final boss. What the hell? I was reminded of my early D&D campaigns in grade school. We’d had a bungling Dungeon Master named Riley, who was constantly backing up and adding retroactive details to steer our party toward whatever clumsy but deadly trap he’d laid for us.
I studied the newly-appeared numbers: 52391003. 10:16 p.m. tonight! That was forty-five minutes away. Crap! I wouldn’t even reach Treasure Island for another half an hour. That would only give me fifteen minutes to rescue Darla from a bunch of gun-toting thugs who would try to murder me before I had to face some mysterious magical manifestations who would try to murder me.
Thanks to the pseudo-clairvoyance served up by my Street Smarts stat, I knew I wouldn’t be dealing with a boss. So I’d probably be facing lesser threats in larger numbers. But given the surrounding circumstances, that was cold comfort.
What was the deal with this idiotic game? There was more misfortune around every turn and it felt like only a matter of time before I faltered in a fatal way. I started to panic—feeling a cold sweat break down the back of my neck.
But then . . . a calm came over me. Suddenly, I knew I could do this. I could be in and out of the warehouse before whatever weirdness came next. I didn’t know where this certainty was coming from. While I may have been bullet proof-ish, my time in advertising hadn’t given me all that much experience neutralizing gangs of heavily-armed, cold-blooded killers. But that’s when it hit me. What I was feeling was a sense of destiny—a wildly irrational sense of destiny, but a sense of destiny just the same.
“This ain’t the movies,” Detective Chazworth had said. But he was wrong. Since I’d lost my dad, the thing I’d missed most was the deep connection we’d shared—a connection forged amidst countless afternoons of action movie marathons celebrating ridiculously unrealistic, gratuitously violent acts of heroism. And right here, right now, I was about to become an embodiment of all of that. I was about to earn my place in the pantheon of stupid violence. It felt like I was reaching into the great beyond to give my dad a huge high five.
I realized now that I’d had twinges of this spiritual awakening when I’d waded into battle with the Cutie Pants gang with the s’mores fork and as I’d channeled Chuck Norris to leap between moving cars. You’d think that the accompanying memories of being charbroiled and having my neck run over by Dean Merrick’s Jaguar would have discouraged me. But my dad didn’t raise a quitter.
###
While I was getting psyched up in the ride share, Darla and her captors were waiting on the clock.
“Boris, skol’ko?” Nikolai asked.
Darla didn’t have to wonder at the phrase’s meaning for long, as Boris looked at his watch and replied, “Three minutes,” before returning to the card game he’d started with a few of the thugs milling around the warehouse.
“Don’t you guys have some crime to do?” Darla asked, wishing that they’d busy themselves with other matters and maybe forget all about the Evergreen AI prediction.
Nikolai smiled and replied, “All crime done for today.”
Darla sighed, disheartedly. There weren’t a lot of ways this could end. She’d already gone through the fear spiral of landing as a prisoner for months or years in some underground Russian stronghold. But only now was she really taking in the alternative. If the shaky fortune-telling printout missed the mark on the Evergreen announcement, she was going to die in this warehouse.
She looked over at Merrick, who was staring off into space in grim acceptance of his fate. Apparently, whatever they were going to do with him, they’d put it on pause until they decided what to do with her. Did they prefer to batch their murdering? She’d read somewhere that efficiency is the key to a successful enterprise. Maybe Nikolai had read that too.
But she did have a little bit of hope that Merrick would face his fate alone—and that her fate would be slightly less awful. So she did the only thing she could. She sat there praying for the Evergreen prediction to come to pass.
“Thirty seconds, boss,” Boris said.
Nikolai looked over at Dimitri, who’d been tapping away at the laptop’s keyboard, perhaps attending to the receipts for their day of crime. But at Nikolai’s cue, he nodded and started clicking around, presumably navigating to some live financial news feed.
He paused, then clicked a couple of times, likely refreshing the browser. Then he looked at Nikolai, raised an eyebrow, and turned the laptop around so Nikolai could see the screen. It was impossible for Darla to read the information from this distance, and just as impossible for her to read the silent exchange between the two men. Her pulse started pounding.
Then Nikolai looked up from the keyboard and over at her.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Sorry, girl,” he said simply.
Apparently, there was no news from Evergreen.
Nikolai looked at a heavy standing behind her and said, “vzyat’ikh.” The heavy gripped Darla’s shoulders and hoisted her out of her seat.
“Ow!” she heard Merrick moan, as another heavy wrenched him out of his seat.
It was surreal. She knew she should be terrified, but a numbness came over her as her mind tried to resist what was happening. What should have been fear poured out as indignation.
“So, what? You’re just going to shoot us and dump our bodies in the bay now?”
“No!” Nikolai answered, as if offended by the crude suggestion. “We make look like accident. Maybe your skulls get crushed between boat and dock.”
“What?” Darla cried, the horrifying image forcing its way into her brain. “That won’t make any sense! How are you going to explain what we were doing here in the first place?”
“Eh,” Nikolai grunted. “Details. We figure it out. Don’t worry.”
His tone was bizarrely reassuring, as if Darla’s main concern was whether her murder and mutilation would turn out okay for him and the rest of the gang. But the focus of her concern was a little less selfless. As she and Merrick were dragged toward the back of the building, the numbness she’d been feeling fell away and her amygdala took charge, dumping gallons of adrenaline into her blood stream.
Her pulse skyrocketed and her heart felt like a runaway locomotive was going to burst through her chest. They wanted to make her death look like an accident, but they didn’t seem to have any real compunction about shooting her if she bolted. Her fight or flight instinct screamed impotently at her as her vision blurred and she began to hyperventilate—overtaken by hysteria.
“No!” she screamed like an enraged toddler. “I’m not going! You can’t make me!”
She started thrashing around, breaking free of her chaperone and stumbling several steps forward before falling to her knees in front of the card table.
As she did, she saw it: the printout, still laying there on the table top. But something was different.
Suddenly, her dread ebbed and her vision cleared. It was like some kind of switch had been flipped. She thought again about the un-highlighted passage she’d suddenly been able to read amidst the flush of emotion she’d experienced on re-living her abduction—a flush of emotion that paled in comparison to what she was experiencing now.
She snatched up the pages and poured over them, eyes wide with disbelief. Whatever had happened amidst her mortal terror had changed things.
“Literally scared out of his mind,” they’d said about her uncle. Looking back, she saw it clearly now. Every time she’d suddenly been able to make out a section of the feed, she’d been coming off a fright of some kind. The beeping that had unsettled her as she discovered the very first legible words on screen. The kamikaze cyclists and Henry being run over. Her flashback to her abduction. And now the prospect of her imminent head crushing between boat and dock. Now she knew her uncle had indeed been able to read the feed, or at least some of it. And if she’d had the bandwidth, she would have worried about whether this all meant that she was headed for a full crack up like her uncle. But she had more immediate concerns.
“Wait!” she blurted out as the heavy pulled her back up.
She didn’t know what biding her time could accomplish in the face of her imminent execution, but the prospect offered a thread of hope to cling to.
“Wait!” she cried again, meeting Nikolai’s eyes. “I can read it now!”
Nikolai smirked, incredulously.
“I can read it all!”
“Sure, sure,” Nikolai replied, unconvinced. “Or maybe you tell little story. Either way, now we know, like you say, printout not to be trusted.”
In her fear and excitement, she’d forgotten that she’d sealed her own fate. Far from changing everything, her magical revelation had changed nothing. The heavy grabbed her again.
“Wait!” she cried a third time. “Don’t you at least want to know what it says? Aren’t you curious?”
“Yeah!” Merrick parroted hopefully from the clutches of his burly escort as he was dragged toward the door. “Aren’t you curious? You gotta be curious.”
Nikolai put a hand up, bringing both heavies to a halt.
Then he paused for a long beat, clearly recognizing the blatant stalling tactic. But then, to Darla’s surprise, he shrugged and said, “Why not?”
###
Decklan dropped me off at 175 Whipple Street, a block down from the warehouse. I wanted to make my final approach on foot, because that’s what John Rambo or John Matrix or John McClane would do. Dubbed “The Holy Trinity of Johns” by my father, the headliners of Rambo, Commando, and Die Hard had been perhaps the most revered figures of my formative years.
Obviously, I knew the Johns weren’t real people. They were just characters played by action icons Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Bruce Willis—who had not, in fact, infiltrated a Russian mafia compound even once in their lives. The reason they hadn’t done so is that no one in their right mind would. But for me, right-mindedness had taken a seat at the back of the bus when a death squad of dolls had shown up in my apartment.
Within a couple of minutes, I’d made my way along the post-industrial waterfront to the warehouse, affecting a casual gate as I took in the place. The structure was mostly brick and rusted sheet metal, with a row of plexiglass windows set just below the roof. I could see any plans of a stealth approach were foiled from the jump. The place was easily 15,000 square feet, but not an inch of that square footage was particularly vulnerable. The entire perimeter was secured by a twelve-foot, razor wire-topped fence. Even if I could climb that, finding an access point that was out of view of the guard house out front would be tricky, if not impossible. I could only see one entrance set beside the steel rollup door and despite the late hour, the place was annoyingly well lit by street lamps.
Granted, there had to be an entrance on the other side. So I supposed I could walk up a block, make my way over to the shore, and then backtrack to attempt an amphibious approach. But the dock entrance was bound to be at least as well monitored as the street entrance. And more importantly, the Johns always made their best entrances through the front door, greeting a hail of bullets with one of the aforementioned a snappy one-liners.
I dropped the casual façade and marched purposefully up to the guard house. A scruffy man slid open a small window and looked me over.
“You lost, bro?” he asked in a thick Russian accent.
Apparently, he was giving me a chance to walk away. I thought briefly about doing so. I could fall back, come up with a more thoughtful plan. But had John Matrix pussy-footed around after bad guys kidnapped his daughter and forced him onto a flight to Val Verde to do their bidding? No. He’d snapped his chaperone’s neck, leaned the guy back in his seat with a hat over his face, and politely told the flight attendant, “Don’t disturb my friend. He’s dead tired.” Then he’d jumped out of the plane at five hundred feet and killed everyone in the movie.
Summoning my forty-three points worth of Muscles to snap the guard’s neck seemed like overkill, but I saw no reason to mince words.
“I’m here for Darla Cunningham,” I said coolly.
“You got wrong place, bro,” he responded.
He opened the door and stepped out of the guard house, revealing a black machine gun hanging from a strap around his shoulder. A huge, curved ammunition clip protruded from the bottom of the weapon, suggesting its successful operation wouldn’t demand tremendous marksmanship.
Part of me felt like it was all too cliché, cartoonish. Then again, guns of any class or caliber are fair game in the great US of A—and to some extent, so is shooting any trespasser who poses a threat. This guy was for real. But that didn’t matter. I’d made up my mind. I was going full John.
“Stock or barrel?” I growled.
“Hm?” The guard grunted in reply.
“Stock or barrel?” I repeated out of the corner of my mouth, as if talking around an imaginary cigar.
He stared at me, still not getting it. So I elaborated, “Which end of that thing do you want me to shove up your ass?”
My “You want s’more?” one-liner at the GetGet hadn’t cowed my adversaries as much as I’d hoped. But I’d had a bit more time to workshop this one, and I felt good about it. It had all the key ingredients: an unexpected twist, blatant disrespect for clear and present danger, and a crude anatomical reference. Mwaa! Chef’s kiss.
Anyway, the guard shot me—a whole bunch of times. And that’s when I realized that a machine gun was a very different proposition from a hand gun. While none of the individual bullets spraying forth could bottom out my Life-O-Meter, the volume was a problem. Still, I was faring better than the guard expected and confusion spread across his face as I staggered back but kept my feet. He paused and I saw him think through the situation. Then he made up his mind that the best way to go would be to just keep shooting me.
My Life-O-Meter was fighting a losing battle. As quickly as I could heal non-RIP-related damage, I was still headed for zero, slowly but surely.
Contrary to my previous assumptions, I could really get killed here. And my Muscles stat was pretty useless, given my proximity to the gunmen. I didn’t think I could close the gap between us before he finished me.
Things were not going according to plan. I had to regroup. I stumbled back onto the sidewalk and dived behind a dumpster. The guard stopped firing, but I could hear his footsteps as he stomped toward me to finish the job.
As I sat there, slowly rebounding from my wounds, I started to re-evaluate my whole “full John” plan. Sure, there was a good chance I’d be healthed-up enough to take the guard down by the time he reached me. But with my new-found respect for machine guns, I knew I’d be hard-pressed to handle the two or three or ten guys in the building.
A particularly warped part of my brain insisted that I had to stay the course or I’d be letting my dad down. But a more sensible part of my brain argued that I should definitely retreat and rethink.
I’d reasoned that I needed to save Darla before my next RIP showdown in case I didn’t survive that showdown. But my preferred order of operations had been derailed. My fifteen-minute window was now down to seven minutes. If I stayed the course, the RIP threat may well arrive in the middle of the rescue. And that was obviously the worst-case scenario.
Or . . . was it? As I crouched there behind the dumpster awaiting my would-be executioner, I suddenly thought maybe not.