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have to kill their captives.
I didn t know that the Israelis were noted for being
humanitarians.
They aren t. If, for instance, they kill a Palestinian terrorist,
the terrorist instantly becomes a martyr. If they mind-wipe the
guy, and send him home, his family and his cell have to take care
of him. It slows them down and it s also psychologically wearing
to have a drooling idiot following you around, knowing that he
was once one of your more brilliant disciples. The Israelis have
found that if they send a mind-wiped guy back to his cell, within
six months the cell is functionally inactive.
I hate to keep asking questions, but what do you mean by
cell?
Cells are like our city s gangs, except they are sanctioned and
financed by the Palestinian government.
How do you know all this?
I study technique. It s like a hobby with me. And from time
to time I use some of the things I ve learned.
Like mind-wiping me when you re done with me?
No. For one thing I don t have the right combination of drugs,
and I don t know how to do it. I just know it can be and is being
done. He looked at her for a bit, then reached out and stroked
her cheek with the back of his hand. Out of respect for Jim, I
will do everything I can to protect you and keep you safe.
Including this. He gave her a paper bag, Your journal is in
there. I had it hidden, for obvious reasons. I kept my word and
didn t read it, but you can t keep writing down everything that
happens. I ll end up in prison.
STIX 101
She changed the subject, You act like Jim and I were a
couple.
That was Jim s idea. He was in love with you.
I didn t know.
You were the first woman in a long time who treated him like
he was something special.
Tell me about Jim?
What do you want to know?
Well, I assume that he was born and grew up, went to school,
probably got in a few fights, probably got drunk a few times,
hopefully got laid a few times by girls from good families and once
or twice by a real horny little piece of trailer trash. So let s start
when he became a cop.
Spruce was surprised by her candid appraisal of Jim s
adolescent years.
Well, I was in the Academy with him. I didn t know him very
well until just before graduation. I was assigned with him to the
same group in which we were to do a project that involved a
great deal of research. I was in the bottom of the class and about
to flunk. Jim put together a paper that we all got credit for that is
still used as a model of how to do a research project. So Pete,
Jerry, and I all owed our careers to Jim. He never was very good
as a street cop, but he made it up in report writing, and we made
damn sure he was covered when he was on the street. It was like
Jim getting himself killed. A street cop or an investigator would
never have grabbed that ornament off the limb. I guess you
could say that Jim lacked the common sense of a street cop.
That s not a slam, that s just the way he was.
Did you kind of keep track of him after that?
You don t understand about cops. They are a family. Once
you bond with one another, it s like you re closer than brothers.
So the four of us put in for the same precinct. And you ve got to
remember, the Brass were all street cops too. So they knew and
they put us all together. To start with, we didn t know enough to
be on our own, so for the first three years we all were paired up
with older cops who knew the streets. Then about a year before
everything went to hell, Jim and Jerry partnered up. Pete married
102 DAVE MEAD
his partner s daughter and moved into the top floor of his in-laws
brownstone with his new bride. He and his father-in-law got
along so well that they just stayed together.
So that left you.
We all worked the same shift, so I saw them every night. And
I had gotten married to a reporter; she kept me pretty busy, what
with her social life and all. He stopped talking and grinned,
thinking of her. She called us the `White Bread Four. She
would fix a big pot of stew, using moose meat that her Dad would
send her from Alaska, and tell me, `Bring the other Wonder Boys
and their tag-a-longs. `Wonder Boys was her take-off on `White
Bread Four. So we all would pile into our house and eat stew;
Jerry s wife would bring several loaves of homemade bread and
everyone else would bring bottles of red wine.
It was obvious to Stix that Spruce didn t want to come back to
the present; she suspected that, for him, getting through
whatever had happened was painful to the point of avoidance.
She prodded him along, So what happened?
To tell you about Jimmy, I m going to have to tell you quite a
bit about myself.
Stix nodded and wrapped her hands tightly around the mug of
hot chocolate that he d made for her and let the heat seep
through her body. Now if she could just use her legs to push
herself back into the chair.
We had a Halloween party that lasted two days, then my wife
left for South America to do a story on a drug cartel. She never
came back.
What was her name?
She went by Judith Rawlings.
Didn t she write a lot of articles on single mothers?
Yeah, she did. And I should have realized that she was in
over her head on doing a story on a drug cartel.
Would she have listened?
Probably not. But I should have tried. He looked up at her
from where he was squatting against a wall, facing her and
watching the door. Thanks for looking at it as if it weren t my
STIX 103
fault. I got over that a long time ago. Anyway, she was
interviewing a single mother whose husband had been a judge
killed by a drug cartel. The woman had hidden all of his files on
the cartel and she gave them to Judith. With her editor s
blessing, she and a photographer went to Colombia. Nine days
later I got a cable from the State Department. She had been
killed in a plane crash. His voice was getting tight with anger
and pain. I flew down there and checked it out. The bastards
hadn t even tried to cover it up. It took me less than three days
to find out that the CIA had picked her up and tortured her to find
out her source. I needed funds to fight them and so I knocked off
a drug deal.
By yourself?
Yeah. It wasn t hard. They were so sure of themselves that
they did the trade in an open air restaurant.
And so you took their money?
I walked in with a Uzi in one hand and a sawed-off shotgun in
the other. At first they thought it was a joke. After I blew the
main man s brains all over their table they decided that I was
serious. At my request, they loaded everything into a Land Rover
that I was driving. It wasn t until later that I discovered that it
was the biggest transaction that cartel had ever been involved in.
How did you pull it off?
It was shit-house luck fueled by anger and hatred. I was able
to find a place to hole up and from there I began a campaign to
kill all the CIA bastards involved in the Colombian drug trade.
Are you sure that it was the CIA that killed your wife?
Yeah. I found the hotel where they d taken her. They hadn t
let the staff back into the room they d kept her in to clean it. I
think that they were leaving it `as is as a kind of reminder of
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