of the road.
“The real cops are going to be here at any minute,” the agent told Batman. “We probably want to avoid that.”
Batman tripped over something. He looked to see pieces of Twitch’s artificial leg next to the Rolls taxi.
Then he looked over the edge of the road and saw a crumpled body below. Batman didn’t even think about it. He immediately slid down the side of the embankment, Audette close behind.
He reached Twitch, turned him over and went to feel for a pulse. But his colleague surprised him by sitting up and shouting at him, “What the fuck took you so long?”
Batman almost had a heart attack and came close to dying a second time. He could have punched Twitch right in the mouth.
“I’ve been trying to crawl up this fucking hill for a half hour,” Twitch complained. He seemed not the least bit harmed, except his artificial leg was no longer attached to him. Oddly, the same thing had happened to him on their previous mission.
“You have a hard time holding on to that thing,” Batman told him. “Why don’t you just grow a new one?”
Again with Audette’s help, Batman dragged Twitch up to the roadway. Then they quickly told the agent everything that had happened: winning the gagnant’s buy-in fee, getting into the Palace, playing the very brief game and getting not the Z-box but a key that apparently opens or activates it. The story ended with Batman telling Audette of seeing the man with the rings on his fingers stealing the mysterious key.
Audette listened in disbelief.
“This is the first I’ve heard about any key,” he told them. “But it must have something to do with the Z-box if only because a bunch of people just lost a lot of money trying to get it.”
“Well, we had it, for about three minutes,” Twitch said. “But who’s got it now? And where the fuck is the box?”
“Lots of rings on the fingers sounds like Jihad Brotherhood,” Audette told them. “They’re usually gofers for al Qaeda’s African operations, but it looks like they’ve expanded their sphere of influence and are flexing their muscles.”
“But how the hell do guys like that get into Monte Carlo?” Batman asked him. “Aren’t they all over the watch lists?”
Audette shook his head.
“I’m guessing they slipped through when they let all the vendors in for the race week,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean it’s going to be that easy for them to get out.”
He pulled out a sat-phone and started dialing
“You’ll recall I’ve got a small army of private PSOs running around this city?” he said. “Well, they’re all going to be pissed off these Jihad monkeys just killed some of their brothers up here. So I’m going to use them to seal this place tighter than Tupperware. All the roads, the bus station, the train station—I’ll get people to the Nice Airport. Key or no key, box or no box, those assholes ain’t getting out. And when we’re through beating the crap out of them, you guys can take over…”
Full of rage now, Audette was ready to start giving orders. But his cell phone wouldn’t cooperate. No matter what he did, he couldn’t get a dial tone.
“Are we in a dead zone here or something?” he asked Batman and Twitch, looking in all directions. “I mean, we’re up on fucking hill. What’s blocking the signal up here?”
They both shrugged. “Nothing works when we’re around,” Twitch murmured.
Audette finally gave up and said, “I got to get back to the city and get on a landline. How are you guys feeling? Need to go to a hospital?”
“Not me,” Twitch said.
“Same here,” Batman replied.
At that point they heard sirens approaching.
Audette told them, “OK, I say we all get out of here before the local cops start asking questions we don’t want to answer.”
* * *
IT WAS 3:00 A.M. by this time.
Audette drove like a madman back to Monte Carlo, agreeing to drop them at their hostel.
Squeezing his rented car into the alley nearby, the agent parked next to the hostel’s dumpster long enough for Batman to get Twitch out of the backseat.
Then Batman awkwardly thanked Audette for being there in their time of need. The CIA agent waved off his gratitude and handed him an umbrella. He said Batman might be able to fashion parts of it into a temporary leg for Twitch.
Then the agent drove off with a squeal, leaving Batman with the distinct feeling that he wanted to get away from them as quickly