The Shaft

by David J. Schow

  Bauhaus collides with the door. A whitewood crack appears lengthwise through the middle. It bows toward her. The hinges tear halfway free of their moorings.

  Jamaica sweeps aside the racked clothing in the closet, mostly coats, slickers, winter gear. She paws around for the big red button she knows to be there. Accelerating fear tries to iris her throat shut.

  The heel of her hand skids past the edge of the circuit box. It is further back than she remembers. It is industrial gray with a flexible conduit hose coming out of the top. The button is mounted in the center of the box, within an insulated collar that prevents an accidental trip.

  The door of the green bedroom flies apart into matchsticks and kindling sawdust. Bauhaus sprawls in, still clumsy on his injured leg. He stands up, weaving, and yanks a sharp fragment of the door out of his left tit.

  Wooden stakes only stop some monsters.

  His smoking jacket is tom open, belt danging. His feet are crimson to the ankles and he has a hard-on.

  The button emits a buzzer noise Jamaica has forever associated with the employee doors on bank counters. With that noise the back wall of the closet will retract to the right for seven seconds, then relock. It will release her into the rear of the foyer closet, thence into the room with the mirrored walls and bullet-deflecting glass. She will be exactly two feet from the front door.

  If the building's alarms have not gone off by this time, they will as soon as Jamaica employs the escape panel. Pressing that big red button is just like kicking off Doomsday in all those World War III flicks. Bauhaus' legion of backup security, firepower unslung, will come charged and gnashing their teeth. Hell, not so pretty, would officially bust loose.

  Evermore the braggart, Bauhaus has foolishly pointed out the button to Jamaica, about a year back, in the afterburn of two hours of mediocre sex and countless lines of excellent controlled substances. Jamaica has joked to Jonathan about Bauhaus' 'secret panels'. Jonathan is dead now and Jamaica does not wish to join him.

  The panel takes its mechanical time withdrawing as Bauhaus slouches across the room to kill her.

  She steps through, case-first. He misses her neck but ensnares a fistful of her hair and braces against the closet frame, trying to reel her back headlong. She loses the case; it mashes her foot. How can money be so heavy?

  Her hands hang on to the metal hanger bar as she is trawled backward, her neck tendons snapping tight as thick rubber bands to shoot pain up and over the crown of her head. The panel is closing.

  Fleetingly she wishes that she had the chemical edge.

  Bauhaus makes another caveman noise and whips her head back. Her occipital cracks against the panel as it seals off with a good nine inches of her hair still in his grasp on the leeward side.

  She aches to shoot him now, a craving nearly sexual in its bite and intensity.

  The escape panel is a one-shot option that cannot be triggered repeatedly. It is designed to foil such pursuit, and will not open again until five minutes had clocked off on the circuit box's timer. Bauhaus has told her this, too, never suspecting she would be the one to use his own system against him.

  But he would know that, which means that the only thing holding Jamaica 's hair now is the door. Bauhaus is already on his way around to cut her off. Perhaps an extra moment, to collect a meat cleaver or another firearm, to gift her with pain.

  The panel flashing is secured with metal brads and rubberized for a quiet, positive contact. Jamaica steels herself, one, two, three and jerks her head forward. Roots shed and hair filament snaps like twigs in a blaze; there is no sound inside your head like the sound of your own hair tearing away in gobs.

  Seventeen years younger, and she recalls the dentist's warm assurances that this wouldn't hurt a bit, and that he would count to ten before he did anything. He grabbed a lower molar and rocked it in the jaws of padded pliers, counting one two THREE as her tooth was levered free, roots and all, in a blurt of oral blood that had made her gag and cry.

  Tears came now.

  Luckily her hair is still damp from the exertions with Emilio, plus a flash of panic sweat across her scalp. That helps rend her loose, but the back of her head feels sanded and bleeding. Her foot throbs and tries to spill her with a misstep.

  She makes it out through the foyer door just as Bauhaus appears on the other side of the smoky glass. There is blood all over him by now. Neither of them can hear the alarms, though use of the closet panel has certainly fired them off. Just past an inch of armored glass she can see him feverishly punching buttons to override. He makes a hasty error and punches in one more time.

  She recovers the Haliburton with her left hand and crossdraws the.357 with her right. She empties the cylinder at

  Bauhaus' fat ogre head from a distance of less than five feet. The cleavage glass saves him, naturally, but the spectacle of it fragmenting and webbing as it is stung by the police loads is fearsome enough to make him dive. By the time the echoes of report die Jamaica is out the front door and hobbling toward the heated hell that keeps the elements from pestering Bauhaus' 1971 Corvette.

  No alarms outside. Perhaps Bauhaus has inadvertently shut them off.

  A security car will slip up the drive. If she roars past them in the Corvette they will assume she is Bauhaus, and the sight of the police cruiser at the foot of the drive will slow them down another critical second or two.

  It is easy to hide in a blizzard of disaster area proportions.

  The load of drugs she has compelled Bauhaus to ingest has to kick in soon. Has to.

  Icy airflinted against her cheeks; Mother Nature the sadist. She slams the Corvette's door and cheats the storm. Bauhaus still has not emerged. She spies headlights angling up the drive. A third eye, a door-mounted spotlight, probes madly around in the blowing snow.

  As soon as the cherry-red car is free of the port the windows fog up. Good. At least she doesn't have to wear the stupid hat again.

  As she veers around the security car she beeps twice. A second unit is close behind. Go get 'em, boys. Defend the house; let the boss (or his car, at least)fly.

  They buy it wholesale.

  The nose of the 'Vette hits the avenue with a crunch of impacted ice. The leftward slide is unabortable. She broadsides a concrete post smoked in ice, crimping the rear fender on her side. So what.

  She stomps the brakes and the Corvette chomps into a berm of snow eleven feet high, huge enough to ski down. The motor thrums while she sits, knuckles bloodlessly clamping the wheel, fighting to detour tears and perhaps a fit of hyper-respiration that can easily black her out.

  Five seconds pass. No further assault comes from the house above. She imagines the chaos. Ten seconds.

  The idea hits her, tickles her, and she wastes no time jumping outdoors and making it real.

  Officer Stallis' Oakwood cruiser was still dark at the foot of the slanted driveway. She has just missed colliding with it. The keys are still under the floormat. No time to marvel. Work fast and get out.

  She flipped the toggles for lights and siren.

  A full bore Code Three of scintillation and noise rips across the snowy dawn. After locking all the doors she flings the keys strong and they cease to exist in the swirling clouds of white condensation and tornado snow.

  She feels lighter and freer with each stride back to the Corvette.

  The shit is about to come out the shotgun, but she feels okay, like she just might make it.

  She took another rejuvenating swig from Bauhaus' glovebox flask and considered just why she had to meet Cruz at the Bottomless Cup. Why bother going back to Kenilworth Arms?

  Why not just hit the southbound interchange and keep on driving?

  On the floorboard by the Haliburton was the large and ugly automatic Bauhaus had pulled on her. God, so many guns she had actually missed disposing of one.

  It was chucked into a faraway snowbank. When she replaced the flask in the glovebox she found the vehicle registration, and Bauhaus' name was nowhere on it. Of cours
e. Such documents would be filtered. The car was owned by a perfectly innocent bank. If she was pulled over by guys with badges, she might just slam free.

  She had promised Cruz she would rendezvous. It seemed a promise she could break, no strain.

  Bauhaus, if he ever woke up from the overdose, would certainly have Cruz murdered if Cruz was dumb enough to stay in the vicinity of Kenilworth Arms. By now Cruz had inhaled enough of the kilo to hang tough while heavy-caliber slugs ate chunks out of him.

  She no longer needed the slice of money Cruz would reap from the kilo… provided he hadn't already metabolised it all.

  She had her saddlebag and almost too much cash to carry.

  Kenilworth was a trap, a pit, a maze of blood-drenched rooms and more craziness than could ever be scared up at Bauhaus' madhouse. Did she really need more grief to round out her day?

  Silently she asked herself questions in the rearview.

  As soon as the storm relented she could burn a hundred miles or more, ditch the 'Vette in a frozen creek, and check into a gorgeously anonymous Holiday Inn for a long soak of exceeding warmth. Warmth that could seep to her marrow and begin to heal her. Room service. The mindless meditations of television.

  It could start right now.

  She watched the dashboard clockface. Time has become her pal again. So easy, to crank the wheel and cruise your fine moneymaking buns right out of this nightmare. As she drove she would smile and thank the officers as they waved her through collisions and roadblocks. For her safety.

  It was daylight now, and no time for nightmares. It was nearly eleven.

  Jamaica took another sip from the flask and wandered through the FM band on the radio. The frenzy of snow and ice that danced and spun just beyond the hood of the car calmed. It looked like the storm was letting up.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The ceiling was a better place for a gun to be aimed, as opposed to the bridge of Bash 's nose.

  Without conscious aim or grace his hand shot toward the muzzle of the pistol, trapping it between his middle and ring fingers just as it went off. The slug singed the top edge of his right ear and took some hair with it into the wall.

  The explosion seemed to halt time.

  The intruder's dense fist swooped to pulverize Bash's neck just above the knob of spine. Bash's whole world lurched sharply to the southeast. Thoughts of wheelchairs flitted through.

  The fumbled gun hit the floor between them.

  It was like watching two runaway locomotives collide. It was not a fight of heroic blows and manful recoveries, of skilled tricks and artful kicks. This was more like sumo wrestling between two pissed-off guys who had never actually seen sumo wrestling, all wide groping grabs and clumsy tumbles. Boxes took big hits, got split and mashed. Jonathan's possessions spilled to litter the floor and confound footing like a pouch of spilled marbles.

  Bash hit the deck and looked up into another oncoming fist.

  He saw the meshed fingers like struts in the grille of a semi zooming large to fill his face; it was the first time he had experienced the vertigo of a 3-D movie live. He saw a lumpy gold ring with a garnet the color of a burn scab. Hair on the knuckles. Definitely this was an inferior offshoot of homo sapiens.

  Charging face-first into a bank vault door would have been more pleasant, less hurtful.

  He heard the crunch in his gums as his front teeth tried to fold back and his lips were hamburgered. The ring chopped him bluntly open. Blood streaked his beard as he rebounded into the wall. He split open a carton of paperbacks and went down in a torrent of good literature as the forces of illiteracy waded in to obliterate him.

  The gun was near his foot. No time for a retrieve. He kicked it and saw it spin beneath Jonathan's cot.

  His attacker delivered another head shot. Both men were swathed in heavy winter clothing, their padding and insulation at odds with the damage they sought to inflict.

  Bash saw, scattered, the kitchen goods he'd loaned to Jonathan. Spatulas. Plastic lids for plastic tubs. Nothing solid or sharpened or lethal. A shaker boosted from a restaurant (the best place to provision yourself if you're new in town) rolled lopsidedly, spilling salt. Bad medicine, that.

  He would, without thinking, absorb another sledgehammer blow to protect his own borrowed property. This was stupid.

  The dive bomber fist screamed in and Bash jerked his lace out of the firing line. A hole was punched in the wallboard an inch from his ear. Proximity made the demolition gunblast-loud.

  The hole in the wall began immediately to bleed.

  Bash continued his awkward pivot and jacked his elbow into his opponent's open mouth. Even through three layers of sleeve, he felt the incisors.

  Chances are, Bash thought, that this was not one of Jonathan's newfound buddies.

  The stranger's head snapped back like footage of a violent sneeze in reverse. He absorbed the blow and did not fall. Instead he grabbed a potato peeler and tried to add it to Bash's forebrain. When Bash feinted the tool jabbed a neat crescent hole in the wall. That hole, too, began to dribble fresh blood.

  Then the entire apartment rippled with a lateral vibration like the first warning kick of an earthquake. Neither man noticed. Behind Bash the wall roiled gently, once, deep waters stirred by the passage of a big maneater, or the single soft undulation of a python. The fist-hole tore at the top and bottom, becoming an oval and relinquishing more blood with plaster dust and bubbles in it.

  The potato peeler was swallowed by the wall.

  And the room began to shrink, retracting as if stung.

  Bash felt himself nudged from behind, some unseen coach goading him to bull in there and fight, fight, fight. Across the room the cot scooted toward them by half a foot. The pistol was ejected from beneath it like a spit seed. Blood marred it now.

  He struggled to uncross his eyes and get his arm up in time to deflect the boot hurrying to pulp his face. It smashed through the hole in the wall and withdrew trailing webs of blood.

  Bash moved. Not friendly in this corner.

  He rolled out to the right as the ceding sagged down to kiss their heads. The naked lightbulb there popped like a pimple, spraying sparks and convex slivers of glass. He blocked his attacker's outside hook and sank a solid, body-imploding blow to his midsection. But for the clothing it would have been spectacularly crippling.

  The intruder doubled, saw the gun, and turned his recoil to the defensive by grabbing for it. He was good. He had done this sort of thing before.

  At last Bash got to kick him in the face. He felt his boot eyelets split the guy's tongue, spoiling his chance at the gun. But again, the son of a bitch would not fall. He sucked up a winning kick to the dentures and arched straight. This guy is too goddamned tough for me, Bash thought. Thinking of football, he decided to hell with it and charged.

  He caught the assassin by the throat and left wrist, in a parody of a fireman's carry. Bash pulled backward and stole his opponent's balance.

  Here were two inept ballroom waltzers, falling.

  The bigger man's heels crushed another of Jonathan's boxes. His free arm swung wide and grabbed the windowsill. It was the last thing to let go as he went through the glass and out, casement and all, the back of his head taking out the crossbar.

  The howl of the blizzard blew half the pieces back into the room. Bash won enough time to get a grip on the guy's ankles and assist his upside-down exit.

  Gracelessly, the man fell two stories straight down. The snowpack was almost as hard as the sidewalk buried beneath it, and he hit headfirst. Unmoving, he began to collect snow.

  The room ceased its convulsion.

  Bash reeled into the wall, blood streaming from his mouth. He sat down hard in the middle of the floor. His skull was swimming. He was hurt. He was bleeding, damnit.

  Bathroom. Rinse mouth.

  The blood-dappled automatic was still on the floor, and Bash's scattered cognizance caused him to gawp at it as though it was the most obvious clue in the world handed to a guy still
too stupid to figure out the Secret Word.

  The Kahlua bottle he'd secreted as a sneak gift to Jonathan was on its side, bleeding coffee liqueur.

  That, and the exsanguinating wall, made him wonder just what had befallen his friend.

  He picked up the gun and turned it over in his grasp. Heavy. Loaded. No mickeymouse. His thumb moved across the grooved hammer and his finger felt its way around the trigger, collecting blood. This was serious shit.

  The door opened and his heart hit overdrive. He came within an eyeblink of blowing away the person who appeared in the doorway.

  'I just missed Marko on his way out,' said Jamaica. 'Rather, he just missed me. You've gotta be Jonathan's friend. The guy with the truck.'

  ***

  Fergus had no last name to speak of and three preferred expressions in English: Boolsheet sunvabeech. Fockeen I dunno. And I duit.

  When on foreign shores it is generally accepted that the two most important interrogatives are what do you call this and how do you say this? Plying his duties as Kenilworth 's manager, janitor and repairman, Fergus found it more useful not to know things in order to avoid labor that the scumbag residents of this roach motel would never appreciate anyway. Or tip for. Why are the second floor toilets backing up? Fockeen I dunno. Where's the window glass you promised for 210? Boolsheet sunvabeech screens need clean. When are you going to fix the washer in the laundry room? I duit, pronounced eye-do-eat, meaning that Fergus was a grand master of the jerry-rig, the patch job, the boolsheet bandaid solution. When tenants got fed up and vacated they usually left him holding a deposit for breaking their leases early. Gravy. Such extra cash could buy economy-sized sacks of dog food, or the odd fifth of Night Train. Bonus bucks were good for videotapes of white people fucking each other in the ass, or the compensated companionship of a female, under fifty, who shaved her legs once in a while.

  Fergus just loved infidel women.

  His relationship to the occupants of Kenilworth was truly symbiotic. They exchanged rock-bottom sustenance like mutual tapeworms, never taking enough to kill the host. Fergus was an inadvertent authority on parasitism; in a roundabout way it was why he remained as the Concierge from Hell.