by Barry, Mike
Carefully, Sands aimed. Both hands were shaking, the gun fluttering like a bird, it took all of his attention to keep it on the man. He realized something of which he had only been marginally aware before; he was capable of killing another human being. Once you got your mind down to it, it was no bid deal whatsoever. The man was an obstacle, he had to be removed, that was all. Sands extended his toe and flicked the door open another two or three inches. It moved noiselessly.
Holding the gun with all his strength he squeezed off a shot at the man.
It hit the wall in an explosion of plaster, the man crumpled to his knees, then turned, aiming his own pistol and Sands realized with a sick, familiar wrenching that he had missed. Missed the man and now he was dead. How did he think that he could go up against a professional like this? He must have been crazy, but then he always had been crazy.
In that extended, frozen moment, Sands waited for the man to fire and blow his life away but in the dead-center of it the door behind which he was standing blew open and three men charged into the room. Behind them another man came slowly. The one who had tried to kill him fell to his knees from the sudden impact of the door. Sands, gasping, collapsed to his knees.
And the scene dissolved and resolved like shapes of fish twisting in an acquarium.
XVIII
Rolling on the floor, Wulff got off a shot. It went wild but it managed to startle the man at whom he had aimed, the man twitched and dived for cover, struggling with his own pistol. The other two were looking for him but momentarily disoriented by their plunge into the room. Only the fact that he had sensed something and had, at the last moment, opened that hallway door had saved him. Expecting solid impact they had found only air. It had sent them scuttling through, now they were still scurrying for balance.
The son of a bitch in the bedroom had tried to kill him, but no time to think of that now. Stupid: he had been stupid leaving Sands alone there, why had he not thought that the bastard might have had a gun? He could deal with Sands later, however, assuming that there was a later. Wulff held the thirty-eight in his hand and pumped a shot into one of the men who had stumbled clear across the living room and against the window.
The man fell, screaming, bubbling, bright with instant blood. One down. Wulff, looking desperately for cover, felt a shot go by him, fired at the source. There was another scream and he saw the second gunman fall. Two down. How long could he go on this way? His luck was holding but he was as exposed as ever, now lying full-length on the rug, doubling up his knees, moving them in a rapid low-crawl toward the couch.
Cicchini came into the room. Slightly more dishevelled than Wulff had seen him, holding his own gun, purposeful. Supervising. But Cicchini had not anticipated this line of fire; he had obviously expected Wulff to be taken out with a neat shot or two. Instead of using his gun then, Cicchini backed against a wall, struggling to get out of the torrent of bullets. The remaining gunman was behind the couch now. Wulff saw the protrusion, the thrust, of pistol. He fell fully to the rug just in time to avoid the shot. It took a spray of dust out of the wall behind.
“Son of a bitch,” one of the dying assassins said on the floor, “you fucking son of a bitch Cicchini, you got me killed!” and this must have distracted Cicchini’s attention. His eyes flicked over to the form on the floor and just in that one brief lapse of attention, Wulff got him in the shoulder. He had wanted the neck but the shoulder was good enough.
Cicchini screamed, the gun leaping from his hand. He sprawled. Wulff took a direct hit in the shoulder. He had forgotten the one behind the couch. The impact spun him, he felt numbness. Not his gun hand at least. He got halfway to his knees, leading the man, and put a shot behind the couch.
Missed. The man ducked and fired again but the shot was wild. Panic. Cicchini was on the floor now moaning, gripping his shoulder. Cicchini was trying to get to his gun but could not make that gap; he got halfway and fell. Wulff put another shot into him, back of the left knee. He did not want to kill him. Cicchini and he had things to talk about later. He was assuming that he got out of this.
Cicchini was merely a diversion. Shooting the downed man was wasting a bullet. Wulff felt another bullet go by him but the man behind the couch was in an obvious panic now. Two others dead, his boss disarmed and helpless, the man must have felt that he was slated to die. Wulff could hear the whistle and sob of his breath. The man was going to ground.
If he had had a forty-five he could have shot him through the fabric of the couch itself, the bullet using the fragmentation for increasing damage. If he had had the machine gun he could have swept the area clean. But that was neither here nor there; he had the thirty-eight and would make the best use of it. He put another shot into that area just to keep the man down, not expecting to hit him. One of the downed men screamed, a last dying scream that went from shrill to bass and then fell away. Cicchini, his knee torn, was sobbing with pain. Wulff rose clumsily to his knees, giving the man behind the couch a full target and was able to just see the top of the head.
He put a shot into it.
The skull exploded like a teacup. The man vaulted to his feet, his head falling off in fragments, looked at Wulff with an oddly purposeful glare, walked straight toward him like the walking dead, holding the gun stiffly and then, his cheeks yellow, fell gracelessly, arms buckling, legs splitting, at Wulff’s feet. Breathing heavily, Wulff backed away, surveyed the room.
Four down. Only one alive, Cicchini in the center, lying on the mats, his forehead covered with sweat or dew. Wulff felt the pain beginning to come through his shoulder now, gripped at it, then remembered the man in the bedroom. He turned there: the door was closed. Quickly, without thinking about it, he went toward there, gun first. He had to clean out the area.
The door seemed locked. So the man had bottled himself up in there. This made sense he supposed. He put a shot through the lock and went on. The door caved in against his shoulder in splinters, he hit the floor as soon as he was in the room, expecting a shot. His shoulder launched massive pain as he hit, then as the pressure eased it went away. Not a serious wound. He could not see the man.
Not against the window, not on the floor. Sweeping the room he saw Sands. Sands was lying full-length on the bed, shoulders hunched, face down into the pillow. He was sobbing with terror. The gun lay on the floor beside the bed. Wulff went over there, took it, put it away. It was hot and had a peculiar, dry odor. Probably never properly serviced. The man had been lucky to get a shot off with it at all. It could have blown up in his face.
Amateurs. But the amateurs were the most dangerous of all, they were the ones you had to watch Until, like Sands, they caved under. He went to the bed, looked at the man with disgust. Sands heard him, folded the pillow up around his head and mumbled something into it.
Wulff reached out with the uninjured arm and bunched the man’s clothes, yanked him from the bed full-force. The mewing, whining thing that had been Phillip Sands hung in his grasp like a pendulum. He turned the man around toward him, saw the concavities of cheek, the desperate, stricken eyes, the slack, open expanse of mouth from which saliva rolled.
He hit the thing. It hopped with the impact, put both hands to its face, collapsed toward the floor. Wulff caught it before it could fall all the way. It lay almost weightless in his hands. He hit it again on the cheek, feeling the breaking bone like glass, spatters of bone moving through the thing’s face.
The thing cried. It sobbed like an infant, tried to raise its hands against the damaged face, the eyes welling. Wulff felt the revulsion. There was no retaliation. There was no way, ever, that you could get even with them. You might think that you had finally turned around on them, sapped their poison, put the evil in a place where you could deal with it as only evil knew. But then they turned out to be something else. They turned out to be corpses or spent and broken things like this one before him or the one called Cicchini in the living room. At the instant of retaliation they were no longer the thing that you had been attacking. Al
l of the power was drained out of them and they too were only victims.
No. No atonement. No way whatsoever. The score could never be settled because other things would rise up in their place, challenging with their own power and ugliness. For every Sands you laid out on a bed, two or ten would come in his place. Hopeless. It was hopeless.
He felt the bile rising within him and felt he might vomit from a combination of the revulsion and pain. His shoulder was hurting him quite badly now. His head ached from the sudden release of tension. He had not realized how tired he was, what price Boston had exacted.
“Please don’t kill me,” the thing said. It was crouched before him in a penitential posture. The hands snaked around his knee, cupped it like a breast. He felt the moist, ugly contact and broke it with a kick. The thing, hit in the forehead by a toe, the skull damaged, collapsed to the elaborate orange rug on which it had pranced and danced. It was still begging.
“Do kill me,” the thing hawked. “I was wrong, they were all wrong, you must kill me. Bring me death.” It flopped on the rug. It was a fish, an insect. It was no longer a human being. Wulff had to remember that.
He kicked the thing again. He was an exterminator and this putrid, ugly thing was in his way so it would have to be kicked. There was no satisfaction in it. There was no satisfaction in anything. Things like this had killed his girl, destroyed his life, were crawling through all of the streets of the cities injecting their death, and yet there was nothing to do. “You don’t deserve to die,” he said and the understanding came. Death was only for those who could understand it. This thing on the floor never could.
“You don’t understand it,” he said again. The thing sobbed. The thing that had been an associate professor, that had arrogantly turned children into addicts, that had stolen a valise, that had tried to kill him, began to babble again but this time he could not understand what it was saying
No matter. It did not matter what it was saying; the message could not change. Only the faces changed, never the message. Wulff took out his gun slowly, reluctantly. He would kill the thing because if he did not it would be like a stray roach going back to its nest; you could not account for it. It might start the cycle again.
He shot it in the head once, precisely. The thing took the shot behind the left ear and with a gulp of mingled delight and acceptance fell all the way below him, seeming to flow into the rug. Blood mixed with blood. Wulff left it there. He went back to the living room.
Cicchini had somehow managed to stand, propping himself on the destroyed knee, gripping his shoulder. His eyes were blind and desperate. “Help me,” he said. He was a thing too. In the commonality of pain all men became merely objects. That was the clue. It was the clue to Cicchini’s power. It was even why they loved junk. Funnel enough junk in and you no longer had to worry about people taking it. They were people no longer.
“You’ve got to help me, Wulff,” Cicchini said, “or kill me.” The stiffened leg on which he was trying to balance kicked straight out and with a scream of agony Cicchini fell to the floor. He tried desperately to keep weight off his knee and shoulder but failed. He took the full impact on the palm of the injured arm. He bellowed the sounds that children make under bombing and then vomited, more as an extension of the pain than for any other reason.
Wulff let him. He had other things on his mind right now. He checked out the three gunmen, found that they were already freezing into the postures of death. Rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub. Butcher, baker, candlestick maker. Their faces had the shrunken, wistful petulance that he had seen in open coffins. Nothing became life so much for these men than the leaving of it. He stumbled into the bathroom, took off his jacket and ripping off the shirt in clumps, checked out his wound.
Not too bad. Relatively superficial. The bleeding had already stopped, which was not necessarily a benefit, but feeling within the edges he could touch no bone. Delicately, expertly, he checked out the depth of the wound, only a half an inch, if that. It would leave a shallow scar, might limit the mobility of the left shoulder a little. All right. Not the gun hand.
He opened the medicine chest, went through it. Feminine ointments and palliatives tumbled into the sink while he looked for alcohol. No such thing. The Sands household had never concentrated on the basics. He settled for some after-shave lotion, poured it clumsily but directly into the wound.
The pain was intense. It was like the shot all over again but worse, seizing and shaking him in deadly little fingers. He gasped, tears coming to his eyes although he tried to hold them back, leaned over the basin, vomited. It hurt. Everything hurt. You paid and paid the price and at the end it was as it had all been at the beginning. Still, you had to go on. What else was there to do?
The pain ebbed a little. It always would. Unless you were dead the pain would go away, you would forget how it had been until the next time. It was the forgetfulness which kept you going. The same thing for sex. He found some gauze underneath a box containing a diaphragm, ripped it out not bothering about the niceties of it and with a couple of bandaids in another box managed awkwardly to secure the taping. It would hold out. He might need to see a doctor about secondary infection but he even doubted that. The alcohol would have taken care of that. If you could stand the pain you could clean out anything. For a little while.
He turned. Cicchini had crawled into the bathroom like a dog. The man was sniffing at the air that way too, completing the image. Wulff saw the slow drip from the two wounds, heard the uneven exhalation. The man’s eyes were bright and sunken.
“Get me out of this,” he said.
“I intend to,” said Wulff.
“You son of a bitch,” Cicchini said. “I never went up against anybody who beat me. You beat me, Wulff.”
“That’s great,” he said, thinking of the three corpses in the living room, the dead thing near the bed. “That’s a real thrill.”
“Get me to a hospital. Don’t leave me like this.”
“You won’t die, Cicchini,” he said, finished with his bandaging, turning to the man, “not quite yet.”
“Take the valise. Take it.” A stab of pain caught the man crosswise, he slumped to one side and collapsed, rolled to his back, drew up his knees. He barked in his pain. Dog. That was what he had been dealing with all the time.
Wulff finished his taping, turned to the man. Cicchini had not fainted. No such luck for the man. Fully conscious, pinned to consciousness like a butterfly, he lay on his back, strapped to pain, looking up at the fluorescent light. “I can’t stand the pain, Wulff,” he said almost matter of factly, “you can’t leave me like this.”
“Why not?”
“Shoot me then,” Cicchini said. “At least give me that. Give me some dignity.”
“Dignity?” said Wulff, “you were never worried about anyone’s dignity in your life.” He resisted an impulse to kick the man, stepped over him instead, walked back to the living room. The smell of death assaulted him, strong, almost like whine in his nostrils. A thick, dusty odor like an untended corner of a museum.
“It’s no good to you anyway,” Cicchini said weakly, “what have you gained? You can’t do anything with the valise. You win but you lose, Wulff. I never wanted the valise anyway. Nothing will change.”
“I know that.”
“You can’t change a thing,” the man said, rolling his head to look over at him, “so at least you can kill me.”
“Beg for it.”
“I’ll see you in hell,” Cicchini said. He tried desperately to get to his feet but pain had sapped the motor capacities of the body. He could not stand. He lay there like timber grounded on a beach.
“Kill me,” he said again. “If you want me to beg for it, then I’ll beg. Kill me.”
“I have a better idea,” Wulff said.
He went to the valise. It was where Sands had dropped it. Tugging at the clips, he opened it. The effort took more out of him than he had thought; he was weaker than he had conceived. Sweat came off his foreh
ead, dropped into the contents of the valise lightly.
He looked at the contents again. For all that that valise had gone through the contents appeared intact. That was it; the junk remained secure, inviolate. The world revolved around it, men lived and died, distributed and ate, shot and drank it, crawled through a thousand alleys in its pursuit or evasion, but the junk could not be touched. Nothing would ever change it. Like money, like death, like sex it was a neutral quality, all of the torment imposed.
The heroin was arranged in loose decks. He took one out. It felt surprisingly light, almost weightless in his hand. A pack of cards. Running his fingers over it he could feel the little granules of powder moving beneath. He opened one corner, looked for the first time at what he had. He had never bothered in San Francisco, cross-country, Boston. It was beautiful. He could have expected nothing else. Death was always beautiful. Why else would men accommodate themselves to it, administer it so easily if it were not beautiful?
“I’ve got a much better idea,” Wulff said.
He took the deck and went into the kitchen. Poking through a cabinet next to the cheerfully-humming refrigerator he found exactly what he wanted, a huge water tumbler, sixteen-ounce capacity, decorated with merry little floral designs. Red and green and yellow flowers beamed out at him. He went to the spray tap, opened it to cold, put six or seven ounces of water into the tumbler.
Then he tapped the deck against the sink and—very expertly, you learned a few things anyway on the narco squad—he poured half the contents of the deck into the glass. Folded it over, put it away. Took a spoon from the drawer on the side and stirred in the granules until it had the lumpy color and consistency of sour milk.
