“Everybody’s enroute,” Chris said, hugging the street with the riot gun he’d retrieved. “Can’t contact half our units. They don’t respond. B-two, B-five, B-eight.”
“Jesus.” Sykes and Fowler, Preston alone, Dalton and Schiacter. They were all on roadblock duty or patrol. What the hell was happening?
Chris sat gauging range. Impossible to hit anything with a pistol at this distance. The shotgun in his grip seemed a bit futile. Scattershot would get a lot of attention but accomplish little. When he dropped to one knee beside K. C. and met his eyes, both men heard sirens gradually pushing back the stillness of the night.
“Don’t do nothing,” K. C. said. “No shooting, not yet. It ain’t our job to get killed for these guys. Not yet.”
31
Reason and sanity had to prevail. It was Sara’s duty to manipulate the tools of mind and logic to win. But her phobic side told her that Lucas might pivot on a whim, a misspoken phrase, or even a neutral silence, and cut her to pieces, using the inequities only he could perceive as justification. He had been honed away to nerve endings, awaiting stimuli. His response would be ruthless and final. Lucas was a problem solver.
Problem: People jaywalk. Solution: Kill people for jaywalking. Next case.
He was at the front windows again, M-16 slung across one forearm, the .45 hanging butt-down and ready. All the ammo hanging off him clinked comically when he moved. Sara did not laugh.
She was dry now. The thought of what Lucas’ mean weaponry could do to her chipped away her courage. She had seen what kind of damage mushrooming slugs and hydrostatic pressure could do to a human body in several emergency wards. Spence, her first husband, had kept a hunting rifle in the bedroom closet. She had never seen him fire it. It had been an expensive gun… but she had never seen him fire it. If she got a chance to grab any of Lucas’ guns, she was sure she could operate them, although the M- 16, a new sight to her, looked a bit intimidating. That weapon, and the reasons for its presence in her living room—her living room, with the fireplace and the books and her comfortable furniture and the reproduction of “Girl’s Portrait”—was not as easy to deal with as a mechanical intimidation. It was awesome; it was like the end.
He did not need the guns for her. She could be killed with any of the hundreds of blunt instruments and cutting edges scattered innocently around her own house. Bare hands could dispatch her.. . although from observing Lucas, it was now clear to her that he had seriously hurt his hands. It was a tiny advantage, not reassuring. It would be imbecilic to try to bash or stab Lucas while he had the guns, and Sara was not confident that she would exploit an opportunity if one presented itself. She wanted reason and sanity to prevail. She wanted everybody to live happily ever after.
She had become lost in a maze. Each time she turned, she smacked into a wall or dead end.
“Lucas.” She spoke softly, head down. “Gabriel Stannard will never be able to evade the police long enough to come here. They’ve probably corralled him into protective custody by now. Even if he wanted some kind of crazy… showdown… with you, the police would never permit it.”
He looked back at her with something like pity for the stupid. His gaze held the party line: He’s coming.
“Sara. Dear. I think you’re very wrong.” The timbre of his voice had changed. Moments ago he had been faltering, scared, confused. He had needed her help. As soon as he had moved to the window and begun the rigid business of surveillance, his fear had dropped away like a chrysalis. The way he avoided line-of-sight contact with the windows, the stiff efficiency with which he moved, saddened her deep inside. Lucas—her Lucas—was receding.
“I think Stannard’s fuzzy little rock-and-roll brain will make it imperative for him to seize any opportunity to kill me,” he went on. Even the tiny hesitancies had evaporated from his voice. “He knows how mucked up the law enforcement and judicial systems are because he’s a victim of them, just like me. Eye-for-eye justice is something his limited intellect can encompass without causing a headache. His persona demands he pick up the gauntlet. He really has no choice. I’ve turned his manufactured image against him, forcing him to live up to it. His wild-man reputation will compel him to face me, even while the timid good citizen inside him will persist that the safest course is to hole up behind a lot of guards and whistle in the police. To preserve the myth of what he is, he has to come. The cult of personality says so. Rules of promotion and publicity say so. I’m an expert in that field. For him to cringe now is bad advertising.” He turned from the window to offer up another of his odd, scary smiles. “I may be crazy, but I’m not stupid.”
She tried anger. It was all she had left. “I want my goddamned robe, Lucas, and I want it now. No more of this screwing around. If you think you’re crazy, then shoot me. But I think—”
Her heart shoved its way past her voice when Lucas released the bolt on the M-16 with a metallic snap that rang in the high corners of the room, cutting her off like a splice in a movie. Her body tensed, anticipating a bullet. The shot would seem very loud.
Then she heard what Lucas was hearing. The hiss of tires on damp blacktop. Two car doors closing. Lucas was back at the front window, parting the curtains with the muzzle of the M-16. They heard sirens, shrieking tires growing closer. The sirens were no longer dismissible, faraway noises.
“Looks like showtime,” he said.
Bracketing the front door was an arrangement of oblong, delicate windows that latched at the top, bottom, and middle and swung inward when unhooked. Sara had filled the little frames with thick stained glass. Lucas opened the middle one on the right-hand side of the door, flicked a microswitch on the side of the Nitefinder scope, and sighted. There was no light in the foyer. He was invisible.
She had expected more noise.
She thought of bolting for the kitchen. He could easily see her in the periphery of his vision, but now his concentration was focused outside. The kitchen door could not be locked or barricaded. The bathroom was a trap with a minuscule window. She could flee out the back door, but how far would she get, panicked, her bare white ass an easy target in the dark? She could flee upstairs, but how long until Lucas got fed up and started shooting through the ceiling?
Her thoughts of escape steamed away into pipe-dream mist at the sound of the gunshot. All gone. It sounded like a bark, a loud cough, a plug blown out of a hole by explosive decompression. It stiffened her body and slammed her eyelids shut. The sound was irresistible in the way it forced her to flinch. She wondered if what she had just heard was someone getting their skull ventilated. Time and physics suddenly failed to work. Otherwise, why couldn’t she move her damned arms and legs?
“Sit down, Sara.”
She did, floating back into her seat with the loose joints and feather weightlessness of a defective puppet, rudely aware of just how vulnerable and fragile her body was and wanting above all to keep that body intact and alive, even if it was the aging and malfunctioning thing she sometimes saw in her mirror.
Another voice pleaded inside her, and she hoped it was the real reason she had not simply cut and run like a madwoman. The voice insisted that Lucas was her problem, that she was responsible. It demanded she engineer some solution while her puppet-flimsy body was shirking its duties.
All this galloped through her mind in two seconds or less. Time really was screwed sideways.
“Don’t worry, Sara.” He was talking to her but not looking at her. “Let it happen.”
The wild lights of police flashbars illuminated Claremont Street. Tires crooned on the street outside. Somewhere a guttural motor revved and rumbled, distantly.
The all-over chill she felt might have been blowing through the tiny window by the front door. But that was crazy, too.
Bang!
Another brown and brittle boneyard fence divided itself around the prow of the Charger, and the tilting confusion of tombstones and plot markers jounced in the front windshield like the waiting maze of a particularly hairy pinbal
l machine. Stannard corrected course, arms bulging as he cranked the doughnut steering wheel, holding the car to his chosen path by muscle and will. The tow-bar-style front bumper began picking off marble slabs, five or six, and chalky debris scattered across the hood with a hailstorm noise and was lost. They were regaining speed in spite of the crappy ground. The left headlight went dead with a crunch as it met the crossarm of a crucifix-shaped gravestone and turned it to chalk dust. Horns’ hands jumped up to shield his face, but he was otherwise nonchalant.
Stannard downshifted and dug out, vaulting the Charger through the far fence of the cemetery. After a few bouncing seconds of wiping out foliage in both directions, he fixed on the twin track of mud ruts he had described to Horns as a goat path. It was slick and messy, but the car fit, and it provided an adequate way to sneak up on Claremont Street from behind… a totally unanticipatable direction.
He was thankful for the hairy police chase, for the concentration needed to ramrod the Charger through the muck ahead, for all the obstacles cluttering the complicated road that led to Dr. Sara Windsor. His mind was occupied and kept at bay from the real question of just what the fuck he thought he was doing. Horus would not nail him with that one; neither would Cannibal Rex, for different reasons. Horus wanted to do what was needed, to be there for Stannard if the situation got overwhelming, beyond his capacity to cope. Cannibal wanted to hang out, in hopes of some serious mayhem. For Stannard, thinking too hard about what he intended to do tonight could abort everything. He knew this, and so programmed his mind to be other places, thinking other things.
He already knew he did not want the climax of this whole movie bursting out with him offstage.
He was aware that for perhaps the first time, he had to play the part of Gabriel Stannard, to become the Stannard of the sleeve copy and rock articles and promo hype, and to do it without the safety nets that were usually in place for the monied and noteworthy. Money and power had a way of insulating you, of pampering you into a warm stupor of self-security and surface passions. All the insulation in Beverly Hills, however, could not save him from the things Lucas Ellington was capable of doing to his mind.
The cops doubtlessly thought he was some kind of fuzzy-minded jukebox hero, as stupid as the airheaded teenagers who plonked down their drug money to buy his albums. That made Stannard bristle. No way his moment was going to be usurped by some overweight Maalox junkie who probably kept a framed picture of Jack Webb on his bathroom wall, no fucking way, dudes.
In the flash department, the cops were losers. Without their hardware they were nothing. While he, Gabriel Stannard, was…
Was. He was.
Nobody manhandled a microphone better. Nobody gave a more outrageous interview. Nobody could have succeeded in running the wild gauntlet he was now completing, besting it to invade the stage and perform the way he wanted.
Tented open on the Danish leather sofa in his bedroom next to the TV and tape trolley was a screenplay entitled Shakedown. Sertha had also read it. The plot involved the efforts of a group of high-tech thieves to rip off the gate receipts of a Woodstock-style rock festival. Lots of violence, chases, gunfire, and gadgets. A production floor of $30 million, they estimated, if Gabriel Stannard could be convinced to play the part of the main rock ‘n’ roller—the inside man who choreographs the heist, the prime target in the ensuing pursuit. He eats it during a climactic shoot-out on the Golden Gate Bridge, Stannard recalled. A meaty role, fair portions of good dialogue, and a spectacular death scene.
The casting genius who had proposed Stannard for the role had opened up a big and enticing door. Parts for rock stars were nothing to write Variety about; it happened a lot. But most were one-shots. David Bowie had been one of the rare exceptions. Tonight, a hero scene in Dos Piedras against a basket case would cinch his movie career and deliver him unto his entire future. Bad boys aged badly, he knew… unless they were versatile enough to switch hit, to shift gears, to ride the breakers of change.
It could be the perfect melding of fantasy with real life, after which the public would not bother trying to distinguish the difference. To stick his neck up to the knife this way was a fearsome gamble. He felt the physical ache of bluff and bluster versus sinew and gristle. Audiences never believed performers were real people. But tonight the Gabriel Stannard everyone saw on MTV could come to life by daring the old Reaper to do his worst and pulling off a typically audacious Stannard stunt. He would become immortal. Archaeologists would dig up his records and recognize him instantly.
Yes, he wanted this risk. The kickback would be as staggering as the danger. Past this event, he could relax from proving himself. The words of Hollywood Weekend Wrap-Up’s Mardi Grassley taunted him: Was Gabriel Stannard sizzle or steak? He promised himself that if he prevailed tonight, he’d toast Mardi Grassley with some ultrafine Taittinger in the back of a limousine. Then he’d charm her clothes off. Then he’d kick her smug rump out into the middle of the intersection of Doheny and Sunset Boulevard on a Friday night. He wondered how tough it would be to have a camera crew waiting there in readiness.
What he was about to do could pave the road to bigger and better lies for all and enough media attention to get supremely drunk on. He could ride the afterglow for a decade. If he won.
He shoved all this from his head. Get ice, as Jackson Knox used to say constantly. Get control.
“Too bad there aren’t any decent rock stations in this neck o’ the swamp,” he said, pointing at the Charger’s dashboard radio. Now that he had located the hillside path, he would arrive at his destination in less time than it took to listen to one of his own hit singles.
Reflectors winked just ahead in mirrored crimson. Everybody steeled for impact, but Stannard decided to slow down. A car was parked on the path. The single headlight revealed that it was unoccupied. It was a metallic-brown, mud-splattered Bronco, pulled over with its port wheels in one of the road ruts, leaning against the rise of the hill at an angle that barely permitted passage on the right side.
“Be a shame to get traffic jammed now,” Stannard grumped. Horus craned to peer inside the Bronco as they passed. In the backseat, Cannibal Rex snapped the action on the Auto Mag again. He loved doing that; it sounded so bad.
The door handles of the two vehicles whispered within two inches of each other. “Probably teenyboppers,” said Horus. “Fucking or doping.”
“My fans!” Stannard hollered. “My boys, my girls, my lovely leather ladies. Hope they’re banging each other to ‘Maneater.’ ”
Just ahead was a barrier of posts twined with barbed wire. A rusty NO TRESPASSING sign hung from one corner. Beyond that was a brief drop to the dead end of Claremont. The street was quiet, utterly suburban. except for the sheriff’s car and the two uniforms hunkered down behind it.
“Aww, shit.” Stannard seemed let down and pumped up at the same time. He geared the Charger into reverse and backed up, killing his single headlight. “Cannibal, let’s do it.”
Cannibal Rex laid the Auto Mag on the seat beside him and opened up the black duffel, handing Horus the laser-sighted American 180 plus an extra clip. Horus checked it swiftly and professionally. He preferred a light rapid-fire weapon if it had to come down to guns. Cannibal withdrew the SPAS-12 riot gun and began slotting rounds of number-three buckshot into the magazine. Then he chambered the first shell and handed the gun over the seat. Stannard tucked it barrel down between the door and the bucket he was sitting in. Cannibal hooked a few of the flash-pop stun grenades into the button holes on his fatigue jacket. Then he handed over something small and heavy Horus had not seen before. The dark man’s eyebrows went up.
Stannard unzipped his jeans and rummaged around inside his leopard panties, nesting some small and deadly failsafe right next door to his notorious penis. Then he buttoned up, and Cannibal handed over an inhaler from which Stannard took several long, deep draws.
“Rocket fuel,” Stannard said, exhaling slowly, feeling his bloodstream run through the high RPMs. “Oka
y, we got cops. Don’t kill anybody. But let me get to the house.”
“Let’s do some crimes,” Cannibal muttered, anxious to get on with it.
“That’s it?” said Horus.
“That’s it.” Stannard grinned. They all sat unmoving for a beat, idling; then, with all the power his rockstar vocal chords and deep-dish diaphragm could expel, he screamed: “Banzai’!” and with a brain-rattling roar the Charger sucked up the slack on the trail, plowed through the fence, and crashed down onto North Claremont Street in a landslide of bushes, rocks, and mud-fill, accumulating speed in a crank-spiked flurry, ass-whipping right to left, smoke billowing from the wheel wells, long whiskers of barbed wire streaming backward from the car’s chromium teeth.
The cops less than a block away were already pulling their iron as Stannard floored it and the opposite end of the street filled up with speeding police cars.
32
Chris Carpenter had never seen his dad’s buddy K. C. Dew move his fat old ass so fast in his life.
The ululation of approaching sirens had suddenly been flooded out by the crash of splintering timber and the screech of bumper steel scratching sparks on blacktop. Chris looked up, and a lone headlight like the demon eyeball of the Hellbound Train lit his face, a fiery meteor coming at them full speed from the dead end of Claremont Street.
“Jesus H.,” yelled K. C., sounding as though a manure truck had just unloaded into his swimming pool. “What the christ have we got here?”
Then the fanfare of engines drowned him out.
K. C. put the flat of his hand in the center of Chris’ chest and shoved, wresting away the riot gun in the younger man’s grip. Chris sprawled buttwise in the rainwater as the single headlight nailed them, trailing sparks, singing THE END.
K. C. rolled and brought up the shotgun, allowing that critical quarter-second to verify intent, a deadly eyeblink of calm reserved for the violently baptized. When there was no mistaking the lethal trajectory of the Charger, he pumped and discharged 2 three-inch rounds right down its throat in less than a second. The car went nose first into the street, collapsing onto its front rims and yawing wildly around to the left. One wheel disengaged and rolled off into the brush. K. C. was already loping toward it as it completed its one eighty and ground to a stop, leaving its parts in a trail behind it. A mag wheel bent into a potato-chip shape spun on the street like a fat silver dollar, clanging. Smoke rose from the rims, and the perforated radiator pissed steam into the wet night air. The phantom sniper in the front window of 7764 North Claremont had been momentarily upstaged, and as K. C. approached the crippled Charger, the far end of the street became clogged with a convoy of police cars. Chris was still sitting on his ass in a puddle.
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