Two weeks went by in a lovely, lazy blur, quick as lightning, slower than sleep. We had a flight out the next day, and we were sitting in the white wooden chairs on the deck looking out at an ocean that was gunmetal gray blue shimmering with diamond moonlight highlights.
"We could not go back," she suggested.
"Doll, we have to."
"I suppose you're right. Even if Pat takes over, there are things to do at the office. There's our apartments to deal with, and—"
"And there's David and Goliath. We can't miss that."
She chuckled. "I could miss it."
She was wearing a T-shirt and no bra and bikini bottoms. At her age, her boobs should have been to her knees, and the last thing she should have been able to get away with was a bikini bottom. But her breasts were full and firm, the tips poking at the cotton fabric like the eraser ends of pencils, and her belly was flat and her legs long and lush and even darker tan now than before. She was a wonder. She was my wife.
I shook my head, sipped my beer. "Naw. We have to be there for Matt and Jenna. We promised to go with 'em. Besides, aren't you the least bit curious to see what master showman Cooke's cooked up?"
"Maybe a little. I just hope he doesn't scrimp on security."
"He might."
She gave me a sharp look. "You're kidding."
I shrugged. "If there's a small-scale riot, Israeli boosters banging on Arab protesters, guess what happens?"
"Blood gets splashed?"
"Publicity, doll. Cooke's favorite thing in the world. Publicity." I got up. "One more beer."
"You'll be up all night."
"Baby, I've been up for most of two weeks, with you around."
But the refrigerator was out of beer. And I noticed we were also out of biscuits and had only one egg and two slices of bacon left.
Back out on the deck, I said, "I'm walking to that convenience store—we're out of eggs, biscuits, bacon, and beer. All the real staples of life."
"No! Have some bottled water."
"Remember who you're talking to."
She shook her head. "Since we're taking the plane, we can eat breakfast at the airport. Or drive to that Hardee's tomorrow morning. Just sit down."
"Mike needs beer. End of story."
She knew not to bother arguing that point.
The convenience store was half a mile north. I walked down the gravel road bordered by exotic trees and bushes and enjoyed the cool breeze and the night sounds that almost had a jungle tinge. Some nasty little gnats were out, but I'd been sprayed. I was no fool.
I'd slipped on a light windbreaker, a dark blue, white-trimmed Yankees jacket. The word "Yankee" wasn't the smartest thing to throw around in this part of the world, but like I said, I was no fool—honeymoon vacation or not, I kept the .45 handy. Right now it was stuffed in the waistband of my white trousers, and without a jacket, that wouldn't play well in any convenience store, north or south.
About halfway there, my cell phone vibrated. I checked it: Pat Chambers. We'd talked a couple times during this trip, so he didn't indulge in honeymoon kidding, going straight to business.
"That Arab-American FBI guy, Jabara, shared some interesting intel, Mike—that name you handed over, 'Kaddour'?"
"Yeah?"
"Alias of a guy named Elias Kahane. He's not Palestinian, as he'd claimed to a hell of a lot of people on the fringe of the Arab-American community in Chicago. He's Israeli."
"Part of Kakh, Pat."
"Did you say—"
I spelled it for him. "It's an Israeli terrorist group, repudiated by Israel, but with their own ideas ... and agenda."
"You're saying there's a Jewish al-Qaeda out there?"
"That may be overstating it. Has he been questioned?"
"Mike, I didn't say he'd been brought in. The guy was killed in Chicago yesterday."
"How?"
"Close up. A .22."
"Pat, you're going to want to get with the Chicago PD or the FBI or whoever-the-hell and check the forensics on the bullet that killed Dr. George Hurley."
"Way ahead of you, pal. Perfect match. Same weapon."
"But we have no idea who the shooter is."
"None."
Only I did. But some work would need to be done before I shared my theory with Pat ... if I shared it with Pat....
"How's married life treating you, buddy?"
"Let's put it this way, Pat—I'm just about to enter a convenience store to pick up some groceries."
He didn't say good-bye. Just let his laughter get cut off when I hung up.
I walked back with the sack of groceries under an arm. The little beach house on the strip of land looked idyllic, basking in the moonlight with the vastness of the ocean yawning beyond.
But something had changed.
Not anything major—a light that had been on in the kitchen was off. Now, every light in the place was off. Probably Velda had come in off the deck and shut off the kitchen lights and headed for bed.
Probably.
But it was an hour earlier than we usually went to bed, and in fact we'd talked about watching a movie on TCM in about half an hour. Maybe that was it. Maybe she had turned out the kitchen light to make the living room more like a theater for our late show.
Maybe.
I got out the .45.
Gravel doesn't make it easy to move quietly, but I had two things going for me: crepe soles and experience. I crept along the side of the darkened beach house and came around onto the wooden deck, so very goddamn carefully...
And through the doors I saw them...
...the beautiful woman I was married to, nude to the waist, clad only in the bikini bottoms, duct-taped rudely into one of the dining-room chairs, her dark hair mussed, her mouth a smear of red where shed been slapped or slugged...
...and the giant, the tall, broad-shouldered, dark-skinned, trim-bearded, dark-eyed, grinning Goliath, because what other seven-foot-three-inch son of a bitch would be standing in my living room, threatening my wife with a fist the size of a fucking cabbage.
He had a wild nest of hair, a Medusa's crown not of snakes but of thick, clotted locks. Absurdly, his attire was beachcomber-like, a gray short-sleeved sweatshirt and cut-off jeans that revealed muscular tree trunks for legs and un-Biblical sandals that barely housed feet bigger than shoestore sizers.
"Where is he?" Goliath demanded in a thickly accented but utterly understandable bass. "Where is it?"
"Go to hell!" she spat at him, and blood and spittle splattered his face.
He wiped it off with a hand like a frying pan, and rubbed it onto her naked chest, leaving red streaks. Then a sausage-fingered hand clutched his groin, boastfully, and his grin shone yellow within the black curls of beard. "You will break in two, when I take you—"
I didn't bother to open the glass door, I just squeezed the trigger, aiming through the glass at the bastard's oversized skull.
But the .45 jammed, the slide locking back impotently, making just enough noise to attract his attention. He wheeled toward me and I tossed the gun to the wooden deck with a clunk and pushed the door open and ran at him, threw a tackle at him that had half a room's run behind it.
And he tossed me like a rag doll into the wall over the couch, knocking pictures off and shattering glass. Mercifully, I slid down onto the cushions. Not so mercifully, he loomed over me and grinned down with those endless yellow choppers and then huge hands with thick splayed fingers came down to grip me by the windbreaker and drag me up and off the couch and he flung me again, this time into the lamp between the recliners. Velda's gift hit the hard tiles and the sound of breaking plaster was lost in my scream as I got onto my feet and barreled at him, swinging my forearm up and into his breadbasket with all of my force.
It should have knocked the wind out of him, but it didn't faze him an iota. He clutched me by the shoulders and shook me and then that big ugly face stared into mine, eyes enormous, nostrils flaring. "Where ... is ... the... bone?"
Hol
ding me up like that was a mistake, because it put my foot in perfect position to kick him in the balls. My guess is they'd be shrunken to peas, because steroids just had to have had a hand in building this bastard...
Whether golf balls or peas, the kick hurt him, and he howled as he flung me again, and this time I whammed into Velda in her chair, knocking her over, and I heard the wood of the thing snapping, breaking. Briefly our eyes met and hers were urgent as she looked sharply to her left, directing my vision to follow and I saw, under an end table, her .38, where it had been slapped from her hand, no doubt, by our intruder.
I dove toward that end table but Goliath was on me, both hands clutching the back of my jacket like I was on the wrong end of a dwarf-tossing contest. He hurled me hard against the kitchen counter, its edge meeting my back and things popped inside me and maybe broke and I slipped down to the floor.
Slowly I got to my feet. I held my hands up in surrender. "You want to know where it is, big boy? Let me catch my breath."
He frowned, fists balled, a few feet from me as I bent over with my hands on my knees trying to catch my breath, or anyway making him think I was. Then I dropped to the floor and swung my feet around and caught him alongside the knee. He went down, hard, as if following a sudden urge to pray.
Now I was on him, throwing fists at his face in a flurry, tearing skin, breaking his nose and sending streams of blood down out of his nostrils, tearing the flesh at the corners of his eyes. I was hurting him, but he got to his feet and batted me across the room, into the glass doors, rattling them and me, putting the deck and the beach at my back.
He lumbered over toward me, his face a bloody mess, things dripping and dangling off it, and I saw Velda behind him, on her side, scooching with the shattered chair remnants duct-taped to her, toward that end table where the .38 lay a world away.
I played the only card I had left. "It's there, Aladdin—over there!"
And I pointed toward the special lamp, the wedding gift whose art deco plaster base had shattered away when it fell, revealing the giant femur hidden within.
"That's the Goliath bone, buddy. Take it! Take it and get the hell out!"
Groggily he turned toward the lamp with its smashed base and its revealed treasure with the dull ivory surface, the femur still attached to the base enough to stand there in deathly majesty. And that was when Velda managed to kick the gun and it spun and skittered and stopped right within my reach.
Still on the floor, I pointed the .38 up at him. His eyes were wide now and held a strange, ghastly innocence. He still loomed over me but I didn't give a shit. I had him.
"Just took David one little pebble," I said. "And a .38 slug is smaller than that."
And I put one right between his big bleary eyes.
Just a little spray of blood and bone shot out behind him, up through his skull and toward the ceiling, where it spattered and dripped, although he didn't know that. He was still on his feet but he was deader than the original Goliath; he just didn't have the motor reflexes left to do anything except topple not so much like a tree as a big useless puppet.
I thought about putting a few more into him for the fun of it, but this son of a bitch was very fucking dead, and there was no use belaboring the point.
I went to Velda, got the duct tape off her lips, and kissed them. "You saved me, baby," I said, a hand in her soft dark hair. "You saved me."
Breathlessly, she purred, "No, Mike ... you saved yourself, you saved both of us. And you didn't even have a slingshot." She grinned at me and I kissed her again and got the duct tape off her and took her to the bathroom and helped her clean up.
"What now?" she said, wiping her face with a washcloth, looking at me in the bathroom mirror.
"We dump them."
"Dump...them?"
"You saw the Goliath bone?"
She nodded, then pretended to frown. "A wedding gift, huh? A Trojan Horse!"
"I had to get it out of Manhattan. Shipped it down here. Thought I had this thing licked, but al-Qaeda knew they'd been stiffed with that dupe, and they came looking for it, and me."
"Dump them?"
"Yeah. In the drink. We've got a boat, don't we, and you're a big strong girl and I'm a big strong ... well, I'm a man, anyway."
She turned and touched my cheek. "You'd better clean up, too. You're a mess."
"What else is new?"
Even if it was called a "day boat," the craft worked fine for a night excursion lugging two big useless items out to meet Davy Jones. I duct-t aped the big bone to the seven-foot-three-inch corpse, which seemed fitting and functional, since it would help keep him from floating when the body gases kicked in.
So the Goliaths—new and old—went under where neither of them could do any more harm, and maybe some good, the new one feeding the fish and the old one giving the sharks something to sharpen their teeth on.
When we headed back, my first mate was at my side as I steered the boat under the stars and moon, the splash and the spray adding touches of reality to what seemed a dream.
"Is it over?" Velda asked.
"No. We have to go back to New York, kitten."
"For the other Goliath?"
"For the other killer."
Chapter 12
We were seated in the fifth row of the venerable St. John Theatre. I had the aisle with Velda seated next to me, a stunner in low-cut white satin. The Hurley kids were next to her, blonde Jenna in a pink gown with its own impressive dÉcolletage, looking less like a girl and more like a woman. Pity that Matthew in his rental tux looked strictly high-school prom night.
Plenty of tuxes were peppered all around us in the packed sixteen-hundred-some seater, but my best business suit was all they were getting out of me.
The theater had been built in the twenties and refurbished a couple of times, but always maintained its original classy look: recessed ceiling, ornamental panels, crystal chandeliers, blood red seats complementing pale rose walls trimmed white. The auditorium with its single balcony was wider than it was deep, creating an unusual intimacy for a house this size.
Smiling, Matthew leaned forward to ask me a question. "Think this epic'll live up to the hype, Mr. Hammer?"
"Ever see the original King Kong, Matt?"
"Sure. I bought the DVD when the remake came out. Real classic, still a lot of fun. Why?"
"Remember when they were about to display the huge beast in New York, keeping him behind a curtain on a stage? And all of the city's elite were there in black tie and evening gowns, waiting to get the crap safely scared out of them?"
"Sure."
" Then the press photographers spooked the big monkey, and all hell broke loose."
Jenna, amused by my ancient view of things, said, "You don't really think some ... some robot that Harold Cooke had concocted by Hollywood effects artists and Japanese animatronics geeks is going to break loose and create havoc?"
"Mike," Velda said with a mocking grin, "this is not a 'big monkey,' it's a piece of stagecraft."
"Yeah? Where does the Goliath bone fit into this show?"
She shrugged her lovely shoulders. "They'll probably drop down a screen at intermission and show us a film full of close-ups of the thing with some deep-voiced narrator and a bunch of wild music going."
I shook my head. "This is Harold Cooke we're talking about, successor to P. T. Barnum and Mike Todd, a Broadway Cecil B. DeMille. That bone will be onstage. Tonight. Question is, how?"
Matthew said, "I think Mrs. Hammer is right—even big as it is, displaying the bone on that stage with a spotlight or something just won't cut it. But if they have video cameras and drop a screen, like at a rock concert? Then everybody will see it clearly and still get the buzz from being in the same room with it."
The kids, by the way, thought Cooke had the real bone. I was the only one committing fraud here. And maybe Velda.
I kept my voice low, not wanting to be overheard. "Listen, trust your Uncle Mike—Cooke has something up his sleeve. And, r
emember, he's been courting controversy."
"That's just good PR," Velda said.
"Yeah, but he's courting it among groups who hate each other and have no compunction about demonstrating that hate in all kinds of violent ways."
She was almost smiling. "So why are we here, then?"
I shrugged. "We're expected. Anyway, my worst trait has always been curiosity."
Velda cocked an eyebrow. "You have many worse traits than that."
I grinned past my bride at Matthew. "See how they turn on you after marriage?"
My bride laughed and said, "You really think something might happen here tonight?"
"I took the aisle seat, didn't I?"
Mrs. Hammer chatted with the kids while I took in the crowd—lots of famous faces here, including the mayor and his wife, several congressmen local and national and, of course, the top critics. There's always murmuring in a theater before the curtain goes up, but this sounded like a plane landing. This auditorium had some serious anticipation brewing.
Velda was saying to the kids, "Where's your mom tonight? You did tell her we could arrange a ticket, right?"
Jenna said, "Yes, but she's still jet-lagged."
"Oh?"
"She attended a dead-languages seminar and just got back this morning."
Velda smiled at them. "Sounds like things are getting back to normal. Have you told her...?"
Matthew shook his head and smiled embarrassedly. "No. And if we're not careful, now that we're back living in the same apartment? We might get caught, uh ... doing something brothers and sisters don't want to get caught doing. If you get my meaning."
I said, "We get it."
The lights dimmed.
The audience's sudden hush seemed as charged with excitement as their murmuring had.
But as the first of the musical's two acts unfolded, the night began to feel like a non-event. This was the same old overblown production, with the road company of David and Goliath more at ease than the two young pop recording artists who'd been shoe-horned in for some star power. The show had plenty of spectacle to distract—if not please—the audience, even if the songs were about as hummable as an electric fan shorting in and out.
[Mike Hammer 14] - The Goliath Bone Page 21
