to give him up for dead without checking on him, the Dodge might flare
like a fire primed with starter fluid, toasting him as crisp as a
marshmallow.
He had no difficulty imagining himself stepping out of the van and being
hit immediately by a score of bullets, jerking and twitching in a
spasmodic death dance across the black street, like a broken marionette
jerked around on tangled strings. But he found it even easier to
imagine his skin peel off in the fire, flesh bubbling and smoking, hair
whooshing like a torch, eyes melting, teeth turning coal-black as flames
seared his tongue and followed his breath down his throat into his
lungs.
Sometimes a vivid imagination was definitely a curse.
Suddenly the gasoline fumes became so heavy that he had trouble drawing
breath, so he started to get up.
Outside, a car horn began to blare. He heard a racing engine drawing
rapidly nearer.
Someone shouted, and a machine gun opened fire again. Bobby hit the
floor, wondering what the hell was going on, but as the car with the
blaring horn drew nearer, he realized what must be happening: Julie.
Julie was happening. some times she was like a natural force; she
happened the way a storm happened, the way lightning happened, abruptly
crackling down a dark sky. He had told her to get out of there, to save
herself, but she had not listened to him; he wanted to kick her butt for
being so bullheaded, but he loved her for it too.
Sidling AWAY from the broken window, Frank tried to time his steps to
those of the man in the court yard below, with the hope that any noise
he made, trotting on gravel would be covered by his unseen enemy's
advance. He figured that he was in the living room of the apartment,
that it was pretty much empty except for whatever debris that had been
left behind by the last tenants or had blown through the missing
windows, and indeed he made it across that chamber and a hallway in
relative silence, without colliding with anything. He hurriedly felt
his way along the hall, which was as dark as a predator's lair. It
smelled of mold and mildew and urine. He passed the entrance to a room,
kept going, turned right through the next doorway, and shuffled to
another broken window. This one had no splinters of glass left in the
frame, it did not face the courtyard but looked onto a lamplit and empty
street.
Something rustled behind him.
He turned, blinking blindly at the gloom, and almost passed out.
But the sound must have been made by a rat scurrying over the floor,
close to the wall, across dry leaves or bits of debris Just a rat.
Frank listened for footsteps, but if the stalker was still focused on
him, the hollow heel clicks of his approach were completely muffled by
the walls that now intervened.
He looked out the window again. The dead lawn lay as dry as sand and
twice as brown, offering little cushion.
He dropped the leather flight bag, which landed with a thud. Wincing at
the prospect of the leap, he climbed onto the window ledge, crouching in
the broken-out window, hands braced against the frame, where for a
moment he hesitated.
A gust of wind ruffled his hair and coolly caressed his face. But it
was a normal draft, nothing like the natural whiffs of wind that,
earlier, had been accompanied by the unearthly and unmelodic music of a
distant flute.
Suddenly, behind Frank, a blue flash pulsed out of the living room, down
the hall, and through the doorway. The strange tide of light was
trailed closely by an explosion and a concussion wave that shook the
walls and seemed to churn the air into a more solid substance. The
front door had been blasted to pieces; he heard chunks of it raining
down on the floor of the apartment a couple of rooms away.
He jumped out of the window, landed on his feet. But his knees gave
way, and he fell flat on the dead lawn.
At that same moment a large truck turned the corner. Its cargo bed had
slat sides and a wooden tailgate. The driver smoothly shifted gears and
drove past the apartment house, apparently unaware of Frank.
He scrambled to his feet, plucked the satchel off the barren lawn, and
ran into the street. Having just rounded the corner, the truck was not
moving fast, and Frank managed to grab the tailgate and pull himself up,
one-handed, until he was standing on the rear bumper.
As the truck accelerated, Frank looked back at the decaying apartment
complex. No mysterious blue light glimmered at any of the windows; they
were all as black and empty as the sockets of a skull.
The truck turned right at the next corner, moving away into the sleepy
night.
Exhausted, Frank clung to the tailgate. He would have been able to hold
on better if he had dropped the leather flight bag, but he held fast to
it because he suspected that its contents might help him to learn who he
was and from where he had come and from what he was running.
CUT AND run! Bobby actually thought she would cut and run when trouble
struck-"Get the hell out of here"
cut and run? just because he told her to! If she was an obedient
little wifey, not a full-fledged partner in the agency, not a damned
good investigator in her own right, just a token backup who couldn't
take the heat when the nice kicked in. Well, to hell with that.
In her mind she could see his lovable face-merry blue eyes pug nose,
smattering of freckles, generous mouth-framed thick honey-gold hair that
was mussed (as was most often the case) like that of a small boy who had
just gotten up from a nap. She wanted to bop his pug nose just hard
enough to make his blue eyes water, so he'd have no doubt how the cut-an
run suggestion annoyed her.
She had been on surveillance behind Decodyne, at the end of the
corporate parking lot, in the deep shadows under a massive Indian
laurel. The moment Bobby signaled trouble she started the Toyota's
engine. By the time she heard gunfire over the earphones, she had
shifted gears, popped the emergency brake, switched on the headlights,
and jammed the accelerator toward the floor.
At first she kept the headset on, calling Bobby's name, trying to get an
answer from him, hearing only the most god awful ruckus from his end.
Then the set went dead; she couldn't hear anything at all, so she pulled
it off and threw it into the back seat.
Cut and run! Damn him!
When she reached the end of the last row in the parking lot she let up
on the accelerator with her right foot, simultaneous tapping the brake
pedal with her left foot, finessing the small car into a slide, which
carried it onto the access road that led around the big building. She
turned the steering wheel into the slide, then gave the heap some gas
again even before the back end had stopped skidding and shuddering. The
tires barked, and the engine shrieked, and with a rattle-squeak-twang of
tortured metal, the car leaped forward.
They were shooting at Bobby, and Bobby probably wasn't even able to
shoot back, b
ecause he was lax about carrying a gun on every job; he
went armed only when it seemed that the current business was likely to
involve violence. The Decodyne assignment had looked peaceable enough;
sometimes industrial espionage could turn nasty, but the bad guy in this
case was Tom Rasmussen, a computer nerd and a greedy son of a bitch,
clever as a dog reading Shakespeare on a high wire, with a record of
theft via computer but with no blood on his hands. He was the high-tech
equivalent of a meek, embezzling bank clerk-or so he had seemed.
But Julie was armed on every job. Bobby was the optimist; she was the
pessimist. Bobby expected people to act in their own best interests and
be reasonable, but Julie half expected every apparently normal person to
be, in secret, a crazed psychotic.
A Smith & Wesson.357 Magnum was held by a clip to the back of the glove
box lid, and an Uzi-with two spare, thirty-round magazines-lay on the
other front seat. From what she had heard on the earphones before
they'd gone dead, she was going to need that Uzi.
The Toyota virtually flew past the side of Decodyne, and she wheeled
hard left, onto Michaelson Drive, almost rising onto two wheels, almost
losing control, but not quite. Ahead, Bobby's Dodge was parked at the
curb in front of the building, and another van-a dark blue Ford-was
stopped in the street, doors open wide.
Two men, who had evidently been in the Ford, were standing four or five
yards from the Dodge, chopping the hell out of it with automatic
weapons, blasting away with such ferocity that they seemed not to be
after the man inside but to have some bizarre personal grudge against
the Dodge itself. They stopped firing, turned toward her as she came
out of the driveway onto Michaelson, and hurriedly jammed fresh
magazines into their weapons.
Ideally, she would close the hundred-yard gap between herself and the
men, pull the Toyota sideways in the street, slip out, and use the car
as cover to blow out the tires on their van and pin them down until
police arrived. But she didn't have time for all of that. They were
already raising the muzzles of their weapons.
She was unnerved at how lonely the night streets looked this hour in the
heart of metropolitan Orange County, bare of traffic, washed by the
urine-yellow light of the sodium-streetlamps. They were in an area of
banks and office buildings no residences, no restaurants or bars within
a couple of blocks. It might as well have been a city on the moon, or a
vision of the world after it had been swept by an Apocalyptic disaster
that had left only a handful of survivors.
She didn't have time to handle the two gunmen by the book and she could
not count on help from any quarter, so she would have to do what they
least expected: play kamikaze, use her car as a weapon.
The instant she had the Toyota fully under control, pressing the
accelerator tight to the floorboards and rocketed straight at the two
bastards. They opened fire, but she was already slipping down in the
seat and leaning sideways a little trying to keep her head below the
dashboard and still hold the wheel relatively steady. Bullets snapped
and whined off the car. The windshield burst. A second later Julie hit
one of the gun men so hard that the impact snapped her head forward,
against the wheel, cutting her forehead, snapping her teeth together
forcefully enough to make her jaw ache; even as pain needled through her
face, she heard the body bounce off the front bumper and slam onto the
hood.
With blood trickling down her forehead and dripping from her right
eyebrow, Julie jabbed at the brakes and sat up at the same time. She
was confronted by a man's wide-eyed corpse jammed in the frame of the
empty windshield. His face in front of the steering wheel-teeth
chipped, lips torn, chin slashed, cheek battered, left eye missing-and
one of his broken legs was inside the car, hooked down over the
dashboard. Julie found the brake pedal and pumped it. With the sudden
drop in speed, the dead man was dislodged. His limp body rolled across
the hood, and when the car slid to a shaky halt he vanished over the
front end.
Heart racing, blinking to keep the stinging blood from blue ring the
vision in her right eye, Julie snatched the Uzi from the seat beside
her, shoved open the door, and rolled out, moving fast and staying low.
The other gunman was already in the blue Ford van. He gave it gas
before remembering to shift out of park, so the tires screamed and
smoked.
Julie squeezed off two short bursts from the Uzi, blowing out both tires
on her side of the van. But the gunman didn't stop. He shifted gears
at last and tried to drive past her on two ruined tires.
The guy might have killed Bobby; now he was getting away. He would
probably never be found if Julie didn't stop him. Reluctantly she swung
the Uzi higher and emptied the magazine into the side window of the van.
The Ford accelerated, then suddenly slowed and swung to the right, at
steadily diminishing speed, in a long arc that carried it to the far
curb, where it came to a halt with a jolt.
No one got out.
Keeping an eye on the Ford, Julie leaned into her car, plucked a spare
magazine from the seat, and reloaded the Uzi. She approached the idling
van cautiously and pulled open the door, but caution was not required
because the man behind the wheel was dead. Feeling a little sick, she
reached in and switched off the engine.
Briefly, as she turned from the Ford and hurried toward the
bullet-riddled Dodge, the only sounds she could hear were the sounds of
a faint breeze in the lush corporate landscaping that flanked the
street, punctuated by the gentle hiss and rattle of palm fronds. Then
she also heard the idling engine of the Dodge, simultaneously smelled
gasoline, and shouted, "Bobby!"
Before she reached the white van, the back doors creaked open, and Bobby
came out, shedding twists of metal, chunks of plastic, bits of glass,
wood chips, and scraps of paper. He was gasping, no doubt because the
gasoline fumes had driven most of the breathable air out of the Dodge's
rear quarters.
Sirens rose in the distance.
Together they quickly walked away from the van. They had gone only a
few steps when orange light flared and flames rose in a wooooosh from
the gasoline pooled on the pavement, enveloping the vehicle in bright
shrouds. They hurried beyond the corner of intense heat that surrounded
the Dodge and stared for a moment, blinking at the wreckage, then at
each other.
The sirens were drawing nearer.
He said, "You're bleeding."
"Just skinned my forehead a little."
"You sure?"
"It's nothing. What about you?"
He sucked in a deep breath. "I'm okay."
"Really?"
"Yeah."
"You weren't hit?"
"Unmarked. It's a miracle."
"Bobby?"
"What?"
"I couldn't handle it if you'd turned up dead in there.
"I'
m not dead. I'm fine."
"Thank God," she said.
Then she kicked his right shin.
"Ow! What the hell?"
She kicked his left shin.
"Julie, dammit!"
"Don't you ever tell me to cut and run."
"What?"
"I'm a full half of this partnership in every way."
"But-"
"I'm as smart as you, as fast as you-"
He glanced at the dead man on the street, the other on the Ford van,
half visible through the open door, and he said, "That's for sure,
babe."
"-as tough as you-"
"I know, I know. Don't kick me again."
She said, "What about Rasmussen?"
Bobby looked up at the Decodyne building. "You think he's still in
there?"
"The only exits from the parking lot are onto Michaelson and he hasn't
come out this way, so unless he fled on foot,"
"In there?"
"all right. We've got to nail him before he slides out of the trap with
those diskettes."
"Nothing worthwhile on the diskettes anyway," Bobby said.
Decodyne had been on to Rasmussen from the time he applied for the job,
because Dakota & Dakota Investigation which was contracted to handle the
company's security checks-had penetrated the hacker's highly
sophisticated false ID. Decodyne's management wanted to play along with
Koontz, Dean R. - The Bad Place Page 3
