“Like a coral snake,” I said. It was the most poisonous snake in the continental United States … and the most innocuous-looking. Colorful. Small. Tempting. They had to clamp on to you and chew to get the venom in.
“The denmotoxin in the Southeast Asian mangrove snake evolved to favor birds, which were the snake’s principal diet. Perhaps that explains why Erik likes chicken so much.”
“I like rumaki better,” said Erik.
I told him to hold still again. “So … it’s still venom, though, right?”
“Yes,” said Kleck. “Although you’d need significantly more of it to incapacitate a mammal.”
“Erik, is it harmful?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah,” Erik said from the back of his throat, knowing that if he moved I’d tell him to hold still again. The lower register of his voice was creepy all by itself.
“Besides the pain of the bite, you’d experience nausea and vertigo,” said Kleck. “If you’re sensitive, you might go into anaphylactic shock or stop breathing. Of course, there’s a difference between a relatively mild snakebite and Erik. His biology is different.”
“Have you ever bitten anyone, Erik?”
Erik’s gaze darted to Kleck. Kleck’s sharp focus went soft. “Once,” Kleck said distantly. “It did not go well.”
That was my hole card secret weapon there in the car with Gun Guy, who had sustained a full-contact bite wound all around his upper right shoulder. Blood had blossomed freely through his shirt and he was doing his best to hang tough and ignore it. But I already noticed him favoring that arm.
“Man, you did well,” Gun Guy said, almost conversationally. “You played well. Ran me ragged. But you’ve got to be as sick of this as I am.”
“You killed my friends.” We were headed for the Lincoln Tunnel.
“You don’t have any friends, sport. Your friends all despise you.”
“Not Joey.” It still hurt to say his name. About everybody else I’d known, he was basically right.
“That shithead with all the tats? Metal in his face? You probably warned him to stay away from your loft. He went back there anyway, to shoot some porn film, when he knew you’d be gone.”
“I wish he hadn’t.”
The tunnel lights zoomed at warp speed, curving over the windshield. It was the middle of the night; the best time for the tunnel.
“You’d better start getting specific about direction,” my captor said.
The only destination I had to give was the location of Cap Weatherwax’s truck. If Cap himself was not there, a Fire When Ready sentry would be on duty. Probably ex-military, like Cap. They did not deserve to die. Neither did the crew members who might be loitering around the other trucks as production was wrapped for the company move.
All beyond my control.
Yet Gun Guy had strong-armed Arly Zahoryin and not killed him. He had broken his pattern. Perhaps there was enough of a gap there to save Cap or Cap’s men.
It was so late that I hoped personnel was at a minimum. I had no other place to be.
* * *
What little I knew of Burke did not extend to whether that was his first or last name. He was just “Burke,” a vaguely Middle Eastern–looking fellow who I gathered had logged trigger time with Israeli Special Forces, in another reality. Curly black hair, eternal five o’clock shadow, decisive hawklike eyes, quick to grin.
Burke had his own little way station set up outside Cap’s Fire When Ready truck. Standard-issue waterproof folding chair with pockets, the kind the stuntmen always lugged around so they could park anywhere. Camp table, area light, cooler, iPod, and—surprisingly—paperback books. You see a lot more people reading on a movie set than you would at first guess. Stunties, as their Aussie brothers and sisters had christened them, had a lot of downtime between prep, rehearsal, and actual go, because the nature of shots and setups was constantly in flux. You had to be cocked, locked, and ready to rock at any moment. It was similar to combat. Or sex.
“Do you know that guy?” asked Gun Guy.
I asked my evil tormentor not to kill him, please.
“Does he have shome kind of check-in schedule?”
I didn’t have the faintest idea. He had said “shed-ule,” like the British.
“Even if he does, he’ll have some kind of red flag word. Shomething innocuous. A code word for trouble. No check-in ish itself an alert. So you had better move your assh doublequick, Eliash, when I shay show.”
Was Gun Guy slurring his words? Was he aware of it?
I wondered what shape Erik was in, back in the city, already a universe ago. He had taken multiple hits from exterminating machinery, both before and after he had clamped his jaws on Gun Guy’s still-oozing shoulder. A little less than an hour, since the bite. Erik had held on and grappled, during the time I was practically blind. It had taken more bullets to force him to release. That was pretty much my definition of a full-contact bite.
I wanted to say Gun Guy sounded tipsy. I didn’t say anything. It was no time to be ironic or spout off a cool line that might alert him … like a code word.
“We shtroll up all friendly,” said Gun Guy. I think he heard himself. He hesitated. Jerked his head as though to shake cobwebs. “Hi, how ya doin.”
I had stupidly hoped nobody else would be loitering around the truck rally zone in the middle of the night. Now I wished for crowds; circus fairways of warm bodies. Witnesses. But Burke’s encampment seemed to be the sole point of light in an otherwise powered-down cluster of tenantless equipment. The trailers here were all grip ordnance, lighting gear, props—locked up tight. More than seventy yards away, there was a security guy in a parked car near the airplane hangar where the sets were being broken down. Some night crew, doing the breaking down. All blocked from view by a herd of Star Waggons–type mobile homes for the cast, shut down, cleaned up, and awaiting Transpo back to the rental place. The distant work lights halated the trailers. The security man would patrol on a one-hour circuit, and besides, what the hell, there was a Fire When Ready man on duty near the trucks anyway. If Burke craved a little conversation or coffee, he’d roll over to the set. Not now.
The arena of my final moments was totally oblivious to my needs. A zillion years ago, a fool in school, I had read Emerson’s essay, “Self-Reliance,” in which old Ralph Waldo had observed, “Traveling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places.” My travel had been to escape … now look where it had gotten me. I fled from rough handling, and people had died because of it.
“Shtay on your hands,” said Gun Guy. Keeping a pistol on me left-handed, he shifted his complicated-looking glasses and dumped eyedrops into his right eye, the one he’d wounded in my darkroom. The glasses seemed to be some kind of compensation for the injury, or protection against a similar accident happening again. They resembled the shooting glasses Cap had made me wear on the range.
My own eyes dialed down to accommodate the darkness. This was not going to end well, but I began to see a way it might end without me dying. I knew where the Kimber automatic was inside Cap’s truck. I mean, exactly. The light was crap and Gun Guy’s vision was handicapped. My own vision in low candle power might lend me a tiny edge, if it was dark inside the trailer. I knew where the lights were and Gun Guy did not.
I could hear him breathing. I couldn’t before. His respiration was becoming more labored. Probably because of Erik. But there was no time for me to wait and watch Gun Guy do a slow fade or do an expository speech as he ebbed; we were already on the move.
“Play friendly. You know thish guy.”
And Burke knew my current face. It would be impossible for him not to recognize me, the unit photographer. He looked up from his book at the crunch of Gun Guy’s feet on gravel. My own feet were peppered with small stones and already bleeding. Burke was wearing a sidearm in a holster with a thick black thigh strap, as all of Cap’s men did.
“Hey, Burke,” I said.
He shaded his eyes. “Ju
lian, isn’t it? You lose your shoes? Who’s with you?”
There was a flat, muffled crack! by the side of my head and my left ear felt as though it had just been boxed. All the fluids in my skull lurched to the right. Burke’s eye vanished and the light gray truck panel directly behind him sprouted a corona of blood spray that appeared black in the light. Dripping, like fresh graffiti. Burke’s hand was not even halfway to his gun. He slumped in the collapsible chair, arms swanning. He looked like a slouching sunbather.
“Keys,” said Gun Guy.
I was no longer needed. I saw how the plot twist worked now. Burke dead at my hand, truck burgled … and me, dead by self-defense.
All because of a fancy gun.
More accurately, all because I had tried to whip out a little pecker of manhood, against forces whose malign notice I had no business attracting.
Who did I think I was?
“Get it yourself,” I said, my voice still cowed. Slightly louder: “If you’re going to shoot me, shoot me. Get this over with. I’m done.”
“Correction,” said Gun Guy. “You’re finished. But you’re not done.” He unsnapped the key bunch from the carabiner on Burke’s belt. “I’m not going to ransack the truck looking for my Kimber. You are going to get it for me.”
He shot me in the thigh, taking marksman care not to sunder the bone. “Or thish ish going to take a very long time, and you-shup a lot of bulletsh.”
The silenced shot attracted no one’s attention except my own. It felt as though a large screwdriver had been pounded through my leg with a sledgehammer. I fell the way a tripod falls when one leg is unlocked, and landed, as they say in Texas, with my dick in the dirt.
“Ged up, you pushy.” He sounded impatient and distracted. I could not see him fighting to focus because my own eyes were spilling hot tears of shock. “It’s a flesh wound. Hardball round. Twenty more if you don’t do what I shay.” He shook his head to rattle things toward normal, then stretched his jaw. In my blurred view his jaw seemed to elongate, the way I’d seen snakes do it.
Then he said: “Dosh my voice shound funny to you?”
Mirth. It sounded like a bad party imitation of Bogart.
“Keyshh. Truck. Now.”
There was very little blood on my leg but it was already swelling. He tossed me a kerchief from Burke’s gear to tie around it. I could stand, just barely. He made me pick the keys off the ground anyway.
“Do it the way I want,” he said, “and id’ll be quick. My gift to you.”
Burke was dead, and I was next. The end of a long chain of killing, all my fault. I had earned my own demise.
Two big industrial padlocks on the side door of Cap’s truck. What a pisser, I thought, if Cap had been working inside the whole time.
Dark inside. No Cap.
“You shtep up first. Lightshh.” He tried again, enunciating. “Light.”
The first bank of switches near the side door would illuminate several small neon lamps over the principal work surfaces. Next to them, another panel would fire up the interior like Broadway. If the little lights were on, maybe Gun Guy would not think about bigger ones. I clicked two of the five toggles.
He kicked me in the ass as he climbed up, dumping me headlong into the narrow work corridor of the trailer. “Now go for it, you fucking loser.”
The rickety dam of my control burst. I scrabbled down the space into the dark like a whipped animal.
Mister Kimber says stay.
It was a replay of the darkroom. I was on the floor again, ready to shit myself, whittled down to instinct and reflex and …
… muscle memory. Just like Cap had said.
Back there, an ordinary person would be pawing around for a flashlight. I could see the steel work drawer containing the Kimber just fine, in gray tones, as though my color input had converted to black-and-white. I did not even need to look at it to know the feel of it in my hand. The weight read as unloaded. The mags with my practice rounds were in the drawer. Load smooth. My fingers remembered. Do it again. Now do it blindfolded.
“You got it? Good, good,” said Gun Guy from the far end of the box. “About time. Now take your fucking sshhot, big man.”
He had wanted it to happen this way. That was the answer for why I wasn’t dead yet. It was the phony Western shoot-out I had fantasized, but without the fantasy dressing, and strictly per Gun Guy’s agenda.
I brought the Kimber up on adrenaline and endorphins. Sight picture. Squeeze, don’t snap. Live target. Hot weapon. Erase the bad guy.
One shot wasn’t enough. I held rock-steady and fed the clip in Gun Guy’s direction, the blasts deafening in the close quarters of the trailer. One shot after another, a purely organic continuance, until the mag was exhausted and the slide locked back and echoes receded and the only sound was me, howling like a caveman.
Gun Guy had not budged.
“You’re a lousy shot,” he slurred, speaking above the absence of room tone, grinning, devilish. His shooter’s glasses seemed to glow faintly blue, an alien visor preparing to unleash a death ray. I thought it was his aura.
He leveled his big, silenced nightmare of a pistol at me and showed me how it was done.
PART THIRTEEN
CHAMBERS
To simply kill Elias McCabe, to overload him with holes and metal as he flailed around like a stymied beast or a terrified child, flapping his hands and crying, would not satisfy. Simply killing him would have been an act of mercy he had not earned. He owed me my rage.
The “hot prowl” of my entry to the Salon had my system singing with brain chemicals, akin to an Ecstasy high, but better—a killing high. All systems at full burn. Turban Guy had eaten my shit and died. Gator Guy, ditto. And now it was Elias’s turn to blanch before the killing wrath of my weaponry and anger. This is what I did. This is what I was best at.
The monsters in the freak show had nothing on me. Now it was my turn to be the monster. It felt good, and I liked the way it felt.
Still, I needed a half beat for sheer astonishment. More than once.
The first time was when Gator Guy came charging out of his room, nearly frothing, rhino unstoppable, truly a bizarre sight to behold. This was no dude wearing a costume. The teeth and claws seemed brutally real, just as the light in his inhuman eyes told me a swift death was coming to eat me. I cross-sighted the Browning and emptied it into him until he fell, unplugged. But it took five rounds.
That manned up the midget, who gave me what I wanted.
I kicked the door open a bit too aggressively. It turned out not to be locked. Warmth buffeted from the chamber, which was dimly illuminated by hothouse lamps. Ten feet away on a canopied bed was Elias, in flagrante delicto.
Time for surprise number two.
Elias was being mounted by some kind of beige-colored bat-woman, or maybe just a tart in a skintight PVC bondage rig. The large wings were spread wide and catching the chemical light the way moth dust glitters. I had not spied this one from my surveillance roost; it was new to me. My entrance caused it to snap around to glare at me with chatoyant eyes.
No problem. Shoot through it. That was what I had brought the silenced SIG to do.
Elias was completely shielded but a lucky strike might blow through to hobble him. It took four shots to hurl Bat Girl down and clear. I was perilously close to needing a magazine change; the Browning was dry, and there was a whole crowd just outside yet to kill if I didn’t get my way.
Elias puled and hollered and fell off the bed. I had him, dead bang.
Before I could squeeze off, a bulldozer rammed me from behind—a dozer with crooked reptile teeth, which it sank into my shoulder, spoiling my aim a wink before I knew I had a fight on my hands.
Gator Guy was still in the ring. Damaged but not decommissioned.
And holy crap, it was just the same as wrasslin’ a real, live crocodilian.
I’d heard about the “mouth trick” used by reptile wranglers. You can hold a gator’s mouth shut easily, with your ha
nds, with a single strip of duct tape. The muscles that open it are weak. The muscles that close it generate more than 2,000 pounds of crush pressure. Human beings can only manage about 150. It takes about 1,400 to implode a man’s skull. You can almost never pry a gator’s jaws open once they’re closed, and these jaws were trying to marry up through my shoulder, destroying everything in between.
Gator Guy’s momentum took us both down. It was stupid and inelegant, a bar fight. My face bounced off the floor and I saw whole galaxies of impact lightning. I lost the Browning. The animal certainty of my assailant’s fury rushed into my nostrils, gamey and pungent. I had to sweep him over with my entoothed arm; my SIG and my other arm were pinned under me, and any moment now, Elias would rally and join the battle, since someone else had started it. I’d been attacked plenty of times, but never by a large, wounded, pissed-off monster.
I managed to half spill Gator Guy, whose clamp on my shoulder could only be called a death grip. Once a crocodilian’s jaw is closed, you need a crowbar, a tow truck, or maybe explosives to open it back up. I jammed the long snout of the suppressed SIG into the nearest patch of scales and gave him everything the weapon had left. He recoiled as one shot skinned through, ricocheted off the floor, and terminated a large hydroponic lamp inside an aluminum reflector. Apparently there was a knot of vital organs near my blast point, causing him to jerk back as though electroshocked.
My shoulder came alive with release pain, the preamble to a rush of blood. Dizziness, nausea. Gator Guy fell into neutral and I kicked away from him. I could feel the macerated bones in my shoulder grinding as I did a mag change on the SIG as fast as I could manage. It was absolutely mandatory, because any second now the freak show in the next room would get braver.
I half hitched into a stumbling run across the room to nail Elias before he could find the rest of his wits. He seemed lagged or drugged, not quite caught up with the time line yet.
The pain in my shoulder was sparking down my arm like dripping acid. I could not show Elias I was incapacitated in any way. I pressed the SIG’s hot muzzle to his face to brand him with a small, circular souvenir about the time the doorway filled up with reinforcements. The midget. The other midget. Mason Stone, playing hero.
Upgunned Page 28
