Cowboy Angels

by Paul McAuley

  4

  The man Stone had knocked out and tied up was starting to come around, jerking on the white carpet of the hallway, making a muffled growl into his gag and giving Stone a cock-eyed glare as he stepped past. Stone locked the door of the apartment behind him and at the bottom of the stairs eased back the fire exit door and checked out the club, relieved to see that the bartender had the place to himself. The man challenged Stone as he walked out across the dim room, but raised his hands when Stone showed him the Colt .45.

  ‘I bet you keep a peacemaker under there,’ Stone said. ‘How about taking it out and laying it on the counter?’

  The bartender produced an aluminium baseball bat and a snub-nosed .38 revolver with duct tape wrapped around its grip. Stone tossed the bat across the room, pocketed the revolver, and told the bartender to come around the counter and sit on the floor with his hands on his head.

  ‘Whatever problem you have with Mr Layne, it’s nothing to do with me,’ the man said.

  Stone dropped the keys in his lap. ‘Close your eyes and count to a hundred. When you’re done, go upstairs and check on your boss and his friends.’

  He took a quick peek through the bull’s-eye port in the front door and saw Carol Dvorak standing at the rear of the van parked across the street, talking to a tall young man wearing a shoulder holster over his short-sleeved shirt. She was dressed in a black jacket and a thigh-skimming skirt, and a big purse was slung over her shoulder. Her eyes were masked by sunglasses, and her hair had been dyed blonde and cropped close. It wasn’t a bad disguise, but even without Linda’s description he would have recognised the woman anywhere. He thought for a moment, then put on his thick-rimmed glasses, stuck the Colt in the waistband of his khaki pants, its grip snug against the small of his back, and took a breath and walked out into the hot sunlight.

  Carol Dvorak glanced at him and looked away, and for a moment he thought he’d be able to walk away free and clear. But then she looked at him again, and reached into her purse and pulled out a pistol. He smiled at her as she trotted across the street toward him, followed by the young officer. His hands raised to shoulder-height, the .38 revolver dangling by its trigger guard from the forefinger of his left hand, he said, ‘How are you, Officer Dvorak?’

  ‘Stay right where you are,’ she said, watching him over the sight of her pistol as the young officer approached warily.

  Stone said, ‘Is this guy with GYPSY, Officer Dvorak, or is he unwitting?’

  ‘Lose the gun, Mr Stone,’ the young officer said. He was trying to sound calm and reasonable, but there was a slight quaver in his voice and an unsteadiness in his gaze.

  ‘Do it,’ Dvorak said. Her jaw was puffy and her voice congested.

  Stone swung the revolver to and fro, getting the young officer’s attention, then flung it in a long arc across the street. The man’s gaze twitched, following the revolver, and Stone stepped in, grabbed the man’s wrist, thumb pressing into the nerve cluster there, shutting it down. The man dropped his pistol and Stone pivoted on the ball of his right foot as if he and the man were partners in a dance, his left forearm in a choke-hold across the man’s throat as he pulled the Colt .45 from his waistband.

  Dvorak stepped back, her pistol jerking in tight little arcs as she sought to aim it at Stone’s face, and Stone shoved the young officer toward her as she fired, two shots that struck the man in the chest. He grunted and collapsed face down on the sidewalk, and Stone shot Dvorak in her right shoulder. Exactly where he’d shot Tom Waverly when SWIFT SWORD had gone bad. The impact spun her around and she dropped her pistol. Stone kicked it into the gutter, seeing in his peripheral vision pedestrians scattering and the back door of the white van across the street slamming open. He put two shots in the door and a man fell down behind it, and he shot out the van’s nearside tyres. Dvorak sat on the sidewalk, clutching her shoulder. She’d lost her sunglasses and was giving Stone a death-ray stare.

  The temptation to shoot her was there and gone. No. He needed to talk to her.

  ‘Are you going to walk,’ he said, ‘or am I going to have to knock you stupid and carry you?’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere with you,’ Dvorak said, and there was a squeal of tyres and a blare of horns down the block as a battered black car sped through the intersection, swerving wide to overtake a slow-moving army truck, screeching to a halt beside Stone and Dvorak. Its door flew open. Linda Waverly was behind the wheel. She’d lost her wig and her red hair was loose about her face as she leaned across the passenger seat and shouted at Stone, telling him to get his ass inside.

  Stone yanked open the back door of the car, hauled Dvorak to her feet and shoved her inside, picked up her purse and swung in beside her and slammed the door as Linda took off in a squeal of tyres. She made a handbrake turn at the next intersection and accelerated down a one-way street the wrong way, working the stick shift with one hand and the steering wheel with the other as oncoming traffic swerved and flashed headlights and blew horns. She went up on the sidewalk to get around a bus, turned left against a red light and settled into a steady stream of traffic heading uptown, finally sparing a second to glance back at Stone. Her face was flushed with excitement.

  ‘I told you to get out of there,’ Stone said.

  ‘I wasn’t about to leave you behind,’ Linda said.

  Dvorak had pushed herself into a corner of the back seat, her skirt bunched on her thighs, her face grey with shock. The right side of her jacket was wet with blood and her hand was underneath it, clutching her wounded shoulder.

  ‘Nice disguise,’ Stone told her. ‘After our little disagreement back on the train I guess you must be travelling under an alias. Who sent you after me?’

  Dvorak shook her head, then gasped when Stone punched her in the shoulder as hard as he could. ‘I know you’re with GYPSY,’ he said. ‘I bet those guys in the van watching Freddy’s place are with GYPSY too. I want to know who sent you here.’

  ‘I’m a loyal American.’

  Her gaze was hard and bright and full of hate.

  ‘Who told you to kidnap me and Ms Waverly?’

  ‘I picked up the order at a drop.’

  From the front seat Linda said, ‘Where do you want me to go?’

  ‘Just keep driving,’ Stone said, and put his pistol in Dvorak’s face. ‘Where were you going to take us?’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  ‘They’ll have made the car,’ Linda said.

  ‘We’ll see about that. One last chance, Ms Dvorak. Who sent you?’

  ‘You won’t find it so easy to get away from us this time,’ Dvorak said. ‘And if you do, we’ll go after that woman’s kid. Petey. We’ll take the little fucker—’

  She screamed when Stone punched her in the shoulder again. Linda lost control of the car for a moment, braking hard just before it slammed into a taxi. Horns blared, Stone grabbed the back of the seat to steady himself, and Dvorak pulled her hand from under her jacket, holding a little two-shot .22. Stone shot her twice in the heart, the noise tremendous inside the car, blood spray across the door, across the rear window, hot blood spattering his face and the glasses he was still wearing and the front of his tunic.

  Linda got the car going again, saying ‘Shit, shit, shit’ as she drove. Stone took off his glasses and wiped blood from his face with his sleeve, dropped the empty clip from his Colt and shoved in the spare. He searched Dvorak’s purse and found ID and travel orders identifying her as a captain in Army intelligence, a cell phone with no numbers in its memory or redial, a wallet stuffed with local bills. Linda was watching him in the rearview mirror. He said, ‘Pull over.’

  ‘Thank you would be nice.’

  ‘For giving her a chance to draw on me?’

  ‘For saving your neck.’

  ‘You should have cut and run, like I told you to. If this woman had had more backup we’d both be bleeding out on the sidewalk.’ Stone spotted a subway entrance, pointed to it, and said again, ‘Pull over. We need to lose this car right
away.’

  He got out of the car and headed straight for the subway, stripping off his blood-spattered tunic and dumping it in a trash basket. He was pumped up and furious. He knew he should have checked the woman for a backup piece.

  Linda caught up with him, half-jogging, half-walking to match his long strides, saying breathlessly, ‘We left a body back there.’

  ‘I left two more on the sidewalk outside Freddy’s place. Want to go back and clear them up too?’

  ‘This is how it works in the field? You shoot someone and walk away?’

  ‘If you have to.’

  ‘My father told me I would need your help,’ Linda said as she followed Stone down the steps to the subway. ‘But that wasn’t why I came back.’

  ‘You took a big risk,’ Stone said, and realised that he was taking his anger out on her. ‘You took a risk, but you did the right thing. It wasn’t you that screwed up back there. It was me.’

  ‘We got away, so we did something right,’ Linda said, and asked if they were going back to Walter Lipscombe’s place, or to the gate under Grand Central Station.

  ‘Freddy gave me the address of your father’s apartment,’ Stone said.

  After a moment, Linda said. ‘Do you think they know about it? Carol Dvorak’s friends from GYPSY, I mean.’

  ‘If they do, they’ll be waiting for us there. Want to let it go, head for the gate instead?’

  ‘After we’ve come this far? Of course not.’

  5

  The New York subway system was one of the few unalloyed triumphs of the American Bund. The stations were clean, spacious, and air-conditioned, with polished marble floors and pink granite walls decorated with enormous murals. The ones featuring the Dear Leader had been smashed or disfigured, but most of the others were still intact, blazoned with brutalist propaganda: hero workers marching arm in arm with proud soldiers; atomic power stations; fleets of combine harvesters sweeping across wide wheat fields; a parade of tanks and missile carriers stretching to an apocalyptic horizon; a bevy of athletic girls in skimpy shorts and T-shirts pounding over a mountain ridge. Trains arrived every two minutes, clean futuristic designs with bullet noses and unnecessary streamlining.

  As they rode uptown, Stone gave Linda a précis of his conversation with Freddy Layne. She listened with her full attention, sitting with her shoulders hunched and her hands clamped between her knees. Every now and then a shiver passed through her entire body, but she was in control, grimly determined to see this through. Doing pretty good, Stone thought, for a back-office number cruncher.

  When he had finished telling her about Freddy, she said, ‘He didn’t know how my father had been exposed to radiation?’

  ‘I don’t suppose Tom told Freddy any more than he told me,’ Stone said.

  ‘It must have had something to do with GYPSY.’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘My father said something about an atomic bomb.’

  ‘My first thought, too.’

  ‘Maybe he stole a bomb, a suitcase nuke. Maybe it wasn’t properly shielded.’

  ‘Or maybe he was downwind of a bomb when it went off.’

  ‘The Company would know if a bomb had gone off.’

  ‘Maybe not. Not if it was in a wild sheaf, a long way from any civilisation.’

  Linda thought about that. ‘This is something really big, isn’t it?’

  ‘Your father claimed to have stolen something that could change history. It could be a suitcase nuke, it could be documentation about GYPSY’s plans, it could be anything.’

  ‘He didn’t tell me what it was, Mr Stone.’ Linda brushed her hair back from her pale face, held it in a fist by the side of her neck. They were sitting side by side on orange plastic seats at one end of the passenger car, no one near them, the train rocking smoothly as it sped through the dark. ‘That woman mentioned a boy, said her friends would go after him,’ she said. ‘Is it your son?’

  ‘The son of an old friend of mine, Jake Nichols. Jake died in an accident last winter.’

  ‘Oh. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Jake’s wife . . . Susan . . . Two of Carol Dvorak’s friends tried to kidnap her a couple of days ago. They planned to exchange her for me. Susan shot and killed one of them, wounded the other. And then the one she’d wounded shot and killed her.’

  After a moment, Linda said, ‘This is why you wanted to come with me.’

  Stone nodded. After everything that had just happened, she deserved to know the truth. ‘I don’t owe the Company anything, Linda. Not after I found your father. Not after what happened to Susan. I came with you because I wanted to put an end to this. And Kohler let me do it because he thinks your father lied about stealing something from GYPSY, and doesn’t want to waste manpower on some kind of diversion or distraction.’

  ‘He didn’t lie.’

  ‘I’m pretty sure he didn’t. Linda, listen to me. There will be more people like Dvorak coming after us. And I can’t guarantee that we’ll be so lucky the next time.’

  Linda’s expression was as serious as a heart attack. ‘You have a good reason to go after this. So do I. We’ll do it together, just like my father wanted.’

  They got off the subway at Amsterdam Avenue and walked three blocks north, past a bookshop with stacks of sun-bleached paperbacks crowding its dusty window, past a butcher’s shop where a stout housewife in a shawl and threadbare floral dress watched a man chop a chicken carcass into four pieces on a wooden block, past shacks built from scrap wood and cardboard boxes amongst fire-blackened ruins. A woman soaped a toddler who stood naked and shivering in a red plastic bowl. Battered taxis and pickup trucks swerved past horse-drawn wagons. An armoured personnel carrier was parked at the corner of one block, its engine idling, its snorkel exhaust emitting puffs of black smoke.

  ‘We were right around here just a couple of days ago,’ Linda said.

  ‘That was that,’ Stone said. ‘This is this.’

  He was walking quickly, couldn’t shake the feeling that at any moment a convoy of police cars and black limos would roar up Amsterdam Avenue in hot pursuit or a helicopter would descend from the sky, loudhailer yammering, ordering him to surrender.

  The address Freddy Layne had given him was an apartment building on a quiet cross-street, one of a dozen square, four-storey blocks built of yellow brick. Stone and Linda showed their fake army IDs to the fat, sour-faced old woman who sat behind a card table just inside the front door, and Stone asked her when she had last seen Mr Anderson, if he ever had any visitors, how long he’d been living here. She gave monosyllabic answers that more or less confirmed Freddy Layne’s story, adding that two men had come to see him yesterday.

  Stone touched his left eye. ‘Was one of them wearing an eyepatch?’

  The woman nodded. ‘I told them Mr Anderson has gone away, but they insisted on seeing for themselves.’

  ‘The local law is leaning on Freddy. He came looking for something he could use to make a deal,’ Stone said to Linda, and asked the woman how much she had been paid to let the men into Mr Anderson’s apartment.

  ‘I don’t get what you mean, mister.’

  Stone took out Dvorak’s wallet, counted off five ten-dollar bills and spread them on the card table. ‘Either you can take this and loan me your pass key, or I’ll kick in the door. Do you get that?’

  ‘Mr Anderson’s’ apartment was at the far end of a gallery walkway, overlooking a courtyard where a handful of small kids were chasing each other between mounds of garbage. A sweet rotten reek packed the humid air. A fat brown rat burrowed into a burst trash bag. The wired-glass window beside the apartment’s plywood door was cracked top to bottom and lined by aluminium foil. Linda used the pass key and Stone hustled in, leading with his pistol, aiming at different corners of the stale, dim room.

  Freddy Layne had done a good job of tossing the place. A pull-out couch lay on its back, its brown vinyl gashed in a dozen places. Its cushions had been slashed and chunks of foam-rubber stuffing were scattered a
cross the greasy carpet. A sleeping bag ripped from top to bottom curled in a froth of feathers. A coffee table was split in two. Science-fiction paperbacks lay everywhere like dead birds. The door of the closet hung by a single bent hinge. Holes had been punched in the dividing wall of the little kitchenette in the corner. The grille of the heating register over the bathroom door had been levered away and the plasterwork around it kicked out. The toilet in the tiny bathroom was cracked and the ceramic lid of the tank lay in two pieces on the flooded tiled floor.

  Linda was searching through the cupboards in the kitchenette. She told Stone that all she’d found were a couple of cans of soup and the biggest roach she’d ever seen.

  ‘Probably a survivor from the good old days,’ Stone said. ‘They had the biggest and best of everything before the revolution.’

  He was standing in the middle of the little room, trying to imagine Tom Waverly camped out there, cleaning his gun, meticulously plotting his hit. He could hear the mutter of a TV through the wall, the shrieks of the children playing outside in the garbage.

  ‘It smells of him,’ Linda said.

  She had an odd expression on her face. Stone realised that she was trying not to cry, and got busy checking out the rest of the apartment.

  He shook out the paperbacks, ripped flapping sheets of vinyl from the frame of the couch, looked in the kitchen cupboards that Linda had already searched and found nothing but the roach flattened in one corner of a cupboard, its antennae twitching as it tested the air. It was a monster, all right. A hero roach. There ought to be a mural dedicated to it in one of the subway stations. He found a can opener and opened the soup cans, tipped chicken soup and vegetable soup into the sink. One coffee mug, one plate, one dish, a cheap aluminium saucepan, and a spoon and a knife, all neatly rinsed, sat in the plate rack.

  Linda was standing on a kitchen chair and peering inside the broken heating register. ‘Someone swept this clean,’ she said.