“No.”
“Where is Vicky Brown?”
“She’s safe, dwarf. I told you that.”
“She’s in a biosphere somewhere around here, isn’t she? Nuvironment has actually built one of those things, right?”
There was a long pause. I didn’t think Thompson was going to answer me, so his answer came as a surprise. “Not around here,” he said at last.
“The letter she wrote to Santa Claus was mailed in New York.”
“Patton told me about the letter. That was what started it all. It’s how you and your brother found out about Vicky and Kenecky … and other things.”
“Yes.”
Tanker Thompson made a low, guttural sound in his throat that could have been a curse. “The devil even uses children,” he said. “I was a fool. I should have read it before I mailed it.”
“You mailed the letter?”
The man absently nodded his shaved head, winced slightly when the motion pulled at his ears. “I didn’t see how it could hurt. Vicky asked me to, and I wanted to make her happy. I was wrong; I should have been more vigilant. Satan was trying to trick both of us.”
“So you brought the letter with you to New York City from someplace else?”
“It was in my pocket; I’d forgotten about it.”
“Where, Tanker? Where did you bring it from?”
Thompson was silent, and I sensed that our conversation had come to an end. “Tanker,” I continued quietly, “I don’t like pain. I’ve experienced enough so that I know I certainly don’t enjoy getting it, and I don’t like giving it. You’re not at all what I expected you to be; in some ways, I feel sorry for you, and I respect you for knowing that what Kenecky was doing to Vicky Brown was wrong. But I’m going to have to hurt you if you don’t tell me where you’re keeping Garth.” I replaced the Beretta in my shoulder holster, leaned forward, and pushed in the cigarette lighter. I wasn’t certain it would still be working, but a few seconds later it popped. I pulled the lighter out of the dashboard, looked at the glowing end.
The prospect of what I was preparing to do sickened me—but I was damn well going to do it. I didn’t have any other choice.
“We’ve got as long as it takes, Tanker,” I said, and swallowed hard. “Three men have killed themselves rather than tell tales out of school. Well, we know you’re not going to kill yourself, because I’m not going to let you. But unless you want me to start burning off your skin piece by piece, you’re going to tell me where Garth is. Then you’re going to tell me what tribulations you loonies have cooked up for the rest of us, so we can put a stop to it.”
“I’m certainly not going to kill myself, dwarf,” Tanker Thompson said matter-of-factly. “I’m going to kill you.”
And with that pronouncement, he yanked his right hand away from the side of his head. Blood spurted from the ragged flesh that had been his right ear. Stunned and horrified, I felt paralyzed as the huge hand, bloody flaps of tissue adhering to the palm, reached out and locked around my left wrist, began to twist. Instinctively, I stabbed at the back of his hand with the cigarette lighter. There was a sharp hissing sound, then the smell of singed flesh and hair. Thompson cried out, reflexively released his grip—at the same time as he pulled his other hand free, and ripped off his left ear with it. Screaming in rage and pain—but also with what sounded eerily like triumph and ecstasy—he reached for me with both his bloody hands.
Moaning with terror and revulsion, I scrambled back across the seat, fell out the door onto cold concrete that was slick with oil and antifreeze from the smashed radiator. A hulking Tanker Thompson, blood welling and rolling out of the wounds on the sides of his head, suddenly appeared above me on the seat, reached down for me with hands that still had the flaps of his ears attached to their palms. I screamed and rolled away from the horror of the grasping hands, jumped to my feet, and clawed for my Beretta. I got the gun out, backed away a few steps and aimed it at Tanker Thompson’s massive chest as he climbed out of the car and started toward me.
“That’s far enough, Tanker,” I said in a voice that squeaked, holding the gun out in front of me with two trembling hands. “You stop right where you are, or I’m going to blow your head off.”
“God will keep me alive long enough for me to kill you, dwarf,” Thompson replied in an almost casual tone. “After that, it doesn’t matter. In a few days, I’ll be in Paradise.”
Even as I aimed the gun at his chest, it occurred to me that the other man didn’t even need God on his side in this face-off; I couldn’t afford to kill him, since he was my only link to Garth. I lowered the gun slightly, took careful aim, and squeezed off a shot. The bullet hit Thompson in the left thigh, two or three inches above his knee. He cried out, grabbed his leg.
“The next one goes into the kneecap, Tanker,” I said. “Now, you just sit down right there and we’ll talk this over.”
I should have shot him in the kneecap to begin with; the bullet in his leg only made him stop long enough to reconsider his strategy. He limped back to the car, grabbed hold of one of the Cadillac’s hanging doors, and tore it the rest of the way off its hinges. Then he reached down and picked up the crowbar that had come flying out of Beloved’s sprung trunk. Holding the door in front of him as a shield, trailing blood from the wound in his thigh, Tanker Thompson started shuffling toward me.
It seemed like a good time to rethink my own strategy. I had myself a dilemma; I could, I thought, rather easily dart around the gimpy Thompson and get away—but I needed to get information out of the other man, not get away from him. On the other hand, the man with the torn-off ears was not a good candidate for cooperation. It was obvious that Tanker Thompson had a tremendously high tolerance for pain; and he didn’t care if he died, as long as he could take me with him.
Not a good situation.
While I was doing all this heavy thinking, Thompson had continued to come forward, and I’d continued to back up—until now he’d cut off a good three-quarters of the concrete platform, and I was heading back onto a lip over the icy Hudson.
I went down on one knee, fired two bullets at his ankles and feet, which were exposed below the door. The bullets ricocheted off the concrete, missing him. He crouched down, began shuffling forward even faster, obviously oblivious to the pain from his torn ears and the wound in his leg. I figured I had two, maybe three, seconds to make my exit, if that was what I was going to do. Watching his beady black eyes that were peering at me over the top of the door, I feinted to the left, then cut to my right. There was a corridor perhaps ten yards wide I might use to try to sprint past the car-door-armored Tanker Thompson, but a flying crowbar just might catch, kill, or cripple me if I tried that.
Besides, I found that I didn’t really want to make an exit after all, and my feelings involved more than the need to find my brother. Anger welled in me, rage at the mindless force of evil slouching toward me, evil that could kill not only Garth, but a good many other people—the evil of superstition, chauvinism, megalomania, and willful ignorance that had haunted humankind ever since we’d dropped out of the trees; all of that evil was embodied in the giant shuffling toward me, forcing me back toward the river. I stopped, braced my legs, and emptied the Beretta into the center of the car door. I knew the bullets wouldn’t pass through the layers of steel, but the force of the gunfire stopped him, and even backed him up a little. And it made him duck down behind the door. When he again peered over the top of the door, what he saw was me flying feet first toward him through the air.
It seemed I wasn’t getting so old after all—or, at least, the rage, frustration, and desperation in me was sufficient to roll back the years momentarily. I hadn’t flown so high, or had so much control over my body, since my headliner days with the Statler Brothers Circus, and my timing was perfect. Tanker Thompson poked his head up from behind his shield just in time to catch my heel in his jaw. His head snapped back, and we both landed on the concrete at about the same time. I landed on my left shoulder, rolled over in a somersault
to absorb the force of my landing, came up on my feet, and immediately spun around.
The giant, a reformed racist and Jew-baiter who now considered himself a kind of hit man for Christ, was down—but definitely not out. The kick I had delivered to his head would have broken the necks of most men, but it hadn’t even knocked Tanker Thompson unconscious, only dazed him slightly. But it was enough—I hoped.
The tire iron had fallen perhaps fifteen feet to his right. With rage still fueling my muscles, I darted to the tire iron, picked it up with my hands on both ends, then ran to Thompson, who was just getting up on his knees. I jumped on his back, pressed the length of the tire iron up against his throat and pulled. I didn’t want to strangle him, only knock him unconscious without the risk of breaking open his skull. I had no real idea of what I was going to do with him then, but I knew that I could not—would not—be finished with Tanker Thompson until I had found out where Garth was being held prisoner, or one of us was dead.
Thompson’s answer to my grand strategy was simply to get to his feet, carrying me right up in the air with him. I pulled even harder on the steel bar, but the muscles in his neck were like steel cords. He brought his left hand up, wriggled his fingers between his throat and the bar, began to push the tire iron away.
I decided it was time to get off Tanker Thompson’s back and go for the Seecamp strapped to my ankle. But it was too late for that. His right hand had come across his body to where the heel of my left foot was digging into his side; thick, powerful fingers wrapped around my ankle. I had no choice but to go along for the ride as Tanker Thompson marched toward the edge of the platform. I dropped the tire iron, started yelling and pounding on the top of his head, but that had about as much effect as someone trying to stop a locomotive by dragging his heel in the gravel. Thompson never slowed his purposeful pace, and I stopped yelling just in time to suck in a deep breath as we plunged off the end of the platform, went crashing through the ice, and slipped into a black, gelid, wet night that hit my body with such a shock that I half expected to die right then of a heart attack. My heart didn’t seize up on me, but I knew that I couldn’t last long in that icy, underwater darkness; in perhaps twenty seconds or less, the cold would paralyze me and drain away all my energy, I would go into shock, and I would drown.
And Tanker Thompson still had hold of my ankle.
My first reaction was blind panic, a desperate need to try to struggle back toward the surface—but I knew I would certainly die if I tried that. Tanker Thompson was obviously perfectly willing, indeed eager, to die to further his purpose, namely to kill me, and he could easily hang onto a panic-stricken dwarf for the few more seconds it would take me to drown.
I had lost almost all feeling in my body, yet I managed to reach down and, using both my frozen hands as a kind of clamp, pull the small pistol from the holster on my right ankle. As we settled into the muck in the shallow water, I pushed the barrel of the Seecamp between his hand and my left ankle, pushed. The fingers came off. I twisted around, planted both my feet on his barrel chest—and then felt his fingers wrap themselves around my right calf. But Tanker Thompson had had some of the zip taken out of him; he’d absorbed my kick to his head, and he too was freezing, drowning. I pushed with all my strength—and the fingers slipped off. I shot to the surface, bumping my head on floating chunks of ice, and the pent-up breath escaped from my lungs in an explosive, gasping moan.
Seconds were all I had before I lost the ability to move, and then I would sink back down below the surface to join Tanker Thompson in icy death. I clawed at the bobbing chunks of ice, flailing with my arms and legs, and finally made it back to one of the pilings supporting the concrete platform. I gripped the wood, at the same time as I felt my feet touch gravel. I pushed and pulled, made it up over the lip of the platform, and flopped on the concrete. With my clothes and body steaming in the air, I crawled on my hands and knees across the platform to where the wreckage of Beloved still lay smoldering against the concrete support pillar. There was little smoke now, and still no sound of sirens; the wreck and explosion, muffled by an envelope of concrete and steel, had gone unnoticed. However, there were still some flames flickering in the wreckage. There was no feeling at all in my fingers, and there was no way I could manage to handle zippers and buttons, but I was able to use jagged pieces of metal literally to tear the clothes from my body to the waist. Then, slapping and rubbing my hands together, I leaned over the flames, so close that the hairs on my forearms and chest began to sizzle. More steam rose from my skin, and I backed away just before the flesh began to burn—but sensation had begun to return. I stripped off the rest of my clothes, then huddled, naked and shivering, next to Beloved’s life-saving flames.
After ten minutes or so of slowly basting myself on all sides, I finally started to feel relatively warm, and I knew that the danger of hypothermia from a precipitous drop in core temperature had passed; but I was still in danger from delayed shock. And Garth would be in even greater danger if and when his captors discovered that I had prematurely dispatched Tanker Thompson off to Paradise. That could be soon, which meant that I had to get moving, no matter how unappealing the thought. I picked up the remnants of my clothes, found that they were still soaked. The fire was almost out, which meant that I had a problem or two. Even if I didn’t freeze to death, the sight of a naked dwarf hippety-hopping down the West Side Highway just might attract a tad too much attention, and questions from the police.
I slipped on my shoes, squished my way across the platform to the Cadillac with the smashed front end. I was looking for something—anything—with which to cover myself, for I was already starting to shudder with cold again, and I no longer had a fire to warm myself up with. I peered in, and my eyes went wide when I saw, crumpled on the floor in the back where it had landed when it had slid off the backseat, a quilted jacket bearing the logo of Thompson’s former football team. I snatched up the jacket, slipped it on. It was only about a dozen sizes too big for me, which, for my purposes, made it just right. I wrapped myself in its folds, was just starting to zip up my down and wool cocoon, when I felt ice cold hands wrap themselves around my neck. I screamed.
I grabbed a thumb that felt like a nub of frozen steel, twisted it back. The grip loosened. Still screaming in a kind of terrified series of hiccups, I wheeled around, gazed in horror at the dripping, steaming figure of Tanker Thompson. The exposed flesh of his face and hands was blue-white, the color of ice, and his clothes were covered with ooze from the bottom of the Hudson. I could not understand how he could possibly be alive, but he most indubitably was; he couldn’t stay alive much longer, certainly, but as long as he was alive it was quite obvious what was on his mind.
I’d had quite enough of Tanker Thompson, who reminded me of nothing so much as some great mythical giant, a cruel Antaeus who gained strength from contact with the elements, and who could not be killed. As he again reached for me, I ducked under his arms, then ran as fast as I could in my oversize coat and water-filled shoes off the concrete platform, scrambled up the rutted dirt access road to the West Side Highway.
I’d once again lost all feeling in my feet, and it felt as if I were hobbling on stumps as, holding up the bottom of the jacket so as not to trip over it, I managed to extricate one arm from the folds and used it to try to flag down a car.
Fat chance. This was New York City, and I wouldn’t have been picked up even if I were dressed and looked like Mother Theresa.
What I got was a cop—which, considering the fact that I was close to freezing to death, was probably just as well. I knew him; his name was Frank Palorino.
“Mongo?” he said uncertainly as, shuddering inside Tanker Thompson’s massive jacket, I managed to open the door of his squad car and slide into the front seat. “What the hell’s going on?”
“Thanks for stopping, Frank,” I said through chattering teeth. “I, uh … I had a little accident.”
Suddenly the cop with the close-cropped black hair with matching permanent s
tubble on his chin and cheeks began to chuckle; the chuckle quickly grew into a full-fledged belly laugh. “A little accident? What the hell? Did you fall in the river?”
“As a matter of fact, I did,” I said stiffly as I reached out and turned the heater in the squad car up to full blast. “Listen, would you mind—?”
“Where the hell did you get that jacket?” Palorino managed to say between bursts of giggling. “I didn’t know you’d played professional football.”
Frank Palorino was beginning to try my patience; I could still feel the icy cold of the river—and fear of death—in me straight to my bowels. “A passing fisherman,” I stammered. “Look, Frank, give me a break, will you? Get me home.”
“Sure,” he said, still chuckling as he accelerated and moved into the left lane.
A few minutes and a couple of miles later, as he was pulling up in front of the brownstone, it seemed to occur to my jolly chauffeur that perhaps something not so amusing was afoot, as it were, and that perhaps he should make further, more sober, inquiries into just what a soaked dwarf swaddled in a decidedly oversize athletic jacket had been doing stumbling alongside the West Side Highway on an otherwise peaceful Sunday morning in the middle of winter.
“Mongo,” Palorino said seriously as he pulled the car up to the curb, “tell me just what happened to you. How did you happen to fall into the river?”
“Thanks for the ride, Frank,” I said as I got out of the car.
“Mongo, hold on. I’m serious. What’s going on? What were you doing down by the river?”
“Listen, Frank,” I said, shaking violently now inside the jacket as I turned back to the policeman. “Call Lieutenant McCloskey. Tell him I’ll be in touch with him just as soon as I get myself a little more warmed up, and a little more together. Tell him everything I said to him in our earlier conversation goes double now. In the meantime, you can go down to the waterfront off Eighty-sixth Street. You’ll find a couple of wrecked cars, and you’ll probably find a frozen stiff somewhere close by. The stiff’s name is Thomas Thompson. Tell Lieutenant McCloskey that it was Thompson who killed William Kenecky.”
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