Armageddon Crazy

by Mick Farren

  "Maybe you sold 'em all and you got the money on you?"

  Speedboat felt sick. "I'm telling you, you heard wrong. I'm tapped out."

  "Maybe we should look through that funky coat of yours."

  At that moment a police gunship clattered overhead, randomly probing the neighborhood with twin searchlights. Speedboat saw his chance and went for it. While Jetson and Ratner were looking up at the chopper, he took off at a dead run, his legs pounding for dear life.

  Carlisle

  The Grass Roots Tavern was not the kind of place that Harry Carlisle normally frequented, but it was close to the Astor Place complex, and he had a bad need to drink and think. The Grass Roots Tavern also was not the kind of place that cops were supposed to frequent. It was the hangout of all kinds of East Side scum. Its clients ran pills and pornography and low-rent prostitution. Cops who hung around in scum joints were generally frowned upon. The only reason for a detective to go in there was to anchor a snitch or bust a drug dealer on his home turf. If one wanted to get drunk, he was supposed to go to one of the cop bars up on Fourteenth Street. Anything else was suspect, and if he was seen going into the Grass Roots, it would doubtless go on his political file. Carlisle did not give a damn. He was so far in after the day's fun and games that there was virtually nothing they could do to him anymore. Besides, Harry Carlisle had had enough of cops for one day.

  The clientele of the Grass Roots did not exactly make him welcome. A suedehead in a ragged parka, who was coming out as he was going in, turned white at the sight of him. The kid probably had a pocketful of Haitian speed, but Harry didn't give a damn. He had more on his mind than a cheap, off-duty bust. The bartender gave him a hard look as he poured his scotch, and a number of customers seemed to be thinking about leaving. Harry mitigated the effect that he was having by taking his drink to an empty table as far from the jukebox as he could get.

  He was still disturbed by the conversation with Dreisler. The man was like no other deacon that Harry had ever encountered. There were plenty of swine among their ranks, but Dreisler transcended the usual choice of fanatic sadism or brute nastiness. He seemed to be totally without belief or principle. He was also quite without the bulldozing hypocrisy that was the usual deacon method of rationalizing their excesses. He looked at it all as one great game, and he played it with a chilling relish. He was either so compartmentalized that he had no real feelings, or he was a brilliant case of arrested development, a vicious child pulling the wings off flies, who had been layered with a cold, steely self-control and an urbane, scalpel-sharp wit. He was certainly a master of the oblique. In fact, now that it was all over, Carlisle realized that he had no real idea of what they had been talking about. Ostensibly Dreisler had been pumping him for his thoughts and suppositions regarding the Lefthand Path. Underneath it all, though, something else had been going on. Dreisler was so Machiavellian that he would certainly have covered all of Carlisle's theories and probably many more besides. It was as if Dreisler had been sounding him out about something deeper but was not revealing what.

  There were times when the man's cynicism glided close to actual heresy. Perhaps, as chief headhunter of the city's deacons, he felt that the normal constraints did not apply to him. Even his manner amounted to an affront to the deacon orthodoxy. With his silk scarves, leather coat, immaculate black lounge suit, and languid attitude, he was nothing less than a sinister fop. At the same time, though, the dark dandyism was the velvet glove that covered the remorseless iron hand. If Faithful ever came up with a final solution, it would be Dreisler who would implement it.

  Harry recalled how strange the conversation had become toward the end. Dreisler had given him an odd sideways look.

  "When you think about it, the Lefthand Path was inevitable. "

  Carlisle had not rushed to reply. "What was inevitable?"

  "The whole thing. It's almost Darwinian."

  "It is?"

  "Oh, yes. Any truly repressive regime is going eventually to produce a highly efficient clandestine opposition. I think we have ours."

  Dreisler had looked quite pleased by the idea. Carlisle knew he had to call him on his choice of words.

  "Are you saying that we're repressive?"

  Dreisler had smiled, taken off his Raybans, and dangled them by one earpiece. "Not you, dear boy. You're much too busy being an honest cop."

  Carlisle got up and went to the bar for another drink. His action caused only a slight ripple among some new arrivals who had failed to notice him sitting quietly in the corner away from the jukebox. The Grass Roots was getting used to him. He returned to his seat. There were levels of speculation about Dreisler that, for his own peace of mind, he did not particularly want to explore. The worst was that Dreisler had almost seemed proud of the Lefthand Path. Sure, he was pleased that the LP existed because it fitted in with his theory of cyclical cause and effect, but Carlisle was sure there was more to it than that. Dreisler had really seemed delighted that there was a terrorist operation running rings around the police and the deacons. A man like Dreisler scarcely seemed capable of being that delighted with something that was not his own creation. That was the thought that Harry did not want to think. If Dreisler was somehow involved with the LP, it opened a universe of wheels within wheels, and each wheel had cogs sharp enough to tear him apart. What really worried Harry was that he was becoming more and more certain that Dreisler had decided that he might be of some use to him. Harry Carlisle did not want to be of use to Deacon Matthew Dreisler, if for no other reason than the fact that he did not want to discover what might happen to him when he stopped being of use. Dreisler's parting remark had been the final enigma.

  "Remember, Lieutenant, it is a natural process. Every so often there has to be a cleansing of the temple." He had given Carlisle a knowing smile. "I'll be in touch."

  With that, he had summoned his aides and swept out.

  Harry sat in the bar shaking his head. "I don't like this. I don't like this at all."

  He realized that he was talking to his scotch on the rocks. He was spending too much time on his own. He rubbed his chin. Maybe he should flash his badge, take a complimentary bottle off the bartender, and head on home. With all the stuff that was running through his mind, he would have a hard time sleeping without a good deal of whiskey inside him.

  He was just reaching for his hat when two men came in. They were local street punks, but bigger and badder than the usual. They were dressed in old, full-length military raincoats and heavy engineer boots. Their eyes, their expressions, and the way they moved combined to scream silently that they were in the advanced state of strung out where it hurt to be alive. Harry half recognized one of them, a guy with a record of low-class armed violence. What was his name? He used a street name, the title of some old TV show. Jetson. That was it.

  They were too strung out to be drinking. Harry was reminded mat he was still carrying the Magnum under his left arm. Jetson was walking toward the bartender while his partner just stood his ground, halfway down the long narrow barroom. Heads were starting to turn. Harry was not the only one who could sense the tension. Jetson opened his coat and laid a caseless, stripped-down autoload on the bar with the muzzle pointing at Earl. Harry sighed. It was going down.

  Jetson sounded as if he had been gargling razor blades. "We needs a loan, Earl. All you got in the till."

  The partner also opened his coat. He had an Israeli needier, the kind that fired bursts of metal slivers from its triangular barrel. "Don't nobody get excited. There's a transaction going on here that ain't no concern of any of you."

  How the hell had that punk gotten his hands on a needier? A single burst could decimate the room, and turn the Grass Roots into a bloody slaughterhouse.

  When Earl finally found his voice, he sounded as bad as Jetson. "You're crazy. You can't get away with this. Everyone knows you."

  It was a fact that probably did not need pointing out.

  "The money, Earl, get the money. When we out of her
e, we gone."

  Were they crazy enough to waste everyone in the place? It had happened before in narcotics-related holdups. Carlisle had his hand on the Magnum. He was easing back his chair. Earl was emptying the till. The two punks were watching the bartender intently. Carlisle was on his feet in combat stance, the Magnum pushed out at arm's length. His voice was soft but absolutely audible.

  "Police officer. This is your only warning."

  The punks were half turned away from him, but they started to bring their guns around. Carlisle fired twice. The recoil of the old gun felt reassuring. Jetson went down, shot through the head. Blood and brains were spattered all over the mirror and bottles in back of the bar. The second shot was a little low on the partner – he took it in the chest and spun around. The needier went off. Carlisle ducked, but the blast tore harmlessly into the ceiling. Dirt, paint, and plaster cascaded down. A section of the decaying tin ceiling fell out. Harry walked slowly forward, the smoking Magnum held loosely at his side. Jetson was sprawled across the bar, flat on his back and stone dead. His partner was in a fetal position on the floor with his chest making sucking sounds.

  Harry looked at Earl. "I don't expect tearful gratitude, but first you could pour me a drink. After that you could call some uniforms and get this mess out of here."

  Earl poured Harry a very large straight scotch. He peered over the bar. "Should I call the paramedics for him?"

  "That's up to you."

  Carlisle removed himself from the place as soon as the uniforms had taken control. When the sergeant in charge had asked him if he wanted to tape a statement, he had wearily shaken his head.

  "I'll do it tomorrow. I'm beat."

  There was always a degree of shock after a shooting, a blank numbness, as if a bit of him had been left with the dead. He did not relish killing, the way some in the department did, but this time he felt a certain sense of release. There had been something real about pulling the trigger, a reality that was the perfect antidote to the shadow play of conspiracy in which he had been spending too much of his time. Harry Carlisle knew what he was going to do. He flagged down a cab and took it to Eighty-sixth and Broadway, one of those blocks where the police turned a blind eye. As he got out of the cab, he took off his hat and draped his raincoat over his arm – he did not want to look like a cop. He was approached by a dark-skinned girl with long legs and straight black hair. She was wearing an old fur coat, which she opened to allow him a flash of naked flesh.

  "You want to go out?"

  Carlisle's smile was crooked. "Sure, I want to go all the way out."

  Winters

  At three o'clock in the morning Winters was still at his desk. His eyelids felt gritty, and the hard neon light was boring into the back of his head. There was the metallic taste of machine coffee in his mouth. And nothing he was doing seemed to have any useful purpose. He and the other junior deacons, on duty for more than sixteen hours, had been given what amounted to little more than make-work. He had interviewed four of the women from the house on Fifteenth Street, seen that they were locked down in the holding cells, and then completed four totally inconclusive reports. He had fed the reports into the database along with the transcripts of the interviews. His next task had been to run everything through an inconsistency filter and cross-match his results with those of the interviews that had been conducted by the other officers. The whole process had taken the best part of the day and had yielded nothing. The discrepancies in the prostitutes' statements were well within the parameters of standard eyewitness variations. If any of the whores knew anything about the triple assassination they were hiding it extremely well. In fact, they were hiding it like a professional. Oddly, the higher-ups still had not authorized a depth interrogation of any of them.

  It was probable, of course, that the higher-ups had more pressing matters on their minds. Dreisler's headhunters were still all over the place. At regular intervals, one after another of the senior officers were taken out for questioning. Some returned to their duties quite quickly, while others did not come back at all. It was starting to look as if Dreisler and his Internal Affairs goons were using the murders of Bickerton, Baum, and Kinney to conduct a full-scale shakedown of the upper levels of the anti-terrorism section. Hie junior deacons were more than a little resentful, in part because they felt their turf was being violated, but also because of a very definite fear that after IA had finished with the senior officers, the juniors' turns would come.

  Around seven, the junior deacons who had been on continuous duty since eight that morning had expected to be ordered to stand down. No such order was given. The red condition that had been imposed after the news of the killings continued, and they were put on monitor status, watching the incoming crime reports, the stepped-up sweep of telecommunication patterns, and the random spy eyes in the major newspapers and TV stations. Again it was make-work. They were overseeing complex computer programs that were quite capable of looking after themselves. It started to seem that they were simply being bottled up in the CCC complex and kept occupied. The suspicion was that the killings and the PD raid on Fifteenth Street had blown the lid off some kind of major scandal that they were not being told about.

  The worst of it was that even in the skittish atmosphere of building tension and resentment, none of the junior deacons felt they could talk about it. Certain that their every word and deed was being observed and recorded, they either folded in on themselves in tight-lipped silence, or, if they talked at all, they reduced conversation to its blandest fundamentals. A few of the more competitive tried to trap their rivals into an unguarded moment of complaint. Rogers had taken a couple of shots at Winters. The last time had been as he had walked past Winters' desk carrying a pile of videotapes of the crime scene that had finally been confiscated from the Channel 15 news department. He had shot Winters a rueful glance.

  "So when do you think we'll get out of here?"

  Winters, who was staring uncomprehendingly at a graphic representation of pay-phone usage in lower Manhattan at the time of the killing and wishing that he were stretched out on the couch in his apartment watching Pretaped Football, was almost jolted into some grunted condemnation of the hierarchs. He caught himself in the nick of time. "I guess Satan doesn't work to our convenience."

  Rogers treated him to a sour look and went on to the viewing room.

  Around eleven-thirty, insult was suddenly added to injury. On the police blotter, which was running on his secondary screen, an item came up: Carlisle, off duty, had shot two aimed holdup men in a bar on St. Marks. The bastard who had caused all the trouble that very morning was making himself a hero. He would probably be on TV. Grim junior deacons exchanged glances. Aside from the LPs themselves, Lt. Harry Carlisle was the one they would most have liked to see take a fall. Winters was instantly suspicious. The story had to be some phony PD media setup. Carlisle must have thought that a bit of publicity would keep him out of reach of the deacons. Screw you, Carlisle, Winters thought. We'll get you in the end.

  Hie night dragged on, and the red condition dragged right on with it. It was starting to look as if he were never to go home. The stuff on the monitors had ceased to make any sense at all. His eyes were just starting to droop when, with no warning, both his screens blacked out. He was reaching for the helpkey when a single sentence glowed green, right across the middle of his primary screen.

  THERE WILL BE A CLEANSING OF THE TEMPLE.

  His jaw dropped. He blinked stupidly. What? The message lasted for five seconds, pulsing slowly, then it faded to black. Abruptly everything returned to normal. Winters looked around, trying to act as casual as possible. The others were all going about their business just as they had been doing all night. Was he the only one who had seen it? Should he report it? His paranoid conditioning warned that it could be a loyalty test. How he reacted to it could have a serious effect on his already precarious E&D scores. There was something else though. Something deep inside made the confident suggestion that God was talking
to him. But that was ridiculous. God did not talk to junior deacons. Not through a computer terminal. Winters found that he was sweating.

  Kline

  By the time they arrived at the third party, Cynthia Kline had lost all sense of time. Immediately after the taping of the Vent and Emily show she had been picked up by Deacon Longstreet in a large black Lincoln Continental. The first party had been a fairly sedate affair at a reception suite on the fifty-sixth floor of the Trump Grand Tower. The situation had been explained to her as they had ridden up in the crystal elevator, through the melodramatic sweeps of the tower's neo-Egyptian architecture.

  "It's very simple, Cynthia. We're here to show you off to the print media and the TV stations that have not, as yet, committed to going with you and your story. You don't have to say anything. Just smile nicely and let us do the talking."

  There were maybe a hundred journalists in the suite. It was a brave magazine or TV talk show that turned down a party invitation from the deacon PR department. The decor was white and gold with a palm-tree motif. It looked like the set fora very crass production of Antony and Cleopatra. Once inside, Long-street and his team of seven surrounded her like a beaming phalanx. They smiled and bantered, handed out press kits and ten-by-eight color glossies, and put amiable but quite determined pressure on those who remained unsold. Longstreet repeated the same pitch over and over again.

  "What you have to understand is that this isn't simply about Cynthia and her act of courage. It isn't even a matter of making the Corps of Deacons look good. It goes much deeper than that. It you think about it, you'll realize that Cynthia is a symbol for everyone who has ever wished that he or she could strike back against the daily terror that plagues our city. Cynthia may be attached to the deacons as a clerical auxiliary, but when she drove off those Godless thugs, she wasn't doing it as a part of her duty. We don't put women in the danger zone. She was a woman on her own, fighting back. She'd seen the men with her shot down and she was determined to save her own life. I think everyone can relate to that."