Merle Bettencourt was so caught up in thinking of his troubles that he almost missed his target, standing right there on the street before him, no disguise. The rat was just emerging from an alleyway, perhaps a block south of the auditorium where Jesus people had been trooping in to hear the word. Cuvier was followed by a woman dressed in clothing that resembled Gypsy garb.
Screw it.
Bettencourt followed the mismatched pair with his glasses, making sure that there was no mistake. You would've thought that Cuvier had sense enough to grow a beard or mustache, anyway, some effort to disguise himself while he was wandering around the very heart of Armand's territory, but there was no accounting for stupidity. If Cuvier had been half-smart, he never would have testified against his boss man in the first place.
Bettencourt kept watching, waiting, for the pair to veer right, across the street, head for Justine's, but they kept walking north until they reached the Holy Roller crowd and got in line. The line was moving swiftly now, and Cuvier and his lady friend were at the front door of the auditorium before Merle got the walkie-talkie unhooked from his belt and brought it to his lips.
"Brunelle, you there?"
"Here, boss," the leader of his hit team answered.
"They're across the street," Bettencourt said, "going in the auditorium right now. He's with a Gypsy woman and I think-I think maybe I saw the Chinaman. Maybe not."
"We're on it."
Merle stowed the two-way radio and watched Cuvier and the Gypsy a moment more, until they disappeared inside the auditorium. He could have sworn he saw the little old Chinaman, just for a second. But he didn't see him again.
Merle put down the glasses and retrieved the latex mask rolled up in his pocket. Bill Clinton, looking swollen and red-nosed with cartoon hair. Merle slipped it on and double-timed in the direction of the service stairs.
There would be no harm watching while his soldiers did their thing, if only from a distance. He could verify the kill himself and be on hand to help if anything went wrong.
But it had better not go wrong, Merle told himself. It damn well better not.
LEON WAS TALLER than three-quarters of the other people in the crowd, excluding those who had arrived on stilts, and so he had spied his targets even as Merle Bettencourt was spotting them from farther up the street. The wolf man recognized all three of them, the stoolie from his photos and the Gypsy woman and the little Asian man, who moved through the crowd with such fluidity and speed that even the wolf man's sharp eyes had trouble keeping up with him. Leon felt his blood begin to simmer, hackles rising, as his lips curled back from yellow teeth.
The bitch couldn't have spotted them, as short as she was, but she picked up on his tension, the excitement thrumming in his veins, and gave a little whimper that became a snarl. A tall transvestite dolled up like Reba McEntire retreated from the growling wolf and wobbled on his comical stiletto heels.
"Ooo, keep that beast away fom me," the person of transgendered persuasion cautioned in a hoarse falsetto.
Leon's right hand lashed out, dark fingers snagging in the neckline of the he-she's party dress, and ripped the garment to its owner's waist. Pink rubber falsies hit the sidewalk like two balls of Silly Putty, bounding off in opposite directions through the teeming crowd.
"Oh, my babies!" squealed the she-male, diving for his disembodied left tit in a move that cleared the way for Leon and the bitch to pass beyond arm's reach.
Leon was tracking all the while, saw his three targets get in line outside the auditorium whose marquee wore the brand of Mission Mardi Gras. He watched them disappear inside and cursed his luck, surmising that the ushers on the door wouldn't admit a loup-garou, much less his canine date, to hear the Reverend Marvin Rockwell speak. Leon could lay them out in seconds flat, of course, but the effort would attract whatever passed for muscle at a Holy Roller outing, and his quarry could escape while he was dealing with the hired help.
There had to be a better way.
He saw the alley coming up, between a deli and the auditorium, and steered the bitch in that direction, shoving through the crowd. Another werewolf was about to take offense, until he got a look at Leon and his painted cheeks immediately crinkled with a smile.
"Hey, brother," the bogus wolf man said, "us lycanthropes should stick together. Put her there!" He groped for Leon's hand, too shocked to scream as Leon crushed his fingers in a grip of steel and left him kneeling on the sidewalk, retching through his pain.
The alley wasn't quite deserted, but the figure sprawled across their line of march was already unconscious. Leon stepped across the scrawny legs and heard the tick-tack-tick of claws on pavement as the bitch kept pace. In other circumstances, she would almost certainly have paused to taste the wino, but her blood was up. She felt the call to vengeance and would let nothing distract her from that quest.
Leon hadn't devised a plan yet, but the auditorium would have a back door, and if it was locked ...well, he would take one problem at a time.
In fact, the back door to the auditorium was standing open when he got there, with a sixty-something man leaning next to it, in shirt and tie, smoking a cigarette.
"My gracious, brother," said the old man, smiling at Leon's approach, "you look a-"
Leon snapped his neck and flung him into the garbage bin some twenty feet down the alleyway. The man was gone in seconds, and no one had been there to see where he went.
"Now," Leon told the bitch, "we going have some fun tonight!"
THERE IS a GOOD DEAL more to saving souls than many people realized. Most thought it boiled down to a rousing hellfire sermon followed by an altar call, and then the sheep came forward to surrender. That was part of it, all right, but Reverend Rockwell had learned his trade from masters of their craft, the planning and the details that went into it.
Making salvation pay.
There were a million different things to think about, from the selection of a meeting place to lighting, sound effects, emergency precautions, all the rules imposed by zoning boards and fire inspectors.
Once you had picked the place, there was a whole new list of details to arrange, from musical selections to the proper shills, if you were healing for the cameras. It wouldn't do to hire some yokel who would make it look too easy-or, conversely, one so drunk that he was unable to leap up from his wheelchair and begin to dance on cue.
Most critical of all, however, any preacher worth his salt planned for passing the collection plate-or bucket, as the case may be. The Reverend Rockwell preferred a shiny metal pail to the traditional collection plate for two good reasons. First, it held more cash, its very size encouraging his faithful audience to dig deep and give until the bucket didn't seem so empty anymore. And second, since the pail was made of metal and produced a ringing clang when coins were dropped inside, the first couple dozen contributors were encouraged to give folding money, thus sparing themselves the embarrassment of looking-or sounding-like cheapskates. That got the ball rolling each time, and those who saw a wad of greenbacks in the bucket when it came to them were more inclined to give in kind.
Psychology was a marvelous gift from God.
So far this evening, everything had gone like clockwork. Music for the first half hour, from a cheap piano and a choir donated-naturally-by the pastor of the Ninth Street Free Will Apostolic Church. They weren't half-bad, at that: more like three-quarters, with a couple of alleged sopranos in the ranks who couldn't hit high C if they were using antiaircraft guns.
Oh, well, Rockwell told himself, it wasn't quality that counted so much in revival meetings as the quantity. More people meant more money, and more souls to trail the first few shills when Rockwell made his special altar call. Same thing at healing ceremonies, only more of them were apt to be in wheelchairs, pushing walkers, maybe hobbling down the aisle like Quasimodo. Reverend Rockwell would "heal" them all, with just a prayer and a light touch. Next night, same thing, his press gang making sure that no one hired the same street people two nights in a
row.
Show business was a gas.
This night, the well-oiled, finely tuned machine was running like a Swiss watch. The choir had done its thing and shuffled off the stage, immediately followed by Rockwell's sidekick, Jerry Pratt. Jerry could milk an audience of cash the way an expert snake handler milked vipers. Only Rockwell himself was better at it, which explained why he took personal charge of the untraditional second collection, made concurrently with his dramatic altar call.
Reverend Rockwell was pleased with the crowd, noting that the auditorium was SRO, with only a handful of the spectators in costume, and all of those except a giant Tweety Bird had doffed their headgear in a gesture of respect. Rockwell made no effort to convince himself that he had won them over yet; in truth, he didn't even care. The whole point of his Mission Mardi Gras was getting on the tube, grabbing some airtime that that hell-bound sinner Elmo Breen could not begin to emulate. A few months down the road, when individuals were lined up at the polls and they began to think about what really mattered-family values, sacred principles, the right to life-they would remember Reverend Rockwell as Christ's own candidate.
This night, in keeping with the holiday, he had a hellfire message for the crowd, straight out of the Book of Revelation, strong enough to make the diehard drunkards in the audience take notice.
"The final days are coming!" he proclaimed, his bull voice amplified by the acoustics and sound system of the auditorium. Without missing a beat, he shifted to scripture, leaving the faithful to decide which words were his and which were God's.
"'Before the throne,'" cried Reverend Rockwell, "'there was a sea of glass like unto crystal, and in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four beasts full of eyes before and behind.'"
There was a stirring in the audience, a couple of the women gasping, while a tall man pointed toward the stage. Rockwell wasn't used to that particular reaction, but he made the most of it, leaning forward with his full weight on the podium, shouting directly at those brothers and sisters in the front row.
"'And the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast was like a calf,'" he bellowed, "'and and the third beast had a face like a man, and-'"
Christ, the whole front row was screaming now, some of them bolting from their seats and making for the nearest aisle. Distracted, Reverend Rockwell wheeled to his left, faced toward the wings and saw a most ungodly apparition rushing toward him, long legs eating up the stage.
He wouldn't have described the face as like a man's exactly, even though the thing was wearing overalls and boots. It struck him more as something from a nightmare, spawned by too much pepperoni on his late-night pizza, but Rockwell knew that he wasn't hallucinating. Not if everybody in the audience could see it, too.
Without a weapon close at hand, nowhere to run, Rockwell did the only thing that he could think of, lifting up his Bible in both hands and holding it in front of him to ward off the monster. No one was more surprised than Reverend Rockwell when one long, shaggy arm reached out and swept the book aside, immediately followed by a shoulder slamming square into his chest.
The words that poured from Reverend Rockwell's lips as he began to plummet off the stage and down into the pit bore no resemblance to a prayer.
Chapter 18
Chiun was slightly amused. He was mostly annoyed. These were the worst kind of spectacles, greed cloaked as religion. For some reason, the followers of the carpenter from Galilee had an abundance of gaudy exhibitions such as this. What was most miraculous was that the worshipers came to them and enthusiastically permitted their pockets to be emptied.
But this was as good a place to meet the enemy as any other. Chiun would simply use the crowd to personal advantage when his foes arrived. Remo would probably find himself twiddling his thumbs in the restaurant and fighting the temptation to order some sort of fried cattle entree.
The entertainers on the stage went through their paces. They were all familiar to Chiun from his channel surfing. He wondered if these actors thought there was some sort of supposed secret hypnotic quality that came from referring to the carpenter as "Jay-sus-uh. "
The greed-preachers were experts when it came to flogging simpleminded viewers into a state that was equal parts ecstasy and pain. When they attained that level, crimson-faced and weeping, brandishing their pudgy hands aloft like baseball fans rehearsing a coordinated wave, the salesman at the podium had little difficulty separating them from any cash they carried. Some of them collapsed, while others hopped about and babbled gibberish, like caricatures of small children pretending to speak a foreign language.
Chiun, despite the entertainment, was instantly aware of the first two Cajun gunmen slipping into the auditorium. He left his charges with strict orders to remain exactly where they were, awaiting his return.
Three more assassins were inside the auditorium as Chiun approached the first he had seen. They kept their weapons out of sight, but it was obvious that they were armed, with awkward bulges visible beneath the jackets they would not have worn this night if they had nothing to conceal.
Chiun had no idea if they had been forewarned to watch for a Korean, but he knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that nothing in their wasted lifetimes had prepared them to confront a Master of Sinanju. He was standing at the first one's elbow by the time his adversary knew that he was being hunted in the crowd. Too late, the big man with the rubber skull mask tried to draw his weapon, dead before he reached it from a strike no human eye could follow. It was child's play for Chiun to hold him upright, although the dead man's head wobbled as they moved together through the press of worshipers who were compelled to stand against the back wall of the auditorium for lack of seats. Ahead of him, a second gunman-this one with the plastic face and dangling hair of Fabio-glanced over, saw his comrade coming, and began to drift toward him, clearly having failed to spot his targets in the crowd.
When the second gunman came within arm's reach, Chiun reached around the corpse and delivered another lightning strike. Half of Fabio's unyielding countenance imploded. Chiun was now bracing two dead men and looking for a place where he could prop them up together without setting off a stampede and a chorus of screaming.
Then he saw movement on stage, far below. The hulking, hairy man-thing he had last seen at Desire House was charging at the startled minister. As Chiun dropped his pair of corpses, the manlike demon swept away the preacher. One of the wolf-dogs ran on stage with the creature.
The audience erupted into screaming chaos as Chiun homed in on his nearest living enemy with greater speed.
LEON HAD KNOWN they would be entering a crowded room, but the marquee for Mission Mardi Gras meant nothing to him, and he had expected something in the nature of a barn dance, people milling everywhere, instead of wedged in seats and watching while a fat man paced around the stage, a microphone in one hand, black book in the other. Leon didn't know what the occasion was, nor did he give a muskrat's ass. The moment that he cleared the wings and heard the screaming start, he knew exactly what he had to do.
The fat man was first, turning to face Leon with his face contorted, shock and fear most evident among the jumbled senses flickering behind his eyes. Leon went for him in a rush, ignored the flare of pain from recent wounds as they collided, snarling triumph as the fat man tumbled backward, off the stage, to the unyielding concrete floor below.
Leon couldn't begin to guess how many people there were in the auditorium-it had to be hundreds, possibly a thousand-but he knew that every one of them was staring at him now, some of them pointing, screaming, many scrambling from their seats and making for the nearest exit in a rush. He needed time to find the three he had come looking for, but there would be no time, he realized, as panic seized the audience at large and individuals began to scramble over one another, elbowing their fellows to the side and trampling those who fell.
The bitch streaked past him, bounding off the stage without a moment's hesitation. Leon didn't know where she was going, whether she had s
potted their intended quarry. By the time he spun in that direction, tracking her, she had already disappeared into the crowd.
Goddamn it!
Someone came at Leon from the wings directly opposite, another fat man, this one with a badge pinned to his sweaty shirt. Some kind of rent-a-cop retained for the occasion, and he didn't even have a gun. The club he brandished overhead might have intimidated a normal, but Leon didn't give the stick a second thought.
He met the man halfway, his good arm reaching out, lips curled back in a snarl. The fat man blanched and tried to change his mind, but it was too late now. Before he could retreat, Leon had grabbed a handful of his shirt and jerked him forward, lunging at his triple chins with sharp, discolored teeth. The fat man's scream was drowned in gurgling crimson, and his night stick clattered on the stage, rolled toward the footlights, useless and forgotten.
Leon didn't pause to feed, but rather thrust the dead man from him after he had swallowed enough blood to quench his sudden thirst. If he was going to retrieve the moment, find his quarry in the milling, shrieking crowd, he had to get down there among them, on the main floor of the auditorium.
Each moment wasted gave his targets that much time to get away.
Without hesitating, Leon charged the footlights and leaped off into space.
MERLE BETTENCOURT KNEW something had gone wrong the moment he heard screaming from the auditorium. There was no sound of gunshots, so he had to figure that his men had not yet connected with their targets, and that meant something else had roused the audience to screaming panic in the time it took for him to cross six feet of sidewalk and approach the double doors out front.
It wasn't Jesus-screaming. It reminded Bettencourt of what you expect to hear inside a crowded theater if fire broke out.
Entering the smallish lobby of the auditorium, Bettencourt was greeted by a tide of frightened-looking people running in the opposite direction, toward the exit and the street beyond. He ducked behind a concrete pillar, braced himself, then plunged into the crowd, prepared to slug his way upstream if necessary, anything to find out what the hell was going on and what had happened to his crew.
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