by Al Ewing
Monk wasn't so sure. He'd just forced his way in and left no sign of it. Easy enough with hands like his.
They were strong, and they were sensitive. Even under that thick layer of callus, they knew weight, and give, and push. They knew how to open a door with a cotter pin and make it look as though you'd used a key, even to the smartest cop in the world - which the ones who'd checked this place over weren't, not by a long stretch. And more. He knew, instinctively - and it was the smallest twinge in the middle of his gut and on the edges of his subconscious but by God, he knew - he hadn't been the first to force that lock.
So the police had it wrong. Donner didn't know his killer. Didn't even know his killer was there until the sword was in his back.
Monk considered it, weighted it in his mind for truth, then continued along the mental path. Donner hadn't gone to the window after letting his killer in. He was already standing, looking out on the city, when the killer had let himself in silently, padded across the carpet, and stabbed Donner in the back. No mercy. Not even an explanation. Just the kill.
That was the how.
He ran his fingers over his sloped brow, as if coaxing the thoughts into life, a physical tic from his childhood. He had the why, too. If Doc was right - and Doc was always right - Donner was the leader of Untergang, and that was why enough for a hell of a lot of people. So, five out of six. One to go.
Put the why together with the how, the silent entry, the quiet, instant kill... secret service? Or the Special Tactical Espionage And Manouvres unit? But no, they wouldn't let it reach the papers. And Doc would have been told. Him and President Bartlet had been the best of pals ever since that brain transplant stunt Lars Lomax tried.
Someone else? No love lost between Untergang and N.I.G.H.T.M.A.R.E. - but they weren't about to go to war, either. Besides, N.I.G.H.T.M.A.R.E. was finished. After what Doc had done to them in Milan, they didn't have the manpower to go after a stray dog, never mind a top-flight bad guy. And E.R.A.M.T.H.G.I.N. was just a joke taking itself a little too seriously. It didn't have the chops for this.
Someone new, then.
Monk needed more information. He frowned, took another quick look around the room, then padded across to the bedroom, reaching behind him as he went, unconsciously mussing the pile with his fingers, making sure he left no tracks. An old habit.
In the bedroom, he let those fingers - rough and gentle, club-like and dexterous - tease lightly over the fabric of the bed, while the eyes under the ridged, furrowed brow of his ape-like face scanned every passing detail.
The lamp beside the bed; gold, with a German eagle motif. Monk wouldn't have been surprised to see a swastika there too, but that would've given the game away.
A little rectangle on the bedside, where the dust wasn't so thick. Something had lain there for a while, by the side of his bed. It wasn't there now.
A dent in the wall, like a crescent moon.
The sheets. Expensive. Silk? Or a blend? Either way, they were a little sweaty, a little scummy. Not quite as clean as might be expected.
He looked around, taking another look at the dust on the bedside table. Then he closed his eyes, thinking back to what he'd seen of the living room. Norman Rockwell print on the wall. An ashtray, filled with old cigarettes, a pyramid of them. Not emptied in too long. Food particles caught in the carpet - he'd stopped eating at the table.
Filthy sheets. Filthy ashtrays. He'd stopped doing a lot of things.
On a whim, Monk picked up the heavy lamp and held the circular base to the dent. It matched. A struggle?
No. He'd just thrown the damn thing at the wall.
Depression. Hits a guy that way sometimes. Things stop mattering, people stop caring. The detectives probably wouldn't have noticed. They hadn't been there.
Why hadn't he hired a maid? Because he needed to stay hidden. Stay reclusive. Nobody could know.
Why?
Monk's mind was racing now, cogs whirring in his head, switches flipping. Think, ape-man. Why can't the leader of Untergang hire a maid?
Because he wasn't the leader of Untergang any more. He wasn't anything. That stunt in Paraguay Doc had talked about - that was his last run. He might have been the big boss across the big pond, but that didn't mean he didn't have superiors back in the Fatherland. If Uncle Adolf figured he'd been compromised - out he'd go. Exiled.
Monk shook his head, frowning. No, not exile. Storage. He'd been locked away like last year's gramophone, just in case he ever came good again, in case any of the secrets in his head were ever useful to anybody. Instead, he'd been forgotten and left to rot.
So Monk was back to the why. Why now? He scratched the back of his scalp with great club-like fingers. If he only knew why, he'd know who - but then, if he knew who, he knew why. Sometimes it shook out like that.
He needed to know what it was that had been taken from the bedside table. Some kind of book?
He shook his head, then took a last look around the bedroom, hoping against hope that he'd see the damned book or framed photo or whatever it was under the bed or something. No joy.
Best thing to do now would be to head back to Doc, give him what he'd found out, let him figure the next move. One last look around the main room and -
Monk froze.
There was somebody in the main room.
A tall guy, all in black leather, with a big coat and hat. He'd cut his way in from outside, through the window, leaving a big circle of glass on the pile carpet. How the hell had he done that? They were more than forty floors up.
The tall guy bent over the bloodstain on the carpet, brushing gloved fingers over the matted fibres. Monk stilled his breathing, the gentle eyes under that ugly slope of brow narrowing. He moved forward, silent, the soles of his big bare feet falling light as snowflakes on the thick carpet. Silent as the grave.
He was wearing some kind of helmet under that hat. Or a mask.
A red mask.
Almost without thinking, Monk reached forward, those big hands moving towards the back of the tall guy's neck. This was going to have to be done carefully. He was going to have to choke this guy out without killing him.
And he had killer's hands.
He moved fast. Those big, brutal killer's hands wrapped around the tall guy's neck and squeezed - hard, hard enough to cut off air and blood, but at the same time Monk knew he had to be gentle. So, so gentle.
Too gentle, in the end.
The tall guy in the red mask twisted out of the grip and brought the butt of one pistol hard across Monk's face. It would have broken another man's jaw, and it sent him sprawling to the right, cracking his head against the wall and leaving a dent. Red Mask was up on his feet in an instant -
- Jesus, his face! -
- and Monk forced himself not to look at those eight featureless lenses, lashing out with those big feet, those ape's clubs on the end of his legs, driving them up and into the taller man's gut. The impact sent the man in the coat flying back in a short arc, landing with a crash that demolished an occasional table.
Monk spat blood, and a molar, then flipped back onto his feet, loping towards the downed man like a charging gorilla. He didn't have room to be gentle any more. He needed to finish this fast, and if that meant mashing that metal mask into the tall guy's face so he never quite looked human again, well, that was just too bad. He'd done his best, but now it was kill or be -
- the revolver in the masked man's gloved hand swung up and spat a bullet into Monk's kneecap, then another into his lung.
Monk went down like a freight train crashing, rolling over from the force of his own momentum, coming to rest next to the destroyed table. He reached, fingers trembling, a last attempt to grab hold of the masked man's coat as he scrambled upwards, but he only caught air.
Then he caught another bullet.
This time he didn't even hear the shot, just felt his head knocked sideways, saw his vision double, then triple. He felt nauseous, the pain in his ruined knee and deflated lung joined by a s
creaming cold iron spike right through the meat of his brain. He figured he must be dead.
He wasn't. The bullet had glanced off his thick skull, cracking it, and into the wall. The masked man fired another two - one in the gut, another in the chest about three inches from the first.
The last thing Monk saw was the masked man lifting the gun up and aiming it right between his eyes. Those eight lenses didn't have a shred of mercy in them. They didn't hold anything human at all.
Then it all went black.
In the blackness, he thought he saw a star explode, far away. A little supernova that took the shape of a thunderbolt for long moments while it faded. He felt something metallic in his hand, and realised he was awake and pointing that metallic something-or-other through a window at the night sky. There was a big circular hole in the window, which was a little strange. Had that been there before? Was it his window? He figured he should head up to bed, but then he remembered this wasn't the brownstone. It was some fancy apartment.
Whose apartment? Heinrich somebody.
Monk suddenly had a very clear sense that he'd missed something very, very important. Something obvious, something that could have changed the whole game, changed everything - if only he'd thought of it sooner.
He passed out before he could think what it was.
He didn't remember using the flare gun, but he must have, because he came round to find Doc shining a torch in his eyes. "Con cushion. Sirius." Something like that. Monk couldn't think straight.
He was alive, anyway. That red mask guy must have left him for dead, gone out the way he came in. He should tell the Doc.
He tried to speak, and went away again into blackness. He felt as if he were out for hours.
He came back around, and Doc was still shining the light in his eyes. No time had passed at all. Monk wondered if he was going to die.
Talk, ape-man. Ook ook.
"Duh. Drrr."
Doc put a hand on his shoulder. "Don't try to talk, Monk. I have to stop the bleeding and then I need to get you across town to the hospital. It's going to be bumpy."
Maya broke in. How long had she been there?
"You can't be serious."
Doc's voice was cold and terse. Deadly serious. Monk realised there was a good chance he was dead, and he tried to say something, tried to say what he'd found, but all he managed was to cough blood.
"Look at him!" Maya's voice held an edge of anger that Monk had only heard a few times in his life. She was furious, which meant she was scared. Which meant... talk, ape-man. Talk while you can.
"Look at him! He might die if you move him. If you try to - I can't even say it..." she drew in a breath, her emerald eyes flashing green fire. "If you try what you're planning, he'll die for certain."
"He'll die if I don't. By the time the paramedics get here and get him to the hospital, he'll have bled out. I've already done the math, Maya, there's no way to play this that won't probably kill him. But at least he's got a chance, if get him there myself. If."
Maya gripped his massive wrist, and her grip was like steel. Where there'd been fire in her eyes, there was nothing but a sea of ice.
"If you kill him, I kill you."
Doc pulled his hand away, not speaking, not looking at her, just dressing Monk's wounds with whatever he had - torn silk shirts from the wardrobe, alcohol from decanters on the sideboard. He didn't speak.
It was Monk who broke the silence. "Duh. Doc."
"I said don't try to-"
"Important." he coughed again, and spat more blood. He didn't know how much he had left. "Donner. Not... not Untergang." He flicked his eyes around the room. "All this... exile. Ret... retirement..." He breathed in, weakly, trying to get some air into the lung he had left. Why was this so difficult? He just wanted to go to sleep.
"Monk!" Doc was yelling in his face. He forced himself to spit out some more words and prayed they made some sense.
"Guy who... did this. Red mask. Red mask." Eight lenses. Black coat. He tried to say it, but his brain and his tongue seemed disconnected. The blackness seemed to be closing in on him again. He had to try. Ape-man. Talk. Say it. Eight lenses.
Talk, ape-man!
"Eyes... crazy eyes..."
That was as far as he got before his head fell away, down into a black ocean with no bottom to it.
And maybe this time he wouldn't wake up.
"Red mask. Damn it." Doc was cursing himself. He should have known. Maya's dreams didn't lie. Why hadn't he thought about it? A man in a red mask, standing over the man he killed, a man Maya cared for. Monk, of course Monk, it couldn't be anybody but Monk because Doc was all but invulnerable to anything except his own damned stupidity. And he'd sent him into the lion's den anyway. How had he been so damned careless with his best friend's life?
He shook his head, spitting out another curse under his breath. It was Donner. Always and forever, it was Donner. Even beyond the grave - especially beyond the grave - Donner had the power to blindside him, to get under his skin, to get him making mistakes. And now Monk had paid the price for one of those mistakes, and he might not make it through.
No wonder Maya was mad. She stood behind him, those green eyes burning into his back, as he gently cradled Monk in his arms, holding the immense dead weight of the man as if he was carrying a baby. He took a deep breath, stilling his mind and steadying his nerves.
And then he threw himself out of the window.
The important part was to get the landing right - every landing. If he fell from this height and he didn't take the whole impact on his leg muscles, he'd break Monk's neck and most of his other bones. Even so, it'd be a hell of a jar.
"Hold on, Monk." he breathed, almost whispering it. "Hold on, buddy."
The sidewalk rushed up to greet them both like an eager lover. Doc braced, and when his feet hit the pavement - hard enough to crack it - he bent his legs, softening the impact, then straightened them quickly enough to hurl himself over the rooftops. If he'd aimed right, he'd come down on Madison. After that, a leap to Third Avenue, and then one more would get him there. Hopefully that wouldn't be one too many.
Below him, citizens craned their necks, pointing, witnesses to the miracle of a man who could leap more than a thousand feet in one bound, carrying a human gorilla. None of those who saw - not the carriage-drivers whose horses bolted as Doc Thunder landed in front of them, shattering the tarmac and then taking off into the sky again like an eagle; not the secretaries working late in high-up, high-class advertising offices, who turned their heads at just the right moment to see a god sailing past their window with an injured ape-man in his arms; not the kids staying up late on the fire escapes and feeling them rattle with every shockwave - not a one of them would ever forget the sight. Some of them would carry a fear of Doc Thunder around with them the rest of their days, the arachnid response of those confronted with the alien, with a man who so plainly could not be a man. Others would close their eyes in hard moments and bring the memory back, to give them strength in a difficult time.
For Doc Thunder himself, it was three short leaps and nothing more, with the clockwork of his superlative mind crackling as he performed the calculations that would allow him to do it without killing his best friend. He felt no triumph as he landed for the last time in front of Saint Albert's, only a great wave of relief.
Monk was still alive.
"Get this man stabilised!" he yelled, kicking open the door hard enough to send it off one hinge, nurses and orderlies running to fetch stretchers and gurneys. "And get me Hamilton! Miles Hamilton! He still works here?"
A tall man with longish grey hair, haggard cheeks and eyes that had seen far too many sleepless nights stepped forward from the relative calm of one of the wards. He showed little emotion, even while his staff fought to fit their huge patient across two gurneys strapped together, his blood slicking the floor as they wheeled him down the corridor towards the operating theatre. Instead, his cold blue eyes looked up at Thunder's, accusingly. The
name on his badge read Dr. Miles Hamilton.
Once upon a time, Hamilton had been Doc's closest ally, his personal physician - the one man Doc had trusted with the secrets of his strange, inhuman physiognomy. He'd been a warm, uncommonly gentle man, a man who would rather die than cause bad feeling to anybody. Then there had been that final, ugly business with Lars Lomax, the most dangerous man in the world, almost three years ago. Lomax had kidnapped Hamilton and tortured him for hours in an effort to get hold of any secret that might destroy his enemy once and for all. Perhaps it was the torture breaking his mind in a way that couldn't be fixed, or perhaps Hamilton blamed Doc for allowing it to happen in the first place, but after it was all over - after Lomax had plunged to his fiery death in the Amazon rainforest - Hamilton had never been the same. The old gentleness was gone, replaced by a cold, hard demeanor, almost cruel. He snubbed old friends in the street, and even his closest colleagues at the hospital felt uneasy around him.
Doc had tried to bring him back to himself, but Hamilton had only grown colder, a new and barely-disguised hatred for Doc Thunder bubbling under the surface of his frosty attitude. Worst of all, he now bugged Doc constantly for a sample of his blood, insisting that the recuperative qualities inherent within it could revolutionise medical science, and even if it were weaponised, well, that would only allow America to spread its military might across the entire world, which could only be a good thing. Imagine an army of soldiers with Doc's powers...
This was the kind of talk that had caused the end of their friendship. Doc had stopped calling, stopped feeling anything for his old friend but sadness at the change in him. Now, Hamilton stood, looking superciliously at Monk, like a man looking at a sideshow freak, and Doc felt again the pain and anger at how far Miles had fallen from his old self.
His voice was curt but without emotion, as if he simply didn't care. "Doc, what on Earth is the meaning of this intrusion?"
Thunder shook his head. He wasn't about to get into an argument now. "There's no time, Hamilton. Trust me, I'm not exactly relishing this encounter either, but you were the closest person I could trust. I can trust you?" Even as he asked the question, he reached down to his bicep, grabbing the skin and pinching, digging in with his thumbnail. "Get a catheter."
