Needles

by William Deverell

  “Eighty-seven American okay?” he asked. “That’s less than fifteen per cent off your dollar.”

  “Okay,” Plizit said after a little mental arithmetic. “Eighty-seven U.S.” The man paid him in large bills.

  The buyer took the ounces, threw his outfit in a wastebasket, and they left. “You the one they call the Hunkie?” he asked, smiling, just before they split up at the bottom of the stairs.

  “Not to my face,” said Plizit stonily, and walked back out through the beer parlor and onto the street, then south toward Chinatown.

  His .45 was in his pocket, with a silencer. His second task was to kill an old man and a boy. He had heard there might be a policeman on the street outside the building, but risks were part of his work, and he had to admit to himself that they added spice to one’s life.

  After the other guests departed, Foster and Deborah Cobb stayed on, drinking cognac late into the night and listening to Santorini’s new Don Giovanni.

  At two a.m. there was a telephone call, and Martha Santorini told Cobb it was for him, and that it was important.

  “It’s me,” Honcho Harrison said. “Sorry about this. I know it’s late and all, but I’ve been trying to reach you every place I could think of. We got one of the Surgeon’s punks in the cooler. Name of Laszlo Plizit. Picked him up at the Chungking Rooms. The little arsehole is in for it this time. You better get down here fast, because I’m just about to start talking to him. He pulled a good one.”

  Cobb thought his case against Dr. Au was blown.

  Saturday, the Fourth Day of March,

  at a Quarter to One O’Clock in the Morning

  There was no bull patrolling the street after all. That would make the task simpler. Plizit could see lights from second-floor windows of the Chungking Rooms, and that was a good sign, too. The old man and the kid were probably at home.

  His best bet would be just to walk into the building, knock on the door, say hello, enter, kill them, and not fart around. Maybe it would not be necessary to use a chunk at all if these people could not move very fast. He would rather just use his hands, or hit them, causing as little noise as possible. But he had a silencer.

  Before he entered the building, Plizit popped a couple of ups to make him sharp and alert. He was about to put the bottle away when he thought, what the hell, and swallowed six more for a big kick. May as well have a blast while I’m at it, he thought. Then he went through the doorway and up a flight of stairs. The stairs turned at a landing, half-way up, and he paused there, the speed starting to buzz him fast. He stepped carefully the rest of the way up, avoiding a creaky-looking step, and at the top he peeked down the corridor.

  He saw a cop.

  The uppers were popping and bubbling in his stomach now.

  Holy Jesus, he thought — the heat! What a bitch.

  The man was sitting on a hard wooden chair, reading a pocket book and kind of rubbing himself. His holster was clipped closed.

  The ups were hitting him harder, jangling him. His plans for an easy hit were screwed. But this was what he got paid for. He knew he had to do the number, or deal with Dr. Au over it, and that could be even more dangerous.

  He had never iced a pig before.

  So. Think. Organize.

  But suddenly the gears were spinning too fast, and his body was beginning to jerk and jump, adrenaline and amphetamine pouring explosively through his arteries.

  Whoa, he thought. Slow down! Stop shaking!

  Okay. Go up smiling and pop him close.

  No, no. The silencer. Hit him while he’s reading the book. Yeah, the silencer.

  He fixed it to the gun.

  Stop shaking, stop shaking. One clean shot, Laszlo. Please, God make it a good one. Please, God, make it just one good one.

  His heart was thundering in his ears.

  One shot. The bullets were blunted.

  Please, God, don’t let him get on me his gun.

  He leaned forward. The cop was twenty feet away, still reading. Plizit held the gun in both hands to steady his fire.

  Then he froze.

  From behind him, coming up the stairwell, came the sound of drunken song — a dissonant choir it sounded to his erupting senses. In reality there were only two voices. He heard their steps now, moving up toward the landing mid-way between the floors.

  The whites were giving him a full rush now. His mind raced and went nowhere.

  “‘My bonnie lies over the ocean,’” the voices sang. “‘My bonnie lies over the sea . . .’” Then they were at the landing below him, staring at him, bleary and swollen with beer and wine.

  “Who the hell?” Billy Sam asked, clutching a half-filled bottle of André’s Cold Duck.

  Millie Redfeather giggled. “Jus’ in time for party,” she cried. “Billy, give the man a drink. Have a party . . .”

  Something snapped in Plizit, and he became unfrozen. He wheeled at them and fired, the bullet discharging with a soft thunk through the silencer, exploding the bottle of Cold Duck and sending a wash of wine against the wall.

  Sam opened his eyes in disbelief, then charged, rushing up the steps, gripping the neck of the broken bottle like a dagger. Plizit moved sluggishly, as if in a dream, and when his right index finger found the strength to pull the trigger again, Sam was close enough to jar his arm. This bullet ripped a slab of plaster from the wall, leaving laths exposed.

  Redfeather stood at the landing seven steps below them, her fingers pressed to her mouth. She was shrieking.

  At the top of the staircase, with an erection, was Constable Moeller. He did not see the gun in Plizit’s hand, because that hand was pinned beneath him. What the constable saw was a small man — Plizit — lying ungainly athwart the steps and heading down them on his ass, at the same time kicking a leg high into the air to fend of a bigger man — Billy Sam — who was bringing the cutting edges of the bottle down upon the smaller man’s face, a grey rictus of fear.

  The constable knew what he had to do. His training had been specific on the point. When a life is in danger, you do not fire in the air or in the ground. You do not try to disable or wound. Shooting at a man’s gun is Hollywood stuff, and only John Wayne did it well.

  You take your best aim at the most obvious vital target, and pump.

  Moeller already had his revolver unholstered, and it was in his right hand, pointed down at a forty-five-degree angle, in line with the point which Billy Sam’s forehead would reach in exactly one-quarter of a second, assuming the head’s continued downward movement.

  His left hand still clutched Teen-Aged Nymphos, his middle finger stuck between the pages to mark the point at which he had been interrupted.

  As he pulled the trigger, his cock went limp.

  The first bullet entered two centimetres above Billy Sam’s right eye. The second went dead through the cornea, anterior chamber, and pupil of that right eye. The third shattered the cheekbone two centimetres below. The fourth went through the right cheek and exited through the back of the neck. The fifth caught the edge of the jawbone and ricocheted to the inside, splintering Billy Sam’s face, causing flesh, teeth, and bone to explode outwards. As each bullet struck, Sam jerked back several inches until finally his corpse tripped backwards down the steps, moving like a headless chicken, slammed against the wall at the landing, and sagged slowly into its own puddle of blood.

  Screaming and whooping, Millie Redfeather thundered like a moose up the stairs and piled on Moeller, a tackle atop a straying quarterback, her face livid with hatred — her weight, her breath, and his terror combining to render him helpless.

  Plizit rolled over, freeing his gun arm and bringing the .45 to bear upon the two people wrestling at the top of the stairs.

  Moeller caught a glimpse of the gun, and with strength born of panic he rolled, getting on top of Redfeather, whose nails clawed gouges of flesh from his
cheeks and neck.

  Plizit’s hand was wildly shaking and jumping when he fired and struck Moeller’s left shoulder. Moeller shot without aiming, the bullet skewering the floor boards harmlessly.

  He was still pumping, the empty chambers clicking hollowly, when Plizit pulled his trigger again, the bullet cutting through Moeller’s neck and severing the carotid artery.

  By this time Selwyn Loo, his eyes looming large behind the thickness of his spectacles, was peering through an open three inches of doorway in Suite B, watching Millie Redfeather scrambling from beneath Moeller’s lifeless form.

  The muscles and tendons of Plizit’s knees were the consistency of Play Dough, and as he turned to descend the stairs they bent in different directions, and he stumbled down a step or two, momentarily regaining his balance on the landing. When he stepped on the pool that had drained from Billy Sam, his foot slid out from under him, and he landed hard on his back, his gun flying from his hand and spinning like a top on the between-floors landing. He started to crawl towards it, then stopped when his working eye made sense of a form at the bottom of the stairs.

  It was Police Constable 203 Terry Patrick. The policeman’s mouth was wide in wonderment, and his .38-calibre police special was in his hand.

  The interview room in the homicide offices was small, spare, and cold. About ten feet square, it contained only a table and three hard chairs. Its entrance was a door with a small window. A naked bulb was set into the ceiling. Two of the chairs were now occupied, Laszlo Plizit sitting between the table and the wall, and Detective Lars Nordquist sitting across from him. Detective J.O. Harrison was leaning back against the door, his arms folded, his features grim.

  Harrison had told himself to keep his cool.

  Lars Nordquist, Harrison’s partner, would be asking most of the questions. He would be calm and polite.

  Plizit’s eyes were red, and stared fixedly in different directions. His pupils were large because of the speed. He was jerking nervously.

  “Now, we just want you to relax, Laszlo,” Nordquist began. “No one’s going to get difficult with you here. We just want to find out a few things, what happened in that building, what you were doing there, that sort of thing. Now, there’s a tape recorder here, and we’re going to leave it on, because I always like to have a complete and accurate record of what’s said, so there can be no questions if this goes to court.” His voice sounded flat in the small room.

  “Give him the warning,” said Harrison.

  “Now, Laszlo,” Nordquist said, “it’s my duty to caution you that you need not say anything, but that anything you do or say may later be used in evidence. Do you understand?”

  “Yeah,” Plizit muttered.

  “Could you just relate to us what was happening in that rooming house?” Nordquist said. “I mean, how you came to be there, et cetera.”

  “All right, here it is,” Plizit said. “I am not doing nothing. Like I am in the wrong building. I came to visit friends, and I am in the wrong building, do you see?”

  “Yes, the wrong building,” said Nordquist, nodding. “Who were these friends? They lived down there someplace, I guess?”

  Plizit’s eyes were blinking rapidly. “Well, like only once before I meet them. John and Peter or something. We meet in beer parlor, and we get to talking, you see, and they ask me up, and I am in that part of town, and I go, do you see?”

  “Yes, I see,” said Nordquist. “And what address did they give you?”

  “It’s down someplace on Pender in that street. Someplace I have written note, maybe, I don’t know. They describe the building, you see, and I am accidentally in the building where all the trouble is happening.”

  “Yes, two men got shot up there, Laszlo,” Nordquist said. “I guess you know they’re dead — an Indian fellow and a policeman. Now, I want you to tell me how that happened.”

  “I don’t know really for sure, you see,” said Plizit. His forehead was creased in concentration. His gaze was locked on the spool of virgin tape, smoothly unwinding. “Everything is mixed up. You guys think I do that? Like, I mean, shoot a police for no reason?”

  “Well, Laszlo, we’ll be honest with you,” Nordquist said. “We’ve got nothing to hide, and I hope you’ll treat us the same way. We’ll be fair to you, and you be fair to us, okay?”

  “Yeah, well . . . ?”

  “Well, I guess you know about the gun that was found there. It’s got your fingerprints on it, so I guess that bears some explanation, Laszlo.”

  Plizit sighed. “Yes, okay, I will be honest, like you say. So here’s what happens. These guys, we get to talking in the beer parlor, you see, and so they want to buy a gun, and, uh, a silencer, and they have the bread. And I do not kid with you guys, because you have my record, and you know I deal a few pieces in my time, and I have this gun and will deliver it to these guys, do you see?”

  “For how much?” said Harrison.

  “Oh, three, four hundreds, just a little so’s I get by from day to day, ’cause I ain’t now working.”

  “You’re broke, huh?” said Harrison.

  “Well,” said Plizit, attempting a smile, “there isn’t too many jobs.”

  “Horsecock,” said Harrison. He looked at Nordquist. “He was carrying nearly nine grand in U.S. dollars. Big bills, Plizit. Tell us how poor you are.”

  “Now, let’s take it easy here,” said Nordquist. “You want some coffee or something, Laszlo? I’m sure Detective Harrison will be happy to get us some coffee. I’d sure like a little myself. I’m in a bit of an overtime situation here.” He chuckled.

  Harrison left the room.

  Nordquist smiled reassuringly at the Hungarian. “Now, Laszlo, I wanted Detective Harrison to take a bit of a breather because he’s pretty upset about what happened at the Chungking Rooms. Maybe while he’s out you can take this chance to level with me, because I don’t think you’ve been telling me the whole truth here.”

  “I do my best, but I ain’t had too much sleep. I am here as a circumstantial victim, do you see?”

  “So now tell me about how those men got killed. We’re just going to try to talk straight-forward like two men.”

  “It was an accident, you see.” Plizit cleared his throat. “This guy is drunk Indian, and he smash his wine bottle and come at me, and there is shooting all around me all sudden, and I think there is his friend with gun, and I shoot blind. I don’t mean to shoot, but actually this Indian’s arm juggled me, and I guess I just hit this cop, this police.”

  Nordquist frowned. “Well, now, Laszlo, I’m a little disappointed here, because we have a statement from Miss Redfeather, and I want to be fair to you. She says you just turned around and shot at them from about eight feet away as they were coming up the stairs, and there was some kind of struggle, and you shot the policeman as he was lying on top of her. That’s what she says, anyway.”

  “This old squaw is so piss she don’t see nothing but a blur. . . . You guys don’t hang no murder on me on some lies of some old drunken Indian.”

  “We did a breathalyzer on her, just like we did for you, Laszlo. She had a little bit, yes. How much did you have?”

  “A lot, you know? Is why everything is fuzzy, you see.”

  Harrison returned and, glowering at Plizit, put a coffee in front of him.

  “Well, your reading didn’t seem to be that high,” Nordquist continued. “We show you here as a point-oh-five. That’s not too bad. Just a few beers will get you that.”

  Harrison snorted. “Didn’t affect his aim any.”

  Nordquist shrugged. “Says it was accidental, J.O.”

  Plizit nodded eagerly. “It just sorts of just goes off, you know?”

  Harrison bore down on the prisoner and slammed a hand on the table. “‘It just sorts of just goes off?’ You’re holding a gun, pointing it at the man’s head, and ‘it just sorts
of just goes off?’ Listen, Plizit, we’re not running no Sesame Street rehearsal here. Aw, Christ!”

  “Now, let’s just ease off here a bit,” said Nordquist, holding up a cautionary hand. “Let’s get back to the money. Now, where did that come from?”

  Plizit scratched his head. “You guys is getting me so mixed up is hard to think back. Let’s see. Actually, a guy gave . . . no . . . no, I sell some other guns . . . let’s see . . . I am. . . . You know, I am asking here to make another phone call to my lawyer.”

  Nordquist looked at Harrison, who shrugged.

  “You know we’ve been trying, Laszlo,” Nordquist said. “We’ve left a message for Mr. Pomeroy, but I guess his answering service screens his calls at night. He needs his sleep like everyone else, you know.”

  “Let’s talk about the money,” Harrison said.

  “I sooner not talk right now about that.”

  “Eight-seven hundred U.S.,” Harrison said. “That’s over ten thousand Canadian, today’s rates. The going rate for a hit is five G’s, right? Two for ten. Why don’t you cut out all this horsecock and lay it out for us, and we can all go home and get some rest.”

  “I want here to see my lawyer.”

  Nordquist persisted: “I think you know Dr. Au P’ang Wei.”

  “Don’t believe I have the pleasure.”

  “I’m getting tired of this, Lars,” Harrison said.

  Nordquist sighed. “Look, Laszlo, I don’t think you’re doing your part. I think you’re trying, but you’re a little scared, right? I know — we’re cops, and it’s a kind of scary situation here, and to be honest, I think you’re being used here, and I think you know it. I mean, you’re looking at twenty-five years, no parole, and here’s Dr. Au sitting around his swimming pool laughing. If I were you, I’d want to make sure the man behind this whole thing paid for his share, and maybe — you know I can’t make any promises — but maybe the court will see you as the innocent victim of a man with a lot of power over you, specially if you help us out —”