"I don't know, sir, but . . . well, Dutch killed one eight years ago, and nothing came of it."
"Dutch killed one that as far as we can determine came to Earth all by its lonesome," Philips said. "Dutch killed one that proceeded to blow up about a square mile of jungle while it was dying. Any of the others that might have been around, or that came to check on their buddy, must have thought Dutch was caught in the explosion and killed-hell, he damn near was. Or maybe they figured their buddy tripped over his own feet and broke his neck, maybe they didn't know who killed him."
"But then why would . . ."
"Why would they be after Schaefer? Okay, they figured out something somehow, and they came to get the mad-dog human that was able to notch one of their people, and they got it a bit wrong and went after his brother instead. Fine. Think that through, Perkins-they knew who did it, out of five billion humans on this planet, even though they didn't see what happened, and they were able to find a close approximation of the right one. Think about the kind of technological sophistication that implies.
"And this time, judging by the radar reports, they didn't just send one lone hunter out for a good time; they sent a whole goddamn fleet."
"Are you beginning to see my point?"
"I'm not sure, sir."
"Well, think about it. Think about what happens if we help Schaefer defend himself. They'd know it. I don't know how, but if they could find Schaefer, then they must have ways of finding these things out that we can't imagine. To them Schaefer's a murderer, a man-eating tiger loose in the game park. We know he's the wrong man, but how could we convince them of that? They can't be bothered to talk to us-we've seen that: They treat us like animals, they hunt us for sport, but if we start organizing against them, then we start to look these things aren't even human; how could they have guessed?"
"Who knows? Maybe they read minds, Perkins; and there's no question those bastards are smart, probably smarter than we are. Does it really matter?"
Again Perkins didn't answer.
"Get me a plane, son," Philips said, turning away from the window. "It'll take a while for Schaefer to get himself outfitted and find the right place-even if Dutch told him where it is, it's the ass end of nowhere."
"But if Schaefer's as good as dead, sir, what can you do for him . . . ?"
"I can pick up the body and make sure he gets a decent burial," Philips snapped. "It's the least I can do for Dutch's brother." dangerous, maybe too dangerous. They'd wipe us out."
Perkins considered this unhappily.
"I'm not sure about this, sir; seems to me you're making a lot of assumptions-"
"Damn right I am," Philips agreed. "I know it. But it hangs together, it works-and are you willing to bet the whole goddamn planet that I'm wrong?"
Perkins didn't answer that. He stood silently as Philips got to his feet and walked over to the window, to take a look out at the city.
"You know," Philips said thoughtfully as he looked down at the taxis and pedestrians on the avenue below, "I think I might want to supervise operations down there myself just to make sure nothing gets out of hand. After all, it doesn't look as if the aliens are doing anything more here in New York. Maybe the attacks here were just meant to lure Schaefer to the jungle, so they could execute him on the same spot that Dutch killed the other one."
"Why would they want to do that?"
"A sense of what's fitting, son. Make the criminal return to the scene of the crime."
"But how could they know Schaefer would react this way?" Perkins asked.
"They think he's his brother," Philips answered impatiently. "They think he knows what they are, and they think he's smart enough to recognize what's been killing those people, and to go back to where he fought one before."
"But I still don't see . . . I mean, General, I wouldn't have expected Schaefer to do that."
* * *
15
Rafe T G. Mako strutted the empty streets feeling good. He was packing serious heat, he had a good buzz on from sampling the latest shipment, he had a hot new bitch waiting for him-all was right with the world.
He looked up, smiling.
The sky was still thick with smog and summer heat, but Rafe didn't really give a fuck about the weather, he felt too good to let that worry him.
The buildings seemed to dance against the dirty sky -as he walked, a combination of his footsteps and something in the drugs playing with his mind, and he loved it. The whole damn city danced to his tune, all right. Word was out on the street that Lamb was dead and Carr had lost some of his best boys, and that meant there were opportunities to be had, room to move up, and Rafe intended to find himself some space at the top, somewhere he could rake in the big money, get himself a place to live that looked like a goddamn Hollywood movie set, take his women two at a time.
Something flickered overhead, leaping from one building to the next, and Rafe blinked. His steps slowed.
Wasn't anything up there, man, but he thought he'd seen something ....
Just a bit of hot air, he told himself, or a fart from some car's exhaust, playing tricks with his eyes in the heat. He strolled on, but just to reassure himself, just to scare off any fools might be on the roof planning something, he pulled out the Uzi he'd scored, pulled it out and checked to make sure it was loaded, and held it out pointed at the sky while he looked along the rooftops.
Heat shimmered along the sunlit parapets, in one spot in particular, and Rafe stared at it.
He could see through it, no question-he could see the chimney behind it.
So it wasn't really there. Unless the stuff he'd taken was giving him goddamn X-ray vision, that shape was nothin', just a trick of the light, a side effect of the drug.
But, hey, real or not, he didn't need to let it bother him. He fired a burst, three rounds, and sure enough, the shimmer was gone.
Rafe smiled.
Wasn't anything gonna mess with him, man!
Something thumped on the sidewalk behind him, and he turned, startled.
Wasn't anything there-but the air was shimmering, just a few feet away. He looked to see if there was a grating or vent or something where hot air might be coming up, but it was over solid sidewalk.
"Shit," he said.
This had to be the drug, messing with his head. This wasn't good, he didn't like this-they must've cut it with something weird, those bastards who sold him the stuff.
Then the shimmer moved, and something slashed across his chest, something he couldn't see, and he looked down at the twin red slits in his microfiber shirt, red on the blue fabric, and it sank in that that red was coming out of him, it was blood, something had cut him. The pain couldn't penetrate the haze of drugs, but he was cut, he could see it and feel it.
He swung the Uzi and sprayed the street with bullets but didn't hit anything, and he was scared now, there wasn't anything there, so what had cut him?
He turned, looking for his attacker, and a pair of blades plunged into his back, one on either side of his spine.
He flexed once, horribly, and. the Uzi flew from his hand to land rattling on the sidewalk; then he slumped and hung limply from an invisible claw.
The blades slashed upward, cutting through ribs.
A few moments later a boy turned the corner and spotted the shape lying on the sidewalk in a puddle of something red.
A drunk lying in spilled wine?
Wine wasn't that red.
Paint, maybe?
He edged closer.
"Oh, shit," he said.
It wasn't a drunk.
Drunks have heads; this guy didn't. Something had ripped his head right off.
The boy inched away, then noticed something else lying nearby.
"Awesome!" he said as he snatched up the Uzi.
He looked both ways; no one had seen him, unless it was some nosy old woman looking out a window somewhere.
This was a fine weapon here-should be worth a hundred bucks or more!
He took the gu
n and ran.
Five minutes after that a woman found the body and ran screaming into the deli in the next block; the man behind the counter called the cops.
When the body had been loaded into the meat wagon, Officer Brownlow glanced at his partner.
"Think this is one for the feds?" he asked.
Ortiz looked up from his notepad. "What, the feds?" he said. "What for?"
"You know, that special bunch with the notices," Brownlow said. "They said they wanted to know about any really bizarre killings."
"They said bodies hung upside down, and people skinned, and like that," Ortiz said. "They said people with guns. You see any guns here?"
"Some shell casings back there."
"So someone dropped 'em-I don't see no guns. Nobody got skinned or nothin'."
"Got his head pulled off."
"You call that bizarre? Come on, they turn a guy inside out, maybe I'd call it bizarre. Those feds, man, they're too busy for us to bother 'em with every little detail. Too fuckin' busy with our own god damn shootin' range they sealed off, too goddamn busy pokin' their noses into our business. No, man, I don't want to tell 'em about this one, any more than Lieutenant Thomas told 'em about the two last night!"
Brownlow nodded.
"Just making sure we understood each other," he said, tucking his own notebook away.
And at Kennedy International, General Philips told his aide, "It's just Schaefer they're after, otherwise there'd have been more killings by now"
And later that night, when Philips's plane was somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico, word reached Carr that someone had taken down Mako and kept his head for a souvenir.
"Shit," he said. It took an effort not to blow away the smirking son of a bitch who'd brought the news, but Carr resisted the temptation.
Besides, it wasn't as much fun with this wussy .38 he was carrying-he'd lost his .357 back on Beekman Street, and he was still royally pissed about that, too. He'd get another, but he hadn't got around to it yet, he'd been busy with more important shit.
Like these killings. T G. Mako wasn't the first. He wasn't even the second.
Carr had been thinking Mako might take over Edgie's old post, and now Mako was just as dead as Edgie.
"Shit," Carr said again.
Someone was out there cutting down the baddest dudes around-except for Carr himself, of course, who'd been missed in that first big throwdown.
Word on the street said that whoever it was had hit a bunch of cops, too, so it wasn't the feds or the cops deciding to screw the rules and get serious, the self-proclaimed good guys wouldn't play that rough, not even if every cop who'd gone down turned out to be on the take.
But it might be some bunch of rogue cops out on their own. It might be that son of a bitch Schaefer and some of his buddies. He was crazy enough to try something like this, Carr thought.
He'd denied it, but that didn't mean shit.
After that first massacre Carr had figured it was a onetime thing, something meant to scare the crap out of him, put the fear of God out on the streets, and he'd gone back home and tried to get back to business as usual, tried to put together the leadership he needed to run the whole goddamn show now that that wimp Lamb was meat on a slab. He'd wanted to make sure none of the survivors in Lambikins's bunch got ideas about picking up where Lamb left off-they were his boys now, he didn't need fresh competition.
But then someone had iced Tony Blue, ripped his head off in a loft on St. Mark's.
And someone got Q.Q. at his woman's place on Avenue B, and his head was gone, too.
And there were people saying it was Carr's boys finishing off Lamb's gang, and others who said one of Lamb's punks was trying to show how tough he was.
That didn't explain the first massacre or the reports of dead cops, though.
Carr didn't know who the hell it was, or why, but he knew one thing.
He had to stop it.
He wasn't going to be able to do any normal business, wasn't going to get things straightened out, until it stopped.
So he stopped worrying about business. He started lining up muscle.
Sooner or later the killers were going to screw up, and Carr would find out who they were. When that happened, he intended to come down on them hard, take them all out in one big hit.
To do that, he needed the baddest men in the city-not just his own people, not a regular gang, but muscle he could call on once; for this one job. He needed to have them standing by, ready to move on a moment's notice. He started compiling a list of phone numbers-his own boys, the toughest of Lamb's survivors, uptown muscle who didn't mind a little freelance work, hard-core muscle from out on the Island, serious bad news from all five boroughs. .
Maybe it was Schaefer, maybe it was the Colombians, maybe it was someone else; Carr didn't care.
When he found out who it was, he'd be ready.
* * *
16
The town, such as it was, was called Riosucio.
It had taken Schaefer some time to get there.
On the flight from New York to Panama City he had worked out a course of action, from what he remembered of what Dutch had said and his own knowledge of how the drug trade operated in Central America; he couldn't be sure there was any connection between Dutch and the drug-runners, but it was the way he was betting it, at least for the moment.
First stop had been an old friend from Special Forces who'd got himself a job in the DEA; Schaefer had stayed in touch, since it's always useful for a cop working narco to have contacts in the DEA. That was a good way to pick up information that he might miss otherwise.
It wasn't information Schaefer was after this time, though. It was weapons.
He'd seen that thing in the tenement; he'd felt its fist. He'd heard Dutch talk about how unstoppable his theoretical superhunter would be, and Schaefer didn't doubt that the killer he was up against was the same one.
He wasn't about to tackle it bare-handed. He wasn't even planning to take it on with ordinary armaments if he could help it. He wanted something with real stopping power, something that would take down anything he ran up against, including an eight-foot monster.
A Vulcan Gatling gun would have been about right, Schaefer thought, but Hanson, his friend at the DEA, couldn't get him one on short notice.
He did all right, though, and not just with weapons, Hanson was able to get Schaefer enough cash, both dollars and the local stuff, to cover whatever other expenses might come up.
Of course, he'd put it all on Schaefer's credit cards, but Schaefer had no complaints, about the money or the ordnance. He owed Hanson a big favor now.
Once he was armed, he had to figure out where to go and how to get there.
He was doing all this because he wanted to know more about what he was up against. Dutch had fought it somewhere and had gotten away alive. He'd lost all his men, and maybe the son of a bitch had caught him later, maybe Dutch had been skinned and hung upside down somewhere eventually, but he had gotten out alive once.
Maybe he'd. left some clues about how he'd managed it. Maybe they were still there, even after eight years, and maybe Schaefer could learn enough from them to ensure that he'd survive, too-and maybe even take the bastard down once and for all.
First, though, Schaefer had to find where it had all gone down.
Dutch hadn't given him a map, but he'd talked about his rescue mission, and Schaefer could remember damn near every word. Dutch had talked about coptering in over the Pacific, then going up over a ridge and across a border, then heading northeast down a valley to make pickup.
Schaefer had put that together with whatever other information he could come up with, had bought himself a ride north out of Panama, and had followed his conclusions as far as he could, into the back country, to where the roads ended and there was only jungle-and that had eventually brought him to Riosucio, where his last ride had refused to go any further no matter what Schaefer paid.
Schaefer had shrugged and put out word of
what he wanted through all the local channels. He'd settled in and made a table in the local saloon his headquarters.
It had all taken time, time when that thing might be killing innocent people back in New York, but Schaefer had to live with that-he didn't see any other way to get at the thing, and besides, it gave him time to heal up. He didn't much care to go into the rematch with his ribs still aching or his jaw still sore.
Riosucio was little more than a clearing in the jungle where a dozen huts, built in the traditional palapa style, were gathered. The polite liberals back in the Big Apple could call the green hell a rain forest if they wanted, but as far as Schaefer was concerned, and as far as the locals were concerned, it was jungle, sweltering hot and thoroughly hostile, and it was all around.
The saloon where Schaefer made himself at home was the showplace of Riosucio; it had a floor of smooth black dirt with good drainage and nothing growing on it, and the roof was tin over planking, rather than thatch. It didn't leak enough to water the drinks, which Schaefer considered a plus, since the bartender watered them enough to begin with. The windows had shutters, but no glass which didn't really matter, since the screen door had holes big enough to let in buzzards, and even the biggest of the mutant mosquitoes in the jungle outside could fit through if they tried.
There were no ceiling fans, no electric lights, and the idea of air-conditioning was the wildest of fantasies here; the air felt as hot and thick as soup, and the inside of the saloon was no different in that regard from the jungle outside. The lessened air circulation was roughly balanced by the greatly reduced sunlight.
Far more important than any of this, from Schaefer's point of view, was the fact that Riosucio was built at the foot of the ridge that marked the border between this particular stretch of malarial rain forest claiming to be a nation, and the next, equally backward chunk of jungle.
As the real-estate folks said, location, location, location. Riosucio might not have much, but as far as Schaefer was concerned, it had the right location.
Dutch had gone over that ridge, Schaefer was sure. Dutch had said that his rescue mission was hush-hush stuff because of the risk of starting a war, and at the time, this particular pair of banana republics had been closest to escalating their perpetual disagreements and border incidents into something bloodier and more formal.
Watt-Evans, Lawrence - Predator 01 Page 10
