At Schaefer's direction Rasche got off the avenue and found a place to park on a cross street somewhere in the thirties.
"Carr," he said, "how many men can you get us? You lost Edgie and Hatcheck . . ."
"I lost more than that," Carr interrupted. "Those bastards have been taking my people down one by one for weeks. Most of my boys who aren't dead are lying low."
Schaefer stared at him.
"You said you could help us;" he said accusingly.
"That's right," Carr said. "I was figuring something big was gonna come down. Whoever was picking my people off wasn't going to keep it up forever, just getting 'em one or two at a time."
Rasche glanced at him but didn't say anything.
"Sooner or later whoever it was had to come out in the open, and I figured on being ready for 'em."
"And?" Schaefer asked.
"And I lined up some muscle-not my people, loaners and freelancers." He grinned. "Just what we need to use those toys of yours."
Schaefer nodded. "So what do you figure you'll need to get us the men we need, a week?"
Carr laughed.
"You're not listening, Schaefer-I said I wanted to be ready. Couple of hours should do it."
Schaefer looked at him silently for a moment. "No shit," he said at last.
"No shit," Carr agreed. "Gotta make some calls, but we can get this over with tonight."
"Go ahead," Schaefer said, pointing at a pay phone, "make your calls."
It was busted, of course, but they found a working one two blocks up.
"Yo," Carr said, holding the receiver, "gimme some change-I left my wallet at home." He grinned again.
"Rasche?" Schaefer asked. He was freshly back from his little vacation in Central America and hadn't had time to worry about things like money.
"How many calls you making?" Rasche asked, digging for quarters.
"A lot," Carr answered.
"Just give him your card, Rasche," Schaefer said impatiently.
Rasche frowned, then dug out his MCI card and handed it over.
Carr took it, still grinning, and began punching numbers. "Why don't you boys go somewhere else for a few minutes?" he said. "I got stuff to say that maybe you might not want to hear."
"You don't . . . ," Rasche began.
"Come on, Rasche," Schaefer said. "We'll get a bite to eat." He jerked his head toward the hole-in-the-wall diner down the block.
Reluctantly, Rasche followed.
"Goddammit, Schaef," he said as they stepped through the door, "he's gonna run up God knows how much of a bill, and I'll never get reimbursed, you know what an asshole McComb is about unauthorized expenses. That son of a bitch could be calling his mother in Hong Kong for all I know"
"Yeah," Schaefer said, "but more likely he's calling every cheap hood, dope dealer, and gangbanger on the Lower East Side, and next month you'll have an itemized bill right there in your mailbox with every one of their private numbers on it, ever think of that?" He smiled thinly. "Carr's just as stupid as he is cheap."
Rasche shut up, reluctant to admit that no, he hadn't thought of it.
They sat at the counter and ordered sandwiches and coffee, and while they ate, they brought each other up-to-date on what had happened while Schaefer was out of town. Rasche was mildly pleased to hear that Eschevera was dead; Schaefer was less pleased, but very interested, to learn about what Rasche had seen through the mask-he'd seen one ship for himself half an hour earlier but hadn't really had time to think about it.
They were just finishing when Carr came in and announced, "Let's go."
"Where?" Rasche asked.
"You just drive," Carr said. "I'll tell you."
They got the van rolling, and Rasche followed Carr's directions, arriving a few minutes later at the entrance ramp to the lower levels of a parking garage a few blocks farther up Third.
Somehow Rasche found it appropriate to be meeting Carr's friends below street level.
"Stop here," Carr said as Rasche pulled onto the ramp.
Rasche stopped. "What," he said, "we need the password or something?"
"No," Carr said. "You two wait here. I'll drive down alone; then we'll see. My people were expecting a blow-off, yeah, but against cops, not a bunch of little green men. Some of them aren't always easy to convince; you gotta give me some time to sell this."
"You've gotta be kidding!" Rasche protested. "We're carrying enough ordnance in here to start a small war-I'm not going to let you pass it out to your scumbag pals like party favors!"
Carr grinned, and Rasche wished he had the strength-and the nerve-to knock those teeth out.
"Let him go," Schaefer said as he picked up the mask and his appropriated M-16 and opened his door. "Do it his way for now, and if there're any problems, we'll kill him first."
He got out of the van.
"Wow, ultimatums," Carr said. "My little heart's palpitating in fear. Maybe when this is over, Schaefer, we can get together and see who's really king of the hill."
Schaefer grinned back at him, and Rasche reluctantly climbed out of the van.
Carr slid into the driver's seat and started the van down the ramp; Rasche and Schaefer watched him go.
"I'd like that, Carr," Schaefer said quietly. "I'd like it a lot."
Rasche sat down on the narrow curb at one side of the tunnel. He glanced down after the van but could see nothing-the entrance ramp curved. He sighed. He glanced at his watch and saw that it was half-past midnight-Carr's calls had taken well over an hour.
So here he was in the middle of the night, sitting in a parking garage, hoping to make a deal with an insane gang boss to join forces in a hopeless battle against monsters from outer space.
How the hell had it come to this?
These things from the spaceships were like something out of one of those paranoid sci-fi movies from the 1950's, killing just for the sake of killing ....
No, he corrected himself, they weren't; those monsters had had reasons. They wanted to conquer the world, or they killed people for food-they didn't kill just for fun.
These things did.
In the more recent movies the aliens were usually the good guys, come to save humanity from itself, or just paying a friendly visit.
These things obviously weren't doing that, either.
It didn't seem right, somehow.
"It's funny," he said.
Schaefer was still standing in the roadway, staring down the ramp after Carr; he didn't respond.
"It's funny," Rasche repeated. "Those things are way past us, technologically-their ships make the space shuttle look like a Matchbox toy, they've got ray guns and invisibility and God knows what else-and yet they still get off on hunting and killing things, they take trophies, they seem to love blood and pain. I wonder why. I mean, shouldn't they be more advanced than us socially, as well as technologically? Wouldn't they have outgrown all that?"
Schaefer glanced at him, then went back to staring down the tunnel.
"You think that's something you outgrow, Rasche?" he asked a moment later.
"Isn't it?"
"Maybe." Schaefer paused for a moment, then said, "Maybe they're just like us. Technology removes us from our true selves, lets us pretend we don't have to kill to eat, lets us forget we're all a bunch of killer apes. It takes us away from the beast inside. People talk about getting back to nature, and they just mean going out in the woods somewhere and treating it like a fucking garden, a bunch of birds and bunnies and flowers, and they forget that Mother Nature's a bitch, that claws and fangs and blood are natural, and gardens aren't. Nature's a jungle, not a garden."
"Well . . . ," Rasche began.
Schaefer cut him off. "Maybe those things up there don't forget what nature's like. Maybe the hunt is their way of getting back to nature, their way of keeping the beast alive, keeping that competitive edge that lets them develop their spaceships and ray guns. Maybe they need an edge-maybe they're worried about natural selection selecting them out, if
they get soft. Maybe the whole goddamn galaxy's a fucking war zone, a big bloody free-for-all, the law of the jungle on a cosmic scale, and those bastards need to stay tough to survive." He shrugged.
"Or maybe," he added after a second's pause, "they're just naturally sadistic sons of bitches."
Rasche stared up at his partner. That was about the longest speech he'd ever heard from Schaefer.
"You really think we can beat them?" he asked.
Schaefer didn't answer.
They sat, and thought, and waited, but Rasche didn't ask what Schaefer was thinking or offer to share any more of his own thoughts.
He thought about Shari and the kids and hoped they were safe, up there in Elmira or back home in Queens, wherever they were. He hoped they weren't too worried about him.
He thought about those files Brownlow had shown him, about the string of hideous murders that might have been committed by the aliens-or might have just been an unusually vicious serial killer.
Carr thought that was the aliens.
Rasche hoped it was the aliens.
It bothered him that he couldn't be sure it was the aliens. What kind of a species did he belong to, that he couldn't be sure people wouldn't do that to each other?
And what kind of species did the aliens belong to that they apparently not only committed such atrocities against other intelligent species, but saw nothing wrong with it? Those ships weren't just a couple of desperate criminals or crazed degenerates running loose; those ships were an organized party of some kind, a big one, and that meant that whatever they were doing, it was just fine with the folks back home.
Or maybe it wasn't; maybe when those monsters got home, they'd find themselves facing the alien equivalent of a picket line, placards reading SAVE THE HUMANS, angry demonstrators throwing blood or paint at the hunters the way demonstrators attacked women in fur coats ....
People didn't have fur, but those things sometimes skinned their victims-what did they do with those skins? Did they wear them? Was Lamb's face going to wind up on another planet, stained with extraterrestrial paint?
Rasche was tired and hungry, and this chain of thought was making him feel slightly sick to his stomach-he was in great shape to save the world from the Martians, he was.
Or even just to tackle Carr and his buddies if they'd decided not to help, after all.
And besides everything else, his ass was sore from sitting on the hard concrete; he shifted uncomfortably and scraped a shoe across the pavement.
Schaefer raised a hand for silence.
Rasche listened.
Footsteps were approaching, coming up the ramp.
Rasche turned and watched as Carr came into view, an assault rifle slung on his shoulder, a machine pistol on his belt. At least a dozen other young men were beside and behind him, all of them armed to the teeth with the contents of Rasche's van, with the weapons Salvati had given him, everything the Somalis had sold the Jamaicans, all of it loaded and ready to go. Ammunition belts were draped across tattooed chests, automatic weapons were tucked under muscular arms, shotguns were clutched in sweaty hands.
"Hey, Schaefer!" Carr called. "We put it to a vote, and it was unanimous. Humans one, alien shits zero!"
Schaefer smiled, a humorless baring of teeth that Rasche didn't like at all.
"Good," he said. "So listen up while I tell you what you're up against."
A couple of Carr's buddies glanced at one another; someone said derisively, "Oooh, tell us, Mr. Policeman!"
"The things we're fighting are invisible, except through one of these." He held up the alien mask. "They all wear them-I figure they're invisible to each other without them, same as they are to us."
"You got those for all of us?" a black kid with a shaved head and an AK 47 called.
"Nope. Just the one. But you take one of 'em down, you want to get its mask."
"How we take 'em down if we can't see 'em?"
"You'll see a weird shimmer in the air when they're near," Schaefer explained. "Aim for it with all you've got. And don't wait-these things are bigger and stronger and faster than you are, and I don't care how big and strong and fast you think you are, they're more."
"Faster and stronger and we can't see 'em?" someone mumbled. "Shit."
"That's why you've got the guns," Carr said.
"If they're invisible, how do we know they aren't watching us right now?"
"We don't, not for sure," Schaefer said. "Except if they were, they'd probably have already started killing us."
"Hell," another man said, hefting a tripod-mounted, belt-fed machine gun, "I didn't come here to hear no fairy stories about invisible bogeymen. Why don't we flash this pig and test-fire our new toys over in the diamond district?" He turned and looked around at the others for support.
Schaefer stared at the man for a second, then lashed out without warning-a single blow of the fist.
The man went down and lay gasping on the asphalt.
"Any more questions?" Schaefer demanded as he picked up the mask again.
"Yeah," Rasche said. "How are you planning to find them? How are we going to lure them in where we can get at them? Showgirls and dancing bears? A big sign, `Today only, everything half price to killer aliens'?"
"I had an idea on that," Schaefer said. "A couple of ideas, actually. First off, you said you saw them cruising over the city, right?"
"Right," Rasche said, not sure where Schaefer was going with this.
"So they aren't hiding. They don't realize we can actually see them through this thing-they've got no reason to hide. They're probably still up there, cruising around-all we have to do is watch. Second thing, they're still tracking me." He touched the device on his neck. "I figure they're probably cruising over this place every few minutes, keeping an eye on me."
"So they're cruising overhead," Carr said. "You didn't bring us a goddamn F-16, Schaefer-how the hell do we get them down here? Or did you want us all to help you watch the pretty ships go by?"
"I think the arrogant bastards are getting cocky," Schaefer said. "Sure, we took out two of them so far, but they've trashed a lot more of us, and most of the time we've been running from them, not fighting. I figure if we get their attention, they'll come down here after us-that'd be the sporting way to get us. Shooting us from their ships would be like hunting deer with a bazooka-it'd work, but it wouldn't be any fun."
"Yeah, yeah but just how do you figure to get their attention?" Carr asked.
Schaefer pointed to the Soviet antitank gun that Rasche had used to kill the one at Carr's place.
"With that," he said. "I don't know if it'll punch through whatever armor they've got on their ships, but ten to one they'll notice it."
* * *
32
It hadn't taken long for one of the soldiers to get free and untie the others, and Schaefer and Rasche hadn't tied the knots all that tight to begin with, but Philips kept rubbing at his wrists as he sat in the copter.
He'd gotten the reports over the radio, heard how Detective Rasche had smashed his way out of captivity, how he'd made off with a cache of heavy weapons, and he didn't need to be a genius to figure out what that meant.
Schaefer and Rasche were planning to fight the aliens, even if it meant a goddamn war.
Philips couldn't figure out how the hell Schaefer and Rasche had worked it out, how they'd communicated when they were both being held in protective custody, but somehow or other they must have planned it all. He still remembered Schaefer standing there on the rooftop saying, "Jesus, Rasche, where the hell have you been?"
Schaefer had expected Rasche, had known what was happening, and he, Philips, the supposed intelligence big shot, hadn't had a clue.
And then there was the mask-the agents who'd picked Rasche up and held him while Philips was off in Latin America said that Rasche had had one of the aliens' face masks.
And they hadn't done anything with it.
A piece of the alien technology had been right in their hands, and t
hey hadn't done anything with it.
And when Rasche broke out, when an out-of-shape New York cop took two highly trained federal agents by surprise and beat the crap out of them, he took the mask with him-the thing was gone again.
Philips didn't even know why Rasche wanted it, where he'd gotten it, he didn't know anything.
And those goddamn shit agents didn't know, either, they'd never bothered to ask Rasche about it, never asked him a damn thing.
Christ, Philips thought, what a bunch of fuckups.
This whole thing was going bad-no, it had started out bad; it was getting worse. It was, in fact, going straight down the tubes. They didn't have a damn thing to give the aliens-and they never had, not really. The aliens took what they wanted. They'd taken back their dead companion, and when they wanted Schaefer, they'd take him, too.
And they hadn't even shown up for the rendezvous. Philips's men had been transmitting every kind of signal they could think of as bait, to get the monsters interested-and as far as Philips could see, the aliens hadn't paid any attention.
They must have known what was going on. They could have had someone at the heliport if they'd wanted to.
So they didn't want to. They didn't want Schaefer as a gift. If they wanted him at all, they wanted him on their own terms.
Maybe they didn't want him, maybe the one who'd tagged him was the one he'd killed, and the others didn't give a shit ....
Too goddamn many "maybes"!
The truth, Philips finally admitted to himself, was that he and his experts didn't know a damn thing about how the aliens thought.
The Schaefer boys had both seemed to have something of a handle on it, though. For all the good that did.
And Schaefer had wanted to fight back. He'd thought that just waiting for the bastards to leave was a mistake. He'd thought trying to propitiate them, as if they were a bunch of little gods, was a mistake.
Maybe Schaefer was right.
The President had said they couldn't afford to fight-but what did he know? He'd also said he trusted Philips's judgment, and right now Philips judged that Schaefer was right-they couldn't afford not to fight.
Watt-Evans, Lawrence - Predator 01 Page 20
