Strawman Made Steel (13 page)

A man dashed through in a blur of motion.
He tripped over the accountant’s still body and sprawled.

I rammed the door closed again. From the
pained cry, I guessed I’d smashed #2 in the nose. I flicked the lock on, and
turned in time to see Thor hammering the first intruder on the top of his skull
with his fist, like a pile-driver.

Beside Thor, the safe’s door hung open.

“That was quick,” I said.

He shrugged. “I’m good.”

“The desk,” I said.

Thor plucked the desk off its feet as
though it were a saltcellar, and butted it against the door.

I poked into the safe, and found it mostly
empty. A shelf separated its insides into a large partition and a small one.
The large space was bare. The top held seven vials of clear liquid, all
unlabeled.

I took two, put one in each inner coat
pocket, shut the safe and spun the lock.

I stooped to collect the pistol, which had
fallen to the floor. I offered it to Thor, but he said, “
Nein
.”

So, gun in each hand I said, “Let’s get out
of here.”

We went through the door into the loft, and
ran along under the dangling feet. They swung gently with our passage like
listless wind chimes.

At the far end of the loft was another
door. There was a landing on the other side of it, and a service staircase that
switched back on itself down into darkness.

Shouts ricocheted to us, sounding close. I
had no feel for how the joint was laid out―the men could have been yards away,
around an elbow in a hallway.

Thor squeezed down the stairs. I followed.

Light flared in the gloom. A bullet tore
the faded wallpaper at the stair’s head. Where I had just been.

We dropped quickly, taking the stairs two
and three at a time, our feet pounding dust off the steps. Adrenaline
suppressed my sneeze reflex. I guessed the stairs weren’t much used.

Another flash and peal of gunfire smote the
darkness, and footfalls followed fast, tumbling down the stairs above.

I raised the pistol into the darkness and
returned fire, a single round straight up the stairwell. My elbow and shoulder
soaked up the recoil. The spent cartridge ejected, chimed on the stair, and
flew into open space. It tinkled somewhere below.

Silence poured in. Our pursuers had
something to think about now.

A mental count put us nearly on the ground
floor.

I reached it and ran smack into Thor’s
back. He was standing stock still.

He swayed once then plunged down the next
flight.

“Know what you’re doing?” I said, keeping
an ear open for our pursuers. The sound of their tread reached me, more
measured now.

“Maybe down here,” Thor said.

Maybe?
Maybe
he was picking his grave plot. Didn’t matter. I followed. I wanted to know how
this monster Teutonic skein was snarled up with Alltron and hitmen.

Hit
man
.

I figured that out on the drop to the
ground floor too. It had been an itch that struck up when I saw the accountant
trussed and bowed on the floor at Thor’s feet. He hadn’t been panicking. He had
been
calculating
. I’d seen it before. Some would say I’d been it before.

People think you need to be big and strong
to do professional kills. You don’t. A gun, yes. A knife. Poison. Speed helps.
But the vital ingredient―the lack of which keeps so many wannabes at home―is
the will. The will to snuff a life and call it a paycheck.

The man we’d left passed out on the top
floor had it in spades.

But I’d been in too much of a hurry to
scratch that itch.

The stairs landed in a basement. It was the
neatest basement I’d ever seen. It was lit by a single night-light cupped in an
elegant steel fixture, and beneath the light was a door.

Thor grunted once and went through the
door. I followed and soon was huffing along behind him in some kind of tunnel
in near darkness. The air smelt of concrete, alkaline. Caged.

My mental compass finally caught up to
events, and told me we were heading away from the street where the taxi had
dropped me, away from the back of the townhouse and underground.

Sparse lamps made pools of light on the
swept concrete, and barring the flap of our shoes on the concrete, there was
not a sound. Nothing from our pursuers. My back prickled.

We passed a retaining wall through which a
hole had been hewn. Curtains were draped over its raw edges, and steel struts
supported a cross bar overhead. We passed beneath it, and I knew we’d entered
whatever building backed onto the townhouse, facing the street north and
parallel.

We reached a door and Thor opened it
without stopping. A breeze feathered my hair. A reflex threw me forward, and I
tackled Thor to the ground―just. A bullet from behind tore the door’s hardwood
lintel.

I pushed through the doorway, keeping low,
and hauled the door shut. We were in a basement the mirror image of the one we’d
just left. No lock on the door and nothing to wedge it shut. We legged it up
the stairs.

And straight into High Society.

The stairs gave onto a small foyer serving
restrooms. The smell of the toilets was the first hint it was a classy joint―there
wasn’t any. That, and the demure tinkling of glassware and murmur conversation.

I walked down a hallway that seemed to head
somewhere. Doorways slid by on either side, windows on rooms hosting private
dinner parties. A lady with sculpted red lips shot me a
haute-couture-and-escargot glance. Between my purple cheeks and sweat-slicked
hair, and the Germanic Colossus striding behind me, we were about as welcome as
a slice of salami in the Vegan Special.

The corridor terminated and we emerged into
a large space, a restaurant and bar. The murmur and clink of cutlery rose, and
the air here was thick with the mingled odor of perfume and spice. Couples sat
at tables in the blush of faint, warm lamplight, each a little world.

Pairs of eyes darted behind me to Thor.

The bar patrons were hemmed in by a
thigh-level partition, with the bar itself running the length of one wall.
Behind it, a vast mirror doubled ranks of bottles into a forest of glass and
liquor, and gave the room a subterranean feel.

I strode toward the street door, parallel
to the bar. Halfway along it I halted in front of a barman. He was pouring a
drink, one hand gripping a draught handle, the other tilting a glass beneath
the tap. A frothing liquid rode up the side of the glass then began sluicing
into the drain. He’d not moved since I’d noticed him, except for his eyes. They
had tracked us, like marbles swiveling on gimbals.

I stared at him. He stared back.

This was bad.

I got the hell out of there. Thor at my
heels, no idiot.

Outside the street was dark and, but for a
loner or two skulking between streetlamps, deserted. I spoke some French and
strafed the darkness for an exit.

“There,” said Thor, his arm stuck out like
a tree limb, pointing to a cross street a hundred yards north. That made it Allen
Street. A cluster of cars were banking up at the intersection against the
signal, while an officer in the signal station was holding up the traffic for a
road train that had pulled off the expressway ten exits early.

We just needed warm bodies. The more the
better.

We ran toward the clot of honking metal,
and the signalman’s booth―he was technically a cop and licensed to carry. We
passed the mouth of a serviceway running between the restaurant we had just
exited and the flanking building. From the corner of my eye I saw men tumble
from a doorway.

I pushed to a sprint, tallying the odds of
survival from that brief mental snapshot. Five men. A handful. Packing more
than double our arsenal. Not great odds.

But before I had a chance to digest that
information, the next piece of mental calculation rammed home; we weren’t going
to make it.

Thor must have seen it too. He dived down
the next serviceway. I turned, slipping on wet-slick litter. Scattershot
blitted the bricks in a tight pattern only feet away and chased me after him.
The shot came from a shotgun. A clean kill was not an operational parameter for
these guys.

Thor was already halfway along the alley.
It was short, didn’t run the length of the building, but split off into an open
parking complex and a million exits. Make that and we were home.

I heard more gunfire, but it was no
shotgun. It was the deep, compressed cough of a heavy-caliber pistol. Two
shots.

I stuck my head back around the corner.

And caught a three-inch wedge of mortar
above my ear.

But in the half-second between the bullet
tearing a chunk from the wall and lights out, time expanded. I slipped down the
rabbit hole and the world turned hyper-real and absurd.

Absurd was how the chunk of mortar lifted
away from the wall and spun lazily toward me. It was absurd because my brain
told me it was a wedge of ice―grey, dirty ice. I guess when time slows the
brain’ll grab any old association just to fill a need.

Hyper-real was the scene playing out behind
that gyrating mortar-ice: on the ground, perhaps twenty feet away, was a man
with a hole the size of an ashtray cored through his trunk. A big ashtray. The
heavy-caliber pistol was packing soft-nosed slugs.

A shotgun lay at an angle inches from his
dead eyes. His shirt was a mess, and his pants were grimed kitchen-hands’
whites. He was one of our pursuers. Had been.

Farther up the street, two men crouched.
One, facing me, had just loosed the slug that smashed the wall near my head.
The other was straining to shrink behind a post box, looking for the missing
part of his right arm.

Two of our pursuers were missing. Maybe they’d
circled back. Maybe I should tell Thor.

Too late. I was about to get brained.

But there was one more detail of the scene
that got seared on my optic nerve before I passed out. I caught a glimpse of
the shooter helping us, in silhouette only, and already ducking for cover down
the alley by the restaurant.

It was the accountant.

— 9 —

I felt fingers press on my skull.

I kept my eyes hooded and tracked the
fingers by their touch. Right hand? Thumb and three digits splayed over the
mortar impact site.

Two more fingertips above my ear. Left
hand.

Those two digits pushed.

Someone moaned. It might have been me.

I felt warm breath flow over my cheek, and
decided I knew enough. Step on a bear trap and you can’t complain if it snaps
shut.

I forced my eyes open and saw a blurry
half-darkness. My left arm gripped the guy’s right, ripped it away from my
head, and pulled the forearm vertical. At the same time, my right hooked his
elbow and locked it in place.

Holding that elbow as pivot, I forced the
hand back, counter-clockwise, like turning the handle on a butter churn. Only
the stuff that was going to churn was shoulder ligaments and cartilage.

Before the shoulder joint popped from its
socket, two things happened. One, I realized the arm belonged to a girl not a guy.
And, Two, a loud voice filled the small space. It said, “
Nein! Halt,
”
which, although I understood well enough, was not what froze me. It was Thor’s
voice.

I let go, and blinked to clear my vision.
The woman, her eyes wide with fright and glistening in the poor light, stepped
away, hugging her arm to herself.

Thor loomed. “Nurse,” he said, but I’d
already got it.

I said sorry to the woman. She nodded but
her eyes remained wary.

I looked around. Shadows and stone and hobo
interior design. The rusted hulks of drums. A boarded up window. The place was
poorly ventilated, and smelt of burnt gas. There was something familiar about
it all.

Voices drifted down, from the floor above I
guessed. A deep rumbling reached my ears, travelling through the stone walls.

“Where am I? What happened?”

I was lying on a table. Thor sat on one
end. It creaked under the load. I sat up and swiveled my legs over its lip. A
noise like a collapsing bridge swelled in my head and I rode a wave of nausea.

When it passed I asked again.

Thor said, “I took you. You passed out.
Took a car and came here.”

“Where’s here?”

“Safe place.”

Safe like the underside of a chesterfield.

I said, “Can I get a drink?”

The nurse disappeared and returned with a
mug of brackish water. I thanked her, and she gave me a little dip of the chin.

I glanced at Thor and pictured him carrying
my ragdoll deadweight over his shoulder like a sack of wheat.