City of Heretics (9 page)

A sudden intense pain in his left shoulder made him nearly drop the gun, and he looked to see a throwing knife sticking out of him. He gazed up in mild shock at the businessman. He’d crept up while Crowe was preoccupied, and was now smiling down at him from less than six feet away. Already, he had another knife in his hand and was getting ready to throw it.

Crowe lurched to his feet and bullets whined around him. The knife-wielding businessman threw his blade, and it caught Crowe in the right shoulder blade as he was turning to get away.

He stumbled forward, right into the other businessman, the one with the machete.

He pushed Crowe back with one hand, swung his machete at him with the other. Crowe felt the blade slice across his face and everything went like a kaleidoscope, different colors, spinning crazily.

Crowe was in the middle of the road, about to fall, firing at something he couldn’t see. He could hear bullets pounding the blacktop, and then he could hear his own revolver clicking empty. In his peripheral vision, he saw Chester, laying face-up but not moving.

A bullet in Crowe’s right arm then, like a hot lance, and he fell, fell far, far down, to the icy blacktop.

And there had been no time, no time at all, to even wonder, except in the vaguest way, who these people were or what the hell was going on. It all happened too fast. Seven killers, a semi-truck, four dead Sheriff’s Deputies.

And three hapless crooks, down before they knew what hit them. 

After that, the sound of another car arriving, and of Murke and the freaks escaping.

His new overcoat wasn’t doing such a good job keeping out the chill from the blacktop. He sprawled face-down, tasting the copper tang of blood, but didn’t feel much pain because the cold was seeping into his bones and everything was numb. Particularly, he couldn’t feel his right arm. He didn’t want to turn his head and look. What if the damn arm was gone completely?  That would’ve been too goddamn depressing to even think about.

He gave his best effort toward lifting his head, but didn’t have any luck. The road scraped his jaw and fresh warmth trickled down his temple. But by casting his eyes up as far as they would go, he could see the tail end of the Sheriff’s Department transport van. The rear doors were thrown open, and one of the cops half-hung out of it. His hand dangled over the road. Three of his fingers were gone, from when he’d raised his hand to ward off the machete blow.

Crowe couldn’t hear anything except his own heart pounding against the blacktop.  

That was when the Ghost Cat came out of nowhere. It materialized before him, flickering like an ancient piece of film, black and white and ravaged by time.

Black and sleek, with the white cross on its forehead, like a Pentecostal. It meowed, but the sound of it seemed far away. It wandered around amidst the spent bullet casings and blood, sniffing, searching.

“Cat,” Crowe said, for no good reason.

It looked at him with curious gray eyes, meowed again. He couldn’t hear it now. It sat on the cold road, licked irritably at its hind-quarters, and looked at him one more time.

Then it disappeared. It just evaporated, like steam off the blacktop.

“No,” Crowe said. “Come back.”

He rolled his eyes back to a more comfortable position and saw Chester, about six or seven feet away. He was on his back, near the side of the road. He didn’t look so good, but as Crowe watched him he saw his chest moving up and down—very slowly, almost imperceptibly, but moving.

The sonofabitch was alive.

Not far from his head, metal glinted. Crowe focused on it. It was a gun, a revolver. Not his, he had no idea where his was, and not Chester’s or D-Lux’s. One of the cops, maybe. He grasped at it with his left hand. His fingers barely reached the barrel, but he managed to snag it and painstakingly drag it toward him.

When it was close enough, he grabbed the grip. It was cold in his palm.

“Hah,” he said to himself.

He extended his arm in Chester’s direction, aimed the gun at the back of Chester’s head, pulled the trigger.

The hammer slammed on an empty chamber.

“Sonofabitch…” he said. “Sonofabitch gun…”

He tried two or three more times, just for the hell of it, but no-go. He put the goddamn useless gun down next and closed his eyes.
Death. Ghost Cat means death. I dreamed about it. I dreamed about the Ghost Cat
.  

That’s when the ice started coming down.

He heard tires squealing as their back-up arrived, someone saying, “
Jesus Christ, what the fuck!
” and he thought about the lesson he should’ve known by now, the adage he’d had to learn the hard way, seven years ago:
That’s what you get, fella, for going into something not
knowing.

That was all.

Our defining tragedy
, Crowe once heard a melodramatic news anchor call it, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. What the assassination of JFK was to a previous generation, or the bombing of Pearl Harbor, or any number of horrible things you can think of. Crowe remembered it very well, because at the time he was beating a man to death in a seedy hotel room off Elvis Presley Boulevard, in Whitehaven.

The little 13-inch TV was on the whole time, but he didn’t notice it because he was preoccupied. He was pulling Leon Berry up off the floor for the third time, getting annoyed because Leon kept laughing, even with a mouth full of broken teeth. “Not the time for chuckles,” Crowe said, and slapped him backhand across his jaw.

Leon grunted, blood spilling down his chin onto his bare chest, and laughed again and mumbled, “You gotta… you gotta do better than that…”

It took a great deal to get Crowe truly angry, but little Leon Berry was pulling it off. Crowe had come there to beat a little sense into him. He was into the Old Man for almost five grand, betting more than he could afford on a series of bare knuckle brawls over the summer, down near the state line. He’d ignored the Old Man’s calls, and eventually dropped out of sight, and Crowe had been the one tagged to track him down and make him see the error of his ways.

Finding him had been easy. Crowe knocked on his hotel room door, heard him fumbling around in there in sudden panic, and Crowe kicked open the flimsy lock with the heel of his shoe. Leon had been standing by the bathroom door, reaching with one long-fingered hand for a razor blade on the sink. When he saw Crowe, he went still.

Crowe grinned. “Leon. You don’t call. You don’t write. We worry.”

Leon said, “There ain’t nothing you can do to me.”

“Well,” Crowe said, closing the door behind him. “Why don’t we just put that theory to the test.”

Leon was wrong. Crowe did plenty to him. Only it didn’t do any good.

This was the sort of thing that should’ve been par for the course. Just another day in the life. But instead, it turned out to be the day that changed everything. Leon Berry was no ordinary squelcher. And this was no ordinary morning.

The TV was on, and from the corner of his eye, Crowe saw a shot of the Twin Towers in New York, saw a newscaster looking grim, his mouth moving. Leon had turned the volume down.

Crowe didn’t think anything about it. He had work to do.

He didn’t know that Leon was one of those rare fellas who are practically impervious to pain. He didn’t know the cops wanted Leon on a felony charge. He didn’t know they were staking him out, in the very next room. He didn’t know terrorists were throwing airplanes at the World Trade Center.

Didn’t know, didn’t know, didn’t know. That’s what you get for going into something
not knowing
.

He wound up doing a lot more damage to Leon than he’d intended, because Leon wouldn’t stop laughing and carrying on. Holding him up by the collar of his dirty tee-shirt, Crowe smashed his fist into his nose, and Leon only grunted and kept laughing. Crowe said, “Leon. I’m getting bored with this. I don’t wanna keep hitting you. Do us both a favor, and stop laughing.”

“I can’t… I can’t help it,” he choked. “It’s not… it’s not my fault…”

And went into another bout of hysterical cackling.

Later, he would read about people like Leon, people who have some faulty wiring upstairs, messing with their pain receptors. It wasn’t a mental illness. It was a neurological thing.

Crowe found it amazingly frustrating.

So he kept pounding Leon and Leon kept laughing and Crowe kept getting more and more angry. His knuckles were raw by then, Leon was missing several teeth, and his eyes shined out of the blood-red mask his face had become. Finally, Crowe saw his eyes shift over to the TV, and something like horror finally came into them.

That tore it. Crowe couldn’t get the reaction he needed, but something on the goddamn television had affected him. Furious, Crowe hit him one last time, square in the left temple, and Leon went limp, like a hippie being arrested at a protest. Crowe let him drop, and he slumped lifeless to the floor.

He’d killed him. HE could tell that much without checking his pulse. You do this sort of work as long as he had, you just know.

“Sonofabitch,” he said. “Leon, you stupid little bastard.”

He glanced at the TV to see what exactly had inspired the dread he’d failed to create, just in time to see what must have been the fourth or fifth replay of the footage they would wind up playing all week. The World Trade Center was smoking, and the second airliner was just crashing into one of the towers. And the whole goddamn thing collapsed.

“Sonofabitch,” Crowe said again.

The cops burst through the door then, guns waving, screaming, “On the floor, now!  Get the fuck down on the goddamn floor!” and they were all over him, throwing him to the dirty carpet, yanking his arms behind his back, cuffing him. They didn’t pass up the opportunity to kick him in the head a couple of times, being the pragmatic fellas they were.

“Sonofabitch,” Crowe said again, craning his neck to see the television. “Are you boys seeing this?”

“Shut up!” one of them said, and punctuated the sentiment with another kick to his skull.

They’d heard the whole thing between him and Leon, listening from the next room with the device they’d planted under Leon’s bed. How long they must have agonized, surprised by the unexpected arrival of one of the Old Man’s strong-arms, trying to decide if they should risk their operation by busting in and saving the day. By the time they finally decided, it was too late to save their suspect. Crowe’s only consolation was they didn’t know any more about the World Trade Center than he did.

He was charged with second-degree murder, given a ten-year sentence, and was in the State Penitentiary by late December.

The Old Man didn’t do a goddamn thing.

Crowe tried to reach him, naturally. His obligatory phone call was directly to his office. The Old Man didn’t take the call. He didn’t send a lawyer. The bastard had washed his hands of Crowe completely. And later on, of course, he’d die of heart failure and Vitower would take over and send the stupid punk to try to kill him.

They gave him a state-appointed attorney who went through the motions and shrugged philosophically when they sentenced him. “Good luck,” he said when they escorted Crowe in cuffs out of the courtroom. “Be good. You’ll never do the whole ten, so don’t worry.”

He was right, Crowe didn’t do the whole ten. He would’ve done five, except for the killing in prison, which got him an extra two, and he was out after seven years without even a parole hearing.

Seven years, ten years, a hundred years. It didn’t matter. It didn’t take near that long for him to know what he would do when he got out.

Dr. Maggie lost her medical license fifteen years earlier for selling prescriptions to junkies. So Crowe had to laugh when she said, “In my professional opinion, Crowe, you should stay in bed for at least another three days.”

His laugh didn’t endear him to her. She glared from behind her John Lennon frames and tapped a pen against her large but firm thigh.

“Three days,” he said. “Right. Doctor’s orders.”

“It’s not as if you have anywhere to be, is it?”

Now she was just getting nasty. He grinned and let her push him back down against the pillows.

From what everyone had been telling him, they were in a large, frame farmhouse north of Memphis. He didn’t really know, as he hadn’t been out of bed in two days. He had a window he could peer out if he sat up, but the view was limited; the branches of a heavy magnolia tree, glimpses of gray sky beyond it. They could have been anywhere, so he had to take their word for it.

They
were Dr. Maggie, Marco Vitower, and Marvis Hicks. 

Crowe come to late yesterday afternoon, after being out for almost twenty-four hours straight, and the first face he’d seen hovering over him was Marvis. He’d said, “Well, I’ll be damned, he’s waking up,” and then he veered out of sight and Crowe heard him calling, “Dr. Maggie, Crowe’s waking up,” and Crowe sort of groaned and tried to move an arm to touch his face—everything hurt—and Dr. Maggie loomed into view, pushing his arm back down, and saying, “Try not to move, Crowe. You’re okay now.”

He wasn’t convinced, but he let her push his arm down. Marvis said, “Long time no see, Crowe. Sure hate that we meet again with you in such sorry-ass shape.”

Crowe said, “Where?”

Dr. Maggie told him about the farmhouse then, and how their so-called back-up had come upon them sprawled around on the blacktop. 

Marvis said, “They put you boys in the Hummer, managed to get it separated from the tree it was attached to, and they all got the hell out. They said it was a crazy scene. What the hell happened?”

And Dr. Maggie said, “Not now. Let him rest.”  She looked down at Crowe and said, “I have to call Mr. Vitower now that you’re awake. He’ll want to talk to you.”

Crowe said, “Chester?”

She nodded. “He’s here. Worse shape than you. I pulled a bullet out of his stomach, and another had gone through his leg and hit the femoral artery. He’s in and out of consciousness.”

Crowe didn’t like the way the room smelled, sort of antiseptic and musty at the same time, and he didn’t like the glaring yellow of the walls and he didn’t like the way his pillows were bunched up under his head. It was hard to talk; something was on the left side of his face that made moving his mouth difficult. He managed, “He gonna make it?”