Darkman (29 page)

“Chase the fucker up to the roof, if there’s an exit,” Durant said, already edging toward the helicopter. “Force Westlake up there. I’ll take care of him like he won’t believe. Skip, take the bitch to Strack’s place. He wants to talk to her in person.”

He ran to the copter, swung one of its small white doors open, and climbed in. Martinez saw him clamber between the bucket seats and disappear into the belly of the craft. Soon a door slid open sideways, like the side cargo door of a van. Durant had positioned himself behind the huge machine gun, legs crossed, sunlight beaming off his perfect teeth, eyes bright with hate. The brass cartridges gleamed golden and evil under the dying sun, bandoliers of .50-caliber ammo made for the express service of blowing giant chunks out of scared soldiers and making blood flow in the mud. He motioned the copter up, and the pilot didn’t hesitate.

Durant was shouting as he rose in the air, chunks of syllables and verbs tangling with one another as the helicopter wound up tight and whisked the sentences away. Durant was fifty feet in the air before he decided it was useless and quit hollering.

“Land on the roof,” he shouted to the pilot, his former business associate. The man was more than happy to oblige.

And on the ground, not much bigger than toy soldiers from Durant’s viewpoint, Smiley and Martinez were contemplating their dismal futures.

“God, I’d hate to die today,” Smiley said, groaning. “If it ain’t Westlake doing us in, it’ll be Durant. How the fuck did I ever get associated with this screwball outfit?”

“Shut up,” Martinez hissed. “For once in your life just shut the fuck up.”

“What’d I say?”

“It’s not so much what you say,” Martinez growled. “It’s more how you smell.”

“Smell?” Smiley raised an arm to expose one poisoned armpit, where a sweat spot the size of a fairly hefty pancake was spreading. He stuck his nose in the mess and inhaled deeply, frowning. “Sweeter than a rose,” he said, and Martinez wished he could produce a rose so that Smiley could watch it wilt under the steamroller of his B.O. But then, it didn’t matter. They were doomed to die, one way or the other. Westlake was just too tricky, being a college egghead and all, and Durant was just too mean.

“Let’s go back in,” he said, squaring his shoulders and checking the pearl buttons on his shirt to make sure he wouldn’t make a slovenly corpse. “It’s just one guy against you and me, and a helicopter full of guns waiting topside. And quit aiming that goddamn shotgun in my face!”

Smiley pointed it skyward, where the first tinges of dusk were painting the puffball clouds pink and orange. The air was growing cool, still tainted by the helicopter’s jet-fuel exhaust as the craft landed on the roof and shut down.

“In,” Martinez said, and they went to the steel door that had quit flapping and banging, and stepped inside once more. Behind them, Skip drove away, the girl in the trunk pounding and screaming. He was grinning and seemed glad he did not have to chase shadows in the dark. Martinez snorted and wondered what he had done to deserve such luck.

“Wish I had a flashlight,” Smiley muttered as the dark interior turned his idiotic Scooby-Doo T-shirt a pale shade of gray.

“Put it in the suggestion box,” Martinez snapped, almost gagging on the man’s hideous odor. “Let’s split up. You go left, I go right. Got it?”

“Yeah, sure. Do you have your peashooter out?”

“It’s out, smelly. Turn left.”

He did, and Martinez had time to find a space of clean air and actually breathe again. Already sweat was rolling into his eyes, making him squint as he walked under the dusty sign that said this or that about Fresh Splash Soap and other banal items that didn’t concern him one way or the other. He just wanted Westlake in his sight, a 9-mm bullet that would fly straight and true, a gun that would not jam up at the critical moment, as automatic pistols tended to do. All in all, he just wanted to be done and at home swilling cold Miller beer down by the case, forgetting everything.

He walked into a door with a loud clump, his twisted nose taking the brunt of it. His fear tempered by anger, he tried the knob, but because the door seemed locked, he kicked it open just to show who was really boss around here. The door ripped off its upper hinge and groaned as it slumped downward, its edge to the floor. Martinez kicked the useless thing aside and went in, daring the impotent dark to frighten him again. He was Rudy Martinez—a tall, strong man, if a bit ugly—and he could have been even
better
than a contender, he could have been champ.

Something thumped to the floor, something hollow and hard, and rolled to a gritty stop at his feet. He bent over and felt it, discovered it was only a Coke bottle, and almost threw it away before realizing that most Coke bottles do not hit the floor and roll to your feet unless thrown that way.

“Westlake,” he said evenly, searching the dark with blind eyes, his left hand clutching this baffling prize. “Nobody gets hurt if you do what I say.”

He waited. Seconds ticked past.

“Westlake!”

Nothing.

Martinez turned in a circle, boots clumping. Only the faintest bit of light penetrated the small corridor, and it wasn’t enough. His bravado shrank, replaced by new fear. What kind of trap was this?

A minor notion came into his head. Two could play the same game, right? He tossed the bottle back from where it had come, waiting for the glassy
ping
as it hit the floor, or the explosive noise of a large glass bottle smashing against cement. Instead he got . . .

Nothing.

???

“Where are you?” he screeched, heart thundering, his pulse pounding thickly in his ears. “Westlake, come out here like a man!”

Nada.

What was left of his self-control took a hike into the deeper recesses of his brain. What it left behind was a crazy, frantic kind of terror.

He fired his pistol into the dark, pointing at everything, pointing at nothing. Sweat drizzled off his face. With each shot the walls were illuminated with bright bursts of orange, exposing spiderwebbed tools and shelves mantled with ancient dust. And Westlake?

No sign. Martinez fired in a blind panic, spinning in circles, momentarily forgetting that his pistol held only fourteen rounds. Some dim part of his mind must have remembered, though, because his spastic finger stopped pulling the trigger on round number fourteen, leaving it, and it alone, between him and the horrors of this ghastly, dead factory and the creature that lurked there.

He waited, trying to be silent, lungs screaming for breath, sweat soaking into the collar of his Western shirt as if it were a sponge.

Something scraped on the floor. Ahead? Behind? He tried to look both ways at once, gun held ready in his slick fist, his greasy hair stuck to his forehead in strange zigzags.
“Westlake!”
he screamed in terror and desperation,
“where the fuck are you?”

Silence. Then . . . a strangled voice.

“Closer than you know.”

Martinez, all courage gone, whirled around to the place from which the voice had spoken. He heard thumps there, like someone walking in very heavy shoes. Breathing, too, ragged, hissing.

He fired his last shot as Darkman jumped for him, Darkman a frozen picture of orange and red in that brief illumination, Martinez a man made of sweat and fear. The flash died a quick death, but the bullet zoomed harmlessly into a wall.

Martinez bubbled out a wheezing scream as bony claws clamped over his mouth. After that he fainted into a blessed oblivion where anger was not known, and death a fantasy.

35

Grouchy

T
HE FORMER
S
MILEY
heard Martinez’s screams stab through the dark from the other side of the massive building, and his grouchy frown turned down even farther, looked even grouchier. He could no longer remember why he had been smiling these long years, for it was a greater pleasure to wear a frown than an idiot’s grin. The boss man, Durant, was no stranger to trouble, not much of a smiler, and Smiley had been no stranger to trouble, either. But Durant’s little messes had a way of getting cleaned up almost by themselves—a little blackmail here, a bit of torture there. Only this deal with Westlake had been absolutely botched, and there was no one left to blame but Durant. It had been his goofy idea to leave the scientist guy alive and make fireworks out of him; it had been his idea to turn a simple hands-up, gimme-the-paper routine into a double murder accompanied by torture. And who had to pay the price? Everybody except Durant, the greasy slug.

Martinez screamed again. Grouchy found that he did not care that much, because Martinez was a spick, first of all—and he was always trying to be a hotshot and pretend he was in charge. The slimy bum had been a lousy boxer, and was a lousy crook as well. Surely Durant knew the man was a phony, and most surely he believed that Smiley had the brains to be second in command. And as Smi—oops—Grouchy knew quite well, Durant’s criminal shoes were just panting to have a new boss inside them.

But Martinez was still screaming, as if he had stepped on a nail, which didn’t seem unlikely in this dump. Sighing, reluctant, the newborn Grouchy plodded toward the place from where the screams were coming, his shotgun lounging on his shoulder, his mind free of burdens. What would Strack say when Durant, under questioning, burst into tears and begged him to let him give up mobstering forever? Strack would say, “Smiley”—not knowing the new moniker—“Smiley, my boy, I need a good man with brains and talent. Care to be my top dog, since the former one turned chicken?”

He got to the place where Martinez had been screaming. There was a door keeled over on edge, its bent lower hinge catching small sticks of light and reflecting them dully into Grouchy’s wide eyes. He took a firm step forward, determined to make this the best night of his life, the one that would get him promoted.

As is often the case with stupid people, he was fooling himself and no one else. What happened was that he stumbled across something that was somewhat firm, and picked it up because it was warm. It was a boot. Grouchy stuck his nose in it. Martinez’s foot odor wafted out, smelling even worse than that cheap Mexican cologne he liked to wear.

Grouchy dropped the boot to the floor with a soft clunk, wondering. What had happened here? Had that Westlake guy simply
eaten
Martinez?

He heard muted footsteps coming from dead ahead, where the blackness was complete except for one miserable shaft of dying daylight poking through a knothole in the sagging wall. Grouchy moved his shotgun down to waist level, ready to mutilate whatever walked through the weak beam of light. Like Martinez, sweat oozed out of his forehead, dripping and tickling his eyelashes on the trip down his face. He shook his head, flinging drops from the wet strings of his hair, internally cursing it and the scalding fear that was forming in his guts and brain.

Worse yet, who in the hell was that man standing with his head right in the light, the guy swaying on his feet like a drunk?

Grouchy squinted. By all that was holy, it was
him
standing there, a copycat Smiley with one corner of his lips hiked up into a sneer, his eyes full of torment and fear, just like Grouchy was feeling about now.

His finger tightened on the shotgun’s broad trigger. “Wha, wha—who are you?”

No reply, or at least not a good one. The other Smiley wobbled on his feet, making small moaning noises.

“Westlake?” Grouchy demanded in a voice full of the bravado of stupidity. “You sure as hell can’t fool me!”

He jumped forward and smashed the butt of the shotgun against the mouth of the “fake” guy, who staggered back and hit an unseen wall. Decrepit tools clanged and rattled to the floor. He fell to his knees, then toppled over, his face cut in half by the gray beam of light. Blood was oozing out of his mouth.

Grouchy went into a squat beside him. “You ain’t so tough, and you ain’t so smart, Westlake. We know about your fancy masks and all. The boss figured it out in a second. So now all I have to do is fill you full of buckshot and drag your ass out. Get it?”

The fake Smiley rolled left, then put his hands on the floor. Blood dripped out of his mouth in large clots as he found his feet. He began waving his arms, speaking muted mumbo jumbo.

“So long, fucker,” Grouchy said, and blew his chest apart with a shotgun blast that sounded as loud as an atomic bomb in these confining walls. Fake Smiley flopped backward in a splash of his own blood, his head once again landing—hard—in the pitiful beam of light. Grouchy watched Westlake die with great relief.

Something at the base of the dead man’s neck began to wrinkle where the light hit it. It smelled bad, smoked a little. Grouchy frowned, then used the hot barrel of his gun to worm under the mushy fake skin. With a flick he pulled the mask off, more interested in seeing Westlake’s dead face than anything else.

All his hopes of someday being head honcho vanished forever.

Martinez lay there dead with a large wedge of wood stuffed into his mouth, his eyes open and locked forever in an expression of manic surprise.

Grouchy stumbled backward, thudding into things that hadn’t seemed to be there before. Panic was rising to a boil in his feeble mind. He had shot Martinez. Nobody shoots Martinez—or Skip or Durant or anybody else—without permission. Martinez had been a damn good man, an asset to the team. With Pauly and Rick gone forever, he was irreplaceable. So what would the boss have to say about this?