Ripper (33 page)

Drawing the string required a pull of 100 pounds, so the weapon was cocked with a goat's-foot lever separate from the bow. The lower fingers of the lever—which looked like a bent tuning fork—engaged pins protruding from both sides of the stock, while hooks closer to the handle gripped the string. The lever was pulled back until the string dropped behind the catch on top of the nut.

"The answer must be here," Wynn said as they moved to the second card.

The trigger had an external handle nine inches long which ran back almost parallel to the belly of the stock. The gap between the stock and handle widened toward the butt. The stock had two grips on top for the first and second fingers of the crossbowman's hand. When his thumb squeezed the handle toward the stock's underbelly, the point of the internal trigger—the pivoting duck's bill—dropped out of the notch in the undercurve of the nut. Now free to rotate, the nut released the bowstring held fast by its upper claw, hurling the bolt target-bound at a speed of up to 200 miles per hour. The handle pressure required to fire was just eight pounds.

Gingerly, Zinc replaced the weapon in its frame, noting how the handle touched the shelf. The heavier weight of the crossbow squeezed the handle toward the stock.

"See the problem?" he asked.

The old man nodded. "If the weapon was cocked, loaded, and placed on the shelf in advance, the difference between the crossbow's weight and the pressure required to release the trigger would fire the bolt at once."

"So how did the crossbow fire itself unless it was held off the shelf with someone's phantom finger on the trigger handle?"

Hatchet Job

Vancouver International Airport 

7:32
P.M.

DeClercq's plane was the last that would land in Vancouver until early Sunday morning. As he walked from the airport terminal to the parking lot, the storm advancing from Vancouver Island hit full force. The typhoon wind almost knocked him off his feet, wrenching the umbrella from his hand to blow it skyward like Mary Poppins's parasol, before hurling the rain at him in a knifethrower's act. Robert was soaked by the time he reached the spot where he'd parked his car.

The spot was there.

But his car was gone.

In a universe where the Arrow of Time flows from lesser to greater entropy, carping critics are in their element. Someone, after all, must destroy what's created. When it came to critics who panned his books, (he had written a history of the Force and an expose of Wilfred Blake) DeClercq thought no one put it better than playwright Brendan Behan: "Critics are like eunuchs in a harem. They're there every night, they see it done every night, they see how it should be done every night, but they can't do it themselves." When it came to those who lauded his work, they, of course, were scholars and gentlemen/women. 

The acerbic critic who'd done the hatchet job on
Jolly Roger
was named Chas Fowler, the perfect handle for a sour snob. Seated in back of the taxi weaving toward his home, DeClercq ran a penlight down Fowler's surly review in
Publishers Weekly,
while the cabbie did a yeoman's job keeping them on the road, fighting a snarling crosswind that tried to flip them ass over tea kettle. Fowler's barbs were:

. . . the spawn of a mind in need of electric shock and lobotomy,
Jolly Roger
sinks to the nadir of horror fiction . . .

. . . the best argument for censorship since Adolf Hitler published
Mein Kampf.
Wrap fish in its pages and the fish will surely complain . . .

. . . nondimensional yahoos in a one-dimensional story. Neither plot-driven nor character-driven, this trash slips like a slug on the slime of its own gore . . .

Fowler getting his head crushed while cruising off Barbados didn't surprise DeClercq. In a world where President Reagan was shot to impress Jodie Foster, and John Lennon may have been gunned down by "the Catcher in the Rye," goading a psychopathic author could turn you into a lightning rod begging to get fried. These days it always paid to know who you were fucking with.

What surprised him was that the killers took time from their Hanged Man ritual for the Caribbean hit.

Unless, of course, they contracted it out.

Were they Nietzschean Supermen?

Take that,
Untermensch?

A near head-on collision yanked DeClercq from his thoughts. The cab was cresting Lions Gate Bridge high above First Narrows when a howl of wind off English Bay veered the oncoming car into their lane. DeClercq pitched forward when the driver hit the brakes, skid marks fish-tailing from the tires as the car nosedived. Bumper to bumper, a half inch to spare, both vehicles screeched to a halt.

"Hell's bells!" the cabbie gulped. "What sign are you, friend?"

"Scorpio," DeClercq said, releasing his breath. "Double the influence. That must explain it." The driver fumbled through the pages of
The Province
beside him.
"The world isn't against you, but it may seem like it today.

Guard against bonking your head. There's little time to lose.
Our joint horoscope. I shouldn't be driving today."

Horoscope,
DeClercq thought.
The Astral Plane again.

Marine Drive along the West Vancouver waterfront was deserted. Anyone with any sense was curled up in front of a crackling fire, hot toddy in hand. The cabbie dropped him
hi
his driveway this side of Lighthouse Park, where he lipped the driver triple for saving his life. The prospect of an all-night stakeout in this storm made him shiver.

The slope beneath his shoes was a flooding river. The firs that lined the path to his house groaned in agony as branches I urn from their trunks crashed to the ground. Sounds unrelated to the storm were lost in the shriek of the wind, while ominous shadows haunted the woods like
A Night on Bald Mountain.

The telephone line to his home was ripped from its connection.

The lights on
both
sides of the door were smashed.

Something was wrong.

Despite his ordeal with the Alley Demons during the Cutthroat case, the Chief Superintendent didn't carry a gun. In any event, he wouldn't be armed because he had been on a plane. Movement to his left made him stop and squint through the dark at something swaying, twisting, hanging in that copse of trees. "Christ," he whispered when he got close enough to discern what it was.

Lyric Stamm, like the other points of the Ripper's Cross, was naked and suspended by a hook in the base of her skull. In line with Chloe and Zoe, yet dissimilar to Marsh, her face was skinned but none of her hair was scalped. Crossbones weren't painted on her upper chest, because, like a dugout canoe, her torso was hacked open from her clavicle to her pubic bone, and all the organs in her body cavity were gone. DeClercq could see her spine, white bisecting red, while wedged in her gutted rib cage were two crossed bones. As he stared in awe at this horror jerking like a puppet in the death-grip of the wind, one flailing leg almost kicking him in the face, Tautriadelta's
Pall Mall Gazette
article flashed into his mind:

. . . in one of the books by the great modern occultist. . . Eliphaz Levy . . . we find the most elaborate directions for
working magic spells . . . and it is in the list of substances prescribed as absolutely necessary to success that we find the links which join . . . necromancy with the quest of the East-End murderer .. . Among them are strips of the skin of a suicide, nails from a murderer's gallows, candles made from human fat. . . and a preparation made from a certain portion of the body of a
harlot.

He stood transfixed by the human carcass twisting, turning, and swaying back and forth on the hook.

The wind was blowing the wrong way to carry the stink of psychosis from Garret Corke to him, but the lunacy in the demented eyes charging from behind the tree told DeClercq this sudden apparition was unhinged. This guy was crazy. This guy was rabid. This guy was stark staring mad. The hatchet cleaving the air between Corke's raised arms and DeClercq's brow corroborated the fact. Too late to escape the ax.

Corkscrew's camouflage fatigues dated from the steaming jungles of Vietnam. His eyes shone white in a face greased black, his lips curled back from pearly teeth in a madhatter's grin, making him look like Al Jolson about to sing "My Mammy."

The ax was inches from DeClercq when Lyric kicked it away.

Though dead, her body jumped with more life than either man, the fluctuating wind from offshore thrashing and swinging her stiff limbs unpredictably.

The ax hacked all the toes from her interfering foot, before it struck the hanging tree and shaved the trunk of bark. DeClercq ran. With Corke in hot pursuit.

The mercenary had a good ten years on the Mountie, and Corke had kept himself fighting fit. Dashing past the door they rounded the west side of the house, scrambling along the wall toward the crashing sea ahead, Corkscrew raising the ax as his other arm reached for DeClercq, fingers gripping the Mountie's collar and yanking him off his feet. The Canadian slipped in the mud and rolled faceup beneath the window.

The wind blowing inland rattled the pane above, throwing the sounds of the struggle against the shimmering glass.

Corke stomped an army boot into DeClercq's stomach, then straddled him, ax raised to split his head in two.

Folding like a jackknife, DeClercq was caught mid-whistle.

"Dumb fuck," Corke said, pausing just a moment to savor the thrill of the kill . . .

Wasting precious seconds he didn't know he couldn't afford . . .

Making the fatal mistake of every foreign punk dense about this country . . .

If you take on one of The Mounted, for God's sake watch for the dog.

Fangs bared in a hundred pounds of purebred German shepherd, trained to attack by the OIC of the RCMP Dog Service at Innisfail, Alberta, Napoleon—catching his master's whistle carried by the wind—ran the width of their living room and took a powerful leap that sent him crashing through the window beside Corke. Fangs locked on to the killer's ax arm as the dog flipped to the ground, the sharp twist snapping both forearm bones. Before Corke's grunt died the shepherd was on him again, going for his throat as the ax dropped from the broken hinge of his wrist. The mercenary defended himself the only way he could. He jammed the stump of his mangled arm into the dog's mouth.

DeClercq struggled to his knees, holding his bruised stomach as he gasped for breath. The wind was blowing from him to Corke so he didn't hear the
kchuck!
of the switchblade opening. But he heard the yelp from Napoleon as
the sharp steel sank to the hilt in the shepherd's belly.

The yelp brought bile to his throat.

Humping his shoulders off the wall where the dog's second leap had pushed him, Corke stuffed the stump of his broken arm into Napoleon's windpipe, wrenching the switchblade free with a vicious twist, before throwing his own weight at the dog to pin him to the ground. He flipped the knife like a coin magician as he fell on top, grabbing the handle blade-down to sink the steel again, this time in Napoleon's throat which he exposed by forcing the shepherd's muzzle back with his stump, there were the arteries, there were the veins,
So long, you fucking hound .. .

When DeClercq brought the back of the hatchet smashing down on Corke's skull.

He didn't use the sharp edge, but the ax still did the job.

The crack of Corke's skull fracturing was muffled by scalp and hair, the blade stopping midplunge as the soldier of fortune's luck ran out. DeClercq gripped the knife arm while Corke's eyes rolled back in his head, tearing it from its socket as the body fell limp. For all he cared this punk could bleed to death in his own puke.

He had other worries.

Napoleon lay panting, whimpering, trying to get up from the mud. Pale and in shock, his abdomen was matted with too much blood. Tearing off his coat, DeClercq wrapped it around the dog, bracing himself feet apart in the muck to lift Napoleon. Already blood was seeping through the fabric to stain his arms.

"Not again," he pleaded, his heart skewered by guilt. "Kate, Jane, Genevieve. Please don't take my dog. I haven't got it in me to bear the hurt again."

The phone lines were down.

Sabotaged?

The backup cellular phone in the trunk of his stolen car.

The sea was behind him; snarled thickets on either side.

Only one way to go.

Back up the path.

Afraid he'd slip and fall on the dog and rupture his insides—the shepherd was bleeding internally from some important organ—-Robert staggered up the swath through the trees, caked with mud from his roll on the ground and blood from Napoleon's wound, the dog breathing so shallowly each suck could be his last, the wind mocking them from each hole through the trees, buffeting, chilling, smiting, whipping, and almost uprooting them.

Powered by adrenaline, he made it to the top.

Now here he stood beside the road with his dying dog in his arms, talking to Napoleon, begging him not to give up, the road completely deserted, who'd be out tonight, muddy, bloody, as if he'd escaped from Riverview or the pen, even if a car came, who in their right mind would stop?

A pair of headlights came around the curve.

Napoleon's muzzle slumped against his cheek.

The dog's labored breath sounded like a goodbye sigh.

"Oh God," Robert murmured through clenched teeth and tear-salted lips, "let it be an ambulance or the West Van Police. Let it be someone, anyone, with a heart. Let it be . . ."

A ninety-grand Mercedes-Benz.

Leather interior,
he thought.
Slimed with blood and mud.

Robert stepped into the road to be seen and the car swerved around, an effortless maneuver, let them eat cake. Once, twice, the taillights blinked, glaring back at him, like some hellhound's bloodshot eyes.