Sleeping Policemen (29 page)

The car hit the gate with a shattering metallic
whumph
, tearing it from its hinges and flipping it high into the air. Its shadow streaked across the hood, the image of some bird knocked from flight. In the mirror Nick saw it bounce off the trunk and disappear. One of the security cameras, twisting like a clockwork vulture, plunged through the back windshield.

Vergil Gutman's domain loomed ahead, as big and lifeless as an oil tanker. His hands welded to the wheel, his teeth gritted so tightly that his jaw popped, Nick pressed the accelerator to the floorboard, aiming the cruiser square at the dented metal door. The tires spit gravel as the cruiser roared through the parking lot.

Nick chanced a quick look at his watch.

4:32.

Hurry, Nicky
.

When he looked back up—the car less than fifty yards from the entrance, the building growing before him like some creature in a bad science fiction movie—the door swung open and Oscar stepped outside. Oscar gazed at the car in shock, his mouth agape. Sunlight winked off his Coke-bottle glasses, gleamed across the oily pate of his balding head.

At thirty yards, maybe twenty-five, Nick hesitated. He lifted his foot from the gas and let it hover over the brake for maybe half a second. Oscar snapped his mouth shut, raised his hand. Nick saw that he held a gun, and in the same moment that nightmare image returned to claim him: Sue, her mouth frozen in a timeless scream as her finger tumbled toward Gutman's blotter. Nick let his foot fall square on the accelerator. The cruiser lunged forward once again, gaining speed. Something punched through the windshield and whistled past Nick's ear, tiny slivers of glass gnawing at his cheek.

Oscar never got off another shot. The car caught him halfway through his turn to escape. His glasses flew off, winking briefly in the sun.

Nick hit the brakes.

The car spun, the half-open warehouse door folding over the left fender—the one that caught Oscar—like a man taking a solid punch in the gut. The right fender snapped a support beam, the force turning the car even farther sideways. The sign with the juggling elephant flew across Nick's field of vision. The wall gave with a shriek of metal on metal, shearing away the passenger side mirror and shattering the window.

Bright crystals of safety glass showered over Nick as the car skidded through the office and broadsided Oscar's banged-up desk, throwing it halfway through the wall. The front end rammed a girder hidden behind the paneling, bending it almost double as the car ground to a reluctant stop. In the same moment, Nick released the wheel and hurled himself across the front seat, the seatbelt tearing at him. The car jolted as the back end came off the ground and slammed back down. Nick caught a glimpse of the trunk flying open in the rearview mirror, and then he was down, huddled across the seat, his arms flung over his head, his foot still pressed to the brake pedal. Something—

—
a gun
—

—exploded like a cannon round. The rear end of the car sagged, and Nick sighed in relief. Not a gun. A tire. Just then, something else gave way—the crack of a stout board, glass shattering. Then nothing. Silence curled around him like a pall.

Nick pulled one of Pomeroy's pistols from his belt, unbuckled his seatbelt, and peered over the dash. Spiderwebs spread across the windshield, the shattered office a kaleidoscopic jumble. Smoke lifted lazily from beneath the hood. Something hissed spastically.

He sat up.

4:33.

In his mind he saw the Pachyderm—his Jekyll—self being swallowed by the grotesque ballooning of his Hyde-self—approaching Sue with the cigar trimmer. Reaching for her.

There was a small explosion—a quiet, muffled boom—and, simultaneously, something threw Nick against the seat, something huge, leviathan, bearing into him, its hide rough and pebbled.

Nick screamed and fired two rounds—two thunderous claps, one on top of the other—into the creature. He heard the faraway whine of ricochets. Shrinking away from him, the creature shrieked in pain and despair. Nick flailed at it, scrambling to the other side of the seat. He leveled the revolver again—

—and discovered the driver's side airbag slowly deflating. He stared at it in amazement, his breath hitching in his chest, smoke curling from the barrel of the gun. With the revolver still pointed at the air bag, he kicked out the windshield. It gave way in a single crumpled sheet of glass and collapsed like something dead over the hood.

The tape.

He looked on the seat beside him, and then under him, patting the leather down and wedging his hands between the seat and door. He thought it was gone—that he had somehow left it behind on the hillside with Pomeroy; then he saw it on the floorboard, a darker rectangle against the iron-gray carpet. He picked it up and slipped it inside his jacket pocket. Heedless of the noise, he crawled from the car and clambered across the hood to the floor.

A groan came from the next room. Nick whirled, his body falling instinctively into a crouch, both hands bringing the gun up. The noise came again, a timorous moan, the sound of death approaching.

Oscar, he thought. Somewhere in the next room, broken into a thousand pieces.

“H-h-hel—” The plea died away. A gasping rattle of air. Nothing.

The gun leading the way, Nick stepped to the wall and peered around the corner. The long hallway that led to Gutman's office was empty. He stepped into it and pulled the door closed behind him. From above Gutman's door, a security camera stared down at him, its red eye unblinking. He took several steps into the hallway. The lights flickered above him, once, twice, then went out.

Tuesday, 4:41 PM

The darkness was alive; it wormed its tentacles into him, sucking away his breath, his courage. Nick sagged against the wall as a wave of panic broke over him, releasing a tide of haunted images. Finney and Tucker loured out of the darkness, their eyes accusing.
Your fault, your fault
. Vergil Gutman appeared, sloughing off the sane Jekyll-portion of his body to reveal his true self, the misshapen Hyde-thing, rife with cauliflower-shaped tumors. Sue—her face contorted, her pinky clutched in the steel maw of the cigar trimmer—wailed at him,
Nick, you promised! You promised!

The image of Sue did it, her face twisted with agony. She brought him back to his world, the hallway, the
click
of another second fleeing past—

Sue, oh Sue
.

Nick glanced down at Finney's watch. He could see nothing. Prodding the blackness with the .45, he took a tentative step forward and then stepped sidewise, coming up against a cold metal door. He fumbled for the knob, turned it. Locked. He huddled there, cowering in the shallow recess, seconds zipping past like bullets.

He strained his eyes toward the far end of the hallway. A block of darkness slowly separated from the surrounding blackness. The base of the shape—

—
Gutman's door
—

—flickered with a smokey blue light, faraway heat lightning that pushed back the envelope of darkness, turning it into a smoked-mirror image of the hallway, a passage lined with doors and shadows. Watching the flickering light, he found himself back in Glory for an instant, standing on the beach, his six-year-old hand in the cancer-ridden grip of his mother. He could feel every bone, brittle as dry twigs, as they looked out over the horizon. A storm brewed there, massed thunderheads high above the Gulf, shimmering with ghostly pulses of light.

“Never forget the beauty, Nicky,” she had told him. “Never overlook simple things.” Her last lesson, their last walk on the beach.

Nick pulled out the second of Pomeroy's six-shooters. With his mind's eye he saw Gutman crouched behind the door, waiting, a gun held loosely in his Jekyll hand, the malformed Hyde hand wrapped around Sue's porcelain throat, her hair spilling around the monstrosity in copper rivulets.

Nick pressed the barrel of the larger gun to his lips and inhaled the acrid stench of cordite. Thumbing back both hammers, he murmured something—

—
a prayer
—

—under his breath. Then he charged down the hallway, his fingers squeezing the triggers again and again.

Thunder roared in the narrow hallway. Tongues of orange flame licked at the gloom. At the far end of the hall—miles and miles away, an endlessly elongating funhouse corridor—quarter-sized holes bloomed in the door to Gutman's office. Ghostly lasers of smokey blue light beamed out, slashing Nick's face and chest. He ran on, forging through the dense air, each step jarring him as though it might shake him apart, each gunshot like a stick of dynamite detonating between his ears.

The smaller gun, the one in his right hand, quit firing; Nick dropped it and fumbled for the .45. The sight caught on his belt. Never slowing, he tugged harder—and then Gutman's door loomed up before him, each bullet hole a cataract-stricken eye, staring at him with its milky blue gaze. The hammer of the second gun fell on empty chambers.

Click!

Click!

Click!

The thunder of time.

Nick dropped the pistol—still tugging at the .45—and launched himself at the door. He hit it with the meat of his shoulder, following with his full weight. A satisfying crack sounded and the door flew back. Nick tumbled through—he felt the cold plate bearing the name
VERGIL GUTMAN
brand his cheek—and spilled across the thick carpet of the Pachyderm's office. He rolled and came up in a crouch, pulling the .45 free at last. The flickering glow from the bank of television monitors illuminated the room with an eerie incandescence. Nick glanced at Finney's Rolex and discovered that his fall had shattered the watch. Time stood still, frozen at 4:41, the second hand jutting up like an accusatory finger.

Behind him, the door crashed against the wall. Nick whirled, firing two rounds into the gleaming oak as the door swung back into its frame. Wispy tendrils of smoke, like a bank of fog, rolled slowly into the room. The air smelled charred.

Someone chuckled, an oily wheezing sound.

“Oh, bravo, Mr. Laymon. I
do
love an entrance.”

Shadow loomed mountainously behind the desk. Even as Nick pivoted, even as he raised again the .45, a desk lamp clicked on; a pool of light spread across the desk, revealing the Pachyderm. Again the burp of obscene laughter threatened to burst from Nick. For an instant he knew that it would, that shocked, vulgar hilarity would spill from his throat. Something—a belch, a swallowed chuckle—escaped his lips, burbled into the room.

Nick met Gutman's eyes—and all humor died.

Vergil Gutman stared at him with eyes devoid of emotion. The Pachyderm had changed not at all since Nick had last seen him: the burn-puckered whorl above his eye; the alien nodule of diseased flesh running rampant along his left cheek; the thick, twisted lip. Everything looked exactly, horrifyingly the same. Again vertigo knocked Nick off balance, sent his mind reeling. Staring into those cold eyes, Nick sensed the titanic battle raging inside the man, the struggle between his Jekyll and Hyde selves, between the normal, sane man and his tortured, malformed twin. Looking at him—the deadness of his eyes, the rigidity of his posture—Nick knew that the Hyde-self, for the moment, held sway.

Nick leveled the .45 at him. “Where is she? Where's Sue?”

Gutman studied Nick, his hands folded in front of him on the desk, the smaller hand—

—
the sane one
—

—engulfed by the malformed one, thickened with spongy tumors. Lying in the center of the desk was a silver pistol; it gleamed wickedly in the pool of light. Gutman made no move for it. Instead, he watched Nick with what might have been a smile playing across his tortured lips. Next to the gun lay the cigar cutter. Nick saw it and looked quickly away, his heart stalling, his blood running cold. The blade was clotted with something thick and brown.

With blood.

Sue
.

He glanced at Finney's watch again. Still—as it always would be-4:41.

Gutman sighed. “I fear that your solo appearance bodes ill for my dear Lawrence. And yet I cannot help but notice also the absence of Mr. Durant. An eye for an eye, Mr. Laymon, is that—”

“
Shut up! Shut the
fuck
up!
” Nick grasped the butt of Evans's .45 with both hands and pointed the barrel at Gutman's massive head, centering the sight on the whorl of marbled flesh. “Where is Sue? Tell me now or—”

“Or you'll what Mr. Laymon? You've proven yourself terribly resourceful—but not foolish, certainly not that. Surely you realize the precariousness of your situation.” Gutman paused, tilting back in his chair. He shifted slightly—the leather making a terse farting sound, the chair groaning beneath his weight—and searched for a thought. “A person of your—how should we say?—resilience? Yes. And
imagination
. I think that captures you precisely. Surely a person of your resilience and imagination must comprehend how precarious a situation you find yourself in.” Gutman spoke each word fastidiously, forcing each precisely enunciated syllable through his malformed lips. An image bloomed in Nick's mind: Vergil Gutman posed before a mirror, his eyes boring into his reflection as he worked his way through the dictionary, pronouncing each word a thousand times—until it was perfect, until it flowed precisely from his mouth.

“A man of your constitution,” Gutman continued, “could be of use in an operation such as mine. After all, you've proved yourself to be a man of … flexible … morals—”

Nick stepped forward and pressed the gun to Gutman's forehead.

The Pachyderm smiled, a grotesque constriction of his facial muscles. The smile never reached his eyes.

“If you shoot me, Mr. Laymon, you'll never see Miss Thompson again. That would be a shame. She is quite … lovely.” His tone thickened with the word, as if the Jekyll-self had stumbled; then the voice rediscovered its measured cadence. “We had a deal, remember?”