Strawman Made Steel (12 page)

“What am I going to do with you?” He wasn’t
asking me.

“You’d better kill me,” I said.

“But how?” he said, as if he was choosing
from a mental list of precise length.

“Doesn’t matter to me,” I said. “But if you
don’t, I can’t be held responsible for what my friend does.”

Finally I got some play from his face. A
single eyebrow crooked. He glanced at the prone giant and back at me.

“Your friend isn’t going to be helping
anyone.”

“Him?” I said. “Don’t know the guy. I’m not
talking about him.”

He shook his head a little, wanting me to
make sense. “Then you came alone?”

“I never go anywhere alone. I can’t. There
are two of me.”

He smiled, and said, “My arm needs
calibrating. I must have hit you harder than I intended.”

“You did fine,” I said. “It’s just someone
beat you to it, years ago. Cracked my skull and sheared my brain in two. I live
in one half. My friend lives in the other.”

He licked his lips, and said in the voice
of one playing a game, “Who hit you?”

“Fate.”

He leaned back in his chair, and his face
lost its animation. “Fine. Today I am Fate’s hand, and I have decided what to
do with you both.”

I glanced at the giant. His chest was still
rising and falling. His left leg was splayed farther than it had been. I
thought I could see his profile better. The skin at his temple was ripening
into a deep maroon.

The accountant turned and retrieved my
revolver.

“Don’t you want to know who I am?” I said.

He trained the gun on me.

“If I put you down first,” he said, “I can
investigate without your talk. It grates.”

“Frisking a corpse isn’t the same as hearing
it first hand. I’m good at stories. Don’t you want to hear one?”

He thought about it for a moment. “Not if I
have to listen to you tell it.”

“Killing me will upset Mrs. Speigh.” Shot
in the dark.

But it landed.

I saw it land in the way his eyelids parted
minutely. On that bland face that movement was a volcanic eruption.

He bent over me, and sent his cobra-quick
hand darting in and out of my pockets until he found my card. He read it
silently, and then weighed me in his gaze.

I nodded at the card. “Get out of jail
free?”

He replaced the revolver on the desk,
precisely where it had lain, then fetched a cigarette and lighter from his
pocket. He lit up and drew on the cigarette. Smoke seeped from his mouth and
nose while he continued to stare at me.

“You’re investigating the murder of Mr. Speigh,”
he said.

He laughed. “Clever.”

I had no idea who or what he was talking
about.

He leaned over me again, and a familiar
odor enveloped me―one that tickled at my memory―but I couldn’t place it. Not
aftershave. Maybe toilet cleaner.

“Whodunnit?” he said with a mock twang.

“Dunno,” I said in a passable imitation of
his twang.

“But you have ideas.”

“I’m full of ideas.”

He drew on his cigarette. “Speculate with
me.”

“You’ll have to hire me first.”

With the hand holding his cigarette he
reached past my ear and stubbed it into the tender fold between lobe and scalp.

The pain was so sharp I felt as if it were
coming from every square inch of skin on my body. I couldn’t help sucking air
through my teeth.

“I don’t want to hire you. I just want an
answer.”

“A dickhead. There’s your answer,” I said.
“You get the question for free: What do you see every morning in the mirror.”

He turned to look at the big lump on the
floor. Then he drew heavily on the cigarette. He squatted by the man’s head and
hung the cigarette over his face. He shut his eyes and moved its burning tip
around like he was playing pin-the-tail, until it stopped just above the man’s
left eyelid. It dropped―

“Wait,” I said.

The cigarette halted a quarter-inch above
skin, and the accountant’s eyes popped open, expectant.

“Eutarch,” I said. “Middle brother murdered
the younger.”

He seemed to ponder my answer, before
turning toward the giant’s slack face, saying, “Would have been a pity to
tarnish a beautiful face.” He seemed to mean it.

When he returned to stand over me again, I
caught movement in the corner of my eye. The sole of the big guy’s boot edged
an inch across the floor.

“Bend down,” I said to the accountant, “and
I’ll whisper how he did it.”

He bent until I felt his breath in my ear.

Fast as a spasm, I twitched my head
sideways and back―and delivered the most brutal head-butt my neck would give.

Only it missed.

The accountant’s head whipped upward and
out of the way.

Momentum took me over. I crashed onto my
skull, and lay on the floor still shackled to the chair.

Which is where I’d wanted to finish.

The accountant was too quick, too smart to
have fallen for a head-butt. I’m familiar with his type. Always cool
calculation.

If you wanted to upset the calculation, you
had to heat the machine.

So that’s what I did. Lying on my side,
head ringing from the blow it took on the floorboards, I stretched forward,
opened my jaws, bared my teeth, and sunk them deep into his leg above the left
ankle.

(It’s a strange sensation, to feel a man’s
blood run in your mouth―at least, it seemed strange later.)

Nothing heats like outrage. The machine got
hot.

He made a noise deep in his throat and
wrenched his leg free, nearly taking my incisors with him. He stumbled
backwards and fell over the big guy, landing flat on his back with his legs
angled over the body.

And the big guy came to life.

With his hands still manacled behind him,
he raised his legs into the air, twisted to change their angle, and brought
them down around the accountant’s torso, a huge pair of pincers. He shimmied
until he got his knees to meet beneath the accountant’s spine, locking his
arms.

The room was still except for the giant’s
shoulders, which heaved with his breathing. His hands were flexed into fists
the size of pineapples, white with strain. I couldn’t see his face or the
accountant’s.

My backside had just enough play over the
seat of the chair to let me get my feet where I could lever myself upright. I
stood and waddled to the desk, wearing the chair behind me like a Victorian
bustle. The desk drawers had handles of tubular metal thin enough to get my
teeth around. When I’d pulled the top drawer open all the way, I found the keys
sitting there slotted onto a ring. I ducked my head into the drawer, like I was
bobbing for apples in a barrel, and managed to snag them on the second go.

I swung around to face the giant, mumbled
“keys” around a mouthful of metal, then dropped them into his hands, which
sprung open to receive them.

I glanced at the accountant. He lay pinned,
and still as a spinal cord patient. I turned and sat the chair over his legs
and waited while the giant attempted to unlock my handcuffs. His hands were
surprisingly nimble. Two minutes and I heard a click, and the weight of one
cuff fell dead away. I stood and undid the other, then stooped to free the
giant.

He said, “
Danke.
”

Without pausing to rub his wrists, he
wrapped his hands around the accountant’s throat and began to throttle him.

I watched as the accountant’s face colored.
It got to purple―the same purple as the welt on the giant’s temple―before I
retrieved my .38, stepped round in front, and said, “Don’t do that.”

He kept his hands there, but must have
relaxed his hold. Color drained from the accountant’s face, and he heaved air
into his lungs.

I holstered my gun. The giant removed his
hands from the accountant’s throat―and hauled off and punched him in the face
with a hundred-car freight train. Blood flowed from both nostrils, and the
sight of it seemed to calm the giant down. The accountant was out cold.

The giant got up, shook my hand, and said
that word again.

“McIlwraith,” I said.

“Thorsten,” he said. He said it
Torsten
.

“I’ll call you Thor.” He didn’t object.

At the desk, I put my hands on the
accountant’s neat stacks of paper and made a mess of them looking for I didn’t
know what.

“This door,” said Thor in a thick accent.
“Where does it go?” He was pointing at the door to the loft.

To hell
, I
thought, and said, “Loft.” He grasped the door handle, and I said, “Careful.
There’s a whole team of dead guys hanging from the rafters.”

He went out in a rush that sucked air from
the room.

I pawed over the paper on the desk. No sign
of Alltron letterhead anywhere. There were some accounts with cryptic entries,
and notes in a shorthand I couldn’t interpret. And lists. Many lists of names.
Nothing odd about the names―if I was in Europe. Czechs, Poles, French, a few
Russians, and Germans.

I heard a cry come from the loft. My .38
was in my hand before Thor came back through the door, but I holstered it again
when I saw the smile splitting his melon-head from ear to ear.

He had a nice smile, but it soon collapsed,
leaving the hardened face I’d seen watch while he brained a guy with a single
devastating blow. A glitter in his eyes was the only trace of the smile.

“Hans is not there,” he said.

Hans.
There
were no Hans’s on the lists I’d read. I passed a sheaf of them to Thor. He
snatched them from my hand, held them close, and ran a finger down the top
sheet like he was doing times tables.

My gaze fell on the safe. I wanted it open.

That’s when I heard footsteps clattering up
a staircase. More than one pair, and coming fast.

Thor stiffened, then stuffed the lists into
his coat and went to the door I guessed led to the stairwell.

“Locked,” he said. “But
dünn
. Thin.”

He caught me looking at the safe, and said,
“You want to open this?”

I did.

“Hold the door,” he said. “I’ll open.”

He went to the desk and dug his personal
effects out of the mess I’d made. He stuffed them all into his pockets except
for the pince-nez, which he clipped to the wide bridge of his nose. He angled
the standing lamp’s articulated neck until the element poured bright light over
the safe’s face.

I drew my gun and took up station, back to
the wall, on the opening side of the door. My ears were in the stairwell, my
eyes on Thor as he squatted at the safe.

Thor’s massive back obscured his hands, so
that I couldn’t see what he was doing. Lucky for me he kept up a commentary in
his German English.

“Light and touch,” he said. “All you need
to crack these. And time.”

He had the first in abundance. I guessed he
had the second. The third would be a problem. The clatter of shoes on stairs
switched to the pounding beat of men in a hallway. I’d been wrong about it
being three men. There were four closing on our position.

I flicked the Lady’s safety off.

Drowning now beneath the noise of
approaching bodies was the faint clicking of the safe’s dial. It wound up and
down, a rattler’s tail.

Thor was still speaking. “Last to first.
Combination number. No tumblers like a door lock. Each number notched in a
metal disc. Just need to line them up.”

I made a shushing noise. The storm of
footfalls had reached the other side of the door and died.

The door knob rattled. Gentle then violent.

“Freiter?” said a voice. Sounded like a
name. I glanced at the inert accountant. His name?

“Freiter. Open up.” A different voice.

The knob rattled again, twisting a little
off its axis.
 
Pretty soon someone was
going to pull out the thug’s lock pick―a shoulder.

I relaxed my grip on the .38. It felt hot
in my hand.

Hoarse whispers filtered through. I couldn’t
make out words. Conferring. Planning.

I glanced at Thor again. If he felt tense
it didn’t show. The only movement he made was the slightest twitching of his
right shoulder.

A juddering blow beat on the door, and the
lock jumped but held. There was a pause of four seconds, then another blow. The
lock assembly twisted and stayed that way.

The door was flimsy plywood. It was going
to tear off the lock in any case. One, maybe two more hits tops.

A timer in my head wound down. Three
seconds... Two...

I skipped to the other side of the door,
flicked the lock off, and yanked the door open.