The Kill Riff (30 page)

    The change in the resonance of Reese's voice told her that he had stuck his head back out through the door.
Careful, now
.

    "All kinds of nice stuff. Too bad the Datsun won't make the climb. Might have to use you as a pack mule, puss.'' She heard a stack of plastic cassette boxes rattle as they fell to the wooden floor. Lucas' tapes. "Check this out,'' commanded the low, graveyard voice.

    Suddenly her mind insisted that this was hopeless and futile. In the movies, they fired these things with both hands, grimacing while they did it. One of her hands was still crippled.

    "Hey." She still had not turned, and now the reptilian eyes were sought on her, drilling into her back through the merchant marine sweater, seeing her secret prize with some alien form of X-ray vision.

    She took casual chances with her life; she'd told Lucas so. Now she had to live up to the brag.

    "Just a minute." She tried to sound irritated, thinking phony normalcy would buy her another half second.

    She turned. Reese was standing, one foot in, one out of the doorway, holding Lucas' portable Sony Trinitron television. Wires trailed from it back into the room. Reese wrenched them free with an irritated expression; more stuff clattered as it was swept off the table inside.

    Cass finished her turn by raising the pistol and pulling the trigger in a single smooth motion. Her left hand braced her wrist, as she had seen in the movies.

    Reese's eyes locked on the gun. Instead of widening in surprise, they narrowed as his whole body tensed. Recognition was instantaneous, and his reaction time was blindingly quick, juiced by the speed in his system. His lips curled back over his teeth, and his body had already jerked to shield itself within the tiny room when he realized that nothing had happened.

    The trigger was frozen solid; it had not budged. Cass' eyes were squeezed shut, but the expected booming report and the slam of recoil had never come. Her finger jerked on the trigger again. Nothing.

    In that second Reese, still holding the TV set, decided to take her down. Four sure steps accelerated him across the room, and he swung the TV wide to extend his reach. To him it weighed nothing.

    As Reese took his first step, Cass' brain screamed that there was a thing called a safety, that it immobilized the trigger, that it was a little thumb lever on the left side of the butt. She turned the big Llama ACP sideways to shove up the safety with her good hand, and when she glanced up she saw the TV set swooping down in Reese's hand like some damned ICBM targeted right between her nice green eyes.

    The pistol seemed to go off by itself.

    It kicked, almost snapping her wrist bones, and yanked itself violently to the right, jerking her arm out straight. The steel-jacketed hollow point mushroomed as it plowed into the blank glass eye of the Sony. The TV exploded like a magician's jack-in-the-box with an eardrum-compressing pop, peppering them both with whizzing slivers of glass from the disintegrating vacuum tube. Reese collided heavily with the counter where Cass had been standing before the recoil had jerked her out of his path. His free forearm shielded his eyes. Flying pieces of the TV set made an incredible hailstorm din all over the cabin in the aftermath of the gun's loud and obliterating voice.

    An animal roar jumped out of Reese as he pushed himself upright against the counter, amazed that he was still alive. His right ear was a ruined casserole of tissue that sparkled with fresh blood. His eyes, fixed and gleaming, caught Cass, and his face split into a hungry grin that showed all his teeth. His forehead was lacerated; blood began to bead there instantly. The sticky mass that was once his ear welled red, and blood coursed down to drip off his chin like candle wax.

    And he smiled at her, saying, "Okay, you cunt."

    And he reached for her.

    Cass forgot the agony in her arm and fired again, from a distance of less than four feet. There was no time for aim or thought; her fingers simply snapped shut around the gun.

    The noise and flame and impact stunned her again. Tears ran from her eyes and wove cold webs on her face. Reese was yanked backward. He hit the table, collapsing two of its legs. His right arm flailed out and slapped the floor as he slid diagonally down. His left arm, the arm with which he had just tried to grab her, had been blown off at the elbow. It was lying in the sink, fingers still trying to close.

    She heard him breathing as he lay there on his back, his blood starting to pool around him on the floorboards. His second Dos Equis had rolled off the table and was upside down in his lap, gushing yellow foam, mixing with the blood, making the liquid orange. Blood jetted from his left elbow joint in gruesome arterial gushes.

    The trick with the gun, it seemed, was to keep it from launching toward the ceiling when you shot it.

    Reese was trying to get up, making guttural noises of effort. With one arm gone and needles of glass sticking out of his forehead, he fought to lift himself, watching her as she stepped closer. There was no fear in his eyes. If there was any expression, it was that of a robot who dumbly tries to complete a programmed task as more and more of its parts fall off. His breath husked in and out, becoming labored.

    The gun trembled in Cass' raw and throbbing hands. He was halfway up, sitting now, reaching for her. She became aware that she was murmuring under her breath in a nonstop litany.

    "Stop it… stop… stop it…''

    It looked as though Reese had been bashed in the side of the head with a meat-tenderizing hammer. His ear was pulp. Cass thought she could see a white bit of skull exposed to the air. He chocked a boot under himself and leaned forward.

    "… stop breathing… stop…"

    He looked at his left arm, which ended at the elbow. No reaction. He looked at her. She saw in his eyes what he wanted for her. His right hand stretched toward her, a bloody claw.

    "… stop… bleed to death… stop… die, goddamn you, Reese!"

    One more shot reverberated through the forest, quieting the chatter of the birds. Then stillness.

    Except for the gentle sobbing.

    

    

    GULLS TRIED TO TILT INTO the buffeting wind, and gusts hurled them around like so many scraps of dirty white paper. As the day had darkened, it had turned surly and hostile. A gale-force storm had blown in with the dusk, soaking everything in mist, stinging the eyes and ears with the chill. The sea churned, shifting itself massively and pounding the beachfront with vast, frothing breakers. Here and there a lone vehicle-a municipal safety rig, or highway patrol blazer, or some hapless, behind-schedule traveler-inched its way south against the hurricane of motive force, motor grinding with strain, door and window seals leaking.

    He was a free man.

    The realization replayed for the millionth time in less than twenty-four hours. Free. And, as Burt Kroeger undoubtedly would have added, exonerated. Free. And forced at last to admire the fortuity of absolute coincidence, free to concede the existence of luck, as a rational man would have to under such circumstances.

    Pain still ossified his hands. Steering the Bronco against the whipping wind trying to shove it off the road was a necessary torture. His leg fought the accelerator the way his hands fought the wheel. It shot pain through the roof of his head in regular tick-tock jolts. His kneecap had been crowbarred off and nailed back into position with a rusty cement spike. The backbeat of pain made his complexion look drained and cheesy in the green glow of the dashboard telltales. His stare was fixed, his jaw clamped, as he made slow but inexorable meatgrinder progress toward home base at a careful forty miles per hour.

    The storm had puffed up a while back, scouring the tarmac with its violence. The Bronco's wipers strobed erratically in the splattering pellets of rain, which rendered the roadway nearly invisible.

    By comparison, the desert night had been too warm, arid and stifling, making him sweat profusely, making his pores weep from exhaustion and depletion and the fear he hated to see in himself. Dehydrating him spiritually as well as physically. Never had the security of his cabin seemed so out of reach as it had the evening of the 'Gasm concert, when the foremost thought in his brain had been-

    
I've finally lost my mind, I've slipped all the way down the trough into gibbering madness.

    Sometimes time defies its own rules and elongates. For one achingly clear second, the Kristen nightmare had not only come back, it had become real and true. As the tale spun out, he watched it like some vagrant astral spirit dispassionately monitoring the hell suffered by its recently vacated physical shell. In that cruel moment, he had looked up-and seen himself strafing 'Gasm to shreds with a machine gun. And that sight had scared the marrow right out of his bones.

    But it had not been himself. Of course. That would be… well, crazy.

    It had been someone else, another man with another mission. An insane mission. Lucas remembered thinking,
Why, that nut is trying to scrag the whole bloody band!

    Pepper "Mad Max" Hartz's smoking white Fender Strat hits the stage and bounces, the screech of its feedback blanking out the popping report of automatic weapons fire. Band members Reichmann, Hartz, and Hicks get chopped down one two three. His own finger is still stalled on Dragunov's trigger after picking off Fozzetto. He sees gouts of yellow-white fire spitting from the muzzle of another weapon on the catwalk level, even with himself. In the flashbulb light of the discharges, he registers a single image of the attacker, legs splayed atop a girder, sweeping his weapon back and forth. Then his own feet move him from the scene, pronto. 'Gasm never gets to perform "Cock Knock."

    Had he actually seen Kristen in the crowd? No… that had to be dismissed as a hallucination.

    He runs, fast yet cautiously, and through the catwalk grids he sees, in a blur, dozens of faces turning from the stage to the ceiling of the Arena. Almost at once comes the cattle panic of bodies compelled to flee and meeting the resistance of fellow bodies in the lethal illogic of the mob. He only has a second to think of this before he is tearing away the mesh screen of the duct through which he invaded the amphitheater. Then a brief, furious period of crabbing awkwardly along on hands and knees, needing more speed and feeling the panic he had felt in Denver when Brion Hardin had almost refused to die. The fear tries to wrap him up in its arms and squeeze. The riot noise behind him cycles down as he gains distance. Blindly, he shoves away the curling flap of metal that served as his breach point. He gashes his palm and hits the graveled tar of the roof. The Dragunov skids ahead of him like a broomstick as he rolls. It doesn't discharge from impact, as he fears. He is gasping now, terror sliding in and out of his lungs and rawing them with the hot, dry air of the Arizona desert.

    A deep, murky puddle exploded upward on the left as Lucas plowed the Bronco through it. It was not much of a distraction from the pain of his wounds and the infuriatingly slow countdown of green posted mileage signs. There were still twenty miles to traverse. He was alone on the road.

    Yesterday, the problem had been too much traffic.

    Below the fire escape ladder are maybe ten cops, milling around, just beginning to ask what has occurred inside the Arena. In ten more seconds they'll catch the drift. He yanks his grapple and climbing line from the nylon slipcase and runs full-tilt for the opposite end of the roof. Less light there. If a police whirlybird has been called in, its spotlight can still nail him like a butterfly on a board. Like Pepper "Mad Max" Hartz. He hears push-bar exit doors crash open below. A stream of shouting and running people is unleashed. Most will remain inside to bungle the cops, to gape, to face part of the Event. He thumbs the release, and the tri-clawed grapple snaps open. He slips it through a square rain vent and unfurls the thin nylon line over the side. It hangs straight between two pools of diffused lighting from decorative standards at ground level. He sleeves the Dragunov in its black pouch and digs for his gloves. They aren't there.

    At first he had thought, Oh, yes, the gloves weren't in the dream, that's why. Perhaps his alter ego on the opposite catwalk had borrowed them. Then he realized those notions were crazy, too.

    No time for panic. He zippers the pouch shut and loops the strap over his shoulder. He kicks his leg over the lip of the roof, into the void, and begins to rappel down the coarse brick surface of the wall without looking. And without gloves, on the thin nylon cord. People are beginning to fill up the parking lots in the distance as he hangs heavy on the line. He is a vague shadow against a dark wall. The stiff toes of his boots brace agreeably against the abundance of toeholds on the wall. He feels a tiny spark of relief that this might not be impossible after all. Not that he really has any choice. He who hesitates is busted.

    The damned gloves were probably still up there on the catwalk. They'd dropped out of the pouch while he was fiddling with the rifle in the gloom. It made him feel sloppy and stupid; here was his first accidental clue for the sleuths. The gloves were leather, traction-palmed and calf-lined. They'd carry finger oil but no prints. It wasn't good enough. Two successes had made him careless, and it had taken no time at all for him to-

    
Slip.

    His foot misses a perch, and he yaws heavily to the left after only five downward steps. The line yanks taut and skins his palm like a wire cheese cutter, laying wide the incision made by the ducting just a moment before. A bark of pain dies in his throat, and he clamps both fists shut on the line. Three feet greases through and comes up dark red before his plunge is aborted. He hangs dumbly, legs splayed to keep him from twirling, since the line is not belayed from below. With slices of flesh and pattering droplets of blood he buys several more crucial feet, then his friction checks out for the night. Agony flares in both hands, and he releases the line, lurching vertiginously out from the wall, into space. Picking up speed. The ground gets bigger. About the same amount of time as a dive from the high board. Air rushes past his ears as he plummets. He tries to tuck and roll as his boots thud into the turf. He hears the fresh carrot crunch of his right knee dislocating on impact. This time he screams into the crook of his arm. Nobody notices him. He scrambles into the darkness, back against the wall, terror oiling him from top to bottom. This is no time for wimping. The adrenaline is making him ill; his breath speeds in and out. He grits his teeth and kicks out to reset the kneecap. This time the sound is the crack of dry kindling. The pain is utterly fantastic; it makes him forget his bleeding hands for a second, and, weirdly, he hears the jingling of the two spent cartridge casings inside the box taped to the Dragunov.