The Magpye: Circus (15 page)

"I came here to destroy Cane
King, now you're telling me I'm the rightful heir to the King
empire."

"And who better to burn it to
the ground?"

For the first time in a long
time, the ghost of Able Quirk smiled.

"Why didn't I remember him?" he
asked indignantly. He was getting tired of ghosts playing tricks
with his mind, hiding in its darkest recesses to jump out when he
least expected it.

"Marv," replied Dorothy. "That
would be Marv's doing."

Able felt the tug of memory,
and opened his mind's eye once more.

***

Marv clicked his fingers, and
Able opened his eyes.

He looked around, scanning his
surroundings. He felt his heart beating in his chest: slowly,
rhythmically. Not the rapid hammering he had grown used to, the
drumbeat of his fight or flight response that pounded in his ears
every second of every day. No breath on his neck, either, no shadow
rising up behind him. No monster. Just Marv's trailer, and the old
magician tucking his pocket watch back into this pocket.

"How do you feel, Able?"

Able turned his head one way,
then another. Where the monster had been, there was something else.
Something different, something that didn't scare him, not like
before. It was something very old, and very big, but… quiet.
Patient. It was waiting for *him* to reach out to *it*. And so he
did.

"Able? Able, can you hear me,
son?"

"Call me Magpye…"

Taylor stalked through the
corridors and offices of the old paper mill. The bullet wound on
his side, little more than a graze in the soft flesh, ached. Blood
was still seeping slowly from it, slowly but surely sapping his
strength. His shoulder, meanwhile, had gone numb and icy cold, a
bad sign, and his arm left was growing weak. He would have to
finish this quickly. One of the advantages of the perfect clarity
that he possessed was that it told him when he was losing, when he
has weak. He laboured under no illusions of his own strength. He
always knew exactly what would be required to win in any situation
and Taylor had never gotten into a fight that he could lose.
Hopeless fights were for hopeless people. A knife in the back was
always an option and Taylor wasn't above running, when he had to.
But running out on Cane King meant that you stayed running for a
very long time, probably the rest of your life. And if you stopped
running, life was sure to get a whole lot shorter very, very
quickly.

Taylor didn't like to be
trapped and his uniquely perceptive mind began to search for an
alternative solution as he crept soundlessly from room to room. He
could kill King, of course. That had been on his agenda for a long
time, but there was still too much of the organisation that was
fiercely loyal to King, or at least to the King bloodline, for
Taylor to put that plan into action now. Killing King would create
a power vacuum that he could not control, not yet. There were the
other crime syndicates to take into account as well. Bringing them
to heel required demonstrable power and control, power and control
that Taylor was far from possessing.

No, killing King was not an
option. Yet.

To Taylor's way of thinking,
that also meant that he had to keep King alive, and Cane King
lacked the clarity required to know when to run away from a fight.
He thought that never backing down made him strong, but Taylor knew
it made him weak. It made him predictable and that made him
vulnerable.

No, getting Cane King to run
was not an option either.

Jack Taylor's mind, with
perfect clarity, settled on a single course of action. He focussed
on isolating the pain, packing it away to deal with later, and
turned his thoughts to the singular task of hunting and killing
Officer Nutt before he bled to death.

Nutt paused at a junction
between two parts of the mill. Spiral stairs led up and down while
the corridor stretched away from him in two directions. The
building was deceptive, its layout not true to the expectations set
by its exterior. There had been a lot of remodelling over the
years, with pieces being changed and melded back together like a
Frankenstein's monster of iron and brick. The vast body of the
thing was a patchwork, a history of its rise and fall told in
cement and plaster. Nutt hated buildings like this, where even the
layout was against you. A shot could come from anywhere: above,
below, left, right. He'd have wished for a squad, if only the
junction weren't so narrow. The place was a death-trap.

Dropping to a low crouch, he
crept towards the junction. There were no sounds other than his own
movements, but something was telling him that there was someone
else nearby. Two hunters, moving through the labyrinthine veins of
the desiccated carcass of the mill, each seeking to make the other
prey. Nutt had already seen how fast Taylor was, he had to assume
that he could move as quickly and as soundlessly as Nutt could too.
Most men were less dangerous with a bullet in their shoulder, but
not Jack Taylor. Nutt knew the type. Only a kill shot would stop a
man like Taylor, anything else just made him more dangerous.

It was time to change the rules
of the game.

Nutt pulled the hammer back on
his pistol and fired a shot into the ceiling.

"I'm here!" he yelled, walking
towards the deadly junction. "Come and get me!"

Cane King jogged quickly down
the stairs towards the bowels of the old mill, trying his best to
mute his footfalls. He trusted Taylor to deal with the last cop,
whoever he was, but he wasn't sure he trusted Taylor. His death in
the heart of his fiasco would be too easy to explain. White hadn't
been the first person to intimate to King that Taylor had his eyes
on the throne. In Cane's experience, there wasn't a worthwhile
person who didn't. It was how he had been raised, of course. Power
through succession had been the way of the Kings for a very long
time.

He reached the gantry above the
giant presses themselves. The rusting old leviathans still oozed a
strange, stagnant power. Cane remembered playing in the place as a
child, and listening to his grandfather's long diatribes on the
power of print. They said the old man had ink in his veins. Cane
had been glad when his father had killed the old bastard.

A droplet of ink, cold and
dark, landed on his cheek.

Instinctively he looked up as
he smudged it away.

The Ink was on the ceiling, a
dark patch in the shape of a man. Before King could react it had
fallen towards him, emptying in a sudden torrent. He stumbled
backwards as the Ink filled his mouth and blotted his eyes. He felt
his back hit the railing and struggled to keep his balance.

It had to be a trick. A
trap.

Maybe something that Grace had
set up, to trap the non-existent vigilante.

"Grace Faraway is dead."

King twisted towards the voice
and toppled head first over the edge of the gantry.

Adam King turned, recognising
his brother's scream instantly. He watched as Cane fell from the
gantry and fell, colliding with the giant wheels and gears of the
old printing press underneath the gantry.

Sliding over the side of the
machine, Adam watched as Cane tumbled the rest of the way, his body
contorted and twisted from one impact after another.

As Cane vanished from sight,
Adam could only smile.

"Hit every branch on the way
down," he said to himself and jogged over to inspect his brother's
body.

On the floor of the mill, Cane
King choked on what should have been his last breath. Everything
was black, his eyes filled with ink, his mouth frothing with dark
bubbles. The fall had broken bones and torn his flesh. Inside his
twisted body, organs had burst and released their precious
fluids.

"So many wounds," mused the Ink
to itself, as it set about its task. "So much blood."

The rips and tears, the gashes
proud with protruding bone, they all just made it easier for the
Ink to slip inside and to start rebuilding, rewriting, Cane King
from the inside out.

King gasped, then swallowed,
and the Ink rushed inside him, filling his stomach and lungs and
breathing into him a new life.

Taylor came from the left,
stepping out of the shadows with his gun raised. Nutt could tell
from the way that he was holding it that he wasn't a natural right
hander. Dumb luck, but he'd put the guy's dominant arm and shoulder
out of action with the bullet meant to go through Cane King's
head.

Nutt raised his pistol, keeping
the sub-machine gun at his hip. If Taylor tried to duck or dive,
he'd fill the corridor with lead at shin level and cut the guy to
pieces. He should have fired already, but Nutt wanted the kill shot
to be clean, neat, professional. Taylor was an animal, Nutt was a
hunter. He'd make the distinction all the way to the grave.

"So, you're Grice's partner
huh?" shouted Taylor.

Nutt rolled his head in a
circle, loosening his shooting shoulder.

"He told me a lot about you,"
continued Taylor. "You're a hell of shot, apparently."

"You're about to find out,"
retorted Nutt.

"Well, I've already been shot
twice today," said Taylor. "I don't intend to make a habit of
it."

Nutt shook his head. The guy
really had a screw loose, that was for certain.

"Put the gun down, put your
hands on your head and drop to your knees."

Taylor laughed. "Are you
serious?"

Nutt was asking himself the
same question. He'd said the words without thinking. Was this what
Grice would have wanted? He asked himself. Drag the guy in front of
the courts, make him spill his guts on King, Garrity, the whole
crooked crew? Nutt shook his head. It was a pipe-dream. Six months
and all they had were empty files and a dead friend to show for all
their efforts. So they'd made a few busts, so what? All they were
doing was wiping the shit away so King could crap on the city some
more. The whole shitty mess had pulled them over the line, the
vortex of corruption that powered this city sucked everyone in
eventually and those it didn't make dirty it destroyed.

Lee Grice was dead. Rosa Blind
was dead. Rigby, Cooper, Rogers, Hartley, all dead.

The vortex was pulling at Nutt
too. He could feel it.

He thought about Grice, a good
man reduced to a soggy jigsaw puzzle and tossed into the gutter
like trash. A good man turned into someone's game.

Nutt wasn't going to play their
game anymore. He might be the last of them, but he was going to be
a good cop. Just this once. For Grice. The trick was to make sure
that Taylor didn't know that.

"I can drop you where you
stand," threatened Nutt.

"Then do it," replied Taylor.
"Take your best shot. Then I'll take mine. Sounds fair, right?"

"I'm not playing games with
you,"

"You know, your partner read me
my rights? Tied to a slab, buck naked and shit scared, he read me
my god-damned rights."

"Grice was a good cop," said
Nutt. "I'm not."

"Oh I know," replied Taylor
coyly. "Like I said, Grice told me a lot about you. He told me a
lot about all of you. He was a talker, wasn't he? Wanted everyone
to like him, wanted everyone to get along. He was the type that
'took an interest', you know what I mean?"

"Like I said," replied Nutt,
re-fixing his aim on Jack Taylor's head, "He was a good guy."

"He cried at the end," said
Taylor. He started to walk down the corridor, moving from side to
side like a snake as he did so. "He cried like a little bitch."

"Don't take another step!"
ordered Nutt. He put a warning shot into the ground a yard ahead of
Taylor, sending up a plume of flooring.

"Up to you," said Taylor,
retaking his aim at Nutt. "You know, it wasn't what I'd done to
him. I mean, he was pretty cut up about it…" Taylor stopped to
chuckle at his own joke, "… but really he was worried about his
kid."

"Grice didn't have a kid,
idiot," said Nutt. "No family, no connections, any of us. You want
to throw me off my game? Good plan. But get your facts
straight."

"Oh, my facts are straight. No one can lie to me, officer,
did you know that? I see lies like other people see the sun on a
bright day. Clarity, you see, that's my
thing
. Grice had
a kid alright. He just didn't know it when he signed up with you
guys."

"Bullshit."

"He told me, just after I'd
finished cutting off his right leg at the knee. He didn't tell any
of you because he didn't want you to know he was compromised and he
made sure his lady friend kept him off all the paperwork. She
didn't want her kid growing up with a cop for a Dad anyway, that's
what he said. He begged me to let him go, guess he thought he could
pension out with his lost leg and go play happy families or
something. He gave me everything on you guys, just for that
shot."

"And you killed him anyway, I
get it," said Nutt. "You're a hard-case and you can kill a guy even
if he's got a kid somewhere. That doesn't make you special, Taylor.
It just makes you another scum-bag who ruins lives because he
can."

"What it makes me is a scum-bag who cut your friend to
pieces while he was still alive," said Taylor, taking a sudden step
towards Nutt, then another. "Toes, feet, legs, knees, thighs,
fingers, arms, ears. I left him for hours like a broken doll on
that slab and when I came back the only thing he'd been able to do
was piss and shit himself. I put your friend in a fucking
bag
just to send you a message, and it brought you all here
like moths to a fucking flame. I'm the guy who killed each and
every one you."