The Passenger (11 page)

“Hole-in-the-Wall,” Alan said.

“We’ll need a warrant. Know any judges
who are early risers?”

“As a matter of fact I do,” he said.

A year ago he’d slept with her. Janet
never knew.

* * *

Now
, she thought,
it’s got to be now.

Ahead of her on the stairs Emil was
hauling Marion down, cursing and fighting him all the way but Janet knew his
strength firsthand and knew it wasn’t going to do her a damn bit of good. Billy
was smiling, having a fine old time with all this, laughing and poking her with
his index finger from behind. Ray ignored him but seemed to consider Marion
with something like regret.

In one way or another each of them was
focused on Marion. She stopped and turned.

“Micah Harpe,” she said. “Big.”

He looked puzzled.
How would this woman know his name
? So did the black guard behind him.

“Yeah?”

“Two things. My name’s Janet Morris. Does
that ring a bell?”

“You been on the bands all night. I know
who you are.”

“You don’t understand. I’m a lawyer. I
represent your brother. And our defense is based solely on you, Mr. Harpe.
We’re saying it was you who killed George and Lilian Willis and not Little.
That’s the first thing.”

She was talking for her life now and she
knew it. She also knew learning of her defense strategy wasn’t going to make
him happy.

“I’m interested. The second?”

“I read your rap sheet. The attempted
murder, the one in prison.”

“Uh-huh.”

She glanced down the stairs. The others
had reached the bottom and Emil was staring hard at them, suspicion knotting
his brow.

“The man was your cellmate. He’d been
there just three days. You beat him into a coma. Why?”

“I didn’t like him.”

The guard was smiling.

“You didn’t like him because he’d
murdered his wife and children. His
children
.
You seemed to feel very strongly about that.”

“Nobody on the inside likes a
baby-killer. Maybe me less than most. So what?”

“What if I told you what you
haven’t
heard on the police bands yet?”

She looked over her shoulder. Emil had
handed Marion off to Ray now and was climbing back up the stairs. He was
already halfway there.

“What if I told you I just saw these
people shoot a four- or five-year-old girl to death in her parents’ car, just
to steal the
car
? Would you still let
them walk on out of here? Because that’s what they did. A man, a woman, a
teenage girl and a five-year-old
child
,
Mr. Harpe.”

She was aware of Emil right behind her
now and knew he’d heard that last part but she didn’t give a good goddamn what
or how much he’d heard and her anger was real when she whirled on him.

“
Tell
him
!” she said.

Emil looked too damn surprised to answer.

“That true?” said Harpe.

Emil just looked at him.

“You a pimp
and
a baby-killer, asshole?”

Then suddenly his confusion seemed to
resolve itself. He threw his arm around her neck and yanked her off the stair
she was on and slid the gun out of his belt and jabbed the barrel to her
forehead, his breath hot and sour against her face.

“
Fucking
bitch
!”

The guard behind them raised his rifle.

“Go ahead,” said Harpe. “Shoot her. And
then I guess you’re gonna shoot your way outa here, right?”

She glanced down at Billy and saw him
draw Marion’s .22. Harpe saw it too.

“Looks like you are,” he said. “You are
one bunch of stupid people, you know that?”

“Back off!”

He slammed her forehead with the gun
barrel. His arm was choking her. She saw stars and tried not to fall.

“Back off, goddammit!”

He hit her again, harder this time,
exactly where she’d hit the windshield hours ago so that she was bleeding
again, yet even through the bright spreading pool of pain she could feel him
trembling, fear or anger or both, and that drove her own anger, keeping her
afloat above the pain. She was aware of all the people watching them below and
that the place had gone practically silent, that somebody had finally killed
the chaos they’d been listening to all night. So that the third time he hit her
it thundered in her ears like a single blow on a drumhead.

“
You
want a dead lawyer here? I’ll damn well give her to you!
” Emil screamed.

“You already did that, remember?”

“What?”

“I said you already did. You’re damaging
your own merchandise. Fool.”

And that was true enough. She could feel
the warm blood crawling down her cheek. Emil didn’t seem to understand.

She did, though. Hope seemed suddenly to
fly away down those stairs.

“Did I say what you did or didn’t do
changes anything?” Harpe said. “Mr. Thaw says to try Harrison, I try Harrison.
You get it now, you ignorant sonovabitch?”

Then he
did
get it finally and lowered the gun and let go of her and she
fell to her knees against the stair. Harpe held out his hand. Emil hesitated
and then handed him his pistol. Then turned to Billy downstairs.

“Put it away, Bill.”

“I don’t have any accord with this man,”
Billy said. The gun was pointed directly at Harpe.

“The man don’t like you either. Put it
away.”

“It’s all right,” said Harpe. “Let him
hold it if he wants. Don’t matter.”

He nodded. Just once. And suddenly the
room exploded in gunfire, all of it pouring across the floor at Billy, at
least a dozen guns at once, Ray and Marion pitched flat-out beside him with
their hands covering their heads as Billy danced and twitched like some
boneless thing erupting flesh and blood, muzzles flashing and bullets tearing
into him from every which way keeping him on his feet until he dropped like a
sodden sack, the gun still clenched in his bloody right hand.

She smelled cordite thick and vile for
the second time that night and thought of the little girl again. She felt
nothing at all for Billy—not even satisfaction. It was no surprise to her at
all.

She looked at Emil. His face was white,
his mouth
slack. Without his own gun he seemed
smaller, diminished down to just another weak aimless man. Harpe moved on past
them down the stairs, saying nothing to either of them, past Marion and Ray
peeling themselves up off the floor and past Billy’s pooling blood, and Emil
stooped and helped her up and they followed, Emil’s legs just as unsteady as
her own, she thought, the guard a step behind them. Followed him as he moved
through the crowd and gunsmoke like a walking boulder or some living, breathing
god past a biker leg-wounded in the crossfire, patting him on the shoulder, the
man grinning at that, followed him to the back of the room where he opened a
door and led them down to more stairs and darkness.

* * *

Billy was there one moment and
not there
the next and that was the way
of it, the way it always was, Emil thought, for the cop and for that family
back there and for all the others, nothing too fucking astounding about that,
nothing to worry a man particularly. So he had to figure it was the fucking
room
and what was going on in it that
was troublesome, the dark of the room and the long moving shadows against the
rough stone walls as they came off the stairs, the room dark except for some
candles and a flickering fireplace way down at the end. So the
room
was bothering him? The fucking
room
?

Or maybe it was the fucking
altar
?

Because that’s what it was all right, a
goddamn altar, three long wide slabs of what looked like solid granite— these
assholes and these rich bitches gathered around it a bunch of weirdo zombies
going about their business crowded around the altar toward the back, the word
rise
painted across the ceiling, some
dumb-ass pentagram
thing on the wall behind
them just like in the horror movies, diamond necklaces and formal ties showing
above black robes, diamond earrings and Rolex watches, no bikers or Nazis in
this
neck of the woods, no sir, all
these rich-fuck weirdo zombies moving along one by one, washing their hands and
faces out of a great big copper bowl and toweling dry and throwing the towels
in the fireplace.

All
that
was bothering him. Yes it was.

The six big Dobermans prowling around
were bothering him too. Their eyes gleaming by firelight, their wet panting.
The chattering sounds their toenails made against the fieldstone floor.

And the one he guessed was the Big
Kahuna, the only one facing him, the one with the
hooded
robe and the upraised bloody hands and the goddamn blood
streaked all over his goddamn bony face, he was
sure as hell
bothering him.

“Who the fuck
are
these guys?” he whispered to the guard.

“Ever hear of the Church of Final
Judgment? Meet your basic pastor.”

And then he was coming toward them,
smiling, face and hands washed and dried now just like the others who parted to
let him pass and Emil could see what else besides the bowl was on the altar.

It had been a guy once. Now it was naked
body parts. A hand here. A leg there. A cock and a pair of hairy, bloody balls.

“Jesus Christ,” he said.

“Healthy, Mr. Harpe?” said the man.

“Depends on your point of view,” said
Harpe. “Healthy enough, I guess.”

And then the goddamn fruitcake was
walking around
inspecting
them.
All
of them. He took a while checking
out Whatsername’s tits in particular.

“Seedy,” he said. “I like that.”

“The price is ten thousand,” said Harpe.
Whatsername had already begun to cry. Fuck her. Two black-robed women took her
by either arm. “All right. They’ll do,” said Harrison.

“Hey. We’re only talking about the ladies
here, remember?” Emil said.

“Really?” said Harrison.

He looked at Harpe and Harpe looked at
Emil.

“Not really,” he said.

* * *

She watched them bolt up the stairs and
hit the door at a dead run. The door wouldn’t budge. Ray stumbled and lull and
Emil backed off and tried again.

“This one’s excepted,” Harpe said.

“Why?” said Harrison.

“She’s a lawyer. A defense attorney.”

Harrison laughed. “Quite right, Mr.
Harpe. No policemen, no lawyers and no Supreme Court justices. I suppose I can
live with the other three.”

There was considerable strength in
numbers and it didn’t take them long to pull them off the stairs—Emil’s furious
terror, his flailing feet and fists be damned. Ray put up practically no
resistance at all. Maybe he really it us sorry about what he’d done to her.
Maybe he figured he deserved this. Whether he felt that way or didn’t, she
couldn’t care less.

On the floor they surrounded them and
began to kick and as though that was some signal the Dobermans began to bite
and growl and shake.
Ray’s calf, blood
flying off it, his right hand. Emil’s arm and then his shooting hand
. Over
the howling of the men and shrieks from Marion she heard Harrison tell Harpe he
could take her now.

“You want to watch?” he said.

“No.”

They started toward the stairs. Behind
her Marion screamed her name and she turned.

“Janet!” She was struggling to get free
of the women behind her. There were three of them now. One of the women
clenched and squeezed her breast, her diamond ring catching the firelight, just
as she’d done to herself not so very long before. She wondered what passions
Marion was feeling now.

“
Jesus
,
Janet! For Christ’s sake,
please
! You
got to help me! I didn’t kill anybody! You
know
I didn’t kill anybody!”

“I know,” she said.

They’d hauled Ray and Emil up off the
floor to the cinderblock wall, to the shackles there. The family man was
sobbing. Someone was stripping off Emil’s belt and tugging down his pants while
another took his head between both hands and pounded it against the wall to
make him stop his bellowing. She supposed it annoyed him.

It worked.

She looked at Marion again. The women
were already dragging her toward the bloody altar.

“But this way,” she said, “you never
will.”

* * *