The Shaft (46 page)

    It could start right now.

    She watched the dashboard clockface. Time has become her pal again. So easy, to crank the wheel and cruise your fine moneymaking buns right out of this nightmare. As she drove she would smile and thank the officers as they waved her through collisions and roadblocks. For her safety.

    It was daylight now, and no time for nightmares. It was nearly eleven.

    Jamaica took another sip from the flask and wandered through the FM band on the radio. The frenzy of snow and ice that danced and spun just beyond the hood of the car calmed. It looked like the storm was letting up.

    

    

    The ceiling was a better place for a gun to be aimed, as opposed to the bridge of Bash 's nose.

    Without conscious aim or grace his hand shot toward the muzzle of the pistol, trapping it between his middle and ring fingers just as it went off. The slug singed the top edge of his right ear and took some hair with it into the wall.

    The explosion seemed to halt time.

    The intruder's dense fist swooped to pulverize Bash's neck just above the knob of spine. Bash's whole world lurched sharply to the southeast. Thoughts of wheelchairs flitted through.

    The fumbled gun hit the floor between them.

    It was like watching two runaway locomotives collide. It was not a fight of heroic blows and manful recoveries, of skilled tricks and artful kicks. This was more like sumo wrestling between two pissed-off guys who had never actually seen sumo wrestling, all wide groping grabs and clumsy tumbles. Boxes took big hits, got split and mashed. Jonathan's possessions spilled to litter the floor and confound footing like a pouch of spilled marbles.

    Bash hit the deck and looked up into another oncoming fist.

    He saw the meshed fingers like struts in the grille of a semi zooming large to fill his face; it was the first time he had experienced the vertigo of a 3-D movie live. He saw a lumpy gold ring with a garnet the color of a burn scab. Hair on the knuckles. Definitely this was an inferior offshoot of homo sapiens.

    Charging face-first into a bank vault door would have been more pleasant, less hurtful.

    He heard the crunch in his gums as his front teeth tried to fold back and his lips were hamburgered. The ring chopped him bluntly open. Blood streaked his beard as he rebounded into the wall. He split open a carton of paperbacks and went down in a torrent of good literature as the forces of illiteracy waded in to obliterate him.

    The gun was near his foot. No time for a retrieve. He kicked it and saw it spin beneath Jonathan's cot.

    His attacker delivered another head shot. Both men were swathed in heavy winter clothing, their padding and insulation at odds with the damage they sought to inflict.

    Bash saw, scattered, the kitchen goods he'd loaned to Jonathan. Spatulas. Plastic lids for plastic tubs. Nothing solid or sharpened or lethal. A shaker boosted from a restaurant (the best place to provision yourself if you're new in town) rolled lopsidedly, spilling salt. Bad medicine, that.

    He would, without thinking, absorb another sledgehammer blow to protect his own borrowed property. This was stupid.

    The dive bomber fist screamed in and Bash jerked his lace out of the firing line. A hole was punched in the wallboard an inch from his ear. Proximity made the demolition gunblast-loud.

    The hole in the wall began immediately to bleed.

    Bash continued his awkward pivot and jacked his elbow into his opponent's open mouth. Even through three layers of sleeve, he felt the incisors.

    
Chances are,
Bash thought,
that this was not one of Jonathan's newfound buddies
.

    The stranger's head snapped back like footage of a violent sneeze in reverse. He absorbed the blow and did not fall. Instead he grabbed a potato peeler and tried to add it to Bash's forebrain. When Bash feinted the tool jabbed a neat crescent hole in the wall. That hole, too, began to dribble fresh blood.

    Then the entire apartment rippled with a lateral vibration like the first warning kick of an earthquake. Neither man noticed. Behind Bash the wall roiled gently, once, deep waters stirred by the passage of a big maneater, or the single soft undulation of a python. The fist-hole tore at the top and bottom, becoming an oval and relinquishing more blood with plaster dust and bubbles in it.

    The potato peeler was swallowed by the wall.

    And the room began to shrink, retracting as if stung.

    Bash felt himself nudged from behind, some unseen coach goading him to bull in there and fight, fight, fight. Across the room the cot scooted toward them by half a foot. The pistol was ejected from beneath it like a spit seed. Blood marred it now.

    He struggled to uncross his eyes and get his arm up in time to deflect the boot hurrying to pulp his face. It smashed through the hole in the wall and withdrew trailing webs of blood.

    Bash moved. Not friendly in this corner.

    He rolled out to the right as the ceding sagged down to kiss their heads. The naked lightbulb there popped like a pimple, spraying sparks and convex slivers of glass. He blocked his attacker's outside hook and sank a solid, body-imploding blow to his midsection. But for the clothing it would have been spectacularly crippling.

    The intruder doubled, saw the gun, and turned his recoil to the defensive by grabbing for it. He was good. He had done this sort of thing before.

    At last Bash got to kick him in the face. He felt his boot eyelets split the guy's tongue, spoiling his chance at the gun. But again, the son of a bitch would not fall. He sucked up a winning kick to the dentures and arched straight. This guy is too goddamned tough for me, Bash thought. Thinking of football, he decided to hell with it and charged.

    He caught the assassin by the throat and left wrist, in a parody of a fireman's carry. Bash pulled backward and stole his opponent's balance.

    Here were two inept ballroom waltzers, falling.

    The bigger man's heels crushed another of Jonathan's boxes. His free arm swung wide and grabbed the windowsill. It was the last thing to let go as he went through the glass and out, casement and all, the back of his head taking out the crossbar.

    The howl of the blizzard blew half the pieces back into the room. Bash won enough time to get a grip on the guy's ankles and assist his upside-down exit.

    Gracelessly, the man fell two stories straight down. The snowpack was almost as hard as the sidewalk buried beneath it, and he hit headfirst. Unmoving, he began to collect snow.

    The room ceased its convulsion.

    Bash reeled into the wall, blood streaming from his mouth. He sat down hard in the middle of the floor. His skull was swimming. He was hurt. He was bleeding, damnit.

    Bathroom. Rinse mouth.

    The blood-dappled automatic was still on the floor, and Bash's scattered cognizance caused him to gawp at it as though it was the most obvious clue in the world handed to a guy still too stupid to figure out the Secret Word.

    The Kahlua bottle he'd secreted as a sneak gift to Jonathan was on its side, bleeding coffee liqueur.

    That, and the exsanguinating wall, made him wonder just what had befallen his friend.

    He picked up the gun and turned it over in his grasp. Heavy. Loaded. No
mickeymouse
. His thumb moved across the grooved hammer and his finger felt its way around the trigger, collecting blood. This was serious shit.

    The door opened and his heart hit overdrive. He came within an eyeblink of blowing away the person who appeared in the doorway.

    'I just missed Marko on his way out,' said Jamaica. 'Rather, he just missed me. You've gotta be Jonathan's friend. The guy with the truck.'

    

    

    Fergus had no last name to speak of and three preferred expressions in English:
Boolsheet sunvabeech. Fockeen I dunno. And I duit.

    When on foreign shores it is generally accepted that the two most important interrogatives are what do you call this and how do you say this? Plying his duties as Kenilworth 's manager, janitor and repairman, Fergus found it more useful not to know things in order to avoid labor that the scumbag residents of this roach motel would never appreciate anyway. Or tip for. Why are the second floor toilets backing up?
Fockeen I dunno
. Where's the window glass you promised for 210?
Boolsheet sunvabeech screens need clean
. When are you going to fix the washer in the laundry room?
I duit
, pronounced
eye-do-eat
, meaning that Fergus was a grand master of the jerry-rig, the patch job, the boolsheet bandaid solution. When tenants got fed up and vacated they usually left him holding a deposit for breaking their leases early. Gravy. Such extra cash could buy economy-sized sacks of dog food, or the odd fifth of Night Train. Bonus bucks were good for videotapes of white people fucking each other in the ass, or the compensated companionship of a female, under fifty, who shaved her legs once in a while.

    Fergus just loved infidel women.

    His relationship to the occupants of Kenilworth was truly symbiotic. They exchanged rock-bottom sustenance like mutual tapeworms, never taking enough to kill the host. Fergus was an inadvertent authority on parasitism; in a roundabout way it was why he remained as the Concierge from Hell.

    Back in 1972 the Boss had pointed out that Kenilworth Arms had been constructed during Prohibition, using bricks and material recycled from outmoded and condemned structures that dated to the mid-1880s. Fergus had noticed at once the peculiar smell of the bricks; a tang of mummy species, or what old tombstones smelled like when they broke. An American never would have perceived it. A smell of age.

    After sight, smell constituted Fergus' principal sensory input. His nose was keenly tuned. It was one of the things that kept him from bathing too often. The odor of American soaps and the reek of hard, piped water seemed toxic.

    The building was very special. The Boss stressed that. It contained a tunnel system accessed via the basement level, plus custom-built deadspaces, akin to small attics, between the second and third floors. These had originally been engineered for the concealment of large quantities of bootleg liquor.

    Fergus was not particular about accepting the position. The thing inside of him forced him to say yes. Later he reckoned all had been for the best. He decided he did not mind being coerced.

    The thing alive within him had begun as a stitch, stabbing in just below his left lung and causing the kind of pain you feel when running too fast or breathing wrong. It tended to linger, pulsing rhythmically.

    Stomachaches followed. Then massive bouts of constipation. He swigged Mad Dog and ate a bottle of aspirin to cut the worst of the pain. He thought he had grown a tumor, and if so, why bother? He was not ambitious enough to become a morphine addict, so the pain was a convenient excuse for doing nothing with his entire life. His way of giving the finger to an infidel god.

    Never would he forget the evening he had been scanning the papers, seeking custodial work to pay rent and buy wine. His little pet stitch decided to sting him, viciously doubling him over hard enough to bang his broad nose on the kitchen table. Blood ran and his head filled swooningly with its aroma. Clutching his gut, he slouched to the toilet to vomit.

    Great torture-rack heaves battered him bodily. It was impossible to draw air and it felt as though a policeman was kicking in his lungs. Internal pressure bulged his eyes. They would pop and smear the bowl with aqueous jelly. Most of the pizza he had wolfed down earlier resurged in vast unmasticated hunks. Whole pepperonis tinted purple by cheap vine flip-flopped from his spasming gullet and glued themselves to the walls of the bowl. He puked blood. He knew there were probably ulcers down there, but this pain was new, compounded, different. The ulcers had never bitten him quite this way before.

    He spat blood-ribboned mucus and black gouts of digestive acid, his face as red as Thunderbird port, veins tumescent, breath husking inward when it stole the chance. His sphincter contracted and he loaded his trousers with liquid shit that stank of alcohol. His bladder voided warmly as tears, oily and yellow with the impurities of his metabolism, squeezed loose to drip into the toilet bowl. That porcelain ring had become a life preserver, and he hung on even as his internal seizures bounced his jaw off the rim more than once.

    Each time the worst part of the nausea passed, he spat and geared for the next wave.

    At last his stomach floated as a solid mass ascended, pushing past his epiglottis and separating his teeth. His windpipe was blocked and at first he thought he was chucking up his own intestines. He had heard of really lucked up people actually doing that…

    Except that this mass was squirming too vigorously to be married to his musculature. Something was trying to wriggle free of his throat, pushing against the walls of his trachea.

    It fell out into the darkened water of the toilet bowl, and coiled. A blunt, eyeless head, brown and bullet-shaped, rose into a cobra pose inches from Fergus' face. He thought of it as a head only because it resembled the business end of his man-thing, only larger, with a red-lipped vertical mouth that suckled on the bloodstains while he watched.

    His first impulse was to flush it away. It hung on to the bowl via oral suction and was rinsed clean.

    What he had coughed up was about a foot long, and with a vaguely ridged undercarriage. Overall it was the muddy color of potter's clay, the busily feeding head the same girth as the body, which did not taper. It was six or seven inches around. No appendages.