King of Diamonds

by Ted Thackrey

  Or breathing.

  Jack and Perdita Soames had entered the casino together, movements coordinated and in step, determination implicit in every motion, bearing gifts for the multitude.

  And no one could doubt their purpose.

  Perdita’s hands were occupied with the weight of an oversize plumber’s blowtorch, its business end lighted and flaming.

  Her husband’s back was straining a little under the weight of two open satchels filled with what looked like an even dozen Molotov cocktails.

  Their faces were agleam with the fever-light of Mission.

  “Blessed be!” Perdita Soames repeated, the torch steady in a double grip before her. “Let every heart be filled with joy—the time of the Rapture is upon us!”

  Jackhandle Jack had bent double to set down his burdens. He straightened now. with a gasoline-filled wine bottle in either hand.

  The rag wicks looked wet.

  “We bring greetings from the Master,” he said, brandishing the bottles and holding them aloft for all to see. “He invites you all to join him this day . . . in hell!”

  I was in motion before he spoke the first word.

  His next move would be to pass the wicks through the flame of the blowtorch. And after that, all the options would narrow to one. My right foot found a hard purchase on the wall behind me and my arms stiffened to create a battering ram aimed at the solid portion of the breastbone just above the heart chamber, a blow that might not kill but would surely drive him backwards out of the range of that damned torch.

  But Suleiman was just as quick.

  And effective: His left hand grasped the muzzle of his sister’s torch, deflecting it upward and out of range of Jack Soames’s death bottles, and the right jab that took her solidly on the jaw was aimed with precision and measured to the final ounce of expended energy. Perdita Soames collapsed without a sound. He caught the still active torch before it could reach the carpet—and put it to use immediately as one of the angels who had accompanied the pair swung at him with manrikigusari, an Oriental version of the medieval mace and chain.

  One end of the weapon connected and wrapped itself around Suleiman’s arm. But it was the wrong arm, and before the road-company ninja using it could recover, the flame of the appropriated blowtorch was hissing in his startled face, fusing mouth and nose into a single blackened entity and stifling the scream that filled the ruins of his throat.

  Suleiman moved back a step, kicked him deliberately in the crotch, and then stood passive, ready for the next pyromaniac with a passion for plumbing tools.

  But there were no immediate takers—and that was just as well, because I had a little problem.

  Soames had gone down with a thump that sounded a bit more final than I had really intended, and in other circumstances I might have checked the heart and pulse against the chance that my blow had paralyzed the diaphragm or collapsed the sternum. No sense killing a man for a little thing like attempted mass murder.

  One of the casino’s security guards had other ideas, however. And a .357 magnum revolver.

  He had backed off about five paces, well outside the range of any preventive action I might take, and his face was already arranging itself in the good-bye look of the determined life-taker when Suleiman threw the flaming blowtorch.

  It missed the guard’s gun hand.

  But it spoiled his aim and distracted him long enough for me to cover the distance between us and feint a kite to the head, which moved him into perfect position for the hook kick that put him down.

  The gun landed under him, and I might have gone for it with the idea of getting it out of the way before someone got hurt.

  But I didn’t have time.

  Jack Soames was back in the play. Looking at the purple color of his face, I knew I had been right about the damage done by the double-handed blow to his chest; the man was drowning in his own blood and it was a kind of miracle that he could move at all. For the moment, nonetheless, he was still in command of his body and intent upon forcing it to carry out its assignment. The sometime street fighter was on his knees, a bottle of gasoline in either hand, and he knew enough about the weapons to be willing to throw them without waiting for the wicks to be lighted.

  A cold Molotov cocktail is almost as dangerous as a lighted one. Once the detergent-laced gasoline is free and soaked into carpeting, drapes, or furniture, the fumes can be ignited by the smallest spark—anything from static electricity to a light switch.

  I launched myself sideways, swinging for his head, with a kiai I hoped would freeze him for just long enough . . .

  But again, I was a moment too late.

  Say what you will, having only one eye does limit the scope of vision. I hadn’t seen the other security guard enter the room, hadn’t seen the blow Suleiman used to turn his lights out—and hadn’t seen him seize the unconscious man’s revolver.

  I was close enough, though, to get a detail-perfect view of the damage a .44 magnum bullet can do at powder-burn range.

  Soames landed four feet from the bottle-filled satchels.

  His hands were empty. And I didn’t need to check for vital signs.

  Activity on the floor of the casino had come to a full stop, and the single gunshot did absolutely nothing to break the spell.

  Everyone seemed to be waiting to see what was going to happen next.

  Nothing did.

  I landed in the spot where Soames had been, relaxed into a forward roll, and managed to come up with my back to a wall. But no one else seemed ready to argue. Suleiman held his own side of the corridor with an air of total competence, sparing not even a side glance for his erstwhile in-law.

  No one else moved.

  But finally, someone spoke.

  “Hey, you Bible-thumpin’ peckerwood,” Armadillo Skinny said in a tone that a stranger might have misinterpreted as one of casual inquiry. “Y’all want to kind of tell me just exactly what in the ever-lovin’ blue-eyed hell is goin’ on around here?”

  It was a legitimate question and I’d have liked to give him a clearly reasoned, lucid answer.

  But suddenly a clock was running—backwards, toward zero—in my head, and I was sprinting through the front door into late-slanting afternoon sunshine.

  I stole the first car I saw with keys in the ignition, breaking the glass with an elbow reverse that would have dented armor plate, and put the pedal to the metal, gunning the little sedan in and out of traffic across Coast Highway and down the hill toward the beach. Toward the hotel. Toward Angela and Terry and Willie.

  And Gideon.

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  Busy up your time in ways that bring a smile to the face and a balm to the heart, and the accounting will be a joyous one whether it comes early or late . . .

  THIRTY

  The first thing I saw on entering the hotel was the big wooden ankh.

  And Willie Axe.

  Willie had been crucified, stripped to undershorts and nailed to the cross, his head crowned with what looked at first like the traditional thorn tiara but on closer inspection was revealed as a ring of galvanized nails driven through the scalp into the skull. He had died in agony, and the horror-mask that marked the final animation of his features said it had gone on for a long time before he was nailed into position.

  Someone had wanted Willie to suffer. Someone who knew about pain.

  I stood still for a moment, looking at the blasphemous wreckage that had been a friend of mine and absorbing the sure and certain knowledge that I had put him there. Another hand had driven the nails, but I had left Willie the Ear in range of the hammer and nothing was going to change that. Ever.

  Regret is the deadliest appealing of all human weaknesses, paralyzing the spirit by attacking and perverting its best instincts. It can be lethal. And the moment I took to indulge in it at the foot of Gideon’s cross almost stopped my clock.

  Rage was building, and the world was filled with a buzzing sound that blanketed the alarm systems
and almost prevented me from sensing a sudden disturbance in the atmosphere behind me. Response was slow.

  But adequate.

  I ducked and rolled to the left in time to avoid the first blow and came to my feet again facing the threat.

  One of the angels I had left sleeping in the basement was awake again and doing his best to even the score. The roll that had taken me out of his initial attack hadn’t disconcerted him in the least; he was in motion again, taking the first of two steps that would put him in position to strike at my head with one foot and at my chest with the other, accompanying the movement with a practiced and professional kiai.

  It was a good move, and I couldn’t fault the kind of training that had taught it to him. His sensei must have been ichi-ban.

  But tournament sparring is one thing, and street fighting is another. A potted fern was under my right hand, and I tossed it into his face to keep him occupied while I reached for the edge of the little throw rug under the foot he would use for takeoff.

  He went down in a tangle, looking outraged.

  No fair!

  I had broken the rules—and I broke them again by not giving him a chance to complain or try for a second fall, stepping in quickly with the right foot, which I planted solidly beside his hip to give a firm base for the left that connected with his temple at mid-stride.

  It was a foul blow, and the tiny crack I heard as it landed told me it wouldn’t have to be repeated. Residual tonus held the body in position for a moment, but all emotion had fled from the face, and the head came to rest at a peculiar angle, as though no longer fully connected to the shoulders.

  The eyes stayed open.

  I stepped back and looked away from him to Willie, saying good-bye decently and without the whimpering he wouldn’t have understood. And didn’t need.

  “He died for you.”

  The words, echoing my own recent thoughts, were spoken by the work-assignment angel I remembered from my last visit to the hotel. But he was not talking to me.

  “This is the single, full, and appropriate sacrifice,” he said, eyes aglow in the middle-distance stare I remembered. “This is the time of Rapture. Blessed be!”

  He was naked below the waist, kneeling in front of the desk that had been his work station and surrounded by the dark scarlet saturation of his own blood. I wondered how he could still be conscious and able to speak. The switchblade loosely clasped in his right hand had been used to detach penis and scrotum at the root; the amputated organs lay discarded a few feet from where their erstwhile owner was bleeding to death.

  He didn’t seem to care.

  “Blessed be!”

  A contralto voice drew my attention to the other side of the lobby where a tall woman stood smiling in my direction. But she wasn’t seeing me, either. She couldn’t. She had gouged out both eyes and held them now in her hands before her, as though offering alms.

  “Blessed be!” she repeated. “The Rapture!”

  It was the phrase Perdita Soames had used and remembering details of my own trip to Cloud Cuckoo Land, I was beginning to see just how Gideon meant to accomplish the craziness I knew he had in mind.

  First the acid trip.

  Then the Rapture . . . as interpreted by the Master of the Eternal Flame.

  I forced myself to look around the room. A fat man in a business suit was crawling in circles not far from where the eyeless woman stood, his attention fixed on the pattern of his progress. He seemed intent and satisfied, but progress couldn’t have been easy. A heavy wooden chair was attached to his right leg by a length of chain that ended in a padlock, and dragging it along required an effort that kept him sweating.

  Not far away, seated in an overstuffed chair arranged to view the ocean sunset, a grandmotherly woman with blue hair and shawl had just finished stuffing both her nostrils to capacity with wooden safety matches and was now engaged in the serious business of pushing a long, jewel-tipped hatpin through both cheeks via the mouth. Her face was solemn with effort; one does not, she seemed to say, carelessly impale the tongue during these vital maneuvers.

  “Blessed be!”

  I turned away toward the elevators, stepping over a man who lay quite still, almost concealed behind a potted rubber tree, and found that my timing was good for once.

  The floor pointer moved to the L marker just as I arrived, and the doors opened automatically to disclose the single passenger who, I decided, had probably been pushing buttons at random. She was sprawled on the floor of the car just beside the operator’s panel, her blouse torn to rags, sucking her thumb and slowly massaging her bared breasts with the other hand. Her empty eyes looked through me and beyond to infinity, but I had met her once before and knew her from countless photographs.

  “Maria Theresa,” I said, bending to remove the thumb from her mouth. “Terry—where’s your mother? Where is Angela?”

  She didn’t pay attention to the names or to the words, but the pressure on the thumb hand got an immediate response.

  The mouth opened and the teeth snapped at my fingers, and the thumb went back into the mouth.

  “Angela,” I insisted. “Angela Palermo. Your mother. Where is she, Terry?”

  Still nothing.

  But the slot at the top of the button panel offered a clue. One of the card-keys I’d seen Jack Soames use to reach Gideon’s vulture nest on the rooftop was still in the electronic lock, and I didn’t stop to question the ways of Providence. The doors closed as soon as I pressed the card into the back of the slot, and the elevator car began its long, clattering ascent.

  Terry Palermo remained seated throughout the trip, both hands still fully occupied. But the vacant eyes blinked when we arrived at the windowless corridor leading to the wood-paneled security door.

  The corridor was brightly lighted now. And occupied. A woman I didn’t recognize stood there, back braced against the wall, eyes closed, expression beatific, driving her fingernails again and again into her cheeks and yanking them out again. Her blouse was covered with blood. She didn’t seem any more interested in me than had anyone else I’d encountered—except the one murderous door guard—since entering the hotel, and the perverse genius of Gideon’s plan was becoming clear.

  Jim Jones had gone the same route: Mass martyrdom as religious theater.

  But when Jones decided to lead his flock beside the still waters of the Styx, he had needed to exert every ounce of that immense personal charisma in order to persuade them to swallow their individual doses of cyanide. And at that, there were a few dissidents, holdouts who had to be dispatched by guards armed with automatic weapons.

  Sloppy work.

  Amateurish, really. And definitely not up to the standard of the Reverend Gideon Goode. He’d had a much more detailed scenario, foolproof and probably under development, detail by detail, as a kind of Wagnerian final option from the moment he moved his flock into the old South Bay Plaza hotel.

  Jack and Perdita Soames’s dozen bottles of fire had been no spur-of-the-moment reaction to the financial reverses I had engineered; fire was the central ceremonial instrument of the Temple of the Eternal Flame, Gideon’s weapon of choice against a world he could neither control nor comprehend except in terms of violent death.

  The steel bars that now guarded all windows except those in the lobby hadn’t been part of anyone’s security system. Hadn’t been installed to keep intruders out. The card in the elevator’s call panel had been his only slip—if it really was one—and I was reasonably certain all the other routes to safety, stairways and service access doors, would be firmly locked by now.

  Not that anyone would be trying to use them. That was the beauty of the Rapture according to Gideon.

  Blessed be, indeed!

  His in-house mad scientist, the execrable Dr. Flax, had provided a foolproof method of ensuring cooperation. I wondered for a moment how the mass dose of LSD had been administered. In the coffee perhaps? Or in an otherwise innocuous soft drink, à la Jim Jones? No. Gideon wouldn’t want any
holdouts. The object of the exercise was to keep the faithful tractable and largely confined to their individual rooms while the future was being annihilated. The hotel’s water pressure was maintained by a tank on the roof, so the simplest and most effective method of administering the lysergic acid would be to put it in there and let nature take its course.

  The place would be full of crazies in an hour or so.

  After that, the only precaution necessary would be to station one carefully selected fanatic in the lobby to handle escapees or intruders—with orders not to get thirsty.

  A strange and prolonged musical chord sounded, and the walls began to bend. Just as they had before.

  Stress seemed to bring on the weirdness, especially if I took time to think about it. I forced myself back into the elevator, moved my hand up to take the plastic key from the panel slot with an effort roughly comparable to that required for the creation of the pyramids, and held it before me like the Banner with a Strange Device on my way along several hundred miles of bright corridor to the door I knew was only a few steps away.

  It took about a month, but as therapy it seemed to work.

  The edges of the world were sharp again and the only sounds were real ones by the time I was able to slip the card into the slot in the door. The handle turned with a click, and I threw myself forward, past the threshold, in a roll that I hoped would bring me back to my feet in the vicinity of the metal chair that had confined me during the interview with Gideon.

  But the chair was gone, and so was the darkness.

  Shutters that had blocked the windows before were open now, and light filled the room. It was a rectangle, furnished in the spare and utilitarian style usually associated with Eastern asceticism. Tatami matting was stacked in one corner, and the only adornment was a larger version of the obscene altar I had first seen in the house at Glen Ellen. But the fire bowl beneath the ankh was much larger.

  Human size.

  And occupied. I covered the distance in three steps that didn’t quite touch the floor but hesitated for a moment before bending to touch the sacrifice that lay unmoving there.