KR told Sol to shut up and listen to what Fatboy had to tell them. That was when the real shocks began to arrive. He was nearly half way to the workshop when Fatboy relayed edited conversations that had taken place earlier in the afternoon at the Barnardi woman’s dress warehouse. He found himself listening to a high-pitched voice, that he immediately identified as Brolin’s, telling Barnardi that Dolly was his sister. He nearly fell over in astonishment and rage: Brolin had figured out where Dolly was working and had gone there to poison the deal? That guy was going down. At the same time he cursed his own stupidity: why had he let his sister get so deep into that situation?
So now Barnardi thinks that Dolly is a snitch and her brother is the guy who’s shaking her down for a few hundred bucks. Absolutely not something she needed to know.
He slithered on at a dangerous pace, his attention fixed on the next Barnardi conversation that Fatboy was playing back. This one was worse. A security guy he didn’t know telling her about the Goldberg killing, how it was done. Jesus, now she thinks that Dolly’s brother is killing people, and she’s got evidence.
The mannequin.
He thought back to his conversation with Dolly. What did Barnardi say? That she didn’t know how she was going to fight, but she’d work it out. So, looks like she just worked it out.
He turned off the street and walked down the icy passage to the yard at the back and entered the house through the rear porch. He trotted down the stairs and felt mildly comforted by the buzz of activity in the workshop. Sol looked like he’d found religion, eyes wide, arms reaching out in expansive gestures.
“This fucker just woke up! Found a voice! Decided to demonstrate its powers!”
“You figured it all out?” KR said. “How it logged what this Barnardi woman been doing?”
“That’s nothing. man! Technology! This thing’s loaded down with features we never even thought about. Security stuff. Cover your ass wherever you go. It’s all built in.”
“Okay, so let’s use it, let’s think about this. Fatboy, what’s the time delay? Exactly when did this woman talk to the security guy?”
“That conversation finished twenty-three minutes ago.”
“Anything happened since then? Any follow-up?”
“Ms. Barnardi called her husband and told him that things had changed and that she’s waiting to speak with a police detective.”
“Jesus.” He pivoted on the balls of his feet, stared at the glowing shape on the floor. He was feeling threatened, challenged in some ultimate way, but also free, as though everything was on a new plane, with new rules. “These data sources of yours tell you anything about this detective? Is she on the way?”
“Police communications are still resisting decryption, Mr. KR. I have no information.”
“So what’s your suggestion? What do we do?”
“My mission should be to recover the neutralized mannequin from Ms. Barnardi’s warehouse.”
KR nodded. Get rid of the evidence. That made sense. “Is there time?”
“I don’t know, Mr. KR. I should leave immediately.”
Sol waved his arms. “You know what I think? Get the mannequin, sure, but at the same time we got to frighten the shit out of this dame, make her understand she don’t go to the cops whatever she thinks she can prove, because if she does she’s gone, history, zapped like the Goldberg guy. Maybe Fatboy has to show itself, do some tricks, whirl around like a dervish, act like a godly power, why not? Do it! A little of that and she’s too fucked up to say a word.”
“Fatboy?” KR said.
“I should leave immediately, Mr. KR.”
“Yeah, okay, you work it out. But no physical harm to Ms. Barnardi, okay?” Another murder rap might not matter much to him, but he sure as hell didn’t want Dolly dragged into something like that.
Fatboy began to move. KR waved at a couple of his men to let him out.
Chapter Eleven
Sara wrapped a scarf around the lower part of her face and stepped outside her building for a second time, just to confirm that nothing in her surroundings had changed. She stared across at the ghetto, darker than the neighborhoods to the north and south. A miasma of primitive ill-will seemed to encompass it; and for a second she gave way to visions of fearsome predators leaping forth from its murky outlines.
She shivered and retreated quickly inside. She sat down and tried to carry on with some reconstructive sewing on an old and damaged dress, a task she had begun with Dolly to give her an idea of the skills involved. She had been thinking about Dolly a lot since the patrolman’s visit. How had she been so completely fooled? Dolly had seemed so sincere and interested in the business. Well of course she was interested in the business, but for the wrong reasons. All the same... the innocence was surely not entirely faked. Maybe she was scared of her brother, played along, tried to keep out of trouble.
What mattered at the moment was that Dolly had been long gone when the patrolman had arrived, so there was no way she could know that her cover was blown. Which meant there was no particular reason for the brother to mount an attack. Unlike Mattie, she had paid the money. She wouldn’t be seen as a threat. But she’d be glad when Dennis’s friend Alice turned up and she could hand over the mannequin.
Dennis had offered to hang around until she arrived, but she knew Dennis was busy and she wasn’t about to let him know she was vulnerable and scared. The little girl inside her wanted badly to be so irresistibly attractive and seductive that he stayed anyway, but he didn’t. And that was the right outcome, she thought. Don’t be vulnerable and scared. Grow up and deal with it. But if Alice didn’t arrive in the next few minutes, she was going to give her another call.
A car’s headlights briefly lit up her entrance doors. Thank God. She stabbed her needle into the dress and stood up. She bumped into the counter getting round it. She approached the door and then held back, waiting. The person who entered her shop, cautiously, with the air of someone breaching a sacred space, was male, not female.
Foster. Her husband.
She stared at him, caught entirely by surprise.
He stopped and responded to her look with a sheepish half-smile. “Okay, I should have called... I just wanted to see...”
Foster never came to her shop. It wasn’t something that interested him. She tried to keep the impatience out of her voice. “Honey... I mean, why are you here?”
He continued to look uncomfortable. He glanced quickly around, returned his gaze to her face. “Sweetheart... I was worried about you. You said the police were coming, and so I thought...”
Something in his hesitant manner, combined with her heightened state of awareness, led her to a sudden insight. Foster thinks he’s intruding on my territory. It wasn’t that he took no interest in her shop: it was her fault; her determination to be efficient and businesslike had made him think that his interest was superfluous, unwanted.
She stepped forward suddenly and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “I’m fine, but it is a bit spooky here in the dark, so I’m glad to see you. Sit down. The detective didn’t come yet, but she should be here soon.”
She pulled a chair around from behind the counter. He said, “Thank you,” but didn’t sit down on it. He still looked bewildered, now perhaps by her sudden change of mood.
“Were you really just worried about me?” she said, suddenly seeing another angle. “You didn’t think I’d made the wrong decision, talking to the cops?”
He hesitated. “It’s riskier, of course... but I thought it was unselfish, courageous... so I came to give you some support. As long as I’m not in the way.”
“Of course not.”
He was about to sit down, but they were both distracted by a rumbling, rattling, sound from the roof like distant thunder. A shiver passed through her. She stood still and looked up. The noise ceased.
“Wait here,” she said and went through the door to the warehouse. The lights came on and she peered round. Everything looked normal. She went back to the s
hop. Foster was displaying the resilience he had shown in their home: he looked nervous, but not overwhelmed. He gave her a questioning glance. She nodded in reassurance.
All of the lights went out, leaving a blind void.
She swore inwardly, her pulse rate climbing. She thought she heard her security mice scuttling into emergency positions. She took a pace towards where Foster had been standing.
“Is this normal?” he said out of the blackness, his voice steady.
“No,” she said.
Her backup batteries restored a low level of lighting. His face looked white but strangely calm. She felt anything but calm.
“Sweetheart, you should get behind the counter. Keep a low profile.”
He moved obediently.
She turned. Weak light from the street filtered through the entrance doors and the high window. She activated her phone and spoke the name of the detective, Alice Bukowski. “I think we might be under attack,” she said.
There was a delay of a few seconds. “You serious?”
“The power is out.”
“I’m nearly with you. Say five minutes. Leave the line open.”
The stillness in the air was like a static charge. She told herself not to panic. Should they run for it? Probably not. Her mice might tell her what was happening, if she could remember the code.
A cracking, percussive noise from the high window made her gasp. Her limbs went stiff. Something fluorescing in brilliant colors flew through the window and crashed to the floor and began to flail and shake from end to end of the shop, like a huge trapped bird. She collapsed backwards against the counter. Her limbs felt as lifeless as a rag doll’s.
The bird was crying or singing or chanting, she wasn’t sure which, but the space was filled with its primitive, rhythmic calls. Then it swooped to within a few feet of her, stood on two of its appendages, the bands of color on its chest too bright to look at, and began talking in a strange language.
Without knowing how she did it, she hauled herself onto the counter and over the other side. Foster grabbed hold of her and she held on to him. She wanted to say something over the open line to Alice: Are you getting all this? But she was almost comatose with terror, and she couldn’t move her lips.
The bird leaped onto the counter and the colors along the bottom of its carapace turned to intense white lines. There was a hissing sound and an acid smell. White smoke briefly billowed upwards. She and Foster pushed themselves desperately away from the heat and the smoke. At the same time she felt a burst of fury. This fiend from hell was cutting up her shop!
The bird or the alien or the robot suddenly flipped itself back onto the floor on the other side of the counter. She could only see its top appendages, but it seemed to swing around and harangue her eighteenth century bridal mannequin, colors flashing, as though it now believed that this was the entity in charge, and that another display of dominance was required.
The digression enabled her to catch her breath. “Are you hearing this?” she gabbled. “It’s here, going crazy, in front of us.”
“Hang in there. I’m calling in backup.”
The robot swung around again, and stood still, its colors dying. It was close to the counter and she could see its top half. It seemed to watch them intently, although she could see no eyes, no face.
“The password,” it said. It jumped on the still-smoking counter, pin-sharp lights appearing on its body, blinding her.
She was convinced that it would kill them both if she didn’t respond. An upper appendage was already gathering shape as a bar-like weapon, silhouetted against the beams of light. She moaned and tried to pull herself and Foster back towards the door into the warehouse.
“The password!” it said more loudly.
“There is no password!” Foster shouted beside her. “We are non-combatants!”
She had a hallucinatory sense that she and Foster had been spirited into an academic debate, safe, rational, part of some different life. It passed in a flash and she was again scrabbling on the floor, driven by sheer terror to push them at least into some new space, some potential sanctuary. The door to the warehouse, still weakly functional on battery backup, shuddered open.
She felt a rush of air like a passing train and the robot had passed above them into the warehouse. She slumped face down, still expecting the killer blow. She was aware of Foster’s body, half covering hers. Three or four seconds of agonized expectation stretched on forever.
“You okay?” Foster whispered.
“What’s it doing?” she muttered.
“Can’t see. But it’s still here.”
The mannequin, she thought; it wants to remove or destroy the mannequin.
Fury bubbled up inside her again. Did it matter any more? Not if the police got here in time to see the robot. But if they didn’t?
She maneuvered away from Foster and pushed herself up on her elbows. The warehouse was nearly dark, and the robot must have gone into camouflage mode: she could see nothing moving. She had pulled a couple of dustsheets over the defunct mannequin, but she hadn’t tried to move it. Surely the robot would have no trouble locating it.
She said quietly, “Alice? Where are you?”
No reply. “Alice?” She waited a few seconds. Nothing.
Shit. The connection was down or Alice was busy coordinating backup. She heard a scraping sound from the far end of the warehouse, several little coughs, then a jarring crash. What the hell was it doing? Finding the mice? She had a sudden impulse to jump to her feet and look around, see what it was doing to her property, but she controlled herself.
A voice in her ear: “Sara?” Alice was back on line.
“Yeah.”
“Is it still there?”
“Yeah.”
“We’re out front. Where do we get in?”
“The entrance door works.”
She felt herself grabbed beneath the armpits and dragged roughly across the floor. She gave out a squawk of alarm and tried to roll away.
“It’s okay, it’s okay.” Foster’s voice.
At almost the same moment her mannequin seemed to fly past at five feet above the floor, heading through the door to the shop. The whoosh of air and the thudding vibrations on the floorboards told her that the camouflaged robot had also gone by beneath it.
“Look out, it’s coming!” she screamed into her phone.
There was a sequence of crashes and then gunfire. When everything had gone quiet she took a deep breath and raised her head. Foster stood up first and helped her to her feet.
Chapter Twelve
“Where is this thing? What’s it doing?” KR was pacing around the underground workshop, kicking at bits of equipment, his brain on fire. Fatboy should have been back an hour ago, so something must have gone wrong. It was after eight in the evening. He wanted to go home, but he couldn’t face talking to his mom; or Dolly, or Rosa. If something had gone wrong, there was going to be trouble. And if he’d brought trouble into the ghetto, he was a bad kid, he’d broken the rules.
Sol was even more agitated, sitting on a stool amidst the equipment, the screens around him lighting up his wild gestures. Whatever his dialogues with Fatboy’s auxiliaries were about, he wasn’t getting any answers.
“They say there’s an emergency! Special conditions apply! A lockdown on communications! Holy shit, I swear these motherfuckers are making it all up, because none of them has any idea...”
KR heard a voice in his ear: Tank was calling from the corner store.
“Hey, KR, listen good. We got an invasion force pulling in to the lot. Cop cars, trucks, containers, National Guard, hoo boy. This is big, and it ain’t the Popeyes, let me tell you.”
KR closed his eyes for an instant, then said sharply, “Listen, Tank? They ain’t got the right to abuse you, just ‘cause you’re wearing a C-spy. You got that? You got the right to remain silent.”
“Yeah, sure,” Tank said, but sounding like he’d folded already. That was the problem with the C-sp
y: you lost the will to resist. Tank was going to talk.
“Okay, so don’t sweat it. Tell the other guys, get out if you can, but don’t try to be heroes. That’s not going to work.”
He cut the link with Tank and screamed, “Fuck!”
Sol looked startled. “What?”
“Trouble. Cops, feds, all kinds. At the store. The big clean-up has started. Fuck!” he screamed again.
“They found Fatboy?”
“Must have. That’s why it didn’t come back. So now it’s kickback. Come on, we got to do something.”
He started circling the basement with rapid steps, trying to figure out the next move, his brain sluggish, refusing to give him ideas. It occurred to him that this was inevitable, that he knew it would happen, that he’d been waiting for it, but at the same time it seemed totally unexpected, a bolt from the blue.
They had Fatboy, they knew about Fatboy, they knew about him, the Barnardi woman, should have taken care of her sooner. Fuck!
The other gang members in the basement were staring at him.
Sol was shouting: “Maybe I can reach it! I’ll send messages! Attack, attack, whoever’s got you, attack! Come back to the ghetto and attack these cocksuckers!”
KR stopped and drew himself up and raised his voice. “No! No, no, no! They’ll have bigger stuff than we’ve got. SWAT team robots, National Guard stuff. Go home. You hear me? Everybody go home. Lay low. Forget all this shit. Say nothing. Whatever we do, they’re coming through here on a hellfire mission, and we’re fucked. Got it? There’s nothing we can do. So get out of here and play dumb.”
“No, come on, man, we got to fight,” Sol wailed loudly.
KR went over to him and grabbed his shirt and pulled him off the stool. “I’m counting on you, Sol,” he said through gritted teeth, “not to start a firefight, not to drag the hood deeper into the shit. Or so help me I’ll kick your ass all the way to Pittsburgh. Got it?” He pushed him away and started for the door.
“Where are you going?” Sol moaned.
“I’m going to find the cops,” he shouted without looking back.
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