by Neil Mcmahon
“That’s a good cop, sitting in that car,” Monks said. “Let him go.”
Hearne nodded stiffly.
Monks trotted after Kenneth Bouldin to the stairs at the end of the hall.
24
The room where Lex Rittenour lay on the floor was upstairs in the north wing of the house, in the guest quarters for executives, separated from the public areas. A plainclothes security guard with an Uzi on a sling stood in front of the door. Audrey Cabot was in the hallway, pressed back against a wall, her composure finally gone. She looked ashen and her voice trembled.
“My god, I only left him for a minute,” she said.
Another security guard was kneeling beside Lex, with a wadded bloody bedsheet pressed to the left side of Lex’s back. There was no stain on the carpet underneath—no large exit wound—but the danger of internal bleeding was high.
Bouldin said urgently, “Lex. Who was it?”
Lex shook his head, a barely perceptible motion. “Don’t know. Got hit and fell.” Monks registered a floor lamp that had been knocked over and two ugly gouges in the wall, undoubtedly from missed gunshots.
Monks knelt opposite the guard and said, “I’ll take over.” His hands and senses worked automatically, checking the vital signs. Lex’s pulse was rapid and thready from shock, his breathing shallow.
“Get a helicopter coming,” Monks told Bouldin. “The closest trauma center is at Bayview.”
Bouldin frowned. “That’s not going to look good. We’ll take him in a limo.”
“The hell with looking good,” Monks said heatedly. “He needs full medical attention, fast.”
Bouldin’s mouth tightened, but he nodded and stepped out into the hall.
“We gotta stop meeting like this,” Lex mumbled. The words were labored, but he was not sucking for air.
“Save your breath,” Monks said. His forefinger found the entry wound, a hole a little smaller than a dime, in the upper left quadrant of Lex’s back. The shoulder blade had probably stopped it from hitting the heart.
“How’m I doing?”
“Okay.”
“Really?”
“Really,” Monks lied.
“I need a shot,” Lex breathed. “The guards have it. Doling it out just like you, the pricks.”
Monks hesitated, but then nodded to the waiting guard. He handed Monks a syringe and vial of Demerol—the precious healing balm that Lex had come in out of the cold for. Monks gave him the shot in the forearm, IV, and felt the tensed flesh start to relax under his hands.
“Sorry about that, tonight. Lost my nerve.” Lex’s eyes were closed, his face dreamily peaceful.
“Stay quiet, goddammit,” Monks said.
“I was going to get some more money and dope and take off again,” Lex said. His eyes opened and rolled up with that same flattened, fishlike gaze Monks had seen in the ER the first night. “I was having a hell of a good time, being out there.”
Abruptly, his lips parted in a sad little belch of laughter. A bubble of blood bulged out between them, collapsing in a tiny spray.
“Bouldin,” Monks said. “The chopper.”
The guard in the hall leaned back in the doorway. “It’s on its way.”
“Get the paramedics up here on the run. Tell them to bring a MAST suit.”
“A what?”
“A MAST suit, M-A-S-T. They’ll know.”
Bay view Hospital was only a few miles away. But Monks was sure now that there was severe bleeding into the chest. It was nothing he could hear or see. It came through another sense he could not name, perhaps a feel through his palms. He kept them pressed firmly on Lex’s back, the best he could do to slow the internal wound. But he could feel Lex’s consciousness slipping too, as if it were flowing away with the blood.
“When you’re over this, we’re going to take another road trip,” Monks said, quietly, leaning close to Lex’s ear. “Nobody on our ass this time. Just drugs, women, and booze.” He could not tell if Lex heard him. “We’ll go up to Montana, I’ve got a crazy brother there. He knows every good bar in the state.”
Monks started to feel the helicopter, a barely perceptible disturbance on the far perimeter of awareness. His body knew what it was before his mind did, bringing the sour taste of bile far back in his throat, a Pavlovian response to what it portended: bloody men on stretchers being rushed out of medevac flights, landing on a navy hospital ship in the South China Sea.
Through the room’s windows he could see the rapidly approaching glow in the sky, quickly coalescing into a narrowing funnel of light as the chopper dropped down through the mist onto the grounds outside, met by signaling security guards. Two paramedics jumped out, carrying gear and a stretcher, running with the guards toward the house.
“Come on, Lex,” Monks said. “You’re a fighter.”
He helped the paramedics get Lex, unconscious now, into the bright orange MAST suit and inflate it. Its help to the chest wound might be slight or even nil, but it was all that could be done until surgeons could get in. They strapped Lex to the stretcher and carried him downstairs. Monks followed.
A man in a suit stepped in front of him. “I’m sorry, sir, but Mr. Bouldin wants you to stay here.”
Monks recognized Andrew, the heavy who had been with Tygard in the emergency room that first night. With sudden rage, Monks grabbed him by the lapels and shoved him against the wall.
“That’s Lex Rittenour and I’m his doctor,” Monks said into his face. “Don’t you fucking dare try to stop me.” Monks strode after the paramedics. No one followed.
He exited through a ground-floor doorway at the building’s rear. Outside, the night was cool and wet, the fog turning to drizzle. Above him, on the rear balcony, a crowd of party-goers had gathered to watch the helicopter and the man being rushed toward it. He could see the consternation on the faces, the mouths moving as information or rumors flew around. He caught a glimpse of Bouldin circulating, talking, palms raised in a calming manner.
There were going to be some blistering headlines in the next hours.
“Could I get you to take another look at this?” a voice said.
Monks wheeled, startled.
Pete Hazeldon stepped out of the building’s shadow, holding up his injured hand. Frizzy-haired and boyish, he had the air of wearing sneakers, even in black tie.
“I know it’s a pain, people coming up to you at a party and asking for advice,” he said, “but I’m afraid it’s getting infected.”
Monks stared at him, incredulous. His hands started rising to shove Hazeldon out of the way, while the words, Are you crazy? Lex is dying! formed in his brain and were on their way to his tongue.
But he stopped them. Hazeldon’s other hand was in his jacket pocket, gripping something. It was just visible: the butt of a high-caliber automatic, its barrel pointed at Monks.
The injured hand was swollen badly, the flesh puffy and red around the bandage. Monks remembered the wound, with its ragged punctures from being crushed between the powerful jaws of machinery—not likely to get infected, as it obviously had.
But something played at an edge of his consciousness, a quick eidetic byte:
Himself, sitting in the van a few hours ago, watching ghostlike as Hazeldon scurried across the Bank of America plaza with the furtive air of a man on a guilty mission.
Just about the time when Gloria Sharpe was murdered.
The hand, crushed between powerful, infective jaws.
The jaws of an attack dog.
Monks told himself it was impossible. He had seen many dog bites—he would have recognized the sharp punctures of teeth. Hazeldon’s wounds had been larger, ragged, gaping.
But arranged in the narrow V-shape of a Doberman’s jaws.
Monks swallowed tightly. Something in him insisted that Hazeldon had deliberately torn the punctures open further; that in spite of his shock and agony, he had rent his own tormented flesh to disguise the wound’s real origin, so that no one would think to connect hi
m with Gloria after she disappeared.
“Come on with me,” Hazeldon said. “We’ll find a quiet place.” His eyes were very bright and focused with absolute intensity.
It came to Monks with gut-level certainty that Hazeldon’s pistol was the weapon that had killed Gloria Sharpe.
He glanced quickly toward the helicopter. It was more than a hundred yards away, the rotor drowning out sound around it. The paramedics and security guards were occupied with loading Lex in. There was no one closer.
“Okay,” Monks said.
They moved toward the dock, staying in the shadows. Hazeldon took the pistol out of his pocket, pointing it at Monks’s spine. The barrel ended in a silencer that looked homemade. Monks stepped with careful precision, on edge for cues from his captor, bristling with dread.
At the end of the dock, the dragon prow of the Viking longboat was lit and the boat’s main body dark, giving the impression that its inventors had intended a thousand years ago: of a fearsome monster rising from the sea. Back on shore, the sound of the helicopter’s rotor increased. The chopper lifted off, carrying Lex to Bayview Hospital. Everyone else had left the area. The boat looked deserted too.
Hazeldon gestured with the pistol barrel toward the mooring ropes. “Untie them.” Monks unwound the two heavy ropes from their cleats and tossed them up onto the boat. “Now you,” Hazeldon said. Monks climbed the ladder up the boat’s side, with Hazeldon following.
When Monks stepped over the gunwale, the wet wind stung his face, bringing an image of the Viking warriors who had shivered and starved under the brutal North Sea storms. But the Mjollnir’s resemblance to those old-time crafts ended there. The deck was teak-wood furnished with cushioned seats. The cabin was shielded by curved glass and housed a control panel that glowed with digital readouts. The galley below, down a short stairway, revealed a luxury bar with leather-upholstered chairs. The bottles of premium liquor lining the backbar flickered like flames in the dim light.
“You ever run a boat?” Hazeldon said.
“Smaller ones.”
“I’ll coach you.”
They walked to the cabin, rocked in a greasy seesaw by the chops of water lapping against the hull. Hazeldon motioned Monks to stand at the console.
“That switch there will heat the plugs,” he said, pointing with the gun. “Give it thirty seconds, then hit the starter.”
Monks did. The big Cummins diesel turned over and caught instantly, settling into a powerful, throaty purr.
“Now put it into forward and give it just a little throttle,” Hazeldon said.
“Where are we going?”
“Sausalito. Go ahead, take it out.”
The boat lurched as Monks put it in gear. He took the wheel, eased the throttle lever back, and pulled slowly away from the dock. When they were clear, he swung the prow to head directly into the chop. Sausalito was a little over a mile west, its lights dimly visible through the fog. Farther south, glimmers of the San Francisco skyline appeared and vanished in the swirls like a distant fairyland.
“Keep it slow,” Hazeldon said. “Four, five knots.”
Monks adjusted the throttle, risking a covert glance back toward shore. A floodlight had come on over the dock.
Hazeldon half sat on a cabinet, his bandaged hand held away from him, the pistol in his other hand balanced across his thigh. It jittered nervously.
“You must have taken chemistry, huh?” Hazeldon said.
“A long time ago.”
“You remember Maxwell’s Demon?”
“Not really,” Monks said warily. “No.”
“You’ve got this box full of hot and cold molecules,” Hazeldon explained. “The law of entropy says they’re going to mix randomly. Equal numbers of hot ones and cold ones everywhere. But there’s this little demon in the middle who separates them, keeps the hot in one half, the cold in the other. He defeats the law of entropy. Imposes order on chaos.
“Except he doesn’t really exist. Well, that’s who I was. The invisible demon, putting in eighteen-hour days, making it all work. But nobody knew I was there.”
Monks started to get a glimmer of what might lie behind the madness that had erupted in Pete Hazeldon. He was a man who considered himself brilliant, but he labored in the shadow of a true genius—Lex Rittenour—with all the resentment, jealousy, and rage that could engender. Worse, Lex was a genius who made it look easy, who made a mockery of the earnest worker bees. Monks recalled Hazeldon’s words in the Aesir offices that first night:
He’s like an idiot savant. We have to go back and fill them in, to make it all work.
“You’re very important, from everything I heard,” Monks said. “Head of R and D. One of the chief Aesir.”
Hazeldon made a disgusted sound, spitting air. “Are you kidding? They threw me a bone because they needed me. Look at Ken and Audrey, they’re like European nobles. Lex is shooting dope and living glossy, with the girls nibbling his heels. Me? I’m Howdy Doody, the nerdy kid in the background. But they didn’t dream I had them wired. I had everybody wired.”
They were in the open waters of Richardson Bay now, the boat bucking across the white-tipped chop. Monks was watching for a chance to run for it and dive, or to slap the weapon out of Hazeldon’s hand. But he was trapped in the cabin, with Hazeldon vigilant and too far away. Monks searched for a distraction, trying to push aside the fear that clouded his brain.
“What were you aiming for?” Monks said. “With your research?”
Hazeldon stared at him, looking puzzled. “Do you have any idea what’s going on these days?” he said, in the tone of speaking to the simpleminded. “Rich people are standing in line for a chance to buy genetically perfect grandkids. Whoever gets on top of that is going to rule. Forget Lex Rittenour.”
Hazeldon stood suddenly, the gun barrel rising. “Take off your clothes,” he said.
“What?”
“Payback. Did you like sticking that needle in my ass?”
“I was giving you penicillin, for Christ’s sake. You asked for it, remember?”
“Toss them over here.”
Monks kicked off his shoes, then stripped off his sweatshirt and jeans. He threw them at Hazeldon’s feet.
Hazeldon gathered them up, then stepped back out of the cabin. Monks heard the click of an electronic lock, trapping him inside. Hazeldon laid down the pistol and shrugged out of his own clothes, grimacing as he pulled jacket and shirt sleeve past his bandaged hand. Monks saw that there was something tied or taped to his thin white waist: a small black rectangle with a tiny red light. Hazeldon’s hand went to it, one finger searching, then pressing. The light started to blink.
He stepped into Monks’s jeans, buckling them awkwardly with one hand, and pulled on the sweatshirt. He opened the door again and kicked his own pile of discarded clothes inside, pistol held ready.
It was sinking into Monks what the device on Hazeldon’s waist was: a detonator. Hazeldon had not been wiring the boat for a communications system. He had been wiring it with explosives.
“Put on my clothes,” Hazeldon said.
“This isn’t going to fool anybody,” Monks said. “You know that.”
The gun muzzle flashed along with a quick little sound, a sort of putt that had a leaden weight, like a dead bird being dropped. A chunk blew out of the cabin roof just above Monks’s head. He flinched, hands flying to cover his face. Beads of glass sprayed him like shrapnel.
“Put them on,” Hazeldon said.
Monks lowered himself to his right knee, a motion as familiar as breathing to his body from thousands of boyhood genuflections, and gathered the clothes. He struggled into the pants. They were tight and short. He knelt again and picked up the wadded shirt. Hazeldon looked at his watch.
Monks flung the shirt at his face and lunged, shoving off the console and diving low with his arms outstretched, going for the gun. Hazeldon flailed blindly at the shirt and fired two shots. Monks heard them crash into the console behind him. His lef
t hand caught Hazeldon’s gun forearm while his right clawed for a grip, getting hold of a fistful of sweatshirt. Hazeldon twisted like a cat, with desperate, unbelievable strength. Monks could feel the forearm muscles flexing like cables, forcing the pistol barrel toward Monks’s body. It fired again and again. Their legs fought a battle of their own—shoving, kneeing, struggling to trip.
Monks let go of the sweatshirt suddenly and drove his right fist into Hazeldon’s belly. He felt the torso double inward, heard the sudden harsh whuuunh of expelled breath. But the pistol fired another round, this time so close to his face he could feel the slap of air.
Monks punched again, planting his right foot and coming up hard off it, giving it all the shoulder he had. Hazeldon caved in further, wrapping himself around the fist. His face fell on Monks’s shoulder in insane intimacy.
Then his teeth tore into Monks’s flesh.
Monks roared, a ferocious bark of pain. His groping right hand found Hazeldon’s other forearm and worked its way down to the bandage, moving spiderlike, clinging to the sleeve.
When it got there, Monks crushed Hazeldon’s wounded hand in his own with every bit of strength he could summon.
Hazeldon threw his head back violently and howled, a long, eerie wail that might have come from the murdered dogs.
“Drop the gun!” Monks yelled. He felt the forearm twisting, trying to point the pistol at him. It fired several shots, a wild spray that crashed around the cabin, shattering plastic and glass.
Monks crushed the hand again, twisting it viciously. Hazeldon shrieked, a despairing sound that tore at Monk’s ears.
“Drop the gun!”
This time, Monks felt the forearm relax, and heard the thump as the weapon hit the deck. He stepped back and spun Hazeldon around, keeping his grip on the bandaged hand, then bringing it up tight behind Hazeldon’s back in a hammerlock.
“We’ve got to get off!” Hazeldon croaked. His voice came out in sobbing gasps. “It’s going to blow in less than three minutes!”
Monks shoved him ahead, out of the cabin and toward the longboat’s stern. A light had appeared on the water to the east, in the direction of Angel Island. It was about a mile away and only showed in glimpses through the fog, but it seemed to be gaining on them fast—like a Coast Guard cutter.