Upgunned

by David J. Schow

  “Is this a bad time?”

  “Excuse me; what the hah-h-hell do you think you’re—?” It took him two breaths to form the word “hell.”

  “If there’s one thing I hate,” I said. “It’s stupid questions. The ones designed to buy time and express false outrage. ‘Eww, who do you think you are you’ve got no right.’ Here’s my credentials.”

  I showed him the business end of Bulldog’s modified SIG. A line of drool actually escaped one corner of his mouth before he remembered to shut his trap.

  “You stay right in that chair. Sit on your hands. Just like that. Good.”

  Arly’s supersized pores were ripe with amber panic sweat. He wanted to wipe his smudgy glasses but didn’t dare. He squinted as he tried to suss me out. Dim awareness, like the dawning of tool use for Australopithicus. “You’re that guy. That fire safety guy.”

  It had not occurred to me that he would not recognize me with my new hair and beard, in Glazelnut, or the lightest cool brown Clairol Perfect 10 could offer, since I went back and read the box again when I could actually make out the text.

  “Your hair’s … different…”

  “Focus, Arly. The question you need to be asking now is what do I want. I want Elias McCabe. You may know him as Julian Hightower.”

  “Are-are you some kind of cop, I mean, you’re not the fire guy, right?”

  “Focus. Last warning. I ask, you answer. You ask, and this weapon answers for me. Deal? Good.”

  “I-I-I think that guy Julian is a fake. I checked him out on the IMDb and he doesn’t have a single credit.”

  I wasn’t sure what that meant but it sounded encouraging.

  “Listen, swear ta god, totally honest truth: my days here might be numbered anyway. I think Julian was the one who ratted me out to Collier about the YouTube leak.”

  The short version—the bullet version—was that Elias McCabe, in his secret identity, had gotten this pasty boy in trouble with his superiors, too … by providing the video clue that had led me to Vengeance Is. Swell, now we were brothers under the skin.

  “That means nobody would miss you,” I said, pulling the SIG’s hammer to full cock, a single soft click.

  His hands flurried into the air as though he was trying to stop a runaway bread truck. “No, no, no, no, wait—wait! Wait!”

  “Hands,” I said.

  Arly contritely stashed his hands again. He fell completely silent for a beat, marshaling his next words so he wouldn’t stammer. Points to Arly, for that. I didn’t think he had the depth.

  “Look, I’m cooperating, okay? I didn’t see you, don’t know you, and can’t remember you. You want Julian, or whatever he calls himself, he’s been slacking off work for a couple of days now. Shaving the time-card since we’re about to do a company move I’m probably not gonna be a part of now. Mason Stone—you know the actor, Mason Stone?”

  Not really, I thought, nudging the gun so it kept Arly on track.

  “Mason Stone got him into the Salon, that underground freak show.”

  More Greek, to me.

  “No, just wait—follow me now. You want that guy, he’s probably at the Salon if he’s not here. I didn’t get invited. Couldn’t. Never mind. But I know where it is in the city.” Arly was proud of knowing the inner workings of things, even when he was excluded.

  “And you think that’s worth your life?”

  “Yeah.” He gulped audibly. “I’m hoping it is.”

  * * *

  Details spilled out of Arly the way loose change falls from people when you turn them upside-down and shake. Details on Salon and its location. He had a copy of the desk key he’d given to Julian Hightower—“you know, just in case.” The desk gave me Elias’s hotel hide. No Kimber, though. Irritating.

  Yet I did not cap Arly the way I should have.

  Several possibilities: perhaps I didn’t want a body count connected to this movie. Perhaps I didn’t want to risk another eye injury by harvesting him. Or perhaps yes, maybe I was losing my edge for real.

  Or maybe I was simply fed up with killing people who weren’t Elias McCabe. For free, just win the next morsel of intel.

  Pick any or all. I let Arly live.

  He was completely craven and pathetic. He tended to splutter. But at least everything he did added to my knowledge and brought me nearer to the unexpectedly slippery Elias. Dammitall, Arly had helped me. He didn’t excuse or lie. I saw him in the grip of his own transformative moment. Waking up one more day to pop fresh zits in the mirror had become important to him. He would torture himself far more, in life, than I ever could with threats of death.

  As “Julian Hightower,” Elias had become as blond as I had been before Clairol. He now looked like I used to. I now looked vaguely the way he used to.

  Don’t think that didn’t mess with my brain. I was essentially trying to find myself … and he kept eluding me, mostly through luck, and I did not believe in luck. Coincidence, yes; accidents, yes, but fortune, never.

  The dropped ball was mine. I owned the responsibility.

  I wanted to bring Mal Boyd the head of Elias McCabe in a bowling bag. I wanted to jam a ballpoint pen into his eye and watch him squirm, as payback, before I did his other eye. I wanted the satisfaction of bearing witness as the life vacated his body. But then what? According to Mal, my face was blown and I needed to start shopping for plastic surgeons if I wanted to stay in the game. Become a shape-changer. New life or not, none of it could begin until Elias was off the planet.

  Predictably, the Salon held court in the middle of the night.

  I had always liked night shifters, the people who moved between the spaces of the ordinary world. Daytime was noise and bright light and obligations. Mister Sun no longer held Nazi dominion over your existence, forcing you to rise at cockcrow. I accepted that some people are nocturnal, and some diurnal. What I resented was that all the diurnal ones, the rush-hour masses, insisted they were the “normal” ones. When a dentist cannot understand why a 10:00 A.M. appointment is not good for you, and you turn the scenario around and say, well, how about you come ’round to my place and work on my teeth at two thirty in the morning, the dentist would regard you at best as unreasonable, and at worst as a being from some other planet. Because to him, you are. You’re from Nightworld. You have learned the core value of sleep, because Daywalkers permit you so little of it.

  Nightworlders were easier to get along with. Give them a little quiet time and some coffee, and they’re good to go. Get in their face before that and you’re likely to get your own face peeled off and fed to you.

  All I knew was that daylight savings time had always felt skewed and unnatural to me. I felt more calibrated between October and April.

  From what I could make out in my spotting scope, the denizens of the Salon were hard-core night people; foursquare on the “night” part, iffy on the “people” part. Either that, or my eyes were now actively deceiving me.

  From twenty-six floors up, my vantage was similar to my spy perspective on Elias’s loft in Hollywood. The street was wider—Upper Broadway—and penetrating closed buildings after business hours a bit dicier, but nowhere near impossible. The row of target windows as provided by Arly Zahoryin were all obscured by reflectorized shades. Except one: a narrow side casement looking down a blue-lit hallway that apparently led to a bathroom on the north side, after a jog to the left.

  This was the waiting part. The excruciating time-crawl of stakeout that can unhinge ordinary minds with its sheer dullness.

  On the south side of the corridor were two large archways that fed from a bigger central room, which overlooked Broadway. Intermediate closed door on the south side about four feet in from the naked window.

  First up: a big guy, Olympic weight lifter size, in a kind of genie getup with a turban and a veil. His eunuch-pimp carriage hinted that the oh-so-exclusive Salon was just another tarted-up whorehouse.

  Next: skinny guy. Either incredibly old or notably emaciated. But for the cut of hi
s clothing, he looked like one of those derelicts found in a refrigerator box after a winter thaw; malnourished and caved-in.

  A half hour after that: a topless woman with well-sculpted breasts and a round ass to match. She paused to stretch in the corridor and her arms seemed to subdivide into thinner appendages, making me think of a spider measuring a space for a potential web to trap food. It was a neat illusion. She must have been wearing some sort of harness or appliance under what appeared to be skin. She was backlit by the blue corridor light, so it was hard to tell.

  Then: a midget, a dwarf, little person, whatever. A Munchkin in a W. C. Fields suit. This was getting boring.

  My acrylic spectacles were carving grooves into the sides of my head. I administered my eyedrops and nearly missed the woman. Ordinary configuration—two arms, two legs, sky-high booted heels. She kept glancing back the way she had come in the manner of someone who needed a bathroom not for cleanup or relief, but to do more coke. She fit the profile of Artesia Savoy, from the set of Vengeance Is.

  I dearly wished for a decent sniper’s rifle. Something built around a Remington 700 bolt-action, a heavy-barrel .308 that could reach out and slap down. Maybe with a recessed-crown muzzle for better accuracy. My gunsmith could have supplied a Savage Model 10 with the AccuTrigger and a Millet mil-dot scope (a gun popularly known as the “Tackdriver”)—but that tempting option was on the other side of the continent; out of the country, in fact. Bolt guns are better because an autoloader can give away your position. From cold barrel zero, one shot to break the safety glass, one shot to patch the target, about two seconds from start to finish. I dearly wanted to see what a custom-packed NATO round could do to Elias McCabe’s skull.

  Artesia came out of the bathroom. Definitely her—I caught her face in the light before she blacked out into a backlit silhouette. At least I was in the right place. She passed a guy wearing a crocodile head.

  The whole Salon thing seemed like a pretentious bal Masqué, the kind of artifice wealthy pricks needed in order to stiffen. Crocodile men. Spider women. How too, too cutting edge. My contempt for privileged, pampered celebutards like Mason Stone made me feel better about hosing the room, if it came to that. Nobody would miss these fucking ghosts. They’d be replaced by the next up-and-coming batch of superstars to cannibalize. It’s been that way ever since Jesus. Eat me, drink me, I give my life for you. Next.

  I could have gone from trigger pull to target down in one shot, not two, if I’d had the luxury of a Barrett, perhaps an M-107 or an M-40A3, basically the equivalent of a tank without treads, a one-hit kill either way so “stopping power” per round was irrelevant. You had to know what are called “damage multipliers,” that is, formulas that balance body mass and general health versus ballistics to yield probabilities for your own success. But I was no mathematician, nor was I a seasoned sniper, really. Mooning about best cases meant I was getting impatient. Drifting was not allowed. In any case, I did not want to dispatch Elias from a distance. Up close and personal was what I truly wanted; dammit, we had only met twice and we had the burden of a relationship.

  Jerk.

  His new look almost threw me. Lightened hair, trimmed differently. Clean chin. I recognized his body carriage first of all, in the blue corridor light. He meandered, as though exhausted or drunk.

  Target acquired.

  As light as I was traveling, I needed a bulky jacket to hide most of my gear, and most of the mods to the jacket could be done with a complimentary hotel sewing kit. I had Bulldog’s SIG .40 with two extra mags in open-top pouches (flaps just get in the way)—thirty-six shots, plus one already in the tube. Sewn inside the lower right front of my coat were sleeves for my spotting scope and a Gem-Tech silencer about seven and a half inches long. The Bar-Sto threaded barrel for the silencer had cost Bulldog about three hundred bucks. The silencer, commonly known as a “can,” was engineered to reduce recoil and bore flash as well as mute noise. It was made out of aircraft aluminum, finished in matte black, and featured a little piston-spring combo that decoupled the mass of the suppressor from the gun barrel during recoil so the weapon could cycle properly. In other words, it allowed the barrel to move backward inside the silencer housing while the silencer stayed in place. Without it … jam-town.

  The in-gun clip and two spares were full of jacketed Hydra-Shoks—picture a hollow point with a tapered post of harder lead in the center. On impact, the post uses clothing, tissue, and body fluids as a wedge to force the bullet to expand. Muzzle velocity of 1,100 feet per second at 445 foot pounds. Sledgehammer hit, then it treated your insides to a weed-whacking.

  Glasses and gloves, check. Building security was nothing my LockAid kit could not rape quietly. I stashed my scope after wiping it down. If it chanced to fall out of my coat, it needed to be print clean, like everything else I carried. It was tough to find latex gloves in “nude”—like panty hose—but essential so that some stray or bystander would not remember seeing a man wearing gloves.

  Okay: a large subdivided, retrofitted loft space, probably fed by an elevator on the west end, which meant fire stairs somewhere in the back of the building on a less-stylish emergency exit route. The interior of the building would most likely be a maze; easy to get confused if you did not know which way was north. Decades of tenants had added or subtracted walls to taste. There might be blind access, or a sealed-off doorway or two.

  Probably. Most likely. Might. The total scenario was what tac guys quaintly called “controlling unknown space.”

  I could probably have waited a day to reconnoiter the space, most likely would lose track of Elias once more, and might have gone a little more blind during all that wasted time. Or I could attack frontally, demote maximally, and assess threat potentials as I tightroped through that wet worker’s version of interpretive dance—the run-and-gun.

  I had him in my crosshairs. It was time for us to meet again.

  * * *

  Fifty-five-odd stairways and four locks later, I came out into the elevator foyer of the building’s twenty-sixth floor. I had encountered four security cameras on the way. I lacked the luxury of reconnaissance, floor plans, or Blaine Mooney’s lovely roundabouts. I did not even have pieces of tinfoil and earthquake putty, which could be stuck to the coaxial collars to make static. So, I smudged the lenses with hotel soap. The water pipes visible in most New York stairways provided my ladder, and when I reached up, I found each camera frosted in dust. Once installed, they were rarely maintained except for periodic checks by the security company—like elevators. Think of the last time you were in a spastic elevator with a duly dated checkup slip. These things frazzed out all the time and nobody called the cops. At most, the desk guy downstairs would whack his monitor as if it was an old rabbit-eared TV set, bitch and moan, and then scribble a note to have the goddamned screwed up system checked tomorrow, by somebody else. Security officers in buildings like this were unionized, and not eager to run into potential life-threatening situations for thirteen bucks an hour. If they panicked and whistled up the NYPD, I had a good thirty to forty minutes to work. Plus, this setup was middle ground, not top skim. The illicit nature of the Salon would require certain bribes and a subradar profile. In English: yeah, the building had “security,” but only just.

  The other thing I encountered in the twenty-sixth floor elevator foyer was Richard Fearing, bodyguard to Mason Stone. His station gave me the correct suite door, and his manner upon my entry told me he was an obstacle that needed to be put down quickly. He was six foot two of shaved pate, black trench coat, and zero warmth. On my way up the stairs, I had decided I needed him.

  “Hey there,” I said, all sunny. “Building security. I’m the rover.”

  “No, you ain’t,” he said. As last words go, it was sad. He was staring at my glasses.

  Like a nightclub magician, Fearing had one hand out to distract me while his other hand snaked into his coat. It didn’t work.

  One would have sufficed, but I gave him two—throat and forehead—with t
he already-drawn SIG. Throat to shut him up, head to collapse him. He dropped like a clipped marionette. Both slugs stayed inside him, minimizing the mess. The silencer worked like pure gold; modern magic. No more noise than two loud coughs.

  The reason I needed Dick Fearing was for an extra firearm; I wanted one for each hand when I tackled the room. His still-parked gun turned out to be a two-tone Browning Hi-Power nine, a weapon particularly abusive to the web of the hand. He carried it cocked and locked. Interestingly, he had loaded the mag with alternating rounds—Gold Dot hardball and Golden Saber hollow points, all high-performance cartridges. One to perforate, one to destroy.

  Fearing was—had been—one of those “lighter and faster” guys who used nines or .357s, conscious of the overpenetration factor of bigger guns and more beefy ammo. You wanted your bullet to stay inside the target and wreck some mayhem, not drill cleanly through the far end. Clearly the man had lent some thought to how best to fuel his firepower … and came up with a compromise, knowing that he would probably never have to field-test it. How many times have you seen a celebrity bodyguard actually pull a hot weapon? Not many, if there’s a camera around, and there always are. Politicians, yes—they’re making a political point, after all. For Mason Stone’s club, having an obvious pistol-packin’ posse would be counterproductive to image. You had to be in the music biz to get away with that.

  The foyer was done in fake marble veneer, black with jagged white veins, floor to ceiling. It was akin to standing inside the brain of a lunatic. The suite doors were done in a gilt-edged, antique style whose sloppy brushwork betrayed them, too, as equally fake. Despite all the brass hardware, you could blow these open with a sneeze.

  I gave the double door to the suite three smart, no-nonsense raps, just as Fearing might have.

  The door was opened by the midget in the W. C. Fields suit. His eyes and mouth made a perfect inverse triangle of zeros.