Darkman

by Randall Boyll

  And then it was done. He turned the Bio-Press off with shaking fingers and picked up the tube of mastic. He painted his right hand with it, nostrils stinging against the turpentine smell. He uncovered the aluminum tub and fished out a piece. He placed it over the back of his hand and smoothed it out, looking for flaws. The computer had had a vectoring of his own mangled hand and had made the new one thick where it should be, thin where his own meat was still good. He fished the bottom of the right hand out of the tub and slipped it into place, carefully smoothing it.

  He almost laughed. It was a hand! Pauly’s hand, but as good as any other. It smelled a bit like chemical glue, and it didn’t have fingernails yet, but it was damn good, and he knew it.

  “Success,” he whispered, smiling with no smile. “Goddamn success.”

  If his face could have produced tears, they would have been falling now.

  At last it was time for the Darkman to expose himself to the world.

  He made it to Pauly’s high-rise apartment before sunrise, never really feeling safe until the elevator had carried him to the seventeenth floor and he had successfully picked the apartment lock, which took far longer than was necessary. His face and hands were wrapped in fresh gauze. Mad at himself for not being a proficient lock picker, he pocketed the wire and the sliver of metal that comprised his crude locksmith’s tools and slipped inside Pauly’s place.

  It was dark, of course, and it smelled of stale cigarette smoke and cheap cologne. Darkman went past the living room and eased the bedroom door open, the path to sleeping Pauly as clear in his mind as on the night Rick had described it. And Pauly was in there, flat on his back, snarking and snoring. An alarm clock on the stand beside the bed ticked loudly—no competition, though, for Pauly’s slobbers. Darkman withdrew a large wad of cotton from one suit-coat pocket, a bottle from the other. This stuff was Nacoxidin liquid, light-years ahead of chloroform or ether, both of which wore off in several seconds. Two whiffs of Nacoxidin could knock out a rhino and keep him that way for hours.

  He doused the cotton with it, holding his head to the side. The fumes were practically non-odorous and thus very dangerous. Darkman held his breath and advanced on Pauly’s noisily sleeping form.

  The alarm clock went off like a hurricane of bells. Darkman shoved the Nacoxidin in a pocket and fumbled for it. No snooze button in this little jewel; it was an old-fashioned job you had to wind up.

  Pauly sat up in bed while Darkman fumbled with the clock. It thumped to the floor with a clang.

  “Huh?” Pauly said.

  Darkman whirled, seeing that his careful plans were headed for the tubes, and mashed the cotton over Pauly’s nose and mouth.

  He went limp instantly. Darkman, still holding his breath, ran for the window, jerked it open, and threw the cotton outside, down seventeen floors to the sidewalk. He hung his head out and breathed for a while. No major problems yet. The rest should be easy.

  He felt through Pauly’s closet and found a suitcase. He stuffed it full of Pauly’s clothes, carefully ransacking drawers, then snapped it shut. Out of his coat pocket he withdrew the two airline tickets the fat lady had sold him. He placed them atop the suitcase. Before he left, he found some of Pauly’s cheap cologne in the bathroom and splashed himself with it. The medicine cabinet was stocked full of Maalox, and he took a bottle.

  And then he did leave, hiding himself in an alley behind some garbage cans, because what happened next was up to Durant.

  20

  What a Ruckus

  DARKMAN AWOKE WITH a jerk and didn’t know where he was. He looked around, groggy and disoriented, and then everything packed itself into place, his connections with the past and the present fusing into something coherent, something real.

  He was sitting in an alley with his back against a brick wall and his knees tucked under his chin. A pleasant breeze played across his face, gently flapping the bandages; this small noise had awakened him. A cat was scrabbling through one of the garbage cans that shielded him, making a clatter as it searched for a late breakfast: another possible explanation for why he had opened his weary eyes after only a few hours of sleep. The sun was high enough to cast long black shadows. With growing alarm Darkman looked at his new watch.

  Almost ten-thirty. He pushed himself to his feet, becoming quietly frantic. His knees popped and his spine crunched, somewhat pleasant for the ordinary person but of little import to Darkman. He stood and unwrapped his face with shaking hands. Had Durant been there? Was the whole scheme going down in flames?

  The white gauze formed a pile behind the trash cans. He went to work on his hands, these Pauly hands. The gauze unwound horribly slowly, but it did unwind. The fingernails looked good. There were bulges where veins should be. It lacked hair on the upper fingers and back, but who noticed that kind of stuff?

  He felt his pockets. A bottle of Nacoxidin. He dropped it in the trash. His locksmith tools. They went into an inside pocket. A new stopwatch, courtesy of Millings Supply. This he kept. He patted his rear, almost satisfied, and realized he had forgotten Pauly’s wallet.

  New fear raged in his mind. You dumb cluck! What if it’s Pauly’s turn to buy breakfast at the deli? What about lunch? You don’t have a dime on you, you royal dullard! What if they realize that you are not you?

  He practically sprinted out of the alley. It came to him, too late, that he had not even started the stopwatch. How much time had passed since the skin had hit the light? Thirty seconds? Sixty?

  He dug the watch out and clicked it on, then raced to Ernie’s Best Deli, arriving in twenty minutes with sweat trickling down his back and the hot autumn sun shining on his sweatless face. Was there even to be a delivery today? Rick had said it was pretty constant. The money launderer handed the cash to Martinez and Skip of no-leg fame, and they passed it to Pauly. Pauly passed it to Durant, and God knew where it went from there.

  He pushed the door open and peeked inside.

  Martinez and Skip were already there—in the fifth booth, as usual. Martinez looked annoyed and was playing with a napkin, tearing it to small shreds. Skip’s back was to Darkman. Both had plates smeared with egg yolk and toast crumbs on the table in front of them.

  He made himself go in. The smell of morning bacon was in the air. Martinez looked up and narrowed his eyes.

  “About fucking time,” he croaked, and moved aside. Darkman slid into the booth.

  “What’s the big deal, Pauly?” Skip snapped. “You been messing with some woman till dawn again?”

  Darkman formed a sneer, hoping to hell his remaining face muscles were pulling the mask in the right directions. It seemed they were, for no one reacted. Skip reached under the table and pulled out a briefcase.

  “Durant wants to know where Rick is. He’s really hot about it—really hot. I don’t know why, and I don’t give a shit, either, but Durant likes that Nervous Norvis for some reason. Know where he is?”

  Darkman shrugged.

  “What’s that fucking smell?” Martinez asked suddenly. “Smell it, too, Pauly?”

  Darkman nodded. His stomach was a twisted rag, his nerves exposed and raw. He felt mildly dizzy. The goddamn mastic—maybe it was that. And maybe that was what Martinez was smelling.

  “Anyway,” Skip went on, flipping his head to get his long blond locks out of his eyes, “Durant seems to think we’re all Rick’s fucking baby-sitter. If you ask me, I think he’s way too chicken for this line of work. One of these days he’s going to step on his own foot, and we’ll all take a tumble. If he’s gone for good, I say good riddance. How about you, Pauly?”

  Darkman nodded, beginning to feel like a mute sort of puppet, Howdy Doody’s speechless brother.

  Skip pushed the briefcase over, glancing left and right. The deli was almost empty; the owner, Ernie, seemed intent on cutting a roast into thin slices on a big noisy slicer on the counter.

  Skip looked at Darkman and frowned. “Are you okay, Pauly? You look kind of . . . different. Where’s the gold ring gone to?�
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  Thank God my face cannot sweat, Darkman thought, because at this moment he was feeling very much like a man who has stumbled into a trap that has no escape. He gave a shrug, then made a bye-bye motion with one hand.

  “Lost it, eh?” Skip looked out the window. “We’ve got shit to do, man, or else Durant will be on us like white on rice.” He checked his watch. “Damn, we have to meet him in twenty minutes.”

  He leaned back and waved at Ernie. The slicer shut down. “Mr. Moneybags is here,” he sang out. “Pauly, pay the fucking check so we can get out of here.”

  Darkman felt like swooning. All his nightmares were coming true. He pretended to fumble in his pockets, of which there were many. That farce ended pretty quickly. In desperation he clicked open the latches on the briefcase.

  There was money inside in neat little stacks. Darkman guessed twenty thousand, at least. He stuck a casual hand inside and pulled one bill free from its stack and rubber band. He put it on the table and shut the briefcase.

  Martinez scowled. “You’re risking your life, man. Those bills are marked until the boss gets them laundered.”

  Skip was frowning again. “I still say you look funny.”

  Darkman’s hand went into a pocket and pulled out the bottle of Maalox. He took three large swigs of it.

  “Yeah, you’re back to normal,” Skip said, and they got up.

  Martinez wagged a finger in his fake face. “Don’t be late tomorrow, man, or I’ll be telling Durant on your ass. Get me?”

  He nodded. He got it quite well.

  But the real Pauly would get it much worse.

  And he got it, at eleven twenty-five, thirty seconds after the Nacoxidin had been sufficiently purged from his lungs and his veins, allowing him to come awake from his stupor.

  He opened his eyes, eyes that refused to focus. There was a strange taste in his mouth and a funny odor to his breath. It smelled to him like a chemical factory. He sat up, grimacing, chewing his sleep-sticky tongue, groggy and confused.

  He heard the front door smash open with a brittle crunch. Heavy feet tromped down the hallway. Three friends appeared at the bedroom door.

  Martinez came in first. He hoisted Pauly under the armpits and thunked him into a wooden chair beside the dresser. Pauly looked up in wonder, aching in the ass, and saw the hard face of Durant towering over him.

  “Ah, Pauly,” Durant said, shaking his head in very convincing sympathy. “We’ve been mighty concerned about you. What have you done?”

  “Done?” He shrugged, baffled by this. “What did I do?”

  “That’s for you to tell, and for us to find out,” Durant said evenly.

  Pauly sensed something very amiss in this situation. Martinez and Skip were frowning huge frowns at him. Durant exuded hostility with every expression of his greasy face, with every move of his lithe and muscular body. Even his pristine hair had suffered dislodgement; there were a few errant strands falling over his forehead. To Pauly’s knowledge this had never happened before. The man was famed for his plastic hair.

  “What did I do?” Pauly asked again, his eyes large and beseeching. “Just tell me and I’ll make it up.”

  Durant’s face grew stony. “Yeah, well, Pauly . . . Pauly, where is the money?”

  “Money?” Pauly felt the blood drain from his face as his realization of the situation grew. “I didn’t even make the pickup,” he whined, hoping with every part of his being that he looked honest. “I swear it.”

  Durant stepped sideways and lifted two airline tickets off the suitcase standing by the bed. He flipped one open. “Ah, Rio. And first-class! How delightful!”

  He opened the other ticket. “Here we have one for Rick,” he announced to Martinez and Skip. “I guess this explains his disappearance.” He aimed his eyes at Martinez, then at the suitcase. Martinez strode over and opened it. Piles of Pauly’s clothing flopped out.

  Durant shifted his gaze to Pauly, his eyes slitted with anger. “The money, Pauly. Now.”

  Pauly felt like blubbering. What was going on? He had overslept, overslept like a horse, and now this waking nightmare was being dumped on him just after his eyes had barely opened. What in the hell . . . ?

  He slid down off the chair and landed on his knees. He clasped his hands together, racked with terror. “Boss! I swear! I didn’t make the pickup—I overslept—I haven’t been outside since last night. I swear to God!”

  Durant slapped the tickets together and tucked them into the breast of Pauly’s Road Runner pajamas. “Well, Pauly,” he said, “I’d hate to see you miss your flight.”

  He flipped a hand at Martinez. Martinez clomped over and hoisted Pauly into the air once again. He carried him to the bedroom window, which was half open.

  “So long, Pauly,” Durant said, and Pauly began to scream and scream and scream. Martinez hoisted him higher. Scream scream scream. Martinez leaned backward, ready to toss him. Scream scream scream. Martinez smashed him through the window, utterly ruining the expensive glass. Pauly sailed out into the sunshine of a pleasant midday, glass splinters in his eyes and mouth, glass spears sticking from his pajamas like jagged diamonds, and scream scream screamed as he plummeted seventeen floors. In desperation he flapped his arms, much like the Road Runner imprinted on his pajamas. Gravity was not impressed; nor were Newton’s laws. He reached a sickening velocity as he neared the tenth floor. His hair whipped in the wind. He flapped and flapped. His pajamas billowed in fantastic shapes as they whipped against his skin. He flapped and flapped, then screamed.

  The last eighth of an inch was the toughest. Pauly was all over the place.

  And Darkman, watching this from yet another alley, filled with glee and misery and doubt, turned away and went home, the taste of victory sour in his mouth and the knowledge of what the future would bring glowing in his mind like a cold and senseless fire.

  There was no way to stop it, no way to stop him, though a tiny portion of his mind begged him to stop in a voice that was small and insignificant and just a shallow echo of Peyton the man.

  Stop before it’s too late.

  21

  Requiescat in Pace, Rick

  POOR RICKY. HIS mind had roughly the intelligence of a baked potato now. His face was blank and stupid. After climbing out the window of his house (the locks were things of mystery now), he roved around in his pajamas for the better part of the morning, managing to propel himself to a shopping mall. He trundled in and window-shopped, seeing things and monsters and beasts no man had ever seen before. He was on the ultimate trip.

  An escalator brought him to the second level. Another escalator brought him to the third. He wandered around, teenage kids laughing and tossing popcorn at him, old ladies avoiding him as one might avoid a rabid dog, children staring at him with their bright and mysterious gazes.

  Sometime around three he stood at the low railing of the third level, looking down on a beautiful splashing fountain, his pajamas—no Road Runners here, thank God—slick with sweat, his face crumpled and insane.

  “Wa-wa,” he said, sounding quite terrified, quite lonesome. He tipped himself over the railing.

  His flight was no more memorable than Pauly’s. But he did make a big splash.

  The papers carried a brief report about it the next morning. Mall officials wanted it hushed up in a hurry.

  And thus Rick died as he had lived, afraid of everything, unknown and unloved by his fellow man, a useless soul in a nondescript body.

  Requiescat in pace.

  22

  First Kiss Foiled

  NIGHT CAME, AS it tends to do, and on this night—shortly before one o’clock in the morning—Julie unlocked her apartment door and ushered Louis Strack in, both of them giggling at some joke they had pulled on the waitress at the club, deep in the new heart of the city, the South Side, where everybody that was anybody went. On the South Side, surrounded by new malls and boutiques and growing construction, the well-to-do of the city gathered to compare wealth and bank accounts an
d wives, hoping to come out on top and be the big fish of the day. Louis Strack had no time for such inanities, and Julie liked them even less. She was she and he was he. Enough said, to her way of thinking.

  She was wearing a stunning green sequined outfit, a slinky emerald dress that Louis had bought for her two days ago. How he knew her size was a mystery to her. It would remain a mystery forever. He had handed her a large flat box and begged her to accept it. She did, with reservation. Pulling the dress out, she had almost laughed (and spoiled the mood) because a dress like this one seemed preposterous for a young lady lawyer trying to work herself up the ranks. If Louis hadn’t been there, she might have tossed it out a window. But he was there, and at that time she only wanted to humor him.

  As it turned out, the dress was just perfect. Especially for an evening like this. But the evening had ended, and the party was over.

  “God,” Louis said, slumping down onto her couch and hooking his hands behind his head. “This is one night I won’t forget.”

  “Forget?” Julie smiled at him as she kicked off her shoes. They thunked against a wall. “Louis, you are the kindest man I’ve . . . ever met.”

  She supposed he saw, somehow, what she was thinking, and she was right. Peyton was still there, alive inside her. She was not yet ready to chase his memory away.

  The silence grew too long between them. At the club—the High Rider, Louis’s favorite hangout and a place that seemed reserved only for the rich and famous—they had danced and talked and delved hesitantly into each other’s souls. Julie felt as if Louis were shouldering some of the burden that had weighed on her so much these last weeks: Peyton dead, servicing her clients; Peyton dead, Pappas and Swain to attend to; Peyton still dead, Louis’s loving attention to ponder. Basically she knew that the man she had loved since high school was gone and never would be back. But he lived, in a way, in the memories she couldn’t get rid of because they were so recent.