“In,” Martinez said, and they went to the steel door that had quit flapping and banging, and stepped inside once more. Behind them, Skip drove away, the girl in the trunk pounding and screaming. He was grinning and seemed glad he did not have to chase shadows in the dark. Martinez snorted and wondered what he had done to deserve such luck.
“Wish I had a flashlight,” Smiley muttered as the dark interior turned his idiotic Scooby-Doo T-shirt a pale shade of gray.
“Put it in the suggestion box,” Martinez snapped, almost gagging on the man’s hideous odor. “Let’s split up. You go left, I go right. Got it?”
“Yeah, sure. Do you have your peashooter out?”
“It’s out, smelly. Turn left.”
He did, and Martinez had time to find a space of clean air and actually breathe again. Already sweat was rolling into his eyes, making him squint as he walked under the dusty sign that said this or that about Fresh Splash Soap and other banal items that didn’t concern him one way or the other. He just wanted Westlake in his sight, a 9-mm bullet that would fly straight and true, a gun that would not jam up at the critical moment, as automatic pistols tended to do. All in all, he just wanted to be done and at home swilling cold Miller beer down by the case, forgetting everything.
He walked into a door with a loud clump, his twisted nose taking the brunt of it. His fear tempered by anger, he tried the knob, but because the door seemed locked, he kicked it open just to show who was really boss around here. The door ripped off its upper hinge and groaned as it slumped downward, its edge to the floor. Martinez kicked the useless thing aside and went in, daring the impotent dark to frighten him again. He was Rudy Martinez—a tall, strong man, if a bit ugly—and he could have been even better than a contender, he could have been champ.
Something thumped to the floor, something hollow and hard, and rolled to a gritty stop at his feet. He bent over and felt it, discovered it was only a Coke bottle, and almost threw it away before realizing that most Coke bottles do not hit the floor and roll to your feet unless thrown that way.
“Westlake,” he said evenly, searching the dark with blind eyes, his left hand clutching this baffling prize. “Nobody gets hurt if you do what I say.”
He waited. Seconds ticked past.
“Westlake!”
Nothing.
Martinez turned in a circle, boots clumping. Only the faintest bit of light penetrated the small corridor, and it wasn’t enough. His bravado shrank, replaced by new fear. What kind of trap was this?
A minor notion came into his head. Two could play the same game, right? He tossed the bottle back from where it had come, waiting for the glassy ping as it hit the floor, or the explosive noise of a large glass bottle smashing against cement. Instead he got . . .
Nothing.
???
“Where are you?” he screeched, heart thundering, his pulse pounding thickly in his ears. “Westlake, come out here like a man!”
Nada.
What was left of his self-control took a hike into the deeper recesses of his brain. What it left behind was a crazy, frantic kind of terror.
He fired his pistol into the dark, pointing at everything, pointing at nothing. Sweat drizzled off his face. With each shot the walls were illuminated with bright bursts of orange, exposing spiderwebbed tools and shelves mantled with ancient dust. And Westlake?
No sign. Martinez fired in a blind panic, spinning in circles, momentarily forgetting that his pistol held only fourteen rounds. Some dim part of his mind must have remembered, though, because his spastic finger stopped pulling the trigger on round number fourteen, leaving it, and it alone, between him and the horrors of this ghastly, dead factory and the creature that lurked there.
He waited, trying to be silent, lungs screaming for breath, sweat soaking into the collar of his Western shirt as if it were a sponge.
Something scraped on the floor. Ahead? Behind? He tried to look both ways at once, gun held ready in his slick fist, his greasy hair stuck to his forehead in strange zigzags. “Westlake!” he screamed in terror and desperation, “where the fuck are you?”
Silence. Then . . . a strangled voice.
“Closer than you know.”
Martinez, all courage gone, whirled around to the place from which the voice had spoken. He heard thumps there, like someone walking in very heavy shoes. Breathing, too, ragged, hissing.
He fired his last shot as Darkman jumped for him, Darkman a frozen picture of orange and red in that brief illumination, Martinez a man made of sweat and fear. The flash died a quick death, but the bullet zoomed harmlessly into a wall.
Martinez bubbled out a wheezing scream as bony claws clamped over his mouth. After that he fainted into a blessed oblivion where anger was not known, and death a fantasy.
35
Grouchy
THE FORMER SMILEY heard Martinez’s screams stab through the dark from the other side of the massive building, and his grouchy frown turned down even farther, looked even grouchier. He could no longer remember why he had been smiling these long years, for it was a greater pleasure to wear a frown than an idiot’s grin. The boss man, Durant, was no stranger to trouble, not much of a smiler, and Smiley had been no stranger to trouble, either. But Durant’s little messes had a way of getting cleaned up almost by themselves—a little blackmail here, a bit of torture there. Only this deal with Westlake had been absolutely botched, and there was no one left to blame but Durant. It had been his goofy idea to leave the scientist guy alive and make fireworks out of him; it had been his idea to turn a simple hands-up, gimme-the-paper routine into a double murder accompanied by torture. And who had to pay the price? Everybody except Durant, the greasy slug.
Martinez screamed again. Grouchy found that he did not care that much, because Martinez was a spick, first of all—and he was always trying to be a hotshot and pretend he was in charge. The slimy bum had been a lousy boxer, and was a lousy crook as well. Surely Durant knew the man was a phony, and most surely he believed that Smiley had the brains to be second in command. And as Smi—oops—Grouchy knew quite well, Durant’s criminal shoes were just panting to have a new boss inside them.
But Martinez was still screaming, as if he had stepped on a nail, which didn’t seem unlikely in this dump. Sighing, reluctant, the newborn Grouchy plodded toward the place from where the screams were coming, his shotgun lounging on his shoulder, his mind free of burdens. What would Strack say when Durant, under questioning, burst into tears and begged him to let him give up mobstering forever? Strack would say, “Smiley”—not knowing the new moniker—“Smiley, my boy, I need a good man with brains and talent. Care to be my top dog, since the former one turned chicken?”
He got to the place where Martinez had been screaming. There was a door keeled over on edge, its bent lower hinge catching small sticks of light and reflecting them dully into Grouchy’s wide eyes. He took a firm step forward, determined to make this the best night of his life, the one that would get him promoted.
As is often the case with stupid people, he was fooling himself and no one else. What happened was that he stumbled across something that was somewhat firm, and picked it up because it was warm. It was a boot. Grouchy stuck his nose in it. Martinez’s foot odor wafted out, smelling even worse than that cheap Mexican cologne he liked to wear.
Grouchy dropped the boot to the floor with a soft clunk, wondering. What had happened here? Had that Westlake guy simply eaten Martinez?
He heard muted footsteps coming from dead ahead, where the blackness was complete except for one miserable shaft of dying daylight poking through a knothole in the sagging wall. Grouchy moved his shotgun down to waist level, ready to mutilate whatever walked through the weak beam of light. Like Martinez, sweat oozed out of his forehead, dripping and tickling his eyelashes on the trip down his face. He shook his head, flinging drops from the wet strings of his hair, internally cursing it and the scalding fear that was forming in his guts and brain.
Worse yet, who in the
hell was that man standing with his head right in the light, the guy swaying on his feet like a drunk?
Grouchy squinted. By all that was holy, it was him standing there, a copycat Smiley with one corner of his lips hiked up into a sneer, his eyes full of torment and fear, just like Grouchy was feeling about now.
His finger tightened on the shotgun’s broad trigger. “Wha, wha—who are you?”
No reply, or at least not a good one. The other Smiley wobbled on his feet, making small moaning noises.
“Westlake?” Grouchy demanded in a voice full of the bravado of stupidity. “You sure as hell can’t fool me!”
He jumped forward and smashed the butt of the shotgun against the mouth of the “fake” guy, who staggered back and hit an unseen wall. Decrepit tools clanged and rattled to the floor. He fell to his knees, then toppled over, his face cut in half by the gray beam of light. Blood was oozing out of his mouth.
Grouchy went into a squat beside him. “You ain’t so tough, and you ain’t so smart, Westlake. We know about your fancy masks and all. The boss figured it out in a second. So now all I have to do is fill you full of buckshot and drag your ass out. Get it?”
The fake Smiley rolled left, then put his hands on the floor. Blood dripped out of his mouth in large clots as he found his feet. He began waving his arms, speaking muted mumbo jumbo.
“So long, fucker,” Grouchy said, and blew his chest apart with a shotgun blast that sounded as loud as an atomic bomb in these confining walls. Fake Smiley flopped backward in a splash of his own blood, his head once again landing—hard—in the pitiful beam of light. Grouchy watched Westlake die with great relief.
Something at the base of the dead man’s neck began to wrinkle where the light hit it. It smelled bad, smoked a little. Grouchy frowned, then used the hot barrel of his gun to worm under the mushy fake skin. With a flick he pulled the mask off, more interested in seeing Westlake’s dead face than anything else.
All his hopes of someday being head honcho vanished forever.
Martinez lay there dead with a large wedge of wood stuffed into his mouth, his eyes open and locked forever in an expression of manic surprise.
Grouchy stumbled backward, thudding into things that hadn’t seemed to be there before. Panic was rising to a boil in his feeble mind. He had shot Martinez. Nobody shoots Martinez—or Skip or Durant or anybody else—without permission. Martinez had been a damn good man, an asset to the team. With Pauly and Rick gone forever, he was irreplaceable. So what would the boss have to say about this?
“Nice shooting,” someone said behind him, and Grouchy spun in the air, twirling like a master of ballet, and landed back on his feet, agape with fright.
Durant was standing there. A familiar shadow, no more. But the voice was his—no doubt about that.
“Boss, boss,” Grouchy said, already switching his voice into the high range that customarily indicated remorse. “Westlake put a new face on his ass. No, wait. He had a different face, you know, like . . . my face. I knew it wasn’t me, so I shot him. Jeez, boss, anybody could fall for that.”
Grouchy stared hard at the dark figure. The aroma of expensive cigars drifted over as Durant got one out of a pocket and bit off the end.
“You know, of course, that what you did is wrong,” Durant said gravely.
Grouchy nodded, suddenly wet with sweat and dread.
“The repercussions of your little disaster here will be severe, Smiley. Very, very severe.”
Grouchy—not even worthy of that name anymore—stood in the dank heat and waited for his sentencing.
Durant lit his cigar. His face shone briefly in the light, a bit smudged and strained. He sighed. “Do I do it, Smiley, or do you?”
The man who had no name left began to blubber, shoulders hunched, tears coursing down his cheeks. “Please, boss,” he said, sobbing. “One little mistake. Okay, two, yeah, the one a minute ago and then this one. But haven’t I been faithful? Haven’t I always done what you said?”
Durant nodded. “Fine, then. You must now do as I say.”
The wretched husk that had been Smiley and Grouchy nodded vigorously, nearly snapping a neck bone. “Anything, boss. Anything!”
Durant must have smiled, because Smiley-Grouchy-Nobody caught a wink of light off a tooth and grinned back.
“Blow your stupid fucking head off,” Durant said, his voice smooth and reassuring and deadly. “Right now. Do it and I won’t have to have you killed the slow way, the way I like.”
Smiley’s bowels went loose. To the sane and healthy, death is something confined to hospitals and nursing homes and graveyards. This new Smiley was now thrust into the stark border zone between life and death, and he didn’t like it one bit.
“Y-you can’t make me do that,” he said, stammering.
“Watch me,” Durant said. “Just watch.”
Durant turned and walked away. On the trip outside he stopped and puffed his cigar, eyes fastened on Smiley, a hint of a smile moving his lips. Smiley had seen the look before. It was the same look he had worn on the day they quick-fried Westlake and exterminated his chink pal. It was the same look he had had when Pauly sailed through a really nice window and dropped seventeen floors, whooping and screeching.
He would never get out of this dark hole alive.
The distant door was pulled open, letting in the weary light of dusk. Then it was shut. Darkness.
Smiley sat on the dirty floor with Martinez’s body behind him and his own executioner waiting out front.
He put the barrel of the shotgun between his eyes—hot, bony flesh against cold steel—and before he pushed the trigger with his thumb, he hoped that when he entered hell, he would not find his dead baby sister there, because she had been a real pain in the ass.
36
Durant
OF COURSE, THE real Robert G. Durant was still up on the roof in his pal’s helicopter, sitting Indian-style behind the .50-caliber gun, its barrel pointing at the strips in the tar that indicated a trapdoor. The tarred roof itself was flat and dotted with stagnant puddles. Their resultant mush of leaves, bugs, dead birds, even toads and frogs, and don’t—for God’s sake—forget the mosquitoes that bred there by the millions and feasted on the blood of suburbia, not so far away smelled awful.
Durant, in the belly of the copter, heard a muted bang that indicated a gun in action. He cocked his head, wanting to hear more but hearing instead only the horrible whining of mosquitoes as they buzzed around him by the hundreds, miniature Draculas feasting on his blood. He slapped at them, occasionally getting a few, but these were swiftly replaced by more and more and more.
“Get this bird in the air!” he shouted, whacking at his tormentors. The pilot, Steve Dalton, recent widower worth a million bucks, gave the bird some power, and up it rose. It drifted sideways, away from the roof, hovering over the street. Durant glanced down and saw himself walk out of the soap factory, puffing a cigar. His bewilderment lasted only a second, and then he was pointing and shouting.
“Turn around, Dalton! Goddammit, turn this turkey around so I can get a shot!”
Dalton, no slouch in the pilot department, complied by spinning the craft in a swift half-circle that left Durant feeling quite nauseated. On the ground, even over the whapping and whining howl of the copter, Darkman could hear Durant shouting. The copter bobbed in the air while Durant raked the .50-caliber’s cocking handle back, and then the machine gun was pounding the rutted sidewalk at his feet, the huge bullets smashing inch-deep craters in the cement before rebounding away, singing the high song of multiple ricochets. Darkman danced for a while, not expecting this kind of high-powered technology from a goon like Durant. It was when Durant quit shooting and began firing grenades from an actual grenade launcher that Darkman decided the options here were limited, and that if he were to die today, he might as well die in the dark that had been his prison these long weeks.
He ducked back inside. Durant went back to the machine gun, pounding the steel door with bullet
s, shouting inventive curses and gripping the .50-caliber hard enough to break its wooden grips. With a snarl he socked the hot barrel with a fist, got hurt by the steel and burned by the heat, gave up, and crawled forward to the cockpit, where Dalton was busy doing nothing. “Get me on the ground fast!” Durant shouted, and pulled his pistol out of his belt. “That bastard is one dead motherfucker.”
The copter fell from the sky. At the last moment Dalton yanked on the collective joystick, the one that made the bird go up or down. Durant’s queasy stomach bottomed out and threatened to slide out of his asshole to complain in person, but he held on, gritting his teeth. When the craft was firmly on the ground, he hopped out and went to the door of the soap factory, his greased-back hair flying wildly and his eyes glistening with pure animal hate.
He swung open the door, went inside. The good people of Fresh Splash Soap welcomed him with the cheery sign overhead, the one caked with dust and yellow varnish. Beyond that, things were dark. Durant began to sweat immediately.
“Westlake!” he shouted, and was answered by echoes. “Westlake, I’m not here to kill you! I have someone you ought to meet!”
More echoes, more silence. Durant scowled. This wasn’t going to be easy. The heavy artillery was in the chopper, currently useless. Here, in this darkness, it would be man against man. Durant’s little revolver only held the usual six bullets. His pockets were empty except for the usual coins and keys, and the cigar snipper. So what did Westlake have? An atomic bomb, probably.
Something thunked off to the right, where the light was a weak haze. It sounded like a large slab of metal falling on edge, ringing. Then, rapid footsteps.
Durant ran toward the noise, tripping and falling just as Martinez and Smiley had done, banging his shins on invisible obstacles, getting a spluttering faceful of cobwebs now and then. He stumbled over something soft and yielding and stopped, going down on one knee.
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