She was babbling and clawing at him nonsensically, her hair a stringy mess.
Hawker shook her roughly and said into her ear. “You’re going to be okay. Get hold of yourself, damn it! Can you swim? Can you?”
Her teeth were already chattering. She nodded her head. “Yes.”
“Good. Let’s go—and make it fast. No stopping to rest until we’re out. Water this cold doesn’t take long to kill you.”
On the other side of the car, Hawker heard a splash and whoof as the man surfaced from the other window. Now it would be a race back to shore. Hawker hoped with everything he had that the man had lost his weapons. If he hadn’t … well, they were taking a very cold swim for nothing.
With no moon, the December sky was a black swirl of stars, and the lake was darker yet, reflecting nothing. The water was like ink had the stunning texture of slush. The momentum of the car had carried them about twenty yards from shore. Hawker began to do a strong crawl stroke toward the embankment, but he left the girl behind so quickly that he stopped.
“Come on, damn it! Don’t rest. Swim!”
The woman tried to reply, but all that escaped her lips was a fast series of inhalations. “Too … co-co-cold,” she chattered finally.
Hawker reached out and yanked her toward him. “God damn it,” he snapped, “you either swim or sink, lady. You’d better get tough—and get tough quick—if you plan to survive this.”
Even so, Hawker threw his arm across the firm swell of her breasts and began to pull her along in an awkward sidestroke. Not far away, he could hear desperate splashing as the goon paddled toward shore.
Great, Hawker thought. If he still has a gun, he’ll just wait for us and shoot us as we crawl out of the lake.
Hawker began to angle toward a more distant corner of the quarry. It was a longer swim, but it might give them a better chance of survival.
The water was almost beyond endurance now. It was so cold that it was like being in a vat of molten metal. His skin burned and his teeth ached. Hawker felt his head growing sluggish and his muscles becoming cramped, yet he knew he had to force himself onward.
And he did. Still clinging to him, the woman made a token effort to kick and stroke. Hawker took it as a good sign. If she was willing to swim, she still had the will to live. In freezing water, you had to want to live—or you wouldn’t. You didn’t have a chance.
As they neared the shore, Hawker began to use his feet to explore for the bottom. But the quarry walls were abrupt, and he was within arm’s length of the bank before he finally found bottom. He shoveled the woman into his arms and climbed laboriously out of the water.
A strong northwest wind was blowing, and it was like razors against Hawker’s skin. He cuddled the woman to his chest, trying to warm her. “Are you okay? Hey, are you going to make it?”
The woman’s teeth clattered together. “Just … jus-s-s-t a little sleepy—”
Hawker swung her down to the ground. He positioned her on her feet and shook her gently by the shoulders. “Hey, wake up; wake up, damn it! You’re not sleepy—you’re dying. It’s hypothermia, and if you doze off now, baby, you’ll never wake up.”
The woman’s eyes flipped open and she crossed her arms tightly across her breasts. “God, I’m so cold.”
Hawker took off his soaking jacket and wrapped it around her. “Come on, we’ve got to walk. We’ve got to go find help.”
The woman stopped in midstride. She shuddered, as if she had just remembered what had transpired that evening. “Oh, James—that terrible man, he shot Paul, and he … he tried to—”
Hawker threw his arm around her. “I know what he tried to do, Claramae, but he didn’t. Anyway, we can’t think about that now. We have to get out of here before—”
“Before what?” called a voice from the darkness.
The woman pulled herself tightly against Hawker as Queen Faith’s goon stepped up over the embankment. Standing above them, hands on his hips, he made a stark black silhouette against the night sky. Hawker studied the silhouette closely, looking for any sign of a weapon. For a moment, he thought his hands were empty, but then he saw the stiletto shadow of a knife.
“We have to get out of here before we all freeze to death,” Hawker called back. “Not just us, friend. You too. The body isn’t geared for the kind of swim we just took. We all need to get help, and we need to get help fast.”
The man half slid, half fell down the embankment toward them. Hawker stepped in front of the woman. The man got to his feet, waving the knife as he said, “Real smart boy, aren’t you? Played a real cute trick driving into this lake. Saved your little girlfriend from having some fun and made yourself look like a regular hero, didn’t you?” Holding the stiletto like a sword, the goon lunged at Hawker. “Let’s see what kind of hero you are now, asshole.”
Hawker stepped out of the way of the knife and shoved the woman. “Run,” he shouted at her. “Start running and don’t stop until you’ve gotten some help. Flag down a car or go to a house—but don’t stop until there is someone to take care of you.”
He gave her another shove and turned just in time to see the goon charging at him again with the knife. Hawker had time only to let his feet drop from beneath him and roll his shoulder in a halfhearted body block.
Hawker’s bones and muscles were so cold that the impact was hauseatingly painful. The man stumbled over him and fell face first into the brush. The vigilante dove onto the prone figure and hit him with a laborious combination of lefts and rights to the kidneys. The man swung back with his elbow, catching Hawker with a glancing blow to the nose. It sent a wave of shock through him, like the first full breath of ether, then his eyes began to water so badly he could not see. When Hawker tried to turn away, the man swung the other elbow into his face.
Hawker rolled away and got slowly to his feet. As he did, he saw that the silhouette was already upon him and the silver blade of the knife was arching downward toward his face like a meteor. The vigilante caught the man’s wrist in both hands and twisted sideways. When the man bent over, Hawker kicked him once in the solar plexus, then twice in the scrotum.
The man gave a wheeze of pain and the knife dropped from his hand. Quickly Hawker released his grip and snatched the stiletto away. He folded his left arm around the goon’s neck and pressed the point of the knife into his ear. Hawker whispered, “One wrong move, Jake, and I’ll shove this knife through the wall of the eardrum, into your brain. Understand?”
The man nodded anxiously. He was breathing heavily, as was Hawker. Hawker’s hands and face burned as if being stabbed with needles, and his feet were numb. Even so, he was determined to get some information out of him. “Where can I find Queen Faith? How can I see her face to face?”
“Don’t know,” the man said, gasping. “Get all my orders over the phone.”
“Over the phone?”
“He’s lying!” put in an unexpected voice. It was the woman. She stood in the darkness looking very small, very pale, with her soggy skirt and Hawker’s big jacket.
“I thought I told you to run, damn it!”
“I’m … I’m too cold to run. Besides, I couldn’t leave you. I thought I might be able to help.” She came a few steps closer, and Hawker could see she was carrying a grapefruit-sized rock.
“Is that how you were going to help? You were going to hit him with that?” Hawker snickered.
“It was all I could f-f-find.”
“Great. Stand by. If this slob doesn’t give me a straight answer pretty quick, I’ll have you drop it on his foot.”
“I ain’t lying,” the man said quickly. “I met her, sure. And I know where she keeps her girls. But I don’t know where she lives.”
“Then just tell me where she keeps her girls.”
The man hesitated. “Hell, if I tell you that, she’ll kill me.”
“And I’ll kill you if you don’t, friend.”
“You can’t do that, man. That ain’t right.” He struggled briefly to
free himself. Hawker put enough pressure on the knife so that a thin river of blood began to flow out of the goon’s ear. The man held his arms out toward Claramae Riddock. “Hey, lady, talk to this guy, would you? You’re a cop—tell him! I got my rights. He’s violating my rights. I demand a lawyer, and tell him if he don’t get that knife out of my ear, I’ll file suit.”
“Shut up,” the woman ordered in an oddly hoarse voice. “Shut your dirty mouth right now.”
Hawker felt a slow anger rise in him. He heard himself say, “The guy’s right, Detective Riddock. Maybe I’d better walk him back to the road and wait for help to come.”
“But we’ll freeze to death, James!”
“Then I’d better let him go. I have no right to hold him—”
“He shot Paul, damn it—”
“You don’t know that for sure, Detective.”
“And he tried to rape me.”
“Did he?”
The woman took two quick steps toward him. “I know what you’re doing, James. I know what you’re trying to prove, but this isn’t the time or the place.”
The goon sensed correctly that Hawker’s attention had been diverted just enough. He kicked backward, driving the heel of his shoe against Hawker’s shin, then twisted away from the knife as Hawker buckled forward in pain. He then knocked Hawker’s head sideways with a well-placed elbow and hit him once more with his fist.
Hawker squatted heavily on his knees. Most men would have dropped the knife. Hawker didn’t. And he had had just about enough of this character’s physical abuse. With a grunt of effort that was more like a battle cry, Hawker drove himself upward, drove hard toward the man’s chest cavity, the stiletto cradled in his hands.
The knife splintered through his rib cage with the same high-torque impact of a tumbling .45 slug. The man screamed, his legs kicking, his head thrown backward, as Hawker lifted him right up off the ground, twisting the knife inside him. The goon slapped weakly at Hawker’s face, but it no longer mattered. The vigilante twisted and heaved with all his strength, and the killer sailed off the blade of the knife, landing with a weak cry in the black water of the lake.
Hawker felt the woman draw close to him, and the two of them stood silently as the dying man floundered desperately for several seconds before sinking into the darkness.
The woman sniffed then sobbed. “My God,” she whispered. “My God, I can’t believe this is happening.”
“It happened,” said Hawker. “Either that, or this is the coldest dream I’ve ever had in my life.”
“You killed him.”
“Yeah? I prefer to think of it as a severe violation of that particular asshole’s rights.”
“I feel like an absolute fool, James, after the way I acted.”
Hawker squeezed her tightly against him as he looked out over the lake. At the exact point where the corpse had gone under, there were now teacup-sized bubbles erupting from the dark water. Hawker said, “That’s only because you deserve to feel that way.”
“There’s a real deep nasty streak in you, James Hawker. But I shouldn’t complain—you saved my life.”
“I haven’t saved anyone’s life yet, lady—certainly not Paul’s, and maybe not even our own. We’ve got to get moving.” Hawker began to pull her along with him up the incline. “If you see me nodding off, give me a good swift kick in the butt, okay?”
“An hour ago, I would have given you one for free.”
Hawker chuckled. “See? We have some things in common after all.…”
ELEVEN
Three days later, Hawker pushed his way through the double doors of the intensive care unit at Henry Ford Hospital in downtown Detroit. The nurses were used to him by then, so they nodded and smiled.
Paul McCarthy lay in one of two dozen beds that fanned out along the wall. Most of the beds were in use. All were connected to a maze of tubes and wires and complex electronic monitoring equipment that beeped and hummed and buzzed.
McCarthy lay beneath a translucent oxygen tent. Plastic tubes snaked up his nose, and an I.V. siphon was taped to his left arm. His brown hair had lost its luster and his skin was white.
Hawker stared through the plastic oxygen tent for a moment, then signaled to one of the nurses.
“How’s he doing, Peg?”
“Not bad, Mr. Hawker. Blood pressure’s back up, vital signs are good, and he seems to be breathing easier.”
“Hum.”
“Oh, yeah, and he swore at the doctor today.”
“Good!”
“Yep. He said to the doctor, he said, ‘Get these god damn tubes outta my face and bring me some decent food if you really want to help.’”
“Hey, he might make it after all, huh?”
“That man’s got the constitution of a backhoe. The doctor says the slug smashed between a couple of ribs, went right through his lung and out the other side. I don’t believe it, though. I think that bullet went into his stomach and Officer McCarthy digested it. That’s some tough man there.”
The nurse was a lithe black woman with a close-cropped Afro. She had the bedside manner of a drill sergeant, but was generally regarded as one of the best intensive care nurses in Detroit. She had worked extra hours to make sure McCarthy got the best of care.
Hawker winked at her. “After we get him out of here, Peg, we’re going to buy you the best dinner this town has to offer.”
She giggled girlishly. “Shoot, if you want to do something nice for me, don’t bother with no restaurant. You two fellows invite me over to your place, and you cook dinner and see to it I don’t have to stand up even once. A nurse’s feet take an awful beating on this floor.”
Hawker smiled. “You’ve got it, lady. For a night, we’ll make you a princess. Your slightest wish will be our command.” He nodded toward McCarthy. “You think he might wake up soon, or should I come back later?”
“Since you’re only allowed fifteen minutes, you’d better do what you’ve done the last two days.”
Hawker raised his eyebrows. “And what’s that?”
“Shake that man by the leg until he opens his eyes.”
“You think I’d do such a thing?”
“You’re damn right I do!” The nurse went off laughing and shaking her head.
The moment she was gone, Hawker gave the Detroit cop’s knee a tap. “Hey, Detective McCarthy, are you in there?” He had to repeat himself several times, but finally McCarthy’s eyelids lifted. It took him a moment to focus. His smile was weak—but it was a smile.
He pushed the oxygen tent aside just enough to talk. “Jeezus, they’ll let anybody in here.” His voice was hoarse—the result of the tubes.
“Nothing I like better than visiting a hospital intensive care ward. What a jolly place.”
“They kept me alive, didn’t they?”
“They’re saying it’s mostly because you’re such a hard guy to kill.”
McCarthy laughed painfully. “So, did you have your meeting with Claramae yet?”
“Hey, you remembered. The nurse said you were so drugged up you probably wouldn’t remember what happened from day to day.”
“He shot me in the chest not the head, dumb shit. So how did it go? Did Little Miss Priss get down off her high horse?”
“Didn’t have the meeting. She had other plans.”
Actually, Riddock had spent the last two days in the same hospital under observation. When they finally got to a phone and called the police, the detective found herself with a sticky choice—whether to tell her superiors the truth and thus expose Hawker, or to plead a temporary case of amnesia brought on by the shock of seeing McCarthy shot and the punch she’d gotten in the face. She chose amnesia, and so a visit to the hospital was unavoidable. As of yet, no one had found the sunken car or the body of her attacker, so they hadn’t taken her story as anything but the truth. Hopefully, the car or the corpse wouldn’t be found until the spring thaw—if ever.
“Boy, Hawk, I can’t believe I brought that bitch in on
it. But I knew she was going to start an investigation, so I had to do something.”
“Don’t worry about it, Paul. She’s not so bad. And I think she’ll help.”
“If she doesn’t, don’t forget about Randolph. He’ll do all the legwork you want.”
“Randolph?”
“Yeah, Detective White. Most people call him Randy, but the other guys on the shift call him Randolph because of his nose. You know—like Rudolph. He likes beer.”
“Ah.”
“He won’t be much help on the action end, but he’s a hell of a guy with facts and figures and research. His name’s in the book.”
“Great. I’ll call him tonight.”
McCarthy started to say something else, but his face changed and he grabbed his chest painfully. Hawker gave him the thumbs-up sign and rearranged the oxygen tent. “That’s enough for now. I’ll stop back tomorrow.”
McCarthy grinned his appreciation and closed his eyes. A moment later, he was asleep.
In Detroit, in December, there is no sunset. About five P.M., the wind begins to leach the color from the sun, gradually transforming it into a pale, chalky orb no warmer than a full moon. Then the smog absorbs the waning light and a nordic wind rushes in to fill the vacuum.
Then, even though it is populated by more than a million people, the city becomes a desolate maze of concrete canyons. Lights flash, cars screech, factories rumble and clank, people rush and shout and hurry with their collars pulled tight around their ears, yet the sense of desolation prevails. The wind howls from dark alleys and steam gushes from street grates as if the great creature of industry lies deep beneath the pavement, warm in its lair, waiting for the light of summer. Hawker liked the people of Detroit. They were tough and funny and streetwise. But he did not like their city in winter. There was something ominous about it, something cold, uncaring, aloof.
Amused by his own bleak thoughts, Hawker found his way through the downtown streets, then caught Lake Shore Drive to Jefferson Beach where the narrow asphalt drive twisted through snowbanks and bare trees to his rented bachelor’s cottage on Lake St. Clair.
Detroit Combat Page 6