Detroit Combat

by Randy Wayne White

  For a time, it seemed as if it would work, as if it were the smart thing to do. The T-Bird just didn’t have the mobility to get around the Corvette. But they had something else. The window shattered behind him, and it took the vigilante a moment to realize they were shooting at him. Hawker took out the Walther and placed it in the bucket seat beside him as he began a series of S-skids. The entrance ramp was close now, so Hawker knew he had to do something to stop them, and do it quickly. Then it suddenly came to him. It might work—if he was lucky.

  He slowed a little and let the T-Bird start to pass. He felt the Corvette’s fiberglass body shudder as more slugs cracked through it. When the car was halfway past, Hawker turned sharply. His port fender collided with the T-Bird, and the white car wheeled crazily up the side on a snowy incline, then came to a stop.

  Keeping the body of his car between him and the bikers, Hawker jumped out of the Stingray, the Walther ready. If they wanted a shootout, he would give it to them—as long as they kept the girl out of the way. And they probably would. After all, she was valuable property.

  “You ready to talk business now?” Hawker called over the roof of his car.

  “I was just getting ready to ask you the same thing,” the big biker called back. “Fritz is dead. I think the cops call that murder.”

  “Dead? You shot him by mistake, right?”

  “Naw, naw—he just stopped breathing. Scared the hell out of your girlfriend—I think she was getting real fond of him. You hit him too hard, man. You hit him way too hard. You’re a killer, and I’m a witness. But I tell you what: If you come along with us nice and quiet, I won’t say one word to the cops. Promise. How about it?”

  “Don’t do it, Hawk!” Clare yelled. “They want to kill you; they want to—”

  Hawker heard a cracking sound, a momentary silence, then the woman’s gasp of pain. They had slapped her down.

  “I’d rather just stay right here and wait for you to show yourselves,” Hawker called back. He held the Walther ready, eager to use it. “Sooner or later you have to move. And when you do, I’ll see if we can’t open up negotiations again.”

  “Hey—what the hell are you, a cop or something?” the man yelled back. Hawker almost smiled at the nervousness in the big biker’s voice.

  “I’m just an honest skin-flick maker who doesn’t like to get shit on.”

  “We still got the woman, buddy. Don’t forget that—we got the woman.”

  “And if you so much as touch her again, I’ll see to it the both of you spend eternity saying grace through your assholes.… Understand? Understand?”

  There was no answer.

  The white fluorescence of the freeway bled across the snow patches and rank weed, giving Hawker enough light to see the T-Bird plainly. He held the Walther in both hands, waiting for a shot. But no one moved. Hawker glanced nervously over his shoulder. He was glad the ramp didn’t get more traffic. Sooner or later though, a car was bound to come shooting down the ramp. And, if the car stopped, the bikers would just be able to add to their list of hostages.

  Hawker decided to act.

  It wasn’t much of an act.

  Yelling “Run, Clare, run!” he sprinted across the open ground between the two cars, dove, rolled, and came up ready to shoot the two men dead. He caught himself just in time. They sat behind the car with Clare Riddock between them, both of their handguns pressed to her temple.

  There was no way she could have run. Had Hawker shot either of them, they would have immediately killed the girl.

  The big biker laughed. “You catch on quick, pretty boy. Now just rid yourself of that piece before we do serious damage to your ladyfriend. No, no, don’t even let yourself think what you’re thinking. Sure, you might be able to get one of us. But the minute you try anything cute, this little bitch’s brain gets reamed, and then the one of us left shoots you.” As Hawker slowly let the Walther roll off his finger and fall to the ground, the biker added, “I don’t mind an honest bluff, but I sure as hell don’t like a man who ain’t got the balls to see it backed up.” He stood up and walked quickly toward Hawker. The vigilante saw the kick coming, but there was little he could do. He dropped to his knees, his groin throbbing with pain.

  “You killed Fritz!” the biker screamed, kicking Hawker in the head. “You killed Fritz—and for what? For what? Nothing!”

  Hawker tried to shield his head. He heard the woman scream … and then he was in the gauzy space of a psychedelic tunnel, falling, falling, spinning, spinning like Alice on her trip to …

  SEVENTEEN

  Hawker awoke in darkness. Complete, all-encompassing, total darkness.

  He stirred, not sure what had happened, not sure where he was. His head hurt, his neck hurt, his stomach was in knots. He gave careful thought to the possibility he had a hall-of-fame hangover. It must have been some party. He could remember nothing.

  Then it began to come back to him. A chunk and a swath at a time. They had beaten him. They had taken the woman. Now where in the hell was he?

  Hawker sat up experimentally and moved his legs. He was on a bed … no, a cot. Creaky springs and the smell of mildew. His feet found the floor, and only then did he realize they had taken his shoes. He still had his pants on, though, and his shirt, but that was all. His Randall knife was gone, and so was the shoulder holster that had held the Walther, and so, thankfully, was the idiotic wig. They had even taken his watch.

  Hawker touched his face. It was caked with something. Dried blood. He snorted, hacked, and spit into the darkness and found he could breathe through his nose again.

  Finally he stood, fighting an unexpected wave of vertigo. The floor was wooden, cold, and the darkness was still total. It was as if someone had sewn his eyelids shut, then taped patches over them.

  Holding his hands out like a blind man, he began to explore the room. When he found the wall, he followed it. It was a small room with bare walls. No pictures, no light switches, no windows, nothing. Finally he arrived at the cot again. He couldn’t quite believe it—he had found no door.

  No door?

  He made two more trips around the room and still found no knob, no seal that indicated the presence of an exit. How in the hell had he gotten in? More important, how in the hell would he get out?

  Frustrated, he sat on the cot and forced himself to consider the possibilities. He came up with four: There could be a sliding wall; there could be a door in the ceiling; there could be a door in the floor. The fourth possibility was that they had built the room around him. He discarded it, amused at his own meticulousness.

  With each wall in turn, he tried with all his strength to force some movement. His shoulders creaked, but the walls didn’t budge. He rested for a time, then climbed up on the cot and reached above him—the ceiling was still too high to touch. He tried jumping and still did not touch it. He decided he could make the cot into a kind of ladder if necessary, but he would save that until he finished his search of the floor.

  Crawling on his belly, Hawker used his fingertips to explore the cracks in the floor, inch by inch, foot by foot. When he got to that section of floor under the cot, he shoved the cot roughly out of the way.

  And that’s where he found the door, what had to be the door. He could not tell exactly how it was cut into the floor, but there was a heavy metal latch that, he assumed, could be maneuvered from either side.

  Hawker expected it to be locked—and it was.

  He pried at it with his hands until he felt the skin break and the warm trickle of his own blood. Then he tried using his heels, kicking at the latch. In the darkness, though, he couldn’t hit it squarely, and only succeeded in scraping most of the skin off his ankles.

  Finally he threw the mattress off the wire cot and began to take the cot apart piece by piece. The two metal braces weren’t quite right—too soft. At last, he snapped off one of the cot’s leg posts and jammed it under the latch bolt. Using the post as a fulcrum, Hawker put all his weight into snapping the bolt away
… and suddenly he heard a snap and clatter from beneath the floor.

  Whatever was holding the latch had broken.

  Hawker dropped to his knees, pulled the bolt up, and slammed it back … and the whole floor seemed to give away, and once again he was falling, falling, riding headfirst down some kind of slick metal chute toward a bright white light.…

  Detective Claramae Riddock prayed for unconsciousness. Fear moved through her like an acid, and it seemed as if she could not get enough air no matter how fast she breathed.

  “It won’t be so bad, dearie,” said an oily female voice. “In fact, you may come to enjoy it. I do hope so. I really do. It will be so much less … messy that way.”

  Riddock struggled once again against the leather belts that held her on the low, hard examination table. Her wrists were strapped above her head, and her legs were pulled wide, buckled to the bottom of the table that had been positioned so that her pelvis was arched, lower than her head.

  The leather cut into her skin, but would not give.

  The two bikers had stripped her naked. They had gawked and leered and made obscene gestures. They talked between themselves and let their hands brush her as if by accident. They had said things that made her want to gag. She thought she knew what they planned to do, and that was terrifying enough.

  But she was wrong. The bikers did not rape her. They left abruptly when they finished securing her, as meekly as toy soldiers.

  No, they had not raped her—but the horror of rape didn’t compare to the sheer, bleak terror she now felt.

  The room was large, clinical and cold. The tile on the floor had yellowed with age, and the wires to the neon light overhead had been spliced with electrical tape. In the far corner of the room, an ornate bed sat on a patch of wine-red carpet. Behind it, the old stone wall was painted white. Overhead were banks of lights and a camera on a remote track. Strangely, the small film set somehow seemed colder, more clinical than the rest of the room.

  “Still nervous, dearie?” purred the deep female voice. “Oh, I know why. It’s because the two of us are all alone in this big room, and I’m the only one still in clothes.”

  Clare swung her head away, then looked back in a sort of horrified fascination as the woman began to undress.

  She was a grotesquely fat woman. She stood on thick ham legs wearing a tentlike kimono. She had a massive cherub face, white hair stacked in a pile atop the huge head, pale lashes, buttery white skin, and a tiny, oval mouth painted bright red from which a black cigarette dangled. When she laughed, the layers of jowl beneath her chin quivered, and when she talked, her head tilted back strangely and her eyelids fluttered as her hands spasmed up and down to add emphasis.

  It was Queen Faith … Queen Faith, the murderess; Queen Faith, the kidnapper; Queen Faith, the scavenger that fed on lost and homeless children. For some reason, Clare Riddock had never come to terms with the idea it was a woman behind it all. She just couldn’t picture a female who was twisted enough, brutal enough.

  Now she could.

  The obese woman stuck the cigarette in her mouth and began a bizarre strip-tease, shuffling back and forth as she untied the kimono. She stopped long enough to flip on the stereo: oboes, strings, and timpani. Humming to herself, Queen Faith slid the garment off her shoulders and let it fall to her feet. Naked, she looked as if someone had taken a flesh-colored sack and filled it with gelatin. Her breasts were long, flat tubes capped with liver-tinted nipples, and her buttocks were like massive scoops of yellowed lard. Despite her white hair color, the woman’s pubic thatch was jet black, a tiny dark streak amid all the folds of white, like a scar.

  Clare could look no longer, and she jerked her head away with a dolorous moan.

  The smile that seemed to have been painted on the fat woman’s lips vanished. The tiny mouth crinkled into a sneer. “Too ugly for you, little miss priss?” she said with heavy sarcasm. “Too disgusting for you to even take the trouble to look?” Her sandals clippity-clopped as she hurried toward a steel medicine cabinet. Still talking, she unlocked it. “Well, let me tell you something, you little bitch. I don’t need a beautiful body because I can take all the beautiful bodies I want. Tonight I’m taking yours. That’s right—yours!” Queen Faith snapped open the locks and removed a syringe, alcohol, and a tiny vial filled with a milky liquid. “And let me tell you something else, dearie: Before you leave this house, you’ll be begging to have the chance to please me. Understand that? You’ll be begging. Mark my words. You’ll get down on your knees and plead for a chance to satisfy me.”

  Before filling the syringe, the obese woman reached beneath the cabinet and pulled out a leather garter belt into which was built a black plastic phallus.

  Behind her, Clare Riddock moaned softly as the fat woman strapped the weird contraption around her hips.

  “Please don’t do this to me,” the detective pleaded. “I’ll give you money; I’ll give you anything. But don’t do this, for God’s sake. If there is any humanity in you at all, don’t do this.”

  Holding the syringe up to the light and tapping out the air bubbles, Queen Faith walked toward her. She spit the cigarette from her mouth, crushed it out, and grinned obscenely. “I’m going to give you something that will make it all a lot of fun, dearie. A great deal of fun. In fact, you’re going to love it.”

  Queen Faith pointed the needle at the naked woman and moved in to administer the injection. She stopped suddenly, her head cocked.

  Had she heard the muted sound of a gunshot, or was it just her imagination?

  She decided it was her imagination.

  Once again she drew back the needle, ready to inject it into the naked girl’s arm.

  As Clare Riddock’s mouth formed to scream, the obese woman began to laugh. More than anything else, she loved these nights with a new girl; these nights flavored with incense, with violence and the sticky, dreamy sweetness of cocaine. She delighted in these nights when, more than any other moment in her life, she dominated, she controlled. They were nights when she could force the female of the species to pleasure her.

  In truth, this is why she had built her empire. This is why she had forged an organization built on fear, on drugs, on bribes and blackmail. This is what it was all for—so that she could have any beautiful woman she truly wanted. The younger, the better. The more helpless, the more desirable. The vulnerability of her women always touched her as very funny. Queen Faith continued to laugh now. She laughed until her body shook and all the rolls of fat slapped in chaotic motion.…

  EIGHTEEN

  James Hawker tried to slow his descent as he plunged onward toward the speck of light.

  It was not easy to do. He was in some kind of metal tube, a tube slicker than a sliding board and much steeper.

  He pressed his arms out against the tube, trying to use his elbows like a toe-break on a soap-box derby car. Gradually he began to slow, but then his shirt ripped, the skin peeled off his arms, and he was falling again.

  The entire trip took less than five seconds. It seemed like half an hour.

  Finally the tube seemed to flatten and lift, and then Hawker was flying forward, tucking and somersaulting, his whole body braced for the shock of impact. It was not as bad as he’d expected. He whoofed into a pile of cardboard boxes and got slowly to his feet. Now he seemed to be in some kind of small rectangular cement vat. The tube that had conveyed him came down out of the bare wooden ceiling above him.

  What in the hell kind of place was this, anyway? Some kind of weird funhouse?

  At least he could see. Light spilled over the high walls of the vat. Hawker took survey of his injuries. His shirt and pants were torn and splotched with his own blood. His neck and back still ached from the beating he had taken. His arms were badly scraped. His hands were bruised and his bare feet were streaked with blood.

  He could only guess at how his face looked—not good, judging from the puffiness and the tenderness. But he was alive. He would survive if he could find a way out.
>
  Funny how much better he felt now that he could see. For the first time since he had awakened in the darkness, his sense of optimism returned—and his sense of anger.

  First, he had to find the woman. And he had to find her fast. With his wig off, it was just a matter of time before Queen Faith’s people realized who he was. Someone would connect him with the rescue of Brenda Paulie and with the disappearance of her keeper. It wouldn’t take a wild jump of logic for them to assume he and the woman were cops.

  And to be a cop in the hands of the Queen Faith organization was to be dead.

  Hawker climbed up the stack of boxes, jumped, and caught the top edge of the vat. He pulled himself up, then rested on his belly for a moment, lying on the edge of the wall.

  He was in some kind of cellar. A bare light bulb produced the light. The walls were damp, built of heavy rock. He was, indeed, in some kind of permanent vat or pool. There was another a few feet away, and a squat, powerful-looking furnace next to that. The furnace did not seem to be working, and the place smelled damp and musty. Dark corridors led off on three sides.

  Hawker swung down off the wall. He wanted to get upstairs. If he was in Queen Faith’s residence, upstairs seemed the mostly likely place to find Clare Riddock.

  He chose a corridor at random. The cellar seemed to spread itself into wings—apparently beneath the wings of a very large, very old house. Hawker noticed that most of the storage, stacked on shelves and in corners, looked like things you might find in an out-of-date doctor’s office: broken gurneys, powders and liquids in antique bottles on chipped metal shelves. Could they have somehow locked him in an abandoned hospital?

  Hawker wondered as he hurried along.

  The corridor he chose was darker than the room that contained the vats and the furnace. Gradually his eyes adjusted. As he rounded a corner, he began to notice a nauseating odor. The farther he moved down the hall, the stronger the miasma became. It took him a moment to recognize the smell: It was that of human excrement.