The Bad Kitty Lounge

by Michael Wiley

  A laugh came from my chest. It hurt to laugh. But it was a good hurt. You can hurt like that only if you’re living. I laughed and I accelerated around the other cars and passed a building that housed sanitary district offices and then a block-long oil products depot. I laughed until I realized tears were running down my cheeks, and then I sped up some more.

  I don’t know how many blocks I drove like that, half-blind with the shock of being alive. Cars and trucks got out of my way, blew their horns, skidded to a stop.

  Then a cop’s icy blue lights appeared in my mirror and a siren filled the air.

  I grinned like an idiot and pulled to the side.

  The cop strutted to my window. He was thin and had a wisp of a goatee, a moustache, and wire-rimmed glasses. He’d parted his receding red hair in the middle. He looked like a librarian in a bulletproof vest.

  I smiled at him. “I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you.”

  He didn’t look glad to see me. His eyes moved over my bruised and filthy head. He glanced back at the shattered pieces of the rear window. He said, “You were going seventy in a thirty-five-mile-an-hour zone.”

  Bless his heart. He was going to give me a ticket. I laughed again. His fingers touched his service pistol, ready to draw and shoot if I turned out to be the nutcase I sounded and looked like.

  “Officer,” I said, “I swear I wasn’t going a bit over sixty.” I couldn’t help myself.

  Sweat beaded on his brow. “Would you please keep your hands where I can see them and step—”

  A burst of gunfire cut him off. The side of his face exploded into flesh and teeth and blood.

  I dove for the seat.

  I waited for more gunshots.

  None came.

  I crawled out the driver’s side door. Nothing remained of the cop, nothing that mattered.

  Cars were stopping. Their drivers watched like I’d done the shooting.

  I got so close that I felt the heat of the cop’s body leaking into the cold afternoon, and I wished he was far away, at home with a wife and kids, sitting behind a desk at a library, anywhere but here. There wasn’t anything I could do to put him back together.

  I climbed back into the BMW, sat, got out again. I eased the dead man’s nine-millimeter from his belt. The steel was ice cold.

  I got into the car and shifted into drive. The tires spun on the roadside gravel and bit. Something thumped under the rear wheel. The cop’s foot.

  The clip in the nine-millimeter was full. That meant fifteen rounds. They could put fifteen holes in David Stone. I drove up Columbia Avenue after him. If I figured Stone right, after shooting the cop he would have pulled into a parking lot and waited for me to pass. He would be planning to slip in behind me again and kill me.

  So I cruised in the right-hand lane past a cast metal manufacturer and a gas station. Stone kept out of sight. I crept past a used car lot and Hank’s Auto Wreckers. I could have waved a red flag and painted a target on the hood. Stone wasn’t there. Three cop cars sped in the other direction. An ambulance followed, though it could do nothing but carry the pieces to the morgue. When an overpass for the Illinois-Indiana Skyway appeared, I figured Stone must have spooked himself and given up on me. I sped up and crossed under the viaduct.

  But as I came back out into the daylight, the rear passenger window imploded and a bullet blew a hole through the inside of the car roof. Stone’s car whipped onto the street from behind the viaduct. The car closed on me and the hand with the pistol came out of the driver’s side window.

  I reached over the backseat and fired.

  A spiderweb of cracked glass appeared on his windshield. His car weaved and the hand disappeared inside it. I figured I’d hit him. But the car straightened and closed on me again.

  I accelerated through a yellow light and turned onto a cross street, following signs to a Skyway on-ramp, Stone’s car right behind. We sped onto the highway and the wind howled in the cavity where Stone had shot out my back window.

  The Mercedes moved up on my back bumper, the cracked web of a windshield charging like a clouded eye. Stone couldn’t possibly see through it. I raised the nine-millimeter and put a second web in it. Then a black object punched a hole in the glass from inside his car. Stone was beating the windshield with the butt of his gun. Sheets of broken glass fell onto the hood and whipped away in the wind.

  The Mercedes moved toward the back of my car and hugged it like Stone wanted to lock bumpers. No window separated us. Ten feet divided us. His eyes stared at me in the mirror. He lifted his gun over his steering wheel and pointed it at my head. I yanked the steering wheel to the side as he pulled the trigger, and the BMW rocketed across two lanes. The blast shook the air.

  Stone swung his car after me. I sped past an SUV, swung back, and slowed so the SUV blocked me from behind. I rolled down the window as Stone accelerated next to me. I aimed and shot. The passenger-side window of his car blew in. He raced forward eight, nine, ten car lengths, then slowed, and the Mercedes wobbled left and right in its lane. The other side window came down and he started firing. A bullet dug a trench in the hood of the BMW. Two bullets went through the bottom of the windshield and shredded the passenger seat. I fired back and killed anything that was sleeping in his trunk.

  The Mercedes flew forward and cut around the side of a semi. I went after it, hung in the draft of the big truck, swung from side to side, and looked for Stone. He’d disappeared. I swung side to side again, chose left, and accelerated, the nine-millimeter in my hand.

  I flew past the front of the truck.

  Stone was gone.

  A minute later, a roadside sign welcomed me to Chicago. I kept my nerves and didn’t shoot it.

  Stone was gone, charging back into the city, and I was driving at twenty over the limit in a car with blown-out windows and bullet holes in the metal body. Every cell phone on the highway between Hammond and the city limit must have called 911. If I was smart, I would pull over to the shoulder, put my hands in the air, and wait for the cops to cuff them. But my skull had taken too many knocks to be smart. I shoved the accelerator to the floor and wove through the traffic.

  Stone’s Mercedes didn’t show itself until Eighteenth Street. The car was on the exit ramp and I was in the middle lane, going eighty. I hit the brakes, cut the wheel, and slid past the guardrail onto the ramp.

  Stone saw me coming and cut around a van into the cross traffic.

  I went after him.

  He zigged and zagged and then drove north. He didn’t shoot at me. I didn’t shoot at him. I cut into oncoming traffic, pressing the horn, and tried to pull even with him, but I could have been honking at a moving wall. The cars came at me and I cut back in behind Stone. We behaved as politely as possible for two guys driving bullet-pocked cars, until Stone sped through a changing light and left me behind.

  I stayed calm. I knew where he was going.

  A couple of minutes later, I parked the BMW next to his empty Mercedes at the Stone Tower construction site.

  The BMW dashboard clock said the time was 5:21. Construction had ended for the day an hour earlier or more. I got out and looked the Mercedes over. It was a pretty car if you didn’t mind broken windows or punched-out upholstery. Or blood smeared on the front seat. Not enough blood to slow Stone but enough to make him mad.

  Stone had his own gun and mine. He knew the building, inside and out—every steel beam, copper wire, and PVC pipe. He could be waiting for me anywhere, watching me now, taking his time until I stepped against the barrel of his gun.

  I white-knuckled the dead cop’s nine-millimeter and walked into the building.

  FORTY-TWO

  I YELLED, “STONE!”

  The concrete lobby absorbed the sound. I yelled again anyway. “Stone!”

  No one answered.

  A draft blew a packing receipt across the floor. Shadows lined the lobby and the edges of a dimly lighted corridor. I moved into the shadows, figuring I would live or die there. A pool of water stoo
d on the floor and, a little past it, a stack of slate tiles. Then the temporary offices appeared. Stepping into the light seemed like a bad idea. If Stone was as good as he seemed to be, he could be standing twenty feet from me and there would be no movement, no glint off the polished steel of a handgun.

  So I stood next to a concrete column and peered at the door from the dark before I stepped into the light.

  The door was locked.

  I threw my shoulder against it. The office was thin plywood, nailed to a flimsy frame. The wall shook. But the door stayed shut.

  If Stone hadn’t known where I was before, he knew now. I ran back to the shadows, caught my breath, and peered into the dark some more.

  Nothing moved. Nothing glinted.

  I charged across the corridor and threw my shoulder against the door again. The door and the frame broke into the office and I fell forward, rolled, and scrambled over the top, waving the gun around the reception area, ready to shoot man, woman, or child, anything that came at me.

  I went into the inside room where Stone’s cousin and his vicious German shepherd had interrupted me as I’d looked through the folder of deeds and titles. I returned to the file cabinet and looked for the folder.

  It was gone.

  I clambered back over the broken door and sprinted into the shadows. Then I stepped deeper into the building.

  The corridor led past a door to a big room that looked like it would be used to house utilities. At the end of the room a heavy security door led outside. I stepped through it to the back of the building.

  The back lot was a scar of dry clay soil with four Dumpsters parked against the side of the building and a chain-link fence and gate limiting access to trucks delivering construction materials. An elevator rose almost twenty stories along the outside of the building—a steel framework structure with two steel-cage elevator cars. Anchored to a concrete base behind the building, a tower crane rose higher than the elevator, higher than the building itself.

  Stone stood behind one of the vertical struts that supported the crane. He’d trapped himself between the building and the fence. But he didn’t look worried. He shot at me. I ducked behind the security door and he shot again. The slug dented the metal door frame. I waited, then poked my gun out and shot blindly at the place where I thought the crane stood.

  Four, five, six shots, maybe more, pounded into the security door as if Stone figured he could bore a hole through it to me. I wondered if he could.

  I cracked the door open and yelled, “You’ve got nowhere to go!”

  He answered with four more shots.

  I waited, swung the door open, shot twice at the place where he’d been standing, and ducked back inside.

  He didn’t shoot back.

  I cracked open the door.

  Nothing.

  I waited, peered through the gap.

  Stone was climbing a series of ladders that rose through the interior of the latticed steel tower crane.

  I stepped outside and called to him, “What the hell are you doing?”

  He stopped, midway up a ladder, pulled a gun from his belt, and fired.

  A bullet sank into the clay at my feet. I ducked toward the door.

  Another shot. Another twock of clay.

  I glanced out. He was climbing again. I aimed the nine-millimeter and fired. If the shot hit anything, it was too soft to make a sound. I fired again and he fired back.

  A few yards from me, the door to one of the construction elevator cages was open. I ran to it and punched the lever to go up. Gears ground as the car climbed a track.

  The car rattled and the metal whined for oil.

  Then Stone’s gun fired and steel banged against steel.

  Gears didn’t bang like that.

  Another gunshot, another metallic bang, and the steel mesh wall of the elevator dented in.

  Another shot. A strand of mesh tore and a slug fell to the floor.

  I threaded the mesh with the nine-millimeter barrel and shot.

  Stone didn’t seem to mind that we’d exposed ourselves to each other’s shooting. But I did.

  I punched another lever. The elevator stopped between floors.

  Stone shot and metal banged against metal.

  I slid open the cage door, slipped through the bottom, and dropped to concrete. A bullet dug into the floor. I spun and shot.

  That got Stone climbing again.

  He went up ladder after ladder until he reached the operator’s cab. It was a tinted glass box. Above it, an American flag whipped in the wind. He got into the cab and a moment later the cable hanging from the long working arm started retracting. I’d figured he’d climbed the crane because he’d had nowhere else to go, but he was acting like there was no place he would rather be. The cable reeled into the working arm, and a steel I-beam rose from the dirt lot behind the building. It went into the air the way smoke rises, hovers on a down draft, and rises again. The beam passed about twenty feet from me and rose into the darkening sky. The working arm of the crane swung toward the building, like a second hand on a giant clock speeding toward home. The beam accelerated as it approached. I looked up as it struck. High above, a plate of reflective glass exploded under the impact, and slabs, heavy enough to cut a man in two, rained down the side of the building.

  The working arm swung out again, then in. Another plate of glass exploded and rained down.

  Another.

  Stone was destroying the building.

  The working arm swung farther from the building and the cable lowered until the I-beam was even with me. The trolley that held the cable rolled toward the operator’s cab, stopped.

  The I-beam turned in a gust of wind, then straightened. I pointed the nine-millimeter at the crane cab window. The working arm swung toward the building.

  The beam closed on me. I squeezed off a shot and then another. I was shooting at the clouds.

  I dove to the floor as the beam smashed into the concrete column where I’d been standing. The steel rang like a huge bell. The beam broke from the cable, fell to the concrete floor, and rang again. Then the beam bounced over the side of the building and disappeared far below into the brown earth.

  I got up on one knee and fired the nine-millimeter at the crane cab.

  The glass on the cab exploded. Stone sat in the open sky with a pistol pointed at me. He fired three, four times. I ducked behind a column, waited, spun into the open, and shot at the cab.

  Too late.

  Stone was scrambling down a ladder.

  WHEN HE STEPPED FROM the last section of ladder onto the concrete base, I was waiting for him behind a pile of scrap. He ran into the open from the steel framing, looking for me, his gun pointing everywhere except at me.

  I took my time.

  As he peered up at the floor where he’d tried to crush me with the steel beam, I stepped out, aimed for his chest, and fired.

  His body fell back and hit the concrete.

  He didn’t get up. Didn’t move.

  I wanted to keep shooting him until the clip in the nine-millimeter ran dry. Then I would keep pulling the trigger just to hear it click. That seemed about as crazy as smashing a skyscraper with a steel beam, so I tucked the nine-millimeter in my belt and went to him.

  His chest had stopped heaving. His left arm was bent back and away in an unnatural pose of the dead. I watched him like he was a curious monster, safely asleep in a cage—until I noticed he had no blood on his chest or his belly, none on his face either, except the gash where I’d hit him with the coffeepot.

  I grabbed for my gun, but his eyes opened and his right hand rose from the concrete with his pistol in it, pointed at my forehead.

  I put my hands in the air.

  He sat up and squeezed the trigger.

  But a gunshot rang from across the dirt lot. Stone spun. When he came back around, pain and shock had put a horror mask on his face. A patch of blood spread from his left shoulder toward his belly.

  He turned toward the end of the
building. Lucinda stood there. Her pistol was pointing at him. She looked as stunned as he did that she’d shot him. Stone steadied his gun and fired at her. Her gun arm flew sideways and her pistol soared from her hand and hit the building wall. Stone swung his gun at my face and stumbled toward me. I reached for the nine-millimeter.

  From behind me a burst of automatic gunfire cut him down. His body flew back. His gun flipped into the air, fell on the concrete next to him, bounced and bounced again and came to a rest against a steel strut. He landed on the concrete slab, dead—he had to be dead this time.

  Another burst of automatic gunfire tossed his body across the concrete.

  The shooting stopped, and I went to him. His body and legs had dozens of holes in them. His head was blood and splintered bone. I pointed the nine-millimeter at his chest and fired. I knew better. I knew I would have nightmares about shooting a corpse. But I fired.

  When the shock and the sound passed, I looked at the building behind me. Perched inside a third-floor gap, DuBuclet’s helpers, Robert and Jarik, cradled light assault rifles. Robert nodded to me with a grim smile. Then he and Jarik disappeared into the shadows.

  FORTY-THREE

  LUCINDA SAT ON THE dirt by the side of the building. She’d gotten her gun and had it in her lap. I ran to her and she looked at me with sad eyes.

  “I froze,” she said.

  I looked at her wounded arm. “How bad is it?”

  Her leather jacket had a hole in the sleeve. A trickle of blood was running down her arm and dripping from her fingers. She lifted the arm, looked at the hole, and grimaced.

  “I froze,” she said. “I shot him. Then I froze.”

  “You saved my life.”

  “I’ve never frozen before. I was afraid I’d hit you.”

  “Can you take off your jacket?” I said.

  She stood and held her arms open to me. I undressed her like a child, unzipping the jacket, slipping the sleeve off her left arm, gently sliding off the other sleeve.