Tann looked wide-eyed and imploringly at Cobb. “Oh, my God, what do they want?”
“It’s probably for hostages, Jenn. To get Au safe conduct out of the country.” Cobb had no remote hope for that as a real possibility. “Go to the living room and let me talk with Leclerc.”
Tann looked once more at him, took a deep breath of air, let it go; then, with the sheet clutched around her, climbed from the bed. Klegg tried to take her arm, and she shrugged it off. Klegg, grinning, tried to pull the sheet from her, and she gave him a wild look. “Get your hands off, you bastard,” she said.
Klegg’s eyes narrowed.
“Don’t fuck around,” Leclerc said. “Just take her out of here.”
“Just go, Jenn,” Cobb said.
She strode into the living room, followed by Klegg, who whispered huskily: “Hey, lady, don’t try to be tough. You can save yourself a lot of hurt if you just try to get along with me.”
She sat on the sofa. He sat beside her. She got up to move to a hard-backed chair, but Klegg grabbed a corner of the sheet and pulled her sprawling back to him.
She nearly convulsed with the gamy smell of the man and her fear of him. He pressed her to him, and she felt a hard bulge in his pants and a harder bulge in his jacket pocket.
She did not call out, but tried to still her terror by centring on it, in the yogic way. . . .
Cobb was still on the bed, naked, immobile, breathing in short puffs.
He desperately wanted a terrific hit of junk.
Never in his life had he needed one so badly.
Leclerc stood with his feet splayed, the shotgun held in both hands and pointed at Cobb’s chest. He was leaning against the locked sliding door which led from the bedroom to the balcony outside. He kept blinking his eyes, and he wore a thin smile.
Move! Cobb told himself. Move against Leclerc.
Instead: “Well, what are you doing here?” It sounded like a pleasant pass-the-time opening in a gentlemanly conversation.
Leclerc shrugged. “You was just about to get it on with the lady prosecutor, huh? I been fucked over by lawyers, but that’s as close as I ever come.” His smile opened up over crooked dark teeth. “She hot for you?”
“Why did Au send you?”
Again Leclerc shrugged. “He says you are brothers, him and you. I don’t understand it, but I don’t ask. Yin and yang, or something like that, he says. One’s gotta die so’s the other can live.” Again the black smile. “And guess who gets to die?”
Cobb felt his guts contract. Could he save Tann? Leclerc and his friend would not risk staying long after the sound of a shotgun being fired in the building. If he jumped Leclerc now, and the man had to pull both triggers . . . if there were a struggle, a diversion, she would have time to get out the door. . . .
Leclerc took a few steps and glanced out the bedroom door to the living room. He laughed. “Looks like you gave your girlfriend too much hots, Mr. Cobb. She ain’t saving any for you, that’s for —”
Cobb was moving.
There was not much chance. He had seven feet to travel before he could reach Leclerc, and by the time he had scrambled off the bed, Leclerc had swung around. He brought the shotgun around in a wide arc, and the barrel crashed into the side of Cobb’s head. Cobb went reeling back onto the bed, dazed, barely conscious, blood trickling from a gash near his right ear.
“You didn’t think I plan to shoot you, did you?” Leclerc said. Balancing his shotgun in the crook of his elbow, Leclerc extracted from his sweater pocket a syringe and a packet of white powder. The sound of his voice came distantly to Cobb: “Well, what I’m gonna do is shoot you up. Dr. Au figured you should eat it like Charlie did. But I say that’s a waste of good stuff. I figure I can fix you in the mainline with about half a gram, keep the rest. Don’t think you’ll tell on me. Half a gram of pure, it’ll have you out of it in ten minutes, alors, tout fini. Mort avec un sourire, Monsieur Prosecutor.”
Cobb was trying to to struggle into wakefulness. He was aware that Leclerc had slipped briefly into the adjoining washroom and now had a tumbler of water and was mixing a heroin solution to the bowl of a bent spoon.
“I always get a t’rill when I turn some guy on first time. I got a friend, there, Bryon, I turned on. Now he uses all the time. But don’t worry, Mr. Cobb, this won’t get you addicted.”
As he chattered on, he held a lighter to the bottom of the spoon and cooked the dope. Then he pulled it into the syringe.
He took Cobb’s belt from his pants and tightened it around Cobb’s right bicep. Cobb was still weak, unresisting.
“You got the nice big veins, Mr. Cobb.”
Cobb started to jerk away from the needle, and winced from the pain in his head, nearly blacking out again. Then there was the sharp prick of the needle in his arm, and he felt the heroin rushing into him.
“You just O.D.’d, Mr. Cobb,” Leclerc said, and he began cooking up a smaller shot for himself. He yelled to Klegg in the living room: “Hey, you wanna do up, John? Mr. Cobb and me is having a party.”
“Having a party myself, man,” Klegg called back.
Leclerc smiled at Cobb. “He’s getting his rocks off wit’ your chick. You don’t mind?”
Cobb was into a hard, banging rush, struggling to breathe, his lungs on fire, his body convulsing in a wild narcotic orgasm.
Tuesday, the Twenty-first Day of March,
at Nine O’Clock in the Evening
“You want it, lady, I know you want it.” Klegg was breathing hard, his hands groping at Tann under the sheet.
She was on her back on the sofa, trying to jam her body in behind the cushions. He was on top of her, hot and foul of breath. She felt his hands go down to her thighs and felt the strength of his arms as he tried to pull her legs apart. His pants were down around his knees.
“Yeah, you want it,” he said.
Her right hand was pinned to her side. If she could free it, she would be able to reach into his left jacket pocket.
“Please, I can’t breathe,” she said.
He grunted and shifted his body, and her hand came free.
Klegg felt her hands caress his body.
“Yeah, you do want it. Just hard-to-get, ain’t ya, counsellor?”
Her legs were apart now, his knees between them, and his hands were sliding up her thighs.
“Making out with a lady lawyer. I’m really gonna get off on this.”
Klegg heard a muffled roar from underneath him and felt a biting flash of pain as a bullet tore through his groin.
His scream was shrill and long, wild and piercing, and it brought Leclerc to the bedroom door. His pinned eyes danced about the room; Cobb’s belt was tied about his arm, and he was holding his outfit in one hand, the barrel of his shotgun in the other. His mouth was open, and for a few seconds he was immobile.
Klegg was yelping like a stricken dog, grabbing at his groin as blood seeped through his fingers and ran down his legs. He rolled off the sofa, scrambled to his feet, and, crouching and skipping and clutching his pants, made it to the front door and outside the apartment to the elevator.
Tann was now standing, her sheet wound about her like a sari. The gun in her hand was hidden from Leclerc’s view, the sheet bunched around it.
Leclerc, stoned now, slowly raised the barrel of the sawed-off shotgun. Then he saw a little hole pop open where the sheet was bunched around Tann’s hand, and he heard the crack of her gun as it fired, and a framed Cézanne print beside the bedroom door — three feet from his head — crashed to the floor, glass splintering. There was another shot, and the bullet sliced through the door frame. Leclerc went to his hands and knees and crawled backwards into the bedroom to get behind cover.
Winnifred Fenwick was seventy-two and hardly ever left her apartment, except to buy a few things or take some air on a nice day. She lived on tea and
toast and salads, and pills for her nerves. Tonight she had a full two-hour Kojak special to enjoy before tucking herself into bed. During a commercial break she went to the front door — for the fourth time that evening — to reassure herself again that the lock button was pushed in and the chain hooked in place. Earlier she had checked the sliding glass doors in the living room and bedroom, which entered onto balconies.
Suddenly she sat bolt upright. The building was not soundproof, and the explosions of gunfire on the floor above so loudly assaulted her frail ears that she had to fight strongly to clench the muscles of her urinary tract.
And about fifteen seconds later outside her balcony came the blast of a shotgun, and a man flew onto her balcony — a tall blond man whose mouth was agape and whose eyes were wild, and whose buttocks were streaming blood. This person, she observed, arrived with a crash on her flowerpots.
The fearsome event that Winnifred Fenwick had long awaited was now giving life to her terrible fantasies.
The gunfire was a distant echo in Cobb’s ears. He was hallucinating now. His roaring chariot bore him wildly, mercilessly through billowing crimson clouds and surging crimson rivers, across fields and seas of red-brown and red-purple and crimson.
More distant sound of guns. Ringing like gongs in his ears now, sending frenzied vibrations into the protoplasm of every quivering cell. He was unable to organize rational processes in his mind, and acted with instincts, not thought. His instincts, in fact, comprised the only working structure of his central nervous system. The mightiest of them was toward self-preservation, and these instincts directed the muscles of his arms and legs to carry him off the bed and onto the floor and to the sliding glass balcony door, and they directed his hands to unlatch and open it. He stepped foggily across the outdoor carpet on the balcony. All this happened in seconds, but aeons passed in his mind. (He was transformed in his mind into a giant fuzzy caterpillar inching across the deserts of infinity. He was a man trapped lethargically in a nightmare.) He moved far faster than he knew, driven by a powerful surge of adrenalin that pumped through his system, hoisting him to the top of the railing.
As Tann’s gun fired again, Cobb was looking twenty-five stories down, watching Julius Katsknywch, like an ant below him, spraying wildly with his hose, shouting and gesturing, and running about. Cobb leaned over the railing, unevenly balanced, like a drunk on a tightrope, swaying, concentrating woozily upon the balcony below — the balcony of Winnifred Fenwick’s living room.
And then he saw Leclerc was behind him, and Cobb leaped, and heard the thunder of the shotgun, and felt a searing pain . . .
. . . and descended with a crash upon Winnifred Fenwick’s flowerpots, bouncing from them loosely and drunkenly onto the carpet of her balcony. The left cheek of his buttocks was lacerated where the shot from the shells grazed his body.
Winnifred Fenwick, in her fortress, stared at him through the glass, her mouth an oval of fear.
Cobb saw on the balcony above, through shimmering patterns of light and color, his intended assassin. Leclerc stood for a time, motionless, uncertain, the shotgun dangling from his arm. Then he rushed away.
Winnifred Fenwick opened her mouth. She could not shout, could not scream. Lieutenant Kojak shouted orders to Stavros. The nude and bloodied man on her balcony stared at her with bright, pointed eyes, and crawled to the glass door, and banged on it, and clawed at the lock.
She unfroze. She screamed. She ran to the front door, fumbled with the chain a long time, then disappeared howling into the corridor.
Cobb, his instincts still acting on his brain’s behalf while the overdose insisted that he sleep and die, lifted one of the earth-filled pots above his head and hurled it at the door, shattering the glass. He crawled into the apartment, cutting himself on broken shards, and clutching at the carpet with his fingers he crawled toward the front door, his adrenalin slowly dissipating, lethargy taking over. He was creeping toward the front door with the strength of an infant. The God of Dreams whispered sleep to his ears. . . . Kojak, on the tube, snarled snide accusations at him. . . .
Julius Katsknywch finally let the secretary depart with her beer and groceries. “Now, if there’s anything your boyfriend can’t fix, you give me a call. I’m a handyman.” She gave him a teasing wave, and wiggled up the stairs and into the lobby. Katsknywch, whose lust for some small romance had once again been satisfied in the foreyard of his majestic high-rise, turned on his hose again, went down to the public sidewalk, and began to wash it, watching passers-by, when he heard from above him some . . . what? A banging. Thunder. Or a series of explosions.
Was it coming from his building? Yes. It was coming from his building. He strained his eyes to see if there was fire or smoke. Nothing, or . . . what? A man — he was naked — was hanging over a balcony! Katsknywch’s hose danced crazily, sending wiggling fountains over the street and boulevard. Then there was another man up there! A shotgun rang out . . . the naked man fell to the balcony below, and the other man disappeared. Katsknywch did not know what his responsibility was in such a situation.
He yelled: “Hey!” To no one in particular.
He was about to run in, to his ground-floor suite and telephone the police, when a car came screeching to a halt on the street and a man who looked like a long-retired football tackle emerged and came thundering past him.
“What apartment is that?” the man yelled, gesturing upward.
“Uh, twenty-fifth floor. Oh, God, that’s Mr. and Mrs. Cobb’s.”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” the man said, drawing a gun from his inside jacket pocket.
The front door was locked.
“Open it!” the man yelled.
“What?”
“Open it! I’m Harrison, city police. Police, you asshole!”
The building manager fumbled with his keys for what Harrison felt was an infinity before they got inside. The policeman roared to the elevator and pounded on the button.
“Anybody comes down while I’m up there, you hold onto them,” Harrison said. “And call homicide and get some men down here. Fast!”
Katsknywch made his call from a pay phone in the lobby while Harrison fumed and snarled at the elevator.
The elevator door finally opened.
“Help!” Out came Winnifred Fenwick, screeching in a tinny little voice.
In went Harrison. And huddled in the corner of the elevator, in pain, looking balefully up at the big detective, was John Klegg. The door closed on the two men.
Julius Katsknywch, dredging a few pints of courage from a nearly dried reservoir, clenched his fists and stood guard.
Tann ran from the apartment and down the hall. She pounded first on one door, screaming: “Help! Oh, God, help! They’re killing him!” From inside came a plaintive voice: “I can’t help you.” She ran to the next door and banged on it and screamed.
Then Leclerc came out, stuffing two more shells into his gun. He saw Tann.
She screamed again. Then she fainted.
Leclerc levelled the shotgun at her prostrate form.
The elevator door opened.
The first person Leclerc saw in it was John Klegg. His face was red and he was gasping for air. Behind him, his burly arm about Klegg’s throat, holding a snub-nosed .38 to his back, was Honcho Harrison.
Leclerc whirled, started to go one way, then another.
“Freeze, you little cocksucker!” Harrison barked.
Leclerc backed up slowly, then rushed into Cobb’s apartment, slamming the door shut and bolting it.
Harrison, still holding Klegg by the neck, dragged him out of the elevator and dropped him in front of Cobb’s door. With one perfect kick he splintered the door at the lock and it crashed open.
He picked up Klegg, and carrying him as a shield, walked inside, gun levelled.
Leclerc was not in view.
“You got ten second
s to throw the gun down and get your hands up and come out where I can see you, Leclerc.” Nothing happened. “You rotten puke. If Cobb’s dead, I’m gonna make ground meat outta you.”
There was nothing. Harrison noticed the door to the balcony was open. He carried Klegg toward it. Klegg was choking and sputtering.
“Five seconds,” Harrison said.
“Four seconds.
“Three.”
“Two.”
“One. You’re dead.”
And Leclerc, as if answering the bell, emerged from behind the balcony door, low and fast, firing off one barrel at Harrison and Klegg.
But Harrison was a moving target by the time Leclerc pulled the trigger. He had thrown Klegg, wild-eyed and screaming raggedly, onto the floor. Harrison dived to his right, moving like an athlete, hitting the floor with a whump, and rolling, while Leclerc’s shot ripped the back off a leather chair.
Leclerc wheeled the shotgun around for his second shot, trying to get a bead on the big target.
But Harrison was a marksman from a standing or moving position. As he bounced up from his roll, he fired three times.
Three soft bullets from his Smith & Wesson exploded in Leclerc’s heart, lifting him in the air, sending him reeling backwards onto the balcony railing and down over it, a scream dying on his lips as he plummeted toward the bed of azaleas in the foreyard of Cobb’s apartment building.
Tann gained consciousness to the sound of Harrison’s gun being fired. She rose woozily to her feet, seeking to escape from the floor, found the fire exit, and stumbled down the stairs to the twenty-fourth floor, and out into the corridor, toward the elevator.
She stopped, put her hands to her mouth, and gasped.
There was a body in the corridor, several feet from the elevator, beside the open door of an apartment.
She ran to him, stumbling as the sheet tangled beneath her feet, and knelt over him.
Foster Cobb was sprawled face down on the corridor floor, his fingers curled into the carpeting as if he had been trying to dig. There were superficial wounds on his buttocks, and the blood was drying. Tann could not tell if he was breathing.
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