“You were designated a Mark Three,” Peaches said, cutting him off with a curt smack of her plump, blood-red lips.
“A what?” Stone asked, rubbing his temples with the palms of his hands, trying to get the sensation of tightness out of his skull.
“A Mark Three. Everyone who comes in the place, the back room, anyway, the ‘take room,’ as we call it, for ‘take the suckers off,’ is given a number that identifies him as either a Mark One, don’t touch because he’s too important; Mark Two, who can be drugged and ripped off but then just thrown out of the place, and a Mark Three, who is clearly a geek of highest order—without friends in high or even low places. He is to be killed and stripped of everything—even gold or silver teeth. That was to be your fate, Mr. Stone.”
“So how come I’m not dead?” Stone asked as he took little sips of the cool amber liquid she had given him. It seemed to make everything a hell of a lot better, sending streams of cooling comfort through his burning veins.
“Because I decided not to kill you, that’s why,” Peaches said, staring Stone right in the eye from the other end of the bed. “You don’t remember me,” the ancient whore went on, “but I was one of the slaves from the Dwarf’s mansion—the Last Resort. We were being brought in on a truck just as you were fleeing the place. You took the diesel and drove us the hell out, just as the whole damn resort blew its stack straight to hell. We helped dig you out from the debris afterward. Anyway, I told you—you wouldn’t remember. I was just one of twenty dirty whores in the darkness.”
“I—I—” Stone started to stutter, not remembering her at all from the group of grime-coated, smock-clad women who had helped him but not wanting to say it.
“Oh, shut up, you have no reason to remember me, so don’t apologize. You’re lapsing into your dumb-asshole routine. Perhaps it’s become permanent.” Stone chuckled at the nasty comment. The women had a biting way with words that got right under your skin.
“I knew it was you right when I latched on to you on the bar floor. Stone. I saw how you handled that bazooka who tried to elbow your face to the wall. No one else did, but I did. I always got my eye on things. You’re damn lucky Scalzanni didn’t see it—he’s as sharp as a fucking razor, believe it. But his back was turned. I had heard they’d set some kind of trap or something for somebody. The bigwigs had been talking about it to each other for days, and some of the other girls had heard a thing or two. So I put two and two together—and ol’ Peaches ’n’ Cream walks over and just delivers your smooth little ass right out of the clutches of the devil. I had to Finn you—’cause everyone keeps an eye on the operation. Then when you passed out, two of the waiters helped me carry you up to the room here. Then I was supposed to strip you, take everything worth taking, including, as I mentioned, your gold teeth. When we off someone, Scalzanni gives us ten percent of everything we collect. He’s very generous. Guess he figures we’ll search a little deeper, if you know what I mean.”
“How would you have done it?” Stone gulped, realizing for the first time just how incredibly close to death he had been only minutes before.
“Oh, simple, we don’t even mess the place up.” She pulled out a long ice pick a good fourteen inches in length and as thin as a beam of light. “Just turn the unconscious mark on his stomach, insert this at the base of the neck, press it in, then twist it around like this a few times”—she turned the pick in the air as if slicing through nerve cells—“and that’s that. Severs the spinal chord at its narrowest and most vulnerable part. So easy. I can’t understand why everybody doesn’t kill like that. All that blood is so unnecessary.”
“And how often does this go on? This ice picking?” Stone asked in disgust.
“Oh, three, four, five—I don’t know, maybe up to eight a day, if there’s a big crowd.”
“And nobody misses them?” Stone asked, amazed at the scope of the operation, though not particularly misty-eyed over the demise of the kind of shopper who came here.
“You see the scum we got in Keenesburg.” Peaches laughed with a snort of ultimate disdain. “These morons can hardly wipe their behinds. A lot of them are loners up in the mountains. Or gunslingers just roaming around trying to drum up some business. These guys get killed, disappear all the time. Nobody misses them. Nobody even notices them.”
“And the bodies?” Stone asked as he finished off the last of the brain-clearing brew and wished he had more. He was just starting to feel vaguely human.
“Oh, they’re taken away in the dumbwaiters we have here. Every room has one.” She walked over to the wall and opened a small door, revealing a shaftway with ropes hanging in it. “They’re lowered down to the subbasement and taken in wheelbarrows to the pit at the far end of the mall, way in the back where they don’t let anybody go. I hate it back there,” the powder-coated whore said with a shiver. “It’s like a swamp and a sewer and a graveyard all mixed together. It’s black and horrible. They just throw the bodies in one after another, then they pour acids and lyes over everything, so the whole place just keeps filling up—and melting away with the dead bodies. You can—can even see bits of them floating around—legs, arms, heads. They come up sometimes and—”
Peaches stopped in mid-sentence and looked truly pale. It was the first time Stone had seen her show even a hint of emotion or weakness. It made him trust her just a little more that such a thing could sicken her.
“Anyway, I had killed one lover boy already, but that didn’t bother me too much—the world is a better place without him—I guarantee you. But you—you was supposed to be my second. And I couldn’t—just couldn’t. ’Specially after you saved my damn ass. I’d just be part of the rubble back there at the Last Resort but for you—even if you did blow the place up.”
“Well, I sure appreciate your not sticking that ice pick in my neck,” Stone said, rubbing it. “It’s sore enough already.”
“Why are you here?” she asked, suddenly moving toward him so that she was leaning over the bed, and her watermelon-sized breasts squeezed forward in her taffeta body dress as if they were about to explode out at any second.
“My sister,” Stone said as he drained the last drop of the restorative liquid and sat up looking around for his weapons. As soon as he could walk straight, he had to get going. This place was hell on earth. God only knew what was happening to her at this very moment. “They killed a good man I knew —Dr. Kennedy—and took my sister, April. ‘Brought her to Keenesburg’—those were Kennedy’s dying words.
“They squashed the Snakeman,” Peaches said, her face going even paler under the pancake, the lips dry under the greasy red lipstick. “I knew the doc good, real good. He treated some of the girls at various places I’ve ‘worked’ over the years. He was a good man—like you say, Stone, a good man. They took out the doc.” She shook her head back and forth, like a little girl who’s just seen Santa shot and the Easter Bunny tortured and castrated. She’d seen a lot, to say the least. More than most people could if they lived to be a thousand. And most of what she’d seen had been bad, real bad. Yet still, within her sarcastic tongue and cynical core there dwelt a microscopic flower of hope and love. And Dr. Kennedy had filled a big place there. One of the few who had actually wanted to help her.
“Didn’t just squash him,” Stone said as he swung his feet around on the bed and set them down on the rug-covered floor. “Cut him to ribbons and left him for the vultures, the centipedes, and the worms. Wouldn’t even kill him, the bastards. He’d been lying out there for days—alive. Just a piece of meat for the world to feast on.”
“Well, I’m through here. That’s for damn sure. I’ve had a long haul,” the ancient whore said with a dark laugh. “And God knows, if the Lord above opened the narrow doors of heaven another ten miles, I still wouldn’t be able to get inside. But I’ll tell you as I stand before you, I’ve had enough. I ain’t whoring and I ain’t ice picking no more.” She closed her eyes with an almost religious intensity, and Stone saw little rivulets of water seep out
from each side of her eyes and trace little slick tracks through her thick makeup. They actually carved out the powder, digging down nearly an eighth of an inch into the stuff, so it looked as if little ditches were being dug down each side of her face.
“Well, I’m most proud to witness your conversion,” Stone said as he set himself up on both legs and started wobbling immediately. “But really, what I want is to find April. Do you have any idea where she is, where they’ve taken her? Any of the other girls heard of a young, real pretty girl, they’d undoubtedly be marking her as a virgin—if they’re selling her.”
“Haven’t heard a thing,” Peaches said, drying her eyes with a perfumed handkerchief. The moment the excess moisture had been wiped up, she pulled a little makeup tin from her omnipresent purse and began dabbing at it, slamming the thick powder onto her cheeks, sending up a cloud of the stuff all around head so she half disappeared for a moment. “But you could try Main Square—it’s the center of the mall—where the best, the most high-priced weapons and girls are. The Fifth Avenue, so to speak, of the place. If they’re selling your sister as high-priced virgin meat, that’s for sure where they’d stash her. That’s the only advice I can give you, sweetie pie. But be careful. If there is a trap being set for someone here in Keenesburg, it can only be for you. If your sister is the bait, then they’ll be waiting, Stone. Waiting to cut you down. You’re luckier than a prairie mouse that fell into a rattlesnake den that you’re even still alive. That dumb disguise of yours wouldn’t have lasted another day here. Believe me. The lower-level assholes are just amoeba brains, but the upper echelons—the Scalzannis, his brothers, the dons, all of them—they’re sharp as hawks. They see anything funny. They have their eyes on this place like you wouldn’t believe. Even got video cameras on all the major mall corridors, sweeping back and forth in case anyone tries to break through the windows and take anything.
“I’ll have to take my chances,” Stone said, finding that as he walked around the floor of the Howard Johnson’s circa 1960s decorated room with pinups of naked girls from old Penthouse and Playboy magazines glued onto the walls, his legs seemed to grow a little steadier. “She’s my blood. All that’s left of it. If I don’t save her, she’s dead meat.” He didn’t add that he also felt responsible for the death of his father and mother—and that if April was taken, too, it would have been a bases-loaded home run in the kill-your-own-family department. In which case he might as well join them. For the feelings that would have been created in him would have been unbearable.
“This way, then, Stone,” she said, taking him by the elbow in the same ironlike grip she had exhibited on the barroom floor. She opened up the little door in the wall and started pulling on some of the ropes that dangled in front of her, like nooses ready to be flung around necks. “They’d notice you if you tried to go back down the stairs. It’s slow back there tonight. They was all joking about how dumb you looked as they carried you up here.” Stone leaned forward and looked down the long, dark shaftway. It seemed that he was trusting his life to strangers more and more these days.
“Well, if I have to, then I guess I have to,” Stone said as he sat up on the ledge and wriggled his way in so that he was sitting on top of the little wooden box once used to take away garbage, that had risen up to the third floor of the building he was in.
“It’s not that far—just goes down four stories to the basement. Get out there and go through the corpse room—shouldn’t be too busy—then right out to the street. Good luck, Stone. You’re sure as hell going to need it.”
“Thanks again for the ‘no ice pick’ policy,” Stone said with a half grin. Then he disappeared into the darkness. As he put his full weight on the top of the dumbwaiter, it suddenly started shooting down faster than he had expected. By the time he got his hands back around the thick, fraying ropes that held the thing, it had already fallen to the first floor. He grabbed hard with both hands and nearly screamed as the rope ripped across his skin, instantly burning it red on both palms. The wooden box came to a hard thump on the concrete floor of the basement, and Stone went flying out through the air into a bunch of tables and chairs.
Don’t make noise, Stone thought to himself with a bitter mental laugh as he rolled to a stop amid a deafening clatter of tables and chairs that were flying every which way. He rose to his feet, whipping out his Uzi, which he threw onto full auto and gripped hard around the frame-only magna stock. He was in a long and fairly narrow room with concrete block walls and a single dangling light bulb lighting the entire basement chamber, which was about eighty by ten feet. The tables he had knocked over lay mixed with a half dozen chairs, and Stone saw two corpses by the flickering light—both with purple faces and severed spinal cords waiting for the pit. He waited motionless, ready to kill, but no one showed up for the party. After about thirty seconds he let out a deep sigh and realized he hadn’t breathed since he’d hit the floor. He was luckier than his ass deserved. Whoever was supposed to be around here wasn’t anywhere in sight—or hearing distance. Off somewhere fucking or getting stoned. Thank God for drugs and women, Stone thought as he started forward through a dark, narrow passageway. They had just saved his ass.
It was easy to get outside, as Stone didn’t find a single guard in the lower level. He came to a ramp and then was out on a side street. He walked without the cap or glasses now but pulled the leather collar of his thickly lined field jacket up around his neck to hide at least part of his lower face. It was late now, even for the mall—four-thirty in the morning—and Stone only encountered stragglers here and there, staggering back to their rooms with whores under each arm, bottles in each hand.
He made his way toward the center of the mall as Peaches had suggested, keeping a wary eye out for the surveillance cameras that he saw posted here and there at major intersections of the larger corridors. Stone just had to pray that the scumbag at the controls of the thing was asleep at the wheel, as most of these goons were. Then he came to what was obviously the main thoroughfare. Here, the store windows were all gilded in fake gold, with real glass nearly an inch thick that rose up high, framing its contents. Stone walked slowly along, looking deeply in each window. It was the crème de la crème of rifles in the first few stores. Handcrafted and carved, with finished walnut stocks and stainless-steel parts. These were the collector’s editions—available only to the top warlords, the deacons in the church of crime.
After several blocks the windows were filled with girls again. But these weren’t whores, used up and scarred like a canyon. These were young, rosy-faced teens and young women just captured from the Styx, from wagon parties, from raiders, from all over the region. The most desirable of the young beauties that were for sale in the mall. The ones that the richest of the death dealers were after. The guns they bought, but it was the girls,—the sweet, young, angelic virgins—they craved, that they bid against each other for, that they drove by cars and armored vehicles a thousand miles to visit the slave stores of the Scalzanni Mall. Quality was quality, and though Scalzanni was one of the biggest sons of a bitches in the West, he delivered. His reputation for carrying untouched, unblemished meat was unmatched.
Even now, in the dying hours of the night, Stone saw a pining figure here and there staring at some lovely thing who lay fast asleep in the window, looking at her with wild, lusting eyes. Dreaming, dreaming. None of them paid Stone the slightest notice as he walked by. Each of the girls was back-dropped by some mythical scene or other to add fantasy to the crude reality of being imprisoned in a glass cage but a few feet wide, naked for thousands of drooling men to see. Behind one girl were crude paintings of ancient Egypt. She had a necklace around her neck, attempting to approximate the Cleopatra look. Another display had a Revolutionary War motif with George Washington crossing the Delaware. Its nude sixteen-year-old occupant wore only an American flag around her groin, held there by but a single ready-to-snap thread. Yet another naked teen appeared to be in the deep woods with a little leaf glued over each breast.
Stone rushed forward, knowing he was losing his cool. But he couldn’t stand seeing her tied up like an animal, her uncovered nakedness but for a small crown she wore on her head as if she were some medieval princess. He came right up to the glass covering and pressed his face against it. She was so close—right on the other side—yet as if in another dimension. Her eyes were closed tight, and Stone could see by her slow breathing and sallow complexion that they had drugged her. He hit against the side of the glass with his fist, then harder, trying to wake her. Before he knew what he was doing, he was pounding against the glass with both fists in a fury of rage and murderous intent against the bastards who had done this.
Suddenly her eyes seemed to tremble slightly, and they opened just a hair. The pupils within seemed to focus on Stone, and suddenly the eyes opened almost halfway.
“Martin…” The lips formed silently, hardly moving. “Martin…” Then she seemed to fall back into a swoon, her head dropping back to the side. Stone was beside himself with rage, wanting to reach her. He reached down and pulled out his Ruger 44 Mag and stepped back. He knew somewhere inside himself that he probably shouldn’t be doing this, that as Peaches had said, they’d be watching him. But he also knew that direct action is the only way to make things happen. And that you could sit around for a million years and wonder about the consequences of things—or just do them.
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