Watt-Evans, Lawrence - Predator 01

by Concrete Jungle (as Archer Nathan) (v5. 0)

  When his ears stopped ringing and he could hear again, Carr exclaimed happily, "That was fun (" He blinked drifting dust and gun smoke from his eyes and looked at the gaping hole where two of the three windows had been; they were gone completely, leaving a hole seven feet high and ten feet wide through which New York's famous skyline glowed in outline, black against the fading sunset.

  "Nice view," he remarked.

  "Jesus," Lamb said, surveying the destruction.

  There was no sign of the man who had been yanked out the window, he noticed; the body must have fallen to the street, along with the remains of whoever had done the yanking. Nothing could have lived through that firestorm.

  Edgie, Bonamo, and Hatcheck looked at the wreckage, at their leaders, and began reloading; Lamb's men did the same. Crazy Charlie's corpse lay ignored under a coating of debris, in a surprisingly small pool of blood.

  Each side had lost a man, but the leaders were still talking; nobody aimed anything.

  Lamb stepped forward, toward the hole, with the intention of looking down at the sidewalk to count the bodies; Carr's heavy hand on his shoulder held him back.

  "Now, about that treaty . . . ," Carr began, grinning..

  Lamb didn't turn; he still stared at the hole, at the broken line of bricks where a window had been. "Oh, my God," he whispered.

  Carr glanced at the hole. Just like that sorry excuse for a man to be impressed by a blown-out wall. He and his men carried guns; hadn't they ever seen what they could do before?

  Then Carr saw where Lamb was staring.

  There was a hand holding on to the bricks-or was there? It seemed to flicker as Carr looked; at first he saw a big yellowish hand with long black nails, then a ghostly blue flicker like faint sparks jumping, and then the hand was gone, and there were just the bricks and a shimmering in the hot air.

  "What is that?" Lamb asked.

  The hand was back, and this time it stayed-a big, strong hand, bigger than Carr's own, with nails like claws, and Carr realized it wasn't human, it had to be a fake, one of those costume gloves you could buy in the discount stores.

  It was moving; someone was trying to climb up into the room. Somehow, someone had lived through the barrage.

  Whoever it was must have been on the floor below, out of the line of fire. Carr let go of Lamb's shoulder and stepped back, .357 at ready.

  Whoever it was in the monster gloves must've thought he was being cute with those things.

  "Son of a bitch thinks it's Halloween," Carr said as the fingers flexed and a shadowy shape rose into view. "Hey, bozo!" He pointed the heavy pistol. "Trick or treat!"

  He pulled the trigger.

  Then the world fell in on him.

  Six blocks away Rasche handed Schaefer a plastic cup that was not steaming. Ordinarily, that might have pissed Rasche off, but in this heat he didn't think he cared if the coffee was cold. At least something was.

  He took a gulp from his own cup and almost spat it out again. The stuff tasted like raw liver.

  "Jesus," he said, "why would anyone pay gang prices for drugs? A cup of this'll make 'em feel just as awful for half a buck." When Schaefer didn't respond, Rasche glanced at him and saw that Schaefer was sitting motionless, staring up out the car window, the coffee untasted in his hand.

  "What is it?" Rasche asked uneasily. Schaefer had been acting weirder than usual lately, and while Rasche didn't believe in any of that psychic shit, he knew Schaef could pick up on stuff other people missed; his weird moods usually meant trouble. Worried, Rasche leaned over and looked out past Schaefer's shoulder.

  All he saw was empty sky, darkening to indigo. The first few stars were appearing.

  "Something's wrong," Schaefer said. "The city doesn't feel right."

  Rasche snorted and straightened up. "That's like saying battery acid doesn't taste right, Schaef. This is New York, remember? The city where we busted a satanic cow cult last month? Where good `ol Al Napolitano blew away his wife a couple of hours ago because she wouldn't change the channel?"

  "I know that," Schaefer said, "but this is something else. Was that thunder a few minutes ago?"

  "I didn't hear anything," Rasche said. "I was in there." He jerked a thumb at Bud's Deli and Diner.

  "I thought you might've heard it anyway. Loud. Didn't sound right."

  Rasche stared at his partner in disgust.

  They'd been together for six years, but every so often Rasche still forgot just how weird Schaefer could be when he started getting mystical. "How the hell could thunder not sound right? It was probably heat lightning or something."

  "Sounded like guns," Schaefer said. "Like a fucking army. But it must've been thunder, right? Who'd be firing that much at once?"

  Before Rasche could reply, the car radio crackled. "All units in vicinity respond-shots fired, corner of Beekman and Water."

  "That was it," Schaefer said, and Rasche almost thought he could see Schaefer's face relax in relief. "Like a fucking army. Roll."

  That would figure, Schaef being relieved that the sound really was guns. Anyone else would be scared, but Schaef was more concerned that he might be losing his feel for the city than that they were about to drive into a war zone.

  Rasche climbed into the driver's seat and slammed the door. "At least it'll be that much longer before we have to write up Al the TV critic," he muttered as he turned the key.

  The streets were running the wrong way, and traffic and the junk along the curbs were thicker than usual but not bad enough to make Rasche use the lights or siren, so by the time they arrived on the scene, four other cars were already there, uniforms cordoning off the area around an abandoned five-story walk-up tenement. One of them jumped in front of Schaefer as he climbed out of the car.

  "Sorry, Detective Schaefer," the officer said, "I've got orders to keep the building clear of all personnel until Captain McComb arrives. He wants to handle this one himself."

  Schaefer nodded once, slowly, but Rasche didn't like the set of his partner's shoulders. He knew that Schaef wanted to get in there, get after whoever it was had put out that roar like thunder.

  Well, he'd have to wait.

  Rasche looked up at the building, just a casual glance, but he found himself staring.

  A chunk of brick wall on the fifth floor had been blown out, littering the sidewalk with debris; it looked as if a bomb had gone off, not like anything done with firearms. And he could hear distant thumping somewhere in that direction-not guns, something else. "What the hell," he said. "Shots fired? Not an explosion?"

  One of the uniforms heard him. "Yessir," he said. "A lot of shots."

  "That wasn't a bomb did that?" Rasche asked, pointing at the hole.

  The patrolman glanced up. "We don't know," he admitted, "but we heard shots. Lots of 'em. Like a gang war or something." He shrugged. "So far we've got 'em tagged for reckless endangerment, illegal discharge of a firearm within city limits, God only knows how many violations of the Sullivan Act, disorderly conduct . . . Hell, we can thrown in exceeding noise restrictions . . . ."

  Just then a sharp crack sounded as boards burst out from one of the fifth-floor windows, followed by a gurgling scream as the man whose body had burst them out sailed across the street and plummeted to a hard landing atop a police cruiser, shattering light bar and windshield spectacularly.

  Shocked into silence, the cops all stared for a moment as shards of glass and plastic tinkled to the pavement and across the cruiser's hood, and as broken boards thumped and clattered to the neighboring sidewalk.

  Then the silence broke as men hurried to check on the condition of the fallen figure, and someone called in for an ambulance-no, several ambulances.

  The patrolman who had been talking to Rasche swallowed and said, "Guess we can add destruction of police property to the list."

  Somewhere above, gunfire rattled, and a shrill scream was suddenly cut off short.

  Calmly, Schaefer drew his 9mm service pistol and chambered a round.

&
nbsp; "Screw McComb," he said.

  The officer who had met him at the car door stepped back. "I guess we can make an exception on that no-admittance thing, Detective Schaefer, if you feel it's warranted-I mean, you're here, the captain isn't."

  He was still babbling when Schaefer pushed past and trotted into the building, pistol ready

  Rasche followed, grumbling and tugging his own piece from its holster.

  The door was open, the ground-floor hallway empty and dim; Rasche followed Schaefer to the stairwell, pistol gripped firmly in both hands. Up above- he could hear hoarse shouts and loud thumps.

  "Sounds like a ninja movie up there," he said quietly. "Who the hell do you think's up there, Schaef? Isn't this Lamb's turf?"

  Schaefer grunted affirmatively. "Gang-bang central," he said. "Lamb uses it when he takes his goddamn meetings." He took a look up into the darkness, then headed up the stairs, weapon ready.

  The. middle floors were dark and silent; Rasche took a quick glance down each hallway, pistol aimed at nothing, and saw only garbage and emptiness.

  Schaefer didn't bother even to look; he was headed where the action was.

  On the fifth floor dim light spilled into the hallway from an open door; the thumping had stopped, but someone was screaming steadily, a scream of pain and terror like nothing Rasche had ever heard before. Gun smoke was drifting in the air, and the whole place reeked of it.

  "Jesus, you hear that?" Rasche asked, crouching on the top step.

  "Yeah," Schaefer said, standing in the hallway. "They're really starting to piss me off in there."

  The scream ended in a choking gurgle.

  "Cover me," Schaefer said as he approached the door, his back to the wall. "I'm going in."

  Rasche didn't bother to reply; Schaefer didn't give him time, anyway. Almost as soon as he'd finished speaking, Schaefer was around the door frame, charging into the room with his gun ready.

  Rasche moved cautiously up the corridor, back to the wall, trying to ignore the fact that there were a dozen goddamn bullet holes in that wall, and his back was sliding right across them, begging for another few high-velocity rounds to come punching out.

  He heard Schaefer's footsteps go in, then stop somewhere in the middle of the room.

  And then he didn't hear anything but a thick dripping sound, like steak sauce going on.

  "Oh, Christ," Rasche muttered to himself, very quietly.

  He imagined that he could feel that wrongness now, the same thing Schaefer had mentioned back at Bud's Deli. Something wasn't right. The all-out firefight, the blown-out wall, now that heavy silence, and something intangible and indefinably wrong, in a way the city had never been wrong before, in all the years Rasche had lived there.

  Just as Schaefer had said.

  "Schaef?" Rasche called quietly.

  Schaefer didn't answer; Rasche heard his boot scuff on grit, but, Schaefer didn't say anything at all.

  Rasche stepped forward, pistol ready, and swung around the door frame.

  Then he stopped, frozen, staring into the room beyond.

  It's odd, what goes through a person's head at certain times-or at least Rasche thought so, as he took in what lay beyond the doorway. Because what he immediately thought of, upon seeing it, was his mother.

  He remembered her holding him, crooning soothingly to him, when he was maybe four, five years old: He remembered the soft touch of her hands, and how long and thin her fingers seemed, and how one curl of her hair brushed against his forehead as she held him close.

  The rest of the memory came back, and he decided that maybe it wasn't so very odd after all.

  Because the reason she'd been holding him and comforting him is that he had woken up screaming in the darkness, shaking uncontrollably with nameless terror, after some nightmare he couldn't remember, something about monsters in the night, about suffocating in his own blood, about the things that wanted to hurt him.

  And she had rocked him gently in her arms and had told him softly, "Those bad things are just dreams, they're not real. They can't hurt you. There are no monsters in the night, not really"

  As he looked at the big room on the fifth floor, the room where one wall had been party shot away, the room littered with broken glass and spattered blood and plaster dust, the room where his unflappable partner Schaefer was standing dumbstruck, Rasche knew that his mother had lied.

  Because the monsters had to be real. Nothing else could have done this.

  The two cops stared silently for a long moment.

  Finally Schaefer spoke.

  "Gang war, my ass," he said.

  * * *

  3

  The bodies were swaying gently in the breeze from the blown-out wall, and the blood that dripped from their dangling red fingertips drew loops and whorls on the floor.

  There were eight of them in all, hanging by their feet; something had smashed away most of the ceiling and tied the corpses to a joist. Even in the dim light of the city outside they were all bright red, from heel to head.

  It was obvious what had been done to them, what the monsters in the night had done, but Rasche had to say it anyway.

  "They've been skinned," he said.

  Schaefer nodded.

  "Some of them are Lamb's men," he said, "and some are Carr's. An equal-opportunity massacre, that's what we have here."

  Rasche stared at him which was better than staring at the bodies, anyway. "Jesus Christ,

  Schaef," he said, "how can you tell? They don't have their goddamn faces anymore!"

  "They don't have the skin, the faces are still there," Schaefer said. "That's Edgie, and Hatcheck-Carr's boys. That's Fiorello, one of Lamb's--and here's the real kicker, Lamb himself. Look at the eyes, they're still there."

  Rasche looked before he could stop himself, before he could remind himself that maybe he didn't want to, and he felt a sudden surge of nausea. Sweat dripped down his face, cold sweat despite the heat, and he couldn't make himself move to wipe it away. He couldn't take his eyes off the bloody bodies. He couldn't move his feet, either; if he stepped forward, he'd be walking in blood, and he couldn't step back, he wasn't sure why but he couldn't, it felt as if the monsters in the night would get him if he stepped back.

  And there were cartridge casings everywhere, and guns were lying in the blood, covered with blood, blood coating the grips and barrels, and the room stank of gun smoke and meat. These men hadn't died without a fight.

  "Jesus," he said again. "Schaef, who . . . It would've taken an army to . . ."

  He didn't finish the sentence, because there was a sound, and in Rasche's condition just at that moment any sound he couldn't account for had to be monsters, and you didn't talk to monsters. He crouched and whirled, gun ready.

  A fallen section of ceiling was moving, a broad chunk of lath and plaster that had been torn away and flung aside to uncover the beam that held the hanging bodies.

  And when a bloody figure rose slowly out of the fallen plaster, it was all Rasche could do not to fire, his finger was squeezing down on the trigger but he stopped it, it was like stopping a runaway truck, it was the hardest struggle of his life to keep from squeezing that last fraction of an inch, but the figure was a human being, it wasn't the monsters, and he was a good cop, a good cop didn't shoot the last survivor of a massacre, not without knowing who it was and what was happening, not unless it was the only way.

  This was a man, a man with long red hair tied back in a thick braid, but he was so covered with blood and bits of debris stuck to the blood that Rasche couldn't make out his face at first.

  He rose to his knees, dazed, staring wildly about, and then his eyes focused on Schaefer.

  Schaefer's 9mm was hanging at his side unthreateningly, and Rasche thought to himself that maybe he should lower his own weapon, but he couldn't bring himself to do it.

  White teeth gleamed through the bloody ruin of the man's face; he coughed, then said, in a voice thick with dust and emotion, "Well, if it isn't my old pal, De
tective Schaefer." He groped for something in the wreckage. "You missed one, Schaefer. The wrong one."

  "Carr?" Rasche asked, wonderingly

  Carr was looking around at the dangling bodies and the debris, but all the time one hand was still searching for something.

  "Hey, Schaefer," he said conversationally, "I've seen you cops pull a lot of crude shit, but nothing like this. Man, I'm impressed."

  "You're crazy, Carr, you're fuckin' insane," Rasche said, unspeakably relieved to have a human opponent to shout at. "Cops didn't do this, cops couldn't begin to do this . . . ."

  "You didn't see them?" Schaefer asked, his flat, calm voice cutting Rasche off short. "You didn't see who it was that did this?"

  "All I saw was some geek in a trick-or-treat mask climbing in through the window, then someone brought the ceiling down on me," Carr said. "Maybe it was cops and you're covering, maybe it wasn't, I don't know-and you know, Schaefer, I don't give a shit. It doesn't really matter. 'Cause I may be crazy, I may be fuckin' crazy as a bedbug, but while I'm crazy, you're just plain dead!"

  And his hand finally came up with what he'd been looking for, and the sawed-off pump-action shotgun came up fast, Carr pushed himself to his feet and brought the gun to his hip and fired all in one motion.

  Rasche had been on a hair-trigger since he'd first set foot in the building, he didn't need to have the ceiling fall in on him; he dived the instant he saw Carr's hand come up full, he was rolling for cover in the shattered plaster before Carr's finger could tighten on the trigger.

  The roar of the shotgun seemed to shake the weakened building right down to its foundation, and Rasche's ears rang even before the second blast put buckshot through a space where Schaefer had been standing a fraction of a second before. He couldn't hear Carr's footsteps as the gang leader started running, couldn't hear if Carr had said anything else, couldn't hear him curse when he ratcheted the pump and got an empty click and realized the goddamn shotgun had only had two shells left in it.

  Then Rasche's hearing began to come back, and he did hear Schaefer bellow, " Freeze, you son of a ---"

  Schaefer's 9mm barked three times, and by that time Rasche had finally gotten himself turned over and headed back to being upright, and how the hell had Carr gotten so far down the corridor already, and how'd Schaefer get into that solid shooting stance?