Plan John chuckles once more, the exact same sound, and this time it’s so transparently a nervous reaction that Doyle wonders how he could never have divined the fact. “I have so many questions for you. Who is she? How did you smuggle her in here? How on earth did you suppose you could keep this up without my noticing?” Plan John sighs, a fluttering note of disappointment, and that at least seem unfeigned. “But there’ll be plenty of opportunity for Carlita to answer my questions, and I suspect that I’ll like the answers a lot more coming from her lips.”
“It won’t be much of a story, whoever tells it,” Doyle says. And he looks directly at Silensky, who shrivels beneath his gaze.
If Plan John detects their brief communion, he gives no indication. “I promised the young lady that if she complied then I’d let you live. But honestly – and I hope you won’t esteem me any the less for this, Carlita – I was going to have you killed whatever she said. I was just curious as to whether she’d come here of her own volition. If I’m being absolutely honest, I would have to admit that I’d have liked to keep you around. There’s something about you that makes me laugh. I think it’s your complete inability to see the things about yourself that should be staring you in the face. But Johnson, you’ve taken that choice out of my hands. This can’t stand.”
“I know that,” Doyle says. “Yeah.” He considers. “But Howard, you took the choice out of my hands first.”
“Is that true?” Plan John asks. There’s genuine interest in the inquiry.
“You could have kept her out of it. You could have left well alone. But it’s not in your nature.”
“No,” Plan John agrees. “I could never be a weak man. I take what I want.”
“Right.” Doyle nods, thoughtful. On some level, he feels that everything makes sense. “Give me the gun, Silensky.”
Plan John watches him with clear amusement. “Is that your idea? While I don’t wish to be critical, I doubt Mr. Silensky is likely to comply.”
“Silensky,” Doyle says, “this has gone on long enough.” Might he have misjudged the situation? Ben Silensky is a fetid little shit of a human being, but Doyle doesn’t believe he would let his girlfriend be used by a creature like Plan John, if only because, sooner or later, the truth of his own involvement would be bound to come out. “Give the gun to me now.”
He allows Silensky not quite a second to comply, sufficient that Doyle feels in his gut that he won’t. Then he moves.
Doyle has always been quick. Silensky hardly seems to have caught on by the time Doyle has a hand wrapped round his wrist. As Doyle steps back and wrenches Silensky’s arm, he’s beginning to react.
Maybe that reaction would be to pull the trigger. Maybe Silensky doesn’t know himself – in which case, he never will. Because by then his shoulder is coming out of joint, with a crack like splintering ice, the gun is falling toward the floor, and Silensky is screaming.
* * *
What Austin imagined had come from video games, movies, and this is nothing like it. Outside of the flashlight’s illumination, the blackness is absolute, and it has weight. Nor had he appreciated how narrow the shaft would be. Seeing the opening from the outside was one thing, being within and feeling smooth metal pressing on every side is entirely another.
He barely negotiates the first bend, the one that takes him downward and inward. Only thanks to protruding joints between sections, scarcely wider than a pencil, can he descend. Even then, his attempts to be silent when everything about the situation works against him bring him close to slipping more than once. As his feet graze the bottom, his nerves are stretched to breaking point. It’s all Austin can do not to climb straight back up again and flop, sobbing, into the night.
He doesn’t. Instead, he waits until his heart has ceased its drumming. And bit by bit, moment by moment, his anxiety turns again to exhilaration. He’s done it. It can be done. And solely by him.
Austin crawls farther, on his back, shuffling on elbows and butt, flashlight gripped in one hand. He goes far enough to grasp, fully, that he had no concept of what he was getting himself into. The ductwork is a maze of pitfalls, ninety-degree turns, and inoperative machinery. If the air-con wasn’t defunct, long since become an impossible luxury, these claustrophobic tubes would be a death trap. To make this work will take time and tools and effort.
Which means it’s possible. Simple, even.
Those dangers aren’t what make Austin stop. He halts when he hears the voices. They’re distant at first, but the more still he becomes, the louder they grow, as if the shaft is a conductor and he’s becoming an instrument designed to receive. Suddenly they’re quite distinct, and Austin switches the flashlight off, irrationally anxious that someone might be close enough to see its glow. He lies unmoving in the blackness, listening with all his attention.
Yet he isn’t scared. That’s strange in a way, because he’s been so scared for so long that he’s come to view his fear as basically a part of him. Its absence is like an itch going away, or like the opposite of noticing a sound you’ve been perceiving forever but never registered, such as the insect buzz of a refrigerator.
He’s only heard Plan John speak once or twice, bellowing orders from his balcony, but the man is unmistakable. The woman, Carlita, he knows by default; there are two women in Funland, and she certainly isn’t the doctor. What does it mean that they’re talking together? Bad news for the woman, surely, and bad news for Austin’s father. Now the conversation he eavesdropped, the guard and Silensky, makes perfect sense.
Since he’s already envisaging Silensky, he identifies his voice immediately, though the words are brief and muffled. The fourth man, after the opening and shutting of a door, takes him the longest to recognize, which makes the shock all the greater when he realizes it’s someone he’s known his whole life.
Austin has been avoiding his dad. It’s too hard to forgive him, so much easier to stay clear. He thinks maybe his dad is avoiding him as well; at any rate, he hasn’t tried very determinedly to find him. But Austin has never considered the possibility of losing his father for good. While his dad was okay, there’d been the chance at least that a day would come when he’d talk to Austin and Austin would respond, and that would be the beginning of something. Austin could never have admitted the hope, not until this moment, not until he knew it couldn’t happen.
Because his dad is in there with Plan John: Plan John who’s learned about Carlita, who must have discovered that his dad helped to hide her. And Plan John hurts people. Kills people. Even Austin knows that.
He’d thought he couldn’t lie any more motionless. Yet when the screaming starts, Austin still manages to freeze, every muscle locking like old gears. He’s hardly breathing, encapsulated by darkness, and for that reason, the gunshot that follows is all the more inordinately loud.
* * *
The pistol’s roar is colossal. Doyle had intended a warning shot, but he’s never fired a handgun while walking before. Plan John screeches and clutches the wound that’s blossoming in his fleshy bicep. He tumbles out of his chair and goes after the second gun, the one he’d been clawing from his desk drawer, which has clattered to the floor.
“Stop it, Howard,” Doyle says. He has to speak up because Silensky is still howling. “Just stop. Or the next one goes in your head.”
By that time, Doyle is close enough to pause and aim, so that both of them can understand that the threat isn’t empty. Plan John stops moving. His eyes cling lovingly to the gun, which has come to rest beside a wastepaper basket in the corner.
Doyle doesn’t look at Carlita. But he glimpsed her when he went for Silensky, knows that she’s abandoned her chair and has backed against the doors to the balcony. “Carlita, get out of here,” he says. He feels, somehow, that if he sees her, really sees her, he won’t be able to do this. “Run. Go back to Aaronovich. Lock yourself in from the inside.”
“Ben….�
�� Her voice is a tight ball of fear.
“Go on. He’ll be fine. But run.”
“You won’t get away with this,” Plan John says.
“Shut up. Go, Carlita.”
This time, she obeys. Doyle waits until he hears her footsteps clattering upon the stairs outside. Then he retrieves Plan John’s second gun from beside the basket. Silensky is sobbing now: loud, gushing noises of pain.
“Don’t move,” Doyle tells Plan John.
Doyle withdraws to where Silensky kneels, tentatively supporting his dislocated arm with his other hand as tears stream down his cheeks. Doyle hurriedly empties Plan John’s gun and places it on the table in the corner, then drops the gun he took from Silensky and the loose bullets into his pocket. “Hold still,” he commands Silensky. “Grit your teeth. Try to relax.”
Silensky looks at him with horror, and maybe he would resist, but again Doyle is too quick for him. In an instant he has one hand on Silensky’s back, another round his shoulder, and is wrenching. It’s easier than he’d thought it might be, like the bone wants to slide into joint. It can’t have felt good from the inside, though, for Silensky’s roar is an exhalation of pure agony.
Doyle takes the gun from his jacket pocket and returns his attention to Plan John. Plan John is sitting with his back to the wall and his legs outstretched, one huge hand holding a crumpled handkerchief to his bleeding arm. He is watching Doyle with bitter contempt.
“What do you think you’ve done?” he says. “I am not a man you toy with, Johnson. I am certainly not a man you fucking shoot.” The last word comes out in a hiss that is nothing like his usual speech. “I was contemplating letting you live, even after everything, but this…this….” He looks at where his palm clasps his bicep. “Shot me,” he finishes, with stupefied disbelief.
“Get up,” Doyle tells him. A course of action has formed in his mind, unbidden, and he has no argument to challenge it with. “You’re going outside.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then I’ll kill you here. Get up, Howard.”
For a protracted moment, Plan John’s eyes hold Doyle’s own. Whatever he finds there, it’s enough, in the end, to make him heft himself to his feet. “Let’s deal then. That’s what this is about, isn’t it?”
“Move. Over there.” Doyle motions toward the balcony.
Plan John looks as if he’s readying to say something else. Reconsidering, he does as instructed, though ponderously, like an unwilling beast of burden.
“Don’t move a muscle,” Doyle orders. “Or I’ll shoot you in the kneecap.”
Plan John watches the gun greedily, but doesn’t shift from where he’s standing, half in the room and half on the balcony, fingers still clasped around his bleeding arm.
Walking backward so as to keep Plan John in his line of sight, Doyle retreats to the door. There, relying on touch alone, he drops the latch and slides a thick bolt into place. “There we are,” he says. “Just you, me, and Silensky.”
“What do you think you’re going to achieve? You have nothing to bargain with. You won’t kill me. You have nothing to offer.”
“I’ve thought about that,” Doyle acknowledges.
“Not clearly you haven’t. If you hadn’t shot me then maybe, maybe, I could have found a way to spare you. But this? This is too far.”
Doyle gestures with the pistol. “Go on.”
Plan John seems genuinely surprised. “Are you hearing me, Johnson?”
“Are you hearing me? I said, on the balcony.”
“My Lord,” says Plan John, in the tone of one appealing to a third party in the face of impossible unreasonableness. Nonetheless, he goes. Doyle follows behind, waiting inside the doorway, out of arm’s reach.
“I’ll make you one offer.” Plan John is speaking slowly, emphasizing each syllable. “The only offer I can make. Leave now. Take one of the trucks. Take your boy. But not the woman, you get me? The two of you are gone within an hour and no one will pursue you.”
“We wouldn’t last a week.”
“If you did, it would be a week longer than you have here.”
Doyle steps onto the balcony and takes a position at the far end, away from Plan John. He’s tired; he wishes this was all over. He leans against the railing, trying discreetly to take some of the strain off his adrenalin-exhausted body.
“This isn’t about me or my son,” Doyle says. “It’s not about you. It’s not even about Carlita – though, I tell you, you should have left her alone.” Doyle discerns a strangled note in his own voice, and understands that he’s talking purely for his own benefit. Is he trying to justify himself or solely to buy time? He motions with the pistol toward the cellblock. “It’s about them. You’re like ivy on a dying tree, Howard, and sooner or later someone’s going to have to hack you down.”
Plan John is looking at him with undisguised confusion. “So? You were getting by, Johnson. If you don’t want the woman, why didn’t you cut her loose? A man such as you…if this revolution of yours were to arrive, you’d still come out in one piece. I’ve been honest with you, Johnson. I like you. Whatever Foster’s offered you, I’d have bettered it.”
Foster? That throws Doyle momentarily. He does his best to hide his confusion. “And then? If I let things run their course, your legacy’s going to be a pile of corpses on a heap of bricks.”
Doyle runs his free hand across his face, rubs tiredly at his eyes. Plan John can keep this up all night, and if he lets himself, Doyle will go along with him, just to put off what needs to be done.
“This can’t be a dictatorship. It can’t be your personal little empire. What the hell good is that to anyone?” Doyle hefts the pistol. “So stop talking,” he says, “and start yelling. As loud as you can.”
“What? Don’t be ridiculous.”
In a single swift motion, Doyle flips the gun, steps forward, and smashes the grip with all his might into Plan John’s mouth.
“Aargh! You, you fuck!”
“Louder.” Doyle twists the pistol back around and points the muzzle at Plan John’s forehead. “I said, louder.”
This time, Plan John does as he’s told. He’s every bit as loud as Doyle could have asked for.
Chapter Seventeen
The pain is indescribable. Ben had always assumed, somehow, that beyond a certain point you would pass out, your brain would switch off: a tiny, inbuilt act of mercy. Ben’s brain has no mercy. The pain is such that it should kill him, he should die to stop it, but he can’t pass out and he can’t die and it won’t stop.
Yet he has to do something. While Plan John and Johnson are out of his sight, he can hear their voices clearly. Ben knows there are very few ways in which their conversation will conclude, and he can’t imagine an outcome that won’t be the end of him.
Clenching his teeth, Ben reaches his good left hand behind his back and feels for the plastic handle tucked under his shirt, which bruised his spine when he went down, a minor hurt beneath the greater. He draws the shiv out carefully. He inspects the blade, though concentration is practically inconceivable. Everything, even his own hand, seems at a distance.
It’s all going to be decided this night. Plan John will find a way to come out on top, or Johnson will, or Foster will make his move. But the outcome will be tonight, and here’s a chance, Ben’s only chance, to get on the inside. Whichever side wins, he could be on it. He could even be the one to make that choice.
Ben hates Doyle Johnson enough just now that the prospect of driving a blade up into his guts is altogether fine. But not the thought of moving, every motion that would lead to that moment strikes him as impossible. If Ben can save Plan John, won’t he be grateful? Maybe, until he learns who Carlita really is, as he surely will. All right, so Foster; if Ben can get the gun off Johnson, use it to do what Foster demanded of him—
But the pain…god, the pain. Ben r
ehearses the chain of actions in his mind: standing up, crossing the room, then out the double doors, and the movements he’d have to make with his one good arm, which is linked inextricably to his useless arm, so that each slight flinch jolts excruciatingly through his shoulder blades. And now Plan John is shouting, or rather bellowing, and Ben knows there’s no more time. He weighs in an instant all the things he might do and what the pain will allow, all the ways in which anything he might attempt could go wrong.
Ben tosses the shiv away, skipping it across the floor until it comes to rest in the shadows beneath Plan John’s desk, where it’s out of sight. Where, if it should ever be found, it can never be traced to him.
Then he lies back. Ben gives himself up to the pain, to the helplessness, and waits with something like acceptance for the night to play itself out.
* * *
They come in ones and twos, at first. Then there are shouts from around the cellblock, and suddenly it’s everyone. They gather in the yard below, and Doyle can hear the back-and-forth of low conversation, of questions being asked. He thinks that surely someone will tell him to stop; one of them will try to stop him. But no one does.
Doyle has never felt comfortable with crowds. He looks down at the faces below, lighter patches in the darkness like dead fish bobbing to the surface of a still sea, and forces his tongue not to cleave to the roof of his mouth. With an audience, this feels like a show. Is that how it is? Gather enough people, enough sets of eyes, and any transgression becomes entertainment?
Plan John has stopped yelling. Doyle lets it go without comment. A few last stragglers are hurrying across the yard, black shapes drifting half-visibly through the darkness, gaining definition as they draw nearer to the light spilling from the balcony. Doyle hasn’t a clue what he’s going to say to them. He’s started something he can’t finish. It will cost him his life.
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