Takumo turned to him, his expression bleak. “They were,” he whispered. He walked uncertainly to the porch and pried the shuriken loose. He nodded.
“Real?”
“Now it’s real.” He held it gingerly over the porch and dropped it. It thunked into a board, biting deep. “Let’s not try that trick with the jumping again, okay?” the stuntman said, trying not to smile. “Not unless it’s an emergency.”
“Whatever you say.”
Packer had never learned how to be demonstrative, and as much as he loved his guns, he would no more have kissed one than he would have kissed a man. He contented himself with staring fondly at his rack of rifles and shotguns while drinking a homecoming can of Coors. He then ritually crushed the empty can and threw it at the trash can with better-than-usual accuracy, sat on the bed and unlaced his boots, all without taking his eyes from the rack. A few minutes later he fell asleep, a smile on his face and the familiar smell of a recently fired gun in his nostrils.
It was three minutes to four and ninety-nine degrees inside the shack; Mage didn’t even want to wonder about the temperature outside. He cast a glance at Takumo, wondering how he could sleep so peacefully in the stifling heat. Mage was lying on the stone floor of the kitchen/laundry, watching the key spin slowly on the loop of hair.
Bring Amanda back if you’re so wonderful, he thought.
Nothing happened. Probably just as well, he decided. If Takumo was right, then the best he could do was to put flesh on his memory of Amanda, creating a good-looking puppet, a soft, warm ventriloquist’s dummy obeying the commands of his imagination. Would it disappear when he stopped concentrating, he wondered, or become yet another corpse?
He blinked. What if Amanda had used the key to create a corpse-copy of herself and throw Tamenaga off the track? What if she were really alive? No, he thought, he knew her well enough to know she wouldn’t have dumped him into this sort of shit … would she? Did he know her well enough? He’d always prided himself on being able to read women, but he certainly hadn’t known Amanda for very long… .
Despite the heat, he shivered and wished there were something he could do to take his mind off—He stopped the thought half-formed and mentally trod on it. Unfortunately, he had already minutely studied every interesting crack and stain on the walls and ceiling. Their library consisted of a first-aid manual, a handbook on desert survival, and a few paperbacks of Japanese mythology and folklore that both he and Charlie had already read from cover to cover twice. Mage had never been an enthusiastic reader anyway. What was really bugging him was the lack of women. Not merely of sex, though that was a major part of it. A kiss—hell, a smile—would have tided him over for another few days.
I must be growing old, he thought. A year ago, if I’d spent more than a week celibate, I would’ve forgotten who I was. He stared at the key again. Okay, not Amanda. Just send me a woman.
The stone floor was hideously uncomfortable beneath his head. He turned sideways and heard, through the ground, the faint sound of hoofbeats.
He listened until he was sure that the sound wasn’t merely an echo of his pulse, like the waves you hear when you cup a shell over your ear, and then he stood uncertainly, walked over to the nearest newspaper-covered window and peered through a crack, seeing nothing but desert. He’d always pictured deserts as being flat, but the broken land looked more like a moonscape. The horses could be on any side of the house, down any valley or behind any rise. He crept from window to window, looking, listening. Nothing. Finally he tiptoed into the room where Takumo was sleeping, peered into the tent grabbed the flashlight and waved the beam over the stuntman’s face. Takumo blinked twice and reached for the ninjato beside his bed.
“Hey, relax. It’s me.”
“Is … what’s happening?”
“Listen.”
Slow, irregular hoofbeats could be heard echoing faintly from outside. Takumo’s eyes opened wide and he jumped to his feet, scrabbling for his clothes.
“How close are they?”
“Too close. Get ready to—”
The hoofbeats suddenly became louder and faster. Mage slid over to the window nearest the front door and saw two women on horseback riding furiously up the road toward the house.
“Two of them—”
Takumo, pulling on his desert-brown tabi, shook his head. “I thought I heard four a second ago—unless it’s an echo. Are they armed?”
“I can’t see any … Jesus, they’re only girls.” Mage decided not to mention that he’d just wished for the focus to send him a woman.
The two young women seemed to be racing each other; the faster, olive-skinned and raven-haired, reined her bay stallion to a halt just short of the front porch. She was wearing khaki jeans, a loose brown jacket, fawn riding boots, and a soft brown Stetson. Her companion—a blonde, wearing white from her hat to her running shoes, her pretty face half hidden by mirror shades—stopped three lengths behind her.
“Anyone here?” she asked.
“Can’t see anyone.”
Mage looked toward Takumo and shrugged. Takumo quietly continued to don his weapons.
The woman in the Stetson turned her horse and rode slowly around the shack, counterclockwise. The blonde sat with her back to the sun and waited.
Suddenly there was a sound from the roof, and Takumo yelled, “Out!” Something landed in the fireplace and rolled onto the hearth. Mage yanked the door open and leaped out over the porch and into the Death Valley sunlight. A kunoichi, in a desert-brown shinobi shozuko, slashed at his legs with a knife, a fraction of a second too late.
Mustard-colored smoke billowed out of the cylinder on the hearth. Mage, sprawled in the dust, turned to face the kunoichi and yelled, “Charlie! One at the door!” The kunoichi started slightly and Takumo’s hand, protected by a neko-de, smashed through the newspapered window and into the side of her head. The kunoichi staggered and dropped. Mage heard hoofbeats thunder-loud behind him and spun around.
The horse reared above him, its front hooves ready to smash into his skull and arm. He couldn’t see the rider clearly; she was keeping the sun behind her, blinding him. One moment it was behind her head, then over her right shoulder, burning a round, blue-green hole into his vision. For an instant it seemed to Mage that he could see the sun through her chest.
The horse shied away from him, and Anna Judd fell from its back. There was a massive, cauterized wound above her right breast, as impossible to look into as the Death Valley sun. Mage stared at her in horror, until a flicker of movement attracted his attention; he turned, saw something flashing in the sunlight and reacted instinctively. Five venom-tipped shuriken reversed their flight in midair, hurtling toward the olive-skinned kunoichi on the roof. Two missed and she managed to deflect two more with her iron sleeves, but one hit her in the thigh, drawing blood. She cursed, then drew a large butterfly knife from inside her jacket and leaped from the roof. She landed lightly, catlike, but before she could run, a metal ring whistled through the air near her knife hand and jerked back as a tough, thin cord wrapped itself around her wrist. She looked along the cord and saw Takumo standing near her horse, the sharp end of a kyotetsu-shoge in his left hand. He jerked at the cord, pulling her off balance. Then, before she could recover, he hooked the sickle-shaped blade into the bay’s stirrup.
The wounded kunoichi tossed the knife from her right hand to her left and slashed at the cord. Takumo swatted the stallion’s rump as hard as he could and the bay reared and bolted, pulling the woman off her feet and dragging her behind him. Takumo turned toward Mage, and froze. A fourth kunoichi, almost invisible in her shinobi shozuko, had appeared from behind a rise and was running silently toward the photographer.
Mage, still staring at Anna’s corpse, saw the new shadow and looked up just as Tsuchiya Shimako drew her ninjato and slashed. He raised his arm to block the blow and nearly lost the limb as the blade ripped through his biceps and grated on the bone.
Mage was conscious of more pain than he’d
ever experienced, of the Death Valley heat and the retina-searing sun, of the smells of blood and flash-burnt flesh, but of nothing else. The world was a dusty red blur, too hellish to be real, a figment of some medieval priest’s joyless imagination. I will open my eyes, he thought, and find myself safe in Carol’s bed, shadows on the ceiling and this nightmare sweated out of me.
He opened his eyes and vanished, and the point of Shimako’s ninjato slashed through the space where his kidneys had been a tenth of a second before.
Shimako’s immediate response was to look down at Mage’s footprints. Ninja are acknowledged masters of mysterious and sudden disappearances, and the kunoichi wondered briefly if her opponent had slipped into some concealed pit. But the ground appeared unbroken, even when she tested it gingerly with her toe. Only then did she notice the bloodless, fist-sized hole in Anna’s body. No weapon, no force that Shimako had ever seen, could have made a wound like that.
An unusual sensation hit her: the knowledge of failure, of defeat. Mage had disappeared completely and— wherever he was now, dead or alive—had taken the focus with him.
She looked up suddenly and cut a star-shaped shuriken from the air with her ninjato. Takumo had recovered from his own astonishment enough to fight. More proficient at arrow cutting than the stuntman, she easily deflected two more shuriken while walking cautiously toward him. Takumo reached over his shoulder and drew his own ninjato. The edge of the unblooded blade reflected the sunlight into Shimako’s eyes, but the kunoichi was prepared for the trick. She feinted, forcing Takumo back, and stepped sideways. Then they stared at each other for several agonizing seconds, their dusty hoods revealing little more than their eyes. She saw his reluctance to kill, he saw her indifference to dying, and neither moved.
For more than a minute they watched and waited—and suddenly Shimako crushed a packet of blinding powder in her left fist and threw it into Takumo’s sun-seared face, simultaneously reaching under his guard and lunging at his chest. Takumo, startled, parried blindly and energetically, accidentally catching her ninjato’s edge on his iron sleeve and deflecting it, and then crashed into her.
Shimako stumbled and they both fell, her sword arm pinned beneath his chest. She reached into her obi for a knife—her fukiya were in a pocket on her left wrist—but Takumo rolled away before she could stab him. She scrambled to her feet, and Takumo immediately scissored his legs around her ankles, throwing her onto the porch. Her head thumped against the boards, dazing her briefly, but Takumo made no move to attack; he merely waited, blinking in an effort to clear his eyes, ninjato ready to parry. Shimako sensed another body near hers and turned her head slightly. One of her karima kunoichi lay still beside her, eyes blank, blood on her lips. Shimako lay there motionless, feigning worse pain than she felt, allowing her head to clear, and then sprang to her feet. A half-rotten board cracked beneath her heel, and she staggered forward onto the point of Takumo’s sword.
The knocking on the door was sharp and insistent but not loud; it filtered through Packer’s sleep as slowly as a glacier. It was nearly a minute before the gunman, who prided himself on his combat reflexes, opened his eyes and glanced at his watch (he kept the windows shuttered and the blinds drawn to keep out prying eyes, and the darkness in his rooms was timeless).
The knocking continued, and he listened while he contemplated a course of action. Soft and staccato: not a cop, and probably female. He reached into the nightstand for his favorite pistol, a .357 Magnum Desert Eagle—Packer disliked Jews, but he had to admit that they made lovely guns—and hauled himself out of bed. He picked his bathrobe off the floor, wrapped it around himself and shoved the pistol into the large pocket, then strode over to the peephole in the door. A blonde, even prettier than the one he’d had in Vegas, was standing outside, looking at the peephole with large, slightly anxious blue eyes.
Packer was not accustomed to receiving visitors, and he noticed that the woman was carrying a shoulder bag large enough to hide a sawed-off shotgun or a mini Uzi. She was also wearing a bulky winter jacket, but that was hardly astonishing: it was November, and it was snowing nearly every night. Packer looked at her again, vaguely suspecting that something was wrong with the picture. The woman knocked again, her mitten-muffled knuckles making no more noise than a cat’s footfall, and he wondered how long she’d been there before he woke up.
That she’d been sent by Hegarty, or Hegarty’s boss, Packer didn’t doubt; whether she was an assassin or a reward, he couldn’t guess. He gripped his pistol in his right hand and opened the door with his left.
“Mr. Packer?”
“Yes?”
“May I come in?” She sounded puzzled, asking rather than demanding—it was cold out in the drafty hallway— and more than slightly amused.
Perhaps, Packer guessed, someone was supposed to have phoned him and warned him to expect her. He nodded and stepped back, then shut the door behind her, all without letting go of his pistol. She glanced around the room and nodded when she saw the locked rack of guns and the hand-loading equipment on the kitchen counter (Packer was no cook). She removed her mittens—her fingernails were painted pink, and too long to be practical—and then turned to face him. The dumb-blonde face—the Marilyn Monroe mouth and innocent blue eyes—collapsed into a gunmetal-gray void. Packer, who had just realized that her breath hadn’t clouded in the cold outside, felt a sudden wet warmth in his groin as he pissed himself in mind-shattering terror.
Sakura grabbed Packer’s right forearm gently and pulled his hand away from his pocket. If she’d had a mouth, it would have smiled as she steered her unresisting victim toward the bed and eased him into a sitting position. She left him there for a few minutes as she reached into her shoulder bag and removed three pairs of panties, holding them between the points of her sharp pink fingernails; she dropped one on the pillow, pushed one under the bed, and draped the third over Packer’s empty left hand. Then she drew a Colt Python from inside her bag, placed the muzzle at the gunman’s temple and blew his dead brain out of his skull.
25
To Leap in Ourselves
Mage opened his eyes and stared at the shadows on the ceiling. The leopard shattered into its component rosettes and became a map of the moon, and the Venus de Willendorf evolved into a four-armed Kali, complete with scimitar, skull-topped scepter, and severed head. He looked around the room and at the bed—Carol’s bed, and unmistakably Carol’s room.
He examined his arm and found it undamaged, but it still hurt. It was also entirely bare, and he realized that he was naked, except for the talisman wrapped around his wrist. He raised his eyes to the ceiling again and thought: when I look down at the floor, my clothes will be there.
He looked down and they weren’t, and neither was the floor; there was nothing, no color, neither light nor darkness, not even an impression of distance. He grabbed the bed—it felt solid enough—and rolled over onto his back, closing his eyes hurriedly and trying to concentrate.
He couldn’t remember having seen his clothes on Carol’s floor; he’d always reached over the edge of the bed and groped until he grabbed them, then dressed as well as possible without leaving the warmth of the blankets. He thought hard about Charlie’s experience in Vegas, wondering what it was and wasn’t safe to visualize. If he tried imagining his clothes, he was almost certain to get something wrong: the size, zippers that didn’t work, buttons without buttonholes, sleeves sewn shut, whatever. It occurred to him that if he practiced, he might be able to imagine a pair of jeans that fit a normally shaped human comfortably. The thought cheered him slightly, even though he didn’t feel up to trying at the moment. First things first: what had Carol’s floor been like before he’d annihilated it?
A few seconds of memory-cudgeling told him that it had been carpeted—a slightly worn, gray shag carpet, reminiscent of an old and disreputable Persian cat. When he opened his eyes, it was there again, and in all the right places; when he touched it gingerly, it felt reassuringly furry, and when he rapped it, he he
ard the floorboards beneath it. Clothes, he decided, could wait.
The floor remained solid as he walked across it to the door and listened. No one else was home, and so he opened the door and looked into the living room. Everything in there seemed much as it had when he’d stayed there before. The Susan Seddon Boulet calendar on the kitchen door showed a new page: November. He glanced through the window and noticed snow on the rooftops. The clock told him that it was ten past four.
At least I didn’t time-travel, he thought with mingled relief and disappointment. I didn’t time-travel, and I haven’t been dreaming—or if I have, I’m still dreaming, and dreaming that I haven’t been dreaming. Or I … what would Dante call it? Teleported? Jaunted? Jumped?
He shivered, but more from the cold than from fear. Teleportation, he thought as he opened the closet door and looked for a robe. No more hitchhiking, no more airports or bus depots. A kitchen and a warm bed always in reach —if I can do it again.
He heard a key rattle in the lock, and froze.
The instructions Gacy received had been simple and the money was good; that took some of the pain out of sitting in a van day in, day out, but not all. Still, there was fuck-all else he could do; he’d had nobody else who could have gotten to Totem Rock in time. Packer had already been here, and though Gacy hadn’t heard all the details, it was obvious that the farmboy had blown his cover.
Gacy had been more careful. He’d paid his secretary to play the role of his wife, then bought an old Citroën and carefully sabotaged the electrics so that it’d fail as soon as he arrived in town. He’d looked glum when the mechanic had told him how long it would take for the replacement part to arrive, checked into the only motel (conveniently close to the 7-Eleven, to his delight), and spread the story that he and his wife, accountants with a passion for bird-watching, were traveling to Winnipeg to see their first grandchild—a cover story carefully calculated to make them as invisible as possible and explain away a suitcase full of cameras and binoculars.
The Art of Arrow Cutting Page 19