Double down, p.36
Double Down, page 36
They had made it as far as the next-to-the-last room in the corridor. Waverly stood with his back pressed to the wall alongside the door. Bennie and Caroline crouched in the corner opposite him, bundled in shadows. Nothing moved in the breezeway. The moon came out from behind a tumbling rush of clouds, and a pale shaft of light slanted through the window and fell across the floor. Waverly searched about desperately for a weapon, anything to serve as weapon. Objects, fuzzy and distorted by the blackness of the room, took on a kind of dim shape: a mirrored dresser, a table, couple of chairs, couple of beds with a nightstand between them, and on the nightstand a lamp. Tubular brass lamp, catching a thin beam of light. He made a stay-down motion at Bennie and Caroline—all communication by gesture now, not a word whispered—and then he slipped over and removed the cobwebbed shade. He knotted the trailing cord around the lamp and, grasping it with both hands, batter’s grip, returned to his station by the door.
He waited. Still nothing out on the breezeway—no movement, no sound. And waiting that way, poised in comic, inept ambush behind a flimsy door, the dark humor of the scene, the moment, was not entirely lost on him. Bottom of the ninth, two outs, bases loaded—and the slugger stepped up to the plate, home-run hitter, come to salvage the deadly game. Beware, you shooters! This formidable foe, resourceful prankster, packs a mean and hefty, well, lamp.
A scream, more on the order of a squeal, pierced the silence, followed closely by the sound of splintering wood, followed by the sight of a figure darting past the window, followed by a series of familiar sharp thumps echoing through the corridor. Waverly slid the door open just a notch, just enough to make out the figure stooped over something—impossible to tell what, some shadowed fallen lump—at the south end of the breezeway. A curtain of cloud descended over the moon. He signaled Bennie and Caroline, and they came to their feet and the three of them bolted through the door and ducked around the corner into the north stairwell and went clattering down the steps, Bennie in the lead now and Waverly, still clutching his redoubtable lamp, bringing up the rear.
D’Marco came out on the top floor in time to see one figure leaning over the guard rail and another sailing through the air, arms and legs fluttering in the frantic graceless fall of a broken-winged bird. He couldn’t tell for sure who the flyer was, but from the pitch of the scream he could pretty much guess. Pile of goo splattered across the grass seven flights down, that had to be Sigurd. Poor Chubbo. Poor dumb fuck. Never going to be a Burt now.
So what he did was put on his fast shoes and dash through the breezeway, laying down a volley at the figure shrouded in darkness at the other end. It rocked back off the rail, staggered, seemed to do a shuddery little dance, made a guttural noise, and then toppled thuddingly to the floor. D’Marco edged forward slowly, weapon arm extended, rigid. His jaw muscles bunched. A pair of needlenose pliers, unseen but no less real, pinched his nerve ends. When he arrived at the end of the corridor, what he heard was a faint throaty gurgle and what he saw was a mound of flesh reclining face down in a pool of blood and, by the stink of it, piss.
It didn’t move. Nevertheless, D’Marco approached cautiously, piece leveled. He put a foot under one beefy shoulder and rolled the inert figure over on its back, fully expecting to discover the player or possibly the Jew, one or the other, tried to pull an end run on them and in fact succeeded, though only by half. But his face registered a blank gape of incomprehension at what he saw: goddam spook, f’Chris’sake, couple gushing holes in his chest, snowball eyeballs bulging, mouth ajar, tongue lolling, still fighting for breath, still gurgling. A metal baton about the length of a bat, and a gun, looked like a Magnum, lay on the floor just beyond the reach of the limp outthrust arms. An obvious shooter, or maybe even heat. Jesus, it got complicated. D’Marco stooped down for a closer look. Never seen him before in his life, far as he could tell, since they all looked alike, especially in the dark. Whoever he was and whatever the fuck he was doing here, he was gumming up the game. But not anymore. Trust a spade be in the wrong place at the worst time.
D’Marco laid the silencer-elongated muzzle of his piece squarely between the eyes, gone glassy now with resignation. “This one’s for Burt,” he said, and he squeezed the trigger and took off the top of the head. A twitching spasm shook the body and ran its course, and the gurgling stopped. He was surrounded by a sudden silence. A moment’s thoughtful silence. He didn’t know anything about regret; sorrow was an emotion alien to him. Still, he felt a curious vacancy, as if a persistent, nagging, familiar ache had lifted, but too abruptly and with insufficient notice. Better not to think about it. The way he saw it, his obligation was fulfilled, debt paid. So much for partnering. Never again.
Rushing footsteps sounded at the opposite end of the breezeway. He swung around and caught a glimpse of three shadowed figures turning into the stairwell. Okay, back to business. Time to wrap it up. Business he understood. He reloaded the .22, grabbed the Magnum—little extra firepower never hurt—stuck it under his belt, and took off after them in an adrenaline-pumped sprint.
Running, dodging, scrambling, stumbling, cursing, fetching breath in panting gasps, they made it down six flights of stairs and through the rat’s maze of breezeway along the bungalow units and down the last flight to the ground floor behind the main building, where Caroline sagged against Waverly and moved her head slowly, negatively, and said, “No more. Can’t run anymore.” Bennie was no better off. Doubled over, clutching his side, snorting like some barnyard animal, he couldn’t find the breath to speak, but even had he been able the message would surely have been the same: No more.
Terror squared. A whole new dimension to the quaint image of blind flight. Waverly looked about wildly. Open breezeway ahead of them; wide swatch of lawn, absent of cover, to the right of them; and behind them a shooter, or shooters, no way to know, coming on fast. Which left nothing but the hotel dining room, vast as a cavern and as impenetrably dark, on the other side of a long wall of glass. He had a speck of an instant. He had the lamp and he had what remained of his wits and that’s all he had. He had no choice.
The door was only a few feet down. He gave Bennie a shove and dragged Caroline along beside him, and then he set himself and drew back the lamp and swung. The shattering glass ruptured the silence. He thrust a hand inside and released the bolt and yanked open the door and pushed them through. Near as he could make out there were three, maybe four, files of tables, most of them still with place settings and lantern-shaped candle holders, and still draped with white linen tablecloths. Clusters of round white holes in the dark. The air in the room was musty, stifling, thick with the vestigial aromas of a thousand leisurely pleasured feasts. He heard a shuffle of footsteps out in the breezeway. A wisp of a shadow, barely visible in the murky light of the cloud-smeared moon, crossed the glass. One shadow, one shooter. One was plenty, more than enough. No pleasures tonight, and no leisure.
He steered Caroline and Bennie to a table in the second file directly opposite the door. “Down,” he said, and obediently they hunkered down. Bennie’s breath came in dry, hawking gasps. A palsied quake shook Caroline’s thin shoulders. She stared at him vacantly. He tugged the tablecloth back and partly over them, anchored it with the candle holder and dropped to his knees and started to crawl away.
“Where you goin’?” Bennie said, voice a rasp of fear.
“Just stay down. There’ll be shooting. If you can get behind him, run for the door.”
“What about you?”
Waverly looked at him steadily, at both of them, this exhausted pair, petrified with fear, innocently tangled in the braided chain of folly and mischance and evil luck that strung together the sorry chronicle of his life. “Don’t ask,” he said.
Bennie couldn’t meet the steady gaze. He didn’t ask.
“You watch out for her,” Waverly said. “You’ll do that for me, right?”
“Yeah, right. Do what I can.”
The shadow was at the door. Waverly crept across the floor and ducked behind a table. There wasn’t time to put much distance between himself and Caroline and Bennie: couple of tables, maybe ten feet, no more than that. Narrowest of margins. After the first pops he couldn’t count on them staying down; one or the other, maybe both, was bound to be spooked. So what he had to do was draw the action—and the fire—his way. The shadow remained crouched by the door, seemed to deliberate. Taking its time, taking no chances, running no risks. Softly, but distinct enough to isolate his general location in the room, Waverly said, “Welcome to the Collonades. Why don’t you come on in.”
For a prolonged moment there was only silence. Then on a ghost of a chuckle came the reply, “Oh, I’m coming, man, I’m coming. Bet to it.” But no fire. Nobody’s fool, this shooter.
Waverly gripped the lamp tightly in his right hand. With his left he reached up and lifted a place setting off the table—knife, two forks, a spoon. Handful of silver and a brass lamp. Puny weapons. Now he had a serious choice to make. He could chuck the silver into the row of tables behind him, classic B-movie maneuver, and hope the shooter was keen enough and quick enough to see through it. Or he could create the rackety diversion right here, right next to him, assume this shooter was a beat behind. A hard call, either way. And all of it turned on the unknown: an unknown level of cunning in an unknown adversary.
The door creaked open. On an impulse, a hunch—no, more a wild guess—he tossed the silver straight up in the air. He braced himself, ready to take a backward leap, dodge and run. The silver came clattering down around him, and a silence settled over the room. No movement at the door. No fire. Nothing. Silence.
It lengthened. Till finally a voice, mirthless, wised-up, heavy with scorn, drawled, “Jesus, man, you need new material. Give it some thought. We got lots of time.”
Time? Waverly felt curiously like a child again, playing childish games in the dark, propelled by memory and imagination down some magical menacing corridor of time, pursued by specters and shadows invested with awesome powers of prescience, undeceived, thinking his thoughts, reading his mind. A fantastic, time-warped game of hide and seek. Deadly game. His legs were pulsing, cramping. And he was run out of strategy and artifice and clever transparent moves. He drew in a breath and bawled, “Here I am, chump, over here,” and then he drove his shoulder into the table, upended it.
The shadow came charging through the door, announcing, “Avon calling” and executing a deft acrobatic roll across the floor and laying down a scatter of fire.
Waverly dove to the right. A bullet pinged off a chair next to him, another skimmed just over his head. Someone, he couldn’t tell who—Bennie? Caroline?—bolted out from under the tablecloth and scampered toward the back of the room. A sudden wash of moonlight fell through the glass, and the shadow took on form and shape and dimension in a square of the silvery light, and it was kneeling now, both arms lifted and extended, taking careful aim at the figure fleeing into the dark. Waverly sprang to his feet and lunged across the narrow space between them. He had the peculiar dreamlike sensation of running at peak speed, all the stops out, but running through a wet patch of fresh-laid cement. He brought the lamp down across the outline of a collarbone, shattering it. But not before the shooter got off a round. Two shrill cries pealed simultaneously through the night. The shooter slumped forward. His piece rattled onto the floor. One arm dangled limply, the other clawed at his belt. Waverly swung again, caught him squarely across the back. The force of the blow would have flattened anyone else. Not this one. He came up off his knees, agile as a gymnast twirling in air, and speared his good shoulder into Waverly’s midsection, plowed him backward, took him off his feet.
Waverly was sprawled on his back, his head wedged against the solid wooden base of a table. And the shooter was all over him, hammering at him with a fist, just one, but that one was heavy enough. Instinctively he crossed his arms over his face in a desperate effort to blunt the impact of the single clubbing fist. Abruptly the pummeling stopped, but a forearm dropped across his exposed throat, the full weight of a body behind it, bearing down on it, mashing out his last gagging breaths. His pinned legs and torso thrashed wildly. His arms flailed the air. Tiny explosions erupted in brilliant starburst patterns behind his eyes, which were swimming up in their sockets now and which fell on a loop of white cloth above his head. He grabbed for it, yanked it, and a candle holder and four sets of tableware came spilling down on them in a tangle of linen. The shooter, undistracted, single-minded, bore down harder. Waverly’s tongue seemed to be inflating, filling his mouth. His arms sagged. His hands groped feebly along the floor. One of them, his left, turned over a piece of silver, a fork by the feel of it; and he brought it up in a rolling stabbing motion and drove it into the shooter’s face, just below the cheekbone, and then raked it diagonally across the right side of the face, tearing the flesh, ripping a nostril, slicing the lips. The shooter let out an astonished screeching wail, and his arm lifted off Waverly’s throat and he lurched backward, shuddering convulsively. Blood squirted out from under the hand that covered the lacerated face.
Waverly sucked in air, gasping and wheezing like an animal run too hard, too long. Exhausted, emptied, he nonetheless recognized dimly he had a sliver of an instant remaining to him and not a bit more. Understanding that, he jammed the fork into the covering hand, puncturing it; and another scream issued from those shredded lips and the shooter, centered by the perfect, exclusive focus of pain, a writhing package of pain, grasped at the fork with his other hand, the limp one. Seizing what was left of his instant, Waverly bucked him off and scrambled across the floor and recovered the fallen gun. He trained it on him, staggered to his feet. Now he held the power. From somewhere off in the second file of tables a quavery voice called, “Timothy? That you?”
“Bennie?”
“You okay?”
“Get over here! Quick!”
Bennie hauled himself off the floor and came toward him, holding out helpless palms. “Listen, I tried to stop her but she—”
Waverly wasn’t listening. He pressed the gun into one of the upturned palms. “Cover him. If he moves, whack him.”
He weaved through the tables in the direction of where she fell. He found her lying on her back in a widening pool of blood. He dropped to his knees and lifted her head gently and cradled it in his lap. Her eyes were open, startled, steep with wonder. Her breathing was rattly and faint. He said, “Hang on, Caroline. I’m going to get you out of here.”
Scarcely audible, she murmured, “It hurts, Tim. Hurts really bad.”
“Hang on,” he said, “hang on,” repeating it desperately, as if the force of his words and his will could restore breath, animate slackening limbs, arrest a spirit leaking away on a rushing current of blood, vanishing in the dark. Her lips seemed to move, but he heard nothing. He bent in closer. “What is it, Caroline? What? Tell me.”
“We could have had such a time, Tim. You and I. Such a party.”
“We will yet,” Waverly said, believing not a word of it.
Her lips moved a while longer, producing no sound. A death knowledge filled the wonder-struck eyes. Her expression changed. She sighed a small rueful sigh and her breathing stopped.
For a long, stunned moment Waverly didn’t move. He knelt there, his own eyes fixed in a desolate mid-distance stare, her head still resting in his lap, limp in its tangled bed of hair. He was overtaken by the anguished wish to go back, far back, across the gulf of years, and begin this journey over again. And then that universal melancholy wish passed, replaced by a choking rage. He eased Caroline’s lifeless head onto the floor, mumbled something, or maybe he didn’t, maybe he thought it instead, and rose up and crossed the room.
The shooter was on his feet now, swaying a little, steadying himself against the back of a chair. Somehow he’d gotten the fork out of his hand. His face was glazed with blood. Bennie stood on the other side of the table, keeping a wary distance, a piece in each hand, one of them lengthened by a silencer, one not. Both were leveled on the wobbly figure. Two-gun Epstein.
“He was packin’ this,” Bennie said, giving the Magnum a slight wiggle. “I patted him down.”
“She’s dead, Bennie.”
“Jesus, Timothy. What can I say?”
“Nothing to say.”
Waverly looked over at the shooter. Recognized him as the same one who’d been tracking them these past weeks. He took the Magnum from Bennie and came around the table and gazed at him, as though he were committing the mutilated features to memory. Very evenly he said, “You killed her, you son of a bitch. You know that? You killed her.”
D’Marco stared back at him, a challenging thrust to his jaw. He lifted his good shoulder, half a shrug.
“I think you better move away from the chair now.”
