Darkman (16 page)

Millings waved a hand to shut her up. “Get on the horn and tell whichever dipshit ordered that stuff that he can get his ass over to K Mart. The chemicals are no problem, but we aren’t haberdashers.”

She turned to leave. Millings made her stop.

“Who
did
order that, anyway?”

She looked at the paper. “Wayne State.”

“Order code right?”

“Down to the last digit. Chemistry Department.”

Millings frowned, puzzling over this. What was going on over at that college? It occurred to him that they might be building a robot or something. Either that or they had decided to put Millings to the test. By contract they had to buy all university-related equipment from Millings Supply, but that contract was due for renewal at the end of this fiscal year. Something was fishy here, and it smelled like a pullout.

“They’re negotiating with another firm,” he told Ms. Jackson. “Probably Willis Supply, the bastards. We’re both being put to the test, I guarantee it. If we screw up, the deal is gone, and that sucker is worth over three mill a year.”

She looked alarmed. “What should we do, then?”

He grinned, even though he hurt. “Give them everything they want. Everything that’s in our power to get, and by God, if we can’t get it, we’ll invent it. Give them a ten-percent discount, just for the hell of it. No way am I going to let Willis steal my customers.”

“Fill the order, then?”

He nodded. “Take the day off and hit the department stores if you have to. I want that order filled and delivered before noon. And Willis can sit on his thumb and rotate. We’re the biggest, and we’re gonna stay that way.”

She nodded and left.

Millings sat around feeling very crafty, but his hangover got the best of him and he went to sleep again.

19

The First Move

B
Y LATE AFTERNOON
Darkman was taking his first crack at developing film. The developing set, which arrived in the shipment from Millings around noon, came complete with bottles of developer, fixer, wetting agent, and enough pans to satisfy Betty Crocker. On his way back from the phone booth Darkman had scouted through several promising-looking dumpsters and trash cans, finding old clothing that stank worse than sour diapers, and even a huge, tattered black hat he could pull down past his ears. Feeling strangely proud of himself and his new wardrobe, he paraded back to the soap factory but didn’t come across a soul. A pity, he had thought, and ducked into the cool darkness of home.

After the shipment came and was put into some semblance of order (the driver had not stuck around long to help, though), Darkman loaded up his brand-new Nikon XE-35X, unwound himself from his burden of bandages, and became a bagman. The smell of the ratty clothing he wore was revolting, but it would ensure that no one came very close. He tied a colored rag just below his eyes, a bandanna that was stiff with age but covered his absent face like a train-robbing outlaw. The hat went on top, the camera in his pocket, his hands safely buried there too.

It had been two o’clock, a hot and muggy afternoon, the sky a blank slate, when the sleaze bag named Pauly Reynolds arrived at Ernie’s Best Deli, a place where Rick had said illegal transfers of money or dope took place almost daily. Pauly, Darkman remembered, was the tough guy who drank Maalox by the quart and enjoyed torturing innocent biochemists. Seeing him saunter to the deli with a smirk on his face and a blue bottle of Maalox in one hand, Darkman’s rage had ballooned, threatening to split his skull and send him charging out of the alley where he had hidden himself. He could kill Pauly as easily as Pauly had killed him, and with greater effect on the man’s future.
But,
he said to himself again and again,
I will not kill anymore. I will destroy.

He raised his camera up and zoomed in on Pauly as he walked to the door. The Nikon was a professional model with auto-wind. He snapped eight pictures. Several moments later two other shady types approached, a Mexican fellow carrying a briefcase . . .

Martinez!

. . .
and a man with a bad limp.

Skip!

Darkman got six clear shots, feeling absurdly as if he had known these unsavory chaps all his life. He watched through the big windows as they marched to a booth and sat down with Pauly. Though the fumes from his scavenged clothes were beginning to bother him, Darkman waited until they reemerged twenty minutes later. When they did, it was Pauly who had the briefcase. Darkman got three more shots, then pocketed the camera.

While on his way home, feeling safely disguised and smelling sickeningly of garbage, he stopped at a travel agency on McQueen Street and purchased two airline tickets. The fat lady he talked to was about to tell him to take a hike when he withdrew fifteen hundred dollars and handed it over.

After that she worked fast.

Developing the pictures now in near darkness, Darkman’s heart was beating just a little too fast. The day was about to end outside, the sun giving up and sinking past the horizon, and if he wasn’t able to do it tonight, he probably never would. In the planning stage it had seemed oh so plausible, so perfect and so fitting. Now that night was approaching, he was having an attack of nerves. His hands shook as he used tweezers to withdraw the photo from its bath. What if it was blank?

He carried it to the loading dock, finding the last of the day’s light.

It was Pauly, all right. A little too fuzzy but Pauly nonetheless.

Satisfied, although still jittering inside, he developed the other photos and clipped them to a piece of old twine he had tied to the nearest mooring pillars. When they were done and sufficiently dry, he started the new generator (John Deere instead of Honda—oh, well), which purred to life and didn’t make half the racket he had expected.

The connections had already been made while the prints were developing. For the first time in decades the dusty overhead lights came alive, filling the factory’s lower level with a sick, feeble glow that made it seem even more haunted than when it was bathed in darkness. So? he thought defiantly. It’s still home sweet home.

Almost trembling, he flipped the power switch on the big IBM computer. A green cursor began to flash on the screen while the hard drive whined, getting itself up to speed. Presently it announced that all was well and good.

He sat on the bones of his office chair and began to empty his scientific mind out into the computer. Peyton Westlake had been a genius.

The computer was even smarter.

By eleven his brain was frazzled and his ears were sore from the eerie and endless
tack-tacking
of his finger bones on the keyboard. The stench of his clothes was enough to fell a tree and he got out of them. Wearing only brand-new underwear that still smelled of its modern factory, his face exposed and his hands unwrapped, he loaded a floppy disk into the slot below the hard drive and clicked the lever shut. He typed two last commands, and the holographic plate began to sprout rainbows.

So far so good, he thought, and wished now that he could have salvaged the digitalizer from his old computer. The old way, you fed the picture in and the computer broke it down into vectors and angles. Now, holding the Pauly pictures like a deck of cards, he fed the information manually.

It took two hours. He was ready to collapse, but he was getting the hang of it again. He ran through the sequences that fed the Bio-Press. It signaled okay. He went to the ThinkTank-PinkTank transformer and started the charging process. Nervously gnawing on a finger bone, he checked everything over again, wishing he had skin on his face because he was hot there but unable to sweat. Just another annoyance.

When the bulletlike charge came, he hastily opened the pipette and watched the goop surf onto the hot Bio-Press. When it had filled all the crevices and was a shimmering, pancake-thin sheet, he turned the pipette off and waited. The smell of burned pork rose in the air as the hot pins of the Bio-Press adjusted upward to remake the picture Darkman had broken down into lines and vectors. In less than a minute it was done.

Darkman peeled it off the press with the tweezers and dropped the completed sheet into an aluminum tub. This he covered over with black plastic. In the dark it would be fine.

Growing excited, he manhandled the computer some more and made two new parts. They went into the tub. The hardest part came next, and while it was brewing, he used surgical scissors to cut the first two parts out of the remainder of the floppy sheet of artificial skin.

And then it was done. He turned the Bio-Press off with shaking fingers and picked up the tube of mastic. He painted his right hand with it, nostrils stinging against the turpentine smell. He uncovered the aluminum tub and fished out a piece. He placed it over the back of his hand and smoothed it out, looking for flaws. The computer had had a vectoring of his own mangled hand and had made the new one thick where it should be, thin where his own meat was still good. He fished the bottom of the right hand out of the tub and slipped it into place, carefully smoothing it.

He almost laughed. It was a hand! Pauly’s hand, but as good as any other. It smelled a bit like chemical glue, and it didn’t have fingernails yet, but it was damn good, and he knew it.

“Success,” he whispered, smiling with no smile. “Goddamn success.”

If his face could have produced tears, they would have been falling now.

At last it was time for the Darkman to expose himself to the world.

He made it to Pauly’s high-rise apartment before sunrise, never really feeling safe until the elevator had carried him to the seventeenth floor and he had successfully picked the apartment lock, which took far longer than was necessary. His face and hands were wrapped in fresh gauze. Mad at himself for not being a proficient lock picker, he pocketed the wire and the sliver of metal that comprised his crude locksmith’s tools and slipped inside Pauly’s place.

It was dark, of course, and it smelled of stale cigarette smoke and cheap cologne. Darkman went past the living room and eased the bedroom door open, the path to sleeping Pauly as clear in his mind as on the night Rick had described it. And Pauly was in there, flat on his back, snarking and snoring. An alarm clock on the stand beside the bed ticked loudly—no competition, though, for Pauly’s slobbers. Darkman withdrew a large wad of cotton from one suit-coat pocket, a bottle from the other. This stuff was Nacoxidin liquid, light-years ahead of chloroform or ether, both of which wore off in several seconds. Two whiffs of Nacoxidin could knock out a rhino and keep him that way for hours.

He doused the cotton with it, holding his head to the side. The fumes were practically non-odorous and thus very dangerous. Darkman held his breath and advanced on Pauly’s noisily sleeping form.

The alarm clock went off like a hurricane of bells. Darkman shoved the Nacoxidin in a pocket and fumbled for it. No snooze button in this little jewel; it was an old-fashioned job you had to wind up.

Pauly sat up in bed while Darkman fumbled with the clock. It thumped to the floor with a clang.

“Huh?” Pauly said.

Darkman whirled, seeing that his careful plans were headed for the tubes, and mashed the cotton over Pauly’s nose and mouth.

He went limp instantly. Darkman, still holding his breath, ran for the window, jerked it open, and threw the cotton outside, down seventeen floors to the sidewalk. He hung his head out and breathed for a while. No major problems yet. The rest should be easy.

He felt through Pauly’s closet and found a suitcase. He stuffed it full of Pauly’s clothes, carefully ransacking drawers, then snapped it shut. Out of his coat pocket he withdrew the two airline tickets the fat lady had sold him. He placed them atop the suitcase. Before he left, he found some of Pauly’s cheap cologne in the bathroom and splashed himself with it. The medicine cabinet was stocked full of Maalox, and he took a bottle.

And then he did leave, hiding himself in an alley behind some garbage cans, because what happened next was up to Durant.

20

What a Ruckus

D
ARKMAN AWOKE WITH
a jerk and didn’t know where he was. He looked around, groggy and disoriented, and then everything packed itself into place, his connections with the past and the present fusing into something coherent, something real.