Darkman (27 page)

“Qué?”

“Yeah, and elemenopee too. No sleeping on the job. Remember what happened to Pauly.”

Martinez nodded, rubbed his face. Between the seats were a pair of military walkie-talkies, the bulky green Army-surplus kind most often seen in Central America. Each man was carrying the weapon of his own choosing: Martinez had a double-stacked 9-mm pistol, a Smith and Wesson that held fourteen rounds. Smiley was not so particular: He carried a simple sawed-off shotgun of dubious origin. But it fired, and he had some extra shells, so he was happy.

The walkie-talkies hissed in unison. A moment later Skip was playing Army with the airwaves, and not for the first time. “Mobile unit two to mobile one. Come in, one.”

Smiley grabbed one of them up, mashed it to his ear, and thumbed the talk button. “What now, Major Asshole? Another radio check?”

“Roger, one. Do you read me?”

Martinez snatched up his walkie-talkie. “I’ll be reading your goddamn obituary if you don’t stop playing with your radio. If there’s—”

Suddenly Smiley was pointing. Martinez followed his finger.

The Hastings lady had stopped at the large rusty door of a building that had once been a soap factory. A faded sign on the roof said something about
FR SH SP ASH,
the letters obscured by decades worth of pigeon droppings. Julie had put her shopping bag down and was trying to break open an ancient padlock the size of a hubcap. Smiley stopped and eyed a faded street sign.

“Corner of Beech and One Sixteenth, I think,” he said, and talked to Skip again. “Get your ass here fast. Where the hell are you, anyway?”

“Fuck if I know,” Skip said, and laughed. “Go ahead and grab her. I’ll cruise until I find your location. Shouldn’t be long.”

Smiley was about to bark something unkind when Durant’s voice boomed through the walkie-talkie. “I’m gonna have your balls if you aren’t there in one minute!” he shouted to Skip. There was a lot of noise behind him, the sound of a huge engine and rotors beating the air. How Durant had rounded up such hardware was a mystery to his employees.

“Smiley,” Durant barked over the noise, “give me some smoke. We’re flying in circles.”

“Okay, boss.” Smiley pointed to the backseat with a thumb. There were several old-looking grenades there. One of them had the word
SMOKE
printed on it in fading yellow. Martinez leaned over the seat and picked it up.

“What now?”

“Wait till I get closer, then pitch that fucker out the window.”

Martinez waited. When Skip stopped the car across from the factory and the woman beating on the door there, Martinez pulled the pin and let the elderly grenade fly. It hit the sidewalk near Julie’s feet, rolled to the curb, and instantly began to squirt thick yellow smoke. Smiley’s grin got bigger as he saw her hold her mouth and start to cough. The smoke grenades were fun, but the real fun was in the helicopter with Durant. He had a huge machine gun and about a billion shiny belts of bullets for it, and some kind of black tube on a rack, that fired grenades. Before they left to begin this operation, he had called it his special bonus from Garcia, though Smiley had never heard of a Garcia. It didn’t matter. Durant had assembled the equivalent of a small army, complete with a helicopter and a machine gun and a grenade launcher. But
. . .
why? That Julie Hastings didn’t pose any threat. And Westlake was just one man. So why all the artillery?

“I see it!” Durant shouted, his voice sounding tinny through the walkie-talkies. “We’ll be there in one minute.”

“Okay,” Smiley said.

“Unit two to unit one,” Skip blared. “Unit two to unit one. Come in, unit one.”

It was Martinez’s turn to talk. “You dumb, one-legged, bony-eyed asshole!” he shouted. “Stop fucking around!”

Skip sounded wounded. “I just wanted to tell you I can see the smoke and I’ll be there in just a little while. Do you copy?”

Martinez eyed Smiley, shaking his head. “He’s watched one too many Vietnam shows.” Then, into the walkie-talkie, “Roger Ramjet, Skip. We’ll wait.”

“Ten four,” Skip replied.

“Up yours,” Martinez answered.

So they waited. The smoke was a drifting fog now, Julie a lighter shadow inside it. She was banging on the door in a frenzy, coughing and crying. Smiley happened to look up, and saw a figure behind a shattered window, a man whose head was a ball of white bandages, whose hands were white clubs. He was staring down at Julie, shouting across the distance for her to get away before it was too late.

“Check it out,” Smiley said, and leaned back to let Martinez have a look.

He smiled. “Westlake?”

Smiley nodded. “Gotta be. Groove on those bandages for a while, Rudy. Who else would be wrapped up like that?”

Martinez nodded and picked up his walkie-talkie. “Boss,” he said, “we’ve spotted Westlake through a window. What now?”

Durant’s reply sounded almost rabid.
“Shoot!”

He clicked off, and the two men shrugged at each other. It was too damn easy. They got out, Martinez pulling his pistol out of its hidden holster, Smiley reaching to the backseat for his shotgun. They looked up through the haze of smoke.

Westlake was still there, still screaming down orders to the lady on the ground, the gist of which Smiley could understand quite well. He wanted her to run before the fireworks started. Unfortunately for Smiley, the distance was a bit too far for his shotgun to be effective, though it wouldn’t be hard to bag Julie. She turned and looked through the billowing smoke, tears flowing down her cheeks, her eyes bright with fear and sorrow. Kind of cute, Smiley thought, and wished it was him, and not that idiot Skip, who would get the drop on her. A little tussle in the backseat would be just fine. Perhaps she would bear his children.

He looked back up at Westlake. He was no longer shouting, no longer waving his arms. He looked like a statue.

Smiley nodded to Martinez, who brought his pistol up and steadied it on the roof of the car. He squeezed one eye shut.

Pop!

A chunk of Westlake’s face burst away in an explosion of tattered gauze. He toppled over backward.

Martinex frowned at Smiley, who could only shrug. Westlake was dead. What a fool Durant must be. Smiley leaned inside the car and got the walkie-talkie out. “Boss?”

“Yeah?” He sounded closer now.

“Uh, Westlake’s dead. Martinez nailed him right through the head. Any, uh, other instructions?”

A long pause. Then: “What about the girl?”

Smiley looked. She had sunk to her knees on the crumbling sidewalk and was crying into her grocery bag, looking absolutely miserable. He keyed the walkie-talkie again. “On the ground crying. Should I shoot her?”

“Not yet. Find Westlake’s body and make damn sure he’s dead. The fucker has nine lives.”

“Roger. Out.”

Christ, he was starting to get as goofy as Skip. He motioned to Martinez just as Skip roared up in his junk pile of a car, a 1969 Javelin. His bald tires screeched, and he jumped out. By now the smoke was thinning, along with the smell of burned sulfur. Skip stomped over, his wooden foot slapping on the street inside his Reebok high-tops. “Done already?” he asked, panting, his face glowing with expectation.

“All over,” Martinez said, and Skip’s face drooped. “Only thing left to do is find the bastard’s body. I imagine Durant will want a finger, like always. Skip, put the lady in your car until the boss can figure out what to do with her. She’s a witness to all of this—and he won’t want her alive for long, I imagine. Smiley, what say we go inside and pay our respects to the newly departed?”

They went across the street to the door. Skip hauled Julie upright and kicked the grocery bag away. Forty dollars’ worth of food tumbled out as the bag split open. Mindless with grief and fear, she tore away from Skip and went on her knees to pick the groceries up, sobbing. Skip put his hands under her shoulders and dragged her to the car. She screamed and spit, trying to claw him. He opened the trunk and dumped her inside. “Serves you right!” he snarled after he slammed shut the trunk, then massaged his leg where flesh ended and wood began.

Smiley exploded the old padlock with one close shotgun blast. Most of the pieces clattered down to the cement, very old and very rusty, yet worn to the smooth metal in spots, as if someone had been using it quite often lately. He freed the remains from the hasp, tossed them away, and looked inside.

Dark.

He started in, shotgun ready, Martinez skulking close behind.

32

Martinez

H
E COULD TRAIL
Smiley in the dark because Smiley happened to have more B.O. emanating from his body than a road-killed skunk under a broiling sun. Competing with this unpleasant aroma was the smell of age and dust and decay, a ghost factory where the machines were silently rusting to nothing, walls collapsing, rats inbreeding, mutating. It gave him the spooks, and he wished he had cat eyes to penetrate the musty gloom. All he could see was the back of Smiley’s Scooby-Doo T-shirt, where Scooby was imprinted holding a bowl of dog food in one paw, a kerchief around his neck, tongue hanging out and dripping. Never one for goofy T-shirts, Martinez was wearing his usual Western shirt, Levi’s 501s, and real snakeskin boots. The high heels clicked and gritted on the black cement floor. As he walked behind Smiley he pulled out a comb and ran it through his greasy hair.

Smiley was walking in large circles. Martinez tapped his shoulder.

“Wuh?” Smiley whirled around, banging his shotgun on a rusty pipe that climbed from the floor to the ceiling, slowly dripping foul water. It hummed like a huge tuning fork.

“He’s upstairs,” Martinez whispered. “Find the stairway.”

Smiley slapped at his chest, indicating a heart attack. “Don’t ever do that again, man. And I don’t know where the goddamn stairs are.”

“Find a light switch, then.”

“What do you think I am? The meter reader?”

They walked, grumbling, stumbling over dark things, sidestepping shadows, barking their shins on old cable spools and giant discarded cogs. Weak spears of light shone down the cracks in the ceiling, proving that there was a second floor full of window light. So how did Westlake get up there?

Smiley stopped. “Here’s a cable hanging down. Climb up it.”

Martinez looked up. The cable was anchored somewhere in the ceiling, with no sign of a trapdoor or anything remotely resembling one. He turned on Smiley. “You numskull—what good would that do?”

They walked, getting mad and getting scared. Finally they passed a spot where sunlight beamed through cracks in the wall. Martinez tapped the wall with his foot, and it rattled like an old steel garage door, which it practically was. They had found the loading dock where Bosco’s replacement, and various pizza-delivery boys, feared to tread. Martinez found a handle and pulled the massive door up. Bright sunlight washed in, making them squint.

“What is this?” Smiley breathed.

Martinez turned. His jaw dropped.

It was a gigantic science laboratory, something out of Frankenstein’s era when mad scientists concocted terrible things and made the dead walk. Martinez’s skin tightened into gooseflesh from his ankles to his scalp as he saw what Westlake had done.

Lab tables made from doors and crates, loaded with beakers and petri dishes. Pizza boxes. Exotic things looking much like Julius Kelp’s fabulous machinery in that Jerry Lewis classic,
The Nutty Professor.
Spirals of glass tubing full of green-and-pink fluid. Pizza boxes. Bunsen burners flickering away beneath tall glass beakers in metal stands. Test tubes whirling in a centrifuge, full of pretty colored liquids. Pizza boxes, crushed paper Coke cups. Lengths of twine stretched overhead, some bearing large pictures on clothespins, others draped with some kind of pink, drippy blobs. Pizza boxes. A large computer with a blank screen. Scattered boxes marked IBM. Two tall green tanks labeled
OXYGEN
and
ACETYLENE.

“Jesus,” Smiley whispered. “What
is
all this?”

“Looks like Frankenstein’s dungeon. Let’s go.”

“Huh? And tell the boss Westlake’s dead, even though we can’t be sure? I don’t know about you, but I plan to postpone dying as long as possible.”

Martinez frowned. What was he scared of? He had shot a 9-mm bullet almost dead center in Westlake’s face. White gauze had tattered and flapped before he dipped out of sight. There could be no doubt that he was dead.

But what if Durant wanted a finger? Lately he always did. An immense amount of shit would hit the fan if Durant were lied to and then came in wanting to see the body. What to do? “Golly gee, boss, we couldn’t find the stairs. So sorry.”

“Search for stairs,” he told Smiley, and they split off in two directions, passing around corners, avoiding crumbling pillars, climbing over piles of crates and soggy cardboard. Huge dark rafters spanned the ceiling overhead, but now they were swaybacked and bent, wooden spines holding too much weight too long. Martinez figured the place could collapse at any time, and was probably held together by the tons of cobwebs in its corners. He stepped on something round and nearly lost his balance, his boots tapping out a beat as he fought to remain upright. He bent and picked up the round thing. It was heavy. He brought it to the light.