Darkman (28 page)

A fat piece of pipe.

Martinez threw it out the loading dock door, not understanding why his heart was hammering so hard. Hadn’t he thought—just for a moment—that he had stepped on an arm or a leg? Crazy. No one was here but the bugs and rats.

He looked around some more. The smell of moldy wet cardboard was nauseating. Water was dripping somewhere, ghost splashes in the poor light. He threw damp wooden crates aside, which splintered into mush in his hands. His stomach was trying to get bad.

He stepped on something else, and had to do the boogie-woogie once more or fall into the debris and maybe get a stick in the back. When he had his balance, he picked up the piece of debris and was about to . . .

debris?

. . . throw it when he glanced at it and saw that it was an old skull, one that was crumbling in his hand, wet gray bone-meal making his fingers feel sandy. As he looked, horrified, a small rat wormed out of one eyehole and looked at him with shiny black eyes, its whiskers twitching.

He screamed and dropped it. It made a wet plopping sound on the cement. The rat squealed. Martinez danced his way out of the garbage pile and made it to the safe light of the dock. He leaned against the wall, panting.

“Over here,” Smiley brayed from somewhere in the darkness. “Come on!”

He made himself go. The boss’s punishment would make that little face-to-face with a rat seem mild in comparison to the tortures Durant could dream up. He had once poked white-hot nails into a man’s eyes while Martinez held him down. This did not amuse Martinez, nor the man he was holding captive.

So, yeah, you bet I’m coming, Smiley. I wouldn’t miss this for the world. I could have been a contender, but I don’t want to be a corpse, so I very much want a ringside seat at the Westlake funeral.

He found Smiley, who was already on the stairs. They looked mushy and rotten, the railing long since fallen off, rusty nails poking up here and there to snag incautious feet. Martinez waited until Smiley was up, then made his own way, ready to abandon ship if this soggy staircase decided to sink. But he made it to the top and it was much better here. There was a breeze and light and not much debris.

“I think it was that window,” Smiley said, pointing left.

They walked that way, spooks and creeps and crawling flesh forgotten. They came to Westlake’s body, the thickly wrapped head as good as exploded, the gauze hands splayed out beside the body, which was cut off at the waist and spilling what looked like wet newspaper onto the floor.

Martinez and Smiley exchanged incredulous glances. Smiley kicked the thing and it flew a bit before landing a few feet away. The head fell off and rolled in its direction of choice, light as a puff of cotton.

“Oh, shit,” Smiley muttered. “Oh, damn. Oh, hell.”

Martinez was silent. The spooks and creeps and crawling flesh were coming back, stronger than ever.

“What do we do now?” Smiley asked, whining, as if Martinez were the mastermind of this little troupe.

“Call the fucking boss,” Martinez snapped. “Where’s your radio?”

“Mine?” Smiley’s smile was a thin bloodless slash. “In the car. Where’s yours?”

“Same.”

“Well then, what?”

“I want out of this place.”

“Ditto.”

They scrambled to the dark rectangle that opened on the stairway. Smiley jumped down first, rattling down the rotted steps two at a time, and Martinez had a foot out and was ready to follow when Smiley screamed. There was a huge flash of light, a burst as fast as a thunderbolt. Martinez shrank away from it, reaching for his pistol.

Silence. Martinez clicked the safety off the pistol while sweat beaded up on his forehead.
“Smiley!”
he hissed into the blackness, the hairs on the back of his neck spiking up as his fear grew. “
Goddammit, Smiley, what happened?”

“Shit,” Smiley replied. “Rudy, come down here and help me out of this stupid mess.”

“What happened?”

“Stair broke. Scared me half to death. I thought something had grabbed my foot.”

Martinez blew a long, gratified sigh. No death here, no danger. Just rotten wood. He put his pistol away and, stepping lightly, went down, then grabbed Smiley under the shoulders and hoisted him while Smiley kicked free of the splintered wood.

“I wonder what the deal is,” Smiley said with a grunt. “This Westlake must love dangerous stairs. Remember his old lab, the one we blew up?”

“Yeah. Fifth step missing.”

“How many steps are behind us?”

Martinez walked his hands back up the stairs. “Five.”

“Coincidence?”

“Don’t know.” Martinez edged down past Smiley, a puzzling thought rising in his mind. He stepped past the ruined step, stuck his hand down into blackness, and felt around.

Shards of soggy wood, some with nails hanging out. A length of twine, stretched taut.

He backed down to the floor and went under the stairwell, found the twine again, and followed it through eyebolts and hooks set in the wall to a spot twelve feet away. His hands found a tripod. He followed its slick aluminum legs to a camera screwed on top. He caressed it, frowning, blind. The twine was hooked to the camera’s shutter button with some kind of gizmo. The flash unit on top was still warm.

“We got trouble,” Martinez said. “But I don’t know what kind.”

Smiley came down, his B.O. following in a cloud. He gave the camera a similar feel-over. “Took our picture, seems like. What for?”

“I swear I don’t know.”

“I’ll tell you what,” Smiley said grimly. “I happen to be camera-shy because of all the damn police photos I’ve had to stand for. So when some civilian ass wipe snaps my photo, I usually grab the damn camera and rip the film out.”

“So?”

“So this.”

Martinez waited. Smiley fumbled with the camera. The back opened with a tiny “boing,” and the fine, clean smell of a Japanese camera factory wafted out. Pretty new, then.

“Bingo,” Smiley said, and dug for the film.

The camera was empty.

“It’s time,” he said gravely, “to get the fuck out of here.”

Martinez could not agree more.

33

Darkman

H
UNCHED OVER THE
computer keyboard, his heart hammering, finger bones chattering against the keys, invisible sweat cascading down his face.

A freshly developed photograph hanging in front of him, still wet and dripping. Smiley’s face, frozen in time, eyes wide with surprise, mouth open, foot beginning its crash through the step Darkman had cut almost in two.

The thin, twisted face of Martinez, one cowboy boot slung over the first step, hands on each side of the door frame as if preparing to parachute out of a plane.

The loading-dock door, still open, the generator putting out a gentle purr as it kept all the lab equipment running, but not the lights.

Distantly the flapping noises of a helicopter.

And time running out.

34

Martinez

T
HE HELICOPTER
D
URANT
had managed to obtain for this tremendous undertaking landed a few minutes later on the street between the junk heap that Skip dared call a car, and the car Smiley had been driving, Durant’s own Continental. The helicopter’s noisy tornado of wind swept away the last remnants of smoke, and rolled a large amount of paper and similar debris out of the gutters to tumble against the deserted buildings. Skip rolled his window up against the wind and the noise, even though the sun was beating down as if it thought this were still balmy summer, Indian summer. In the back Julie pounded on the walls of the Javelin’s pitifully small trunk. Skip wondered idly if she might suffocate back there. He found that he didn’t care one bit. Hauling that banshee around had made his stump sore where it met the prosthesis, the fabled machine-gun leg, so to hell with her.

The wind died a bit as the motor wound down to idle, and Robert G. Durant, in his finest blue polyester suit, hurried over. Skip rolled his window down again.

“Where’s Westlake’s body?” Durant snarled in his face, but Skip could only shrug. He didn’t have a clue.

“Where’s Martinez? Where’s Smiley?”

The two men in question came charging through the door of the building just then, as if chased by wolves. The large steel door behind them clanged open and shut, thunking against its frame. Both men looked somewhat pale and shaky.

“Where is it?” Durant barked at them. “Where’s the goddamn corpse?”

They skidded to a stop and began inspecting their shoes, fidgeting. Both wore a bright coating of sweat on their arms and faces.

“Talk to me!”
Durant shouted.

Martinez spoke up first. “Well,” he said, “well, boss, it seems that I, um, I . . .”

“Shot a dummy instead of Westlake,” Smiley finished, doing his best to make Martinez the whipping boy in this little scene.

Durant frowned wickedly, his eyes snapping back and forth between the two. “What dummy?” he asked softly.

Smiley smiled as always. “Westlake made it, I bet. He stuck it in a window for us to shoot at.”

“Must have thought you two were really dumb, huh?” Durant said very quietly.

“Guess so,” Smiley said. He eyed Durant hopefully. “So it’s no big deal, huh? One little mistake. And how were we supposed to know he was gonna take our picture?”

Martinez helplessly ground his teeth.

Durant’s eyes eased shut. His face shifted into a gentle smile. “You shot a dummy and then posed for a picture. That is really something. Yeah, something.”

Smiley giggled. “He had a trap set up for us, and I stepped right into it. You shoulda seen it. Foof! Like that old show
Candid Camera,
a little. I hope I was smiling!”

Durant nodded. “Of course you were smiling, Smiley. And I bet Martinez was holding two fingers behind your head to make you look like a rabbit.”

“Nah.” He turned to Martinez. “You didn’t, did you? I’d hate to look stupid in my picture.”

“You fucking idiots!”
Durant screamed, turning purple. Martinez flinched back. Smiley frowned for the first time in six years. Durant seemed well down the road to insanity, skin mottled, eyes bulging, a barrage of spit misting past his lips, his hands waving too fast to follow.
“You stupid brainless wonders! Get back in there and waste him!”

“But, boss,” Martinez whined, “it’s darker than midnight in there, and so full of junk, we can’t move around. Westlake’s got some kind of laboratory set up. And traps like you wouldn’t believe. It’s like the Vietnam jungle inside.”

“Do tell,” Durant screeched. He yanked a huge black pistol out of a holster nested below his back, right at his belt line. The odd-looking gun, a modified KG-99—currently in great favor with mobsters and drug runners—caught on his belt and he had to wiggle it a little to pull it free. He raked the cocking lever back, putting thirty rounds of major ammo behind his trigger finger, and waved it at Martinez and Smiley.

“Vietnam was a picnic compared to what I have in mind, if you two don’t go in there and kill Westlake,” he growled, angered into a new and higher frenzy in which they had ever seen him before. “I give you ten minutes. No Westlake, no pay. No pay, no life. Do my village idiots comprehend?”

What the hell is a village idiot? Smiley started to say, but Martinez rammed an elbow into his ribs. Christ, Martinez thought, numb with dread, is this man a moron or what? What a buffoon, this psychotic man-boy named Smiley. Martinez forgot about him and lifted his chin, arranging his face into a Mussolini-style sneer, a sneer of pure bravado with no brains behind the vacuous brown eyes.

“Give us ten minutes, boss. His fingers will become yours.”

Durant took a step toward him, eyes slitted down to microscopic slots, teeth bared. “I don’t want his fingers,” he roared into Martinez’s face, “I want his fucking head!”

“Head it is,” Martinez said briskly, and turned to Smiley, who was smiling no more. If he happened to live long enough, they would soon call him something else. His hair was glued to his forehead with sweat. His dull brown eyebrows twitched up and down a little. His lips had repositioned themselves into an ugly frown, which he would wear to the end of time. As far as the modern world went, Smiley was dead. In his stead, Grouchy was born.