Dead Man's Hand (8 page)

I took it all in at a glance, but my mind
started running a hamster wheel again over one more detail that
screamed out at me.

This zombie, too, was missing its right
hand.

Lester Rincon, I presumed.

So whose was the other handless corpse with
its head and left arm being dissolved in the vat? Neat Pete must
have had a busy few days.

“
What are you doing?”
Grommet said, clearly surprised at his man’s actions.

“
There’s something else
back there,” he said, cocking his head in the direction he’d just
come. It was all shadows to me, but there must have been a door, a
room where the Grommets had retreated with Rincon when the rest of
the zombies had broken free. They’d come out at the all clear only
to find me about to be dropped into the drink.

Yancy Grommet had no sympathy for his man’s
uneasiness. “Well give him to Mike and get back there and find out
what—”

But that was as far as he got.

At that point things started happening
fast.

A white blur darted out of the shadows and
hit the latest arrival square in the back, making him lurch forward
and knocking the zombie Rincon off balance. A second later, I saw
that the blur was Neat Pete, only not so neat any more. He’d
clearly been bitten in all of the earlier commotion and had
undergone the Turn while hidden away in the back room. Where he’d
been psychotically precise in his actions in life, the undead
version of Pete had no reason to be measured; all the rage he’d had
to channel away to allow for his artistry with a blade came out
now, and he vented it first on the man who’d been wrangling Rincon.
The man went down with Pete on his neck; seconds later blood pooled
on the floor around the Grommets’ feet.

With his neck still collared and the pole
dragging impotently behind him, Rincon regained his balance after
stumbling away from the collision and turned immediately on Mike.
The man whose job it had been to keep his gun trained on the bound
Clancy Grommet hadn’t known what to do in the first moments of the
attack, and so had done nothing to save his compatriot from Pete’s
undead rage. Now, with Rincon loose and coming at him, Mike
panicked, firing three slugs into the zombie’s gut, slowing him for
only a second before he was on Mike. The poor guy tried braining
the zombie with the grip of his pistol as he went down, probably
realizing only in his last second of life that he should have shot
the thing in the head and been done with it.

There was snarling and shouting, the sounds
of tearing flesh and gurgling, slurping revenge being taken on the
living and then the dead. The Grommet brothers, no longer hell bent
on each other’s destruction, had managed to find some coordination
in their four legs and were moving rather quickly away from the
mayhem. Edward had taken his gun away from my head and tried
training it first on one zombie then the other, but the Grommets
were moving straight toward us and so blocked his shot.

Their escape caught Neat Pete’s attention,
and he was no sooner done with his first victim than he was up on
all fours and bounding after the Grommets. He threw himself into
Clancy’s chest, and the three tumbled to the ground.

That was when Edward’s gun went off. He must
have held it almost next to my ear, as a high-pitched whistle was
suddenly all I could hear. The air filled with the smell of
gunpowder, and Neat Pete flew backwards off the Grommets, a spray
of blood from his head wound.

Dazed from the gunshot going off so close, I
just stood there for a second as Edward leapt off the catwalk to go
to his boss. Yancy lay under the bulk of his brother, who had blood
on his shirt. Whether it was Pete’s or his own, I couldn’t
tell.

My only thought was to run, to squeeze past
the van and out the door I’d been forced through earlier. But then
I saw Lester Rincon look up from Mike’s corpse. He ignored the
Grommets and Edward and Pete’s thoroughly dead body and looked
instead right at me.

I had always known that zombies could move
fast. After that night, I could have written a dissertation on that
fact. Rincon was up and at me, speeding across the floor as though
drawn to me by some inexorable force, like we were two magnets that
would fly together solidly if they got even close to each
other.

I could do nothing but take a few steps back
and brace myself. With one heel just at the edge of the vat, I
leaned forward, hoping I could fend him off when he hit the top of
the ramp. But even as he was coming, I knew it wouldn’t go that
way. He’d steamroll me into the same stuff that was busy dissolving
the body beside me.

So, when the zombie hit the top of the ramp,
I leapt forward, telling myself I’d take him out at the ankles. It
worked better than I would have dreamed. I dropped in front of him,
hitting him in the shins with my shoulder. While his body moved
fast, his mind must not have been quite in sync, as he kept going
forward even though he must have seen me crouch before him. He
tripped clumsily against me and then sailed over my body.

If I’d been possessed of the slightest bit
of grace, I would have continued my roll, popped up on my feet and
turned to make sure he wasn’t coming back at me. But grace has
never been my strong suit. I ended up rolling off the side of the
ramp and hitting the concrete floor head first, my body rolling
over my neck and my feet flying out over me so I landed flat on my
back with a thump. The drop didn’t knock the wind out of me, but I
lay there for a few seconds anyway just trying to make sure that I
really had survived.

Then I got to my feet and crouched again,
ready to bolt. But when I looked up onto the platform where I’d
been standing seconds before, all I saw was the first dead zombie,
the one I’d thought was Rincon. And as for Rincon himself, I could
see nothing but the metal pole that had been fastened to his neck.
It stuck straight up out of the vat for a second as the zombie
thrashed around in the liquid, and then it sank as the chemicals
began to do their work on the already compromised body.

I thought for a second of running up the
ramp to grab the pole and fish him out, if only to save the
remaining hand, but there was no use, and I really didn’t want to
get my hands on that pole now that it was wet from whatever was in
that vat. It wasn’t like I carried rubber gloves or anything. Plus,
I really didn’t want to try that hard.

When I turned from the vat, I saw Edward
trying to help the Grommets to sit up. It required a lot of moving
of legs and shifting of weight, all of which was rather undignified
for the conjoined mobsters, and they both cursed him as he worked.
In their twisting around, I could see each brother’s face, and they
both looked scared, though not just from the attack.

Edward saw me looking and said, “He’s bit.
What do we do?”

The blood I’d seen on Clancy’s shirt hadn’t
just been from Pete getting shot. The former blade man had taken a
little chunk out of Clancy’s pectoral muscle, right through his
shirt—one last betrayal of his boss. Now the question of whether
the brothers shared more than just skin and bone would be answered.
Clancy was bound to Turn, but would Yancy, too? And what would it
be like being joined at the head to a thrashing, raging, flesh
hungry zombie if it turned out that only one brother should Turn? I
supposed if anyone deserved to find out, it had to be one of the
Grommets.

Edward looked at me, expectant, as though he
figured I’d know what to do, as though I had some expertise in this
area. And, of course, I did. Zombies, vile and dangerous though
they were, were my people, too.

The thing was: I was faced with a choice.
Rescue one or both of the Grommets and earn whatever passed for
gratitude among their kind as they went back to double-crossing
each other in more conventional ways. Or let one or both Grommets
die, their criminal empires expiring with them. I’d be a hero to
many, having effectively dropped a house on two witches at the same
time. But it would only have meant watching over the next couple of
months as petty thugs and killers nastier than Neat Pete struggled
over bits of the Grommets’ turf. After a while, two or three would
emerge, clamp down on the rest, and the city would be back to what
it was now—only with criminal overlords of a type I couldn’t know
or predict.

It took me only a few seconds to see I
really didn’t have a choice. It was a case of the devil you knew
and the devil you didn’t. I reached into my back pocket and pulled
out the case containing Drea’s antidote.

“
We can talk later about
what this is worth to you,” I said, my voice still hollow in my
ears from the effects of the gunshot.

Seven

“
That ought to do it,”
Bascom Quibble said, pulling the needle out of the hand and
stepping away from the table.

He looked disgusted, like he was a stuffy
art collector who’d just had to purchase a comic book for a
nine-year-old.

The hypodermic fitted neatly into a
foam-lined case, which he zipped shut with finality and tucked into
his briefcase.

“
We’re done then?” he
asked, looking from me to Pixel.

“
No quality control?” I
asked.

He narrowed his eyes at me and then answered
his own question. “We’re done. I’ll see myself out.”

He turned without another word and was out
the door in seconds.

I was glad to see him go, having already
told myself he’d have to find someone else the next time he or his
girlfriend got themselves into a jam. I didn’t like the way they
worked.

Pixel barely noticed Bascom’s passing. I
could see she was nervous. She looked at the severed hand where it
sat on a plastic cutting board that she’d placed on the plain pine
boards that made her coffee table, her lips held tightly together
and sucked in between her teeth just a bit. I doubted she got this
tense when doing a major hack. Lester Rincon’s hand was a bigger
deal than anything else she’d done in a long time.

I’d phoned Pixel the night before after
walking out of the drug lab with all my body parts intact to tell
her it looked like I’d be able to get Bascom Quibble to work his
magic on the hand. It had been good news, but she still hadn’t
heard from her old man, and his absence was starting to get to her.
At the time, I hadn’t felt all that sympathetic: I was exhausted
and shaken up and still wondering why I’d started down this path in
the first place. I still didn’t know if she’d been straight with
me, if she was spending her down time getting rolled with the drugs
Neat Pete had been overseeing at the lab, or if that smell I’d
picked up on the night she’d shown me the hand had just been the
lingering scent of her dinner.

I’d decided it didn’t matter; the ride I was
on with her was about done now, and I didn’t have to have all the
facts in order to be able to get out and walk away. If the hand
failed to re-animate, I wouldn’t be getting a vacation, but at
least I had the satisfaction of knowing the Grommets were beholden
to me. Sure, I could call in the favor and use it to have Max
Patterson’s debts forgiven, but Pixel would have to prove herself
worth it first.

On the phone, I’d insisted on a day’s rest
and had set up the meeting at her place for the early evening. Now,
after having slept till almost noon and worked on a few loose ends
with other cases, I stood here with Pixel and watched the dead
man’s hand as it began to twitch.

“
My God,” Pixel whispered
when she saw that Bascom’s process was beginning to
work.

She reached for it, but I stayed her hand.
“Be careful.”

She gave me a quizzical look. “It’s not like
it has teeth.”

I gave her a be-my-guest gesture and stepped
aside. Pixel must have re-thought it for a moment, as she picked up
the cutting board rather than just lifting the hand off it. She
carried the whole thing to her computer desk and set it down in
front of the keyboard. Then, a bit gingerly, she grabbed the thing
near its base and nudged it forward, lifting it just a little to
place the fingers on the keys.

We waited, both of us expecting the muscle
memory to kick in at the familiar feel of the keys beneath its
fingertips.

But nothing happened.

We waited longer, and the hand just
twitched.

It wasn’t going to work. Pixel’s plan had
been an interesting one, but nothing more. All those dead men last
night, me almost among them, all for nothing. No pay off for Pixel,
no vacation for me. All wasted.

And then, after a few seconds more, I
understood why.

“
It’s not going to work,” I
said. “Not like this.”

Pixel gave me another questioning look.

I nodded toward the desk. “Put the hand on
your tablet.”

“
My tablet?” she asked. “I
don’t get it. Why would…?”

“
Just try it.”

She pulled a drawer open, took out her
tablet, and switched it on. When it had booted up and she’d called
up the keyboard, she set it down on the cutting board and picked
the hand up, not so gingerly this time, to place it on the
tablet.

Almost immediately, the
fingers began to move.
P
, it typed. Then
I
. I glanced at Pixel, my teeth
gritted. The
X
followed, and I wished I’d kept my mouth shut. The
E
came next, and then
the
L.
It paused
and started with the
P
again.

Pixel looked at me, her mouth open now,
confusion on her every feature.

“
Ace…” she said. “Why would
Lester Rincon be typing my name?”