Death Mask (23 page)
"This is your last warning!" warned Officer Gillow, and fired.
Red Mask shuddered, the way that a reflection shudders when you throw a stone into a darkened pool, but apart from that the shot didn't appear to affect him at all. He let out another roar and swung Deputy wildly from side to side. Deputy screamed in pain, until Red Mask swung him sideways and hurled him clear across the office, so that he collided with a thump with the side of one of the cubicles and left streaks of blood down the side of it.
"Hold it right there!" Officer Gillow demanded. "Put your hands on top of your head and kneel down on the floor!"
Red Mask held up the knife in his right hand and then slowly and defiantly drew a second knife out of his coat. His eyes were black slits. His mouth was a gash, like a lizard's.
"Thought you'd be clever, did you?" he said. He turned his head around and looked at each of them in turn.
"I said kneel on the fucking floor, scumbag!" Officer Gillow yelled at him. "Are you deaf, or what?"
"Oh, I can hear you sure enough," said Red Mask. "I can hear you clear as those cicadas. You're loud and irritating and twice as ugly."
"You got three," said Office Gillow, cocking his revolver again, and pointing it directly at Red Mask's chest.
Red Mask slowly approached them. Frank said, "I'd stay back, friend, if I were you."
"Friend? I'm not your friend. But I do know one person here." He turned to Molly, and said, "I know you, don't I, my darling? You and your brushes."
"What the hell is he raving about?" said Officer Gillow.
"Your brushes, my dear…your soft, sable brushes…licking my skin like the tip of your tongue, coaxing out my colors. And your pencils…the way they shade my face and my body so intensely, giving me shape, giving me strength. You have a wonderful gift. You can make life rise up from nothing but whiteness."
They could hear the elevators whining. Any minute, backup would arrive.
Red Mask slowly sank to his knees, although he was still holding the two knives over his head. Officer Gillow stepped up closer to him, pointing his revolver directly at his face.
Red Mask was still staring at Molly. "You gave me personality. You gave me everything. I should be grateful to you, shouldn't I? Except, you know, that I'm not. The only reason you painted me was so that I could be caught, and tried, and sentenced to death. No wonder I have no faith in human kindness."
"Drop the knives!" Officer Gillow demanded. He was almost as red in the face as Red Mask now, and he was sweating.
Red Mask didn't take his eyes off Molly. "But the way you brought me to life…that was so sensual. As soon as you painted my eyes I could see you. But I knew that I wanted revenge. That was all I was born for."
Without warning, he snapped his head around so that he was facing Officer Gillow. Officer Gillow shouted, "Hold it right there!" But Red Mask reared to his feet as if he were a red and black volcano erupting, both of his knives held up high.
Officer Gillow fired two shots. Sissy ducked and covered her ears with her hands. She was sure that Officer Gillow must have hit Red Mask, but the shots didn't seem to have any effect on him at all, except that black tatters flew from the back of his suit.
Trevor came bounding across and tried to jump on Red Mask's back. Molly cried out, "Trevor! Don't!" But Red Mask swung his left elbow behind him, and then his right, and sent Trevor sprawling back onto the floor.
Then, without any hesitation, he brought both knives down into Officer Gillow's shoulders, and into his chest, and into his neck. Officer Gillow staggered backward, with both arms held up in front of him to protect his face, but Red Mask's attack was so furious that he couldn't fend him off. He fell backward over a chair, and then Red Mask was on top of him, his knives flashing like some terrible harvesting machine, chopping him apart.
But Frank was on him now. He grabbed Red Mask around the neck in an armlock and forced his knee into the small of his back.
Red Mask roared, "Get off me! Get off me! I'll cut you to pieces!"
"Oh, yeah? You son of a bitch! Just try it!"
Frank pulled his head up even more, and gripped his right wrist and began to slam it against the side of one of the desks, again and again.
"Get off me! I'm going to cut your guts out for this! Do you want to see your own intestines? I can show you, you maggot, in glorious Technicolor! Get off me!"
Frank slammed Red Mask's wrist right against the edge of the desk, and the knife went flying. Then he twisted him around and made a grab for his left wrist, too, pinning him down.
For almost ten seconds, Red Mask strained against him, glaring directly into his face. But then he let out a bark of triumph. "You're the same as me, goddammit! I can see it in your eyes! I can see it in your face! You're painted, too!"
Sissy cried out, "Frank!"-frightened for him, terrified that Red Mask was going to hurt him, but at the same time pleading for his forgiveness for bringing him back to life.
As Frank and Red Mask continued to struggle, Trevor and Molly had pulled Officer Gillow well away from them. Officer Gillow was decorated in stab wounds, and his uniform was soaked in blood. He was quivering from head to foot, but he was still conscious. He held up his blood-slippery radio and said to Trevor, "Call them. Find out what the fuck is holding them up."
Trevor took the radio and clicked the switch.
"Hello? Hello? This is Trevor Sawyer with Officer Gillow, on the seventeenth floor. We have serious trouble here. Officer Gillow's badly hurt. Hurry!"
"-goddamned elevators are stuck-have to use the stairs-"
"For Christ's sake, hurry! And send paramedics, too!"
Frank and Red Mask struggled and grunted and punched at each other. They rolled over and over across the office floor, colliding with desks and chairs. Red Mask still had one knife left, and he repeatedly jabbed it at Frank's face, trying to put out his eyes.
He succeeded in nicking Frank three or four times on the forehead and once on the bridge of his nose, but Frank had his wrist in too tight a grip for him to succeed in blinding him.
Sissy said to Trevor, "Here-hit him with a chair." But even though Trevor picked up a stacking chair and circled around the two wrestling men, there were rolling over too rapidly for him to be sure that he would hit Red Mask, and not stun Frank instead.
Red Mask grunted and tried to jab at Frank's face again. But Frank managed to pin his wrist to the carpet and punch him on the side of the head. He pulled himself upward so that he could press his right knee on Red Mask's wrist with all of his weight, and at the same time he punched him again and again until Red Mask roared at him in frustration.
"Sissy!" he shouted. "Sissy, your lighter!"
"What?"
"Your lighter! Throw me your lighter!"
Sissy fumbled her lighter out of her purse. Trevor took it from her and tossed it to him. Frank caught it one-handed.
"Frank!" said Sissy.
Frank was sitting astride Red Mask now, but Red Mask was much heavier than Frank, and very strong, and he was gradually forcing Frank to tilt to the right, where his knife blade was still in his hand and sticking upward. One powerful push, and he could force Frank sideways onto the floor, and the point of the knife would be driven straight into his ear.
"No rest for the wicked!" gasped Red Mask. "No mercy for the innocent!"
"Why don't you save your-"
"No mercy for you, either! Nothing for you but blood! And more blood!"
There was a moment of supreme struggle, in which both men were pushing against each other to the very limits of their strength. Frank's teeth were clenched, but Red Mask's mouth remained a black soulless slit. All the same, he was uttering this high, continuous hiss, like steam pressure building up to danger level.
Red Mask was gripping his left wrist, but Frank gradually managed to lift the cigarette lighter up toward Red Mask's face.
His voice dropped an octave. "You wouldn't dare," he said, hoarsely.
"Oh? You don't think so?"
"What are you, some kind of a martyr? I burn, you burn. You think any of these people are worth it?"
"You value your life."
"I was created. I came out of the whiteness. The same way you did. We were like Arctic explorers, lost in the snow, and then one day we just appeared."
Red Mask coughed. It was the first sign of how much physical strain he was under. "You wouldn't throw your life away, would you? Just to punish me?"
Frank flicked the lighter and a long blue flame curved out of it.
Molly called, "Frank! Be careful! Frank-remember that you're only-"
But Frank gradually forced his hand around until the flame was playing directly on Red Mask's cheek. Red Mask screamed, and thrashed, and kicked his legs, but Frank kept the flame concentrated on his face. His red skin crinkled like cellophane, and Sissy could hear it crackle.
"Get that off me! Get that off me!"
Red Mask managed to yank his left arm free and immediately started to stab at Frank's shoulder and sides, screaming all the time. But it was then that his face burst into flame, and then his shoulders, and then his arms.
"Frank!" screamed Sissy. "Oh my God! Frank!"
Frank had caught alight, too. His hair was burning, and within seconds the fire had spread down his back, as if he were wearing a cloak made of waving flames.
Frank and Red Mask then screamed at each other in a terrible chorus of hatred and pain. Then they both exploded. A huge orange fireball rolled across the office, and it was them, rolling over and over. They collided with a central pillar and then they stopped, still blazing so fiercely that Sissy had to raise her hand in front of her face to prevent her cheek from being scorched.
There was a second explosion, and then the whole office was filled with a whirlwind of white ash, which spun around and around and filled the air from floor to ceiling. The whirlwind was furious, but almost silent, and after less than a minute it gradually began to die down.
Sissy and Molly and Trevor stood amongst the softly settling ash. It reminded Sissy of the first Christmas she had spent alone after Frank had been killed. She had walked out into the yard and the snow was falling.
"You did it to me again, Frank," she whispered. She couldn't stop her eyes from filling up with tears.
Trevor knelt down beside Officer Gillow. The policeman was groaning and coughing, but he was still alive. Sissy knelt down beside him, too, and took hold of his hand, sticky fingered with blood.
"What's your name, Officer?"
"Herbert, ma'am, but everybody calls me Duke."
"Well, you're going to be okay, Duke. I'm a psychic and I can feel it. You're going to recover, I promise you."
"You don't have to lie to me, ma'am."
"I wouldn't, and I'm not. But after you've gotten yourself well, you're going to retire from the police department so that you can run your own business. A bakery, maybe, or a restaurant. You're going to get married and you're going to have at least five children, all girls."
Officer Gillow blinked up at her, his face speckled with ash. "Five girls?" he asked her, and a bubble of blood popped between his lips. "Why don't you just let me die?"
Molly came back from the other side of the office.
"Poor Deputy's dead."
Sissy stood up and took hold of her hand and squeezed it. "Deputy did us proud. And remember, he was only made of paint and paper."
She didn't have to add that Red Mask and Frank were only made of paint and paper, too. Their ashes were still tumbling across the carpet.
"Only Deputy could have picked up Red Mask's scent," she said. "And only Frank could have burned him. Look how many times Red Mask was shot, and it didn't affect him one bit."
"We still have another Red Mask to find," Molly reminded her. "And the police still don't have any leads at all on the real Red Mask."
"Well-finding the real one, that's up to them," said Sissy. "We can only find the painted ones."
They heard pattering footsteps and clattering noises from the stairwell, and somebody shouting, "Breaching ram! Bring up that breaching ram!"
"Do you hear that, Duke?" Sissy told Officer Gillow. "Your buddies are coming to get you. You'll soon be fixed up."
A loud banging came from the stairwell doors, and then they heard the locks break open. Trevor came up to Sissy and laid his hand on her shoulder. "How are we going to explain this, Momma?"
"All we can do is tell the truth. Whether they believe us or not, that's up to them."
"I just want to say that-Everything I used to say about your psychic stuff-"
Sissy reached up and patted his hand. "You don't have to say a word. Even I find this hard to believe, and me, I've had conversations with real live dead people. It's like a dream, isn't it? Your father, and everything. I keep thinking I'm going to wake up and I'll be back in my bed in Connecticut."
A half dozen police officers and two young paramedics came weaving their way between the cubicles. The paramedics immediately started work on Officer Gillow, cutting off his shirt, while two of the police officers came up to Sissy and Molly and Trevor. One of the officers was big bellied, with a brush mustache. The other was round faced with flaming red cheeks and looked far too young to be a cop.
"What the hell happened here?" asked Brush Mustache.
Before anybody else could answer, Sissy said, "We were looking for forensic evidence."
"You were looking for forensic evidence?"
"That's right. We were checking this office for latent scents when the suspect appeared without any warning and attacked Officer Gillow."
"You were looking for forensic evidence?" Brush Mustache repeated. "You?"
"Well, not just me. Me and my son and my daughter-in-law."
"It was authorized by Lieutenant Booker and Detective Bellman," Molly put in. "I'm an accredited CPD sketch artist, and my mother-in-law…she has special forensic expertise."
The officer turned to Molly, in her flowery blue gypsy blouse and her tight designer jeans. Then he looked Sissy up and down-a seventy-one-year-old woman with wild hair and silver bangles and a black and silver dress with moons and stars on it.
"Special forensic expertise?" he said. "I'll bet."
"We had a scenting dog with us," Trevor explained. "He tracked Red Mask to that closet. Officer Gillow kicked down the door and all hell broke loose."
"That the dog there?"
Trevor nodded. "Red Mask stabbed him to death, and then he went for Officer Gillow. He was like a crazy person. A lunatic."
The officers looked around the ash-strewn office. "So where is he now? This Red Mask character?"
"He disappeared," said Sissy, promptly.
"Okay-which way did he go?"
"I couldn't exactly say. There was so much confusion, you know. Stabbing, shouting. It was like he vanished into thin air."
"Did you see which way he went?" Brush Mustache asked Trevor, as if Trevor was his last hope of getting a sane answer.
"I, um. No. Not really."
"So what's all this fire damage, all this ash?"
"Some paper caught light, that's all. It got a little out of hand."
"Some paper caught light? I see. How did that happen?"
"Listen," said Sissy. "Is Detective Bellman with you?"
"Detective Bellman took the elevator, so he's trapped between floors. The engineers reckon at least a half hour before they can get it working again."
"I really need to talk to Detective Bellman. He'll understand what happened here."
Brush Mustache jammed his notebook into his breast pocket. "Okay, ma'am. That's fine by me, so long as you don't mind sticking around to make a statement. But you will stick around, won't you? You won't leave the building?"
"Of course not. I'll wait in the lobby."
Brush Mustache and his red-cheeked partner went across to examine the black scorch marks on the office carpet. One of the burns distinctly resembled the outline of a man with one arm outstretched.
Trevor said, "Are you going to be okay with the stairs, Momma? It's seventeen flights down to ground level."
Sissy picked up her purse. As she did so, she lifted her head and frowned.
"Momma? We can always wait till they fix the elevators."
"Actually, sweetheart, I think I'm going to go up first."
"Up? What the hell for?"
"If I remember rightly, George Woods used to work on the nineteenth floor, didn't he, Molly?"
"Yes," said Molly. "He was a Realtor for Ohio Relocations."
"I'd like to go up and take a look-see."
"I don't understand."
"I'm not so sure that I understand, either. I have one of my tingles, that's all. George Woods told a deliberate lie during my séance."
"So?"
"It's very rare for gone-beyonders to tell lies, even to spare the feelings of the loved ones they've left behind. I told Frank about it, and he was interested to know what George Woods was lying about, too."
As Sissy and Molly and Trevor walked across to the stairwell, Brush Mustache called out, "Can you manage all those stairs, ma'am?"
"I'm not an invalid, Officer. I walk ten miles a day, as a rule, and I smoke forty cigarettes down to the filter."
"Nothing like a healthy lifestyle, ma'am."
As they went through the door, Trevor said, "Listen, I need to go to the office to pick up some paperwork. Why don't I catch you later? I can take a cab home."
"In other words, you don't want to be involved in what I'm going to do now?" Sissy asked him. "Okay…if you feel like you have to."
Trevor lifted both hands. "Momma…psychic investigation, I can put up with. But when it comes to real serial killers…I don't think I really want to know. Especially when you're going to go poking around in somebody's private office. I have my job to think of here."
Sissy tapped her forehead so that the little bell on her index finger jingled. "Sorry, Trevor. There's a little voice inside of me someplace, and it's telling me to go upstairs."
"Yes, Momma. I believe you, Momma. But all I can say is, don't do anything stupid. I don't want you ending up in the women's reformatory, at your age. Molly-make sure she doesn't do anything stupid."
Trevor kissed her on both cheeks, and kissed Molly, too. Then he took the left-hand staircase and went down. Sissy and Molly took a quick look around to make sure that nobody was watching them, took the right-hand staircase, and went up.
"Christ on a bicycle." Sissy found it much harder to climb up two flights of stairs than she had imagined. On the landing of the eighteenth floor, she stopped to take a rest, tilting against the railings, trying to get her breath back.
"What's happened to me, Molly? I used to bound up stairs like a mountain goat."
"I hate to say this, Sissy, but forty years and forty Marlboros a day can take their toll on you."
"I don't believe it. They're just building stairs steeper than they used to, when I was a girl."
"The Giley Building was completed in 1931. You weren't even born in 1931."
"Don't split hairs."
They carried on slowly climbing until they reached the nineteenth floor. Sissy tried the door to Ohio Relocations, and to her surprise it was unlocked.
"This is very handy indeed," said Sissy, as she opened it up and peered into the offices. "I thought I would have to use my lock-picking skills."
"You can pick locks?"
"A very smooth conjuror taught me-amongst other things. All you need is the right kind of hairpin."
"The staff probably left in a panic, after that last attack. Forgot to lock it."
They ventured into the offices. They were laid out in cubicles in much the same way as the office on the seventeenth floor, except that these cubicles had higher sides to them, and the chairs and desks were very much smarter and more modern. The carpets were deep purple, and there was purple lettering across the wall-ohio relocations, moving ohio-and a picture of a circus strongman with an uprooted buckeye tree over his shoulder.
"Sissy," said Molly. "Are you okay?"
"I'm out of breath. Otherwise, I'm hunky-dory."
"You know what I'm talking about. Frank."
Sissy looked away. "That wasn't the real Frank, and you know it."
"He was real enough to make you happy."
"Yes. But I knew that it couldn't last. Apart from anything else, look at the difference in age."
"There's still Red Mask number two."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning we're going to need another Frank. And another Deputy, too."
Sissy pressed her hand over her mouth and kept it there for a long time. Eventually, she said, "If that's what it takes."
"But what about afterward?"
"Afterward?"
"What if Frank survives this time?"
"You have plenty of erasers, don't you?"
"I'm not so sure that you mean that."
"No," said Sissy. "Neither am I. But let's cross that bridge when we come to it, shall we?"
Molly looked into one of the cubicles. "What exactly do you think we're going to find here?"
"I don't know. Let's try the secretary's office."
"You really do have a feeling about this, don't you?"
"Yes, but I don't exactly know what I can feel. During that séance, I think that George Woods was desperately trying to cover something up-something he was ashamed of. Usually, when people die, they don't care what they confess to. They like to clear the air. But George Woods was hiding something, and I'll bet that whatever it was, it had something to do with his life at the office. What other life did he have? He went to work, he came home."
They walked along the corridor until they found a frosted glass door with gold lettering on it-frances delgado, personal assistant. Sissy went inside and looked around. A desk, a PC, a dried-up yucca plant. A bookshelf, with rows of files and framed photographs of Ms. Delgado's family.
Sissy picked up one of the photographs and peered at it through her bifocals. "God almighty. They look like orangutans."
Molly went across to the gray filing cabinet marked "OR Personnel" and tugged the handle, but it was locked. Sissy opened the drawers in Ms. Delgado's desk, but Ms. Delgado was plainly a neat freak, because it contained nothing but Magic Markers in order of color, and paper clips in order of size, and dictation CDs arranged A to Z.
As she closed the drawers, however, Sissy noticed a cardboard box under the side table, the one on which the dried-up yucca stood. She maneuvered the box out with her foot so that she wouldn't have to bend too far, and then she lifted it up onto Ms. Delgado's desk. On the lid was scrawled "G. Woods, desk" in felt-tip marker.
Inside, Sissy found mostly trash. Unused matchbooks from Jeff Ruby's Steak house and Neon's. A dog-eared copy of How To Win At Horse Racing. A blue flashlight with no batteries in it. The instruction booklet for an HP desktop printer. Nail clippers. Six or seven ballpoint pens, all with their ends gnawed. A wooden Indian's head, roughly carved, with the name "Quamus" on it.
She found heaps of old receipts, too. Receipts for gas, receipts for pharmaceuticals, receipts for drinks at Japp's and the Crowne Plaza bar. And five receipts for a dozen roses.