Night & Demons (67 page)

Penske started to say something but thought better of it. He grinned at Coster and raised his own rifle. Instead of a shot, there was a ripping five-round burst, the rifle emptying its own magazine as Penske held the trigger back. Dirt spouted around the bottles, though the last three shots had been slung skyward by the recoiling muzzle.

“Thought you had the only automatic rifle here, huh?” the short man crowed. “Converted this myself, same as one a’ the M1s and the .22 there. Not so special now, are you?”

“You only hit one bottle,” Coster said. His left hand curled around the grip on the rifle’s forearm.

“Only one?” Penske cried in a fury. “A man’s a lot bigger target’n a goddam bottle!”

Metal clicked as Coster’s forefinger slid forward the safety catch in his rifle’s trigger guard. Speech crumbled into the shattering muzzle blasts of the automatic rifle.

Coster ignored the nearest targets. The bottles at 200, then 300, yards disintegrated in pluming earth. The weapon fired in short bursts of two and three rounds, the muzzle recovering momentarily between blasts to snuffle another target. When the bolt locked back on an empty magazine, there was nothing but dust and glass shards at either aiming point.

Coster’s fingers relaxed on the handgrips. He extracted the magazine and began thumbing cartridges into it from a box on the ground. He looked sidelong at Penske.

“We’ll try the moving one, wise guy,” the shorter man said.

Behind them, Kerr had gotten out of the van. “What kind of gun is that?” he asked.

“M14E2,” Penske replied. “The squad automatic version of the standard M14. Has pistolgrips and a straight-line stock. Made goddam few of ’em, too, before they switched from the fourteen to the sixteen.” He looked at Coster. “Hey, ain’t that so?”

Coster shrugged and locked home his magazine. Heat waves danced from the tip of the barrel where metal was exposed to the air.

“Well, don’t you even goddam know?” Penske demanded. “How’d you get that rifle, anyway?”

The rifleman looked at him. “You’d better hope you never learn,” he said. “Now, are we going to shoot guns or talk about them?”

“We’ll shoot,” the smaller man said fiercely. “We’ll goddam shoot.” He pointed to the gallon milk jug suspended beside the engineer stake. “One line’s through the handle, the other’s tied to it,” he said. “When I pull this one—” he gestured with the loop of wire-core clothes line in his left-hand—” the jug runs to the other post. Don’t sweat, I poured it full a’ dirt so it’ll show if you hit it. If you hit it.”

“Then pull,” Coster said, and braced himself. His knuckles were as white as Davidson’s had been. His head, hunched low, looked more like that of a man trying to hide than one aiming.

Penske chuckled. “Won’t hit nothing but air if you’re that scared a’ your weapon,” he said. He tugged two-handed at the line bent around the fencepost. The jug spurted sideways and the first three bullets ripped it. Sandy loam sprayed from the torn plastic in all directions. The impacts spun the jug around its support line and the second burst caught it at the tip of its arc. Dirt flew again and both lines parted. The gun muzzle tracked the flying container, spiked it in the air, and then followed it down the swale, the bullets themselves kicking their target into a semblance of life.

Flying brass had driven Kerr back from where he stood to Coster’s right. Now he massaged his left fist with his right palm, watching the rifleman reload methodically.

“That enough?” Coster asked. Kerr nodded.

Penske had silently begun to gather up the paraphernalia they had brought. Suddenly he stopped, staring at the empty cartridge box he held in his hand. “You reloaded from this,” he said, waving the box in Coster’s face. “Last time.”

“So?” said the rifleman. “You want me to pay you for them?”

“You stupid bastard!”the shorter man blazed. “This was .30-’06 for my Remington there. It won’t
fit
a goddam M14. You need .308!”

“Then I didn’t use your ammunition after all,” Coster said, backing a step. “I brought my own in my kit, you know.” His foot tapped the AWOL bag gently.

“Let’s see that goddam rifle,” said Penske, lunging forward, and the safety clicked off with the muzzle only six inches from the bridge of his nose.

“Don’t,” said Coster very quietly.

Sullenly, the ex-soldier backed away. “Somebody gimme a hand with this crap,” he said, thrusting weapons back into their cases.

“We aren’t rivals, you know,” Coster said without lowering the M14. “I wasn’t Oswald’s rival either. If you want a man dead and he dies, what else matters?”

“Just shut the hell up, will you?” Davidson burst out unexpectedly.

The three men looked around in surprise. Davidson’s fists were clenched at waist-height, her elbows splayed. After a moment Coster said, “All right.” He dropped the muzzle of his rifle and began handing guns back into the van.

A mercury-vapor streetlight threw a line of saw teeth through the Venetian blinds to the wall above the couch. Penske lay there, fully clothed, watching the whorls which his cigarette smoke etched across the pattern. The apartment was still.

Penske took a last drag on his cigarette. Its yellow-orange glow was momentarily brighter than the blue of the streetlight. He ground the butt out in the dish with the others and the crumpled pack from which they had come. Then Penske swung his feet over the side of the couch and stood, his right hand silently drawing his knife from its sheath in the same motion. He glided across the worn carpet to the door of Coster’s room.

For a moment the swarthy man waited with his ear pressed against the panel. There was no sound within. The door did not have a working latch; its hinges were nearly silent. Penske pulled the door open just enough to slip through into the pitch-dark bedroom. His whole body followed the knife as if he were a serpent and the blade was his questing tongue.

There was a metallic click from the bed, tiny and lethal as a cobra.

“The light switch is on the right,” Coster said quietly. “Better flip it on. Carefully.”

Penske’s hand found the switch. The room was narrow. The bed lay along its axis, the foot of it pointing to the door. The M14 pointed down that same axis. Coster’s index finger was within the trigger guard. The safety catch had clicked as it slid forward. The shorter man stared at the muzzle brake of the automatic rifle. He remembered the way bullets had shredded the earth-filled jug that morning. Now his blood and tissue and splinters of his bones would spray the inside of the door panel.

“Put your knife away,” Coster said.

The shorter man only blinked.

“We’re not here to kill you, Penske,” said the automatic rifleman. His voice was calm, almost wheedling. “Put your knife away and close my door behind you. It’ll all look different tomorrow. Kawanishi will be dead, and you’ll have as much of the credit for it as you want.”

Penske swallowed and began to back through the doorway. The gun muzzle waggled disapproval. “First the knife,” Coster said.

The shorter man hunched over, his eyes on the rifle except for quick dips down to the strait boot sheath. He jabbed the point into the flesh above his ankle the first time he tried. At last he succeeded.

“Fine,” said the rifleman. “You can go now.”

Penske’s face contorted with rage. “You bastard, you gotta sleep sometime!” he said.

Coster smiled like a skull. “Do we?”

The swarthy man slammed the door, turned, and jumped back before he realized that the figure hulking on the arm of the couch was Kerr. “What’re you doing up?” Penske demanded in a husky whisper.

Kerr shrugged. “Let’s go out on the landing,” he said. “Dee’s asleep.” But it was toward the rectangle of light around Coster’s door that he nodded.

The second-floor apartment was served by an outside staircase. Its landing formed a small railed balcony, open to crisp air and the stars of early morning. Kerr waved Penske outside, then followed and swung the door closed behind them. The big man was barefoot, but he wore slacks and a shirt. The latter was unbloused to conceal his pistol.

Penske clenched his joined hands. “He can’t shoot,” he said in a low voice. “Not worth a damn.”

“You could have fooled me, then,” said Kerr. “What I saw this morning was pretty convincing.”

“I tell you he’s afraid of it!” Penske burst out. “The recoil, the noise even—he flinched every time Dee shot, and when he was shooting himself—I swear to
God
he kept his eyes shut!”

Kerr’s fingers played at flaking paint from the bars of the railing. His complexion was richened to a true black in the wash of the streetlight. “It looked like that to me, too,” he admitted, “but he hit everything he shot at. He couldn’t have done that if—if you were right.”

“Unless that goddam rifle was alive,” said Penske under his breath. He gripped the railing with both hands. His eyes were focused on the cars parked in the lot beneath them.

“Don’t be a fool,” Kerr snapped.

“George, I’ve
seen
people who can shoot,” Penske said urgently. “That bastard’s not one of ’em. Besides,
nobody’s
that goddam good to shoot like he did offhand. Nobody human. He got it somewhere, and he trained it up to look like an M14 and shoot for him. Christ, he don’t even know the difference from one kinda ammo and another. But it don’t matter ’cause he’s trained this—thing—and it’s just like a guard dog.” The little man paused, breathing deeply. “Or a witch cat,” he added.

Kerr’s index finger began to massage the gum above his bad tooth. “That’s nonsense,” he muttered around his hand. He did not look at Penske.

The smaller man touched Kerr’s wrist. “It
fits,
George,” he said. “It’s the only goddam thing that does. The whole truth an’ nothing but.”

Kerr pursed his lips and said, “If we suppose that . . . what you say . . . could be true, does that change anything?”

“It changes—” Penske blurted, but he stopped when Kerr raised his hand. The question had been rhetorical.

“We accepted him as a man with a sophisticated weapon,” the big man continued as if he had not been interrupted. “That’s no less true now than it was. And our need for his weapon is no less real.”

Penske blinked. “Maybe you know what you’re doing. But I don’t like it.”

Kerr patted him on the shoulder. “After tomorrow it won’t matter,” he said. “After this morning, that is. Let’s both get some sleep.”

Coster’s door was dark when the two men reentered the silent apartment. Everything was peaceful. Penske wondered briefly at what would have happened if instead they had returned determined to kill the automatic rifleman. He took his mind off that thought as he would have taken his hand off a scorpion.

The three men in the back of the van were each expressionless in a different way. Davidson swung to the curb in front of the office building. The street was marked “No Parking” but there was little traffic this early on a Saturday morning. Kerr nodded minusculy. Penske, carrying a Dewar’s carton, scrambled out the back door. Coster followed with a long, flat box stenciled “Ajax Shelving—Light—Adjustable—Efficient.” His right hand reached through a hole in the side of the box, but a casual onlooker would not have noticed that.

The entranceway door was locked. After a moment’s fumbling with the key Kerr had procured, Penske pulled it open. Behind them, the assassins heard the van pull away. It would wait in the lot of a nearby office building until time to pick them up.

The hallways were empty and bright under their banks of fluorescents. Coster stepped toward the elevators but Penske motioned him aside. “We take the fire stairs,” he said. “Get in a elevator’n you got no control. We can’t afford that.”

The stairs were narrow and sterile, gray concrete steps in a dingy yellow well.

Penske slipped once as he took two hurrying steps at a time, barking his shins and falling with a clatter on the box he carried. He got up cursing and continued to leap steps, but now he held the liquor carton in his right hand and gripped the square iron rail with his left. At the third floor landing, the little man pulled open the door and peered suspiciously down the hall.

“Clear,” he said, stepping through. He let the door swing closed as Coster grabbed for it. Penske was opening an office with another key when the rifleman joined him. Then they were inside, the hall door closed and the fluorescents in the ceiling flickering into life.

Coster threw down the shelving box and caressed the M14 with both hands. Penske squatted on the carpet as he reassembled the stock and action of his carbine. He sneered, “You shoulda took that down ’steada hauling a goddam box that size around. Or don’t you know how?”

“I don’t take him down,” said Coster. “You handle your end, I’ll handle mine.”

Penske strutted into the inner office. From the letterheads on the desks, the suite was connected in some fashion or other to the university. The swarthy man pushed a swivel chair aside and raised the Venetian blinds. “There,” he said, waving. “There’s where the bastards’ll be.”

Coster’s slight smile did not change as he ducked a little to follow Penske’s gesture. The rifleman had not visited the ambush site before. The window looked out on a parking lot, almost empty now, and the back street which formed a one-way pair with the street in front of the building. Beyond the lot and the street was a chainlink fence surrounding the building that sprawled across the whole block. The gates were open, but there was a guardhouse with a sign which read “Carr Industries—Knitwear Division.”

The name had amused Kerr.

In the paved yard between the gates and the two-story mill were already gathered a score of newsmen and perhaps an equal number of plain-clothes security personnel. Many of the latter carried attaché cases and binoculars. They looked bored and uncomfortably warm in their suits.

The phone beside Penske rang. He jumped, waggling his carbine. Coster grinned and lifted the instrument out of its cradle. He offered it to the shorter man. Penske glowered. “Yeah, everything’s goddam fine,” he said. “Just don’t screw up yourself.” He laid the receiver down on the desk instead of hanging up. At the other end of the open line was Kerr in a sidewalk phone booth. The sound of the shots through the telephone was the signal to start the van toward the pickup point.