On the Nickel (23 page)

Jack Liffey went ahead of their party, and the world started to get even darker, and damper. No lights were on anywhere. At the top of the second flight, he kept to the right, feeling the wet heat off to his left and hearing the ugly hiss grow insistent. He tested the blowing spout of steam with an outstretched hand and yanked away when he found it grew scalding fast. The source had to be superheated vapor, like from a boiler. There was a little outside light from the end of the hallway, and as his eyes adjusted he could see that the enraged fizz seemed to be erupting from an open rectangle on the wall.

‘Stay all the way to the right, folks,' Jack Liffey called behind him. ‘On the left, the steam gets hot enough to burn.'

For some reason, nothing was really worrying him. The vitriol of weeks of bondage to the wheelchair seemed to have drained out of him, and he was freewheeling now on a kind of recovery euphoria. He'd been intimate with drugs and drink long ago, and this was as good as that, he thought – a buzz like a couple of serious drinks.

Up another half flight of regathering darkness, he came up against a wire barrier that was almost invisible. Wires, hard edges. A flickery lantern light began to move around on the upward side to help a little. He made out a tangle of innersprings and random chairs that had all been taped and wired together.

‘Jack here!' he called. ‘How the hell did you folks figure on getting out of here for food?'

A small balding man in a brown wooly suit stepped into the lantern light. He was doing his best to look fierce, arms akimbo, but really only managed to look like a constipated Leprechaun.

‘We don't anticipate the standoff lasting forever, Mr Liffey. We just have to make it known we're still here. If we slow the whole process down, maybe Vartabedian Enterprises can't strip everything out of the hotel and go forward with the loft conversion.'

He could sense the worry underlying the man's voice. How simple and true, he thought. ‘This is going to be yuppie lofts?
This?'

‘I know, man.
Feh
!'

‘Maeve, come out and talk please,' Jack Liffey called.

Then a door slammed well below them and they all turned abruptly. Probably the street door since a faint purr of the ambience of the outside world abruptly ceased. Uh-oh, he thought. Incoming.

‘Tell me you didn't know they were right behind you,' the little man challenged.

‘Man, look, I'm your best friend. Believe me. My daughter's up there. But we're stuck on the wrong side of your barrier.' He touched his .38 momentarily. ‘Does one of the guys you're expecting have golden dreadlocks?'

McCall and Thibodeaux stared up the linoleum staircase, listening to the faint voices under the insistent fizzing sound and feeling something like a condensation on the air, vaguely warm.

‘What the hell?' McCall said softly. ‘The boiler's fail-safe. I worked on this shit in Chicago. You can't fire it up if there's no back pressure in the steam line.'

‘Only bitches got teats,' Thibodeaux said. ‘But then you and me got teats.'

The big man's evil eye came around on him. ‘Why are we talking about this? Is this more of your Nietzsche shit?' McCall said.

‘And here we are.' The little man took out a big ugly K-bar Special Forces killing knife that he'd picked up somewhere. ‘Yo, fuckers. This has all been unacceptable from the beginning.'

Thibodeaux turned and charged up the steps, well ahead of McCall, who sighed and then plodded after him in his long-suffering way, heading into the unintelligible howl of the world and in no particular hurry to run himelf into another hornets' nest. Then Thibodeaux screamed up ahead of him, and McCall heard the knife drop to thunk into the linoleum.

* * *

Maeve was wriggling her way down the outside of the barricade like a caterpillar, forcing her way underneath, ripping tape free and shoving aside corners of bare bedsprings, pushing under and through the tangled mass of junk. The lantern up above showed her progress.

The two short old men beside the lantern were not very pleased to see how easily she was getting through, evidently suspecting a kind of treason.

‘You gotta crawl under stuff the way I'm doing,' Maeve announced to those below.

‘You left a path for the
shaygets
to get at us!'

Maeve ignored the complaint from above as her head emerged at the bottom, pushing aside a big oblong of torn plywood. ‘Quick! Everybody.' She beckoned them to follow her back up. ‘Stay in the corner over here. Push stuff up or away really hard and tuck under.'

They heard running footsteps down below and then a terrible scream. Jack Liffey decided not to argue about anything. Maeve lifted the plywood for the little girl first and then Felice, and then she wriggled ahead to hold the bedsprings open at the next level. Jack Liffey went last, holding up his own barriers.

‘Gentlemen, give us a hand!' Jack Liffey called. Reluctantly the men began to tug at the upper reaches of the barricade.

Maeve seemed a bit jittery. ‘I better seal it back! Dad, go past me.'

It was a lot harder than it looked, since he was bigger than any of them and sapped by his weeks of immobility. He went over on his back and wormed himself up the stairs, pushing with his legs, the bare bedsprings riding painfully across his face and scraping down his body. Maeve wriggled behind him, carrying a roll of silver duct tape, waiting for him to clear a little space for her.

Thibodeaux came running blindly down the steps, his hands clapped to his eyes, and McCall tried to catch him, nearly bowling them both over in near darkness. McCall lifted him up bodily and held his still running feet above the steps as the man whimpered and cried.

‘Jaysus, man, suck it up! Be frosty now!'

‘They blinded me!'

‘Shit, stay right here.' McCall set him down hard at the foot of the steps, against a wall, and hurried upward, drawing the huge .50-caliber Desert Eagle from his shoulder holster. The old Jews could wave their little .25 purse-gun all they wanted now.

Maeve was scrunched up, fixing the oblong of plywood back in place with her tape on the uphill side as Jack Liffey kept forcing his way under the box springs, urging Felice and Millie on ahead.

Time is all that matters, he thought; it's the only narrative we've got. Hurry or die. ‘This is all bullshit!' It was a man's deep and resonant voice, yelling from well below them. The voice was vaguely familiar to Jack Liffey – Goldilocks. ‘Just fall in where you are! OK. Ow, you got live steam blowin' loose, don't you? Did you plan that? I can get past this shit!'

‘Go away,
golem
!' one of the old men called from above.

‘You're outgunned, man! Don't think you can make war on an old warrior!'

Jack Liffey knew that he and Maeve were still sitting ducks – trapped in a maze of wire bedsprings if a shooting war broke out. By the lantern light, he could just see Maeve working rapidly and clumsily with the roll of duct tape, tying things back together below himself.

Reluctantly Jack Liffey reached into the back of his waistband and drew out the .revolver – a terrible lump between his hip and the floor that had bruised him at every step. He aimed it high, well over Maeve, but still held his fire.
OK, kiddo, this is where we all find out who we are,
he thought.

‘Listen to me, my blond friend!' Jack Liffey called out. He knew who the voice belonged to now. ‘Whoever you are, whoever you're working for. I don't know you and you don't know me – other than dumping me on Skid Row in a wheelchair. Not very brotherly, I must say.'

‘Who the fuck are you, man? Are you Liffey? I've still got your wallet and gun.'

‘I have a better pistol. I've been through Tet in the big Nam, and I'm guessing you've seen your own share of hell in Iraq. Am I right?'

‘Well, I think you're an asshole, Liffey. You're just a guy of nothing, less-and-less as you turn into a senior citizen.'

‘So what was
your
MOS? 44C?' Jack Liffey suggested. That was the military occupational specialty for accountant – a challenge that was well over the edge of insulting.

Maeve continued wrapping the duct tape around wire frames at his feet, and he wormed up and up through the convoluted barricade to stay ahead.

‘Screw you, gimp! MOS 11B and proud. What about you, friend? What was your stupid MOS?'

Eleven B was plain rifle infantryman. This guy had never even made NCO, or made it and got busted back down. He himself had been a 350G – imagery intelligence technician, a radar watcher who'd tracked the B-52 runs from Thailand, but he wasn't going to cop to that, nor was he going to falsely claim eighteen something-or-other for Special Forces. No lies when you were this close to death. ‘That's for you to worry about, creampuff!' Jack Liffey shouted. ‘Maybe I was in a sniper team! These people up here are under my protection tonight, son. Like
Have Gun, Will Travel.
Wire Palladin, San Francisco. Or were you too young to remember all that?'

‘What the fuck you on about?'

So he
was
too young to remember even the reruns of that wonderful old Richard Boone TV show. Basically, Jack Liffey was just trying to keep him occupied while he gestured frantically for Maeve to do a less thorough job of sealing the barricade and step it up a notch. She nodded when she felt him pluck at her back.

Chills ran up and down his spine whenever he realized they were trapped like insects in amber. He had no doubt his 11B infantryman opponent downstairs was well armed. There was something in this terrible moment that he knew he would remember in his nightmares.

‘What's your name, soldier?' Jack Liffey called.

‘Maybe you could just tell me who the fuck you really are, Mr Big Nam.'

‘I'm a specialist in protection now,' Jack Liffey said. ‘Like all those trigger-happy jerkoffs Blackwood sends to guard the Baghdad embassy and shoot up civilians.'

There was a sharp bark of a laugh below. ‘Then you'll love my partner. That was him for two years. Blew away whole families of towel-heads just for getting too close.'

From the progress of the voice, Jack Liffey sensed the man was working his way slowly up the stairwell, and he strained to see into the darkness below. Unfortunately, the kerosene lantern threw most of its light on him and Maeve. They were only two-thirds of the way through the entrapping barricade, but there was no way he was going to hurry on and leave Maeve behind, methodically wrapping her duct tape.

‘Be very careful about entering my line of fire, Private Eleven-B,' Jack Liffey called. ‘The minute I can make you out, you're part of my business.'

‘Why you protecting these folks? We ought to get together on this. There's big money in clearing out this building.'

‘What're they promising you, soldier – a thousand a head?'

Suddenly, he thought he saw a blur of movement down below, then a point-source flash, and a powerful gunshot
pazinged
past them, a kind of chime at one of the box springs. The deep boom a half-instant later echoed deafeningly up the staircase and raised the hackles on Jack Liffey's neck. It was the loudest pistol shot he'd ever heard, probably some oversized magnum. There was little chance the man was still standing where he'd seen the muzzle flash. Whereas, if he fired back now, he'd show his own muzzle flash, and he couldn't dive quickly away from it.

‘Don't do that again, son,' Jack Liffey called, with all the authority and calm he could muster. ‘I don't want to hurt an army brother.'

Then Jack Liffey heard two men down below, speaking in that voiceless voice that was often quieter than a whisper. He guessed his opponent had retreated one landing at least.

‘Who's your pal, Eleven-B?' Jack Liffey called out. ‘Mr Blackwood finally show up? In a world of bad things, mercenaries are about as bad as you get!'

‘Fuck you, asshat!'

It
was
the other one he remembered. The shrill voice he recognized, the knife man who'd grabbed his gun. He'd hoped to provoke him, get a kind of read on him, and he had already: a voice that was off-center, carrying some peculiar undertow of impassive madness. Jack Liffey knew he'd been a small man. He guessed he'd been something of a loser all his life.

He grabbed Maeve's collar with his free hand and bodily dragged her away from the taping chore that she was intent upon. The barricade would just have to do as it was. ‘
Up
,' he said very softly but urgently a few inches from her ear.
‘Now.'

She knew better than to resist. She crawled over him and wriggled under the last of the barricading box springs. It would do fine as a barrier as long as they watched it.

‘Hey, Liff,' the knife-man's voice called scornfully from down below. ‘One good trainee from Blackwood could wax ten of you bearded doper draftees from Nam. What you got – a peace sign tattooed on your forehead?'

Keep him talking,
Jack Liffey thought as he wormed his way out beneath the last springset, pinning his own arms dangerously for a few moments. ‘Why not the regular army for you, Shorty? I bet they wouldn't take you. You a Section Eight? You one of those dingbats who eats his own shit?'

‘You're mine, Liffey! I'm a knife man. Whatever else goes down here tonight, whatever iron you're carrying, I'm going to git behind you some time and carve you like a jack-o-lantern.'

Jack Liffey's legs came free and he jumped to his feet too soon and then toppled forward into the barricade – he'd forgotten how weak and dizzy he was on his feet. He waved several people nearby to get around the corner of the stairwell and pointed urgently at the lantern until Maeve got the idea and took that away as well.

Now the payback, if they came up to the landing. He wished he had a reload for Gloria's .38.

‘Come on up, pals. Let's talk. I have a weakness for dingbats.'