The Bastard Hand (19 page)

I hadn’t gone a step into the room before a bullet tore through my pants leg and seared my thigh with heat. Firing both guns blindly, I dove for the only cover I could see, an old, solid sofa, already torn up with bullet holes.

Stoker was there, crouched like a cat, frantically trying to reload his .45. I handed him the nine-millimeter. Relinquishing his .45, he quickly rose, fired off three rounds at the enemy, then dropped back down. Bullets tore up the wall behind us, and pieces of old drywall fell down on our heads.

He said, “There’s only two now.”

“Did you get one?”

“No, you stupid fuck. I think you did, when you came in.”

“Ah. Lucky shot.”

“That’s two for two, man. Let’s do it.”

It took me a moment to understand what he meant, but when I did, I could only stare at him.

“Come on, Boy Wonder. There’s one by the door and one in the corner. Make your call.”

I took a deep breath. If he could do it, I could.

A bullet pounded through the sofa, missed my head by less than an inch. Our cover wouldn’t last much longer. It would have to be now.

I said, “Door.”

He nodded. “Okay.” Then, after a moment to work his own courage up, he barked, “Now!”

Both of us stood up, bullets flying all around us, and opened fire.

Stoker took a hit in the shoulder. I heard him grunt as the bullet ripped into him, but it didn’t affect his aim much—the gunman in the corner fell back into the wall, hit first in the chest, then the side.

I managed to pull it off without getting hurt, but my aim wasn’t as good as Stoker’s. I squeezed off three rounds, and only one of them hit. My target screamed and dropped his Uzi, clutching his arm.

I only winged him, but it did the trick. He stumbled back outside, leaving a trail of blood behind him.

And then silence.

I stood there for long seconds, gun smoking, pulse pounding in my ears. The whole screwed-up operation had taken only minutes, but the devastation staggered. The sudden stillness lingered over the dead bodies and blood-soaked carpet and bullet-riddled walls, and Stoker gazed briefly over the scene. He nodded, apparently satisfied.

There was noise in the kitchen, noise we hadn’t been able to hear before, Bone yelling, “Bastard!” and then the brief cough of his Uzi. Tassie cried out victoriously, “Yes!”

Apparently, things had worked out in there. Vinnie called, “Stoker! Charlie! You breathing?”

“Yo,” Stoker said.

“Hurt?”

Stoker glanced at his bloody shoulder, started to answer. Then he stopped, and said, “No, man. All cool.”

“Out the front, then,” Tassie yelled. “Cops’ll be here any minute! Haul ass!”

Shouts of mad joy, due more to the fact that they were alive than anything else, and then the sounds of them scrambling out the back door and down the rickety steps.

“Come on,” I said, moving to help Stoker out the front door.

He moved fast, shoving me face-first against the ragged sofa, and I saw the nine-millimeter swing around in my direction. “Eat this, motherfucker,” he said, placing the gun at the back of my neck.

I felt it vividly, in bright reds and agonizing blacks. He pulled the trigger and the bullet tore into the base of my spine and exploded out the front of my throat and my own blood sprayed all over the sofa and I tasted something like an electric battery on my tongue. I even saw the bullet, the one that had just torn through my neck, pound into the far wall and kick out a chunk of plaster.

Oh Christ, I thought. Oh my Christ I’m dead I’m dead the bastard shot me—

But I wasn’t.

Almost immediately, the blood congealed at my throat and I felt blistering hot agony deep inside me and skin tingled at the base of my neck and vocal cords hummed like a harp, and Oh my God I’m not dead! I’m not dead, and something’s happening to me, what the hell, what the hell is this?

I elbowed him hard in the gut. He gasped, stumbled back. Spinning around to face him, I knocked the gun from his hand. My fingers glowed gold light, my hands burned with it like fire and it wasn’t in my imagination because he saw it too. Fearful wonder blanked his face as he stared at the light, the spreading golden glow that enveloped my hands and snaked like lava around my arms.

He would’ve killed me as casually as he would’ve stomped on a roach. Goddamn, he did kill me, he did. He killed me, but I didn’t die.

We looked at each other for just a moment. His eyes held none of the confident hatred that fueled him anymore. Just fear.

Eyes wide, he said, “The hell . . . what the hell are you?”

Grinning, I said, “Good question.” My voice rumbled deep in my throat, as if my vocal cords were brand-new and being used for the very first time.

He made a move to rush me, and I wrapped my glowing hands around his throat and the light jumped suddenly around his neck. He screamed, and the golden lava burned into his flesh, smoking, bubbling, and blood flowed down his chest and back and shoulders and his throat got smaller in my hands until I was grasping his exposed neck bone and he was dead.

I let go. His limp body dropped to the floor, the face still registering shock but everything below it a bloody ruin.

The light slowly faded from my hands.

I turned and ran out the front door.

I would read in the papers the next day that three of the gangsters survived—two of them, I figured, were the ones I’d dealt with personally, but who the third survivor could’ve been I didn’t have a clue. FOUR DEAD IN GANGLAND HIT, the headline read, then in smaller letters, Members of Bad Luck, Inc. street gang being held for questioning, and I didn’t like the sound of that Bad Luck, Inc. thing. The three who lived through the whole mess offered no information. And there was no mention of a man with his neck burned through to the bone.

But running away from the place, my gun still hot in my waistband, I wasn’t thinking about survivors.

Sirens wailed from nearby, getting closer, and a few people peeked timidly from the doors and windows of the otherwise abandoned-looking houses up and down the street. It dawned on me then that I might not make it out of there.

I ran hard. The sidewalk under me seemed distant, miles away. If I fell, I would plummet headfirst and bust my head open as thoroughly as if I’d fallen from twenty stories up.

At the corner I turned right, nearly tripped over an over-turned garbage can. Red and blue lights flashed against the sides of the houses, but I couldn’t tell where they came from. A vague notion passed through my head that I was running right for the cops.

At the corner ahead of me, headlights flashed, an engine roared. A car I didn’t recognize squealed into the intersection. Tassie yelled, “Charlie!”

Thank you, God. I bolted for the car, dove into the passenger side window without bothering about the door, and Tassie hit the gas.

We peeled out of the neighborhood with the sound of police sirens and the glare of flashing lights nipping at our rear bumper, and ten seconds later we were safe amid the relative anonymity of Danny Thomas Boulevard, heading north.

We were the only ones in the stolen car. I said, “Vinnie and Bone?”

“I don’t know,” she said, all nerves and anxiety. “We got separated. There were people everywhere. I couldn’t make it to the car. Where’s Stoker?”

It would have been easy to lie, to tell her the gangsters got him. But I didn’t.

“Dead,” I said.

She glanced at me, stunned. “What happened?”

“I killed him. He tried to take me out as soon as you left. I didn’t have a choice.”

She looked back at the road, her hands tight on the steering wheel. “Oh, God,” she said. “Oh my God.”

“I’m sorry, Tassie.”

“Oh my God.”

“He would’ve killed me.”

Then she said, “I knew it. I just knew that fucker would try it.” And she grinned, a sort of sick, scared grin. “You were too fast for him, huh?”

Now it was my turn to be stunned. So much for the period of mourning, I thought. So much for the memory of poor, dead Stoker.

The bastard.

We made it back to the house twenty minutes later. Vinnie and Bone were still absentee. Whopping and hollering, Tassie bounded into the living room, tore off her jacket, and ripped out the linings. Money came cascading out of it, all over the floor, a fountain of dirty green marked with the numbers 20 and 50 and 100. I couldn’t help but be caught up in Tassie’s exuberance—after all, we were alive, we were safe, and we had a shitload of money.

Tassie kicked off her shoes and danced around the living room, singing “La-la-la-la, la-la-la-la, LA!” like a little girl on Christmas morning. Money scattered under her bare feet. She yelled, “We did it! We did it, Charlie!” and laughed crazily.

I watched her, smiling a big stupid smile. She stopped and looked at me, breathing hard, her neck muscles twitching. The blood on her mouth had dried, smeared along her cheek. Her right eye was puffy and black.

She said, “Come here.”

I did. Wrapping my arm around her waist I pulled her to me and forced her lips to mine. She threw her arms around my neck, kissed me with a sudden, frantic urgency. I lifted her up and she wrapped her legs around my torso and I took her up against the wall. Her mouth moved over mine, down my chin to my neck, nipping at my skin with her teeth, and I slid her black tights down to her thighs and cupped her buttocks and pulled her up again, off the floor.

Breathing hard, she pushed away from me, her eyes gleaming, and pulled my shirt off. She threw it across the room, grabbed me by the back of the neck and pulled my face again to hers. Her tongue found mine, and there was no playfulness this time, just manic desire. With one hand, she quickly removed her tights, kicked them away, and pressed her body against mine. Her breathing was harsh and ragged against my lips.

She moved her hands between us and unbuckled my belt and we slid down the wall to the floor, still locked together in our moment of beautiful madness.

And it was good to be alive.

My old friend the dawn was stretching her purple fingers under the blackness when I finally got back to Cuba Landing, and I had to grin at the sight. I had almost three thousand dollars in a plastic bag on the seat next to me, Tassie’s earthy scent was still fresh in my memory, and I was lucky to be seeing the dawn at all.

A hell of a night. What would my doctor at the hospital have said, I wondered? He’d worked so hard to make me into what he called “a productive member of society”, and now here I was, pulling off feats far more daring and violent than anything I’d ever done before coming under his care.

On the other hand, how much more productive can one be? We’d wiped out a crack house. A blight on the community and all that. Granted, the neighborhood still wasn’t Beverly Hills, but it at least had one less crime problem.

I pulled into the church parking lot as the purple-black sky shifted subtly to purple-gray. There was another car in the lot, a steel-gray Jaguar XJ-S. Elise’s car.

I parked and got out, leaving the bag of cash in the Malibu, walked over to the Jag. I peeked in. The car was empty.

An ugly thought flashed through my head, an ugly thought involving Elise and the Reverend, but then I heard a rustling in the bushes at the side of the church. I caught a glimpse of Elise’s blonde head, and then movement as she tried to conceal herself.

I said, “Elise? What are you doing?”

Reluctantly, she stepped out of the bushes and stood staring at me with an embarrassed and uncertain look on her face.

I said, “If you’re going to hide, you should remember to do something about your car. It’s a dead giveaway.”

The uncertain look vanished. Setting her jaw angrily, she turned on her heel and stalked away toward the front of the church.

“Elise!” I called. She ignored me.

I chased after her, caught up at the front of the church. She paused on the steps, looking out over the park. “What’s going on? What are you doing here?”

Her green eyes flashed at me, bright in the first rays of morning. She said, “I’ve been here all night.”

“What? Why?”

“I came to see you. You weren’t here. You lied.”

“Elise, I—”

“You lied. You’re just like the rest of the people in this town.”

“Elise,” I said. “That’s not fair.”

“You told me you had work to do here after Reverend Childe’s sermon, and I came down to see you and you weren’t here. The Reverend told me he didn’t know where you were. He said you’d been there when he started the sermon, but when he was done he couldn’t find you anywhere.”

“I’m sorry, Elise. It was urgent. It came up suddenly, and I had to take care of it.”

She shot back, “All night? Your business took all night? That’s how long I’ve been waiting here.”

Her lower lip trembled, not with coming tears but with rage. Looking back on it now, it seems odd to me that she would’ve been so forcefully angry—after all, it wasn’t as if we were dating. We didn’t owe each other anything, and I certainly didn’t have to explain myself if I didn’t want to.

But at that moment, after all the night’s outrageously surreal events, her rage seemed perfectly natural.

I said, “Actually, yes. It did take all night.” I heard impatience in my voice.

She looked at me, really looked at me for the first time during our confrontation, and noticed my ragged state. My pants ripped where the bullet had cut through them, and my temple swollen from the beating I’d taken. Blood covered the front of my shirt, like a bib for a baby cannibal.

“Charlie,” she said, stepping towards me, “What happened?”

“That business I was telling you about.”

“My God, what were you doing?”

I smiled. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

She touched at my temple delicately, concern replacing her anger. “My God, you look like you’ve just come back from Hell.”

I laughed, said, “Hell, no! It was worse than that. But over all, it was a very profitable evening.

“What did you do? Did you rob a bank or something?”

I’m not sure to this day whether or not I would’ve told her the truth then. Before I could open my mouth, she stopped, her hand frozen at my forehead. She said, “Charlie.”