Warlord's Revenge (19 page)

“Very entertaining,” Stone said, turning away at last as he felt his stomach do a few funny flips and make some noises. He
hoped he didn’t lose it.

“Yes, isn’t it, though?” Peaches grinned in the darkness, and her red lips shone like little overripe strawberries in the
candlelight. “The guy who runs this place—that Scalzanni fellow who you saw out front, with the hooks. Remember—the hooks?”
She squeezed his hands again, and Stone winced.

“Oh, yeah—the hook guy. Tough—very tough. I wouldn’t want to—”

“Well, he’s the one who had them put in,” Peaches said, cutting him off. “Great sense of humor, the guy has. I mean, what
a joker, huh? Ah, here’s our drinks.” The aging whore cackled, rubbing her hands together as the waitress deposited a gallon
bottle of “champagne” on the table and poured them each a glass. The liquid bubbled as it went into the glass, but when Stone
toasted with the whore and lifted his dirt-smeared glass to his lips, he could instantly taste that it was the same rotgut
he had bought at the bar—but with some CO
²
pumped into it to give it a bubbling action. It tasted foul, undrinkable.

“Drink up. Drink up, snookums,” Peaches went on, her Cheshire cat of a grin undulating in the half-darkness, the red lips
grinding together like worms humping in the soil. “Drink up. Tonight we party, for tomorrow we die.” She laughed with fake
abandon, holding her lips far apart so she didn’t smear them, forming them into an
O
shape, in what appeared quite an obscene—and suggestive—gesture.

Stone took another slug of the rotgut and suddenly started feeling funny. He didn’t drink a hell of a lot. But he knew he
could hold his damn liquor. But as she talked to him her whole face started looking even stranger, getting all skinny, then
fat again, until he felt like he was walking inside a fun-house mirror. Her words turned into a buzz of bees, and he couldn’t
understand a thing she was saying.

Then everything was spinning around him much too fast, and even as he rose to his feet in a futile effort to fight back, Stone
realized that he had been drugged. But by then it was too late. For suddenly he was dropping, as if his legs had just been
chopped off at the knees. He dimly wondered if his nose would smash into jelly when he hit face first on the floor, which
was looming up at him like a locomotive coming down the track. But his brain tumbled into darkness before he even got the
chance to find out.

W
hen Stone woke up, he felt like his head had just been used as a bowling ball in the U.S. Championships.

“Jesus,” he heard his own lips mumble, and even that sounded like a bomb going off an inch from his ear. He suddenly realized
he was alive when he should be dead, when he had expected to be dead. Stone forced his eyes apart, seeing as the flood of
light exploded into his sockets like razors slicing across the pupils that he shouldn’t have done so. He slammed them shut
again before he could even see what was out there, and let out an involuntary groan.

“Easy, junior, easy,” a voice said from out of the painful darkness. “Just take it real easy. I’m whipping up a brew that
should help counteract some of that potion you took. We Mickey Finned you,” Peaches went on, and Stone heard her shuffling
around on the other side of his closed eyelids. “I was supposed to kill you,” she said with a giggle. “You don’t know how
lucky you are, boy—that you ended up in Peaches’s arms and not some other bitch who would have followed orders and taken you
out like an ant.”

“What the hell are you talk—” Stone started to ask, forgetting that his head felt like the inside of a punching bag.

“Easy, I said,” the voice from out of the darkness scolded him. “Aren’t you going to listen to your Auntie Peaches? Don’t
you know how many men I’ve Mickey Finned in my time? And still, you don’t want to listen to me. Ah—men,” she said with half-real,
half-mocking disgust. There was a rush of air toward him, and Stone could smell her strong perfumes wafting down all around
him. A hand suddenly gripped him behind the neck, lifting his head up to a glass.

“Here, drink this, Mr. Martin Stone,” she said, pushing him to take the liquid in. Stone nearly gagged as he heard his name
spoken. That plus the fact that she had just fed him knockout drops and now was trying to get him to sip yet another beverage.

“Drink it,” she said, squeezing his neck. “If I wanted to kill you, for chrissake, I could have done it anytime in the last
five hours you’ve been out. This stuff will help you, I swear it.” It made at least minimal sense to Stone, and in his present
head-throbbing state, he was ready to take anything that offered help. So he sipped down the cool liquid, which didn’t taste
half bad once tie got over his trepidations that he was drinking his last. And lo and behold, within only minutes he was sitting
up and able to talk without the reverberations slamming back and forth inside his skull.

“Okay, thanks,” Stone said. He no longer had his wool cap or glasses on anymore, and he didn’t look for them. She knew who
he was. “Now tell me what the hell is going on,” he said, propped up on the pillow as she stood at the far end of the bed,
her hands draped over a wooden footboard. “First you Mickey Finned me, then you were supposed to kill me, then you didn’t
kill me, then—”

“You were designated a Mark Three,” Peaches said, cutting him off with a curt smack of her plump, blood-red lips.

“A what?” Stone asked, rubbing his temples with the palms of his hands, trying to get the sensation of tightness out of his
skull.

“A Mark Three. Everyone who comes in the place, the back room, anyway, the ‘take room,’ as we call it, for ‘take the suckers
off,’ is given a number that identifies him as either a Mark One, don’t touch because he’s too important; Mark Two, who can
be drugged and ripped off but then just thrown out of the place, and a Mark Three, who is clearly a geek of highest order—without
friends in high or even low places. He is to be killed and stripped of everything—even gold or silver teeth. That was to be
your fate, Mr. Stone.”

“So how come I’m not dead?” Stone asked as he took little sips of the cool amber liquid she had given him. It seemed to make
everything a hell of a lot better, sending streams of cooling comfort through his burning veins.

“Because I decided not to kill you, that’s why,” Peaches said, staring Stone right in the eye from the other end of the bed.
“You don’t remember me,” the ancient whore went on, “but I was one of the slaves from the Dwarf’s mansion—the Last Resort.
We were being brought in on a truck just as you were fleeing the place. You took the diesel and drove us the hell out, just
as the whole damn resort blew its stack straight to hell. We helped dig you out from the debris afterward. Anyway, I told
you—you wouldn’t remember. I was just one of twenty dirty whores in the darkness.”

“I—I—” Stone started to stutter, not remembering her at all from the group of grime-coated, smock-clad women who had helped
him but not wanting to say it.

“Oh, shut up, you have no reason to remember me, so don’t apologize. You’re lapsing into your dumb-asshole routine. Perhaps
it’s become permanent.” Stone chuckled at the nasty comment. The women had a biting way with words that got right under your
skin.

“I knew it was you right when I latched on to you on the bar floor. Stone. I saw how you handled that bazooka who tried to
elbow your face to the wall. No one else did, but I did. I always got my eye on things. You’re damn lucky Scalzanni didn’t
see it—he’s as sharp as a fucking razor, believe it. But his back was turned. I had heard they’d set some kind of trap or
something for somebody. The bigwigs had been talking about it to each other for days, and some of the other girls had heard
a thing or two. So I put two and two together—and ol’ Peaches ’n’ Cream walks over and just delivers your smooth little ass
right out of the clutches of the devil. I had to Finn you—’cause everyone keeps an eye on the operation. Then when you passed
out, two of the waiters helped me carry you up to the room here. Then I was supposed to strip you, take everything worth taking,
including, as I mentioned, your gold teeth. When we off someone, Scalzanni gives us ten percent of everything we collect.
He’s very generous. Guess he figures we’ll search a little deeper, if you know what I mean.”

“How would you have done it?” Stone gulped, realizing for the first time just how incredibly close to death he had been only
minutes before.

“Oh, simple, we don’t even mess the place up.” She pulled out a long ice pick a good fourteen inches in length and as thin
as a beam of light. “Just turn the unconscious mark on his stomach, insert this at the base of the neck, press it in, then
twist it around like this a few times”—she turned the pick in the air as if slicing through nerve cells—“and that’s that.
Severs the spinal chord at its narrowest and most vulnerable part. So easy. I can’t understand why everybody doesn’t kill
like that. All that blood is so unnecessary.”

“And how often does this go on? This ice picking?” Stone asked in disgust.

“Oh, three, four, five—I don’t know, maybe up to eight a day, if there’s a big crowd.”

“And nobody misses them?” Stone asked, amazed at the scope of the operation, though not particularly misty-eyed over the demise
of the kind of shopper who came here.

“You see the scum we got in Keenesburg.” Peaches laughed with a snort of ultimate disdain. “These morons can hardly wipe their
behinds. A lot of them are loners up in the mountains. Or gunslingers just roaming around trying to drum up some business.
These guys get killed, disappear all the time. Nobody misses them. Nobody even notices them.”

“And the bodies?” Stone asked as he finished off the last of the brain-clearing brew and wished he had more. He was just starting
to feel vaguely human.

“Oh, they’re taken away in the dumbwaiters we have here. Every room has one.” She walked over to the wall and opened a small
door, revealing a shaftway with ropes hanging in it. “They’re lowered down to the subbasement and taken in wheelbarrows to
the pit at the far end of the mall, way in the back where they don’t let anybody go. I hate it back there,” the powder-coated
whore said with a shiver. “It’s like a swamp and a sewer and a graveyard all mixed together. It’s black and horrible. They
just throw the bodies in one after another, then they pour acids and lyes over everything, so the whole place just keeps filling
up—and melting away with the dead bodies. You can—can even see bits of them floating around—legs, arms, heads. They come up
sometimes and—”

Peaches stopped in mid-sentence and looked truly pale. It was the first time Stone had seen her show even a hint of emotion
or weakness. It made him trust her just a little more that such a thing could sicken her.

“Anyway, I had killed one lover boy already, but that didn’t bother me too much—the world is a better place without him—I
guarantee you. But you—you was supposed to be my second. And I couldn’t—just couldn’t. ’Specially after you saved my damn
ass. I’d just be part of the rubble back there at the Last Resort but for you—even if you did blow the place up.”

“Well, I sure appreciate your not sticking that ice pick in my neck,” Stone said, rubbing it. “It’s sore enough already.”

“Why are you here?” she asked, suddenly moving toward him so that she was leaning over the bed, and her watermelon-sized breasts
squeezed forward in her taffeta body dress as if they were about to explode out at any second.

“My sister,” Stone said as he drained the last drop of the restorative liquid and sat up looking around for his weapons. As
soon as he could walk straight, he had to get going. This place was hell on earth. God only knew what was happening to her
at this very moment. “They killed a good man I knew —Dr. Kennedy—and took my sister, April. ‘Brought her to Keenesburg’—those
were Kennedy’s dying words.

“They squashed the Snakeman,” Peaches said, her face going even paler under the pancake, the lips dry under the greasy red
lipstick. “I knew the doc good, real good. He treated some of the girls at various places I’ve ‘worked’ over the years. He
was a good man—like you say, Stone, a good man. They took out the doc.” She shook her head back and forth, like a little girl
who’s just seen Santa shot and the Easter Bunny tortured and castrated. She’d seen a lot, to say the least. More than most
people could if they lived to be a thousand. And most of what she’d seen had been bad, real bad. Yet still, within her sarcastic
tongue and cynical core there dwelt a microscopic flower of hope and love. And Dr. Kennedy had filled a big place there. One
of the few who had actually wanted to help her.

“Didn’t just squash him,” Stone said as he swung his feet around on the bed and set them down on the rug-covered floor. “Cut
him to ribbons and left him for the vultures, the centipedes, and the worms. Wouldn’t even kill him, the bastards. He’d been
lying out there for days—alive. Just a piece of meat for the world to feast on.”

“Well, I’m through here. That’s for damn sure. I’ve had a long haul,” the ancient whore said with a dark laugh. “And God knows,
if the Lord above opened the narrow doors of heaven another ten miles, I still wouldn’t be able to get inside. But I’ll tell
you as I stand before you, I’ve had enough. I ain’t whoring and I ain’t ice picking no more.” She closed her eyes with an
almost religious intensity, and Stone saw little rivulets of water seep out from each side of her eyes and trace little slick
tracks through her thick makeup. They actually carved out the powder, digging down nearly an eighth of an inch into the stuff,
so it looked as if little ditches were being dug down each side of her face.

“Well, I’m most proud to witness your conversion,” Stone said as he set himself up on both legs and started wobbling immediately.
“But really, what I want is to find April. Do you have any idea where she is, where they’ve taken her? Any of the other girls
heard of a young, real pretty girl, they’d undoubtedly be marking her as a virgin—if they’re selling her.”