But the bed was the centerpiece. And not because its size—Krysty thought it had to be ten feet by ten—dominated the spacious, high-ceiling room. Behind and on either side of the bed stood, or sat, or reclined on silk cushions at least a dozen women dressed in a variety of what she could only think of as fetish outfits: a bare-legged nun, at least a pair each of white-clad nurses and plaid-skirted schoolgirls, saucy maids, garter-belted dominatrices like the still-stunned Asian woman, a pair in tentlike baby-doll nighties who were clearly nude beneath.
Six women lay sprawled on the red satin spread of the bed, some asleep, some clearly drugged to stupor. These were all quite young, though Krysty noted with some relief they were all clearly in their twenties.
That didn’t make her feel any more charitably inclined to the man in the gold-trimmed deep-blue silk robe sitting with his back propped on pillows against the high, wide headboard.
But the somnolent young women scattered with casual contempt at his feet and around his legs were all entirely nude. Whatever the status of the women in fantastic outfits was, clearly the naked women were something they were not: captives.
“Get your hands up, you fat bastard!” Krysty yelled.
Hizzoner Claude Michaud smiled insouciantly.
“Why should I, dear girl?” he asked in a voice of calm reason. “If you meant to chill me, you would have blasted me the instant your male escort kicked open the door. Might I hazard a guess that he’s another former employee of mine named Ryan Cawdor?”
Ryan took off his helmet and tossed it aside with what Krysty recognized as a look of relief.
“Yeah.”
Leto likewise discarded his helmet. “And I’m Leto, new Maximum Leader of the Desolation Angels.”
Michaud nodded courteously to him. “I have heard descriptions of you. They don’t quite do credit to your...presence.”
The others were coming in behind and spreading out along the walls. Friendly and Bronk had already winged out left and right to stand alongside the two men in SWAT armor.
Some of the bizarrely clad women sashayed forward as if to surround the bed protectively.
“Stay where you are!” Ryan snapped.
“What are you going to do, you big handsome one-eyed devil, you?” asked the doorkeeper. She rose gracefully from where his door kick had thrown her against the bed. The trickle of blood from where the door had hit her nose looked disturbingly natural, trickling across her equally red lips. “Shoot us?”
“If we have to, honey,” said Mildred from Krysty’s left, “we will.”
“It was an admirably constructed ruse,” Michaud said in his voice of honeyed oil. “But to what do I owe the honor of this little pageant if it’s not meant to murder me?”
“It’s still an option,” Ryan growled. “That ‘murder’ thing.”
“We want to negotiate with you,” Leto said. He lowered his shotgun and looked questioningly at Ryan.
Seeing no resistance, Ryan shrugged. “Right. Put them down. Keep eyes peeled and shoot at the first sign of trouble.”
He lowered his own carbine.
“Negotiate what?” Michaud asked.
“An end to this war,” Leto said. “It can only drain us both to the point the other gangs in the city will see us as potential prey and jump on us. If that happens, neither of us wins.”
“Perhaps,” Michaud said. He smiled. “But what if I win?”
“Doesn’t seem likely from where I stand,” said J.B. from Krysty’s right.
“And what do you offer by way of inducement for me to negotiate with you?”
Leto pushed his head slightly forward on his neck and stared as if suspecting the mayor was stupe. “Your life, to start with.”
Michaud laughed heartily.
“Time to start taking this seriously, Michaud,” Leto said. “The time we’re willing to waste on you is limited and running out fast. So what’s it going to be? Yes or no?”
“I do not negotiate with terrorists. What do you have to say to this?”
Then he whipped out a tiny black handblaster and shot Ryan three times in the chest.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Ryan whipped up his right gauntlet. “Hold fire!” he rapped to his people. Then he felt gingerly where the bullets had struck him.
“You do know I’m wearing your own SWAT armor, right?” he said. “And that’s a what? A blaster that fires a .25-caliber bullet?” He grinned.
“Except for, nice grouping, Your Honor. Okay, haul his butt out of bed. It’s time this got real.”
He gestured. Bronk and Friendly started forward. Fetish maidens moved to bar their path.
“Indeed it is,” Michaud said.
“Do what he tells you, you fat murdering rapist bastard!” Raven shrieked.
In a single bound she was up on the bed, knocking the hapless doorkeeper sprawling again, this time to the deep blue floor. Raven waded right across the still-unconscious naked women to kick the blaster from Michaud’s hand. Then she pressed the tip of her bloody sword against the wedge of hairy chest visible at the top of his robe.
He had paid more than a cursory glance only to Krysty, Ryan and Leto. The others he had flicked a mere glance over and dismissed. But now his cheeks became ashen, and his eyes bugged wide.
“Aaliyah?” he said.
A plump black woman in a platinum bob wig and white nurse’s costume picked up a candlestick and struck Raven over the head with it.
And it all went to glowing nuke shit at once.
Friendly had grabbed a willowy Latina in a formfitting red dress with a slit clear up to her rib cage by the wrist. “C’mon, honey, out of the way,” he said.
She tugged furiously. He was as immovable as granite.
But the tug had been a blind. It gave her cover to turn half away from him.
When she turned back she whipped around with a commando-style dagger protruding from the bottom of her fist and buried it in his sternum.
He bellowed like a scalded buffalo bull and backhanded her with all his enormous strength. Her neck broke with a loud snap. She was flung atop the bed like a rag doll.
The nude young women she fell across were scarcely more limp and passive than she was.
Bronk was advancing along the other side of the bed when Friendly was stabbed. As she turned to look, the black nurse whipped out a MAC-11 and emptied its magazine into her from four feet away. The little machine pistol lacked its customary counterbalancing suppressor. The noise was loud as hell.
The Angel threw her head back, cried out in agony and fell.
The MAC’s slide locked back from an empty chamber. Then the nurse’s head rocked back with a blue hole over her left eye as Mildred shot her.
Staggering, Friendly grabbed the dagger’s hilt with both hands. A pale, blue-eyed waif of a woman in an absurd pigtailed blond wig and blue-and-white
Alice in Wonderland
pinafore dress held out a snub-nosed .38 in both hands and blasted all five shots from the cylinder into the huge man’s torso.
Ryan was trying to swing around his M4 to bring her down. The room was full of screams, curses and hurtling bodies. He had to take a step back as two women, one dressed as a cowgirl with a hat hanging behind her neck by a chinstrap and the other another nurse, jumped up on the bed, sprinted over the limp bodies and launched themselves at Krysty in a flying tackle as she tried to line up a shot on Hizzoner.
A splintering crack came from Ryan’s blind side. He snapped his head around in time to see a shiny wood panel explode before a massive black boot. He snapped the carbine that way and a figure lunged out of the concealed niche at him.
A whistling blow of a side-handle baton slammed against the right side of his chin and sent him smashing straight down to the floor with blackness and purple lightning vying for space in his cranium.
But he kept his presence of mind enough to fire a long, shuddering burst into the center of the immense, blocky, black figure that loomed suddenly over him. From around the room he heard echoes of the first clash as other bodyguards kicked their way out of similar concealment.
The figure didn’t so much as rock. Suddenly Ryan’s blurry eye focused enough to realize that it was a sec man wearing Type IV body armor, a kind of apron with pockets down the front holding ceramic-steel plates. Ryan’s regular SWAT armor was Kevlar, with only a single trauma plate over the center of his chest.
Of course he’d shrugged off the burst of point-blank 5.56 mm rounds. That armor would stop pretty much everything short of a .50 cal.
“Take the rest alive!” yelled Michaud, who remained in bed. Probably he felt that was still the best way to stay out of danger for the moment. “Don’t mark the women up too bad, and you can play with them!”
Before Ryan could switch his aim to the sec man’s lower legs, the boot came down right at his head. He had to roll violently aside to avoid the stomp.
He caught quick glimpses of some of his friends. Krysty was rolling around in a furious kicking, punching tangle with the two women who had jumped her. Doc was reeling around trying to dislodge a tiny woman in a French maid outfit who clung to his back with her legs locked around his chest, holding a fistful of his hair with one hand and punching his head with the other. Ricky flung himself at a sec man in assault armor like the one who’d clubbed Ryan, and he got stiff-armed onto his butt on the floor for his troubles.
Leto raised a handblaster to the other sec man who had appeared on the far side of the bed near the outer wall. He fired two shots into the man’s chest. The sec man, not even bothered, stunned him with an overhand club blow to the head.
And then Friendly rose from the floor, roaring like an angry grizzly bear with blood streaming from his mouth and nostrils. He lunged at the sec man who’d struck down his Maximum Leader, put his shaved head down and stuck his right shoulder into his midsection. He locked his arms around the heavily armored figure and drove him bicycling backward.
The sec man windmilled into a tall, wide window past the head of Hizzoner’s bed. The metal framework holding the glass was strong, but it couldn’t resist the berserk power and fury of the dying Angel, nor the combined masses of two big men. The framework tore free of the stone, and the two men flew out the seventh-story window in a flurry of sharp glass fragments.
Ryan saw Ricky tackled by a fetish guard in a pink baby-doll nightie. Doc went to his knees, stunned. Then Ryan rolled back to his right side.
His mind was still fuzzed by the baton blow, his reactions not as crisp as he needed them to be. The heavy-armored sec man’s boot caught the M4 before it came to bear and ripped it out of Ryan’s hands. It clattered on the floor out of sight.
Suddenly a figure interposed itself before the enormous sec man and the supine Ryan. It was J.B., hat defiantly in place. He held something in his hand that sputtered. Before the guard could react to J.B.’s sudden appearance from his blindside, the Armorer had grabbed the neck of the shirt he wore beneath his armored apron, yanked it open and stuffed the little object down inside.
“Get clear,” the Armorer called to Ryan, a heartbeat before following his own advice and diving back in the direction of the doorway. Ryan rolled frantically away, fortuitously landing on the backs of the legs of the cowgirl, who was sitting pinning one of Krysty’s arms while her nurse partner sat astride the redhead’s hips, pinning her as they beat her.
The guard stood staring down at himself in horrified disbelief. He dabbed at his armor-plated chest with his unwieldy black gauntlets, going, “Buh! Buuuuh!” in mindless panic.
The fuse burned down to the cap stuck in the C-4 chunk J.B. had jammed inside his armor.
The deafening detonation blew out the other window glass in the mayor’s luxury suite. It also blew the sec man’s arms and head right out of the armholes and neck of his armor, if not entirely to shredded pieces. Blood fountained upward and to both sides, along with clouds of pulped organ and splinters of bone.
* * *
E
VERYONE FROZE AT
the terrific noise. Ricky felt as if he’d been clapped over both ears with frying pans. The blonde who straddled his body reeled.
He was physically stunned by the sharp and echoing crack of the plas ex going off—muffled only a little by the armor, which had largely had the effect of concentrating the blast’s energy into puréeing the whole upper half of the man’s body and squirting it out the available apertures. But the kid was less mentally disoriented by it because it didn’t take him completely by surprise.
He had seen what his mentor was about to do, and he was similarly equipped.
Ricky took advantage of the oh-so-brief pause in the head punching and boot stomps to fish out his own C-4 chunk and the little spring-and-gear striker he had fashioned himself in emulation of his teacher, J.B. He lit the tiny sprout of fuse and sent the chunk skittering between the legs of the sec man, who had taken two steps back as if physically driven by the force of his companion’s detonation. Then he grabbed the woman in the peculiar pink lingerie, who had recovered enough to be cocking her fist again.
“Stop hitting me!” he yelled, then rolled them both to his left, away from the sec man and the improvised bomb beneath his boots. Fortunately, the good old inverse-square law guaranteed that the blast energy of the plas ex would taper off rapidly with distance, especially in the open air. Not so fortunately, at least where Hizzoner’s special bodyguard was concerned, it didn’t dissipate fast enough to help
him.
Unmuted by cloth, metal or flesh, this explosion was much louder than the first.
Dissipated though it was, the blast wave stung like a vicious full-body slap when it hit Ricky and rolled on. Luck had him roll just far enough—just past being on his back again—that his nearer eardrum wasn’t aimed directly at it, or his eardrum would have been burst for sure.
He still felt as if he’d been picked up about ten feet and dropped on pavement.
Fortunately, nobody else in the room was in better shape.
When his sense and senses, all of which had been bodily booted out of his body by the shock, came swarming home again—in a momentarily confused form—he glanced back over to where the sec man had been. The man’s armor hadn’t helped him. His legs had stuck unprotected out the bottom because death from below was not something it was designed to deal with.