Authors: Francis Porretto
The old warrior reared back as if she'd struck him across the face.
That was not well done, Christine.
Nag, you have been more of a help to me than any other creature I've ever known, Louis excepted. Right now it doesn't mean shit. I intend to do this thing. Don't
you
get in my way, either.
The room had grown quiet. Christine fancied she could hear Loughlin thinking. The master strategist was weighing probabilities, assessing potential avenues of attack, straining to see what there was to be won or lost along each line of development. But his need was not hers. What he decided could only affect her tactics. It could not change her objectives.
"I will agree," he said, measuring out his words, "not to interfere with you, but on one condition: that you start thinking again. You have the right. I would never question that. You may have the ability. But your opponents are formidable, and they will overwhelm you unless you reactivate your most formidable weapon at once."
"What weapon is that, Malcolm?"
"Your mind. Use what I've taught you. Study the terrain, reflect on your enemy, and devise a strategy that maximizes your chances. Don't go charging into their den in your current state. Christine," his voice cracked, "I don't want to lose you, too."
She nodded. "All right. Will you help?"
"What do you want me to do?"
"Wait."
She went to her bedroom and opened the safe. She returned to the living room with a thick wad of cash. Loughlin glanced at it questioningly.
She fished her car keys from her purse and tossed them to him. "Go to Cayuga and Helmsford. Start a search spiral for Boomer. If you find him alive and unhurt, or dead, bring him back here. If you find him injured, take this" -- she handed him the wad of bills -- "and go to the Foxwood Animal Hospital on 231 and Kettle Knoll. Give Boomer and the money to them. Tell them to do whatever they have to to save my dog's life, and that I don't expect change. We'll talk again after that."
He nodded. "And you?"
"First I'm going to shower. After that I have preparations to make. I'm going to be making some justice, so I have to assemble the capital equipment and make sure it's all in working order."
***
The consciousness of a dog differs qualitatively from that of a man. A dog possesses no sense of the extension of events through time. Each moment of its life is separate from all the others. Because of this, a dog forms no abstractions, and learns no principles of cause and effect. It lives its entire life on the plane of concrete objects and events.
This does not keep a dog from having desires, even passions. Some of those passions are natural, rooted in hundreds of thousands of years of development. Others are man-made and man-implanted, owing to the domestication of the dog and its instruction at human hands. A third group are in the gray zone between, a melding of instinct and experience, but no less powerful for that.
Boomer had been badly hurt. Of course, he didn't know that. The impact of Rusty's motorcycle had broken several of his ribs and given him a hematoma that held one quarter of his total blood supply. He was on the border of shock, and in danger of his life. He didn't know that either. His emotions were a mixture of pain and yearning for his absent mistress and her comforting touch.
He had dragged himself perhaps two hundred feet from the scene of the assault, into the darkness of a garbage-filled back alley, before his giant strength and gallant canine heart were overwhelmed by the pain. If nothing happened to disturb him, he would lie here until the passage of time and the natural processes of his body determined whether he would live or die.
If he lived, he would search for his mistress until his strength gave out or his sense-impression memories of her affection had faded beneath the weight of more current experiences. If he died...who knows what happens to the soul of a dog?
He lay there, breathing shallowly, bearing the inexplicable pain from his chest. He grew hungry, and terribly thirsty, but was unable to do anything about either. The light faded and was gone, returned again, and was beginning to fade again, before the footsteps sounded in his ears.
It was the other man, not the mistress but the one with whom the mistress sometimes left him for a little while, the one who smelled like an ancient wolf. Boomer's ears pricked up and his tail wagged feebly as the man examined him. He flinched in pain as the man's fingers passed over the giant bruise in his side and the broken ribs behind them.
An unknown time later the man's strong arms lifted him. He yelped from the spikes of pain as the ends of his broken ribs ground together, and again as the man deposited him in the back seat of the mistress's car.
As he passed into unconsciousness, the familiar smell of the car filled his nostrils and reassured him that all would soon be well.
==
Chapter
50
Christine fingered the key. It was the only one Louis had given her that she had never used. The time had come to use it. She descended to the basement, went to the steel-doored room off the exercise area, and admitted herself. She flicked a switch on the wall to her right, and a darkroom bulb set into the ceiling overhead began to glow, providing her with a bare minimum of crimson illumination.
The little room was lined with office-style sheet steel cabinets. Each had a strip of masking tape on its door with two or three words written thereupon. The concrete floor was bare except for a drain in the center. She approached the cabinet at her right and began to puzzle out the legends.
Handguns & ammo
Full auto
Reloading supplies
Reagents
Stealth gear
Optics & batteries
Blades
Exercise room spares
The last cabinet's label prodded a chuckle out of her. It appeared that Louis had decided to make maximum use of this storage space.
From the handgun cabinet she extracted a chromed nine-millimeter Beretta. It was a beautiful piece. She had practiced with it when Louis was alive. Two magazines for the Beretta, and the rounds that would fill them, went into her pockets.
From the full auto cabinet came two Uzi submachine pistols. On the shelf below lay the empty clips for them. Louis had told her they held fifty rounds apiece. She took four and a large box of the rounds for them, and put them aside before closing the cabinet.
The Uzis caused her some worry. She'd never practiced with them; there had been nowhere to do it. Louis had harped on how difficult and uncertain a full auto weapon was to control.
He said they all pull up, and most pull to the right. There's no other way this is going to work. I'll have to chance it.
She took a seven-power pair of night binoculars from the optics cabinet and disdained the rest. This wouldn't be distance work. Most of her targets would be close enough to spit in her face as she killed them.
From the blades cabinet came a K-Bar combat knife. She couldn't foresee a use for it, but to head into what she planned without at least one strong blade on her person would be simple madness.
She hesitated before opening the cabinet labeled
Reagents
. She knew what it held, knew what she intended to do with it, and was still unhappy at the thought.
You know it's necessary, don't you, Christine?
I know, Nag. But I don't have to like it, and I don't.
The bottom of the cabinet held two large ceramic containers that looked like cheese pots, their lids held on by self-tensioning retainer clips. Louis had called them "shock crocks." After Christine stopped tittering, he had warned her in the strongest possible terms not to jostle or bump them if she could avoid it.
She calmed herself, took the two containers by their wire handles, and swung them out of the cabinet. Once they were off their shelf, she was massively reluctant to put them down again. She carried them to their deployment points, settled each onto the floor with all the delicacy she could muster, and breathed a great sigh of relief.
Mustn't forget the fusing.
She returned to Louis's arms room and took a large bundle of medium-gauge rope with a waxy surface consistency from the Reagents cabinet before closing it for the last time.
I'll string this last, I think.
The enormity of what she planned to do was upon her.
Louis, wherever you are, please forgive me. I have to do this. If you were here, I know you'd understand.
She gathered her selections, locked the door behind her and headed back upstairs. There was a lot of work ahead.
***
Tiny stared at Tommy Lekachmann in complete disbelief.
"You're shitting me."
Tommy shook his head. "It's all over the street, Boss. I ain't the only one to hear it. Five guys in Butcher colors attacked a couple on Cayuga yesterday about this time, and four of them got iced."
Rusty must've picked on a real badass couple. In a real badass mood.
"Are all the guys in the barracks right now, Hans?"
The lieutenant bobbed his head. "To a man, Boss."
"Keep them here. No exceptions, not even for booze. I've got to pay a call to our official friends." He plucked his leather jacket from the coat tree and headed out into the evening.
The ride to First Precinct headquarters helped to clear his head, but failed to supply any explanations. He couldn't work out why Rusty's bunch would have attacked some random couple walking the streets of the city.
How the hell did they blow it so badly as to take eighty percent casualties? Al and Pete? Mac and Carl? They weren't phonies. Was the guy carrying a rocket launcher or something?
Maybe Lawrence can tell me more. If he can't, we're going to have to stay forted up for a while, make sure there isn't someone else out there trying to get us in a crosshairs.
Tiny nursed his anxiety in the anteroom while the desk sergeant sought for Raymond Lawrence. The hour being what it was, the Chief of Police wasn't likely to be around. When Wendell Magruder came out to greet him, he was unsurprised. Magruder escorted the biker boss into his office without a word. Tiny settled into a guest chair without waiting for an invitation as the policeman seated himself behind his desk.
"Can you fill me in, Captain? I'm in the dark about this incident."
Magruder rocked backward in surprise. "You've lost four associates and you hadn't even noticed it yet?"
"Captain Magruder, as far as I know, all my men are in the barracks."
The policeman tapped several times on a thick sheaf of papers. "Six eyewitnesses say otherwise. Are there a lot of non-Butchers out there riding Harley hogs and wearing leather jackets with bloody cleavers on the back?"
Tiny started to speak, caught himself in time.
They don't know about Rusty's bunch. The little faggot didn't exactly go register with the cops when he rode into town. They've got no reason to accept my word that it was a splinter gang that had nothing to do with the Butchers. If my guys had done this, I'd say exactly that. What'll it do to my relationship with Magruder and Lawrence if they decide I can't control my own men?
"You know, Captain," he said, "I took my lieutenant's word for it that all the boys were in the playpen. I didn't do my own headcount. There's a nice, accommodating bar just down the street where a lot of us go when we have nothing else to do. We don't bother to take our bikes. I just might be short a few, and Hans might have assumed they were at the Crazy Clown."
Magruder's mild, urbane expression acquired a delicate moue that beat any scowl of contempt Tiny had seen.
"The county protects you because we consider you an asset, Tiny. But Chief Lawrence and I have been worried from the start that you might push the boundaries of acceptable behavior. We've talked about proper responses to such a development, at some length. I think it only fair to tell you that the one Ray likes best is to eliminate your entire pack."
Oh, the gloves are off, are they?
"Captain, if I were to authorize any of my men to go freelancing in this manner, surely I'd have that possibility in mind already. Wouldn't I? A clever fellow like me? And I'd have prepared for it by gathering some strategic information and fashioning a deterrent from it. Something with both poignancy and punch, so that you'd think twice before trying to take us out. Perhaps you should call Eric Smalley again, ask him a few more questions about the arrangement we had, about this time last year."
Magruder stared at him a moment, then chuckled.
"We know about Buffalo, Tiny. It was very clever of you, really. It impressed the hell out of Commander Smalley. And apparently there was no need for you to use it, which was for the best all around. But you're not the only clever fellow in Onteora County. And you should always remember that the value of information decays over time. You know, as people move, and change their places of employment, and their names, and their hair colors, and their facial characteristics. So sometimes your deterrent doesn't have the effect you planned for."