Authors: Francis Porretto
Tiny did his best to control his reaction, hoping his face remained smooth.
Ray Lawrence has at least one smart guy working for him. If the chips ever do go down, I'll have to take him out first.
"I see, Captain. Well, pursuing the other line of thought, doesn't it strike you as implausible that I'd have come here on my own if I were the mover behind the deed?"
Magruder's tiny shake of his head was all but imperceptible.
"So, where do we go from here, then?"
Silence stretched.
"Ray wants you boys to confine yourselves to your barracks for a few days. No unnecessary trips anywhere, and no showing your colors whatever. We have to defuse this thing before we have a regional panic over the breakdown of law enforcement."
Your scare tactics worked pretty well, eh, Captain? And all the county needed to go from anxiety to all-out panic was one sufficiently bloody incident that occurred on its own, outside the perimeter of your planning. Nice work, asshole.
Tiny stood, thought about offering his hand to Magruder, and decided against it.
"Very good, Captain. I'll be in touch in about a week. Send my compliments to the Chief. Your men are doing a hell of a job."
He let himself out, mounted up and started to ride back to the Woodlawn barracks, then changed his mind and headed across town.
Hans will keep them all indoors until he hears from me. He's reliable that way. I'm going to give myself a few hours off from this. Ride for a while, drink for a while, shake the cobwebs out. Tomorrow will be time enough for everything.
***
Christine was sitting on the sofa honing the K-Bar when Malcolm returned. Dusk was deepening into night.
"Find him?"
The old warrior seated himself beside her and surveyed the mini-arsenal she had arrayed on the coffee table. "He's at the hospital. Four broken ribs and one enormous bruise. They say he'll live."
"Thanks, Malcolm." She looked up from her knife and her whetstone, and was surprised when he drew back.
That's right. He's never seen me without makeup.
She had decided not to make up again after she showered. She wanted Tiny to face her
au naturel
, to see the price she'd already paid.
I was sure Louis had told him about it.
"Is that what you're going to wear to the party?"
She glanced down at her chosen combat outfit. "Yup."
"Chris, are you sure you're ready for this?"
"No." She stropped the blade along the stone from back to point, ending with a baroque flourish. "Why?"
He said nothing more.
"It's going to happen, Malcolm. If you've got something more to throw into the kitty, just do it. I'm not going to ask."
"All right. Is there anything more you want me to do?"
She nodded, eyes still on the blade. "Go up to the office and disassemble the computer. Put it in the Chrysler. Take anything else you want from this place and throw it in there too. Drive it all out to your trailer and stuff it in there. You won't have time for more than two or three trips, so be selective."
He swiveled his head, scanning the many bookshelves.
"I can't save much, Chris."
"I know. Take what you want. Oh, and take this." She fumbled for her keys, found the key to the arms room and passed it over to him. He took it with no sign of recognition.
"There's a gray steel door just to the right of the exercise room. It's where Louis kept his weapons. Take what you want from there, too. In fact, go down there first. I expect a lot of it will be irreplaceable. Just don't forget the computer."
Loughlin studied the floor.
"How do you think he'd feel about this, Chris?"
She sighted along the blade of the K-Bar, saw no burrs or chips, and sheathed it carefully in her boot.
"I don't know, Malcolm. Probably, he'd hate it. For all that he could whip a whole regiment with nothing but a handful of pine needles, he didn't like himself better for it. He said he let Tiny live to send a message to the rest of them. I always figured it was just as much because he didn't have the heart to kill him, once the bastard was down and helpless."
The old warrior nodded. "He was a good man."
"Oh, the best. There'll never be a better one, take it from me. But he let Tiny live, and now I have to do this. I figured something out today, Malcolm. Want to hear it?"
Loughlin's head came up, and she looked him in the eyes.
"Once you know a man deserves to die, you have to kill him. If you don't, you're committing a crime against everyone who doesn't deserve to die. If you get him down but can't bring yourself to do it, and he gets up off the mat and kills you instead, you're only getting what you deserve yourself."
Loughlin nodded again. "I figured something out today myself, Chris."
"And that is?"
He grinned. "All my best students have taught me more than I taught them. And you're the best I've ever had."
"Malcolm? Are you really two thousand years old?"
"Older, Chris." He paused. "Would you like to hear about it?"
Holy shit. It's breakthrough time.
She settled back into the sofa. "Well, yeah."
He told her.
***
Rusty McGill was looking at the end of his life, and found that he didn't mind it at all.
The house was all his, now, but there was no purpose to it. He had no reason to hole up any more, there or anywhere. He'd gathered from it what little he could use and rode away without a backward glance, shortly after full dark.
I've got no mates now. If I'm gonna take Tiny down, I've got to do it myself.
I still want to. Motherfucker got Rollo killed and then lied about it. But it's seventeen to one against. And I didn't do so good at five to two in favor yesterday. Sergeant Avery would be tellin' me to pick another fight about now.
I ain't got no other fight. But I ain't gonna kamikaze the bastard. I'm gonna have to watch him and think hard.
Wait till it's deep night, set up in the bushes across from the barracks. Just watch. Wait for an opening. And be ready to take it.
Shit, I didn't want to get old anyway.
***
"So how old are you, then?"
Loughlin shrugged. "I didn't count the years. They just went by. The people around me aged and died, or sickened and died, and I went on. Of course, I died a few times myself, but I always came back three days later."
Christine studied his face. "What's the earliest thing you remember?"
He closed his eyes. "A wall of ice under an open sky, a few hundred yards from the edge of a huge forest. The sky was so blue, so brilliant. Nobody's seen a sky like that for a very long time. I was already full grown."
"Sounds like the end of the last ice age."
He nodded. "I knew I was different. The challenge was convincing the others that I
wasn't
different. A few times I wasn't able to, and I had to die."
"Not a tolerant bunch, huh?"
His jaw clenched. "Do you think things have improved very much in that regard since then?"
She chuckled. "Forget it. I accept you. Will that do, for starters?"
He nodded. Color rose into his face.
What must it have been like, to have lived so many thousands of years having to conceal the most basic fact about himself? He's right, though, that hasn't changed. If anyone ever found out his nature, Joe Sixpack would be howling to have him dissected for the secret of eternal youth, whether it did anyone any good or not.
"When did you get into the general business?"
"Just after I, ah, gave up preaching. God help me, what an idiot I was back then!" He shook his head at his younger self's naivete. "I thought I just had to find others who valued freedom and justice as much as I did, and train them up to be champions for the rest. I never reckoned on the corrupting effects of mating that kind of knowledge to any kind of charisma. Almost all of them disappointed me very badly." He leaned back against the sofa and stared up at the ceiling. "Do you begin to understand why I don't look for great deeds to do?"
"But you kept on. Why, Malcolm?"
"Because I had no other ideas. Religion had failed. Persuasion by reason had failed. I had to do something, and I couldn't think of anything else. So I kept selecting likely young men with some aptitude for leadership and some hint of moral courage, and I approached them and offered to train them. I told each one that I would watch him, and I did, and despite my warnings, in all but seven cases I had to kill them or arrange their deaths."
"How many were there altogether?"
"I didn't keep count. I used to break cover and select a fresh trainee about once every twenty-five or thirty years. That would make it between sixty and seventy."
"That gives you about a ten percent success rate. Not entirely shabby, even if it doesn't speak too well for the human race."
A sharpness entered his expression. "Don't disparage the human race, Chris. It's made fantastic progress in many ways. There is nothing higher in the world, and there can never be."
"Why is that?"
"Because the ability to reason is the final step in evolution. It's the key to the universe. There is nothing beyond its powers."
"And you know this for certain."
He sat up straight. "Yes, I do. Don't ask me to tell you how, but I'm certain of this as I am of little else."
"Okay, okay." She let her mind's eye rove through the house. "Do you have everything you want to save?"
"No. May I make a suggestion?"
"Go ahead."
"Leave the charges to me. I can get another trip in that way. Maybe two."
"All right, Malcolm." She rose, and he stood with her. He put out his hand. She stepped past it and wrapped him in her arms.
"It'll be a while, Malcolm, but I'll be back. I promise you. Keep yourself and Boomer safe for me."
"Go do it, Chris." His voice was muffled against her shoulder.
"What?"
"Eliminate them all. A clean sweep. Make Louis proud. Make
me
proud."
"Okay." She kissed him on the cheek, released him, and hefted her bag. She paused for one last loving look at the house she'd never see again, and stepped out into the night.
==
Chapter
51
Christine forced herself to knock on the apartment door before her unease could build to paralytic size.
I haven't even spoken to her since before the New Year. What on Earth is she going to think? Or say? Especially the way I look tonight.
The woman who answered the door was not Helen Davenport. She appeared about forty, was as tall, buxom and broad-shouldered as Christine, and bore a monumental crown of brown ringlets. She was barefoot and wore a caftan printed in a Moroccan motif. She eyed Christine with unconcealed suspicion.
"What can I do for you, Miss?" Her voice identified her as the woman who had answered Helen's telephone when Christine had called last.
Christine smiled formally. "I'd like to speak to Helen, if it's not too late in the evening. Would you please tell her that Christine D'Alessandro is asking for her?"
The woman's face remained cold. "And can you give me a reason why I should disturb Helen for you?"
Christine tried to feign bashfulness.
"Miss, you haven't offered me your name, and I'm not going to ask you for it. But if you think you can keep me from talking to Helen, on this or any other occasion, you'd better have a lot of good weapons concealed on you. Now why don't you tell her I'm here, before I decide your makeup needs retouching?"
The woman hissed and raised clawed hands to attack when Helen's voice sounded from the living room.
"For God's sake, Ione, let her in. She's done nothing to you."
The woman lowered her hands and backed away from the door, all the while watching Christine as if she were a poisonous snake. Christine dismissed her and looked toward the living room sofa, the direction from which Helen's voice had come.
Helen looked up, and Christine's eyes went wide.
Helen had aged. The taut, rosy complexion Christine remembered had become puffy, with broken capillaries plentiful along the line of her jaw. Her eyelids were swollen, and bags had formed under her eyes. She'd made a bun of her hair, giving her elfin face a schoolmarmish cast. Most noticeable of all, her essential animation, the vitality that had been so apparent in her before, was absent.
"How have you been, Helen?"
Helen shook her head. "Not so well, dear. I suppose I'm getting by, but I haven't been having much fun lately. How have you been?"
Christine set her weapons bag on the floor and seated herself alongside her friend. She heard Ione hiss from behind her, and decided to ignore it.