Takedown, page 11
“Dieu le veut,” he roared as his recently sharpened edge sliced off the man’s right arm below the shoulder.
A bell rang, not the kind of bell he had heard from towers, but more like many small bells, rapid, jingling. They stopped for a moment, then rang again. Krogan closed his eyes and heard a voice. The voice sounded like his own, or at least the one he had now gained possession of.
“Yeah, you’ve reached the, uh, office of Jackhammer Hoban. Leave a message… or don’t.”
He opened his eyes. The wounded peasant was gone, as was the horse he’d just been riding.
Beep. “Uh, Jack? Hello? You there? This is Michael Grossman. Look, uh, we need to talk. I was a little hot yesterday. Well… heh, heh, who wouldn’t be after you.… Listen, I said some things that at the heat of the moment…”
Krogan lifted the receiver. “Talk,” he said in a raspy whisper.
“Oh… you are there… good. Like I was saying, we… Mr. Bodder and I… Mark… you remember Mark… Bodder… my attorney. Well, we were just going over some of the numbers… I mean, response…”
“Stay there,” Krogan said, his voice hushed, his thoughts wanting to be elsewhere.
Krogan hung up and tried to settle his mind back to where it had been before the phone rang. He remembered the time well, perfectly, as if he were still there. The first crusade had been good, as were the others. Nothing was quite as confusing and foolish as a “Holy War,” and nothing was quite as satisfying as confusion. So many questions with so few tangible answers. Religion doing what it did best—driving the individuals, then the groups, and finally the masses into the places they were most vulnerable, while making belief in God appear absurd to the rest of the world. And then, where possible, absurd to the believers themselves.
The phone rang. He listened to his outgoing message. Knowing what it was going to say bored him. Grossman again. He wanted to know how long they were supposed to wait for him. Krogan reached over and tore the line from the wall. No more talk. They would stay until he was ready to see them, if he decided to see them.
Again Krogan gathered his thoughts, but another memory, more recent, more humbling, annoying, kept scattering what he was trying to gather. The tortoise. He remembered the clouded vision, the strange sounds, the cage, the other tortoises thinking he was a tortoise, the taste of leaves… insects.
He threw off a thin blanket and saw his naked body. He studied it, moved his fingers, stretched his limbs, flexed his muscles. A sound at his window jerked his chin upward. He walked over and separated the curtain. The window was tall, and the bright light of midday assaulted him as an electric train roared by less than fifty feet away at eye level. After a long moment he knew where he was. The man Hoban lived in an apartment in Jamaica, Queens.
Below the elevated train were the street, stores, and people. He looked back at the train. Faces. Some staring at him. How easy it would be to end any one of their lives… all of their lives. He thought of his ancient comrades, their anticipation of seeing him again. The thrill of the prowl. Shadahd. The thought was as satisfying as ever. Enticing. But first there was a little business he had to attend to. Payback for the humiliation suffered in that thing’s body.
He thought back two years, to the time of his imprisonment. He saw the faces of his captors. How could he, Krogan, the warrior of warriors, enjoy his natural call before his revenge was satisfied? He would strike. He would retaliate skillfully. Their general would fall, but not before he could see his fall coming. He would suffer long before his death and be strongly impressed. The Reverend Buchanan would first see his disciples suffer and die. Only then, after the Asian and the cop were dealt with, would the old man’s time come. And even then his own demise would begin with his granddaughter. The name of Krogan will once again be spoken with reverence and awe in the heavens.
Krogan took a final look at the streets below, calling on Hoban’s feeble memory for the nearest fish store. He smiled mischievously, having a sudden craving for lobster.
16
By the time Gavin had dressed and found his way into the kitchen, a ferocious appetite had seized him. Picking at the cold cuts as he worked the grill, he cooked up a more-than-healthy portion of ham, three over-easy eggs with cheddar cheese melted over a small mountain of home-fried potatoes, and rye toast.
“Smells delicious… but does he always eat like this?” Larry Larson asked Amy as they talked over what Gavin hoped were the final details of “freshening up” the kitchen.
Amy nodded. “He could do that all day and never gain a pound,” she said, then placed the morning’s newspaper next to Gavin while he stabbed at the potatoes.
“I would kill for a metabolism like that,” Larry said.
Gavin stopped chewing when he saw the front page. An aerial shot of the train wreck. He wondered if the Camel pack had prints.
“Not literally, of course,” Larry said.
“Of course,” Amy said, giving Gavin a frown. “So what were you saying?” she said, trying to keep her decorator’s attention.
Gavin went back to attacking his meal, stabbing a combination of potato, ham, and wet egg with every forkful.
“I think okra green would be gorgeous in here if we can steal a little more light. Maybe a skylight over here would help?”
“Like the vegetable,” Gavin said, his mouth full.
“Excuse me?” Larry said.
“Okra. You want to paint the walls the color of a vegetable and the trim butter yellow. Is that cause it’s a kitchen?”
Larry laughed. “I never thought about that. But I wouldn’t do it without the skylight… the light’s a bit mean in here for okra, but, oh my, it’s very pretty with the Hawaiian green granite.”
“The light is mean?” Gavin said.
“Dark… mean. You know. It’s all about matching mediums, color and—”
“Granite? Did you say granite counters?”
Amy put her hands together as if she were praying, giving him those light-green eyes he could never refuse. “Pleeeease?”
Larry gave him the same kind of look a judge might give a felon at sentencing. “You have to use granite. There’s no question. The only decision is what kind of granite.”
“There are no other choices?”
“No.”
“I thought there were.”
“None.”
Gavin looked around him and figured there really wasn’t that much counter. How expensive could it be? He shrugged his shoulders and said, “I suppose if we don’t have a choice…”
Amy clapped her steepled fingers and squeaked out a high-pitched “Yes!”
Gavin’s cell phone rang.
“Yeah?”
“We’ve got a print off the Camel box,” Chris said.
“You get a match?”
“I don’t smoke.”
“Was that a joke?”
“Poor, huh?”
“As usual.”
“Well, no match yet. You coming in soon?”
“Yeah.”
Gavin sopped up the remaining yolk with his toast, drained the last of his coffee, and took the dishes to the sink. After a token rinse, he placed everything in the dishwasher, then reflexively sponged the Formica counter. Done. Gone.
“You’ve certainly trained him well,” Larry said to Amy. “Any more where he came from?”
“Him?” Amy tried to hold back her grin. “I don’t know. Gavin, Larry wants to know if you have any clean-freak friends who might be available.”
“I don’t have any friends. And I don’t know too many… decorators.”
Larry furrowed his expansive brow.
“Oh, he does so have friends,” Amy said, giving Gavin a peck on the cheek, and then with mock concern continued, “They’re just not always comfortable admitting it.”
Gavin almost smiled. The one good thing he liked about Larry was that he was keeping Amy occupied. If she was going over colors with Larry, she wasn’t running around town or gardening or heaven knew what else. Besides that, Gavin found Larry educational. In the last hour he’d learned that not enough light was “mean,” khaki tan in the hallways was “gutsy,” butter yellow was “safe and friendly,” blue could work in a girl’s room if it was mixed with a “fun” yellow… at least in Larry’s book. Amy seemed to be going with the “pretty” and shying away from the daring.
Gavin bent down and kissed Amy’s belly on the way out the door, then said to Larry, “Now, you take care of Mommy. Make sure she gets off her feet soon. She’s always trying to do too much.”
“I do not.”
“And she lies.”
Larry nodded reassuringly to Gavin’s orders.
“Watashi wa shiawase,” Amy whispered sweetly before pecking him on the cheek.
Gavin paused, then smiled. “Me, too,” he said, then left the room, Cedar happily following him to the door.
“Stay,” Gavin ordered without turning, knowing the dog had stopped where he was. He was halfway to his car when he stopped and turned. “Okay, c’mon, Cee.” He heard the slipping of paws on the oak floor, then the door was pushed open with the nudge of a long nose. Unless his dog was told otherwise, Gavin knew he would find him on the stoop waiting for him when he returned home.
Gavin went through the usual routine of pumping and cranking his car. As he worked the key and pedal he thought of Chris. His partner never got enough of ribbing Gavin about his car’s constant reluctance to work. He could hear a sarcastic Chris in his mind: “Starting to start your car, Gav?” He turned the radio on before his mind conjured up anything else he didn’t want to hear.
With the Tiger warmed and purring, he pulled up to the sidewalk, having backed into the driveway the night before. He didn’t know what the weather was going to be and thought he might need to put the hardtop on. As it turned out, another hot, sunny day. Hopefully they wouldn’t have to spend too much time in the office with what Chris referred to as the world’s first experimental air-conditioning system—a jerry-rigged mess of long cords and old, noisy fans. He waited for a car to go by and was reminded by Amy’s license-plateless minivan next to him that he needed to stop at the DMV. Not today, he thought, and then took off straight ahead, up the block opposite his driveway. A glance in the rearview, his property framed in the small mirror. His soon-to-be decorated property. All his hard work in the hands of a stranger. He shook his head, not wanting to think about it. She’s happy, he thought. That’s what’s important. “Watashi wa shiawase,” he said aloud, his pronunciation much better than when he had first repeated the words slowly to Amy on their wedding night.
His eyes back on the road, he frowned. “What the—” he said, then flashed his lights at an oncoming cement truck; its rear concrete chute, extended long and perpendicular, barely missed a parked car on the other side of the street. No, it had hit the car’s side mirror and antenna… and would hit him if he didn’t veer right to the shoulder… or into a driveway.
“Doesn’t that idiot know?” Gavin said angrily to himself, flashing, flashing, flashing his lights. And what cement truck drives at that speed in a residential neighborhood? And with the barrel turning the wrong way. Gavin remembered when his own foundation was being poured, the barrel had first spun clockwise to mix and then counterclockwise to pour.
Instead of veering to the right, Gavin went left, head on. This moron had to be stopped before someone got hurt. Flashing, flashing. Nothing. Can’t he see? At the last second Gavin steered right, jumping a curb and spinning out on wet sod, underground sprinklers dousing him and his car inside and out. The truck sped by, barrel spinning backward, chute extended and swinging like a dragon’s tail knocked from one side of the street to the other by parked cars. He had seen a glimpse of the driver’s face. Not much detail through the glass except for two horrifying facts: The driver was definitely laughing… and there was a passenger. When does a cement truck have a passenger? And at the speed it was going, it might not be able to slow down when it got to—
“Oh, God! No!” Gavin screamed.
17
Gavin fumbled for the gearshift, threw it into first, and popped the clutch to an already redlining engine. The rear wheels of his British racing car instantly dug into the soft, soaked earth, spinning and spitting grass and mud onto the house, all while Gavin watched the cement truck running out of street, not even a flicker on the brake lights. The car was foundered. Gavin cursed repeatedly and slammed into reverse. Same result.
Suddenly Gavin found himself in the middle of the street, his legs seeming to move slowly, his gasps for oxygen deep, fast, urgent. The cement truck’s front rose slightly when it passed over where Gavin knew Amy’s new minivan had been parked when he last saw it in his rearview mirror. He heard himself screaming but didn’t know what because his entire mind was given over to his eyes—huge eyes searching for the power to make the truck stop, pleading, demanding that his house… home… would somehow stop the enemy truck like some giant catcher’s glove.
Gavin was the length of a football field away when the cement truck came to a complete stop… in his backyard, the barrel still spinning. The truck no longer mattered.
“AMY!”
There was no answer as he screamed her name, hurdling a flattened skid of black metal and smashed glass that used to be her mode of transportation. He landed on rubble, feet twisting, falling, hitting his walkway hard on his hip. Back on his feet in a second and down again on the broken concrete of his front stoop. His arms and legs grabbing and pushing him through a huge open expanse where the front door and half the rest of his home used to be.
“Amy!” he yelled. “Amy, where are you?” There was no answer, the only sound coming from the squeaking barrel of the cement truck. His eyes darted desperately. Where to go? “Oh, God!” he said, seeing one of Cedar’s doggie dishes half crushed, sticking out from under a pile of wood. His dog had been on the stoop, he remembered. “Cedar!” he yelled, looking, spinning, desperate to see something alive. Nothing. The dog always came when called… unless he couldn’t.
“Amy!” he shouted in tears as he ran back to where he’d left her in the kitchen, which was no longer there at all. Just open space with fallen debris and rubble from the collapsed second floor. Most of his house was in the backyard along a path to the tanklike truck. If the truck hadn’t been going so fast, it probably would have fallen through to the basement.
Gavin grabbed his cell phone from his waist and dialed 9-1-1. A figure caught his eye. “Jesus!” he gasped. Larry was part of the wreckage along the path to the truck. If there were even the slightest chance he was alive, Gavin would have raced to him, but he had seen enough twisted bodies in his life to know which ones were and were not worth spending time on, especially when—
“Uhhh!” Gavin gasped, startled by something alive touching his leg. He turned. “Cedar!” His delight to see the dog vanished almost as quickly as it arrived. “Mommy, Cedar—where’s Mommy? Go find Mommy. Where’s—”
“Nine-one-one emergency,” called a female voice over the cell phone.
“This is Detective Pierce. Code three!” he shouted with his home address. Under the circumstances there was little more needed to say. A code one would have meant there was no present emergency but to have an officer stop by at his convenience. A code two carried more immediacy but still did not necessarily signal an emergency; an officer could respond without the use of his lights and siren carving a path for him. A code three pulled out all the stops. There was no code four.
“I repeat, we’ve got a code three! Code three! Need several ambulances, patrol and fire assistance. Multiple injury, fatality and—” he yelled, almost eating his phone, before he suddenly heard Cedar bark to his right.
Cedar was staring at a section of roof that had fallen and was now leaning precariously over a part of the house still standing. The dog looked at him and then looked back again in the same direction.
Gavin dropped the phone and leaped toward the fallen roof. Behind the roof was a hallway leading to a bathroom. He grabbed and pulled at the roof section, black sandy granules from the shingles scraping his fingers as he fought. Not a chance of him and all the adrenaline in the world moving this mass. He looked around the side, hanging on the edge of the shingles. “Amy! Can you hear me?”
A moan.
He’d heard a moan! It was faint, but it was definitely there. The shingle he was holding tore off in his hand. As he fell he caught himself on something sharp… painful. Jumping to his feet, he ran back out to where the front of the house used to be and around to a window at the end of the hall. He looked into the window. Dark. No, a shade down. He pushed on the window but it was locked. He thought of throwing something through it, but what if Amy was there… right there? Just below the lock he bashed the window with his elbow, reached in, unlocked the window, and threw it open. A moment later he was in the hallway, light pouring in behind him.
“Amy!” he cried, dropping to his knees in the middle of the hallway.
“Gavin,” she said weakly. She was curled into a fetal position, cradling her belly, cut, bruised, and semiconscious, just like the Spanish woman the night before.
“Shhh. I’m here. Everything will be all right,” he said. He could hear sirens.
