Carrion Comfort (57 page)

“Natalie!”

“I’m all right.”

He felt toward her voice and helped her up. “I’m going to leave your suitcase here,” he said.

Natalie barked a laugh. “Let’s go.” They came up out of the darkness into a street made narrower by parked cars, most of them derelicts. Burned-out buildings mixed with row houses with lights on in the windows. There were no streetlights. Gentry could hear footsteps clapping down the hill, echoing under the railroad bridge. There were no shouts or curses when the figure fell heavily, only scrabbling sounds on ice and brick.

“Over there,” called Gentry and half pushed Natalie uphill toward the first lighted house a hundred feet away.

He was panting, half staggering by the time they reached the three-step concrete stoop. He turned and stood guard as Natalie pounded on the door and called for help. A dark silhouette pulled a torn shade aside for a second, but no one appeared at the door. “Please!” screamed Natalie.

“Natalie,” called Gentry. The man in the torn and soiled business suit was rushing the final thirty feet at them. In the light from the single window, Gentry could see the wide, white eyes and the mouth agape, saliva streaming down over chin and collar. Gentry aimed the Ruger and applied enough pressure to pull the hammer back. Then he lowered the hammer and the gun. “To hell with it,” he said and lowered his shoulder to meet the man’s charge.

The attacker hit Gentry’s shoulder at full speed and flipped into the air, landing on his back on the sidewalk and lowest step. There was a sickening sound as the man’s head bounced, Gentry leaned toward him, and the older man was on his feet at once, blood streaming from his disarrayed hair, his dentures clacking as he went for Gentry’s throat. The sheriff picked him up by the lapels and swung him out over the street; let him fall. The man hit, rolled, let out an inhuman snarl that was part laugh, and immediately was on his feet, lunging. Gentry clubbed him down with the barrel of the Ruger. The body lay on its face, twitching.

Gentry sat on the lowest step and lowered his head between his knees. Natalie kicked and pounded at the door. “Please let us in!”

“I’m a police officer!” yelled Gentry with the last of his breath. “Let us in.” The door remained locked.

More footsteps echoed from under the bridge. “God,” gasped Gentry, “I thought . . . Saul said . . . the Oberst could . . . control only one . . . at a time.”

The figure of a tall woman emerged from the shadows under the bridge. She was running in her stocking feet and held something sharp in her right hand.

“Come on,” said Gentry. They had run thirty feet uphill when they heard the roar of the city bus around the bend in the street. Headlights flashed off brick row houses across the street to their left.

Gentry looked for an alley, a vacant lot, anything, but there was only the solid facade of uninterrupted row houses for the 120 feet back down to the railroad bridge. “Back down there!” he shouted. “Up the embankment to the tracks.” He turned just as the tall blond woman silently covered the last ten feet on stocking feet and crashed into him. They both went over, rolling onto the wet street, Gentry dropping the Ruger in an attempt to hold her head and snapping teeth away from his throat, trying to get a choke hold on her. The woman was very strong. She swiveled her head and bit deeply into his left hand. Gentry made a fist, struck at her jaw, but she was able to get her head down in time for her skull to take most of the impact. Gentry pushed her away, trying to decide how to knock her out without permanently injuring her, just as her right hand came around and under his arm. He felt a cold shock and did nothing but watch as the scissors slashed in a second time. She pulled back her arm to strike a third time and Gentry swung a round house that would have taken her head off if it had connected. It did not connect.

The blond woman danced back two paces and raised the scissors to eye level just as Natalie brought her loaded camera bag down full force on the woman’s head. She crumpled tonelessly to the street just as Gentry was able to get to one knee. His left side and left hand were on fire. There was a rising roar and the headlights of the oncoming bus froze them in their glare. Gentry felt around for the Ruger, knew it must be there somewhere. The bus was fifty feet from them and accelerating downhill.

Natalie had the gun. She had dropped the camera bag and now she took a wide stance, cradled the weapon with both hands, and fired four times the way Gentry had taught her.

“No!” shouted Gentry even as the first bullet struck, taking out a headlight. The second one starred the broad windshield just to the left of the driver’s position. Recoil made the other two go high.

Gentry grabbed the camera bag and pulled Natalie toward the curb and a row house stoop even as the bus swerved left toward them. It caromed off the stoop, sparks flying, the right wheels rolling over the unconscious blond woman without a noticeable bounce. Natalie and Gentry pulled each other up as the bus hit ice, spun ninety degrees to the left, and went under the railroad bridge broadside. There was a scream of metal on wood.

“Now!” gasped Gentry and they ran for the embankment. Gentry ran in a half-crouch, holding his left arm against his side.

A diesel engine roared, gears screamed, and a single, skewed headlight beam lanced out of the far side of the underpass as the rear wheels of the bus spun, found purchase, spun again. A wooden timber gave way with a shriek and the rear end of the bus emerged just as Gentry and Natalie reached the embankment and began to scramble up the littered, frozen slope. A rusted loop of wire caught Gentry around the ankle and brought him down heavily. For a second he was in the full beam of the crazy headlight and he looked down to see his coat slashed to tatters and hanging open, blood dripping down his arm onto his chewed hand. He looked over his shoulder as Natalie grasped his right arm and helped him up. “Give me the Ruger,” he said.

The bus was backing up the hill, getting a run at the slope. “The
gun.
”

Natalie handed him the pistol just as the driver slammed the big vehicle into first gear. Both of the bodies on the street looked flattened now. “Go!” Gentry commanded. Natalie turned and began climbing, using her hands. Gentry followed. They were less than halfway up the slope when they came to the fence.

The bus picked up speed quickly, shifting gears, the noise echoing off brick buildings, the single headlight cocked upward at such an angle that it illuminated Gentry and Natalie on the slope.

The fence had been invisible from below. It had sagged and rolled until it resembled concertina wire. Natalie was snagged on the second tier of ripped metal. Gentry pulled wire loose from Natalie’s pant leg, heard cloth rip, and pushed her uphill. She took four steps and stopped, snagged again. Gentry turned, braced his feet on the slope, and raised the Ruger. The city bus was almost as long as the embankment was high. Gentry’s coat hindered him. He took it off and turned sideways, raising the Ruger, feeling the weakness in his arm.

The bus rolled over the bodies, shifted gear, bounced enough on an unseen curb to avoid burying its nose in the cold ground, and began climbing the hill.

Gentry lowered his aim to compensate for the tendency to shoot high when firing downhill. The light reflected from the snowy hillside clearly illuminated the driver. It was a woman in khaki, eyes very wide.

They . . . he . . . won’t let her live anyway
, thought Gentry and fired the last two rounds. Two stars appeared directly in front of the driver, the entire windshield went white and collapsed into powder, and Gentry turned and ran hard. He was ten feet from Natalie when the bus caught him, the grill hitting him hard, sending him flying out and upward like an infant carelessly tossed skyward. He hit hard on his left side, felt Natalie next to him, leaned across a cold rail, and watched.

The bus came to within five feet of the top of the embankment, lost traction, and went slewing back down with its headlight swinging like a frenzied searchlight. The right rear fender caught the pavement with a solid, final sound and the long bus tried to stand on its end, the nose hitting and bouncing thirty degrees off the slope before it rolled slowly to its right, went almost over on its back, and settled on its side with wheels spinning.

“Don’t move,” whispered Natalie, but Gentry fought his way to his feet. He looked down and almost laughed aloud to see the Ruger still clenched in his cold hand. He went to put it in his coat pocket, found that he was no longer wearing topcoat or sports coat, and tucked it in his waistband.

Natalie held him up. “What do we do?” she said very softly.

Gentry tried to clear his head. “Wait for the cops, the fire department. Ambulances,” he said. He knew something was wrong with the idea, but he was too tired to think through it.

Lights had gone on in more row house windows, but no one had emerged. Gentry stood leaning on Natalie for several long, cold minutes. It began to snow. There was no sign of ambulances.

Below them, there was the hollow sound of pounding and a window on the side of the toppled bus popped out and fell to the ground. At least three dark forms emerged, scurrying like huge, dark spiders across the metal carcass of the bus.

Without saying anything, Gentry and Natalie turned and began hobbling quickly down the rail bed. Once he fell against the rail and felt a solid per sis tent humming. Natalie pulled him up and urged him into a run. He could hear distant footsteps on the cinders behind them.

“There!” Natalie suddenly gasped. “There. I know where we are.” Gentry opened his eyes to see an old three-story home sandwiched between empty lots. Lights burned from a dozen windows.

He stumbled and fell down the steep hillside. Something sharp tore at his right leg. He staggered to his feet and helped Natalie up as a commuter train roared by above them.

There were people on the porch. Black-sounding voices shouted challenges. Gentry saw two young men with shotguns. He fumbled for the Ruger, but his fingers failed to close on the grip.

Natalie’s voice came from very far away, urgent, insistent. Gentry decided to close his eyes for a second or two just long enough to get his strength back.

Strong hands closed on him as he collapsed.

N
atalie looked in on Rob throughout the day Monday. He was feverish, vague about his whereabouts, and occasionally he would talk in his sleep. She had lain next to him during the night, being careful not to brush against his taped ribs or ban daged left hand. Once in his sleep he had put out his right hand and gently stroked her hair.

Marvin Gayle had not looked overjoyed when she and Gentry had staggered up to the front door of Community House on Sunday night.

“Who your fat friend, babe?” Marvin had called from the top step. He was flanked by Leroy and Calvin carrying sawed-off shotguns.

“It’s Sheriff Rob Gentry,” said Natalie, regretting at once that she had identified him as a lawman. “He’s hurt.”

“I see that, babe. Why don’t you take him out to the white folks’ hospital?”

“Someone’s after us, Marvin. Let us in.” Natalie knew that if she could get through to the charismatic young gang leader, he would listen. Natalie had spent most of the weekend at Community House. She had been there on Saturday night when word came that Monk and Lionel had been killed. At Marvin’s request she had gone with them and photographed the dismembered bodies. Then she had staggered around a corner to be quietly sick in the dark. Only later did Marvin tell her that Monk had been carrying a print of the Melanie Fuller photograph, showing it to inactive members in the neighborhood, trying to track down the old lady. The photograph was not on Monk’s body. Natalie’s skin had gone absolutely icy when she heard that.

Incredibly, neither the police nor the news media responded to the murders. There had been no witnesses other than George, the terrified fifteen-year-old who had escaped, and George had told no one except Soul Brickyard. The gang kept it that way. The two mutilated bodies were wrapped in shower curtains and stored in a freezer in Louis Taylor’s tenement basement. Monk had lived alone in a condemned building off Pastries Street. Lionel lived with his mother on Bringhurst, but the old woman was in an alcoholic stupor much of the time and would not miss him for days.

“First we fix the honky motherfucker that did this, then we tell the cops and TV people,” Marvin said late that Saturday night. “We tell them now, they won’t be enough room to
move
around here.” The gang had followed orders. Natalie had stayed with them through Sunday afternoon, repeating her edited description of Melanie Fuller’s powers again and again, then listening to their war plans. The plans were simple: They were going to find the Fuller woman and the “honky monster” with her and kill them both.

On Sunday night, the snow falling heavily, she stood on the sidewalk while trying to support the semiconscious bulk of Rob Gentry, and pleaded, “There are people after us.”

Marvin made a motion with his left hand. Louis, Leroy, and a gang member Natalie did not recognize jumped from the porch and faded into the night. “Who’s after you, babe?”

“I don’t know. People.”

“They be voodooed like the honky monster?”

“Yes.”

“Same old woman be the one doing it?”

“Maybe. I don’t
know.
But Rob is hurt. There’re people out there after us. Let us
in.
Please.”

Marvin had stared at her with those cold, beautiful blue eyes and then stepped aside and motioned them in. Gentry had to be carried to a mattress in the basement. Natalie had insisted on calling a doctor, or ambulance, but Marvin had shaken his head. “Uh-uh, babe. We got two dead we ain’t telling nobody about until we find the Voodoo Lady. No way we bringing the Man down on us for your hurt cracker boyfriend. We’ll get Jackson.”

Jackson was George’s thirty-year-old half brother, a quiet, balding, competent man who had been a medic in Vietnam and who had finished two and a half years of medical school before dropping out. He arrived with a blue rucksack filled with bandages, syringes, and drugs. “Two ribs broken,” he said softly after inspecting Gentry. “Deep cut there, but that’s not what broke his ribs. Half inch lower, inch and a half deeper, and he would have been dead from the puncture wound. Somebody’s been chewing on his hand for sure. Probable concussion. Can’t tell how bad without some X-rays. Look out, please, so I can work on the man.” He had proceeded to staunch the bleeding, clean and dress the deeper cuts and lacerations, tape the broken ribs, and give Gentry a shot for the bite that had almost chewed through the webbing on his left hand. Then he broke a capsule under Gentry’s nose, bringing the sheriff awake almost instantly. “How many fingers?”

“Three,” said Gentry. “Where the hell am I?”

They had spoken several minutes, long enough for Jackson to decide it was not a severe concussion, and then he had given Gentry another shot and allowed him to float back into sleep. “He’ll be all right. I’ll check with you tomorrow.”

“Why didn’t you finish med school?” Natalie asked, blushing at her own inquisitiveness.

Jackson shrugged. “Too much bullshit. Came back here instead. Keep waking him up every couple of hours.”

She had wakened Gentry briefly every ninety minutes in the curtained corner of the basement where Marvin let them sleep. Natalie’s watch read 4:38 when she shook him awake for the last time and he gently touched her hair.

“Bunch a strange dudes around this neighborhood,” said Leroy.

A dozen of the gang members sat around the kitchen table, dangled legs from the counter, or leaned against cabinets and walls. Gentry had slept until two
P.M.
and awakened ravenous. By four the war council was convened, and Gentry was still eating, nibbling on Chinese food he had paid one of the young members to bring back. Natalie was the only female in the room except for Marvin’s silent girlfriend, Kara.

“What kind of strange dudes?” asked Gentry around a mouthful of Moo Shun pork.

Leroy looked at Marvin, received a nod, and said, “Strange white
po
-lice dudes. Pigs. Like you, man.”

“In uniform?” asked Gentry. He stood at a counter, his taped ribs and ban daged side making him look bulkier than he was.

“Sheet no,” said Leroy. “They in
plainclothes.
Real subtle motherfuckers. Black pants, windbreakers, them little pointy Florham shoes. Fuckers
blending’ in
with the neighborhood. Hah.”

“Where are they?”

Marvin answered. “Man, they’re all over the place. Couple unmarked vans each end of Bringhurst. Got a phony telephone truck been in the alley off Greene and Queen for two days now. Got twelve dudes in four unmarked cars between Church and here. Whole mess of them hangin’ around on second floor of some buildings on Queen and Germantown.”

“How many all told?” asked Gentry. “Figure forty. Maybe fifty.”

“Working eight-hour shifts?”

“Yeah. Dudes think they invisible, sittin’ out there near the Laundromat on Ashmead. Only honkys on the fucking block. Punching in and out like they work for fucking Bethlehem Steel, man. One dude does nothing but run and get doughnuts for them.”

“Philadelphia police?”

The tall, thin one named Calvin laughed. “Shit, no, man. Local pigs wear that Banlon suit, white socks,
orthopedic
shoes . . . all that shit when they on a stakeout.”

“Besides,” said Marvin, “they’re too many of them. All of vice and hom i cide and local narcs with the kiddy cops thrown in don’t put fifty of them on the street. Got to be like the federal narcs or something.”

“Or FBI,” said Gentry. He rubbed absently at his left temple. Natalie noticed the slight wince of pain.

“Yeah.” Marvin’s eyes lost their intense focus for a few minutes as he pursued a thought. “Could be. I don’t understand it, man. Why so many? I thought, like, maybe they were after Zig and Muhammed’s and everybody’s killers, but no, they don’t give a shit who offed some niggers. Unless they already after the Voodoo Lady and the honky monster. That it, babe?”

“That could be it,” said Natalie. “Only it’s more complicated . . .”

“How come?”

Gentry moved up to the table, his upper body stiff. He laid his bandaged left hand on the table. “There are others with the . . . voodoo power,” he said. “There’s a man who is probably hiding somewhere here in the city. Others in positions of authority have the same power. There’s a sort of war going on.”

“Man, I love the way you talk,” snorted Leroy and imitated Gentry’s slow, soft tones. “Theah’s a saht of wah goin’ ohn.”

“I find your patois equally agreeable,” drawled Gentry.

Leroy half rose, scowling fiercely. “What the fuck you say, man?”

“He say you shut the fuck up, Leroy,” Marvin said softly. “
Do
it.” He shifted to look at Gentry. “OK, Mr. Sheriff, tell me this . . . that man who’s hiding, he white?”

“Yep.”

“The dudes after him, they white?”

“Yep.”

“Other dudes might be in this. They white?”

“Uh-huh.”

“They all as rat’s-ass mean as this Voodoo Lady and her honky monster?”

“Yes.”

Marvin sighed. “It figures.” He reached into the loose pocket of his fatigue jacket, extracted Gentry’s Ruger, and laid it on the table with a solid
thunk.
“Fuckin’ big piece of iron you carry, Mr. Sheriff. Ever think of putting bullets in it?”

Gentry did not reach for the weapon. “I have extra cartridges in my suitcase.”

“Where you suitcase, man? It in the squashed Pinto, it
gone.
”

“Marvin went back to get my bag from the alley,” said Natalie. “It was gone. So was the wreck of your rental car. So was the bus.”

“The bus?” Gentry’s eyebrows show up so high that he winced and held his head. “The
bus
was gone? How soon after we got here did you go back?”

“Six hours,” said Leroy. “We gotta take babe’s word for it that you was chased by a big, bad city bus,” said Marvin. “She says you had to shoot and kill it. Maybe it crawled off into the bushes to die, Mr. Sheriff.”

“Six hours,” said Gentry. He leaned against the refrigerator for support. “The news? It must be on the national networks by now.”

“No news,” said Natalie. “No TV coverage. Not even a sidebar inside the
Philadelphia Inquirer.
”

“Jesus Christ,” said Gentry. “They must have incredible connections to clean it up and cover it up so fast. There must have been . . . at least four people killed.”

“Yeah, man and SEPTA be pissed,” said Calvin, referring to the transit authority. “I don’t recommend you take any mass transit while you here. Killin’ their buses really piss off ol’ SEPTA.” Calvin laughed so hard that he almost fell off his chair.

“So where’s your suitcase, man?” said Marvin.

Gentry shook himself out of reverie. “I left it at the Chelten Arms. Room 310. But I only paid for one night. They would have picked it up by now.”

Marvin swiveled in his chair. “Taylor, you work in the old Chicken Arms. You get into their storage room, man?”

“Sure, man.” Taylor was a seventeen-or eighteen-year-old with dark scars of acne on a gaunt face.

“It may be dangerous,” said Gentry. “It may not be there at all, and if it is, it’s probably watched.”

“By some of the voodoo pigs?” asked Marvin. “Among others.”

“Taylor,” said Marvin. It was a command. The boy grinned, lowered himself from the counter, and was gone.

“We got other business to discuss,” said Marvin. “White folk can adjourn themselves.”

Natalie and Gentry stood on the small back porch of Community House and watched as the last of the gray winter light faded to night. The view was of a long lot filled with mounds of broken, snow-covered bricks and the backs of two condemned apartment buildings. The glow of kerosene lamps through several begrimed windows showed that the condemned building was still occupied. It was very cold. Occasional flurries of snow were visible around the solitary undamaged streetlight half a block away.

“We’re staying here then?” asked Natalie.

Gentry looked at her. Only his head was visible outside of the army blanket he had thrown over his shoulders in lieu of a jacket. “It makes as much sense as anything for to night,” he said. “We may not be among friends, but we have a common enemy.”

“Marvin Gayle is smart,” said Natalie. “As a whip,” agreed Gentry. “Why do you think he’s wasting his life with a gang?”

Gentry squinted at the dirty twilight. “When I was in school in Chicago I got to do some work with city gangs there. A few of their leaders were jerks— one of them was a psychopath— but most were pretty smart individuals. Put an alpha personality in a closed system and he or she’ll rise to the top of what ever represents the most competitive power ladder. In a place like this, that’s the local gang.”

“What’s an alpha personality?”

Gentry laughed but stopped abruptly and touched his ribs. “Students of animal behavior look at pecking order, group dominance, and call the top ram or sparrow or wolf or what ever the alpha male. Didn’t want to be sexist so I think of it in terms of personality. Sometimes I think discrimination and other stupid social roadblocks breed an inordinate number of alpha personalities. Maybe it’s a sort of natural selection pro cess by which ethnic and cultural groups affirm their fair places in unfair societies.”

Natalie reached out and touched his arm through the blanket. “You know, Rob, for a good-old-boy sheriff, you have some interesting thoughts.”

Gentry looked down. “Not terribly original thoughts. Saul Laski discussed something similar in his book,
The Pathology of Violence.
He was talking about how downtrodden and often unlikely societies tend to produce incredible warriors when national or cultural survival depends upon it . . . sort of specialized alpha personalities. Even Hitler fit that description in a sick, perverted way.”

A snowflake landed on Natalie’s eyelid. She blinked it away. “Do you think Saul’s still alive?”

“Logic suggests that he shouldn’t be,” said Gentry. He had told Natalie about his last few days during a long talk after he awoke that afternoon. Now he tugged the blanket tighter around him and rested his ban daged hand on the splintered porch rail. “But still,” he said, “something makes me think he
is
still alive. Somewhere.”