The Kill Riff (46 page)

    "That's littering," said Horus.

    "Aw, another law broken. Damned shame."

    Then the music started, and everybody on both sides shut their traps. It was loud and distorted, the bass notes penetrating the rainfall, and it was blasting out of Sara Windsor's house.

    The singing voice was Gabriel Stannard's, and the song was "Riptide," Whip Hand's first hit single.

    Raindrops rolled forward off the gray sedan as it stopped sharply, its headlights inches from the rear of a van-type ambulance. The sniper saw two paramedics in orange jerseys leaning against the port side of their unit, smokes in hand. They seemed unconcerned, wanting nothing to do with gunfire or blocking strays. They were here only to plug up the bleeding or body-bag the dead and so turned their backs on the standoff to stare into the empty field on the far side of Claremont.

    

    

    The sniper sniffed trouble up at the point, the head of the cluster of law enforcement vehicles. If he ventured forward to scope things out, the locals would involve him… and he might not get to do his job. The paramedics saw him and decided to squat down to continue their conversation. Past that, they gave him no notice as he stepped off the pavement and was swallowed up by the rain-sprinkled darkness of the open field.

    His boots grabbed the mulch, and the ground soon began to slope away and become pocky. No fun, to blunder into a chuckhole out here and maybe turn an ankle.

    So many deadly weapons had come out into the chill night air. It was time for him to unsheath his own, in the name of civil good.

    He fixed on Sara Windsor's house. He'd scanned the available maps and diagrams. He made his way toward his predetermined optimum vantage, unshouldering his waterproof case.

    Most police tactical teams favored bolt-action Remingtons in the 800 series for sniper duty, but modern firearms technology was working to unseat bolt guns and forward thinking was important to the sniper. Most sniping ops, he knew, were within a hundred yards of the target, and his weapon of choice was a nightmare of accuracy for three times that distance. He unsleeved it with practiced-in-the-dark precision, careful not to snag the premounted opticals.

    The sniper was an adept. He knew his job, and he respected history.

    Once upon a time, in the late 1950s, a team of designers under Eugene Stoner fabricated a rifle-and-cartridge combination and pushed it hard at a government anxious to provide its dog soldiers with a weapon more modem than the standard field issue of the Second World War. The gun was designated AR-15, and used high-velocity.22-caliber ammo. The Air Force Security Police used it to replace a variety of rifles and submachine guns, and the army followed suit by ordering the guns for use by Special Forces trainers. In Indochina they achieved the status of legend. The Viet Cong offered rewards in gold to anyone who captured one of the fabled Black Rifles. The mythos was pumped by horror stories of the buzz-saw damage the AR-15's whirling slugs could wreack on a human body. President Kennedy kept one of the guns on his yacht, for shooting sharks. As the war escalated and Indochina began to be called Vietnam by the news personalities, the military's need for a smaller and more manipulable infantry weapon caused the AR-15 to be tagged for service use under the new designation M-16.

    For the Dos Piedras assignment, the sniper had chosen a customized Insight Systems AR-I. It was based on the AR-15. Its power was guaranteed by the heavier 7.62-millimeter cartridges it fired; its accuracy, by the sniper's personal hot-rodding. He had replaced the "vanilla" plastic stock with one of glass-filled, injection-molded polymer. It was padded by a thick neoprene collar that could warm his cheek and make the whole package less slippery. He had covered the front grip with a steel-backed National Match handguard of dense, shock-absorbing foam. The position and terrain denied him the use of the Harris bipod, his "crutch." This shot would have to be made from a free-standing position.

    He flicked on his optics and test-sighted the Windsor front porch. The gridwork of the Thompson Contender scope came alive in red-another personal modification. His line of fire bisected the no man's land currently in force between the crippled Charger and the barricade of police cars thirty yards away. At this range, the sniper could have turned Cannibal Rex's bald head into lasagna with a single shot. But that was not what he had come for.

    He tracked the reticle across the front windows, right to left. All were shaded. A shadow scared briefly across the one nearest the front door.

    He saw Gabriel Stannard move.

    The shooting gloves kept his hands warm and his fingers free. Just as the sprinkles of rain began to get more ambitious, he shouldered the AR-I, maneuvered his toothpick around to the far edge of his mouth, and sighted.

    
God,
he thought,
I love my job.

    

    

    Lucas knew a Gabriel Stannard entrance when he saw one.

    Pinning the two sheriffs down behind their own cruiser had been simple. While one end of the street choked up with blinking gumball lights, the opposite end had filled up with the furor of Stannard's arrival. Mild surprise was Lucas' only reaction as he watched the jacked-up, overpowered street machine vault from nowhere, from the place of graves, to touch down in his field of fire. Guessing who was at its helm was no quiz. He felt sorry for the cops-those poor suckers were caught in the eye of a shitstorm they could comprehend only in the broadest procedural terms. They would not care about his back-story or the neat fit of the events about to happen. Now they were faced off by Stannard's own assault force, two men holding twenty-five at bay. Lucas had factored the police into his scenario, and it looked like Stannard had, too. The authorities were not stupid… they just had no idea of how it was supposed to go.

    Lucas kept shy of the windows to avoid possible sharpshooters. The police had information, and none had dared to intercept Stannard on the front lawn because they were aware that at Lucas' Point Pitt cabin a man had bought the farm courtesy of a land mine, and they had seen how Jackson Knox had died. None of them would be eager to step down hard on turf that had not yet been swept for explosives.

    There were no mines salted into Sara's front yard.

    The older sheriff had been a man with a considerable bag of cojones. Lucas had watched him face down the oncoming Charger with the steady cool of a toreador dispatching an uppity bull. Through the Nitefinder scope, Lucas had seen K. C. Dew's tongue protruding from his lips in concentration as he gunned down the vehicle, tearing away its front tires with his second expert shot. Then Claremont Street had come alive with cop cars.

    Sara was still mute in her chair by the fireplace. Soon her fear would kick over into anger, and he would not be able to cow her. She would attack.

    Several times she had started to speak, then fallen silent. She was still mustering strength. He did not want to kill her.

    The brilliant phosphorous white-out of the flash-pop had frozen everybody. Stannard's men were well packed, and Stannard had come upon the house with the speed of a Fury… but almost no weaponry. Lucas' eyes had recovered from the grenade burn in time to see him drop the shotgun. Soon he would be without his six-gun as well.

    More sirens, distantly. Backup; maybe the fire department.

    He ripped open a black Velcroed flap pocket on his pants leg and produced a cassette. It was time to get down to it.

    Stannard's cheek was almost admirable; he'd made it, the crazy son of a bitch.

    The phone in the hallway began to ring again, and Sara's now-sunken eyes sought it each time it made noise. Lucas walked over to where she sat.

    "That'll be the police, outside," he said. "They want to know if you're all right, what I want, all that good B-movie stuff. Let's give them a little easy listening instead." He handed her the cassette. "Play it loud."

    She reached, then snatched her hand back to reinforce her falling towel. Then she slotted the tape into her stereo, notched up the volume, and hit Play.

    There was a huge piece of smoky quartz on the glass shelf next to the cassette deck. It was a hexagonal chunk with bubbles inside of it. It would make an awkward weapon, and Sara estimated she would get halfway across the room before Lucas chopped her down with his unstoppable Teflon slugs.

    Lucas was nearly gone from the world, totally removed. A changeling had been substituted, a malign, alien creature that looked like Lucas and had his voice… but one that found more joy in the passion play about to enact than any salvation she might offer. It was Lucas with his emotions deleted, or, more to the point, Lucas with his emotional equipment reduced to the level of tools, used to get what he wanted. Needed, now.

    She wanted to say no, to say that it had to stop now. But the stereo emitted an abrasive opening riff, and

    Gabriel Stannard began to screech about getting caught in the riptide.

    She knew what her mind was doing. It was converting Lucas into an enemy so she could goose herself into action and dispose of him. It was converting him into something she would not mind eliminating. Deep love relationships frequently evoked a similar pattern. Broken lovers circumvented trauma and the depression of loss by redefining the former partner in the most repulsive terms possible-not exactly a healing process so much as a survival mechanism. Her mind whittled away at him inexorably, changing him as much as he was changing himself. It was like a steadily brightening light. Soon it would be blinding.

    Surrender would accomplish Lucas nothing. The police were obviously girded for a massacre; they wanted shooting to start, because it would simplify their options. There was no leniency in the face of a SWAT madman. At this point Lucas was armed, dangerous, homicidal. The only reason the police had not stormed her house was because they needed to know if she was alive; that was why the phone had started ringing. Their need for her to be alive would diminish as time ground onward.

    Even if Lucas got what he wanted, he could never escape. Why was he stamping PAID IN FULL on his death certificate this way?

    Lucas had mentioned cycles closing. He had no plan beyond what was to transpire here in her house, tonight. Unless…

    Stannard came juggernauting in to impact with the wall opposite the porch balustrade outside. Lucas hurried to crack a shade and take a peek.

    … unless Lucas survived, and was hospitalized, so the cycle could start all over again.

    She realized, abruptly and defenselessly, what

    would have befallen her if she and Lucas had gotten together in Los Angeles, "gotten to know each other better," as the lie went, gone to bed together at the time she had craved it, made love at the moment she needed tactile reassurance worse than any ache she had ever felt. She would not be breathing now.

    He raised his voice to penetrate the raucous Whip Hand tune and beckoned her to the door. The rifle came up. "The man of the hour is at your front door, Sara. Why don't you let him in?"

    

    

    THE DOOR OPENED TO A slit of light, and Gabriel Stannard saw a nude lady. Already things inside him were fighting to jump their hinges.

    "What you want to do," said a voice, "is to crawl inside slowly, on your hands and knees. Push the gun ahead of you with the knuckles of your hand. Any frills, and I'll blow your spine out your asshole. Stick your head up any farther, and the cops down there will probably do the same."

    A hot animal odor pulsed from him, the smell of lions on the sedge coming right out of his pores. Astrologically, he was a Leo; Sertha had told him that one day he would have to live up to it. The audiences did not know Gabriel Stannard was for real. Now he could feel how real his blood was. Cannibal Rex's dope charge fizzed away in his veins like champagne.

    Conscious that the eyes watching him were wired to a trigger finger, he set the Magnum down uncocked and scooted through the doorway as instructed.

    Hard, stringy, seesaw guitar riffs cranked hard into the night. Behind them, his own voice, seven years younger. His heart had begun its own manic drum solo, and his system throbbed with the onrushing intoxication he felt in concert, where he controlled his audiences, got them to show their hands and jump up and down. When he exhorted the ladies down front to toss him their underwear,
by Christ,
they stripped down and did it.

    The naked lady shut the door, and before he could ask what kind of weird fucking scene this was, the M-16 was sniffing the bridge of his nose.

    The woman, the doctor, had a look about her that said she had seen two autopsy films too many. There was a fire going in the hearth. And towering above him, armed and all in black, was the man who had given him the permanent scar through his right eyebrow.

    The moment was perfect for him to tuck his elbow, roll, pluck up the Magnum, and blow the psycho's gray matter all over the foyer. The drugs, twanging and rippling through his muscle tissue, cut loose.

    At the instant Stannard's body moved, Lucas stomped down hard on his other hand, anchoring him to the polished wood floor and arresting any hope of momentum. The muzzle of the M-16 swung away as a booted foot shot around to shut Stannard's face with a thud and the click of chipping dental work.

    The singer fell back onto his butt, both hands clamped over his mouth and muffling a guttural noise of rage. His eyes shone at Lucas in the firelight, a bright, glazed blue. Lucas' eyes assessed him in turn and found no threat.

    He stooped and easily retrieved the revolver. At the sight of his own blood oozing between his fingers, Stannard made another inarticulate growl and almost charged. The M-16 kept him right where he was, huddled against the front door. After a second he searched his gums with his fingers and came up with a chunk of broken tooth. He stared at it as though it were a sliver of ice from Saturn's rings.