The Shaft (34 page)

    His unit was faced into the wind. The frontal attack of the storm strobed his wipers. Useless. He did not dare roll along at more than a steady thirty on this late tour. The Oakwood patrol grid assured about five square miles. The most persistent drawback here was boredom. At least that was better than the panic ulcers of most of the officers that worked in the Loop.

    Victor Stallis was a policeman in decline. He had let his exercise regimen slide ever since Liz had left that stupid note on that stupid dresser. The one her stupid mother had bought her at antique store mark-up, as a fourth anniversary gift. Liz was a closed case now not because Stallis was a cop, but because his ideas of sexual progress and hers had dovetailed late in their third year together. He had begun to suggest things. Calisthenic alternatives. Jellies and devices. Submissive-dominant positions. New orifices. The kind of lovemaking that left the marks of a severe interrogation. Handcuffs and pimp sticks.

    Stallis rode the brake and tried to grind the sleep from his face. He was unsaddled, his belt and gear dumped on the shotgun seat. Five of Oakwood's twenty-man force were downed tonight by bugs and the runs, the numbing depletions that came of working too many double shifts in blizzards. Tonight he had rolled solo, with nothing to look forward to except B&E calls and a domestic or two wintertime cabin fever made people pull the weirdest shit.

    He thought about tearing off a piece with the hooker the station guys had nicknamed Little Oral Angie. Things were slow, so he went through the motions. He reported a vagrant with a head wound needed to be dropped at St Jude's. Then he went on the prowl for a vagrant. Angie held forth from a condo two doors from the turn-in for St Jude's emergency bay. Usually you could get a sympathetic orderly or nurse to chase the paper. In the time it took, a cop with a good sense of schedule or an alarm on his watch could fly by Little Oral Angie's and get his torpedo sluiced.

    But Angie had been riding the rag tonight of all nights, bloated and surly, her glands puffed with some busily incubating infection. Stallis had bid her a hasty adieu, cursing the snow and the cold once more. He had dealt the baton to his chosen vagrant smartly. The head injuries were convincing. But his side trip to the ER had been a total waste of time, not counting the paperwork.

    Victor Stallis' assessment of his own sexual condition was sympathetic and rationalized. Police were exposed to so many tough scenes over a decade of service that the accretion of emotional callus was inevitable. You got so you required more and more stimulation to feel basic reactions. His own genital appetites had become afflicted as a byproduct of his sensual neutrality. In his own words, these days he needed to swing much wider to hit the sweet spot. Liz had not been understanding. Hell, Little Oral Angie could comprehend this sort of psychology without needing it explained chapter and verse. Stallis had even given her money. Twice. He tried to be a decent guy.

    Now alone in the AM, he sat in his cruiser, a hard-on inflating, then ebbing, then retumescing as he thought about what he'd missed with Angie, the poor bitch. There was certainly no street action on Oakwood's ice-encrusted sidewalks this night, and his stuck-up mate was far gone.

    The radio blipped, chasing channels, then crackled and fuzzed completely out. It was like trying to listen to punk music, for godsake. Stallis thumbed the volume down to minimum. The scanner LEDs continued marching. It was too freezing to coop; if he tried catching some naptime he'd wake up an icicle in the St Jude's morgue. Three o'clock seemed continents distant. After tonight's run he'd be switching shifts from day to night. He'd get off at three and wouldn't have to go back on duty until midnight the following day.

    He had so counted on Little Oral Angie.

    In the middle of this stormy night, the glacial mounds of snowfall reflected sizzling bright. Tornados of flying snow inched visibility to zero. Even using his low beams, Stallis could not see more than a few feet ahead. The street lamps were at lull power and he could not see them, only their hazy light, coming and going like clouds dashing past the window of a jet. High beams would just throw his own light back in his face. He thought of a high-mountain whiteout. Fresh snow piled up in the poorly plowed avenues.

    It was too goddamned cold for criminals to be afoot.

    He was not even sure of which street he had wheeled onto until he recognized Jamaica 's beat-to-shit Honda Civic, half-interred by a rising summit of white. He reached over to crank down his passenger window and looked up at the Garrison Street entrance to Kenilworth Arms.

    Now there was a notion.

    If Jamaica was holed up in Kenilworth tonight, it would surely have something to do with the aftermath of the bust in which Stallis had partaken. Maybe the dopers were massing to flank, or that scumbag Bauhaus had ordered a relocation. Retreat and regroup. Stallis enjoyed the game; dope dealers and their idiot operatives were always so predictable. He could say he spotted suspicious local activity, to justify a follow-up. If Jamaica was inside, she would squat-thrust this beef bayonet just to avoid more jail, more hassle, more black copy on the big bad yellow sheet. She'd take it up the ass and bark like a whippet if he ordered her to.

    He dismounted, buckled his gunbelt and zipped up his high-collared, insulated coat. A grim smile above, a loaded gun below. Stiff upper lip; stiff lower tip, as Reinholtz incessantly joked.

    Curtains fluttered wildly from an open ground-floor window, one of the corner ones. Inside it was totally dark, and through the blizzard the window looked smashed. If anyone was sleeping in there they would have blocked the window up by now, he thought.

    Even in this craven-cur weather, it looked like a burglary, by god. Maybe a death.

    Both in the military and on the force, Stallis had seen a heavy helping of dead people. He had killed two or three himself; it depended on what you counted as people. Death, he theorized, was one of the things that had hardened him… as opposed to making him hard.

    Damn Liz anyway. Wives were supposed to be supportive.

    He waded over and found the windowsill to be a couple of feet higher than his eyebrows. No obvious clues visible from his position. Should he call this in? Should he bother?

    To protect and serve. He thought it would be better to protect once he had been serviced. After his below the belt needs were taken care of, he could get official.

    The storm's wild tarantella provided peachy cover noise. He grabbed the sill and hoisted himself up for a fast peek. The likely answer was that this was a vacant room whose glass had been blown in by the blizzard. His boots thunked the slippery bricks and his hardware clattered. It was all subsumed by the howl and pelt of the wind. Snow stung his cheeks so hard he wondered if they were bleeding.

    He swung his baton flashlight to bear. The first thing his sight registered was blood, lots of it, smeared all over the walls and floor as though a gallon jugful had been lustily slung by a drunken vandal.

    When the smell hit him, he lost his grip on the sill. A catalogue of profanity slugged up in his mind. His chin thocked hard against the cement overhang; he tasted tooth enamel shavings and his own blood for real. None of his awed words made it into the refrigerated air.

    His fall was arrested by strong arms.

    It took Stallis a second to see this. His jaw felt like it had stopped a good hook that had jarred his gray matter and caused him to drop the flashlight. His eyes teared and the tears froze on contact with the slipstream of iced wind.

    When he cracked his eyes open he felt the skin rupture in papercut slits. Pain slammed his sight dark again. Two seconds ago this had not happened yet. Reflex made him think to claw his.357 from its holster. Another nook of his brain fought to decide whether he should holler protest or thanks at being grabbed by the scruff.

    His toes never got the opportunity to touch the cold crust of ice blanketing the sidewalk. As he was hoisted up he finally got his eyes open and his senses ordered. The smell that had galvanized him was the battlefield fetor of messy death. Those schooled in proximity to the lifeless will tell you there is no smell quite equal to it, and once you know it, you're stuck with it, close as a lover, ominous as the glinting edge of good buddy Mr D's waiting scythe.

    His knees struck the brickwork as he was dragged upward. His scrotum got mashed. His skull was an airtight can with a rubber ball bouncing madly around inside, making dings and dents.

    He saw the face of the person who had dared to mess so physically with a police officer.

    Not a person. Not a face. His hand hurried to draw the revolver.

    Stallis saw a moist visage awash in discharge and blood, looking peeled, or overbaked. Skinless sinews cuddled a good nine inches of jaw in which hundreds of pencil incisors were crookedly seated. At the crown was a pulsing wad of cauliflower brains topped by a froth of bloody white hair. The arms supporting him were naked bone enwrapped in hanks of muscle like a derelict's clothing held together by electrical tape.

    No eyes looked back at Stallis' in the chancey storm light.

    This was not real. It was a ghoulish caricature, ineptly architectured, holding him aloft with strength that was not structurally possible. It was all wrong.

    It was wearing a bloody necktie, loosely knotted at half mast. No body, no legs, just a solid caterpillar column of flayed and oozing flesh all the way to the floor, covered by a red-soaked shirt just as long. The bone haft of a switchblade jutted like an aerial from the thing's right shoulder.

    Stallis had to get to his radio. Call in a Code 34 - officer needs help. He still had not pulled his gun all the way out. If he died in this room the call would be a 10-19. If he blew this obscenity away, he would be asked what was your backstop? You were not supposed to fire a round from your weapon unless you made damned sure it would not pierce whatever waited behind your target, and thus possibly hole some slow bystander.

    
Fuck all that jive.

    Stallis freed the Magnum from its roost, cocked on the upswing, jammed it into the breastbone of the creature holding him, and snapped the trigger. The gun went off with a muffled
kowkff
and remained mired to the trigger guard in the quicksand clay of sternum. It hung fast even after Stallis' grip slackened and fell away.

    Impact. Impact. By the fourth time Stallis' occipital smashed into the casement he was thoroughly insensate. Thin splinters fell from the molding. Bits of glass were embedded in the back of his head.

    The sluglike creature sneezed, causing the revolver to catapult from its chest and skid into a gelid bloodpool on the floor, smoke still wisping from its muzzle. Stallis was propped against the inside wall. His body refused to sit, lolling drunkenly.

    The thing wearing the necktie was confused and slow. It knew it was supposed to be the occupant of this room. It knew the building had intended for it to be this room's occupant. But what was it supposed to do next?

    A skeleton claw rose, badly puppeteered, and closed on the bone handle of the Italian switchblade, feeling it the way a teenager might probe his first facial hair. Yes. Remembered behavior was the cue.

    It unsheathed the switchblade from the meat of its shoulder with a juicy sliding rasp. Then it sawed a jagged, leaking line, ear-to-ear, across the crown of Victor Stallis' head. Bony fingertips immersed themselves, gripping the lips of the gushing fissure, and peeled back firmly. Wet treats aplenty were unveiled.

    The thing could not think. Its drives were tidal, elemental, orts of memory like jigsaw puzzle pieces in an unruly pile. Part of it wanted to coil back into the humid sanctuary of the tunnels. Part of it was hungry. Part was satiated and beset by incomprehensible nightmares - images impossible to assimilate, as strange and alien as telepathic impressions from a different species.

    Another part of it wanted its eyes back. Its fine, clear-seeing, Jew-hating eyes.

    

    

    Heights did not scare Jonathan. Nor the dark. The close press of the shaft was no threat because he was not a claustrophobe. Its confinement was illusory. The downward rappel was going to take him back to his caving days, during which he had inched down chutes larded in clay mud or wrist-deep in batshit.

    He thrilled to the fact he was going to such cliffhanger lengths. He felt alive to the core and in charge of his own destiny. This was a missed sensation, and welcome.

    Going down would be the easy part. His biceps and forearms were equal to such a short hop. Jamaica watched him tip outward from the bathroom sill and brace his gumsoled boots against the waffled metal. He eased his weight on to the makeshift extension-cord line and it went taut enough to play a solo on.

    'Shh,' he cautioned. Jamaica was hanging on to the cord.

    He anchored with his left arm and felt for the next climbing loop with his right. Almost immediately his toes skidded against the slick, wet surface of the airshaft's lining. This was going to be like a series of short falls from one pretzel knot to the next… and the next was down near his knees.

    Despite his tight grip the free line smoked through his gloved hand with alarming acceleration. He felt air rushing upward. He fisted leather around insulation and lurched to a lung-compressing halt when he hit the next pretzel. Momentum bashed his face against the corrugated steel and flung shock lightning across his inner eyelids. His heart freaked, punching too much blood furiously through his brain, flooding it with an assortment of nasty thoughts about his own abrupt termination, like defective cars smashing together in a freeway pile-up.