The Shaft (38 page)

    All her thoughts changed nothing.

    She hung. Fifteen seconds more. She heard bubbling. She called his name once more… but softly this time, realizing he was gone, taken away in an instant.

    On the tank the gun awaited her pleasure, a scepter of power. You do what I say. Point the scepter and they do what you say. It gets you into the apartment on the first floor with no credentials or questions. It lets you pass so you may shine a light. Solve the mystery. Then move your fine symmetrical butt, lady, because you're packing an illegal firearm plus enough even less legal dope to put you in the state hotel until your fucking eyes turn gray.

    A big part of her wanted to stick, and continue calling uselessly out the window. A bigger part craved lights out and deep, irresponsible sleep without dreams. She forced herself to move; it was like wading.

    The candy box was sealed in clear packing tape. When she tried to muscle it open she only succeeded in ripping off the box lid, exposing a grooved butt in matte black. When she tipped the box she felt the packet of cartridges slide heavily. Taped to the inside of the box were also two magazines, already loaded, the blunt copper noses of the headmost shells peeking out. Minuscule phallic symbols all in a regiment. She withdrew the pistol and got the clip in right on the first try. She thought she knew how to use this weapon.

    She was on her way out the door, determined, decided, gun in hand, when she nearly collided with Cruz, who looked like he had just wandered out of a freefire zone.

    

    

    Sometimes the place remembers holes. The cat knows this.

    The cat does not know the concept of a building. Merely place. It cannot know the building is older than its own span of years, the very bricks that comprise its walls themselves the remnants of other buildings, long demolished. The cat has no notions of age or death or time, or a time for dying. These are human conceits.

    Kenilworth Arms has been mortared together from the components of buildings long-dead. To the cat the bricks smell unstable.

    The cat pauses in its latest exploration of the basement, endlessly questioning, yet never extrapolating. All it knows is that new avenues of passage come and go in the place like sunspots. There are holes that exist for a moment to link ground floor to rooftop, or east fire escape to west corridor. Then they close up seamlessly. The cat is learning how to employ these deliciously random doorways. How to pull clear of them before the place recalls its own structure accurately enough to put solid walls back where they belong.

    Sometimes the cat squeezes through the far end bloodied or filthy. The cat dislikes this, but not enough to shun the curious holes as they open and close like blooms beneath a sunlamp.

    Just now the cat freezes on alert. It senses the proximity of another living thing. It crouches low and proceeds paw over paw to reconnoiter the corner.

    A large, sleeping animal is blocking the tunnel. The cat already finds the tunnel unhospitable. Too hot, too damp, too slimy down here. It is lost. It wants a new hole to iris open so it may go somewhere else. To its rear is nothing but more horizontal tunnel, terminating in a thick iron hatch that is bolted shut from the opposite side.

    The thing is coiled, sleeping in a pool of its own amniotic juice, and it looks enormous to the cat. The cat acknowledges the presence of quite a few long, needle-like, nasty teeth. It does not desire combat, but if cornered by the iron door, it will claw and hiss and attempt to inflict as much damage as possible in order to buy a chance at running around the big creature. Escape lay ahead, not behind. Just now, to pass the sleeping thing, the cat will have to squeeze around it or walk over it. This is not worth the risk of waking the creature up.

    The cat will wait, but never for long.

    The cat sits, feels dampness, rises back. It watches the creature breathe. It smells identity spoor: The blood of a recent kill, the hydrochloric waft of digestion and elimination. The place takes no more notice of this creature than it does of the cat; no more notice than the cat itself would lend a tapeworm.

    The cat lifts one paw and shakes it fastidiously. Hopeless. So much grooming to do, once it gets out. If.

    The cat has rapidly cultivated a sense of trust that a hole will open soon. But it feels the tilted equilibrium of the place. The place has become fitful and unreliable. The place has remembered to make the elevator function, then forgotten its purpose. The car remains jammed, doors agape, near the second floor. The cat knows this because it has padded to the edge and peered into the darkness of the shaft. The cat has heard some half-living thing, wet and angry and incomplete, wallowing about on the roof of the car. The cat did not check into that one. It did not want a fight then any more than it wanted to agitate this even larger creature sleeping some ten paces distant, blocking the metal tunnel with its bloated brown bulk.

    The creature is rather like a snake the cat had once caught and eviscerated, only lacking the serpentine symmetry. The only other applicable physical comparison the cat could dredge up - its attention span is extremely limited - is of a stale sausage casing it had once thrown up. This creature was like that, too. Dented and fat and stinky, exuding smells of grease and fat, curled into itself like a braid of excrement.

    Only this is much bigger. And alive.

    A measure of careful respect was to be accorded here. The cat would wait.

    The sound of slowly dripping water, to the rear, made the cat check quickly to see if another of the place's holes had decided to open up.

    When the cat looks back, the creature is shifting. Dreaming, perhaps. Its fatty hide hangs loosely, as though a sleeker corpus is trapped within a baggy monster suit. Gravid flesh drips from the hump of back to pool around the creature, blocking the cramped accessway even more.

    Sleeping, it regurgitates bones, yawns wide and toothy, and resumes dreaming.

    The expelled bones are waxed in adipose and stomach acid. Curls of steam twist up into the cooler air. Broken rib struts, thin wings of calcium, airy and light. A human mandible with porcelain and silver fillings.

    The cat holds at ten paces, disinclined to assume the role of dessert or midnight
snackeroo
. For this creature, the cat would not even be two bites.

    When the creature yawns again the cat sees that the lining of its circular maw is ribbed and tessellated, with pimply bumps. It is a startling uniform white. The luminescent mold slathered about the metal tunnel makes this last observation possible. The cat cannot see colors so it does not see all the red. It can smell the blood, however, and recognizes it as recently fresh.

    The cat's feet are genuinely wet and uncomfortable now. It backs off nearly all the way back to the metal hatch, high-stepping and shaking each paw in turn. It is warmer back here. It stretches against the wall, out of sight of the sleeping creature. The wall yields. The cat sees its claws open scratching-post furrows.

    The cat's brain is not sophisticated enough to posit that perhaps it willed this opening to happen. It knows only to take advantage. In moments it has slashed the hole wide enough to permit passage. Worth the discomfort and damp, this time, just to get away.

    As was its nature, the cat forgets about the sleeping creature just as soon as it is gone.

    

    

    'Calm down!'

    The first thirty seconds of hysteria were loud and useless.

    'Calm down! Shut up!'

    Strangers screamed for quiet. Threats were hurled from behind tilt-bar locks, but no one actually emerged to rumble as Cruz and Jamaica shouted in each other's faces near the second floor stairwell.

    'No, no!' Jamaica was prattling, rapidfire. 'You don't understand; he's hurt, he's down there; we've got to help him-!'

    The gun, forgotten in her own grip, was randomly aimed right at Cruz's groin while she spoke. He snatched it right out of her hand. 'Will you just wait one second!'

    She overrode and shoved him back roughtly. 'You wait. He could be drowning while you just stand there!'

    With a sound like a growl she shoved past, colliding with his injured arm and spinning him halfway as she lit down the stairs.
Drugs,
Cruz thought.
She acts like she's on something
.

    Who was drowning?

    He wanted to chase her then, but the cocked door to 207 deterred him. The gun in his hand offered bravery. He squirmed around the airlock doors and poked his head into Jonathan's place.

    Maybe Jonathan was drowning?

    Inside: Boxes, clutter, the cot, more boxes. Bloody footprints. He trailed them to the bathroom and saw his own Glad bag slowly deflating in the tub. Blood and shit were smeared everywhere and the window was open. It looked like an open mouth. When he saw the orange extension cord feeding out and down, he thought of plugging it in to perhaps electrocute the ghosts of Kenilworth and sterilize the dead or dying things down in the shaft.

    When he saw the kilo of coke stationed on top of the toilet tank, Cruz forgot all about poor old Jonathan.

    Half the stash had been salvaged. Half at least. Whatever else had gone down while he was trapped in hospital dreamtime, half his payoff was here, now, and it was good enough. It would need hiding. Bauhaus' pet mugger, Mr Marko of the fullback body and golf tee brain, would return here just as soon as he found out he had been foxed.

    And five minutes ago Cruz had just accidentally discovered the perfect hidey-hole.

    On the closed lid of the toilet seat was the candy box, ripped open. Inside were a clip and a box of cartridges. Gun's in your HAND already, homeboy, Cruz's brain informed him.

    He lurched, vision spotting momentarily. His arm pounded. He hurt and couldn't quite deduce what the hell had transpired during his brief absence, and by the way…

    … there is still a police car parked on Garrison Street, right outside, and you are standing here like a dickless mannequin with a gun in your hand and enough pharmeceutical cocaine to get you butt-fucked by convicts for five or six more lifetimes.

    Chaos thundered back from the stairs. He tried to whirl and draw a bead. The muzzle didn't dip when he knew it was Jamaica, knew it was his name being called.

    You could always toss the kilo back out the window. It was time he stopped repeating mistakes. In an instant he decided that he was capable of blindsiding a lone cop. Knock his ass down the stairs. Run like hell. Disappear into the blizzard. Stop someplace where he could dope it all out. Later.

    No time.

    He thought of Rosie's crisis cool. The shit was flying grandly now. He had to be careful not to inhale any.

    She was at the bathroom door. 'Come on, come on, you've gotta come, hurry UP!'

    One-handed, he lofted the kilo onto Jonathan's cot and got a positive grip on the Sig Sauer. He wouldn't be able to shoot worth a tick fart with his left hand, but life's rich cornucopia of options did not afford him a choice. Sidewise, gun drawn, he edged down the stairs to 107 right behind Jamaica.

    Dark in there. Cold. He saw her hesitate at the threshold.

    She had come down here, seen stuff, and bolted back up the stairs. Twenty seconds, tops. Too much for her mind to process without distance.

    He saw the look on her face as she urged him ahead.

    The only light that seemed to work blazed from the bathroom. Cruz saw the dried blood all over the living room walls by its pale, canted luminescence. Some splashes reached nearly to the ceiling. Blood stained the blinds and soaked the flapping curtain in the busted casement window. Broad smears of it across the floor. Gelid little ponds, still tacky, where gravity had pooled it. The furniture was overturned and sundered.

    He stepped carefully around the blood. The bathroom vestibule, identical to those in his and Jonathan's rooms, was like the drainage gutter of an abattoir on beef bashing day. There was an eye on the floor, roots already dried stiff. The bathroom itself was even worse.

    Cruz could not make his lips and tongue cooperate enough to ask stupid, obvious questions. This was nothing like seeing Chiquita perform her swan-song dive. This was an overload of unending meat and fluid and carnage; a corpse pit empty of corpses, yet retaining plenty of clues.

    Wadded into a corner and soaked with blood was a policeman's hazard jacket bearing an Oakwood patch and single hash marks. In the far corner there was a cap, upside-down, with some bloodied hair still inside. Cruz crossed to the broken Garrison Street window and sure enough, the cruiser was right outside. Still vacant.

    Jamaica 's face held the expression of a woman who had just been punched out by her one true love. Or punched from the inside. Only now did Cruz notice she was wearing a pair of bright orange Playtex rubber gloves.

    This was the old Jew-hater's apartment, he realized. He spotted an open dresser drawer and purloined a handkerchief, folding it to mask his nose and mouth from the stench. His throat wanted to gag. He had zero desire to look at what he might chuck up, thanks.

    The bathroom was awash in dry maroon. A cleanup challenge worthy of Mrs Bates' best boy, Norman. The airshaft window was smashed out and there were bloody bootprints marking the exterior sill. The extension cord hung in the blackness, pretzel loop swaying dreamily - a Daliesque component of weirdness texturing this tableau of slaughter.

    Cruz saw the straight razor in the bathtub and shivered. It had nothing to do with the biting cold. The bloodied razor stuck to the porcelain was Emilio, raising his platinum shaver and saying, remember me?