The Shaft (45 page)

    Ludes, loads, poppers, black cats, percs; Bauhaus is infamous for the freshness of his fruit salad. Gyros, highwires, dexedrine, black beauties, red nightmares, crystal blue persuaders, none of them a niggardly dosage. Skimp for guests? Never. About ten assorted pills are gathered in his palm.

    'Drink me,' she says. 'Cheers.'

    She takes a long pull off her Quietly while Bauhaus chokes down the cornucopia of drugs. Two hard swallows. Something gets lodged and he coughs.
Ack ack ack
. He washes it all down with beer.

    Jamaica makes him repeat the routine four more times, until the bowl is half empty.

    Keeping him in sight and making sure his legs stayed wrapped around the stool, she hunts up car keys from the cabinet rack. She does not want him to know which of his automobile collection she is stealing. Backstepping, always holding the pistol on him, she collects the Haliburton case from the dining room.

    Bauhaus works on making saliva. He says nothing now.

    She is itching to murder him. Make him eat the gun and watch his brains decorate the picture window, to drip down. If he gets loose he'll make her compost in a second. She will be erased from the earth. To Bauhaus it would be an adjustment in a ledger. He has never related to her as a human being, or even a person for rent. To kill him would be to degrade herself to his level of nonhumanity. She does not want to become a robot that badly. What is good, merciless corporate practice is not necessarily a good bottom line for her life. She would relive killing him every day of her life, and he is not worth that much time inside her head.

    Bauhaus does not rate her rage. This comes as somewhat of a revelation to her.

    She is about to tell him what to do next when he makes his move. He slaps himself hard in the face with his palm. Then he snarls. The snarl becomes a yell; the sound martial artists make when they pop a good workout sweat.

    Bauhaus launches himself from the stool, pounding toward her on bloody feet, his muscles fighting their way to the surface of his flesh, and Jamaica has just enough time to remember that among the dope on the bar, lost in the mix, are probably some ampules of PCP.

    Bauhaus has smashed the ampule right into his face. Pinpoints of glass are jammed into his upper lip.

    His charge is clumsy and mad, making up in fury what it lacks in grace. His arms are outflung into claws.

    She gets the Haliburton up one-handed and whacks him in the face. Christ but the thing is heavy and all that's inside is paper. Not a good shot, but it has weight behind it. Bauhaus is deflected to execute a spreadeagled headfirst dive into the sunken living room.

    Instead of trying to circumvent him, Jamaica sprints for the first bedroom. The green bedroom. Two doors down, Emilio is still faded to black, touring dreamland and getting angry at everything.

    Bauhaus yowls incoherently, spraying spittle, the veins in his eyes bulging. He gets an arm and a leg through the bedroom door just as she tries to slam and lock it.

    She kicks him in the shin hard enough to lay back flesh and expose bone. He does not feel it.

    His hand clutches blindly for her windpipe and she must drop the Haliburton to hold the door. The door seesaws and he skins his wounded leg free to kick at it. Now Jamaica is making her own kind of growl. She shoulders the door hard and hears two of his fingers break as his hand is hastily withdrawn from the jamb. The bursting knucks sound like a party-popper.

    She reconsiders having to relieve Bauhaus of his life in the next ten seconds or so. She gets the door lock engaged but knows it won't hold.

    The first time Bauhaus rams the door a framed painting jumps from the wall to break frame and glass on the floor. It depicts human skulls in ochre, and is signed in a childish hand by John Wayne Gacy.

    Jamaica grabs the case and runs for the closet. When Bauhaus caves in the door it will take him two or three seconds to track and orient. She is counting on that lag of time to save her bod.

    If the bedroom had been a dead end she would have had to shoot her way to the front door. Breaking windows to sneak free was a joke in this building - all the windows are security-barred, on coded releases. There are even tiny bars on the intake for the industrial heating/cooling unit. Jamaica is not stupid enough to retreat to a dead end just to be cornered by a lunatic lathered out on animal trank. She has ducked into the green bedroom specifically to enter the closet.

    Bauhaus collides with the door. A whitewood crack appears lengthwise through the middle. It bows toward her. The hinges tear halfway free of their moorings.

    Jamaica sweeps aside the racked clothing in the closet, mostly coats, slickers, winter gear. She paws around for the big red button she knows to be there. Accelerating fear tries to iris her throat shut.

    The heel of her hand skids past the edge of the circuit box. It is further back than she remembers. It is industrial gray with a flexible conduit hose coming out of the top. The button is mounted in the center of the box, within an insulated collar that prevents an accidental trip.

    The door of the green bedroom flies apart into matchsticks and kindling sawdust. Bauhaus sprawls in, still clumsy on his injured leg. He stands up, weaving, and yanks a sharp fragment of the door out of his left tit.

    Wooden stakes only stop some monsters.

    His smoking jacket is tom open, belt danging. His feet are crimson to the ankles and he has a hard-on.

    The button emits a buzzer noise Jamaica has forever associated with the employee doors on bank counters. With that noise the back wall of the closet will retract to the right for seven seconds, then relock. It will release her into the rear of the foyer closet, thence into the room with the mirrored walls and bullet-deflecting glass. She will be exactly two feet from the front door.

    If the building's alarms have not gone off by this time, they will as soon as Jamaica employs the escape panel. Pressing that big red button is just like kicking off Doomsday in all those World War III flicks. Bauhaus' legion of backup security, firepower unslung, will come charged and gnashing their teeth. Hell, not so pretty, would officially bust loose.

    Evermore the braggart, Bauhaus has foolishly pointed out the button to Jamaica, about a year back, in the afterburn of two hours of mediocre sex and countless lines of excellent controlled substances. Jamaica has joked to Jonathan about Bauhaus' 'secret panels'. Jonathan is dead now and Jamaica does not wish to join him.

    The panel takes its mechanical time withdrawing as Bauhaus slouches across the room to kill her.

    She steps through, case-first. He misses her neck but ensnares a fistful of her hair and braces against the closet frame, trying to reel her back headlong. She loses the case; it mashes her foot. How can money be so heavy?

    Her hands hang on to the metal hanger bar as she is trawled backward, her neck tendons snapping tight as thick rubber bands to shoot pain up and over the crown of her head. The panel is closing.

    Fleetingly she wishes that she had the chemical edge.

    Bauhaus makes another caveman noise and whips her head back. Her occipital cracks against the panel as it seals off with a good nine inches of her hair still in his grasp on the leeward side.

    She aches to shoot him now, a craving nearly sexual in its bite and intensity.

    The escape panel is a one-shot option that cannot be triggered repeatedly. It is designed to foil such pursuit, and will not open again until five minutes had clocked off on the circuit box's timer. Bauhaus has told her this, too, never suspecting she would be the one to use his own system against him.

    But he would know that, which means that the only thing holding Jamaica 's hair now is the door. Bauhaus is already on his way around to cut her off. Perhaps an extra moment, to collect a meat cleaver or another firearm, to gift her with pain.

    The panel flashing is secured with metal brads and rubberized for a quiet, positive contact. Jamaica steels herself, one, two, three and jerks her head forward. Roots shed and hair filament snaps like twigs in a blaze; there is no sound inside your head like the sound of your own hair tearing away in gobs.

    Seventeen years younger, and she recalls the dentist's warm assurances that this wouldn't hurt a bit, and that he would count to ten before he did anything. He grabbed a lower molar and rocked it in the jaws of padded pliers, counting one two THREE as her tooth was levered free, roots and all, in a blurt of oral blood that had made her gag and cry.

    Tears came now.

    Luckily her hair is still damp from the exertions with Emilio, plus a flash of panic sweat across her scalp. That helps rend her loose, but the back of her head feels sanded and bleeding. Her foot throbs and tries to spill her with a misstep.

    She makes it out through the foyer door just as Bauhaus appears on the other side of the smoky glass. There is blood all over him by now. Neither of them can hear the alarms, though use of the closet panel has certainly fired them off. Just past an inch of armored glass she can see him feverishly punching buttons to override. He makes a hasty error and punches in one more time.

    She recovers the Haliburton with her left hand and crossdraws the.357 with her right. She empties the cylinder at

    Bauhaus' fat ogre head from a distance of less than five feet. The cleavage glass saves him, naturally, but the spectacle of it fragmenting and webbing as it is stung by the police loads is fearsome enough to make him dive. By the time the echoes of report die Jamaica is out the front door and hobbling toward the heated hell that keeps the elements from pestering Bauhaus' 1971 Corvette.

    No alarms outside. Perhaps Bauhaus has inadvertently shut them off.

    A security car will slip up the drive. If she roars past them in the Corvette they will assume she is Bauhaus, and the sight of the police cruiser at the foot of the drive will slow them down another critical second or two.

    It is easy to hide in a blizzard of disaster area proportions.

    The load of drugs she has compelled Bauhaus to ingest has to kick in soon. Has to.

    Icy airflinted against her cheeks; Mother Nature the sadist. She slams the Corvette's door and cheats the storm. Bauhaus still has not emerged. She spies headlights angling up the drive. A third eye, a door-mounted spotlight, probes madly around in the blowing snow.

    As soon as the cherry-red car is free of the port the windows fog up. Good. At least she doesn't have to wear the stupid hat again.

    As she veers around the security car she beeps twice. A second unit is close behind. Go get 'em, boys. Defend the house; let the boss (or his car, at least)fly.

    They buy it wholesale.

    The nose of the 'Vette hits the avenue with a crunch of impacted ice. The leftward slide is unabortable. She broadsides a concrete post smoked in ice, crimping the rear fender on her side. So what.

    She stomps the brakes and the Corvette chomps into a berm of snow eleven feet high, huge enough to ski down. The motor thrums while she sits, knuckles bloodlessly clamping the wheel, fighting to detour tears and perhaps a fit of hyper-respiration that can easily black her out.

    Five seconds pass. No further assault comes from the house above. She imagines the chaos. Ten seconds.

    The idea hits her, tickles her, and she wastes no time jumping outdoors and making it real.

    Officer Stallis' Oakwood cruiser was still dark at the foot of the slanted driveway. She has just missed colliding with it. The keys are still under the floormat. No time to marvel. Work fast and get out.

    She flipped the toggles for lights and siren.

    A full bore Code Three of scintillation and noise rips across the snowy dawn. After locking all the doors she flings the keys strong and they cease to exist in the swirling clouds of white condensation and tornado snow.

    She feels lighter and freer with each stride back to the Corvette.

    The shit is about to come out the shotgun, but she feels okay, like she just might make it.

    She took another rejuvenating swig from Bauhaus' glovebox flask and considered just why she had to meet Cruz at the Bottomless Cup. Why bother going back to Kenilworth Arms?

    Why not just hit the southbound interchange and keep on driving?

    On the floorboard by the Haliburton was the large and ugly automatic Bauhaus had pulled on her. God, so many guns she had actually missed disposing of one.

    It was chucked into a faraway snowbank. When she replaced the flask in the glovebox she found the vehicle registration, and Bauhaus' name was nowhere on it. Of course. Such documents would be filtered. The car was owned by a perfectly innocent bank. If she was pulled over by guys with badges, she might just slam free.

    She had promised Cruz she would rendezvous. It seemed a promise she could break, no strain.

    Bauhaus, if he ever woke up from the overdose, would certainly have Cruz murdered if Cruz was dumb enough to stay in the vicinity of Kenilworth Arms. By now Cruz had inhaled enough of the kilo to hang tough while heavy-caliber slugs ate chunks out of him.

    She no longer needed the slice of money Cruz would reap from the kilo… provided he hadn't already metabolised it all.

    She had her saddlebag and almost too much cash to carry.

    Kenilworth was a trap, a pit, a maze of blood-drenched rooms and more craziness than could ever be scared up at Bauhaus' madhouse. Did she really need more grief to round out her day?

    Silently she asked herself questions in the rearview.

    As soon as the storm relented she could burn a hundred miles or more, ditch the 'Vette in a frozen creek, and check into a gorgeously anonymous Holiday Inn for a long soak of exceeding warmth. Warmth that could seep to her marrow and begin to heal her. Room service. The mindless meditations of television.