Lady Slings the Booze Page 29

  “All right, I didn’t expect you to fall for that one. But at least tell me this: are you the Master Maniac, or just a stooge?”

  He frowned, offended.

  “I have the right to know who kills me,” I said.

  “True,” he conceded. “And I know you are not wired. Very well. Yes, as you ’ave guessed, I am the Chief of Surgery. But now you must tell me ’oo you are, and very quigley.”

  “Certainly, Doc. My name is Ken Taggart. I’m a licensed proctologist. I clean out diseased assholes.”

  He sighed. “Mr. Taggart, I tell you again that I refuse to follow your movie script. You will not be the smart ass and waste my time. I am reluctant to begin burning you so soon, because you must answer many questions before you die. So the next time I find one of your answers unsatisfactory, I will kill one of your friends.” He produced my own gun and held it where I could see it.

  Ah. That sounded promising. If he shot one of them, the bullet wouldn’t hurt them any, and the ricochet might just hit him…

  Okay, my move was to be the wisecracking detective. Simon Templar. Make him mad enough to blaze away. Perhaps a wild bounce would thunk into Lady Sally’s desk and bring the Marines.

  “I didn’t know you did it retail, dear heart,” I said cheerily. “Murder, I mean. I thought it took numbers of a million and up to give your little reptile-brain an erection.”

  His face tightened, and he slapped me hard on the side of the face with my gun. It’s a heavy weapon. Thank God I had instinctively tried to roll with it, and so simulated the natural motion he expected from a man slapped that hard. If he figured out the invisible body armor, he would not waste time shooting us. I had the presence of mind to register great pain nearly at once. I could not simulate a bruise, but the light was poor. “My, I must have touched a sore spot. Do you know, I actually believe you might have thought about doing that even if I weren’t helpless.”

  To my disappointment, he got a grip on himself. “You will tell me what agency all of you work for now,” he said tightly.

  “I’m sorry to disappoint you, Doc,” I said. “But the God’s honest truth is, we’re freelance. Well, inexpensive lance, but we’re doing this on our own time.”

  “And you carry weapons so arcane that I do not even understand what they do.” He closed his eyes and shook his head slightly. “Very well,” he said.

  He went to where Pris and Arethusa lay side by side, breathing in slow rhythmic swells. He bent and placed the barrel of my gun in Pris’s mouth and pulled the trigger.

  My heart broke in that instant, and a man with a broken heart is a dangerous opponent.

  The sound it made was unique and horrible, a muffled, wet bang that took a long time to fade. Her brains and the slug did not erupt from the back of her head, because the useless magic body armor worked just as well from the inside. Instead the slug whanged around in there churning everything into mush until chance sent it down into her body cavity. Things emerged from her ears, nostrils and mouth, and both her eyes bulged from internal pressure. None of this struck him as unusual; he was not familiar with handguns, just A-bombs.

  The Miner removed my gun and made a face, wiped the end of it fastidiously in Pris’s hair.

  “God damn you,” I roared, “I told you the fucking truth.”

  “Ridiculous,” he said. “How could you have stumbled onto this?” He climbed over Pris and squatted by Arethusa.

  “It started out theoretical,” I said desperately. “This could be done. Why hasn’t anyone tried it? How do we know no one has? If someone did, how might one find out? We deduced you.”

  “I do not believe it,” he said. “How?”

  “Neutron reflector,” I improvised frantically. “We got to thinking about design and placement as a single problem, and realized that a water main would be an ideal environment for a nuke. Then I studied a city services map and looked for good places to leave one.”

  “And how do you finance this ’obby?” he snorted.

  “I’m rich—” I tried.

  He snorted. “You are not and never ’ave been rich. Never mind, I see you will not answer this question until I begin with the torch. Instead, answer this one: ’ow did you succeed where your friends failed, and enter this chamber without setting off the alarm?”

  “I had a gas mask then,” I said, knowing it wouldn’t stand up.

  He shook his head. “I ’ave looked quite carefully. There is no such mask here, and no way it could ’ave been removed. Even if there was, it is not necessary to breathe the gas to be affected by it.” He put the gun into Arethusa’s sweet slack mouth.

  “Wait!” I roared. “For God’s sake, Doc, wait! My wife’s the only one who can explain that, I swear!”

  It was the best I could come up with. I had no plausible lie, and the truth would not serve.

  He started, and stared from me to Arethusa. “Neither of you wore a ring.”

  “We just got married, I swear to God. Wake her up, she’ll tell you everything you want to know. She’s the brains of the outfit; she’s a genius electrical engineer, a disciple of Nikola Tesla. She located your mine with a gadget she built: it detects radio receivers that are located underwater, by the resonance or something. The little trumpet things you thought were weapons. We used them to wreck your radio trigger.”

  He removed the gun from her mouth. “That is the first thing you’ve said that is remotely plausible. Very unlikely, but possible.”

  “She really is a genius, Doc, I swear. She’s the one that’s rich. Give her some of that stuff you injected me with and she can tell you anything you want to know.”

  He set the torch down and tapped the gun against his palm. “A student of Nikola Tesla. And she is truly your wife?”

  “Do you want to hear me beg? Okay, I’m begging: if you’ve got to kill us both, do me first.”

  He ran his tongue across the inside of his lower lip, making it pooch out briefly. “I begin to believe for the first time that you may actually be independents,” he said slowly. He was thinking aloud, reasoning it out for himself. “Or if you are affiliated with an intelligence agency, you are acting without authorization. They would not send a ’usband and wife. I also believe that you do not know my name or location, or you would not have tried to set a trap for me ’ere. So even if you have other confederates, the maximum risk they represent is the loss of this single bomb. I do not think there is any way it can be traced back to me, and I can always reset the frequencies…”

  I let my eyes widen in horror. “Oh Jesus Christ, you’ve got other mines? Where?”

  “Thank you, Monsieur Taggart,” he said gently. “That was the last thing I ’ad to know.”

  He stood up and shot me three times in the torso. The ricochets were frighteningly loud, but I reacted convincingly, pitching sideways and twisting so he wouldn’t notice that the new holes in my clothes were dry. Maybe he didn’t count the ricochets, or maybe he just assumed the slugs had gone clean through me. Whatever, he bought me as a corpse.

  I held my breath and prayed.

  And heard the sound I feared most of all to hear.

  The rustle of his trouser legs as he squatted back down again.

  I knew then, the instant I heard that silken whisper in the darkness, I had gambled, and failed. My heart died, and a man without even a broken heart is a very dangerous antagonist.

  Frozen helplessly in my limp sprawl, I heard again that hideous muffled liquid thud-d-d as a .45 slug smashed Arethusa’s brain to jelly.

  17. The Car Chase

  Bad luck, bad luck is killin’ me:

  I just can’t stand no more of this third degree.

  —Traditional blues lyric

  OH my love, forgive me! I have failed you utterly; I cannot even cry out at your murder—lest all the world be lost and your death unavenged…

  Cold black despair saturated my heart. My luck was gone now, gone with my heart. Now The Miner would check my pulse to make sure I was dead, and
when he saw I was not he would put one into my mouth to make sure…

  There was a brief fumbling sound, and then I heard the safety catch of my gun snap closed. The gun landed on the floor with a sound so loud and unexpected I barely suppressed the flinch.

  He had no stomach for firing a make-sure shot into the mouth of someone he knew damn well was dead. He had aimed three shots at my chest, and was too ignorant to know how astonishing it was that he had actually hit a target that size with a handgun from ten feet.

  A ladder groaned softly under weight. I hoped it was the one to the manhole exit. If it was the one to the inspection plate, if he were going to try and repair his radio trigger now, then he would probably decide to take my flashlight with him when he left, and that would be bad.

  I heard him grunt hugely with effort, and the manhole cover came free. Faint light spilled down into the chamber. Excellent. Either he had done whatever he could with the bomb before waking me for a chat, or he had written it off in his haste to quit the scene of his debut murders. He scrambled from the chamber, and wrestled the manhole cover into place behind him.

  I sat up at once and looked around.

  With an immense effort, I suppressed all emotion. I considered the tactical situation with icy dispassion, from the kind of Olympian perspective from which the slaughter of my beloved was a trivial sidebar. How badly was our cause damaged?

  The Miner was now very likely to advance his plans, go public with his mines in advance of his target date. That was bad. I knew nothing useful about him that I had not known in Lady Sally’s office. That was bad. In order to have any hope at all of salvaging the situation, it was imperative that I get free at once and tail him.

  Assets within reach: a flashlight. If I didn’t mind working in darkness, I could have three D-size batteries. No, wait, here was something really useful, almost within reach: a drop cloth.

  That fucking toolbox was probably bulging with things far more precious than rubies. It was more than a body length out of reach.

  I inspected the angled bracing bar I was double-cuffed to. At either end it was set into a retaining collar a good inch deep. I strained at it experimentally until spots swam before my eyes, but I knew there was no way I was going to snap off something meant to help support that mammoth pipe.

  A bell rang in the back of my mind. John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee had faced a situation like this once. Cuffed to an angled bracing bar in the bow of his houseboat, as I recalled. I had tools analogous to the ones he had used. Maybe even better…

  I studied the situation. The concrete truss was shaped like what an antique naval cannon sits on. On either side there was a transverse rectangular hole about two inches by four all the way through the concrete. I would guess they were there to accommodate some kind of girder that hadn’t been used in that chamber. They were just where I needed them.

  Hurry!

  I only had to strain my cuffed arms half out of their sockets to get hold of the drop cloth. Working awkwardly behind myself, I got it folded once cattycorner and twisted into a crude rope. With even more difficult contortions I worked an end of it through the hole in the truss, tied a secure knot, led the bigger end over the bracing bar. There was just enough to reach back down to the knot at the truss again. I tied it off as tight and as securely as I could manage. Now for a lever. The only thing within reach was the flashlight. I plucked apart the two strands of taut drop cloth in the middle of their span from truss to bar, tucked the flashlight in between them, and began winding the drop cloth like a rubber band.

  In theory, what had worked for Travis McGee should work for an agent of Lady Sally McGee. Something about the screw of Archimedes. Same principle as an automobile jack, I think. Wind the drop cloth/screw tight enough, and the bar, designed to take longitudinal stress, should deform, bend sideways enough to pop out of its collar at one end or the other. At that time it would probably try to break one of my major bones, but I was armored against that.

  In practice, it was unbelievably difficult to keep hold of that fucking flashlight, and keep on winding it against increasing tension, with cuffed hands, behind my back, with the desperate awareness that the clock was ticking, that The Miner was getting further and further into the vast anonymity of Penn Station, while moisture that had collected on the drop cloth transferred itself to the flashlight and made it slippery…

  Finally it got away from me. The drop cloth went into high revs, and the flashlight, unbalanced, worked free and went flying. It broke when it landed, but not before I had time to see for sure that it was hopelessly out of reach.

  I wasted no time on curses or tears. I tried to kick off a shoe in such a way that I could reach it, succeeded on the second try. I got it into the drop cloth and tried winding again.

  A shoe doesn’t work. Not stiff enough.

  IN all the world I had one tiny morsel of hope left, one I hated to even consider because it hurt too much to think about. But I no longer had such luxuries.

  I went inside my head, where it was even darker and colder and lonelier than the chamber, and where another kind of nuclear device waited. I went way back deep inside, as close as I dared to the hot pulsing place where emotions surged and boiled like captive neutrons behind the lead walls. And I opened up a porthole into Hell.

  Arethusa, I screamed into that vortex, help me! Help us all! Brooklyn is that way! Find your other body, my love, and wake it up!

  I tried desperately to remember every lingering microsecond of those golden moments when Arethusa and I had experienced something like telepathic union. Those memories tore like claws now, but I needed to do anything I could to tune my telepathic transmitter to what I remembered of her receiver frequency, to send her a pattern she would recognize and recall and respond to.

  Here I am, love. Remember? This is me, Ken/Joe/Humphrey, your husband, someone back in the land of the living, who still needs you. Hitchhike on my carrier wave if you need to, if you can, but find Brooklyn and wake up!

  Not all of my telepathic scream was directed at her. I think some of it went into what I believe is called “praying.” Don’t ask me Who to; you wouldn’t believe me if I told you. Telepathic screams need not pause for breath; mine went on for a long, measureless time.

  Light bloomed on the far side of the pipe.

  “Here I come, Joe,” Arethusa said, and for the second time that night, I bawled like a baby.

  HOW long does the soul linger after the brain is destroyed? Or had her soul, whatever that is, flown to Brooklyn at the instant of the shot, and waited there too weak or confused or traumatized to wake until I yelled? I was too busy to ask her.

  Mike Callahan was on her heels. As Arethusa and I blubbered, he dealt with the bracing bar, then the handcuff chains. I didn’t see how and didn’t care. My arms went around Arethusa and clung for dear life. After a timeless time I became vaguely aware that the Professor was picking the locks on the cuffs themselves and removing them.

  Figuring that detail out jumpstarted my brain. “We may still catch him,” I cried, and leaped to my feet. I didn’t fall down again. Those ankle cuffs had been tight, and I’d stressed them fussing with the drop cloth, but my magic skin had protected the circulation within.

  Mike had already heaved the manhole cover clear with one hand. “Come on, Ken,” he boomed, and held out his big mitt. I took it and was hauled upward as easily as Priscilla—oh God, Priscilla!—had hoisted Arethusa, a hundred years ago. He pressed a Smith & Wesson into my hand.

  I set off at a dead run.

  As I rounded the corner, I skidded to a halt. There was that fucking raised floor. I tried to spot the gas jets, and failed. Except for the floor, the corridor was utterly featureless except for bare light bulbs. People began to pile up behind me. Nobody said anything.

  Damn it, The Miner had walked that floor. If he used some handheld device to do so, I was screwed; we’d have to fall back to Lady Sally’s, and have her reset her magic gate to deliver us to some point past th
e boobytrapped corridor. I hated to take the time to go backwards. Suppose my luck was back: suppose he didn’t have a handheld trap-suppressor. Then there had to be a short-term cutoff located at each end of the hall. If so, there was only one place for it to be.

  I reached under the floor, felt the little switch, and threw it. When I stepped onto the floor, nothing happened.

  I sprinted again.

  It was very good that that corridor was completely empty. It did not contain the corpse of Ralph Von Wau Wau. That suggested The Miner (the hell with the name “Doc,” with his conception of himself as a planetary surgeon) had been either sentimental enough, or cautious enough, to take time to dispose of his body. The bastard hadn’t bothered to do that with my body, or Arethusa’s or Pris’s, but he’d taken the trouble for a dog. I didn’t care why he’d done it; the point was that it had to have slowed him down some.

  As I ran I was trying to recall details of the map. At the end of the fatal corridor I took a right and was relieved to see a door where my memory said it ought to be. I tucked my gun away in my pants and kept on running.

  A while later I emerged from a door marked “No Admittance” into an obscure part of Penn Station, with Mike, the Professor, Arethusa, Father Newman, and Tim right behind me. Mistress Cynthia too had managed to keep up somehow on her shorter legs. There were citizens in sight, but no one seemed to notice us despite the obvious bullet holes in my clothes. I looked around wildly, trying to catch my breath.

  Lady Sally materialized in mid-air in front of me, squeaked, and dropped two feet to the floor with cat-like grace, dressed in a stunning Kelly-green jumpsuit and sneakers. This event was noticed. But we were after all in New York; those who witnessed it ignored it except to note the nearest exit.