The hallway floor splintered beneath the clomping hooves of the rampaging werebull. Behind it, plainclothes cops continued to unload dozens of rounds into its departing beef round. The bullets weren’t bouncing off, but they evidently weren’t causing more than the mild irritation of mosquito bites on the ass of the charging monster.
Sweat glistened across its skin, and as it lowered its clothesline horns I felt once more the furious blast of heat from its flaring nostrils.
Three seconds before it would have hooked me on the tip of a horn and sent my lifeless corpse sailing into the wall like a P.I. rag doll, the elevator doors finally opened and I tumbled gracefully inside. My rookie cop companion remained frozen in place, a matador who’d soiled his lamé skivvies, and I had to snag him by the arm as I dropped and yank him from the werebull’s path.
I got only a blurry glimpse of a terrifyingly long body crashing past the wide open doors of the elevator. It was like watching a living subway car roll out-of-control through the house as I valiantly cowered in the back of the broom cupboard.
In a flash, the charging bull was gone and I was up on my knees and stabbing viciously at the ground floor button. Through sheer force of will combined with a hyperactive bladder I tried to get the silver doors to roll shut.
The stampeding hooves grew eerily silent. My panicked breathing didn’t.
In the moments after the behemoth stomped past the elevator, the kind of hush that never ends well fell over the precinct house, like the calm before “I do.”
All at once came a gentle “ding,” and the silver doors at last rolled softly shut. Soothing Muzak assaulted my terrified eardrums. (Goddamn Kenny Loggins.)
“They’re supposed to do a blood test to check for were-animalism,” the rookie cop panted. The kid was white as a sheet. As he spoke, he grabbed for the bar that wrapped around the walls of the elevator and hauled himself up from the floor. “I guess the labs on Jones didn’t come back yet.”
“I’ll read about all the advancements in police incompetence in the next issue of Cop Digest,” I assured him. “In the meantime, get down.”
I didn’t mean it in the goddamn Bee Gees sense.
I grabbed the kid cop by the arm and yanked him back to the floor. An instant later, a massive horn pierced the door and sliced to ribbons the vacant air into which the rookie cop had a moment before been heaving a premature sigh of relief.
The werebull shook its head and the car jerked around on the end of its horn.
The thinness of the cable that was preventing us from plummeting to our deaths was suddenly of paramount importance to me. The box in which we were suspended bounced around the elevator shaft on the end of its wire like the rubber ball at the end of a grammar school bastard’s wooden paddle.
There came a mechanical lurch and accompanying metallic strain. The grinding gears informed us that the car was meant to be moving, but we were locked in place on the end of a huge horn, like a struggling garbage disposal stopped up by a broom handle.
My vain hope that somebody on a floor above had rung for the elevator was shot to hell when I glanced at the pad on the wall. According to the little red light, the unmoving car had just passed the floor directly below us.
“Is that bad?” the kid cop asked. He, too, was staring in panic at the numbered pad on the wall, a fairly remarkable act considering it meant his entire existence wasn’t focused on the gigantic, living stalactite that was wiggling around searching for somebody to murder three feet above his head.
“I’m no expert on elevators, even though, as a lawyer (which, just in case we survive this, I’m still claiming I am), I’ve passed water and passed out in more than my fair share. But I’d say that the cable above us is unspooling even though we’re hanging more-or-less still. Right now it’s coiling up on the roof of the car just waiting to make very bad, very gravity-specific things happen.”
I struggled to my feet and hung back in the corner opposite the one the horn was currently stabbing. Outside, there came an angry, frustrated, “moo.”
“If that’s the case,” I continued, “which it almost certainly is, that means that when the bastard bull yanks out its horn, this tin box will drop to whatever floor those little numbers say we’re supposed to be on.” As I spoke, I inched carefully along the wall towards the front of the car. “If we drop enough floors, the cable will snap when the car jerks hard enough and we’ll plummet to our certain deaths. Basically, the shortest distance we can possibly fall is the safest, and right now that’s wherever the car is supposed to be at this moment. Ergo.”
I stuck the barrel of my gat through the crumpled metal next to the enormous horn and fired twice into what I could glimpse of the werebull’s T-shirt and, presumably, the ear concealed below it.
A furious howl issued from the opposite side of the closed elevator doors, and the horn vanished back through the hole like a blind rat in a Whac-a-Mole game.
As Sir Isaac Newton and I predicted, with the peg that had been holding us in place pulled, the bashed-up elevator immediately plummeted down the shaft.
I hadn’t even looked at how far along the numbers had advanced, and it came as a pleasant surprise that we didn’t rocket thirty stories to our deaths. Still, a one-and-a-half story drop was no picnic, especially since I’d failed for days to prepare my sensitive liver with an adequate amount of liquid cushioning so as to ensure the poor, dehydrated organ the soft, Jim Beam landing it deserved.
The car plunged, jolted, and banged off the sides of the shaft. All at once, the cable twanged like a banjo string and the two hapless bastards stuck bouncing around inside were flipped like flapjacks. Since the horror wasn’t quite horrific enough for whatever universal force directs the constant bombardment with excrement that is my daily existence, the lights flickered out and we were plunged into total darkness.
More terrified bouncing ensued. I got an elbow in the gut and a knee to the chin, both of which belonged to me. There was quite a bit of justified hysteria, a dollop of terrified sobbing, some deeply earnest praying and a lot of inventive and sincere swearing, only most of which could be attributed to me.
The seconds-long chaos was abruptly followed by the ridiculously ordinary ding of the elevator bell. The lights switched back on, the doors rolled open, and the kid cop and I were dumped out of the bucking car two stories down. The good news at the tail end of five minutes of bad was that we managed in our undignified egress to wipe out a pair of dame police dispatchers and an actual public defender, who was dolled up in bellbottoms and a yellow peace-symbol necktie and was evidently hanging around for Sergeant Pepper’s magic elevator asshole time machine to transport him back to 1968.
I was up on my feet in a nimble flash.
I immediately got lightheaded and had to grab the wall because I’m a middle-aged disaster and not a Flying Wallenda.
There was a necessary, momentary pause as I waited for my MIA blood to return from wherever it went on vacation back to the lump between my ears that laughably passed itself off as a brain. The world cleared, I kicked the hippie for good measure, flung the Shyster, Pilfer and Fraud business card at him so he’d know precisely who to sue, and I was back on my own two feet and running like a maniac to anywhere other than there.
I no longer heard the sound of pounding hooves, but I wasn’t taking the chance that the werebull hadn’t read the floor numbers on my descending elevator and wasn’t at that very moment stuffing its steroidal bull ass into the next car down.
I found the staircase and booked it down two stories.
I’d nearly reached the ground floor when I became aware of a couple of muted noises that had the nerve to eclipse those being made by my own terrified feet, which were echoing and amplifying my extreme cowardice off the walls of the stairwell.They came as a distant rumble. Lucky for me, they originated from somewhere far off in the precinct house. The vibrations carried through the shuddering floors and walls like the aftershocks you felt through your stool legs while sitting in air-conditioned comfort in front of a one-arm bandit down the street from a Vegas hotel implosion. Along with the soft horror that came along with a mental image of the Sands collapsing around my ears, I heard the collected racket of a whole lot of people screaming their muted lungs out.
As I circled the second story landing I caught a glimpse of the werebull, which was, I was pleasantly surprised, not giving a murderous snort and patiently waiting to kill me on the other side of the window past which I was running.
The behemoth knew how to make a dramatic exit, which had more to do with instinct than whatever of Igor Stradivarius’ consciousness remained inside its huge head.
After it failed to harpoon my delicate carcass, the werebull must have stumbled around and found its way to the precinct’s main marble staircase. That taxpayer-funded extravagance brought it down to the floor I was on, albeit a blessed half-city block away.
The architect who’d designed Precinct #1 had incorporated a Grand Central Station-like monstrosity of a multistory, multi-pane window at the front of the building, which pretty much looked like I.M. Pei had got drunk, got lazy and glued a greenhouse above the main entrance. As I circled to the final staircase, I watched every pane of glass in the multimillion dollar window explode out into the street.
The hulking shape of the werebull carried out into open air along with the scattering shards of glass, the twisted bronze grid system, the silver sash and -- because this was a money-is-no-object government monstrosity -- the solid gold and diamond-encrusted window casing. The werebull plunged down to the road one-story below like a sack of wet cement.
The huge front hooves arrived at ground level first, but to get there had to first pass through the hood and engine of a parked police cruiser. Tires exploded and the cruiser crunched like a box of Fiddle-Faddle. The entire front end of the cop car met the pavement like a cartoon cat run flat by a steamroller.
The rear hoofs of the leaping werebull joined its two front companions at street level an instant later, but the monster was so massive they nearly missed the cop car entirely. The stomping rear legs merely grazed the bumper, which came off like a pop-top and twisted underfoot like a metal boomerang.
With the front end compressed, the rear end of the cruiser shot up in the air and nailed the werebull in the stomach. The beast howled in rage and rolled onto its side, releasing the cruiser from the pavement like a Mexican wrestler set loose from el canvas.
All four of the werebull’s legs kicked furiously at the air. The two rear flailers snagged the bouncing cruiser and flipped it halfway down the block. The cop car landed spinning on its roof like a top and took out a taxi and a couple of street mimes on its way straight through the front window of the L. Ron Hubbard Museum.
The werebull flipped back over and reassembled its legs in the traditional running-the-hell away position, which it promptly did. It took off down the main drag, Igor Stradivarius’ soiled laundry flapping like mad on its horns.
Traffic swerved to avoid the moonlit monster as it charged up the double yellow line. A Mercedes slammed into a mailbox, dumping letters out all over the street. A Fiat (or some other little piece of shit car, as I have no desire to be absolutely sure what a Fiat is) slammed into a vendor’s fruit cart, the presence of which was, by recent city law inspired by lazy movie cliché, required on every downtown city corner.
The fruit vendor of indeterminate ethnic origin shook his fist in the air, slipped on a banana peel and landed on his ass in a basket of soggy peaches. A student in the music store across the street gave a couple of exquisitely timed practice blasts on a tuba, and somewhere nearby I assumed was Adam Sandler scribbling down the hilarious high point of his next goddamn movie.
As the werebull raced to freedom, it cut loose with a moo! that busted out windshields and set off car alarms up and down the street. A speeding city bus drew too close and the charging werebull snagged it with the tip of one horn. The deadly spear dragged down the whole length of the bus, tearing up a jagged stripe in the metal like a stampeding can opener. Another violent moo!, and the werebull deposited an asphalt gift for the sanitation department before disappearing around the corner one block down between the Woolco retail outlet and the Anaerobics Studio for the Hard-of-Breathing.
I ducked away from the window in anticipation of the inevitable bus explosion. When it came a moment later, the blast launched shards of flaming metal against the stairwell window, but the wire mesh that lined the inside of the heavy pane held. There were distortions formed by a couple of fresh cracks in the pane when I glanced back out.
The flaming, decelerating bus was slowly rolling after the now tragicomic figure of the fruit vendor, who couldn’t get his ass out of his peach basket. As slow as the hulk of the bus was moving, the poor bastard was running slower, pathetically trying to outrun the out-of-control bus while bent double with his rear end wrapped in soggy wicker. Rather than help, some punk kids were filming it with their phones. Goddamn YouTube.
Flames and moonlight glinted off scattered glass that looked like shattered ice. Motorists climbed out of cars. An army of cops too late to do anything but yell at civilians and wave their guns around raced down the front steps of the main precinct house, yelling at civilians and waving their guns around.
There were no distant “moos.” The werebull, which would tomorrow morning once more become Gypsy king Igor Stradivarius, was long gone. In another minute (assuming somebody didn’t poke a button that would turn the stairs into a side-splitting slide in order to deliver me into the bowels of some fresh hell), so too would be I.
The staircase remained solid beneath my shoes as I raced like mad down to the first floor, out into the cool night and, eventually, into the loving arms of a well-earned, God-given American right to get completely loaded off my ass.