Outside the tearoom,
fine flavors still on my tongue,
cigarette smoke cloud–Soezi
It’s Swbyra!
“Told you I had back up,” Shrike says. “Hey, my man.”
Swbyra trains his weapon on me. It’s all I can do not to say, “Huh?”
“Why didn’t you tell me you was a cop instead of giving me that shit about Carlotta,” Shrike yells at me. “We could have come to some kind of arrangement like with my man here.”
“You’re with him?” No wonder Ace and Spade haven’t been able to find Shrike. Swbyra’s been tipping him to their operations. And no wonder the Terminal Road bust went bad. Swbyra took the back door not to head off Shrike’s escape but to engineer it. When he came barreling around the side of the house, he wasn’t fleeing Shrike, he was clearing the way for him. When I got hit running for cover after knocking Swybra out of his path, I thought it was Shrike doing the shooting, but maybe not. Maybe it was—”
“What this arrest shit?” Shrike asks Swbyra. “You supposed to keep shit like this from happenin’ to me. Here Mansion just jig his ass right on in here.”
“You’re the one who let him in,” Swbyra reminds him.
“Yeah, well, you be the one to put him out.”
“Put him? ...”
“Waste ‘im,” Shrike says, and starts back up the aisle.
A wave of cold flows down my back leaving puckered skin in its wake. Swybra doesn’t move.
“I said waste him,” Shrike yells. “Are you my man or what?”
Still Swbyra doesn’t move.
“Aw, useless fuck. I got eleven-year-olds worth more than you,” Shrike says and shoots Swbyra. He falls back, firing. Before anyone can aim at me, I hit the floor. Shrike doesn’t mess with the secured exit. Covering his back with blasts from the Cobray, he races up the side aisle toward the lobby. With the Beretta, I fire after him but half my attention is on Swbyra, now flat on his back. Shrike takes cover behind a row of seats and retaliates. Still in a painful crouch, I scrabble over to Swbyra and drag him to the foot of the first row. “Are you hurt?”
“Yeah.”
There is a small hole in his quilted jacket. When I peel the jacket away, I find a bloodier hole in his vest. I don’t want to think about the projectile that drilled through it.
“Backup! Why can’t they get in? How’d you get in?”
“Shrike ... let me in ... service entrance. Backup ... there is no backup.”
Bullets punch into and carom off the seats. I fire back, then lie alongside Swbyra. “Does Shrike know?”
“Yes,” he hisses.
“Swbyra ... why?”
He doesn’t answer right away. “Nearvana,” he finally says.
Swbyra a junkie? That can’t be. He’s a good cop, thorough, on target, always right there. Except for those migraines—
Oh, God, no. The migraines weren’t migraines.
I risk rising enough to peer over the seats and spot Shrike in the center aisle. He shoots at me and I shoot back, sending us both diving for cover.
“Get ‘im, Mansion,” Swbyra hisses.
“Get him? Are you crazy? Dammit, if he’d stop trying to kill me, I’d let him get as far away as he wants. I just want to get out, get you some help.” Swbyra is in bad shape. I know what will happen if I don’t get him an ambulance soon.
Swbyra grasps my ankle. “You’ll have to kill him. He won’t run. Not and leave you alive.” His voice is thready.
As if to prove Swbyra right, Shrike unleashes another round. Gunfire from behind is hard to ignore. “It’s only a movie, it’s only a movie,” I keep telling myself, until one entirely too-real round whizzes past my ear. Shrike’s second, not so dead he can’t try to finish what Swbyra wouldn’t, is up on one elbow and firing a pistol. A drop gun! In response to the new threat, a fresh wave of adrenalin floods my system. Before I can return fire a shot rings out from Swbyra’s direction. Shrike’s second jerks back and falls flat.
“Go!” Swbyra yells hoarsely. “I got your back.”
Like he did on Terminal Road? Can I take that chance? My thigh screaming, I crabwalk up the aisle, scrunching behind seats whenever Shrike fires. He reaches the swinging door to the lobby and slams on through, leaving me in the clear. I gamble on standing upright for which my leg and shoulder are grateful.
“Swbyra?”
No answer. Once through the door, I inch up the yard-long alcove just shy of a lobby darker than the theater’s interior. No light projected onto a white screen here and I can’t see a thing. It’s a dead end! Worse, a trap, with Shrike out there somewhere just waiting for me to show myself.
Panic makes me so lightheaded I can’t think. I take a deep breath, then another, and strain to see. This time I can make out details I couldn’t a moment ago. Encouraged, I stand still, breathe slowly and deeply, direct all my energy to my eyes, and find the darkness a shade less total. Cracks in the paint opaquing the clerestory windows let in some street light. The illumination is just enough.
Directly opposite me is a wall. The front door angles off it to the right. Another door gives access from the lobby to the ticket booth. About six feet to the right of the ticket booth there’s yet another door, possibly to an office. The service entrance from Miracle Mile is to the right of the office, and at the far right are the restrooms.
A glass pane in the office door reflects light coming from something directly across from it. I can’t tell what for certain without leaving the safety of the alcove and stepping into the lobby, but I can guess. If my memory serves me, the concession stand is to my right, opposite the ticket booth. Something there is picking up the light from the clerestory windows, possibly the candy case’s glass front, or the mirror behind the concession stand. Whichever, it reflects back onto the office door glass.
A small green light glows steadily on the wall next to the service entrance door. The security system is still armed. Shrike could have already escaped, rearming the system as he exited in order to slow me down. Or, he could still be here, waiting to get me out in the open. He could be hiding in the ticket booth, the office, either of the restrooms, or the concession stand. From any of these positions, he’s got the drop on me the minute I leave this alcove to step into the lobby.
Maybe I should go back into the theater and take my chances with the control panel at the exit door. I don’t like the odds. There’s no cover at that position. All Shrike would have to do is open the door from the lobby and he’d have me directly in his sight.
As I’m considering my options, I notice a detail I missed in the reflected light on the office door glass. A dark shape. A shadow.
Shrike. Behind the concession stand. Knowing where he is helps, but not much. He still has the advantage the minute I break cover. I’ve got to flush him out of his bunker.
A diversion? No. If he didn’t fall for it, he’d have my position. If I were him, I wouldn’t even move. With that Cobray, I’d just blast me through the wall between us.
Good idea. Praying I’ve got ammo left in the TEC-9, I step back and drill the wall between me and the concession stand. Sheetrock flies and glass tinkles. A second later I see a rain-coated figure dart across the lobby, making for the service entrance.
“Shrike, stop! Drop your weapon! Drop it!”
He whips around. “Your ass!” he yells back and ducks into the men’s room under covering fire from the Cobray.
He shoots at me, I shoot at him. It’s ridiculous. We’re both with our back against the wall and nowhere to go. We don’t have unlimited supplies of ammo and it’s just a matter of time before one of us runs out. My TEC-9 clicks dry first.
A high cackle rattles across the silent lobby and Shrike steps into the smoky haze, Cobray aimed in my direction.
Giving me no choice but to drop him with the Beretta.
Before he even hits the ground, the sound of a tree being felled whips me around. With the squeal of splintering wood, the front door caves in and a phalanx of men in riot gear crash through behind a battering ram. The lead man, poised like a tackle, sees me, sees Shrike crumpled near the service entrance, and hollers at me, “Drop your weapon! Get down on the ground!”
“Grady, it’s me,” I yell back.
“Down on the ground!” he repeats, his revolver pointed at my chest.
“Oh, God, don’t shoot, it’s me, I tell ya. Mansion!” Kneeling, I lay both guns on the ground. With one hand at the back of my neck, I push my cap off with the other, swipe at the black toner on my face.
“Mansion?” Grady says. “Hold your fire.” He takes a step closer. “It is you! Are you OK?”
“Yeah, but Swybra isn’t. We need an ambulance, now. We’ve got one officer and two suspects down.”
“Cover Shrike,” Grady tells an officer. “Get an ambulance,” he tells another. “You two, secure the scene. The rest of you, fan out, see if there’s more of them.”
“Sir, he’s still breathin’,” reports the man at Shrike’s side.
Grady grunts. “Swbyra?”
“Follow me!”
In the theater, Shrike’s second lies still near the exit door. Guardedly, Grady approaches the supine junkie. “He’s dead,” Grady announces.
He joins me at Swbyra’s side. He lies moaning in bright light. The movie over, closing credits crawl down the screen. Swbyra’s weak, but alive.
“Saved your ass, didn’t I?” he asks. “We’re even now, huh?”
“Yeah, we’re even.”
“You OK?” Grady asks me.
“Just.” My healing wounds feel ripped wide open, I’m drenched in sweat, but I am alive. “Thanks, Grady.”
One of the uniforms administers aid to Swbyra while the other bleats our location into his radio. “Code 20. I mean 30. Oh, God, officer down!”
“Swbyra,” I murmur. “He’s been using! Grady, I can’t believe it.”
“Hell, who the fuck knows anymore? I thought someone might be on the pad. Was thinking it was you, the way you been acting so fucking weird.”
Let’s not go there. “I guess I’ve been wondering the same thing about you. What took you guys so long to get here?”
“Hell, you’re lucky we’re here at all. I get back from interviewing Marybeth Waltann and go to see what kind of plan Swbyra put together and man, there is no fucking plan. No fucking backup, no nothing. So I tell Crowberry and he goes fucking ballistic. Tells me to commandeer what I can and get my ass over here. Not a moment too soon, huh?”
“Not a moment too soon,” I breathe.
While Grady checks on Swbyra, I go to stand over Shrike. This is the moment I’ve longed for: Shrike at my feet, vanquished. I wait to be suffused with a sensation of closure, of release, of confidence that I’ll be all right now, but it doesn’t happen. I feel only uneasy.
The paramedics and Crowberry arrive almost simultaneously. The ambulance whisks Swbyra and Shrike away. Crowberry takes my report, his face going as gray as campfire ashes, his jowls sagging lower as Swbyra’s duplicity unfolds. Grady helps me retrieve Old Paint from where I left it parked near the pawnshop. So disreputable is its appearance it survived two nights on Miracle Mile unharmed except for a missing hubcap.
I take myself to the E. R. Swbyra and Shrike have already been admitted to beds where they will remain under guard until they’re well enough to be booked. The doctor examines my leg, re-bandages my shoulder, and gives me a vial of pills for the pain. I don’t plan to take them but I accept anyway; I need a new talisman.
There is still work to be done. This evening’s events have generated a ton of paperwork. Even worse, I still don’t know who killed Hector. I offhandedly remarked to myself at the Jade Pagoda it could be that one of Hector’s neighbors at the motel took a deep disliking to him. After all this, his death could be the result of random violence.
Still, what about this secret lover, the one Nikki alluded to, the one Hector dumped her for? The one Shrike implied Hector was buying drugs for? Could that be the mystery woman in the hooded cape the hookers and desk man at the Jade Pagoda claimed they saw? We might be able to pry a name out of Nikki Saint Clair or Overshort. If so, it can wait until tomorrow. They’re not going anywhere. I, however, am headed home.
Main Street has such a nightmarish quality it makes me think I’ve taken a wrong turn and ended up back on the Miracle Mile. Skeletons, Angels of Death, mummies in winding sheets throng the sidewalks. Oh. Hallowe’en.
Like the rest of downtown’s stores, the Kaffeteria’s front window is decorated with grinning orange jack-o’-lanterns, booing white ghosts, and leering gray skeletons, their mouths garishly lit by the yellow light from inside. The silhouettes on the glass indicate the place is packed. I’m in no shape to party but I’m too wired to sleep. I’m also not eager to be alone with my thoughts about Swbyra.
The chalkboard on the easel just inside the Kaffeteria door advertises today’s special beverage as Witch’s Brew and the Daily Muffin as Devil’s Food. My nose must be functioning normally again: I can smell sweet cinnamon and rich French roast.
Behind the counter is Juan Valdez. The brim of a wide straw sombrero tilts down over his face and shadows shoulders draped by a brown burlap poncho.
“I’ll have the special,” I say.
He raises his face. It’s Dunk. “Will!”
“Juan.”
“What are you doing here, man, I thought you were in the hospital? I tried to come see how you were doing but they wouldn’t let me. Said you couldn’t have visitors.”
“At least none I would have wanted, so I left. Seems I came to the right place.” Around me, Dunk’s clientele wear costumes that run the gamut from elaborate to simple, manufactured to homemade, and represent all the popular icons. There’s a trio of Madonnas—the media darling, not the Holy Mother—in various incarnations; an impeached President, a dead Princess, a bandoliered and pinstriped gangster, an oft-married movie star, characters from the latest Disney film. There’s even a man in an Airol Jones jersey. There’s a lot of cross-dressing; all three Madonnas are men. Spirits are high and so is the noise level.
“Nice outfit, Juan,” I tell Dunk.
“Gracias,” he says with a twirl of his store-bought mustache. “Eet ees my own design. Made the poncho from a bean bag.” He fans out the burlap to reveal “COLUMBIA SUPREMO” stamped in black block letters across his chest. “You, I see, came as a street dealer. What is that, some kind of little police in-joke?”
“Some kind of. How about some of that Witch’s Brew to go?”
“Not for you, man. You need something far more palliative. Here, munch a muffin while I fix it.”
Ruffed in orange paper, the Devil’s Food muffin is black and fragrant with chocolate. A little frosting goblin on the top winks at me with chocolate chip eyes, smiles with a mandarin- orange-slice mouth. Dunk sets before me a large foam cup of tea. The chestnut aroma tells me it’s brewed from green, not black, leaves. Familiar puffs of popped brown rice float on top.
“It’s genmaicha,” I say.
“Not just any genmaicha,” Dunk replies. “It’s my latest recipe: tea and rice with lemon grass, black cohosh, and ginseng. You’ll feel like a new man. Maybe even want to stick around for the wet T-shirt apple bob.”
“Sounds tempting, but I’m packing it in for the night.” I snap a lid on the tea.
“Help me think of a name for the tea, Will,” Dunk calls. “ZenBlend? BuddhaBrew? SereniTea?”
Shaking my head, I elbow my way through the crowd. A magician sweeps past me in a black cape, taking me momentarily aback. The cape has no hood and the magician’s a man, not a woman. What did I think, that I’d find Hector’s killer right here under my nose?
Home, I drag myself up the stairs, trudge through the kitchen, and head straight into the tub to soak what isn’t bandaged and sip. Dunk was right; the tea is restorative, although not quite enough to return to the Kaffeteria for his Halloween party. Too bad; a wet T-shirt apple bob ... what a concept.
For the first time in days, I have an appetite. The chocolate muffin a mere drop in the bucket of my hunger, I amble into the kitchen where the only thing edible is peanut butter. No bread, and even the crackers are stale. I perch on a kitchen chair, suck peanut butter off my fingers, and regard the tabletop, still littered with the papers I took from Hector’s condo. The trash bag I hauled them away in is on the floor and I drop the papers in one by one.
To my hand comes the half-folded sheet of paper I’ve picked up several times but never examined. The paper’s coarse grain and eggshell color, before only tantalizingly familiar, is now telltale. Even as I open it I know what I expect to find. The light, sure strokes of a pencil sketch raise the hairs on the back of my neck. It’s incriminating evidence that a man disguised as Pizza Boy sneaked into Hector’s condo to retrieve: a sheet of paper torn from his sketchpad with his custom design for a tattoo. For Hector Waltann. By Lix Gemini.