Billingsgate Shoal (39 page)

I had drawn up my arms six inches as I saw him squirm
around, my fingers still curled around the one-inch flange of iron. .
.When I heard him jerk back the bolt, I let my arms drop in perfect
unison, letting my tired hands flow outward with the descent of the
heavy pipe. Because I knew I had to release it smoothly, on a very
straight path, or it might hang itself up and bind. in the cage. It
fell straight as an arrow, a finned bomb, a mortar shell down its own
tube. The last vision I had of it was curious: I could still peer
down its ever-diminishing bore. And even more curiously, in the
milli-second before I drew my head back from fear of its being blown
off, I noticed that in that pipe bore, Jim Schilling's head and
shoulders loomed larger and larger—geometrically—awfully fast.

I had drawn my head back and down, like a mortarman,
and waited for the bullets to sing up toward me. They spanged off the
steel cage and rocketed drunkenly off the old brick wall.

But they didn't catch me.

Jim Schilling screamed. It was fitting that he should
see his own death coming, and scream in terror.

He shouted, "NO!"

Only the scream was cut off in the middle. A dull
clacking sound interrupted it, like a melon being opened with a swipe
from a machete—the blunt edge down. It was the sound of his skull
being cut in half.

Then silence.

I looked over the edge after half a minute of
catching my breath. I saw a big black shiny thing askew in the ladder
cage, tilted at a crazy angle, wedged into the iron bars. And then I
made out a pair of twisted. legs and knees intertwined in the ladder
rungs, They were doubled up, almost pointing up at me. Schilling was
underneath the pipe; he hadn't fallen down the cage to the ground.
That meant I had to go down there and kick him loose in order to get
past him to the ground.

I didn't relish it.

Yet the alternatives were clear: either attempt the
crossing on the wilted pipe (something I wasn't even remotely
considering) or else climb down the six stories on the outside of the
cage. Again: no way. So like it or not, to return to earth I had to
haul myself back down that barred steel tunnel, and somehow dislodge
the corpse I had just created.

The corpse I had just created.

I had never killed a human being before in my life.
No matter how vile, how evil and cruel Schilling had been, the
thought struck home.

I climbed back down. It was scary. It was now light.
enough to make me realize how danm high the ladder was. But I kept my
eyes stoically glued to the brick wall in front of me, watching the
rows slide smoothly upward a foot in front of my face.

Then I felt the pipe with my foot. I looked down, and
wished I hadn't. I wished instead I'd simply waited up on top of the
roof for a reasonable period (like three years) until somebody came
and took me off. Jim Schilling, that big and brawny bully, was
doubled over, compressed against both sides of the cage by the force
of the death blow. His knees pointed up, bottoms of feet resting on
the ladder rungs and against the wall behind them. His body was bent,
as if in Moslem prayer, except he was facing straight up, toward the
Pole Star, rather than toward Mecca. His back was pressed tight
against the far end of the cage. His head was facing the pipe that
had terminated his nasty life. But his face, and the entire front
portion of his head, was curious by its absence. The pipe's lip had
caught him as he jerked back, plowing down through the skull at
midpoint, removing the front half, face, and mandible. What stared at
the jammed pipe was a superbly cross-sectioned head, revealing much
of the brain stem, soft palate, throat cavity, and larynx.

I placed my instep underneath the pipe and drew it up
with all my remaining strength, which wasn't much. I worked the free
end of the pipe around until I could once again grab the flange. Then
I lifted it up and dropped it to the side of Schilling's body; It
rattled around in the cage a bit on the way down, then thunked
sideways into the asphalt of the courtyard.

There remained Schilling. Even in death, he would be
a pain. It shall spare the gruesome and clinical anatomical details
of removing him from his death perch. My feet, and 175 pounds,
finally dislodged his corpse from its weird Yoga stance by thumping
down on the blood-soaked shoulders until he straightened out enough
to slide down the tunnel cage and thump onto the ground with a sound
like a sack of wet laundry. I then reached the ground, took a quick
look around, and promptly toted myself over to a dark corner of the
courtyard where I proceeded to throw up.

Copiously and repeatedly.
 

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

AS SOON AS I could stagger upright, I lurched around
the corner and stumbled toward O'Shaughnessey. I wanted to pay him my
respects, especially since I was the indirect cause of his death.
Every part of my body hurt. But the fun and games still weren't over.

I stumbled along until my foot thumped an oil drum.
Up ahead of me I heard the metallic clacking of a big hammer being
pulled back. God Almighty I was sick of that sound. I fell forward as
the big pistol boomed. There was a long, drawn-out whine. The slug
had ricocheted off a wall and was now heading over to Duxbury.

"For Christ's sake!" I shouted.

"My Jesus, is it you?" `

"I thought you'd been killed—"

"Hmmmph. Not bloody likely. I was certain you'd
been killed. I thought you were Marlowe."

"No. I killed him with a bomb. How are you?"

"Fine," said the Irishman: Then he slid
over into a heap on the ground, the revolver clattering after him.

I raised his legs, putting them up on a concrete
ledge, then covered him with my sweater. He needed help, and fast.
Then I heard the
breee-om breee-ow
of the first police wagon. I saw I them stop at the outer gate just
long enough for one of them to cut through the chain with a pair of
giant cable cutters. In two seconds they'd skidded to a stop in front
of me, their rack of blue and white lights swirling and winking. I
saw a big pair of shiny black boots approaching me as I bent over the
fallen man. They, grated and crunched on the gravel that covered the
asphalt. The trooper stared down at me, bewildered. He reached down
and picked up the big gun that was lying seven feet from me. His
partner, gun drawn, was moving in a fast crouch around to my side.

"Get an ambulance here fast," I said. "Do
you have an oxygen bottle? If so, get it over here on the double."

They did.

I pointed to the remains of Thug Number Two, the kid
who had been so deadly accurate with the pistol, that lay almost
invisible in the dark shadows of the wall.

"There's another dead man up in the far
courtyard. Seems he went and lost his head. There are at least two
more dead people in the big building on the pier. One of them you
won't find because she took a dip. Be careful of that building; there
may be some nasty people still inside it, though I doubt it highly."

"What happened? Tell us everything," said
the older officer. But I didn't have time because just then two more
cruisers came in, followed by the ambulance. I helped place
O'Shaughnessey on the litter. We got a plasma bottle over him right
away., He kept puffing away at the oxygen mask. Still, when I put the
cuff on him, his blood pressure wasn't even registering on the gauge.
Poor O'Shaughnessey had kept himself going the past hour on
adrenaline and Celtic pluck. He certainly had no blood left.

I was hunched over him in the ambulance as we headed
for the hospital. As the big van wheeled and started its siren, I
looked out the back and could see the police cutting through the
inner fence, then barreling through the gate in their cruisers. The
blue lights were winking, sweeping along the old dirty buildings.

In the emergency room they typed him as A Positive; I
rolled up my sleeve and they pumped a pint of mine into him. Then he
got two more bags, and they had a third ready. As soon as he was
stabilized he would undergo surgery to close that blood vessel. Then
they would set the leg. It would require a steel pin, they told me,
because the X-rays had shown a big hunk of femur gone. But I'd
guessed as much earlier; that big .45 slug had walked away with it,
and taken the vein too.

An internal specialist looked over my Sport Section
and pronounced it reasonably intact, though I still fairly rang with
pain down there. My ribs were taped (two were cracked) and they
placed a special walking cast on my left heel for the time being. It
would be several months—at least—before I could run again. I
didn't like that. During all this time the Law had been waiting
patiently, unobtrusively, in the background. I had almost forgotten
the polite young officer until O'Shaughnessey dozed off and the nurse
came in to give him a bath prior to surgery. Then he oozed up into
the foreground and requested I accompany him back to Cordage Park,
the last place on earth I wanted to go.

We swerved into the complex and I wobbled out of the
cruiser. The night's adventures, coupled with the missing pint of
blood—now hopefully speeding the Irishman's recovery had done me
in. The police had finished photographing Thug Number Two, and now
drew a coverlet over him. Poor kid.

"Any idea who he was, Doctor?"

"No. He was an American though. He talked like
an American, not from across the water—"

"Thank you. Now if you could just come with us
back here. . ."

Oh no. I had to go and view Schilling's remains
again. They had the body covered for obvious reasons. Even the
hardened law officers couldn't stand the sight of the Headless
Horseman. But three of them were staring into the pipe, transfixed. I
bent over. The first thing that caught my eye was a gleam of gold
amidst the clots of red tissue. The gold was set on yellow-white. It
was one of Schilling's molars, riding on the jawbone that was packed
tight into the pipe with the rest of his head. And then I saw a
bright white dot amongst the gristle and gore: Schilling's hearing
aid. `

It was as if the head had been
canned
.
I found the notion outrageously funny. And then I imagined shopping
at the supermarket, throwing things into the cart: can of beans,
cling peaches, asparagus, human head, corned beef hash—

A demonic, aching giggle was trying to surface. I
knew if I started laughing perhaps I wouldn't stop for days and days.

Watch it! Watch it, Doc. . . y0u're letting this
thing get to you . . . you're taking it way too seriously—

I grabbed at my sides and sat down. Faces peered into
mine, asking me questions. I told them to leave me alone. They
persisted. Then I heard a faint but familiar voice:

"Yeah I know this isn't my jurisdiction, but I
am a law officer. Matter of fact I am Chief of Police, OK? And this
is Detective Lieutenant Joseph Brindelli of the—huh, you know him?
Well good because we're here to stay."

Brian Hannon, my brother-in-law in tow, stomped
around the corner of the building and toward me. He was flicking his
eyes everywhere, his trenchcoat flapping open in the wind of his
walking. He stuffed a Lucky into his mouth and cranked fire to his
Zippo, trailing clouds of pale blue smoke behind him. Joe gambled
along in his wake, murmuring apologies and explanations to the local
officers.

"We're gonna nail this thing
down
.
Bell, Donnato, get moving. Each of you take a building. We're gonna
swarm over this place like flies on dogshit."

I waved my arms and they caught sight of me. DeGroot,
bless his heart, had called them after the alarm went off, only he'd
waited thirty-five minutes first just to make sure I was overdue. I
confided to Joe that I did not feel like answering questions and
leading the fuzz all over Cordage Park, showing them exactly what
happened, how, when, and why. But he told me I bloody well would have
to, and to bear up nobly under it, and that he and his loudmouth
friend—this was said in a whisper—would stand by me.

And so I told the whole thing, from the time I left
the
Whimsea
in the
dead of night until the first police cruiser arrived and spotted me
hunched over O'Shaughnessey's prostrate form.

"And the other man," asked Brian, "the
big man you say is an IRA Provo. You have any idea where he might
have gone?"

"Laura Kincaid mentioned a boat called the
Coquette
. It was to be
their escape. You might alert the Coast Guard and tell them to be on
the lookout for it. I have a hunch it's on the big side. I kind of
hope the guy gets away, this time anyway. He saved my life."

We called Mary and she wept. But she was glad to hear
Schilling was put away for keeps. Then we got into Brian's car to
head for home. I saw a cabin cruiser swing into the dock. DeGroot
flung a line to a waiting cop and seconds later was jogging down the
pier toward us. He rapped on the window and I rolled it down.

"I see you're OK, Doc. Anything happen?"

"Nah."

"For a minute I was worried. I was listening to
the VHF a minute ago; there was an explosion not far from here. For a
second I thought you——"