Darkman (17 page)

He was sitting in an alley with his back against a brick wall and his knees tucked under his chin. A pleasant breeze played across his face, gently flapping the bandages; this small noise had awakened him. A cat was scrabbling through one of the garbage cans that shielded him, making a clatter as it searched for a late breakfast: another possible explanation for why he had opened his weary eyes after only a few hours of sleep. The sun was high enough to cast long black shadows. With growing alarm Darkman looked at his new watch.

Almost ten-thirty. He pushed himself to his feet, becoming quietly frantic. His knees popped and his spine crunched, somewhat pleasant for the ordinary person but of little import to Darkman. He stood and unwrapped his face with shaking hands. Had Durant been there? Was the whole scheme going down in flames?

The white gauze formed a pile behind the trash cans. He went to work on his hands, these Pauly hands. The gauze unwound horribly slowly, but it did unwind. The fingernails looked good. There were bulges where veins should be. It lacked hair on the upper fingers and back, but who noticed that kind of stuff?

He felt his pockets. A bottle of Nacoxidin. He dropped it in the trash. His locksmith tools. They went into an inside pocket. A new stopwatch, courtesy of Millings Supply. This he kept. He patted his rear, almost satisfied, and realized he had forgotten Pauly’s wallet.

New fear raged in his mind.
You dumb cluck! What if it’s Pauly’s turn to buy breakfast at the deli? What about lunch? You don’t have a dime on you, you royal dullard! What if they realize that you are not you?

He practically sprinted out of the alley. It came to him, too late, that he had not even started the stopwatch. How much time had passed since the skin had hit the light? Thirty seconds? Sixty?

He dug the watch out and clicked it on, then raced to Ernie’s Best Deli, arriving in twenty minutes with sweat trickling down his back and the hot autumn sun shining on his sweatless face. Was there even to be a delivery today? Rick had said it was pretty constant. The money launderer handed the cash to Martinez and Skip of no-leg fame, and they passed it to Pauly. Pauly passed it to Durant, and God knew where it went from there.

He pushed the door open and peeked inside.

Martinez and Skip were already there—in the fifth booth, as usual. Martinez looked annoyed and was playing with a napkin, tearing it to small shreds. Skip’s back was to Darkman. Both had plates smeared with egg yolk and toast crumbs on the table in front of them.

He made himself go in. The smell of morning bacon was in the air. Martinez looked up and narrowed his eyes.

“About fucking time,” he croaked, and moved aside. Darkman slid into the booth.

“What’s the big deal, Pauly?” Skip snapped. “You been messing with some woman till dawn again?”

Darkman formed a sneer, hoping to hell his remaining face muscles were pulling the mask in the right directions. It seemed they were, for no one reacted. Skip reached under the table and pulled out a briefcase.

“Durant wants to know where Rick is. He’s really hot about it—
really
hot. I don’t know why, and I don’t give a shit, either, but Durant likes that Nervous Norvis for some reason. Know where he is?”

Darkman shrugged.

“What’s that fucking smell?” Martinez asked suddenly. “Smell it, too, Pauly?”

Darkman nodded. His stomach was a twisted rag, his nerves exposed and raw. He felt mildly dizzy. The goddamn mastic—maybe it was that. And maybe that was what Martinez was smelling.

“Anyway,” Skip went on, flipping his head to get his long blond locks out of his eyes, “Durant seems to think we’re all Rick’s fucking baby-sitter. If you ask me, I think he’s way too chicken for this line of work. One of these days he’s going to step on his own foot, and we’ll all take a tumble. If he’s gone for good, I say good riddance. How about you, Pauly?”

Darkman nodded, beginning to feel like a mute sort of puppet, Howdy Doody’s speechless brother.

Skip pushed the briefcase over, glancing left and right. The deli was almost empty; the owner, Ernie, seemed intent on cutting a roast into thin slices on a big noisy slicer on the counter.

Skip looked at Darkman and frowned. “Are you okay, Pauly? You look kind of . . . different. Where’s the gold ring gone to?”

Thank God my face cannot sweat,
Darkman thought, because at this moment he was feeling very much like a man who has stumbled into a trap that has no escape. He gave a shrug, then made a bye-bye motion with one hand.

“Lost it, eh?” Skip looked out the window. “We’ve got shit to do, man, or else Durant will be on us like white on rice.” He checked his watch. “Damn, we have to meet him in twenty minutes.”

He leaned back and waved at Ernie. The slicer shut down. “Mr. Moneybags is here,” he sang out. “Pauly, pay the fucking check so we can get out of here.”

Darkman felt like swooning. All his nightmares were coming true. He pretended to fumble in his pockets, of which there were many. That farce ended pretty quickly. In desperation he clicked open the latches on the briefcase.

There was money inside in neat little stacks. Darkman guessed twenty thousand, at least. He stuck a casual hand inside and pulled one bill free from its stack and rubber band. He put it on the table and shut the briefcase.

Martinez scowled. “You’re risking your life, man. Those bills are marked until the boss gets them laundered.”

Skip was frowning again. “I still say you look funny.”

Darkman’s hand went into a pocket and pulled out the bottle of Maalox. He took three large swigs of it.

“Yeah, you’re back to normal,” Skip said, and they got up.

Martinez wagged a finger in his fake face. “Don’t be late tomorrow, man, or I’ll be telling Durant on your ass. Get me?”

He nodded. He got it quite well.

But the real Pauly would get it much worse.

And he got it, at eleven twenty-five, thirty seconds after the Nacoxidin had been sufficiently purged from his lungs and his veins, allowing him to come awake from his stupor.

He opened his eyes, eyes that refused to focus. There was a strange taste in his mouth and a funny odor to his breath. It smelled to him like a chemical factory. He sat up, grimacing, chewing his sleep-sticky tongue, groggy and confused.

He heard the front door smash open with a brittle crunch. Heavy feet tromped down the hallway. Three friends appeared at the bedroom door.

Martinez came in first. He hoisted Pauly under the armpits and thunked him into a wooden chair beside the dresser. Pauly looked up in wonder, aching in the ass, and saw the hard face of Durant towering over him.

“Ah, Pauly,” Durant said, shaking his head in very convincing sympathy. “We’ve been mighty concerned about you. What have you done?”

“Done?” He shrugged, baffled by this. “What did I do?”

“That’s for you to tell, and for us to find out,” Durant said evenly.

Pauly sensed something very amiss in this situation. Martinez and Skip were frowning huge frowns at him. Durant exuded hostility with every expression of his greasy face, with every move of his lithe and muscular body. Even his pristine hair had suffered dislodgement; there were a few errant strands falling over his forehead. To Pauly’s knowledge this had never happened before. The man was famed for his plastic hair.

“What did I do?” Pauly asked again, his eyes large and beseeching. “Just tell me and I’ll make it up.”

Durant’s face grew stony. “Yeah, well, Pauly . . . Pauly, where is the money?”

“Money?” Pauly felt the blood drain from his face as his realization of the situation grew. “I didn’t even make the pickup,” he whined, hoping with every part of his being that he looked honest. “I swear it.”

Durant stepped sideways and lifted two airline tickets off the suitcase standing by the bed. He flipped one open. “Ah, Rio. And first-class! How delightful!”

He opened the other ticket. “Here we have one for Rick,” he announced to Martinez and Skip. “I guess this explains his disappearance.” He aimed his eyes at Martinez, then at the suitcase. Martinez strode over and opened it. Piles of Pauly’s clothing flopped out.

Durant shifted his gaze to Pauly, his eyes slitted with anger. “The money, Pauly. Now.”

Pauly felt like blubbering. What was going on? He had overslept, overslept like a horse, and now this waking nightmare was being dumped on him just after his eyes had barely opened. What in the hell . . . ?

He slid down off the chair and landed on his knees. He clasped his hands together, racked with terror. “Boss! I swear! I didn’t make the pickup—I overslept—I haven’t been outside since last night. I swear to God!”

Durant slapped the tickets together and tucked them into the breast of Pauly’s Road Runner pajamas. “Well, Pauly,” he said, “I’d hate to see you miss your flight.”

He flipped a hand at Martinez. Martinez clomped over and hoisted Pauly into the air once again. He carried him to the bedroom window, which was half open.

“So long, Pauly,” Durant said, and Pauly began to scream and scream and scream. Martinez hoisted him higher. Scream scream scream. Martinez leaned backward, ready to toss him. Scream scream scream. Martinez smashed him through the window, utterly ruining the expensive glass. Pauly sailed out into the sunshine of a pleasant midday, glass splinters in his eyes and mouth, glass spears sticking from his pajamas like jagged diamonds, and scream scream screamed as he plummeted seventeen floors. In desperation he flapped his arms, much like the Road Runner imprinted on his pajamas. Gravity was not impressed; nor were Newton’s laws. He reached a sickening velocity as he neared the tenth floor. His hair whipped in the wind. He flapped and flapped. His pajamas billowed in fantastic shapes as they whipped against his skin. He flapped and flapped, then screamed.

The last eighth of an inch was the toughest. Pauly was all over the place.

And Darkman, watching this from yet another alley, filled with glee and misery and doubt, turned away and went home, the taste of victory sour in his mouth and the knowledge of what the future would bring glowing in his mind like a cold and senseless fire.

There was no way to stop it, no way to stop him, though a tiny portion of his mind begged him to stop in a voice that was small and insignificant and just a shallow echo of Peyton the man.

Stop before it’s too late.

21

Requiescat in Pace,
Rick

P
OOR
R
ICKY.
H
IS
mind had roughly the intelligence of a baked potato now. His face was blank and stupid. After climbing out the window of his house (the locks were things of mystery now), he roved around in his pajamas for the better part of the morning, managing to propel himself to a shopping mall. He trundled in and window-shopped, seeing things and monsters and beasts no man had ever seen before. He was on the ultimate trip.

An escalator brought him to the second level. Another escalator brought him to the third. He wandered around, teenage kids laughing and tossing popcorn at him, old ladies avoiding him as one might avoid a rabid dog, children staring at him with their bright and mysterious gazes.

Sometime around three he stood at the low railing of the third level, looking down on a beautiful splashing fountain, his pajamas—no Road Runners here, thank God—slick with sweat, his face crumpled and insane.

“Wa-wa,” he said, sounding quite terrified, quite lonesome. He tipped himself over the railing.

His flight was no more memorable than Pauly’s. But he did make a big splash.

The papers carried a brief report about it the next morning. Mall officials wanted it hushed up in a hurry.

And thus Rick died as he had lived, afraid of everything, unknown and unloved by his fellow man, a useless soul in a nondescript body.

Requiescat in pace.

22

First Kiss Foiled

N
IGHT CAME, AS
it tends to do, and on this night—shortly before one o’clock in the morning—Julie unlocked her apartment door and ushered Louis Strack in, both of them giggling at some joke they had pulled on the waitress at the club, deep in the new heart of the city, the South Side, where everybody that was anybody went. On the South Side, surrounded by new malls and boutiques and growing construction, the well-to-do of the city gathered to compare wealth and bank accounts and wives, hoping to come out on top and be the big fish of the day. Louis Strack had no time for such inanities, and Julie liked them even less. She was she and he was he. Enough said, to her way of thinking.