Darkman (26 page)

Durant stood in the den of his expensive house in Briar Wood Estates, surrounded by potted plants and a regal bookcase that took up two walls. There were Thoreau and Twain and Joyce, massively thick volumes of every kind of book. To top it off, Durant even owned a rare collector’s edition of a Jack London novel.

Of course he had not read any of these rare editions. His head was too full of thoughts about crime and money ever to let him concentrate on the written word. But when business acquaintances dropped by, this luxurious combination of den, greenhouse, and library was most impressive. If there was one truth about him that should never be exposed, it was the fact that he was borderline stupid and a social cripple. Most of his talents lay in the area of being a cutthroat and a bully. Those were roles he played quite well. Let others think of him as a self-made rich man, a gentleman and a scholar. Very few would think of him as the coldhearted sleaze he really was.

Standing amid this luxury, staring blankly at the telephone, he tried to dredge up some decent reason for Westlake to be alive. At the same time he wondered how to extricate himself from this monstrous blunder. Mr. Strack had not sounded very angry on the phone, but he hadn’t sounded all that overjoyed, either.

Durant slumped into his expensive leather desk chair, eyebrows drawn together, frown deepening. He picked up a pencil and began to tap it on the desk. In another room a stereo was playing some unpronouncable German opera, for Durant had quite a collection of classical works. He tried to spend at least twenty minutes every day listening to the crap, figuring that eventually someone might mention opera at a stuffy party and he didn’t want to sound dumb. If there was one thing he hated more than almost everything else he hated, it was looking like a dope and feeling like the brainless crook he was.

The pencil tapped. The stereo blared Wagner. The frown hung on. He was feeling like a dope. One little shit named Westlake had managed to put his position with Strack in jeopardy, and that position was the only thing keeping him from poverty and bread lines. Strack was considered Mr. Nice Guy to the bone. His charitable donations kept the police away from Durant, freeing him to perform every dirty trick in the book.

Durant gave his padded shoulders a little shrug. Today he was wearing a black pin-striped suit and an Indiana Jones hat. On his feet were patent-leather shoes with tips as pointy as spears. In about two hours Dana was supposed to come over and screw his brains out, and he had hoped to surprise her today by actually dressing up before they got down to business. Even better, since the old whip was worn out, he had bought a new one. God, but did that Dana scream loud. He couldn’t ask for a better partner in S and M, his favorite sport next to killing people.

Yeah, that again. While musing, he had almost forgotten about Westlake and the sorry mess he had landed him in. Bad enough that this Sunday’s weekly screw was, well, screwed. Strack wanted Westlake dead in a hurry. Sure, no problem, boss. We’ll follow his girlfriend and find out where Mr. Genius scientist lives. Then we shall plug him and watch him die.

Really think so?

Well, yeah. So he survived electrocution. Who wouldn’t? That boiling pink shit in the tank had toasted him, made him bald, burned off his face. Big deal.

What about the explosion?

Ahem. Yes. Ahem.

He’s one tough sumbitch. Maybe wears bulletproof long johns. Why bother, though, when your whole head is one burned marshmallow? Jeez . . . no hair, no scalp, no face, no . . .

No face.

No face!

Durant felt himself suddenly trembling as various mental tornadoes churned up new thoughts from the depths of his limited brain. That disgusting thing in the alley beside Chin Fong’s joint, that was a melting mask. The smoking gloves, fake hands? Why? To avoid leaving fingerprints? No. Because Westlake’s hands were black and burned clear down to the bone.

He was a master of disguises, obviously. A genius, a survivor, a terrifying menace. What if he did wear bulletproof long johns, like those metal suits skin divers do when they’re in shark territory? How do you get around that?

He sat there and thought, still frowning, his forehead beginning to ache from it. If Westlake was smart enough to look like anybody he wanted to, maybe Pauly hadn’t been lying. Westlake made the pickup, not Pauly. Rick would drop dead on the spot if he saw Westlake, and maybe he had. And just maybe Westlake was Mr. Strack now. Maybe.

Durant realized he was on the brink of panic. Why would Westlake pretend to be Strack? Why would he tell Durant to kill Westlake if Westlake was really Strack, and could he be Strack and then Westlake at the same . . . ?

He dropped his head into his hands, wallowing in confusion and misery. New Wave crime, techno crime, seemed to be the rage now. What had happened to the Capones and Dillingers? God, but it had been easier in those days. Not that Durant had been alive back then—he was only thirty-seven now—but the old black-and-white movies he had watched made those years seem fun.

He decided to give this matter a lot of thought, even though his head was aching already from the mental gymnastics. The murder of Westlake would not be an ordinary hit, you could bet your buns on that. This particular job demanded courage, intelligence, and a better weapon than the standard Ruger .22 pistol at close range, the choice of both the CIA and R.G. Durant. A silenced .22 made less noise than a door being slammed, but it wouldn’t be any good if Westlake was wearing body armor or some kind of bulletproof mask.

Damn. That melting thing in the alley by Fong’s place—had it been bulletproof? Hadn’t looked like it. But still . . .

An idea jumped into his mind. You can bulletproof yourself all you want, but a .50-caliber machine gun will penetrate many inches of solid steel. Even if it didn’t punch through the armor, the force alone would shatter Westlake’s insides, like getting tossed off a building and landing hard on a steel rod. Shooting Westlake with a .50 would be very satisfying indeed. But therein lay a small problem.

A .50-caliber machine gun weighed about a zillion pounds, despite the comic books that show Sergeant Rock carrying one in each fist. It would be possible, with some metalwork, to anchor one to the roof of a car; however, the cops, bribed or not, would hardly stand for carting a gun that big and that illegal around town.

Well, damn, Durant thought wearily. It wouldn’t be all that hard to get one: Notify the supplier, who gets his wares from Colombia, that you would like to buy one, and pretty soon a van comes over and the supplier’s boys haul it out in two crates. Cost? Maybe five grand. Pocket change for Mr. Strack.

So, how to mount the thing? Forget a car. Truck? Nah. Airplane?

Durant emitted a cheerless chuckle. Airplane. Har-har. Why not just buy a helicopter? They only run about three hundred thousand. No, it seemed . . .

Wait. Durant’s eyes were growing larger.
Helicopter!
Two years ago he had done a large favor for a man who piloted an air-ferry service from the shore of Lake St. Clair. It seemed the man’s ferry business was about to fall apart, and he needed a million dollars in a hurry, twenty-five percent going to Durant if he would make the wife’s death look quite natural. “No problem,” Durant had said. “Go ahead and buy that million-dollar insurance policy. In two weeks she will be very dead. You just make sure you have a solid alibi every moment of the next fourteen days.”

Fourteen days later the poor man’s wife was kidnapped. The police found out about the insurance policy that was so new, the ink still smelled funny. The husband was arrested, but not for long. His alibi was rock solid.

It was three days later that they found her nude body in a ditch not far from home. She had been raped, and stabbed forty-seven times. There was a strange fingerprint on her purse latch, and a check showed it belonged to Roddy “King Killer” Dorado, a minor crime figure who had been murdered years before.

The APB went out: He ain’t dead. Find Roddy.

The coroner had the body exhumed. It didn’t smell all that great, so his team worked with unusual haste. The only strange thing they found was that one of Roddy’s fingers was missing.

The case was never solved. The pilot got his million. Instead of getting a quarter of a million dollars, Durant settled for two hundred grand.

“I don’t get it,” the man had said, and Durant grinned at him.

“The stabbing wasn’t all that fun,” Durant had said, “but I loved the part where I got to rape her.”

They enjoyed a hearty laugh, and Durant showed him his collection of fingers, proudly pointing to the one that had been Roddy’s before Durant had killed him those long years ago.

Musing over those happy times, Durant lit a cigar and dialed the phone. It took thirty seconds to place the gun order. It took a full minute to get hold of that pilot guy, but he agreed it would be a lot of fun, and do you mind if I land in your front yard?

“No problem,” Durant said, then hung up and called Martinez and Smiley and Skip.

When it was over, Durant leaned back in his chair and smiled. Mission almost accomplished. Westlake was about to be dead again.

31

Smiley

“I
CAN
’
T BELIEVE
this shit,” the man nicknamed Smiley said as he drove. His real name was Sam Rogers, but few people knew that, because he did not know many people. If by chance he did meet someone, the someone would usually see to it that their paths never crossed again. Below the grimy tangle of his mud-brown hair was a dull and flattened face, a small potato for a nose, a mouth welded into a permanent loony grin. In other words, your basic crazy man.

When Sam was thirteen years old, he was notoriously famous as the crudest kid on the block. Dogs, puppies, cats, kittens—any sort of pet let outside the house in his crummy little town, Wabash Heights—usually wound up dead. His favorite kick was to bury a cat head down in a hole that, shoveled full again, left only the cat’s tail poking up like a bizarre twitching weed. That, or tie the kitties’ tails together with twine and drape them across a clothesline, where they would hang and spit and attack each other in a frenzy of fear. The loser got tossed into the woods to rot. The winner got its skull smashed in with a shovel, then made a similar trip to the woods.

And it was in the woods behind his parents’ ramshackle house that Sam Rogers—Smiley—did his most dastardly deed. He had seven or eight brothers, a few sisters, and when the newest addition to the family was born, little Sarah, he decided enough was just enough. He would spend hours staring at her in her battered crib, this tiny white thing with its egg-shaped bald head and black eyes that did not focus, tiny imitations of hands and feet flexing and waving without direction. Mom was sick of having kids, but Pop was one extra horny drunkard, and he took what he wanted. The new baby was just one more miserable soul in an Indiana life that had no meaning.

So one afternoon when Mom was watching
Days of Our Lives
in the front room, Sam had picked up the baby and carried her out the back door. On the way to the woods he got a shovel out of the garage and went into the shadows of trees and weeds. He buried the baby head down and left one leg sticking out.

Not much time had to roll by until there were search parties hiking through the woods, most of them convinced this was a kidnapping, but because the Rogerses didn’t have any money, it was probably the work of a sex fiend. In short order they found the leg sticking up, a small pale foot, bright in the sunlight leaking through the trees. When they pulled her out, one searcher keeled over, overwhelmed by the sight of a newborn baby with a broken leg and skin gone the color of dirty motor oil.

Sam couldn’t understand all the commotion. It was around this time that he began to develop the permanent idiot’s smile that would later get him nicknamed Smiley. It also was around this time that he pleaded guilty of murder and was shipped to the state hospital for the criminally insane until the age of twenty-one.

Then they let him go, and he wound up in Detroit driving a midnight-blue Lincoln Continental, cautiously following a woman named Julie Hastings as she worked her way into the dead heart of the city, a shopping bag parked on one arm. Beside Smiley was Rudy Martinez, who could have been a contender if only he knew how to box.

“Can’t believe what shit?” Martinez grunted.

Smiley’s smile was almost a frown; he was only half happy. “The boss letting me drive his car. And for what? Following that lady? We’ve been at it since four, and it’s almost five. Where is she going?”

“Taking us to that Westlake guy. You know that.”

“But shit, Rudy—nobody lives down here. She must be wise to us, and’s leading us in circles while Westlake takes it easy.”

Martinez slouched down and propped his knees on the dashboard. “Who gives a shit? We’re getting paid. Quit bellyaching and drive.”

“Fucking crazy,” Smiley muttered, feeling useless. At this moment they were the only car on these deserted streets, and all Julie had to do was turn around a few times to know she was being tailed. He dropped back even farther, trying to look nonchalant—tough job for a guy as “chalant” as he was. Presently Rudy began to snore. Smiley jerked his arm, and he sat up.