Demolition Angel (40 page)

Starkey thought about these things until she realized that she was doing it so she wouldn’t think about Pell, and then she couldn’t get him out of her head. The tea was suddenly bitter, and the knowledge of how Red had played her was a jagged pill that cut at her throat. She threw away the tea, popped two Tagamet, then turned for home, feeling empty, but not so empty that she wanted to fill that lost place with gin.

That was something, and, she guessed, maybe she had Pell to thank for it, though she was in no mood to do so.

By the time Starkey reached her house, she was hoping that she would find Pell waiting in the drive, but she didn’t. Just as well, she thought, but in that same moment her chest filled with an ache of loss that she hadn’t known since Sugar had died. Realizing that did not improve her spirits, but she forced the thought of it and what it meant away. She was better now. She had grown. She would spend the rest of her day trying to save her job, or deciding how best to leave it and the memory of Jack Pell behind.

Starkey shut her engine and let herself into her home. The message light was blinking by the front phone, but she did not see it, nor would it have mattered if she had.

The first and only thing she saw, the thing that caught her eye as if it had reached out with claws, was the device on her coffee table. An unexpected visual jolt of plastic and wires, alien and mechanical, stark and obvious as it rested on a stack of
Glamour
and
American Crime Scene;
everything about it screaming BOMB in a way that flushed acid through Starkey’s soul in the same moment her world exploded in a white fury.

“Can you hear me?”

His voice was surprisingly mellow. She could barely understand him over the shrill ringing in her ears.

“I can see your eyes moving, Carol Starkey.”

She heard footsteps, heavy heels on hard floor, then smelled the overripe odor of what she thought was gasoline. The footsteps moved away.

“You smell that? That’s charcoal starter fluid I found in your pantry. If you don’t wake up, I’m going to set your leg on fire.”

She felt the wet on her leg, the nice Donna Karan pants and the Bruno Magli shoes.

The sharp throb behind her right ear was a swelling spike that made her eyes water. She could feel her heart beating there, strong and horrible. When she opened her eyes, she saw double.

“Are you okay, Carol Starkey? Can you see me?”

She looked toward his voice.

He smiled when their eyes met. A black metal rod about eighteen inches long sprouted from his right hand. He’d found her Asp in the closet. He spread his hands, gesturing wide and presenting himself.

“I’m Mr. Red.”

She was seated on the hearth, arms spread wide, handcuffed to the metal frame surrounding her fireplace. Her legs were straight out before her, making her feel like a child. Her hands were numb.

“Congratulations, John. You finally made the list.”

He laughed. He had beautiful even teeth, and didn’t look anything like she’d imagined or anything like the grainy photos that she’d seen. He looked younger than his twenty-eight years, but in no way the shabby misfit that most bombers were. He was a good-looking man; he had all his fingers.

“Well, now that I’m there, it ain’t so much, you know? I’ve got bigger fish to fry.”

She thought to keep him talking. As long as he was talking, her odds of survival increased. The device was on longer on the coffee table. Now, the device was sitting on the floor inches beyond her feet.

She tried not to look at it.

“Look at it, Carol Starkey.”

Reading her mind.

He came over and sat cross-legged on the floor, patting the device like a friend.

“The last of Daggett’s Modex Hybrid. It’s not the mix I prefer, but it’ll get the job done.” He stroked the device, proud
of it. “And this one really is for you. Got your name on it and everything.”

She looked at it just to watch his hand; the fingers were long and slender and precise. In another life, they could have belonged to a surgeon or watchmaker. She looked at the bomb: Dark shapes within a plastic container, wires sprouting up through the lid to a black plastic box with a switch on its side. This bomb was different. This bomb was not radio-controlled.

She said, “Timer.”

“Yeah. I gotta be somewhere else when this one goes off. Celebrating my ascension to the Ten. Isn’t this cool, Carol Starkey? They wouldn’t put me on the list until they knew my name, and you’re the one who identified me. You made my dream come true.”

“Lucky me.”

Without another word, he reached to the black box, pressed the side, and a green LED timer appeared, counting down from fifteen minutes. He grinned.

“Kinda hokey, I know, but I couldn’t resist. I wanted you to watch the damned thing.”

“You’re insane, Fowles.”

“Of course, but couldn’t you be more original than that?”

He patted her leg, then went to her couch and came back with a wide roll of duct tape.

“Look, don’t do anything chicken and close your eyes, okay? I mean, why waste the moment? This is my gift to you, Carol Starkey. You’re going to see the actual instant of your destruction. Just watch the seconds trickle down until that final second when you cease. Don’t sweat being wounded or anything like that. You’ll reach death as we know it in less than a thousandth of a second. Oblivion.”

“Fuck you.”

He tore off a strip of tape, but stopped on his knees and smiled.

“In a way, that’s what I’m doing to you.”

“I want the truth about something.”

“The truth is a commodity.”

“Answer me, you bastard. Did all of this happen … did Buck die because I brought you here?”

He settled back on his heels to consider her, then smiled.

“Do you want the truth?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll have to answer one of mine.”

“I’ll tell you whatever you want.”

“All right. Then here’s the truth. Spend your guilt on other matters, Detective Starkey. I learned about the Silver Lake bomb on the NLETS system before you and Pell ever started playing your little game. Daggett brought me here, not you.”

Starkey felt a huge wedge of tension ease.

“Now you answer mine.”

“What?”

“How did it feel?”

“How did what feel? Being used?”

He leaned closer, like a child peering into an aquarium.

“No, no, no. The trailer park. You were right on top of it. Even though it was just black powder and dynamite, it had to hit you with an overpressure of almost sixty thousand pounds.”

His eyes were alive with it. She knew then that this was what he wanted, to be the person in that moment, to feel the force of it. Not just control it, but feel it, to take it into himself and be consumed by it.

“Fowles. It felt like … nothing. I lost consciousness. I didn’t feel anything until later.”

He stared at her as if he was still waiting for her answer, and she felt her anger rage. It had been the same with everyone since the day it had happened; friends, strangers, cops, now even this maniac. Starkey had had enough of it.

“What, Fowles? Do you think a window opens so that you see God? It’s a fucking explosion, you moron. It happens so fast you don’t have time even to know it’s happening. It’s about as mystical as you hitting me when I walked through that door.”

Fowles stared without blinking. She wondered if he was in a fugue state.

“Fowles?”

He frowned, irritated.

“That’s because you had nothing but a low-end piece of bullshit, Starkey. Homemade crap thrown together by some ignoramus. Now you’re dealing with Mr. Red. Two kilos of Modex boiling out at twenty-eight K. The pressure wave is going to sweep up your legs in one ten-thousandth of a second, smashing the blood up into your torso just like a steamroller driving right up to your hips. The hydrostatic shock is going to blow out every capillary in your brain in about a thousandth of a second. Instant brain death at just about the same time as your lower legs separate. You’ll be dead, though, so you won’t feel it.”

“You should stay and enjoy the show. You could sit on my lap.”

Fowles grinned.

“I like you, Starkey. Too bad I didn’t know you when you worked the bombs. I would’ve gotten it right the first time.”

He grabbed her hair with his left hand, forced her head back, and pressed the tape over her mouth. She tried to twist away, but he pressed the tape down hard, then added a second piece. She opened her mouth as far as she could, letting the skin pull. She felt the tape loosen, but it didn’t pull free.

The timer was down to thirteen minutes and forty-two seconds. Fowles checked his watch.

“Perfect.”

She tried to tell him to fuck himself, but it came out a mumble.

John Michael Fowles squatted beside her and gently touched her head.

“Save a place in hell for me, Carol Starkey.”

He stood then and went to the door, but she did not see him. She watched the timer, the green LED numbers spinning down toward eternity.

Coombs and Armus were gentlemen about it. They could have brought him in like just another mutt, but they played it straight. They wanted his gun and his badge, which he had left in his motel, and they wanted to talk to him. He asked if he could meet them at the field office, and they said fine. It helped that Dick Leyton told them that Pell had been instrumental in getting them this close to Mr. Red.

Pell drove back to his motel, got the ID and the big Smith 10, then checked out. He sat in his car for a long time, listening to his heart beat and feeling sweat run down his chest. He did not think about John Michael Fowles, or about Armus and Coombs; he thought about Starkey.

Pell cranked his car and went after her, having no idea what he would say or do, only knowing that he could not let her go this easily. Coombs and Armus could wait.

Pell parked on the street in front of her house, relieved when he saw her car in the drive. Funny, he thought, that his heart beat now with the same kind of intensity as when he was facing a mutt in a life-or-death situation.

When Starkey didn’t answer, his first thought was that she’d seen him approach, and was ignoring him.

He knocked, and called through the door.

“Carol, please. I want to talk.”

He tried to see through the little panes of glass that ran vertically beside her door, but they were crusted with dust. He
rubbed at them, looked harder. He thought that she was sitting at the fireplace, but then he saw the tape, and her wrists and the handcuffs. Then he saw the device at her feet.

Pell slammed the door with his foot, and then he was in, going through the door when something heavy hit him from behind and the world blurred. He stumbled forward, seeing flashing bursts of light. Starkey’s eyes were wild. Something exploded brilliantly in his head. A man was behind him, hitting him. The man was screaming.

“You fuck! You fuck!”

Pell clawed out his Smith as he was hit again. He could feel consicousness slipping away, but the Smith came out and the safety went off and he fired up into the shadow above him even as the light bled into darkness.

When Pell came to the door, Starkey tried to call through the tape, whipping her head from side to side. She kicked at the floor with her heels, trying to warn him with the noise. She raked her face on her shoulders, tearing at the tape, and jerked at the handcuffs, letting them cut into her wrists.

Fowles jumped behind the door with the Asp just as Pell crashed through. Pell saw only her, and even as Starkey tried to warn Pell with her eyes, Fowles nailed him with the Asp. Fowles hit him again and again, the hard weight of the Asp crashing down like a cinder block.

Pell went down, woozy and blank. Starkey saw him reach out his gun, that monster ugly autoloader, and then he was shooting, shooting up into Fowles, who flipped back and sideways, then crawled toward her couch.

Starkey raked her face against her shoulders, feeling the tape work free, even as she watched the timer. It was winding down so fast the numbers blurred.

Fowles tried to rise, but couldn’t.

Pell moaned.

Starkey worked at the tape, stretching her jaw and raking her face until finally one end of the tape came free and she found her voice.

Starkey screamed, “Pell! Pell, get up!”

6:48.47.46.

“Pell. Get up and get the keys! Wake up, Pell, goddamnit!”

Pell pushed himself onto his back. He stared straight up at the ceiling, blinking his eyes again and again as if he were seeing the most amazing thing.

“Damnit, Pell, we’ve got six minutes, this thing is gonna explode! Come over here.”

Pell pushed onto his side and blinked some more, then rubbed at his face.

“I can’t see you. I can’t see anymore. There’s nothing left but light and shadows.”

Starkey’s blood drained. She knew what had happened. The fight had finished the work on his eyes, caused the damaged retinas to separate and fold away, severing their final fragile connection to the optic nerves.

She felt herself hyperventilating and forced herself to hold her breath, to stop breathing just long enough to get herself under control.

“You can’t see, Jack? How about up close? Can you see your hand?”

He held his hand in front of his face.

“I see a shadow. That’s all I see. Who hit me? Was it him?”

“You shot him. He’s on the couch.”

“Is he dead?”

“I don’t know if he’s dead or not, Jack, but forget him! This bomb is on a timer. The goddamned timer is running down, you understand?”

“How much time do we have?”

“Six minutes, ten seconds.”

Not enough time for the police to respond. She knew it was the first thing he would think.

“I can’t see, Carol. I’m sorry.”

“Goddamnit, Jack, I’m handcuffed to this fucking fireplace. You get me loose and I can de-arm that bomb!”

“I CAN’T SEE!”

She could see the sweat leaking from his short hair down his face. He rolled onto his side and pushed himself up onto his hands and knees. Facing away from her. Across the room, Fowles tried to rise once more, failed, and whatever life was left seemed to drain from him.