Scenes from the Secret History (The Secret History of the World) (27 page)

He leveled the truncated barrel into the cop’s face.

“Forget it,” Jack said as he came up behind him.  He had the Semmerling pointed at the back of the guy’s head.  “You’ve done enough for one night.”

The guy glanced over his shoulder.  When his eyes lit on the Semmerling, he smiled.

“Ain’t never been threatened with a pop gun before.”

“Just drop the hog and take off.”

“You mean you ain’t gonna arrest me?”

Jack had acted on impulse.  At the moment, the best course seemed to be get rid of the shooter and call an ambulance for the cop.  Then disappear.

“One more time.  Drop it and go.”

The guy’s voice jumped.  “You kiddin’ me, man?  I could take a couple from that pop gun and sit down for breakfast.”

“It’s a Semmerling LM-4,” Jack said.  “World’s smallest forty-five.”

The gunman paused.

“Oh.  Well, in that case–”

The guy ducked to his right as he made a hard swing with the shotgun, trying to bring it to bear on Jack.  Jack corrected his aim and pulled the trigger.  The Semmerling boomed and bucked in his hand.  The gunman’s right eye socket became a black hole and his leather cap spun away like a Frisbee.  Red mist haloed his head as it jerked back with enough force to yank his feet off the pavement.  The sawed-off tumbled from his hand and skittered along the sidewalk as he sprawled back on the sidewalk and flopped around until his body got the message that what little remained of the brain was mush.  Then he lay still.

Jack knelt beside the fallen cop.  He looked like hell.  The mercury light further blanched the deathly pallor of his face.  Eyes glazing, going fast.  Where the hell was old man Costin?  Where was the cop’s partner?  Why wasn’t anyone around to call an ambulance?  Jack felt naked and exposed out here on the street, but he couldn’t take off now. 

He switched the Semmerling to his left hand, located the spot in the fallen cop’s throat that was doing the most pumping, and jammed his thumb into it.  The flesh was wet and hot and sticky.  He’d read novel after novel that mentioned the coppery smell of blood.  He didn’t get it.  He’d never known copper to have an odor worth mentioning, and if it did, it sure as hell didn’t smell like this.

Jack was about to look around again for help when he heard footsteps behind him.

“All right!  Hold it right there, you fucker!”

Jack turned his head and saw a uniformed cop crouched on his right, taking two-handed aim at his head with a Glock.  Another blue-and-white blocked the street behind him. 

Jack’s gut looped into a knot and pulled tight.

“I’m holding it.”

“Drop the gun and put your hands up!”

Jack dropped the Semmerling and raised his left hand.

“C’mon!”  The cop said.  “Both of them!”

“This guy’s already half dead,” Jack said.  “If I take my hand off this pumper, he’ll go the rest of the way in no time.”

“Christ!” the cop said, then shouted: “Gerry – you make the call?”

“Ambulance and back-up on the way,” said a voice from the unit.

“All right.  See who’s down.”

Another uniform dashed out of the darkness behind the first cop and stopped within half a dozen feet of Jack.  He squinted at the ruined face above Jack’s hand.

“Oh, Jeez, it’s Carella!”

“Shit!” said the first cop.  He spoke through clenched teeth as he glared at Jack.  “You dirty–”

“Hey-hey!” Jack said.  “Let’s get something straight here.  I didn’t shoot your pal.” 

“Just shut the fuck up!  You think I’m stupid?”

Jack bit back an affirmative and jerked his head toward the guy on the sidewalk. 

“He did it.”

Apparently the cop hadn’t seen the other body until now.  He jumped to his feet.

“Oh, great.  Just great.”

The second cop, the one called Gerry, eased around to the sidewalk and checked out the body.

“This one’s cooling,” he said.  “Head wound.”  He whistled.  “Looks like a hot load.”

“And I suppose you had nothing to do with that, either?” the first cop said.

“No.  Him I did.  But there was another cop.  He went into Costin’s.  I heard a shot, and then this guy–”

“Jeez!” Gerry said.  “The kid was with Carella!”

“See if he’s all right!” the first cop said.

Gerry dashed up the stairs and grabbed the door handle.  As he pulled it open, a voice screamed from within.

“Stay back!  I got your buddy and the owner in here!  Stay back or I’ll kill ‘em both!”

Gerry scuttled back down the steps. 

“We got a hostage situation here, Fred.”

“He’s got the kid!” Fred said.  “God
damn!
  Call the hostage team. 
Now!
”

As Gerry ran off, an emergency rig howled down the street and screeched to a halt.  Jack explained to the EMTs what had happened and why he had his thumb sunk an inch into the wounded man’s neck.  One of the techs pulled on a rubber glove and substituted his finger for Jack’s.  He held it there as the wounded cop was lifted onto a stretcher. 

Jack watched for a second, then began to edge backward, preparing to slide between two parked cars.

“No, you don’t!” Fred the cop said, jerking his pistol up level with Jack’s head.  “You ain’t goin’ nowhere!  Hands on the car and spread ‘em!”

Desperation gnawed on Jack’s spine as his eyes hunted for an escape route.  The street crawled with uniforms, and they all seemed to be watching him.  Slowly he forced his lead-filled limbs to move, slapping his hands against the hood of the patrol car, spreading his feet.  He held up okay during the frisk, but he almost lost it when his hands were yanked behind his back and the cuffs squeezed around his wrists.

Cops, arrest, cuffs, interrogation, investigation, fingerprinting, exposure, court, lawyers, judges, jail – a recurrent nightmare for most of his adult life. 

Tonight it was real.

The rest of the story continues in…
Quick Fixes – Tales of Repairman Jack

December

LEGACIES

After a 14-year holdout, I finally gave in and wrote a sequel to
The Tomb
.

I’ve always been a genre hopper: SF in the 70s, horror in the 80s, medical thrillers in the 90s.  In the mid-90s I signed a multi-book contract for medical thrillers. 
The Select
and
Implant
had been fun but I was finding the genre confining and losing interest. I submitted
Deep as the Marrow
as part of the contract, but it was really a political thriller with a doctor as protagonist. The next novel I wanted to write was a techy thriller with
no
medical elements. In fact, it looked perfect for bringing back Repairman Jack. Just once… just this once.  But the contract called for a medical thriller. 

I decided what the hell.  I tipped my hat to the contract by having a doctor hire Jack. (“It’s got a doctor and it’s a thriller – that makes it a medical thriller, yo.”)  The publisher wasn’t fooled for a moment, but they liked the novel and
Legacies
was published in 1998.  I had so much fun with Jack that I decided to do one (just one) more.  That was
Conspiracies
.  By then I was hooked.  So I gave in.

Eventually I came to realize that this series was the answer to my genre-hopping dilemma. I can do a conspiracy novel, a medical thriller, a high-tech thriller, a haunted house story... I can do any kind of novel I feel like writing.  As long as Repairman Jack’s in it, the marketing department’s happy, the readers are happy, and I’m happy. What had seemed like a trap turned out to be liberating.

Legacies
danced along the borders of Tesla territory but had no supernatural elements.  The events of
The Tomb
are alluded to (Jack has scars) but play no part in the story.  You could start the series with
Legacies
and go back to
The Tomb
later (as long as you read it before
All the Rage
).

One impetus for bringing Jack back was a news story about the theft of a load of Christmas toys being put aside for children with AIDS.  It infuriated me.  I wanted to get even with that guy soooo bad.  So I sicced Jack on him…

LEGACIES

(sample)

FR
IDAY

1

“It’s okay!” Alicia shouted from the rear seat as the cab jerked to the left to swing around a NYNEX truck plodding up Madison Avenue.  “I’m not in a rush!”

The driver – curly dark hair, a thick mustache, and swarthy skin – didn’t seem to hear.  He jogged his machine two lanes left, then three lanes right, hitting the brakes and gunning the engine, hitting and gunning, jerking Alicia back and forth, left and right, then swerving to avoid another yellow maniacmobile trying a similar move through the morning traffic. 

Her cab’s net gain: one car length.  Maybe.

Alicia rapped on the smudged, scratched surface of the plastic divider.  “Slow down, dammit!  I want to arrive in one piece.”

But the driver ignored her.  If anything, he upped his speed.  He seemed to be engaged in a private war against every other car in
Manhattan.  And God help you if you were a pedestrian. 

Alicia should have been used to this.  She’d grown up in
Manhattan.  She hadn’t been here for a while, though.  She’d moved away at eighteen for college and had stayed away for medical school and her residencies in pediatrics and infectious diseases.  She hadn’t wanted to come back – what with that man and her half-brother Thomas still living here – but St. Vincent’s had made her the proverbial offer she couldn’t refuse.

So now, after a little over a year, she was still getting used to the city’s changes.  Who’d have believed they’d be able to scour off the grim sleaziness that she’d assumed to be permanently etched on
Times Square?

Cabbies too.  What had happened to them?  They’d always been pushy, brazen drivers – you had to be to get around in this city – but this new crop was maniacal. 

Finally they hit the Forties. 

Almost there, Alicia thought.  Maybe I’ll live to see another sunset after all.

But as they neared 48
th
she noticed her cab was still in the center lane, accelerating.  At first she thought he was going to miss her turn off, then she saw the opening: two lanes to the right, behind a graffiti-coated delivery truck and just ahead of a bus pulling away from the curb.

“You’re not!” Alicia cried.  “Please tell me you’re not going to try to–”

He did.  And he made it – just barely – but not without forcing the bus to slam on its brakes and give him a deafening blast from its horn.

The cabby floored it along the open stretch of 48
th
, then swerved violently rightward toward the curb, jerking to a halt at the address Alicia had given him when she’d slid into its rear seat down in Greenwich Village.

“Six-seventy-five,” he said.

Alicia sat there fuming, wishing she were strong enough to break through the partition and throttle him.  She wasn’t.  But she could give him a taste of his own medicine – in reverse.

Slowly, she inched toward the curbside door, opened it with the greatest of care, and edged herself out into the chill December air.  Then she took out her wallet
and began to count her change… carefully.  She had about two dollars worth.  She picked out a dollar-seventy-five in dimes and nickels.