Slaughtermatic (5 page)

Download was pounded to the floor. He moved his arm as though he’d the temerity to protect himself. In what form would his atonement come to fruition? They refused to tell him, feigning bafflement. A fist smashed into his jaw and with a sound louder than a bomb, the building vaporized so fast a dozen cops were left falsifying evidence in mid air.

How many times does a man have to shave, thought Blince, before his chin gets the message? He threw the razor aside and gazed through the tank window. Stubborn horrors passed in darkness. That’s how fish stay smooth, he thought - no chin. And birds? No chin, forehead, ears or nose to speak of. Imagine an army of such men. Worse than useless.

‘
Den’s exploded,’ mentioned the driver without looking back. ‘It’ll be Parker.’

‘
Sure, he’s been tryin’ to put me under the bridge for years. Remember the last one, Benny?’ Blince reminisced. A Barrett 82 Light Fifty blasted at the denfront, the shooter leaving the rig in the road and screeching off in a customized drophead. Brute Parker thought ‘passive aggressive’ meant shooting someone from a lounger. ‘Sure, distributin’ bullets with a real largesse.’

‘
He’ll give you the cod eye, Chief,’ taunted the driver.

‘
Not me. Nobody’ll get this joker coolin’ on a slab - nobody but God in his infinite wisdom.’ Blince thought about an early Parker attack and Benny getting winged. Few people Parker shot were ever shot again. ‘Someone’s been takin’ liberties with democracy, Benny. Democracy in its smartest pants.’

Benny sat opposite, his face revealing nothing - not even his eyes.

‘
Wake up Benny goddammit, am I talkin’ to
myself
here?’

‘
Sorry, Chief - feelin’ daffy.’

‘
Daffy ain’t an option, trooper boy - what if we hadn’t called back-up and wound up stuck in the Mall? We’d be gettin’ rid o’ crooks only to have ’em spring up again to the crack o’ doom.’ He said it without conscious irony. ‘Boredom shoulda tipped us off, Benny, no gettin’ round it.’

The tank jerked to a stop and Blince threw the hatch open, lolling out and approaching the cop emplacement through the spackle of gun hits. Benny followed after, skirting bodies and bonfires.

A guy with a face like a spaniel trotted toward Blince. ‘Damn fine to meet you, Mr Blince. I’ve followed your career with astonishment and horror. Never in my wildest nightmares did I expect to shake your hand.’

‘
Foresight’d be a gift in a smarter man,’ Blince remarked, sailing past the proffered limb and peering at the Deal Street bank front, where employees were screaming demands and throwing out their dead. A cop earthmover ploughed the corpses aside to allow the free exchange of gunfire. ‘Get a real sense of
deja vu
, eh Benny?’

The spaniel man was shouting through a hailer. ‘The violence you manifest is compromised by its appearance.’

Blince stopped in the act of lighting a cigar. ‘Just what at the subatomic level was that?’

‘
Testin’ a new strategy uptown, Chief,’ Benny fidgeted, embarrassed. ‘Phenomenology.’

‘
Phenomenology my bulgin’ ass,’ roared Blince, lumbering back toward the barricades.

‘
Throw down the guns - an object is an object only insofar as it may happen to resemble what is in your hands,’ hailed the spaniel man, breaking off amicably as Blince arrived.

‘
What’s your name, soldier?’

‘
Tredwell Garnishee.’

‘
What
did you just say to me?’

‘
My name, sir.’

‘
His name, he says. That’s not a name, Tredwell, it’s a stab in the back for the forces o’ light. All bets are off. I’m takin’ over this investigation. What the hell is this?’ Blince snatched a bag from Tredwell. ‘Trail mix? You got trail mix for a bank job? I oughta slap your droolin’ face.’

‘
Give him a little credit for tryin’, Chief,’ Benny pitched in.

‘
Tryin’ what? To poison me? Gemme doughnuts and coffee, Tredwell - and baguettes, Macphersons baguettes, with fish sticks and fries. Gemme pasta. Then wait at the situation van. Gimme the goddamn bullhorn. Get outta here.’ Blince raised the hailer and gave a deep, ugly laugh. ‘It’s all over bar the shootin’, boys. You’re countin’ ten in Italian.’

A meek voice from the bank front expressed a fear of the beef-witted brotherhood, which was known to arrest guilty and innocent alike with a strange certainty.

Blince drew at his cigar and raised the hailer again. ‘And you presumed to defend yourselves, right? By God, you take that to the perjury room you’ll be voted dead by a panel of experts. We’ll put you in the chair and bake you to perfection. And I’ll laugh my head off, ha ha ha - think about it.’

He handed the hailer to Benny as Tredwell ran up with a tray. ‘Doughnuts, Mr Blince?’ He scrutinized Blince’s face anxiously.

‘
These from the stand?’ asked Blince, biting into one. ‘If I didn’t know better I’d say you and your flunkies were usin’ unsweetened dough in these. But of course that couldn’t possibly be the case.’

Tredwell sniggered uncertainly, his eyes evasive.

Blince stared hard. ‘You’re a waste of hair, Tredwell. You wouldn’t make an impression on a goddamn pillow. Get outta here before I rip out your spine and dip it in your eye.’ Tredwell scampered away. ‘We’ve fallen on our feet this time, Benny. Such a poignant exchange o’ gunfire is a clarion call to those sworn to shorin’ up the chill dream o’ justice.’

‘
Right, Chief,’ said Benny, his voice flat as a dog hit at sixty.

‘
Eh?’ Blince gave Benny his full and frowning attention. ‘Are we, Benny, or are we not sworn to shorin’ up the chill dream o’
justice
?’

Benny’s reaction was a heady brew of indifference and neutrality.

‘
You on line, Benny? Your eyes are as glazed as this doughnut.’ He shook it in front of Benny as bullets and shrapnel spattered the ground around them. ‘As
this doughnut
, Benny.’

Benny was absently thinking that the doughnut which Blince held against the night sky resembled a giant blood cell, when its centre was pierced by the white lightning of ballistic track. The sight was burned into his cortex like the insignia of some forgotten crusade.

6

IN THE SITUATION VAN

In the situation van, Tredwell Garnishee regarded a carnage strata graph. It had never been easier to be shot in the face with a softnose bullet. Instead of drugs, entire skeletons were being flushed down the john. A lion had escaped from the zoo and been eaten by a kid. An old guy had blinded a traffic cop by spitting out a gallstone. A plane had crash-landed on a porn theatre, killing hundreds of lawyers. This very day Beerlight was host to a snipers’ convention. Tredwell felt he was at the heart of the issue.

Due to the high rate of Chief-strangulation in the uptown precinct and an official inquiry which put it down to ‘stress and hate’, uptown Chiefs were now appointed on a monthly rotation from the lower ranks. Tredwell had quickly made the leap of imagination from the real world to one in which he was loved and respected. The guys even had a nickname for him - Choke Chain.

‘
Let’s kill the fatted calf, Benny,’ said Blince, bellying in. ‘And tell Bazooka Joe here to lay out the scam.’

‘
It’s like this, sir,’ Tredwell began eagerly.

‘
I seriously doubt it,’ rumbled Blince, dropping heavily into a chair.

‘
The manager didn’t show, there’s the first odd thing. Then a denizen drove up in a junker just before lock-up. We beamed this out of security.’

A video scan of the bank floor appeared on a tatty monitor. Tredwell zoomed in on a young disaster in an ANTI-CYCLONE T-shirt and froze the image.

‘
Findley Taz,’ Blince nodded. ‘The Entropy Kid.’

‘
What’s he holding?’ asked Benny.

‘
Cod
-eye forms,’ said Tredwell.

‘
And he’ll be packin’ a Kafka gun - an ammo-guzzler. The Kid’s an escaped bullethead, Benny. Lives a life o’ danger to everyone else. Got a psychosis you could hang your hat on.’

‘
Could be in town for the convention, Chief.’

‘
You’re puttin’ the cart before the horse has bolted, Benny. I saw the Kid take an Uzi machine pistol to a palm-court orchestra. His intelligence will surprise and delight you. Get Specter in here - he’s a whipsmart fella.’

Benny went out and Blince bit thoughtfully into a pie. ‘This changes everything. Except me.’

Harpoon Specter peed on a fire and felt relieved that he portrayed his trade in a town where justice was a verbal luxury. His lucky stars were tarnished with the thanks of years. A night of tank-chasing had ended in his misrepresenting a wealthy gran who had witnessed the brotherhood breaking a kid’s neck - denial had reached such a pitch it was illegal not only to premeditate a crime but to remember it later. Now he took up his briefcase and followed Benny to the situation van for a jaw with Blince and his attendant foodstuffs. Entering, he pulled up a chair and insulted Blince in a degree of detail which did him credit.

‘
You got a point, Harpo,’ Blince wheezed, broken up with laughter. ‘I hate to be the one to say it. Watch this shyster, Benny - he can find evidence where none exists.’

‘
Learnt it all from you, Henry,’ Specter responded. He had a big soul which he sold by the hour. ‘First time I saw you cavorting with the facts my tears flowed like wine.’

‘
Ever misrepresented the Entropy Kid, Harpo? Cop-on-a-Stick here’s tagged him for the entertainment tonight.’

‘
Excuse the interruption,’ coughed Tredwell Garnishee, who had been trying to engage Blince’s attention for several minutes. ‘But that isn’t at all what I’ve been saying, sir.’

Blince stared around at Tredwell as though some immaculate boundary of etiquette had been overstepped.

‘
Lemme bring you up to speed, Mr Blince,’ said Tredwell, blithely adding insult to injury. ‘This here’s the bank-floor view ten of your Earth minutes before the Kid entered, and fifteen minutes before lock-up. Now take a swatch at the other screen.’ On a second security screen was a view of the vault room.

Just as Blince was opening his maw to ask what in the wide world of sports they were meant to be seeing, a figure abruptly appeared crouching in front of the vault. ‘Tape jumped,’ rumbled Blince.

‘
The tape isn’t faulty, sir - look at the timeframe as I replay it. Bear in mind also that the tapes of the bank floor and the vault room are synchronized - nobody entered the vault room from the bank floor. On the third screen we can see the man enter the vault itself and wrench a safe deposit.’

‘
What
is
that?’ asked Specter, approaching the screen to peer.

‘
I guess it’s a book,’ said Tredwell, blushing. ‘After, er ... reading a little he snipped the cameras. And as you can see, this man is not the Entropy Kid.’

‘
Well for God’s sake break it to me, Blue Boy
- how’d the guy appear outta thin air?’ Suspecting the answer would shiver the brittle reed of his reasoning, Blince began instantly to fend it off. ‘It’s a trick or piece of chicanery. Everythin’ is, right Benny?’

‘
I’m feelin’ stranger’n Godzilla’s chubby son, Chief,’ said Benny, his voice slurred. ‘I think I’m gonna hurl.’

‘
Well go hurl at the gunslingers, Benny - our boys need all the help they can get. And these pasta shells are like magnified rugbugs - get ’em outta here.’

Benny slammed out of the van holding his mouth.

‘
The vault works on a phased time lock, Mr Blince,’ Tredwell continued. ‘I believe the thief created an illegal fold.’

‘
It’s a time breach,’ muttered Specter, squinting at a freezeframe of the man in black tucking the book into his pants. ‘And I know this guy.’

Benny staggered through a spread of ashes, breathing deeply. Acidic wasps were swarming behind his eyes, his brain being sucked through a straw. He was feeling the urge to go to a distant someplace, with something to achieve.

Beyond the siege scene the street was freckled with molotov flares and halloween ribcages. Firefly smithereens warmed his face. The shots and shouts grew distant as Benny approached the hulk of a dying car. It was a yellow cab studded with shielding and railway buffers which hadn’t saved it. Bullet-riddled and internally ablaze, the car twinkled like a starry sky.

In a sudden pounding flashback Benny was bundled into a VR car in the Mall, neon strobing and a voice giving him directions.

Back in the now, he shook the recall from his tolling head. He told himself it was a residual drug effect, an eventuality he’d accepted when he became a cop. He could no longer trust the evidence of his senses.

Benny turned back toward the firing, feeling for his missing gun and trying to remember brotherhood policy. A fundamentalist performance was officially encouraged - it was reasoned that a martyr gave better value than an opiate as it could be used and abused at the same time, while a drug was only abused when you ceased to appreciate it. Or was it the other way around? The idea broke like a bone, hurting and useless.

Thought had given him a nosebleed. Tipping his head back, he saw something happening around the side of the Deal Street Highrise, away from the action. A hatch opened on the fourth floor and something ballooned out against the darkness. Eight Hitlers, three Napoleons and a Mao emerged and began drifting upward like a soap-bubble cluster. Suspended beneath them was the Entropy Kid and a cackling woman.