The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2) (41 page)

Incredibly, Oleg was on his hands and knees, attempting to stand up. Baby Joe took the bottle by the neck like a softball bat. It was full. And heavy. He walked over to Oleg.

“
A pre-funeral?” he said. “A little something for monsieur, before you die?”

He swung the bottle up over his head. The light caught it at its apex. It glowed like a party balloon.
Party’s over
. Baby Joe brought the bottle down, aiming for the base of Oleg’s skull.

A bullet smashed the bottle. Baby Joe was spattered with sweet yellow Galliano and broken glass. And blood. He fell backward, tripped, and slammed against the wall, leaving an oddly decorative smear as he slid down. He sat on the floor, trying to concentrate, trying to clear his eyes. Trying to clear his mind.

He saw Oleg stagger to his feet and limp unsteadily toward him, a bloody, dripping apparition, a noseless ghoul.

You fucking stupid bastard. An ankle holster.
A little something before you die, monsieur?
Witty. A fucking parting shot. Why didn’t you stop and have a drink at the bar while you were at it? It wasn’t finished. I thought it was done. I was dizzy. You weren’t dizzy; you were weak and stupid. And it wasn’t done. You are. You are going to die, sitting on the floor soaked in a fucking Italian party drink, and you deserve to.

Oleg stood over him and leveled the gun. He was standing back, out of kicking range. Baby Joe looked at him. Oleg was staring into his eyes, looking for something. Something he wanted. He didn’t find it.

“
Not very fucking sporting, pal,” Baby Joe said.

Oleg fired. The panel next to Baby Joe’s face splintered. Oleg fired again. The bullet smacked against the heel of Baby Joe’s shoe. Baby Joe wasn’t sure if Oleg was doing it on purpose. He was rocking slightly on his heels. He lifted his gun hand and wiped the blood from his eyes. Baby Joe moved, and Oleg immediately dropped the barrel and fired. The slug went through Baby Joe’s calf. Baby Joe flopped sideways and rolled. Oleg stepped back and fired. The bullet hit Baby Joe in the buttock. He booted Oleg’s legs out from under him. Oleg dropped straight down and sat, almost comic, with his legs outstretched like a toddler taking a tumble. Baby Joe was almost to his feet. Oleg swung the gun and clubbed Baby Joe over the head. It lifted a piece of his scalp and dropped him back to his knees. Oleg pointed the gun at Baby Joe’s face, but Baby Joe grabbed his wrist. Oleg brought his other hand up. Baby Joe nutted him and he fell backward, pulling Baby Joe down on top of him.

It became a contest of strength. A wrestling match over possession of the weapon. They struggled in silence, their faces inches apart, staring into each other’s eyes as if each sought to draw the will from the other by mesmerism.

And Baby Joe could feel himself weakening. The first bullet. He couldn’t identify the wound, and it didn’t hurt, but it felt like something was leaving him. He tried to use his weight and his position, but Oleg could sense the waning of Baby Joe’s strength, and he abruptly thrashed and jerked sideways, and raised his leg, and Baby Joe was unable to prevent himself being tilted to the floor. He clung on, but he was losing the sensation in the fingers of his left hand. The gun was slippery with blood.

Oleg was doing it right. He knew he was getting the upper hand. He knew what was happening, and he knew that all he had to do was maintain the pressure and wait, forcing his wrist around, slowly but inexorably bringing the barrel of the pistol around to point at Baby Joe’s eye. Baby Joe saw it clearly for the first time. He played his last card. It was all he could do.

The gun was an FN Baby Browning .25 ACP, which carried six slugs and had to hit something vital to kill you. One slug was in the bar, one was in the sole of his shoe, and three were in him. If he could make it to his feet, he still had a dog’s chance. Baby Joe suddenly let go of the gun, and smacked Oleg twice in the eye with his right hand. Oleg hadn’t expected it. He concentrated on keeping hold of the gun. Baby Joe was halfway to his feet before the Oleg could get the barrel around. Baby Joe tipped over a heavy, round wooden table. Oleg struggled up and backed off. Baby Joe lifted the table. Oleg was husbanding his last round. He knew the .25 wouldn’t go through the wood. He stood weaving, the gun extended, waiting for his shot. Baby Joe advanced, holding the table like a shield. The effort was making him lightheaded. White dots swirled before his eyes. He set himself up to rush Oleg, to crowd him, to make him miss his mark.

Baby Joe put his foot in the pool of Galliano, slipped, and went down. The edge of the table hit him on the cheekbone. He pushed the table away. Oleg was over him. He looked up at the black hole pointed at his eye.

Asia ran into the room. She saw a moment excised from time with a scalpel and frozen in her mind forever. A surreal black-and-white still, hand-tinted in yellow and red. Baby Joe down. A man standing over him with a gun. If she’d had time to reflect, she would have realized that she had never seen anything with such clarity in her entire life. She raised the service revolver she had taken from the policeman. She remembered Baby Joe’s words from years ago—from another time, another life, another self.

Aim for the middle. Shoot and keep shooting.

She fired five times, pulling the trigger as fast as she could. The first shot missed, and took out a row of glasses behind the bar. The man turned. The second shot hit him in the shoulder, and he staggered backward, but did not fall. The third shot smacked into the wall behind him. The fourth clipped him in the ribcage, at an oblique angle; the slug didn’t penetrate, but it still dropped him. Asia’s fifth gave him a partial auriculectomy.

She kept frantically pulling the trigger as the man struggled to his feet. He shuffled toward her, limping. He seemed ponderous, a nightmare Ed Wood monster, his face a ruined, bloody mess, but he was on her before she could move. She swung the heavy gun at his head, but he swayed out of reach and punched her in the stomach. She fell to her knees and he kicked her in the chest, sending her sprawling on her back. He stood over her and raised the .25.

Baby Joe smashed a chair across his outstretched arm. The gun dropped from his hand and went skidding across the floor. He looked at the gun and then back at Baby Joe. He tried to raise his fists, but his right forearm was broken, and he could not close his right hand. The bone was sticking out, and he stared at it, uncomprehending, as if he could not understand why his hand wouldn’t work. He held it toward Baby Joe, as if to show him the wound, almost shy, the way a child shows you a cut. Baby Joe stepped in and punched him on what was left of his nose.

Maybe Oleg was lucky. A lot of guys don’t get such a nice view on their way out. But Asia’s skirt had ridden up during the fight, and Oleg got a clear view of the crotch of her panties and her full thighs as she stood astride him with the bloody Baby Browning she had retrieved from the floor, and sent him to the big sleep with the last round through his right eye.

***

“
So what? Come to finish job. Go ahead. You do me favor.”

“
Khuy. What are you talking about?”

“
You set me up,
manda
. Was all big game. To get hands on R3 and Fab 13.”

In the aftermath of the bloodbath at the Savoy, Fanny was able to piece together something of what had happened the night Khuy disappeared and she got sucker-punched.

Major Oblov, who had been prized from the roof of the taxi with several fractures and a renewed faith in the structural integrity of Lada motorcars, and who, when he regained consciousness, found Fanny standing by his bedside, told her about the deal at the morgue, and also that he hoped he wasn’t on his way to it. She knew that someone checking into a hospital with several bullet wounds and a broken switchblade stuck in his abdomen, and fitting the description of an infamous hoodlum whack job with considerable accuracy, would immediately instigate a series of phone calls. She knew that Khuy could not afford to let his incapacitation become common knowledge. So where would a grievously wounded Russian gangster have gone to lick his wounds? The same place all monsters go: to their lairs.

She found Khuy in a room tunneled under the gazebo in the grounds of his mansion. He was alone except for a doctor, a nurse, and a couple of old babushkas in attendance. He was heavily bandaged, whiter than a halal chicken, and had enough needles and tubes in him to rewire Grand Central Station. She could see from the screen that his pulse was weak, but steady.

“
Khuy. No. No. I was waiting for you. Someone hit me. When I woke up, you were gone.”

“
Huh. Some fucking writer if that is best story you come up with. No wonder books are so shit.”

“
You said you liked my books.”

“
That was before you try kill me.”

“
Khuy. How can you even think such a thing? I love you.”

“
You love me so much you fuck Oleg so he set dog on me.”

“
I never fucked Oleg.”

“
You lie.”

“
Khuy, you have it all wrong. Somebody is trying to…”

“
Better you kill me now. When I get strong back, I kill you.”

“
Khuy. You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“
I saying to kill me so you can steal R3 and Fab 13. Was you plan all along. You lucky I so weak or I break you neck now.”

Fanny jumped up from where she had been sitting on the side of his bed. Her face was flushed, the skin taut across her cheekbones, and her eyes could have drilled more holes in him than he had already.

“
Right. I’ve had enough of this shit. I’ll fucking prove it. I’ll prove to you that you’re talking out of your fucking fat, flabby Russian ass.”

“
You always say you like my ass.”

“
That was before you threatened to kill me every five fucking seconds. Well, I’ve got news for you, buster. I’m going to find the R3 and the Fab 13, no matter who has them, or where they are. I am going to find them and bring them back to you, just so I can prove to you what a seismically stupid Slavic shithouse you are. And then you can fuck off, and stay fucked off.”

As Khuy watched her bodacious buttocks bouncing out of the cellar, he had reason to ponder if he might not perhaps have made a mistake.

***

“
Not bad for a guy with a broken rib.”

“
Yeah, well, it was only my rib that was broken.”

“
Ain’t that the truth, baby.”

Baby Joe had been lucky, and he knew it. Lucky the slugs had only been .25. Anything bigger, and the one that went through his thoracic wall would have taken some major plumbing with it, and it would have been Goodnight, Irene. Lucky that he had a woman who loved him enough to tilt at windmills, and moxie enough to knock them down. Lucky that life had given him another roll of the dice. Usually fate was not so forgiving, and when you made a knucklehead play like the one he made by not figuring on the mouse gun Oleg had stashed, fate made you pay. Maybe it still would.

So he was lucky. But he still had some hard questions for himself. Lying awake, under the dim green lights, listening to the subdued and creepy ambient noises of a nighttime hospital ward, which were somehow stiller and more evocative than no sound at all, gave a guy time to reflect. Maybe too much. What the hell was he doing there in the first place? Not physically there—that was cause-and-effect, the end result of a chain of circumstances and consequences over which he hadn’t had much control.

He meant the place he’d arrived at in his mind. His perception of who he was, and what it meant to be Baby Joe Young. It somehow meant less than it used to, and there was no way he could deny it.

Was it all to do with Asia? Or was it deeper than that? Was it battle fatigue, depression, some subtle psychological devaluation of his life force to the point where it was no longer precious to him, where he felt the need to put his life in needless jeopardy? Was it some unrecognized or unacknowledged siren call to oblivion? Was he tired? Had he had enough? Was something broken in his clock, some spring gone haywire, a cog flipped out, some spoke snapped? Some subtle but catastrophic failure of his will to survive? Oleg would have killed him if not for Asia. Was he beat? Or did he quit? Okay, except for the gun, he would have won, but how could he not have foreseen and forestalled that? You don’t just suddenly forget things that you’ve known all your life. Your instincts don’t just suddenly abandon you. Was he asking for it? Like when he just walked into Lundi’s place, unprepared and uncaring, just barreling in through the door. At least then, he had a reason. Asia. But this shit—it was none of his business. Like Agent White said, all he’d had to do was wait in the car. So why didn’t he wait in the fucking car? And if he had known that Asia was there, that she had followed him, would he have waited in the car then?