Vicious Circle (27 page)

“Just tell me what you want me to do, Castor.”

“You take the high road, and I’ll take the low road. While they’re watching me, you sneak up behind them and take them out with your usual mixture of elegance and brutality. Then we’ll look around and see what we can see.”

I was really impressed with my own performance: my voice didn’t shake in the slightest. You’d have thought I waded into the middle of riots every day of the week—whereas, in fact, since my student days ended I’ve more or less kicked the habit.

I’d expected more opposition from Juliet, but she made a one-handed gesture that suggested she was sick of the subject. She shucked her coat and let it fall to the ground. Roses opening. “All right,” she said. “I’ll climb the lift shaft. And you’ll—?”

“I’ll use the escalator. I want to stop in at Top Man.”

I walked away before she could change her mind, still trying not to think about roses.

The other end of the corridor opened directly onto the main concourse, which was looking as though a hurricane had hit it while it was pulling itself together after an earthquake. The floor was a carpet of broken glass from storefront windows, in which display dummies lay sprawled like placeholders for the dead. Someone had trodden down hard on the head of one of them, shattering it into powdery shards. For some reason I thought of Abbie’s porcelain doll, and shuddered in a kind of premonitory unease. Dress rails that had been used as battering rams lay half-in and half-out of the window frames they’d shattered, and up against one wall a gutted till leaked copper coins like congealed blood. This didn’t look like looting, though. Not that looters have any higher standards of respect for the retail environment, but the crunching debris under my feet included wristwatches and shiny gold bracelets from a jeweler’s carousel that I’d already had to step over. At some point, the sheer fun of destruction had taken over from any purely mercenary considerations here. That told me a little bit more about what I was dealing with—in fact, at that precise moment, more than I wanted to know.

The escalators were right out in the center of the lower piazza, which meant that as I approached them I had plenty of time to look up at the galleries on the second and third floors. The second floor seemed to be deserted, but up on the top level three men were struggling with a fourth in what I took at first to be a good-natured scrum. Then I realized that I’d misread the situation: it only seemed friendly because three of the men were laughing. The fourth wasn’t making any sound at all, because they’d gagged him before slipping the noose around his neck. Now they were tying the other end of the rope around the railings; it wasn’t hard to guess what the next item on the agenda was.

Okay, it was definitely time to make an entrance. I stepped onto the escalator, which wasn’t moving, and put my whistle to my lips. Walking slowly up the steps, and almost stumbling because of their uneven height, I played a shrieking, nasal blast like the scream of a lovesick bagpipe. The mall had pretty good acoustics, at least when it was relatively empty like this. Up above me the crazies paused in their recreations to look around and find out who was killing the cat.

They separated and stood up, allowing me to get a better look at them. They looked scarily ordinary: one in late middle age, bespectacled and balding, dressed in shirtsleeves and suit trousers; the other two much younger—one of them maybe no more than a student—and in casuals. You couldn’t imagine them carrying out a murder together. You couldn’t even imagine them standing in the same bus queue.

But this wasn’t the time to speculate about how they’d met and discovered a common interest in death by hanging. No, this was show time. Theater was going to be all important here. I wanted them to keep watching me rather than getting back to the business at hand. I started to scuff my feet on each step, Riverdance style, to get a rhythm going in counterpoint to the skirling notes I was pushing out of the whistle. Left foot and then right, raising my knees high and swaying my upper body from side to side like some kind of deranged snake charmer trying to go it alone after his cobra had left him.

All of which combined to produce the desired effect. The three men abandoned their hog-tied victim and crowded to the railings to watch me walking up toward them. Then a whole lot of other faces appeared behind theirs, men and women both, clustering at the railings to peer past them with varying expressions of alarm, eagerness, and incomprehension. I hadn’t seen these people before because they’d been standing away at the back of the upper gallery, presumably in a tight, attentive cluster.

My skin crawled. Somehow the intended execution was made infinitely worse by the fact that it would have had an audience. If I’d had any doubts before as to whether I was in Kansas or the merry, merry land of Oz, I ditched them now: whatever was going on here, it wasn’t natural.

I stepped off the first escalator, turned, and crossed the short expanse of tiling that separated it from the second. That meant presenting my back to the crazies, which I didn’t welcome at all, but on the credit side it meant the escalator was going to bring me out on the opposite side of the upper gallery from where they were. Something big and heavy crashed to the floor right in front of me, showering me with shards of glass and plastic. It had been a sound system of some kind, speakers not included, and one of the fragments close to my foot bore the
OLU
of a
BANG
&
OLUFSEN
logo: not a missile you see used all that often. I stepped over it, and kept on going.

There were howls and jeers now from the gallery above me, followed by a rain of smaller objects that I didn’t bother to acknowledge. One of them thumped me in the back, but it wasn’t sharp, or heavy enough to break bone. Maybe I hiccupped on a note, but it’s not like I was playing Beethoven’s Ninth to start with. It was just noise, loud and discordant and impossible to ignore.

As I climbed step by step up toward the top level, the crazies ran around the gallery to meet me. That was good insofar as it took them away from the man they’d been about to kill, but bad because I still couldn’t see any sign of Juliet and I honestly didn’t think they were running to get my autograph. I got to the top of the escalator just as they rounded the last corner and came running toward me in a solid wall. I tried to swallow, but found that my mouth was dry. This was the moment of truth, and I normally prefer elegant prevarications. I cast one last forlorn glance around the gallery in the hope that my curvaceous, demonic cavalry might appear in the nick of time: no such luck. With a muttered curse, I slipped my whistle back into my inside pocket, out of harm’s way, clinched my fists, and braced for impact.

The first of the rioters to reach me was a woman, dressed for the office in a pastel-colored two-piece and sensible heels. The only thing that spoiled the ensemble effect was the claw hammer she was waving over her head. I jumped awkwardly back out of its way as it came down. Then, since she followed through with her entire body, bending from the hip to get more of her weight behind the blow, I was able to hit her on the back of the head with a roundhouse punch. She went down heavily, the hammer skidding away across the tiles. I didn’t feel particularly good about it, but this was no time for chivalry.

In fact it was probably a time for running away, but I wasn’t thrilled by the prospect of being run down from behind and trampled. As two burly men lunged for me at the same time, I ducked and crouched low to the ground, and their momentum carried one of them on past me, the other over my head in a graceless somersault.

That was it for tactics. A great many arms were clutching at me all at once, a great many fists pummeling at my shoulders and the back of my neck. I was hauled to my feet, then knocked sprawling again as the crazies got in each other’s way in their eagerness to claim a piece of me.

At that moment the shop window behind them, one of the few that was still intact, exploded outward in a rapidly expanding flower of glass splinters that somehow, miraculously, gave birth to Juliet. She dived through the window headfirst, but rolled in the air and landed on her feet with a barely perceptible flexing of the knees. Then, having made her entrance and her point she strode forward with perfect poise, glass splinters pouring off her like water.

The crazies had turned at the sound, their assault on me slackening for a moment as they took in what was happening—and then for another moment, as they stared at Juliet and came to terms with her scarily perfect beauty.

Then the nearest guy swung a metal bar at her head. It wasn’t much of a bar; it looked as though it had been torn from a clothes rail of some kind, and it was probably hollow, so the chances are that it wouldn’t have done that much harm to Juliet in any case. But we never got the chance to find out: she ducked gracefully around it, took the guy’s arm at wrist and elbow, and flung him backward over her shoulder through the window she’d just smashed. Another man did manage to land a blow, with his bare fist, on the point of her jaw. She took it without comment and kicked him in the stomach, making him fold with an unpleasantly liquescent gurgle.

Without breaking stride she walked into the midst of the rioters, a cat among seriously unbalanced pigeons. They closed around her, hands and weapons raised, which only went to prove that they hadn’t really been watching when she came through the plate-glass window. It takes a lot to hurt Juliet, and then a lot more on top of that to slow her down. There were sounds of organic impact, truncated gasps and grunts, then the dull thunder of collapsing bodies as people fell like wheat around her.

There was a hypnotic fascination to it that made it hard to look away. But since the heat was off me, I reckoned I’d better put my time to some productive use. Turning my back on the scene of rapidly diminishing mayhem, I sprinted along the gallery to the section of railing that had been turned into an impromptu gallows. The man they’d been looking to hang was lying on his stomach on the floor, his hands and feet tied tightly and then an additional length of rope lashed between them so that his legs were bent back, his feet sticking up into the air. I used the loup-garou’s knife to cut this last rope, but the blade was too sharp for me to risk using it close to his wrists and ankles. I rolled him over on his back and hooked the gag away from his mouth. He was pale and sweating, his dark hair lank and his eyes exopthalmically huge. The fact that he was wearing a tie struck me as a piquant little grotesquerie: who goes to a riot wearing a tie?

“The hostages,” I said. “Where are they?”

He spat in my face. “You fucking piece of shit,” he screamed. “Satan will ream your throat out, you degenerate bastard motherfucker! He’ll shove his fist up your—”

A little of that kind of thing goes a long way. I stuffed the gag back in his mouth and wiped away the spittle while he glared and grunted at me. “Not on a first date, pal,” I murmured.

Hostage, hostage, who’s got the hostage? I looked around for inspiration. The news footage had been shot from the front of the building, out in the street, and that was where I’d caught sight of Susan Book’s face peering out through the smashed window. I tried to orientate myself, remembering which way I’d come in and which way the main concourse underneath me ran. It seemed that the front ought to be over to my left, where foot-high red capitals shouted T.K.Maxx to the world.

“Where now?” said Juliet, appearing silently and alarmingly at my elbow.

I got to my feet and pointed. She walked across the gallery without a sound and entered the store. I shot a single glance back to the scene of the earlier engagement: bodies littered the ground, and none of them were standing.

I ran to catch up with her. “Did you kill anyone?” I demanded.

“No. There’s one who could die from her wounds—one of her comrades slashed her neck and shoulder with a knife, trying to get through to me. The rest will live.”

“Thank God for that,” I said dryly. “I was thinking you’d just turn up the heat under their libidos and melt their brains into slush. This was a little more . . . direct than I expected.”

“I tried,” Juliet snapped. “They should have been incapable of any aggression as soon as they saw me. They should have been incapable of anything except involuntary orgasm.”

“Oh. So what went wrong?”

“Perhaps I’m losing my touch.”

It wasn’t that. Even without looking at her, I could feel her sexuality washing over me like a warm, caressing tide. And I knew from terrifying experience how strong the undertow was in those waters. But I think we both knew the answer: The demonic miasma was all around us now, and it had been ever since we got up onto this top level. These poor sods were possessed.

Without having to discuss tactics we both shut up at this point. We were walking through the shop, which was eerily silent apart from the mournful echoes of police bullhorns from the street outside. Our own footsteps were very effectively muffled by the clothes spilled from the racks and strewn on the ground. The rails and shelf units were none of them higher than about four feet off the ground, so we had a good view of the big open-plan area we’d moved into, but up ahead of us the store curved around in an L-shape, which we couldn’t see until we got to the end of the aisle. We weren’t trying for stealth, exactly—Juliet didn’t have much use for stealth—but we didn’t want the sound of our conversation to drown out any warning we might get of a possible ambush.

Rounding the corner, we found ourselves right in the thick of the party. The wall ahead of us now was the front face of the shopping center—windows from floor to ceiling, with the night pouring in through that ragged hole in the center pane that I’d seen from the other side in the news broadcast. To either side of it, maybe three or four men knelt low or flattened themselves against the wall, peering out at the cordon in the street below as if they’d never heard of police snipers. Farther away from us still there was a circular display area ringed with floor-level mirrors, which seemed to have been intended for trying on shoes. In this cramped amphitheater, two more men, one armed with a baseball bat, kept watch over a small, terrified huddle of presumably innocent shoppers. That was all—and it looked like good odds except that one of the men at the window had a rifle. Long-haired and thickly bearded, he looked, as he swung back the bolt and put the first bullet into the chamber, like someone who’d accidentally wandered off from the set of
Deliverance
and found himself in an episode of
Eastenders.