But the voice memos didn’t have to relate to Val to be wonderful. The notes to herself could be about dental appointments or school conferences… it didn’t matter. Just the sound of her voice allowed him to fall asleep on these nights when he couldn’t sleep. Usually she sounded busy, distracted, rushed at work, sometimes even annoyed, but still… the sound of his mother’s voice touched something in the core of him.
There was a text section to the phone, of course, and large files there the last seven months of her life, but they were encrypted and after a few lazy attempts to break the cipher, Val left those text files alone. It might be a diary she’d been keeping, but whatever it was, his mother had wanted to keep it private. If his parents’ marriage was in trouble or if it were some other grown-up angst that she’d used an encryption file to keep anyone from overhearing, Val thought it was none of his business.
He just wanted to hear her voice.
You are such a pussy, Val Bottom. Less than a year away from getting drafted into the army or marines, and here you are…
Val ignored that voice and listened to his mother’s, his cheek and nose against the flattened baseball mitt.
Even with tomorrow and the Omura thing hanging over him like a black-garbed ghost, the soft voice and the leather smell cleared his mind and allowed him to fall asleep within ten minutes.
His last waking thought was I have to pack these two things at the bottom of my duffel tomorrow where Leonard won’t find them…
“YOU MOTHERFUCKER!”
“Motherfucker yourself, Coyne,” said Val. “And fuck you too.”
Val was ten minutes late for their rendezvous at the Cigna Hospital entrance to the storm sewers. He almost hadn’t come at all but—in the end—knew that he’d always doubt his own courage if he didn’t show up.
“We were just leaving without you, Bottom-wipe,” snarled Coyne. The leader was wearing a leather jacket open to show a squinting, scowling Putin. Coyne already had his ski mask on, although the balaclava was rolled up high on his head.
“Did you bring your gun, Bottom-wipe?” asked Gene D. with a high, almost hysterical-sounding giggle.
Val slapped the taller boy across his cheek with a flick of two fingers.
“Hey!” screamed Gene D.
Coyne laughed. “I get to call Bottom-wipe here Bottom-wipe. Nobody else does. Zip up your fly, pimple-head.”
Gene D. looked down and the other boys laughed too loudly. Everyone sounded like they were wound too tight.
“Got your flashlight?” asked Coyne. He was carrying the bulky OAO Izhmash right here in the open behind the hospital medical-waste Dumpster. It was twilight, but not really dark yet. Anyone driving into the parking lot could see it.
Val held his flashlight up.
“Let’s go,” said Coyne.
Dinjin banged the storm sewer cover open and one by one they slid down into the dank and dark passageway. Coyne led the way as they walked the half mile or so to the downtown through the labyrinth of twists and turns they’d memorized rather than marked. No one spoke as their flashlight beams danced across the moldy, heavily tagged concrete walls. Once in the tunnels near the Cigna entrance, flashback vials crunched underfoot and the floor of the tunnel—dusty and dry—showed a litter of toilet paper, old mattresses, and used condoms that the boys fastidiously avoided.
Val was amazed that all eight of them had shown up. Did the younger kids like Toohey, Cruncher, Monk, and Dinjin have any sense of what they were getting into?
Did the older kids—Sully, Gene D., even Coyne?
Did he himself have a clue? wondered Val. If he did, why was he here?
They reached the Performing Arts Center outlet sooner than Val wanted.
“Turn off your flashlights,” hissed Coyne. “Pull your ski masks down.”
“It’s another ten minutes before…,” began Sully.
“Shut up and do it,” said Coyne.
The boys pulled their balaclavas down. Val hated the smell and feel of wet wool against his face. At first it seemed like absolute darkness—Val could see nothing at all and a sudden panic made his bowels go watery—but then the light through the rain slits in the closed metal panels filtered in and their eyes began to adapt, at least to the point where they could see one another’s dark shapes standing there. Val sensed someone next to him—Monk?—and felt the other boy’s arms and body trembling hard with terror or anxiety.
Coyne shoved and pulled until all eight of them were piled in as close to the rebar grating and steel panels as they could get. By straining their heads and necks forward through the grate, they could get a glimpse outside through the six tiny slits. The youngest boys took turns at their two slits.
When Val peeped through he thought his heart was going to race itself to death. There were already people and automobiles out there, although the prime parking spot just ten or twelve feet from the storm sewer was still open and empty. The sound of voices, traffic, shouts from the reporters and photographers, and a general crowd buzz seemed to be all around them despite the barriers of concrete and steel. All the other times they’d been here, all the hours they’d spent cutting away parts of the rebar grating and making sure the key Coyne had would actually unlock the swinging cover panels, 2nd Street had been empty and the bit of late-night traffic on Grand Avenue had sounded far away.
Now it was all here.
What the hell had they been thinking? Val knew that it had been a boy’s fantasy up to this point—playing pirates in a cave with real guns—but this was real.
“Coyne,” Val whispered. “We can’t…”
Coyne hit Val in the face with his closed fist. Val went down heavily, the Beretta still in his belt. He felt the strange, squarish muzzle of the OAO Izhmash flechette-spewer pressing painfully into his cheek. “Shut the fuck UP, asshole,” hissed Coyne. “Or I fucking swear I’ll do you here, now, rather than later.”
Flechette guns, Val knew, made little noise, not much more than a whooshing sound. Coyne might risk the noise to… no, Val realized with a sickening lurch of absolute certainty, Coyne was going to risk being heard by killing Val right here and now. With that flood of certainty came the twin realization that Coyne had always planned to kill Val here, this night. Maybe Coyne planned to kill all of the flashgang members before the shooting was over.
Val’s Beretta was in his waistband, under his hooded sweatshirt and flannel shirt, and before he could fumble it out in the darkness, he heard Coyne ratchet back something on the flechette sprayer—a safety, most probably. The next sound he heard would have to be his last…
“He’s here!” shouted Monk. “The limo’s here.”
“What?” whispered back Coyne. “Too early. Another three minutes…” Their leader had obviously been watching his expensive watch.
“He’s getting out!” shouted Gene D. There was no attempt to stay silent now.
The padlock was unlocked, the chain off, and now six of the boys stumbled over themselves reaching for the four-foot-long pieces of rebar they’d propped against the wall under the sewer opening. These short metal poles were the way they’d practiced swinging the steel panels open in the early hours of the morning, with Monk or Dinjin outside and ready to run forward and push the doors back in place.
“It’s him!” screeched Sully at one of the slits. “Omura!”
“Shut up! Shut up!” whispered Coyne, but it was too late to control things now. Events were creating themselves.
At least the OAO Izhmash wasn’t aimed at his head any longer. Val took a breath and began crawling away, slithering on his back toward the darker areas yards away from the opening.
The boys had practiced pushing the panels open smoothly, working together, but now they were banging and prodding almost at random, rebar against flat steel. The panels screeched, scraped, began to open. Light from streetlamps, car headlights, TV lights, and photography flashes flooded into their tunnel and almost blinded eight pairs of eyes that had adapted themselves to near
-total darkness.
“Shoot! Shoot! Shoot!” Cruncher was shouting, fumbling to pull back the hammer on his heavy .357 Magnum.
“No, wait, wait, wait!” shouted Coyne.
What does he have planned? Val wondered dumbly. Whatever it was, he couldn’t wait around to find out. He stumbled to his feet and ran toward the curve in the sewer tunnel.
“Fucker!” screamed Coyne and fired the flechette sweeper at him.
The other boys took that as an order to open fire. The sound of six weapons firing at once was absolutely deafening in the echoing cement and concrete vault. Gene D. didn’t even have the right-side panel fully open yet, and sparks leaped off the steel. The rest of the boys shoved and jostled to fire through the four feet or so of open space between the partially opened shutters.
Val had ducked around the abutment in the turning tunnel just as Coyne had fired and fifty or more barbed flechettes sparked against the walls and continued ricocheting down the long passageway. If Val hadn’t made the turn just when he had, he’d be dead. If he’d continued running, the barbs would have shredded him in full flight and he’d be dead.
Then Coyne was shouting with the others and obviously firing out through the gap in the shutters, pushing other boys in front of him even as he did so. Val knew this because—even though he knew it was the most stupid thing he could do—he had to see what was going on and he’d peeked around the barb-gouged corner.
Someone, probably Omura’s security, was firing back. Val saw Toohey’s shaven head explode in a red and gray mist and the slim boy’s body tumbled against Cruncher and went down. Dinjin screamed something and then he was hit and his body went down like a sack of potatoes. There was none of the dramatic flying backward that Val had seen in a million movies, just a deadly, final, sickening drop when a boy was hit.
“Keep shooting! Keep shooting!” screamed Coyne in a weird falsetto. Even as he backed away from the opening, he was lowering his flechette sweeper toward the huddled backs of his screaming, shooting friends.
Fuck this. Val turned and ran as hard as he could. It took bouncing off a cement wall at the first branching of the tunnel to make him realize that he’d dropped and forgotten his flashlight. He’d been running blind in the darkness. He had to turn left along a narrow side tunnel at the next branching, but he’d never even find the branching in this darkness. He was screwed.
He’d picked himself up and was shaking his head when there came a flash brighter than the sun and then a sound louder and more terrible than anything Val Fox had ever heard. A blast wave picked him up and threw him fifteen feet down the main corridor. He was only vaguely aware of losing skin on his knees and elbows as he hit and slid on cement, his jeans and sweatshirt ripping.
Flame billowed and blossomed around the first turn in the tunnel behind him. Val glimpsed a scarecrow silhouette throwing itself aside right where Val had hidden a few seconds earlier, and then the second shock wave hit him and rolled him another ten feet down the black corridor.
He could see now.
Val pulled the ski mask off and tugged the Beretta from his waistband. The pistol was under the wool as he ran. The storm drain was illuminated red and orange by unseen flames, Val’s shadow leaping ahead of him as he ran for his life, ducking rebar hanging down here and there, listening to the chaos still exploding thirty yards behind.
Somebody from outside must have fired an RPG or something. Or something. There was no way that any of the boys still in that first section of the drain could be alive after that.
Men’s shouts. More shots. Security people or cops or military were inside the drain with him. Their clever idea of keeping them out by leaving the interior grate rebar in place hadn’t worked for thirty seconds. Someone had just blown the shit out of the steel panels, rebar grate, boys’ bodies, everything.
And now they were inside.
Val was running so hard and panting so loudly that he almost tore right past the narrow defile extending to the left of the main drain passage. He skidded, sneaker soles screeching, and doubled back and in.
The flames were receding behind him, and this narrow passage—barely wide enough for his shoulders—was dark.
To get to the higher drain and eventual exit, he had to find the narrow, round opening above him with the metal rungs. But he’d never see it in this blackness.
More shouts. Men were running past his side passage now, shooting ahead of themselves down the tunnel. They had machine guns.
Of course they have machine guns, dipshit.
The best Val could do to find his vertical pipeline was to keep jumping every few paces, dragging his free left hand along the roof. He was still carrying his ski mask and Beretta in his right hand. The odds of missing the small aperture were great, but he was goddamned if he was going to slow down.
Problem was, he’d checked out this sewer drain and it dead-ended about thirty yards beyond the vertical access he needed.
More shouts behind him. Footsteps on cement. Lots of men running. A voice echoed down his passage, although he couldn’t tell what the man was screaming.
They’re all dead. Coyne, Monk, Gene D., Sully, Toohey, Cruncher, Dinjin. All dead.
The fingers of his left hand flicked against nothingness.
Val skidded to a stop, stepped back, jumped and swung his left arm vertically, guessed where the rungs must be, and leaped blindly.
His left hand caught a rung but his weight almost pulled his shoulder out of its socket. He dropped the Beretta and mask, caught both of them against his rising thigh, grabbed them clumsily in the darkness, and used that hand to find the next rung, fighting not to drop the gun again even as three fingers on his right hand gripped the rung.
He was climbing, his feet found rungs, and he was up. Val heaved himself onto the dry concrete of the higher passage that headed east and he could feel his breath puffing dust up against his face.
Bleeding, hurting—although he was fairly sure that none of the barbed flechettes had caught him—Val struggled to his feet and began staggering down the corridor with his left hand sliding against the south wall of the tunnel. Thank God it only went one way from the vertical standpipe he’d come up. If he’d had to choose directions in this total darkness, he would have been lost for sure.
Val was less than a hundred feet down the tunnel when he heard a slipping, sliding noise behind and to his right.
Rat?
Even before the thought was complete, he was blinded by a flashlight beam directly in his eyes.
Cops! Would they allow him to surrender or just gun him down? If the other guys had hit Advisor Omura with their wild firing, Val thought he knew the answer to that question.
He still started to raise his hands in surrender when Billy Coyne’s voice from behind the circle of blinding light said, “I always knew you were a total pussy, Val.”
Incredibly, absurdly, Val’s terrified but not panicked mind flashed on the old James Bond and Bourne and Kurtz movies that he and the Old Man used to watch. “The villains’ ultimate undoing,” the Old Man said from the couch, the popcorn between them, “talk, talk, talk. They always explain, and keep talking rather than just shooting the hero and getting it over with.”
“I’m gonna flash on this tomorrow when I’m flying to Moscow with my mother—in first class, asshole,” said Coyne, his voice still high and weird and adrenaline-driven as it had been back at the gunslits, “and I’m gonna get off thinking about how a hundred barbed flechettes just tore your fucking wimp body to…”
Val fired the Beretta through the bunched-up ski mask that concealed it.
Coyne said, “Ugh,” and dropped the flashlight, which hit on its metal side and did not shatter. The beam of light rolled in a slow circle.
Val threw himself to the right, trying to stay out of the beam of light. It was too fast, but it crossed him and kept going.
Val dropped to one knee, braced his right arm, and aimed the pistol low.
The flashlight beam came to a
stop on Coyne on his knees, using the big OAO Izhmash as a sort of crutch to keep himself upright. Coyne was staring at his own chest where, just above and to the right of Vladimir Putin’s pale brow, a small red circle was beginning to blotch wider and spread.
Coyne looked up with a stupid, smirking grin. “You shot me.” He sounded almost amused. He began struggling with the bulky flechette sweeper.
Val didn’t think that Coyne had the strength to lift and aim the thing, but he didn’t care to wait and see if he was wrong. He shot Coyne again, in the throat this time.
Coyne’s head snapped back as his neck exploded, then the boy fell forward into the circle of the flashlight beam. The sound of his teeth snapping off as he hit the cement face-first, jaw wide open, would stay with Val always.
More shouts from behind and below.
Val was panting as if he’d run a hundred-yard dash. He felt a queer numbness spreading through him and doubted if he could walk now, much less run the distance he had to. He grabbed the flashlight and had started to turn away when a voice from Coyne’s corpse said, “Vy rasstrelyali nas, vy ublyudok!”
Val whirled and crouched, Beretta extended. Coyne lay still on his face. The pool of blood continued widening.
Approaching warily, Val set his sneaker to Coyne’s right shoulder and rolled him over.
Coyne’s eyes were wide and sightless, his mouth with the shattered front teeth opened wide. The throat below the bloodied jaw was shredded. The second shot had almost decapitated the boy.
Vladimir Putin sneered up at Val, the thin-lipped little mouth snarling, “Ty ubil nas, svoloch. Vy proklyatye fucking parshivo…”
Knowing he was wasting a bullet and not caring, Val shot Vladimir Putin directly between his beady little eyes.
The AI stopped talking.
Voices from just beneath the standpipe now. Perhaps they hadn’t seen the vertical access. Val prayed they hadn’t. He had a few seconds to get around the first bend.
Flashlight in his left hand and Beretta in his right, Val ran. And ran.