You cannot survive as a lawman unless corruption amuses you at some level. Otherwise, it’d be a life with no laughs at all. Zach was amused by Fatboy Mooch, and Fatboy Mooch was pleased by that and smiled to himself as he surveyed what had, until very lately, been his domain.
“What if I told you I had a lead on Dominic Abend?” Zach said. “That I could bring him down with the right intel? Get you your corner back so you can go on killing those children with your drugs.”
Without another word, Fatboy Mooch began to walk again—to walk along the school fence, the empty playground at his shoulder. Zach hesitated only a moment, then followed after him until he caught up, until he had a view of Fatboy’s profile. He could see the gangster was doing a nervous scan of every face that came toward them on the sidewalk.
Fatboy noticed that he’d noticed and murmured low, “A world full of faces—and every face a face to meet the faces that it meets.”
“Someone stole something from him,” Zach answered, side of the mouth. “Abend. By accident or on purpose, I don’t know. But whatever it was, he wants it back. Wants it bad enough to show himself. We think he was there in person when they sliced and diced up Marco Paz.”
The street was noisy. Traffic; sirens; truck panels rumbling as tires hit potholes. Even the sound of footsteps on concrete was loud. Voices could get lost—intimations and innuendoes could get lost. Nonetheless, Zach heard the Mooch’s breathing change, or sensed it. He smelled . . . something coming off the man. He smelled him thinking the situation through. He smelled him putting the pieces of the puzzle together. Apparently that had a smell. Who knew?
“The Guyland heists,” said Fatboy then.
Smart, thought Zach. Say whatever else you would about him, the gangster was smart.
Fatboy Mooch continued: “Out in Gravesend near Avenue U, near a red brick building across from Moody Square, there’s a dumpster in an alley with a black plastic bag inside. And in that plastic bag there is a moldy old mess of shit that looks like papier-mâché before it dries. You ever seen that?”
“Papier-mâché before it dries? In school when I was little, sure.”
“Well, good. Then maybe you will be able to tell the difference between what that looks like and the remains of Billy Grimhouse, which is what’s in that bag—all that’s left of him after that devil was done.”
“And Billy Grimhouse is? Or was . . . ?”
“The brother of Johnny Grimhouse. Which made them the Brothers Grimhouse. The pair of fools who did the Guyland heists.”
Now it was Zach’s turn to make the connections—a whole series of them rattling into place in his mind like dice coming up Yahtzee. These Grimhouse clowns had been doing mansions out on Long Island. They had taken something from Dominic Abend. Dominic Abend had traced some fenced merchandise back to Paz, tortured Paz to get to the Grimhouse brothers, tortured Billy Grimhouse. . . .
“How long ago was this?”
“Don’t know,” said Fatboy Mooch. “Two days. Three. A week at most.”
Before the storage unit had been tossed. So Billy didn’t have the answers and Abend still hadn’t found what he wanted, Zach thought. Which raised a new question: If Billy was the Guyland thief, why didn’t he know where Abend’s merchandise had gotten to?
“If you were up on all this,” Zach asked the Mooch, “why didn’t you drop a dime and let me in on it, give me a head start?”
“’Cause that German mo-fo already owns half the cops in town. And though Fatboy Mooch is wiser than the children of light in his generation, even he isn’t wise enough to know which half is which.”
This sent another twinge through Zach’s anxiety centers re: Goulart. Was Goulart one of the fifty percent of cops Abend already owned?
“But I figure . . .” Fatboy Mooch went on. “I figure if you’re asking me, you want to know. And if you want to know, maybe you ain’t yet been body-snatched. Maybe you’re still clean.”
If, thought Zach, annoyed to think it, cursing Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell because she had made him think it. If you want to know. . . . Did Goulart want to know? Did he really? Or was he just helping Abend stay out in front of Task Force Zero?
Zach and the Mooch were stopped at a corner, at a red light. They didn’t have the schoolyard on their flank anymore, so there were pedestrians on every side of them. Yellow cabs and panel trucks and cars whooshed past them from every direction. Fatboy Mooch’s head was swiveling, eyes watching everything at once.
And Zach, when he spoke, spoke in a secretive mutter. “There’s still Johnny Grimhouse, then.”
“Last I heard.”
“And I’m guessing Johnny Grimhouse is on the run.”
“All men fear death,” said Fatboy Mooch.
“Of course if Abend could find Billy, he can find Johnny too.”
“Johnny the smarter one.”
“All the same.”
Fatboy Mooch’s Killer T-shirt rose and fell and rose and fell while he considered whether to trust Zach with what he knew. At last he spoke into the middle distance. “You trying to tell me you the only hope of saving Western civilization?”
“You trying to tell me you’re Western civilization?”
“You was expecting maybe Mozart?”
The light turned green, but the two big men stayed right there at the sidewalk’s edge while the other pedestrians streamed past them, while Fatboy Mooch made his decision.
“Johnny got a hole I know in Long Island City,” he said then. He murmured an address. “And was I you, I would hie me hence with wings as swift as meditation or the thoughts of love.”
Zach had already pivoted on his heel, was already hurrying away.
12
GRIMHOUSE
Zach was about halfway across the 59th Street Bridge, the Crown Vic doing twenty in steady traffic, when a wave of fever hit him. The world turned suddenly distant and unreal. The criss-crossing bridge supports surrounding him became a sort of graph superimposed on the surface of the scenery beyond, making it all seem two-dimensional. The gleaming pinnacles of Manhattan in the rearview—the drear flatlands of Queens in the windshield—the alien reaches of Roosevelt Island at the windows—looked to him all at once like territories on a map of themselves, drawings on one of those old brown maps with sailing ships and whales in the sea-spaces and monsters in the vast unknown beyond the borders.
Zach felt sick and started sweating. The cars ahead of him blurred. Their red bright taillights smeared themselves across his field of vision. His sudden sense of unreality—this image of New York as a map of itself—a hand-crafted picture of a place—a cartoon cityscape through which he was all too mysteriously passing—reminded him so much of his drive through Germany that he was only somewhat surprised, only somewhat nauseated, to see the executioner from his dream standing impossibly on one of the bridge’s low stone towers just up ahead. Both the executioner’s hands were resting on the hilt of his long sword, and the sword’s round end was pressed into the concrete. He watched Zach drive by beneath him with what could only be called a tragic smile.
My love! My love! It is for you I am become an abomination!
With that, the wave of fever—the sense of unreality—receded. The bridge was the bridge and the city was the city again, after what had to have been less than half a minute. Nothing remained of the incident but the high-sea-rolling of Zach’s stomach, and that was already subsiding as well.
Still, the moment left him worried—weak and worried. Since returning home from Germany, he had come to believe that his dissociation during that weird drive out of Dresden must have been the first symptom of the septicemia that ultimately brought him low. He was worried that this—this moment on the bridge between Manhattan and Queens—was a sign that he hadn’t fully recovered, that he was in danger of having a relapse.
Which, in turn, made him think that he should have brought Goulart along on this excursion. He should have called Goulart, at least, and arranged to meet him in Long Island City.
Of course he should have. He would have, at any other time, and he had no idea how he was going to explain to him why he hadn’t, why he had come out here alone. But if there was any chance of getting to Johnny Grimhouse before Abend did, he had to take it. And if there was even the slightest chance that Goulart might have gone bad, that he might give Abend a warning call, he couldn’t risk it. Damn Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell for putting these thoughts into his mind; but now that they were there, he couldn’t ignore them. He had to do this on his own.
His head was more or less clear again as he pulled the car up to the curb on a desolate gray block beside the railway yards in Long Island City. He stood out of the Crown Vic into the cool clear autumn weather. He still felt a little hollow and fuzzy in his gut. He breathed deep in an effort to restore himself, but even the air was dead here. He looked around him. There was a dirt construction site with an abandoned tractor sitting idle by a half-dug pit; there was the ruin of an old concrete plant, the aluminum siding half-stripped off its water tower; and there was the building Fatboy Mooch had sent him to find. It was six stories—red brick—blackened red brick—and had held apartments once, but was gutted now. The big windows were dark. The glass in some of them was broken. The brick was smashed around some of the frames. There was a lopsided scaffold rotting around the building’s base, and a construction screen draped down one corner, roof to sidewalk. It looked as if a restoration project had been abandoned halfway through.
A train rattled across the yards, one level below the street. Zach was about to start away from his car and cross toward the building—but his breath caught and he stiffened as he spotted a movement at one of the windows. Unconsciously, he raised his hand in the direction of the gun under his arm. He stared hard at the window, a tall intact rectangle of black glass up on the fourth floor. Nothing. No movement now. His hand slid slowly back to his side. Maybe it had been an optical illusion. Or more fever stuff.
Still, he kept his eyes on that window as he walked across the empty street. He scanned all the windows but kept coming back to that one until he reached the sidewalk, reached the building, and stepped under the scaffolding to reach the front doors. The doors were two majestic slabs of carved mahogany, sadly scratched and weathered. There was no padlock on them—no lock of any kind. Zach pulled the handle on one and, sure enough, it opened.
He stepped through into the foyer. He caught a glimpse of ruin. A shattered mosaic on the floor, lacerated walls, a lopsided balustrade rising with the stairs. Then the door swung shut behind him and the place went dark. Not full dark—there was gray light from the window of a gutted ground-floor apartment against the far wall—but dark enough, the shadows hanging like drapery. Zach smelled brick dust and emptiness and . . . something else. A heat at his nostrils. A whiff of something alive. Someone. . . .
He drew out his flashlight. Panned it from one wall of the foyer to the other. He moved behind the beam to the stairway and started up.
The treads moaned grievously as he made his ascent. He paused on the second landing. Moved the flashlight over the hallway from the far corner on his left to the near corner, just to his right. Everything was silent. No movement anywhere. Still that smell—the hot smell of life—had grown thicker as he climbed.
On the third landing, some unthinkable creature suddenly skittered across the floor, out ahead of his light. Not a rat—too jittery and insectile—but if it was a cockroach, Christ, he didn’t want to think about the size of it. He was from Texas and he’d seen a toe-biter or two in his time, waterbugs the size of your forearm that would take a chunk right out of your foot given half a chance. He hadn’t liked them on the prairie; the thought of something that size here, full of the filth of the city, roiled the waves in his stomach again.
Whatever it was, it was gone before he got the beam on it. Just as well. He didn’t want to see it. He stood where he was and caught his breath and let his heart steady. Then he reached for the shattered orb of the newel post and was about to head up to the fourth floor, the floor where he’d seen that movement at the window.
But before he took a step, somebody screamed.
It was ugly—an ugly scream. A man’s scream—the sound wrenched out of him as if someone had rammed a hand down his gullet and ripped it up out of his belly. A gurgling death scream.
Zach had his gun in his hand—his gun and flashlight in his two hands braced together—and was chasing the flashlight beam up the next flight before the sound faded away. He swung around the landing balustrade—saw the assassin waiting for him down the hall—a robed, hunched, monkish, rat-featured man with long greasy hair. Zach fired and dove and rolled behind the cover of the corner before the blast of the killer’s giant pistol made the walls quake around him.
Plaster pattered to the floor. What the hell was that bastard shooting? A Dezzy, Zach figured: a gangster’s Desert Island .50 cal.
Zach rose to one knee. He shouted, “Drop that heater, you son of a bitch! I’m a federal officer!”
No answer. Not even another shot. Zach pressed his body against the wall, whipped his gun-and-flashlight around the corner in front of him, and peeked out behind it. He caught a quick glimpse of the killer scuttling around the corner at the hall’s opposite end, gone before he could get a shot off. He climbed to his feet and was about to go after the guy when another gunman—this one goateed, grinning, and satanic—broke through a doorway and fired another Dezzy cannon—boom! boom!—twice, running, shooting wild. Zach let out a strangled curse as he pulled back into cover—then immediately swung out around the corner again, gun and flashlight first, and squeezed the trigger. The jolt of the 9mm went up his arm and glass shattered somewhere, but this second killer had turned the corner too and gotten away.
Zach held the gun and flashlight steady, trained them on the open door. Edged down the hallway.
Suddenly, a black blast went through his mind, a quaking jolt of pure nothingness that filled his heart with terror. He thought: What? What? What just happened?
And Dominic Abend stepped out into the pale white of the flashlight’s beam.
He was a looming presence in the gray light and gunsmoke: even taller and broader than he seemed in the photographs, his shaven head large and powerful, his eyes vital and flashing. He held a longsword, the hilt out from his side, the blade half lifted across his body, so that the line of the bright metal slashed the dark spill of his black overcoat.
“Drop the weapon, Abend!” shouted Zach, approaching him slow step by slow step. It was the excitement of the gunfight that made him shout, the confusion of that dark jolt he’d felt. “I want you alive, but I’ll take you dead. Drop it.”
Even in the shadows, he saw Abend smile—that thin, cruel, damp, and somehow ancient smile of his. He saw it just before he felt the pain—the excruciatingly deep burn—like being stabbed in the ankle with a blade of fire.
Zach looked down and saw the horror that had locked on to him—a tremendous cockroach—an insect at least a full foot long—its legs scrambling clackety-clack over his shoe as it twisted its beak into his flesh.
He shouted and, with an instinctive spasm, tried to kick it off him. As he did, he caught a glimpse of the other one on the wall, just as big—bigger!—right by his face. He glimpsed its searching mandibles—its weirdly human expression of gleeful hunger. Then, with a wet flutter of wings, it sprang at his eyes.
Zach reeled away, batting at the thing wildly so that the light from his flashlight jerked over Abend’s grin—up over another bug on the wall, and another nearby it—and up over the ceiling where five or six more of the monsters had crawled out from under the chipped plaster trim.
The flying waterbug dropped to the floor beside the other, the one Zach had kicked away, and amidst two more that were scrabbling toward Zach’s feet quickly. Zach staggered back away from them, his flashlight lifting over the corridor—and in its wavering beam, he saw them all.
There were dozens of them. Roaches and waterbugs of mind-boggling size—impos
sible, preternatural size. They were racing toward him over the walls. Swarming toward him across the floor. The hall was filled with their hungry chittering and with the eager skidding patter of their legs. His light went up and—oh God, they were above him too, on the ceiling. Even now, one dropped onto his shoulder. He knocked it off with the flashlight—and another dropped into his hair.
Zach let out a scream. Writhing, he had to put gun and flashlight in one hand so he could tear the clawing creature off his head with his fingers, drag its wriggling legs and searching beak out of the tangle of his hair. For a moment, he caught sight of its gleeful hungry human eyes staring into his. He felt its six legs clawing for purchase in his hand. Then, his gorge rising, he flung it down onto the floor—and saw that there were so many of them now! A swarming brown mass flowing toward him as one.
Afraid of Abend and his sword—the unseen swipe of steel across his throat—he sought the gangster in a panic, waving the flashlight beam all around him. Where the hell was the man? There! Right where he’d been. Grinning in amusement. Turning calmly now. Strolling quietly away, tapping the longsword’s blade against his leg in an easy rhythm.
Teeth gritted, Zach made to chase after him. But the bugs crunched and exploded under his shoes, and he tripped on them and slid in their goo. Two more were climbing onto his pants legs. One took a lacerating bite of his calf that made him cry out. As he fought them off, he nearly toppled over, nearly went down—and the image that flashed through his mind—himself on the floor, the creatures swimming up over him, devouring him, tearing him apart—filled him with nausea and terror.
He saw the back of Abend’s overcoat as the gangster vanished around the corner, but he had no chance of going after him now. All he could do was struggle to keep his balance. The floor, the walls, the ceiling—they were one great moving carpet of enormous roaches, swarming up him, falling on him, bent on bringing him down.