Ques did, but only by a little. “They had guns,” he said shakily. “Real guns!”
“What’d you expect drug dealers to carry? Slingshots?” She looked at the Green Falcon. “You in one piece?” He nodded, his eyes huge behind his mask. “We were circling the block, waiting for you to come out. We figured you’d never get out of this neighborhood alive. We were almost right, huh?”
“Yes,” he croaked.
Welcome to the big city. You find the Watchman?
“I did.” He drew a couple of deep breaths, could still smell the gunsmoke. “And something else too.” He gave the library card to Ques. “That’s where we’re going. I think it’s the Fliptop Killer’s name and address.”
“Not that again!” Gracie protested. “Man, we’re taking you home!”
“No. We’re going to Santa Monica. You don’t have to get out of the cab if you don’t want to—in fact, I’d rather you didn’t. But I’m going to find the Fliptop, with you or without you.”
“It’ll be without me, all right,” she answered, but the way he’d said that let her know he was through talking about it. The man had a mission, and he was going to do it come hell or high water. She settled back into her seat, muttering, and Ques turned toward the Santa Monica Freeway.
The address was near the beach, so close they could smell the sea. The building was dark-bricked, one of those old art-deco places that probably used to be a hotel when Santa Monica was young. Ques pulled the cab to a halt in front of it and cut the engine.
“I want both of you to stay here,” The Green Falcon said. “I’m going in alone.” He started to get out, but Gracie caught his arm.
“Hey, listen. If the Fliptop’s really in there, this is the time to call the cops. No joke.”
“I don’t know that he’s in there. It’s an old library card; he might have moved. But if he’s there, I’ve got to see his face for myself. Then we can call the police.”
“She’s right,” Ques told him. “Listen, it’s crazy to go in there. You don’t have a gun or anything.”
“The Green Falcon,” he said adamantly, “never carries a gun.”
“Yeah, and the Green Falcon’s only got one life, fool!” Gracie didn’t release her grip. “Playtime’s over. I mean it. This isn’t some old serial, this is real life. You know what reality is?”
“Yes, I do.” He turned the full wattage of his gaze on her. “The reality is that… I think I’d rather die as the Green Falcon than live as an old man with a screwed-up bladder and a book of memories. I want to walk tall, just once more. Is that so terrible?”
“It’s nuts,” she answered. “And you’re nuts.”
“So I am. I’m going.” He pulled loose from her and got out of the cab. He was scared, but not as much as he thought he’d be. It wasn’t as bad as indigestion, really. And then he went up the front steps into the building, and he checked the row of mailboxes in the alcove.
The one for apartment D had BOWERS on it.
Apartments A, B, and C were on the first floor. He climbed the stairs, aided by a red-shaded light fixture on the wall, and stood before Apartment D’s door.
He started to knock. Stopped his hand, the fist clenched. A thrill of fear coursed through him. He stood there facing the door, and he didn’t know if he could do it or not. He wasn’t the Green Falcon; there was no such entity, not really. It was all a fiction. But Julie’s death was not a fiction, and neither was what he’d been through tonight to reach this door. The sane thing was to back off go down those stairs, get to a phone, and call the police. Of course it was.
He heard a car’s horn blare a quick tattoo. The cab, he thought. Ques, urging him to come back?
He knocked at the door and waited. His heart had lodged in his throat. He tensed for a voice, or the sudden opening of the door.
The stairs creaked.
He heard the cab’s horn again. This time Ques was leaning on it, and suddenly the Green Falcon knew why.
He turned, in awful slow motion, and saw the shadow looming on the wall.
And there he was: the young blond, dark-eyed man who’d slashed Julie’s throat. Coming up the staircase, step by step, not yet having seen the Green Falcon. But he would, at any second, and each step brought them closer.
The Green Falcon didn’t move. The killer’s weight made the risers moan, and he was smiling slightly—perhaps, the Green Falcon thought, musing over the feel of the blade piercing Julie’s flesh.
And then the Fliptop Killer looked up, saw the Green Falcon at the top of the stairs, and stopped.
They stared at each other, standing not quite an arm’s length apart. The killer’s dark eyes were startled, and in them the Green Falcon saw a glint of fear.
“I’ve found you,” the Green Falcon said.
The Fliptop Killer reached to his back, his hand a blur. It returned with the bright steel of the hunting knife, taken from a sheath that must fit down at his waistband. He moved fast, like an animal, and the Green Falcon saw the blade rising to strike him in the throat or chest.
“It’s him!” Gracie shouted as she burst into the alcove and to the foot of the steps.
The killer looked around at her—and it was the Green Falcon’s turn to move fast. He grasped the man’s wrist and struck him hard in the jaw with his right fist, and he felt one of his knuckles break, but the killer toppled backward down the stairs.
The man caught the railing before he’d tumbled to the bottom, and he still had hold of the knife. A thread of blood spilled from his split lower lip, his eyes dazed from a bang of his skull against a riser. The Green Falcon was coming down the steps after him, and the Fliptop Killer struggled up and backed away.
“Watch out!” the Green Falcon yelled as Gracie tried to grab the man’s knife. The killer swung at her, but she jumped back and the blade narrowly missed her face. But she had courage, and she wasn’t about to give up; she darted in again, clutching his arm to keep the knife from another slash. The Green Falcon tensed to leap at the man, but suddenly the killer struck Gracie in the face with his left fist and she staggered back against the wall. Just that fast, the man fled toward the front door.
The Green Falcon stopped at Gracie’s side. Her nose was bleeding and she looked about to pass out. She said, “Get the bastard,” and the Green Falcon took off in pursuit.
Out front, the Fliptop Killer ran to the parked cab. Ques tried to fight him off, but a slash of the blade across Ques’s shoulder sprayed blood across the inside of the windshield; the Fliptop Killer looked up, saw the man in the green suit and cape coming after him. He hauled Ques out of the cab and leapt behind the wheel.
As the cab’s tires laid down streaks of rubber, the Green Falcon grasped the edge of the open window on the passenger side and just had an instant to lock his fingers, broken knuckle and all, before the cab shot forward. Then he was off his feet, his body streamlined to the cab’s side, and the vehicle was roaring north along serpentine Jericho Street at fifty miles an hour.
The Green Falcon hung on. The killer jerked the wheel back and forth, slammed into a row of garbage cans, and kept going. He made a screeching left turn at a red light that swung the Green Falcon’s body out from the cab’s side and all but tore his shoulders from their sockets, but still the Green Falcon hung on. And now the Fliptop Killer leaned over, one hand gripping the wheel, and jabbed at the Green Falcon’s fingers with the knife. Slashed two of them, but the Green Falcon’s right hand darted in and clamped around the wrist. The cab veered out of its lane, in front of a panel truck whose fender almost clipped the Green Falcon’s legs. The killer thrashed wildly, trying to get his knife hand free, but the Green Falcon smashed his wrist against the window’s frame and the fingers spasmed open; the knife fell down between the seat and the door.
Beachfront buildings and houses flashed by on either side. The cab tore through a barricade that said WARNING – NO VEHICLES BEYOND THIS POINT…
The Green Falcon tried to push himself through the w
indow. A fist hit his chin and made alarm bells go off in his brain. And then the Fliptop Killer gripped the wheel with both hands, because the cab was speeding up a narrow wooden ramp. The Green Falcon had the taste of blood in his mouth, and now he could hear a strange thing: the excited shouts of children, the voices of ghosts on the wind. His fingers were weakening, his grip about to fail; the voices, overlapped and intermingled, said Hold on, Green Falcon, hold on…
And then, before his strength collapsed, he lunged through the window and grappled with the Fliptop Killer as the cab rocketed up onto a pier and early-morning fishermen leapt for their lives.
Fingers gouged for the Green Falcon’s eyes, could not get through the mask’s slits. The Green Falcon hit him in the face with a quick boxer’s left and right, and the killer let go of the wheel to clench both sinewy hands around the Green Falcon’s throat.
The cab reached the end of the pier, crashed through the wooden railing, and plummeted into the Pacific Ocean twenty feet below.
10
Nightmare Netherworld
THE SEA SURGED INTO the cab, and the vehicle angled down into the depths.
The Fliptop Killer screamed. The Green Falcon smashed him in the face with a blow that burst his nose, and then the sea came between them, rising rapidly toward the roof as the cab continued to sink.
The last bubbles of air exploded from the cab. One headlight still burned, pointing toward the bottom, and for a few seconds the instrument panel glowed with weird phosphorescence. And then the lights shorted out, and darkness claimed all.
The Green Falcon released his prey. Already his lungs strained for a breath, but still the cab was sinking. One of the killer’s thrashing legs hit his skull, a hand tearing at his tunic. The Green Falcon didn’t know which was up and which was down; the cab was rotating as it descended, like an out-of-control aircraft falling through a nightmare netherworld. The Green Falcon searched for an open window but found only the windshield’s glass. He slammed his fist against it, but it would take more strength than he had to break it.
Cut, he thought. Panic flared inside him, almost tore loose the last of the air in his lungs. Cut! But there was no director here, and he had to play this scene out to its end. He twisted and turned, seeking a way out. His cape was snagged around something—the gearshift, he thought it was. He ripped the cape off and let it fall, and then he pulled his cowl and mask off and it drifted past him like another face. His lungs heaved, bubbles coming out of his nostrils. And then his flailing hands found a window’s edge; as he pushed himself through, the Fliptop Killer’s fingers closed on his arm.
The Green Falcon grasped the man’s shirt and pulled him through the window too.
Somewhere below the surface, he lost his grip on the Fliptop Killer. His torn tunic split along the seams, and left him. He kicked toward the top with the legs that had won a gold medal in his junior-year swim meet, and as his lungs began to convulse his head broke the surface. He shuddered, drawing in night air.
People were shouting at him from the pier’s splintered rail. A wave caught him, washed him forward. The rough surface of a barnacled piling all but ripped the green tights off his legs. Another wave tossed him, and a third. The fourth crashed foam over him, and then a young arm got him around the neck and he was being guided to the beach.
A moment later, his knees touched sand. A wave cast him onto shore and took the last tatters of his Green Falcon costume back with it to the sea.
He was turned over. Somebody trying to squeeze water out of him. He said, “I’m all right,” in a husky voice, and he heard someone else shout, “The other one washed up over here!”
Cray sat up. “Is he alive?” he asked the tanned face. “Is he alive?”
“Yeah,” the boy answered. “He’s alive.”
“Good. Don’t let him go.” Cray snorted seaweed out of his nostrils. “He’s the Fliptop Killer.”
The boy stared at him. Then shouted to his friend, “Sit on that dude till the cops get here, man!”
It wasn’t long before the first police car came. The two officers hurried down to where Cray sat at the edge of the land, and one of them bent down and asked his name.
“Cray Fl…” He stopped. A piece of green cloth washed up beside him, was pulled back again just as quickly. “Cray Boomershine,” he answered. And then he told them the rest of it.
“This guy got the Fliptop!” one of the kids standing nearby called to his friend, and somebody else repeated it and it went up and down the beach. People crowded around, gawking at the old man who sat in his pajamas on the sand.
The second police car came, and the third one brought a black go-go dancer and a kid with a question mark on his scalp and a bandage around his shoulder. They pushed through the crowd, and Grade called out, “Where is he? Where’s the Green Fal—”
She stopped, because the old man standing between two policemen was smiling at her. He said, “Hello, Gracie. It’s all over.”
She came toward him. Didn’t speak for a moment. Her hand rose up, and her fingers picked seaweed out of his hair. “Lord have mercy,” she said. “You look like a wet dog.”
“You got that sucker, didn’t you?” Ques watched the cops taking the Fliptop, in handcuffs, to one of the cars.
“We got him,” Cray said.
A TV news truck was pulling onto the beach. A red-haired woman with a microphone and a guy carrying a video camera and power pack got out, hurrying toward the center of the crowd. “No questions!” a policeman told her, but she was right there in Cray’s face before she could be restrained. The camera’s lights shone on him, Gracie, and Ques. “What happened here? Is it true that the Fliptop Killer was caught tonight?”
“No questions!” the policeman repeated, but Gracie’s teeth flashed as she grinned for the camera.
“What’s your name?” the woman persisted. She thrust the microphone up to Cray’s lips.
“Hey, lady!” Ques said. The microphone went to him. “Don’t you recognize the Green Falcon?”
The newswoman was too stunned to reply, and before she could find another question, a policeman herded her and the cameraman away.
“We’re going to the station and clear all this mess away,” the officer who had hold of Cray’s elbow said. “All three of you. Move it!”
They started up the beach, the crowd following and the newswoman trying to get at them again. Gracie and Ques got into one of the police cars, but Cray paused. The night air smelled sweet, like victory. The night had called, and the Green Falcon had answered. What would happen to him, Gracie and Ques from this moment on, he didn’t know. But of one thing he was certain: they had done right.
He got into the police car, and realized he still wore his green boots. He thought that maybe—just maybe—they still had places to go.
The police car carried them away, and the TV news truck followed.
On the beach, the crowd milled around for a while. Who was he? somebody asked. The Green Falcon? Did he used to be somebody? Yeah, a long time ago. I think I saw him on a rerun. He lives in Beverly Hills now, went into real estate and made about ten million bucks, but he still plays the Green Falcon on the side.
Oh, yeah, somebody else said. I heard that too.
And at the edge of the ocean a green mask and cowl washed up from the foam, started to slip back into the waves again.
A little boy picked it up. He and his dad had come to fish on the pier this morning, before the sun came up and the big ones went back to the depths. He had seen the cab go over the edge, and the sight of this mask made his heart beat harder.
It was a thing worth keeping.
He put it on. It was wet and heavy, but it made the world look different, kind of.
He ran back to his dad, his brown legs pumping in the sand, and for a moment he felt as if he could fly.
The Red House
I’VE GOT A STORY to tell, like everybody else in the world. Because that’s what makes up life, isn’t it? Sure. Everybod
y’s got a story—about somebody they met, or something that’s happened to them, something they’ve done, something they want to do, something they’ll never do. In the life of everybody on this old spinning ball there’s a story about a road not taken, or a love that went bad, or a ghost of some kind. You know what I mean. You’ve got one too.
Well, I want to tell you a story. Trouble is, there are so many things I remember about Greystone Bay. I could tell you about what Joey Hammers and I found in the wreck of an old Chevy down where the blind man lives amid the junked cars. I could tell you about the time the snakes started coming out of old lady Farrow’s faucets, and what she did with them. I could tell you about that Elvis Presley impersonator who came to town, and went crazy when he couldn’t get his makeup off. Oh, yeah, I know a lot about what goes on in Greystone Bay. Some things I wouldn’t want to tell you after the sun goes down, but I want to tell you a story about me. You decide if it’s worth the telling.
My name’s Bob Deaken. Once upon a time, I was Bobby Deaken, and I lived with my Mom and Dad in one of the clapboard houses on Accardo Street, up near South Hill. There are a lot of clapboard houses up there, all the same shape and size and color—kind of a slate gray. A tombstone color. All of them have identical windows, front porches, and concrete steps leading up from the street. I swear to God, I think all of them have the same cracks in those steps, too! I mean, it’s like they built one of those houses and took a black-and-white picture of it and said, “This is the ideal house for Accardo Street,” and they put every one together just the same right down to the warped doors that stick in the summer and hang when it’s cold. I guess Mr. Lindquist figured those houses were good enough for the Greeks and Portuguese, Italians and Poles who live in them and work at his factory. Of course, a lot of plain old Americans live on Accardo Street too, and they work for Mr. Lindquist like my dad does.