-- DAN
CHAPTER 8
That night, Jake Friskel’s breath hung unexpectedly in the air before him as he kept a lookout. It flickered and danced beneath a blinking, dying streetlight. Just in the last few minutes, just after 11:00, the temperature had plummeted. Jake didn’t think much about it. He did think for a second he felt someone watching him, but he was sure the place was clean, so he didn’t say anything to Marko or De’shan.
De’shan had picked up enough knowledge of wires and circuits over the years from his older brother, the electrician, to take care of the simple alarm system rigged to the chain-link fence. Now the three of them, pressed into the shadows in the loading zone of Grant’s Discount Electronics, moved silently up the concrete steps to the heavy back door.
De’shan and Marko looked as if they’d been stamped by the same cookie cutter: both well over six feet tall, both skinny as scarecrows. De’shan’s head was smooth and bullet-shaped, though, while Marko wore his hair in rows. Tonight they both carried 9mm revolvers, but Jake didn’t like the idea of anything that couldn’t take down more than one target at a time. He held a sawed-off, 12-gauge, pistol-grip pump shotgun pressed against his left thigh, one finger on the trigger.
Jake massed nearly as much as De’shan and Marko put together. At six feet, one inch, Jake weighed in at two hundred sixty-seven pounds, very little of it fat. De’shan and Marko referred to him as “Cinder,” short for “cinderblock.” Jake was two years younger than his friends, and that was the only reason he wasn’t in charge.
Long seconds passed, and the feeling of being watched grew stronger, though the night remained perfectly still and Jake couldn’t see anything moving. The clicks from the lock sounded unnecessarily loud.
Jake whispered, “What’s takin’ so long?”
“Shut the fuck up,” De’shan hissed. “It’s comin’.”
They heard a thump from inside the store, and Jake watched as the lock flipped over of its own volition under De’shan’s fingers. As De’shan and Marko traded panicked glances, the door popped open, and the Grant’s night manager backed his way out onto the dock, humming a tune, his arms filled with empty boxes.
He was a short, overweight Hispanic man with receding hair and a moustache, dressed in cheap slacks and a short-sleeve button shirt with a loosened necktie through the collar. The door thumped into De’shan’s leg. The manager pushed harder, didn’t look around, as if it were just some innocuous obstruction that kept the door from opening. He still hummed.
The three boys froze for several seconds. Jake saw De’shan’s face clearly, and the expression on it said Shit! What now?
Marko growled, “Get out here, bitch!”
He grabbed the manager by his shirt, from which hung a name tag that read, “Hi, my name is RICO,” and yanked him onto the loading dock. The door immediately swung shut. Rico swiveled his spherical head around, realized what was happening, and said, “Don’t hurt me! Don’t hurt me, I just work here! Don’t hurt me!”
“Shut the fuck up!” Marko barked out, and shoved the barrel of his revolver into the manager’s cheek.
Jake had by this time moved up the stairs, and said, “What is this, man? You said everybody’d be gone by now!”
De’shan had his mouth open to answer, but before he could say anything the latch clicked again and the door punched open.
Marko said, “Shit, another one?” and De’shan cocked his gun and had just started to turn when a heavy black boot pistoned out of the darkness inside the doorway and crushed his nose. His head snapped back and he pitched nervelessly off the loading platform.
Jake scrambled down the stairs, the shotgun forgotten in his hand, and watched De’shan fall the six feet to the concrete lot. De’shan landed solidly on his back, and his head struck the pavement and bounced. He didn’t get back up. Jake glanced at the open doorway and felt his bowels loosen.
A man dressed entirely in black stepped out onto the loading platform.
Silhouetted against the streetlight, he looked to Jake as if he were wearing a suit jacket, or something like it; there was padding of some kind around the chest and shoulders. He stood empty-handed, but a mean-looking semi-automatic rested on one thigh. Jake tried to make out his face, and realized a mask covered the man’s entire head. Solid white eyes floated in the mass of darkness. The stranger remained silent, but moved quickly forward, toward Marko and the night manager.
Jake had momentarily forgotten about Marko, but he stepped back and away, and waited. Marko would deal with this. Jake was big, sure, and strong as a bull, but Marko had a black belt. He was fast. Marko could handle this.
Marko stood halfway up the stairs, Rico pressed to his side, and even as the stranger approached him he took the revolver from Rico’s face and raised it toward the stranger.
As soon as the barrel of the gun moved away from his head, Rico screamed, “Hijo de puta!” and rammed his elbow into Marko’s ribs.
Marko gasped, surprised, and his gun hand faltered. Rico jumped off the steps, but landed badly and immediately crumpled. He rolled over onto his back and clutched one ankle.
Suddenly alone and confused on the stairs, Marko tried to speak, but before he could get anything out something flashed in the air with a sharp, whistling sound, and Marko’s gun clanged out of his hand.
The revolver smacked against the brick wall beside him and clattered off the steps, out of reach. Marko’s head went down for an instant as pain started to blossom in his hand, but back in the shadows Jake saw it clearly: a long, slender wooden staff, held loosely in the stranger’s gloved grip, where there had not been anything a second before.
Marko howled and jumped off the stairs, landed beside the writhing night manager. He looked around for his gun but couldn’t see it.
The stranger slammed into him.
Marko had studied tae kwon do and jujitsu since he was thirteen, had trophies to prove it, but the stranger never gave him a chance. The wooden staff flew out and down, tangled Marko’s legs and twisted. Marko landed hard on the pavement. He absorbed the impact with one arm, as he’d been taught, but it still shook him. The staff rolled away into the shadows. The stranger didn’t go after it.
Instead he stepped back and let Marko get up.
The young man surged off the ground and launched a brutal kick at the stranger’s head—and shouted as the stranger blocked it with an arm that felt like a tree limb. Marko spun off-balance and the man in black moved into him.
The stranger had his back to Jake and blocked his view, so Jake received little more than an impression of what happened in the sick strobing of the faltering streetlight. The stranger’s hands and arms seemed to blur, and the sound of impacts, gloved fists on skin, rattled together like a great ratcheting.
When the stranger stepped calmly aside, Marko slumped face-first onto the concrete.
Rico lurched up to one knee, pale and sweating. The stranger turned toward him and began to extend a hand when Rico saw Jake, back in the shadows at the base of the concrete steps. Rico’s eyes grew huge and round. The stranger, who had not yet spoken a word, spun around and drew the semi-automatic.
Jake didn’t realize he’d raised the shotgun until he felt it buck in his hands. He hadn’t fired it more than three times in the past, and he didn’t have a tight enough grip on it: even as the roaring battered his ears, he felt the weapon jump backwards, and the hammer embedded itself in his hand between his thumb and index finger, slid and grated against bone.
In the second before the pain hit him, Jake stood straight, frozen like an ice sculpture, watching as the stranger braced his feet and accepted the blast across his chest.
The spread was too big, though, and the stranger didn’t move quite fast enough, so that several pellets ripped into Rico’s face and neck even as the impact of the shot flipped the stranger around like a doll. Blood sprayed from Rico’s skin as the man in black landed heavily beside him.
A land mine seemed to go off inside Jake’s hand as the pain finally caught up with him, and he started screaming obscenities. Tears filled his eyes.
Under its own weight the shotgun dropped, and the hammer slid out of his hand with a wet sucking sound. Jake collapsed against the wall, his hand gushing blood, and squeezed his eyes shut as he screamed.
Because of the pain, it didn’t really register on him that the stranger, who’d just taken most of a shotgun discharge at five yards, immediately stirred and rose shakily to his feet. All Jake could think about was his torn and broken hand, even as the stranger spoke briefly to Rico and helped the shorter man to his feet.
Jake’s attention narrowed to a needle point, however, as the stranger in the mask lifted his pistol. Words left Jake’s head and he screamed like a little girl—but stopped abruptly as gunfire splashed off the walls again.
The round blew out the guttering streetlight.
The loading area plunged suddenly into absolute darkness, and a frigid breath of air knifed across Jake’s tear-stained cheeks. He could see nothing but a huge greenish-purple after-image amid the black, but he knew the stranger wasn’t there anymore.
De’shan groaned.
Marko made no sound other than ragged breathing.
In the distance Jake heard sirens.
# # #
Chief Resident Carla Gates leaned wearily against the admissions desk in the emergency room of Gavring Medical Center.
Her shift was almost over, no car wrecks or third-degree burns were on their way in, her husband’s return flight from Tokyo would arrive at Hartsfield International in another two hours, and she looked forward to doing absolutely nothing but spending the entire night in bed with him. Awake or asleep, it didn’t matter; she was exhausted and knew he’d be jet-lagged as well. But for the first eight or nine hours, she only wanted to lie next to him, breathe in the smell of his skin, and let the rest of the world drain away from her mind and body.
An odd sound shook her from her half-dream. She looked around, trying to pinpoint its source, and heard it again. Harry, one of the admissions clerks, came to the counter and said, “What was that?”
# # #
Down the corridor, lounging against a wall and wishing he could smoke, Detective Zach Feygen glanced up with mild interest at Harry’s words. Unable to sleep, he’d staged a rule-bending after-hours visit to Chooley, who had benefited greatly from getting shot. After admission to the hospital, the nurse who examined Chooley found five separate ailments he needed immediate treatment for, not the least of which was acute malnutrition.
“I’m amazed this guy could walk around,” the nurse had said. “I’ve seen healthier corpses.”
Ill or not, Feygen had never seen the man quite so ...intact. “It’s the hospital food, buddy,” Chooley said. “It’s like a laxative for the brain. Purges you.”
Odd declarations aside, Chooley seemed clearer of mind than Feygen had ever known him to be in the past, and had engaged the detective in an unexpectedly cogent discussion of the second season of Barnaby Jones, which he’d apparently been watching in syndication in the free TV area of the Georgia Tech student center. Feygen surprised himself by not really wanting to leave when the pager buzzed in his pocket.
That attitude changed as soon as he got to a phone, though, replaced by a pure adrenaline rush. As they spoke, the dispatcher said, an ambulance was making its way to the hospital. It carried three young men who may or may not have been assaulted by the same man who’d both humiliated Feygen and saved his life at the Hargett Theatre. One of them was still conscious.
Standing in the ER hallway, he’d already checked his watch three times. He couldn’t believe it was taking the EMTs so long to get there. The doctor and the clerk and their mystery sound gave him a welcome distraction.
# # #
“You heard it too?” Gates frowned and moved toward what she thought was the noise’s source. It came a third time, a muffled rattling, from a supply closet tucked away in a small alcove.
As she reached for the handle, the door swung partway open, and two men stumbled out. One was a portly, gray-faced Latino, clutching a square of black cloth to his bleeding face and neck.
The other man, supporting the first, wore some kind of form-fitting black jumpsuit—and a full-head, featureless mask.
Gates backpedaled and said, “Oh my God.”
The Latino’s shirtfront was soaked with blood, and he grunted and sank to one knee. As the man in the mask turned to face her, Gates felt a chill skitter over her skin.
“He’s been shot,” the masked man said. “Twelve-gauge shotgun pellets. I don’t think they pierced anything essential, but he’s lost some blood.”
A team of nurses rushed forward while Gates barked orders, focusing on what she knew best. The wounded man held onto enough consciousness to cooperate in getting himself onto a gurney, but she thought he was going into shock. Gates glanced once over her shoulder at the stranger, one time, before she followed the gurney through the swinging door.
# # #
As Rico disappeared into a trauma room, Matt turned and stepped back toward the closet and the welcoming darkness inside it.
He froze when he saw the cop from the theatre, Feygen, standing in the middle of the corridor and staring at him.
Matt only held the eye contact for a couple of seconds before he ducked into the tiny supply room and snicked the door shut behind him. He heard Feygen’s slapping footsteps just outside the door as he concentrated and flickered away. This was bad, it lacked finesse; Feygen would surely begin to suspect him of more than simple vigilantism when he opened the door and found him gone...but it wasn’t as if he had a lot of options.
# # #
Feygen’s eyebrows whitened with frost as he yanked open the closet door, the sudden rush of cold air so intense it was painful. He flipped the light switch. Fluorescent bulbs hummed and lit up, revealed mops, buckets, cleaning supplies, and a thin film of ice on the floor and wall in the back corner.
Feygen’s stomach shrank, his balls drew up tight against his abdomen, and his brain did a hitching little dance.
He tore into the closet, pulled bottles and boxes and sacks off the shelves as he searched the back wall for concealed doorways or traps. After five minutes at it he growled in frustration and backed out of the tiny room.
This couldn’t be what it looked like. No sir, no way it could happen, none.
But he’d seen it. First at the theatre. Then here. Tonight. Just now. After a few moments he flicked the rime away from his face.
“I’ll be damned,” he muttered. “Boogeyman. Lives in the closet.”
Feygen shut the door, turned around and stuck his hands in his pockets. “Carries a gun. Shoots people.”
He lumbered down the hallway with unfocused eyes, shaking his head. “Boogeyman. Shit.”
AUTHOR’S NOTES FOLLOW IN THE COMMENT SECTION.
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2 comments:
DAN’S NOTES – CHAPTER 8
I’m actually really pleased with this bit. I think the action plays out well, and I enjoy the scene at the hospital, particularly from Feygen’s perspective. I like that guy.
Initially, way way back when, I attempted to make the petty burglars here sound very “street.” I’m intensely glad I dropped that, because not only would it have been stale, dated, mid-90’s “street,” it would also have been mid-90’s “street” as interpreted by one of the whiter white guys living in the U.S. today. (That’s me, despite the not-insignificant amount of Cherokee blood in my family.)
Anyway, this serves to illustrate a rule that every writer should know and adhere to: if you’re not INTIMATELY familiar with a dialect, do not attempt to write it. You will get it wrong, and you will look stupid because of it.
Of course, this doesn’t stop everyone from forging right ahead; there are countless movies produced in Hollywood featuring characters with “Southern” accents that make my toes curl in distaste. But if you’re a writer, it SHOULD stop YOU.
(Psst – hey Hollywood – nobody in the South refers to one person as “y’all.” Y’all is a contraction of “you all,” as in “all of you.” It’s plural. That means more than one. Just FYI.)
One of my favorite chapters. Matt gets a reality check in missing the third guy, a useful (if painful) lesson that any dedicated vigilante needs to learn.
And I like Feygen, too.
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