The Hammer Falls Read online

  And just like that, her fear and uncertainty disappeared. The wall came down behind her eyes, and he recognized it instantly.

  Her warm breath seeped through the fabric covering his crotch, sending fresh, tingling heat through him. Her fingers went to his belt buckle, tugging. Glimmering doe-eyes looked up at him, but they were not warm. This was all a task she had decided was necessary.

  “You don’t have to do that,” he said.

  “Just let me.” Her gaze moved to button and zipper. In her eyes now was a kind of determination, a single-mindedness that had nothing to do with him, a suppression of whatever emotions were troubling her, whatever old habits died hard.

  Her warm, smooth hand slid into his underwear, cupped him, clasped him, stroked him.

  A tiny part of his brain recognized what she was doing and squawked with the wrongness of it, but when she took him in her mouth, even that squawking went away.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Horace and Lilly slid into the booth with the others. Roxanne now sat much closer to Vincent, hand on his thigh, and a slim, glamorous-looking Asian woman now leaned into the curve of Trask’s arm, looking very sympathetic to the cast on his arm. Silent appraisals shot between Lilly and Roxanne, like swords clashing.

  In the endorphin afterglow, mellow relaxation had loosened every muscle in Horace’s tired body. Beside him, the confidence that served Lilly so well on stage had mostly returned, but now he thought he could see the tiny cracks in her armor.

  Lilly said, “Spectacular place you got here, Vincent.”

  “Thank you for noticing,” Vincent said, raising his glass. “A woman like you could be famous in a place like this. How would you feel about going under my protection until all this blows over? You and your kids.”

  She swallowed hard, and her hand seized Horace’s. “I’d be awful grateful. Being on the run sucks.”

  “Hammer here feels terrible about your involvement in this,” Vincent said. “I hope you understand that.”

  She glanced at Horace and nodded. Her chin rose higher. “I run into some pretty rough folks at my job. This palooka’s one of them.”

  Horace looked Vincent squarely in the eye. “I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to thank you, Vince. But you got my gratitude all the same.”

  The currency still traded in the Italian mob after all these decades was gratitude and obligation, and Horace had no illusions about the depth of altruism in Vincent’s heart. That awful, ruthless gleam in Vincent’s eye had been the first real glimpse of ambitious gangster lurking inside his charming exterior.

  In that gleam, Horace saw what would happen to Lilly if he failed. She’d have a few good years left as a dancer—protected, but indentured—in one of Vincent’s clubs. Or perhaps she’d be turned out as a prostitute, her kids caught in the mob’s endless vortex of obligation. All for Horace’s sins.

  Vincent smiled an easy smile. “I appreciate that, Horace. Like I said, I like helping the right people, you know?”

  “So what now, Vincent?” Horace said.

  “Where are the kids?” Vincent said.

  “Asleep at my aunt and uncle’s house.”

  “Then you and Hammer take the car and go get them. The driver will take you to a safe place.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Why are you willing to go to so much trouble?”

  “Call it an investment in the future. And Hammer’s got pretty good taste.”

  She paused for a long moment, gauging, calculating. Finally she said, “So when do we go?”

  When they got into the air, a prim cultured voice came from all around them. “May I have the address please?”

  “Uh...” Lilly said. “You’re the car?”

  “I am indeed, madam. Does that make you uncomfortable?”

  “Well, I’ve just never ridden in a robot car before. Out of my price range, you know?”

  “Rest assured, madam, you are in the safest of hands, so to speak. I’m a sixth-generation autonomous vehicle with senses and reaction time far superior to any human driver.”

  She gave a crooked smile. “That’s good to know.” She gave the AI the address.

  “Our ride will be about thirty minutes. Please make yourselves comfortable.” The hover drive spooled up and the limo eased smoothly away from its parking place.

  “That’s just about right,” Horace said, as he took her in his arms, pulled her close, kissed her. She resisted only for the first moment of surprise, then surrendered to his embrace.

  For a moment, then she pulled away.

  “What happened in there...” His voice trailed off. “I don’t need a personal stripper.”

  She stiffened away from him, anger flaring in her face. “What the—”

  “Hold on a second. I appreciate you coming all this way. I appreciate the private... I’m happy as hell to see you, to have you here after all this time. But I got a long way to go before I’m the kinda guy you might want to keep around.”

  He looked into her eyes for a moment. There was the wall, with an entire universe of hidden wants and dreams and loves tucked safely behind it.

  “You don’t have to let me in,” he said, “Hell, I might not let you in. We’re both pretty fucked up as normal people go. But I do know this: I don’t want to be a customer anymore.”

  Then he took her face in his hand, stroked her cheek, and kissed her. With shocking suddenness, tears burst out of her and she choked back a sob.

  She quickly wiped the tears, eyes gleaming. “Asshole.”

  Then she threw herself against him.

  Within moments, kisses were not enough. Hands slid into clothing again, seeking deeper ingress, seeking warm skin. In the burgeoning fervor, two buttons popped from his threadbare shirt front. Clothing peeled away, cast off into puddles on the floor. Hot mouths devoured each other, warm flesh sliding and caressing.

  “You have me at a disadvantage, sir,” she said. “I have never seen you naked.”

  They laughed and wrestled, licked and squeezed, as if trying to acquaint every square centimeter of their own bodies with the other’s.

  Worries about his heart blinked through his mind but drowned in the rush of throbbing heat.

  When she settled onto him, surprise and ecstasy burst into her face. For a long moment, they paused. Her moist heat consumed his awareness in a way that he had not experienced since...

  And then they began to move, at first hesitant, out of sync, but then he took her slim hips in his massive hands and moved her.

  And the cries built, and the sweat beaded, and their hearts hammered against each other, and Horace’s awareness became a shining river of frenzied, inescapable rapture, and the pleasure ripped through them both until there was nothing left in them but to subside, diminish, and fall separate onto the leather seat.

  Afterward, he said, “Not bad for an old man.”

  “Holy shit!” she gasped and kissed him again, petal soft skin sheened with sweat, aglow with subsiding heat. Then her hand examined the injector box on his chest, traced its outline, brushed its surface. “We gotta get you a new heart. Somehow. The biggest one there is.”

  “If I get a new ticker, prepare to have your world rocked in ways you can’t imagine.”

  “Do you know how long it’s been since I had a boyfriend?”

  “Do you know how long it’s been since I had a girlfriend?” He knew exactly how long it had been.

  “What are we doing here?” she said.

  “Let’s not overthink it right now. One step at a time.”

  A minute of comfortable silence passed. Horace was lost in the scent and feel of her.

  She broke the silence with a quiet voice, cheek against his breast. “I always wanted to be a costume designer.”

  “Is that like a fashion designer?”

  “Sort of, but for like movies or theater and stuff.”

  “That sounds pretty fine.”

  “I love fabrics, and sewing, and creating, and making a character come
alive. Did I ever tell you I made the costumes for all the girls at the club?”

  He shook his head.

  “They kept me pretty busy at it, with girls coming and going all the time. I got started doing it for my high school theater, and just fell in love with it. I loved acting, too, being in front of people. That’s why I did the modeling for a while.”

  “You were a model?”

  “Don’t sound so surprised!” She poked him in the ribs, but there was no anger in her voice, only regret. “I was in some rag-mags. I was good at it, too. The acting helped.”

  “So what happened?”

  She leaned back and looked into his eyes for a long moment, and it was one of the few moments since they’d met when she allowed him to look into her. “I got roofied and raped by one of the event managers. Then I was pregnant. Nobody wants a model with stretchmarks.” A tear trickled down one cheek, quickly wiped away. She sniffed. “Turns out nobody wants a costume designer either unless you go to school for it.”

  “Was that... Jimmy’s biological father?”

  She nodded.

  “I apologize on behalf of my kind.” He had had a lot of women, but he had never forced himself on anyone. “You want me to take care of him?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Typical Neanderthal reaction.”

  “Well...do you?”

  “For a long time, I’d have jumped at your offer. Not anymore. I have Jimmy now, and he’s an angel.”

  “And Cassie?”

  “That boyfriend I mentioned. What are we, sharing our deepest, darkest secrets now?” She turned away. “Leave it to me to over-fucking-share.”

  “You don’t have to tell me anything.” He had seen in her eyes just what baring that old scar had cost her. It had cost her the indomitability of her self-built internal fortress.

  He hugged her close again. “No one is ever going to hurt you again, not with me around.”

  She accepted the hug. Another tear cooled on his chest. “Someday, maybe I’ll believe you.”

  Shattering the moment like a dropped Tiffany vase, the AI driver spoke over the intercom. “We’ll be there in five minutes.”

  Fuck. “Thanks, brother!” Horace called.

  They finished dressing moments before the car eased to a halt in front of an old brick apartment building. The driver’s door opened and closed, followed moments later by the curbside door opening.

  “Let me go first,” Horace said. He slid out and surveyed the trash-strewn street.

  Hover-cars like the limousine offered a much smoother ride, but this was not the natural habitat for such vehicles. This was a ragged, labor-class neighborhood, where the air smelled of kerosene, ozone, and garbage. Since none of them could afford cars, they got to their daily grinds with mass transit, usually decrepit buses, some of which still ran on biodiesel like something out of the turn of the century. Hemming in a street otherwise empty of vehicles, four-story brownstones crumbled under relentless time. An angry young man walked with hunched shoulders and shuffling gait. Pools of streetlight formed pale islands in the night, flickering. A handful of windows still glowed from within, now well past midnight.

  “We’ll be right back,” Horace told the car.

  “Take whatever time you need, sir,” the car said.

  Horace took Lilly by the hand and led her into the building’s vestibule. Flickering fluorescents bathed the chamber in ghostly dimness. The air smelled of old dust, mold, and quiet desperation. The intercom panel hung useless in long-exposed strands of multicolored spaghetti. The latch on the inner door had been extracted long ago, leaving only an empty hole bored through the wood. In other words, it was a standard labor-class tenement.

  Lilly pushed the door open and led them into the narrow stairwell leading upward. Ancient boards creaked under Horace’s weight, echoing hollowly in the naked column. A time-darkened wooden banister stood smoothed by the passage of countless hands. On this floor, paint peeled from plaster walls, and the space smelled of marijuana smoke, onions, and cat shit.

  She led him up to a dented steel door on the third floor. The doorframe was also steel, the lock electromagnetic, embedded in the wall itself, capable of stopping a rhino in midcharge if rhinos had still existed. There had been a common advancement in door locks over the old deadbolts and chains of Horace’s childhood, at least until power distribution had gotten so sketchy in run-down neighborhoods. They came with battery backups, but sometimes even those ran down.

  Lilly knocked on the door. “Uncle Stan said he was going to wait up for me.”

  They waited and listened. No sound came from inside.

  She knocked again and clutched her elbows.

  A gobbet of cold dread settled in Horace’s stomach as the seconds ticked by with no response from inside.

  “Uncle Stan?” she called. “Aunt Emma!” Still nothing. Her voice rose in pitch. “Jimmy! Cassie!” She beat the door with her fist.

  “Move over,” Horace said. She stepped aside, and she reached into her purse and pulled out a pink pistol the size of Horace’s palm. “You know how to use that?” It was an old-style semi-automatic slug-thrower, small caliber.

  “Took a class.”

  “Please don’t shoot me.”

  He threw his entire 169 kilos against the door. A charging rhino had nothing on Horace The Hammer Harkness. The door exploded inward, tearing mag-lock and chunks of steel frame out of the wall, and crashed against the wall inside. Horace stumbled into a hallway.

  Lilly called from behind, “Jimmy? Cassie, baby?”

  Bright light spilled into the hallway from a room to the right, ambient light from straight ahead, and beyond a hallway where dark bedrooms lay. Horace quick-peeked into the bright room and found an empty kitchen. A half-full cup of coffee sat on the old speckled-Formica table, and the scent of coffee from a pot on the counter still filled the room.

  As Horace crept forward, a foot came into view, clad in leather work boots attached to a motionless leg sitting in a battered easy chair, a thick, hairy hand sagging off the arm of the chair. The smell of blood and burned flesh clung to the back of Horace’s throat.

  He motioned Lilly to go back out into the hallway and call the police. Her eyes shone with terror, hand clutched over her mouth.

  Across the living room was a window, the view of which was filled by another brick wall perhaps two meters from the glass. Directly facing the window, slumped in the light of the lamp, was a man slightly older than Horace, with thick, workman’s arms and a middle gone to paunch. A submachine gun rested between his thighs. His face was a mask of half-cooked blood from the three blackened pinholes in his forehead. His head lay half-glued to the leather of the chair from the equally neat exit wounds in the back of his skull.

  From behind him came Lilly’s voice, “Oh, come on! You’re the police! Answer the goddamn phone!” The police would never come to this neighborhood.

  Horace crept toward the dark hallway where three dark doorways hung ajar, the silence oppressive upon his ears. His hands itched for a weapon that was not a firearm, even a simple knife or club. He had more faith in his empty chitinous hands than in those same hands with a gun in them. The hallway floorboards creaking under him like a chorus of alarms, he pushed open the nearest door and found a guest bedroom also used as an office, empty, the bedcovers undisturbed.

  His heart hammered at his breastbone, harder, harder.

  The final room lay in darkness too deep to discern any details until he flipped on the light.

  A motionless form sprawled across the bed. A gray-haired, thin-boned woman, face frozen in a rictus of terror. The front of her robe was blackened, scorched, as was the pale flesh exposed beneath it. The scent of ozone and burned flesh lingered in the air like invisible smoke.

  There were no children. He called for them, checked the closets, under the bed, checked the hallway bathroom.

  Horace called out. “Lilly, don’t shoot me! I’m coming out.”

  In the hallway, Lilly was
breathlessly answering questions to someone on her netlink. Address, break-in. And she kept repeating, “I don’t know! I don’t know! No, I don’t live here!”

  Finally, she disconnected in disgust. “Maybe they’ll send someone, maybe they won’t. This is a Yellow Zone, low priority. Jimmy and Cassie—”

  “Not here,” Horace said. “And your aunt and uncle are dead.”

  “No. No. No, no, no, no, nonononononononononono...”

  He pulled her close. “We’ll get ’em back. We’ll get ’em back. Everything will be okay.”

  She shoved him away with a shriek of feral rage. “NO!” Her eyes blazed with a crazed glare. Her fist slammed into his chin, then the other fist into his cheek. Tears streamed down her cheeks.

  “Stop,” he said, grabbing both of her wrists as gently as he could. “Lilly, no.” Her hands became raking talons aimed at his eyes and cheeks. Her stiletto heel stabbed into his instep, piercing his plastic loafers with perfect ease. In the shock of pain, his grip slackened enough for her to twist her hands free, and she laid a tremendous slap against his left ear that popped hard against his eardrum and disoriented him for a moment, long enough for her to spin away and run down the stairs.

  He chased her, limping at first. Somewhere he heard an apartment door open, then another. Hot wetness seeped into his punctured shoe, but his tolerance for pain kicked in and he picked up speed in pursuit.

  “Lilly, wait!” he called.

  By the time they reached the vestibule, he was two steps behind. She was outside; he reached for her, but she stumbled on the stoop and fell. Her legs collapsed, her hand reached out to break her fall, buckled under. Her face slammed against the concrete stoop rail.

  He grabbed for her again and saw the spatter of fresh crimson on the pavement. The almost invisible slits opening to drool blood from her neck, from her arms. She rolled onto her back, staring up at him with eyes wide with confusion, with fear. Scarlet poured from her nose and mouth as she tried to form words drowned in blood. He stood frozen for a heartbeat in the door of the vestibule.

  Then he lunged for her, snatched a handful of her blouse, and dragged her with him against the side of the limousine. Her bare arms and legs flopped in her blood, so much of it, smearing all over him. His mouth was babbling. His hand fumbled on the rear door latch of the limousine, grabbed, fumbled, finally flung it open. He dragged her into the car.