The Hammer Falls Page 24

  She was gasping his name, wetly, “Hammer. Hammer...”

  He slammed the door shut, encasing them in a bullet- and rail gun-proof mobile bunker.

  Horace roared, “Go! Go! Go!”

  But nothing happened. No reply came from the car’s AI.

  He slammed the door-lock button, sealing them inside, then lunged forward to the opaque panel that separated the cabin from the driver’s compartment. His fist destroyed the panel in two blows and revealed an empty compartment, as he had expected, but the air in the cabin smelled of ozone and burned wires. Had they disabled the AI somehow? Some kind of electromagnetic zot?

  Ripping and tearing into the shattered panel, he widened a gap to thrust himself into the compartment. As he wormed his massive bulk through the gap, shards of the panel ripped furrows in his suit, scratched deep into his flesh. Every precious second left more of Lilly’s blood spilled on the floor behind him. He kept calling back to her, “Hang on! Hang on!” his voice crumbling.

  Propped in the back seat, she sagged against the window, her breathing a wet gurgle, ensanguined hands quivering against her chest.

  If he could get her to a hospital within three or four minutes, they could bring her back.

  Thrashing and straining to twist his long, thick limbs around so he could right himself in the driver’s seat, he felt the seconds ticking inexorably past, escaping him.

  His palm slammed the hover-drive control and the limousine’s engines spooled up. It eased off the ground.

  A triangle of brilliant green dots angled down from above through the windshield onto his leg. Searing heat speared deep into his thigh with the hiss of burning flesh and a tongue of flame as the tri-laser set the fabric of his trousers afire. Clenching his teeth at the pain, he shoved the forward thrust lever against the stop. The car surged forward with a powerful whine. The laser beams swept away from him and burned a furrow across the plastic dashboard.

  His hands were shaking as with a palsy as he fumbled his netlink of his breast pocket.

  “Bunny! Bunny! Goddammit, Bunny! Are you there?” he roared.

  After a moment, her voice came through, murky with sleep. “Yeah, it’s me. What’s up?”

  “Give me the hospital closest to my location! And it’s gotta have regen facilities!” Even as he punched the throttle, he cast about through the windows for signs of the attack drone. It wasn’t a large drone, about the size of a trashcan lid, so he doubted it could keep up with a limo going full speed, but something had disabled the AI and that tri-laser and rail gun might still do some damage.

  Right on cue, a succession of projectiles pinged against the armored skin of the limo. If they penetrated, he didn’t know where. The windshield glass where the lasers has passed through had slagged into a blurred patch just outside his necessary field of vision.

  After a moment, the netlink pinged in his ear. “Done,” she said. “About two-and-a-half minutes from your location.” The location popped up on the limo’s positioning map. “Are you okay?”

  His heart was pounding so loud he could barely make sense of her words, his mouth so dry he could barely speak. “It’s not me, it’s Lilly! She’s been shot by a fucking drone! She’s bleeding out! They can bring her back!”

  “Hammer, wait.”

  “What? What?”

  “They won’t take you if you don’t have the cash—”

  “She’s dying!”

  “No cash, they’ll lock the door. The next closest is Sisters of Mercy. They have a no-turn-away—”

  “How far?”

  “About six minutes from you. Need me to distract any traffic police from your path?”

  The limousine picked up speed. “Do it. Can’t talk, but I’m keeping you on intercom. Call Trask and tell him where I’m going.”

  “Also done.” A guided map sprang to life on the limo’s screen.

  He laid the netlink beside him and took the yoke in both hands. One hundred kilometers per hour down the narrow city streets. One hundred twenty. One hundred forty. May all the gods help him if he had to make a sharp turn in this lumbering beast. Was the drone still behind him? He couldn’t’ see it.

  “Bunny, is there a drone on my ass?” he called into his netlink.

  “I’m reading a couple still in the area,” Bunny answered.

  The yoke flexed in his hands as the hover car zipped over medians and curbs. Fortunately, at this hour, the streets were all but empty except for a few hapless taxis sent spinning out of control in his wake.

  He reached the hospital in four minutes and thirty-two seconds, charged inside, begged for help, dragged a gurney outside as if it were made of tinfoil, and flung open the back door of the limo.

  Lilly’s eyes stared, fixed. She was not breathing. They wheeled her inside.

  Someone said, “Jesus Christ, look at ’im, he’s glowing!”

  A deep chill settled over him, the hard cold of Antarctic winter, the kind that freezes souls into chunks of brittle ice.

  The nurse was asking him questions about what happened, and he couldn’t answer for certain. “Mini rail gun maybe. Some sort of assassin drone. Didn’t even see it. Didn’t see a shooter. Didn’t hear a thing. Never mind my goddamn leg! Bring her back! Didn’t you hear me? Forget the leg!”

  “She’s gone, Mr. Harkness.”

  “Resurrect her!”

  “She can’t pay—”

  “Fuck you, I’ll pay!”

  “You can’t pay either, I’m afraid. I’m sorry, sir. Look, we’re a charity hospital. We don’t have the—”

  “Save her, or you’re a dead man!”

  “—put me down—”

  “You hear me? All of you! I’ll tear this place to the ground if you don’t save her!”

  “Security!”

  “Do it! You put her on that regenestation right there! Goddammit, do it! She’s got two kuh-kids!”

  “Don’t move! I said, don’t move!”

  “Fuck you!”

  “Tase him!”

  “Fuh-fuh—”

  “Hit him again!”

  A bestial, tortured roar.

  “Holy Christ, hit him again!”

  “Again!”

  “fuh...fuhk...yuh...you.”

  ROUND 3

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Horace awoke on a lumpy bed with harsh fluorescent lights in his eyes. The air was cold and stank of sweat and excrement. His mouth was a coarse-gritted desert. His limbs were immense trunks of flaccid meat. His heart chugged and chuffed in his breast like a decrepit steam engine. Cold gray walls, cold gray bars. Snoring from nearby. A deep cavernous space. Feet shuffled without direction or purpose. Whisperings in the distance.

  The moment he tried to move, his head clanged with pain. Best to leave it alone for a while. Just lie here. Gather his thoughts, gather what was left of him. Shattered. Splintered. Left in pieces on the stoop of a beaten-down brownstone in a shitty neighborhood. The fresh wound on his thigh still ached, but his fingers found a patch of synth-skin there through the seared gash in the cheap trousers. He still wore his jacket, ripped and tattered and stiff with blood that was not his. Mostly not his.

  Occasionally a garbled oath would mumble out of him as the pain in his head reached a crescendo, and all he could do was clutch his head in his hands and hope it passed soon. At some point, his brain coalesced around the idea of where he was, but it didn’t matter. If a dirty cop walked in and put a bullet in his head right now, it would be a mercy.

  Interminable time dragged past. Self-recriminations spun in endless circles like broken wheels stuck in a marsh. He should have stopped the bleeding. He should have called for help. He should have held her while she died. He should have gone to the first hospital, smashed down the doors, and made them fix her, profit or none. He should not have left her alone in the back, choking on her own blood, unable to reach him. He should have gone outside ahead of her.

  He should have been more careful.

  What was going to ha
ppen to her kids now?

  Some small part of his mind, the part unoccupied with pain, recognized this place it had gone, this deadly numbness, this place of retreat and hiding, this deep, dark borehole into oblivion. He had been here before, once. The only time in his life when he had given up. When he had gone to the remains of Singapore with everything he’d had for as long as he could, and found nothing.

  A warm voice rose out of his memory. “She’s quite a number, fuck face. A little damaged maybe, soiled.”

  “Turns out I like a little soiled. Why do you only come to me when I’m mostly dead?”

  “That’s the only time you’ll listen. So listen. You have to stop chasing me.”

  “I couldn’t find you. I looked and looked, but there was nothing left.”

  “I didn’t want you to find me.”

  “Why, darlin’, why?”

  “Because I couldn’t do it. I loved the life as much as you did. I had to cut it off completely, cold turkey, and you were part of it.”

  “I didn’t get to tell you—”

  “I knew.”

  “I’d have quit for you! For him!”

  “Don’t lie. You think it’s good for a kid to watch his daddy get killed over and over? Do you think I could do it?”

  “I’m lost. Are you still out there? Is he? Or am I just crazy as a shithouse rat?”

  “Get up, fuck face. Get up, baby. Get up right now.”

  “Just wanna sleep...”

  “She’s not dead.”

  “What do you mean, she’s not dead?”

  Those words congealed into sound coming from his throat, a ragged scrape of syllables. And he heaved himself into a sitting position.

  The bleary, half-lidded eyes of other prisoners regarded him with quizzical half interest. Men talking to themselves were hardly unusual in a city lockup.

  Lurching upright, he leaned against the bars to steady himself. His laser wound squealed in protest. The three other occupants of his cell, any two of which combined might have matched his mass, all edged away from him and kept their glances veiled and surreptitious. Others watched with more blatant interest from the safety of other cells.

  He clutched the bars, using them to steady himself, stubbled face pressing against rock-hard hands, when all he wanted to do was collapse on the floor and die of a brain aneurysm.

  More time passed. No one tried to speak to him.

  “Harkness,” a man’s voice said. “You got a visitor.”

  “Who?”

  “Says she’s your lawyer.”

  He sat down in the flimsy folding chair, wondering for an instant if it would collapse like folded paper, and leaned forward over the table, over his cuffed wrists. If he kept his eyes down, the light hurt less.

  “You said you were my lawyer,” he said.

  “I am a lawyer. Princeton, Class of ’49.” Roxanne said. Today she was dressed in a conservative, gray business suit, hair bound into an elaborate braid at the back of her head. Her expression was even more inscrutable by day.

  “What do you want?”

  “We have a date in Vegas.”

  He surveyed the cold, green conference room, the cameras, the one-way mirror. “So who’s watching?”

  “I paid extra for complete privacy. Besides, this is not a high-profile case. Assault and battery and destruction of property does not warrant pitchforks and burning at the stake.”

  “Is she alive?”

  “They were able to resuscitate her, but the projectiles perforated her aorta, and she nearly bled out again. They stabilized her with surgery but would not regenerate her. She’s alive, but comatose.”

  The fist clenched around his heart relaxed and he nearly collapsed onto the table. He coughed back tears.

  She said, “As they are not a for-profit hospital, they were morally bound to stabilize her but not keep her indefinitely. Such organizations have very little discretionary budget. She has forty-eight hours before she’s designated ‘no hope of recovery’ and unplugged. Unless next-of-kin can be found willing to pay for her.”

  He sensed the pressure behind this deadline. She knew exactly how far he would go to protect Lilly. “Why do you still want to go to Vegas?”

  “Yvgeny Mogilevich has Lilly’s children. He will toss them in the garbage like used tissues. And he will go on using up the world and everyone in it for his own sick amusement.”

  Horace squeezed his eyes shut.

  “Listen to me. The only way to save them is to do something. Before he can hurt them.”

  “But you’re just another hydra, like you said. How many bodies you got sunk to the bottom of your swimming pool?”

  Her face tightened. “Irrelevant at this point. Do you want out of jail or not?”

  “Okay, I’m in,” he said. “But if we’re successful, Lilly gets a full regeneration. Do we have a deal?”

  “What about you?”

  “I’ve been a walking dead man for years. You let me worry about me. Do we have a deal?”

  “We have a deal.”

  “Now, how do I get out of here?”

  “The charges will be dropped.”

  “You got that kind of pull?”

  “With the appropriate dollar figure applied, yes.”

  “And you’re just investing in the future, right?”

  “More like gambling. But the stakes are too high to sit out.”

  Horace was barred from seeing Lilly after what had happened at Sisters of Mercy. At some point, he’d have to go there and apologize to a few people, but today was not that day.

  A car took Horace to a rat-bag motel called the Starlite Kiss, where Trask had holed up himself, Tina, and Bunny under fake names. The bedspreads were of scarlet velvet, the walls of blood-red fleur-de-lis print, and the refrigerators stocked with lubricants and edible sex toys—just the kind of cheesy grandeur he’d loved once, in what now felt like an entirely different lifetime.

  Fortunately the room also came stocked with a few over-the-counter painkillers. He took enough of those to subdue a killer whale, stripped off the blood-crusted clothes, and lay back on the surprisingly soft bed. With the lights down low, he closed his eyes for a few minutes and was awakened by a sharp knock on the door. He ignored it, but it came again.

  “I know you’re in there, Hammer.” Tina’s voice. “Open up.”

  He answered her with a couple of nonsense syllables and tried to gather himself sufficiently to speak English.

  “Let me in.”

  “You must like seeing me naked.”

  “I actually got your clothes here from the other night.”

  He opened the door a crack, and she thrust a wadded bundle through the gap. A few seconds later, he’d stripped and dressed himself again. It felt good not to have any blood on his clothes. He swung the door open and let her in.

  She thrust her hands deep into the pockets of her red-and-white polka-dot jeans. “I’m really sorry about everything that happened last night. She was a looker, even had a little class for a stripper.”

  “Wait a—were you there?”

  “In the club, yeah.”

  “How the—” His memory floundered for images of people that might have been her last night, but his focus had not really been on the crowd.

  “Ninja, remember? Don’t hurt your brain. Look, I keep asking Trask what you all got cooked up, but he won’t tell me anything. So tell me.”

  “Listen, kid—”

  “Fuck you, Grandpa Moses! I’m neck deep in this thing! Poor Bunny is beside herself, afraid she’s going to lose her parole. These motherfuckers have their fingers in everything! And it’s all because of you!”

  “Like I said, stay the hell away from me and you’ll be better off.”

  “Too late! You’re an albatross who just sank the whole fucking ship, so now here we are in the middle of the ocean, surrounded by sharks and sea monsters, and the only way any of us are going to survive is if we stick together. You, me, Bunny, even Trask. We’re
with you whether you want us or not. So what is your plan?”

  Horace turned his full attention on this brilliant, beautiful, brassy young woman, standing there in her polka-dot jeans and crossed arms, dark eyebrows furrowed over a button nose that was too cute by far for what she was capable of. “I’m going to Vegas with Roxanne, in disguise as one of her bodyguards. There’s a death-match boxing event. Mogilevich will be there. I’m going to kill him.”

  “That’s it? Sounds like a suicide mission.”

  “I’ll try to make sure my medical is up-to-date.”

  “It’s always going to be life and death with you, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know any other way.”

  “You need to take me and Bunny.”

  “Not a chance.”

  “No, you listen now. We made a damn good team the other night. And people like this mobster have layers of invisible protection you can barely imagine. That’s why we need a slicer—Bunny.”

  “And you’ve talked this over with her?”

  “What do you think we’ve been doing all day while you were sleeping off your taser hangover?”

  “So we need a slicer. You’re not a slicer.” And the thought of what those Russians would do to someone like Tina made his stomach turn cold and tight.

  “You need me to watch your back while you’re busy Thunder Hammering.”

  He sat there quiet for a long time, running his fingertips over the chitinous ridges of his knuckles. “Jesus, kid, you got more balls than most guys I ever met.”

  “Who needs balls? I got a vagina. Those things can take a pounding.”

  Horace knocked on the motel room door.

  After a moment, the door opened and Bunny looked up at him. Her face melted at the sight of him, but she blinked it back into composure. She cleared her throat. “Yes?”

  “Uh, I just wanted to say thank you for everything you’ve done for me.” He handed her a paper bag. “It’s not much.”