A hoary figure appeared at the end of the walkway ahead of them. It was a tall man carrying two red containers.
“Now what?” said Pedro Luz.
Joe Winder’s heart sank. Skink didn’t see them. He went down two nights of stairs and stacked the gas cans on the back of a Cushman motor cart. He ran back up the steps, disappeared through an unmarked door near the Rare Animal Pavilion and quickly emerged with two more cans of gasoline.
“The Catacombs,” Pedro Luz said, mainly to himself.
Joe Winder heard him unsnap the holster. He turned and told Pedro Luz not to do anything crazy.
“Shut up, smartass.”
As they watched Skink load the second pair of cans onto the Cushman, Winder realized his own mistake: he had tried too hard to be reasonable and civilized and possibly even clever. Such efforts were wasted on men such as Francis X. Kingsbury. Skink had the right idea.
Pedro Luz aimed his.45 and shouted, “Freeze right there!” Skink stopped at the top of the steps. Pedro Luz ordered him to raise his hands, but Skink acted as if he didn’t hear.
“Don’t I know you?” Skink said, coming closer.
Pedro Luz found it difficult to look directly at the bearded stranger because one of the man’s eyeballs seemed dislodged from the socket. As Skink approached, he gave no indication of recognizing Joe Winder.
“Hello, gentlemen,” he said. Casually he bent to examine the taped stump of Pedro Luz’s leg. “Son, you’re dropping more parts than a Ford Pinto.”
Flustered, Pedro Luz fell back on standard hardass-cop colloquy: “Lemme see some ID.”
Skink reached into the blaze-orange weather suit and came out with a small kitchen jar. He handed it to the security man and said, “I believe this belongs to you.”
Pedro Luz felt his stomach quake. At the bottom of the jar, drifting in pickle juice, was the tip of his right index finger. It looked like a cube of pink tofu.
“The old woman bit it off,” Skink reminded him, “while you were beating her up.”
Beautiful, Joe Winder thought. We’re both going to die long horrible deaths.
Hoarsely, Pedro Luz said, “Who the hell are you?”
Skink gestured at the soiled bandages around his chest. “I’m the one you shot at the trailer!”
All three of them jumped as a Roman candle exploded high over KingsBury Lane. A band was playing the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey. It sounded dreadful.
In the tank below, Dickie the Dolphin rolled twice and shot a light spray of water from his blowhole. A few drops sprinkled the barrel of Pedro Luz’s gun, and he wiped it nervously on the front of his trousers. The circuits of his brain were becoming badly overloaded; assimilating new information had become a struggle—the drugs, the finger in the jar, the one-eyed stoner with the gas cans, the fireworks, the god-awful music. It was time to kill these sorry bastards and go to the gym.
“Who first?” he asked. “Who wants it first?”
Joe Winder saw no evidence of urgency in Skink’s demeanor, so he took it upon himself to ram an elbow into the soft declivity beneath Pedro Luz’s breastbone. Winder was stunned to see the bodybuilder go down, and idiotically he leapt upon him to finish the job. Winder’s punching ability was hampered by the searing pain in his rib cage, and though Pedro Luz was gagging and drooling and gulping to catch his wind, it was a relatively simple exercise to lock his arms around all hundred and seventy-five pounds of Joe Winder and squeeze the breath out of him. The last thing Winder heard, before blacking out, was a splash in the tank below.
He hoped like hell it was the pistol.
Marine biologists debate the relative intelligence of the Atlantic bottle-nosed dolphin, but it is generally accepted that the graceful mammal is extremely smart; that it is able to communicate using sophisticated underwater sonics; that it sometimes appears capable of emotions, including grief and joy. Noting that the dolphin’s brain is proportionally larger and more fully developed than that of human beings, some experts contend that the animals are operating in a superior cognitive realm that we simply cannot comprehend.