The shack was suddenly pitch black.
I threw myself to the right; Sarge was already gone like a cool breeze. I could hear the thump and tumble of newspapers as he hit the floor in a flat dive. Then silence. Utter and complete.
I waited for my night vision, but when it came it was no help. The place was a mausoleum in which a thousand dim tombstones loomed. And the Sarge knew every one of them.
I knew about Sarge; material on him hadn’t been hard to spade up. He’d been a Green Beret in Vietnam, and no one even bothered with his real name anymore; he was just the Sarge, big and murderous and tough.
Somewhere in the dark he was moving in on me. He must have known the place like the back of his hand, because there wasn’t a sound, not a squeaking board, not a foot scrape. But I could feel him getting closer and closer, flanking from the left or the right or maybe pulling a tricky one and coming in straight ahead.
The stock of the gun was very sweaty in my hand, and I had to control the urge to fire it wildly, randomly. I was very aware that I had three-quarters of the pie in my pocket. I didn’t bother wondering why the lights had gone out. Not until the powerful flashlight stabbed in through the window, sweeping the floor in a wild, random pattern that just happened to catch the Sarge, frozen in a half-crouch seven feet to my left. His eyes glowed greenly in the bright cone of light, like cat’s eyes.
He had a glinting razor blade in his right hand, and I suddenly remembered the way his hand had been spidering up his coat lapel in Keenan’s carport.
The Sarge said one word into the flash beam. ‘Jagger?’
I don’t know who got him first. A large-caliber pistol fired once behind the flashlight beam, and I pulled the trigger of Barney’s .45 twice — pure reflex. The Sarge was thrown back against the wall with force enough to knock him out of one of his boots.
The flashlight snapped off.
I fired one shot at the window, but hit only glass. I lay on my side in the darkness and realized that I hadn’t been the only one waiting around for Keenan’s greed to resurface. Jagger had been waiting, too. And, although there were twelve rounds of ammunition back in my car, there was only one left in my gun.
You don’t want to play with Jagger, fella, the Sarge had said, Jagger will eat you up.
I had a pretty good picture of the room in my head now. I got up in a crouch and ran, stepping over Sarge’s sprawled legs and into the corner. I got into the bathtub and poked my eyes up over the edge. There was no sound, none at all. The bottom of the tub was gritty with flaked-off bathtub ring. I waited.
About five minutes went by. It seemed like five hours.
Then the light nicked on again, this time in the bedroom window. I ducked my head when it glared through the doorway. It probed briefly and clicked off.
Silence again. A long, loud silence. On the dirty surface of Sarge’s porcelain bathtub I saw everything. Keenan, grinning desperately. Barney, with the clotted hole in his gut, due east of his navel. Sarge, standing frozen in the flashlight beam, holding the razor blade professionally between thumb and first finger. Jagger, the dark shadow with no face. And me. The fifth quarter.
Suddenly there was a voice, just outside the door. It was soft and cultured, almost womanish, but not effete. It sounded deadly and competent as hell.
‘Hey, beautiful.’
I kept quiet. He wasn’t getting my number without dialing a little.
When the voice came again, it was by the window. ‘I’m going to kill you, beautiful. I came to kill them, but you’ll do fine.’
A pause while he shifted position once more. When the voice came again, it came from the window just over my head — the one above the bathtub. My guts crawled into my throat. If he flashed that light now . . .
‘No fifth wheels need apply,’ Jagger said. ‘Sorry.’
I could barely hear him moving to his next position. It turned out to be back to the doorway.
‘I’ve got my quarter with me. You want to come and take it?’
I felt an urge to cough and repressed it.
‘Come and get it, beautiful.’ His voice was mocking. ‘The whole pie. Come and take it away.’
But I didn’t have to, and I suppose he knew it. I was holding the chips. I could find the money now. With his single quarter, Jagger had no chance.
This time the silence really spun out. A half-hour, an hour, forever. Eternity squared. My body started to stiffen. Outside, the wind was tuning up, making it impossible to hear anything but rattling snow against the walls. It was very cold. The tips of my fingers were going numb.
Then, around one-thirty, a ghostly stirring sound like crawling rats in the darkness. I stopped breathing. Somehow Jagger had got in. He was right in the middle of the room . . .
Then I got it. Rigor mortis, hurried by the cold, was rearranging Sarge for the last time, which was all. I relaxed a little.
That was when the door rammed open and Jagger charged through, ghostly and visible in a mantle of white snow, tall and loose and gangling. I let him have it and the bullet punched a hole through the side of his head. And in the brief gunflash, I saw that what I had holed was a scarecrow with no face, dressed in some farmer’s thrown-out pants and shirt. The burlap head fell off the broomstick neck as it hit the floor. Then Jagger was shooting at me.
He was holding a semi-automatic pistol, and the innards of the bathtub were like a great percussive hollow cymbal. Porcelain flew up, bounced off the wall, struck my face. Wood splinters and a single hot spent slug rained down on me.
Then he was charging, never letting up. He was going to shoot me in the tub like a fish in a barrel. I couldn’t even put my head up.
It was Sarge who saved me. Jagger stumbled over one big dead foot, staggered, and pumped bullets into the floor instead of over my head. Then I was on my knees. I pretended I was Roger Clemens. I pegged Barney’s big .45 at his head.
The gun hit him but didn’t stop him. I stumbled over the rim of the tub getting out to tackle him, and Jagger put two groggy shots to my left.
The faint silhouette stepped back, trying to get a bead, one hand holding his ear where the gun had hit him. He shot me through the wrist, and his second shot ripped a groove in my neck.
Then, incredibly, he stumbled over Sarge’s feet again and fell backward. He brought the gun up again and put one through the roof. It was his last chance. I kicked the gun out of his hand, hearing the wet-wood sound of breaking bones. I kicked him in the groin, doubling him up. I kicked him again, this time in the back of the head, and his feet rattled a fast, unconscious tattoo on the floor. He was as good as dead then, but I kicked him again and again, kicked him until there was nothing but pulp and strawberry jam, nothing anyone could ever identify, not by teeth, not by anything. I kicked him until I couldn’t swing my leg anymore, and my toes wouldn’t move.
I suddenly realized I was screaming and there was no one to hear me but dead men.
I wiped my mouth and knelt over Jagger’s body.
He had been lying about his quarter of the map, as it turned out. It didn’t surprise me much.
No, I take that back. It didn’t surprise me at all.
My heap was just where I had left it, around the block from Keenan’s house, but now it was just a ghostly hump of snow. I had left Sarge’s VW a mile back. I hoped my heater was still working.
I was numb all over. I got the door open and winced a little as I sat down inside. The crease in my neck had already clotted over, but my wrist hurt like hell.
The starter cranked for a long time, and the motor finally caught. The heater was working, and the one wiper cleared away most of the snow on the driver’s side. Jagger had been lying about his
quarter, and it hadn’t been in the unobtrusive (and probably stolen) Honda Civic he’d come in.
But his address had been in his wallet, and if I actually needed his quarter, I thought there was a pretty good chance I could find it. I didn’t think I would; three pieces should be enough, especially since Sarge’s quarter was the one with the X.