He’d thought about ducking into the bar up the street, especially since the rain started. His fake ID was good enough, but he didn’t want anyone getting a good look at him. Once the guy was dead, all a witness would be able to say was that the attacker was a young black male in a dark leather coat. Christ, that’s half the fucking city.
Jamal saw the sweep of light across the dark buildings and knew that a car had turned onto the street. He spun and saw the headlights of a vehicle about six blocks up, just past that bar. The big Glock 17 in his pocket suddenly seemed lighter. It was eleven-fifteen and all the other houses had been quiet for hours. This had to be his man coming.
A beat-up Chevy Cavalier pulled out from the parking spot directly in front of Tiny’s just as Mercer turned onto his street. Not one to avoid providence, he pulled his Jag into the spot without so much as a second thought and headed into the bar. It was a quarter past eleven on a Saturday night, and there was no way he was going home without a nightcap or two.
“The anointed has returned,” Harry White growled over the stereo as Mercer walked in. “What happened? They close the open bar or did they just close it to you?”
Mercer took his customary seat next to Harry and sipped the gimlet that Tiny had poured as soon as he’d entered. Tiny fingered the material of Mercer’s tux, nodding his approval.
Mercer shook his head sadly. “No one appreciates the old lamp shade on the head gag anymore.”
Tiny’s was exactly what Mercer needed to forget about Aggie Johnston and her problems. He and Harry bantered with a biting sarcasm that would wither most people, but neither would have it any other way. An hour and a half went by, Mercer’s couple of nightcaps turning into an entire milliner’s shop as he and Harry as well as a few of the other regulars drank their wallets empty. Tiny closed the place at one, making sure to call cabs for those patrons too drunk to drive and assigning moderately sober drivers for the rest. Harry left with Mercer, each of them with two bottles of beer in hand for their walk home. Harry lived five blocks away in the opposite direction from Mercer. He began swaying up the street after a few parting jibes about Mercer’s tuxedo.
Mercer left his car and turned down the street, taking swallows from one bottle as he went, though each footfall made him dribble a little beer. He knew he was really drunk when his feet crossed each other and he nearly sprawled on the sidewalk. He glanced around, his blurred eyes trying to penetrate the darkness to see if anyone had noticed, but the street appeared quiet.
He continued, draining the first beer as he crossed onto the block just before his. Rather than fighting open the other, a task he knew would be impossible in his state, he simply carried it with him, each dangling by its neck in his hands. He tripped again stepping to the curb on his block and laughed at himself. He’d heard from enough people that alcohol was a depressant, but right now he had that perfect buzz that made everything funnier than hell, even the shadowy figure that stepped from behind a van parked a few paces from him.
Mercer saw the blow coming and willed his body to tense, but his alcohol-deadened nerves wouldn’t respond. He was completely limp, and that saved his life. The pistol butt laid into his face, snapping his head so hard that he corkscrewed to the sidewalk. A vicious kick to the ribs turned him over twice, and he went with it, rolling away from his assailant, giving himself enough distance to get to his feet.
He staggered up, blood slicking the right side of his face and dripping into his mouth with a metallic salty taste. The Glock came down, its nine-millimeter muzzle leveled at Mercer’s chest.
The suddenness and ferocity of the attack would have frozen a normal man, but Mercer’s reactions were quick — if dulled by the gimlets. The alcohol coursing through his body filled him with a reckless courage. He leaped forward, ignoring the Glock, his evening shoes sliding across the rain-soaked cement. The gun never went off.
Jamal Lincoln was thrown off guard by Mercer’s assault and hadn’t squeezed hard enough on the integrated trigger safety of the unfamiliar weapon. He shifted the big semiautomatic in his hand, feeling the safety disengage an instant before Mercer crashed into him. The gun was aimed at his intended victim’s chest and at this range would blow him halfway down the block.
Mercer still had the beer bottles in his hands and swung them with all of the strength he could muster, each arm whipping inward so that the two bottles smashed into Jamal’s head simultaneously. The full bottle exploded on impact, showering them both with frothing beer and shards of green glass while the empty bottle remained intact, knocking Jamal off balance. His right arm whirled across his body so when he fired, the shot ricocheted off a building across the street. Jamal almost blacked out from the blow but retained enough control to push against Mercer just as the return stroke of the bottle came at him, missing him by inches.
The unbroken bottle whizzed by Jamal’s head, the force of the swing leading Mercer into a natural follow-through, and without thinking he plunged the remains of the shattered bottle deep into his assailant’s throat. The jagged glass cut through skin and muscle and arteries with only spongy resistance. The Glock dropped as Jamal reeled away, clutching at his shredded throat. It was the last voluntary movement he would ever make.
Mercer fell to the ground at the same time as Jamal, the alcohol, shock, and fear draining his strength. Darkness crept into his mind, cutting his vision down to a haze-filled tunnel. Even the lights that had snapped on in response to the shot were just distant points, fading even as more of them lit the street. He laid his head against the cold concrete as a siren began to wail someplace in another reality.
“You’re dead, aren’t you, Howard? They got you already,” Mercer mumbled to the cement before he passed out.
Alyeska Marine Terminal Valdez, Alaska
Under the glare of sodium arc lights, the hull of the Petromax Arctica was even darker than the water of Prince William Sound. The sun had not yet set in the northern latitudes though it was past nine at night. Despite the umber light, regulations demanded that the lamps high up in the oil gantries be on at all times. They bathed the VLCC (Very Large Crude Carrier), bringing out harsh shadows on her huge deck.
The ship was more than a thousand feet long, but what truly made her seem unworldly was her width. With a hundred-and-fifty-seven-foot beam, she was nearly as wide as a city block was long. Her red-painted deck was as large and flat as a parking lot, broken only by inspection hatches and a raised catwalk that ran nearly a quarter of a mile from her superstructure to her blunted bows. The tanker’s superstructure was a slab-sided white box at the very stern, rising fifty feet over the deck. Cantilevered promenades wrapped around a few of its levels, and the wings of the flying bridges hung over empty space on each side of the ship. Her single funnel sat foursquare in the center of the superstructure. The emblem of Petromax Oil, a stylized oil derrick with the intertwined letters P and O, was lit by a floodlight just below the twenty-foot-tall standard.
Unlike any ship in history, supertankers, as VLCCs had been dubbed by the media soon after their debut, defy nearly every law of naval architecture. Because of their size, they cannot be built like a traditional vessel with a laid keel and massive steel supports rising up like ribs from the backbone. Tankers must be built in sections, each one floated independently and welded together in the water. According to the engineers, tankers are safe, yet they still tend to break up when nature or man’s own folly stresses them too much. They are a bastard creation, spawned by an oil-thirsty world with little regard for how that thirst was slaked.