There would probably be motion detectors on the farm itself, he thought, but by that point it would be too late for the defenders. He put a dark cloud just in front of himself and Croyd as they walked to the farm, to conceal them from anyone with a night vision scope.
"You learned algebra?" Croyd asked.
"I almost got my doctorate in physics."
"No shit!" Croyd was impressed. "I never knew that, homeboy! Why didn't you finish?"
"I sorta got into the vigilante business."
"Yeah. The bastards. They always screw you out of everything."
Shad wasn't too clear on the antecedents of this remark, but he let it pass. "There's a lot of suffering out there," he said, "and most of the time you really can't help. The situation is just too complicated. But sometimes you know exactly what the problem is, and exactly who's causing it; and sometimes that person is invulnerable. I mean, who's going to go up against Howard Hughes?"
Croyd giggled. "We are, homeboy."
"Well, yeah, but that's my point. Who the hell else? The Sharks are part of the government. They're part of industry. They're part of show biz. They bought Gregg Hartmann, for chrissake!"
Croyd looked at him. "Do you always have to talk yourself into it this way?"
Shad took a breath. "Sometimes. When I realize I'm going to kill a bunch of people I've never met, and that some of them are kids."
"Well, do whatcha gotta do to get yourself up for it. But they're jumpers, you know, and even when I was on the Rox they gave me the creeps."
"You were on the Rox?"
"Yeah, but I fell asleep, and the next thing I knew I was waking up on the Jersey shore, and the Rox wasn't there anymore."
"Huh."
"Just remember who put us in the slams, bro." Shad looked at Croyd and his nerves started to wail - Croyd had shifted his appearance to look just like Shad again. Croyd gave a twitchy grin. "This way we don't get confused and shoot each other by accident. Right?"
Shad tried to calm his shrieking nerves. "Fine, man. Whatever."
"Jesus. What's that smell?"
"Something died, I expect." The odor seemed to be coming from one of the farm's small outbuildings. Shad scanned it, found no sources of body heat. His heart sank. "They've probably killed someone and stuck him in there," Shad said.
"We'll check later, if there's time."
Shad looked at Croyd's automatic shotgun. "Sing out if you want to shoot that thing," he said. "And I'll hit the deck."
Shad stepped closer to the farmhouse, and suddenly lights switched on.
"Showtime," he said.
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
Try to remember who put us in the slams. That thought helped a lot.
Shad felt oddly disconnected from the whole business as he walked through the back door and killed two people in the kitchen with his silenced Czech sub-machinegun - one of the guards and an Asian kid presumably a jumper. He realized he'd fallen back in prison mode again, not feeling anything. He kept a cloud of darkness in front of him and around him and no one could see where the danger was coming from. He advanced into the house and shot another guard, a man who fired a few blind rounds into the walls before he fell. And then there was a huge booming crash that set his nerves shuddering, and a stunning blast of odor that felt like the shock wave from the first blast. Shad flung himself on the floor. There was another crash, then another, then the sound of a body falling. Waves of a hideous stench flew through the air like echoes of each shot
Shad whipped around, saw Croyd standing with his shotgun smoking. A man was sprawled in the doorway from the kitchen, a big man in a black fighting uniform with a one-eyed black hood over his head. The man began to move again.
"No!" Shad shouted just as Croyd fired for a fourth time. The man shuddered and lay still.
"Shit!" Croyd said. "He just kept coming!"
Shad jumped to his feet. "That's Crypt Kicker," he said "He's a friend of Battle. If we'd taken him, he might have told us where Battle is." He must have been living in the small house outside, where his smell wouldn't offend people.
"Too late now." Disgust at the odor twitched across Croyd's face. "Too late for some weeks, smells like."
There was a hissing sound from the body. The acid that ran in Crypt Kicker's veins was melting a patch on the linoleum.
This had taken too long already.
"Let's get moving," Shad said "You guard the stairs. I'll go up and out."
He threw open a window and went up the outside of the building. The top floor was dark. Once he found who he was looking for, it was over in seconds.
No one else was in the house, though there were two bedrooms - one filled with the foul odor of French tobacco - that there were no bodies to match with.
Croyd opened file cabinets in search of documents while Shad went out onto the grounds. He found an empty space in the garage where a car had been parked, Crypt Kicker's cozily furnished little outbuilding, complete with Hank Williams poster and a well-thumbed Bible, and nothing else.
"Lots of documents," Croyd said as he returned.
"We missed two of our targets," Shad said. "Peggy Durand and that girl in the leather jacket."
"Stick around and wait for them to come back?" Croyd offered.
"No. Leave enough of the documents to show something incriminating, then go get Hughes. We can find Durand again just by following Baron von Whatsisname."
Shad guarded the gate when Croyd went back for Hughes. The night was so quiet that he could hear Hughes offering Croyd a date with Rita Hayworth as Croyd marched him back across the field.
I'm not feeling anything, he told himself. But still a part of him cringed as he heard the shot, and Hughes' voice ceased.
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
Herzenhagen's heart hammered in answer to the banging on the door of his suite. He gasped for breath, reached for the drawer with the pistol in it, took the weapon in his hand.
He looked at the clock. Not quite four in the morning.
He chambered a round in his Hi-Power, put on his dressing gown and stepped to the door. He looked through the peephole, saw Peggy standing anxiously in his fish-eye view. He put the pistol in his pocket and opened the door. Peggy stormed in.
"We've just come from Latchkey," Peggy said. "Something's happening. The place is swarming with cops and press."
"Have you heard about Flynn and Hughes?"
"No. What?"
Herzenhagen took a firmer grip on his pistol.
"Let's talk," he said.
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
News filtered through from people Herzenhagen knew, and he tried to put it all together in his mind. The jumpers - dead. How does someone with a gun kill a jumper at short range without being jumped? Let alone jumpers that had four of the General's best men guarding them? It didn't make sense.
Gerard could have died with them, if Peggy hadn't decided to take pity on her and drive her to DC for an evening's pub-crawl.
Gerard, whom Peggy had stashed at a Baltimore hotel before coming here.
Only one jumper left. He was going to have to use her very carefully.
A terrible thought entered his mind. What if the jumpers weren't in their bodies when they'd died? What if they were elsewhere now and ... working for someone else?
Dawn leaked past drawn blinds. The coffee and pastries he'd ordered from room service had been consumed.
"Let me think here," he said. "All the jokers from Governor's Island escaped, and all of our people dead. Hartmann dead just when he was becoming useful. Flynn dead just when the Quarantine Bill is stuck in committee. Hughes missing, and being blamed for Flynn's death. The jumpers dead."
"Someone's got it in for us," Peggy said.
"But look at the style," Herzenhagen said. "No witnesses. No suspects except for those intended to be suspects. No apparent connection between the crimes. No apparent motive ..."