there any more… as if he’d braked fast and shut off the beams. And just as suddenly I knew that was what he had done-I knew this wasn’t a shortcut at all, I knew what it was, and the knowledge put the brassy taste of fear in my mouth.
Trap, goddamn trap. And I had blundered into it like a witless amateur.
I spun the wheel hard left, sent the car into a slashing turn that made the tires squeal and spin up gravel and dirt. But it was too late by then-too damn late. The trap car was hidden over that way, in the clotted black alongside the last of the drayage company’s loading docks; it came shooting out at me, dark and formless, like some kind of phantom. Before I could complete the U-turn, it banged into my right front fender… impact, crunch of metal… and the wheel twisted out of my hands and the car slewed around and came to a shuddering stop that stalled the engine. I shoved back off the wheel and reached for the door lock with my left hand, for the flashlight under the dash with my right — the only weapon I had in there.
But it was too late for that, too. They weren’t all in the trap car; one of them had been hidden somewhere else nearby, on foot, and he got to my door before I could lock it and yanked it open and lunged in at me. I fought him, but he was big, bull-strong: I had an impression of youth, of mindless exhilaration at what he was doing. He got one hand on the collar of my suit jacket, the other bunched in my hair, and hauled me out of the car.
The other two were there by then, big and young like the first one-faceless shapes in the darkness, without humanity of any kind, a trio of androids programmed for violence while the one who had activated them stood off somewhere, maybe watching, maybe not, depending on his stomach for this kind of thing. I fought all three of them in a kind of frenzy and for a few seconds I held my own, I did some damage: kicked one of them somewhere in the body, heard him grunt, hit another one in the face and felt his spittle spray my cheek. But I had no real chance against them, none at all. One of them kicked my legs out from under me and once they got me down on the ground I was finished.
I kept trying to fight, trying to get my legs under me again-until one of them hit me or kicked me in the head, full-force, behind the right ear. Then everything went a little crazy. I heard somebody yelling… and it was me because there was blood in my mouth and throat and my voice got caught in it, mired in it, and I felt as if I were strangling. All three of them were using their feet on me now and out of the pain and the craziness a thought swirled up: Cover your head, cover your groin, don’t let them hurt you down there. I managed to roll onto my side, to curl up with one arm over my head, one hand covering my privates. And they kept kicking me, and after awhile I stopped feeling anything and just lay there curled like a fetus with the blood raging in my ears, gagging, fighting desperately not to cry or whimper, I will not cry or whimper, I will not give them the satisfaction of that. Then they weren’t kicking me anymore and one of them was shouting something; but I couldn’t understand him and when he realized that he got down beside me, rolled me onto my back, yelled his message in my ear. Even then the words were filtered through the blood-roar, so that only some of them got through to me.
“Lay off,” he seemed to be saying. “No more investigate. Understand? No more, drop the Purcell, next time kill you, understand?”
I passed out.
I must have passed out because the next thing I was aware of was pain, savage and pulsing in my left side, my head, my left hand. But nobody was hurting me anymore, or looming over me or shouting at me, and I sensed they were gone. I was still lying on my back, choking a little on my own blood. I turned my head, coughed my throat clear.
Quiet now, no more roaring in my ears, just the far-off warning blast from a locomotive. Hear that lonesome whistle blow, ask not for whom it blows it blows for thee, oh God they did a job on me, they beat me good, what if I wet my pants? I was suddenly terrified that I had lost control of my bladder. I felt down there-and I was dry. That calmed me, made me more lucid. I tried to open my eyes; the right one was stuck shut and when I put my hand up to it it felt swollen, sticky. Through the other eye I could see the clouds moving overhead, then a little of the crescent moon, then only the restless clouds again. The locomotive’s air horn sounded another time. Couplings clattered distantly; there was the steel-on-steel rattle of a train moving through the night.
I rolled over onto my side. The pain was so bad I almost bit through my lower lip. But I couldn’t just lie there, it was cold, I was aware of the cold all at once and I started to shake. Freeze to death out here. I tried to get up; the pain drove me back down again. I looked around for my car and it was there, over near the loading dock, driver’s door shut; the headlights were dark, they’d shut them off before they left because lights might attract attention. It seemed a long way off, halfway across the world. Phone, the mobile phone… what if they’d disabled it? Can’t drive in this condition. Can’t even walk.
I started crawling toward the car. It was slow work; I blacked out once, or maybe it was twice, and all the way the pain was like something eating at me, something tearing at me with claws and a muzzle that was smeared with my blood.
Pay for this, Dessault. Make you pay for this.
And I kept crawling, and finally I reached the door and pulled myself up a little at a time until I could take hold of the handle and depress the latch and pull it open. I crawled up onto the seat in stages, using the door handle and then the steering wheel. Lay there gasping, hurting.
The phone, pick it up.
Picked it up. Listened.
Working, it still worked.
I made a call somehow, didn’t even think about who I was calling, just did it. Please be home… and he was home. Eberhardt. I tried to talk to him but my mouth was broken, the words came out in little broken pieces that didn’t seem to make any sense. But they must have made sense to him, after a while, because I heard him say, “Don’t move, for God’s sake don’t move. I’ll call an ambulance. I’ll come there myself.”
I lay on the seat feeling dizzy, feeling sick. Knew I was going to vomit and tried to push myself back out of the car and couldn’t do it and vomited on the floorboards.
Passed out again.
And came to when the ambulance got there, and talked to the medics, and talked a little to Eberhardt when he showed up.
And passed out for the last time on the way to Mission Emergency Hospital.
Two cracked ribs. Concussion. Dislocated middle finger on my left hand. Bruises, cuts, abrasions too numerous to list. I was lucky, the doctor said. There didn’t seem to be any serious damage to my eye. Nor any internal damage. That was the main thing: no internal damage.
That’s what you think, doc. There’s internal damage, all right-plenty of it inside my head. And somebody’s going to pay for it. Dessault, Melanie, the three sluggers, anybody else who might have had a hand in this.
Lay off the Purcell case?
No way. No frigging way!
Chapter Twenty-one
I spent Monday and Tuesday in bed, my bed. I saw no one except Kerry and, briefly on Tuesday, Eberhardt; I ate nothing other than some soup Kerry insisted on feeding me. Mostly I slept. A beating like I’d taken is a shock to the nervous system, a trauma to the psyche, an embarrassment to the ego; no matter how much rage, how much desire for revenge there might be inside you, you don’t just slap on some tape and liniment and walk away from it, the way people do in movies and crappy novels. You need rest, time to heal. For a man my age, anything else would have been like playing Russian roulette with more than one bullet in the gun.
Kerry hung around part of the time, even while I was sleeping and even though I did not really want her there. She put on a nice smiley front, but the fact of the beating, the physical evidence of it, had shaken her-almost as badly as that time I’d got shot in Eberhardt’s house. Eberhardt didn’t take it too well, either. He’d gone to Mission Creek Sunday night, after taking me home from the hospital, and braced both Dessault and Melanie. I’d told him it wouldn’t do any good and it hadn’t. The girl admitted to calling me but said she’d done it out of a momentary fit of pique, no ulterior motive and not because Richie had told her to; she also said the two of them had made up after he’d explained his absence the past couple of days-he’d gone on a fishing expedition with a friend who owned a boat. Dessault said he didn’t know anything about any thugs, or that I had been following him through the freight
