Death Mask

Although he was so close, his image appeared to be wavering slightly, as if Detective Kunzel were looking at him through a haze of rising heat.

Detective Kunzel cleared his throat. Then he said, “Take your knives out real slow and toss them out of reach.”

Red Mask held up both of his hands, palms outward, like a conjuror. “I don’t have any knives, Detective. See?”

“Open your coat. Do it real easy.”

Red Mask opened the front of his coat. There were no knives there, either.

“Okay. now I need you to get down on the floor. Flat on your face. Arms and legs spread wide.”

“Oh, I don’t think so, Detective. I came here today to talk to you, not to give myself up. Look around you. My work isn’t finished yet. Not by a long chalk.”

“I’m giving you a count of three to kiss the concrete, Mr. Mask. If you haven’t done it by then, I’m going to drop you, and that’s a promise.”

“If you do that, how are you going to find out how I managed to make such mincemeat out of all of your fellow officers? I mean, look at them, Detective. Twelve good men and true. Courageous fellows, all of them. Heroic, even. And armed to the eyeballs. How can one man hang them all up like so many sides of beef? One man, all on his ownsome? If you know the answer to that, Detective, then by all means go ahead and drop me. But otherwise, you just listen to what I have to say to you, and you listen good.”

“One,” Detective Kunzel warned him. “Two.”

“You’re not going to shoot me, Detective, and the reason you’re not going to shoot me is because you believe there’s two of me, or even more. I’ve sworn to you that there ain’t, but you can’t work that out, either, can you? And suppose I’m lying to you, and there is two of me, or three, or even five? If you shoot me now, how are you going to find out if they truly exist, and where they are, and what they’re bent on doing next?”

“Three,” said Detective Kunzel. “That’s it.”

Red Mask raised both his hands, not so much in surrender, but in exasperation.

“You don’t have any idea what you’re up against, do you, Detective? You don’t have any idea at all. But let me tell you this: whatever you do now, whether you squeeze that trigger or not, the streets of Cincinnati are going to run ankle deep in blood, and there’s nothing that you can do to stop it. Absodamn-lutely nothing.”

Detective Kunzel hesitated. He knew that Red Mask was right. If he shot him here and now, too many critical questions would remain unanswered, and it was possible that even more innocent people would be killed.

“So what did you want to say to me?” he asked.

“I’m trying to do you a favor here, Detective. You will never find me and you will never catch me, no matter how hard you try. So stop wasting your time and your valuable resources. Stop putting your men in harm’s way. Do you know how much it costs to train a police officer? And look at them! Dead meat, every one!”

Red Mask took a step closer, and then another. His voice dropped to a whisper. “One day, I may feel that justice has been served and that my thirst for vengeance has been slaked. Good word, that, isn’t it — slaked? But that day isn’t today, I regret to tell you, and it won’t be tomorrow.”

Drop him! said a voice in Detective Kunzel’s head. But it was then that he heard an extraordinary noise right behind him, a noise like a huge sheet of drawing paper being torn in half. He twisted around, almost losing his balance — just in time to see the painting of Red Mask step right out of the wall, as if it he had entered the parking level through some kind of invisible door.

Both of his arms were raised high, and Detective Kunzel glimpsed the rusty-colored glint of a bloodstained blade.

He fired. Inside the parking level, the sound of his gun was deafening. Chips of shattered brick flew off the side of the wall, and the bullet ricocheted across the parking area with a mournful whine.

He fired again, at point-blank range, and this time he hit Red Mask full in the chest. He turned back toward the first Red Mask, shouting, “Hit the deck! Now!” But the first Red Mask simply smiled at him and stayed where he was, and without any hesitation the second Red Mask came right up to him and stabbed him in the shoulder and the side of his head, right behind his ear. He felt the point of the knife dig into his skull.

He raised his arm to protect himself, but the second Red Mask stabbed him in the elbow with one knife and the back of his gun hand with the other. Detective Kunzel felt warm wet blood spraying against his face.

He tried to fire again, but the knife that had gone through his elbow had cut his tendons. His fingers opened and the gun clattered onto the floor.

He was stabbed again and again, but he ignored the knives, even when they cut into his hands, and he pushed the second Red Mask away from him. The first Red Mask dodged from side to side, trying to block his way.

“Leaving us, Detective? So soon? And we were just beginning to enjoy ourselves!”

Detective Kunzel was stabbed in the back — once in the shoulder and once in the ribs. He dropped forward onto his knees, but before the second Red Mask could stab him again, he hunched his shoulders and lowered his head, and reared up from the floor with a bellow of rage and pain.

He collided with the first Red Mask, knocking him aside. Then he started to run across the parking level, in between the hanging bodies and the concrete pillars. He hadn’t run as fast as this for years, but he was damned if he was going to be stabbed to death and hung up from one of the sprinkler pipes.

He could hear himself panting, as if he were listening to somebody else who was running close behind him, and he could see droplets of blood flying in front of him with every step that he took.

My mother didn’t give birth to me to die like this. My father didn’t take me to baseball games to die like this. I didn’t go to the police academy to die like this. I’m going to die in my bed with my family all around me and the evening sun shining through the window.

He reached the door that led to the stairwell, and pulled it open. Looking back, he could see that the second Red Mask had stopped trying to chase him now, and was standing in between the suspended bodies of two SWAT officers, thirty yards away, both knives lowered, staring at him. His face shone in the midday sunlight like a red warning lamp.

He went through the door and the first Red Mask was standing there waiting for him, and he was holding a knife in each hand, too. Without any hesitation, he plunged them with a sharp chopping noise into Detective Kunzel’s stomach, cutting first one deep diagonal, upper left to lower right, and then another, upper right to lower left.

Detective Kunzel felt pain so intense that his whole body began to quake. Nothing could hurt this much. It just wasn’t possible. He stared at Red Mask, and tried to speak, but all that came out of his lips was a bubble of blood.

“Now that was the kind of sport I was looking for,” Red Mask whispered. “Entertainment and revenge, all in one. And a mystery, too. Am I one? Am I two? Maybe I’m neither. Maybe I’m both. So sad that you’ll never get to find out, Detective.”

He stepped away, sliding his knives back into his coat. Detective Kunzel staggered back against the wall. He stood there for a moment, his chest heaving. Then he tilted sideways and tumbled down the stairs, twenty of them, and lay in a bloodied heap on the landing below.

He wasn’t quite dead. He could see the light fitting on the ceiling above him. He could hear voices and the sound of people running. He thought of his mother, standing by the kitchen window. She was smiling at him and saying something that he couldn’t hear very distinctly.

It sounded like “Liebling.”

“Mom?” he croaked. “Mom, is that you?”

He heard a loud, resonating bang somewhere in the parking structure, but he had no way of knowing that it was the elevator dropping from the top floor down to the basement, with the remaining SWAT officers inside it.