On the hotel room’s wet floor were the remains of the kid, the gross, unbreathing matter of torso and limbs, the face still sheathed in the first gel that McNihil had used on him, back in the theater. Turned to one side, the kid’s face had a blank, empty gaze, mouth open but silent, as though the tongue were somehow trying to taste blood through the clear barrier. Whatever low-wattage spark had existed behind the dulling eyes had been caught in a jar like some bright, fluttering insect. Dead meat wasn’t trophy material; asp-heads brought back to their clients something a little livelier.
McNihil returned his scattered tools to their slots in the pack, folded it, and stood up. He wiped the pack off against the wall, leaving a long red hieroglyph across an ancient pattern of faded roses. He slipped it into his jacket pocket. Turning and reaching for the trophy container he’d left propped against the front of the dresser-with the spherical casing sealed to the tube, the result looked like a fatter version of a drum major’s baton-McNihil saw smoke laced with sparks rising past the window. The temperature in the room had gone up a few degrees, the heat penetrating from the floors below; much hotter, and the blood soaked into the carpet would begin to boil.
He didn’t bother saying good-bye to the corpse. Some asp-heads, he knew, were in the habit of leaving behind some indication of a mess like this being the result of an agency hit-some went so far as to sign their names and ID numbers with the point of a scalpel on the dead flesh-but McNihil had never seen the need for that. Anybody who couldn’t tell what had gone on from the evidence, the hydro-gel mask and the laid-open spinal column, was beyond educating.
Smoke, thick and black, rolled down the hallway outside the door. McNihil had drenched his jacket sleeve in the room’s tiny efficiency sink; arm raised, he held the wet cloth against his face, his eyes stinging as he made his way down the corridor.
From the landing one flight down, he could see into the lobby of the End Zone Hotel. The mob with its primitive torches had shattered the street-level windows and ripped the door from its hinges. A shrill, clanging alarm sounded above the voices and battering clamor. An iron bar had been used to tear the grille from above the counter; the desk clerk had either fled or been trampled beneath the crowd’s feet. The tethered junkies in front of the lobby’s wall-mounted television hadn’t bothered to move; through the obscuring smoke, the slumped figures on the sofa and upholstered chairs could still be seen, watching the dead screen or languidly rolling their heavy-lidded gazes toward the riot with equal interest. One of the chairs had already caught fire, the edges of the yellow-stained upholstery crawling with a charred red line, gray smoke billowing around the comatose figure sprawled there. The black hookups to the metal drug device writhed snakelike in the heat.
“There!” A voice split the laden air. The vocal cords emitting the words sounded raw with shouting and smoke inhalation. “There he is!”
McNihil recognized the voice as his recently acquired nemesis, the bearded operator of the panhandling gantry. With the encased trophy tucked under one arm, McNihil peered across his other forearm and managed to spot the mob’s leader through the thickening haze. In the face blackened with soot, the red-rimmed eyes glared with a fierce delight; the burning buildings and the excited mob were all to the bearded figure’s liking.
Torches and improvised weapons aloft, the mob surged up the bottom of the open staircase. McNihil backed up a few steps as he dug into his coat pocket, past the folded tool kit, for the hand-filling tannhauser. He brought it out; barely having to aim, he fired into the center of the welling crowd below.
The gantry operator had the sense not to lead the charge; McNihil saw the bearded figure being toppled backward by the crowd momentarily retreating under the impact of the broken-chested corpse at their head. His fall had sent the gantry operator sprawling across the lobby’s floor, shoulders bumping up against the base of the desk clerk’s counter, the impact enough to knock the torch from his hand. He was still conscious; a shake of the head, and the gantry operator managed to refocus his gaze toward the top of the stairs. His eyes widened at what he saw.
This time, McNihil aimed. Above the heads of the crowd, toward one specific target-not from any hopes of improving the present situation, but just from the personal conviction that people shouldn’t be given extra chances to make trouble. He pulled the trigger and saw, through the smoke filling the lobby, a bright red flower substitute itself for the bearded face. The gantry operator’s body rolled shuddering onto its side.
A well-placed kick broke open one of the room doors. Any occupants of the hotel had either fled or joined the mob below. The tiny space’s window, bright and hot with the flames in the street, was jammed tight. McNihil shattered the glass with the butt of the tannhauser, then used its muzzle to knock away the remaining shards. He climbed out with the trophy container, onto the rusting metal grid of the fire escape.
The irony of the term wasn’t lost on him, as McNihil scanned the scene beneath. Enough of the surrounding buildings’ contents had been dragged out and thrown onto the fire for it to have spilled from the central open space-the downed and uprooted 747 was by now a twisted, blackened skeleton-and across the streets. One major branch of the fire had rolled right up against the walls of the hotel; the bottom section of the rickety framework on which McNihil stood was engulfed in flames. The heat traveled up the metal and scorched the palm of his hand, as he tried to look past the roiling smoke.
No way down, at least not that he could see here; at the same time, McNihil could hear the sound of the mob, their adrenaline courage revved up again, filling the End Zone Hotel’s darkened interior.
The rusting iron creaked and swayed, bolts pulling loose from the building’s side, as McNihil reached and drew down the narrow ladder above his head. Climbing one-handed, with the gun tucked against the trophy container, he headed toward the roof.
ELEVEN
A DAMP CARNIVAL OF BILLOWING FOAM AND SLIPPERY HUMAN SKIN
The mob rampaging around in the open space had made it easier for her to tail him and his incapacitated business, from the movie theater over to where McNihil would complete the job. All the excitement, the crowds and shouts and mounting flames, had obviously distracted McNihil, kept him from doing even the most cursory scan to see who might be following him. She’d watched him dragging along the skinny kid that he’d come up here to meet, the contact’s face swallowed by that hydro-gel glop asp-heads were always so fond of-November admitted it had its uses, but she preferred more direct and obviously violent methods. What was going to happen next to the kid, she’d already known; asp-heads weren’t exactly reticent about publicizing the consequences for copyright infringement. Too bad for the kid trying to peddle those old books-but that was what you got for being a wiseass.
For McNihil as well, it was going to be too bad; he didn’t know what he was getting into. November shifted her position in the alley, going a little closer to its mouth in order to peer toward the lobby of the hotel. The bottom floor of the hotel building was engulfed in flame by now; the crowd with the torches, who’d been so hot for McNihil’s blood, had streamed back outside, leaving their dead and wounded to cook.
November stepped out of the alley, easing her way through the crowd. The mass adrenaline peak had been a few minutes ago; the smell of that hormone-laden sweat hung in the air as an invisible stratum just below the smoke. A certain fatigue level had set in, the result of all the incendiary excitement. The central fire, with the
