Headhunter

Reload first. Destroy the heads. Then blow that fucker away. No room for an error at this stage of the game.

Flipping open the cylinder and emptying the casings, Sparky fed the.38 six new cartridges. That's it. All right. Fingers steady. Don't shake. Flick the weapon shut. Now you're ready to go.

At this very moment half the West End of Vancouver was probably phoning the VPD to say that World War III was on. Magnified by the cavern, the shots would travel far and wide. By now the VPD would be dispatching patrol cars and calling out the SWAT squad. There was not a second to lose: the heads had to go.

As luck would have it all eight heads were in the Adidas bag. So was Al Flood's diary. Sparky glanced quickly at one page.'Why do human beings so fear a severed head?' Sparky read. 'If this is everyman's general fear, why must I he plagued with it multiplied a thousand times?' A flick through a couple more pages brought home to Sparky the diary's chilling implications, and what must be done.

Someone had left an oily rag on the floor after working on a car. Grabbing it quickly. Sparky soaked the cloth in crank-case oil now spreading out across the concrete from beneath the Volvo. Then grasping the Adidas bag, gun still in hand, the murderer ran up the ramp and out into the snow.

Flood was not around, neither right nor left.

Across the lane, embers glowed in the burning can.

Half expecting a.38 shot and still clutching the Adidas bag, Sparky skirted the alley and tossed the oil-soaked rag into the tin. It ignited at once. With a whoosh the flames shot up, dyeing the snowflakes orange. Holding the gym bag open with both hands Sparky shook the contents into the burning tin. The shrunken heads caught fire immediately amid the stench of burning hair. The skin ignited like paper. The lip rings turned red and glowed. And then the heads were gone. When the diary burst into flame, its pages curled like fingers as each sheet charred black and then crumbled, sifting down as ash.

Fuck you, Mother, Sparky thought. Burn, witch, burn.

Then with an intense feeling of satisfaction and newfound freedom, Sparky lifted the lid of a nearby garbage can and stuffed the Adidas bag inside. As soon as the lid was replaced it began to recollect snow.

Turning out into the alley, Sparky surveyed the ground. A second later, gun in hand, the killer set off to follow the trail of blood that the detective had left in the snow.

Okay, Mr. City Bull, now it's you and me.

Shootout

7:56 p.m.

Al Flood had never been shot before so he didn't know what to expect. It was true that he had heard from cops on the Squad who had received gunshot wounds and survived, and had also spoken to a few who had later died. One and all, they had informed him that you could tell if you would live or die from the thoughts that ran through your head. But that did not mean much. For as the man says: you had to have been there, right?

Al Flood was there now — and he knew he was going to die.

So go on and die!he thought. What's so wrong with that? We all have to face this fear one day or another. Are you so afraid to die if your time has come?

No, Al Flood thought. I'm not afraid to die.

There, he felt better for that. After all there are many more things in life far worse than death. Things like loneliness and not being loved, and he'd had his share of them. Yes, when you got right down to it death could be a blessing. A good, clean release. Perhaps his own salvation. Death was only bad when it hurt so much or took so long that it humiliated you.

Well, it sure the hell hurts, Flood thought, and his head began to spin.

It had been a mistake — Flood knew that now — to have made for the loading bay. At the time he had made the decision, however, all that seemed important was to escape from the line of fire, to get away from the killer as quickly as possible. Turning into the loading bay off the alley had accomplished that. But it was a mistake all the same. For now Flood found himself trapped on his hands and knees in a dead-end alcove. He was cornered in a three-sided box no more than twelve feet wide, and for anyone looking in from the alley he was an open target. He was totally unprotected, with only three shots left. Once those rounds were gone he had no extra shells.

To make matters more precarious, dizziness was coming at him in nauseating waves. Here one moment… gone the next… then surging back again. At certain times he thought that he could hear the wail of police sirens through the wall of snow, rising and falling, rising and falling, very far away. It's foolish, his mind told him, to place any hope in that. Far, far better than most you know that this is a crime- plagued town. They're not even heading this way

Al Flood had collapsed on his stomach and was facing into the alcove with his back to the alley. He had not the energy to turn himself around, to at least face the direction from which an attack would come. Instead he let his head drop and his face fall into the snow.

Al Flood allowed his thoughts to lightly drift away.

The visions began with a man, an old man with a wrinkled face wearing wire-rim glasses, a man whose hair was sparse and swept back and graying at the temples, a man who smoked a cigarette below a thin moustache. The old man was sitting in the back of a sleigh, wrapped in a warm fur blanket. He was reading a newspaper. The paper was yellow and dog-eared, covered by snow. Al Flood recognized the man: he'd once read one of his books.

The man in the sleigh turned toward him and held out the yellow paper. In a voice thick with smoke he said: 'It says here this snow is general throughout the entire province. It's falling further westward into the dark Pacific Ocean. It's falling on every peak and summit in the Rocky Mountains. It is falling also on that lonely mountain graveyard… lonely mountain graveyard… lonely, lonely graveyard…'

And then the man was suddenly gone, obliterated completely by a rage of swirling snowflakes, disappearing beyond ii curtain of white that parted several seconds later to reveal a precipitous slope with banks of snow that lay thickly about a shattered fuselage and plane cockpit. This vision. Flood knew, was his father's grave.

Off in the distance beyond the slope he could also discern the angry black waves of an ocean pounding against a shore, throwing out spray to mix with the snow that tumbled down upon crooked crosses and headstones in a deserted, abandoned churchyard.

'What you see — ' it was the old man's voice again ' — is a Christian Indian graveyard, the West Coast of Vancouver Island. One of the graves has been redug and your brother is buried there.'

Then once more Flood could just make out the sleigh within the blinding storm, only this time there was another figure standing behind the old man wrapped in the blanket. This second figure was a much larger individual, full-faced with a bushy beard and one hand on the shoulder of the older one in the sled. They're friends, Flood thought, comparing them. An incongruity.

'Can you hear the snow,' the old man asked, 'falling, faintly falling through the Universe? The snow is falling, my son, on all the living and dead.'

'She's dead,' the big man stated, 'but you are still alive. If you can do nothing for yourself, then do something for her. Each one does what he can. Take another look.'

Then Al Flood saw the alley all white with its sheet of snow. He could see himself in the alcove, face down as flake by flake enveloped his prostrate form and buried him in a shroud. And he could watch as that same snow blew into the parking lot, its whiteness stained red in the pool of blood that spread out from Genevieve.

'Die for a reason,' Hemingway said. 'Don't throw your life away.'

'Die for a cause,' Joyce added. 'Let's have one last fight for the dead.'

And then they were gone, both of them, leaving nothing behind but the snow. Al Flood heard his breath come in gasps as phlegm caught in his throat. Death rattle,the man thought. I guess my time is near.'One more fight,' he said: then slowly he found himself coming around and moving across the ground.