Castle Murders (21 page)

"Yes."

The old man nodded. "She might like that. She one smart little girl. She could do it."

"She'll have to do her own typing."

"She can do that too."

"Castle Imports, East One Hundred Forty-fifth Street. Tell her to tell them I referred her."

The old man nodded. "Thank you, suh."

Carney took another swig. The stuff was flowing smoother now. "I'm beginning to like this."

"It get better and better."

"I'll bet." Carney set the bottle down. "I have to use your bathroom."

"In the hall."

The bathroom door was ajar. He opened it and stopped. There, on the floor in front of the commode, lay a girl of about nineteen. Her head was wedged between the seat and the wall. She had vomited and missed the bowl.
 

Carney checked her. Her eyelids fluttered and she moaned.

The woman was standing at the door.

"I don't put her to bed no more. She can stay there all night for all I care. She can live in there."

Carney picked her up. She was light, a soft bundle in a cerise cotton party dress, one shoe dangling.

He carried her into the bedroom and put her on the big bed. There was a quilt at the foot of the bed; he unfolded it and covered her. He looked at her face for a while. The girl was pretty.
 

Velma was standing behind him. He turned and she gave him his hat. She was holding the bottle.

"Let's get out of here," she said.

He took out a wad of bills and offered it to the woman. She regarded him gravely, looked at the money, then took it.

"Good night," Carney said, putting on his hat. "Say goodbye to Mr. Hamilton for me."

The woman nodded silently.

 

Tony woke up when the car door opened.

"Have your beauty rest?" Velma asked, sliding in beside him.

"Jeez, musta dozed off." He rubbed his eyes.

Carney got in and shut the door. "Let's get over into Hellgate."

Tony watched Carney drink from the bottle. "You come all the way up here to buy some bootleg hooch?"

"Yeah. Start the car, you dumb guinea jerk."

Chuckling, Tony turned the engine over. He was adjusting the choke when a car went past. Something made him lift his head.

"There's Riordan."

He gunned the motor, pulled out of the parking spot, made a U turn, and raced down the street, making the Leland's engine whine and roar. He tore around the corner, left, raced a block, careened right, and nearly collided with an oncoming cab. A horn blared. He swerved, straightened out and slowed, glancing into the rearview mirror.
 

"I think we lost 'em."

Tony cruised for a block, then checked the mirror again. His eyes widened.

"
Madonn'!
"

He floored the accelerator and the straight-eight Leland engine howled.

"Where's the hardware?" Carney asked.

"On the floor in the back!"

Carney got to his knees and reached, couldn't get it, and tumbled into the back seat. He picked up the submachine gun and cocked it. He pushed Velma down in the seat, then rolled down the back side window and stuck the barrel of the gun out.
 

A green Durant Roadmaster was pulling into the oncoming lane to pass. Carney let it have a few rounds in the general area of its huge shiny grille.
 

There was an answering shotgun blast that shattered the rear window. Carney ducked, waited, then sat up. He pointed his index finger through the jagged hole in the glass.
 

Fire left his finger and enveloped the Durant.

The Durant slowed, flames dancing on its shiny paint. But the fire began to dissipate, rolling off and turning to smoke. The flames soon burned out, leaving the car untouched. The big car sped to catch up.
 

"They got somethin' workin', boss!"

"Yeah, so I noticed."

Tony tore right around a corner.

He slammed on the brakes, and Carney hit the back of the seat. Ahead, a huge truck was angled into the street, unloading, and blocking the way.
 

"Out!" Carney yelled. "Run for it!"

Tony reached into the back seat for the submachine gun, brought it out, opened the door, raised the gun and got off about twenty rounds before being cut down by a storm of bullets.
 

While that was happening, Carney opened the back door, rolled onto the pavement, crawled between two parked cars and hid behind one.
 

He heard advancing footsteps. He summoned power — and was amazed by how much was available.

"Carney!"

He recognized the voice as Seamus Riordan's, who would have been Tweel's
capo de tutti capi
had Tweel been Italian. Since he was not, Riordan was lieutenant hood, first under the demons.
 

"Come on out, Mr. Carney. You can't win. The deng's got us fixed up so good you can't touch us. Come on out. We won't hurt the dame. She's one of us."
 

Carney stood up.

Seamus Riordan, tall, tweed-jacketed and red-haired, stopped in his tracks when he saw the strange-looking long tube in Carney's hands.
 

"Whatcha got?"

"Bazooka," Carney said.

"What's that?"

Carney demonstrated, aiming at the Durant. The missile left the tube with a
whoosh
. By the time Riordan swiveled his head to follow it, the Durant had blossomed into a gorgeous red fireball. The concussion knocked Riordan down.
 

"They didn't fix you up good enough," Carney said.

Riordan got to his knees, groped for his lozenge-magazined submachine gun, got it and raised it — but by that time Carney was there to kick it away. Carney then kicked Riordan's solar plexus.
 

"Not quite good enough, Seamus, me boy."

Another kick. Riordan groaned.

"Were you sent to pick me up or kill me?"

"Pick you up."

Carney's foot found a softer spot near Riordan's groin.

Riordan screamed, "Kill you!"

"That answer was extracted under duress, but I believe you."

Carney went to Tony. Most of the bullets had found his legs, but a few had hit his chest. He was still conscious.

"
Madonn',
" Tony said. "I'm hit. It don't hurt, though. Funny. Always wondered."

Velma was on her knees on the front seat, looking down at Tony.

Carney asked her, "You okay?"

She nodded, then reached for something. She handed Carney the bottle. "Saved it."

Carney took it and pulled out the cork. He tipped the open bottle to Tony's lips.

"Drink a little."

Tony drank. He choked. "Boss, that tastes like lighter fluid."

"You get used to it. It might save your life."

The big Durant burned, thick black smoke coiling into the narrow band of sky between the tenements. Out of the sleeping city night, sirens approached.
 

 

 

 

Voyager

 

It was a tight fit for two beasts and two humans inside the tiny craft. There were four seats, but they were small, obviously designed for nonhuman occupants. Ironically, the nonhumans were the most discommoded: Snowclaw spilled out of his chair, and Goofus's sufficed only for his tail and hind legs.
 

Jeremy's voice came out of the intercom speaker. "Okay, everything seems to check out. We're ready any time you guys are."

"We're ready as hell," Gene said.

"Yeah, whatever that means."

"We're ready, Jeremy," Linda said.

"Okay. Remember, no more voice communications once you get started, but my messages will be on the computer screen. The computer will be doing most of the piloting anyway. If contact is broken for some reason, the craft's automatic systems will kick in. So don't be too worried. I programmed it to do just about everything on its own."
 

"Reassuring," Gene said. "For some reason Chernobyl comes to mind . . . but, hey, this is an adventure."

Jeremy sounded a bit put out. "A good . . . you know, like,
attitude
would help, Gene. A little respect for technology, maybe."

Gene tugged at his collar. "Hey, it's rough bein' a computer, you know? You don't get no respect."

"Very funny, Gene," Linda said sternly. "Does everything have to be a joke with you? Can't you take one thing seriously? I mean, just for once?"
 

Gene cringed. "
Eeep.
"

"I'm scared! I don't know about you. You always act so goddamned brave and macho. Sometimes . . . Gene, sometimes you really make me mad."
 

"Sorry," Gene said in a flat voice. "Okay. Jeremy. Let her rip. Don't bother with a countdown or anything. That'll just make it worse."
 

"Okay. Good luck, you guys. Be careful."

"Yeah, we will."

It was quiet inside the craft except for Goofus's heavy panting.

"I'm sorry I snapped at you, Gene."

"Forget it. We're all under pressure here."

Gene busied himself with checking instruments, most of which he didn't understand. The computer screen was a confusion of numbers and letters decipherable only to those fluent in hieratic computerese.
 

Gene turned to say something and bumped into Goofus's enormous head. "Get your dog breath out of my face, Goofus."

As if he understood, Goofus scrunched back in his seat.

"Good boy. God, this is nerve-racking, I'll tell you. Maybe we should have had a count — "

A high-pitched whine filled the tiny compartment. Then the craft shuddered slightly.

The view out the view window disappeared, replaced by something difficult to apperceive: a murky, swimming nothingness, inchoate and devoid of feature.
 

"We're off," Gene said. "We're out in the interuniversal medium, I guess. The non-space between the universes. I hope this scheme works."
 

"I'm not even sure what the scheme is," Linda said.

"Well, I'm not crystal clear on it either, but somehow Jeremy reduced Melanie's old clothes to data and fed them into the computer."
 

"How'd he do that?"

"He faxed them. I dunno what he did. I think he just took two video shots of them, getting perspective parallax, combined those two signals into a 3-D image, and fed the results into the mainframe. So now the locator spell has something to work with."
 

"Okay," Linda said, "I think I understand that."

"You're one up on me. Anyway, what we're going to do is this. We're going to riffle through whole bunches of universes and let the spell sniff at each one. If Melanie shows up in any of them an alarm will sound. When that happens, we enter that universe and Goofus tracks her down. Got that?"
 

"Got it."

"Simple and straightforward. And highly implausible."

The whine of the craft's engines increased in pitch. The
Sidewise Voyager
's occupants felt a barely perceptible sensation of thrust.
 

"Okay, here we go."

There appeared outside the viewport a flickering montage of rapidly changing scenes, similar to the effect produced by a motion picture film in which each frame is a discontinuous and separate image — or by a slide projector gone berserk. Each image appeared only long enough to persist in the human (and probably nonhuman) visual apparatus, a fraction of a second at most.
 

They sat and watched. Nothing else happened for a good while. At the top of the computer screen an intelligible message appeared — ALL SYSTEMS GO, GUYS.
 

Gene gave up trying to make sense of the instruments and sat back. "Well, this could go on forever, since there are an infinite number of universes. Or variations on the same universe."
 

"Which is it?" Linda asked.

"I dunno. I think the latter. Look at this stuff. Each universe has a world, a planet really, in it, right underneath us. There may be universes in which there isn't a planet, or maybe no planets at all. But if that's true, we haven't run into one yet. I guess what we would be seeing would be empty space."
 

"It's hard to make anything of that jumble out there," Linda said. "It goes by so fast."

"Yeah. It's like we're skipping across the surface of the big pond of space-time, skipping like a stone, touching but not really entering the water."
 

"There's not much feeling of motion."

"No. How're you doing, Snowy?"

Snowclaw said, "I'm fine, except I got a cramp in my leg."

Gene shifted a little. "Is that better?"

Snowclaw moved his leg. "Yeah, thanks."

"Well, at least the thing works," Linda said.

"Seems to be working."

Flashing red lights appeared on the control panel.

"What's that?"

Gene peered at the instruments. "I don't know."

More warning lights appeared, flashing ominously. Soon the whole panel looked like an eight-alarm fire.

"Gene, are we in trouble?"

"Uh . . . yeah. Massive systems failure, it looks like. Either that or there's a sale at Kmart."

"Is Jeremy still in control?"

The computer screen was blank.

"Looks like we lost contact. We're on our own."

Outside the craft, the flickering had stopped. A vast red sky was the main feature. Below was an ocean edged by a thin strip of beach. The whole scene was suffused with red light.
 

"Are we going to crash?" Linda asked.

The ground was slowly getting closer.

"No, this thing becomes an aircraft when it enters a universe. There's enough left of the control system to land us, it looks like."
 

The craft settled slowly, but not slowly enough to avoid landing with jarring bump. The whine of the engines died, and there was quiet.
 

Gene exhaled. "Well. That's that. Unless we can fix this thing, here we stay."

"Where are we?"

They looked out. Something very unusual was in the sky, a great swollen sphere of redness, bathing everything in its dim light.