Ladies' Night (14 page)

She stopped. He fell back to the bed, sweating and unable to speak, his old-man's smell filling the room.

He felt the thin light blade on him then and there was still enough of a doctor in him to know what she was doing. He felt the blade sink deep into the top of his left thigh, pull down across the femoral artery and slice through his genitals, withdrawing, its arc completed, at the top of his right thigh.

And somewhere inside all his screams he heard the wet bubbling sound from within and knew that everything was slipping out inside him, sliding out into the light of the bedroom, all the secrets inside and that she would see it all, finally.

He cried and felt an overwhelming shame.

On the second floor Elizabeth slept, silent and peaceful.

The birch tree brushed her window, a gentle scratching sound against the screen. The fine brown ringlets of hair across her forehead stirred. Her naked back glowed in the streetlight. Her skin drank in the cooling breeze.

In the garden below Lydia, her mouth caked with her own and Sheldon's blood, stared up at the pale white glowing flesh of the tree and saw instead another tree in the yard of her childhood home in Morristown, New Jersey, a town she'd not revisited since she'd opened the bookstore.

She and her brother used to climb it. It was a beautiful tree. It almost made her want to cry.

She wondered if the branches would hold her.

Elizabeth slept.

~ * ~

Susan awoke from a dream in which her father, long dead, was giving a press conference.

He was telling reporters that yes, he knew his daughter was a homosexual but that she had committed no crime and he would support her completely during this her hour of need. Reporters scribbled in their pads. Behind them, unnoticed on the lawn, Susan lay in bed with her lover, a woman much younger than she but whose face she could not see because it was buried between her thighs. She and her lover were naked, writhing with passion. Her father looked young and stern and vigorous.

Then Tom was at the podium, telling reporters that in his opinion Susan ought to be walled up forever and fed through a slot in the door. Period.

She got up and led her lover into a forest. Her lover's hands were tied behind her back. Susan kept pushing her until she found a suitable tree and then slung the rope she carried over the tree and the hangman's noose over the woman's head and began to hoist her up. Her lover's feet kicked as though she were trying to run and then began to twitch. She felt a sudden sadness.

She woke up thinking of Andy.

Her thinking was unstructured, without logic, but obsessive. Andy, Andy and Andy again, his image, his name — a strange claustrophobic sense of him coming from deep inside her like a wound opening and closing, pulsing over her.

She got up and went to his room and stood silent at his bedside.

She knelt beside the bed and smelled the musty odor of sleep. She leaned forward, heart racing, something urgent and irresistible happening inside her — and only then, in the grip of it, knew why she'd come.

Her hands moved lightly, delicately over the small thin chest and arms and shoulders, his small tight musculature beneath the cotton pajamas.

He stirred but did not waken.

A cauldron shuddered within her. Inside it something rising.

Her fingers found his wrists and gripped them. His eyes flashed open. Hatred, hunger and something twisted but which was also love drew lines of fire through her veins. The ache inside was immense and horrible and bore his name.

A wash of tears quivered in her eyes.

His breath upon her face was a fluttering of wings.

She moved closer. Her pale lips parted.

"Wait a minute," said Phil. "You're talking about the Dorset? Big fucking high-rise over at 68th and Broadway?"

"That's right."

"You're gonna love this. I know a guy's got
guns
over there.”

“What?"

"Sure. Real good friend of mine. Name's Glen Sharkey. You know him?"

"It's a big building."

"Glen's a retired cop, off the force maybe two years now. He's got a Colt .45 and a .22 something-or-other — guns aren't my specialty. But I've seen 'em both. Keeps 'em in his bedroom closet. Even if he's not there, I know where to find ‘em." The big man laughed and stepped behind the bar. "Hell, I've got his keys here! Glen drinks a little. I keep a set in case he gets forgetful."

He punched open the cash register and took a key out of the drawer and used it on a small metal box next to the register. There must have been a dozen sets of labeled keys in there. Evidently the
cop
was not Phil's only customer who drank a little.

He found the ones he wanted.

"Here we go," he said. "We're set."

"You mean you want to come along?"

"I guess we're
all
coming along, right? Just
listen
to that shit!" The pounding was incessant now. Nails were coming loose all the time and had to be hammered back again.

Their armor was looking decidedly frail.

"Besides I
know
that place," said Phil. "It's built like a concrete bunker."

"He's right about that," said Tom. "Built it that way for fire. The only way into an apartment unless you can scale the side of a building is through the front door, reinforced steel and aluminum plated. Again because of fire. That way you don't need sprinklers."

"That leaves the problem of getting out of here," said Neil.

"Okay, let's see what we got," said Phil. "Knives in the kitchen. Plenty of bottles. Got three fire extinguishers, one here behind the bar and one in the kitchen and one in the basement. And I think I can get us out through that door now without a hitch."

"How?" said Bailey.

"I got the idea looking at the first aid kit, the rolls of gauze there. Any of you guys do any cooking? Ever make anything
flambe
?" No one answered.

"Okay. No cooks. But suppose we took some of these hundred-proof bottles of cognac, some one-ten green chartreuse, some one-oh-one Wild Turkey and one-fifty rum and Polish vodka. Suppose we put 'em in a pot filled with water and heated 'em, then stuffed their mouths with gauze. Wouldn't we have some kind of low-grade Molotov cocktails we could brew up here?"

"Damn!" said Bailey.

"Throw the bottles at their feet," said Neil, "and point the extinguishers in their faces. They'd never know what hit '
ern
. We could do it."

"We're gonna do it," said Phil. "Let's go!"

For
Lederer
it was a first. He'd never given chase to a squad car before. He'd never expected to. It was a new experience.

But tonight was a night of a lot of firsts.

He'd never shot a kid for instance. But the little girls were as bad as their mamas, he'd found that out the hard way stepping out into a pack of them and got a screwdriver stuck in his leg for his trouble. The wound was just a flesh wound but when she'd raised it again going for his chest and the little girl beside her started swiping at him with the broken bottle, he'd shot them both and got the hell back in the car before the rest of them could get into the act.

And now they were chasing a squad car.

It was nuts.

The car swung west on 46th, fishtailing like a
sonovabitch
.
Horgan
pulled them neatly around and gained on her a bit.
Lederer
sat with his .38 in his lap watching her long dark hair tossing in the wind through the open window, waiting for a halfway decent shot at her. He didn't have to worry about pedestrians because the streets were mostly deserted by now except for stragglers here and there who had not found shelter yet. Or women. And the women were all lethal anyway. So he wouldn't have minded one bit if he could have piled her into one of these storefronts here with a bullet in her damn skull.

They knew now that it was not going to go away, that the women infected were going to stay infected and that was that, that this was all some crazy Pentagon Vietnam old-boy
gameplan
to make war on men by making war on their women but which they'd never dared to use because they knew what the press would do with it, an airborne chemical poison, a psychosexual hormone cocktail for god's sake designed to drive them
batshit
and terminally homicidal, a final batch of which somebody had overlooked for years and decided to move through the city as fast as possible before the talking heads got wind of it, on its way to its allotted final resting place in the Atlantic, but it had not made it to the Atlantic, it had stopped right here
.

There was nothing to do but ride it out and let it take its filthy course and come in with the troops as soon as possible. He understood that was being arranged.

Wonderful.

Meanwhile they were engaged in a holding action. The holding action had cost them cop after cop tonight. It was not going to cost them
Lederer
. He had Millie to think of for one thing. He was glad she was up there out of it.

Not like this one.

~ * ~

Mary Silver saw a tall black man in her headlights and thought,
Hitler. Hefner. Rape
.

She slowed the squad car a little so she could go after him on the sidewalk. Her headlights and fender were already splashed with blood. Mary smelled more on the way.

The man saw her coming much too late and went over the grille like an acrobat, like a tumbler, leg bones turned to powder at mid-thigh. She felt the impact throughout her body and the sensation pleased her enormously. First the whack against the bumper, the slide across the hood, then the head-on crash through the windshield on the passenger side. The man stayed there too, his head halfway through the broken safety-glass, dripping blood on the dirty carpet.

She'd found the car at Lincoln Center. Its once uniformed passengers were lying in a steaming heap across the stone staircase leading to the fountain. They'd been doused with gasoline but that had already burned away and two large dogs were at the bodies. Mary avoided the dogs carefully and slipped inside the car. She dropped her knife out the window. She wouldn't be needing it now. The car was better.

She drove around the park and managed to hit three men in a group, laughing as they flew like bowling pins in front of her. She missed a fourth when he ran up on the grass into the trees. At Central Park South she saw a short fat man in front of the Plaza. His tuxedo had already been torn somehow and he was scared and running, probably running home, but when he saw the police car he stopped and Mary ran him over. She could still picture him alive and howling, pasted like a bug on the sidewalk, as she drove away.

She proceeded down Fifth Avenue, and that was where the second squad car started following her.

She didn't mind. Company was okay too.

~ * ~

Lederer
saw her hit the black man but there was nothing they could do to stop it. By the time she picked up speed again they were almost abreast of her. He got off a shot at her.
Horgan
kept on her good and tight. She skirted a cab, grazed a hydrant. At Broadway she turned south so that now there was room for them to pull up next to her on the right. He squeezed off two rounds and saw one of them clip the inside driver side door. Almost, but no cigar.

Her car was swinging wildly now, as though the woman were losing control, but she kept it on the street at least, and
Horgan
was keeping up with her. The black guy on her hood stayed with her too, his right arm swinging up and down like Gregory Peck's on the back of the whale at the end of
Moby Dick
. It was dead weight keeping him up there — that and his head lodged in the fucking windshield.

At 42nd she turned west again, tires screeching.
Come on
, he thought,
make a mistake. We almost got you
. But then he and the woman must have seen the guy in front of the Lyric at exactly the same time because he knew she was going to swerve over in their direction and go after him way before it happened and he yelled
look out!
as the front fender glided toward them.

Horgan
was good. But nobody was
that
good. She slid them off the road and over the curb at maybe fifty miles an hour into the plate glass window of the porn shop next to the Lyric and when he opened his eyes again he saw S/M magazines and
lesbo
and
kiddie
porn lying all over the floor and the hood of the car was plowed through a glass case full of dildos and fuck movies and the handcuffs in his lap were not his own, but had slipped off a rack that lay broken and leaning against the passenger side door.

~ * ~

There were two trophies on her prowl car now. This newest could not have been more than eighteen. He'd jumped the wrong way — exactly the way Mary was turning. When she hit him she was doing sixty and his body lay wedged between the hood and the fender like a foot-long hot dog on a steaming bun.