******
Las Vegas
The cell in the city lock-up was totally wrecked. Its bars were broken and steel door burst asunder like a herd of buffalo had run through cardboard toilet paper rolls. The bodies had been removed from the corridor, but bloodstains still splattered the floor and half way up the walls to the ceiling. Ray had seen worse, but not often.
“How many cops were killed?” Ray asked.
“Seven,” Captain Martinez said through clenched teeth.
Ray looked up at the sharpness of the tone in her voice. “Hey, don’t blame me. I warned you.”
She sighed. Her dark, short hair was plastered to her skull with sweat which ran in runnels down her full cheeks. Her eyes were big, soft, and brown. They were not cop eyes. She herself was big, soft, and brown. She looked as if she were out of her depth. Ray actually felt somewhat sorry for her. Clearly she was not used to dealing with killer aces.
“You got any aces on the roll call?” Ray asked.
“Quite a few,” she said. “Mostly telepaths and a few precogs who work out of bunco. Assigned mostly to casino duty trying to keep scumbag wild carders from ripping the casinos blind.”
Ray just looked at her.
“Sorry,” she said after a moment, her eyes avoiding his.
“That’s all right,” Ray said flatly. “I’ve dealt with a few scumbag wild carders in my day. A few scumbag nats, too. I suggest you take your best telepaths and precogs off keeping the casinos safe from losing a couple of bucks to rogue gamblers and put them on scouring the city to keep your citizens safe from a homicidal maniac.”
“Of course.” Martinez turned to a group of horrified-looking assistants who were clustered around her. “You heard the man.”
One of them nodded, and ran off.
Ray looked into the cell. Butcher Dagon’s one-piece orange jumpsuit lay shredded among the twisted metal that was once his bunk. Fortunately, he hadn’t had a roommate, or else what was left of him would have been lying on the floor in pieces as well.
“Were all the bodies fully dressed?” he asked.
“What?” the Captain asked.
Ray looked at her coldly. “I’m beginning to think that you’re out of your depth here, Captain. Dagon loses his clothes when he transforms into his fighting form. I was wondering if he’d managed to dress after waltzing out of your cell here, or if we’re still dealing with a naked homicidal maniac. If that’s the case, he should be a little easier to spot, and we’re going to need all the help we can get with this one.”
Martinez looked at another one of her assistants, a tall, thin man with a prominent Adam’s apple that bobbed nervously every time he swallowed.
“Well.” Swallow. “I don’t know.” Swallow. “Some of the bodies.” Long swallow. “Were pretty... damaged.” Swallow.
“Find out,” Martinez said between clenched teeth.
He nodded, swallowing, and ran off as well.
Ray shook his head. “Not much we can do until he’s spotted.”
Martinez nodded. “I was afraid you were going to say that. I was hoping...”
Ray shrugged as her voice trailed off.
“I’m a fighter,” he said. “Not a finder. Our best hope is the telepaths and precogs. Our second best is the ordinary citizen. If this burg has any ordinary citizens. You’ve got to put the word out, publicize his escape like Hell. Let everyone know he’s dangerous. Someone has to have seen the hairy little bastard.”
Martinez frowned. “That’ll only cause a panic. Plus, we’ll look bad.”
“You’ll look worse,” Ray pointed out, “as the body count mounts. Now you’ve got a cop killer running around. The citizens are sympathetic. But when—not if, but when—Dagon adds a couple of ordinary citizens to his score, all Hell will break out. You’ve got to let the public know what’s going on.”
Martinez nodded reluctantly.
“Put me in a room with him,” Ray promised, “and I’ll take care of him. Until then, I’ve got to be patient and wait. Just like you.”
Martinez nodded again.
Ray had the feeling that this was going to be a long, difficult wait.
Staten Island: Nighthawk’s Nest
Cameo spread the comforter that Nighthawk had given her upon the living room sofa. It was new, right out of its plastic wrapping. She settled down on it and closed her eyes for a moment, then looked at Nighthawk.
“Ready?” she asked.
He nodded from the adjacent loveseat. He reached into his inside jacket pocket and took out the harmonica, turning it over in his hands for a moment. Then he tossed it to her.
Cameo caught it deftly and studied it herself. She put it to her lips and blew a tentative note that came out like a blaaaattt! from a whoopie cushion. She paused, then ran a simple scale, smiled, and a song came spilling out of it that Nighthawk hadn’t heard in a long time. It was Robert Johnson’s “Drunken-Hearted Man,” and before it ended Nighthawk was laughing and crying and clapping his hands in time all at once. He recognized the style in which it was played, and there was no doubt at all in his mind that it was Lightning Robert Nash blowing like he did back in ‘46 when they were both dying together in that charity hospital.
Cameo took the harmonica from her lips and smiled. “You looking good for such an old fart, Nighthawk. Too damn good.”
Choked up with emotion, Nighthawk couldn’t answer for a moment. “I… I got a disease that day. You remember.”
“Hard to forget the day I died, old boy.”
Nighthawk nodded. “I’ve never forgotten, either. This disease went way deep into me, deeper than my flesh, deeper than my bone. It changed me. It gave me powers, Lightning. I can take other peoples’ essence. I can take it from them and use it myself.”
Lightning Robert whistled through Cameo’s lips. “That sounds mighty powerful, John.”
Nighthawk nodded solemnly. “It is. I’ve tried to use it righteously over the years... but that first day... when it first came over me... I didn’t know how to control it.” He looked down, unable to look his old friend in Cameo’s eyes. “I took too much from you, Lightning. And I killed you. I’ve been living all these years afraid that I stole your soul—or part of it—to keep me alive. You, and others, that day.”
Lightning looked at him. “You may have took something from me, John, but it wasn’t my soul.” He laughed. “I seem to still have that. I sure do.”
“I’m glad of that, Lightning.”
“Maybe you killed me.” Cameo’s head shook. “I don’t know. I do know I was old and dying, anyway. The cancer was eating me alive. I hurt. Man, how I hurt. If you were able to take the pain away and by the way send me home, well, John, we was friends. I wouldn’t begrudge you that.”
“Thank you, Lightning.”
“My pleasure, John.” He looked around. “Where am I, anyway?”
“You’re in the body of a young lady named Cameo. She was able to call you back by holding your harmonica.”
Lightning looked down at it, held in her small white hands. “You live in a strange world, John Nighthawk.”
Nighthawk laughed. “You don’t know the half of it, Lightning. I’m a hundred and fifty years old now. In my time men have walked on the moon and visited the planets of another star. Men can fly. They can read your mind. They can turn invisible and disappear. They can do most anything except bring peace to the world.”
Lightning shook his head. “Then I’m glad I’m where I am and you’re here. You was always one for stirring things up, John. I was the quiet one.”
They sat in silence for a moment like old friends who hadn’t seen each other in decades enjoying an unexpected meeting.
Then Nighthawk asked, “What’s it like, Lightning, where you’re at now?”
Lightning looked at him and smiled. “I can’t rightly say, John. It’s like I don’t know anything past the time my heart stopped beating, but there’s dreams, like, I can almost remember. Dreams of a place that feels like home.”
“Is that all you can say?”
“That’s all I can say.”
Nighthawk nodded. It was enough. He knew now that he hadn’t destroyed his friend’s soul all those years ago. If he had, Cameo would never have been able to call it back from wherever it was now.
“You got to get back right away?” Nighthawk asked.
Lightning Robert Nash considered. “I can sit awhile. Play some tunes.”
“That’d be nice,” Nighthawk said.
“You know this one,” Lightning said, and put the mouth organ to his lips and started to blow “Sweet Home Chicago.”
John Nighthawk clapped his hands and sung in a sweet baritone that age had not dulled.
Those who heard them faintly through the walls of Nighthawk’s small house were mesmerized by the music. It sounded like nothing they’d ever heard before, as if it were being played by spirits, or perhaps angels.
Las Vegas
Ray spent the afternoon with a special flying SWAT squad investigating Butcher Dagon’s progress through Las Vegas, which was marked by a tidal wave of unsubstantiated rumor and a smaller trail of very substantiated bodies spread across the city in no discernible pattern.
The SWAT team guys were all right, but Ray would have felt better if they’d had at least some other wild carders in the field who had some useful powers. It turned out, however, that the Las Vegas PD was not exactly on the cutting edge when it came to hiring non-nats. Not that the telepaths pulled off casino patrol by Captain Martinez didn’t have their uses.
The command center that Martinez set up to deal with the Dagon situation got over five hundred tips in the first four hours, thanks mainly to Ray’s suggestion to publicize the killer ace’s escape as widely as possible. It was hard to separate the few clearly authentic sightings from cases of mistaken identity from the ravings of the lunatic fringe, but the telepaths helped. They were able to immediately discredit the obvious loonies and attention-seekers, but plenty of dead ends were left that had to be investigated.
The widespread publicity also led to a series of unfortunate gaffes. Six portly tourists were mistaken for Dagon and arrested before they could be vetted and cleared by the telepaths. Two other innocents were assaulted by irate vigilante bands, one in a cheap dive off the strip, the other in a gay bar that was having teddy bear day. Fortunately neither were seriously injured.
Ray and the SWAT guys, backed up by experienced homicide detectives, investigated four bodies that were found with Dagon’s M.O.—excessively brutal violence—literally stamped all over them, but by the time the bodies had been discovered the crime scenes were cold. There were no witnesses, no clues as to Dagon’s current whereabouts.
Around sunset a fifth body was found behind an abandoned 7-11 in a poorer section of the city. It had been stuffed between the back seat and the floor of a vehicle that had been left in the alley behind the deserted building, the keys still in the ignition.
“What’s bothering me,” Ray said to the SWAT team commander,
“is, what is Dagon thinking? There doesn’t seem to be a pattern to his activities. Yeah, he’s out of jail, he’s on the run, but what’s he trying to accomplish here? What’s his ultimate goal in all this wandering around?”
“Maybe he’s changing his hiding spots,” the SWAT guy said. “But he can’t stay hidden forever, especially if he keeps littering the city with bodies. He must have some kind of goal in mind—maybe he’s trying to reach a safe house. Maybe someplace where he can connect with his gang again.”
Ray nodded. He looked thoughtfully at the back of the 7-11. It was boarded up and graffiti-ed to Hell and back. “You may be right,” he said, strolling toward the structure.
He tried the rear door. It was unlocked. He looked at the SWAT lieutenant, who stared back, and then silently waved his arms to his men to gain their attention. Ray opened the door slowly, and from inside the structure came the sound of some animal howling a long, drawn-out, lingering greeting. It sounded almost human.
“Jesus Christ,” Ray said. He threw open the door, and looked inside the abandoned store.
It was a dusty and dirty confusion of toppled shelves, of empty refrigerated drink banks, of merchandise racks tossed in untidy piles. And on the far wall was a door. It wasn’t a normal door. It was just a black-semi circle imposed upon the wall which once held shelves laden with motor oil and pet food and pork rinds. A couple of men were walking right through the blackness, disappearing as if they’d been cut in half, but seemingly unconcerned by what should be a discomfiting experience.
They looked back at Ray as he came through the door, and one of them shouted, “Jesus Christ! It’s that Ray fucker!” before he plunged further onward and disappeared.
A disconcertingly human-looking dog, or maybe a disconcerting canine-looking human, was standing next to the gateway. He was held by another man on a leash, and he was fawning over Butcher Dagon, who was in his human form. Dagon looked less jolly than usual. His clothes were tattered and bloodstained, and he was pushing disgustedly at what Ray now realized was a particularly unfortunate-looking joker, saying, “Down, Blood, down.”
He, too, turned to look at Ray. He didn’t look happy at Ray’s sudden appearance.
“Your ass is mine, Dagon,” Ray said happily. “Again.”
“Move it,” the man holding Blood’s leash said as Ray charged across the room, dodging empty merchandise racks, “you’ve got to go through first before Blood can close the gate.”
“Shit,” Dagon said, and plunged through the blackness, Blood and his handler on his heels.
If Ray had a clear shot across the room, he would have had him. He would have pounced on Dagon before he could disappear. As it was, he had to zigzag around and jump over half a dozen obstacles, and as he reached the far wall Blood’s handler had already dragged the joker through the blackness. Blood’s hindquarters were disappearing. The blackness was starting to dilate shut like the closing of a pupil in a bright flash of light.
Ray heard the SWAT team charging after him. He heard their cries of amazement. He didn’t hesitate. He hurled himself, diving arms outstretched at the shrinking pool of blackness. He went into it head first. The shouts from the SWAT team were cut off as if by a knife. He heard nothing. For a disconcerting moment that might have lasted hours for all he could tell, he saw nothing, neither darkness nor light. He felt nothing, neither coolness nor warmth. He wondered if this was what death was like. If this was the Big Nothing. The sensation, or lack of sensation, of a spirit plunging endlessly through limbo. He was suddenly afraid. This was something that could drive a man mad in little order. To be stuck inside his mind, feeling nothing, forever. He concentrated as hard as he could, questing outward with all his senses. Suddenly he felt a low thrumming throb, and he realized that it was a single beat of his heart, stretching out impossibly long, its reverberations filling up the universe.
Abruptly, it ended.
He fell on his face on grass and dirt. It was dark, nighttime, wherever he was. Air felt cool and soothing on his skin. His knee hurt a little from where he’d landed right on a sharp-edged pebble. He breathed a sigh of relief. He was back again, somehow, in the real universe.
He looked up at the circle of men who stared down at him with varying degrees of disbelief on their faces. Butcher Dagon. The man and his leashed joker. Three guys with guns.
All right! Ray thought joyously. And he got to work.
A quick-as-a-cat leg-sweep brought down two of the men. He swarmed over them, punching and kicking as Dagon ran off into the night. As the third jerked his rifle into line, Ray yanked it away from him and tossed it away over the small, rustic building that was at their back. The man tried to run, but Ray snagged his ankle before he could take a step, and pulled him down, kicking and screaming and clawing at the dirt. Ray bounced his head once off the ground and he shut up.
Ray got to his feet. The deformed joker cringed before him, huddled against the man holding his leash. “Don’t hurt Blood none, mister,” the handler said. “It ain’t none of his fault what went on.”
“What the Hell is he?” Ray asked.
“He’s an ace, Blood is,” the man said, nodding vigorously. “He can open gates, like, to connect places what are far away from each other. Bring them next door, like. Only,” the man shrugged helplessly, “he ain’t too smart. It ain’t his fault we fell in with bad men.”
“It’s your fault, then?” Ray asked. He stepped closer to the two and Blood whimpered piteously.
“It is,” the man said. “It is my fault.” He put his hand out in a gesture as piteous as Blood’s whimpering. “You don’t know these people, mister. Yeah, I got ourselves mixed up with them. I’m trying to look out for the boy. I’m his brother.” He put his hand down on his Blood’s head, protectively. “I got us working for them, which was a sure enough mistake. These people are mean, mister, I mean mean.”
“Yeah, well, so am I.”
The man nodded. “I know, mister. They’re afraid of you. They truly are.”
That made Ray feel at least a little better. “Well, where the Hell are we, anyway?” he asked.
“Some place called New Hampton,” the man said, and Ray almost did a double take at his revelation.
“The camp?” Ray asked. “The camp where John Fortune is hiding out?”
The man nodded vigorously.
“How they Hell did they discover that the kid was here?”
The man shook his head. Blood, sensing that the mood of the conversation was shifting, tried to smile. “I don’t know. They don’t tell me shit. Just, have Blood take us here, have Blood take us there. You’d think it was easy on the fellow for all they put us through—”
“We all got problems,” Ray said flatly. “Focus on mine.”
“Yessir.”
“The boy’s here?”
“Yessir.”
“They’ve come to get him again?”
“Yessir.”
“Why, for Christ’s sakes?”
“Well, that’s just it. The Allumbrados think he’s the Anti-Christ whom they have to bind in chains if the real Jesus Christ is to come to restore his Kingdom on Earth.”
“Jesus Christ!”
“Yessir.”
Ray didn’t bother to explain that he was just exclaiming, not questioning. Though, in a way he was. This was no time, though, to sort through dubious theology. There’d be time for that later. Maybe.
“How many men have they got?” Ray asked.
“About twenty, counting me’n—”
“Aces?”
“Well, there’s Blood—”
“I know that,” Ray said impatiently.
“—And now Dagon, of course. The Younger Witness—”
“Younger Witness?” Ray repeated.
“Yeah, there’s two Witnessess to Revelations. They’re brothers—”
Ray nodded. “One’s big and blonde—”
“The other’s dark and skinny.”
“Right,” Ray said grimly. “I’ve seen the blonde one in action. He the younger one?”
The man nodded.
“Any more aces?”
The man shrugged. “Nighthawk and his team are supposed to be here, but the Cardinal couldn’t find Nighthawk. He was real peeved about that—”
A cascade of gunfire echoed through the still night, waking it up. Ray turned toward the rolling thunder of sound like a dog on point, practically quivering with eagerness. He turned back to Blood and his brother.
“All right,” he said. “Stay out of this. Get out if you can. But stay out of my way. You’re only getting one warning.”
Blood’s brother nodded. “Yessir. Thank you sir.”
“Don’t thank me,” Ray said, before he vanished into the night. “Just obey me.”
And then he was gone.