"Van Lustbader, Eric - Black Blade(eng)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Van Lustbader Eric)

There was no set time when Arquillo would appear; he would come when he would come, and Wolf would sense his approach. As always, after he had identified his quarry, Wolf knew the identity of Arquillo's next victim. There was a synchronicity between victim and murderer, he had found, as if the stalker was somehow able to tap into the life pulse of the victim - as unique as an individual's fingerprints - and match his own pulse to the other, identifying in some way with the victim, with what was to come, the cessation of breath, sound, heat: life.
Wolf closed his eyes, thought he could sense both Bobby and Junior, although in truth he couldn't be sure, and wondered not for the first time whether his talent was genuine - or merely some form of eerie parlour trick beyond his ken.
'Kill you, maricone!'
Wolf turned his head towards the barked shout, the movement in the street below, saw a squat Puerto Rican with a barrel chest running after a lithe young man, skin so black it glistened like oil in the light reflected off the rutted pavement. The two men raced diagonally across the street, through the sulphurous steam billowing up through an iron manhole cover and out the other side, around the black Firebird. In their wake, laughter rather than concern over the murderous intent from the spectators who lived in this Brechtian theatre, who had nowhere else to go when the curtain came down on the last act.
Wolf felt something, as of a puff of wind inside his mind, as he became aware of Arquillo. He heard the snik! of the gravity blade. Even though it came from very close at hand, he did not turn his head; he had the vivid premonition that, as with a shark that had tasted blood, any movement on his part would result in the commencement of an attack with which he could not effectively deal.
Arquillo was crouched behind him, a big man, muscular, with a sense of subliminal menace that, like an ocean's tide reducing cliffs to boulders and thence to the. rubble of sand, caused in those close to him the surge of primeval fear.
Arquillo crept towards Wolf's back, secure in his safety in the shadows of the roof, the stealth of his attack. Wolf felt the murderous intent as Arquillo leaned forward, tongue licking dry lips.
Wait, Wolf whispered to himself. Wait. At the last instant, he spun, already in a crouch, and there was Arquillo in motion, handsome moustachioed face like a bull, with the square shoulders and majestic bearing of a matador, lunging towards his kidneys.
Everything and everyone else was still. Wolf was acutely aware of a suspension of the snow swirling, the bonfires in the reservation of New York's damned, the hiss of traffic over slick pavement, the continuing altercation that might possibly be resolved by murder, the bark of a dog denied its meagre scavenged meal.
In the slowness of time came magnification. Wolf swung to the side, saw Arquillo's face distorted by hatred and the killing effort. He saw his own reflection miniaturized in a bead of sweat hanging at the end of Arquillo's sideburn.
Then from stillness, there was motion. An instant before the point of the knifeblade would have punctured his flesh, Wolf's right elbow crashed into Arquillo's forearm. For a time, they were locked in an almost immovable struggle, veins popping, hearts pumping desperately, lunging, surging with inhalation and exhalation, muscles knotted, pitted one against the other, as bull and matador, in the end, come together, locked in a dance of death. The viscous snow whirled down all the harder, hanging from his brows and eyelashes, tasting of iron and cinders, and then he gritted his teeth, applied the last ounce of leverage he could manage. In that next heartbeat, the sharp, sickening crack as the radius, then the ulna splintered.
Arquillo's handmade gravity knife, with which he had disembowelled three effete men - the mules of a rival drug dealer? Ex-lovers? Or the connection between the four something unfathomable except in madness? - lay on the dark rooftop empty of menace, as innocent as a child's finger. Arquillo slammed the heel of his good hand into the bridge of Wolf's nose with sickening impact.
Wolf took off after Arquillo, thinking of alerting Bobby and Junior via his throat mike, but changing his mind as he swung open the metal door to the roof, listened for five seconds, gauging distance and direction of his quarry's flight, took the iron stairs three at a time. Selfish of him to want Arquillo himself, but there was something undeniably intimate between the two of them now, the stealthy approach, the slow dance of death on the rooftop a personal challenge, that swing at the kidneys the slap in the face that signals the intent to duel, an affair of honour now. The killing effort on Arquillo's face etched into Wolf's memory; the dark pupils fixed on death were what Wolf imagined those three effete men had seen in the instant before Arquillo had taken their lives.
The girl Arquillo had been after this time lived on the fourth floor, in a half-abandoned apartment, scoured by fire, more suited to the rats and roaches that nested in its darkest corners. And yet, Wolf had discovered earlier tonight, this girl had three mattresses stuffed with cash, nothing smaller than fifty-dollar bills. Evidence that Arquillo wasn't stone loco, but was motivated by business concerns? Perhaps. But then why didn't he hire someone to off the competition; why take the risk of doing the wet work himself? Unless it kicked him into gear.
Wolf hit the door to the girl's apartment at a run, the wood not giving him as much resistance as the awful stench within of a graveyard overturned by an army of bodysnatchers. His eyes watered as profusely as if someone had thrown formaldehyde in his face.
He heard the girl screaming and he thought: this is what Arquillo wanted, to kill her after he had warned me of his presence. Once again, he did not know how he knew this, did not question the truth of it. And just how Arquillo had become aware of him was another question to ponder, after Arquillo had been taken into custody. It was discomfiting, to say the least, for the watcher to be made aware that he had become the watched.
Like a hound he could smell the blood, thick and cloying, like confetti at New Year's. The taste filled his mouth, making him want to gag. He went swiftly from room to room, dizzy with a surfeit of stenches and the mirror of the girl's imminent death held up to him by Arquillo, as if the bastard knew - how could he know? -of the link that drew Wolf to him as surely as sonar brings a destroyer to a submarine.
Rotting burlap, used to keep the cold out of a heatless apartment, slapped dolefully, like the fitful thrashing of a child with night terrors. Wolf rounded a corner, saw the thin cocoa hand, fist, really, clutching burlap to bring it down or the body that belonged to it up.
He became aware of a rhythmic sound, as of an engine labouring beneath a load too great for it, but there was an obscene quality to it that he recalled from rookie days patrolling sleazy peep-shows on Eighth Avenue, cheap plywood floor and walls sticky with ejaculate and Vaseline.
He was aiming for the body because a shot through the head would mean finis for them both, Wolf and Arquillo, because he very much wanted to take this one back alive, even knowing that it was pride that pricked him now like a thorn, a desire to drag this beast among miserable beasts into One Police Plaza like a trophy, and make of him if not a spectacle then at least an example for the other monsters out there.
He thought of the Romans then, great warriors, un-defeatable in their heyday, with their massive shields, because Arquillo was using the girl, draped over him from shoulder to shin, in just that way. Arquillo's expression made him seem even more the bull. His lips were pulled back from his teeth, his breaths were coming in small, excited pants and his eyes had that look people get when they are engaged in a private act. His broken arm held the girl tight and, on his face, Wolf could see that surge of endorphins killing any pain he might feel from the pressure he was exerting on it. He didn't care about his own pain - he had other things on his mind.
Wolf hesitated - fatal because maybe, just maybe, he had had a split-second when Arquillo's right temple was exposed, and for a NYPD-certified sharpshooter like Wolf, a high percentage risk even in this low light. Then the girl, her face pale and pinched with pain and fear, moaned, and Wolf saw that she was exsanguinating.
How far had Arquillo gone with his butcher's work? It was impossible to say, but the moral dilemma facing Wolf was what if she had already lost so much blood that she would be DOA no matter what action he took, if he put his gun up, put three shots into the human shield at close range to get at least one bullet into Arquillo. But that kind of thinking would never do, no matter the circumstances.
Arquillo gave him a wide grin, just as if they had engaged in a hard-fought but friendly round of golf and, exposing a homemade hand scythe formed from three razor blades, held the girl up by her hair, sliced right across her, throat-neck-spine, one-two-three, just like that, severing her head from the rest of her and, with a laugh, tossing it like a bloody ball at Wolf.
Blood all over him, Wolf leaped past the decapitated girl, reaching the window through which Arquillo had exited. He was on his way down, already two floors below on the rusty fire escape that ran along the tenement's spine like a scar that would never heal. Wolf moved, but this time he raised Bobby and Junior on the mike, gave them Arquillo's likely egress point from the building.
'Got him!' he heard Bobby's tinny voice from the receiver in his ear canal.
He was almost to the second storey when he heard the shots, a flurry of eruptions not so very out of place in this unquiet and unfriendly neighbourhood.
Wolf hit the pavement running, bent his shoe soles to the concrete of the garbage-piled alley. He rounded a corner, saw Bobby Connor kneeling over the prostrate form of Junior Ruiz, said, 'Shit!' under his breath, and then, when he recognized the blank look in Junior's eyes, said more loudly, 'Where is he?'
Bobby stood up. His hands were covered with Junior's blood. The two men looked as if they belonged in an abattoir. He pointed, mute with shock, to a corner of the alley. Wolf went across, kicked the body over. Chucho Arquillo's mahogany matador's face was covered with blood.
'Good work, Bobby,' he said.
'I - I didn't do anything, Lieutenant.'
Wolf, hearing some hoarse and semi-hysterical note, looked back at Bobby.
'What the hell is it?'
'Look,' Bobby said. Then, swallowing hard, 'Look at the bastard's face.'
Wolf turned back to Arquillo's corpse, the dark face made so familiar to him over the past seven weeks as it hung in his mind like a black moon. The blood still seemed to be bubbling out of wounds he could not see. He knelt, looked more closely. Really bubbling, as if with a terrific heat that emanated from the inside of Arquillo's body. He started. Had he seen the flicker of a flame dancing along the edge of the cheekbone? But, no, that was impossible. Still... He put a hand out, over the face, and felt a heat he could not explain.
Wolf stood up and, acknowledging Bobby's reluctance to approach Arquillo's corpse, came over to where he stood, shivering. Bobby, in his early thirties, broad-shouldered and strong, with an open Midwestern face, pale-blue eyes and sandy hair, looked like he could use several stiff drinks. Wolf put a steadying hand on his shoulder. 'Just tell me what happened here.'
He could see Bobby struggling to maintain his composure, said, 'If you're gonna be sick, do it, there's no shame in it.'
Bobby nodded, wiped the cold sweat from his brow, said a bit shakily, 'I'm all right, Lieutenant.' And, when Wolf nodded encouragement, began again. 'Junior and I saw Arquillo coming down and we identified ourselves. He was already in shadow. There's so much of it in here.' He shivered again as he looked around the black alley. 'Anyway, after Arquillo hit the ground everything seemed to happen at once, and I don't know - I'm not sure what happened. We both had our guns out. Junior fired first, and he thought he'd gotten him. He went into the shadows and I covered him. Then I heard two shots and Junior was thrown back almost into my face.' He stopped there, as if come to the end of his debriefing.
'And then you saw Arquillo,' Wolf prompted.
Bobby shook his head. 'I saw something but I don't know what it was. It was like a - I don't know - a fireball, a blue fireball. I heard a sizzle, smelled - Jesus, the smell was sickening. Then someone screamed - Arquillo, I'm sure, and he came staggering out of the blackness. One arm was hanging like it was broken, but the other hand was held to his face. His burning face.'
Bobby blew out air very fast as if by these hearty exhalations he could rid himself of the memory.
Wolf, thinking of the heat, the hint of a flame flickering along Arquillo's cheekbone at the periphery of his vision, said, 'I want you to think about this carefully, Bobby. Arquillo was on fire, is that right?'
Bobby looked at him. 'His face. Only his face.'
Sirens coming. Wolf could hear their familiar clamour even this far off. He said gently, 'Then what happened?'
'Then something went past me.'
'You mean someone.''
Yeah, I guess. To be honest, Lieutenant, I don't know what the fuck it was. It was dark and thick.'
'Heavy, you mean.'
'No.' Bobby shook his head. 'Thick, like syrup, like a stew, filling the alley. It felt like it had suddenly got darker in here.'
A cold sensation began to wind itself like a viper through Wolf's belly. He used his mind to search the vicinity for a new aura, perhaps stronger even than Arquillo's, but there was nothing, not even a lingering afterscent. The viper, already having been awakened, began to stir, coiling and uncoiling restlessly.