The one-armed man stared impassively at the boy sitting on the counter. Finally he sighed. “Let me tell you a parable,” he said. “A man had a new hearing aid, and he was telling a friend how good it was. ‘It cost me twenty thousand dollars,’ the man with the hearing aid said, ‘and it runs on a lithium battery that’s good for a hundred years, and it’s surgically implanted right into the skull bone and the nerve trunk at the base of my brain.’ And his friend said, ‘Wow, what kind is it?’ and the man with the hearing aid looked at his watch and said, ‘Quarter to twelve.’”
Sullivan wished the story had been longer. Surely Nicky would…would somehow come along soon, and perceive this, and put a stop to it. The shotgun was steady, and the man was standing just obviously too far away for Sullivan to have any hope of leaping forward and knocking the short barrels aside before the gun would be fired.
“I’ll give you twenty thousand dollars,” the one-armed man said. “I’ll take that automatic that’s against the wall there, I can hold that on you without being conspicuous. We’ll go out and get the money, and you can tell me then, once I’ve handed it over to you. We’ll be out in public, I won’t be eager to shoot you out in a street. Once I’m unjammed, I can kill anybody and eat ’em, I won’t need you.”
Kootie’s head swung back and forth. “No. You’d still want Thomas Edison.”
The man’s pale face puckered in a derisive smile. “For that much money you’d have told me. You don’t even know how to do it, do you?” He shifted his stance and raised the gun slightly.
“Yes he does!” said Elizalde shrilly.
Kootie turned on her, scowling. “Damn it, Angelica, I do know how this fellow can do it. You don’t need to think you’re…helping some old fool run a bluff.”
“No, no,” said the one-armed man. “You might have known once—but you’re senile now. Hell, you’re what, a hundred and fifty years old?” He snickered. “I can see that you’re wearing a big set of those geriatric diapers right now.”
Kootie’s hands flew to the buttons on his shirt. “I can—damn you—prove you’re wrong.” He was smiling tensely, but his face was red. “This is an electric belt, urine would short it out!” His shaky fingers were making no progress at undoing the buttons. “You’re talking to someone who understands electricity, believe me! I recently received—”
“He’s just taunting you, Edison!” said Elizalde urgently. “Don’t let him get you excited. It’s not worth—”
“You just hired people who understood electricity,” the man with the shotgun interrupted, shaking his head with evident good humor. “You were always just doing dumb stuff like…what was it, trying to make tires out of milkweed sap? That’s proved to have been a real breakthrough, hasn’t it?”
“It happens I recently received a B.S.—”
“Oh really? Where’s your diploma?” The man laughed. “B.S. is right. Bullshit. Why don’t you go ahead and add a Ph.D.? Tiled higher and deeper.’”
Kootie was squirming furiously. “It’s not a, a ‘dipshit diploma,’ you ignorant—”
“So how do I do it, then, if you’re so smart?”
“Edison, don’t—” said Elizalde quickly—
But Kootie’s mouth was already open, and with it Edison said, “I already told you—cross your eyes and spit.”
And now the one-armed man was doing just that. His eyes crossed until the irises had half disappeared in the direction of his nose, as if the pupils might touch each other, behind his nose, and his mouth opened wide.
The barrels of the stumpy shotgun lifted and swung back and forth, and Sullivan pressed himself back against the kitchen counter. He glanced at Kootie, who just shrugged, wide-eyed.
It was as if the one-armed man had a speaker surgically implanted in his larynx—men’s angry voices, crying children, laughing women, a chaotic chorus was shouting out of his lungs.
He might have been trying to spit. His lower jaw rotated around under his nose, and his tongue jerked—and finally one of the voices, a woman’s, shrill and jabbering as if speeded up by some magical Doppler effect, rose and became louder and clearer.
And the one-armed man spit—and then gagged violently, convulsing like a snapped whip—
—As a glistening red snake shot out of his mouth. It was smoking even before it slapped heavily onto the floor, and the instant reek of ammonia and sulfur was so intense that Sullivan, who had involuntarily recoiled from its abrupt appearance, now involuntarily flinched from its fumes. And a chilly, laughing breeze punched past him and instantaneously buckled the blinds and shattered out the window.
Everyone was moving—Kootie had leaped from the counter and was colliding with Elizalde out on the floor in the direction of the broken window and the .45, the red snake-thing was slapping and hopping in front of the one-armed man, who was hunched forward with a rope of drool swinging from his mouth, and Sullivan made himself push off from the kitchen counter and vault over the spasming snake-thing to kick the hand that held the chopped shotgun.
Both shells went off, with a crash like a far-fallen truck slamming through the ceiling. Sullivan had jumped with no thought of anything beyond kicking the gun, and the air compression of the shotgun blasts seemed to loft him farther—his knee cracked the one-armed man’s head and then Sullivan’s shoulder and jaw hit the bedroom doorframe hard, and he bounced off and wound up half-kneeling on the floor.
The room was full of stinging haze, and through squinting, watering eyes he could see Elizalde and Kootie. They were up, moving, opening the front door, in the ringing silence of stunned eardrums. Unable to breathe at all, Sullivan crawled around the wet red snake, which was already splitting and falling apart, and scuttled painfully on his hands and knees toward the daylight and the promise of breathable air. His hands bumped against Houdini’s plaster hands, and he paused to grab them—but they disappeared when he touched them.
He hopped and scrabbled out through the door into the fresh air, rolling over the doorstep onto his back on the chilly asphalt. The breeze was cold on the astringent sweat that spiked his hair and made his shirt cling to him.
Nicky Bradshaw, wearing a sail-like Hawaiian shirt, was standing on the sidewalk, looking down at him with no expression on his weathered old face. Behind Bradshaw were two tensely smiling men in track suits—and each of them held a semiautomatic pistol.
Some kind of the new 9-millimeters, Sullivan thought bleakly; Beretta or Sig or Browning. Ever since Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon, everybody’s crazy about 9-millimeters. He looked down past his belt buckle, and saw Elizalde slowly crouching to place his old .45 on the pavement, watched closely by another of the smiling, trendily armed young men.
Sullivan’s nostrils twitched to a new smell—the burning-candy reek of clove-flavored cigarettes. And when a woman’s voice spoke, barely audible over the ringing in his ears, Sullivan didn’t even need to look to know whose it was. She had, after all, been his boss for eleven years.
“I’m glad they’ve come without waiting to be asked,” said Loretta deLarava. “I should never have known who were the right people to invite! Cuff ‘em all,” she added, “and get ’em into the truck, fast. Nicky and Pete I recognize, and this must be the famous Koot Hoomie Parganas, found at last—but I want all of them. Get anybody who’s inside. Find Pete’s van, and search it and this apartment for my mask. You know what to look for.”