It was a big space, he knew. Unless her habits had changed over the last five years, Phoebe didn’t keep much in it. Three people could stand in there and feel only moderately crowded. Or it could hold three corpses, stacked like cordwood. Jesse sensed no motion from inside. Heard no sound of movement.
“You can’t help them,” Candy said.
Jesse was careful about where he put his weapons as he arrayed them at his feet. Wheeler’s pistol behind the two City pistols. The stun grenade behind that, almost at his heels. He touched the power button of the iPod as he set it down at the front of this collection. The screen lit up as he straightened, icons arranging themselves in a grid of Easter-egg-colored squares. Candy frowned and took a sidelong step, pulling Elizabeth along with him, as if the device might fire a bullet at him. “What is that?”
“It’s harmless,” Jesse said.
“Step away from it.”
“It can’t hurt you.”
“Step back, you dog! I know better than to trust you.”
Blood had begun to flow down Jesse’s arm from the place where Candy’s henchman had shot him. His right hand was slick with it. The pain, radiating from a place between his elbow and the ball of his shoulder, wasn’t unbearable. But three of his fingers had gone numb, a bad sign.
Misdirection, he thought. Something his father had once said, teaching him larcenous card shuffles. Misdirection, the invisible weapon. He took a step back, just as Candy had ordered him to. The heel of his left foot came to rest on the pin of the flash-bang. Candy was troubled and distracted by the eerie glow of the iPod and failed to notice.
But Elizabeth noticed. Even with Candy’s knife at her throat, she managed to cant her jaw in a shadow of a nod.
Footfalls sounded on the stairway beyond the door, Candy’s men coming back to report on the situation downstairs. Maybe Candy wanted them here to see what happened next, beginning with the death of Elizabeth. Jesse’s margin of time had run out. He held his empty hands before him in an imploring gesture. “Please,” he said.
Candy’s madly joyous expression grew even more gleeful. “If you mean to beg, Jesse Cullum, go right ahead! I won’t stop you!”
“Please,” Jesse repeated. The heel of his right foot trapped the pin of the stun grenade and he stepped on the barrel of it with his left, compressing the safety lever as he kicked it away from the pin. The flash-bang rolled behind him, toward Phoebe’s bed and perhaps under it—he dared not look to see where it had gone.
“Please what?” Candy demanded.
One second. Two seconds.
“Please go to hell,” Jesse said.
Elizabeth jammed her hands between her throat and Candy’s wrist. She squeezed her eyes shut, and Jesse did the same.
Shutting his eyes gave him a little protection from the flash, a fiery red starburst, but not from the bang. The bang did what it was designed to do—it boxed his ears, disabled his sense of hearing, induced dizziness and confusion, and interfered with rational thought.
When Jesse opened his eyes, the room was reeling around him. Smoke gusted up from the floor in a sickening chemical reek. He was deaf, but it wasn’t a silent deafness, it was a deafness made out of the ringing of a hundred church bells and the roaring of a thousand dynamos. He saw, in a rolling succession of lightning-flash images:
Elizabeth, who had stumbled out of Candy’s embrace, tugging frantically at the Velcro seam of her trick dress (an angry red line on her throat where Candy’s knife had touched her, but only a drop or so of blood)—
Roscoe Candy, his schoolboy cap askew and both hands empty, his flensing knife on the floor where he had dropped it, weaving in place—
And the door of the room, the knob of which began to rotate as one of Candy’s remaining henchmen turned it from the hallway.
Jesse lurched toward Candy, leaving an open line of sight toward the door for Elizabeth. Elizabeth was peeling off the dress, revealing a cotton undershirt, a pair of ill-fitting men’s trousers, and a small arsenal strapped to her body.
Jesse recovered fully functional vision and a degree of muscular control at about the same time Roscoe Candy did. The murderer locked eyes with him, and Jesse sensed the furious calculation going on behind that reptile stare. He’ll go for the knife or one of the guns, Jesse thought. But which?
Candy was a knife man. Always had been. The knife, Jesse thought. He dived for it himself, hoping to turn it on its owner.
But he had miscalculated. Candy went for the nearest pistol, dropping to the floor with his right arm outstretched and fingers scrabbling at the grip.
Elizabeth had managed to raise her own pistol just as the door flew open. She squeezed off multiple shots, sounds fainter than a parson’s farts to Jesse’s tortured ears, but he felt the concussions in the air like a series of blows.
Jesse took the flensing knife in his hand. The handle was still warm where Candy had been holding it. Candy had got his hand on the grip of the pistol and his finger inside the trigger guard, but before he could raise it Jesse rolled on top of him, kneeling on Candy’s gun arm and pinning him in place with the weight of his body. He brought his other knee hard up against the place Jesse had hurt him once before, that old but still vulnerable wound, and Candy howled loudly enough for Jesse to hear him above the sound of phantom bells.
Elizabeth fired two more shots, perhaps needlessly. The door wheeled fully open, revealing two men dead and another clearly dying—and no one else in sight.
Jesse put the knife to Candy where the point could pass between the slats of his ribs to his heart. No mistake this time. No hesitation. He punched the blade past bone and gristle and the glutinous resistance of dense flesh. He leaned into it, using his weight to keep Candy’s right arm immobilized. Candy flailed fiercely, his heels kicked the carpet, his body bucked like a bull at a Wild West show, but Jesse pushed and kept pushing, surprisingly hard work, like butchering some leathery old hog, until the knife was buried right up to the guard.
It had found a vital point. Roscoe Candy died screaming, but not before he managed to squeeze off a few shots from the pistol, in the only direction he could point it: at the door of Phoebe’s closet.
17
Mercy Kemp wasn’t frightened until she heard the detonations from the California Street mansion.
Well, that wasn’t strictly true. She had spent much of the last two years in a generalized state of anxiety, bordering on fear. Living as a runner, with a man who might as well have had a target painted on his back, had conditioned her to it. But the idea that she could actually be left behind, that she might be permanently stranded in this instantiation of 1877, had only recently begun to feel real. And it felt particularly terrifying now that she was cuffed to Theo Stromberg, in a closed coach on a street above a burning city.
Theo hadn’t taken any of this gracefully, but that wasn’t surprising. Mercy’s infatuation with him had long ago shriveled into an abstract admiration for the work he was doing. From the beginning of their journey into this tranche of Hilbert space, Theo had proved himself to be dogmatic, narcissistic, and arrogant, a textbook pain in the ass. And she was resigned to that. Fact: Important work was often done by unpleasant people. “Can you see anything?” he asked for the third time.
Mercy peered around the edge of the isinglass shade, but nothing had changed. She could see the spectacularly ugly Italianate mansion into which Jesse Cullum and Elizabeth DePaul had apparently vanished, she could see the glow of the distant fires, and she could see the gathering crowd. “No.”
The flex-tie handcuff chafed her wrist. Theo kept tugging at it, pointlessly—even gnawing at it with his teeth at one point—though this only made the irritation worse. Mercy had stopped sleeping with Theo (that is to say, fucking him; they still shared a bed when it was necessary) three months into their sojourn here. Despite that, the collegial aspects of their relationship had remained more or less intact. She had composed more than one of his famous letters for him, and she knew why they had to be written. Though she had always been uneasy about the guns.