Through the loose wall of flotsam in which the barrel of his revolver lay, he could clearly see the main channel down in front of him. He could clearly see the white post of the front sight. To his right, a light came into view, playing along the creek bottom, then sweeping back and forth. They have no idea where I am, he thought. He wondered if it was the cop he helped pull the trick on, Naughton, the little hothead weirdo on Donna Mason’s show. Mal. Hopefully. Cops were all basically the same, though. The light became brighter, tapering back to its source. He could hear the slosh of feet in water, very quiet, but still audible, magnified by the hard concrete tunnel. Slishhh...
Then the beam veered away to the far wall. He watched it focus on the mouth of the runoff line across from his. A dress rehearsal, he thought. He watched the cop. He couldn’t tell if it was Naughton or not. The cop got right up close to the wall. His flashlight was in his left hand. He spread his legs and lowered himself into an amusing, ready-for-anything stance. Hypok could see the gleam of a firearm in his right hand. Then the cop leaned forward and aimed his beam up the opening. He didn’t look in. Hypok watched as the tunnel filled with light, saw the stained brown walls of concrete, the loose archipelago of flotsam and jetsam scattered inside. But the cop still hadn’t put his snout into the hole for a good honest whiff of things. Then he knelt down, quickly, some commando move he’d learned in school. His head was just under the opening and the light went off. In the darkness Hypok couldn’t see what he was doing, but he guessed the man was having a lights-out preview. Ten seconds. Then the tunnel went bright again and the beam had moved to about a yard inside it and Hypok could see the dark silhouette of a head looking in. What a sight. It was a lot like one of those paper targets at the indoor range, but no shoulders, only head, a perfect silhouette. He got the white post of his front sight settled into the notch of the back one and held it steady in the middle of the target. It was easy to do with the barrel on the bed of debris he’d built. A brain shot. Maximum stopping power. Guaranteed knockdown with any hit. The light raked the walls, held steady for a long while, then went out.
The next thing he knew, Hypok was looking across the channel at the flashlight aimed directly at him, weaving a little bit, but coming his way.
The cop veered to Hypok’s left, out of sight. Who wouldn’t? But Hypok could see his light and hear the gentle footfall of shoes on concrete, then the slishhh... slishhh of the dead man crossing the water, then the sucky sound of wet soles on dry cement again. Silence. Hypok imagined: he gets the light in his left hand and shines it in. And it happened. Next, he shines it around in here, but he doesn’t look in yet. That happened too. Bright. Hypok closed his eyes. Then, the cop turns off the light for ten seconds while he looks up here and tries to see me in the dark. The light, in fact, went out, and in the next eight seconds Hypok watched the scarcely visible outline of a human head not six feet away from him, not four feet from the muzzle of his revolver, becoming more distinct with every thunderous beat of his heart.
The shot was almost unbelievably loud. The echo bounced around the canal at me. I flattened myself against the wall and looked back toward Johnny, offing my light. I heard something land in the water. “John!”
Then I heard the sound of a body against the concrete, doing what, I couldn’t say.
“Okay, Naughton! Creep down!”
“Hold there, Johnny! Hold!”
“Holding! Holding!”
John’s voice? He rarely called me Naughton.
His light went on, shining my way. I turned on my own and held the beam down in front of me to light the ground. But I felt wrong, something felt wrong and when I looked up to Johnny’s light I saw it hadn’t moved, it wasn’t moving at all — why wasn’t it on our man? — so I veered out of its path and ran down the middle through the water toward it.
When I got there, the flashlight lay in one of the runoff openings, held in place with a rock. Below the opening was Johnny. Johnny, on his back with his head in the mud, his widow’s peak collapsed over his eyes and smoke rising from his mouth. Far ahead of me now, moving along the bottom of the channel was a figure faintly opalescent in the moonlight, vanishing fast. I brushed Johnny’s cheek with my fingers, then moved out
Louis had already slid down into the channel bottom to give chase. A uniform came jangling down from the other side, skied the last ten yards on his boot soles and fell in behind Louis. I caught them quickly, muttered something about nailing the fucker once and for all and shot past both of them. I am light boned and quite fast, and have much more stamina than a man of my personal habits deserves. But if I had been fifty years old and thirty pounds overweight it wouldn’t have mattered, because I could still see Johnny’s gone face back there in the ugly little stream and I would have willingly run myself to death to avenge him.
I couldn’t outrun the chopper. Stansbury roared past me overhead, raking The Horridus in his light, then banked and tried to stay over him. In the brief moment that the beam caught my prey I saw a scintillant flash of blue silver, like a marlin breaking water in the Sea of Cortez. I raised my knees and ran.
Out ahead, crisscrossing his way across the ditch, trying to avoid the beam above him, The Horridus was a glimmering phantom gliding from darkness to light then back to darkness. He was blue, then opalescent, then violet, then almost invisible in the night. He was fast, but he wasn’t as fast as me. His hundred-yard head start shrank to eighty. I was flying over that channel bottom like a hawk over a city street.
When I was about sixty yards away, he looked back. The chopper beam grazed him and I could see the bright reflection of his eye, straining around to see me. Then an orange-white jet of flame cracked in the darkness ahead and the booming report of a handgun quaked along the channel and passed. I hit the water with both hands out and slid about ten yards. Then I was up again, quick as a seal, and I saw Stansbury’s light capture him in a bright wide halo, with the water splashing up around his shiny legs as he sped down the center of the culvert.
Suddenly he angled up the embankment and scrambled over the last ten yards of rocks and soil without a slip. I realized that using the high ground, he could loop back and shoot me like a duck on a pond — quite literally — so I clawed up the concrete side and fought my way up the loose sharp rocks to the top. God bless Stansbury, who now hovered over The Horridus, drenching him in the full beam of his flood. He just stood there in the center of the light, his metallic body heaving, his metallic head bobbing up and down as he labored for breath. I took a knee and drew down on him, but as soon as I got my sights in line he was off. As he loped out of the light I could tell he wouldn’t go much further: his back was bowed, his arms loose before him, his legs heavy. But the big gun was still in his hand. I tracked him down the barrel of my .45, then stood and started after him again.
Stansbury’s light caught up with him. The Horridus was at the far side of the channel cut, hunched, facing the chain-link fence. I stopped fifty feet short of him and lined up my automatic on his heaving, shimmering back. Just behind the fence was a cinder-block wall, separating someone’s backyard from the flood control easement. He was bent, hands on his knees, looking back over his shoulder at me while he breathed fast and shallow. His breath was an urgent whistle, in-out, in-out, in-out. I could see the revolver still in his right hand and the glint of his eyes behind the fish-scale shine of his hood. He turned his head away slowly, lifted one leg and worked his foot into a toehold in the chain link. He looked back at me again. Then he heaved himself up and reached with his free hand for a grip on the cinder block. He grunted and slipped. Hard. His foot dropped free and his left wrist snagged on the sharp metal X of the fence top. He danced on his tiptoes, writhing around to face me, his left wrist still impaled above him, the big black handgun in his grasp. He brought it up. I shot him once in the face for Johnny and four times in the chest for me. He hung from the fence. Then something gave and his wrist popped loose with a metallic clink and he fell to the dirt.