Part 3 (2/2)
”Ladies and gentlemen, tonight we-”
Suddenly, two men climbed into the pit area. One was white, thoroughly unremarkable in appearance except for a prominent lightning-bolt scar on his right hand; the other was black, with a triangular face defined by high cheekbones. He was immaculately and expensively dressed, his all-black outfit topped with a matching Zorro hat.
A moviegoer might mistake the black man for a pimp, except that, instead of gold around his neck, he wore a very sawed-off shotgun on a leather thong.
Before anyone could react to the intrusion, the black man swung the scattergun up and fired both barrels. The headless announcer's body slumped to the floor as the black man calmly broke his shotgun, flicked his wrist to eject both spent sh.e.l.ls, and reloaded both barrels using the same hand.
The stunned silence was broken when several men in the audience reached for weapons.
A high-pitched squeak-”No!”-momentarily froze those movements as a bunched group of spectators was torn apart by machine-gun fire.
The momentary freeze turned permanent. Some in the audience held their hands away from their bodies in a clear signal of surrender. Others just stared, stunned and immobile.
A large object sailed through the air and landed inside the pit. The camera moved in closer, showing that the object was a human body. Or, more accurately, was once a human body.
The unremarkable man picked up the handheld microphone in his right hand and said, ”May I have your attention, please?”
If this was his idea of a joke, no trace of it appeared on his face, or in his voice.
”Thank you. Now, please listen carefully. These are your choices: You may get up and leave this place peacefully, or you may stay. Those who choose to stay will not be given a second opportunity to leave. Anyone not moving when I stop speaking will never move again.”
One of the dog handlers cupped his hands and called out: ”Okay, man. Whatever you say. We're out of here. Just give us a minute to grab up our dogs, okay?”
A red blotch suddenly blooming on the handler's forehead was the answer. Unlike the other gunfire, this kill-shot had been silent.
”n.o.body takes anything,” the unremarkable man said, in the same dry, flat voice.
The black squiggle Tiger had pointed out moved along with the crowd. The multi-cam unit's sound system was not delicate enough to pick up the single word, this time in English: ”Hit.”
Everyone still alive stood up. Players and spectators filed out, moving slowly, every hand held open and away from the body it was attached to.
As the camera focused on the exit door, the voice of something close to human roared: ”You started it!”
The camera caught only a brief view of what looked like a human leviathan, moving inexorably as it tore through the dog handlers as the dogs would have torn into each other, ripping off body parts as easily as if dismantling cardboard.
The multi-cam only had time to record that the monster's head was shaved, and that he was wearing a banana-colored tank top. Then it went black.
”WHAT THE h.e.l.l was-?”
”The man with the microphone, that's the man we want,” the blond man said. ”His name's Cross. The man next to him is known only as 'Ace.' They've been partners since they came into hardball juvie on the same bus.”
” 'Hardball juvie' ...?”
”Illinois was the first state to differentiate between juvenile and adult offenders,” the blond man addressed his small audience somewhat pedantically. ”It was still maintaining that facade at the time those two first met. That was an end-of-the-line stop for both of them-their crimes should have put them directly into adult corrections, and it was guaranteed their next ones would. And that there would be a next one.”
”The shaved-head guy?”
”Believe it or not, his name is 'Princess.' Off-the-charts insane. He dresses and speaks like a very gay man. Wears all kinds of makeup, minces his words ... even flounces around waving his wrists. His delusion is that this will encourage others to attack him. In his deranged mind, he is not permitted to attack unless he can claim the other party 'started it.' ”
As he spoke, the blond man pushed a b.u.t.ton. A full-body photo of Princess appeared on the screen.
”That's him? d.a.m.n! Whatever he's carrying in that monster shoulder holster-”
”That's a .600 Nitro Express,” Percy snapped out, his voice a mix of anger and awe. ”A .600 Nitro Express pistol. Only one I've ever heard about, never mind seen. That maniac actually carries a sawed-off, over-under elephant gun? A load like that, it'd snap a man's wrist like a toothpick.”
”I'm no firearms expert,” Tracker said, deliberately ironic, ”but do you have any idea why he would carry such a weapon?”
”It goes with his outfit,” Tiger half-giggled. ”Tres chic, non?”
Seeing Percy about to respond, the blond man cut him off with the universal ”Halt!” signal, then said, ”Three hundred and thirty pounds is our best guesstimate of his weight. All of it muscle.”
”Why guesstimate?” Wanda asked.
”He's never been in custody,” the blond man answered. ”We have various records on the others, but even those are spotty, if not outright fallacious.
”The machine-gunner-he was not shown on camera-is called 'Rhino.' Originally sentenced to an inst.i.tution for the severely r.e.t.a.r.ded, he was repeatedly tortured until he became-literally-anaesthetic to pain. That's when they went to the Thorazine handcuffs. By the time Cross and Ace were sentenced, he had already been in that same inst.i.tution for a couple of years.”
”But you said he was r.e.t.a.r.ded.”
”That's what it said on the first admission papers, Wanda. But he wasn't too r.e.t.a.r.ded to a.s.sault staff every time the drugs wore off, so ...”
”So they locked him in that prison even though he never committed a crime?”
”That is what happened, Tiger. It's not our job to judge.”
”Oh, really?”
”Yes! Besides, that was years ago. What we do know is that this Cross individual-remember, he was just a kid himself at the time-figured out a way to detox the monster. But n.o.body knew this until Cross-again, I am speaking literally-actually sawed through cell window bars with nothing but dental floss which had been braided, coated with glue, and then rolled in drain-cleaner crystals. It must have taken months of backbreaking work.
”Then this 'Rhino' bent the bars, enabling Cross and Ace to escape. It was the belief of staff that Cross, a diagnosed sociopath, had simply used Rhino to achieve his own ends. However, somebody later broke him out of custody. No agency has gotten their hands on that monster since.”
”Monster?” Tiger persisted.
”See for yourself,” the blond man responded, flas.h.i.+ng another photo on the monitor. ”He's almost seven feet tall and weighs nearly five hundred pounds. Again, those are only estimates-we don't know his actual age, so we can't know if he continued to grow after he escaped.
”By 'monster,' I was referring only to his size, not his disposition. In fact, we don't even know his actual name. The records of his prior inst.i.tutional 'care' seem to have disappeared.”
”I'll just bet,” Tiger said. ”Okay, that's four men. Four men without one real name among them-is that what you're telling us?”
”Yes.”
”Yeah? Well, someone took that shot with the silencer.”
”Our best guess was that was a man called Buddha. All we know about him is that he and Cross apparently met while serving in what is euphemistically called the 'post-Vietnam' era. His service records don't indicate combat. Or anything else, for that matter. However, Military Intelligence informs us that the man is an expert shot, especially with handguns, a truly gifted driver, and a criminal to his core.”
As the blond man spoke, the photo on the monitor showed a slumped-shouldered man with a vaguely Oriental cast to his dark, cold eyes.
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