Death Mask

CHAPTER THIRTY Carrion

Detective Kunzel reached the next level and kicked open the door. He listened and waited for a moment. Nothing. No sound at all, except for dripping, and the faintest soughing of a draft down the stairwell, as if the parking structure were an elderly cancer victim who was breathing his last.

He stuck his head out, looking quickly to the left and then to the right. He kept his gun held tight in both hands, the slide cocked back ready.

“Red Mask!” he shouted in a phlegmy voice.

Still nothing.

“Special Agent Morrison! Special Agent Greene!”

He waited and waited, but there was no response. He started to climb up to the next level, panting. His shoes made a chuffing sound on the concrete steps, like a train. He wished to God that he had gone easy on the scrapple and goetta breakfasts. His chest felt tight and the blood was thumping in his ears.

He had one more flight of steps to go when he heard another agonized scream. He stopped, gasping for breath, and listened. Although the hollow structure of the building made it very hard to decide exactly where the scream was coming from, he could tell that it was close.

God save whoever that is, and please save me, too. He knew that he had to go on. He could have stayed here in the stairwell and waited for Detective Bellman to bring more backup. But if he did, and he later discovered that he could prevented more officers from being killed, how was he going to live with himself for the rest of his life?

He continued to climb.

“I’m coming, you bastard,” he repeated. “I’m coming, you bastard. I’m coming. You. Bastard.”

He reached the next landing. He dragged out his big red handkerchief and wiped the sweat from his face, and wiped his hands, too, and the butt of his automatic. He crossed himself, even though he wasn’t a Catholic. He thought that he might as well hedge his bets. Then he pushed open the door and stepped past it, moving across the floor as nimbly as a waltz instructor, swinging his gun from left to right, and back again.

At first he thought that this floor was deserted, too. There were no vehicles next to the stairwell, and all the parking spaces on the right-hand side were taken up with broken cardboard boxes and rolls of worn-out green stair carpet.

He waited for a few seconds, and then he edged his way around the stairwell to the main parking area, still treading lightly, still swinging his gun. But as he came around the corner, he stopped dead, and his stomach seemed to drop as if he had stepped off the edge of a building.

Hanging from the sprinkler pipes that ran across the ceiling were the mutilated bodies of the SWAT team, all ten of them, and the two FBI agents, too. Somehow their heads had been forced into the gap between the pipes and the concrete ceiling, and then their bodies had been reduced to rags, as if each of them had been stabbed more than a hundred times.

Detective Kunzel tried his radio again, but it still produced nothing but a crackle. He advanced slowly across the concrete floor, half crouching, keeping his gun held high. He glanced at each of the bodies he passed, but he didn’t want to look too closely. Some of them had been so severely cut up that their insides had dropped out and were hanging between their thighs in glistening loops. Most of them were still dripping blood.

He felt that he was making his way through the larder of some terrible flesh-hungry monster. He crossed himself again, but this time it was less for his own protection than a gesture of respect for the dead.

“Red Mask!” he shouted. He tried to sound stern, but his voice came out as more of a scream. “Red Mask! Where are you hiding yourself, you sadistic bastard?”

He had to sidestep to make his way around the suspended bodies of Special Agents Morrison and Greene. Special Agent Morrison’s face had been so comprehensively sliced open that Detective Kunzel recognized him only from his dark suit and his highly polished black oxfords.

“Red Mask! Come out and show yourself! Or are you too goddamned chickenshit?”

He crossed the parking area toward the elevator.

“Red Mask! You wanted to see me? Well, here I am!”

As he turned the corner, he jerked in shock and almost let off a shot. On the whitewashed brick wall directly in front of him was a life-sized painting of Red Mask, with two bloodstained butcher knives, one in each hand. His face was scarlet and he was grinning triumphantly.

Detective Kunzel spun around, expecting the real Red Mask to come up behind him, but there was nobody there. He approached the painting with a mixture of bewilderment and dread. Who the hell had painted it, and why? It was so detailed that it almost looked alive.

“Red Mask!” he shouted, yet again.

“Looking for me?” said a hoarse voice, close behind him.

He swung around again. Red Mask was standing only a few feet away from him, in a red shirt and a black suit. His face was even redder than Detective Kunzel had imagined it would be, and shinier, and his eyes and his mouth were thin black slits, as if they had been cut into his face with a sharp knife.

Although he was so close, his image appeared to be wavering slightly, as if Detective Kunzel were looking at him through a haze of rising heat.

Detective Kunzel cleared his throat. Then he said, “Take your knives out real slow and toss them out of reach.”

Red Mask held up both of his hands, palms outward, like a conjuror. “I don’t have any knives, Detective. See?”

“Open your coat. Do it real easy.”

Red Mask opened the front of his coat. There were no knives there, either.

“Okay. now I need you to get down on the floor. Flat on your face. Arms and legs spread wide.”

“Oh, I don’t think so, Detective. I came here today to talk to you, not to give myself up. Look around you. My work isn’t finished yet. Not by a long chalk.”

“I’m giving you a count of three to kiss the concrete, Mr. Mask. If you haven’t done it by then, I’m going to drop you, and that’s a promise.”

“If you do that, how are you going to find out how I managed to make such mincemeat out of all of your fellow officers? I mean, look at them, Detective. Twelve good men and true. Courageous fellows, all of them. Heroic, even. And armed to the eyeballs. How can one man hang them all up like so many sides of beef? One man, all on his ownsome? If you know the answer to that, Detective, then by all means go ahead and drop me. But otherwise, you just listen to what I have to say to you, and you listen good.”

“One,” Detective Kunzel warned him. “Two.”

“You’re not going to shoot me, Detective, and the reason you’re not going to shoot me is because you believe there’s two of me, or even more. I’ve sworn to you that there ain’t, but you can’t work that out, either, can you? And suppose I’m lying to you, and there is two of me, or three, or even five? If you shoot me now, how are you going to find out if they truly exist, and where they are, and what they’re bent on doing next?”

“Three,” said Detective Kunzel. “That’s it.”

Red Mask raised both his hands, not so much in surrender, but in exasperation.

“You don’t have any idea what you’re up against, do you, Detective? You don’t have any idea at all. But let me tell you this: whatever you do now, whether you squeeze that trigger or not, the streets of Cincinnati are going to run ankle deep in blood, and there’s nothing that you can do to stop it. Absodamn-lutely nothing.”

Detective Kunzel hesitated. He knew that Red Mask was right. If he shot him here and now, too many critical questions would remain unanswered, and it was possible that even more innocent people would be killed.

“So what did you want to say to me?” he asked.

“I’m trying to do you a favor here, Detective. You will never find me and you will never catch me, no matter how hard you try. So stop wasting your time and your valuable resources. Stop putting your men in harm’s way. Do you know how much it costs to train a police officer? And look at them! Dead meat, every one!”

Red Mask took a step closer, and then another. His voice dropped to a whisper. “One day, I may feel that justice has been served and that my thirst for vengeance has been slaked. Good word, that, isn’t it — slaked? But that day isn’t today, I regret to tell you, and it won’t be tomorrow.”

Drop him! said a voice in Detective Kunzel’s head. But it was then that he heard an extraordinary noise right behind him, a noise like a huge sheet of drawing paper being torn in half. He twisted around, almost losing his balance — just in time to see the painting of Red Mask step right out of the wall, as if it he had entered the parking level through some kind of invisible door.

Both of his arms were raised high, and Detective Kunzel glimpsed the rusty-colored glint of a bloodstained blade.

He fired. Inside the parking level, the sound of his gun was deafening. Chips of shattered brick flew off the side of the wall, and the bullet ricocheted across the parking area with a mournful whine.

He fired again, at point-blank range, and this time he hit Red Mask full in the chest. He turned back toward the first Red Mask, shouting, “Hit the deck! Now!” But the first Red Mask simply smiled at him and stayed where he was, and without any hesitation the second Red Mask came right up to him and stabbed him in the shoulder and the side of his head, right behind his ear. He felt the point of the knife dig into his skull.

He raised his arm to protect himself, but the second Red Mask stabbed him in the elbow with one knife and the back of his gun hand with the other. Detective Kunzel felt warm wet blood spraying against his face.

He tried to fire again, but the knife that had gone through his elbow had cut his tendons. His fingers opened and the gun clattered onto the floor.

He was stabbed again and again, but he ignored the knives, even when they cut into his hands, and he pushed the second Red Mask away from him. The first Red Mask dodged from side to side, trying to block his way.

“Leaving us, Detective? So soon? And we were just beginning to enjoy ourselves!”

Detective Kunzel was stabbed in the back — once in the shoulder and once in the ribs. He dropped forward onto his knees, but before the second Red Mask could stab him again, he hunched his shoulders and lowered his head, and reared up from the floor with a bellow of rage and pain.

He collided with the first Red Mask, knocking him aside. Then he started to run across the parking level, in between the hanging bodies and the concrete pillars. He hadn’t run as fast as this for years, but he was damned if he was going to be stabbed to death and hung up from one of the sprinkler pipes.

He could hear himself panting, as if he were listening to somebody else who was running close behind him, and he could see droplets of blood flying in front of him with every step that he took.

My mother didn’t give birth to me to die like this. My father didn’t take me to baseball games to die like this. I didn’t go to the police academy to die like this. I’m going to die in my bed with my family all around me and the evening sun shining through the window.

He reached the door that led to the stairwell, and pulled it open. Looking back, he could see that the second Red Mask had stopped trying to chase him now, and was standing in between the suspended bodies of two SWAT officers, thirty yards away, both knives lowered, staring at him. His face shone in the midday sunlight like a red warning lamp.

He went through the door and the first Red Mask was standing there waiting for him, and he was holding a knife in each hand, too. Without any hesitation, he plunged them with a sharp chopping noise into Detective Kunzel’s stomach, cutting first one deep diagonal, upper left to lower right, and then another, upper right to lower left.

Detective Kunzel felt pain so intense that his whole body began to quake. Nothing could hurt this much. It just wasn’t possible. He stared at Red Mask, and tried to speak, but all that came out of his lips was a bubble of blood.

“Now that was the kind of sport I was looking for,” Red Mask whispered. “Entertainment and revenge, all in one. And a mystery, too. Am I one? Am I two? Maybe I’m neither. Maybe I’m both. So sad that you’ll never get to find out, Detective.”

He stepped away, sliding his knives back into his coat. Detective Kunzel staggered back against the wall. He stood there for a moment, his chest heaving. Then he tilted sideways and tumbled down the stairs, twenty of them, and lay in a bloodied heap on the landing below.

He wasn’t quite dead. He could see the light fitting on the ceiling above him. He could hear voices and the sound of people running. He thought of his mother, standing by the kitchen window. She was smiling at him and saying something that he couldn’t hear very distinctly.

It sounded like “Liebling.”

“Mom?” he croaked. “Mom, is that you?”

He heard a loud, resonating bang somewhere in the parking structure, but he had no way of knowing that it was the elevator dropping from the top floor down to the basement, with the remaining SWAT officers inside it.