The Beasts Of Valhalla

10

From body temperature, swelling of the ankles, odor, and state of rigor mortis, I made a very rough estimate that Coop Lugmor had been dead at least twelve hours, and probably more. He'd never made the phone calls to my parents' home during the night. If I'd been home, and if I'd believed it was Lugmor and had come over, I'd probably be dead too.

It was a thought that prompted me to run back out the door, crouch down on the porch, and look around. There was no one outside or on the highway. I pulled Janet's car into the barn, closed the door, then went back into the house to examine the body some more.

Bolesh had, I assumed, come here and killed Lugmor right after he'd cleaned out Tommy's room and put Zeke on the bus to the airport. How Lugmor had been killed was another question, and the murder weapon certainly wasn't the butcher knife sticking out of his gut. There was hardly any blood around the site of the wound, none at all coming from his mouth. Lugmor's heart had stopped beating for at least a minute before Bolesh had found the knife and stuck it into the dead meat of the corpse just for the sake of appearances.

It looked to me like Coop Lugmor had been frightened to death.

He was slumped in a seated position, legs splayed at a forty-five-degree angle, against a wall in the garbage-strewn living room. As it sometimes does, rigor mortis must have set in almost immediately. Lugmor's toothless mouth gaped open in a huge O of a scream. His eyes were as open as eyes ever get, almost literally popping from his head. His arms were half raised, the fingers of the hands curled into claws as if he were clutching at something on his chest that was no longer there; the hands were at least a foot above the shaft of the knife.

I stepped closer, knelt down close to the body, and took rapid, shallow breaths as a defense against the ripeness of the dead flesh. There were small marks-some like scratches, others like pimples-on his face. Up close, I could see tiny, white crystals trapped in the stubble of his beard. There were more of the crystals on the front of his shirt, surrounded by what looked like dried water stains. There were other water stains on the peeling, faded wallpaper above his head, more crystals.

I licked my finger, lifted one of the crystals off the wall and tasted it. Salt.

When I bent back Lugmor's stiff fingers and examined them, I found little pieces of dried gray matter sitting on top of the grease and dirt beneath the nails. I stood up and shuddered. Water stains; salt crystals; terror. It was as if something had risen from the sea-or the depths of Volsung-to strike Coop Lugmor dead.

But now I had another "monster from Mirkwood" to contend with. I heard this one walk on its two legs through the door at the front, enter the living room, stop. I slowly turned to face Jake Bolesh and his leveled shotgun. He'd been waiting around a while, probably in the woods to the southwest; he was unshaven, and his eyes were bloodshot and black-rimmed; binoculars hung from a strap around his neck. His voice, when he spoke, was curiously flat.

"Old grudges die hard, don't they, Robby?"

"Hey, Jake," I said as Bolesh slammed the cell door shut on me, "have you seen the old B movie where the innocent victim tells the bad guy he won't get away with it?"

Bolesh turned and stared at me. His expression was strangely blank, his eyes dull; the gorilla had looked more human than Bolesh did at the moment. The liveliest part of him now was his hair; every strand of the pompadour was neatly combed into place, greased and gleaming.

"You're no innocent victim, Frederickson," he said at last.

"What did you use to kill Coop?"

"I didn't kill Lugmor; you did. You came back home here a hotshot hero from New York City. You always thought you were better than anybody else. Now you were upset about your nephew's death, and you decided to use the occasion to even up some old scores while you were here. I know that, because you threatened me at least three times."

"You think Mike Wallace is going to believe that?"

"I seriously doubt that Mike Wallace is going to show up in Peru County."

"Come on, Jake, use your head. I may be a lot smaller than Coop, but you'll find I won't disappear anywhere near as easily."

"No? We'll see."

"How about a phone call? I want to speak to my girl friend."

"The phone's out of order."

"People will come looking for me."

"Will they?"

"Garth, for one. You know that."

He shrugged, touched the gun in the holster at his side.

"Jake, I really feel we should discuss this problem with a third party."

"There isn't any problem."

"I think we should negotiate what we're going to do with me."

He stepped up to the bars, stared down at me. Now, studying him, I realized I'd made a mistake in thinking that his face and eyes were blank; I'd merely been looking at the surface of a black sea. Now I could see below the surface where great tides of rage and hatred swelled.

"What do you have to negotiate with, Frederickson?"

When things get bad, a moderate amount of worry is in order; when things get really bad, a person might as well laugh as cry. I managed a weak chuckle. "I'll make you an offer, Jake. You give yourself up and sign a full confession, and I promise I'll appear at your trial as a character witness."

Bolesh wasn't amused. "You've got balls, Frederickson; I'll say that for you. Just like your parents."

The laughter turned hot and choking in my throat. "What about my parents?" I asked in a tone of voice just short of a plea.

"They're tough," Bolesh said, a thin, cruel smile spreading like a skin disease across his face. "I needed four men-one to grab hold of your mother, another to hold a gun on your father, and two to help me-to search their house. I'm afraid we made a mess of things. It's a shame we had to tear up the home of a nice old couple like that just because their dwarf son is a retard with a big nose who ignores good advice when he hears it."

"Seriously, Jake," I said, struggling to control a surging rage that was pumping my blood pressure up to the top of the graph, making everything around Bolesh seem red, "you're a real shit. Leave my parents alone, for Christ's sake. Even you can't be dumb enough to think there's anything to gain in hurting them."

"We found the papers you took from Volsung, Frederickson."

"Ah." My situation did not look good; it had dropped from really bad to near hopeless. "Did you read them?"

"I destroyed them."

An interesting admission, which wasn't likely to do me any good. It was time to swing down from the high wire, belly up to the green felt, and play. I squeezed up my first card, slapped it down on the table.

"Tell your people in Volsung that I want to see Mr. Lippitt."

"Who's Lippitt?"

"He's an operative for the Defense Intelligence Agency, and he's probably in charge of the silly joke they call security out there."

"Never heard of him."

"It's possible you don't know his name, but he's there. Your bosses will sure as hell know who he is."

Silence. A second card.

"Tell Lippitt I want to discuss the Valhalla Project. I may have put other files in other places; maybe I wrote some letters."

Silence. A dangerous, razor-edged joker from high up in my sleeve.

"Tell your bosses to remind Lippitt that he owes me. If he doesn't show up here, I'm going to start shouting at the top of my lungs about a certain talented mutual friend of ours we're both interested in. Tell him there may be a lot of unmarked graves in Peru County, but the Russians and Chinese have big ears. They'll hear about our friend. You repeat every word I just said, Jake. I guarantee it will get a response, and the people at Volsung will thank you for it."

"You're full of shit, Frederickson," Bolesh said, and abruptly walked out of the cell block.

Lacking a lock pick and having absolutely nothing better to do, I lay down on the hard jail cot and proceeded to catch up on some of the sleep I'd lost the night before. I had a strong suspicion that, very soon, I was going to need all the strength and clear thinking I could muster.

I woke up to the sound of shouting. The voices were muffled by the thick wall between the cell block and the outer office, but one of the voices sounded wondrously familiar all the same.

"Goddamn it, Bolesh, I know he's in there! I want to see him now! You open that door or you're going to have more fucking lawyers in Peru City than you can fit into the town hall!"

My initial surge of relief immediately hardened into a sharp blade of anxiety that pressed against my heart. There was no way Bolesh and the Volsung Corporation were going to allow the loose cannon that was my brother to roll around Peru County.

"Garth!" I shouted, leaping off the cot and banging on the bars. "Garth, run! Get the hell out of here! Don't let them take you!"

Garth had quick reflexes, and he was good with a gun. I hoped my warning shout would allow him to get the drop on Bolesh and any of the deputies who might be in the office. There were more muffled shouts, but no gunfire. There were the sounds of scuffling, large pieces of furniture being broken or overturned; the soft, thudding phonk of knuckles on flesh. Curses. Whatever was happening, Garth was giving as good as he got; if the outcome were still in doubt, at least it meant that my bull of a brother still had a chance.

"Come on, Garth!" I screamed. "Do it, baby! Heeyai!"

There was another thump; deep, resonant. Ominous. Then I heard a heavy body fall to the floor. A few seconds later the door to the cell block opened and Jake Bolesh staggered through. His pomaded hair was thoroughly messed; it also looked slightly askew, as if Garth had pulled Bolesh's scalp down over his left ear. A toupee; very expensive, expertly fitted, but a rug just the same. Bolesh was bleeding from the mouth, and as he grimaced I thought I saw a large gap where a few front teeth were missing. His shirt was torn and flapping; all of the buttons were missing. He was carrying a fat, ugly truncheon wrapped in black leather and stained with blood.

He stood for a few moments, glaring at me, then abruptly swung the truncheon at the brick wall behind him.

Thunk! Thunk!

"Bastards!" he panted in a hoarse, sibilant whisper, the breath whistling in the spaces where his front teeth had been. "Sons-of-bitches!"

He lunged and swung at the bars, and I just managed to snatch my fingers away in time to keep them from being crushed.

Clong!

"Something upsetting you, Jake? Having a bad day at the office?"

Clong! Clong!

"God!" Bolesh, white-faced and shuddering, hunched his shoulders and writhed, as if he were burning up from some unquenchable, white-hot fire blazing deep in whatever was left of his soul. "How I hate the two of you! I hate you!"

"Now, Jake, it's nothing more than a slight personality conflict. Why don't you calm down?"

Thunk! Thunk!

"Shut up, you little dwarf shit! You fuck! You're a diseased thing, Frederickson! You're crooked! Wait until you see what I've got waiting for the two of you!"

The last words were almost, if not quite, enough to make me want to kiss him. It meant he hadn't beaten Garth to death, and wasn't planning to-at least not in the short run. The steel fist that had been clenched around my heart relaxed slightly.

"Put the sapper away, Jake," I said evenly. "Come on in here and we'll go one on one. You're not afraid of a little old diseased, crooked dwarf, are you?"

Clong! Clong! Clong!

"You always thought you were so Goddamn smart! Robby, the smart freak! Robby, the all-A's freak!"

Thunk!

"— and Garth the protector!"

Clong!

"— do you understand, dwarf?! God didn't make you right!"

My old buddy Jake had gone right over the edge, fallen a long way, landed on his head and bounced a few times. Always the optimist, I kept glancing down the corridor and hoping that someone would come running in with a bucket of cold water. Nope. If there were deputies in the office outside, they were too smart to get in the way of the rabid animal who was their boss. It didn't bode well.

Thunk! Clong!

"They're going to be looking for my brother too, Jake," I said quickly, deciding that it was time for some serious discussion. I was making an effort to sound calm, but I was forced to shout in order to be heard over his ranting. "You know how big the Volsung Corporation is! You may hate Garth and me, but you have to be afraid of them! You're running amok, and they're not going to like it!"

"Shut up, you diseased dwarf fuck! I don't need their permission to do what I'm going to do to you! Wait! Just wait!"

Clong! Thunk! Clong!

"This has become too big for you, Jake! Give yourself a break! Ask for some help, some guidance! Put in that call to Lippitt!"

"You bastard! You shit bastard! You've ruined everything!"

"Jake," I sighed wearily, realizing that I would have had a better chance of communicating with a shark in a feeding frenzy, "you were always the once-and-future asshole. At least fix your wig. Seeing you with your hair hanging off really makes me want to throw up."

He went bone white, gaped at me for a few seconds, then clawed at his hair with his free hand. The toupee came off in his fingers, leaving strands of tacky hair glue clinging like cobwebs to his furry scalp.

"Brenner!" the county sheriff bawled. "Peters! Get in here!"

Now they came. Two pasty-faced deputies ran into the cell block, winced when they saw the snit their boss was in, stopped in front of him and stiffened.

Bolesh threw the greasy mat that was his hair into a corner, then took a key ring out of his pocket and unlocked the door to my cell. He had stopped ranting, but his hands were trembling and he was taking in great, gulping breaths, as if he could not get enough air. It was, I thought, a terrific time for him to suffer a heart attack.

He pushed open the cell door, swung the truncheon.

Clong!

"Keep your guns on him," Bolesh said to his deputies. "If he tries to fight back or get away, shoot him in the legs."

There wasn't going to be any heart attack. My initial fear was that he'd come forward and try to smash out my brains summarily, which meant that I'd have to make some kind of move; I'd be shot, but I'd damn well try to kill Bolesh before I went down.

I sat down on the edge of the cot, planted both feet flat on the floor, and tried to look terrified-a feat that wasn't at all difficult. I stiffened the fingers of my right hand and concentrated all my attention on the spot on his thorax just below the rib cage, the gateway to his solar plexus; a blow delivered there at the right angle and with sufficient force could burst his heart. I would have only one chance, and I'd spend it if I didn't like the angle his first blow was coming from.

The deputies were in the cell now, flanking me; each was steadying his gun with both hands and aiming at my kneecaps.

The initial blow was angled away from my head, toward the soft flesh on my right side, below the rib cage. Bolesh didn't seem to be interested in beating me to death either-just close to it. I relaxed my fingers, exhaled loudly, and leaned slightly to my left in an effort to absorb some of the blow's force and pain.

There was nothing to do now but take the beating. It wouldn't be the first time Jake Bolesh had made me piss blood, but I swore it would be the last. I vowed that I would survive anything Bolesh did to me, and then-some way-I would kill him. Planning what I was going to do to him served as a kind of anesthetic while he worked me over. Finally he made a mistake, hit me just a bit too hard, and I passed out.