Warlord's Revenge Page 14

  Without a chance to realize he was going out of character, Stone swung his head down and below the man’s incoming elbow, and in a blur swung his hand in a blade up and into the man’s groin from below. The gold miner turned green and blue and shot backward, as if he’d just bounced off a wall. The gasping miner collapsed in a heap just a foot or so behind Scalzanni’s back. Still motioning for the masses to head on over to the free drinks, the Mafia chief jerked around on a dime and snapped both arms out at shoulder length, ready to pinion anything that was between the two hooks like a butterfly under glass.

  As he twisted his head around, the sprawled prospector saw what was awaiting him and let out an imploring wail.

  “Don’t kill me, boss,” the man pleaded through broken teeth. “It was him what pushed me.” He pointed a filthy, accusing finger at Stone, who stood in what suddenly felt like a very naked position at the edge of the crowd. Stone fell right back into his dumb character praying that no one had seen the fast move. He wished now that he’d taken the goddamn blow. He sure as hell wasn’t ready to have it out with this little meat-hook master here in his own place—with five hundred other psychos surrounding him who would just as soon rip his balls off.

  “Gosh,” Stone said, stuttering and fixing his glasses. “I sure am sorry that man tried to attack you.” Stone added a few nervous tics on his cheeks and eyes just for good measure. “But I sure as heck didn’t push a tough fella like that.” He pointed down at the gray-bearded, buffalo-hided prospector, who didn’t dare raise himself up, as he was afraid Scalzanni would make instant burger of him if he moved an inch. The Mafia chief stared over at Stone, then back at the man on the floor. Then his eyes went back to Stone again, and he seemed to be studying him closely for seconds. Stone could feel the dark little rat eyes trying to bore into him, and he just kept the stupid grin of confusion on his face and tipped his glasses again so they almost fell off the end of his nose.

  “Bah,” Scalzanni spat suddenly, turning and walking away as he spun the two meat hooks around in his bony hands and then deposited them in a flash back inside their hidden holsters, which hung on each hip inside his oversize black silk jacket. He had already killed a huge son of a bitch—it would be anticlimactic to trifle with these two peons. Boring as well, which was even worse. The Mafia lord walked toward the bar with both hands on his hips as the crowd, even in its confusion, cleared a Red Sea for the man. All of them, being cutthroats, rapists, and killers themselves, admired Scalzanni greatly, but being mortal men, they gave him a wide berth, at least wide enough so that if he whipped out those little hooks of instant death, they’d be out of his range—for a second or two, anyway.

  Stone quickly turned as Scalzanni walked off and blended into the crowd as it surged to the opposite side of the room. He had scarcely gone five feet, looking quickly around to make sure no one else had their eye on him, when he felt another elbow hook onto his arm and start to pull him. Stone turned, his fist cocked, ready to smash someone right in the throat. But he held it suspended in midair when he saw a woman alongside him, smiling up as sweetly as any spider ever did to any fly.

  “Going my way, cutie?” the woman asked as she continued to half drag Stone along. He quickly lowered his fist, realizing it looked a little ridiculous just hanging up there. As she pulled him deeper into the recesses of the bar, a squad of cleanup men came running out with body bag and shovels to cart away the early refuse of the evening. But there would be more.

  “Come on, junior.” The B-girl laughed as she pulled him past the four-deep crowd, which now lined the entire length of the bar, cashing in on Scalzanni’s offer. “You don’t want to go hang out with this bunch. Why, they’ll eat you alive.” As they passed beneath one of the dozen half-shattered chandeliers that hung from the ceiling, Stone got a good look at her as she pushed some half-dozing drunks out of the way. She had been beautiful—once. There were still traces of it—somewhere. The skin of her forehead was still an ivory white, a sign of what had once been. The eyes, blue and intelligent, danced in her face. But the rest of the face was a mask of lines—of a thousand grimaces and tears that had dug valleys down every side—and the covering creases. A nose that had been shattered, an ear badly infected—and covered with a pink rash. She looked like she had been through and seen everything—and now to cover it all up, since she was still a “working girl,” the woman had covered up the damage with industrial-strength pancake makeup, lipstick, rouge, eyeliner—and every other damn thing she could get her hands on. Her hand, which rested on Stone’s right arm as she dragged him along in a crude but effective sort of arm lock, had bright purple fingernails as long as claws, and they followed the curve of Stone’s sleeve as if he were in the grip of a man-eater.

  “There, there, isn’t that better,” she said with a smile, her apple-red lips made up in Kewpie-doll style so they appeared tiny and scrunched together, just ready for kissing. She dragged him out of the main bar and into another room in the back. Stone allowed himself to be guided along, as he felt it was to his physical benefit to get away from Scalzanni for the moment, that is, he didn’t feel like dying right now.

  “Yes, much,” Stone said with his doofus grin again, patting her hand reassuringly as they stepped into the smaller and more dimly lit playroom. “You’re so kind,” Stone went on. “I was just so—lost in there. I—I—don’t have any friends in town and—” He wrinkled his nose as if he might sneeze. A strong whiff of her numerous cheap and overdosed perfumes filled his nose like he was standing over the smokestack of a chemical plant.

  “Ah, don’t you now?” The whore cackled with a look of twisted concern so that her eyes, which were lined with blue and pink and orange and so many other colors that it appeared more as if she had been trying to paint Easter eggs than apply makeup around them, rolled back and floated around in her head. “Well, you’ve come to the right damn place, then, mister. Mister—”

  “Mulganey.” Stone grinned back, poking at his glasses so they popped up off one ear. “Here—looking for—” He glanced shyly at her for a second, and then boldly went on, “For a breeding bitch.”

  “Oh, how romantic,” the whore said, slapping herself with her free hand in the cheek, the strike being a little harder than she had intended, and it sent up a big puff of the quarter-inch-thick pancake makeup into the air in a smoke ring. “How romantic. Isn’t this just my night. I’m Peaches. Peaches and Cream, but my friends”—she looked at Stone and batted her eyes a number of times very fast, their long, fake lashes extending over them like canopies—“call me Peaches. Oh, you and I are going to have a lot of fun tonight, aren’t we, my little snookums pie.”

  “Gee, I sure hope so,” Stone answered, pulling his lips back as he glanced at her to reveal his toothiest and perhaps stupidest grin. He heard a splashing sound and dragged her slightly in that direction a few yards to take a look. A swimming pool about forty feet long and twenty wide was filled with young naked women. Perhaps two dozen of them. They scampered and jumped around in the water, splashed and squealed as they tried to—or pretended to—get away from the ropes that were being tossed at them constantly. For around the pool stood a crowd of men—bikers, Mafia middle management, free-lance killers and assassins, even just run-of-the-mill mountain bandits here for a holiday—all holding fishing rods as thick as baseball bats with thick steer-roping lariats hanging from the ends. Every rope had a pre-tied lasso on the end with a slipknot so it would pull closed in a second once it reached its target.

  Even while Stone watched, two of the fishermen got lucky, and their ropes landed cleanly around two of the whore-mermaids. They were pulled, kicking and squealing like stuck pigs, from the water and lowered over onto the floor where their captors grabbed them with gusto. All kinds of noises and sounds ensued.

  “Quite amazing,” Stone mumbled with true incredulity. “I bet they have a ‘whale’ of a good time, huh?” He grinned at her and then winked to show he’d made, or had attempted to make, a joke.

 
; “Oh, yes—whale of a time. Yes, that’s really good.” She smiled at him through huge red lips. “You’re a scream, junior, a real scream.” She turned her face away from him for a moment and silently mouthed the word asshole to her own private entities.

  “Well, at least you can talk,” she said, looking back upon him fondly. “That’s a good start. You should see some of them around here.” She shook her hand back and forth.

  “Oh, yes, I can talk real good,” Stone said animatedly. “I’ve talked all my life. Why, I can talk about all kinds of things.”

  “Yes—that’s—that’s great, Mulganey,” Peaches said, patting his hand sympathetically as she pulled him toward a series of darkened booths inside of which Stone could see couples grinding away and making licky-face as they prepared for quick departures to the nearby bedrooms.

  “Here, we’ll be much cozier in here. Yes, yes.” She patted his head, half pushing Stone down into the seat as she got in on the other side of the table with a thud. Before they had even touched the leather of the seat, a waitress, her breasts bare, the rest of her clad in just a loincloth in the shape of a skull and crossbones, came over for their orders.

  “Champagne,” Peaches said, looking up at the waitress as she winked her eye. “Right, Mulganey? Only the best for us.”

  “Gosh darn right,” Stone said, slamming his fist down toward the table but catching it at the last second so it hardly made a sound as it reached the wood. “Only the best for me and my gal.” He smiled at Peaches, who reached across the table with a snakelike hand, searching for his hand. When she found it, she clamped down hard like a cobra swallowing a mouse and nailed him to the table. The woman had learned all the moves. Every damn one of them.

  “So tell me all about yourself, snookums,” Peaches said, leaning forward in the half-darkness, illuminated only by candlelit lanterns hanging here and there on the walls. She batted her huge eyelashes, which must have come out a good two inches from her eyes, curving off in both directions like Bambi’s lashes rather than those of a sixty-year-old whore with five diseases, two of them fatal.

  Stone had just drawn in his breath to say something dumb when his eyes adjusted to the dimness of the room and he saw something ten yards off that nearly made his heart stop in his chest. It was a man and a woman, naked, standing fact-to-face, perhaps eight inches apart. And even through the darkness it was instantly clear to Stone that they were dead. The pallor to their skin, their facial features hanging like a piece of dough left on the edge of a table. The purple, swollen fingers and feet was where all the blood had accumulated. And as Stone watched, wondering if he had fallen into a nightmare, he realized that the two of them were moving, moving in relation to each other. And suddenly he saw that the organ of the male cadaver has been placed into the entrance of the female. And that, though dead, the two were fucking.

  As his eyes adjusted more, Stone could see the dim outlines of frames of wire and metal stuck into the things from behind, making them move. When he was younger, he remembered seeing coin-operated booths at county fairs where mechanical figures had moved, danced, boxed with each other. They must have gotten hold of some of them—and modified them slightly.

  “Oh, are you looking at Matilda and Fred?” the whore asked him with a cheery smile as she sprayed a little mist from an atomizer onto her neck and face so that the booth felt like it had just been gassed. “Aren’t they the greatest?” She laughed. “They’re the talk of the whole territory, you know. Of course, they rot after a few days. Really, the stench can get unbearable if there aren’t fresh replacements to throw up there. But fortunately,” she said reassuringly to him as she squeezed his hand hard, “there are lots of available volunteers these days.”

  “That is reassuring,” Stone said as he continued to stare at the copulating corpses in repulsed, but unswaying, fascination. Their hands as well had been wired up so that they almost appeared to be stroking each another, and their faces and neck, too, must have had rods implanted within them, for they seemed to turn and brush lips every few seconds like a set of those kissing dolls that Stone had always hated. Their hips thrust forward almost at the same time, slamming together with loud, squishy thwacks, the unmistakable sound that dead flesh makes when it slaps against the same. The male corpse’s organ, which had set into rigor mortis, had been fit right into the female’s sex opening so that it slammed in and out of her every few seconds. Whether or not they felt pleasure—what is the sensation of a dead penis fucking?—only a Zen Buddhist, a master of the highest achievement and understanding, could answer. A single blue filtered light illuminated the couple from above so that their ghostly color was even more exaggerated, their eyes sparkling with four blue flames, as if the trapped souls within were looking back out from hell.

  “Very entertaining,” Stone said, turning away at last as he felt his stomach do a few funny flips and make some noises. He hoped he didn’t lose it.

  “Yes, isn’t it, though?” Peaches grinned in the darkness, and her red lips shone like little overripe strawberries in the candlelight. “The guy who runs this place—that Scalzanni fellow who you saw out front, with the hooks. Remember—the hooks?” She squeezed his hands again, and Stone winced.

  “Oh, yeah—the hook guy. Tough—very tough. I wouldn’t want to—”

  “Well, he’s the one who had them put in,” Peaches said, cutting him off. “Great sense of humor, the guy has. I mean, what a joker, huh? Ah, here’s our drinks.” The aging whore cackled, rubbing her hands together as the waitress deposited a gallon bottle of “champagne” on the table and poured them each a glass. The liquid bubbled as it went into the glass, but when Stone toasted with the whore and lifted his dirt-smeared glass to his lips, he could instantly taste that it was the same rotgut he had bought at the bar—but with some CO2 pumped into it to give it a bubbling action. It tasted foul, undrinkable.

  “Drink up. Drink up, snookums,” Peaches went on, her Cheshire cat of a grin undulating in the half-darkness, the red lips grinding together like worms humping in the soil. “Drink up. Tonight we party, for tomorrow we die.” She laughed with fake abandon, holding her lips far apart so she didn’t smear them, forming them into an O shape, in what appeared quite an obscene—and suggestive—gesture.

  Stone took another slug of the rotgut and suddenly started feeling funny. He didn’t drink a hell of a lot. But he knew he could hold his damn liquor. But as she talked to him her whole face started looking even stranger, getting all skinny, then fat again, until he felt like he was walking inside a fun-house mirror. Her words turned into a buzz of bees, and he couldn’t understand a thing she was saying.

  Then everything was spinning around him much too fast, and even as he rose to his feet in a futile effort to fight back, Stone realized that he had been drugged. But by then it was too late. For suddenly he was dropping, as if his legs had just been chopped off at the knees. He dimly wondered if his nose would smash into jelly when he hit face first on the floor, which was looming up at him like a locomotive coming down the track. But his brain tumbled into darkness before he even got the chance to find out.

  Chapter Sixteen

  When Stone woke up, he felt like his head had just been used as a bowling ball in the U.S. Championships.

  “Jesus,” he heard his own lips mumble, and even that sounded like a bomb going off an inch from his ear. He suddenly realized he was alive when he should be dead, when he had expected to be dead. Stone forced his eyes apart, seeing as the flood of light exploded into his sockets like razors slicing across the pupils that he shouldn’t have done so. He slammed them shut again before he could even see what was out there, and let out an involuntary groan.

  “Easy, junior, easy,” a voice said from out of the painful darkness. “Just take it real easy. I’m whipping up a brew that should help counteract some of that potion you took. We Mickey Finned you,” Peaches went on, and Stone heard her shuffling around on the other side of his closed eyelids. “I was supposed to kill you,” she
said with a giggle. “You don’t know how lucky you are, boy—that you ended up in Peaches’s arms and not some other bitch who would have followed orders and taken you out like an ant.”

  “What the hell are you talk—” Stone started to ask, forgetting that his head felt like the inside of a punching bag.

  “Easy, I said,” the voice from out of the darkness scolded him. “Aren’t you going to listen to your Auntie Peaches? Don’t you know how many men I’ve Mickey Finned in my time? And still, you don’t want to listen to me. Ah—men,” she said with half-real, half-mocking disgust. There was a rush of air toward him, and Stone could smell her strong perfumes wafting down all around him. A hand suddenly gripped him behind the neck, lifting his head up to a glass.

  “Here, drink this, Mr. Martin Stone,” she said, pushing him to take the liquid in. Stone nearly gagged as he heard his name spoken. That plus the fact that she had just fed him knockout drops and now was trying to get him to sip yet another beverage.

  “Drink it,” she said, squeezing his neck. “If I wanted to kill you, for chrissake, I could have done it anytime in the last five hours you’ve been out. This stuff will help you, I swear it.” It made at least minimal sense to Stone, and in his present head-throbbing state, he was ready to take anything that offered help. So he sipped down the cool liquid, which didn’t taste half bad once tie got over his trepidations that he was drinking his last. And lo and behold, within only minutes he was sitting up and able to talk without the reverberations slamming back and forth inside his skull.

  “Okay, thanks,” Stone said. He no longer had his wool cap or glasses on anymore, and he didn’t look for them. She knew who he was. “Now tell me what the hell is going on,” he said, propped up on the pillow as she stood at the far end of the bed, her hands draped over a wooden footboard. “First you Mickey Finned me, then you were supposed to kill me, then you didn’t kill me, then—”