The Dead Town

Chapter 24

One-eyed, one-eared, with a steel-and-copper mechanical hand at the end of his left arm, Sully York could see and hear as well as anyone, better than some. As well as anyone, he could serve up mixed nuts, three varieties of cheese, three varieties of crackers, thick slices of Armenian sausage, and drinks, a forty-year-old Scotch for him and Bryce Walker, and a Pepsi for the boy, Travis Ahern, who was only about ten, which in Sully’s opinion was four years too early either for Scotch or women, or life-and-death exploits.

By the time that Sully had been fourteen, he had enjoyed a good whiskey now and then and could hold his liquor. But of course he had been six feet three at that age, had looked twenty-one, on his own in the world and ready for adventure. Back then, he hadn’t lost the eye yet or the ear, or the hand, and he hadn’t sustained the sabre slash from his right eye to the corner of his mouth that left him with a livid scar in which he took much delight. In fact, at fourteen he hadn’t known much fun at all but was determined to have some, which he damn well did over the decades. Back then, all of his teeth had been real, whereas they were all gold these forty-seven years later, and he had cracked and broken off and simply lost each of them in a thrilling and memorable fashion.

They settled in Sully’s den, which was his favorite room in the house. Over the stone fireplace hung a fierce boar’s head, the tusks as pointed as ice picks, and with it the knife that Sully wielded to kill the beast. One wall and his desktop offered framed photographs of him and his buddies in exotic locales, from jungles to deserts, from mountain passes to ships sailing on strange tides, and in every case he and those good old boys — all dead now, each killed as colorfully as he had lived — had been in the service of their country, though never once in uniform. The kind of work they did was so deep cover that it made the CIA seem by comparison as open as a community-outreach organization. Their group had no name, only a number, but they had called themselves the Crazy Bastards.

On shelves and tables were souvenirs: a perfectly preserved six-inch-long hissing cockroach from Madagascar; an ornately carved wooden leg once worn by a dwarf Soviet assassin; a dirk and a dagger and a kris, all of which had cut him and all of which he had taken away from the cutters, who were rotting in Hell; the knobkerrie that had knocked out his left eye and with which he had dealt immediate vengeance to the one who had half blinded him; a blowgun, a scimitar, a pike, a tomahawk, a yataghan, intricately worked iron handcuffs, and many more items of sentimental value.

They settled in big leather armchairs around the coffee table where all the food was laid out, while Bryce and Travis recounted events they had witnessed — and escaped — at Memorial Hospital. Of the two, Bryce did most of the talking and most of the eating, as the boy slumped in a bleak mood that damn well did not become him. Sully had no patience for sulkers or whiners or negativists in general. He would have given Travis some sharp advice about the necessity to have a positive and high-spirited response to everything in life, from a certain glorious young woman in Singapore to a knobkerrie in the eye, but he restrained himself because he suspected that in spite of the boy’s current annoying mood, he had the right stuff. Sully York had a nose for people with the right stuff, which was one of the reasons he was the only surviving Crazy Bastard.

The story Bryce told — of patients being killed at the hospital, of some kind of mass-murder conspiracy that Travis insisted had to be the work of extraterrestrials — was so screwball and wild-assed that Sully quickly recognized it as the dead-serious truth. Besides, Bryce had as much of the right stuff as anyone Sully York had ever known. Bryce hadn’t spent his life cutting the throats of slick villains who needed their throats cut; he hadn’t pushed off cliffs the people who, in being pushed off, gave noble meaning to those cliffs. Instead, Bryce had written Western novels, damn good ones, full of heroism, in which he portrayed exactly how true evil operated and how good people sometimes had to deal hard with the bad ones if civilization was to survive.

When Bryce finished, Sully looked at the boy, who sat holding a cube of cheese at which he had fitfully nibbled. “Son, I really believe you’ve got moxie in your veins and steel in your spine. I have a nose for people with the right stuff, and you smell to high heaven of it. But there you sit as spiritless as that damn chunk of cheese. Hell, the cheese looks more capable of being ornery than you do. If half of what Bryce has told me is true — and I think it’s full true, front to back — then we have a hard job of work ahead of us, and we have to go at it with spunk and spirit and absolute confidence that we’re going to storm the hill and plant the flag. If we’re to be on the same team, I have to know why you’re moping like this and that you have the guts and the love of glory to get up out of your funk and fight to win.”

Bryce said, “Sully, his mother has gone missing. Travis doesn’t know for sure, can’t know, but he thinks they got her. He thinks she must be dead.”

Thrusting up from his armchair, making a fist of his mechanical hand, Sully said, “Maybe she’s dead? Is that all? Hell, no, she’s not dead. Nobody’s dead until you see the stinking body. I won’t damn well believe that I’m dead until I can look down on my corpse and see for sure there aren’t any vital signs. I’ve known people who were surely dead — he was flung out the door of a chopper at two thousand feet without a parachute, another supposedly took three rounds in the back and fell into an ice crevasse — but a year or two passes and one night in a dark alley or in a crowded bazaar in Morocco, here he is coming at you with a meat ax or pushing you face-first into a huge old basket full of cobras! Dead, my ass. You haven’t seen your mother dead, have you? If you haven’t seen her dead, she’s not dead, and we’re going to go out there and find her. So eat the rest of that cheese and prepare yourself. You understand me, short stuff?”

The flat dull look in Travis Ahern’s eyes had given way to a lively light.

“Better,” Sully York said.