L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume 31

Chapter 2-6

My fist catches his jaw with an audible c***k, dislocating it. He shrieks as I land opposite him, grabbing his wrist and wresting his pistol in one fluid motion. He loses his balance, sprawling to the gravel, crying out in pain, neutralized.

His partner is gasping, trying to recover his breath while aiming at me. I’m moving again, a blur, faster than before. I run to the side of the cooler, concealed for little over a second, and skid, throwing up a shower of rocks.

He pulls the trigger prematurely, hitting nothing. By the time I appear on the other side, I’m on him. My brain computes a combination of fatal blows—strike to the temple, elbow to the summit of the nose, hook to the base of the cerebellum. The information is just coming at me, as if my brain has been transformed into a supercomputer.

I opt for a non-fatal blow, and shatter his clavicle instead, pile-driving my fist with agonizing force. It knocks him back into a screaming tumble.

I hold still, both assailants in my peripheral vision. My heart is pumping harder than it’s ever pumped. I’m supercharged, and I know I can kill these men a dozen ways to Sunday if I want to. And I do.

But I need to resist the craving. I’m a vampire, fighting my nature to drain their lives. Thoughts even go to Reggie and what I might do to him. I clench my fists, try to remain rigid and block out the temptation. I’m not going to become a Kurt Rodriguez. I’m not going to indulge, even though I want to snap these creatures to pieces.

I straddle the chest of the second man, startling him. The doorway light catches the dread in his eyes. He’s breathing fast, groaning from the agony of the pressure I’m placing with my knee squashed against his broken clavicle. He’s mine.

I squeeze either side of his mouth with my fingers like a vise. “I’m going to ask you once, and if you lie, I’m going to rip your f*****g jaw off. Comprende?”

He nods, scared out of his ever-loving mind.

My voice is a hiss, a venomous hiss. “Where do I find the Candyman?”

There is no coming down from a twenty-strip high, at least not in the first couple of hours. Before this moment, I had no idea what it was like to do more than two hits in a twenty-four-hour period. Now I’m worried the high will never end.

I’ve got the worst case of the jitters, and I’m holding my arms to keep from shaking, braced against an I-beam beneath the elevated transit line that ferries the 7 train to and from Manhattan.

Mullins picks up on the other end of my call. “Hey.” He’s barely awake. A second later and, “God, it’s one in the morning. What’s up?”

There are a thousand things I want to say, blistering thoughts competing at light speed in my overclocked brain. “Rodriguez wasn’t a victim.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“He enjoyed every minute of his high. He wanted to kill those cops. You see, it’s a dark side, Ed. It’s a dark side that wants to control you. And if you don’t have the strength, well, you’re a goner.”

There’s a pause on the other end. Mullins’ voice comes back dead serious. “Hey, is everything okay? This doesn’t sound like you.”

Mullins has it wrong again. It sounds exactly like me. The true me. The unleashed me. “You’re a good guy, Ed. I know you’ve had it rough, but I’m telling you, it’s going to work out in the end.”

“Man, you’re scaring me. You’ve been drinking or something?”

“Ed, I want you to listen for a second, okay?”

He keeps quiet on the other end.

“If anything happens to me, I want you to take care of Suzie and Caitlyn. It’s a partner’s oath. You remember that, right?”

“Of course.” He sounds like he wants to say more, but he’s afraid, I can tell.

“There’s nothing to worry about, Ed. I’ve got something to take care of, and I’m going to follow the rabbit hole. I’m going to dig deep, real deep, and finish this.”

“Finish what?”

“What we started. I’m going to close out the Rodriguez case. I’m going to make it right for Yee’s parents, for the family of the other two officers that were shot, for my brother Tommy, for Mr. and Mrs. Rodriguez. For you, buddy, and the rest of the boys. I’m going to rip out the source and make it right.”

“Jesus, Terry, what the hell is going on? Are you in trouble? Hey, man, I’m here. I’m here, you understand? So talk to me!”

He never calls me by my first name. It gives me a modicum of comfort. “I gotta go, partner. See ya.”

“Wait, Terry. Hey—!”

I disconnect and block him from calling back. The L train grinds above me and I let go of my arms. The jitters wrack my body, and I vibrate to the rolling of steel wheels over the tracks. I’m a ball of bottled-up venom, every sedentary moment poisoning my blood a little more. I need to release it. I need to release all of it.

And that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

It’s a fifteen-minute drive to my destination. With each passing streetlight, the pressure builds. I want to uncork the pressure, to let it burst. But I have to hang on a little longer.

I park in the heart of Astoria, Queens, a twenty-four-hour nonstop mini-Manhattan of low-rise apartment buildings and single-story businesses. Spanish, Greek, Arabian and Brazilian clubs and cafés are hopping, showing off the neighborhood’s multicultural personality.

The one I’m interested in is a club called El Toro Loco. My rooftop informant said the Candyman fronts as a legit businessman, using the nightclub scene to traffic product. He claimed he didn’t know which club, but I followed the rabbit hole to its very depths. It’s amazing what you can learn through the Mindnet when your neurons are ablaze.

Reggie was right about the “crazy” part. El Toro Loco translates to “The Mad Bull,” or literally, “The Crazy Bull.” I don’t know if it was his rabid ranting, or he was trying to tell me the answer.

Latin dance music echoes out onto Broadway. Young twenty-somethings are clustered in line, waiting to get into the club while 3-D glyphs advertise drink specials that change in price as demand shifts during the night.

The bouncer at the door is big, like an NFL offensive tackle, close-shaved afro indicative of prior military experience. He’s three hundred pounds easy, with very little body fat. My brain has already calculated six ways to take him down using nothing more than my God-given hands. I’m not dressed for the club, and he makes it a point to tell me to remove my hat and get to the back of the line. I do neither. The young crowd makes no attempt to hide their disgust for my older presence. I don’t care about them. I want in.

There are nineteen people in line at El Toro Loco. A video camera above the door confirms that we’re being watched. The old me would have flashed a police glyph, and the bouncer would have moved aside.

There’s no room for the old me.

I step toward the bouncer.

“Sir, I’m going to ask you again. Please move to the back—”

Faster than he can react, I sock him in the windpipe. He claws his throat, bug-eyed. I follow it up with a knuckled fist to the kidney. His body flexes involuntarily, and he hits the ground, all three-hundred-plus-pounds of solid manpower, down for the count. I step over his mountainous carcass, leaving an astonished crowd behind.

The club is packed. Lasers, stereographs and booming bass thrills my senses. I see two men with the word Security across the front of their black T-shirts quickly pushing through the throng toward me. I’ve been made.

I shove sideways across the dance floor, toward the restrooms and staircase leading up to the catwalk and second bar. People are hanging out everywhere, laughing, talking, drinking and dancing. I don’t want to alarm them. I just want to get to my prize.

I’m rough, pushing people aside, swimming upstream, trying to beat my pursuers. I hit the stairs a couple of paces ahead of them. I punch up the steps, zigzagging precisely between bodies. I’m four strides ahead by the time I catch the top step. It’s less crowded up here, and I bolt toward the back area, past the VIP roped-off access and velour-cushioned lounge chairs, along the black walls toward the solitary door in the very rear. The door opens six paces before I get there. The suited, short Asian man that exits fires a stun g*n at me. A pair of electrodes shoot out. Time slows again. I see the dart-like projectiles and conductive wires propel through the air. I bend sideways, eluding their trajectory. It forces me off balance, but my brain won’t let me fall. It tells me to throw my weight into my right foot and push off into a leap. Airborne, I rain down, driving my forearm into the bridge of my assailant’s nose, breaking it and knocking him to the ground with my momentum.

I waste no time getting my bearings. I grab the butt of his stun g*n and wheel about, clipping the first bodyguard across the forehead with the carbon fiber grip. He knocks mouth-first into the wall, and pitches heavily to the side. The second guard tries to put me in a bear hug. I smack him upside the chin with the butt of the stun g*n, snapping his head back. He’s down a moment later, lights out.

I take an adrenalized pause to absorb my audience, frozen with their drinks in their hands. Their expressions vary from shock to sheer terror. They’re seeing the venom released, the poison of what I’ve become. It triggers momentary remorse. A second later, and I’m ready to engage my prize, any notion of guilt extinguished and forgotten. I told Mullins I was going to finish this, and I am.

I toss the stun g*n on the floor and enter the lion’s den.

He’s sitting comfortably behind the solitary wood desk in the small office, stained glass peacock lamp illuminating his face in a wash of yellow light. He’s not some prizefighter, or Olympian, or martial artist or bodybuilder. He’s ordinary, my age, Hispanic mixed with Caucasian, with a medium build hidden beneath a tailored suit. Behind the calm eyes is a storm I recognize, a tidal wave waiting to crash ashore. I wasn’t expecting an amped welcome, but I’m not frightened by it either.

I lock the door behind me. There are no windows, no secondary exit, just the four walls of our cage. He could have chosen any place to wait for my arrival. But he chose here instead. One way in, one survivor.

He loosens his red silk necktie. I’m drawn to the crimson hue as it shimmers against the bright, recessed lights above, but more so by the y-shaped scar on his tanned knuckle. Air conditioning is piping in, blowing down on us. I can’t feel the cool though.

“So, you’re the Candyman.”

“And you’re Detective Sergeant Terrance Parker.” He has an American accent.

I don’t care that he knows who I am. Facial recognition technology in networked video cameras can easily pick up a name. They use it in casinos; why not a nightclub?

“I’m not here to arrest you.”