Don Pendleton

Whipsaw

1

The stink of dead fish swelled up in the alley.

His stomach started to churn as he moved into the darkness.

He thought for a minute he was going to vomit, and swallowed hard, the bitter taste of the bile rising all the way into his throat until he could taste his last meal along with it.

It was hotter than hell, and the sweat rolled down the back of his neck and trickled under the rounded edge of his shirt neck. He stopped to get control of himself, leaning against the sticky wall.

He took a step away from the wall, and something squeaked. It darted past him, a long, thin tail dragging along the wet pavement. He didn't have to look to know it was a rat. And he didn't have to count to know that there was more than one. They moved in packs, a dozen for each one visible. And it was that, more than anything else, that made him hate the Third World. The damn rats. Why in hell couldn't people take care of their garbage? It wasn't necessary to leave food rotting in alleys for days at a time, until every kind of vermin had a chance to eat its fill. These people were no better than savages.

He took another step, and his foot landed on something soft and squishy. He steeled himself for the familiar smell of dog excrement, but this time he was wrong. Whatever he'd stepped in didn't smell that bad. It was wet and sticky. His shoe made a sucking noise when he lifted it, then some thing cloyingly sweet swelled up around him, much like overripe banana.

As he drew deeper into the alley, the darkness seemed to suck the heat right out of his blood. He started to feel cold all over, and he shivered despite the sweat rolling down his chest and soaking through the underarms of his shirt. He heard a distant throbbing, like some sort of giant dynamo. He stopped again to listen, but he couldn't get a fix on it. The sound rose and fell as if it were stopping and starting, or as if the wind, or the distant ocean, somehow interfered.

He shrugged it off and took another step, and this time the dynamo started to get louder. He accidentally kicked a splintered packing crate, and it fell into a pile of folded cardboard. The humming suddenly swelled in volume and broke into a thousand splinters. Then he realized it wasn't distant at all. It was the flies, sitting like some single, throbbing thing in a layer on the piled garbage. Their separate buzzes slashed at him as the insects soared up over his head, then settled back down.

The noise gradually fell away until once again it sounded a hundred miles away. The smell of rotting fish grew worse, as if fanned by a thousand sets of tiny wings. He hated fish, hated the stink of it, the feel of it on his tongue. He couldn't think of fish without gagging. And he couldn't take another step in that damn alley without thinking of fish.

He turned his head away, but it was too late.

It swelled up in him like the first rush of oil as the drill breaks through and taps a new field.

He doubled over, and the first wave of nausea racked him until his stomach hurt. He thought he would turn inside out. Again and again his intestines tied themselves in knots, trying to get out. He doubled over and braced himself with one hand on his knee.

The spasm passed, and he turned to one side to spit out the horrible, rancid taste. He wished to hell he had a bottle of beer, a glass of water, anything to rinse it away. And he knew that he couldn't afford to think about it unless he wanted another bout of the heaves to sap whatever willpower he had left.

Spitting that awful, dry spit, he shook his head and swallowed hard one more time, sliding past the puddle on the ground. He forgot about the flies now, and even the stink of fish was forgotten. All he wanted to do was to get away from the incontrovertible proof of his own weakness. Giving the mound of garbage a wide berth, he bumped against the wall of the building on his right. It jarred his shoulder, and his teeth clacked together. He thought for a second he'd chipped one, then realized it had been that way for years.

He looked up at the sky, which seemed to have disappeared for a second. Then, like a narrow strip little more than a foot wide, he saw a band of black sprinkled with stars. He realized the eaves of the two buildings arched out over the alley, almost touching in places. It was almost as if he were in a tunnel with a skylight. He felt the walls pressing in on him, and his head started to spin. He closed his eyes to fight off the vertigo, shook his head to clear it and tried once more to concentrate on the business at hand.

Ten feet, he kept telling himself, eight feet, six feet. Step by step, like a scared kid inching past a graveyard, he marked his progress.

In the darkness, in the back of his mind, he kept hearing the squeak of the rats. He shivered, imagining the rodents trying to slither under his cuffs and up his legs. God, how he hated being there. He wondered whether that was why he did what he did, whether he hated such places so much he had a compulsion to obliterate them all, wipe them away as surely and completely as the teacher's pet washing the day's assignments from a blackboard. He asked himself that sort of question often. He never had the answer, but knew it didn't make any difference. He was what he was, and nothing could change him. And it suited him to think of himself that way immutable, irresistible. He was a force of nature, a fact of life.

He was at the hard part. He could look a man in the eye in broad daylight, and put a bullet right between his eyes. He knew he could because he'd done it.

He could design a bomb to look like anything from a Bible to a hair dryer. He'd done that, too. But in the damp dark he felt vulnerable.

He shut his ears to the droning of the flies and groped along the wall until he found the back corner. It was tricky work in the dark, but he couldn't risk using a light. He didn't want to call attention to himself and, more than that, dreaded what unwanted things would be picked out by the beam. At the back corner, he leaned against the wall, taking long, slow breaths through his nose.

In his chest he could feel his heart pounding like an angry fist. The noise of it thumped in his ears, his pulse roaring like white water through a narrow chasm.

His mouth felt dry and pasty. It still tasted of bile and the afternoon whiskey. He placed one hand flat against his chest, pressing on his heart, stroking the tight skin under his shirt to calm himself.

When his composure started to return, he ran through it all in his head one last time, just to make sure. He had the right building he was certain of that.

And he had all the equipment he would need. One by one, he ticked off the inventory. He could even visualize the yellow sheet he'd used to assemble it. So meticulous he was that he always wrote everything down. Just to make absolutely certain. Then, item by item, he had gathered the tools of his trade and put them in the nondescript green canvas backpack. Then he'd burned the list.

He imagined every unforeseen contingency and carried tools to deal with them, as well. He was perfect, and he knew it. So did those who employed him. It was why they paid him so well. It was why he could work as little or as much as he chose. But he was superstitious. He never worked during the month of June. It was the month of his birth, as well as his mother's. It was also the month of her death. In his calendar, June was a sacred month, his own personal Ramadan it was a fixed Lent, a time to reflect on the eleven months that had gone before. He wondered why he had agreed this time to work in June.

In his head he said a little prayer, one of thanks for his success so far, and a petition for safety during the night ahead of him. When the prayer was finished, his heart had returned to normal. He could still feel it, but it was a good feeling, a peaceful, regular rhythm. He was back in control. The rats and the flies were behind him. And there was consolation in the fact that some of them would disappear by the following noon.