Филип Керр - The Second Angel

The red light stayed on as the chamber continued its slow return to sea-level pressure. With her gun still on Rimmer’s neck, Ronica’s eyes searched the pressure gauge impatiently. It was still only halfway back to normal. Gritting her perfect white teeth, she tried to contain the sour uncertainty she was feeling in her stomach. She was close enough to smell Rimmer’s bad breath as it blew back off the corridor wall. There was something less culpable about killing a man with offensive breath, she thought. Another glance at the pressure gauge. Almost there. Just a few more seconds and it would all be over.

‘Do you want to talk about this now?’ he asked.

‘Shut up.’

‘I love a dominant female. As it happens, I’m looking for a responsible and reliable person to set my ten-inch cock on fire for a home movie I’m making. Why don’t we go back to my car where we can discuss the details and possible financial compensation?’ He licked his lips and smiled. ‘Or maybe I’m asleep and this is all an erotic dream. Any minute I’ll have a nocturnal emission, all over the bottom sheet, and wake up.’

Ronica grabbed a handful of Rimmer’s lank and greasy hair to better grind the muzzle of her gun into the boil on Rimmer’s cheekbone.

‘If this is just a dream,’ she said, ‘it’s not one you’ll ever wake up from unless you shut your mouth.’

‘You’re not going to kill me for talking,’ persisted Rimmer. ‘Fact is, you’re not ready to kill me yet, otherwise you’d have done it already. Besides, you can’t live forever.’

With one side of his face pressed up against the wall he had a half-view of her out of the corner of his eye. Although it was hardly hot in the corridor, Ronica’s beautiful black face was shiny with perspiration, as if she still had a few doubts about what she was doing, as if — Rimmer smiled — as if she hadn’t quite convinced herself that she would squeeze the trigger. Fie was about to suggest that he wouldn’t die in his dreams, or any place else for that matter, so long as she still had the safety catch on on her little Matahari — a pretty obvious feint, he thought, but worth a try all the same — when a shot blasted its fortissimo way past his devious thought process.

Ronica’s scream persuaded him that he would feel no pain — at least not from the first shot anyway. She was already down on one knee, but in the second or two available to him before the next shot was heard, he couldn’t tell if she had been hit or not. What was clear was that someone else was doing the shooting, and with no regard for noise. Sometimes it was better that way. Scaring the shit out of people was more efficient than shooting them. Instinctively, Rimmer crouched down as a third shot came zipping up the corridor, bursting with lethal energy. He reached for his gun, pointed it at Ronica’s head, and then thought better of killing her right then and there — he might need all his ammunition to deal with whoever was doing the shooting. Having adjusted the volume in the handgrip, just to let the guy know he was well-heeled, Rimmer returned fire in the general direction from which the first three shots had come. All he could think of was that Ronica had been right after all — that Dallas couldn’t have been in his chamber. Who else would want to shoot at them?

Rimmer fired twice more, and, ignoring Ronica, who was now crouched down in the opposite doorway, he scrambled away in the nick of time as a hole the size of an orange got blasted from the wall he’d been leaning against.

‘Dallas?’ he yelled. ‘Is that you?’

More shots. And, thought Rimmer, more than just the one gun, surely. He fired back, only this time he and Dallas, or whoever it was, both hit the someone foolishly drawn into the corridor to inspect the noise — the same someone, a woman.

Rimmer kept on firing, not caring who he shot. What with the roar of the guns and the smell of cordite, he was enjoying his evening. There were two of them, he was certain of that now, concealed inside the opaque plastic-walled prism that housed the stairwell and helped light the far end of the curving corridor. Behind him, farther around the bend, the elevator shaft sank through a glazed circle in the floor. It was time to make himself scarce. If he could just cross the floor, he would be safe.

Right on cue, a head and shoulder appeared around the edge of another doorway. Rimmer aimed carefully, and as the target collapsed forward into the corridor, screaming loudly, he used him as cover to make his escape, rolling acrobatically across the floor before scrambling around the bend in the corridor, and out of the line of fire. Sensing Rimmer’s presence, the elevator shaft lit up as a car began its automatic ascent to the twelfth floor. Quickly Rimmer reloaded his gun and, from the comparative safety of his new position, glanced around the bend, hoping to get a clear shot at his attackers before making his getaway. Discovering his own line of fire partially blocked by the man he had shot, Rimmer finished him off with a couple of bullets in the chest. A second stolen glance confirmed that he no longer had a clear shot at Ronica, who was pressed into the protection afforded by a doorway. If he was going to settle this account, he was going to have to persuade her that he still cared what happened to her. When she made her own getaway bid and ran toward him, he would kill her.

‘Ronica?’ he yelled. ‘C’mon, let’s get out of here. I’ll cover you.’

‘With what? Kisses?’

‘Stop screwing around, Ronica. The elevator car’s here. You want to stay there and get shot, that’s up to you, but I’m leaving.’

Flattened against the smooth metallic surface of the chamber doorway, Ronica caught a glimpse of her own reflection in the door of 1218 opposite. She looked like some two-dimensional vignette from the Egyptian Book of the Dead — the deceased holding in her left hand a lotus flower. Except that the flower was a gun and she was, for the moment, very much alive. Not that she expected to stay that way the minute she showed herself to Rimmer.

‘You better get going then,’ she said, and seeing the slimmest margin of what looked like Rimmer’s head, she took careful aim with the Colt Matahari and fired.

Rimmer yelped like a dog as Ronica’s bullet hit the wall about an inch ahead of his face, sending up a small explosion of wood and metal splinters, one of which chamfered its way through the scrofulous tip of his earlobe like some large, stinging insect.

‘Bitch,’ he yelled, as he fired off a volley of shots as close as he was able to the doorway where she was still crouched. Then, finding his ear and neck wet with his own blood, and the elevator doors opening expectantly behind him, Rimmer made his exit. As soon as the doors closed and the elevator sank down into the shaft, Rimmer pressed himself back against the wall of the car, with his gun aimed at the glass ceiling and retreating circular lip that was the twelfth floor.

Ronica heard the elevator car descend into the shaft, and longed to go after Rimmer and fire her two remaining shots. But there were still the two gunmen at the other end of the corridor to think about. Her one abiding hope now was that one of them might turn out to be Dallas. Surely she might still convince him of her own good faith even without the corroborating evidence of Rimmer’s corpse. That could mean telling Dallas everything, but she might have little or no alternative. She was about to call out to him when she realized that the door to 1218 was now open, and standing there, a little unsteady, as might be expected of someone who had just been subjected to several hundred atmospheres, but still managing to aim a gun levelly at her braided head, was Dallas.

‘Drop it,’ he said quietly. Dallas was still feeling lightheaded after his experience inside the hyperbaric chamber. Less than half an hour after Gates had left the room, he had been awakened by what felt like some kind of invisible force pressing him down in bed. The pressure quickly became so great that it had forced the blood into the back of his body, and for a minute or so, he had actually blacked out. Recovering consciousness, Dallas had discovered the pressure returning to normal, and hearing the sound of gunfire immediately outside his door, he reasoned first that Rimmer must have found him, and second that Gates must have found Rimmer. So he was a little surprised to find Ronica, a woman whom he recognized as an employee of Terotechnology, cowering in the opposite doorway. She threw her gun toward him. Dallas glanced one way and then the other, his eyes taking in the bodies that now lay on the corridor floor.