Hardshell - Dean R. Koontz, ebook, CALIBRE SFF 1970s, Temp 1
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HARDSHELL
1
ARTERIES OF LIGHT PULSED THROUGH THE BLACK SKY. IN THAT STROBOscopic blaze,
millions of cold raindrops appeared to have halted in midfall. The glistening street reflected the celestial
fire and seemed to be paved with broken mirrors. Then the lightning-scored sky went black again, and
the rain resumed. The pavement was dark. Once more the flesh of the night pressed close on all sides.
Clenching his teeth, striving to ignore the pain in his right side, squinting in the gloom, Detective Frank
Shaw gripped the Smith & Wesson .38 Chief’s Special in both hands. He assumed a shooter’s stance
and squeezed off two rounds.
Ahead of Frank, Karl Skagg sprinted around the corner of the nearest warehouse just in time to save
himself. The first slug bored a hole in the empty air behind him, and the second clipped the corner of the
building.
The relentless roar of the rain on metal warehouse roofs and on the pavement, combined with rumbling
thunder, effectively muffled the shots. Even if private security guards were at work in the immediate area,
they probably had not heard anything, so Frank could not expect assistance.
He would have welcomed assistance. Skagg was big, powerful, a serial killer who had committed at
least twenty-two murders. The guy was incredibly dangerous even in his best moments, and right now he
was about as approachable as a whirling buzzsaw. This was definitely not a job for one cop.
Frank considered returning to his car and putting in a call for backup, but he knew that Skagg would slip
away before the area could be cordoned off. No cop would call off a chase merely out of concern for his
own welfare - especially not Frank Shaw.
Splashing across the puddled serviceway between two of the huge warehouses, Frank took the corner
wide, in case Skagg was waiting for him just around the bend. But Skagg was gone.
Unlike the front of the warehouse, where concrete loading ramps sloped to the enormous roll-up garage
doors, this side was mostly blank. Two hundred feet away, below a dimly glowing bulb in a wire security
cage, was a man-size metal door. It was half open but falling shut.
Wincing at the pain in his side, Frank hurried to the entrance. He was surprised to see that the handle
was torn off and that the lock was shattered, as if Skagg had used a crowbar or sledgehammer. Had he
found a tool leaning against the warehouse wall, and had he used it to batter his way inside? He had been
out of sight for mere seconds, no more than half a minute, which surely wasn’t enough time to break
through a steel door.
Why hadn’t the burglar alarm sounded? Surely the warehouse was protected by a security system. And
clearly Skagg had not entered with sufficient finesse to circumvent an alarm.
Thoroughly soaked, Frank shivered involuntarily when he put his back to the cold wall beside the door.
He gritted his teeth, willed himself to stop shaking, and listened intently.
He heard only the hollow drumming of rain on metal roofs and walls. The sizzle of rain dancing on the
wet pavement. The gurgle and slurp and chuckle of rain in gutters and downspouts.
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Wind bleating. Wind hissing.
Frank broke the cylinder out of his revolver, tipped the two unused cartridges into his hand, dropped
them in a pocket, and used a speedloader to put him back in business, fully stocked.
His right side throbbed. Minutes ago Skagg had taken him by surprise, stepping out of shadows with a
length of rebar picked up at a construction site, swinging it asMick ey Mantle might have swung a
baseball bat. Frank felt as if chunks of broken glass were working against one another in his deep
muscles and bones; the pain sharpened slightly each time he drew a breath. Maybe he had a broken rib
or two. Probably not ... but maybe. He was wet, cold, and weary.
He was also having fun.
2
TO OTHER HOMICIDE DETECTIVES, FRANK WAS KNOWN AS HARDSHELL Shaw. That
was also what his buddies had called him during Marine Corps basic training more than twenty-five years
ago, for he was stoical, tough, and could not be cracked. The name had followed him when he left the
service and joined the Los Angeles Police Department. He never encouraged anyone to use the
sobriquet, but they used it anyway because it was apt.
Frank was tall, wide in the shoulders, narrow in the waist and hips, with a rock-solid body. His
enormous hands, when curled into fists, were so formidable that he usually needed only to brandish them
to assure an adversary’s cooperation. His broad face appeared to have been carved out of granite - and
with some difficulty, with much breaking of chisels and snapping of hammers.
His colleagues in the homicide division of the LAPD sometimes claimed that Frank had only two basic
expressions: mean and meaner.
His pale-blue eyes, clear as rainwater, regarded the world with icy suspicion. When thinking, he
frequently sat or stood perfectly still for long periods during which the quickness and alertness of his blue
eyes, contrasted with his immobility, gave the impression that he was peering out from within a shell.
He had a damn hard shell, so his friends claimed. But that was only half of what they said about him.
Now, finished reloading his revolver, he stepped in front of the damaged door to the warehouse. He
kicked it open. Crouched, head down, holding the .38 in front of him, he went in fast, looking left and
right, expecting Skagg to rush at him with a crowbar, hammer, or whatever tool the scumbag had used to
get into the building.
To Frank’s left was a twenty-foot-high wall of metal shelving filled with thousands of small boxes. To his
right were large wooden crates stacked in rows, towering thirty feet overhead, extending half the length
of the building, alternating with avenues wide enough to admit forklifts.
The banks of overhead fluorescents suspended from the fifty-foot-high warehouse ceiling were switched
off. Only a few security lamps in conical tin shades shed a wan glow over the stored goods below,
leaving most of the place sheathed in shadows.
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Frank moved cautiously and silently. His soggy shoes squished, but that sound was barely audible over
the pounding rain on the roof. With water dripping off his brow, his jawline, and the barrel of his gun, he
eased from one row of crates to another, peering into each passageway.
Skagg was at the far end of the third aisle, about a hundred and fifty feet away, half in shadow, half in
milk-pale light, waiting to see if Frank had followed him. He could have kept out of the light, could have
crouched entirely in the gloom against the crates, where he might not have been visible; by waiting in plain
sight, he seemed to be taunting Frank. Skagg hesitated as if to be sure that he had been spotted, and then
he disappeared around the corner.
For five minutes they played hide-and-seek, moving stealthily through the maze of cartons and crates.
Three times, Skagg allowed himself to be seen, although he never let Frank get close.
He’s having fun too, Frank thought.
That made him angry.
High on the walls, under the cobweb-festooned eaves, were slit windows that helped illuminate the
cavernous building during the day. Now, only the flicker of lightning revealed the existence of those
narrow panes. Although that inconstant pulse did not brighten the warehouse, it occasionally caused
shadows to leap disconcertingly, and twice Frank nearly shot one of those harmless phantoms.
Easing along another avenue, scanning the gloom on both sides, Frank heard a noise, a hard scraping.
He knew at once what it was: a crate sliding on a crate.
He looked up. In the grayness high above, a sofa-size box-visible only as a black silhouette - teetered
on the edge of the crate beneath it. Then it tipped over and plummeted straight toward him.
Wile E. Coyote time.
Frank threw himself forward, hit the floor, and rolled just as the crate exploded against the concrete
where he had been standing. He averted his face as wood disintegrated into hundreds of splintery shards
of shrapnel. The box had contained plumbing fixtures; bright, chrome-plated faucets and shower heads
bounced along the floor, and a couple thumped off Frank’s back and thighs.
Hot tears of agony burned in his eyes, for the pain in his right side flared brighter. Further abused by all
of this activity, his battered ribs now seemed not merely broken but pulverized.
Overhead, Skagg let out a sound that was one part a cry of rage, one part an animalistic ululation
celebrating the thrill of the hunt, and one part insane laughter.
With some sixth sense, Frank was suddenly aware of a murderous, descending weight. He rolled to his
right, flat up against the same wall of crates atop which Skagg stood. Behind him, a second huge box
crashed to the warehouse floor.
“You alive?” Skagg called.
Frank did not respond.
“Yeah, you must be down there, because I didn’t hear you scream. You’re a quick bastard, aren’t
you?”
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That laugh again. It was like atonal music played on an out-of-tune flute: a cold, metallic sound. Inhuman.
Frank Shaw shivered.
Surprise was Frank’s favorite strategy. During a pursuit, he tried to do what his prey would least expect.
Now, taking advantage of the masking roar of the rain on the corrugated steel roof, he stood up in the
darkness beside the wall of crates, holstered his revolver, blinked tears of pain out of his eyes, and began
to climb.
“Don’t cower in the shadows like a rat,” Skagg shouted. “Come out and try to take a shot at me.
You’ve got a gun. I don’t. It’ll be your bullets against whatever I can throw at you. What better odds do
you want, you chickenshit cop?”
Twenty feet up the thirty-foot-high wall of wooden boxes, with his chilled fingers hooked into meager
niches, with the toes of his shoes pressed hard against narrow ledges, Frank paused. The pain in his right
side tightened as if it were a lasso, and it threatened to pull him backward into the aisle almost two stories
below. He clung to his precarious position and squeezed his eyes tightly shut, willing the pain to go away.
“Hey, asshole,” Skagg shouted.
Yeah?
“You know who I am?”
Big man on the psycho circuit, aren’t you?
“I’m the one the newspapers call the Night Slasher.”
Yeah, I know, I know, you drooling degenerate.
“This whole damn city lays awake at night, worrying about me, wondering where I am,” Skagg shouted.
Not the whole city, man. Personally, I haven’t lost any sleep over you.
Gradually the hot, grinding pain in his ribs subsided. It did not disappear altogether, but now it was a dull
throb.
Among friends in the marines and on the police force, Frank had a reputation for persevering and
triumphing in spite of wounds that would have incapacitated anyone else. In Nam he had taken two
bullets from a Vietcong machine gun, one in the left shoulder and one through his left side directly above
the kidney, but he had kept on going and had wasted the gunner with a grenade. Bleeding profusely, he
had nevertheless used his good arm to drag his badly wounded buddy three hundred yards to a place of
concealment, where they were safe from enemy snipers while the medevac chopper had sought and
found them. As the medics loaded him into the helicopter, he had said, “War is hell, all right, but it’s also
sure exhilarating!”
His friends said he was iron hard, nail tough. But that was only part of what they said about him.
Overhead, Karl Skagg hurried along the tops of the boxes. Frank was close enough to hear the heavy
footsteps above the ceaseless rumble of the rain.
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Even if he had heard nothing, he would have known that Skagg was on the move. The two-crate-thick
wall trembled with the killer’s passage - though not violently enough to shake Frank off his perch.
He started to climb again, feeling cautiously for handholds in the darkness, inching along the pile of
plumbing supplies. He got a few splinters in his fingers, but it was easy to screen out those small, stabbing
pains.
From his new position atop the wall, Skagg shouted into another shadowy section of the warehouse to
which he apparently thought Frank had moved, “Hey, chickenshit!”
You called?
“I have something for you, chickenshit.”
I didn’t know we were exchanging gifts.
“I got something sharp for you.”
I’d prefer a TV set.
“I got the same thing for you that I used on all the others.”
Forget the TV. I’ll settle for a nice bottle of cologne.
“Come and get your guts ripped out, you chickenshit!”
I’m coming, I’m coming.
Frank reached the top, raised his head above the edge of the wall, looked left, then right, and saw
Skagg about thirty feet away. The killer had his back to Frank and was peering intently down into
another aisle.
“Hey, cop, look at me, standing right up here in the light. You can hit me with no trouble. All you have to
do is step out and line up a shot. What’s the matter? Don’t you even have the nerve for that, you yellow
bastard?”
Frank waited for a peal of thunder. When it came, he levered himself over the edge, on top of the stack
of crates, where he rose to a crouch. The pounding rain was even louder up here, and combined with the
thunder it was enough to cover any noise he made.
“Hey, down there! You know who I am, cop?”
You’re repeating yourself. Boring, boring.
“I’m a real prize, the kind of trophy a cop dreams of!”
Yeah, your head would look good on my den wall.
“Big career boost if you brought me down, promotions and medals, you chickenshit.”
The ceiling lights were only ten feet above their heads, and at such short range even the dim bulbs in the
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