And then thinking: God, I blew that one. He wasn't anywhere near ready for that.
A few seconds later Jack sneaked a quick glance to his right. Felix still stared stone.
God! I hope I haven't frozen up my damned gunman again. We've got to have him on this one. We go in there and they come busting up and he doesn't shoot... ?
And then he thought: Fuck it! Nothing I can do about it now. If I blew it, I blew it. Forget it. Shouldn't have brought him along. Shoulda come out here alone like I always do, so, Okay, forget he's here, Jack, oh Great Stupid Leader. Forget it. Do your bit. Deep breaths. Deep breaths and forget Felix and go through those pictures, do 'em now, paint those pictures, because if you can't see it now, if you can't visualize success now, then you sure as shit won't know what to do at the split second...
And he began to do it. He steered the car with automatic pilot, seeing not the streets of Cleburne, Texas, through the windshield, but victory.
He set the aquarium filled with pig's blood in the elevator. Laced with speed and coke and rat poison and all the rest of it. Wouldn't kill 'em but, like the flare on that goon, it just had to be a little distracting to suddenly come on to twenty or so LSD trips at once. Sure, it would smell funny. The fiends would know there was something wrong with it but they could see it! That's why he'd had Cat get an aquarium, so they could not only smell the blood, they could see it through the glass. Just too damn tempting to resist. Plunging their rotten fangs into it like bobbing for apples and then all that poison and dope starts hitting 'em and then the elevator takes them up and by the time the doors open they're gonna be so stoned and sore and weirded out...
The crossbow cable pulls 'em out too fast for 'em to stop it, stoned as they are. The cable is attached to the Blazer because the winch is too slow to take a chance and I'll just whistle to Carl on the radio and he'll hit the gas and that fiend will be out of that elevator and through the doors and burning before it knows what hit it.
Sure as hell!
Shit! We might not even need a gunman!
But they did. And right then they didn't really have one.
Felix, sitting beside the oblivious Jack Crow, had begun to rock and tremble like a molten volcano.
Part Two Chapter 17
He sat there on the tailgate of the Blazer and watched them take care of last minute details and he hated everything he saw.
But he did not speak.
He hated the job, of course, and he hated the place and he hated the Plan and he hated the sight of his pair of Brownings lying there beside him waiting to be strapped on and he hated the... earnestness... with which the rest of the Team went about it all.
But mostly he hated the sight of Jack Crow stalking about giving orders and inspiration and knowing this guy in charge was clogged tight with that suicidal half-wit philosophy about... about what? "Everybody's-got-to-go-sometime-so-how's-about-right-now?" or some such obscenity.
But he did not speak.
He just hated and smoked and boiled.
He also feared, but he was too angry at Crow to realize that, too furious and disgusted with that crap Crow had spouted at him by the locomotive. Bad enough having to do this shit and probably die doing it, but to have the goddamn boss start jamming this juvenile Code of Half-Ass Karma at him...
As far as Felix could tell, Crow's philosophical foundations consisted of: "Oh, well, what the Hell!"
But still, the gunman did not speak.
What was the point... The job was on. The war was moments away and they were all going to fight in it, himself included, and nothing Felix could say now was going to stop it or save a fucking soul.
And then he heard it: "Rock and roll!"
And they were going inside.
Past the great glass double doors taped black against the sunlight with even that tiny notch they'd cut for the cable covered with black cardboard flaps and the rest of the inside also dark and cool and dry from the air conditioning - he hadn't realized how hot it had been outside - but in here it was like a soft, dark tomb with every