Over where he lay, Jack barely listened. He was on the verge of unconsciousness, grappling with the thing at the same time that he manhandled nausea and dizziness, trying to dodge all three and evaluate what to do next.
“But seven is not lucky!”
Wright suddenly punched a wall, and directly after removed his red gauntlet and flexed the fingers of the hand, staring at them, apparently in some pain himself.
“Our kinship was undermined,” he blathered on while examining each digit, “by one of our own, in league with another, a corrupting influence from this place. A phony. One of our magnificent seven started to get other thoughts, began questioning. Not a freak out per se, but thinking independent of the other six.” Satisfied nothing was broken, Wright put the glove back on. “He fell in love.”
Blame the searing pain, but Jack had a flash of lucidity in that moment, realized something he’d never suspected and would hardly have dreamed up at any other point in the narrative.
“Shite. The Big O…”
“Hah! ‘Big O’, my foot — we tried to put the kibosh on his developing liaison with Bullet Gal, but the man was too far gone. Betrayal by one of your own, your psyche rebelling against itself — can you imagine such a thing, Jack? Our own flesh, blood and spirit. He betrayed us! Us!” Now continually striking himself in the head with the automatic, Wright turned full circle several times, spinning like a wound-up whirling dervish. “The candyass!” he yelped between blows. “The prick!”
His mask tore and fell aside; nasty welts appeared across the man’s leathery forehead, nose and cheekbones, until finally he stopped smacking. A look of surprising clarity then entered his eyes.
“He passed judgement and denounced the other six. Took on a new costume, a new name, refused to rejoin us. Thought himself a better person. All because of her — that brat Mitzi. A phony, for Christ’s sake. Who did he think he could be? The prodigal-bloody-son? We were never the same after that. We lost a significant part of our soul.”
“But Sir Omphalos was — looked — younger than you.”
If he was offended, Donald Wright forgot to show it. “Yes, yes, all right. Perhaps he discovered a better moisturizer.”
A trail of red seeped down Jack’s face, so he wiped it away with the suit-sleeve of his left arm. This was nothing — beneath him spread a lot of blood on the floor. He refused to examine further. Knew he’d already lost too much of the stuff.
“Still, there were six,” Wright mused. “Six being sufficient to run the roost. We took up an alias our brother didn’t know, this new identity as the publisher of the Patriot — along with all those other hats — and slowly and surely drew our plans against him.”
“And murdered the guy.”
“That’s right, baby. After all, we had a panting public to amuse.”
“Taking self-loathing to new extremes.”
“Not at all.”
“Then you had one of your other duplicates kill himself. Why?”
“A demonstration of our power — an example, and a warning.”
“To who? …You or us? The Big O was already dead by then.”
“Let us say all interested parties.”
“Bit excessive, don’t you reckon?”
“Well, SC-baby, you people didn’t know how many of me there were. Casually offing one of my selves like that would intimate a lot more clones — I have to say, I’m surprised you came close to guessing the correct number. How did you?”
“Little things.”
“Such as?”
“Hats.”
“Well, well. A smart guy.”
At that point Jack closed his eyes, almost let go. Then he remembered Louise, and snapped back to rag-doll attention.
“Which left five of you,” he spoke up. The Equalizer was struggling to focus on the man hovering above. “After I gutted your offices at the Patriot, the police — well, what was it the police said? That they found five bodies…?”
“Ahh, I see your confusion.”
It was Wright’s turn to guffaw, his self-abuse a thing of the recent past.
“Funny thing. We were in the midst of a ceremony — usually careful to stay far enough apart in order that one or two of us would survive any attempt at assassination. This was the first time in years we’d congregated together, and the reason? That same, self-sacri-ficial doppelgänger we were just talking about. You attacked us during a private wake for the man — which accounts for five identical cats being found, even after I escaped the terrible maelstrom. If you look closely, you’ll find that one of them has a spent .45 in his head.”