CRIME THRILLERS-A Box Set (42 page)

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Martin Lansing drove past the freeway exit for Jamison and continued to the next off ramp. He ate at a Dairy Queen, one of his favorite junk-food heavens, but after ordering chili hot dogs, an order of fries, and a milkshake, he was unable to do more than nibble a bite here, sip a swallow there. Immediately his stomach revolted and he hung over the steering wheel of the car holding down the acrid taste of bile. He wiped his mouth nervously.

He did not frequent doctors. Didn't trust them. No doctor had ever done him good in the past. But soon after he escaped the Torrance house four years before, he developed symptoms not easily identified or brought under control by over-the-counter nostrums. Finally, he was forced to see a doctor under an assumed name. The diagnosis stunned him. Tuberculosis. The old "consumption" that killed so many in Europe in the past, but the worst part of the disease was that Lansing could not admit himself to a hospital or cure center. They would discover his identity and imprison him. So he did what he could, his health failing more each day. He went to Florida and, taking a menial job to support himself, stayed at a broken-down Cuban-run hotel in Miami while recuperating in the sun. He stopped smoking and ate as well as his income permitted. He did his best to nurse himself back to health, yet all along he knew he was simply putting off the inevitable for a few years. Without proper medical care his condition would worsen.

Not only did food make him nauseated, but his hands shook at unpredictable intervals so that he might be driving and have to latch on to the wheel to keep from wrecking the car, or he might be shaving and the razor would slip, cutting his chin. Often he woke after midnight shivering with night sweats. The shaking of his hands was at times pronounced to the point that he could not light an infrequent, forbidden cigarette and get it to his lips. When he did manage to smoke, a cough came on him so bad, he thought he would die. To escape these debilitating symptoms he resorted often to his dream of the palace, the castle of his imagination, where he withdrew for safety and succor. He had owned the palace window since he could remember. From it he could see everything at a distance but not be touched by it.

Now the girl, Carla Cohen, had placed a reward on his head. He was safe nowhere in the real world. After the Torrance trial and before the tuberculosis weakened him, he had semi-settled in the state of Georgia. Why not? He felt invisible here, indomitable. He grew a beard, waited a few months, shaved it. He plucked his eyebrows, then let them grow wildly to cover the bridge across his nose. He sported sideburns then adopted a burr head crew cut. He gained weight, lost it--or he had until this sickness came upon him. Now he was rail thin and wasted. Regaining weight was out of the question.

Sometimes he wore glasses with clear glass in wire rims and it changed his looks. Sometimes he changed his manner of dress and was an imposter. He had been a hard-hat laborer, a three-piece suiter, an over-alled farmer, a lanky longhair, a suburban white-collar man. People saw him, but he felt they did not really see him. He looked like everyone else. He melted into the places he stayed. And he never stayed anywhere very long. When he tired of the low-class society of Miami that claimed him during his rest, he left it for the mountains. When getting supplies he always bought a newspaper to see if anyone was copying him. He hated "copycat killers." If he could catch one, he'd string him up by his fucking balls.

It was in his last foray off the mountain that he had bought the paper carrying Carla's reward notice. Carla wanted a vendetta. She wanted to stir old memories, exhume the dead, and have them walk.

It was a lot of money. Twenty-five thousand dollars. Grandmotherly types turned in their golden anniversary spouses for that kind of money.

He coughed into a Dairy Queen napkin and spotted it with blood. His chest was racked with tight little pains. It felt as if needles were imbedded in his lungs. He thought he might have cancer
and
tuberculosis, but put the idea away as soon as it seized him. Cancer, holy fuck, not that. It was just the old TB flaring up, that's all, and he would defeat its grip on him as he had done before.

He dumped the remains of the uneaten food out the car window and rolled the glass up snug. He was chilled--TB did that to you, he temporized. He didn't want to start coughing again.

He consulted a tattered road atlas for an indirect route to Jamison. As bad as he felt, as debilitated as he was with his sickness, he had an appointment to keep.

Carla was calling to him. He had somehow known when he cut her and then could not finish the job that she would seek him out one day. She had not promised it the night he hurt her, but it was in her eyes. It surprised him it had taken her so long. He detoured to Jamison every four months, parked on a timber-wood logging road, and hiked over to Sully's house to look for her. Sully was always alone. Alone and vulnerable. There was no sport in playing with the man. He was like some scared-tail dog. You kicked him, he ran hollering for cover. He even sold his hardware store, and retired to putter around in a garden like some silly senile old bastard, though he was barely middle-aged.

Sully must have missed Carla as much as I did, Lansing thought, turning onto a farm road cutting north to Jamison city limits. He couldn't have missed her more.

The nausea went away and Lansing swallowed easily. His hands were finally steady on the wheel. He lifted his right hand and held it palm up. He glanced at the little white knobby scars and wondered if Carla's disfigurement looked as nice. They had had four years to heal.

She was right to call him. It was time for new, clean wounds, new slices.

He placed the hand on the steering wheel again and breathed evenly. The sickness had no hold on him, it did not know his name. He could see past the pain, beyond and to the other side of it when he wanted to bad enough. He knew how to ignore, then dismiss the cold blue shivering sweat, the rattling cough that sought to impair his progress.

His crooked fate line led him faithfully onward to an ultimate destiny. Everyone knew destiny could not be changed by sickness and maybe--it was possible--it could not be derailed by death.

"I'm coming, Carla," he whispered into the sultry closed, fried-food-smelling crypt that was his car. "We meet a last time, and it's just me and you, kid, just me and you and some dying we've got to do before it's finished."

CHAPTER 4

"All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive."

Sun Tzu

Sully followed behind her every step.

"You're going to get yourself upset this way, Sully," she said, truly concerned though not dissuaded.

"That cost me two thousand, four hundred, and ninety-five dollars. I have the receipt."

"You paid too much." She reached out to snap the wire from the control box. Sully stayed her hand.

"This does not make sense, Carla."

"Sun Tzu makes incredible sense. Read him."

"You're willing to tear out a perfectly good and expensive burglar alarm system because of some ancient philosopher, and you're telling me I should read him?"

"He wasn't a philosopher, at least not in the strict sense of the word. He was a strategist, a war brain. An ancient one man think tank."

"He said go into your modern ranch style brick home and rip out the alarms so any goofy outfit in the country can get in without impediment?"

Carla turned a corner, began surveying the wires in another room, wondering when she'd get the chance to dispense with them. "He said warfare is deception. Appear unable to attack even when you can; when using force, appear inactive. Like that." She waved one hand in exasperation.

Sully shook his head to clear it. "Wait a minute, I want to get this straight since it may wind up costing me money. You want to deceive Lansing into thinking we have taken no precautions. You want him to think you're just sitting here waiting for a phone call turning him in. Have I got that right?"

"Correcto mundo. Now you're catching on. I could teach you something yet." She grinned over at him and slowly snaked out a hand to a wire. Again he caught her wrist and shook his head.

"And I guess you want to do a hatchet job on the triple dead bolts, too," he said.

"Uh-uh, not necessary. We just leave them unlocked."

Sully raised his hands to the ceiling and shook his fists.

"Carla, your Japanese warlord was insane! No, I take it back. He lived hundreds of years ago. If he had dead bolts and a killer in the woods, he'd, by Christ, lock the goddamned doors!"

"No use getting mad." She used a wheedling voice. "And he wasn't Japanese. He was Chinese. Did you know the I-Ching is older than the Bible?"

"I thought you were Jewish."

"Knowledge has nothing to do with my being Jewish, you goya schmuck."

Sully gave up and retired to the kitchen to make iced tea. Carla watched his retreat and felt a little sorry for him. Though she used a bantering tone to try to make the whole thing go down easier for him, it was no good. He wasn't buying passive strategy. He had been brainwashed into thinking aggression the prime mover in a conflict. He really believed in his two grand silent alarms and his "impenetrable" steel-center doors with their barrage of locks. She would never be able to convince him this was the only way. But she could not take out the alarm system unless he agreed. It was, after all, his house. It was his money about to be wasted.

She gazed longingly at the thin lines of wire running along the walls and around the window casings. She turned, marched into the kitchen, and sat down with Sully at the table. The back door was open and June bugs clung to the screen yearning for the light. Crickets burred in the dark. She could smell the scent of sweet night jasmine drifting into the op€en, airy house.

She poured the warm tea over ice in her glass. The ice cracking merged with the cricket chorus. Sully wasn't talking.

"If you looked anymore miserable and were a dog, your owner would shoot you."

"I'm afraid that's what you want to happen. Make it easy for someone to kill us."

"Sully?" She reached for his hand. "Trust me, okay? I know what I'm doing. You don't want any part of this, you better leave now. He'll be around soon."

"You're right."

"What?"

"I don't want any part of it, but I can't leave, how can I leave? I'm going to leave you here by yourself? And you're right, he's coming. I can...feel it, crazy as that sounds."

Carla involuntarily glanced at the screen door littered with June bugs, black dots creating a wordless puzzle. They had not said his name yet, Lansing. Name the devil and he appears, she thought.

"I've kept your old thirty-eight." He looked at her with hope.

"Get rid of it. Guns are useless for this. If it's here, he could use it."

"Your warlord tell you that, too?"

"
Strategist
. No, he didn't. But I have my own weapons. Guns get in the way."

"You didn't feel like that when I got the thirty-eight for you."

She sipped her tea and watched the door. "I was a kid." She made it sound like an indictment.

"Don't the Israelis use guns? I seem to remember them using guns in the Six Day War."

"They might use them.
I
don't.
He
didn't."

They sat drinking the tea, listening to the night come alive with the sounds of moths striking the screen door, matting themselves in between the June bugs. Carla thought about knives, a weapon street thugs favor, a weapon at once modern and millennia old, one used by the man they wished not to name this fragrantly pleasant spring evening.

"I'm going to call Flap." Sully stood and reached for the wall telephone.

"Good. I haven't seen him since I've been back."

"I'm going to ask him to talk to you about this crazy idea of yours."

Carla sighed and poked slivers of ice down into the tea with a forefinger. "You mean you're going to get him to come over and intimidate me."

Sully shrugged and turned his back to her. "Flap?" he said into the receiver. "Listen, Carla's home. Yeah, I was gonna call you earlier. Look, could you come over for a while tonight? Carla's got some ideas I want her to tell you about...fine...half an hour...great..."

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"Are you out of your ever-loving mind?" Flap roared.

Carla turned to Sully. "You see? You brought him in on this on purpose. You just want to make things harder for me."

"Is she out of her mind?" Flap repeated to Sully.

"I don't want to talk about it anymore. You both think it's nuts, then that's it. We'll let the alarms stay put. But you're wrong. I'm telling you it would be better my way."

Flap, an imposing man in his late sixties with extra pounds padding his frame and extra years telling on his face, took hold of his grandniece's arm. "Come on, let's go for a walk."

"Do we have to? I said okay, so okay, we'll forget my idea."

"Yes,
we have to
. Now, come along, young lady, before you really get me riled." He sneaked a wink in Sully's direction.

Carla let herself be propelled out the back door into the cool darkness. Since she was a child, whenever her uncle wanted to talk seriously with her, he asked her for a walk in the woods. The forest was his office, his study, his private sanctuary. Flap took her hand and dragged her along until she matched his pace across the lawn and into the woods. It was darker still in the forest, but Flap seemed to know exactly where to step, his instinct unfailing as he moved smoothly through the underbrush and across fallen logs. He was quiet for some time.

Carla vowed not to say a word, preferring to sulk rather than argue. She loved Uncle Flap like crazy, but he was an old-fashioned traditionalist, an unsophisticated, uneducated mountain man who could never be expected to understand the Chinese strategist she admired. It was unfair of Sully to call in Flap on his side. He knew she could not win an argument with the garrulous old man. No one ever did.

They had been walking for fifteen minutes before Flap slowed and began to talk to her. "Now, honey, listen to your old uncle, you listening?”