The Lighter Side (43 page)

"A poltergeist!" he shouted. "Hey, Harney!"

Chester wriggled out from concealment, ducked through the open door, and slid into the shelter of a gray-painted wall locker as heavy feet pounded in the hall.

"Don't tell me," the barefoot cop was shouting. "I seen 'em before, plenty times. They got a kind of attraction fer me. This here one is a bad one. First it picked up m' desk, then it started throwin' things, then it give me two hotfoots."

"Hotfeet," someone snarled. "See if he's got a bottle, Lem."

"Looky here," the barefoot one started. "I guess you boys never heard the time I seen the saucer . . . "

"Don't see no bottle."

Three large backs loomed a yard from Chester's concealment. He aimed through a narrow opening between them, focused on a blanket dangling from a bunk in the cell across the corridor. Smoke rose promptly.

"Hey!" one of the cops barked. "They's su'thin in there!" He backed from view. "I'll go fer help!"

Chester listened as the three men competed for position; three sets of footsteps receded along the hall. Chester pocketed the permatch and headed for a side entrance.

Half an hour later, a shabby brown tweed jacket filched from the station covering his modishly cut but conspicuous plastic-appliqué sports jacket, Chester strolled past the stretch of street where he and Genie had first arrived, now obstructed by large wooden signs lettered detour. Police squad cars were parked three deep at the curb. The area around the rug with its two chairs was blocked off by yellow-painted sawhorses hung with red obstruction lights. A crowd of idlers gaped.

"All right, move along," a cop bawled. "The bomb squad is goin' in now. You folks wanta get blown up?"

Chester paused, scanning the crowd for Genie. No luck. She hadn't been in jail—at least not in the part he had had an opportunity to check. Surely if she were free, she would have come here. Not that it would help. No one could get through that police cordon.

Chester tried hard to think. If only Case were here—or Genie. But unless he could get back to the rug, he'd never see either of them again.

Case would be thoroughly roasted by now, of course, it that
had
been the purpose of the fire he'd seen—but perhaps that was being overly pessimistic. Perhaps Case was still juggling away, casting anxious glances down the jungle path from time to time, waiting for rescue.

And Genie, being grilled under the hot lights by policemen, who, in spite of their pink coats, were cop all the way through . . . 

One of the cops seemed to be looking Chester's way. He sauntered on, whistling, stepped into the first doorway he saw, found himself in a shop plastered with sale notices and crowded with flimsy tables stacked with gaudily colored merchandise among which bored-looking customers milled, picking over the bargains.

Chester tried to think. He couldn't just stand around; in time, the cops would be sure to notice him. Perhaps if he tried a sudden dash for the rug . . . 

He glanced through the window. The cops were large and numerous, the sawhorses closely spaced, the squad cars ominously ready. He could never hope to penetrate that barrier by a surprise move alone; he would have to do something to distract attention and then slip through quietly.

"Git outa da way, ya bastid," a corpulent lady with a mustache and runover shoes said conversationally, nudging Chester aside.

"Oh, excuse me, Madam . . . " Chester moved on to the next counter, found himself nervously fingering a stack of clear plastic bags.

"That's the two-quart size," a salesman said to a man on Chester's left.

Chester picked up a bag. It was good, tough stuff.

"Seals with a hot iron," the salesman was saying.

Chester felt in his pocket. Hmm. His credit card was no good here, of course. He'd have to—

A large placard caught his eye: don't ask for credit!

"How do I know what you use 'em for?" the clerk was saying. "You want 'em or don't you?"

The customer mumbled. The clerk turned away. Chester slipped a two-inch sheaf of the plastic bags from the counter and under his coat and headed for the door. As he reached it, a hoarse voice called, "Hey, you. The guy with the funny pants!"

Chester hurled himself between two matrons in garish prints with uneven hemlines and set off at a run. Heads turned to stare. A whistle shrilled behind him. He rounded a corner, saw a short flight of steps with an iron rail. He took them four at a time, banged through a massive glass-paneled door into a dim hallway that smelled of stale vegetable oil, fly spray and deodorant. Carpeted stairs rose into a canyon of yellowed wallpaper. Chester went up, whirled through the landing as the door below banged open.

"In here!" someone yelled.

"Take the back. I'll check upstairs!"

The staircase ended three flights up in a narrow hallway leading to a gray window behind limp curtains. Feet were thudding on the stairs. There were three doors with brown porcelain knobs along each side of the hall. Chester jumped to the first on the left. It rattled but held. The second opened and a blat of sound emerged. Chester sprang for the third door, threw it open, whirled and slammed it behind him. In two jumps he was in the bathroom, pulling open a tarnished mirror. He seized a can of shaving cream, blasted a gob into his hand, slapped it across his face, under his chin. In a quick motion, he pulled off the coat, the sports jacket, tossed them aside, grabbled a bladeless safety razor from the cabinet shelf and scraped a swath through the layer of white lather, then dashed for the door and flung it wide.

A cop thundered past, threw a glance at Chester. "Stay inside, buddy," he bawled.

Chester withdrew, closed the door gently, and let out a long breath. "Who says there's no point in watching the Late Late Late Show?" he murmured.

From the windows, Chester looked down on the crowded street. The rug looked pitifully small in the center of the barricade of sawhorses, cops, cars and curious citizens. The distance was, Chester estimated, fifty feet vertically, and an equal distance out from the face of the building. The sounds in the hall had gone away now. He went into the green enameled bathroom, wiped the lather from his face, recovered his shirt from the living-room floor, then checked through the closet shelves, the bedroom and finally the kitchen. He found an electric iron in a cabinet under the sink. The ironing board was propped in a corner. Chester set it up, plugged in the iron, then counted his plastic bags. Forty-two of them. Still, there was no use starting on the bags unless he could work out the delivery mechanism.

A thorough search of the apartment turned up a ball of stout twine, nails, a hammer, a heavy-duty stapler, several hundred back issues of
Crude
, The Magazine for Male Men, and a small plastic wastebasket. Chester set to work.

Pounding cautiously, he drove two stout nails into the window sill eight inches apart, and a matching pair into the wall across the room at a level four feet higher, then strung heavy twine across between them in two parallel strands. Next he cut the bottom neatly from the wastebasket and nailed the container to the wall above the previously placed nails, with the smaller, cut-out end down. The next two nails went into the right-hand wall, with two more matching them on the opposite side of the room, just under the ceiling. Again he strung cord between the paired spikes.

Chester paused to listen. There was a murmur of sound from the street, the drip of water from the bathroom, the snarl of an engine gunning somewhere. He went to the refrigerator, took out a can of beer, drank half of it and went back to work.

He opened a copy of
Crude
, stared wonderingly at a double-page spread in full color captioned "Udderly Delightful" and fitted the magazine over one of the cables at the window sill so that the string nestled against the spine, at the center of the thin sheaf of pages. He crimped the other edge of the magazine, folded the creased edge over the other line and stapled it in place to form a shallow trough between the two supporting lines.

The next
Crude
was positioned above the first. Working rapidly, Chester extended the chute across the room to terminate directly under the bottomless wastebasket.

He stepped back to survey his work. The center of the trough had a tendency, he noted, to droop, the edges of the magazines coming almost together. He went to the closet, extracted half a dozen wire coat hangers and bent them into shallow U-shaped braces, which he fitted between the lines at three-foot intervals. The trough now formed a smooth curve from the wastebasket to the window sill.

Fifteen minutes' work completed the other leg of the trough, extending from the left-hand wall in a shallow curve to end above the open top of the wastebasket.

There was a three-inch roll of masking tape on the desk; Chester used it to attach extra sheets bearing photographs of shirtless women to the floor of the trough, lapping the joints between magazines.

Back in the kitchen, he finished the beer, then filled a plastic bag with water, used a length of clothesline wire to assist in folding the top edge over evenly, then applied the warm iron, sealing the plastic. He went to the living room, stepped up on a chair and placed the plastic bag of water in the wastebasket. It dropped an inch or two, then wedged tight in the tapered passage. Chester went back to the kitchen, located a pint bottle nearly full of vegetable oil, returned and poured a generous helping around the plastic bag. It eased down, plopped into the trough below, where Chester caught it and set it aside.

He went back to the kitchen and carefully filled and sealed the remaining forty-one bags. Next he used the ice pick to make a hole in each side of the wastebasket, near the bottom, through which he threaded a length of string. He tied a knot at one end, drew it up snug, then looped the other around a large wooden match which nestled against the outside of the wastebasket, holding the string in position, blocking the bottom of the container. He used a chair to reach the top of the upper trough, into which he poured a liberal dollop of vegetable oil, smearing it out well so that the entire surface of the chute was lubricated. He repeated the operation for the steeper lower section.

Chester went back to the kitchen, where the water bags lay like a clutch of limp dinosaur eggs, selected one, and placed it in the upper end of the higher trough. It slid gently down the long chute and dropped into the wastebasket, easing down to rest against the obstructing string. Then he loaded the magazine trough above with the other bags. The forty-one rounds just filled the available space, lying bulging, end to end.

Chester crossed the room and looked out. The police below were striding about with tape measures, standing with folded arms, posing for photographers, and waving back the crowd that seemed about to engulf the tiny arena of official activity. Cautiously, Chester raised the window twelve inches. Oil dribbled from the end of the trough into the window sill. He went into the bathroom, ducking under the chute, washed up, smoothed his hair, straightened his shirt, donned his jacket, then removed his heavy silver ring and placed it on the medicine-cabinet shelf beside the shaving cream.

He opened the hall door and looked out. All quiet. The box of matches lay on a table by the door. He lighted one, touched it to the match securing the string which blocked the wastebasket, then sprinted for the stairs, leaped down them five at a time, rounded the landing, took the second flight, pounded down to ground level.

Breathing hard, he paused to glance out the street door. The fringes of the crowd were strung out near the corner. He stepped out, strode along quickly, pushed through the spectators to a position from which the third-story windows were visible. The one directly above the center of activity was open. The curtain billowed slightly; the end of the trough was clearly visible.

Nothing happened.

Chester swallowed. It hadn't taken him more than thirty seconds to make the three flights down to the street. Had the match gone out?

Something flashed in the window, glinted in an arc out over the street, dropped. A strangled yell sounded. The crowd simultaneously surged forward and recoiled, as curiosity struggled with discretion. Chester pushed his way through the press as a second almost invisible missile leaped from the window. "It's radioactive!" someone yelled. The mob churned. A woman screamed. Cops appeared, beating a strategic withdrawal from the field of fire. A third bomb flew from the window, splattered against a tall policeman who yelled and sprang for cover. A fourth bag of water soared out, down and exploded.

"A little under a second apart," Chester muttered, weaving between fleeing citizens. "A little too much oil in the wastebasket."

Four cops remained in the rapidly expanding clearing centered on the rug. One drew his pistol and fired into the air. The other three, eyes on the growing blots on the rug, dropped flat. Chester reached open ground, skirted the first rank of squad cars, seeing the flash of another round, then another. The next fell short, splashed off a police car, sent spray high in the air. Two fat women darted from forward positions, screeching and slapping at water droplets. Chester ducked aside, took an elbow in the ribs, stumbled out into the clear.

"Hey!" a shrill voice sounded behind him. "Ain't you the guy . . . "

Chester threw his leg over the sawhorse.

"That's far enough, Buster," the cop bawled. He took a step forward, bringing the gun around as a bag of water took him in the face. He went down backward. Chester scrambled over, took two steps to the rug.

An immense padded mallet slammed against his head. The world rose up and hit him in the face.

Curious, Chester thought dreamily. I always pictured H-bombs as being noisy. 

Someone was hauling at his arm.

"This is the bastid, I seen him," someone was screeching. Chester shook his head, pulled free from the grip and struggled to his feet. A hatless cop wavered on all fours between Chester and the rug. The fat woman raised a rolled umbrella. "I'm claimin' the reward," she shrieked. A bomb splattered. The cop focused his eyes on Chester and lunged. Chester ducked away, managing a return jab at the fat woman as he bowled her aside, and sprang for the rug. He skidded to a halt midway between the two brocaded chairs, ducked a bag of water and yelled, "Computer, get me out of here—fast!"