Until You Are Dead (22 page)

Cole stiffened. Vickers didn't know his name.

"I know it's you, Cole." There was humor in the voice that was not Vickers's. "This is Dave Dunstan, Lou. I guess you're wondering what's going on."

Cole gripped the receiver harder. "I'm wondering."

"Well, I'll explain," Dunstan said cheerfully. He was always so damned cheerful, Cole thought with a twinge of hate.

"You're sitting on the fourth floor of the Dunstan-Vickers Plastic Company, Lou. You know what we make?" Cole was silent.

"We make all kinds of things," Dunstan said. "Just the other day I had a clock made all out of plastic. Imagine that, Lou, the whole thing plastic!"

Cole listened to his own hard breathing while Dunstan gave him adequate time to imagine.

"Now why a plastic clock, you ask," Dunstan said. "Of what use? To collect insurance, Lou."

Fear grew a cold knot in Cole's stomach. For all his cheer Dunstan was a dangerous man.

"What kind of insurance?" Cole asked. He knew he should hang up the phone and get out of the building, but he was somehow unable to move.

"Why, fire insurance," Dunstan said. "For two partners who want to get out from under a failing business. And there's only one other person who'd burn down the business besides us, Lou, and that's you. You have enough motive to kill me, so you sure have enough to destroy my business. I knew you'd have killed me eventually, Lou. This way I'm one up on you."

"Listen, Dunstan. . . ." Cole was suddenly cold, but he was sweating.

"The plastic clock is perfect," Dunstan continued casually, "Because it can be the timing device on an incendiary bomb, then melt into nothing. In fact, as of five minutes ago the building should be on fire. We put a bomb in the elevator shaft and on the stairway landing on the floor below you. You can't go downstairs, Lou, and it's a long way from the roof."

Dunstan was still talking as Cole dropped the receiver and bolted for the door. "You have the motive, Lou, and you can't very well have been somewhere else when they find your remains in the ashes. You know, dental records and all that. . ."

There was a thick grayish haze in the hall. Cole ran along the echoing tile floor to the elevator and pressed his hand to one of the metal doors. It was almost too hot to touch. Smashing his fist into the door, he wheeled and ran for the stairway, but the smoke was thicker there, and when he looked down he could actually see the flame walking toward him. Coughing violently, he dropped to his knees and began to crawl.

". .
. And it's a long way down from the roof," Dunstan's voice was cheerfully repeating on the phone, then the line went dead.

M
y name is Lockwood. I'm a realist. I have to be, where I'm going. Ackerley has hired me to do this sort of thing before, but my instincts tell me that it's never been as important as this job.

Don't ask me why the job is necessary. Don't even ask me who I'm working for. Oh, sure, Ackerley hired me, but I don't know who he's working for. So I'm twice removed, you might say, from the source of my instructions. Considering the nature of my work, it's better that way.

The DC-10 touches down on the runway with a faint screech of rubber, and within minutes I've deplaned and am walking through the terminal building toward the baggage claim area. When I've picked up my tan leather suitcase with its brass locks, I carry it in one hand, my attaché case in the other, and make my way outside where I can get a cab.

After checking into a midtown hotel under an assumed name, I unpack, pour myself a drink from my silver travel flask, then sit down to examine the contents of the envelope in my attaché case. Some brief typed instructions are in the envelope, along with some added bits of information that might be useful. There is even a key to Garth's apartment. The people I work for are unfailingly thorough.

Garth is a fry cook at a small hamburger joint in the downtown area. His hours are from noon until nine o'clock, taking in both the lunch and supper crowd. He won't be home now. I leave the hotel and take a cab to within a block
of his apartment, then walk the rest of the way.

The building where Garth lives is large and in bleak disrepair. There is a child's rusted tricycle near a heavy wood door with a cracked circular window. As I climb the concrete steps toward the entrance, I see that some of the windows in the looming brick face of the building have been boarded up, and most of the other windows display only lowered yellowed shades. The neighborhood, the building, is inhabited by people who prefer that their misery be private, who neither ask nor answer questions. Doubtless, this is one of the reasons Garth was chosen.

The vestibule is profaned by crude graffiti. No one sees me as I walk up the stairs to the fifth floor, down the long faded hall to apartment 5-E, and push the button beside the tarnished doorknob. There is no answer; the bell tolls inside like the muted distress signal of something lost. After a few silent minutes, I unlock the door and enter.

The apartment consists of a living room, bedroom, and small bathroom. It conforms exactly to the floor plan I memorized. But the floor plan didn't show the filth, the many empty beer cans, the stacks of newspapers, the moldy bread on the sink counter, the unmade bed with its soiled sheets, the disarray of paperback books in a corner. On a stand, near the foot of the bed, is a small portable TV with a long kinked antenna, like that of an alert insect. My teeth are tightly clenched as I begin to look around more closely.

Most of the paperback books are of a sociological nature. In a shallow desk drawer are dozens of newspaper clippings concerning Daniels and the campaign. On one of the bedroom walls is stapled a lewd poster of a young blonde, and next to it on the wall are scrawled the words KISS, KISS in what appears to be black crayon.

Then I make my most important discovery: a diary
.

Almost every page is filled, in the same childish scrawling as the letters on the wall. It is quite a personal diary. I get out my instant-developing camera and photograph each page, then take a few shots of the apartment. After making sure that everything is as I found it, I leave and return to my hotel.

At midnight, I dial Luther Garth's number. He answers sleepily after the tenth ring.

"This is Mitchell," I say. "I wrote another letter last Friday, but the time for threats is past. The time for action has arrived."

There is a low gasp on the other end of the line. "Who is this?"

"It's us. We know it's kill or submit, kill or submit, kill —"

"Who
is
this?" Fear makes Garth's voice small.

"Time for a noble act, a healing act, a glorious act -" Garth hangs up.

I replace the receiver in its cradle and light a cigarette. The call is a good beginning. I know my job; I've been carefully briefed by the psychiatrists. Mitchell is Garth's middle name.

The next day, I again let myself into Garth's apartment. Under yesterday's date, I make a few brief entries in the diary in Garth's crude and childish scrawl.

That evening, I have supper at the diner where Garth works, and as I eat my hamburger and french fried potatoes,
I catch sight of him in the kitchen beyond the serving shelf.

He is a slender young man, with a shock of reddish hair and small, bewildered blue eyes. To a stout man, who is obvi
ously the diner's owner or manager, I complain quietly about my hamburger being burned. I hear him pass the complaint on to Garth in the kitchen. Voices are raised, and the stout man calls Garth a psycho. Beautiful!

"He called us a psycho," I say to Garth on the telephone that evening, at midnight. "I could kill the fat scum, but why should we? He's nothing — the symptom, not the disease."

Garth doesn't hang up. He can't.

I hear his breath hissing into the receiver. Like escaping steam under great pressure. "The blonde girl spat on us," I say. "She could have refused me politely, but she laughed and then she spat on you. We won't have to remember
that
.
Or have you already forgotten? We'll write it down then forget it. She's like the rest of them who laugh at me, who underestimate us. But they'll find out they're wrong. Soon."

"I want to know who this is!" Garth cries, in a tight, pleading voice.

"The only cure for some diseases is to kill them before they spread."

I hear Garth sobbing quietly.

"There are certain people who are like individual cancerous cells."

The sobbing continues. Deep sobbing, punctuated by choked inhalations.

"There is a limit to what we'll take, to how much contagion you'll put up with before we do something noble, something healing, something glorious."

There is a click on the other end of the line, and the connection is broken.

I listen for a few seconds to the lonely, static sound in the receiver before hanging up.

Within less than two weeks, Garth actually comes to accept "Mitchell's" late night calls as routine, sage communications from his other self, the self who wrote in the diary and sent letters and thought the secret thoughts. The psychiatrists were right when they told Ackerley that it would be easy, that it would be inevitable. It dismays me, somehow, that anyone can know that about a man, even so obvious a psychopath as Garth. But Garth is mine now, and I know what to do with him.

On the thirteenth of the month, he is fired from his job. Apparently something was bothering Garth. He appeared tired all the time, was irritable and too preoccupied to perform his work. Hamburgers were burned; orders were confused. The stout man had to pay him off and tell him not to return. The dismissal is an unexpected development that will make my own job easier.

I have only two more days.

When Garth goes out for lunch the next afternoon, I let myself into the apartment and make lengthy, incendiary entries in the diary. I pin several of the newspaper clippings from the desk drawer over the poster of the blonde, then cross out each letter S in the words KISS, KISS and replace each with an L scrawled in black crayon. Then I lay the untraceable .38 Smith & Wesson revolver on top of the diary.

I phone Garth that evening and talk about us buying the gun. At first he doesn't remember, doesn't know what I'm talking about. Then he does recall buying the revolver, and remembers why we bought it.

I phone him several times in the early hours of the next morning.

At noon, I pack, check out of the hotel, and take a cab to the airport. There is nothing I can do now but wait and see if I've succeeded.

By the time the plane lands, the news is out. Senator Bradley Daniels and his pretty blonde wife, Gloria, have been shot and killed at a shopping center political rally, where the senator was trying to muster support for his campaign for the Presidency of the United States. The assassin, Luther Mitchell Garth, is in custody, claiming that he has been used and was the pawn of a conspiracy. At this point, however, officials have no reason to believe that he hasn't acted alone. The evidence is overwhelming that Garth is, not surprisingly, insane, and that his denials of sole guilt are nothing more than the ravings of a madman, perhaps a multiple personality. His apartment, the venomous entries in his diary, seem to confirm this. His is a classic case.

A week has passed. Ackerley is pleased. His employer is no doubt pleased. Whoever clandestinely chose Garth's letter, from the many threatening letters Presidential candidate Daniels routinely turned over to the authorities, must be pleased. And why not? It was a professional job and on a rather grand scale.

I'm waiting now, in the usual place in the park, for Ackerley to pay me. And here he comes, a tall man with one shoulder noticeably higher than the other, walking with his customary, unhurried, deliberate gait. But there is someone with him this time, a short man in a light tan jacket. It isn't like Ackerley to bring company. I am curious, and slightly annoyed.

When the two men draw nearer, I see the way the man in the tan jacket is looking at me — warily, yet with a total disregard for how I am looking at him. Almost as if I'm inanimate. Fear drops through me like a wedge of ice.

"Congratulations," Ackerley says. "You have moved history." He is carrying the leather briefcase from which he usually pays me.

I nod, watching the man in the tan jacket watch me.

Ackerley sighs sadly, the sigh of a man taking a regrettable but necessary precaution. The short man draws a silenced automatic from beneath his jacket.

"Mr. Lockwood," Ackerley says, "there is a darker history of this world that must never be written."

I attempt to shout, but the silenced automatic jumps twice in the short man's hand, making two quick coughing sounds, like strangled laughter.

As I lay dying, watching the two men walk away, I concede through my agony that my killing was a neat, professional job. Ackerley must be pleased.

And no doubt his employer will be pleased.