Frenzy (8 page)

The roar of the crowd.

"Unitas drops back," his play-by-play man says, "he's going to throw the bomb! Three seconds to half-time on the clock, Frank."

He responds without a trace of a lisp or hint of a stammer as he says, "That's right, Gil, three seconds and Unitas is in trouble, he's got to let it go now or — WOW! There it goes! What a cannon! Johnny Unitas gets off a perfect, textbook-classic spiral, what a gorgeous ball, and . . . unbelievable, Raymond Berry's got it in the end zone! A ninety-five-yard bullet out of the Unitas rifle and the Baltimore Colts end the half with a six-point lead over the Green Bay Packers as the gun sounds, twenty to fourteen."

"Into the spot, and you guys are sounding good in the truck," the voice says over the nightmare intercom. Dream logic confuses television and radio, but Spain is unaware of this and dreams on.

"Telegram, Frank," an engineer says, handing him the yellow Western Union envelope. He opens it and reads:

FRANK YOU ARE A WORTHLESS PIECE OF SHIT. I WISH YOU WERE DEAD.
And it is signed Sylvester P. Landis III, and there is an address.

"Gil," he asks his phantom colleague, "who is Sylvester P. Landis the third?"

"Never heard of him. What's the matter, Frank?"

"Here," he says, "read this."

"Damn," the man says. "And you don't know this guy?"

"Never saw the name before. What ya think? Think this might be a prank?"

"Oh, hell, yes. Just some whacko out there listening to us. Throw it in the trash. Come on — forget it, man. Let's get the stats and go to work. You take care of the halftime and I'll pick up at the end of the color, okay?"

"Fine," Spain says, and he does a flawless halftime job. The baton twirlers, the marching bands, the Sousa music, he makes it all flow like fine wine. The rest of the game goes beautifully. At the end of the game he goes back to the station and there is a big fuss made by someone out in the parking lot. The men all go outside and find that the police have apprehended a weird-looking crazy who has defaced Frank's new BMW with a spray can of red paint. He has printed "piece of shit" on the trunk and "Frank sucks" on the passenger door in neatly sprayed aerosol Day-Glo.

"Do you know this man, Frank?" one of the uniformed cops says to him.

"No. Who the hell is he?"

"Claims he knows you. He says his name is Sylvester P. Landis."

"Some whacko. Look." He shows the cop the telegram.

"Did you send this?" The cops are looking at the weird crazy. He is a goofy-looking guy with a crazed, spaced-out expression. Thick, Coke-bottle glasses, horrible acne, bad teeth, a total loser.

"Sure, pig, so what? I wish Frank was dead."

"Uh huh. Mr. Landis . . . you are under arrest." And they drag the weirdo off reading him his rights, handcuffed, and ease into the back of a waiting squad car.

Time passes. Frank (Spain) learns the guy is a harmless crank who likes to send sportscasters hate mail. Spain seems to realize he is dreaming at this point and wonders what the hell all of this has to do with anything. But the dream plays on. The spray painting of the BMW is the first act of vandalism the crazy has ever engaged in, and he is released. There are calls and mail, but Frank ignores it all. Then, one night he returns home and finds his apartment trashed. Across the wall in red Day-Glo is the legend I WISH FRANK WAS DEAD. The police arrest Landis. He confesses. There is a trial. He is found guilty and sentenced to two years in jail for Defacing A Sportscaster's Property, but before he can serve time, he commits suicide in his cell. He has left a suicide note. Spray-painted in red on the cell wall it says: FRANK IS A PIECE OF SHIT.

The radio management sense that Prank is on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but now this horrible crazy is gone and perhaps he will be able to lead a normal life again without someone bothering him constantly. They insist Frank take a week off. He does so. A few days later, back from a relaxing few days in the Bahamas, tanned and refreshed, he drops by the station.

"Er, uh, hullo, Frank," one of the newsmen says sheepishly. "What a, uh, nice surprise." He acts nervous and evasive.

"Frank! Oh! How nice," another of the employees says. "Did you enjoy your vacation?" Everyone is so uptight to see him. Down in the newsroom he is standing there idly, relaxing, just grooving around, reading the wire copy, when he notices part of a mailing tube there in the trash. As he sees the crude printing on the torn cardboard tube, the dream sort of shifts into high gear and begins to take on a glow, as if a light had just come on saying IMPORTANT PART OF DREAM . . . BEWARE! The bogeyman part is coming.

It is the unmistakable handwriting of the one called Sylvester P. Landis. And suddenly, even before Spain/Frank knows what is in the tube, his legs and arms are covered in icy, fear-inspired pinpricks of apprehension and paranoia.

"Hey," he collars a newsman, "what came in this tube?"

"Huh?" The newsman shifts his gaze uneasily, refusing to look him in the eye. "I dunno."

"Come on, Bill. What the hell is going on?"

"See Schmertz." So realistic. Another station employee named Sid Mertz. They call him Schmertz. All the details crystal clear. Right down to the mundane trivia and who-cares minutiae.

"Okay, Sid," Frank confronts the man, "what's the deal here?"

"We weren't going to show you, Frank. You know. It's probably a prank." He's sweating now. "Go down in the boiler room."

"The boiler room?" Schmertz nods affirmative and Frank races down the stairs. The boiler room looks just like the basement of the school he went to when he was a kid. And there in the trash, waiting to be burned, is the rest of the mailing tube filled with papers. He retrieves the package from the trash bin and reads the address on the torn tube. It says, in part, FRANK — THE PIECE OF SHIT c/o the radio station. And the printing is unmistakably that of the dead man Landis.

The first piece of paper inside the tube is an ugly, primitive, crayon sketch of a crudely drawn clown. He remembers he drew it back in the second grade and they laughed at him. Now it is so bizarre and frightening to see there in the tube addressed by the crazy. Landis has penciled all kinds of filth around the clown drawing saying things like THIS IS YOU, SHIT FACE, I WISH YOU WERE DEAD. All the usual. Then the rest of the package is what really scares him. It frightens him so badly he wakes up, shivering, wide awake from the folds of the nightmare. Because inside the remnants of the tube are photos of his mother and father that were burned up when their home burned to the ground back in Agency, Missouri, over thirty years ago, at least five years before Sylvester P. Landis III was born.

The radio station with its busy teletype machines, and the offices he conjures up in the basement of a bank, actually were those of a finance company. They were places the boy, now the man who calls himself Spain, had run in terror to hide. Places that had spawned oppressive fears and memories of painfully vivid horrors.

Halftime at a football game had been another moment of heart-stopping fright for the child. Names and places of the past meant to conjure up stinging humiliation as he remembered the rankling cachinnation of his tormentors. Unforgivable wrongs once experienced in a boiler room just like the one in his dream. Fears, terrors, embarrassments, and cruelties that had led him down that alley toward his first kills.

Even the name — Sylvester P. Landis III, in truth a freely associated amalgam of humiliating and dread memories from his childhood past. A past shaped of events that had pointed him, like a gun, whenever his masters had directed him toward another target. A past that had rebound like a freak ricochet blasting apart his own family.

And Spain shook the dream off instantly upon awakening, with at first only the vaguest eidolons lingering in his mind. But he wouldn't let it alone and he was haunted by the evanescent image of that obscene clown, and he worried it in his mind the way your tongue keeps darting into the hollows of a newly broken tooth. You know better, but some things you just can't leave alone.

For over five weeks he'd wooed her, played her, bedded her repeatedly, romanced her, dazzled her with his fancy tonguework, done his whole repertoire of rap dances, all the while this gentle, handsome, soft-spoken, intelligent youngster is introducing her to cocaine and progressively kinkier sex and the fast lane. And he is getting her primed, ready, willing. Waiting for the right moment when he can turn her just so, take her out onto the dangerous shoulder of the road outside the fast lane, where only the special players run.

For more than five weeks he'd worked her like a twelve-pound outlaw cat precariously attached to a #303 Zebco, the monofilament stretched to the breaking point, and no net in hand, working her over into the shallows by the bank, sinking that hook in deeper and deeper, that cruelly barbed hook that only the hardiest fish could ever work loose, careful to keep that rod pointing skyward, taking up all the slack, but never too much, never forcing it. Watching himself play his new fish. All pro and totally up for it every time. Enslaving her with drugs and sex and romantic desire and promise. Letting the jism of his healthy, horny, Hollywood hotshots lubricate their one-way love affair, greasing her body for the long, hot slide down the dope banister.

"Greg, I love you so much," she purred to him.

"You're one sweet pussycat. You know that?"

"Do you love me as much as I love you?"

"You know I do, angel." He only needed to touch her around the throat and chin and mouth a few times and those full movie-star lips had her rarin' to go. He was an expert at measuring the response time and he was proud of how quickly she opened her petals to him now, a few seconds and she was hot to trot. He'd brought her a long way in just a few weeks. But he was already beginning to bore of the game, and the more he tired of her treasures, the more difficult it would be for him to sustain the illusion.

"Have you loved these weeks together as much as I have, Tiff?"

"Oh, God. You know I have. I've almost forgotten what it was like before. I want you for my husband, Greg. I want us to settle down and raise a family together," she said, her cat's eyes blinking. Her maternal instincts were very strong.

"That's what I want too. Look, I can just see us in that little snowbound log cabin up in the mountains, and the snow is falling, and we put another log on the fire, cuddle close together under the blankets, and make our first child together. Wouldn't that be wonderful?"

"Ummmm."

They kiss. First soft, little tender smooches that he knows will light her fire, and then he's going to work with his hands and the hard, probing, wet kisses begin, and just as she starts lighting up, he pulls back a little and looks at her with his sexy California blues and says, "If you help me, doll baby, we can have all that right away."

"What do you mean? Of course I'll help you." She smiles.

He kisses her and goes over and gets something out of his pocket and brings it back to the bed and shows it to her.

"What's that?"

"That
is our ticket outta here, Tiff. That's our nest egg. That's what's going to let us be together and raise a family."

She looks at the little vial with her wide cat's eyes. "Yeah?"

"Dynamite White," he tells her. "Serpico, White Cloud Nine, Supersnow! I've got a way for us to get it all, baby doll, and I mean now. Me and Roger have this guy who can get us enough of this shit that one big sale will set us up and you and I can cut. We'll be out of this forever."

"Wow."

"Yeah. Thing is it is going to take one shitload of bucks to get us together. And we are stoney, man."

"I thought we had lots of money. I gave you all I had and the jewelry and you had the —"

"Yeah. Right. But we been in the Deuville for thirty-eight days. Double occupancy is a bitch. Just our motel bill alone has tapped us out. And we've
got
to get a score while we can or we'll lose our man here, and I'll end up a bag boy somewhere and you'll be waiting tables in a greasy spoon."

"I don't mind waiting tables, Greg. At least you can't get arrested waiting tables, ya know?"

"Yeah, well just forget that. We've got to move some shit, and I need bucks."

"I gave you everything I had, except for maybe fifteen dollars or so. You can have that." She starts to get up and get her purse.

"Hey, Tiff. Forget the fifteen bucks. Come on, man. Be serious with me. This is our future we're talking about."

"I was being serious. I thought you needed money."

"Yeah. Well, I need money. Not fifteen fucking dollars. I need three thousand bucks."

"Honey, I don't have three thousand bucks."

"Listen to me." He comes back over on her with the curls and the beautiful eyes right in her face, talking very fast, almost in a whisper. "You told me you wanted us to be a family. Look. Both of us are gonna have to make a big sacrifice if we're going to be together always and take care of each other. I got you. You're my only resource, Tiff. You gotta help me, baby. I'm going to ask you to do something that you're not going to want to do, but when I explain it all to you, you'll see it is the best way for us. I don't want you doing what I'm going to ask of you, but, baby, it's the only way, believe me. We've got to have enough to get our nest egg together, right? And I've got to be able to protect you — to keep you out of that prison you were in — and I'm the only one who can do that for you. Just like you're the only one who can do this for me."