The By-Pass Control (16 page)

“We caught it in time. It was all controlled and his treatment was the usual one prescribed in such cases.”

“And when he left here ... was he cured?”

Carlson licked his lips, chose his words and said, “I was sure of it.”

“No recurrence?”

“There’s always that possibility. It’s like having an alcoholic teetotaler taste whiskey without realizing he’s an incipient alcoholic. There’s always that taste to remember. I never thought ...”

“It isn’t your fault.”

“It is. I should have insisted on further checks.”

“Look ... you’re a doctor ... you know things and hear things. What’s the situation on narcotic sales in this area?”

“Oh, hell, you have that disease in every damn city in the world.”

“I’m talking about here.”

“I’ve treated several,” he said.

“Children ... teen-agers?”

“No. Always adults. They came through the police courts.”

“What’s the source?”

Carlson made a negative gesture with his head.

“Guess.”

“Imported,” he said. “No reported incidents of break-ins that I know of. I’ve asked around several times and I’ve never heard of any. Listen ... you get where money is big and you find vice. ...”

“I know all that.”

“And do you know that for some reason professional people seem attracted to addiction? They take a jolt now and then to keep going, to make up for the lack of sleep, the missed meals, the mental distress they undergo. Do you know... ?”

I said, “I know all that too.” Then added, “You aren’t one, are you?”

“No, I’m not.”

“And what do you think Agrounsky’s chances of remaining an addict are?”

“Too big,” he told me. “If he stays away from the stuff he’ll be all right, but if he found a taste for it he will wind up total. I gave him credit for having more sense than that.”

“It’s a disease, Doctor,” I said sympathetically. “They haven’t found a cure for the common cold yet, so don’t blame yourself. It wasn’t something you did. He had it in him all the time without knowing it.”

“Nuts.”

“I can give you some big names who are hooked right now if you’d like to hear them. It would surprise you.”

“Don’t bother.”

“Thanks for the information,” I said.

He didn’t answer me.

 

The police had a report on the .38 used last night. Ballistics had come up negative and nothing useful had been found in the grounds outside the shop. It was supposed the gun had been a revolver since no ejected shells had been located, and it made a front page story for the local paper with the intimation that it was another robbery attempt, interrupted this time, by Boster and a friend appearing in the doorway and startling the heister. There were squibs in the Miami sheets and a brief recap on the TV news broadcast, but that was as far as it went.

I drove back to the motel and parked the car in its original slot, right over the oscillator, put the gimmick back in its place under the gas tank, hooked the charge up under the hood and went into the office.

The manager gave me a big smile, waiting.

“Any calls?”

“None, sir.”

“Anyone looking for me?”

“No, sir, not a soul. Have a good day?”

“Profitable,” I said.

“Care to keep the other room for tonight too?”

I threw a bill down on the counter top. “Yeah, I might as well.”

He took the bill, stored it away and handed me my change and a receipt. “Just call me if you want anything.”

“I’ll do that.”

I went back outside and stood in the fading light and looked over at the car.
They’d have to start wondering sometime,
I thought.
The bastards!
I grinned to myself, thinking through their minds. That oscillator had been put in place with masking tape and it could have fallen off. There was always the chance that a wired charge wasn’t hooked up correctly too. I eased the oscillator down and let it lay in the sandy loam under the car, then rewired the charge myself from a different viewpoint. Up front, a convertible drove in with a young couple in the front and
Just Married
slogans chalked on the sides of their car. I checked the room on the other side of the car, went back to the office and registered that one in under my name too and paid for it. I was getting to be the best customer the guy had. The newlyweds took a room at the far end, giggling all the way, and the manager gave me a knowing wink and a laugh as I went out.

Maybe they’d have a night to remember, I thought. At least nobody could be in the area where they could get hurt. Only the world was reserved for destruction.

The phone was ringing when I got in my room. I recognized the voice but went through the coded check anyway and Dave Elroy gave me the right answers. “Got in an hour ago, Tiger. I’m at the Sea Cliff in room ten. Anything for me to do?”

“Yeah, probe this town and see if you can find any source of narcotics. Look for H primarily and try to find out if Agrounsky was a user.”

“Any indications?”

“All of them,” I told him. “Got hooked in a hospital, thought cured, but was under a severe mental strain and might have reverted. He took off periodically and it might have been to see his supplier. All I want to do is be sure. And see if he made any big buys.”

“Before he left?”

“Right. Try to date it.”

“Okay, will do.”

“You have an informant in this area?” I asked him.

“Not yet, but I know who can give me a lead. Tiger ...”

“What?”

“Things are getting touchy. Hal Randolph is raising hell in New York. They want you on the scene up there.”

“Screw them.”

“They have technicians breaking down all the circuitry of the control system and they haven’t come up with anything yet. Some of the wheels are insisting that it couldn’t have been done and are yammering to call off the search.”

“The idiots.”

“They won’t do it, though,” he said. “They can’t take the chance.”

“How about Niger Hoppes?”

“Not a thing. Grady has called in everybody and is pulling all the plugs. He’s an unknown face. Johnson called from London again with another bit.... There’s a possibility that he might have a slight limp now, but it wasn’t confirmed. It could have been faked to throw off anybody looking for him in the future. You got the angle about him being a sniffer, didn’t you?”

“Check.”

“Then you got the latest. Johnson said he used the Bolatrine variety but that isn’t sold in the U.S. at all. There are derivatives almost the same, so it wouldn’t make any difference at all. I checked with Ernie Bentley and he told me all the inhalers conformed to the Pure Food and Drug Act ... no bennies sold over the counters ... but the only similarity was the containers. One firm makes them all in different shapes and sizes.”

“Good enough. Call me back if you dig up anything.”

“Roger. Off now. Behave.”

I put the phone back and snapped on the television. I lay on the bed in the dark and watched the last segment of a western before the news came on, caught the news broadcast that mentioned that the sniper outside Claude Boster’s shop hadn’t been apprehended yet, then closed my eyes for a little while waiting for time to pass. Nobody was going to come near me until the night had quieted into that death-like quality that comes after a small town goes to sleep and the traffic has diminished to an occasional truck going up the highway.

But I was wrong.

Somebody had waited too long and couldn’t understand why the expected hadn’t happened. He didn’t want to have to make excuses and be responsible for a bungled job and he checked to make sure. He must have found the oscillator and taped it back thinking it had fallen off from the heat and the vibration, then looked again to make sure the dynamite sticks were in place where they should be and when he wiggled the wires he had so carefully installed the night before they all seemed secure until the final wiggle touched off the cross wiring I had rigged and he blew up into a gory mess of parts and liquid slop and was plastered all over the remnants of the rooms I had rented on either side of the car.

The noise of the explosion was a terrible, flat, roaring sound that spread light and heat into the compound like the midday sun for one instant, then died away without leaving a trace of an echo. Only little noises came then—things falling back to earth ... other things slowly giving way to fall from the impact of the blast. The silence was a stunned hush, then a woman’s voice screamed incoherently, gaining in intensity until it was quieted from a lack of breath.

I was out of the door and on the scene before anyone else, standing there looking at the twisted wreckage when the manager came up, the expression on his face one of complete disbelief. “What ... what happened?”

“Go call the cops. Shake it. Then come back and keep everybody away from here.”

He gaped at me absently, swallowed hard and shuffled off, glancing back nervously over his shoulder. But somebody had beaten him to it. The wail of a siren tickled the air, coming from the east side of town, then another joined it from another direction. Already, the curious had started forward at a half-run, converging on the scene while the dust and fumes still hung overhead like a small cloud.

There was little left of the car at all and practically nothing of the buildings that had squeezed it in and softened the blast from tearing up the rest of the place. Blood-wet fragments of flesh glistened on metallic parts and larger pieces of the body were scattered in the rubble to the left.

One piece was intact ... a hand. It lay there palm upward, expressing a peculiar bewilderment as if it still had life and could think and wonder. A section of plate glass lay on the ground and I picked it up, polished it with a handkerchief, pressed it against the fingertips, slipped it into my pocket. Then I flipped the hand as far as I could into the bushes.

The manager was still incoherent, still fumbling with the phone when I got in the office. He never even saw me poke around behind the desk until I found a heavy packet of fold-out cards that gave a picturesque view of the Cape Kennedy area, slip the glass into the middle where I held it in place with tape, then address it to Ernie Bentley and stamp it to go out in the morning airmail.

He’d know what it meant.

I only had a minute to do what I had to do, but it was enough time. I got back to my original room, stripped off the .45 and the speed rig, got the extra box of shells and the two clips out of my suitcase and stuck them behind the air-conditioner grill vent at the top of the room. No matter what happened, I didn’t want anybody impounding my equipment for any reason.

Captain Hardecker got there in his own car, skidding into the drive ahead of the police cruiser and the two fire trucks that followed them. There weren’t enough people around to give him trouble with crowd control and he cleared out all those who didn’t belong in the motel area. The fire crew was quick and efficient, sizing up the situation immediately and checking for any unexploded dynamite sticks, standing by with the equipment to douse any flame that might occur. But like so many blasts of this intensity, combustible materials were disintegrated and the concussion blew out anything ignited before it could catch hold. Nevertheless, they dampened down the bedding remains and wooden splinters still showing, raking through the debris trying to separate the parts of the thing that had once been human.

We held the conference in the motel office, the manager out of it for the time being, trying to settle his nerves with a strong bourbon on the rocks. Hardecker sat back easily in a wicker rocker, scanning me through the blue smoke of a cigar while I told him I had rented both rooms and the car and couldn’t explain why anybody would want to get rid of me.

When I finished he said, “Now that sounds like a reasonable story, all right, but between you and me, it doesn’t make sense. You know what it sounds like from my direction?”

“Tell me.”

“Like you deliberately parked that car there and took the rooms on both sides so nobody would get hurt if the car did get blown.”

I agreed with a deliberate nod. “Except for one thing.”

“Oh?” he said. “Now what could that be?”

“When somebody rigs a car to blow up they wire it so that they nail the occupant when he turns the key. I didn’t turn the key, so either one of two things happened. The car was rigged and somebody tried to steal it or the guy rigging it blew himself up in the process.”

“I can think of something else,” Hardecker said.

This time I said, “Oh?”

“You rigged the car and waited for somebody to get in it.”

“That wouldn’t be very smart, would it? I’m still here.”

“All these stunts aren’t pulled by smart people. Nope, I don’t like your story. Besides, there’s something else.”

“Now what?”

“You aren’t scared enough, mister. You should be all shook and you’re not even sweating. You act like it happens every day around you.”

“I’m not the nervous type.”

He grinned slowly, then looked up as the mailman came in, dropped a few letters on the desk and picked up what was in the receptacle. I watched my card folder go into his bag and felt better. “Fun this morning?” the mailman asked Hardecker without looking up from his work.

“Every day,” the Captain told him. “If it isn’t one thing it’s another.”

When he went out the uniformed cop outside the door spoke to one of the firemen holding a small basket in his hand, stuck his head inside and said, “Captain, they may have some identifiable parts here ... a denture anyway. No clothes or labels yet.”

Hardecker nodded solemnly and puffed on the cigar again. “Get the teeth to the lab and process it. We’ll find out who he was.” He looked at me deliberately and tapped his cigar out and dropped the stub in his pocket. “And now for you. I think we’ll print you up and find out all about you, mister. Mind?”