The Dark Half (27 page)

Frieda drew in her breath in a quick, shocked hiss. “Jesus-God, Rick! Don't joke about things like that! You joke about things like that, they come true!”

“It is true, Frieda,” he said, and found he was on the edge of tears again. And these—the ones he'd shed at the morgue, the ones he'd shed in the car coming back here, the ones he'd shed when that crazy man called, the ones he was trying not to shed now—these were only the first. Thinking of all the tears in his future made him feel intensely weary. Miriam had been a bitch, but she had also been, in her own way, a sweet bitch, and he had loved her. Rick closed his eyes. When he opened them, there was a man looking in at him through the window, even though the window was fourteen stories up. Rick started, then saw the uniform. A window-cleaner. The window-cleaner waved to him from his scaffold. Rick lifted a hand in a token return salute. His hand seemed to weigh somewhere in the neighborhood of eight hundred pounds, and he let it fall back onto his thigh almost as soon as he had raised it.

Frieda was. telling him again not to joke, and he felt more weary than ever. Tears, he saw, were only the beginning. He said, “Just a minute, Frieda,” and put the phone down. He went to the window to draw the drapes. Crying over the telephone with Frieda at the other end was bad enough; he didn't have to have the goddam window-cleaner watch him do it.

As he reached the window, the man on the scaffold reached into the slash pocket of his coverall to get something. Rick felt a sudden twinge of unease.
Tell him I said you're walking around dead.

The window-cleaner brought out a small sign. It was yellow with black letters. The message was flanked with moronic smiley-smile faces. HAVE A NICE DAY! it read.

Rick nodded wearily. Have a nice day. Sure. He drew the drapes and went back to the phone.

When he finally convinced Frieda he wasn't joking, she burst into loud and utterly genuine sobs—everyone at the office and all the clients, even that goddam
putz
Ollinger, who wrote the bad science fiction novels and who had apparently dedicated himself to the task of snapping every bra in the Western world, had liked Mir—and, sure enough, Rick cried with her until he finally managed to disengage himself. At least, be thought, I closed the drapes.

Fifteen minutes later, while he was making coffee, the crazy man's call jumped into his head again. There were two cops outside his door, and he hadn't told them a thing. What in bell was wrong with him?

Well, he thought, my ex-wife died, and when I saw her at the morgue it looked like she'd grown an extra mouth two inches below her chin. That might have something to do with it.

He had meant to call Thad, of course. But his mind was still in free fall—things had assumed new proportions which he did not, at least as yet, seem capable of grasping. Well, he would call Thad. He would do it just as soon as he told the police about the call.

He did tell them, and they were extremely interested. One of them got on his walkie-talkie to police headquarters with the information. When he finished, he told Rick that the Chief of Detectives wanted him to come down to One Police Plaza and talk to them about the call he had received. While he did that, a fellow would pop into his apartment and fit his telephone with a tape-recorder and traceback equipment. In case there were any more calls.

“There probably will be,” the second cop told Rick. “These psychos are really in love with the sound of their own voices. ”

“I ought to call Thad first,” Rick said. “He may be in trouble, too. That's the way it sounded. ”

“Mr. Beaumont has already been placed under police protection up in Maine, Mr. Cowley. Let's go, shall we?”

“Well, I really think—”

“Perhaps you can call him from the Big One. Now—do you have a coat?”

So Rick, confused and not at all sure any of this was real, allowed himself to be led away.

When they got back two hours later, one of Rick's escorts frowned at his apartment door and said, “There's no one here. ”

“So what?” Rick asked wanly.
He felt
wan, like a pane of milky glass you could almost see through. He had been asked a great many questions, and had answered them as well as he could—a difficult task, since so few of them seemed to make any sense.

“If the guys from Communications finished before we got back, they were supposed to wait. ”

“They're probably inside,” Rick said.

“One of them, maybe, but the other one should be out here. It's standard procedure. ”

Rick took out his keys, shuffled through them, found the right one, and slipped it into the lock. Any problems these fellows might be having with the operating procedure of their colleagues was no concern of his. Thank God; he had all the concerns he could manage this morning. “I ought to call Thad first thing,” he said. He sighed and smiled a little. “It isn't even noon and I already feel like the day is never going to e—”

“Don't do that!”
one of the cops shouted suddenly, and sprang forward.

“Do wha—” Rick began, turning his key, and the door exploded in a flash of light and smoke and sound. The cop whose instincts had triggered just an instant too late was recognizable to his relatives; Rick Cowley was nearly vaporized. The other cop, who had been standing a little farther back and who had instinctively shielded his face when his partner cried out, was treated for burns, concussion, and internal injuries. Mercifully—almost magically—the shrapnel from the door and the wall flew around him in a cloud but never touched him. He would never work for the N. Y. P. D. again, however; the blast struck him stone deaf in an instant.

Inside Rick's apartment, the two technicians from Communications who had come to cook the phones lay dead on the living-room rug. Tacked to the forehead of one with a push-pin was this note:

Tacked to the forehead of the other was a second message:

“Any fool with fast hands can take a tiger by the balls,” Machine told Jack Halstead. “Did you know that?”

Jack began to laugh. The look Machine turned on him made him think better of it.

“Wipe that asshole grin off your face and pay attention to me,” Machine said. “I am giving you instruction here. Arc you paying attention?”

“Yes, Mr. Machine. ”

“Then hear this, and never forget it. Any fool with fast hands can take a tiger by the balls. but it takes a hero to keep on squeezing. I'll tell you something else, while I'm at it: only heroes and quitters walk away, Jack. No one else. And I am no quitter. ”

 

—
Machine's Way
by George Stark

STARK DISBELIEF

Thad and Liz sat encased in shock so deep and blue it felt like ice, listening as Alan Pangborn told them how the early morning hours had gone in New York City. Mike Donaldson, slashed and beaten to death in the hallway of his apartment building; Phyllis Myers and two policemen gunned down at her West Side condo. The night doorman at Myers's building had been hit with something heavy, and had suffered a fractured skull. The doctors held out odds slightly better than even that he would wake up on the mortal side of heaven. The doorman at Donaldson's building was dead. The wet-work had been carried out gangland-style in all cases, with the hitter simply walking up to his victims and starting in.

As Alan talked, he referred to the killer repeatedly as Stark.

He's calling him by his right name without even thinking
about it,
Thad mused. Then he shook his head, a little impatient with himself. You had to call him something, he supposed, and Stark was maybe a little better than “the perp” or “Mr. X.” It would be a mistake at this point to think Pangborn was using the name in any way other than as a convenient handle.

“What about Rick?” he asked when Alan had finished and he was finally able to unlock his tongue.

“Mr. Cowley is alive and well and under police protection.” It was quarter of ten in the morning; the explosion which would kill Rick and one of his guardians was still almost two hours away.

“Phyllis Myers was under police protection, too,” Liz said. In the big playpen, Wendy was fast asleep and William was nodding out. His head would go down on his chest, his eyes would close . . . then he would jerk his head up again. To Alan he looked comically like a sentry trying not to fall asleep on duty. But each head-jerk was a little weaker. Watching the twins, his notebook now dosed and in his lap, Alan noticed an interesting thing: every time William jerked his head up in an effort to stay awake, Wendy twitched in her sleep.

Have the parents noticed that? he wondered, and then
thought, Of
course they have.

“That's true, Liz. He surprised them. Police are as prone to surprise as anyone else, you know; they're just supposed to react to it better. On the floor where Phyllis Myers lived, several people along the ball opened their doors and looked out after the shots were fired, and we've got a pretty good idea of what went down from their statements and what the police found at the crime scene. Stark pretended to be a blind man. He hadn't changed his clothes following the murders of Miriam Cowley and Michael Donaldson, which were . . . forgive me, both of you, but they were messy. He comes out of the elevator, wearing dark glasses he probably bought in Times Square or from a pushcart vendor and waving a white cane covered with blood. God knows where he got the cane, but N. Y. P. D. thinks he also used it to bash the doormen. ”

“He stole it from a real blind man, of course,” Thad said calmly. “This guy is not Sir Galahad, Alan. ”

“Obviously not. He was probably yelling that he'd been mugged, or maybe that he had been attacked by burglars in his apartment. Either way, he came on to them so fast they didn't have much time to react. They were, after all, a couple of prowl-car cops who were hauled off their beat and stuck in front of this woman's door without much warning. ”

“But surely they knew that Donaldson had been murdered, too,” Liz protested. “If something like that couldn't alert them to the fact the man was dangerous—”

“They also knew Donaldson's police protection had arrived
after
the man had been murdered,” Thad said. “They were overconfident. ”

“Maybe they were, a little,” Alan conceded. “I have no way of knowing. But the guys with Cowley know that this man is daring and quite clever as well as homicidal. Their eyes are open. No, Thad—your agent is safe. You can count on it. ”

“You said there were witnesses,” Thad said.

“Oh yeah. Lots of witnesses. At the Cowley woman's place, at Donaldson's, at Myers's. He didn't seem to give a shit.” He looked at Liz and said, “Excuse me. ”

She smiled briefly. “I've heard that one a time or two before, Alan. ”

He nodded, gave her a little smile, and turned back to Thad.

“The description I gave you?”

“It checks out all down the line,” Alan said. “He's big, blonde, got a pretty good tan. So tell me who he is, Thad. Give me a name. I've got a lot more than Homer Gamache to worry about now. I've got the goddam Police Commissioner of New York City leaning on me, Sheila Brigham—that's my chief dispatcher—thinks I'm going to be a media star, but it's still Homer I care about. Even more than the two dead police officers who were trying to protect Phyllis Myers, I care about Homer. So give me a name. ”

“I already have,” Thad said.

There was a long silence—perhaps ten seconds. Then, very softly, Alan said, “What?”

“His name is George Stark.” Thad was surprised to hear how calm he sounded, even more surprised to find that he felt calm . . . unless deep shock and calm felt the same. But the relief of actually saying that—
You have his name, his name is George Stark
—was inexpressible.

“I don't think I understand you,” Alan said after another long pause.

“Of course you do, Alan,” Liz said. Thad looked at her, startled by the crisp, no-nonsense tone of her voice. “What my husband is saying is that his pseudonym has somehow come to life. The tombstone in the picture . . . what it says on that tombstone where there should be a homily or a little verse is something Thad said to the wire-service reporter who originally broke the story. NOT A VERY NICE GUY. Do you recall that?”

“Yes, but Liz—” He was looking at them both with a kind of helpless surprise, as if realizing for the first time that he had been holding a conversation with people who had lost their minds.

“Save your buts,” she said in the same brisk tone. “You'll have plenty of time for buts and rebuttals. You and everyone else. For the time being, just listen to me. Thad wasn't kidding when he said George Stark wasn't a very nice guy. He may have
thought
he was kidding, but he wasn't. I knew it even if he didn't. Not only was George Stark not a very nice guy, he was in fact a
horrible
guy. He made me more nervous with each of the four books he wrote, and when Thad finally decided to kill him, I went upstairs to our bedroom and cried with relief.” She looked at Thad, who was staring at her. She measured him with her gaze before nodding. “That's right. I cried. I really cried. Mr. Clawson in Washington was a disgusting little Creepazoid, but he did us a favor, maybe the biggest favor of our married life together, and for that reason I'm sorry he's dead, if for no other. ”