The Shadow Man (15 page)

Andrews’ hand was pale and tight around the telephone receiver. The inside of the cabin seemed to become smaller, to lurch in time and space. A voice that Andrews recognized as his own asked, “Who are you?”

“I told you,” the calm and chilling answering voice on the phone said, “Paul Liggett. I saw you find Samuel Underwood’s body on the slope, Senator.”

“Karpp!”

“Liggett,” the voice corrected.

Andrews refused to make that small concession to insanity. “Whoever you are, what do you want?”

“You, Senator. I want you. And your lady.”

Andrews’ initial shock and fear had dulled somewhat, lodged like something heavy and solid within him. There was room now for anger, for the will to survive a situation he had sensed the moment he’d seen Underwood dead. “Did you kill Underwood?” It was a needless question, but Andrews felt he needed a spoken confirmation to underpin his own determination that he and Pat should live.

“Of course I did. Killing is why I’m here. It’s why I exist.”

Andrews was watching Pat Colombo stare at him. Her body was tense beneath bulky gray sweater and red stretch pants, her face lined with concern and puzzlement. Andrews wondered what she must see on his own face.

“Why did you kill him?” he asked the voice that claimed to be Paul Liggett’s. He saw fear replace puzzlement on Pat’s normally placid features.

“It was Underwood who killed himself, in a way,” the voice said. “I was only the instrument of his destruction, while he was the instigator. He moved of his own volition toward oblivion. As you have done, Senator. You have carried death with you some time now, and you’ve brought it here with you to this cabin. Of course, you’ll be required to share it with Miss Colombo. Will she mind?”

“Listen, you maniac—”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say I’m a maniac,” the voice interrupted. “I might more accurately be described as an extension of a maniac’s inspired mind—yes, I think you could call me that.”

“Do you seriously expect me to believe you’re Paul Liggett?”

“But you do believe it, Senator. That’s why I’m here.”

And with a cold rush of revelation, Andrews knew that at least a part of his mind did believe. It wasn’t the logical center of his mind, it was the instinctual fringe. The primal. That really was what frightened him.

“There are many things we might talk about, Senator,” Liggett said, “but I’m afraid there’ll be no more such communication between you and me. Between you and anyone. You’re dead, Senator.”

Andrews heard the click and buzz of the broken connection. Then, abruptly, even the buzz was gone. The phone wire leading from the cabin had been cut.

He stood for a while holding the silent receiver pressed painfully to his ear. The pain at least was real, at the moment the only thing certifiably real in Andrews’ world. He knew he had to shake that dreamlike sensation of helplessness. Slowly he replaced the dead receiver.

“Jerry?” It was Pat’s voice. “What’s going on? Who was that you were talking to?”

Andrews looked at her, drew comfort from the sight despite her obvious fear. Her fright was a reflection of his own, he realized, and he tried to remove from his face all indication of the terror that prowled his mind.

“It was Martin Karpp,” he said. “Or Paul Liggett, as he called himself.”

Pat’s right hand lightly traced the coarse material of her bulky sweater. “Karpp’s locked in a sanitarium over a thousand miles from here,” she said.

“Yes.”

“So explain.”

“I can’t. And he wouldn’t.” Andrews sounded incongruously flip.

Pat walked to one of the chairs before the blaze in the fireplace and sat down. She seemed now to possess more calm than fear, but Andrews knew that her fear had rooted and was now as constant as it was invisible.

“Why did he phone?” she asked. “Was it about Underwood?”

“About Underwood,” Andrews said. “And about us.”

Her dark eyes seemed to deepen as she nodded. “I see. Now he has to kill us. But wouldn’t it have been smarter not to phone, to surprise us instead?”

“He saw me find Underwood’s body,” Andrews said. He walked nearer to the fire and leaned into the radiating heat. “He knows that we know. And he phoned for another reason. He, it—whatever we’re dealing with—knows about paralyzing with fear.”

A crescent of smooth muscle flexed along Pat’s jaw. “Then forget about that ‘it’ and ‘whatever’ part. There’s a man out there, not some murderous walking figment of somebody’s imagination.”

“If there really was someone on the other end of the phone,” Andrews said. “If the voice wasn’t a figment of
my
imagination.”

For an instant Pat’s eyes were shot with fear again. “Don’t talk like that, Jerry! I heard the phone ring.” She jerked her head to stare at the phone. “Why don’t we call for help?”

“He must have tapped a portable unit into the phone line near the cabin to make his call, then he cut the wire.”

“Then it wasn’t your imagination that did
that
,” Pat said. “Or are you going to suggest there’s some sort of doppelganger out there created by your own fear?”

“It had occurred to me,” Andrews admitted. He saw that he was frightening Pat deeply with his admitted irrationality. “We have to put aside all suppositions of the supernatural if we’re going to get out of here,” he said, and she seemed relieved. She saw the Andrews she knew.

Andrews found himself wondering just how solid a figment of the imagination could become, and, following his own advice, he thrust the thought away. He walked toward the door.

“Where are you going?” Pat asked in alarm.

“Nowhere, I’m sure.”

Carefully, gradually, Andrews edged open the door.

A bullet smacked into the doorframe inches from his head. As he hurled himself backward something stung the right side of his face, very near his eye.

He was sitting on the floor, staring at the door that he’d instinctively closed. Fueled by fear, his heart was on a rampage. The reverberations of Pat’s scream still played in the air.

Andrews stood up on unsteady legs, planted his feet.

“You’re bleeding,” Pat said in a hoarse, somehow sensuous voice.

He stood bent over while she removed a long splinter of wood from the flesh beneath his right cheekbone and showed it to him.

The shot had come from higher on the mountain, and it had been fired to kill. A man with a rifle, Andrews thought; that was unmistakably real. He raised his hand and wiped away traces of blood from his cheek. He was lucky one of the wood splinters hadn’t lodged in his eye.

“Are there any firearms in the cabin?” Pat asked.

“None.” Andrews looked at her. His anger and fear were cold things now, held below the necessity for action. He smiled and kissed her on the forehead. Her flesh was cool and dry. “We’ll figure some way out,” he told her.

Pat returned the smile, said nothing. She was more afraid of this sudden deadly reality than of the threat of the unreal. She knew little about Martin Karpp.

Walking slowly about the cabin, carefully peering from each curtained window, Andrews attempted to assess their situation. Except for the cleared area in front of the cabin, crisp accumulated snow nearly a foot deep covered the ground. On two sides of the cabin sparse woods stretched away on the mountain face, thickening rapidly as the ground descended beyond the timberline. Most of the mountain above the cabin was blanketed by the unbroken snow, but there was plenty of room for concealment provided by slope configuration and occasional jutting rocks or shrouded tree stumps. From above, both the rear and front doors of the cabin were visible and afforded clear shots. And, except for the small kitchen window, the cabin’s only windows faced front and rear. But exit from the kitchen window would be concealed by the cabin’s walls for only a few feet, then anyone on that side of the cabin would also be within range of rifle fire from above.

Andrews’ rented four-wheel-drive Jeep was parked about fifty feet from the front door, its blunt nose aimed up the mountain. Pat’s red sports car was parked nearer, but farther around toward the side of the cabin. It, too, was facing the wrong way for a fast escape.

Surprising their assailant and skiing quickly out of range down mountain seemed a slim possibility, only both Andrews’ and Pat’s skies were propped against the wall outside on the cabin’s small porch. Even if they survived bringing the skis inside, the act would tip their plan.

Andrews turned to face the center of the cabin, the point beyond which fear multiplied in every direction. As his mind traced the perimeter of their predicament, desperately seeking some way out, hopelessness seeped into him, crumbling his will. He was a junkie hooked on dread. Again he told himself that was why who or whatever was out there had phoned, to unnerve them and to bring about that curious inertia of deep terror. But he couldn’t control his reaction to that strategy.

The cabin itself actually provided little refuge. The armed stalker could enter virtually at will and slay the weaponless Andrews and Pat. Or the cabin could be riddled with bullets from the outside. Perhaps even put to the torch to drive its doomed occupants into the open. The killing ground. The assault could occur at any moment, and it certainly would take place before dark.

You’re dead, Senator.

Paul Liggett had told him that as if stating a simple fact.

Pat was seated with her hands folded pale and limp in her lap, like stricken creatures that were separate from her. She was staring up at Andrews, her protector, waiting for him to explain to her how they might survive.

Andrews had nothing to tell her.

It had begun to snow large flakes so laden with moisture that they were barely affected by the breeze and dropped almost straight down. The narrow roads leading to the small self-sufficient town of Perith were becoming more hazardous by the minute, and visibility was decreasing.

Graham and Mathison, in the lead car of the three agency sedans bound for Perith, sat in silence, watching the deteriorating weather conditions. Mathison was driving, hunched forward over the wheel and squinting out through the windshield while he skillfully applied brake and accelerator to hold the big Pontiac on the unpredictable road. To the left of the cars was steep mountain, and to the right steep drop.

“This is the shittiest country to drive in I’ve ever seen,” Mathison said suddenly. It was uncharacteristic of him to curse. He used the cuff of his coat to wipe away some of the mist that persistently formed on the inside of the windshield. The defroster wasn’t working right.

“We’ll get where we’re trying to go,” Graham said, though he was beginning to doubt it. He glanced at Mathison from the corner of his eye, saw no change of expression on the agent’s impassive features. Graham knew that Mathison was sitting there being glad that following this route to Perith hadn’t been his decision.

Graham turned to look out the side window at the silent maelstrom of snow, consoling himself with the thought that there was no way he could have predicted the weather. There were times in the past few days, and especially today, when he felt that he was involved in one of those desperate situations in which fate had decreed that he should fail. The windshield wipers began to screech on the cold glass, torturing Graham’s taut nerves, as if sensing his vulnerability.

He strained to see ahead, his imagination filling in the blurred outline of a white mound that appeared to block the road.

But before Graham could say anything to Mathison, he saw that the road swung right and flanked the irregularity in the mountainside. For a moment Graham had thought they’d come up against another rockslide. That would have finished them in their efforts to reach Perith. That would have finished a lot of things.

The wipers emitted a particularly loud and grating squeal.

“Can you turn those goddamn things on low?” Graham asked.

Mathison gave him a quick sideways glance, more with the head than the eyes. “I can’t see very far past the end of the hood now, sir.”

Graham knew Mathison was right, that he, Graham, had let nerves override logic. The wipers would squeal and that was that. “Okay. If it makes that much difference—”

Graham’s words were chopped off as his mouth snapped shut, and his heart seemed to expand as the car suddenly lurched to the right and downward. He heard Mathison’s sharp gasp, was aware of Mathison’s right foot frantically jerking from accelerator to brake.

For a dizzying instant Graham thought that the car might move again, lurch one more time into the terrifying smoothness of space. But it didn’t.

After a few seconds, Graham allowed himself to believe that it wouldn’t.

The engine had died and they were still. Mathison sat stiffly in the driver’s seat. His foot had slipped from the brake pedal and his gloved hands were trembling on the steering wheel.

“We’re both going to get out slowly,” Graham told him, “on your side. Open the door.”

But there was no need for Mathison to open the door. One of the agents from the following car already was easing it open.

“I think the car’ll hold,” he was saying, “but move slow and careful. The front wheel’s over.”

“The emergency brake wouldn’t be a bad idea,” Graham said. Mathison nodded and smoothly but firmly depressed the pedal with his left foot.

Graham waited, not moving, while Mathison inched cautiously toward the door on the driver’s side. Mathison seemed almost to be levitating by sheer will, only now and then barely touching the seat beneath him.

When Mathison was all the way out, and the car hadn’t budged, Graham began to slide across the incline of the seat to the open door, holding his breath. His instincts screamed at him that any second the car was going to roll into nothingness.

As he drew in his stomach to pass beneath the steering wheel, hands clutched his arm and helped him. Strong fingers dug deeply and painfully into his bicep.

On unsteady legs, he found himself standing on the icy road outside the car. It was a pleasure the way the ground seemed to press up against the soles of his shoes.

After a few minutes, Graham and the three agents examined the car. It was nose down over the side of the road, the right front wheel dangling. Though it had been impossible to tell from inside, the car had really been in no great danger of going all the way over the edge. Yet there was no way, other than the use of a tow truck, to haul it back away from the precipice. Having ventured one cautious wheel into space, it seemed to cling petrified to its present security. It blocked the road.

“There’s no way around it,” Mathison said. “We’re done.”

Graham stood feeling the sting of cold snowflakes on his face. One of them landed on his eyelash and melted, momentarily blurring his vision. He again had the sensation that some malicious spirit was deliberately creating obstacles in his path.

It seemed suddenly very cold. Graham thrust his fists deep in his topcoat pockets and walked to the edge of the road, standing near the rear of the car and peering down into the whirling white void.

“There’s a way past,” he said. “We push the car the rest of the way over.”

Mathison stood with his mouth open, his bureaucratic mind aghast. One simply didn’t so blatantly destroy agency property. The other agents stood with blank, unquestioning faces. This was a need-to-know operation. Only Graham was fully aware of the desperate situation they were in. Even now, he wasn’t inclined to share part of that information. He had his own plans. He always had his own plans. That was what made him different from Mathison, what guaranteed his future.

“Release the emergency brake,” Graham instructed Mathison. “We’ll clear the road and proceed in two cars.”

Brushing snow from his eyebrows with his gloved hand, Mathison turned and obeyed.

The four men got behind the car and pushed in unison. Ice and rock scraped softly, then loudly, against the car’s underside as its balance shifted. Rending metal screamed as if protesting the atrocity that was happening.

The rear wheels suddenly were off the ground, the chrome bumper smoothly rising and falling away from the agents’ hands. With somehow awesome abruptness, the car was gone.

After an unnervingly long time, the eerie sound of its impact on the mountainside rose to them through the cold air, muffled by the snow.

The weather was clear in Manhattan. Amos Franks was driving his department car on Sixth Avenue, past Rockefeller Center, when he heard the radio request for Homicide. The address was on East Fifty-fourth Street, not far from where he was right now. He cranked down the windows, fastened the cherry light to the outside of the roof and accelerated across an intersection against a light that had just changed to red. A mass of pedestrians standing at the curb waiting to cross glared at him, and in one of the irregular intermittent instants of silence in the siren’s warbling wail he heard someone shout angrily at him.

The East Fifty-fourth Street address turned out to belong to something called Bargain Electronics. Franks pulled his car to the curb behind an angled-in police cruiser. A large uniformed cop was at the door of the electronics shop, standing staunchly with hands on hips. Franks got out, ambled around the car and toward the cop. When he got close enough, he flashed his shield in case the cop wouldn’t recognize him.

“Straight on in, Captain,” the cop said.

A crowd had gathered outside. As Franks shoved open the door to the shop, he heard the stalwart cop order everyone to move along, relishing his lines.

The inside of Bargain Electronics was cluttered with displays of cameras, recorders, radios and stereo equipment. Two detectives from Homicide were standing with another uniformed patrolman near a pyramid of boxes containing portable radios shaped like popular soft drink bottles.

One of the detectives, a tall, jowly man Franks remembered as Benny or Barney, recognized Franks and shot him a grave glance. “Right here, sir,” he said, motioning down toward the floor with his head. Franks saw a foot protruding from behind the base of the pyramid of radios. It was clad in one of those crinkly-leather Italian loafers with built-up heels.

“Everyone’s on the way,” the other detective said, meaning the M.E., fingerprint crew and a police photographer.

Franks stepped behind the display and felt his stomach do a loop as he looked down at the man on the floor. He was a short, overweight man, middle-aged, with graying hair and classic features that suggested a long ago Spain far removed from Manhattan’s East Side. And he was as dead as any of those long-ago Spaniards. He was lying very gracefully on his back with his arms flung over his head. On his shirt front was a scarlet bib of congealed blood. A thin wire was around his neck, and it had cut his throat as savagely and deeply as Franks had ever seen a throat cut. There was, Franks thought, an almost inhuman callous efficiency to this method of killing.

“How long’s he been dead?” he asked the detectives.

“We’ll have to let the M.E. tell us,” the jowly one, whose name Franks suddenly remembered was Bernie Addles, replied. “The store was closed today. The kid who helps out here came in about half an hour ago to do some inventory work and stumbled across the body.”

“He the one who called us?”

Addles nodded. “He’s sitting down in the room in back. Want to talk to him?”

“Later,” Franks said. He glanced around at the displays of expensive electronic products, some of the most popular merchandise of thieves. “Robbery?” he asked.

Bernie Addles shrugged his slumped shoulders. “As of now, it appears that nothing was taken.” Addles held up a black trifold wallet he’d removed from the dead man. “His name was Vincent Grammo, fifty-three years old, lived out in Queens.” Addles lowered the wallet. The wrinkled green corner of a bill was sticking out of it. “There’s over a hundred bucks in here,” Addles said. “So far we haven’t found the weapon... ”

Suddenly Franks was barely listening. It had taken him a few beats to remember where he’d heard the name Vincent Grammo, the name of the dead man in the Italian loafers.

There was a commotion toward the front of the store as two fingerprint men came in accompanied by an assistant to the medical examiner.

“So where’s the object of all this attention?” the assistant M.E. inquired, with what seemed to be genuine morbid cheer.

Franks got out of his way, stepped back from the knot of softly conversing men near the body. He nodded to Bernie Addles, then turned and left Bargain Electronics. The police photographer arrived just in time to pull into Franks’ vacated parking space behind the cruiser.

In his office, Franks sat down behind his desk and thought about Senator Jerry Andrews sitting across from him and mentioning Vincent Grammo’s name along with the names of two other people who had since died violent deaths. He thought of Vincent Grammo, sprawled with freeze-frame elegance on the floor of his electronics store with his throat gaping.

With a glance to make sure his office door was closed, Franks reached into a bottom desk drawer and withdrew a bottle of scotch and a clear plastic cup. He poured himself a drink.

And then another.