The Terrorizers (10 page)

“But… but this man is
dead!
” There was horror in her voice. “You
killed
him.”

I drew a long breath, and told myself firmly that I was a reasonable person, not given to violent displays of temper.

“Miss Davidson,” I said calmly, “you’re quite welcome to try to get out of here by yourself. I tell you what, ma’am, although it involves some risk I’ll give you half an hour to do it your way. I’ll wait right here. After that I’ll go out of here my way. That should keep us both happy, right?” I looked at her standing there in the soaking rain. “Well, what the hell are you waiting for? You don’t seem to like my escape technique so go ahead and use your own.”

She was looking down at the man on the walk between us. Her wet face was white and strained. “But you didn’t
have
to—”

“Don’t tell me what I do or don’t have to do!” I snapped, to hell with being reasonable. “I don’t owe these crummy bastards anything, not one thing except a week of hell! I’m not obliged to take a single goddamned risk to keep them healthy; as far as I’m concerned it’s open season at Inanook and no bag limit. I gave them a clear warning the day you brought me here. They chose to ignore it. Now I’m leaving, and anybody who gets in my way is dead!”

“But he didn’t get in your way! He was just—”

“Just strolling around the property with a loaded gun!” I sneered. “A gun he could have shot us with if something went wrong. Even if I hadn’t wanted the pistol for myself, I’d have put him out of action so he couldn’t use it. You don’t leave armed characters wandering around behind you if you can help it.” This was idiotic, having to explain basic principles with the rain pouring down and the clock ticking. “It’s your decision, doll, but make it fast. Either give me a hand with the dirty work, or see how far you get being gentle and humanitarian by yourself.”

She hesitated a moment longer, staring up at me. “Dugan?” she whispered. “How did you know we didn’t have to worry about Dugan? Did you kill him, too?”

“Are you going to cry for
Dugan
, for God’s sake?”

She was regarding me strangely. “And the one in your cottage, the big blond boy they call Tommy? I don’t suppose he stepped aside politely and let you walk out.”

“I feel kind of bad about Tommy,” I said. “He wasn’t really a bad guy.”

Surprisingly, she made a choked little sound that turned out to be a giggle. Well, almost.

“You’re really rather a monster, aren’t you, darling. I hadn’t realized.”

It took me aback, a little. I guess I hadn’t realized, either. When I came to think of it, I didn’t know where those basic principles came from that I’d been explaining to her, any more than I could remember where I’d learned the blow that had killed Tommy Trask. I’d merely been acting in a manner that seemed necessary and natural; but I could see that by conventional, civilized standards my recent behavior might appear to be a little crude. We stood there in silence for a moment—silence, that is, except for the steady rustling of the rain. At last Kitty laughed oddly.

“I’m sorry. I think I’m being stupid. I’m supposed to be working for revenge on these people, aren’t I? Why should I care how many of them die?” Deliberately, she squeezed the soaked hair back from her face so it wouldn’t obscure her vision when she bent over. She swallowed hard, reached down, and grasped the ankles. “Well, where do you want it?”

Ten minutes later, after ducking around bungalows and crawling through occasional bushes to avoid raincoated employees hurrying between the cottages and the kitchen with trays of dirty dishes, we reached the main house. In the darkness at the side of the building it took me a while to locate the right key on Dugan’s ring. My fingers were numb with cold and slippery with rain. I was beginning to think I was going to have to work my way through the guard’s assortment to find the one I wanted, although I knew Dugan had carried one because I’d seen him use it; then a key finally turned in my clumsy grasp and the door opened.

Kitty whispered, “Do we have to go in
there?
” Before I could answer, she said quickly, “Sorry again. It’s just Davidson being stupid again.”

In the treatment room, a small night light was burning. The place still stank of human suffering and its byproducts. Kitty slipped around by way of the wall, keeping as far as possible from the equipment with which we’d both become too familiar. I forced myself to walk straight across the tiled floor, and pat the table and chair lightly as I went by, just to show them they didn’t scare me a bit. I don’t think I fooled them much, or myself, either. It was never going to be my favorite place.

I opened the inner door very cautiously, gun ready. Another small light burned in Dr. Elsie’s examining room. Her office, beyond an open door, seemed to be fully lighted. I moved silently that way and peeked. She wasn’t there. I signaled to Kitty to join me and went in. Somehow, the soft carpet and neat office furniture seemed to emphasize how wet we were, but I checked Kitty with a gesture when she instinctively embarked on a campaign of sartorial reconstruction. I pointed to the chair behind the desk.

“Just sit there and don’t move,” I said. “You’re the bait. We’re waiting for the tiger. I mean, tigress.”

I stepped back into the corner by the soundproof door that led out into the lobby. The inside guard would be in his cubicle, I knew, and there would be inmates—Dr. Elsie referred to them as patients, but Dr. Albert preferred to call them guests—talking, reading, or just staring at the walls out there, but nothing could be heard in the well-insulated office, just as no screams from the back room could be heard in the lobby. I felt a belated rivulet of ice water trickle down my neck. Kitty had her elbows on the desk as she watched the door half-fearfully. Rain from her sweater and her long hair was soaking into the otherwise unmarked green blotter on the desk. Not too many executives went in for desk blotters these ballpoint days, I reflected, but Elsie was an old-fashioned girl.

I knew her pretty well by now. I knew she’d be back soon. Perhaps because she had such fun ways of using electricity, she hated to see it wasted. She wouldn’t have left all the lights on in here if she wasn’t returning to the office shortly… Then the doorknob turned, and she marched in briskly, her starched coat rustling. She stopped short, staring at the girl who’d usurped the chair behind the desk. The moment of surprise was enough; the heavy door closed itself behind her, with a little encouragement from me, before she could throw herself backwards out of danger, or call for help.

“Careful, Doctor,” I said. “There’s a gun on you.” She didn’t turn her head. She was really quite a woman, in her grotesque, middleaged way.

“Mr. Madden?”

“With a revolver in my hand, I think I’m Helm,” I said. “Madden is the guy with the camera.”

“It must be confusing,” she said calmly. She turned, very slowly and carefully. There was a little pause. She didn’t bother with the obvious questions like how did I get out and what the hell did I think I was doing and did I really think I could get away with it. She merely said, “Apparently I underestimated you. We get so many blustering loudmouths who are going to tear this place down brick by brick if we don’t release them immediately with abject apologies. Are you going to kill me now?”

“It would be fun, but I’ll pass as long as you behave yourself,” I said. “I don’t really need to do it for personal satisfaction. I killed you every day in that back room. Little by little, piece by piece.”

Her hoarse voice said, “Of course. They all do.”

“Actually, it wouldn’t be so good if you were really dead,” I said. “The dead don’t suffer. As long as you’re alive I can hope that the remission of your disease, if that’s the proper medical jargon, is only temporary. When it comes back it will do a slower and better job on you than I could ever do.”

Her eyes narrowed under the thick brows. I saw that I’d hit home. It was something she feared, perhaps the only thing she feared. Her face looked like something out of a prehistoric nightmare, the kind that Pacific island savages used to commemorate with stone statues. She glanced bleakly at Kitty.

“All this because a stupid girl conceived an idiot revenge for the death of her wishy-washy husband!” she sneered. “You miserable intellectual midgets! Just because we dealt summarily with a weakling traitor, girl, do you think that gives you the right to deceive and betray us, too? And you, Helm, an establishment mercenary taking advantage of her sentimental grief to further the oppressive purposes of your ruthless government employers in the United States, and their accomplices here in Canada; all trying vainly to put down a great, spontaneous, revolutionary movement far more important to the future of mankind than a single life, or a hundred lives, or a thousand… Kill him, Jake!”

It might have worked. She’d held my attention nicely with her gaudy talk of revolution; but the guard who walked in on us was very, very slow. He had a strap on his holster and I guess he’d never practiced unsnapping it in a hurry. When he opened the door casually, and saw us standing there, and heard Elsie’s sharp command, he lunged forward clawing at his hip. I saw at once that he wasn’t Wyatt Earp reincarnated, no matter what he might think. I took time to bring the heavy gun barrel down hard on Elsie’s wrist as she grabbed for my weapon. I was still in no danger as I stepped into the clear and raised the Colt once more and took deliberate aim…

Gradually, Jake realized that he was dead; the certificate just hadn’t been signed yet to make it official. With his weapon half out of the holster, he froze.

“Wrong grip,” I said. “Two fingers. Lay it gently on the desk, please.”

Then everything and everybody stood quite still for a moment—well, Kitty remained seated behind the desk—while I took stock of the situation. The important thing to keep in mind, I told myself, was that the guard hadn’t known he was walking into trouble, or he’d have had the revolver in his hand or, at least, had the retaining strap off. This indicated that Dr. Elsie hadn’t managed to set off an alarm by means, say of a button hidden under the office carpet or a communicator in the pocket of her white coat. However, she had known he was coming. She’d been doing her best to distract me with conversation while she waited for him to arrive. Maybe that was why she’d left the lights on in here; she’d had an evening appointment with the guy, to give him a raise, fire him, bawl him out, or just hand him his weekly check.

No sounds reached us through the soundproof door. Nobody charged in to see what was wrong, or called us on the phone to say we were surrounded and had better come out quietly with our hands up. Apparently, Jake had not been seen reaching clumsily for his gun as he entered, before the spring-loaded door closed behind him; or if he had been seen, it was only by a disturbed patient with overriding problems of his own.

“I think it’s broken,” Elsie said, clutching the wrist I’d hammered with the gunbarrel.

“Swell,” I said. “Nothing like a little good news on a dreary day. What do you expect, Doctor, sympathy? Now take off your coat, please. That may be just a stethoscope you’re carrying in the pocket, but let me have the fun of finding it out for myself, huh? Oh, and please give me a running report on how much it hurts your poor smashed wrist. I do want to hear every agonizing detail.”

I watched her slip out of the starched garment, favoring the injured arm, if it really was injured beyond a moderate bruise. Somehow I didn’t have a great deal of faith in that fracture, nor did I intend to base any plans on her disabled condition.

I said, “Now drop it on the floor and take a seat in that conversation nook over there. You, too, Jake. What’s your full name?”

He was a lean, pale-eyed, older man with bushy gray eyebrows, and a bushy gray moustache. He looked like the picturesque-old-plainsman type beloved by the movies and TV, the homespun character who chews tobacco and produces dry scraps of backwoods philosophy while he guides the intrepid hero to the hidden canyon where the trembling ingenue is being held captive by the renegade redskins. It was disillusioning to think that a guy with a fine frontier face like that didn’t know how to draw a gun properly. He’d never make it as a Hollywood sheriff until he learned. Maybe that was why he was working as a uniformed guard in a place like this.

“Frechette,” he said in a subdued, accented voice. “My name it is Jacques Frechette.”

“Okay. Go take a seat, Mr. Frechette. You’re less likely to get active ideas sitting down.”

“Oui, Monsieur.”

I watched him carefully as he moved to one of the three comfortably upholstered chairs—one had already been taken by Elsie grouped around a low round table at the end of the big office, perhaps for informal doctor-patient consultations, perhaps for staff policy conferences on matters medical and otherwise. Three similar chairs stood back against the wall awaiting a real crowd. There was a phone on the table. There was also a phone on the desk. There was also a gun, now, on the desk.

“Kitty,” I said, indicating Frechette’s weapon, “can you use that? Not just wave it around like you did that toy hideout pistol when you brought me here, but really use it?”

She shook her head quickly. “I’m sorry, Paul. I… actually I was brought up to think they were terrible. I’ve never really fired one.”

I said sourly, “Someday somebody’s going to have to explain to me what’s so wonderful about raising a generation of helpless, gunless victims these times of crime and violence. Well, take it anyway, but try not to blow my head off.”

I was still watching the office door warily, waiting for a rescue expedition to come crashing through it, but none did. At last I allowed myself to relax a little. I picked up Elsie’s coat and found nothing in the pockets but the stethoscope I’d already spotted. I was tempted to ask her what a head doctor was doing with a chest-listening device, but maybe it was a status badge like the binoculars worn by the Officer of the Deck on a Navy ship, even in port. I hung the garment on an old-fashioned tree-like stand in the corner. I closed the door on the examining room with its scalpels and acids that might serve as impromptu weapons in a pinch. I went back and relieved some of the load on my belt by digging out the three wallets distorting my pockets, and the three bunches of keys, all of which I dumped on the desk blotter. I pointed to the wallets.