Waiting (14 page)

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Authors: Frank M. Robinson

BOOK: Waiting
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The six-o’clock news would call it a drive-by shooting, a drug deal gone sour. Hall had been the right color to hang that one on him. And when the cops searched Hall’s house they’d probably find a bag of crack someplace where his wife might have dusted two days before but not the night before, when something watching had seen them go out for dinner or to a movie and then slipped into their house.
Hall’s sudden offer of lunch—what had suggested it to him? And if it hadn’t been for the phone call, whoever had shot Hall would have gotten two for the price of one: the sophisticated crack dealer using his job at the museum as a cover, and the courageous KXAM reporter investigating a tip about him.
That somebody was trying to kill him wasn’t exactly news, Artie thought.
That somebody was trying to save his ass was.
 
Artie watched while the
police cordoned off the steps of the museum and pushed back the sightseers, pleased that they had been this close to tragedy but that it hadn’t involved them. Two of the women were weeping, and Artie guessed they had been coworkers of Hall’s.
There was nothing more to see—but that wasn’t quite true. Artie inspected the faces in the crowd again. There was whoever had shot Hall and had come back to see how good a job they had done. Say somebody like Watch Cap who, for all Artie knew, was searching the crowd looking for him.
He started back to his car. The crime scene investigators and police photographers would show up any minute, and Schuler would wonder what the hell he was doing there. He glanced at the body once more. A spot on the six-o’clock news, a tragedy for Hall’s family, and momentary curiosity on the part of the kids who came to the anthropology wing and wondered what had happened to the nice Mr. Hall who had always been so patient with answers to their questions.
Artie sat in his car for a long moment, then drove out of the park to Lincoln Way. Mitch had been wrong, he thought. He didn’t like war, never had. He certainly didn’t like this one. Larry, Paschelke, Hall, the old man in the park—all innocent bystanders in a conflict he didn’t quite understand, whose participants he’d never met. Or at least didn’t think he had, with the possible exception of Watch Cap.
Then there was Mark. He couldn’t believe that Mark had just decided to leave, without any warning whatsoever. Had Mark gone up to see Susan? Maybe. He’d told Mark his mother wanted him up there. Mark knew his grandfather was doing badly—his going would have made sense.
Except he didn’t believe it. Mark sometimes seemed remote; probably all teenagers did to their parents. But he would have left a note, would have called, would never have thought, Fuck you, hurray for me, and split. He knew Mark better than that.
Or thought he did.
Mitch didn’t think there had been violence, but he wasn’t sure of that, either. If
something
had slipped into Mark’s head, he could have ended up doing anything it wanted or going anyplace it wanted him to. There were different levels of violence.
But what would have been the point? To hold Mark hostage for the return of Larry’s research diskette? He had never gotten a call, there had been no note slipped under the door. Mark had vanished into thin air, with no indication of violence, no indication of abduction. And someone,
something,
had taken the diskette anyway.
He still hadn’t been able to get hold of Susan, even though the operator assured him the lines were open—and always had been. She should have called him in any event, would certainly have phoned if Mark had shown up at the Eureka airport and called her in Willow to say he was there.
His world was slowly going to hell. His family had disappeared and something or somebody wanted him dead, as Mitch had put it. And he had no face to put to the somebody or something except the photographs that Larry had taken of a sixty-year-old man who seemed younger than he should have been and who had died after an automobile accident on 580 late on a Saturday night. Artie had looked at the photos in Larry’s research a dozen times and could remember nothing about the man except that he’d seemed so ordinary—nobody you would have looked at twice.
The sun had come out and the drizzle had stopped, but Artie didn’t notice either one. He had braked for a ten-year-old battered Mustang that cut in front of him, and his sudden surge of anger had blanked out the slight feeling of fingers plucking at his mind more subtly than they had done several nights before. For Artie the sky still seemed just as gray, the mist still condensing and running down his windshield in rivulets.
The car that had cut in front of him had swerved back into the outer lane and was now crowding him over toward the curb. Artie leaned on his horn and glanced over to look at the driver. Long brown hair, street kid, early twenties at best. The type Artie had come to hate for what they were doing to the city he loved. The kid turned toward him at the same time and flipped him off. Artie couldn’t read lips but he knew what he was saying: “Get off the street, old man!”
They were on Kezar Drive now, then hit the light and turned onto Oak Street, paralleling the Panhandle. Artie twisted the wheel a little to the right and for a moment sparks flew from their fenders. He could feel his lips curl away from his teeth. Just like in the movies. Then his car jumped the curb and he hit the brakes to avoid a tree. The kid cut in front and stopped, jerked open the door of his car, and bolted out holding a tire iron.
Artie yanked open his own door, his hand on the automatic in his pocket. He had no clear idea of where he was or exactly what he was going to do, but he was mad enough to kill, his rage as thick as cotton in his head.
The kid came at him swinging the tire iron and screaming, “What the hell, you old bastard, you don’t own the road!”
Suddenly a car directly behind Artie’s turned out and raced on past. In his head Artie sensed bemused frustration, and then something cold as ice water slid into his mind and his anger faded. He glanced around, noticing with surprise the cloudless sky and the brilliant green of the Panhandle on his left, drops of water glistening jewel-like on the grass.
He turned to the kid and gaped. A student type with glasses, an inoffensive skinny nineteen, his face pale with fright. He stood there looking at the tire iron in his hand, shaking and trying frantically to piece together what had just happened.
“I don’t know what the hell got into me, man—honest to Christ, I don’t know! You all right, man? I didn’t mean to cut in like that!”
A few minutes more and the fight would have escalated, Artie thought. He could have killed the kid,
would
have killed him. And if he’d tried to drive away, there were plenty of people around who would have gotten his license number. When the cops caught up with him it was more than an even-money bet that one of them would have shot him for resisting arrest.
Artie sat down on the curb, holding his head in his hands. “It’s all right—anybody can lose control of a car. It happens.” Especially if they had help.
The kid looked embarrassed. “Shit, my insurance has lapsed.”
His own car was almost as old as the kid’s, Artie thought. Why get the cops and the insurance companies into it?
“Forget it.”
The incident was a reminder, Artie thought, as if he needed one.
Four times now, he’d been lucky.
He couldn’t count on being lucky the fifth time.
What the hell was going on? Something had it in for him, and sooner or later they’d kill him and it would look like an accident or like it was all his own fault.
 
Artie pulled into
a gas station and had the attendant fill his tank while he called Mitch on his cell phone. He got the answering machine, nobody at home. Office hours, noon to five—he could never keep it straight. He called the office and got a worried secretary. Mitch hadn’t shown or called in, and she’d already had to cancel one appointment. No, she had no idea where he might be.
Artie held the phone for a minute after the line went dead. Mitch never failed to show for work, or if he couldn’t make it, he never failed to cancel well in advance. An accident or …
Artie gunned the car and took off. He wasn’t the only one who knew too much. Mitch knew almost as much as he did.
There wasn’t much parking at the top of Telegraph Hill, and he left his car in a neighbor’s driveway with the motor running. The door to Mitch’s small cottage was locked, and Artie fumbled out his key ring and searched frantically for Mitch’s key, a leftover from when Mitch had gone on vacation and asked him to look in on his cat and feed her.
The inside of the small cottage was quiet. A living room, bedroom, bath, and kitchen, all decorated like a Cape Cod cottage. The small office in one corner of the living room, pale blue chintz curtains by windows overlooking the bay, driftwood furniture and maple antiques, braided-wool space rugs over polished wood-plank floors. The hill itself could have been transposed from New England, with wooden walks leading off to the various cottages. It was a perfect bachelor’s hideaway.
Mitch was stretched out on the kitchen floor, bleeding from a scalp wound where he’d hit his head on the table when he fell.
“Mitch!”
Levin was out cold, a half-empty bottle of scotch on the tiled sink ledge. Artie knelt down to feel his pulse. It was then he noticed the glass that had rolled beneath a chair and a small bottle of prescription pills. Valium—half the small yellow tablets were spilled on the linoleum. Bad combination if Mitch had taken them with the scotch, and he apparently had.
Artie lunged for the phone. The ambulance was there sooner than he thought possible, and he rode in the back while the attendant fixed an oxygen mask to Mitch’s face and monitored his slow and laborious breathing.
At the hospital they pumped his stomach, but it was a good two hours in the emergency room before they let Artie in to see a pale Mitch, sitting on the side of his bed.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, I am now. It wasn’t much of a lunch, but they took all of it. It’ll be a week before I’m hungry again.”
“What the hell happened?”
Mitch stared out the hospital window at the gray winter sky. There was a slight sheen of sweat on his forehead but his voice was steady enough. Only his eyes gave away how jumpy he really was.
“After I left you this morning, I went home. Looked over some patient folders and poured myself a drink before going to work. Two fingers of scotch, a few cubes, and half a bottle of five-milligram Valiums.”
Mitch said it casually and Artie wasn’t sure he’d heard right. “I don’t get it.”
Mitch sounded as if he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe it either.
“A neighbor came over to bitch about my cat digging in her flower bed and when she left, I decided to make myself a quick drink before going to work. I knew what I was doing, Artie. I just didn’t believe there was anything strange or dangerous about it.”
Mitch struggled to keep his voice calm.
“I started to come out of it when I felt myself falling. Something just drained out of my head, like you’d pulled a plug. Something had been inside my mind and I didn’t even know it … .”
After a long moment of silence, Artie said, “It’s a strange feeling. You suddenly realize somebody’s been pushing your buttons but you have no idea what it was. Or who.”
Mitch looked at him in surprise.
“When? For you?”
“When I came home from seeing Paschelke that first time. I went out on my back porch and climbed up on the railing. I wanted to fly. I thought it was perfectly normal, too. Three stories down to solid concrete, Mitch.” He didn’t mention Mark; he didn’t want to start talking about him again.
“You should have told me.”
“Would you have believed me?”
“Not then. I sure would now.”
A nurse looked in, disapproving, then pulled the curtains and left.
“Do you know how they do it?” Artie asked.
Mitch seemed more himself now, his voice calmer, his eyes less jumpy. He was still pasty-faced but that would clear up with a decent meal—whenever he felt like eating, which probably wouldn’t be for a while.
“I’ve got my ideas. They’re probably no better than yours.”
“I don’t have any at all.” Artie hesitated. “I don’t understand how anybody can manipulate my mind, Mitch. I just don’t.”
He sounded like a small boy asking his father for reassurance and felt like two-thirds of an idiot. It was Mitch who had almost died, not him.
Mitch glanced at the white curtains drawn around the bed and lowered his voice.
“Forget about free will, Artie—you don’t have any. Physically speaking, you’re an electrochemical machine. Especially your brain. The neurons fire, an electrical impulse travels along a nerve, and you think a thought or move your arm. If you were small enough to crawl inside somebody’s head, you’d probably see little sparkles of light when their neurons fired. And like most electrical devices, your brain generates waves. You broadcast them and you receive them, too.”
He leaned back against the pillows. For a moment, Artie thought Mitch was going to be sick, then he realized Mitch was probably so empty he couldn’t even vomit green bile.
“We talk about it all the time, Artie. We feel the ‘electricity’ in the crowd when we’re at a football game. You can feel the ‘electricity’ of a mob if you get caught up in one. And your mind can be taken over by that mob, Artie. You can end up going along with whatever the mob wants you to do, even if you don’t really want to. The mob is doing your thinking for you.”
“One on one,” Artie objected, keeping his voice down. “We can’t do it one on one.”
Mitch managed a weak smile. “I read about it in the psychology newsletters all the time—talk to any biofeedback expert about your brain’s alpha, beta, and theta waves. A few years back, the air force gave Stanford a grant to link computers with brain waves—they wanted to teach pilots how to fly planes with them. And I’ve seen demonstrations where the participants played Pong on a computer by controlling the ball with their minds. It’s the next frontier, Artie.”

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