CRIME THRILLERS-A Box Set

by Billie Sue Mosiman

  Carla was calling to him. He had somehow known when he cut her and then could not finish the job that she would seek him out one day. She had not promised it the night he hurt her, but it was in her eyes. It surprised him it had taken her so long. He detoured to Jamison every four months, parked on a timber-wood logging road, and hiked over to Sully's house to look for her. Sully was always alone. Alone and vulnerable. There was no sport in playing with the man. He was like some scared-tail dog. You kicked him, he ran hollering for cover. He even sold his hardware store, and retired to putter around in a garden like some silly senile old bastard, though he was barely middle-aged.

  Sully must have missed Carla as much as I did, Lansing thought, turning onto a farm road cutting north to Jamison city limits. He couldn't have missed her more.

  The nausea went away and Lansing swallowed easily. His hands were finally steady on the wheel. He lifted his right hand and held it palm up. He glanced at the little white knobby scars and wondered if Carla's disfigurement looked as nice. They had had four years to heal.

  She was right to call him. It was time for new, clean wounds, new slices.

  He placed the hand on the steering wheel again and breathed evenly. The sickness had no hold on him, it did not know his name. He could see past the pain, beyond and to the other side of it when he wanted to bad enough. He knew how to ignore, then dismiss the cold blue shivering sweat, the rattling cough that sought to impair his progress.

  His crooked fate line led him faithfully onward to an ultimate destiny. Everyone knew destiny could not be changed by sickness and maybe--it was possible--it could not be derailed by death.

  "I'm coming, Carla," he whispered into the sultry closed, fried-food-smelling crypt that was his car. "We meet a last time, and it's just me and you, kid, just me and you and some dying we've got to do before it's finished."

  CHAPTER 4

  "All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive."

  Sun Tzu

  Sully followed behind her every step.

  "You're going to get yourself upset this way, Sully," she said, truly concerned though not dissuaded.

  "That cost me two thousand, four hundred, and ninety-five dollars. I have the receipt."

  "You paid too much." She reached out to snap the wire from the control box. Sully stayed her hand.

  "This does not make sense, Carla."

  "Sun Tzu makes incredible sense. Read him."

  "You're willing to tear out a perfectly good and expensive burglar alarm system because of some ancient philosopher, and you're telling me I should read him?"

  "He wasn't a philosopher, at least not in the strict sense of the word. He was a strategist, a war brain. An ancient one man think tank."

  "He said go into your modern ranch style brick home and rip out the alarms so any goofy outfit in the country can get in without impediment?"

  Carla turned a corner, began surveying the wires in another room, wondering when she'd get the chance to dispense with them. "He said warfare is deception. Appear unable to attack even when you can; when using force, appear inactive. Like that." She waved one hand in exasperation.

  Sully shook his head to clear it. "Wait a minute, I want to get this straight since it may wind up costing me money. You want to deceive Lansing into thinking we have taken no precautions. You want him to think you're just sitting here waiting for a phone call turning him in. Have I got that right?"

  "Correcto mundo. Now you're catching on. I could teach you something yet." She grinned over at him and slowly snaked out a hand to a wire. Again he caught her wrist and shook his head.

  "And I guess you want to do a hatchet job on the triple dead bolts, too," he said.

  "Uh-uh, not necessary. We just leave them unlocked."

  Sully raised his hands to the ceiling and shook his fists.

  "Carla, your Japanese warlord was insane! No, I take it back. He lived hundreds of years ago. If he had dead bolts and a killer in the woods, he'd, by Christ, lock the goddamned doors!"

  "No use getting mad." She used a wheedling voice. "And he wasn't Japanese. He was Chinese. Did you know the I-Ching is older than the Bible?"

  "I thought you were Jewish."

  "Knowledge has nothing to do with my being Jewish, you goya schmuck."

  Sully gave up and retired to the kitchen to make iced tea. Carla watched his retreat and felt a little sorry for him. Though she used a bantering tone to try to make the whole thing go down easier for him, it was no good. He wasn't buying passive strategy. He had been brainwashed into thinking aggression the prime mover in a conflict. He really believed in his two grand silent alarms and his "impenetrable" steel-center doors with their barrage of locks. She would never be able to convince him this was the only way. But she could not take out the alarm system unless he agreed. It was, after all, his house. It was his money about to be wasted.

  She gazed longingly at the thin lines of wire running along the walls and around the window casings. She turned, marched into the kitchen, and sat down with Sully at the table. The back door was open and June bugs clung to the screen yearning for the light. Crickets burred in the dark. She could smell the scent of sweet night jasmine drifting into the op€en, airy house.

  She poured the warm tea over ice in her glass. The ice cracking merged with the cricket chorus. Sully wasn't talking.

  "If you looked anymore miserable and were a dog, your owner would shoot you."

  "I'm afraid that's what you want to happen. Make it easy for someone to kill us."

  "Sully?" She reached for his hand. "Trust me, okay? I know what I'm doing. You don't want any part of this, you better leave now. He'll be around soon."

  "You're right."

  "What?"

  "I don't want any part of it, but I can't leave, how can I leave? I'm going to leave you here by yourself? And you're right, he's coming. I can...feel it, crazy as that sounds."

  Carla involuntarily glanced at the screen door littered with June bugs, black dots creating a wordless puzzle. They had not said his name yet, Lansing. Name the devil and he appears, she thought.

  "I've kept your old thirty-eight." He looked at her with hope.

  "Get rid of it. Guns are useless for this. If it's here, he could use it."

  "Your warlord tell you that, too?"

  "Strategist. No, he didn't. But I have my own weapons. Guns get in the way."

  "You didn't feel like that when I got the thirty-eight for you."

  She sipped her tea and watched the door. "I was a kid." She made it sound like an indictment.

  "Don't the Israelis use guns? I seem to remember them using guns in the Six Day War."

  "They might use them. I don't. He didn't."

  They sat drinking the tea, listening to the night come alive with the sounds of moths striking the screen door, matting themselves in between the June bugs. Carla thought about knives, a weapon street thugs favor, a weapon at once modern and millennia old, one used by the man they wished not to name this fragrantly pleasant spring evening.

  "I'm going to call Flap." Sully stood and reached for the wall telephone.

  "Good. I haven't seen him since I've been back."

  "I'm going to ask him to talk to you about this crazy idea of yours."

  Carla sighed and poked slivers of ice down into the tea with a forefinger. "You mean you're going to get him to come over and intimidate me."

  Sully shrugged and turned his back to her. "Flap?" he said into the receiver. "Listen, Carla's home. Yeah, I was gonna call you earlier. Look, could you come over for a while tonight? Carla's got some ideas I want her to tell you about...fine...half an hour...great..."

  #

  "Are you out of your ever-loving mind?" Flap roared.

  Carla turned to Sully. "You see? You brought him in on this on purpose. You just want to make things harder for me."

  "Is she out of her mind?" Flap repeated to Sully.

 
; "I don't want to talk about it anymore. You both think it's nuts, then that's it. We'll let the alarms stay put. But you're wrong. I'm telling you it would be better my way."

  Flap, an imposing man in his late sixties with extra pounds padding his frame and extra years telling on his face, took hold of his grandniece's arm. "Come on, let's go for a walk."

  "Do we have to? I said okay, so okay, we'll forget my idea."

  "Yes, we have to. Now, come along, young lady, before you really get me riled." He sneaked a wink in Sully's direction.

  Carla let herself be propelled out the back door into the cool darkness. Since she was a child, whenever her uncle wanted to talk seriously with her, he asked her for a walk in the woods. The forest was his office, his study, his private sanctuary. Flap took her hand and dragged her along until she matched his pace across the lawn and into the woods. It was darker still in the forest, but Flap seemed to know exactly where to step, his instinct unfailing as he moved smoothly through the underbrush and across fallen logs. He was quiet for some time.

  Carla vowed not to say a word, preferring to sulk rather than argue. She loved Uncle Flap like crazy, but he was an old-fashioned traditionalist, an unsophisticated, uneducated mountain man who could never be expected to understand the Chinese strategist she admired. It was unfair of Sully to call in Flap on his side. He knew she could not win an argument with the garrulous old man. No one ever did.

  They had been walking for fifteen minutes before Flap slowed and began to talk to her. "Now, honey, listen to your old uncle, you listening?”

  Forced to it she would answer him out of good manners. He was her elder, her relative, and he had saved her life. Besides, she did love the heck out of him. "I'm listening."

  "You think because you went off and got all that fancy learning that you know everything right and good there is to know. That's natural, 'course. Young folks always think they know better than old people. Sometimes they do know better. I'm willing to admit that--just as a point of argument, you understand. And I'm sure you did learn a lot from them smart Jews down there in God's land. Maybe on some points you might know more than me or Sully. But this thing you're wanting to do--take out the alarms, leave the doors unlocked--well, honey, that's just plain cracked-brain thinking. There ain't no other way to say it."

  "But Uncle Flap, that's just because you don't understand the strategy."

  "Suppose you tell this ignorant old geezer this fancy strategy of yours so I'll understand then?"

  "You won't like it even when I tell you."

  "Suppose you tell me and see."

  Carla took a breath and repeated the passage about appearing to be defenseless to make the enemy feel untroubled about his attack. She was careful to explain herself properly to rail against the modern day idea of aggression and false security. She thought she had a good case. Flap might be able to accept new ways if she was skillful in her presentation.

  When she finished speaking, he said, "Ummm..."

  "What does that mean?" she asked. "Does it mean you see it my way?"

  "Nope."

  She halted, standing her ground. She almost stomped her foot, he made her so angry. "Oh, God, you and Sully are cut from the same cloth. You can't take in anything new. Which, by the way, isn't new at all, it's centuries-old wisdom from some of the finest minds the world's ever known."

  "Could be," he admitted.

  "So why can't you see it?"

  "Baby, we're talking about a sick man here. You understand that? Your great Chinese strategist wrote down rules for dealing with a perfectly sane and ordinary kind of man. A soldier under a commander. Seems to me like he was talking about dealing with a common man involved in a perfectly ordinary kind of war--if there is such a thing as an ordinary war--" He laughed a little at the incongruity of his statement. "And your wisdom learned from that little Chinese fellow could trick a regular soldier. It could trick a man used to using certain war tactics. But Carla, Martin Lansing, he ain't your regular run-of-the-mill soldier or your everyday killer or your next-door neighbor. He come up out of the stinking swamp of hell, and he ain't like you and me. He don't think nothing like us."

  Rather than automatically disavow anything her uncle said, Carla pondered this unique way of looking at her quarry. What Flap said did make good sense now that she could stand aside and recognize it. "Maybe," she allowed.

  "No maybe about it, honey. Lansing might be one that'd figure out right away what you was up to. If he figured it out, you'd be in worse trouble than you'd be with the security, now wouldn't you?"

  "Maybe," she repeated, stubbornly relenting to his superior logic.

  "See, you gotta think of Lansing as an altogether different breed of snake. He ain't no milk snake sneaking up on a mama cow to suck her tit. He's more like one of them coral snakes, brightly colored and so deadly just one bite'll kill you. Now, you don't walk out barefooted in the woods hoping it's the milk snake might crawl underfoot, do you? You take precaution. You wear your boots, just in case you encounter one of them goddamned, sneaky-ass corals.

  "So can we get rid of this silly idea of tearing out the alarms and unlocking the doors? Can we do that now, Carla? You think maybe it might be better to keep yourself as safe as can be, with whatever technology can give you? 'Nother words, can we wear our boots, just in case?"

  Carla shifted from foot to foot in the dark forest. She hung her head, thinking. Flap waited patiently, his huge bulky form steady as a block of midnight. "All right. If you think it's okay, I'll leave it alone." She raised her head to stare at him. "But I'm not giving up on everything I've learned just to suit you and Sully. You won't be right every time."

  "I suppose not. Nope, not every time, honey. Just when it counts," he added, grinning.

  Carla knew he must be smiling with triumph as he hauled her behind him from the forest shelter onto Sully's back lawn. He was such a funny old guy the way he mixed common sense with an earthy logic that she had to smile, too.

  He was one of a kind. She trusted him. He might be old, outdated, and hopelessly chauvinistic with his "honeys" and "babys," but she would never rule out the possibility he might also, on occasion, be right.

  #

  Lansing ditched the car on a switchback road that ended where an old shack once stood. Now there were only fallen bricks where the sooty chimney had soared skyward.

  From the trunk of the car he took a puke-green bedroll he had bought at a camping supply store, a canteen, tin cooking utensils that stacked one inside the other and were carried by a wire handle, thick storm candles, a flashlight, matches in a small metal box, and a few provisions.

  Using his shirttail he wiped the surfaces of the car where he had touched it with his hands. It was stolen out of North Georgia. Might be six months before anyone ventured down the switchback and found it, but Lansing knew well not to take chances.

  With a pale, often-washed gray duffel bag slung over his back, he struck off down an incline into the woods. Two miles to the southeast lay Sully's house. Just thinking about it gave Lansing a warm feeling that started in his gut and crept up to his rib cage. He would have liked to rebuild his old lean-to on the sloping bank not far from Sully's backyard, but he couldn't do that because he had told Sully approximately where it was. No. This time he would situate his hideout a little farther away and not directly in line with the house. Tonight, though, he would sleep in the bedroll beneath the tree limbs and the stars.

  He paused and looked up. Already the sky was blueing overhead, and he picked out bright Venus. Suddenly he remembered something he had learned at school. He had been a poor student and, as soon as he was told facts, forgot them. But one day in his literature textbook he read about the gods and goddesses worshiped by the Greeks. It fired his imagination. The god he chose to remember and to call his own was Ares, god of war. Ares was brother to Zeus, the mightiest god of all, but unlike the other gods, Ares did not adorn his throne with gold and jewels. His throne was made of ugly brass, the chair arms e
nding in knobs depicting skulls. The cushion he sat upon in the throne was made of human skin. Ares was tall, handsome, and cruel. His emblems were the wild boar and the bloodied spear. He lived in a house in a mythical patch of menacing woods.

  Lansing looked from the sky to his surroundings. He, too, was returning to his home, the woods, the deep and the dark, the menacing, the fearful. He said to himself, "I am Ares. I can make the heavens tremble." He muttered this incantation until he grew too embarrassed to repeat it. He knew he was no god, was in fact all too mortal and subject to dying. He had nothing but the palace window in his mind, his personal retreat no one in the world could ever reach. Unlike Ares, who still rode the open sky, Lansing was earthbound and beset by disease and trouble.

  Shaking off the thought, he began walking again. A small animal scurried through ground brush away from him. A bobwhite gave its sharp, musical call from somewhere close by, and in the distance the mate answered, Bob-bob white.

  Lonesome, Lansing mused. Every one and every thing has a mate. Awful way for the world to be constructed. Females depending on males, males fawning over females. Every last jack one of them putting the misery on the other. Even the gods and goddesses of old Greece mated with earthlings and brought themselves down.

  His boots sank into marsh disguised as land. He angled up and around it. The stench reached him and he pinched shut his nostrils with thumb and forefinger. Smells like dead stuff down in that muck, he thought, lots of crappy dead stuff. Smells like rats under a sink cupboard going bad.

  Blackberry vines and creepers strangled whatever wildflowers might have grown in this wild brambly section of the forest. Mushrooms with virulent orange caps dotted where Lansing walked. They made squishing sounds when he stepped on them. That made him smile. Ares would have loved to tramp the earth and destroy every poisonous particle of it.

  He could no longer see the sky or stars above the treetops. Pines soared over a hundred feet before branching out. Water oak, scrub cedar, poplar, and red ash hunched in to fill the remaining spaces. Lansing walked where other men did not attempt to go. Deer did not forage here. This was a place for snakes lying in buried pits, spiders hugging free bark, grub worms wriggling blind beneath rotting timber.