The Language Of Cannibals m-8

by George C. Chesbro

  "Excuse me, Mr. Culhane," I said mildly. "You've got throw-up on the front of your shirt. It's really disgusting."

  "Huh-?"

  That seemed as good an exit line as any, and as Elysius Culhane looked down at the front of his shirt, I walked around him and out of the office. I gave the door at the entrance to the town hall a good kick on my way out, but only managed to hurt my toe. Still seething, I walked quickly to where Beloved Too was parked on the street, got in, started the motor, and popped the clutch. Beloved Too's tires spun, and I left twin swaths of rubber behind as I shot away from the curb.

  I started calming down and feeling considerably better by the time I reached the Cairn town limits. It was close to 5:00, but my flight out of LaGuardia wasn't until 9:15. Figuring I had plenty of time to pack and brief Garth on what I was up to before leaving for the airport, I stopped in Nyack-in my opinion the finest, and certainly the funkiest, of the riverfront towns-to get a liquor-laced ice-cream cone at a small ice-cream shop called Temptations. Then I sat on one of the two wood-and-iron benches outside to eat my cone and watch the weekend day-trippers from the city wandering by while I considered my position. All in all, I decided, things were not going all that badly.

  I had been outraged by what I considered a lack of professionalism, cowardice, and a betrayal of my trust on the part of Dan Mosely. But on reflection, I decided that the policeman had probably done me a favor, albeit unwittingly; he'd certainly done Elysius Culhane no favor by informing him that his top aide was probably a KGB agent. In effect, Mosely's phone call had made Culhane a conscious, responsible player, and then Culhane, by confronting and threatening me, had dealt himself even deeper into the game. He now shared responsibility for what happened to Jay Acton. Despite all his bluster and self-delusion, I was fairly certain he knew that I was going to proceed apace. I was also fairly certain that Culhane, by the time he paused long enough to change his shirt, would realize that, under the circumstances, he really had no choice but to help catch the spy he had hired, and then try to capture as much of the credit as he could in order to defend himself against the ridicule and other hits he was certain to take. If anyone could pull strings to keep Acton safely behind bars for two or three days, it was Elysius Culhane; in the end Culhane, for his own reasons, could end up my strongest ally.

  I finished my cone, climbed back into Beloved Too, and went south on Broadway to 9W, then headed for Exit 4 of the Palisades Parkway. To my left, the Tappan Zee Bridge bisected the Hudson River, which appeared unusually blue and sparkling in the slanting rays of the late afternoon sun. Farther on, the grand earthen dam that had given Piermont its name jutted halfway across the river, a relic of World War II. It had been a busy weekend, and I was starting to feel tired, lazy. That feeling didn't last long. I perked up considerably when I glanced in my rearview mirror and saw a bulky pickup truck with a heavy steel plate welded to its front end come zipping up behind me to settle in only inches from my rear bumper. The man behind the wheel was wearing a ski mask-a bright red one, with Ho Ho Ho embroidered in green across the forehead.

  Tailgating truck drivers wearing ski masks in August tend to make me jittery. I snapped on my seat belt and shoulder harness, tightened the straps as far as they would go, then took my Beretta from the glove department and laid it on the seat beside my thigh before tromping on the accelerator. My abrupt acceleration saved me from the full force of impact as the steel plate welded to the truck's front end struck me in the rear, but it was still enough to send me into a slight power skid. I straightened out, floored the accelerator again. The man behind me obviously had a few horses under his hood, because he immediately started gaining on me again.

  Route 9W along this section was two-laned, winding and very narrow, with virtually no shoulders; trees lined the highway to my right, and to my left was all steep, tree-covered embankment with small houses nestled in alcoves all the way down to the river. There just wasn't that much room to maneuver. The next town was perhaps five or six miles ahead; there I could power slide off the highway into the parking lot of a restaurant or service station. But I was going to have to get there first, before I was shoved off the road into a tree.

  Hoping to give my oversized partner in bumper tag something else to think about besides the fun of ramming me, I picked up my Beretta, switched it to my left hand, reached around, and winged a shot over my right shoulder. The rear window shattered, but when I looked into my rearview mirror I could see that I had missed the truck's windshield entirely. The driver was once again coming up on me fast.

  There was a car coming the other way. I furiously honked my horn and flashed my headlights; the driver of the other car, apparently thinking that I was warning him of a speed trap ahead of him, honked and flashed back, waved cheerily as he sped past. I fired again, this time half turning in my seat and taking my eyes off the road for an instant in an effort to get off a better shot.

  I turned back just in time to see the armored front end of a huge semi-trailer cab easing out into my lane from a side road. The driver of the second truck wore no ski mask, either because it would have hurt his heavily bandaged face or because he saw no need to hide his features from the man he intended to see dead. The grimly leering, bruised and bandaged, but clearly recognizable face of Gregory Trex was visible in the truck cab's side window. Crashing into the cab meant certain death for me and probably wouldn't do more than slightly addle the granite-headed Trex. My options were the ultimate in slim pickings.

  I whipped the steering wheel to the left, then released my grip on the wheel and locked my hands behind my neck, bracing as the car hit the slight shoulder on the left and went airborne. This, I thought as I waited for the impending crash and darkness, was the last car I was going to name Beloved.

  I didn't have long to wait.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I regained consciousness-in what I assumed was a hospital bed-with a skull that felt like someone had tried to split it down the center with a chisel, a mouth that felt and tasted like it was filled with steel wool soaked in dirty turpentine, and the terrible fear that I'd been partially blinded. I lay in a dim pool of pale yellow light cast by a bulb set somewhere in the wall above my head. Virtually everything beyond a three-foot radius was impenetrable darkness; what I could see out of my left eye was blurred and milky, and I could see nothing at all out of my right eye. I grabbed for the blind eye. Pain shot through my head and right shoulder, but I was rewarded, if that was the proper term, with the feel of a heavy bandage covering the right side of my face. Maybe I hadn't been blinded after all. I groaned, closed my good eye against the pain. When I opened it, a blurred but instantly recognizable shape, complete with full beard and shoulder-length hair, was leaning over me.

  "Why do I have the distinct feeling that I should have stuck around Saturday to listen to your bad news?" Garth said in a voice that was wry, yet heavily laden with emotion.

  "A comedian is just what I need, Garth. Ha ha."

  "Sorry about that. Just my way of showing how happy I am to find you alive. I passed your wreck on the way here, and it gave me a few anxious moments."

  "What's the news on me? Did I lose an eye?"

  Garth laid one of his large, powerful hands on my left shoulder, squeezed it very gently. "No. You're going to be all right, brother. For a time they thought you'd fractured your skull, but X rays show otherwise. Mild concussion, lots of cuts, scrapes, and bruises to keep the other bruises you had company, but you'll live. You've got a twelve-stitch gash over your right eye, but the eye itself is undamaged; they just found it easier to bandage it the way they did. You've lost a little scalp and hair on the right side of your head, but you were thinking of getting a haircut this week anyway, right?"

  "There you go again with another real knee-slapper."

  "How do you feel, Mongo?"

  "Garth, my physical and mental states of being lend the term 'feeling like shit' new depths of meaning."

  He began to gently knead my shoulder in
a way that relaxed my muscles, and somehow began to ease the twin suns of white-hot pain that were blazing behind my eyes. "That was some job of flying you did in the Volkswagen, brother," he said softly, his tone soothing, almost hypnotic. "You must have sailed better than a hundred feet through the air going down that hillside; you flew right between the eaves of two houses, rolled over, and landed on top of a tree beside some guy's deck. You made him spill his drink. When the paramedics finally managed to climb the tree, they found you hanging upside down in your harness. You're a hell of an advertisement for seat belts and harnesses." He stopped the kneading, eased himself carefully down on the side of the bed. When he spoke again, all traces of warmth and humor were gone from his voice. "What the hell happened, Mongo? What's going on here?"

  I worked my tongue over my gummy lips, tried to clear my throat. "Get me some water, will you?"

  "Watch your eye," Garth said as he rose from the bed.

  He turned on the light, came back, and poured me a glass of water from a plastic carafe on a table beside the bed. Then he sat down again, gently raised me up, and handed me the glass. As I sipped the water, he gently rubbed my back between the shoulder blades, then kneaded the back of my neck. Incredibly, my nausea and pain began to ease, and the vision in my uncovered left eye began to clear somewhat. If I was ever to bet on the healing power of the laying on of hands, it would be Garth's hands I'd bet on. They were hands that, more than a few times in the past, since his poisoning with nitrophenyldienal, had been ready to kill-never inappropriately, but often prematurely, at least in my opinion. But they were also, most definitely, a healer's hands.

  "So," I said as I drained off the water and handed him back the glass, "where am I?"

  "Cairn Hospital. I'm told it's a very good one."

  "What time is it?"

  "Three o'clock in the morning, Monday. I got home around six yesterday, found your note. When you weren't home by nine, I picked up the phone and called the police and the hospital. Bingo. That's how I found out you'd been in an accident."

  "It was no accident; it was an on-purpose. Two guys ran me off the road."

  Garth grunted, as if he wasn't surprised. The knotted muscles in his jaw and neck were the only sign of his anger and concern. He refilled the water glass, then pulled a chair over to the bed and sat down in it. When he spoke, his voice was low, but humming with tension. "What was the bad news you wanted to give me on Saturday, Mongo?"

  "Oh, that," I said, rolling over on my side and propping myself up on a very sore elbow. "You mean the bad news you said I should take care of?"

  "Come on, Mongo."

  "The bad news on Saturday was that I'd become convinced Michael was murdered. Today's bad news is that the KGB agent who probably murdered Michael works for Elysius Culhane. Naturally, Culhane isn't too eager for this fact to become public knowledge, and the FBI seems perfectly willing to help him cover it up. Cairn has a chickenshit police chief who doesn't seem inclined to do anything about it, and then there's the minor matter of the possible existence of a death squad in Cairn, which may be responsible for me being here."

  "Whoa, Mongo. I feel I've done sufficient groveling, so stop trying to be clever and just start from the beginning."

  I did, relating what I'd learned and everything that had happened from the time I arrived in Cairn on Friday afternoon to the moment on Sunday afternoon when I yanked on Beloved Too's steering wheel and went soaring off into space. Garth listened in silence, the steady, bright gleam in his limpid eyes his only display of emotion. When I finished I was exhausted, once again in pain, and with increasingly blurred vision in my good eye. Garth seemed to sense this; he leaned forward in his chair and once again began to knead the muscles in my back and neck with his powerful but incredibly gentle hands.

  "Okay," Garth said softly. "First, let's try to sort out this attempt to kill you. Trex and one of his buddies ran you off the road. The problem is that nobody seems to have seen it happen."

  "Who reported the accident?"

  "The guy who spilled his drink when you landed in the tree next to his deck. He just saw the car come sailing out of nowhere and land on top of the tree; he didn't see what happened up on the road, and no other witnesses have come forward. Do you think the ambush was Trex's idea?"

  "He sure as hell had a powerful itch to kill me."

  "And he was waiting for you in ambush. He knew you'd probably be using 9W to get to the Palisades Parkway. How did he know you were in Cairn? Could he have been following you?"

  I shook my head. "He couldn't have been out of the hospital himself for more than a short time before he came at me. Besides, Gregory Trex wasn't interested in following me, only killing me-and, if he'd been following me, he'd have had a lot better places to kill me than on 9W. Even if they weren't in trucks, that shithead and his friends wouldn't be good enough to tail me without my knowing it. He must have seen my car parked outside Town Hall, or seen me go in. He figured I'd be going home eventually, so he rounded up a buddy and set up the ambush."

  "Maybe Culhane put Trex and his buddy on to you."

  I thought about it, nodded. "Could be; it would be enough simply to drop a hint to Trex that I was in town, and Trex would take it from there. After Mosely called him, Culhane had time to call Hendricks at the FBI before he came to confront me. Maybe he also took the time to call Trex."

  "There's another possibility, Mongo. There is indeed a death squad operating here, with Gregory Trex and his masked buddy being two of its members and Jay Acton controlling it."

  "Acton shouldn't have a clue that I'm breathing down his neck. Supposedly he was out sailing when Mosely called Culhane."

  "Mosely could have reported to Culhane on the conversation you had with him on Friday evening. If Culhane mentioned to Acton that you had questions about Burana's death, it would have put Acton on his guard."

  There was something odd in Garth's tone that made me nervous. "Okay, Garth," I said, watching his face, "that's a possibility. But I really can't see a clever KGB agent having anything to do with a loose cannon like Gregory Trex. Like I said, Trex didn't need anyone to goad him into trying to kill me. The ambush may be totally unrelated to the other matters."

  "I think it is related."

  "What's the matter, Garth? What is it?"

  "Somebody has been following you, Mongo-and I agree that it had to have been a pro, or you'd have picked up on it."

  "How the hell do you know somebody's been following me? You didn't even know I was in the hospital until a few hours ago, and you didn't know what's been happening until a few minutes ago."

  Garth bowed his head slightly, sighed as he ran the fingers of both hands through his long hair. "Harry Peal's dead, Mongo."

  "Oh, God," I said, turning my face away and clenching my fists against the new pain that suddenly shot through my heart. "Shit. How?"

  "He died in a fall off the cliff outside his home sometime Sunday afternoon."

  "That was yesterday; I told you I went up to see him yesterday afternoon."

  "I know. Supposedly there was a witness to his death. This witness claims there was a struggle between Peal and a very small man-'dwarf is the word he used, I'm told-and the dwarf pushed Peal off the cliff."

  I kept my fists clenched and face turned away, fighting back tears of grief, frustration, and rage. Mosely had been dead on target when he labeled me, in so many words, a kind of pariah, but that wasn't news to me. A grand old man of folk song, conservation, and fierce real patriotism had survived more than eight decades of severe trials to body and soul; he'd survived everything but one Sunday afternoon conversation with Robert Frederickson. "Why didn't you tell me this at the beginning?" I asked in a voice that I hardly recognized as my own.

  "To what purpose? I knew you didn't kill some old man. I wanted to hear what you had to say so that maybe I could get some clue as to who did kill him. My money's on your KGB plant."

  "For Christ's sake, Garth, Harry Peal was Jay Acton's father."r />
  "He'd never met the man. Harry Peal would have been just one more threat, like Burana, who had to be removed; we're talking KGB here, not the Junior Chamber of Commerce. And he figured he'd try to take you out along the way."

  "That's fucking absurd," I said, turning back to face Garth. "It doesn't make any sense at all. If Acton wants me out of the way because I know he's probably KGB, why didn't he just kill me, instead of trying to frame me on some bullshit murder charge that can't hold up? Arranging for me to be charged with murder isn't going to keep me from talking."

  "You have a point," Garth said evenly, staring thoughtfully at the palms of his hands. "Except that he couldn't be in two places at once. He took care of Peal himself, and he was counting on Trex and his buddy to take care of you."

  "And they muffed it; I end up alive and in the hospital. So what's to be gained by this stupid murder charge? Who's this witness?"

  "An anonymous phone tip."

  "An anonymous phone tip?"

  "What the hell; it did the job. You're currently under arrest, dear brother, on the charge of suspicion of murder. There's a guard sitting outside your door right now. He was looking real bored when I came in, so I managed to find him a newspaper."

  "How did you get in here?"

  "My old NYPD courtesy card and a little courtesy from a former comrade-in-arms."

  "Mosely?"

  "Uh-huh. That's where I got my information."

  "I take it he failed to mention all the other shit that's been going down around here."

  "It must have slipped his mind," Garth said absently.

  "You remember Mosely from the good old days?"

  Garth nodded. "Vaguely. Our paths used to occasionally cross at the station house, and I remember seeing his name on the duty list. He spent some years in safe and loft, then was transferred to full-time U.N. detail. The word on him was that he was a straight arrow-probably a lot straighter than most of the other cops in that precinct."