by Ed Gorman
Standing in the pooled shadows at the bottom of the stairs, streetlight and frost turning the white curtains to silver, Denise searched her mind for what ASAP meant. Then she remembered; it was an expression her mother had used frequently when Denise was younger. You clean that room up ASAP, young lady; you get your bike into the bam where it won't be rained on, and I mean ASAP.
As soon as possible.
In the echoes of the caller's voice, she could hear desperation and trouble. The caller wanted the man to come to his place right away. Which is probably what the man would do instead of coming back home, especially if he had one of those deals where you could snag your phone messages with one of those little black jobbies.
Which meant that if Denise wanted to confront the man, and tell him how much money she wanted to keep quiet, she was going to have to do it at the caller's address. If, that is, she could find the caller's name and address in the phone book.
At first she thought of the incredible hassle it would be to get back on a bus and be taken to God knew where. It could literally be another three hours. But then she remembered the cash in her coat. She didn't have to rely on a bus. She could call a cab. She had plenty of money.
Keeping the caller's name fresh in her mind by repeating it over and over to herself, she took the flashlight and started looking for a phone directory. After a ten-minute search, she spotted one in a kitchen drawer. By then she'd repeated the caller's name so many times, it was gibberish, the way you could say the word spoon or clock so many times, it ceased to have all meaning.
She found the caller's name and address with no problem, writing them down on a paper napkin she found in the same drawer.
Putting the flashlight back where she'd found it, she drifted toward the back door. In the moonlight the shards of broken glass looked terrible, spoiling the nice, if empty, look of the place.
Shrugging, feeling guilty about making such a mess, she rummaged around in the kitchen closet till she found a broom. Having no luck finding a dustpan, she went over to the green plastic garbage receptacle and fished out a TV dinner cover. She folded the cover in half and went over and swept all the glass up into the fold. It made a fine dustpan.
In ten minutes she had all the glass swept up. All that bothered her then were the holes in the window; bone-chilling night air flowed through them. Ultimately the wind would make the whole house cold.
She realized how weird it was, of course, feeling driven to patch up the same place she'd broken into, but she couldn't help it. Her mother had always taught her to lend a hand when a hand was needed, and one was certainly needed there.
She found some heavy tape in a drawer and then dug out a carton container from the garbage, fashioning two pieces of material that would cover both holes. When she was finished, she stood back and assessed her handiwork. All in all the patches didn't look so bad. The trouble was, they wouldn't last too long. Cold air would freeze the adhesive surface of the tape, and soon enough the patches would fall off.
But at least she had tried.
Going to the back door, she took the receiver from the wall phone and dialled a cab number. She was pretty familiar with cabs. Sometimes johns would pay the cab fare to bring you to different places to meet them. And she liked cabs. You felt kind of regal or special-or at least a country girl did-riding around in the backseat of what was really a chauffeur-driven vehicle. Or at least that was how she imagined it.
The guy at the cab company sounded kind of grouchy. He said that with this weather, all kinds of cars weren't starting, and so it would be a while. She said okay.
While she waited, she looked in the refrigerator for something to eat. It was a huge new fridge, and all the guy had in it was a dried-out apple, some cottage cheese that was already three weeks beyond the fresh date and smelled like it, and one lone egg that sat pathetically in the back, like a deserted child.
Disappointed, she closed the door and started searching the cupboards. Unless she planned to dine on salt and sugar, she was out of luck.
Then she remembered the freezer in the basement, the long white chest model, like the one her father had always been promising to buy her mother.
Maybe in the freezer she'd find something she could pop into the microwave oven. Something that would fortify her for what would probably be a long night ahead.
She went over to the door leading to the lower level and started descending the stairs, the flashlight chasing away shadows the way a cat would chase away mice caught in a bam.
All she could think about was the freezer and the great stuff that might be inside. Maybe he'd have a few of those burger-and-fries deals that took just four minutes (the way they were advertised on TV) before they sat, steamy and succulent, before you on the table.
She headed straight for the freezer, ready to throw back the lid.
17
FOR DINNER GREG WAGNER FIXED HIMSELF a cheeseburger, cut himself a piece of pumpkin pie, and poured himself a glass of skim milk. As if the skim milk would compensate for the pie and the cheeseburger.
But for once he wasn't worrying about his weight. He was too excited over what he'd found that afternoon on one of Emma's computer directories, one he'd never seen before. He hated to think about it, but maybe Emma hadn't been quite the "intimate" friend he'd always imagined. After he read this directory, it was obvious that Emma had kept secrets from him. Important secrets.
Just before eating, he'd called Brolan-twice, in fact-both times leaving anxious messages.
After finishing his meal, he wheeled his chair into the living room and put on a new videotape he'd bought from a mail order house in Missouri, run by a mysterious man who wrote very good and very disturbing horror fiction. The man's second book had given Wagner nightmares for several weeks after he finished it.
The name of the tape was The Falcon in Danger. Even though the Falcon movies of the forties had been dismissed by the critics of their time to be little more than B-movie action fodder, Wagner found them endlessly fascinating and nearly always charming. He especially liked the ones with Tom Conway, who had replaced his more famous brother, George Sanders, halfway through the series run. Conway was more boyish and vulnerable than the somewhat cynical Sanders, and for all of Sanders's drollery, Conway was the more believable ladies' man of the pair. The only thing Conway couldn't do with much credibility was throw a punch. In The Falcon in Mexico he knocked out a man with the worst movie punch Wagner had ever seen. Without meaning any disrespect, Wagner had laughed out loud when he'd first seen the punch. It was that memorably bad.
He watched the new Falcon tape the way he watched all his tapes at night, with all the lights out and only the TV screen providing illumination. He liked the warm glow the screen gave off. Knowing that it was snowy and cold outside and that he was safe and warm inside with a fine movie to watch always made him feel snug and cosy. He supposed it all reminded him of his early boyhood, when his parents had bought a twenty-one-inch Sylvania monster with a glowing frame around the screen. He could still recall how whitely the frame radiated, how soft and pleasant its radiance had seemed in the I Love Lucy darkness.
He never would have seen the girl if he hadn't needed to go get another Diet Coke. He had no idea how long she'd been standing on the kerb across the street, leaning against a tree, staring at the duplex.
On his way back from the kitchen he saw her out the front window, through the part in the curtains. She couldn't have been there too long. The bitter temperature wouldn't have permitted it.
At first he tried to dismiss her. She was probably waiting for a ride. She was probably staring at the duplex because there wasn't anything else to stare at. Anyway, she was just a girl, a teenage girl, and she didn't have anything to do with him at all.
The Falcon in Danger proved to be a real treat. It was better than a locked-room mystery; it was a locked-aeroplane puzzle. The associate of a leading industrialist was found dead after the plane on which he was riding crash-landed at an airport-with
out anybody else aboard, including a pilot. Where had everybody gone? As usual, Wagner made mental note of all the character actors. He liked most of them even more than he liked the big stars. For one thing, character actors usually had juicier roles, and for another, they were fun to follow from one picture to another. The same man might play, in 1942, say, a Mexican assassin, a Nazi spy, and a notorious western gunslinger. His favourite character actor of all was Elisha Cook, Jr., who usually stuck to film noir roles.
After a trip to the bathroom and after pouring another Diet Coke, Wagner came back to the living room for act three. He liked to know how long the running time was in advance and divide by three. It was amazing how most films-especially B-movies-broke down into the three-act pattern.
Before pressing the freeze-frame button off, Wagner pushed over to the window and looked out. He hadn't forgotten about the curious girl standing there, so solitary in the bitter cold.
She was gone.
He looked up and down the street-light traffic going by, exhaust pipes emitting grey-blue plumes behind them-but he didn't see her anywhere.
So, he'd been right She hadn't been watching his place at all. She'd just been waiting for a ride.
Then he did forget about her. He went back to the third act of the Falcon and had himself a very good time. This time he'd even brought along a small bowl of popcorn to munch on. The popcorn had been air-popped and was therefore low in calories. He congratulated himself on his remarkable self-restraint
The only thing he wondered about was when Brolan was going to call. Wagner was excited. He had some hard facts to offer Brolan, hard facts that might lead to the real killer. He had decided that Brolan wasn't the villain after all. Wagner knew it was foolish to go on a hunch like this, but when you came right down to it, what did you have to rely on but your instincts about somebody? You trusted him, or you didn't trust him. Simple as that.
The third act was a doozy. It was by far the most complex mystery Wagner had ever seen in a B. There were four leading suspects, and they kept Wagner guessing right up to the very last It all reminded Wagner of a John Dickson Carr plot, Can-being a mystery writer he liked particularly, especially the atmospherics.
Just as the movie was ending, Wagner heard the noise on the back porch.
A less suspicious man might have put the sound down to wood creaking and groaning in subzero temperature. Houses made the same kind of complaints human bodies did in cold weather like this.
But somehow Wagner didn't think this was the case. Hair bristling on the back of his neck, he clicked the TV set off. He sat there in the darkness and the quiet. The only sounds were of electric appliances humming and of a car going by on the street out front.
He listened.
The sound came again. This time he knew for sure that it was not merely the house creaking and groaning.
Somebody was on the back porch.
He wheeled into the kitchen, where, in the centre drawer of the cabinet, he kept a fancy.45, one beautifully blued and pearl-handled. He had always wondered what it would be like when the day finally came-the day when he'd have to use the gun to protect himself-and now he was about to find out.
He eased his wheelchair up to the kitchen door. He listened, waiting; the gun felt both odd and comforting in his small hand.
***
Denise knew she'd made a mistake as soon as her shoes crunched through the ice on the back porch. They made such a noise, it sounded like a section of wall pulling loose or something.
There on the shadowy moonlit back porch, she stopped, heart pounding. She wished she were back in the big empty house she'd left an hour ago or so. She'd been about to open the freezer and get herself something yummy to eat when the cab horn started blaring. She'd had no choice but to hurry out of the house before the cabbie informed too many neighbourhood people of his presence.
And she was here, at the address given by the man on the phone machine.
When she'd first stood across the street, she'd thought nobody was home. There were no lights apparent on either side of the duplex. But once she'd reached the back porch, she saw the glow of the TV set, faint but warm and inviting.
She wondered if the man who tried to kill her was inside already. But she didn't think so. She didn't see his car in either front or back. She wished idly that she'd taken Polly's advice and forgotten the whole thing. She was too young and too dumb to pull off something like blackmail. It was one thing to think about something like that; it was another actually to do it
Calmer then, convinced that nobody inside had heard her after all, she turned and started to leave the small screened-in porch. She still had quite a bit of cash in her pocket, even after paying for the expensive cab ride. Enough left to buy a few really good meals and some warm clothes for winter. And then that'd be that; she'd never see the guy again, and good riddance. He'd go back to being one more creep and she'd go back to… she wasn't sure what she'd go back to being, but that didn't bother her so much. She just wanted to get away.
She was just putting her hand out for the screen door when the back door inside was flung open, and a small male voice said, "I've got a gun pointed right at your back. Don't think I'm afraid to use it."
The quality of the voice baffled her. It was male and mature, but it didn't seem to have as much… volume as most mature male voices.
The voice said, "Turn around."
She heard her teeth chattering, and she knew it wasn't from the cold. It was the idea of a gun. Within the past twenty-four hours one man had tried to strangle her to death-or something like that-and another man was pulling a gun on her. She was just a simple little Catholic farm girl. Why were so many people picking on her all of a sudden?
"Do you really have a gun?" Denise heard herself say.
"I really have a gun."
"But I mean, you wouldn't shoot me, would you?"
"And why wouldn't I? I found you on my back porch. I assume you were about to break in."
"But I'm a girl."
"Girls can be dangerous, too."
"I'm from a farm."
"So?"
"Farm girls aren't like that."
A hint of amusement played in the small voice. "Oh, they're not, eh?"
"Huh-uh. Honest."
She realized suddenly how weird this conversation was. She was standing on a stranger's back porch looking out on a backyard silver with ice and moonlight in a neighbourhood she'd never been in before, talking to a guy with a little voice, who (a) held a gun and her, and (b) seemed to find her funny in some strange way.
"If you're from a farm, what're you doing here?"
That was a good question. She wished she had a good answer. She panicked, thinking maybe she'd gotten the wrong address or something. "I, uh, was looking for somebody."
"Who?"
"Just a guy."
"Oh, a guy, huh? You don't sound old enough to have a guy."
That remark kind of irritated her. "I'm sixteen."
"That isn't old enough."
She wanted to ask him what was he, a priest or something? But she kept thinking about the gun. "Do you really have a gun?"
"Right in my hand."
"Will you put it away?"
"Why would I do that?"
"Because guns scare me. My brother shot himself in the leg once, when he was messing around with one of my dad's pistols."
"I'm sorry to hear that."
"So, would you?"
"Would I what?"
"Put the gun down. I'm not dangerous. I promise."
The amusement was back in his voice again. "I guess you don't sound particularly dangerous."
"Really I'm just a farm girl, like I said."
"A farm girl who stands in front of people's houses and then sneaks up on their back porches, eh?"
"Well."
"Maybe does a little B&E on the side."
"What's B&E?"
"Breaking and entering."
"No, huh-uh, honest." She shivered. "
Also, I'm getting real cold."
"You weren't cold standing across the street all that time?"
"I kept walking back and forth. I wasn't standing still like this."
"How does some hot chocolate sound?"
"What?" She couldn't be sure she heard him right. One minute he was holding a gun on her and talking about B&E, and the next minute he was asking her how chocolate sounded. "It sounds great."
"Well, I'll make you a cup if you promise me."
So, here it was; the old trade-off. You promise me you'll do all these nice moist things to my body, and I promise you I'll give you something. In this case a cup of hot chocolate. "Promise you what?"
"Promise me that you're not dangerous."
"That's all?"
"Of course. What else would I make you promise?"
"I guess I was just thinking of something else." He paused. "Why don't you put your hands above your head?"
"Like this?"
"Exactly."
"Just like on TV," Denise said.
"Just like on TV."
"And then what?"
"And then turn around very slowly and face me."
"Like this?"
"Like that."
So, she turned all the way around and faced him.
And then-shocked-she saw why his voice was so small. Here was a man sitting in a wheelchair, holding a gun in his hand.
Then he said about the goofiest thing he could say, considering the gun. "You like marshmallows in your hot chocolate?"
18
CULHANE SOMETIMES DRANK in a bar out by the airport. It was a place where the middle management level of advertising people went to sulk about how bad the top level of management was. A nautical motif lent the place the look of a fashionable steak house in the 1950s-a little long on cute, a little short on taste.
