by Barry, Mike
“There’s no shade of moral difference after awhile,” Evers said. “Killing is killing.”
“There are all kinds of kills.”
“Granted,” Evers says, “absolutely. But when killing becomes the major activity—the modus operandi—and is repeated over and over again, you begin to phase out the moral distinctions. Or, I should say, Wulff does.”
“I don’t follow that.”
“Sure you can,” Evers said, “and watch that goddamned steering. You’re getting me nervous as hell. One inch of arc and they’ll be scraping us off the retaining wall.” He lit a cigarette from the car lighter, sighed, leaned back. “Great cars though,” he said. “Now our friend, Wulff, he may be performing good kills, necessary kills, or at least that is the way that he rationalized it in his mind when this started. For all we know they are good kills; we may feel that way ourselves. No question about one thing. He’s made enforcement a little easier since he got on the road.”
“That’s for sure. But I don’t follow you.”
“Just a little bit of psychological training,” Evers said. “You start to mess around with twenty-ton devices that have been rigged by idiots, some of whom occasionally get blown to kingdom come by their own experiments, and you get interested in psychology. You do a lot of reading if only for self-protection. This job,” he said and inhaled at length, tapped the cigarette in the ashtray, and jammed his elbow comfortably in the enormous armrest, “makes you a thoughtful man. Now inside everybody there’s a subconscious mind which is about five years old. If you’re lucky it’s five years old. Some very bright people have a subconscious which might make seven or eight. Now it’s that subconscious sitting under every thing which makes the final decisions on your behavior and decides how you react, and no matter how smart you get and how well you learn to rationalize your acts, you’re still dealing with something which is essentially very stupid. Also which doesn’t do much talking. You can’t make it listen you see. You can’t control the data you’re feeding into it. It just takes everything and messes it all around and comes up with its own answers. And that’s the end of it. Wulff’s carrying around one of those just like everybody else, except for a few psychopaths who have no feelings at all and are capable of anything. But Wulff is definitely not one of those.”
“How so?”
“Because he was emotionally triggered by the death of his fiancée,” Evers said. “Wasn’t he?”
“I guess so,” Williams said, and saw West Ninety-third Street before him again. One flash, one trickle of light and he was back in the patrol car watching Wulff’s face; he was up in that stinking SRO again seeing Wulff as he stood over the OD’d girl…. “Yes,” he said, “yes, you’re right about that part.”
“No psychopath,” Evers said, “but a feeling man, reasonable emotional equipment, all of that. Well, he’s got reasons to kill and he’s killing a lot of the right-type people. No question about it. But as he goes on, as this goes on for months and months, as he starts to slaughter from coast to coast hundreds that we know about and other stuff that we can only suspect—”
“Go on. Get to it.”
“I’m getting there. As he starts to kill them by the hundreds, what do you think his subconscious is saying? Remember, you can’t get to that subconscious. You can’t have a sensible dialogue with it, prove that you’ve got to kill all the drug dealers because they deserve to die and you’re doing enforcement a favor. It takes in everything but says nothing, and you can’t reason. So what do you think that underneath it’s saying?”
Williams could see it. He really could see it. Still, it was better to take it Evers’s way, track it in slow and easy like being back in a classroom, having it laid out for you by a competent instructor. He ran his hands over the wheel, cut left very gently to pass a truck, sat at rigid attention feeling a flick of mild terror for exactly seventeen seconds as the Mercedes cleared the lumbering van by four carlengths, and then dropped it back in. He sighed then, and heard Evers sigh as well. Wulff’s was not the only subconscious that was at issue here. “Tell me,” he said, “what is it saying?”
“You tell me. Think about it.”
“Bomb expert,” Williams said and smiled. “Of course. It’s telling him that he’s a murderer.”
“Exactly,” Evers said, and stubbed the cigarette into the armrest, said excuse me to it, carefully killed all the little embers, and then scuttled the butt into the ashtray. “It’s not making any discriminations, remember. It’s just bearing witness to a brutal and continuing series of murders. Mostly of strangers. It knows that it’s a murderer, then, that it’s doing something awful. It’s only about five years old, remember. It’s afraid of mommy.”
“Yeah.”
“So what does that mean? Never mind,” Evers said, “I’ll tell you, not tease you along. It means one hell of a load of guilt. How do you discharge guilt? Remember you’re hounded by the thought that you’re a bad person, you’ve done evil things. The subconscious is whispering that to you all the time now, absolutely convinced of it, and it has a pretty persuasive voice for a five-year-old. What do you do with this load of guilt? And anxiety, I might as well point out, because guilty people get punished. Mommy finds out or daddy comes after them with a strap and beats the shit out of them. That’s a hell of a load to carry around. But what do you do. I mean, you can’t go around listening to that stuff from the subconscious all the time without making some effort to deal with it.”
“I guess,” Williams said, paused and thought it through, and it seemed pretty right. “I guess that you just increase your killing. You step up the pace. You can’t walk around with that kind of guilt unless you let it out somehow. And you wouldn’t kill yourself, would you?”
“Some people might.”
“But not Wulff,” Williams said thoughtfully, “not Wulff. He wouldn’t.”
“Not directly, anyway,” Evers said. “You’re dealing with a pretty angry guy who can still see the dealers and the organization as being to blame for his basic problem, and he would just step up the pace to prove to his subconscious that it was full of shit. But then in another way, stepping up the pace the way he has might be a form of suicide anyway, might it not?”
“You mean he’s trying to get caught,” Williams said.
“Or killed,” said Evers. “As far as I can judge, he’s just going in for indiscriminate slaughter now. He’s lost any of that sense of pace or detection or motive which he had at the beginning when he was making a serious effort to make sure that he was killing the right people. You go out of control like this and you’re going to go too far. I think he wants to,” Evers said. “I think that he really wants to come up against a situation which he can’t control; a situation where someone is going to turn on him. But he wouldn’t put himself directly into suicide. The-ego is still too strong by far for that. The subconscious hasn’t gotten through to break it all the way down, so what the guy would do would be to arrange a situation where he’d be out of control, and yet not let himself know that he’s done it.”
“In other words—”
“In other words,” Evers said and he smiled, “in other words he thinks that everyone’s a dealer now.”
Philadelphia breakdown, Williams thought, and he began to drive very fast. He had been doing seventy, but it was not near enough. The SEL went to ninety-five on one stroke of the accelerator.
Neither of them said anything for a while.
XX
Maury knew he was going to get the son-of-a-bitch now. The feeling was hotter and sharper now, moving through him in pulsing little flashes of knowledge which alternately excited and then depressed him. Excited him because he was moving in for a kill which would give him as much pleasure as anything in his life, and depressed him because when he committed the kill it would be over and he had the feeling that nothing in his life, no matter how long he lived or what became of him, would delight him as much as killing that big son-of-a-bitch would.
But he
was picking up on the trail all the time. Now in Philadelphia itself he felt as if the actual emanations of the man’s physical presence were moving in on him, even though he was doing nothing more than standing in a downtown bar drinking. There was nothing intrinsically exciting about that, but the fact that he was actually in the same town that the man was known to be in, that he had gone this far in pursuit and now needed to close only a little more ground … this excited him to the point where he could hardly hold the glass steady, hardly keep himself contained. It was all he could do not to throw the glass into the mirror and scream: hot damn son-of-a-bitch I said I’d come to get him and look at me now! But that would have brought improper, useless attention upon him, and if by any chance the son-of-a-bitch had been around would have tipped him off. Better to stand quietly and just relish the drink and consider his further plans now. Philadelphia! He would have to find a hotel, of course; maybe one of those big motels on the pike just beyond. Impossible to go directly at him. He would need to rest for a while just to get himself in shape. He had been on the road almost continuously for forty hours now; he desperately had to break.
But he was close. Oh shit he was close now! He could breathe it, literally could smell the son-of-a-bitch. Or had the feeling, anyway, that he could. After a while he began to tune in to the conversation in the bar, and as he did, Maury began to shake with excitement. He could not quite believe what he was hearing, but nevertheless, it was there. Finally, he could not stand by any more. He leaned over, motioned to the bartender, brought him over. There were ten or fifteen around the bar, a few in the booths back there, and everybody anxious as hell for drinks, so the bartender was nervous and anxious to get back on duty. Nevertheless, Maury held him in place.
“You mean there was a murder here yesterday?” Maury said. “In this goddamned place?”
The bartender shrugged, reached for his apron. “I’m just a relief man, Jack,” he said. “I don’t know anything about it.”
“But they were all talking about it!” Maury said. He realized that his accent was all out of place in this bar, and felt suddenly exposed and ridiculous, and this only made him angry. “Come on,” he said, “you’d better tell me.”
The man on his right said, “You heard it right, Jack. There was a double murder.”
“I’ve got to know about this,” Maury said.
“So do the cops.”
“I mean it. Who did it?”
“Nobody knows,” the man on his right said. “They were both dead. The bartender and some woman. What the hell you so excited about? You did it?”
“No,” Maury said, “I didn’t do it.”
“Some son-of-a-bitch,” the bartender said. “Some son-of-a-bitch did it, all right. I sure as hell would like to know who it was. First it’s one thing and then the next,” he said vaguely. “Before you know it he’ll come in again. You think I like this? But in relief work, you got to go where you’re sent. If I had known when I called in that they were sending me to this place I would have taken the job in Trenton instead. I ain’t crazy.”
“They’ll get him,” Maury said confidently. “They’ll get the son-of-a-bitch who did it.”
“How come you’re so sure?”
“I just know,” Maury said. He finished the shot glass, slammed it on the bar. “Give me another. There’s only one crazy son-of-a-bitch would start walking into bars in Philly and kill people with no reason at all. It’s a sign. I swear it’s a sign that sent me here. Out of all the places I might have stopped for a drink it would have to be this one. I’m close to him now. Jesus, I’m close to him.”
“What are you talking about?” the man on his right said. “Are you a cop or something?”
“Not exactly,” Maury said, and waited for the bartender to refill the glass. “Just a guy with an idea, that’s all.” The bar was filled, and he suddenly understood he was not with his kind of people but with northerners who would never understand him. Whatever happened, whatever he said, they could not be brought to understanding. He had already talked too much. “Forget it,” he said, and when the bartender filled his glass Maury choked it down neat and turned to leave the bar. The man on his right, however, put out a hand, took him by the lapel and hauled him back.
“I don’t like the way you’re talking,” he said. “You’re trying to communicate something but it’s not coming out straight. You know who killed those people?”
“Probably,” Maury said before he could stop himself. “Most likely not,” he said. “Just let me go now.”
“If you know who killed them I think there would be a lot of people who would be interested. Don’t you Frank?”
The bartender said, “I don’t want anything to do with this. I’m just the relief man. I could have gone down to Trenton and worked, but I didn’t know what I was getting into so I came here. I don’t know who this guy is and I don’t know who you are either. I would appreciate your not calling me Frank.”
“Just hold on, friend,” the man said. He was in his late thirties or early forties and for the first time Maury became aware of him, began to see him in physical terms. He was a tough customer. At his best Maury could deal with him, but he was not at his best, he had been on the road for a long time and he had had too much to drink on top of it. “I think I want to ask you some questions.”
“Let go of me,” Maury said. “Let go of me now.”
“You seem to know a good deal about what’s going on here and I think I’d like to get a few details.”
“I don’t want any part of it,” the bartender named Frank said. “Originally I didn’t even want to do shift today. So when the call came in and I had a choice of Trenton or here I figured what the hell. I’d save the mileage and come here. But I could have gone to Trenton just as easily. You got anything to do you take it outside.”
“Screw it, Frank,” the man said. “Just get out of here.”
The bartender threw up his hands in an absent, dismissive way and backed off. No one else at the bar was looking at them at all. Possibly two men checking gambling slips in a corner booth might have looked up to see what was going on, but at the bar itself everyone was absorbed in their drinks or in sudden trips to the bathrooms. Maury felt an enormous sense of quiet descending around him; the kind of quiet which you were supposed to experience at the beginning of a heart attack. He had never had a heart attack, not yet anyway, but he was well prepared for that feeling of being sealed off into a private and absolute sense of doom where no one could penetrate. No one except the man next to him. A hand was suddenly on his shirt. “Who killed them?” the man said.
“Get away from me.”
“You’re shooting off your mouth a hell of a lot for a guy with a southern accent who just happened to be in the territory. Those people were friends of mine. I did a lot of drinking in this bar, spent a lot of hours. You tell me what you know.”
“I don’t know anything,” Maury said. He thought of the pistol in his right pocket. He could go for it, but it was a risky maneuver, and if he was blocked, what would he do then? It could lead to a very unpleasant situation. Even worse than this, if the man next to him could find Maury in the act of going for a gun that he could not reach. The feeling of doom intensified, but it must have only been the fatigue, the unfamiliarity, the sense that he was drifting beyond his depth here and should have kept his mouth shut. What, after all, could be done to him? It was just a neighborhood bar. “Take your hand off me,” he said.
The man slapped him across the mouth once, hard. The impact was shocking to Maury; he would not have believed that a blow with that little arc, delivered only with the wrist, could hurt that much. It seemed to rebound within his consciousness, and slowly the blood began to roll again in the place that had been struck and he felt little slivers of awareness and pain. “Stop it,” he said.
The man said, “I don’t like southern bastards coming into my bars and telling me that they know who killed my friends. I don’t like that at all.”
&
nbsp; “You’re crazy,” Maury said and he thought, he’s not the only one who’s crazy though. There’s a lot of craziness around. The man who tied me up in my own shop, who stole my grenades, he’s crazy too, and in about the same way. “I’m getting out of here,” he said.
The man grabbed him by the arm. “No you’re not,” he said. “You’re going to stay here and let me beat the shit out of you because of what you did to my friends.”
“I didn’t do anything to your goddamned friends. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Take it outside,” the bartender said, coming back to them. “Nothing doing in here; there’s not going to be any of that stuff in here at all. You got to settle something take your business on the street.”
“Get away,” the man said to the bartender. “Just get away,” and turned toward Maury full face so that Maury could see the little dead spaces and unhealthy hollows of his features, so that he could see the broken but purposeful light in his eyes, as he lifted his hand and slapped Maury again in the same place but even harder.
“You son-of-a-bitch,” Maury said, and something broke within him. Yet, he was not sure what it was, could not locate it, would not know for a long time what, if ever, had come over him. Only that he was diving into his pocket, going for his gun, oblivious of the reaction of the man, not caring whether he saw it or not. Not giving a damn what happened as long as he got the gun, the pistol leapt into his hand, warm and familiar, an old friend. I should never have let you go, he thought and brought it out in one motion, cocking it and pointing it into the astonished face of the man, who was already winding up for another swing, not conscious of what had happened. Maury shot the man in the face.
