Incinerator

by Timothy Hallinan

  “C?” Schultz asked when I called him. “What the hell is that?”

  I'd thrown the phone across the room, splashed cold water in my face for what felt like the thousandth time in a week, retrieved the phone, and called him.

  “You're the psychologist,” I said, adapting Hoxley's argument.

  “One hundred twenty-seven C?” He covered the mouthpiece and said something. “Maybe a hotel room?”

  “Have to be a pretty big hotel. What are we talking about? Room C on the hundred twenty-seventh floor? Room 127 on floor C? Who's helping you out, Willick?”

  “An address,” someone said in the background.

  “I heard that,” I told Schultz. “I thought of it, too. One twenty-seven North or South Something, apartment C. Not much help, though, is it? Who's with you?”

  “Bunch of the guys,” Schultz said defensively.

  “Which guys, Norbert? Are you at a convention of the American Psychological Association, or are they cops? Listen, is Willick there or not?”

  “C is the third letter of the alphabet,” Schultz observed, ignoring the question. Someone in the room with him applauded. “Maybe it's cryptology. Maybe he means three, which would give us a four-digit number, 1273, which might mean December seventh at three A.M., which is nowhere, or maybe it's a word, maybe he means that all the numbers are letters, which would give us ...”

  “ABGC,” I said unhelpfully.

  “Maybe it's a chord progression,” Schultz said a little wildly. “Maybe a song title. Anybody here play piano?” I heard laughter.

  “It is a chord progression,” I said. “It's a particularly ugly chord progression. Do you really think he's playing 'Name That Awful Tune' with us?”

  “No,” Schultz said. “But I'm not sitting on my ass making smug comments, either.”

  “He said two out of three,” I said. “Since you're sitting there wrecking your lungs with the boys in blue, why don't you get some computer time and let the computer play around with it as though it were code, which I don't think it is. I think he likes the idea of us chasing our tails until he gives us number three, and when he does that, I think it'll be showtime, and I think it'll be clear. Remember, Norbert, he wants me there.”

  “When did you start calling me Norbert?” Schultz asked crankily.

  “I have so little time left in the world,” I said, “that I can't stand on formality. I feel—if I may say this, Norbert—as though I've known you all my life.”

  “Oh, get outta here,” Schultz said, hanging up.

  It was a little too late to get a suntan and a little too early for a drink. So I made a sandwich and threw it away, and sat and patted Bravo until he got bored with it and went elsewhere to try to dig a tunnel through his head with his left rear foot.

  The next call came at four. Not 3:59 or 4:01, but 4:00. I got it on the first ring.

  There was a crackling sound, like fire licking at kindling. It began faintly and then sputtered and grew. Then it stopped.

  “Cellophane,” Wilton Hoxley said. “Old radio trick, courtesy of Orson Welles. Are you ready for your clue?”

  “I'm sure glad you're having fun,” I said.

  “Three,” Hoxley shouted. He crackled the cellophane some more.

  “I'm waiting,” I said.

  “You're absolutely trying to vex me.” He sounded genuinely upset. “I've remembered you for years, virtually carried your picture in my wallet, and you turn out to be dross. What in the world has happened to your intellect?”

  My eyes were squeezed shut. Thinking of Schultz, I asked, “The number three or the word three?”

  “Who cares!” Wilton Hoxley screeched. “Three, as in one, two, three, as in the perfect Trinity of Thomas Aquinas, as in Aristotle's three elements, earth, air, and fire, as in let's do a triple. Three.”

  “Got it,” I said dutifully.

  “Oh, no, you don't,” Hoxley almost crowed. His adrenaline spigot was at full open. “At the risk of becoming a mathematical bore, I have to tell you that three is doubly important. Three is where it's going to happen, and three is the number of hours until it's going to happen. What time is it, smarty-pants?”

  “Four.”

  “And what's three plus four?”

  “Seven,” I said. I was going to kill him if I got the chance.

  “Well, just look at that, you've solved half of it. I'm sure you'll get the rest of it. I'll be so disappointed, of course I'm growing used to being disappointed by you, but I'll be so very disappointed if you're not there.”

  He hung up, and I heard the coin drop again. Yet another pay phone.

  127.C.3. 127C3. 1-27-C3. 12-7C-3. I thought I recognized the pattern in which the numbers and letters were arranged, but I couldn't find the context. I wrote them out eight or ten times, rearranged them, reversed them, listed them vertically and horizontally. I was so tired that I was repeating patterns without noticing it, but it didn't matter; they were a mess in any order. I called Schultz but got a busy signal. Ten minutes later, I got another busy signal. Four twenty-eight.

  I climbed out onto the deck and paced, staring at the mountains as they rippled through the heat and going through everything he'd said. Firemen and Alpha Centauri, Thomas Aquinas and Charlie Company. It was as though something were knocking on the inside of my skull, demanding to be let out.

  At 4:43 I called Schultz again. Still busy. “Well, Jesus,” I said to the phone, “I sure hope it's nothing important.” I slammed it down and it rang.

  “He got them,” Schultz said. He sounded as though he'd just run a marathon.

  “Got who?”

  “Mommy and Daddy. He got them somehow.”

  “You mean he burned them?”

  “No. They're gone. Not there. Missing.”

  “How do you know?”

  “We had a couple of men there. At the entrance to the street.”

  “You shitheel,” I said. “Privileged communication, my ass. On behalf of my client, I want a refund.”

  “After everything you told me, we were afraid he'd go after them.”

  “Well, you did a terrific job of preventing it,” I said. “And you probably let him know I'm talking to the cops.”

  “So what?” Schultz said. “At this point, who cares? Did he give you the third clue?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What was it?”

  “Norbert, old friend,” I said. “I don't think I'm talking to you any more.”

  The phone rang fifty-eight times before it stopped. I ignored it and concentrated on making a nice long chain out of safety pins. A minute after the phone quit, it started again. By then I was in the bedroom, putting on a pair of swimming trunks and a T-shirt. Then I unchained my safety pins, put them into a Ziploc bag, and rolled it up in the center of my poor little suit of armor, moving on automatic, thinking only about 127C3. It was beginning to sound like a football pass pattern by the time the phone shut up. A mocking bird filled the silence in 6/8 time, and then the ringing resumed.

  I picked it up. “I want information,” I snapped before Schultz could speak.

  “So dial four-one-one.”

  “Give it or good-bye. How'd he get them out?”

  “We don't know.”

  “Tell me everything your idiots saw.”

  “They were there all night,” Schultz said. “Nothing moved till eight, when Mommy came out in the Bentley. Alone. She came back, also alone, about eleven-fifty. Then the team changed. Total overlap, not a minute that no one was watching. Daddy never left the house. Couple of cars cruised the street, no one of Junior's description, looking at the houses for sale. Some business in and out of the other houses. The Lewises have some construction going on, but the workmen parked in the street and walked down to their cars. None of them was Wilton. We've been calling the house every couple of hours, just to get the busy signal or do the wrong number act. The phone was busy from twelve-twenty on, which felt too long. The guys rang the buzzer at two-thirty, got nothing,
and went in. Place was a mess.”

  “What time did the workmen leave?”

  “Two.”

  “All of them alone?”

  “Like I said, they parked on the street.”

  “Swell,” I said. “Obviously, somebody missed something. You've converted me. I now share my client's opinion of the LAPD.”

  Schultz ignored the rudeness. “What did he say?”

  “He said three. He said three is where it would happen, and three hours from now is when it would happen.”

  “Three hours from now?” Schultz sounded panicked.

  “Worse than that,” I said. “Three hours from four o'clock.”

  “One-twenty-seven-C-three,” Schultz said. “I thought you said it would be clear.”

  “You chew on it for a while,” I said. “My jaws are sore.”

  After I'd gnawed my cheeks for twenty minutes, I dialed Schultz again.

  “No other ways to get into that street,” I said.

  “You were there,” he said, sounding frustrated. “It's a cul-de-sac.”

  “Maybe something runs real close behind it.”

  “It doesn't.”

  “God damn it, Schultz, check. They didn't go up the chimney.”

  “All right,” he said a trifle sulkily. “Let me get a Thomas.” The phone clattered to the table.

  “Holy Mary, Mother of God,” I said. That's all it took, a two-by-four between the eyes. I fidgeted from one foot to another, not knowing who could get to it more quickly, Schultz or I. Mine was just down at the foot of the driveway, in Alice's glove compartment.

  Then I came to my senses, hung up the phone, jogged down to Alice, and opened the Thomas Brothers map book. The hell with Schultz; what I absolutely didn't need was thirty-seven squad cars, three or four swat teams, and a battery of heavy artillery. 'Bye-bye Wilton, at the first siren's squeal. Anyway, they hadn't been invited.

  Page 127, Row C, Square 3, was a blank brown stretch surrounded by urban clutter. I finally located the legend. In print small enough to prove that I was getting farsighted, it said, San Bernardino County Fairground.

  I left the Uzi up in the house; it didn't seem like the kind of hardware I'd be able to get into the fairgrounds.

  Ten minutes later, I climbed out of Alice, leaving my suit of armor rolled up on the seat next to me, ran into the Fernwood Market, and tore open an L.A. Times. There it was on page 5 of the Calendar section, right out in the open for any fool to see, filling the San Bernardino County Fairgrounds with adventure and merriment for all.

  The Chivalry Faire.

  20

  Knight in Armor

  At quarter to seven, daylight saving time, the sun was still floating comfortably above the horizon, roasting everything within reach. I was rolling along unfamiliar surface streets in the tinder-dry hills of San Bernardino, trying to figure out where the hell I was.

  The freeway had slowed and then stopped, jammed full of patient, happy weekenders on their way to a bracing dip into the fifteenth century, ready to encounter jugglers, jesters, troubadours, knights in armor, castles, and fair maidens. Maybe even a dragon.

  When I hit the clog of traffic, I skated Alice along the freeway's shoulder to the first offramp, inviting and receiving stares of indignation from drivers who still believed in fair play. Once I coasted down the ramp and off the freeway grid, I was in terra incognita. I don't know much about San Bernardino, and I've tried for years to keep it that way.

  The Thomas Brothers were no help. I knew I was somewhere in the two-dimensional cartographic fiction called C2, and I was pretty sure that I was heading toward C3, but that was only because C3 was east of C2, and the setting sun was grilling the back of my neck. Even stripped for preaction, in nothing but a T-shirt and swimming trunks, I felt like a four-minute egg.

  The road, a two-lane unmarked tarmac, wound between sere, rolling hills that were stiff with weeds and thick with dust. A series of steps, a giant's stairway, had been cut into the skin of the hills to my right, the prelude to a bunch of new dream homes. There was so little anyone could want on the hillside that there was no fence: just the road's oily, uneven edge, a yard or so of tangled puncherweeds posing as shoulder, and then the spiky, overgrown weed garden of the hills.

  Six forty-seven, and I needed altitude.

  Alice grumbled to a stop at the foot of the new building development, and I sprinted up the dirt track that had been gouged for the earthmoving equipment. As I clambered past the pads onto which the houses would be dropped, I seemed to move in the center of a bubble. Outside the bubble were the heat, the dust, the larger sounds and smells of the day; inside were the rattle of wind in brush beside me, the scuff of my running shoes, and the rasp of my breathing. For a moment, I floated above myself and looked down, seeing my laboring body as a machine that existed simply to get my head to the top of that hill.

  My knees began to buckle long before I made it. I was even more fatigued than I'd realized, worn down to nub ends and scraped nerves by Wilton Hoxley. I did the last third of the incline at a sorry trot, which was just as well because I ran right into a chest wound.

  At the moment of impact, I thought I'd been shot. I bounced back, flung like a slingshot, and a bright spot of pain in my chest announced itself in crimson through my T-shirt. Both the red and the pain spread as I stood there stupidly, staring down and waiting for my lungs to collapse. When they didn't, when the sound of the shot didn't follow, when a second bullet failed to tear into me, I looked up and saw a barbed-wire fence.

  A fence, by implication, has something on the other side of it. The thought formed altogether too slowly in my brain as I pressed at the torn skin on my chest and tried to stanch the bleeding. The hill crested some twenty feet beyond the fence. I left a piece of my shirt waving gaily on one of the barbs, but except for that and a scratched knee, I got through intact. I was almost to the top of the hill when I heard the music.

  Polyphonal, rhythmic, anachronistic, something with drums and tambours and sackbuts, it floated on the breeze that blew hot on my face as I topped the hill and looked down on a miniature out of an illuminated manuscript brought to life, a fifteenth-century fairyland set down mistakenly in some obscure corner of the Gobi Desert.

  Turrets rose gracefully against the nicotine-colored sky. Pennons snapped in the wind, arches arched, flying buttresses flew. I counted three crenellated pasteboard castles, stone-solid from here, several smaller structures, and a warlord's moated fortress. On a patch of green sward too healthy-looking at this time of year to be anything but Astroturf, mounted knights with lances gave each other the evil eye through upraised visors when their horses pawed the plastic. This had to be the place.

  Revelers in costume pushed and shoved their way festively through the streets of a medieval town that huddled at the knees of the taller structures. People crowded against stages where jugglers made patterns of oranges in the air and mountebanks performed tumbling tricks and magicians did complicated things with geese and conical Merlin's hats. A sudden burst of flame, seen out of the corner of my eye, popped my goose bumps to attention in defiance of the heat. I focused to see a burly man on one of the stages, stripped to a pair of uncomfortable-looking leather bloomers, lift a torch to his mouth and spew an arc of fire five feet long.

  The fire reminded me that I was underdressed. I clambered back through the fence and scuffed my way back down the hill to fetch my suit of armor.

  The flat little automatic that I'd reclaimed from the cops was in the glove compartment, and I took it out and put it, plus two spare clips, on top of the car. The clip in place was full, and the bullets were illegal hollow-points that made an entrance wound the size of a tenpenny nail and an exit wound the size of a cantaloupe.

  The bucket full of water and towels had been wedged on the floor between the backseat and the backrest of the front seat. I drew out one of the sopping towels and wrung it out over my head, soaking my shirt and shorts, and then twisted the excess water out of the
others and went to work.

  First, two wet towels, one on top of the other, wrapped tightly around my torso from armpits to crotch and fastened to each other and to the T-shirt with the heaviest of the safety pins. Then one towel, wound diagonally, around each of my arms and legs and pinned to my shirt and shorts. I had to leave open areas over my knees and elbows to give me bending room, and it took a little time to get it right. By that time I was as wrapped in white as Claude Rains in the middle reels of The Invisible Man.

  I dipped the extra-large sweatpants into the bucket, gave them a squeeze, and climbed in. The towels didn't look all that bulky, given the size of the pants. The zippered sweatshirt, dripping wet, followed. Finally, I took one of the three plastic slickers from its little package, shook it out, and slipped into it. It had a sash instead of buttons, making it easier to get out of, and it reached almost all the way to my feet. If he sprayed me and threw a match, the fumes just above the surface of the plastic would ignite first, followed almost immediately by the plastic. I figured it would burn through in a couple of seconds, but at least it gave me one skin I could shed, and it would keep the gasoline from saturating cloth. I tucked the two spare slickers into the front of the wet sweatpants, tugged the drawstring on the pants tight to keep the spares in place, tied a simple one-tug bow in the sash on the coat I was wearing, slipped the flat automatic under the right wristband of the sweatshirt, and started up the hill. The two extra clips were in the shirt's single pocket, hard to get to through the coat. I hoped that would be my biggest problem.

  It was 7:09, and I was late.

  Halfway up the dirt track, I realized I had added at least twenty pounds to my weight and invented the world's first portable steam room. The slicker held the moisture in— which was one of the things it was supposed to do, prevent evaporation—and by the time I reached the fence, I was pouring sweat. The sun, which was finally on the verge of dropping behind the ridge of hills to the west, seated through the transparent plastic like a microwave through freezer wrap. When I'd thought this through, if my mental processes at the time could be so charitably described, I'd known I would be hot. I hadn't known I'd be exhausted.