Killer, Come Back to Me

by Ray Bradbury

  It was just about then they heard the scream.

  * * *

  They ran back.

  They found a little man thin as steel wire quivering on Gerbelow’s shack wall, pouring vomit over a fence in a kind of hot, acrid protest to the species of death that lay up there on the roof. In between awful sucks of breath the little man sobbed, “God Almighty, he’s dead! If he’d kept his mouth shut, he’d be alive. You see, see him up there, you!” And he made sick again. “I was just—coming by to pay a visit, and—and—”

  The little man wiped his mouth with a hairy, fumbling wrist and got Steve and Lisa in a kind of frightened focus. “You. YOU killed him! You—Markham!”

  Steve held his badge in his hand like a pebble. The little man eyed it, swore softly, shook like the skin of a horse’s flank. “Police. Detectives. Ah. They come a couple nights, get tired waiting, go away. Soons they go—huh—Markham slips out of hiding. He watches. He knows, by damn, by damn. Police always too early or too late. Damn.” He bent over, coughing.

  Steve quietly asked the man where he lived. The man shook an unsteady hand at the next well. “My name’s Black. Oh, God, my stomach, my heart, my eyes. I don’t want no trouble, don’t make me none!”

  “You knew what was happening to Gerbelow?”

  Black knew, and kept his voice low about it. “He paid money to Markham so Markham would let him alone. Lots of people paid rather than have their machinery smashed. Machinery’s rare, hard to get, hard to repair; the war and all. Oh, God, look at his head up there!” He retched again.

  Steve lit a cigarette and gave it to Black to calm him. Black sucked it hungrily, eyes glinting at Lisa, then Steve. He couldn’t keep quiet. “Now, look, I—I never seen this—blackmailer.”

  “No?”

  “No. Nobody ever saw him. He telephoned. I wasn’t bothered, myself. He didn’t ask much money from the others. Just a little. Everybody paid, it was such a small amount of their total profit, and kept their machines whole.”

  Black went on and on. He told about an oiler named Big Irish Kelly who burned up, screaming, in his shack one night three months before. Markham had set the fire, not intending to murder. But Kelly was caught inside, anyhow, and that was the first blood on Markham’s hands. An accident, but good as murder.

  Steve interrupted the nervous flow of Black’s tongue with: “Time’s moving. Look, now, Black, show us around the fields. We’re new here.”

  Black put his small back to the fence and trembled. “Not on your life. Look what it got Gerbelow! This Markham comes night after night. No noise. No sound. Only the fog.” He whispered it. “Coming like the fog he would, soft, and going like a wave pulling back into the sea, leaving nothing. People set traps. Did they work? Hell, no. Markham knows everybody’s mind. We found ropes on the towers. Figured maybe he swings like an ape around up in the girders in the wind. Surrounded a tower once, but everybody was scared to climb up, scared of being booted off and down. The police came, but they didn’t find anything but some sacks shaped like a body, stuffed and propped up in the girders. Markham was gone, like one of them Hindu rope climbers into air.”

  “Did he ever bring a car with him?”

  No car. Lisa suggested a canal boat.

  Black was getting calmer now, and snorted smoke. “Hell, no. He never ran away from us, not far anyway before’d vanish. He didn’t drive; no car in miles, and no boats. And if he’d swum we’d seen him, sure!”

  Steve threw away his cigarette and casually asked,

  “By the way, how is your oil well pumping these days, Black?”

  That rocked him. Black closed his eyes, waited, opened them again, sullen and dark and replied, “If you want to know—my well’s bone dry…”

  Steve watched Lisa thoughtfully. In the dim light she looked beautiful; she smelled new, freshly young against the old smell of the sea, the primordial odor of oil.

  Black’s voice was sullen, like his eyes. Steve watched him, now, and said, “Your well’s dry. So you’re jealous of your neighbors and their riches. You live close by. You know the lay of the land. You could be the blackmailer, and come and go like the fog, eh? Couldn’t you?”

  “Gerbelow and the other people could tell you the blackmailer’s voice is young. That don’t fit me!”

  It didn’t. And anyway, Steve figured, it would be pretty dumb to kill someone right next door. And the fact that Charlie’d searched miles down the canal pretty well eliminated Black, anyway.

  Steve put away his gun. “You’ll have to escort us, whether you like the idea or not, Black. I can’t have you running around behind me. There’s a lot I want to see and hear. You lead the way.”

  Black led, grumbling. They walked toward the sea. On the way, Steve considered a few things. Gerbelow and Charlie’d both been killed when they were warm on the trail. Markham seemed like the patient kind of guy who’d wait a few months for it to blow over, and come back later. Meanwhile, though, he’d keep his eye peeled on Lisa and Black and himself. Might even be around right now, listening, hiding. If we get too warm, he’ll try and conk us, too. One killing leads to another. You go on, day after day, trying to cover up…

  * * *

  Steve began talking it out to Lisa as they walked down toward the sea, led by Black. “We found Charlie lying in the water near a bunch of abandoned circus wagons at the far end of the canal. So the murderer doesn’t live there, Lisa. He wouldn’t kill a man in front of his own house.”

  Lisa looked at all the black shacks and the fog rolling between them. “Here then, Steve?”

  Steve exhaled slowly. “Maybe here. It would be someone who’s lived here all his life, knows the whole territory and the people. Maybe it was someone I played with when I was a kid, living down on Windward Avenue. That would be something. Yeah.”

  They reached the ocean to watch the breakers crash and shake the sand underfoot. A foghorn blew melancholy notes way out toward Catalina Island.

  “You think the murderer came this way, Steve?”

  “No. Breakers are too damn big, and the Coast Guard is too damn vigilant these days. No.” He lit another cigarette. “The more I think about it, Lisa, the more I think the murderer doesn’t live here among his victims, or at the end of the canal where we found Charlie. No, a happy medium would be better. Somewhere between here and where we found Charlie. That might be it.”

  The first iron wrench flew through the dark like a metal bird.

  Black grunted and fell down and never got up again.

  Lisa screamed and twisted about. Steve knocked her down himself. The second iron wrench smashed off his right side, on the lower rib casing, glancing it. By the impact of it, Steve wondered how much was left of Black’s skull if that first wrench hit him square.

  Steve fell with it, letting it rock him back. He let go of his muscles and lay watching a shadow run off by itself. Steve’s first two shots from his gun richocheted off iron; the third went into air, the shadow with it, behind wooden girders, Steve up and after it, quick. He left Lisa behind, and in the middle of his running he heard her footsteps ticking after. He cut off down a gravel path to the north, instead of going straight ahead, in case the murderer was waiting with another wrench in the shadows.

  He reached the canal, breathing hard. A moment later Lisa grabbed him and sobbed on his lapel. It seemed that Black was dead, too. It seemed that Steve had been the object of that thrown wrench, but Black had gotten in the way. Lisa sobbed about it.

  He held onto her, keeping his eyes on everything at once. The oil towers looked like they wanted to fall down on you, leaning way over, dark and high, with fog playing their timbers like a harp.

  “Oh, Steve, Steve—”

  “Hold onto yourself, sweets. Our little playboy’s let himself in for too much playing. He should have been satisfied killing Gerbelow. But he stuck around to see what we thought, too. I guess he didn’t like the way I talked back there.”

  They stood there together, like a couple kids, a c
ouple kids in Gigantica. A thousand towers marching through the fog over them, grunting and puffing and steaming. Steve breathed easier, but the pain on his right side was knotting up like a snail in a hot shell.

  Lisa said, “This’s been an awful night, Steve. We’re not any better off than we were. Let’s get out of here, let’s go home.”

  He felt tired, himself, sucked out, hot, cold, old, worn. But he swore under his breath and stepped away from her, scowling.

  “Charlie’s funeral is tomorrow. I can’t go look him in the face without doing something about it, now.”

  There was a long silence. Lisa’s voice was funny when she said, “What sort of person was Charlie when he was a kid?”

  “Charlie?” He thought about it, uneasy and talking just to hear himself in the dark. “The old days? We ran around at the beach, played on the piers, fooled around the canal. Charlie’s mother used to whip him for playing near the canal. I remember, one time—” The canal…

  Steve shut up and walked. Lisa followed without a word, looking aside at his suddenly hard white face. He practically ran down three hundred yards of canal looking for something. When he found it he stopped and stood over it.

  A trail of water across cement, dripped and spread and soaking into it.

  “There was water on top of Gerbelow’s shed, Lisa, by his body. There’s water, here, too, where Markham came out of the canal.”

  “Are you sure, Steve?”

  “Yeah. For the first time, I think I am.”

  “But nobody ever saw anybody swimming in the canal, Steve.”

  “There are ways and ways of doing things. I got a screwy, half-baked idea. All that crap about climbing towers like an ape-man was so much hash. Markham threw that in to confuse everybody. He didn’t want people thinking about the canal too much. He wanted them to suspect one another. But he was an outsider, and this is where he came in.”

  Steve peeled off his coat in a cold dream. He unlaced his shoes, slowly, quietly, and then said, “You know what Markham looks like? Once you’ve found a main clue in a setup like this, the other pieces fall in place.” He shucked his socks. “Markham’s young. Maybe twenty-five, maybe thirty. Not much older. Young and healthy. He’s got a chest development that would do for a horse.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “The murderer felt safe in murdering three people. Why? Because he had a good means of escape and didn’t live near where any of the bodies were found. But we KNOW where Charlie was looking, along the canal. Mathematically then, if the killer doesn’t live at either end of the canal where the murders took place, he must live in the middle. And his method of travel gives us a general description of his age and health. Markham was always very careful to emerge from the canal a helluva distance beyond the place where he intended causing trouble. That’s why nobody ever found his water trail, they didn’t look far enough down and away from where the disturbance started on certain nights.”

  He nodded at the canal.

  * * *

  “The canal told me. Another thing—he’s got a healthy tan. He lives on the canal. Sure.” Steve folded all his clothes, including his pants, in a little pile on the cold cement beside the canal waters.

  “I don’t get it, Steve.”

  “Markham spends a lot of time on the beach every day. Lives a life of leisure, never does much. Black said he didn’t ask for much money from his victims. A little bit from each one. Six or seven people kicking out with thirty bucks a month, or maybe fifty. Our blackmailer has plenty of leisure, plenty of time. That’s a pretty good description of him. If I went to a row of houses and asked for a guy answering that description I should be able to find him, eventually, yes? Right. An athlete with a good chest expansion, a healthy tan, idle, young.”

  Steve was down to the skin and a pair of shorts now. He didn’t even see Lisa there in front of him. He just rose and stood by the waters, looking down. “The water’s cold tonight. Probably wasn’t bad in the summer, but I bet it’s cold tonight.” He leaned forward. “Nobody ever saw Markham come or go. Like the fog, they said, drifting. Or a wave from the sea. Silent and easy.” He looked up at Lisa with the face of a lost child. “Have the police come to the end of the canal in about an hour, Lisa. I’ll see you there.”

  She started to argue.

  Steve said, “Nobody ever saw a car come by, or saw a boat on the canal, or saw anybody swimming across the canal. I’ll show you how Markham was so mysterious, Lisa. Goodnight, sweets. See you in an hour.”

  “Steve!”

  He was gone. Slipping like something white and of the fog, cleaving the water without a sound, so only a ripple came in to mark his vanishing, he went. Dark waters closed. The whole canal lay cold.

  Lisa watched for five minutes, but she never saw Steve come up for air again, no matter how hard she stared.

  The fog wrapped her up. The oil wells churned. The ocean pounded the shore. The foghorn sounded off in another world. Lisa, cold and shivering, gathered up the clothes and went to phone the police.

  * * *

  Steve was far away from Lisa, going north, when he came to the surface. He felt air break about nostrils, drew it in with a deep move of his lungs, and sank. The first cold shock of water wore off. Pain had gone from his side.

  Pulling with great strokes of his arms, back, he skimmed through bottom darkness. Slime touched his fingers when they brushed the bottom. The water itself was clean here. It got sluggish, tepid with oil down further toward the sea. He could see about twenty feet ahead before intense black closed down. The lighting system on the Venice canal is lousy. One feeble lamp throwing diffused light from a base ten feet back from the canal; one feeble lamp every hundred yards. At night, with light like that, you’d never see anyone swimming five feet under.

  When he rose again, with just a soft easy gesture of his body, he heard the oil wells throbbing like black hearts in the cliffs of silence on either side. Going down, he felt the extreme quiet of this mode of travel. No one to see you walking or running along sidewalks or dodging in shadows. Just the cold canal under stars, under fog, under wind. No ruffle on the water from swimming the surface. You kept deep and yanked cold wet power back, kicking away, holding breath, releasing it only in small bubble dribbles, gliding on.

  With good lungs, a healthy young body, young and healthier than Steve’s, you could swim a long cold way without having air. You rose quiet, gaped, sank, and shot on your dim way like a shark in familiar sounds.

  Like a shark. Steve grinned against the passing water’s pressure. You get like a fish after months of practice. Less and less air, longer down, easier strokes. No wonder the police never saw anything.

  You can follow a guy for miles if he’s walking on the sidewalk, and he won’t know you’re following. You pace him, get ahead of him, idle back, sink, and wait.

  Steve came up again, slow and quiet as a fin breaking water.

  “Charlie,” he thought, “you walked here last night. You knew what you were looking for. Gerbelow told you his suspicions. You went on from there. It’s fantastic, but it’s true. You figured out how Markham worked, too. You figured him for a deep water shark.”

  Steve shoved under again, thinking, pushing. The cold wasn’t half bad, now. But it’d been a long time since he’d swam late at night this way.

  There was a hole gaping in the canal wall. Part of an old storm drain. Steve investigated. It all fell into place in his mind. Swim up the drain, under the ground a few feet to where the water recedes, crouch with your head out of water, bumping the tile walls of the tube, and you could hide all night if you had to, out of sight like a crocodile in a burrow of a river bank. There were storm drains emptying into the canal all along the way. Convenient burrows to rest in when one is tired of swimming. Rest in one for ten minutes, then swim on. Just enough air between top of tube and water for breathing. No wonder Markham fooled everyone!

  Steve went on.

  * * *

  “Remember, Charl
ie, you and me and the canal when we were kids?” Steve gritted his teeth. “We three, you and me, and the canal. Funny how life begins and ends in the same place, sometimes. Yeah.

  “So he followed you, Charlie. Like I’m after him. How far, Charlie? I’ll tell you. Figure how far a man can swim underwater, with little rests maybe, until he’s tired. One mile, two miles down the canal. No further. Just far enough away so the cops won’t find you. Far enough away from your crimes.

  “You figured it, Charlie, walking, smoking your cigars. You didn’t know Markham was swimming that night, watching, waiting. Right in front of his house, he dragged you under! Hit you with a pipe, then, so you wouldn’t be found there, towed you down to the end of the canal, where everything ends; including the circus and the cages and the old splintered wheels, and he laid you there. Then he swam home, slow, climbed out, went in and dried off, and maybe ate a late supper. Damn!”

  Something lay shining in the water at the base of the canal.

  Tin cans. A dozen of them, filled with cement, lined up in a neat row. Nothing wrong with tin cans. But they indicated the halfway mark, perhaps. They were put there, maybe, to help a swimmer orient himself without having to lift his head high above water and expose himself to view. Just a row of cans, nobody would notice but a shark.

  It must have been fun for awhile, scaring people in the fog, making easy money. Playing like a kid, running around in the salt shadows, vanishing and leaving shivers behind you. Fun making your money that way, lying on the beach by day, getting exercise by night. Fun until the murdering began. You never plan for that. You never do.

  Tiredness got a start in his arm muscles first. The blow struck by the thrown wrench was really hot, now, a heat almost glowing in the water, cringing with every stroke.