The Fear Artist pr-5

by Timothy Hallinan

  Being in Murphy’s room brings back the sense of pressurized fury he’d experienced when he saw the man face-to-face. He has an impulse to call Janos, but instead he looks at his watch-6:52. He’s been inside for only fourteen minutes. Murphy doesn’t expect him to show up at the shopping plaza until eight or eight-thirty. He’s got plenty of time.

  Then why is he so frightened?

  Murphy is pacing the rear office area of a sixth-floor clothing store, fighting a case of the jitters and telling Andrea Fallon, the aging Khao San junkie posing as Helen Eckersley, for the third time what she’s supposed to do when Rafferty finally shows up. He knows he’s repeating himself, but some little animal in his chest is clawing to get his attention. Andrea is just barely not rolling her eyes when his cell phone rings. He glances at the readout, which says ALARM.

  As he looks at the word, the little animal in his chest begins to use its teeth. “Yeah?”

  “Mr. Murphy, we’ve got an entry at your house, but someone there diverted the alarm to the telephones. No one is answering.”

  “How long ago?”

  “How long-”

  “How long since the relay came through your office to ring the phones?”

  “A little less than fifteen minutes.”

  “What the fuck have you been doing for fifteen minutes?”

  “We didn’t have this number in the main file. We had to look at your forms-”

  “You dumb shit.” Murphy punches the DISCONNECT button so hard he cracks the screen. “Get out of here,” he says to Fallon. “Call me tomorrow for the rest of your money.”

  “Yeah, right,” Fallon says, “and you’ll mail me the check.” She holds out her hand, palm up. “Gimme.”

  “Oh, sure,” Murphy says. “Sure thing.” He grabs her upper arm, pinching the area between the bicep and the bone viciously enough to make her gasp. With his other hand he seizes her wrist and brings her open hand up into her face, with enough force to send her staggering back to the wall, blood streaming from her split lip. “Clean yourself up and get out of here.”

  He leaves her leaning against the wall, swearing at him, and goes out into the store. Despite the external display of anger, there’s a kind of glee at his center, and his vision and hearing are amplified. He feels like he could hear a whisper a mile away. It’s a state of consciousness he loves.

  The immediate problem, of course, is getting out. If Rafferty’s not here, he’s got someone else here, on the lookout. The store is obviously being watched. The only way out without taking the escalator, in full view of a thousand people, is the staircase he came up. The entrance to the stairs is about eight meters from the door to the shop. Left, from his perspective.

  As always when he’s in this state, ideas announce themselves to him complete and fully formed.

  “You,” he says softly to the woman who seems to be in charge. “Don’t say no, don’t give me any shit, don’t attract any attention, just do what I tell you to do, or three days from now there’ll be a toy store in this space. Are you listening?”‘

  “Yes,” she says, and a part of him registers the thick, badly applied makeup, the sickly perfume with the pampered-animal smell beneath it, the fragility of her neck.

  “That one, over there,” he says, pointing at a salesgirl who, like the manager, is as tall and lean as a fashion model. “Get her.”

  While the woman scurries to do his bidding, Murphy puts his hands under one of the heavy rods the dresses hang from and pushes up. As he hoped it would, it lifts easily from the wall bracket. He pulls it down and steps behind the counter, where he tilts the rod until all the clothes slide to the floor, leaving him holding a round bar about seven feet in length. To the two approaching women, their eyes on the spill of clothes, he says, “The longest things you’ve got, dresses, coats, I don’t care what they are, but they’ve got to be long. Understand?”

  The manager starts to say something, but Murphy feels his eyes widen, and she retreats, calling instructions in Thai to the other woman. Customers are beginning to pay attention as the two of them scoop clothes from displays everywhere in the store, throw them over their arms and shoulders, and hurry back to Murphy, who holds the pole horizontal.

  “Hang ’em up. Jam them together. I want a wall, you got it?” He holds the bar by one end, the other end slanted up slightly, and the women hook hangers over it until it’s about three-quarters full, the clothes sliding down to his end to be smashed together by gravity. Murphy says, “Fill it up.”

  The saleswoman says, “The clothes,” and Murphy whirls on her so fast that some of the hangers fly off the other end of the rod. “I’m not going to tell you again.”

  A customer backs out of the store, followed by another.

  The saleswoman takes off at a run. Fifteen seconds later the rod is packed with hanging clothes. Murphy shoves the garments on the near end together to bare about a foot of rod. “On your shoulder,” he says to the manager. Then he clears the other end and sets it, not particularly gently, on the salesgirl’s shoulder. “Put your hand on it, stupid. If it falls off, you’ll be sorry for the rest of your short, shitty life. Now, stay there.”

  He goes toward the door of the shop, turns his back to it, and pulls a revolver out of the holster at the center of his spine. “Hey!” he shouts, although everyone in the shop is staring at him. “This is a national security incident.” He repeats the words “national security” in Thai. “We have a threat, but nobody’s going to get hurt if you do what I say.” He holds up his cell phone with his free hand. “I want to see your cell phones, right now, and I mean everyone. If you don’t show me a cell phone and I find one on you, you won’t go home tonight. Get them out and hold them up.”

  Every person in the store-five customers and three employees-holds up a phone. “Put them on that table full of T-shirts, near the front door. Do not go out of the shop. You, you, you. Go to the table and drop your phone on it, then come back. Keep your hands in sight. Good. Now turn around and go through that door in the back. He waves the revolver at the door. “You’ll stay there for five minutes. In five minutes come out. Everyone understand?”

  A few people reply automatically, but most of them head for the door, moving fast, as though they’re anticipating a bullet in the back. When the door has closed behind the last of them, Murphy shouts, “Five minutes!” Then, to the two women, he says, “I’m going to get behind these clothes, and when I say ‘Walk,’ we’re going to walk at normal speed. Outside the door we’ll turn left, all moving together, until we get to the stairs. Then we’re going through that door, all together. Both of you got it?”

  The women nod, and the store manager clears her throat, licks her lips, and says, “Yes.”

  “No hurrying, nothing out of the ordinary. You’re just a couple of women carrying a lot of clothes, okay? There’s a truck waiting down there, and you’re just taking them down the stairs, right?”

  “Fine,” says the manager.

  “Keep me in the middle, same distance from both of you. Go at the count of three. Carefully, so nothing happens to the clothes. Ready. One. Two. Three.”

  They’re both taller than he is, but he hunches down anyway. He knows he’s invisible from below. It’s a watcher a level up that worries him.

  And that’s precisely where Janos is, drinking his third cup of coffee, shifting from foot to foot and wishing with some intensity that he could take a bathroom break. He’s been staring for almost twenty minutes at the front of the store that Murphy went into, and it feels like an hour. The woman has gone into the store, too, and she hasn’t come out yet, so he’s stuck here. He has no idea where Shen is, although Rafferty hadn’t seemed worried about Shen. But it’s sloppy. He needs half a dozen people, with radios, to do this right.

  He’s pulling out his phone to give Vladimir a piece of his mind when the women come out, carrying what looks like a whole rack of clothes. He goes up on tiptoe to see whether he can look over it, but he can’t; he’d have to be
practically on top of them to do that.

  So they’re moving clothes-they’ll take them to the escalator. Except that they turn left, heading for the stairway, the stairway Murphy came up. Maybe it’s nothing, maybe the people who run the mall don’t want that kind of shop business done in sight of the customers. Or maybe Murphy’s got himself an escort.

  Rafferty’s not due to arrive for ninety minutes. Why would Murphy be leaving? And would he be leaving without the woman?

  If it’s not Murphy, and Janos goes out of position to check, he could miss it if Murphy actually does move. This might be a diversion to draw whoever’s watching, leaving the area clear for Murphy to walk out two minutes from now, big as life. Janos leans forward, elbows on the railing. He’s forgotten about pissing. The shop attendant in front pulls the door to the stairs open, toward her, and gives it a shove; it’s the kind that swings closed automatically, and they’ll have to hurry to get through before it shuts on them. And they’re not going to make it. The woman in front is through, and the door is closing on the center of the rack, and then it’s pushed back again, and it opens and starts to close, and the woman at the back pushes it open again.

  Two people, three shoves on the door. The woman in front could have kicked back at it, or …

  Vladimir and the boy are at the front exit, waiting for word. Why would Murphy leave the woman?

  Janos makes a decision and takes the down escalator in a kind of swan dive.

  THE THIRD BEDROOM is small and dim and smells like a sickroom. Rafferty flicks on the wall switch, but nothing happens. The only light comes through the door in the hallway. He stands there, letting his eyes adjust, listening for the sound of movement behind him, and gradually he sees a milky line of light beneath a door in the room’s far right corner.

  To open that door, he’ll have to go through the bedroom, and he realizes that he doesn’t want to. Rose, he thinks, would take one look and back away, saying, “Bad place.”

  The rumpled bed, the sheets creased sharply, as though the person who sleeps there perspires heavily, a lemon yellow, edgy smell that Rafferty associates with fever, the absolutely bare walls-not a picture, not a poster, not a mirror-all fill him with a deep uneasiness. His eyes go to the ceiling. The area above the bed has been attacked with paint: spirals and loops and jagged, shapeless lines, random as roughly torn paper, in dark reds and chromium yellows and a lot of black. Years ago Rafferty had seen video of a spider spinning a web under the influence of lysergic acid, and that web had the same uncontrollable, fractured energy. Imagination as broken glass. He looks away, feeling vertiginous, and then up again. This is what the person on the bed, lying on her back, would have seen: a ceiling full of cracks and fault lines, a solidity on the verge of flying apart, but to what end? Would something come down-was that the meaning of the slashes of red and yellow? — or would the person on the bed be drawn up? And up to what?

  Holding his breath, he enters the room and walks swiftly to the door with light beneath it, which he pulls open. It’s a bathroom, very long and narrow, with a window at each end, looking out on both the back and the front yards. Other than the peculiar shape, it’s purely functional: small and plain, with a single fluorescent tube running almost the full length of the ceiling. The bathtub, located below the back window, is piled full of white, an irregular, cloudlike surface of white cloth. He reaches over and tugs a fold close to him, and what he’s holding is a filthy white nightgown. He looks again. There must be thirty of them in the tub.

  The nightgown smells of damp and sweat and dirt. It’s the same smell he’d caught downstairs, standing in the archway to the kitchen with the open door behind him.

  From nowhere Miaow’s face suddenly swims up at him with its usual mix of hope and apprehension, and he finds himself on the verge of tears. He wants to be anywhere in the world but here.

  He tosses the nightgown back into the tub and looks around to find a reason for the room’s shape. And there it is, a door in the wall opposite the small bedroom, closed and locked. Feeling the pressure of time, he goes quickly through the bedroom and into Murphy’s room. It takes him about four minutes to find the ring of keys; he begins by pulling out the drawers in the dresser and feeling their undersides. The bottom drawer comes out completely, and there it is, on the bare concrete floor beneath.

  The first key on the ring opens the door.

  The room is as long as the bathroom and twice as wide. It’s unfinished; there’s no drywall, and the floor is bare plywood. A small cache of firearms, including holstered sidearms, automatic weapons, and what seem to be wooden spears, fills one corner. Old uniforms hang on hooks set into the two-by-four uprights in the wall, and a low table, the size of a single bed, is piled with papers and photo albums. He opens one and sees a much younger Murphy and two other Americans in camouflage fatigues grinning at the camera. They flank a stick, much like the ones he sees in this room, on which is impaled the wide-eyed head of a young Asian male.

  He pulls out Ming Li’s little silver camera and photographs the page. And the next. And the next. They get worse by the page. By the time he goes downstairs, he’s moving much more quietly. He doesn’t want to wake the dead.

  He’s halfway down when he hears the noises from below, a whirring and a faint, repetitive clicking.

  Janos is slowed by the crowd on the main floor and has to push his way to the entrance and then run, as fast as he can, around the entire structure to reach the door at the bottom of the stairs. It’s heavy steel, and he pulls it open with both hands, only to hear the indignant voices of the two women climbing back up.

  He’s missed Murphy. If it was Murphy.

  And now he’s out of position, not watching the girl, not watching Murphy, not watching Shen. He can almost see the thousand dollars he’s been promised floating away, above the roofs of the parked cars. He can’t just go back in and hope everything’s fine. He has to know whether he was right, and he has to know which exit Murphy will take. If it was …

  He bats the doubt away and stands still, letting his eyes go soft and unfocused, trying to keep the entire scene in front of him in sight. It’s dark and raining, which doesn’t help. When he’s got the gaze he wants, he very slowly turns his head, taking in the part of the lot that’s visible from this side of the building, looking for nothing but movement.

  He gets it, three parking rows away, a short man in a hurry, zigzagging between wet, gleaming cars, not paying any attention to him at all. Janos takes off at a run, up on the balls of his feet to avoid making scuffing noises, trying not to catch up to Murphy but to get a look at which way his car is going, so he can direct Vladimir and the Thai pretty boy who romanced Murphy’s maid. Then he’s to alert Rafferty on the phone, and Vladimir will call to confirm or deny that Murphy is headed home.

  Janos slows and stops. He’s a row of cars beyond the one he spotted Murphy in, but he can’t see the man. To his right he hears a car start, and he turns toward it.

  And hits his cheekbone on the fast-moving barrel of a gun.

  It’s a revolver, Janos registers instinctively, and the sight on the end of the barrel has torn the skin over his right cheekbone. He raises a hand to touch it, but the revolver comes down on top of his wrist, very fast, and Janos knows that a bone has been broken.

  Not until then does he look into Murphy’s blue eyes, eyes the color of the sky on a hazy day. Janos steps back, banging into the car behind him, and Murphy says, “Where’s Rafferty?”

  Janos says, “Who?”

  Murphy lifts the gun until it’s pointing directly into Janos’s left eye. He says, “See this?” and immediately brings the edge of his left hand down on the bridge of Janos’s nose, which breaks. Blood pours over Janos’s chin and onto the front of his shirt, and he coughs and begins to bend forward, but Murphy grabs his hair and pulls him upright. He takes a step back, the gun still pointed at Janos’s eye, and says, “Put your finger under it and push up a little. It’ll hurt like a son of a bitch, but the
bleeding will slow. Where’s Rafferty?”

  “Your house.” He blinks away the tears, but all that does is show him the gun and Murphy’s eyes more clearly, and he can’t look at the glee in Murphy’s eyes; he’s seen people who enjoyed this before, but not like this. He lets his eyes water. He lets his nose bleed.

  “What’s he doing there?”

  “Looking for something. I don’t know what.”

  “Who else is here?”

  “Nobody.”

  Murphy raises his left hand again. “You can’t imagine how it’ll feel if I hit it again.”

  “Vladimir. And some Thai boy.”

  “Vladimir.” Murphy does a little two-syllable laugh. “Talk about the big guns.” He leans in toward Janos, and Janos flinches. “I’ve forgotten your name.”

  “Janos.”

  “Right, Janos. So, Janos, where’s your cell phone?”

  “Shirt pocket.”

  “Don’t be stupid now.” Murphy touches the gun to Janos’s forehead and lifts the cell phone out of his pocket. “Rafferty’s number in here?”

  “Speed dial two.”

  “And Vladimir?”

  “Four.”

  “Great, we’re making progress. Look, we’re both pros, and I’ve got nothing against you, but I don’t want you warning Vladimir and Vladimir calling Rafferty, so I’m going to need to slow you down a little. Lie down in between these cars.”

  That’s when the coffee lets go, and Janos feels the wet heat on the front of his pants. “I … I don’t want to.”

  “All I’m going to do is put flex-ties on your wrists and ankles. I know you’ll get out of them eventually, but by then I’ll have Vladimir under control. What’s his car look like?”

  “Gray Mazda. Sedan.”

  “So what you need to do is let me put the restraints on you and then promise me, one professional to another, that you’ll repay my leaving you alive by not finding a way to get in contact with Rafferty.”

  “I don’t know his number. It’s in the phone, that’s all.”