Koontz, Dean R. - Mr. Murder

by Mr. Murder(Lit)

  compelling him to call a number in Philadelphia to report his change of

  plans. But that was the trouble with a cellar command, sometimes it was

  so deeply buried in the subject's mind that the trigger didn't work and

  it stayed buried.

  While Oslett and Clocker waited at the airport in Seattle to see if

  their boy would show up on a later flight, a Network contact in Kansas

  City drove to the motel where Alfie had been staying to check it out.

  The concern was that their boy might have dumped his entire conditioning

  and training, much the way that information could be lost when a

  computer hard disk crashed, in which case the poor geek would still be

  sitting in his room, in a catatonic condition.

  But he hadn't been at the motel.

  He had not been on the next Kansas City/Seattle flight, either.

  Aboard a private Learjet belonging to a Network affiliate, Oslett and

  Clocker flew out of Seattle. By the time they arrived in Kansas City on

  Sunday night, Alfie's abandoned rental car had been found in a

  residential neighborhood in Topeka, an hour or so west. They could no

  longer avoid facing the truth. They had a bad boy on their hands.

  Alfie was renegade.

  Of course, it was impossible for Alfie to become a renegade.

  Catatonic, yes. A.W.O.L, no. Everyone intimately involved with the

  program was convinced of that. They were as confident as the crew of

  the Titanic prior to the kiss of the iceberg.

  Because it monitored the police communications in Kansas City, as

  elsewhere, the Network knew that Alfie had killed his two assigned

  targets in their sleep sometime in the hour between Saturday midnight

  and one o'clock Sunday morning. Up to that point, he had been right on

  schedule.

  Thereafter, they could not account for his whereabouts. They had to

  assume that he'd snapped and gone on the run as early as one A.M.

  Sunday, Central Standard Time, which meant that in three hours he would

  have been renegade for two full days.

  Could he have driven all the way to California in forty-eight hours?

  Oslett wondered as Clocker turned into the approach road to the Oklahoma

  City airport.

  They believed Alfie was in a car because a Honda had been stolen off a

  residential street not far from where the rental car had been abandoned.

  Kansas City to Los Angeles was seventeen or eighteen hundred miles. He

  could have driven that far in a lot less than forty-eight hours,

  assuming he had been single-minded about it and hadn't slept. Alfie

  could go three or four days without sleep. And he was as single minded

  as a politician pursuing a crooked dollar.

  Sunday night, Oslett and Clocker had gone to Topeka to examine the

  abandoned rental car. They had hoped to turn up a lead on their wayward

  assassin.

  Because Alfie was smart enough not to use the fake credit cards with

  which they had supplied him--and by which he could be tracked--and

  because he had all of the skills needed to make a splendid success of

  armed robbery, they used Network contacts to access and review

  computerized files of the Topeka Police Department. They discovered

  that a convenience store had been held up by persons unknown at

  approximately four o'clock Sunday morning, the clerk had been shot once

  in the head, fatally, and from the ejected cartridge found at the scene,

  it had been ascertained that the murder weapon fired 9mm ammunition. The

  gun with which Alfie had been supplied for the Kansas City job was a

  Heckler & Koch P7 9mm Parabellum pistol.

  The clincher was the nature of the last sale the clerk had made minutes

  before being killed, which the police had ascertained from an

  examination of the computerized cash register records. It was an

  inordinately large purchase for a convenience store, multiple units of

  Slim Jims, cheese crackers, peanuts, miniature doughnuts, candy bars,

  and other high-calorie items. With his racing metabolism, Alfie would

  have stocked up on items like those if he had been on the run with the

  intention of forgoing sleep for a while.

  And at that point they had lost him for too long.

  From Topeka he could have gone west on Interstate 70 all the way into

  Colorado. North on Federal Highway 75. South by diverse routes to

  Chanute, Fredonia, Coffeyville. Southwest to Wichita. Any where.

  Theoretically, minutes after he had been judged a renegade, it should

  have been possible to activate the transponder in his shoe by means of a

  coded microwave signal broadcast via satellite to the entire continental

  United States. Then they should have been able to use a series of

  geosynchronous tracking satellites to pinpoint his location, hunt him

  down, and bring him home within a few hours.

  But there had been problems. There were always problems. The kiss of

  the iceberg.

  Not until Monday afternoon had they located the transponder signal in

  Oklahoma, east of the Texas border. Oslett and Clocker, on standby in

  Topeka, had flown to Oklahoma City and taken a rental car west on

  Interstate 40, equipped with the electronic map, which had led them to

  the dead senior citizens and the pair of Rockport shoes with one heel

  shaved to expose the electronics.

  Now they were at the Oklahoma City airport again, rolling back and forth

  like two pinballs inside the slowest game machine in the known universe.

  By the time they drove into the rental agency lot to leave the car,

  Oslett was ready to scream. The only reason he didn't scream was

  because there was no one to hear him except Karl Clocker. Might as well

  scream at the moon.

  In the terminal he found a newsstand and purchased the latest issue of

  People magazine.

  Clocker bought a pack of Juicy Fruit chewing gum, a lapel button that

  said VE BEEN TO OKLAHOMA--NOW CAN DIE, and the paperback edition of the

  gazillionth Star Trek novelization.

  Outside in the promenade, where pedestrian traffic was neither as heavy

  nor as interestingly bizarre as it was at either JFK or La Guardia in

  New York, Oslett sat on a bench framed by sickly greenery in large

  planters. He riffled through the magazine to pages sixty-six and

  sixty-seven.

  IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, MYSTERY NOVELIST MARTIN STILLWATER SEES DARKNESS

  AND EVIL WHERE OTHERS SEE ONLY SUNSHINE.

  The two-page spread that opened the three-page piece was largely

  occupied by a photograph of the writer. Twilight. Ominous clouds.

  Spooky trees as a backdrop. A weird angle. Stillwater was sort of

  lunging at the camera, his features distorted, eyes shining with

  reflected light, making like a zombie or crazed killer.

  The guy was obviously a jackass, an obnoxious self-promoter who would be

  happy to dress up in Agatha Christie's old clothes if it would sell his

  books. Or license his name for a breakfast cereal, Martin Stillwater's

  Mystery Puffs, made of oats and enigmatic milling by-products, a free

  action figure included in each box, one in a series of eleven murder

  victims, each wasted in a different fashion, all wounds detailed in

  "Day-Glo" red, start your collectio
n today and, at the same time, let

  our milling by-products do your bowels a favor.

  Oslett read the text on the first page, but he still didn't see why the

  article had put the New York contact's blood pressure in the stroke-risk

  zone. Reading about Stillwater, he thought the headline ought to be

  "Mr. Tedium." If the guy ever did license his name for a cereal, it

  wouldn't need high fiber content because it would be guaranteed to bore

  the crap out of you.

  Drew Oslett disliked books as intensely as some people disliked

  dentists, and he thought that the people who wrote them especially

  novelists--had been born into the wrong half of the century and ought to

  get real jobs in computer design, cybernetic management, the space

  sciences, or applied fiber optics, industries that had some thing to

  contribute to the quality of life here on the cusp of the millennium.

  As entertainment, books were so slow. Writers insisted on taking you

  into the minds of characters, showing you what they were thinking. You

  didn't have to put up with that in the movies.

  Movies never took you inside characters' minds. Even if movies could

  show you what the people in them were thinking, who would want to go

  inside the mind of Sylvester Stallone or Eddie Murphy or Susan Sarandon,

  anyway, for God's sake? Books were just too intimate. It didn't matter

  what people thought, only what they did. Action and speed. Here on the

  brink of a new high-tech century, there were only two watchwords, action

  and speed.

  He turned to the third page of the article and saw another picture of

  Martin Stillwater.

  "Holy shit."

  In this second photograph, the writer was sitting at his desk, facing

  the camera. The quality of light was strange, since it seemed to come

  mainly from a stained-glass lamp behind and to one side of him, but he

  looked entirely different from the blazing-eyed zombie on the previous

  pages.

  Clocker was sitting on the other end of the bench, like a huge trained

  bear dressed in human clothes and patiently waiting for the circus

  orchestra to strike up his theme music. He was engrossed in the first

  chapter of the Star Trek novelization Spock Gets the Clap or whatever

  the hell it was called.

  Holding out the magazine so Clocker could see the photo, Oslett said,

  "Look at this."

  After taking the time to finish the paragraph he was reading, Clocker

  glanced at People. "That's Alfie."

  "No, it isn't."

  Gnawing on his wad of Juicy Fruit, Clocker said, "Sure looks like him.

  "Something's very wrong here."

  "Looks exactly like him."

  "The kiss of the iceberg," Oslett said ominously.

  Frowning, Clocker said, "Huh?"

  In the comfortable cabin of the twelve-passenger private jet, which was

  warmly and tastefully decorated in soft camel-brown suede and

  contrasting crackle-finish leather with accents in forest green, Clocker

  sat toward the front and read The Alien Proctology Menace or what ever

  the damned paperback was titled. Oslett sat toward the middle of the

  plane.

  As they were still ascending out of Oklahoma City, he phoned his contact

  in New York. "Okay, I've seen People."

  "Like a kick in the face, isn't it?" New York said.

  "What's going on here?"

  "We don't know yet."

  "You think the resemblance is just a coincidence?"

  "No. Jesus, they're like identical twins."

  "Why am I going to California--to get a look at this writer jerk?"

  "And maybe to find Alfie."

  "You think Alfie's in California?"

  New York said, "Well, he had to go somewhere. Besides, the minute this

  People thing fell on us, we started trying to learn every thing we could

  about Martin Stillwater, and right away we find out there was some

  trouble at his house in Mission Viejo late this after noon, early this

  evening."

  "What kind of trouble?"

  "The police report's been written up, but it isn't logged into their

  computer yet, so we can't just access it. We need to get our hands on a

  hard copy. Were working on that. So far, we know there was an intruder

  in the house. Stillwater apparently shot somebody, but the guy got

  away."

  "You think it has something to do with Alfie?"

  "Nobody here's a big believer in coincidence."

  The pitch of the Lear engines changed. The jet had come out of its

  climb, leveled off, and settled down to cruising speed.

  Oslett said, "But how would Alfie know about Stillwater?"

  "Maybe he reads People," New York said, and laughed nervously.

  "If you're thinking the intruder was Alfie why would he go after this

  guy?"

  "We don't have a theory yet."

  Oslett sighed. "I feel as if I'm standing in a cosmic toilet, and God

  just flushed it.

  "Maybe you should've taken more care with the way you were handling

  him."

  "This wasn't a handling screwup," Oslett bristled.

  "Hey, I'm making no accusations. I'm only telling you one of the things

  that's being said back here."

  "Seems to me the big screwup was in satellite surveillance."

  "Can't expect them to locate him after he took off the shoes."

  "But how come they needed a day and a half to find the damned shoes?

  Bad weather over the Midwest. Sunspot activity, magnetic disturbances.

  Too many hundreds of square miles in the initial search zone.

  Excuses, excuses, excuses."

  "At least they have some," New York said smugly.

  Oslett fumed in silence. He hated being away from Manhattan.

  The moment the shadow of his plane crossed the city line, the knives

  came out, and the ambitious pygmies started trying to whittle his

  reputation down to their size.

  "You'll be met by an advance man in California," New York said.

  "He'll give you an update."

  "Terrific."

  Oslett frowned at the phone and pressed END, terminating the He needed a

  drink.

  In addition to the pilot and co-pilot, the flight crew included a

  stewardess. With a button on the arm of his chair, he could summon her

  from the small galley at the back of the plane. In seconds she arrived,

  and he ordered a double Scotch on the rocks.

  She was an attractive blonde in a burgundy blouse, gray skirt, and

  matching gray jacket. He turned in his seat to watch her walk back to

  the galley.

  He wondered how easy she was. If he charmed her, maybe she'd let him

  take her into the john and do it to her standing up.

  For all of a minute, he indulged that fantasy, but then faced reality

  and put her out of his mind. Even if she was easy, there would be

  unpleasant consequences. Afterward, she would want to sit beside him,

  probably all the way to California, and share with him her thoughts and

  feelings about everything from love and fate to death and the

  significance of Cheer Whiz. He didn't care what she thought and felt,

  only what she could do, and he was in no mood to pretend to be a

  sensitive nineties kind of guy.

  When she brought the Scotch, he asked what videotapes were available.r />
  She gave him a list of forty titles. The best movie of all time was in

  the plane's library, Lethal Weapon 3. He had lost track of how many

  times he'd seen it, and the pleasure he took from it did not diminish

  with repetition. It was the ideal film because it had no story line

  that made enough sense to bother following, did not expect the viewer to

  watch the characters change and grow, was composed entirely of a series

  of violent action sequences, and was louder than a stockcar race and a

  Megadeth concert combined.

  Four separately positioned monitors made it possible for four films to

  be shown simultaneously to different passengers. The stewardess ran

  Lethal Weapon 3 on the monitor nearest to Oslett and gave him a set of

  headphones.

  He put on the headset, turned the volume high, and settled back in his

  seat with a grin.

  Later, after he finished the Scotch, he dozed off while Danny Glover and

  Mel Gibson screamed unintelligible dialogue at each other, fires raged,

  machine guns chattered, explosives detonated, and music thundered.

  Monday night they stayed in a pair of connecting units in a motel in

  Laguna Beach. The accommodations didn't qualify as five- or even