She nodded. “In fact, Louis, the decision has already been made for both of us. The memo disappeared in the explosion. But I—I really don’t want to talk about it right now.”
Want to know why, Louis, you million-dollar man, you? Because if I talk about anything remotely resembling an explosion or fire, I think of Peyton and start to cry because I am so lonely and I hurt and I want him back and . . .
Louis touched her hand. “Julie, I am no stranger to the frustration and anguish that comes from the loss of a loved one. There’s no cure for grief.” He put her hand in his. “No cure, but there’s something that eases the symptoms. It’s called”—he swept her out onto the dance floor before she had time to react—“it’s called dancing.”
Her instincts told her it was absurd, but she had to smile at Louis’s overpowering self-confidence and charm. She let herself be led, making the steps mechanically, gradually getting into the mood for real.
“Julie,” he said, “I was quite impressed with your performance in the Von Holfenstein negotiations. I want you to think about something, think about it hard. I don’t need an answer right now. Just consider it.”
Oh, God, she thought as a queer brand of terror stole through her veins, the man is going to ask me to marry him.
“I want you to think about becoming a permanent member of my staff.”
She could breathe again. If he had proposed, she would have been shoved back into a past where Peyton handed out necklaces instead of rings and chased after her and begged her to marry him. And she would remember how crestfallen he looked, how puzzled and sad as the taxi drove away from Bowser’s because she had needed time to think it over. Now he was dead and she had all the time in the world. She would give anything, anything at all, to be able to do it all over again.
“That’s very flattering,” she said, consciously forcing her thoughts to leave her alone. “But I have commitments to Pappas and Swain.”
“I’ve already talked to Ed Pappas about it.”
She jerked back, a kernel of anger seeding itself in her brain. He had no right. “I’ll have you know I can deal with Pappas without help,” she said, glaring at him.
“Don’t be childish. I knew he didn’t want to lose you. In fact, he swore he would fight tooth and nail to keep you at the firm. ‘Good,’ I told him. ‘Good! I like a good scrap. If it’s not worth fighting for, it’s not worth having. Just consider that I won’t be outbid.’ ”
She frowned, staring blankly at his black bow tie. Pappas and Swain would fight for her? She had had no idea. It had occurred to her more than once that she was a glorified gopher and little else. “Well,” she said at last, “I’ll consider it.”
Louis gave her a fabulous, blindingly handsome smile. She felt herself wilting again, just as she had wilted at the Felix Heights Hunting Club so many lifetimes ago. This man had some kind of power inside, a tremendous magnetism.
“Say,” he remarked casually, “did I ever tell you about the time when my father, may he rest comfortably, forced me to work high steel when I was eighteen? Forty stories in the sky?”
“I don’t believe so,” she said.
He told her all about it. And as he spoke, Julie knew something was passing between them, and she wished to God it would go away.
But Peyton was dead, still dead, dead until the stars winked out and the universe vanished. He was dead but she was alive. So was Louis.
Another brash resolution began to swirl slowly down the tubes, despite her efforts to hang on to it.
Lifelong celibacy no longer seemed so attractive.
14
Night Sweats
THREE A.M. JULIE in bed. Replays of the evening drifted through her dreams: Louis so handsome and suave, so rich and so powerful. Images of Peyton intruded, Peyton before he died, grinning his off-kilter grin, picking a bunch of dandelions and pretending they were a bouquet, posing in a carnival photo booth.
Louis lying on her bathed in sweat and lust. The man had been good at everything. She should have told him yes the minute he proposed. In her dreams Peyton and Louis stood face-to-face, measuring each other, ready to do battle. Who would win? Peyton because he was good at everything or Louis because he was equally good?
She wondered what it would be like to make love to him. The thought almost woke her up. Something stealthy and black moved by her bed. It pulled a box from under the bed and quietly rummaged through it. The box was slid back into place, another withdrawn. More subdued noises, papers rustling, glassware tapping against itself.
The dark thing pushed the box back.
It stood over Julie as she slept. One claw reached out and touched her hair. Julie mumbled and drew away, still asleep, unconsciously recoiling from the claw and the shadow.
It left her bedroom and her apartment much as it had come, silently moving on shoes that were burned and twisted. It opened the door and went out.
In the morning she would discover that the front door was unlocked.
She would never notice that a small red plastic card was missing from one of the boxes under her bed. It was Peyton’s Midwestern First bank card, his code to the automatic teller machine, and his life savings.
He would never go anywhere without it.
15
Bosco Delivers
NOW BOSCO WAS not really named Bosco, and this Bosco business had nothing to do with a certain type of powder manufactured for the purpose of turning plain milk into chocolate milk. He was called Bosco by his fellow workers at Millings Business and Industrial Equipment Supply, where old Bosco had worked for the better part of thirty years, hauling every imaginable piece of business or industrial equipment known to man around the city and six Michigan counties. Once, in 1958, he had attempted to deliver forty barrels of live yeast broth to a huge bakery on the north side. The truck broke down. The refrigeration unit quit working. It was hot. This was his finest hour.
The yeast began to grow in its broth. One barrel blew its top with a noise like a bomb, then another, then all of them. The yeast began squirting out of every seam in the truck. Yeast has a tendency to smell bad; this load was no exception. As Bosco watched in alarm while holding his nose and hiding in a ditch, this Frankenstein batch hatched a diabolical plan. Because the seams in the truck bed were not sufficiently large to allow the overactive yeast a viable exit, it decided to explode, which would cause even the stoutest of men to quake and tremble.
When it exploded, Bosco quaked. Two thousand gallons of the Yeast from Hell rained down on him, a few passers-by who had been getting quite a kick out of the show, and a tow-truck driver, who had been trying frantically to hitch the truck to his pickup and escape. A boiling mushroom cloud of yeast gas was loosed upon the city. People complained. Highway workers breathed through their gloves, griping. Passing traffic flipped on their windshield wipers and air-conditioning, honking furiously at poor Bosco, who had become a man made of yeast and was trembling indeed.
That had been a bad one. The trip today had been rather odd, but Bosco expected no trouble. It was only the peculiar nature of the equipment that had been ordered at the expense of Wayne State University, and the crazy address to which he was supposed to deliver it, that weighed so heavily upon him. It sure as heck wasn’t the college, at least not as far as he knew it.
The address was 4519 Sequoia. Pretty name for a street located dead center in the city’s most rotten area. Bums and derelicts hesitated to go there. The cops gave it a wide berth. Crime wasn’t the problem. Poverty-level housing projects weren’t bothersome. The area was just dead, eighteen blocks north and south on One Hundred Sixteenth Street, eleven blocks east and west on Birchwood. It was a blight and a sore, haunted by the ghosts of men long dead. It had been the scene of some of the city’s worst union warfare back in the thirties, when the Depression had already entombed the world in a shroud of despair that would later give rise to Hitler, Stalin, Fascism, civil war, a world war, and fifty-two million dead. Peachy times, a peachy place. By 1945, the
rest of the world had at last shrugged the Depression off; Sequoia street didn’t get the news. All the businesses, factories, taverns, and hotels closed down—permanently. Bums came and went. Years came and went. Sequoia, along with one hundred and ninety-eight square blocks of city, was being allowed to degenerate into dust.
Bosco got the creeps while delivering this particular Monday morning load. He was at the wheel of a Millings Supply’s step-van, tooling down Sequoia. Small truck, not much of a load. Weird stuff, but not much of it. It would take maybe five minutes to unload. Yet if memory served Bosco right, the address was an old soap factory where a hand soap called Fresh Splash had been manufactured. The name stank, and so did the soap. The factory died a much-deserved death. Died so fast, in fact, that most of the machinery was left behind because it was already antiquated. As a kid Bosco and the gang had spent some crazy times down there, rolling the winos, sneaking booze, puking out of windows ten stories high. In the soap factory they had smashed doors down and even set the place on fire. Tired old building, it had refused to burn. They found some other place to play.
Bosco checked the buildings now as he drove, looking for numbers. Not much luck. His skin was crawling; just being back there was a little too much. Nobody was there because there was nothing to be there for. So why had a college professor called in this goofy order and asked that it be delivered there? Crazy. Crazy, but the college had super-duper credit and never failed to pay. How Bosco got stuck with this delivery was anybody’s guess. He sure as hell didn’t make an extra dime, not one red cent. He figured they ought to pay time-and-a-half for hazardous duty.
He spotted a row of brass numbers on a door front, green with age. It read 4413. Fine, then. One more block. If this was some college prank, the bad boys who did it were good at their illicit trade. They even knew Wayne State’s purchase code. Actually, though, Bosco wouldn’t mind it. It would mean he didn’t have to spend much time in this ghostly slum.
The soap factory loomed up on the right, looking as decayed and ramshackle as Bosco remembered it. There was a loading dock around the side on the alley, and that is where he stopped, backing up the truck professionally so that it was snug against the dock. He killed the motor and got out, ready to laugh this off when the kids said boo.
He climbed up the dock and stuck his head inside the dark mouth of the building. A search for a light switch proved useless. Anyway, Bosco didn’t expect any juice in this old joint. A rat or a bat or two, but no juice.
He took a breath, not liking the looks of the place or the smell, which was a mixture of bone-dry dust and evaporated piss. As he recalled, he himself had pissed there one day many years ago, writing his name on the dirty cement while holding a bottle of Thunderbird wine, certified deadly poison. His name then had not been Bosco, of course, as it was now. He just wished he could figure out who had hung such a bizarre moniker on him. Frank Quail up in Shipping? Ralph Barton? Nah. Most likely Jerry Kunz, forkiift operator and the local funnyman. What a nerd.
“Hello?” Bosco called out in a voice that was remarkably dry and wheezy. “Yo there, anybody home?”
He waited, deliberating.
“Okay, kids. Enough’s enough!”
More waiting.
“Okay, okay, good joke,” he muttered, and turned to leave forever.
“Millings Supply?” a grating, whispered voice rattled out to him from the inside of the building. Bosco put on the brakes and turned back to look inside.
“Just set it by the door,” the harsh voice said, and Bosco frowned a huge frown. Who the hell was in there? Jason? Freddy? Michael? Blackula? Holy hell, the joint was spooked.
“By the door,” the voice demanded, and that was enough to set Bosco in motion. He opened the latch on the tail and shoved the accordion gate up. Inside were two small wooden crates, eight large boxes marked FRAGILE and IBM in several languages, smaller cardboard boxes heaped in a trash bag: light bulbs, electrical connections, two large insulators. There was even a big roll of banded-together heavy wire. Most unsettling of all, perhaps, was the aquarium. To this unusual request Mr. Millings, himself, had called a pet shop. “Go figure college eggheads,” he had grumbled, and sent Bosco downtown to get it.
No problem, Bosco had assumed. The eggheads were going to dissect goldfish. Who was he to deny them this odd pastime?
So now he was unloading as fast as his fifty-six-year-old muscles would allow, really struggling with the crates, hoping to hell he didn’t drop any of the IBM stuff and have to come back here with a new whatever-it-might-be. In two minutes he was sticky with sweat, but this was nothing new. It rained off his eyebrows and dripped in his ears. He could hear the monster inside breathing, hear the click of its teeth, the rattling of its bones. His eyes grew wide, his throat got dry. When he was done, he was almost ready to scream. He jumped off the dock and got back inside the truck, where the inventory/sales receipt and authorization were sitting on the dash. He got them and clambered back onto the dock, wishing he had brought a gun with a silver bullet in it. Silver bullets were widely known to be the only defense against a monster; from the sound of its breathing, the dude must be the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
He stepped uncertainly into the shadowy maw of the factory, ready to bolt at the sight of anything even hinting at monsterdom. The papers rattled in his shaking fist.
“Need a signature,” he squeaked, holding out a pen.
Something approached, some darker shadow against the shadows. It reached out a hand and took the pen. Bosco was sweating bullets. Bones rattled and clicked as the papers were signed. Bosco backed away.
“Yuh—you get a copy of each,” he gurgled, backing now into the sunlight. Papers ripped. The tortured breathing went on and on. Bosco had just about decided to flee when a hand holding the pen and papers thrust into the sunlight. It wasn’t very recognizable as a hand. It appeared to have spent a lot of time in the grave, all white bone and dead meat, and Bosco knew, as he snatched the papers away from those skeletal fingers with a supreme effort of will, that whoever possessed that hand was not someone you would invite to dinner. He backed away some more, his work boots thumping against boxes and things, his heart jackhammering away in the farthest recesses of his chest.
“Is that everything I ordered?” the thing with the hand croaked. “Everything?”
“Yuh yuh yuh,” Bosco replied. “Yuh yuh yuh.”
“Thank you very much. Have a dollar.”
To Bosco’s burgeoning horror the skeletal hand stuck itself out again, holding a crumpled dollar bill.
“Yipe!” Bosco informed the monster. “Yipe yipe yipe!”
He fell off the dock and landed hard on his elbows. He didn’t mind. He got up and tripped over his own feet, falling again. This he minded. He got up and dived into the safety of the truck cab. The keys were there and he used them. He peeled out with his door flapping back and forth and the tailgate rattling up and down.
As soon as he got back, he filled out and submitted a request for voluntary retirement. He got it. They hated to see him go.
16
A Nervous Breakdown
RICK DESMOND HAD a problem on this dark and windblown Sunday night, a night when the trees groaned and rustled, ready to cast their leaves away and shut down for the winter. He had had this problem since the age of twenty, and it refused to go away, even though five years had passed. The doctors told him it was all in his head. The headshrinkers told him it was probably incurable. Nobody knew what caused it, but they all agreed that he must stop drinking and get his act together. One brave if slightly crooked physician gave him a prescription for Valium. They helped a little, but of course, by now he was hopelessly hooked on them and had two bad habits instead of one.
The problem was his nerves; better said, his nervousness. He trembled all the time. He had difficulty getting his breath. He sweated too much and as a result smelled like a dirty jockstrap most of the time. It was he who had pulled the trigger on Yakky and ended his short life.
Rick was not a killer by nature but rather by sheer desperation. As skittish as he was, he could not hold down a real job. The slightest pressure to perform drilled through his brain like an arrow, incapacitating him, giving him the shakes. He usually went into the nearest rest room and threw up, then quit whichever measly job he had managed to land.
Working for Robert G. Durant, though, was not so unbearable. Durant absorbed the pressure and the problems and gave Rick only simple instructions for simple tasks, such as shooting this guy or that, torching a car, “arsonizing” a house. Rick didn’t mind arsonizing, because one of Durant’s talents lay in inventing new and clever words for banal and hackneyed crimes. Arsonizing was one. Murderizing was another, though Rick would privately admit that he had heard it before in an old Bowery Boys movie. The capper was probably torchination, which easily could be substituted for arsonizing without losing effect.
But Rick was about to discover a new crime that night. Durant might call it torturization, Rick would call it a oneway ticket to hell.
It was his bad luck on this lonely, windy night because he decided to leave his favorite tavern and go home. He stopped his car in the gravel drive and shut the engine and headlights off. Wind always made him jumpy; so did every other type of weather. That night was particularly alarming because the hissing wind and the billowing trees made so much noise, he would scarely be able to hear if some old aquaintance, a previous victim of robberization or arsonizing, decided to drop by for some revenge. Rick lived with the agonizing knowledge that he was forever being followed by someone who wanted to kill him; he knew, too, that the CIA had his phone tapped. His house, not exactly the Ritz in this crummy neighborhood, was full of video cameras hidden there by the FBI. Rick spent hours and hours trying to find them, but that bad old FBI was too slick. And to top it off, there was a monster under his bed.
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