The Labyrinth Of Dreams

by Jack L. Chalker

  Brandy should have been excited about this part as much as or more than before, since she was the one who wanted to see this out anyway, but I found her somewhat moody. “What’s the trouble, babe?” I asked her. “All this finally getting to you?”

  She shook her head and stared out the rental-car window at the passing scenery. “Uh uh. I just—don’t feel comfortable around here. We been through the airport back there, to a bunch of stores, and now on the road, and there wasn’t a single black person anyplace we been. I never been in a place where there were no black people before except me.”

  The truth was, I hadn’t really noticed, but now that she mentioned it I couldn’t recall any. Oregon had the reputation for being real liberal near the coast, around Portland and Salem in particular, and as rock-ribbed reactionary in much of the rest of the state. “Anybody give you trouble back in the stores?”

  “No, it’s not that. Not exactly. They just sort of treated me like I was some kind of exotic animal or something. Funny comments—you know, like whether or not one of the wigs was right for my, er, well . . . ”

  “Uh huh. Well, it’s a price to be paid if you want to see this through. I can still turn around, get a room near the airport, and we can fly back tomorrow morning, all the way to Philadelphia and home if you want.”

  “No, no. I want to see this through. Specially after what that rental-car girl said.”

  It had been just another piece in this crazy puzzle that didn’t add up at all. The couple had borne a striking likeness to one another, but he in his business suit had seemed somewhat smaller and younger than she, with a high-pitched tenor—and she had said virtually nothing, but seemed bigger, almost mannish. It had been almost as if the man and woman had been wearing each other’s clothes and aping each other’s mannerisms.

  The town itself was on a main drag, as those things went, but it was no four-lane expressway. It was a winding, two-lane stretch that went up into the wooded mountains and became the main street of a bunch of little towns.

  MCINERNEY, the sign announced just before you got to the turn and saw it, pop. 1349. It was two blocks long and maybe had houses going back a block or two on either side, with the small business district using diagonal parking. There was a drugstore, a couple of small cafes, a post office, a sheriff’s office, a little town municipal building, a small food market, a service station, four places selling redwood burl to tourists who wandered by, and a small branch bank. There wasn’t even a McDonald’s. It all had wooden fronts and twin boardwalks for sidewalks, and not much else. The only reason it didn’t look odd was that we’d gone through a dozen nearly identical places on the drive up here.

  The reason why G.O.D. picked the spot, though, seemed to have to do not only with the depressed area, but also with the railroad tracks we crossed just the other side of town that then turned and paralleled the main drag. We passed a small motel, then saw the complex through the trees although it was well hidden from the road. The whole roadside was bracketed by a chain-link fence that was high and imposing, although partially hidden by the trees through which it snaked; but when you looked back through, in a couple of spots you could see some mighty large buildings up there.

  There were two entrances; one just north of town near the railroad tracks, and the other a main entrance about a mile further up that looked like the entrance to a military base. It was wide and paved, although it took a strategic turn away from visibility as soon as you cleared the gate, and it had a gatehouse in the center with railroad-style crossing gates blocking entry or exit without the man in the gatehouse pushing a button. A sign there indicated that Truck Entrance and General Receiving was the road near the tracks, but nowhere was there a sign indicating what sort of company this was.

  By the time we’d arrived, it was well after seven, so there was little traffic around. You couldn’t help wondering, though, how a place like that could be supported by a town this small. Commuting wasn’t the answer, either; you’d have to go a couple of hours in either direction over a road like this to round up enough people to staff it. There wasn’t much more we could do now; it was approaching darkness. I turned the car around and we headed back for the small motel, which was also, as far as I could see, the only motel or hotel in or near the town. If Whitlock was coming here, and wasn’t staying with friends or associates at or inside the plant, the odds were that he was using the same place. I hadn’t noticed a red Olds in the lot, but that might not mean much.

  The desk clerk, a grandmotherly little old lady, stared at the registration card. “Philadelphia. We don’t get many folks from back east in here. You with General?”

  “Not exactly,” I responded. “But we do business with them now and again. They sell a product for us now, but only in the east and midwest, and we’re seeing if we want to expand to the coast and if it’s worth the cost.”

  “Oh, really? What sort of product?”

  “Women’s wigs, actually. Natural-hair wigs at reasonable prices, and a new way to clean and restore them at home without costly treatments.”

  She nodded and completed the registration, no longer caring or even very curious about us. Even so, if we didn’t wrap this up in a day or so, I knew everybody in town would know about us and why we were allegedly there, and that would include the powers that be, over at the company. I was counting on the fact that places like that have a complicated bureaucracy and that the left vice president usually didn’t know what the right vice president was doing.

  The room was surprisingly nice for a little motel in the middle of nowhere run by Grandma Moses. They had a color TV with cable so we could make sure not to miss any General product ad, and the usual amenities, and the beds were clean and firm.

  Brandy had arranged for her box to be sent up to the Bend airport office of Overnite while we went shopping, and now she unpacked it. It did in fact contain the pistol and a box of bullets, but it also contained an assortment of other stuff, including a can of mace and a set of brass knuckles.

  “You ask about the Currys?” she asked me. She was really feeling self-conscious in these parts, and hadn’t come in with me to register.

  “No, I figure this is a company town from the word go. If I asked her, then it might just tip them, even if they just dropped into the office for something and she mentioned we were asking about them. This is a small place, and if you think you’re out of place here, they are, too. I—”

  At that moment there was a tremendous roar of an engine and the whole place started to shake, and did so for several minutes. I went outside and walked around back of the unit with Brandy. The damned train tracks ran maybe ten yards in back of the motel, and this was one hell of a train going by. It seemed to go on forever, not just boxcars, but covered gondolas full of stuff, and tank cars, as well as flatbeds on which truck trailers were attached. After a while, the train stopped, still not ended, and there was a long pause when it just sat there. Then it lurched, backed up slowly, lurched again, then went forward a bit more.

  “They’re switching off a lot of cars, that’s for sure,” I told her. “I guess they must have their own little switchyard in there. I hope nobody wants to go into or out of town for a while.”

  She stared at the train, deep in thought. “You know, these cars seem to be loaded up with stuff. Those open ones have covered loads, and the freight cars are sunk down on their springs.”

  “Yeah? So? Before they can send the junk out, they have to have it in.”

  “Maybe. But did you see any railroad cars with mail or United Parcel signs on ’em? I couldn’t make ’em out too well in the dark, but this outfit sends almost everything either UPS or mail.”

  “No, I didn’t notice any, but that doesn’t mean much. They probably just ship it out in special boxcars to the parcel terminals,” I responded. “It’d be the only easy way in or out of here. That post office in town wasn’t big enough to serve our block in Camden. Maybe they got their own post office up on the hill, or their own private UPS s
tation. Some big places have that.”

  “I dunno. Maybe. It just don’t seem right, somehow.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe this is just delivery from the hundreds of makers and importers of stuff. Maybe a different train ships ’em out once a day.”

  We left the train to its dancing, and walked back around, and Brandy looked up and then almost pushed me against the building.

  “Hey! What . . . ?”

  “Shhhh! My eyes may be goin’ bad, but I swear there’s a big red car pulling into the motel!”

  I peered around the end unit and, sure enough, here it came. It couldn’t have been coming from town, though, not with the train blocking the way, and it was unlikely to have been coming from the north. They had been over at the plant, that was clear.

  We were in number twelve, and they pulled into the space for number sixteen, only four doors down from us. “Stay here for a moment,” I told Brandy. “I’m gonna walk down and get a Coke.” The soft-drink machine was at the end of the unit, just past number twenty-four.

  They parked the car and got out just as I approached, paying me no attention at all. So here they were at last, I couldn’t help thinking. We’d played all the long shots and we’d won.

  What everybody had been telling us about them was definitely true. They didn’t look just enough alike to be brother and sister, they looked nearly identical. Well, not quite. Amanda Curry looked like Whitlock perhaps ten or more years younger; there was a smooth and youthful look to the face, and a slighter build. Both were dressed casually in jeans and work shirts and boots, pretty much as I was. There was no real sexual confusion in the two dressed like this, but her hair was cut almost in a crew-cut fashion, as short as Brandy’s, in its own way. Removed from the three-piece suit and cultural background, Whitlock’s face was strikingly androgynous. It, too, was smoother and softer than you’d expect, and his hair was cut in much the same short fashion as hers.

  She had been described as butch, and she was certainly that. Her mannerisms, her way of walking and moving, were culturally quite male, and she was clearly aggressive and in charge. They locked the car, and then she went to the door and opened it, and he followed. The door closed.

  I wandered slowly past their room with my drink and there was a small gap where the two curtains hadn’t completely closed, but I couldn’t see much without standing there, and I thought better of that.

  Brandy met me at our door and we went in. She took the Coke and drank a fair amount, then put it down. “Well? What do you think?” she asked me.

  “I think everything we heard is true. The real question is what we do now. There are several possibilities, including going up and introducing ourselves, or trying to bluff our way past that gatehouse. The trouble is, that place looked huge, and there’s no way to know if there’s anything up there worth looking for, let alone what it might be.”

  “Little Jimmy thought there was something crazy goin’ on up there, something dangerous.”

  “There’s only one thing it can be. This corporation’s some kind of blind or legitimate front for some rival in organized crime. Whitlock was into this bunch, and they forced him to double-cross the old bunch. Now that old bunch is busted, there’s two-million-plus profit from the deal, and Whitlock’s under their protection since the eastern mob doesn’t forget and loves to make examples.”

  “And this dyke twin of his? What about her?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I sure can’t figure where she came from and why she looks so much like him, but it’s clear she was in it because of that striking resemblance. Some part of the scam involved him being in two places at once, maybe leading Kennedy’s crew away, or maybe Little Jimmy’s boys. I’m sure the resemblance is natural. If it was some kind of plastic surgery, they’d have used a man with the same general build. Now she’s got to get away as well, to keep the old mob guessing as to how the thing was worked, that’s all. Face it, babe—it’s over. It was one hell of a case, but in the end it was just an ordinary, ugly war between two rival mob factions. I don’t know if old Marty likes to wear his wife’s panty hose or not, but it’s either true or something cooked up to ease the sense of doubt when the male and female Marty switched long-range identities. It doesn’t matter. There’s no more case.”

  She sighed. “I guess you’re right. They’re bound to figure that anybody still chasing them has a contract with the old mob. So what happens now?”

  “Nothing. We stay here tonight, check out tomorrow, and very visibly go back to the airport and then back to Frisco. Then we call somebody back home, get our mail sent out, and see if Little Jimmy really came through with the referrals. If he did, we’ll see if we might want to relocate and work for somebody else. If he didn’t, well, I think we got about two grand in cash left. After that—the Delaware shore, as before.”

  “I guess,” she sighed. “Still, I—”

  Her words were broken by the sound of a loud shot from one big gun and the immediate crashing sound of a broken window. Since it wasn’t our window, Brandy grabbed the magnum and I instinctively dove for and hit the lights, then we both peered out the window from the side of the curtains.

  It was dark out there; somebody had extinguished all the lights along the parking area, and the red neon motel sign gave little light. “You see anybody?” she whispered.

  “Uh uh.”

  “I got some cover with the car. I’m goin’ out there.”

  “What! Why?”

  “They might just have got the wrong room the first time, and in case you never noticed, lover, these places ain’t got no back doors.”

  She crouched down, and I slowly and quietly opened the door enough for her to crawl out on her hands and knees. She made it to the car grille, but I could see someone lying prone further up, someone who just might have been either Whitlock or Curry. I not only couldn’t tell if it was dead or alive, with the light this poor, I could hardly tell which way the body had fallen. Clearly, though, nobody, not even Brandy, could safely move against an unknown potential assassin out there someplace, maybe with a sniperscope, unless there was a diversion. I crouched down low to the floor and opened the door a bit wider.

  “Hey!” I shouted at the top of my lungs through the cracked door. “What the hell is going on out there?”

  A shot came right through the middle part of the door, about where I would have been standing had I not been born cautious. Brandy, however, had taken the opportunity to move down, since if the bastard was shooting at me he wasn’t looking four doors down. I risked another peek and saw she’d reached the downed figure. A third shot roared and struck the pavement, sending sparks flying, but it was a good several inches from her. Whoever it was hadn’t moved fast enough.

  I wondered where in hell the cops were. Surely some of the other guests, or at least the manager, had called them by now. It wasn’t too clear, though, if maybe our man had cut the lines, and in back I heard loud noises and the shifting of heavy cargo. That damned train was still blocking access to town!

  I heard Brandy whispering frantically to someone, but I couldn’t make out the words. There was another shot, and I heard somebody say, “I see him now! Other side of the road. Too far to hit with that cannon.”

  “Maybe not, but I can make it hot for him,” Brandy responded. “Sam! You okay?”

  “I’m in one piece, if that’s what you mean.” It suddenly occurred to me that the woman with the gun had such lousy vision she couldn’t have hit the damned motel, let alone a guy a hundred yards away. Well, she could shoot in the general direction, and he wouldn’t know that.

  “The man’s hit! It’s not bad, but we’re sure as hell pinned down here. That shooter’s got a clear field of fire and—oh shit!” I heard her suddenly squeeze off three shots with the magnum, and I heard a scream from further down the walk. “Got him!”

  Just great, I thought. Two of them. And how many more? Just what we needed at the end of the trail. No big payoff, and caught in the crossfire of a hi
t squad. Brandy had been lucky, too. The guy had missed with his shot, and she had only to brace and sight along the motel’s front wall to nail him. I bet she still couldn’t see the Coke machine.

  “How many bullets you got?” I called to her.

  “Just used three. That leaves five left in the clip.”

  “All right.” I went back, found her box of cartridges, and went back to the door. “I’m coming out low to the car and bringing the bullets. Give me cover if I need it.”

  I didn’t need it, because just then the lights of two cars illuminated the area in front of the motel, coming in toward town from the north. They both illuminated and somewhat blinded the shooter, and I took advantage of them to make it out and to toss the box to Brandy before dropping down to the far side of our car. I had no idea if the shooter saw me at all, but if he didn’t, I had an idea. I made it around to the car door, figuring that it would be out of the shooter’s line of sight, providing he hadn’t taken the opportunity to move. I opened the car door carefully, keeping down, and eased inside, then fumbled for my keys. The shooter had a rifle and a good night scope at a range of maybe a hundred yards. Child’s play for anybody with any skill at all.

  “Give him a full clip!” I called to Brandy. “I don’t want him to hear the car starting up!”

  She fired off the remaining five and I started the car. He returned fire, three shots in their direction, one busting the back windshield of their Olds. Hertz, I decided, wasn’t going to like any of us one bit.

  There was no way I could use the car for cover, and a getaway for any of us was unlikely, but there was one way to buy a fair amount of time if they were ready to move. The end of the rear unit was only eight rooms from where they now were, and that would give them cover and two exits. The trick was to make it that far. I only hoped that, in fact, the bastard was using a sniperscope.