On the Run

by John D. MacDonald

  He drove away from the center of the village, wearing a dark long-sleeved sports shirt, dark slacks. The village slept. He turned the engine and lights off, drifted for the final hundred yards and put the car into the overgrown driveway of an abandoned house. From there he took the route across the fields behind the houses, the route he had scouted while taking the exterior shots of the two neighboring houses. He circled the Brower house in absolute stealth, gratified to note that the few street lamps were as feeble as he had assumed they would be. Aside from a night light in the room of the dying man, the house was in darkness.

  He went to the prepared window, put the tiny pry bar between sill and screen and levered it gently. The hook parted with an almost inaudible ping. But he listened to the silence for a time, his eyes closed, before lifting the screen off the top hooks and setting it aside.

  The prepared window made no sound as he eased it up. He went up and over the sill with a single lithe muscular silent movement, then crouched inside, knuckles braced against the hardwood floor, head tilted, listening. Soon he stood up, slid the window back down slowly and silently, by touch fitting the shortened screws back into the holes. He drifted to the front hallway and to the front door and listened again. He unlocked the front door. The latch made a single brisk clack, and once again he waited. He opened it eighteen inches, slid through, pushed the screen open. The spring made a soft pinging sound. He closed the screen door carefully, went back to the window, hooked the screen in place, shoved the bottom of it in against the sill, went silently back and reentered the house by way of the front door. He left the front door barely ajar. After a long pause, he started up the stairs, taking two stairs with each slow step, planting his feet close to the wall where they were less likely to creak.

  Paula knew both her men were asleep. She could hear the familiar cadences of the sleep of the old man over the bedside monitor. And Sidney’s breathing had deepened, and his arm felt leaden where it rested across her bare waist. Sleep well, she thought. Be safe. Stay safe for me. You are my dear one. You are my life.

  The old man was in a dream. He knew it was a dream and he knew he did not like it. He had been walking down some sort of a tunnel, and he had noticed that it was getting narrower and lower. Now he was forced to crawl on his hands and knees and soon there was not enough room for that, and he had to wiggle along on his belly. But the side walls had begun to brush his shoulders and he knew that if it got any narrower he would be stuck there until this miserable dream ended.

  George, in his dream, was heatedly, irritably, impatiently undressing Mitz, eager to get down to that tawny sturdy exotic flesh, but under each garment there was another garment, and as the pile of clothing grew around them, she kept giggling, writhing, making it more difficult.

  Jud Heiler sat under a maple tree in the front yard of the dark house across from the Brower house. He shook the bottle and estimated there was a couple of inches left. Did the whole tour, he thought. No hold on me. Drink if I feel like it. No damn parolee. He took two burning swallows, gagged, and set the bottle aside with exaggerated care.

  Over there my true love sleeps. A great big gorgeous broad, full of competence. All ready for taking care. That was the penalty for being strong. God gives you a weak one to take care of. One little divorce can’t interfere with an essentially symbiotic relationship, ducks.

  He beamed across at the old house. He thought of her in there all sweet in her bed, and he had a little pang of uncertainty. At first it had been fine, and then it hadn’t been so good, and then he had begun to dread it, and finally it just stopped happening. The psychologist was very understanding. Guilt and anxiety. Psychological impotence.

  With no guilt any more and no anxiety any more, it would probably be just as good as in the beginning. If she’d take it a little bit easy until he got used to it. Hell of a vital woman.

  He peered into the darkness, thinking he saw some sort of vague and shadowy movement near the front door. He watched, but he didn’t see anything else.

  He wondered what he should do. There was a lot of time. The thing to do was serenade her. Make her aware of old Judson out here in the night, singing his heart out. But what was their song? Couldn’t remember it. Bad form. Women like the little sweet stink of nostalgia.

  He lurched to his feet, accidentally kicked the bottle over, dived for it and saved but about one inch in the bottom. Very wasteful. Very careless. Drink it to save it, lad. He finished it and set the bottle down very neatly and carefully. He brushed his knees off, deciding that in the absence of a special song, any good old song would do. He had the feeling that he was in fine voice.

  “Dum dum dum dum. Do re mi fa so.” Lot of resonance in the old pipes.

  When the world steadied down a little, he would march over into the yard and try a nice melodic mating call.

  In the upper hallway Bertold-Jones-Hefton had oriented himself with the calculated risk of a single sweep of the needle beam of his penlight. So the target for tonight would be behind the door on the left or the door on the right. Eenie, meenie, miney, moe.

  He put his hand on the knob and turned it a fraction of an inch at a time. When he had turned it all the way he pushed and it opened slightly. He listened at the opening and heard no sound of breathing inside. He pulled it shut and released the knob as slowly and cautiously as he had turned it.

  He tried the opposite door and found it locked. This made sense to him. The target was a cautious man who knew there was a contract out on him and had nevertheless stayed alive for over two and a half years. He risked a single oblique flash of the tiny light. It was an old-fashioned keyhole. He had come prepared to cope with locks. If the key was in the lock, on the inside, he had a pair of needle-nose pliers, exceptionally thin, with which he could reach in and grasp the key and turn it as readily as it could be turned from the inside. He probed and found the key was not in the lock. His set of master keys and skeleton keys were tape-wrapped to reduce jingle. He found the one he wanted by touch alone, inserted it into the lock, and tested it gently. He felt the tumbler begin to move and exerted a gentle pressure. When he was past the midway point the bolt snapped over with a dismayingly loud sound, bringing his heart up into the base of his throat. After several seconds he put his ear against the door panel, and when he heard the rhythmic rasping snore inside the room, he was able to breathe again.

  He took three long minutes to open the door, enter the room and close it again. The room was pitch dark, and he could not risk a light. He went down onto his hands and knees and began to work his way toward the bed, reaching a cautious hand in front of him after every forward movement. The snoring was louder. He skirted a chair and touched what he decided was the foot of the bed. He worked his way along it. When he reached the head of the bed, he straightened up, still on his knees, to make certain from the sounds that there was but one person in the bed. After he had squeezed his eyes tightly shut many times and opened them wide, he was able to achieve just enough night vision to show him the vague outline of the sleeper. He was on his back, his left side toward Bertold.

  When Bertold was certain, he took the silent weapon out of his shirt. It was based on that homely tool of the Japanese assassin—a sharpened length of umbrella rib. But this was a six inch length of slim, superb steel set into a practical, homemade wooden handle, narrower than an umbrella rib, sharp enough to make a minute and almost painless puncture in the skin, but blunted enough to slip between ribs rather than catch in the bone itself.

  He edged closer, held the handle in his right hand, laid the tip of the blade along the index finger of his left hand, slowly reached out until his finger touched the rib cage. As soon as the fingertip settled into the indentation between ribs, and the sleeper stirred, the right hand slid the blade into the heart, then jabbed with several short swift strokes, turning the handle slightly each time, inflicting a maximum damage.

  There was a wheezing intake of breath, a hard gasp, a spasm, another spasm, and then a long rattling si
gh. Bertold held his breath and he could hear no sound in the room. He wiped the invisible blade on a scrap of tissue, folded the stain inward and put the tissue back in his pocket, the blade back into his shirt. He stood up and turned his penlight on the dead face. He turned the light off, stood in the darkness and shut his jaw so hard his ears rang. All this delicate, perfect, professional effort to kill the wrong man, to give him a plausible, unremarkable, fatal heart attack in the middle of the night. Probably the brother. What was his name? George. No loss to anybody, particularly, but it complicated the hell out of this job. Two identical deaths were out. If they weren’t identical, maybe it could be worked. He felt the indignation of the master craftsman who sees a superb effort wasted. He turned the light on again and, aware of his responsibility to his trade, wiped the single drop of blood from the rib cage. The orifice he had made was almost invisible, the flesh puckering, closing the opening.

  He told himself that he could not have risked the light. He told himself that it was a perfectly understandable accident. But he knew that he could not rationalize this mess. He had been too anxious to believe that it would be this easy. He had not felt right about this one. He had thought himself calm, but in actuality the fear had been so great he had not taken the elemental precaution of being certain of his man. From that horrible old woman’s jabbering, he had learned that Sidney Shanley would be either in this room or the one across the hall. That meant George had to be in the other one. And he had found one empty room, and the door locked on the other one. He had thought it Sidney Shanley because he wanted so desperately for it to be Sidney. This, he decided, had better be the last one. And this one was bitched. The next move was to get out of this room and out of the house and out of this stinking village, to a safe and quiet place where he could think it over and decide what to do next. He moved through darkness out into the hallway, closed the door and locked it again. He stood in the silence, hearing a meaningless creak of the frame of the old house. He moved silently toward the stairs.

  The abrupt change of the sound of the old man’s breathing brought her up out of her dream, her heart in her throat. It was a sound she had never heard before, a laboring gasp. She slipped out of her lover’s arms. He made a sleepy sound. She stepped into her slippers, snatched her robe and shouldered into it on the way to the bedroom door. She pulled the door open and closed it quietly and ran fleetly toward the top of the stairs, and ran headlong into one of the feral night things, one of the things out of the dreams of terror. She made a whimper as she was caught and turned, and a hardness clamped her throat.

  It frightened Bertold so badly, he nearly yelled in terror, but in the first instant he knew he grappled with the silks and warmths and fragrances of a woman. His strong hands went instantly to the lock that would bring a hard pressure against the carotid artery, starve the brain of blood and make her faint instantly. But he was so agitated, he did not get it exactly right. She was a strong woman, made stronger by panic, and he tried to shift the pressure to the proper place. Inadvertently he tried to overcome with strength his momentary awkwardness, and suddenly he felt the larynx go, crushing beneath his fingers with an odd brisk papery feel under the smooth heated flesh of her throat. He felt an overwhelming despair. He lowered her to the carpeting at the head of the stairs, on her back. She was making a horrid little clucking, squawking sound as she fought for air. He put his hand over her mouth. She brought her hands up and held onto his arm, firmly, as though she held the arm of someone trying to help her. She was very strong. She was trying so hard to live. Her lungs spasmed, fighting the obstacle. Then, in her extremity, she began to arch her body like a bow, lifting her hips, letting them thud back. He pressed his hand against the knotted muscles of her belly to hold her flat, and in soundless appeal, his lips moving, he said, “Die! For the love of God, die!”

  And then she settled, and softened and was gone. He sat on his heels there for a moment, dripping with sweat.

  Suddenly, from outside the front door came a great brassy baritone voice, singing off-key with great drunken confidence. “Gone are the days when our hearts were young and gay! Dum dum dee dum. From the cott-tton fields a-wayyyyyy.”

  Bertold forgot his tentative idea of leaving the woman crumpled at the foot of the stairs. He sprang to his feet. Every last fragment of composure was gone. He went racing and stumbling down the stairs, whimpering to himself. He burst out through the front door, ran into the hedge and fell and scrambled up.

  “Hey!” the singer yelled. “Hey! Hey, wait!”

  Bertold raced for his car, the singer lumbering along behind him rousing the quiet neighborhood with his yells. He tumbled into his car and started it and went roaring down through the sleeping village and off into the night.

  twelve

  At three o’clock in the morning, Doctor Ward Marriner came away from the old man’s bedside. He spoke to the woman he had been able to find to stay with the old man. She was a big starched woman, a practical nurse. He told her to watch for any change, and phone him. There was only one change he could reasonably expect.

  He went wearily into the hallway. A voice spoke from the shadows at the foot of the stairs, startling him. “How is the old man?”

  Marriner recognized Captain Lemon of the Bureau of Criminal Investigation of the State Police, a drab, quiet and earnest little man.

  “Dying,” Marriner answered. “Where’s the rest of your gang?”

  “They’re finished here, for now. I stayed to ask you a couple of things, if it’s okay with you. Thanks for the fast autopsy report.”

  “Fast and not exactly legal, you realize.”

  “I’ll cover you every way I can, like I said, Doctor. I want to know this. Suppose he didn’t kill the nurse up there in the hall. Suppose that drunk didn’t see him run out of the house. And tomorrow morning there’s a rush call for you to come and look at that George Shanley. What would you have called it?”

  “Heart. Massive coronary occlusion.”

  “But those other things happened, and we did find the scratches that showed the door had been unlocked and relocked from the hall, so we know he was killed with an ice pick.”

  “I didn’t say that, Captain. I said something like an ice pick. Possibly a little more flexible.”

  “Anyway, if it hadn’t been for the nurse and the drunken songbird, it would have been very neat and professional. But the reasons bother me. I couldn’t get much out of the brother. He was like a crazy man. George was apparently some sort of small time hoodlum from San Diego.”

  “Something like that.”

  “And the younger brother, Sid, he was in the nurse’s bed. Doctor, what the hell goes on around here?”

  “A lot of bad luck, Captain. Quite a lot of bad luck, I think. That poor son of a gun heard the commotion and the singing and came out and fell right over Paula’s body. Captain, I loved that girl. Not the way it sounds. As a friend. As a good friend, both to me and to Tom Brower. A lot of woman, Captain, in a lot of ways. I’m going to look in on Sid on my way home. See if I can bring him back here and give him a pill and put him to bed. Staying with her like that, he’s tearing himself apart.” He sighed and shook his head. “Sam Gates doesn’t get ten bodies a year. Tonight he gets two. And one to go. Captain, if you want to know what the hell went on around here tonight, I think you better get that fake photographer and ask him.”

  “Hefton. John Doe,” Lemon said quietly. “A professional, until things started to go wrong. The kid at the Inn took the license number when he checked in. We made the description of man and car sooner than we had any right to expect. It was a break.”

  “Will you get him?”

  Lemon stood up and stretched. “The longer he lasts, the worse it looks. Maybe he had another car stashed. I hope we get him. I’d like a little chat. I would dearly love a little chat with that savage little con man.”

  At that same moment, Bertold was being picked up at mile marker fifty-one on the Thruway. He had plausible explanations
for the trooper, but they were wasted because the trooper knew absolutely nothing beyond his orders to pick up the described car and driver. So Bertold knew he would be held and he knew how wrong it was going to go, and deplored his own failure to get rid of the keys and the little cutting pliers which could be matched to the severed windowscreen hook. And with a complete astonishment at his own mental lapses, he remembered the bloodied bit of tissue in the pocket of his trousers, the tissue he had used to wipe the slender weapon.

  During the hours of driving, holding the car exactly at the posted speed, he had known that he should revise plans, abandon the car, concentrate on the specifics. But when he would try to focus his mind, he would feel the woman’s hands holding his arm, feel the warm straining lift of her body, hear the horrid clucking. So he would hum and sing to cover the clucking noise and drive on.

  Now he could not accept what was happening to him. All the explanations—even if anyone would listen—were obsolete.

  So he faked a stumble, brought the trooper down with a judo chop, and sprinted toward the high wire fence fifty yards beyond the shoulder, knowing as he ran that he was in a blind panic, and should have paused long enough to kick the man in the head.