John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 02 - Nightmare In Pink

by Nightmare In Pink(lit)

  "You feel okay?" she asked, out of a mouth that was sliding down her throat into the top of her uniform.

  "Just a little residual hallucination."

  "Huh? Oh."

  "I'll be back for some of your delicious coffee, angel."

  "You do that."

  "Don't melt while I'm gone."

  "Melt? It isn't hot in here, man."

  The door kept receding as I walked toward it. It took me three or four hours to reach it. I went into the corridor. I found a storage room. I folded myself into a cement corner behind huge cartons of toilet paper, and held my fists against my eyes and tried to keep the whole world from melting away into a pink eternal nothing.

  In seven or eight months the world began to refocus and solidify. The musical chord died away, and I could hear clattering, shouts, a bell ringing.

  I got up and walked out into a vast confusion. I heard glass breaking. Two men were trying to hold a third man. He was screaming, spasming, throwing them all over the corridor. I edged by them. A woman stood braced with her back against the wall, eyes closed, expression dreamy, slowly driving her nails into her cheeks and yanking them out again, blood running onto her beige blouse. I walked by her. I reached the main entrance.

  The world was out there, beyond tall glass, a bright cool morning. A man on all fours was in a corner, trying to ram his way through, backing up and lunging forward like a big stubborn turtle trapped in a box. A girl sat spraddled on the floor. Her blouse was ripped to rags. Her empty eyes looked at me. She was sucking her thumb and slowly massaging her small loose breasts.

  A man lay quite still just outside the main doors. I stepped over him. I heard sirens. I saw ambulances. People were running toward the building. They ignored me. I saw the parking lot and walked steadily toward it.

  Off to my right I saw a fat woman running in a big circle as though she were running an imaginary base path. A big car came into the lot just as I got there. A man slammed the brakes on and piled out. "What the hell is going on?" he demanded. "What's happening in there?"

  I turned him around and rapped him behind the ear with my length of pipe. When he fell, his car keys spilled out of his hand. I peeled his topcoat off and put it on. I took his car and drove away from there. Fifteen minutes later I was on the Thruway, heading south toward the city.

  Twenty minutes later the sides of the highway began to curl upward and turn pink and the musical sound began again. I had to pull off. It took twenty minutes to get from my lane to the shoulder. The car was barely moving. But when it reached the shoulder it began to leap up and down.

  I stopped it short of a tree and lay down on the seat with my arms wrapped around my head. My own face was melting off. I could feel it. I could hear it drip onto the seat upholstery.

  Several months later the world resolidified and I drove on.

  I drove down off the parkway at Forty-sixth. I drove over Forty-fourth and abandoned the car a couple of blocks short of Times Square. I walked south and found a sleazy hotel and paid five-fifty for a small sour room.

  I stretched out on the bed, still in the stolen topcoat, and waited for the edges of everything to start to turn pink again.

  I had noticed the clock in the lobby. It was quarter after ten. I wondered what year it was.

  Twelve

  WE ARE supposed to learn from our mistakes. I had walked into the Armister situation with all the jaunty confidence of a myopic mouse looking for a piece of cheese in the cobra cage.

  But by the narrowest margin possible I had escaped spending the rest of my life as a very happy fellow working, perhaps, in a shoe factory over in Jersey.

  I had to make some kind of a move now, but everything I could think of scared me. The Mulligan group had all kinds of weight and pressure. I was an escaped nut. A demonstrably murderous nut. And I had no proof of anything.

  Charlie was my walking proof. Charlie was my boy. But I didn't see how I could get to within a thousand yards of him.

  But maybe somebody else could, if they knew enough... Like a loving wife?

  I picked my phone up. A thin and adenoidal voice said, "You wanna make any outside calls, you got to leave the money at the desk. Twenny cents each, local calls."

  I found my apprehensive way down and left a dollar and got back to safe refuge. Then I realized how stupid I was being. I had made all the mistakes I was permitted. I rubbed cold water on my face and studied my mirror image. The eyes looked strange. With the topcoat buttoned, the white jacket did not show. I had a crust of one-day beard. Noticeable, but not too bad.

  I went down again and got change for my dollar and found the phone booths in the dim back of the stale lobby.

  I tried the Plaza. Mrs. Drummond was not registered. They gave me a forwarding address in Athens.

  I leaned against the phone for a little while. I got information. She looked up the Long Island number for Mr. Charles Armister, told me how to dial it and how much to feed the coin slots.

  I got a soft-voiced. woman with a pronounced accent. She told me Mrs. Armister was in the city. At the apartment. She gave me the phone number. I checked the book. It was the number listed for the other apartment, the one further uptown.

  I dialed that one. Terry Drummond answered. That brassy sardonic voice was one of the world's better sounds.

  "McGee! They bought you off, obviously. What's the matter, ducks? You want to see if you can get a better price from me? How'd you find me?"

  "Nobody bought me off."

  "Sweetie, it was perfectly obvious to me from your note that..."

  "Shut up! I have something important to tell you, Terry. I don't know how much time I have. I wasn't bought off. They had me in a mental hospital."

  "In a what?"

  "Get a pencil and paper so you can write things down. I don't know how long I can last. I'll try to give you the cold facts."

  "Hold on just a minute, Trav."

  I waited. A softer voice came on the line and gave a cautious, "Hello?"

  It had a little of the quality of Terry's voice, but was far more subdued.

  "Trav? Joanna is on the extension."

  "This isn't the sort of thing she should hear, Terry."

  "If it has anything to do with my husband, I want to hear it," Mrs. Armister said firmly.

  "All right. I don't know how you can check these things out, but if you get good lawyers and get the authorities in on it, maybe you can move. Baynard Mulligan heads up a group which has stolen six million dollars so far from Charles Armister. There are nine of them. Mulligan, Penerra and Bonita Hersch, those are the only names I know. They plan to work at it for another eighteen months and build it up to twenty million and then skip. When anybody gets troublesome, they get put in the Mental Research Wing of the Toll Valley Hospital up across the river from Poughkeepsie. Write these things down. They've got people up there now who got in the way. Olan Harris, who was the chauffeur. A secretary named Doris Wrightson. And others whose names I don't know. They get them legally committed. They did that to me too. I escaped this morning. I killed a man getting out of there."

  "Dear God," Terry rumbled.

  "That's where Charles went when he..."

  "Shut up, Joanna," Terry said.

  "When Charlie was up there," I said, "they operated on him. They stuck a knife in his head. I think it's called a lobotomy. That made him easy to manage. They keep him happy, and he signs anything. But anybody who didn't know him before would think he was perfectly all right."

  I heard a soft, weak wailing cry of despair and Terry said sharply, "Pull yourself together, Jo!"

  "Write down these names of doctors. God knows where they came from, or how they ever got licenses. Mulligan has them in the palm of his hand. He supports the experimental program. Varn, Moore, Daska and Wilkerson. And listen. Don't go flying off in all directions. There's a hell of a mess out there right now, but if they can get it quieted down fast enough, and if you get in the way, you both could end up out there with little
wires in your heads, and electric currents making you jump around like monkeys on a stick."

  "Can this be true?" Joanna wailed.

  "Sister, dear, I will vouch for McGee. He is a very rough type, and he sounds angry, and what he says explains a lot of very curious things. McGee, where are you? Can I help you? What do you need?"

  "Money."

  "Sweetie, I have the thousand dollars I was going to use to bribe that tart who never showed up. Will that help?"

  "A lot. But get moving on this other stuff first. Listen. This is important for both of you. Don't eat out. Don't drink anything anywhere. Fix your own food and drink right there and don't let anybody near it. Don't even let anybody buy it for you."

  "But why?"

  "One drop of a tasteless, odorless substance can turn you into something they come after with a net. They worked it on me, maybe on Charlie and probably on the others. It imitates insanity."

  "Sweetie, this is priceless. I used to adore Fu Man Chu."

  "You have a great sense of humor, Terry. You are as funny as a crutch."

  "I'm sorry Trav. It's just my image speaking."

  "By now Mulligan knows I'm loose, I would imagine. He is going to be very anxious to find me and shut my mouth. And he can afford a lot of help. I need money, and then I need a place to go, a place for two people to go, if I can..."

  "Sweetie, where are you?"

  I drew such a blank I had to look at the tag on my room key. "The Harbon Hotel on West 41st. Room 303."

  "You wait right there," she said and hung up. But I was in a horrid haste to find the next number and fumble the next dime into the slot. I had thought the best thing to do would be to protect Nina by staying out of touch with her. But in telling Terry what Mulligan might do, I had realized Nina was the best possible weapon for him to use against me. He had proved that point once.

  The cool British accent of the receptionist was an implacable barrier. She was teddibly sorry, Miss Gibson was in conference and could not be disturbed. I said it was life and death. She said that if I would leave my name and number, she would have Miss Gibson call me. I cursed her and she sighed and broke the connection. With my last dime I called back.

  With great gentleness I stressed the urgency of the situation. I begged her to have Miss Gibson phone Mr. Jones in Room 303 at the Harbon Hotel as soon as possible. I stressed the room number. I was certain the place was full of Joneses, miss and mister.

  I bought a paper. The stairs tilted sideways. The railing felt like a wet snake. I shoved seven keys at seven keyholes and they all fitted and all turned, and I stumbled into a pink room and curled up on the bed, my knees against my chest.

  As I fought it, I thought with a sickening remorse of the people out there at Toll Valley-the man butting his head into a corner, the woman pulling bits of meat out of her face, the thumb sucker, the base runner-all of them so ruthlessly tumbled into that horrible place where reality was warped, where things came out of the wall. They were all innocents. They could not know that the private hospital was being used in a vicious way. They were staff, visitors, ambulatory patients, anybody entitled to go into the dining room and have a cup of nightmare.

  It dwindled away. All the pink unstable edges turned back to normal hue and I straightened myself out, in post-hallucination depression. For the ultimate in depressive experiences, try a little jolt of induced insanity while wearing a dead man's clothing in a cheap hotel room.

  Cold air-shaft light came into the room, shining on the dusty sour rug, on a blonde bureau with missing knobs, on places on the headboard of the bed where brown paint had been chipped and gouged away. Ten thousand people had left a stink of loneliness in this room. Here they had paced, coughed, snapped their knuckle bones, spilled their drinks, taken their pills, belched, sighed, wept, scratched, dreamed, vomited, smoked, bragged, cursed and groaned. In this room each had endured his or her own special kind of sickness, felt despair, and either accepted or inflicted something they called love.

  I saw the paper where I had dropped it, just inside the door. I went over and got it and took it back to the bed. While I had been in the blurry world of induced dreams and visions, the other world had trudged its way along to a November Tuesday. Education bill returned to committee. Three injured in Birmingham bomb attack. Actress beats narcotics rap. Seven dead in Freeway collision. Park lands sold to campaign contributor. Truck strike in eighth week. Thirty-nine dead in jet crash. Model claims fractured jaw in divorce action. Disarmament talks stalled. Teacher accused of teen slayings. Earthquake in Peru. Launching failure. Tax cut stymied...

  ... I was back in the sane, reasonable, plausible world.

  * * *

  Terry Drummond rapped at my door and I let her in. She wore fifteen thousand dollars worth of glossy fur coat. Her brown simian face wrinkled with distaste as she looked around. "God, what a scrimey hole!" The coat swung open. The body of eternal girl was clad in gray slacks and a wine-red cardigan. She stared at me. "And you look worn around the edges, dear. And thinner. And where did you get that grim grubby clothing?"

  "Off the boy I had to kill to get out of there."

  She swallowed and sat down quickly. "You do get damned explicit. Maybe I'm not as used to the facts of life as I thought I was. But we did hear Toll Valley Hospital very prominently mentioned over the noon news broadcast."

  "What did they say?"

  "Something about mysterious poisoning, four dead in violent and unpleasant ways, and dozens injured, and dozens out of their mind, patients escaping and so on; and apparently the first batch of people who got there to quiet things down suddenly began to go just as mad as the rest of them. They said something about experimental drugs getting out of hand. It seems that there is still a state of horrible confusion up there, and all kinds of investigations being started, and experts roaring in from all over, and reporters and police and television and everything. Did you do all that, darling boy?"

  I did not answer. Four dead. Four innocents.

  "Trav?" she said in the softest voice I had ever heard her use. I lifted my head and looked at her.

  "Please don't look so terribly agonized. You did what you had to do. I'm sure of that. I've started things going. I believe what you said about them doing something terrible to Charlie out at that place. From the news report, it sounds as if you managed to destroy it. I'm not going to let anything happen to you on account of that, believe me. They were giving you drugs, weren't they?"

  "They were giving me drugs."

  "Then you cannot be held responsible. Which is worse, Trav, some deaths and injuries, or that place going on and on... doing things to people?"

  "I can devise my own rationalizations, thanks."

  "Don't be cold and cruel. Sweetie, I brought the money, but after I got Joanna calmed down, we had another idea. You want a safe place for two people? The other one would be your little Gibson girl you told me about? My dear Roger King is alerting all the legal troops. I am certain he can erect some sort of protective throng around the apartment at East Seventy-ninth. It's really quite vast, and Joanna brought in some of the staff from the Island. I don't think we'd need extra protection, but it would probably make you happier. So let's go on back to the apartment, and then I can go gather up your little friend, and we can all sit there and plan the utter destruction of creepy Baynard."

  "How did you get here?"

  "By taxi. He's sitting down there with his meter clicking."

  "You just walked out of the apartment and took a cab."

  "Of course," she said blankly.

  "And nobody followed you?"

  "My word, aren't we getting a bit paranoiac?" My phone rang.

  "Hello?"

  "Trav! Oh, Tray, darling, thank God!"

  "That letter I wrote you..."

  "Was the most complete nonsense ever written. It was a cry for help. I was going out of my mind with worry The moment I got it I went at once to..."

  "We better do our talking later. Do exactly
as I say, Nina. It's very important. Get out of there as soon as you can. if there is any kind of back exit or side exit, use it."

  "But..."

  "That place where we went, near your office, that first day. Go there. Wait for me there. Don't have a drink. Just wait for me. Don't talk to anybody. Just wait there alone."