Out! Out!” He got up and began to back away slowly, first through the short hall between the kitchen and shadowy living room, then through the living room itself.
He noticed that an ancient pay telephone hung on the wall from the days when this had been a bona fide inn. The Blue Door, Guests. When was that? Richards wondered Twenty years ago? Forty? Before the darkies had gotten out of hand, or after?
He was just beginning to back down the hall between the living room and the front door when a key rattled in the lock. They both froze as if some celestial hand had stopped the film while deciding what to do next.
The door opened, and Elton Parrakis walked in. He was immensely fat, and his lackluster blond hair was combed back in preposterous waves from his forehead to show a round baby face that held an element of perpetual puzzlement. He was wearing the blue and gold uniform of the Vendo-Spendo Company. He looked thoughtfully at Virginia Parrakis.
“Put that knife down, Mom.”
“Nope!” she cried, but already the crumbling of defeat had begun to putty her face.
Parrakis closed the door and began walking toward her. He jiggled.
She shrank away. “You have to make him go, son. He’s that badman. That Richards. It’ll mean prison or worse.
He enfolded her and began to rock her gently as she wept. “I’m not going to jail,” he said. “Come on, Mom, don’t cry. Please don’t cry.” He smiled at Richards over one of her hunched and shaking shoulders, an embarrassed awfully-sorry-about-this smile. Richards waited.
“Now,” Parrakis said, when the sobs had died to sniffles. “Mr. Richards is Bradley Throckmorton’s good friend, and he is going to be with us for a couple of days, Mom.”
She began to shriek, and he clapped a hand over her mouth, wincing as he did so.
“Yes, Mom. Yes he is. I’m going to drive his car into the park and wire it. And you’ll go out tomorrow morning with a package to mail to Cleveland.”
“Boston,” Richards said automatically. “The tapes go to Boston.”
“They go to Cleveland now,” Elton Parrakis said, with a patient smile. “Bradley’s on the run.”
“Oh. Jesus.”
“You’ll be on the run, too!” Mrs. Parrakis howled at her son. “And they’ll catch you, too! You’re too fat!”
“I’m going to take Mr. Richards upstairs and show him his room, Mom.”
“Mr. Richards? Mr. Richards? Why don’t you call him by his right name? Poison!”
He disengaged her with great gentleness, and Richards followed him obediently up the shadowy staircase. “There are a great many rooms up here,” he said, panting slightly as his huge buttocks flexed and clenched. “This used to be a rooming house many years ago-when I was a baby. You’ll be able to watch the street.”
“Maybe I better go,” Richards said. “If Bradley’s blown, your mother may be right.”
“This is your room,” he said, and threw open a door on a dusty damp room that held the weight of years. He did not seem to have heard Richards’s comment. “It’s not much of an accommodation. I’m afraid, but-” He turned to face Richards with his patient I-want-to-please smile. “You may stay as long as you want. Bradley Throckmorton is the best friend I’ve ever had.” The smile faltered a bit. “The
Richards only repeated: “I better go.”
“You can’t, you know. That head bandage didn’t even fool Mom for long. I’m going to drive your car to a safe place, Mr. Richards. We’ll talk later.”
He left quickly, lumberingly. Richards noted that the seat of his uniform pants was shiny. He seemed to leave a faint odor of apologia in the room.
Pulling the ancient green shade aside a little, Richards saw him emerge on the cracked front walk below and get into the car. Then he got out again. He hurried back toward the house, and Richards felt a stab of fear.
Ponderously climbing tread on the stairs. The door opened, and Elton smiled at Richards. “Mom’s right,” he said. “I don’t make a very good secret agent. I forgot the keys.”
Richards gave them to him and then essayed a joke: “Half a secret agent is better than none.”
It struck a sour chord or no chord at all; Elton Parrakis carried his torments with him too clearly, and Richards could almost hear the phantom, jeering voices of the children that would follow him forever, like small tugs behind a big liner.
“Thank you,” Richards said softly.
Parrakis left, and the little car that Richards had come from New Hampshire in was driven away toward the park.
Richards pulled the dust cover from the bed and lay down slowly, breathing shallowly and looking at nothing but the ceiling. The bed seemed to clutch him in a perversly damp embrace, even through the coverlet and his clothes. An odor of mildew drifted through the channels of his nose like a senseless rhyme.
Downstairs, Elton’s mother was weeping.
MINUS 050 AND COUNTING
He dozed a little but could not sleep. Darkness was almost full when he heard Elton’s heavy tread on the stairs again, and Richards swung his feet onto the floor with relief.
When he knocked and stepped in, Richards saw that Parrakis had changed into a tentlike sports shirt and a pair of jeans.
“I did it,” he said. “It’s in the park.”
“Will it be stripped?”
“No,” Elton said. “I have a gadget. A battery and two alligator clips. If anyone puts his hand or a crowbar on it, they’ll get a shock and a short blast on a siren. Works good. I built it myself.” He seated himself with a heavy sigh.
“What’s this about Cleveland?” Richards demanded (it was easy, he found, to demand of Elton).
Parrakis shrugged. “Oh, he’s a fellow like me. I met him once in Boston, at the library with Bradley. Our little pollution club. I suppose Mom said something about that.” He rubbed his hands together and smiled unhappily.
“She said something,” Richards agreed.
“She’s… a little dim,” Parrakis said. “She doesn’t understand much of what’s been happening for the last twenty years or so. She’s frightened all the time. I’m all she has.”
“Will they catch Bradley?”
“I don’t know. He’s got quite a.. uh, intelligence network.” But his eyes slipped away from Richards’s.
“You-”
The door opened and Mrs. Parrakis stood there. Her arms were crossed and she was smiling, but her eyes were haunted. “I’ve called the police,” she said. “Now you’ll have to go.”
Elton’s face drained to a pearly yellowish-white. “You’re lying.”
Richards lurched to his feet and then paused, his head cocked in a listening gesture.
Faintly, rising, the sound of sirens.
“She’s not lying,” he said. A sickening sense of futility swept him. Back to square one. “Take me to my car.”
“She’s lying,” Elton insisted. He rose, almost touched Richards’s arm, then withdrew his hand as if the other man might be hot to the touch. “They’re fire trucks.”
“Take me to my car. Quick.”
The sirens were becoming louder, rising and falling, wailing. The sound filled Richards with a dreamlike horror, locked in here with these two crazies while-
“Mother-” His face was twisted, beseeching.
“I called them!” She blatted, and seized one of her son’s bloated arms as if to shake him. “I had to! For you! That darky has got you all mixed up! We’ll say he broke in and we’ll get the reward money-”
“Come on,” Elton grunted to Richards, and tried to shake free of her.
But she clung-stubbornly, like a small dog bedeviling a Percheron. “I had to. You’ve got to stop this radical business, Eltie! You’ve got to-”
“Eltie!” He screamed. “
“Quick,” Elton said, his face full of terror and misery. “Oh, come quick.”
They crashed and blundered down the stairs and out the front door, Elton breaking into gigantic, quivering trot. He was beginning to pant again.
And upstairs, filtering both through the closed window and the open door downstairs, Mrs. Parrakis’s scream rose to a shriek which met and mixed and blended with the approaching sirens: “I DID IT FOR YOOOOOOOOO-”
MINUS 049 AND COUNTING
Their shadows chased them down the hill toward the park, waxing and waning as they approached and passed each of the mesh-enclosed G.A. streetlamps. Elton Parrakis breathed like a locomotive, in huge and windy gulps and hisses.
They crossed the street and suddenly headlights picked them out on the far sidewalk in hard relief. Blue flashing lights blazed on as the police car came to a screeching, jamming halt a hundred yards away.
“
Gigantic, megaphone-booming voice.
“Your car… up ahead… see?” Elton panted.
Richards could just make the car out. Elton had parked it well, under a copse of run-to-seed birch trees near the pond.
The cruiser suddenly screamed into life again, rear tires bonding hot robber to the pavement in lines of acceleration, its gasoline-powered engine wailing in climbing revolutions. It slammed up over the curb, headlights skyrocketing, and came down pointing directly at them.
Richards turned toward it, suddenly feeling very cool, feeling almost numb. He dragged Bradley’s pistol out of his pocket, still backing up. The rest of the cops weren’t in sight. Just this one. The car screamed at them across the October-bare ground of the park, self-sealing rear tires digging out great clods of ripped black earth.
He squeezed off two shots at the windshield. It starred but did not shatter. He leaped aside at the last second and rolled. Dry grass against his face. Up on his knees, he fired twice more at the back of the car and then it was coming around in a hard, slewing power turn, blue lights turning the night into a crazy, shadow-leaping nightmare. The cruiser was between him and the car, but Elton
