boiling with irritation at having his plans for Mr. Genneret so rudely interrupted.
Chaingang was gone. Inside the office of the show and auction company, mean Dean Seabaugh, Sally Peebles, and Doyle Genneret shuffled papers and talked of a workaday things, oblivious to their luck. They should have run to their wheels, driven to the nearest airport, and chartered the first thing that would fly them to Vegas.
Lady luck was smiling on them this night. They'd come this close to riding the Genneret Exotic Animal, Livestock, Gun Show and Auction on the midnight red-eye straight to hell.
There are those to whom solitary confinement, isolation, and the horrors of restricted movement would be a nightmare. Others, perhaps, might find solace in the heart of private darkness. If it is all you have know, your escape can be a kind of exquisite pleasure—even the severe challenge of the biter.
He is wonderfully alone now, and the night is chill, but he relishes the feel of it on his enormous body and stands—nude and gigantic—the cold breeze somehow pleasant as it cools his skin. He thinks about monkeys. The lights in the distance twinkle and beckon, as his mindscreen scans poisons and toxic drugs in preparation for John Wayne Vodrey, the amputator of children's pets.
What care he will manifest in his application of extended pain to Mr. Vodrey. Curare, Pavulon, Succinycholine, and Venticol all cross his field of thought. Paralysis, respiratory malfunction, pain enhancement, each widen the travesty of a smile that distorts his doughy face.
Who is this strange, poor, genius, idiot, clown, killer, animal lover, people hater? Is he Lucifer, Gilles de Rais, Iago, or Frankenstein's monster? Whoever he is—he can hate. God on high, how can he hate! To him you are less than a microscopic mote, less than the smallest, slimiest elongate, less than a whiff of puke-stick, less than frog- spit on stagnant water, less than the sum of your parts which he will cheerfully render into blobs, clots, gouts, of bloody clabber and gure-deck. So imagine, if you will, how much he feel about Mr. Vodrey?
No evil will suffice. No screaming, splatter-drenched revenge will begin to palliate, abate, or atone. He cannot show Jones Wayne Vodrey the blunt chain-kiss of his great disdain or the Poe-fear of premature burial (paralyzed by rare poison and made insane by drug-enhanced awareness of pain) and the awful anticipation of the unknown. But he will come up with something.
Having identified the problem, his unique mind will collate and assess the product stored, produce a working hypothesis, test and reassess, forming in the anomaly that is his cerebral cortex a procedure and course of action.
Even now as he examines data retrieval, something tingles on his skin. Perhaps it is only the cool of the November night on his vast nakedness. As always, he does not ignore the pinpricks that have touched him.
He shivers as a leisurely lizardly slithery leathery feathery thing causes him to shudder in the darkness, while he watches the Tinytown lights across the flat field.
From the road one can see nothing, but from behind the ruins of the sharecropper shack—from the empty field—one would see the bright stab of light in the mouth of the thing, and know that a hot fire burned in the belly of the beast. It scared his innards with the unexpected intensity of the sensation that something, a factor out of his grasp and beyond his field of vision, was wrong.
Travel down Whitetail Road far enough in a meandering northwesterly direction, circling around the pond and through the surrounding cotton fields to the northwest, and you come to 771, a county blacktop that runs back toward the river. Right before you hit Market Road there's a little job to the right, nothing more than a gravel run, and it will take you through a pit stop known locally as Finch Hollow.
There's a cafe and general store that doubles as the post office drawer for the thirty or so inhabitants of the tiny farm community, a gas station, a feed-and-seed operation, and an out-of-the-way pay phone located over by an MFA oil sign.
The same phone had been used the day before by a “Mr. Norman of General Discount Stores, calling from Scottsville, Kentucky.” He had reserved a room at the Tennessee Motor Courts of Maysburg, for their sales manager, “Mr. Conway.” They thought he would be checking in within the next couple of days. They'd call and cancel if he was going to be late. “He'll bill it to his Visa or MasterCard,” the sissified voice of Mr. Norman proclaims to the motel clerk. The line rang.
“Tennessee Motor Courts, Good Evening.'
“Good Evening. This is Mr. Conway. I believe my company made a reservation for me—General Discount in Scottsville, Kentucky?” The rumbling basso profundo resonated in the motel clerk's ears.
“One moment, sir. Yes. We have your reservation.'
“Well, I'm sorry. I'm not going to be able to get there for a couple of days. I'd like to change my reservation accordingly. May I do so?'
“You certainly may. Any how long will you be staying with us?'
“Just one evening, the way it looks now. Say, listen, I've got a package that I've had forwarded to me there at your motel. And I'm afraid it's going to get there before I will. Is that going to cause a problem?'
“No, I don't think so. I'll make sure the other clerks on duty know that a package will be coming for you, and we'll just hold it at the front desk for you. Okay?'
“I appreciate that. Thanks. That'll be a big help.'
“The package is coming addressed to you here?'
“Yes. It's from a clothing store out East, East Coast Big and Tall. And I also have a fellow sending over some petty cash, which I would like the front desk to hold for me—the reason I'm doing that, the package is being delivered by taxi cab, and I want the clerk to pay the driver out of my cash envelope. Can that be arranged?'
“Well...” The clerk was suddenly on his guard. They'd never had to do anything like this before, and he wasn't sure. “I'd have to ask my manager.'
“Listen—that's fine—but there's no problem. It's very simple. You'll be getting an envelope in tomorrow's mail, and I'll check back by phone to make sure the cash is on hand. It has fifty dollars inside—in cash. I doubt if the cab driver will charge more than twenty dollars, and I want to give him a least twenty dollars for a tip...” the deep voice rumbled on, confusing the clerk with a stream of details. The clerk had to break away twice to answer calls and deal with the desk traffic.
During the telephone call the name Conway and General Discount Stores became identifiable in the clerk's mind. When they finally saw the envelope with the return address “Mr. W. Conway, Scottsville, Kentucky,” with the big red GDS logo, it would all be an official paid-for transaction. Nothing solves problems like crisp new ten-dollar bills and corporate name. The motel would “sell” the transaction, in turn, to a taxi driver who would be asked to pick up ad deliver a package that had arrived in care of general deliver.
The cab driver would already have his cash in hand. If he was asked to leave a package atop a certain pay telephone kiosk or booth, he might think it weird, but he would be likely to comply. Mr. Conway was going to be born again—born out of the box—and no one would see the delivery.
Mr. Conway, who would materialize at some far-flung location, might or might not remember to cancel his reservation at the Tennessee Motor Courts of Maysburg. And the busy clerks would never think it a bit odd that the envelope containing fifty dollars cash had been postmarked “Finch Hollow, Missouri.'
Nor would they know that the corporate envelope was one of several that had been retrieved from the bottom of a company dumpster.
28
Somebody was always uttering succinct aphorisms that stayed in the back of the mind and cooked. When you needed a profound thought, and you reached back in too far, you'd grab one of those all-purpose maxims instead. “Vigilance is the price of liberty.” Who said that?
The price of vigilance—that was something else. That price was up there in the stratosphere. It could cost you. The price of one's thrills could get up there, also. You do pay for your big chills—no question about it. There was another adage to live by.
Royce sipped at his wine, but it had gone bad. It was bitter. Nothing tastes so strong as raw truth, taken straight.
“World Ecosphere, Inc., presents ECOWORLD,” he read from the glossy brochure, “with a commitment to
