The Stalker

Gray and Red had offered no real challenge. Gray, for example, had been in the habit of working late at his trucking concern three nights each week. The limping man simply waited in the shadows of the garage, having gained entrance through a rear window with a simple spring catch, until Gray made his usual cursory night check of the premises before leaving. Then he had slipped up behind him and wielded a sand-filled stocking. Propping the unconscious Gray against the concrete wall in front of one of the trucks, he had then released the vehicle’s hand brake; he had already begun climbing through the rear window again when the loud, satisfying sound of truck and Gray and wall fusing into one reached his ears.

Red had kept his private plane at a small airport on the outskirts of Philadelphia, in a hangar which a child could have gained access to. The small cold-expander bomb, which had taken the limping man no time at all to construct in his motel room, had fit neatly out of sight beneath one of the wings. When Red had taken the plane up to a certain altitude, when a pre-set atmospheric temperature had been reached, the bomb—and the aircraft—had exploded. There had been, of course, no trace of the small device in the subsequent wreckage.

The limping man finished his sandwich and coffee. Now at hand was the problem of Yellow. How would he do it this time? Perhaps the solution lay with Yellow himself. Yes, there was one particular habit which Yellow had, one that he had noted during the careful surveillance he had made on his previous trip to California. There was little, if any, risk involved if he proceeded along that particular line. Yes. Yes, of course.

Hurriedly, he dabbed at his mouth with a cloth napkin and stepped out of the booth. The man in the blue blazer and the flame-haired girl were still holding hands beneath the table in the booth opposite, eyes smiling warmly at one another.

A slut and her pimp, the limping man thought. He walked quickly to the cash register.

5

The doorbell rang at seven-fifty.

Conscious of a painful tightness in his chest, as if some unknown pressure was slowly constricting his lungs, Steve Kilduff opened the door. The lean, solemn man who stood there said, “Hello, Steve,” without expression.

Kilduff nodded wordlessly, and the two men studied each other for a long moment, appraising the effect of the passage of eight years’ time. Kilduff thought: He’s changed, he’s really changed, you can see it in his eyes. He moved aside, swinging the door open wider. Jim Conradin came in past him, walking stiffly, hands held in regimental immobility at his sides. Kilduff closed the door and led the way into the living room, turning when he reached the center to look again at the man who had been his closest friend in the Air Force.

Conradin asked, “Drexel?”

“He’s not here yet.”

“It’s almost eight.”

“Yes.”

Conradin walked in his stiff way to the sofa and sat down slowly, like an old man seating himself on a park bench. Without looking up, he said, “Have you got a drink, Steve?” and Kilduff realized for the first time that Conradin was drunk. His gaunt-cheeked face was flushed, and there was a vague filminess to his eyes; the effort he was making to appear natural was obvious now, and he was holding himself in check by sheer will.

I am not my brother’s keeper, Kilduff thought. He said, “Brandy all right?”

“Fine.”

Kilduff took a bottle of Napoleon brandy from the credenza and poured a drink into a small snifter. He carried the glass to Conradin, who accepted it with a steady hand, raising it to his lips, drinking with measured, care, his eyes almost closed, trying to bring it off oh-so-casually, and failing, failing badly. Kilduff looked away.

“Well,” Conradin said, “some funny thing, isn’t it, Steve?”

“What is?”

“The three of us living so close to one another and not knowing it all these years.”

“Not so funny,” Kilduff said. “You and I are natives of this area, Jim. And Larry was always talking about moving to California.”

“Sure, that’s right.” Conradin drank nervously from his glass. “Listen, what did Drexel tell you? About this meeting tonight?”

“Not much. You?”

“Just that it was important.”

“What did he say about the others?”

“They won’t be here, that’s all.”

Kilduff sat down and looked at his hands. “I don’t like this, Jim.”

“What do you think it-means?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s been more than eleven years.”

“Yes,” Kilduff said.

“Nobody could have found out after eleven years, could they?” Conradin said. “It has to be something else.”

Kilduff said nothing.

Conradin sipped slowly at the brandy. It was very quiet in the shadowed apartment; the only light came from a brass curio lamp next to the couch, bathing one side of Conradin’s face in soft white and leaving the other darkly in shadow. After a time he said, “Do you think much about it, Steve? What we did, I mean?”

“Sometimes.”

“I can’t bury it,” Conradin said. “Nothing helps. The guilt keeps eating at me like a cancer. I keep seeing that guard’s face—the one I hit. I wake up sweating in the middle of the night, seeing it.”

Kilduff did not say anything.

“It bothers you, too, doesn’t it?”

“No,” Kilduff said.

“Why did we do it, Steve?”

“Why do you suppose? We did it for the money.”

“Yes, the money. But I mean, what made us go through with it? It started out as a game, a way to pass the time while we were waiting for our discharge papers, one of those let’s plot the perfect crime’ things that hundreds of people must play every day. What made us go through with it?”

“It was foolproof,” Kilduff answered. “We realized it would work not only in theory but in actuality, that we could get away with it.”

“Do you remember the newspaper accounts?”

“I remember them.”

“They said we were incredibly lucky. They said dozens of things could have gone wrong.”

“But nothing did, Jim.”

“No, nothing did.”

“It was a good plan,” Kilduff said. The pressure in his chest had increased somewhat, now. “No matter what the papers said.”

“We could have been caught so damned easily,” Conradin said. “We could have been rotting away in a prison cell all these years.”

“Jim,” Kilduff said quietly, “Jim, you voted in, just like the rest of us. If there’d been one abstention, we wouldn’t have gone through with it, that was the agreement. You knew the risks then; we’d been over them time and again, and you voted in.”

“Ill tell you something,” Conradin said. He was staring into the brandy snifter. “I was so goddamned scared after I hit that guard that I lost control and shit in my pants. I just sat there in it while we were driving, and I wasn’t ashamed.”

Jesus, Kilduff thought. He said, “We were all scared.”

“I don’t think Drexel was. Or Wykopf or Beauchamp.”

“Why? Because they did the actual holdup? We drew straws for that, Jim.”

“Sure,” Conradin said. “Sure, that’s right.”

The doorbell rang again.