The Dark Half

slammed at once.

  He pushed the elevator button. The doors of the car he'd ridden up in after knocking out his second doorman of the evening (with the cane he had stolen from the blind man on 60th Street) opened at once, as he had expected they would — at this hour of the night, the three elevators were not exactly in great demand. He tossed the gun back over his shoulder. It thumped onto the carpet.

  'That went all right,' he remarked, got into the elevator car, and rode down to the lobby.

5

The sun was coming up in Rick Cowley's living-room window when the telephone rang. Rick was fifty, red-eyed, haggard, half drunk. He picked up the telephone with a hand that shook badly. He hardly knew where he was, and his tired, aching mind kept insisting all this was a dream. Had he been, less than three hours ago, down at the borough morgue on First Avenue, identifying his ex— wife's mutilated corpse less than a block from the chic little French restaurant where they took only the clients who were also friends? Were there police outside his door, because the man who had killed Mir might also want to kill him? Were these things true? Surely not. It surely had to be a dream . . . and maybe the phone wasn't really the phone at all but the bedside alarm. As a rule, he hated that fucking thing . . . had thrown it across the room on more than one occasion. But this morning he would kiss it. Hell, he would Frenchkiss it.

But he didn't wake up. Instead he answered the telephone. 'Hello?'

   'This is the man who cut your woman's throat,' the voice in his ear said, and Rick was suddenly wide awake. Any lingering hope he'd had that this was all just a dream dissipated. It was the sort of voice you should only hear in dreams . . . but that is never where you hear it.

'Who are you?' he heard himself asking in a strengthless little voice.

    'Ask Thad Beaumont who I am,' the man said. 'He knows all about it. Tell him I said you're walking around dead. And tell him I'm not done making fool's stuffing yet.'

   The phone clicked in his ear, there was a moment of silence, and then the vapid hum of an open line.

Rick lowered the telephone into his lap, looked at it, and suddenly burst into tears.

6

At nine that morning, Rick called the office and told Frieda that she and John should go home — they would not be working today, nor for the rest of the week. Frieda wanted to know why and Rick was astounded to find himself on the verge of lying to her, as if he had been busted for some nasty and serious crime — child molestation, say — and couldn't bring himself to admit it until the shock was a little less acute.

'Miriam is dead,' he told Frieda. 'She was killed in her apartment last night.'

    Frieda drew in her breath in a quick, shocked hiss. 'Jesus—God, Rick! Don't joke about things like that! You joke about things like that, they come true!'

  'It is true, Frieda,' he said, and found he was on the edge of tears again. And these — the ones he'd shed at the morgue, the ones he'd shed in the car coming back here, the ones he'd shed when that crazy man called, the ones he was trying not to shed now these were only the first. Thinking of all the tears in his future made him feel intensely weary. Miriam had been a bitch, but she had also been, in her own way, a sweet bitch, and he had loved her. Rick closed his eyes. When he opened them, there was a man looking in at him through the window, even though the window was fourteen stories up. Rick started, then saw the uniform. A window-cleaner. The windowcleaner waved to him from his scaffold. Rick lifted a hand in a token return salute. The hand seemed to weigh somewhere in the neighborhood of eight hundred pounds, and he let it fall back onto his thigh almost as soon as he had raised it.

   Frieda was telling him again not to joke, and he felt more weary than ever. Tears, he saw, were only the beginning. He said, 'Just a minute, Frieda,' and put the phone down. He went to the window to draw the drapes. Crying over the telephone with Frieda at the other end was bad enough; he didn't have to have the goddam window-cleaner watch him do it.

   As he reached the window, the man on the scaffold reached into the slash pocket of his coverall to get something. Rick felt a sudden twinge of unease. Tell him I said you're walking around dead.

  (Jesus — )

  The window—cleaner brought out a small sign. It was yellow with black letters. The message was flanked with moronic smiley-smile faces. HAVE A NICE DAY! it read.

  Rick nodded wearily. Have a nice day. Sure. He drew the drapes and went back to the phone.

7

When he finally convinced Frieda he wasn't joking, she burst into loud and utterly genuine sobs — everyone at the office and all the clients, even that goddam putz Ollinger, who wrote the bad science fiction novels and who had apparently dedicated himself to the task of snapping every bra in the Western world, had liked Mir — and, sure enough, Rick cried with her until he finally managed to disengage himself. At least, he thought, I closed the drapes.

  Fifteen minutes later, while he was making coffee, the crazy man's call jumped into his head again. There were two cops outside his door, and he hadn't told them a thing. What in hell was wrong with him?

   Well, he thought, my ex-wife died, and when I saw her at the morgue it looked like she'd grown an extra mouth two inches below her chin. That might have something to do with it.

Ask Thad Beaumont who I am. He knows all about it.

    He had meant to call Thad, of course. But his mind was still in free fall — things had assumed new proportions which he did not, at least as yet, seem capable of grasping. Well, he would call Thad. He would do it just as soon as he told the police about the call.

  He did tell them, and they were extremely interested. One of them got on his walkie-talkie to police headquarters with the information. When he finished, he told Rick that the chief of detectives wanted him to come down to One Police Plaza and talk to them about the call he had received. While he did that, a fellow would pop into his apartment and fit his telephone with a tape-recorder and traceback equipment. In case there were any more calls.

    'There probably will be,' the second cop told Rick. 'These psychos are really in love with the sound of their own voices.'

'I ought to call Thad first,' Rick said. 'He may be in trouble, too. That's the way it sounded.'

   'Mr Beaumont has already been placed under police protection up in Maine, Mr Cowley. Let's go, shall we?'

'Well, I really think — '

'Perhaps you can call him from the Big One. Now — do you have a coat?'

So Rick, confused and not at all sure any of this was real, allowed himself to be led away.

8

When they got back two hours later, one of Rick's escorts frowned at his apartment door and said, 'There's no one here.'

  'So what?' Rick asked wanly. He felt wan, like a pane of milky glass you could almost see through. He had been asked a great many questions, and had answered them as well as he could — a difficult task, since so few of them seemed to make any sense.

  'If the guys from Communications finished before we got back, they were supposed to wait.'

  'They're probably inside,' Rick said.

  'One of them, maybe, but the other one should be out here. It's standard procedure.'

    Rick took out his keys, shuffled through them, found the right one, and slipped it into the lock. Any problems these fellows might be having with the operating procedure of their colleagues was no concern of his. Thank God; he had all the concerns he could manage this morning. 'I ought to call Thad first thing,' he said. He sighed and smiled a little. 'It isn't even noon and I already feel like the day is never going to e — '

'Don't do that!' one of the cops shouted suddenly, and sprang forward.