My guts knotted up inside me, but I had to get it out. “Yes.” I looked around for Ferris, waiting to hear his sardonic little chuckle.
But Ferris had disappeared back into the past and had left me alone with his terrible present.
You don’t maintain a posture of dignity when you’re staring down the ugly muzzle of a .45 automatic. Not when you know the history of the guy behind the blued steel and thought that he had been eliminated hours ago. Not when you’re in a pair of striped shorts and nothing else, with skinny legs that couldn’t hold still and a lovely blonde woman who had brand-new case-hardened eyes watching you out of mild curiosity and total disdain.
I said, “Just one more time, friend, or Weller-Fabray loses your services permanently. You know the new contact number and you know where he’s at.”
“Please ... Mr. Kelly, you know what will happen if I tell you where ...”
I grinned that same old nasty grin and he saw my hand tighten around the gun butt. “I know what will happen if you don’t.”
It wasn’t much of a choice. If he told me, at least he had an hour’s head start.
So he told me and I coldcocked him for a long sleep with the Colt.
I put the gun away and let my expression fade back where it came from and went back to the truck with Sharon. I looked at my watch. We still had another hour before sunrise. It was the time of day when New York City was in its postorgasmic trance, buried in its smog-choked dreams, the hour between those going and those coming. The rain was trying hard, but there would never be enough of it to clean the stains from its steel-and-concrete skin. I turned the truck and cut across town to a gas station where I had one phone call to make, filled the tank, grabbed two coffees from the dispenser and got back in the cab again.
When Sharon took the steaming cup I handed her she said, “Would you really have killed him, Dog?”
I shoved the gear lever in low and let the clutch out. “He wouldn’t have been the first.”
“I didn’t ask you that.”
A long time ago Freeport had been a lazy little village on Long Island, a short pleasure jaunt down the Sunrise Highway from the big zoo of Fun City. But that was a long time ago before progress had set in, with miscalculated planning and the population explosion to guide it. Now it was just another choked-up town with bumper-to-bumper parked cars walling it in, demanding to be called a suburb, struggling against the ebb and flow of traffic and charge accounts.
I found the street and I found the number of the pale yellow house that was the last on the block and coasted into the driveway with the lights off.
Off in the east the dull glow of a false dawn was backlighting the mist that shrouded the coastline. Inside the yellow house Chet Linden would be sleeping quietly, secure in the knowledge that the order was given, the order had been carried out, and the age of electronic engineering was the big wall no enemy could breech.
Sharon watched me while I breeched his ramparts with a pair of cute little gimmicks, bypassing the circuits in a way that would make him put knots on the heads of the so-called experts later on. She stood by quietly while I slid in the window, deactivated the secondary alarm on the door and she walked in with those steely eyes enjoying the moment ... eyes of an animal lover waiting to see the bull kill the matador.
He woke up when he felt the cold end of the rod under his chin and heard me say. “Lights, honey.”
The overhead fixture snapped on and Chet came awake with an incredible expression of hate at himself because he had failed and didn’t bother to move toward the gun I snaked out from under his pillow and just lay still until I found the sawed-off bayonet beside his leg in arm’s reach.
“You made a gross mistake, Chet. I told you to lay off. I even told you what would happen if you didn’t.”
He was watching the gun in my hand. He saw the hammer lying all the way back and the hole in the end looked as big as the tunnel to hell.
“You’re sharp, Dog. What happened to Blackie and the others?”
“Guess.”
“So you finally turned the corner,” he stated.
“Get up and get dressed.”
He looked over at Sharon.
“She’s seen bare-assed guys before.”
“I have to get dressed to get killed?”
“You always told me I had class.”
“There’s always the end of the line for people like us, isn’t there?”
“Always.”
“Sorry about that, Dog.”
“Don’t be sorry.”
“Oh, not for me. For you. I hate to see you turn that corner.” He kicked his feet out from under the covers and sat on the edge of the bed and looked at Sharon again. “And you’re the one,” he said. “Do you know about him ... all about him?”
“I do now,” Sharon said.
“I see.” He let his eyes slide up to mine. “You destroy everybody, don’t you?”
I shrugged.
But everybody has to fight for their lives. When you know there’s only that last minute left you have to try whether you erupt into the violent exhaustion of death or try to think it through quietly, you try, and Chet elected to think.
“Can you stop him?” he asked Sharon.
“Everybody else has tried. Can you?”
He didn’t cower and he didn’t beg. He just got dressed and went ahead of us into his own living room and sat in his own chair so he could be comfortable when the boat-man called for him to cross the river and wondered who the hell could be coming around at this time of night when the doorbell rang and I told Sharon to answer it.
The big guy came in alone like I had told him to do, saw me standing there with the .45 in my hand and never bothered making a play for his own piece that was hanging at the ready on his hip. He was all pro of the big team and didn’t give a shit for anything at all, except he liked those pretty little explanations you could set down and study later and maybe qualify in the light of experience, wondering how the living hell you could make it all go when they turned the heat lamps on and turned the screws.
I said, “Outside,” and took them to the truck. I let the big guy take a look at all the prospective bodies in the shiny walnut coffin, then made him let Chet take a look too.
The big guy said, “What are you asking, Dog?”
“Only the keys to your car,” I said.
The big guy handed me his keys. I looked at Chet and then back to the big guy. “He’ll tell you one hell of a story,” I said.
His calm, impassive Italian face looked at me with dark, faked-innocuous eyes. “I’d rather hear it from you.”
“The ending is not yet, pal.” I said. “It’s never any good until you get to the ending.”
“I know the one Dick Lagen is going to write. That newspaper syndicate had enough money to buy all the facts since the war ended and you began. They cleared everything through channels and there’s no way out of the noose for you at all.”
“Maybe you’d better talk to him,” I said.
“He won’t listen to me.”
“But he’ll sure as hell listen to me.” I eased the hammer down on the .45 but kept my thumb on the hammer. “Or my GI tool here.”
Until now I had never seen him really smile and I wished I hadn’t. He looked at the blackness inside the truck, his teeth flashing white in the early dawn, “Should I save the coffin, Dog? My mother used to say ‘waste not,
