The Siege (17 page)

“It’s what I can do for you,” Rodgers said. “I have Mr. Cole almost ready for you.”

“Have there been any problems?” the man named Higgins asked. His voice sounded hesitant and filled with concern. “The last time, there were a few complications that I—”

Rodgers laughed softly, cutting him off. “Nothing I can’t take care of at this end.”

“Well, you know what happened last time.”

“What happened last time was merely a fluke,” Rodgers snapped. His warm breath moistened the receiver mouthpiece. “It was a simple mistake of dosage amounts that will not happen again.”

“I hope not, sir,” Higgins said. “It wouldn’t pay to—”

“You just let me handle the details on this end, all right?” Rodgers said. “What happens once I deliver is not my concern. It’s yours, correct?”

“Yes, but I…”

“But you nothing!” Rodgers shouted, cupping his hand over the receiver in case Maggie had gotten curious and was outside his door, listening. Not likely, but it paid to be careful. “I told you he’ll be ready by tomorrow night.”

“Tomorrow?” Higgins said, “You told me it would be tonight!”

Rodgers sighed, as though he was carrying the weight of the world. “The funeral isn’t until tomorrow, so now I’m telling you—tomorrow night!”

The last thing he needed, he thought, was to let Higgins know about the visit he had had this afternoon. Sure, Winfield had sat there, silent and stupid as a stone the whole time, but just the fact that he had been by with that man Harmon. It didn’t bode well. There was no sense taking any risks. He just wanted to play it safe. C.Y.A., as they say: “Cover your ass!”

“Then tomorrow night it will be,” Higgins said. There was disappointment in his voice, but also a note of resignation.

“Any time after dark,” Rodgers said, and without another word, he cut the connection off by gently cradling the receiver. After a few seconds of staring at the phone, quietly enjoying the panic and anger he knew Higgins was feeling, he leaned back in his chair, slid his hand into his pants pocket, and withdrew his key chain. He selected a small, flat key, then unlocked and pulled open the top middle drawer of his desk.

Reaching inside, he found the small wooden box at the back of the drawer. The box was covered with tiny carved figures. Only close examination would reveal that the figures were something straight out of a vision of
Dante’s Inferno
or a Bosch painting. Dozens of nude men and women were tangled up in grotesque postures that suggested either bizarre sexual positions or contortions of extreme physical agony. Ecstasy or suffering, they’re always in the eye of the beholder.

The trembling in his hands intensified as Rodgers fumbled for another, smaller key on his key ring to unlock the little hasp lock on the box. The box contained a single vial half-filled with a dark liquid. The bottle was capped with the rubber end of an eye dropper. Rodgers leaned back in his chair and, for the first time since Winfield and Dale had left, breathed evenly and deeply. Holding the bottle up to the light and giving it a quick shake, he inspected the thick liquid, so darkly purple it actually looked black. He felt the corners of his mouth twitch into something close to a smile as, first, he loosened the cap and then gave the rubber bulb a couple of firm squeezes to fill the dropper completely with liquid. After removing the dropper, he leaned his head way back and brought it over his left eye. He had done this so many times, now, he didn’t need to hold his eye open. He stared blankly at the ceiling as he brought the dropper closer until it was just above his eye. Then, with a sudden tensing of his fingers, he squeezed the bulb.

The liquid spurted out in a thick glob that landed in the center of Rodgers’ pupil. For an instant, a chill like the stab of a metallic sliver jabbed his eye. Nerve impulses shot along his optic nerve and were interpreted by his brain as “vision.” Fiery-edged shapes shot across his retina, but then, as a deep warmth spread out, gradually embracing the whole of his eye, the visual impulses faded, leaving only dim, glowing afterimages.

As always, Rodgers became intensely aware of the roundness of his eye as the liquid generated heat that flowed into veins and capillaries. He was still leaning back, still staring up at the ceiling of his office, as he anticipated what would come next. His pupil, he knew, was now dilated wide enough to receive light. Quickly, he screwed the cap back on the bottle and put it down on his desk top.
No sense spilling it by mistake
, he thought as his anticipation spiraled upward.

Then it happened. The textured ceiling tiles began to sparkle like fresh-fallen snow seen in the glare of direct sunlight. Winking points of light exploded into watery concentric circles as the drug entered his system. The warmth that had embraced his left eye now spread out long, dark fingers that reached out and massaged every convoluted fold of his brain, the fingers pulsed with warm, dark strength as they reached deep inside his brain.

“Eyes! The windows of the soul,” Rodgers said, his voice a papery rattle in his throat. A low laughter rumbled in his chest as the light patterns on the ceilings intensified, exploding into shimmering rainbow sprays. On the edge of his awareness, he heard distant and muffled voices.

What he saw and heard, Rodgers knew was merely the electrical impulses traveling along his optic nerve to his brain. But there was more. What was really happening was that the liquid, shot into one eye, gave him a special kind of vision. It was a vision that allowed him actually to see and hear things from other worlds and other dimensions.

In the years since he had first discovered this liquid and its variations, he had tried many experiments, some successful, some not. At least the unsuccessful ones hadn’t been done on himself! One of the simplest experiments compared the vision of each eye, once immediately after he had “taken a squirt” (as he called it) and then after the drug had lost its intense effects. The physical discoloration of the left pupil didn’t surprise him in the least, and he learned to accept it as the price he paid for his “visions.”

Obviously the dilated pupil made it very difficult to be in direct sunlight without sunglasses. That was why he preferred to have the funeral home so dimly lit all of the time. Looking directly at merely a candle flame could be painful, but after years of practice, he had gotten used to hiding the pain sudden, direct light caused his left eye.

And there was the reverse side of things that made it all worthwhile. The pupil of the left eye was permanently open, but so, also, was his night vision vastly improved. As a matter of fact, Rodgers suspected the changes had occurred so slowly over so many years he didn’t really appreciate how good his night vision was. When he thought about it, he believed he could see at night almost as well as any cat or owl.

In a real sense the drug opened up a new world to him. He could see in two different worlds, and that was the basis of all his other experiments with this liquid. Years ago, when he first encountered the liquid as a Harvard graduate student studying botany in Haiti, he had suspected the potential for this liquid: taken in proper dosages, it could open up whole new dimensions of awareness.

As the drug coarsed through his system, he chuckled again, loudly, not caring now if Maggie Sprague or anyone heard him.
Christ!
he thought, his mind suddenly feeling like a honed razor, Maggie was such a tight-assed bitch! What she needed was a squirt of this!

“Right up the old cooze!” he said aloud, and his laughter got even louder as colors and lights pinwheeled through his brain. The voices he heard grew louder and louder, until he could understand what they were saying in their low, sing-song chant. He closed his eyes and leaned back, listening and watching while the liquid carried him far, far away…

IV

“I
t stinks,” Winfield said, sitting back from the table and sipping on his beer. “It stinks to high heaven.”

Winfield off-duty
, Dale thought,
looked exactly like Winfield on-duty
. Only the uniform had changed. He still kept his thoughts and feelings locked tightly inside him. Dale had his own lingering doubts because of what had occurred at the funeral home, but he realized Winfield wouldn’t take him fully into his confidence until he trusted him. Until that time, Dale would have to trust what Winfield said and take it as the truth.

Kellerman’s on an early Sunday evening was practically deserted. Five regulars, who had all greeted Winfield by his first name, were gathered around the pool table at the back of the restaurant exchanging shots. An Emmylou Harris tear-jerker drifted from the jukebox, whose only concessions to rock were a few Beatles oldies and the latest from Bruce Springsteen. If you favored country-western or Fifties rock, it was a gold mine.

The pizza, Dale discovered, was good, but all you could get on tap was Budweiser. It would take a while for Sam Adams beer to make inroads up here. All that remained on the paper plate in front of them were a few uneaten crusts what Angie used to call “pizza bones” when she was little.

“I can’t really say I’m glad to hear you say that,” Dale said, after glancing over his shoulder to make sure he wouldn’t be overheard by the pool players. “But I guess I am. I think it stinks, too.”

Winfield took another sip of beer and sat back, rubbing his hand under his nose as he shook his head.

“So,” he said, “what do you figure’s going on?”

Dale considered the question then shrugged. “This is your town, not mine. Until this afternoon, I’d never heard of Franklin Rodgers. My first reaction was that he’s… it’s like he’s hiding something.”

“I just can’t figure it,” Winfield said.

Dale took a swig of beer. “Well then, maybe you can start by telling me what you know about Rodgers. Maybe I can figure out some angle that doesn’t make sense until we put together what we’ve got.”

“There’s not much to tell about Rodgers. Not really.”

“Is he from around here?” Dale asked. “Meeting him today, I’d say he fits in here about as well as you or I would in Harlem.”

“Naw.” Winfield drank some more. He picked up a small piece of pizza crust, but then dropped it back on the plate. “He moved into town about ten years ago, maybe fifteen. Said he was from Massachusetts.”

“How’d he get started in the undertaking business?”

It was Winfield’s turn to shrug. “He took over the funeral home from Bill Porter’s family, right after Bill died. ’S far as I know, he was an undertaker in Massachusetts. I know he’s got a Ph.D. in botany from Harvard. You might have noticed it hanging on the wall in his office.”

“No I didn’t,” Dale said. “But what the hell is a botanist doing running a funeral home?”

Winfield snorted with laughter when he thought of a reply. “Maybe it helps him pick the right flowers for the service,” he said. “How does anyone become an undertaker? It ain’t exactly the kind of job you want your kid to say he wants to be when he grows up, is it? I’d start worrying if he did! Christ, Bill Porter used to run the funeral home and deliver oil. Least that’s what he did when he was first starting out.”

“Yeah,” Dale said, “I hate to sound so damned narrow-minded about this, but Rodgers seems so perfect for the job. He looks like a goddamned corpse himself.”

“And that eye of his!” Winfield said, drawing out the last word as he leaned forward.

Dale was shaking his head, but he glanced over at the pool table when there was a sudden explosion of laughter. Emmylou had been replaced by Waylon Jennings on the jukebox.

“That left eye sure does make it hard to look straight at him,” Dale said. “I think he uses that to intimidate people. It is pretty unnerving, but I don’t think that’s all that’s weird about him. There’s more, maybe a lot more.” Winfield drank some more, and smacking his lips, said, “Nothing I’ve noticed until today. Maybe there ain’t anything else. I’ve just been listening to you too much.

You’ve got to expect that someone who goes in for that line of work has got to be typecast. Maybe you’re just seeing all of this because of what happened to Larry.”

Dale took a sip of beer and stared at the wall for a few seconds, letting his thoughts tumble over one another.

He knew Winfield might be right. Hell, denial was a very real, a very human response to the death of someone close to you. He knew it was possible that he might be blaming Rodgers for what happened to Larry.

Could it be something as simple as that?
he wondered.

In Rodgers’ office, Dale had become convinced that Rodgers was hiding something. Just the way he had denied Mildred’s request to see her son’s body, ignoring what he said about her request for a closed casket and the way he had so cleanly cut off, on legal grounds, Dale’s request seemed almost as if he wanted
to keep the body for himself
!

The words jumped into Dale’s mind, and when they did, he couldn’t repress the shiver that raced up his spine to the base of his skull.

“Maybe that’s where we should start,” he said. “We should start by going out to the accident site. Maybe there’s something there that will give us a clue to what’s going on.”

Winfield laughed and shook his head. “Now you’re starting to sound like one of the Hardy Boys,” he said. “There aren’t any clues to dig up. Look, Larry Cole is dead, and that’s final! I was the guy who pulled his body out of the wreck. Why can’t you just let it drop?”