Fear itself: a novel (38 page)

So it was something of a disappointment to him, to have to miss the fire. But otherwise, Plan C had gone so smoothly that by the time he left Atlantic City on Cappy’s classy old Harley, he was not only reasonably certain that the explosion and fire would take place as scheduled, but that the fates had given their seal of approval to the entire venture.

The key to the first part of the plan, as Simon had foreseen, was Rosie. The news about Missy had devastated her—but it gave Simon a chance to comfort her, to play the heartbroken, but loving son, which had not only endeared him to Rosie, but to Cappy as well.

With the ground prepared, Simon had then spun the same yarn he’d spun for Zap Strum after learning of Missy’s death, once again imbuing the embellishments with the authority of his own emotional investment, as well as making sure that both Rosie and Cappy were kept well-lubricated with Select Choice vodka. And by the time he’d finished telling his rapt audience of two how a crooked FBI agent named Pender had tricked Missy into letting him into the house, then attacked Simon, how Missy tried to stop him and there was a scuffle, how the struggle had overtaxed her heart, and how Pender had then shifted the blame to Simon to cover his own rear end, Rosie didn’t need any more convincing—maternal guilt alone would have been sufficient motivation for her.

But just to be on the safe side, Simon added a spoonful of sugar to make sure Cappy’s medicine went down smoothly. He took the old CPO aside and showed him the satchel filled with cash, then explained how once he, Simon, had confronted Pender while wearing a hidden tape recorder and fooled him into confessing, he wouldn’t be needing his getaway money. In which case, he would be happy—no, honored—to leave the money behind for Cappy, as a token of his appreciation for his help in clearing his name and bringing Missy’s killer to justice, not to mention the loan of the Harley.

From the glitter in the old man’s eyes when Simon dumped half of his remaining stacks of dead presidents on the bed, Simon was reasonably certain that he had just bought himself a second accomplice. But it wasn’t only the money that had won Cappy over, it was the prospect of adventure. Judging by the man’s excitement and enthusiasm when they started going over the next part of the plan, Simon had the feeling that Cappy would have paid
him
for the opportunity to be useful again, to do something important for somebody, something that mattered, to be a participant in life again, and maybe even have a little fun with the cops in the bargain.

Simon had thought of everything. The two were to stay in the kitchenette portion of the apartment, where they couldn’t be seen from the apartment’s only window. Rosie was to wait half an hour, then call the cops and tell them she was being held hostage by her son. After that, all Rosie had to do was stall, stall, stall; all Cappy had to do was let himself be heard in the background every so often.

And when push came to shove, Simon assured them, they wouldn’t have to put themselves in danger—he wouldn’t think of allowing any harm to come to either of them. Let the cops in, explain how Simon had threatened to kill them if they didn’t help him get away, then go treat yourselves to a fancy dinner someplace with the money Simon had so generously left behind, and never mind the senior/twilight discounts.

Before leaving, he’d traded clothes with Cappy and kissed his mother good-bye. The wrinkled cheek was surprisingly soft against his lips; the eyes were filled with tears. She cried easily, this old woman—but had she cried when she spent the blood money Grandfather Childs had given her to abandon her children? And did she cry when she spread her legs for that old man on the Murphy bed? Did she cry for her children then?

Of course not—so why should I cry for her? thought Simon as he closed the door behind him. Then he’d made a big stomping show of starting down the stairway, before doubling back quietly to ring the bell of the apartment next door.

“Who’s there?” A shaky, phlegmy old voice. Perfect for his purposes: if the occupant was as feeble as she sounded, there would be no need to strong-arm her, as he’d originally planned. He might not even need to improvise a delayed-action fuse to trigger the explosion.

“Gas company, ma’am,” Simon had called. “I’m afraid there may be a problem with your line.”

Twenty minutes later he was on his way. He might even have passed the Bu-car containing Special Agents LaFeo and Kingmore, traveling in the opposite direction. He heard the explosion an hour later, from a phone booth near Deep Water, New Jersey, just east of the Delaware Memorial Bridge spanning the Delaware River.

“Hello, Mrs. Schantz? This is Joe from the gas company. Your readings are all clear now—as they say in the Navy, the smoking lamp is lit…. Yes, ma’am, I know the smell is strong—that’s the anti-inflammatory I told you we were going to be pumping in.…I quite understand—I’m a pack-a-day man myself. What I want you to do, though, while I’m holding, I want you to flick that Bic for me, walk around the apartment, see if the flame wavers…. No, you can keep the Bic with our compliments…. Yes, ma’am, I’ll wait.”

While he waited, Simon held the phone at arm’s length to avoid the percussion tinnitus syndrome shortly to be experienced by the hostage negotiator for the Atlantic City Police Department, currently holding the line for Rosie Delamour next door—unlike her, he knew what was coming.

And though he’d told himself he wasn’t going to cry, afterward there were tears in his eyes as he replaced the receiver and walked slowly back to the Harley. He was an orphan now, he’d suddenly realized—a motherless, fatherless, sisterless child.

Dorie and Pender hit the hay early. It didn’t take Pender long to drop off—within twenty minutes he was bleating and blatting like a Sun Ra solo scored by John Cage.

No such luck for Dorie, not with her first airplane ride looming at seven-fifty in the
A
.
M
. It was funny, she mused, how she’d never really thought of herself as an aviophobe. Probably because flying was so easy to avoid. But fear of flying was one of those sneaky phobias. It’s not really a problem for me, you say: I don’t like to travel anyway. And you never think about what came first, the fear of the chicken or the fear of the egg.

Plenty of time to think about all that now, however. And the longer she lay there listening to Pender snore, the more unfair it seemed. Wasn’t this whole thing his idea in the first place? So how come he gets to sleep like an adenoidal baby while I lie here gnawing on my liver? She scooted over toward the warm center of the bed until she felt his hip warm and solid against hers.

“Hey, Pen? Pen, you awake?”

“Apparently.”

“Tell me about your house.”

“Hill. Woods. Canal. Bedrooms, lots of bedrooms. Pen sleep now.”

“I wouldn’t count on it. How come you have so many bedrooms if you live alone?”

Pender bowed to the inevitable. “Tinsman. The lockkeeper. He used to add another bedroom onto the end of the house every time his wife had another kid. She had seven.” A portentous pause—this was one of Pender’s set pieces. “Only six bedrooms were added on.” And another pause.

“How come?” Dorie rolled onto her side and pillowed both hands under her cheek the way she used to when she was a little girl—her daddy had been an excellent storyteller.

“The way the rangers tell it—every year they have a special Halloween program down at Great Falls: rangers in period costumes tell all the ghost stories and murder stories from the history of the canal, and they always end with Tinsman’s Lock. The way they tell it, the last kid wasn’t Tinsman’s. His wife had been having an affair with a redheaded mule driver from Rock Creek. They say the lockkeeper cut her throat, then drowned the seventh baby in the canal. Some people claim to have seen her ghost wandering up and down the banks in a bloodstained nightgown, searching for her redheaded baby.”

“Great, a ghost story,” said Dorie with a mock shudder that turned real at the end, as mock shudders often do. “Remember one thing, buster:
I
don’t sleep,
you
don’t sleep.”

Pender reached across his body with his good arm, and patted her shoulder. “You don’t have a thing to worry about. They say she only walks on Halloween night.”

“Pender.”

“What?”

“Halloween is this coming Sunday.”

“Is it really?” Wide-eyed and innocent; butter wouldn’t melt…, as his sister Ida would have said.

“Yeah—and you know what’s amazing? For the first time since I can remember, I don’t care—it doesn’t matter.”

“I remember you telling me Halloweens were always tough on you.”

“And Sunday ones were the worst. ’Cause if it fell on a Sunday, that’d be three days I’d have to hide out in my house with the curtains drawn. Couldn’t go shopping on Friday, because the store clerks might be in costumes with masks, on Saturday night people in masks might be coming and going from parties, and then of course the trick-or-treaters on Sunday.”

“No trick-or-treaters out where I live.”

“But don’t you see, it doesn’t matter anymore? I’d almost like to give it a try.”

“Ask and you shall receive. Pool, the Liaison Support secretary, she and her roommate always do Halloween up real big, costume party, haunted house and all. If you want me to take you, I have a standing invitation.”

“I’ll have to get back to you on that,” said Dorie. She suspected it was an idea that was going to seem less and less attractive, the closer to Sunday they got.

It was close to two in the morning when Linda let herself into the house. She hung her coat on a peg in the vestibule; as she limped past the answering machine in the living room, she saw the message light blinking, and stopped to check it out.

Mr. Pender, this is Judge Heinz. I hope you’ve received my letter by now. There are a few matters we need to go over. Please give me a call at your convenience.

He’d left a number. The machine was on a small table near the vestibule, along with the wire basket full of mail Linda had been saving for Pender. She found a letter from Noble J. Heinz, Attorney at Law, LaFarge, Wisconsin, jotted the telephone number on the back of the envelope, and left it on the top of the pile. Pender was due back late tomorrow afternoon—Linda had no intention of getting out of bed until then.

Or answering any Bu-calls. She retrieved her cell from the pocket of her coat and called her own office to leave a message for Pool, to the effect that she would not be coming into work tomorrow, and that if there were any calls from media or brass or especially OPR, could Pool possibly, please, stall them, hold them off, tell them she was dead, anything—Linda would call her on Monday to explain. And, oh yeah, thanks for the invite, but she’d have to pass on Halloween, because she was going to bed now and intended to stay there, not just through Halloween, but probably through Thanksgiving as well.

And exhausted as she was, it was only the knowledge that she really could sleep in as long as she wanted tomorrow that gave Linda the incentive to prepare for bed, instead of just throwing herself across the bedcovers and collapsing in the rancid clothes she’d been wearing for over eighteen hours.

Linda undressed in the bathroom, while seated on the toilet, pulling her slacks down over her shoes and tossing her dirty clothes into the mildewy rattan hamper. Then she washed up a little, brushed her teeth, and crossed the hall to her bedroom wearing only her shoes and braces, and leaning even more heavily than usual on her cane. Tomorrow, she reminded herself, she’d have to start wearing a bathrobe for the trip across the hall. Tonight, though, she was too tired even to pull on a nightie—she untied her shoes, slipped them off along with the braces, crawled under the covers naked, closed her eyes, and was asleep within minutes.

A dream. It had to be a dream. Simon Childs standing over the bed, holding a revolver in one hand, hiding the other hand behind his back. But not the Childs from the elevator video, with the self-assured manner and the easy slouch, nor the groomed and handsome Childs of the DMV photo, looking better with his silver hair and dapper ’stash than anybody has a right to on their driver’s license.

No, this was a ragged, haggard caricature of Childs—no hair, no mustache, wearing an unzipped black leather bomber jacket over a hideous sport shirt of mustard yellow and dung brown.

“Where’s your boyfriend, Skairdykat?”

Still clinging to the hope that it was only a dream, Linda tried to open her eyes. They were already open. She closed them instead, heard the springs creak and felt the mattress shift. When she opened her eyes again, he was sitting on the edge of the bed, grinning like the happiest madman in the asylum.

“I asked you where your boyfriend was. If you don’t answer me, you’ll have to answer to my friend here.”

Slowly he drew his hand from behind his back. Linda was not surprised to see that he was grasping a snake by the neck. This was
her
dream: what else would he have had in his hand? She tried to draw back, but with his weight atop the covers, she found herself pinned beneath them. Not very dreamlike, she thought, trying to wriggle free—not very dreamlike at all.

“You’re dead,” she told him. “They found your body.”

“Keep telling yourself that,” he replied, slipping the revolver into the waistband of his high-water slacks. “It’ll make the game more fun. But until we get started, you can avoid a good deal of unnecessary suffering by simply telling me where your boyfriend is, and when he’s expected back.”

Unnecessary suffering.
Dream or no dream, Linda didn’t like the sound of that; dream or no dream, she decided to play along. “I don’t have a boyfriend, but if you mean Agent Pender, he’s on vacation—I haven’t heard from him in nearly a week.”

“My misunderstanding. And when is Agent Pender expected home?” There was nothing in Simon’s voice to suggest sarcasm—or that he had tugged the covers down to Linda’s waist.