Night Freight (8 page)

"To begin with," Jones was saying, "I travel."

"Sales job?"

"No. I travel because I enjoy traveling. And because I can afford it. I have independent means."

"Lucky you. In more ways than one."

"Yes."

"Europe, the South Pacific—all the exotic places?"

"Actually, no. I prefer the U.S."

"Any particular part?"

"Wherever my fancy leads me."

"Hard to imagine anyone's fancy leading him to Bayport," I said. "You have friends or relatives here?"

"No. I have business in Bayport."

"Business? I thought you said you didn't need to
work. . ."

"Independent means, Mr. Quint. That doesn't preclude a purpose, a direction in one's life."

"You do have a profession, then?"

"You might say that. A profession and a hobby com
bined."

"Lucky you," I said again. "What is it?"

"I kill people," he said.

I thought I'd misheard him. "You. . . what?"

"I kill people."

"Good God. Is that supposed to be a joke?"

"Not at all. I'm quite serious."

"What do you mean, you
kill
people?"

"Just what I said."

"Are you trying to tell me you're. . . some kind of paid as
sassin?"

"Not at all. I've never killed anyone for money."

"Then why. . . ?"

"Can't you guess?"

"No, I can't guess. I don't want to guess."

"Call it personal satisfaction," he said.

"What people? Who?"

"No one in particular," Jones said. "My selection process is completely random. I'm very good at it too. I've been killing people for . . . let's see, nine and a half years now. Eigh
teen victims in thirteen states. And, oh yes, Puerto Rico—one
in Puerto Rico. I don't mind saying that I've never even come
close to being caught."

I stared at him. My mouth was open; I knew it but I couldn't seem to unlock my jaw. I felt as if reality had suddenly slipped away from me, as if Tony had dropped some sort of mind-altering drug into my second Manhattan and it
was just now taking effect. Jones and I were still sitting companionably, on adjacent stools now, he smiling and speaking in the same low, friendly voice. At the other end of the bar Tony was slicing lemons and limes into wedges. Three of the booths were occupied now, with people laughing and enjoying themselves. Everything was just as it had been two minutes ago, except that instead of me telling Jones about being a dissatisfied design engineer, he was calmly telling me he was a serial murderer.

I got my mouth shut finally, just long enough to swallow into a dry throat. Then I said, "You're crazy, Jones. You must be insane."

"Hardly, Mr. Quint. I'm as sane as you are."

"I don't believe you killed eighteen people."

"Nineteen," he said. "Soon to be twenty."

"Twenty? You mean. . . someone in Bayport?"

"Right here in Bayport."

"You expect me to believe you intend to pick somebody at random and just. . . murder him in cold blood?"

"Oh no, there's more to it than that. Much more."

"More?" I said blankly.

"I choose a person at random, yes, but carefully. Very carefully. I study my target, follow him as he goes about his daily business, learn everything I can about him down to the minutest detail. Then the cat and mouse begins. I don't murder him right away; that wouldn't give sufficient, ah, satisfaction. I wait . . . observe . . . plan. Perhaps, for added spice, I reveal myself to him. I might even be so bold as to tell him to his face that he's my next victim."

My scalp began to crawl.

"Days, weeks . . . then, when the victim least expects it, a gunshot, a push out of nowhere in front of an oncoming car, a hypodermic filled with digitalin and jabbed into the body on a
crowded street, simulating heart failure. There are many ways to kill a man. Did you ever stop to consider just how many different ways there are?"

"You. . . you're not saying—"

"What, Mr. Quint? That I've chosen
you
?"

"Jones, for God's sake!"

"But I have," he said. "You are to be number twenty."

One of my hands jerked upward, struck his arm. Involuntary spasm; I'm not a violent man. He didn't even flinch. I pulled my hand back, saw that it was shaking, and clutched the fingers tight around the beveled edge of the bar.

Jones took a sip of wine. Then he smiled—and winked at me.

"Or then again," he said, "I might be lying."

". . . What?"

"Everything I've just told you might be a lie. I might not have killed nineteen people over the past nine and a half years; I might not have killed anyone, ever."

"I don't. . . I don't know what you—"

"Or I might have told you part of the truth . . . that's another possibility, isn't it? Part fact, part fiction. But in that case, which is which? And to what degree? Am I a deadly threat to you, or am I nothing more than a man in a bar playing a game?"

"Game? What kind of sick—"

"The same one we've been playing all along. Liar's dice."

"Liar's
 
. . . ?"

"My own special version," he said, "developed and refined through years of practice. The perfect form of the game, if I do say so myself—exciting, unpredictable, filled with intrigue and mortal danger for myself as well as my opponent."

I shook my head. My mind was a seething muddle; I couldn't seem to fully grasp what he was saying.

"I don't know any more than you do at this moment how you'll play your part of the hand, Mr. Quint. That's where the excitement and the danger lie. Will you treat what I've said as you would a bluff? Can you afford to take that risk? Or will you act on the assumption that I've told the monstrous truth, or at least part of it?"

"Damn you. . ." Weak and ineffectual words, even in my own ears.

"And if you do believe me," he said, "what course of action will you take? Attack me before I can harm you, attempt to kill me . . . here and now in this public place, perhaps, in front of witnesses who will swear the attack was unprovoked? Try to follow me when I leave, attack me elsewhere? I might well be armed, and an excellent shot with a handgun. Go to the police... with a wild-sounding and unsubstantiated story that they surely wouldn't believe? Hire a detective to track me down? Attempt to track me down yourself? Jones isn't my real name, of course, and I've taken precautions against anyone finding out my true identity. Arm yourself and remain on guard until, if and when, I make a move against you? How long could you live under such intense pressure without making a fatal mistake?"

He paused dramatically. "Or—and this is the most exciting prospect of all, the one I hope you choose—will you mount a clever counterattack, composed of lies and deceptions of your own devising? Can you actually hope to beat me at my own game? Do you dare to try?"

He adjusted the knot in his tie with quick, deft movements, smiling at me in the back-bar mirror—not the same pleasant smile as before. This one had shark's teeth in it. "Whatever you do, I'll know about it soon afterward. I'll be waiting. . . watching. . . and I'll know. And then it will be my turn again."

He slid off his stool, stood poised behind me. I just sat there; it was as if I were paralyzed.

"Your call, Mr. Quint," he said. And he was gone into the night.

Most of my horror fiction, as the entries in this collection demonstrate, is of the character-driven, generally unbloody variety; I gladly leave the slice-and-dice type to those who enjoy reading it and are adept at perpetrating it. "Out Behind the Shed" is probably the subtlest and most ambiguous of all that I've written—a story to make you ponder as well as shudder, after the fashion of William Fryer Harvey's classic "August Heat."

T
here was a dead guy behind the parts shed.

I went out there to get a Ford oil pan for Barney and I saw him lying on his back in the weedy grass. He didn't have a face. There was blood and bone and pulp and black scorch marks where his face used to be. I couldn't even guess if he was anybody I knew.

I stood there shivering. It was cold. . . Jesus, it was cold for late March. The sky was all glary, like the sun coming off a sheet-metal roof. Only there wasn't any sun. Just a shiny silver overcast, so cold-hot bright it hurt your eyes to look at it. The wind was big and gusty, the kind that burns right through clothing and puts a rash like frostbite on your skin. No matter what I'd done all day I couldn't seem to get warm.

I'd known right off, as soon as I got out of bed, that it was going to be a bad day. The cold and the funny bright sky was one thing. Another was Madge. She'd started in on me about money again even before she made the coffee. How we were barely making ends meet and couldn't even afford to get the TV fixed, and why couldn't I find a better-paying job or let her go to work part-time or at least take a second job myself, nights, to bring in a little extra. The same old song and dance. The only old tune she hadn't played was the one about how much she ached for another kid before she got too old, as if two wasn't enough. Then I came in here to work and Barney was in a grumpy mood on account of a head cold and the fact that we hadn't had three new repair jobs in a week. Maybe he'd have to do some retrenching if things didn't pick up pretty soon, he said. That was the word he used, retrenching. Laying me off was what he meant. I'd been working for him five years, steady, never missed a day sick, never screwed up on a single job, and he was thinking about firing me. What would I do then? Thirty-six years old, wife and two kids, house mortgaged to the hilt, no skills except auto mechanic and nobody hiring mechanics right now. What the hell would I do?

Oh, it was a bad day, all right. I hadn't thought it could get much worse, but now I knew that it could.

Now there was this dead guy out here behind the shed.

I ran back inside the shop. Barney was still banging away under old Mrs. Cassell's Ford, with his legs sticking out over the end of the roller cart. I yelled at him to slide out. He did and I said, "Barney. . . Barney, there's a dead guy out by the parts shed."

He said, "You trying to be funny?"

"No," I said. "No kidding and no lie. He's out there in the grass behind the shed."

"Another of them derelicts come in on the freights, I suppose. You sure he's dead? Maybe he's just passed out."

"
Dead
,
Barney. I know a dead guy when I see one."

He hauled up on his feet. He was a big Swede, five inches and fifty pounds bigger than me, and he had a way of looming over you that made you feel even smaller. He looked down into my face and then scowled and said in a different voice, "Froze to death?"

"No," I said. "He hasn't got a face anymore. His face is all blown away."

"Jesus. Somebody killed him, you mean?"

"Somebody must of. Who'd do a thing like that, Barney? Out behind our shed?"

He shook his head and cracked one of his big gnarly knuckles. The sound echoed like a gunshot in the cold garage. Then, without saying anything else, he swung around and fast-walked out through the rear door.

I didn't go with him. I went over and stood in front of the wall heater. But I still couldn't get warm. My shoulders kept hunching up and down inside my overalls and I couldn't feel my nose or ears or the tips of my fingers, as if they weren't there anymore. When I looked at my hands, they were all red and chapped, like Madge's hands after she's been washing clothes or dishes. They twitched a little, too; the tendons were like worms wiggling under a handkerchief.

Pretty soon Barney came back. He had a funny look on his moon face but it wasn't the same kind he'd had when he went out. He said, "What the hell, Joe? I got no time for games and neither do you."

"Games?"

"There's nobody behind the shed," he said.

I stared at him. Then I said, "In the grass, not ten feet past the far corner."

"I looked in the grass," Barney said. His nose was running from the cold. He wiped it off on the sleeve of his overalls. "I looked all over. There's no dead guy. There's nobody."

"But I saw him. I swear to God."

"Well, he's not there now."

"Somebody must of come and dragged him off, then."