The Terrorizers (13 page)

“No, you don’t understand, Paul,” she said, speaking carefully and clearly. “You don’t understand at all. I didn’t shoot that woman just to keep her from getting away, as I told everybody. I lied. I did it because I
wanted
to do it.”

“Sure.”

“But you don’t
understand!
” she protested. “It was all that kept me alive in that dreadful room, knowing that some day, somehow, I’d have the pleasure of killing that sadistic bitch.”

I said, “So what else is new?”

She frowned. “You, too?”

“Me, and probably everybody else who ever wore those straps and electrodes, at least for non-medical reasons. She said as much, remember?”

Kitty shook her head quickly. “It just seems so
incredible.
I’ve been prattling bravely about revenge but I never dreamed I’d
really
… I was only thinking in terms of getting evidence so the law could… I never suspected I was capable of…” She giggled abruptly. “I seem to be quite incoherent, don’t I?”

“I’m with you every step of the way,” I said. “To incoherence, long may it wave.”

We drank to that, and she said, “I was dreadfully shocked when you killed that guard, but now… Really, all I feel is relieved, Paul. I suppose that’s dreadful, but nobody should be allowed to do such degrading things to other people and survive. Now she’s gone and I can breathe again. I don’t have to think of her alive somewhere with that horrible face knowing things about me nobody ought to know… Oh, my God!”

She was staring past me, wide-eyed. I turned, half-expecting attack, conscious that all the weapons I’d managed to commandeer with considerable effort had been taken from me, but nobody was there. Only the door of the coat closet was there, standing open to expose the full-length mirror inside that was designed to permit the lady of the house to make a last-minute hose-and-hairdo inspection before appearing in public.

I heard Kitty give a choked little giggle that was half a sob. She moved past me and posed in front of the glass to get the full effect: the stringy hair, the limp blouse collar above the snagged and sagging sweater, and the shapeless, voluminous pink slacks, ripped at one knee, smeared with the black loam of the landscaping through which we’d crawled, with the wide cuffs abjectly downtrodden and hopelessly filthy.

She began to laugh, staring at the apparition laughing back at her. She raised her glass to the woebegone Kitty-caricature in the mirror, and finished off the contents. Then she swayed a little, choking on her laughter. I stepped forward to take the empty glass before she dropped it. Setting it aside with mine, also empty, I put my arm around her to steady her. She made an odd strangled sound in her throat, and turned with a shudder, and pressed her face against my shoulder.

“Easy,” I said. “Take it easy, Kitty. It’s all over now. You’re all right now.”

But the hysterics I was expecting didn’t come. I felt her fight for control and win. She drew a deep, gasping breath and straightened up, running her grubby sweater-sleeve across her eyes.

“Good girl,” I said. “Now you can duck into the bedroom and get out of those ridiculous pantaloons while I repair to the bar and replenish both our… What’s the matter?”

Her eyes were watching me in a speculative manner. Something had changed in the room. It had happened when I held her—when, about to let herself dissolve into helpless weeping and wild laughter, she’d clamped down the iron discipline once more. I decided that there was a great deal about this supposed fiancee of mine I didn’t know. Suddenly she was no longer a poor weak girl on the edge of hysteria being comforted by a strong man after a terrible experience. Our roles had subtly been switched somehow, but I didn’t know how.

She spoke deliberately: “If you want my ridiculous pantaloons removed, darling, why don’t you do something about it?” There was a funny, hard edge to her voice. “You’re the big Prince Rupert zipper expert, aren’t you?”

I’ll admit it shocked me. Not that I’d thought her sexless in spite of earlier misunderstandings, or that I would have totally rejected the idea, if it had been presented to me, that dainty Miss Davidson might even take the initiative under certain circumstances, but these weren’t the circumstances. I would have bet on champagne and candlelight and filmy lingerie. Obviously, I’d have lost my bet. My slim and lovely lady, finding herself in an embarrassingly bedraggled condition, had apparently conceived a lowdown bedroom game that involved having me liberate her slender body from its cruel prison of grimy rags…

“Well?” she demanded in that same hard voice. “What’s the matter, Paul? Does your dream girl have to have a nice sharp crease in her pants before you’ll condescend to undress—” She stopped abruptly. There was a moment of silence; then she drew a shaky breath and spoke in quite different tones, softly, almost pleadingly: “Please, darling. I make such an unconvincing nympho-maniac, don’t I? Please help me. Don’t you want to
know?
”

Something stirred uneasily in my mind. “Know what?”

“You’re being stupid!” Some of the hardness returned to her voice. “You know perfectly well what I mean. You
must
understand!”

“Tell me,” I said, but I knew I didn’t really want to be told.

After a long moment, Kitty licked her lips and spoke carefully: “Well… well, she did some
weird
things to me, didn’t she to you, darling? Didn’t she? And don’t you want to know if… if you’re still a human being with all your reactions and impulses intact and not just a cheap electrical toy twitching obscenely on the end of a wire? And…” She licked her lips once more. “And there’s really only one way to find out, isn’t there?”

There it was. She’d faced the thing I’d put aside. I’d shoved the nagging doubt far back into the dark recesses of my mind—there had, after all, been a few other things to worry about besides sex—and ordered my mind to forget it, something it seemed to be very good at these days. Now I had a sudden, clear, unwelcome memory of the steel table in the Torquemada room and the agonizing, electrical experiments performed by the woman with the stone face who’d made such a wonderful adjustment to her unfortunate disease.

“Okay,” I breathed. “Okay. I dig you, doll. It’s a little coldblooded, but okay.”

We looked at each other for a moment—a rather embarrassed moment. Kitty laughed abruptly, looking down at herself.

“Of course, I’m not very sexy like this, am I? But then you’re not exactly God’s gift to women right now. I think we can manage without perfume and aftershave lotion, don’t you? If… if we can manage at all.”

“What fornication-location did you have in mind, ma’am?”

“What about right here, darling? I always did have a secret ambition to get laid, as you Yankees so picturesquely put it, on a nice shaggy rug in front of an open fire. If you don’t mind?”

“It sounds fine to me,” I said judiciously. “Interesting. Beds are so commonplace, aren’t they?”

“Paul.”

“Yes?”

“This is rather ridiculous, isn’t it? We’re just standing here
talking.
Lift your arms, there’s a good boy.” When I obeyed, she grasped my turtleneck at the bottom and pulled it off over my head and tossed it aside. She put her arms up. “Your turn.”

I stripped off and discarded her ruined sweater. Suddenly she was in my arms, turning her face up for the kiss. I felt as awkward and inexperienced as if I’d never held a woman before. I told myself that, as she herself had pointed out, she wasn’t the most seductive figure in the world at the moment; but I knew I was just kidding myself. Actually, I found her kind of perversely appealing in her dirty-pink tramp outfit, if only because it was so obviously expendable. We didn’t have to worry about preserving any expensive gowns or fragile nylons, we could let ourselves go. It should have been good, or at least good enough, but it wasn’t. As I faced the possibility of inadequacy, a sharp pain stung my lips. Kitty had bitten me. As I recoiled, she hooked a foot behind my ankle and shoved hard. I sat down abruptly on the shaggy rug, which didn’t do a great deal to cushion the shock.

“Kitty, what the hell—”

“Stop treating me like a porcelain doll or your baby sister, dammit!” Looking up at her, I had a sudden memory of the slender, fastidious person who’d objected to getting all mussed and excited on a hospital bed, but this wasn’t the same girl. She giggled. “It really looks very silly! The ruthless secret agent sitting there with its mouth wide open… Ouch!”

I’d caught an ankle and brought her down beside me. She kicked at me, breaking free, and tried to scramble away, laughing. I grabbed for her and got only a pantaleg and yanked hard on that. Already damaged, it tore further, baring part of a slim, flailing girl-limb. This seemed like a hell of a fine, drunken project, and I proceeded to shuck the leg in question as you’d peel the cornhusk off a tamale. We were both laughing as we struggled breathlessly, both moderately intoxicated and maybe both pretending to be just a little more alcoholically uninhibited than we really were. After all, we had to justify to ourselves and each other our undignified behavior, two grown people roughhousing wantonly and destructively on the floor like a couple of crazy kids. I let the slacks go, half-demolished, and tackled the much flimsier and more satisfactory blouse, feeling her clawing fingers get away with most of my undershirt and some of the skin beneath…

Abruptly, simultaneously, we stopped laughing. I felt her yield, moving against me urgently; I felt myself respond. It took us only a moment to rid ourselves of the tangled wreckage that still obstructed our access to each others’ bodies…

It was a peaceful awakening. I was lying between clean sheets in a soft bed in a quiet attic room full of diffused daylight and somewhere a girl was singing happily. I felt quite happy, too. I’d survived an endless institutional nightmare, and some fairly violent experiences; but at least I wasn’t in an institution any longer. I wasn’t anybody’s patient any longer except, perhaps, my own.

Of course there were problems. There were still things I was supposed to remember, but to hell with them. You could always make new memories if you misplaced the old ones… I yawned and stretched and got out of the bed and found the bathroom. I grinned at myself in the mirror. I had a slightly swollen lip where she’d bitten me and she’d done a respectable wildcat job on my hide. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t been there. My sweet, proper PR lady, for God’s sake! Obviously she wasn’t even feeling very ashamed of herself or she wouldn’t be singing like a bird out in the other room.

There was shaving stuff on the shelf above the washbowl, and a big clean towel by the bathtub. In the bedroom, the contents of my pockets had been piled on the dresser and some fresh clothes that fit me were neatly arranged on one of the chairs. Interesting. Apparently I’d felt enough at home in this apartment before my near-fatal crash to maintain something of a wardrobe here, yet I felt certain that last night was the first time the lady of the house and I… Well, there was no sense in wearing out the mental machinery on a problem the answer to which waited only one room away. When I emerged into the paneled living-dining area, shaved, scrubbed, and respectably attired, Kitty was setting the table for breakfast.

She was wearing slim new blue jeans and a blue-and-white checked gingham shirt with long sleeves. Her long brown hair looked soft and silky. She must have slipped away early from the bed to which we’d finally made our way, and worked hard with shampoo and drier while I slept on. She didn’t look around, she didn’t even seem to know I was there, but she’d stopped singing. I came up behind her, parted the shining hair and, while she stood quite still by the table, kissed the nape of her neck.

“Miss Davidson, I presume.”

“Don’t presume too much this morning, my dear,” she said quietly. “I think we both presumed quite enough last night.”

“Question, ma’am,” I said, speaking to the back of her head. “Apparently we’ve been associated for months on a fairly dangerous mission. A marriage engagement has been mentioned. I even seem to have moved some clothes in here. So how does it happen we never did that before?”

She looked around quickly. “Darling, if I hadn’t got quite smashed on two little drinks I’d never have dreamed of doing it last night, and I certainly have no intention of ever doing it again!” She stopped abruptly. Her face grew quite pink. “Well, not
that
way… Oh, damn, something’s boiling over.”

I grinned, watching her run out of the room, a boyish figure in the brand-new jeans that, indestructible and impenetrable, made it quite clear that the wearer had no intention of cooperating in any undignified sex-shenanigans this morning, no matter what lewd and disgraceful antics she might have participated in last night.

Waiting, I sat down and looked idly out the window at the sunlit suburban view—well, it was about time for a little more sunshine around here. This was only the second time I’d seen blue sky since I’d awakened in the hospital. I could see the freeway embankment up the street, and the tops of the cars and trucks driving by beyond the white-painted barrier up there. It occurred to me that the big highway must have caused a lot of resentment when it was rammed through this peaceful suburb. Even with the windows closed, the steady rumble of traffic was quite audible.

“Your coffee, Monsieur,” Kitty said, returning. “What didn’t perk all over the stove, that is. You can start on that while I dish up breakfast.”

It was very pleasant to tackle a meal that hadn’t been prepared in a hospital kitchen and wasn’t served by a professional attendant in white. I gave it my full attention for a while, aware that across the table Kitty was also doing justice to her cooking. At last I poured myself another cup of coffee and leaned back comfortably in the chair.

“You didn’t answer my question,” I said at last. “I mean, you did give me, and those Ministry of Transport investigators, the distinct impression that our relationship was sexy as hell—”

“Oh, that!” She didn’t look up from her plate. “I was just following instructions. Mike Ross seemed to think that if I let them, or anybody—there was a microphone in that hospital room, remember—guess that our engagement had been strictly platonic, they’d have realized there was something peculiar going on. Nobody has platonic engagements these days. I guess the man you work for didn’t take Mike into his confidence; we didn’t know he was going to blow your cover deliberately. And maybe I overdid the brazen-modern-hussy act.” She glanced up briefly. “Actually, I wasn’t very good, was I? After all the big talk, I couldn’t make myself forget about that mike when… you came all over amorous that day. Sorry.”