The Terrorizers (8 page)

I watched the door open. I stepped back to the window as I was supposed to; we’d settled these small points of discipline long ago, quite amicably. Trask shoved the door wide, checked my location, and turned back to get the tray he’d left on the shelf beside the door so he’d have both hands free in case I had some notion of jumping him as he entered. His expression, as always recently, was slightly apologetic, indicating that he knew these precautions were unnecessary between us, but after all a job was a job and he liked to do it right. He pulled the door closed one-handed, just in case I should take it into my head to make a run for it while he was busy setting out my meal on the little table by the wall. The door could only be opened with a key, from either side. The key was in his pocket.

“A little underdone, just like you like it, Mr. Madden,” he said cheerfully as he uncovered the plate. “And I got you a beer. Just a sec while I open it for you. Sorry about the steak knife, but that’s a nice tender piece of meat; you’ll do all right with your fork.”

I grinned, coming forward as he stepped aside. “Sure. Hell, if I had a knife I might cut your throat. You never know with a dangerous character like me… Oh,
damn!
” I’d knocked the bottle off the corner of the table as I seated myself. “Oh, damn it, Tommy, I’m sorry…”

He went for the bottle, which hadn’t shattered. It was rolling across the floor spewing beer and foam on the carpet. Bent over to grab it, he stopped abruptly, realizing what he was doing. That was when I hit him and broke his neck.

I’ll have to admit that it surprised me almost as much as it did him. I’d known, somehow, that it could be done that way, but I hadn’t had any really good reason to think I could do it. I’d been ready to throw myself on top of him and pin him down and finish him off, one way or another, before he could recover from the first blow. It wasn’t necessary. He went down instantly. There were some ugly, convulsive jerks and twitches as the final, fading signals filtered through the damaged circuits; then he lay limp and still.

I rubbed my hand, stinging from the force of the blow. It was badly bruised—apparently I wasn’t the brick-smashing type of karate expert—but nothing seemed to be broken. Okay. Keys and a weapon next. I got the keys from his pocket. I was fairly sure, from careful observation, that he carried no armaments, but I searched him anyway. Nothing. He’d been picked for his ability to deal with maniacs barehanded; and in a place like that you don’t want to give a maniac an opportunity to become an armed maniac. Only the security guards, the last line of defense so to speak, were permitted firearms on the premises. I took his wallet, since I didn’t know where my own had got to, and money might be required if I did manage to get clear of this place. That made me feel a bit guilty, like a thief.

I let myself out of the room, but paused to look back. Something told me that if you can do it you’d damned well better be able to look at it. Poor Tommy. I suppose there are always guys who aren’t really bad guys who get themselves stuck on the wrong sides of situations. Maybe it was my imagination but the dead boyish face seemed to have a reproachful expression. Well, hell, I’d warned them, and he’d been right there when I did it. I’d given them a chance to let me leave peacefully, hadn’t I? If they persisted in locking people up and running electricity through them after being properly cautioned, they could damned well take the consequences.

Hyacinth Cottage contained my prison suite and a sitting room for the nurse or orderly. Off the sitting room were a small bathroom—just a toilet and basin—and a closet. In the closet I found my clothes and some sanitarium equipment, including several interesting canvas garments well-equipped with straps, and two pairs of crutches, aluminum and wood. Apparently they’d had a crazy cripple to deal with, or expected one. The aluminum tubing was too light for my purposes. I dismantled one of the wooden crutches by removing two wing-nuts and driving out the bolts. I checked the straight lower section after discarding the rubber tip. It seemed to be sound hardwood and it was almost two feet long. It would have to do.

I got dressed. It felt odd to have on real clothes once more, after living so long—with just one brief day’s interlude—in pajamas. My overcoat and airplane bag weren’t there. I left my sports jacket reluctantly, after checking that it held nothing I’d miss if I couldn’t come back. There was nothing in my pants, either. Fortunately, the going-away costume Kitty had provided me in Prince Rupert included a reasonably warm turtle-necked sweater, so going outdoors stripped for action involved no serious risk of pneumonia.

Nevertheless, I shivered as the cold, damp air hit me outside the cottage door. I guess my stint in the cold waters of Hecate Strait had left me with a chronic yearning for warmth and dryness. It was night outside, but they had enough lights on the premises for midnight football. The vague mist seemed to radiate the illumination into all corners that might have sheltered me. To hell with it. I’d be more conspicuous sneaking from one patch of cover to the next than just walking along like a gent on legitimate business. I strolled away casually, therefore, swinging my length of crutch jauntily, like a cane.

It was too late for any patients to be outside. They were either eating in the main dining room or being served in their cottages, depending on medical and psychological condition. For the moment, there were no employees in sight. With Trask eliminated, there was only one employee below the administrative level who concerned me, anyway. The rest had, and apparently wanted to have, nothing to do with the operation of the two Snake Pits, as Goldenrod and Hyacinth seemed to be known: the violent wards. Tommy had told me this resentfully, I remembered. He’d thought it unfair that his fellow-workers considered themselves superior to him just because they dealt with simple lushes and dope fiends instead of…

I saw Dugan coming, carrying a tray. Instinctively, I started to take cover; then I changed my mind. Actually, it was a stroke of luck catching him in the open like this. Otherwise I would have had to worry about him until I found him and immobilized him. Dugan being Dugan—I considered myself a Dugan expert by this time—there were better ways of handling him than jumping out from behind a bush and saying
boo.
I continued to walk towards him.

It was typical of Dugan, I reflected, that he was serving somebody’s dinner half an hour late. It was also typical of Dugan that, seeing a patient loose who shouldn’t be, he never once thought of raising the alarm. I’d counted on that. He could handle it personally, Dugan could. He needed no help, did Dugan. He set the tray carefully on one of the benches along the path, and kept on coming, reaching behind him. No gun, I hadn’t seen any further indications of the compact Colt he’d shown me when we first met, but it was also typical of Dugan, I knew, that he carried something in his hip pocket that wasn’t a wallet or a handkerchief, regardless of the house rules.

I’d seen the bulge of it often enough, but I’d never managed to identify it. Now, as he pulled it out, I saw that it was a slim and flexible blackjack of some kind. Maybe it was what the British call a cosh, but don’t ask me where I’d heard that word because I didn’t know.

“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” Dugan asked as we stopped about ten feet apart. “Where’s Tommy?”

“Tommy isn’t anywhere,” I said. “Not any longer. Poor Tommy.”

His face changed. His eyes narrowed oddly. If I’d thought Dugan could feel concern for anybody but himself, I would have said I’d just startled and worried him. Well, I’d wondered a little about the relationship between the two of them; not that their love life was any of my damned business. Dugan spoke harshly, as if to reassure himself.

“You’re a bloodly liar. Tommy isn’t Einstein, or Muhammed Ali either, but he’d never let you…”

I sighed. “Dugan, you talk too damned much. Are you going to do something with that thing besides slap it against your palm like that, or am I just supposed to fall down dead with fright at the noise?”

He said, “Since you ask for it, cock, it will be a real pleasure.”

He came forward in a half-crouch, weaving a bit, feinting with the sap. I brandished my stick clumsily, like a feeble club. He laughed and kept advancing. I struck out at him in an ineffectual way, and jumped back fearfully as he responded with a slash of his own weapon. I stumbled dramatically. He laughed again, and came in like a bear to honey. I arranged my feet properly and drove the stick straight at his eyes, rapier-fashion. A man six-four has considerable range when he extends himself in a full fencing lunge, even with just a two-foot stick. Dugan recoiled; his arms went up to protect his face. Instantly, in mid-lunge, I dropped the point and sent it into his belly with the full weight of my body behind it, trying to remember the Italian name of that high-low attack that I’d first learned, I recalled, on a college fencing team back when I was still just a nice young fellow with photographic ambitions racking up a few points for phys. ed.

I wasn’t so young, and I didn’t seem to be so nice, any longer. I heard the breath go out of Dugan. He doubled up helplessly, hugging himself, sinking to his knees. I looked down at him for a moment. I could see no need whatever to take any risks for Dugan’s sake, like the risk of leaving him tied up to maybe work himself free and alert the guards before I was ready for them. My right hand was too tender for any further flashy displays of karate, if that was what it was. I stepped behind Dugan, slipped my hands under his armpits, and brought them up and around, locking them together at the nape of his neck and levering his head forward. I remembered the name of that wrestling hold all right: the venerable and respected full nelson. I heard him groan as the pressure came on.

“Goodbye, Dugan,” I said. “Don’t think it hasn’t been nice, because it hasn’t.”

Afterwards, I dragged him into the nearest ornamental bushes, and liberated his cosh and wallet, and his key ring, heavier than Tommy’s. I left him my part-crutch, and got the tray he’d put aside and shoved it in with him to prevent anybody from getting curious about it. Then I frowned thoughtfully, getting curious about it myself. I uncovered the meal on the tray. It was the same kind of bland and uninteresting food, totally digestible and totally lacking in substance, that I’d been getting to keep me alive, just barely, while Dr. Elsie worked on me. I hadn’t been aware that another patient was undergoing the same treatment.

I looked around, and crouched quickly in the dripping bushes as a whiteclad figure emerged from a cottage some fifty yards away and headed towards the main building carrying a disheveled-looking tray that had obviously served its nutritional purpose for the time being. I didn’t know the name of the cottage, and it didn’t concern me, but now I remembered that when I left Hyacinth there had been a light in the neighboring bungalow.

Well, I’d known in a vague sort of way that Goldenrod was occupied but, with troubles of my own, I hadn’t spent much time speculating about my next-door neighbor. There was really, I told myself, no reason why I should do so now. The place was lousy with loonies I didn’t know and didn’t want to know. Dugan’s private patient was probably a perfectly legitimate mental case undergoing perfectly legitimate therapy. After all, on a place this size, they couldn’t spend all their time tormenting people.

I hesitated, drew a long breath, and went back for a look. Goldenrod Cottage was larger than Hyacinth, and had two detention suites, one at each end. The near one was dark. I slipped along the rear of the building to the lighted, barred, windows. The blind was down, but Dugan had done his usual sloppy job. There was a two-inch gap below one. I peered inside cautiously and saw a thin, plain woman in a soiled hospital gown slumped in a chair in the corner, nobody I’d ever seen before…

Then, looking more closely, I drew a sharp little breath, as I realized that the naked legs were actually quite young and slim and that the figure was youthful, too, although on the slender and economical side of feminine perfection. It was Kitty Davidson.

It was a complication I didn’t need. It confronted me with a decision I had no desire to make, although there was really no reason why I should even hesitate. After all, who was it who’d betrayed me into the hands of Dr. Elsie and Dr. Albert in the first place? Apparently, angry at not getting the information they’d wanted out of me, they were now punishing Kitty for their failure. All I had to do, before proceeding with the business of getting myself out of here, was treat myself to a good look at my sweet female Judas, now hunched there gracelessly in her dirty gown with her dull eyes staring blankly through her straggling hair. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer slut, right?

The only trouble was that it didn’t really make sense. I didn’t get it. If she was on the same side—of what?—as Elsie and Albert, as I’d naturally assumed after the way she’d brought me here, why would they put her through the electric wringer? The familiar red marks of the hold-down straps on her wrists and ankles—mine were still visible, although fading—confirmed what I’d already guessed from the diet she was being fed; but if they were just mad at her for bringing to their nuthouse a pecan they couldn’t crack, so to speak, there were much simpler ways for them to show their displeasure. Scientific interrogation suggested that they might have some doubts about her loyalty to them. If she was with them all the way, all they had to do was ask, wasn’t it? In any case it indicated that they thought she knew something they didn’t. It seemed likely that, in my memoryless state, I’d find the same information useful. I reminded myself that it was fairly certain, at least, that she had a telephone number of some interest to me.

Dugan’s keys let me into the building and admitted me to her suite. She didn’t hear me open the door, or pretended she didn’t. Well, if she thought I was Dugan bringing her tasteless dinner of bouillion and fruit juice there’d be no reason for her to jump up to greet me with instant joy.

“Kitty,” I said. She looked around vacantly and stared at me in a puzzled way, as if she wasn’t quite certain where she’d seen me before. I felt a sense of loss, remembering the bright, pretty girl I’d known. It was hard to keep a good hate focused on this vague, bedraggled creature. I said deliberately, “You make a great Snake Pit picture, Kitty, darling. Just let a little drool run down your chin now and you’ll be perfect.”