Things Beyond Midnight (12 page)

“You could be wrong there, too,” Jimmie told her. “Not all lawbreakers are mentally unbalanced.”

“This ‘Deathmaster’ guy is, and I’m convinced of it.”

“You’re a strongly opinionated young woman.”

“Mom always said that.” She sipped her wine, nodded. “Yeah, I guess I am.” She frowned, turning the glass slowly in her long-fingered hand. “Do you think they’ll ever catch him?”

“I somehow doubt it,” Jimmie declared. “No one seems to have a clear description of him. And he always manages to elude the police. Leaves no clues. Apparently selects his subjects at random. No motive to tie him to. No consistent M.O.”

“What’s that?”

“Method of operation. Most criminals tend to repeat the same basic pattern in their crimes. But not this fellow. He keeps surprising people. Never know where he’ll pop up next, or who his target will be. Difficult to catch a man like that.”

“You call them ‘subjects’ and ‘targets’—but they’re
people!
Innocent men and women and children. You make them sound like... like cutouts in a shooting gallery!”

“Perhaps I do,” he admitted, smiling. “It’s simply that we have different modes of expression.”

“I say they’ll get him eventually. He can’t go on just butchering innocent people forever.”

“No one goes on forever,” said Jimmie Prescott.

She put down her wineglass, leaned toward him. “Know what bothers me most about the sniper?”

“What.”

“The fact that his kind of act attracts copycats. Other sickos with a screw loose who read about him and want to imitate him. Arson is like that. One big fire in the papers and suddenly all the other wacko firebugs start their
own
fires. It gets ’em going. The sniper is like that.”

“If some mentally disturbed individual is motivated to kill stupidly and without thought or preparation by something he or she reads in the newspaper then the sniper himself cannot be blamed for such abnormal behavior.”

“You call what
he
does normal?”

“I... uh... didn’t say that. I was simply refuting your theory.”

She frowned. “Then who is to blame? I think that guy should he caught and—”

“And what?” Jimmie fixed his cool gray eyes on her. “What would you do if you suddenly discovered who he was... where to find him?”

“Call the police, naturally. Like anybody.”

“Wouldn’t you be curious about him, about the kind of person he is? Wouldn’t you
question
him first, try to understand him?”

“You don’t question an animal who kills! Which is what he is. I’d like to see him gassed or hanged.... You don’t
talk
to a twisted creep like that!”

She had made him angry. His lips tightened. He was no longer amused with this conversation; the word game had turned sour. This girl was gross and stupid and insensitive. Take her to bed and be done with it Use her body—but no words. No more words. He’d had quite enough of those from her.

“Check, please,” he said to the waiter.

It was at his motel, after sex, that Jimmie decided to kill her. Her insulting tirade echoed and reechoed in his mind. She must be punished for it.

In this special case he felt justified in breaking one of his rules: never pre-select a target. She told him that she worked the afternoon shift at a clothing store on Vine. And he knew where she lived, a few blocks from work. She walked to the store each afternoon.

He would take her home and return the next day. When she left her apartment building he would dispatch her from a roof across the street. Once this plan had settled into place in the mind of Jimmie Prescott he relaxed, allowing the tension of the evening to drain away.

By tomorrow night he’d be in Tucson, and Janet Lakeley would be dead.

Warm sun.

A summer afternoon.

The sniper emerged from the roof door, walking easily, carrying a custom-leather guncase.

Opened the case.

Assembled the weapon.

Loaded it.

Sighted the street below.

Adjusted the focus.

Waited.

Target now exiting.

Walking along street toward corner.

Adjust sight focus.

Finger on trigger.

Cheek against stock.

Eye to scope.

Crosshairs direct on target.

Fire!

Jimmie felt something like a fist strike his stomach. A sudden, shocking blow. Winded, he looked down in amazement at the blood pulsing steadily from his shirtfront.

I in hit! Someone has actually
—

Another blow—but this one stopped all thought, taking his head apart. No more shock. No more amazement.

No more Jimmie.

She put away the weapon, annoyed at herself.
Two
shots! The Phantom Sniper, whoever he was, never fired more than once. But
he
was exceptional. She got goosebumps, just thinking about him.

Well, maybe next time she could drop her target in one. Anybody can miscalculate a shot. Nobody’s perfect.

She left the roof area, walking calmly, took the elevator down to the garage, stowed her guncase in the trunk of the stolen Mustang and drove away from the motel.

Poor Jimmie, she thought. It was just his bad luck to meet
me.
But that’s the way it goes.

Janet Lakeley had a rule, and she never broke it: when you bed down a guy in a new town you always target him the next day. She sighed. Usually it didn’t bother her. Most of them were bastards. But not Jimmie. She’d enjoyed talking to him, playing her word games with him... bedding him. She was sorry he had to go.

He seemed like a real nice guy.

00:06
DEATH DECISION

Michael followed his younger sister up the sloping ramp, the heavy leather suitcase bumping his knee, the cool dusk of the station tunnel behind him—seeing the snake-length of train ahead of them, the gleaming passenger coaches waiting on the tracks in the glare of late afternoon sunlight.

He paused for a moment on the edge of the blazing white expanse of concrete and allowed the hot, unfamiliar iron-and-steel smells of the platform to envelop him.

His first train... his first trip outside the city... his first real adventure.

Then his fathers hard voice probed at him sharply. “Hurry along, Michael. And take sister’s hand. We don’t want the train to leave without us.”

The tall figure moved past him, a lean silhouette against the reflecting silver of the coaches, and Michael followed, switching the suitcase to ease its weight, taking Lucy’s small hand. He thought: Lucy is too young to understand death. When you’re seven, death is a dark fantasy you can’t really believe in. But she was learning, thought Michael bitterly; she was learning all about death, as he had learned. Father was seeing to that.

Michael tried to imagine what they would find in Los Angeles, California; he tried to envision his mother lying starched and painted like a plaster saint in a flower-banked coffin with organ music playing softly in the background and people moving past her in a dreamlike procession, silent and, tight-lipped. When his uncle had died of a heart attack it had been that way, with the flowers so sickeningly sweet that Michael had nearly become ill. He remembered it all, every detail.

But now it was different. He had not seen his mother in six years, not since he was eight, when she had gone away from them forever, and it was impossible to imagine her lying cold and unmoving somewhere in a strange city. She still seemed alive to him; he could hear her repeating his name over and over again, the favorite name she’d had for him: “Mikey, oh, Mikey...”

“Michael!” the lost voice of his mother became the hard, commanding voice of his father. “I
told
you to move along.”

A round-faced, smiling porter took the suitcase from Michael as they mounted the iron coach steps and led them toward their compartment. The coach interior was cool, cooler even than the long station tunnel, and Michael moved behind his father with a feeling of having entered a new world, separated utterly from the city-world beyond the glass windows. He’d
seen
trains, heard them roar past in the night, but this was his first time on one. It was nothing like the bus that held taken them into Jefferson, here to the big station. Not like the bus at all.

His father gave the porter some change and the man disappeared down the narrow corridor, leaving them alone in their compartment. It was like a little room, with a silver wash basin over to one side and green velvet seats.

“Well, don’t just
stand
there, Michael. Close the door and put away our things. What is the matter with you today?”

Mr. Leonard Bair, Michael’s father, was a tall man with a thin, corded neck and small black bird’s eyes. He wore steel-rimmed spectacles which made his eyes look even smaller and more birdlike, and when he smiled, which was infrequently, his lips twisted up from porcelain dentures which seemed at least a size too large for his spare face.