Waiting

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Authors: Frank M. Robinson

BOOK: Waiting
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This book is dedicated in loving memory to
my brother Mark,
who liked this story the best of all.
 
Running
…
A stitch in his side had started to throb, and the chill night air burned when Shea sucked it into his lungs. He’d been half walking, half running, ever since he’d left Macy’s. He’d suspected he was being followed when he got off at the Embarcadero station, the first stop that BART made in San Francisco. He’d even sensed it the moment he stepped onto the train in Berkeley, but that was ridiculous, and the few times he’d suddenly turned around, he hadn’t seen anybody else at his end of the platform.
It hadn’t been much at first, just a growing sense of uneasiness, a feeling that somebody was watching him. He’d taken the escalator up to the street level by the Hyatt Regency, then decided to have a drink in its atrium. He was forty minutes early for the meeting; nobody would be at Soriano’s yet and he hated sitting in a claustrophobic restaurant bar nursing a drink.
Halfway through his second scotch and soda he’d caught himself staring at the balconies above his head, searching for somebody hiding behind the vines that looped down from them. But all he’d seen was a maid pushing a cleaning cart on the sixth level, a few guests checking into their rooms, and a few more carrying coats and umbrellas, leaving for dinner or the theater.
He’d smiled to himself, thinking he was getting jumpy in his old age, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that somebody had followed him from Berkeley and was somewhere in the atrium watching him. He’d tried to shrug it off, then became uneasy again at the thought that perhaps muggers had started to imitate carjackers, stalking their victims until they were alone and vulnerable.
He turned up Larkin Street, ducking into a doorway to catch his breath. He’d stumbled through a good part of the Tenderloin, its borders marked by puddles of vomit and piss stains in the alleyways, kicking at the occasional crumpled sheet of newsprint that skittered ahead of the wind and wrapped itself around his legs. Broken bottles littered the gutters, and the analytical part of him wondered what the winos were drinking these days.
Still Cisco? Still Wild Irish Rose?
He heard somebody clumping down the stairs behind the door and stepped reluctantly back onto the sidewalk, nervously glancing up and down the street. A few people closing up shop, a few others heading for the cheap restaurants that filled the area. Nobody was looking at him or had even noticed him.
But he knew that somebody was watching him as surely as he always knew when it was five minutes to five at the hospital and he’d diagnosed enough clogged arteries for the day.
“Spare change?”
The mumble startled him. As nervously alert as he was, he hadn’t noticed the panhandler huddled under the streetlight. He shook his head and hurried past, only half hearing the muttered “Fuck you” that floated after him.
He’d walked over to Macy’s from the Hyatt, finding protective coloring in the crowds on the street and among the shoppers crowding the aisles of kitchen accessories in Macy’s basement. There had been a group of schoolkids singing Christmas carols at the bottom of the escalator, and any thoughts of violence at the hands of strangers had faded. It was probably the season; almost everybody was uptight at Christmas.
He’d been casually inspecting some stoneware—with his two boys earning their allowance by doing the dishes, the attrition rate among the cereal bowls had been fierce—when he thought he saw somebody staring at him from the center aisle.
He’d almost knocked over a serving platter when he jerked around. But there had been nobody there except some harried housewives and bored husbands browsing among the automatic breadmakers and the copper-bottomed pans.
From then on, it had been all downhill. There was something in the basement and it was after him.
Panicked, he’d pushed his way to the escalator and a moment later was on the street, the chill night air seeping beneath his coat and turning his sweaty shirt clammy. He’d managed a shambling run down Geary for half a dozen blocks, then north on Larkin, looking over his shoulder every five steps and cursing to himself because he never saw anybody following him though he knew damned well somebody was stalking him on the open street.
The pause in the doorway had given him a little time to calm down. He should call the restaurant—it was almost six and Mitch and Artie and the others would be there by now. He could catch a cab or maybe somebody could pick him up.
Or maybe he should just call the cops. Tell them his name was Dr. Lawrence Shea, that he was a law-abiding citizen and he was being followed by somebody he didn’t know for reasons he didn’t know. He’d probably sound like a drunk or an idiot or maybe both, but it was better than running.
There was a phone in its plastic hood next to an alleyway and he hurried over to it, fumbled in his pocket for some coins, heard them drop, and frantically dialed. The restaurant first and then 911.
It took a moment before he realized there was no dial tone, that the armored cord on the handset was swinging free where somebody had yanked it out. He stared at the dangling cord for a moment, ignoring the sweat that trickled down his forehead and into his eyes.
Sweet Jesus … .
He stood there, holding the phone, refusing to move. He’d make them come to him, make them show themselves.
As soon as he thought it, his heart started beating wildly and his chest felt as if somebody had him in a bear hug. The shirt bunched up in his armpits started soaking up sweat like a bath towel. Medically, he knew he was probably having a panic attack, but he couldn’t forget those patients who had dropped dead with no previous history of heart disease. He was a doctor; he was aware of the symptoms, but it didn’t make any difference. His nerves had tightened up until they were stiff enough to squeak and he was sure he could feel the beginning of chest pains.
He slammed the handset back into its cradle and fled up Larkin, grateful when the heaviness in his chest suddenly eased and his heartbeat slowed. Once he glimpsed himself in the window of a secondhand-magazine store, his face framed by ancient copies of
The Saturday Evening Post
and
Look
. A frightened man in his middle forties, just beginning to go to fat, with thinning brown hair, pale face, eyes sunken and terrified, lips pulled away from clenched teeth.
It was the wrong season of the year, he thought: It was Christmas and he was wearing a Halloween mask.
He realized it had been a mistake to leave the holiday crowds downtown, that he would have been much safer there than in the seedy area around Larkin and Post. Nobody was buying Christmas presents at the porno stores or massage parlors, and few people were enjoying a holiday dinner at the Thai or Vietnamese restaurants that dotted the neighborhood.
He’d head back to Union Square. He could lose himself in the crowds; nothing would happen to him surrounded by shoppers.
He turned to hurry south down Larkin and once again his heart tumbled into an erratic, rapid beating. He blindly turned and ran back north, indifferent to the young Asian kids who watched wide-eyed before they ducked out of his way. He tried to force himself to calm down, to think logically about who might be following him and what they might want.
It never occurred to him that he was being herded.
 
It was getting darker
now and the streets were emptying quickly, people chased indoors by the cold and the start of a chill drizzle. Shea could feel his legs trembling, his muscles giving out, and knew he couldn’t run much farther. He was out of shape: he’d never followed the advice he’d given his patients to stop smoking and exercise more.
He could slip into a restaurant. He’d be safer among people, but the moment the idea crossed his mind he felt a brief spasm in his chest and knew if he tried to hide among the crowds he risked having his heart speed up again. He was still too panicked to realize he had finally been run to ground.
Then it struck him that if he couldn’t run, Perhaps he could hide. Someplace dark where nobody could see him. He ran for another block, finally cutting into an alley where he crouched down on the far side of some steps leading to a loading dock. He was sobbing with fright and fatigue and frantically trying to control his breath so his loud gasps for air wouldn’t give him away. He waited.
Nothing.
Nobody had followed him into the alley. The only sounds were those of rats rooting around in the garbage cans behind the back of a restaurant thirty feet away. He was calmer now but still anxious to find a place to hide. He strained his eyes searching the alleyway, which was dimly lit by small bulbs overhanging the back doors of cafés and warehouses.
On the other side of the cracked concrete, a few yards from where he crouched, a huge plywood shipping crate sagged against a brick wall. He waited a long moment, watching the street, then scrambled over. The crate was lying on its side, the lid at the far end propped open a foot or so, and he squeezed in.
He was feeling more like himself by the moment and guessed that whoever it was who had been tailing him had either given up or lost him. He’d just started to relax when he felt the short hairs rise on the back of his neck. He wasn’t sitting on wood; he was squatting on something that felt like remnants of carpet, while another strip of carpeting partly covered the opening he’d just squeezed through.
And he wasn’t alone.
He fumbled for his key-chain flashlight and waved it around the interior. He was right: dirty carpeting covered the bottom of the crate, while at the other end there was a bedroll in one of the corners and a blue plastic recycling box upended to serve as a table. Sitting a few feet away, bundled up in two scarves and a filthy overcoat, a weather-beaten old man with a three-day beard and bleary eyes stared at him. He looked sixty, maybe more, with a face of tanned leather, clumps of gray stubble sprouting from hedgerows of wrinkles.
Reality, Shea thought. Not pleasant but something he could see and touch, a situation he could handle.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled, “I didn’t mean …”
He let the sentence dribble away, noticing for the first time the bottle by the man’s side. Shea crawled over and waved the flashlight in front of his eyes. The pupils responded sluggishly; the old drunk had passed out with his eyes half open, one of the army of homeless clogging the arteries of the city. You saw them all over downtown and even in the outlying areas, panhandling by ATMs and squatting outside restaurants and any other place that might attract tourists, rattling their coffee-takeout cups with a few coins in the bottom. At night, some sought refuge in the city shelters while others found it in doorways or packing crates.
Shea was nearly himself now, managing to light a cigarette with hands that trembled only slightly. He forced himself to try to figure out why he’d become so panicked. Something vaguely felt but never seen had spooked him, and his imagination had run away with him. His emotions must have created a feedback loop so every time he thought somebody was following him, his reactions had become more extreme. The fear of being hunted had become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Mitch was the psychiatrist in the Club; he could explain the mechanics of it.
But for right now, he would stay where he was. He was out of the cold and the drizzle, and his host wasn’t about to complain. He propped up the tiny flashlight on the recycling box so the glow in the crate made it seem almost cozy. He’d wait until he got a grip on his nerves, find a working phone someplace, and. call the restaurant—everybody would still be there. It had been an odd occurrence and it would be a while before he forgave himself for panicking but—
He felt the sweat dampen his forehead again. He’d been staring at the old man, vaguely aware that something was wrong but too preoccupied with his own problems to give it much thought.
Sometime during the last few minutes the poor bastard had stopped breathing.
Shea crawled forward a few feet and felt his neck, right under the jaw by the carotid artery. No pulse. It couldn’t have been very long: he would have sworn the man was alive when he’d first noticed him. But the ravages of chronic alcoholism, acute intoxication, the cold—it happened.
He struggled to get out of his coat, his own breathing ragged and uneven. Cramped quarters for CPR, but he’d give it a try. Jesus, nobody was ever going to believe this.
He suddenly froze, his arms half in and half out of his coat. Once again he had the feeling of a
presence
nearby, the same thing he had felt in Macy’s basement. This time it was right outside the packing crate. Something was standing by the crate, knowing he was there, knowing he was hiding … .
frightened, monkey
?
The whispery voice came from
inside
the crate, not outside. Dry, raspy, old, but very clear, with no slurring. A part of him—that very small part that wasn’t terrified—noted that the words didn’t sound threatening or contemptuous, they merely sounded—descriptive.

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