Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 11 (20 page)

As I’d requested, he was rolling up to a stop at the parking lot where I was keeping my car. “We weren’t allowed to keep anything, Nate. Not any piece of information or evidence, not a thing. Any report we made got quickly turned over to an intelligence officer.”

“Who, Jesse Marcel?”

“No—those CIC guys.”

Counterintelligence Corps.

“Like that guy Cavitt, you mean, who went out to the Brazel spread with Marcel? What became of him?”

Kaufmann shrugged, leaning on the wheel of the idling jeep. “Transferred. I don’t know where.”

“So where does that leave us, Frank?”

“Leaves you here in this parking lot. I leveled with you, Nate—and you’re free to use any of that yarn, as long as you don’t use my name. If you do, I’ll deny it on a stack of Bibles.”

“That’s comforting.”

“It’s like Mr. Ripley says—believe it or not.”

I stepped out of the jeep, gave him a little wave, and he gave me a big old grin and big old wave and rumbled off.

I was about to get in the rental, to go driving in search of an interesting restaurant, when I said to hell with it, locked my spiral pad in the glove box and walked back to the hotel.

Bone-tired, I stumbled into the hotel, found my way to the dining room, where I consumed a rare steak and all the trimmings and a couple bottles of Blatz, which seemed to be the local favorite—I wondered if the little men in silver suits liked it better out of the bottle or from the tap. My room was on the third floor, a small clean cubicle that could have been in any hotel, except for the framed print of a desert landscape over the single bed. Caked with dust, frazzled by bizarre information, I showered, standing in the tub, letting the needles try to pound sense into me.

No smarter, but cleaner anyway, I toweled off, and strode naked from the bathroom, wondering whether I should take in the show at the Chief Theater down the street, or just collapse into bed, where I figured it would take me maybe three seconds to lose consciousness, in which case I might not wake up to take advantage of the back-door date at ten p.m. I had at Maria Selff’s place, when she got off work at the base hospital.

Instead, a powerful arm slipped around from behind me, an uninvited guest tucked against the wall outside the bathroom door, a gloved hand settling a chloroformed cloth over my face, changing my plans for the evening.

At least I was right about how long losing consciousness would take.

The dreams were vivid and they were strange and they were compelling but they were also comforting and I not only remembered them upon awaking, I can remember them today, so many years later, as if they were a movie I watched yesterday.

The usual for me, as I suspect is the case for most people, is that I lose my dreams upon awakening, sometimes instantly, sometimes grasping slippery fragments that slide away even as I try to hold on to them, with only the mood of them, their ambience, hanging on, particularly the unpleasant dreams, lingering like a bad taste in the brain, though nice dreams could, on rare occasions, wake you with a smile.

In this dream, I saw someone or something hovering over me, haloed in light, fuzzy and yet distinct, appearing from utter darkness, a small pale person with a big head and big eyes and a silver suit, his features childlike, his mouth tiny but smiling, his speech precise and strangely accented, his words soothing, though later the words were the one thing I could not recall, only that the man—I thought of him as a man, not a monster (or, for that matter, a woman)—was a kind presence, a friendly presence, an unthreatening presence, a real presence, not an imagined one, not some mortician’s dream, not my nurse’s nightmare, not a disgruntled soon-to-be-ex-employee’s wild yarn, and yet at the same time it was all of those, and when that strange thumbless hand with the suction-cup fingertips touched my brow, it was as if a cool cloth had caressed my skin….

When I awoke with a smile, in a bed, in cool sheets, in a cool, dark room, my first thoughts were of this dream, of the strange kind creature and its comforting presence, and I lay staring at the ceiling, fully awake and yet not really aware, luxuriating in the dream’s afterglow, like the moments after sex, or a junkie coming slowly down.

And when the thought, the memory, finally broke through—
they fucking kidnapped me!
—I bolted upright, sheets falling to my waist—I was naked but for boxer shorts—the dream still with me but shoved back now, the smile reversing itself, and I sat there for long moments, eyes searching the darkness.

Head clear, body sluggish, my mouth thick with sleep and a brackish medicinal aftertaste—from the chloroform?—I made my way to a window where a fan was whirring … not just a fan, but the boxy structure of an evaporation-type air cooler taking up the lower half of the bedroom’s only window. Above it were blinds, which I drew open, and the night sky revealed itself. Stars and a full moon, too, the latter joining with outdoor electric lighting to illuminate the landscape of what was obviously a part of Walker Air Force Base.

My bare feet were on pile carpeting, and the moonlight revealed the shape of furnishings, a dresser, a few chairs, the bed, of course—and night-stand, with phone and lamp….

I switched the lamp on; its blue parchment shade suffused the room with a gentle pastel glow. As for the phone, it was deader than Roosevelt. Despite that ominous note, I seemed to be in a nicely if modestly appointed bedroom, and the man in the mirror over the dresser seemed to be me, in shorts, looking confused but none the worse for wear. The walls were pale plaster, decorated here and there with framed prints of Southwestern vistas—not unlike the one in the hotel room I’d been snatched from.

This bedroom was, in fact, like a hotel or motel room; if I was a captive, this was an oddly benign prison cell, with any number of objects presenting themselves as the makings of makeshift weapons—mirror-shard knives, chair-leg billy clubs, phone-receiver sap, torn-bedsheet garrotes …

Was I in a deluxe jail cell? The window above the air-conditioner unit was fixed in place, unopenable; but that might have been a function of the unit’s installation, not an attempt to keep me in. This left me with the room’s three doors to try….

The first one led to an empty closet; the second to a bathroom, which had a ventilation fan in the ceiling but no window, and no sign of toiletries on the sink, the cabinet over which was empty. But I did suddenly realize I had to pee, so I took the time to do that, and ponder my situation.

How long had I been here? Since I’d been grabbed virtually stepping out of the shower, I hadn’t been wearing a watch; and the one common household item not present in that bedroom was a clock. Rubbing my face with one hand, I felt what I guessed was a day’s growth of beard; this indicated I’d been here at least several hours, but—unless they’d taken the time to shave me—the night out that window was the same night I’d been snatched.

How long had I been unconscious, and dreaming that pleasant, weird, possibly drug-induced dream? Did that space creature in the dream represent someone who’d been questioning me, perhaps under sodium pentothal or some other truth-inducing drug?

I flushed the toilet, washed my hands—soap was provided, and a terry towel—and examined my arms and legs and between fingers and toes for needle marks; didn’t see anything. The angle was wrong to check my ass out in the mirror, but there was no soreness in either cheek, from an intrusive needle.

Back out in the almost chilly bedroom—the desert air the window unit was churning up was already cool—I went to that final door, put my ear to it, heard nothing, and with a what-the-hell shrug tried the knob, expecting it to be locked.

It wasn’t. I entered another darkened room, but light spilling in from the bedroom led me to a standing lamp that I switched on, imbuing a modest living-room-cum-kitchenette with a golden glow. Next to the lamp was an easy chair and, man of the house that I was, I sat down, my legs a little rubbery, the alertness of my mind still outdistancing my body, as if below the neck I hadn’t quite woken up all the way.

My easy chair matched the frayed blue cotton cushions of the davenport; the furnishings were maple-finish Early American, very homey in a spare modern way, scuffed and nicked from use, maybe even secondhand. Over the davenport, which had the look of a daybed, was a bigger Southwestern landscape, this print depicting a sunset almost as beautiful as the one I’d witnessed from Kaufmann’s jeep. A coffee table, scarred with cigarette burns, was littered with a few dog-eared magazines—
Field & Stream, Skyways, Popular Mechanics;
also an ashtray with some spent cigarettes. Since I didn’t smoke, I’d obviously had some company.

The only windows in the room were just behind my easy chair, double blinds drawn tight. Opposite the bedroom door was what I assumed to be the front door, to my right from where I sat. Low ceiling, creamy pebble-plaster walls; interestingly, no overhead lighting. This seemed to be that guest cottage Deputy Reynolds had referred to, where Mac Brazel and Sheriff Wilcox and God knew how many other witnesses of the saucer incident had been detained for “unofficial questioning.”

So I sat there in my boxer shorts like Dagwood waiting for Blondie to bring him a sandwich and breathed slow and deep and took stock of my situation and myself; the oddly agreeable dream waved at me amiably from the back of my mind, though another part was already wondering why my subconscious found the notion of a space creature pleasing. I rotated my shoulders, rolled my neck, worked my joints, getting the juices going, the blood flowing, like an athlete prepping for the big game.

Then I got up and prowled some more. The drawers in the kitchenette were empty; no spoons or forks, certainly not knives. The cupboards had a few glasses and coffee cups but no supplies; the refrigerator was empty but for a few bottles of Coca-Cola and Canada Dry. I plucked one of the cold Cokes from its shelf and, using a drawer handle for a church key, opened it.

Sipping the soda, I walked to what I took to be double windows, raised the blinds, exposing instead a picture window, unopenable; I touched fingertips to the thing and it was some kind of clear plastic, possibly like what they used in aircraft cockpit windshields—toss a chair at this baby and it would toss the chair back at you. Beyond the plastic picture window were the low-slung barracks-style clapboard buildings of the base, interspersed with trees and bushes; not so much moonlight filtered in as yellow light from a streetlamp on the blacktop artery this cottage was perched along.

I closed the blinds.

Chugging my Coke, puzzling out my predicament, I went to the front door; a man’s home was his castle, after all—if he wanted to lower the drawbridge and go out for a midnight pillage, who was to stop him?

“Who” was standing on my front stoop, his back to me: the brawny white-helmeted Negro MP from the jeep, blocking the way like the sentry he was. He glanced over his shoulder at me, like a bull acknowledging a buzzing fly. His face was a beautifully carved tribal mask, his eyes brown and placid and yet very, very hard.

“Can I help you?” He had an intimidating, lower-register Paul Robeson resonance.

“Yeah, how ’bout some clothes and a lawyer … oh, and a car.”

The helmeted head shook. “I can’t let you pass, mister. You’re a guest of Colonel Blanchard.”

“Swell. I’d like to talk to Colonel Blanchard.”

“Colonel’s gone for the day. Please move back inside.”

And the MP, unblinking eyes fixed upon me, reached out and pulled the door shut.

I backed up a step, grunted, “Huh,” took another swig of the Coke, considered my lot in life, and tried the door again—which still wasn’t locked.

The MP’s head turned slowly, almost mechanically, and his gaze over his shoulder at me oozed barely controlled impatience.

“Mister,” he said with the world-weariness only a guy in his twenties can muster, “you got it easy in there. It could go lots harder for you. You prefer the stockade to the guesthouse, I can make that arrangement.”

“Can I at least get something to eat?”

“You’ll get breakfast in the morning.”

The MP half-turned to reach out for the knob again, to slam the door, but instead I slammed the Coke bottle into the side of his head, just under the helmet, across his ear; it didn’t knock him out, but sure as shit stunned him, and I yanked him by that arm and flung him like a shot put across the room, where he slammed into the davenport, which slammed into the wall, knocking that framed print off its nail, dropping with a clunk behind.

Now I shut the door.

The MP, who’d somehow lost his helmet on the trip across the room, was sneering at me as he came up off the davenport, blood running from his ear vivid against his black cheek. He moved slowly, with easy, pantherlike grace, crouching low, though even crouching he was taller than I was, and I was six foot, for Christ’s sake! It looked like he planned to tackle me, but he was smarter than that: he simply unfastened his holster and got out his sidearm and was raising it, probably not to shoot me, just to cover me and make me listen to reason, but I was past reason, and I swung fast and hard with the Coke bottle and knocked the gun out of his hand, but the bottle slipped out, too, smacking against the plaster wall, taking out a chunk, not breaking. You ever try to break a Coke bottle?

Now he did tackle me, driving me back into my easy chair, but we both went backward, chair and all, ass over teakettle, and he was off-balance enough for me to shove up under him and toss him to one side, where he went crashing into the standing lamp, knocking it down, pulling its plug, sending the room into near darkness.

The MP was getting back on his feet again, but before he could get all the way up, I snatched his helmet off the floor and swung it around and clanged the damn thing off his skull. That dazed him, dropped him to a knee, but my swing had been awkward, the helmet slipping from my fingers and flying someplace. A massive fist arced around and caught me in the side, staggering but not dropping me, and as he was picking himself up, I was picking up that coffee table, magazines spilling, ashtray tumbling, and whammed it into him. The thing didn’t shatter, like a chair in a John Wayne saloon fight—the damn thing was maple, and it hurt the big man, sent him onto both knees, this time. So I hit him with it again, across his hunched-over shoulders, and he flopped onto his face, not unconscious, just hurting, with things inside him broken, ribs mostly, I’d wager.

Catching my wind, I found his gun on the floor and, as he was rousing, trained it on him.

“I don’t want to kill you,” I said, “particularly.”

“Shooting an MP is a federal offense.” Despite the size of him, despite that commanding Old Man River voice, this fucker was scared.

“So is kidnapping a citizen. Take your clothes off.”

His eyes and nostrils flared. “What?”

“Don’t worry about it. You’re not my type. Take ’em off. Try not to get any blood on ’em.”

Grumbling, he got out of his MP uniform and soon we were just two guys in their boxer shorts, with a pile of clothes between us. He had the more impressive musculature by far, but I had the gun. Keeping the .38 trained on him, I crouched to sort through his things, fishing out his gunbelt; his handcuffs were looped on them.

“Turn around,” I said, standing, his gun in my right hand, his handcuffs dangling in the left.

He spat on the floor. “Fuck you.”

“I can cuff you or shoot you. Pick one.”

Doing a commendable job retaining some dignity under humiliating conditions, the MP drew in a deep breath; the blood was glistening on his ear. He was a tough man: most guys wouldn’t have to weigh the choice I’d given him. Slowly, he let out the breath; just as slowly, he turned his back to me, and I cuffed his hands behind him.

I left him in the bathtub, his ankles and knees bound with electrical cords I’d liberated from lamps, sticking one of his socks in his yap, shutting him in with the vent fan going (in case he managed to spit the sock out and start in yelling), leaving a chair propped under the knob of the closed bathroom door.

His clothes were too big for me, and I only had one sock, but he was only a half a shoe size or so bigger and the helmet fit fine, not to mention the .38 revolver, which was a perfect fit for my palm, though for decorum’s sake I snapped it in its holster before setting out into the world that was Walker Air Force Base.

Bathed in more moonlight and streetlamp illumination than I cared to be, in my oversize one-sock uniform, helmet tipped forward like Bogart’s fedora, I walked down the sidewalks with an MP’s crisp confidence; at every intersection of blacktops, signs guided me. Up ahead, two noncoms exited a two-story office building, chatting, smoking, heading in my direction; they nodded to me, as they passed, and I nodded curtly back. Up ahead, a pair of MPs stepped out of a barracks, and I cut quickly to the right, moving off the sidewalk onto the grass, hugging bushes, hoping they didn’t see me.