Killdozer! (13 page)

Donzey laughed, reached for a toothpick and set about enjoying the last of that delicious steak. Farrel was a nice guy, but he lacked imagination.

Come to think of it, what good
was
the gadget?

Two hours later a small package was delivered. It contained a note and a splinter of bone. The note read:

Donzey realized that he still had the bone splinter in his hand. He laid it quickly on the table and stared at it as if he expected it to moan at him. He had known for some time that he would have to get a human bone to experiment with, but he would rather have had an anonymous one. He had known Eula Kelley for years. Farrel’s clumsy note didn’t begin to state the tragedy of her life since she married the town’s rich man. She was a Kelley, and she had been a Walsh
before that, and he wasn’t surprised that she had finally decided to leave him. But it didn’t make sense that she had left with another man. Not Eula.

Feeling a little sick, Donzey clipped the bone into his machine, set it for twenty seconds, put on the phones and threw the switch. He sat quite still until it clicked off, and then, white and shaken, adjusted the time switch for forty seconds. Once again he “listened,” then made his final setting of fifty-two seconds—enough to take him right up to the mental image of Eula’s death. More than that he dared not do. His great fear was that someday his psychic identification with the bone’s individuality would be carried with it into death.

Farrel arrived and found him sitting on the steps, his jaw muscles knotting furiously, his sharp eyes full of puzzled anger. Farrel left a deputy in his car and went inside with Donzey.

“Get anything?” he asked.

“Plenty. Farrel, that Bill Kelley ought to be shot, and I’d like to do the shooting.”

“Yeah. He’s a louse. That ain’t our affair. Was there anyone with her?”

“I—think there was. You better see for yourself.”

Farrel shot him a quizzical glance and then sat down beside the machine. Donzey turned it on as the sheriff donned the headset, and then sat back, watching. He was sorry that he had to put Farrel through it, but he felt that the sheriff should know the story that splinter had to tell. His mind ran back over Eula’s idea-patterns, the images they yielded. It was a story of incredible sordidness, and of a man’s utter cruelty to a woman. It told of the things he had done, things he had said. Eula had borne it and borne it, and her ego had slowly been crushed under the weight of it. Then there was that last terrible incident, and she had run away from him. It didn’t matter where she was running to, as long as it was away. And there was the flight of hope, the complete death of relief, when she realized, out there on the highway, that there was no escape. Bill Kelley’s mark was on her; she couldn’t leave him or her life with him. She knew exactly what she was doing when she threw the wheel hard over and closed her eyes against the beginning of that tearing crash.

The set clicked off. Farrel stared at Donzey, and drew a deep, shuddering breath.

“It don’t seem right, Donzey, knowing things like that about a woman. I always knew Bill was a snake, but—”

“Yeah,” said Donzey. “I know.”

Farrel peeled off the headset and went to the door. “Harry,” he called to his deputy, “go get Bill Kelley.”

“What’s that for?” asked Donzey when he returned.

“Strictly outside the law,” said Farrel very quietly. “I’m goin’ to give Bill Kelley somethin’ he needs.” He took off his badge and laid it on the bench.

Donzey suddenly remembered hearing that, years ago, Eula Walsh had married Bill Kelley when she was engaged to Farrel. He wondered if would have called Farrel in if he had remembered that before, and decided that he would have.

“Farrel,” he said after a time, “about that other person in the car—”

Farrel’s big head came up. “That’s right—there was somebody—I got just the impression of it, just before the crash. I don’t rightly remember—seems like it was someone I know, though.”

“Me, too. I can’t understand it, Farrel. She wasn’t running away with anybody. She wasn’t interested in anybody or anything except in getting away. I didn’t get any intimation of her meeting anyone, or even being with anyone until that last few seconds.”

“That’s right. What did he look like?”

“Sort of … well, medium-sized and … damn if I remember. But I don’t think I’ve seen him before.”

“I haven’t, either,” said Farrel. “I don’t know that it’s really important. If she ran away with somebody, she rated it. I don’t think she did, but … heck, he was probably just a hitchhiker that she was too upset to think about,” he finished lamely.

“A woman don’t commit suicide with a stranger along,” Donzey said.

“A woman’s liable to do anything after she’s been through what Eula went through.” The doorbell pealed. “That’ll be Kelley.”

As Farrel went to the door, Donzey noticed that his palms were
wet. Farrel opened the door and the deputy’s voice drifted in: “I saw Kelley, sheriff. He wouldn’t come.”

“He wouldn’t come? Why?”

Harry’s voice was aggrieved. “Aw, he seemed to have a wild hair up his nose. Got real mad. Started foamin’ at the mouth. Said by golly the police were public servants. Said he wasn’t used to bein’ ordered around like a criminal. Said if you want to see him you got to come to him, or prove he committed a crime. Sour-castic son-of-a-gun.”

“That ain’t all he is,” said Farrel. “Forget it, Harry. Shove off. I’ll walk into town when I’m through here.” He banged the door. “Donzey, we’re goin’ to fix that feller.”

Donzey didn’t like to see a big, easy-going lug like Farrel wearing that icy grin. The huge hands that pinned the badge back in its place shook ever so little.

“Sure,” said Donzey futilely, “sure—we’ll get him.”

Farrel spun on his heel as if Kelley’s face were under it, and stalked out.

It was about three days later that one of Farrel’s stooges at the county hospital sent up a bone specimen from an appendicitis death. Attached was a brief case history:

“We have,” muttered Donzey as he clipped the bone into the machine, “a little scientist in our midst. Ol’ Doc Grinniver up to his tricks again! A ruptured appendix and he tosses in a jolt of adrenalin to ‘rouse’ the patient, in the meantime making his heart pump poison all over his body, high-pressure.” He picked up his earphones and glanced at the report again. “ ‘Post-operative hemorrhage’ my
blue eyeballs! That was peritonitis! Oh, well, I guess he would have died anyway, and I guess the old butcher couldn’t get hold of a guinea pig with appendicitis.” He sat down at the machine, adjusted the time switch, and his mind slipped into the bone emanations.

It was the usual life-and-death story, but with a difference. The man had been in the midst of a slimy little office intrigue which seemed to have taken command of most of his thoughts in the last few months; but the ragged stab of pain when his appendix burst drove all that out. Pain is like that, and Donzey had found that people handled it in two ways. They let it pile up on them until it suffocated them, or they floated up and up in it until it supported them; they lay in it like a bed. The second way, though, required a knack which took years to develop, and Donzey was glad he could learn it from other people’s experience.

This particular case took it the first way, and it wasn’t very nice. The agony grew and dimmed all his senses except the one that feels pain; and that grew. Pretty soon he couldn’t even think. But when it got past that stage, it began to overwhelm his sensories, too, and the pain lessened. His eyes were open—had been, because he realized that his eyeballs were dry—but slowly he began to see again. Someone was bending over him. He was on the operating table. He had been to the movies, and he never remembered seeing anyone in dark clothes around an operating table before. And as his vision strengthened and the figure became clearer and clearer, he felt first curiosity, then awe, then the absolute, outside utmost in terror. Like a beam of negative energy, he felt it soaking up the heat of his body, his very life. It was a huge and monstrous thing. He had strength for just one thing; he closed his eyes just a tenth of a second before the dark one’s face swam into focus; and then, in the same instant, the doctor’s needle entered his heart. The warmth flowed back weakly, and when he dared to open his eyes again the dark one was gone.

And then the operation; and he felt every scrape and slice of it. When Donzey thought about it afterward, he felt his own appendix literally squirm in sympathy—not an experience measuring up to the highest standards of animal comfort. Soon enough it was over, and the set clicked off with a nice life margin of two minutes to go.

Donzey sat for a long time thinking this over. His was a mechanic’s mind, and such a mind seldom rejects anything because it has never heard of it before, or because it has heard otherwise. This machine now—it proposed certain very important questions. Donzey spread the questions out on a blank spot in his brain and looked at them.

The machine showed what death felt like, just before it happened. That was the really valuable point—it
happened
, it wasn’t a light going out. It was a force swinging into action, so strong that it could impress itself on the carefully constructed thought patterns mysteriously apparent in bones. All right—

What was this force called Death?

Donzey thought of that dark figure in the operating theater of the county hospital, and knew without a doubt that that question was answered. He was very happy that the late possessor of that piece of bone had had the consideration to close his eyes before he had taken a good look. Or was it the adrenalin that drove the dark thing out of sight? What had being in sight to do with death? Did looking on the Dark One—the capitalization was Donzey’s—result in death? Could that be it? Were sickness and accidents merely phenomena that gave man the power to see death? And was that sight the thing that took their life force out of their now useless bodies? And—

Would seeing Death in the machine kill a man?

Donzey looked respectfully at the machine and thought, “I could easy enough try it and find out,” without making the slightest move to do so.

Farrel arrived that evening, and for once the grim old man looked benignly happy. He clapped Donzey on the back, smiled, and sat down wordlessly.

“If I know you, Farrel,” said Donzey, “all that showing of the teeth means that you are about to be real unkind to someone. It wouldn’t be me, would it?”

“In a way,” said the sheriff. “I’m goin’ to bust up your place a little. You won’t mind that, will you?”

“Nah,” said Donzey, wondering what this was all about. “What are you going to bust up, what with, and why?”

“Answerin’ your questions in order,” said Farrel, grinning hugely, “Whatever gets in my way while I’m playing, a certain Mr. William Kelley, and you know as well as I do.”

“Oh.” Donzey rubbed his hands together. “So he’s coming here? Or are you having him shipped by express?”

“He’s coming of his own free will. He dropped into my office this morning and breezed up the place with a lot of noise about my not finding out who his wife ran away with. She’s dead and he don’t care about that. What makes him mad is that all these years he’s been supportin’ a woman who—You know Bill Kelley.”

Donzey felt a little sick. “How can a man be so rock-bottom lousy?”

“Aw, he’s been practicing for years. Anyhow, I calmed him down and told him I knew a feller … that’s you … who had found out who was in the car with his wife. I told him to come over at eight-thirty and see you. You can shove along now or stay and see the fun. This is the one place in town where I know I can do what I want without being interrupted.”

“Which is—”

“Just what happened to Eula. She was rushing along in her car; she turned over and got all smashed up. I’m goin’ to turn him over and smash him up.” Farrel’s smile was positively childlike.

“I’ll stick around and watch,” said Donzey. “By the way—” He hesitated.

“What?”

“I do know who was in the car with Eula.”

“Yeah? Who?”

Donzey told him. “You don’t say,” say Farrel. “Well, well. Skull an’ a scythe, an’ all that?”

“Nah,” said Donzey. “That’s just a picture somebody drew. Looks as much like Him as a political cartoon does of a presidential candidate.” The doorbell rang. “Farrel,” said Donzey quickly, “I want him to see Eula’s bone picture. Of all people in the world, he ought to appreciate it the most. Please.”

Farrel said thoughtfully, “That’ll be O.K. Then I don’t have to explain nothin’. When the machine’s through, I’ll start, and he’ll know just why.”

Donzey went to the door and let in a superbly tailored gray sports suit with a pin-checked topcoat which contained an overload of pig eyes, flabby jowls and a voice like a fingernail on a piece of slate. Bill Kelley stamped past Donzey as if he were a butler or even a photoelectric door opener. He had apparently started griping even before he rang the bell, because he entered in the middle of a sentence.