The Dead of Winter

by William H Hallahan

  On the wall between the two windows was a huge colored chart, five feet high, of the organs of the human body. Surrounding it were legends with black arrows labeling all the parts of the body. All the organs. A matching chart, also five feet high, was thumb-tacked to the opposite wall. It had graphically presented all the muscles of the human body.

  Fleagle’s books were all on pathology and anatomy.

  Lyons checked the street again and resumed his search. Twenty-five minutes. Fleagle had gone out to run twenty-five minutes ago. How long does it take?

  Quietly, Lyons went through the bureau and the desk and the bathroom and kitchen and the clothes closet. He checked the street now every forty seconds.

  Finally, he had to get out. He stepped through the doorway and pulled it shut. The lock clicked.

  Lyons descended the stairs. At the turning he almost involuntarily stopped. Fleagle was standing there.

  His pale hair, cut short as a toothbrush, was shining with sweat. His dark-blue, deeply socketed eyes were looking at a pile of letters that his hands were sorting. He dropped them back on the table one at a time. Plop. Plop. Plop.

  Lyons stepped past him, past his back and his massive, sloping shoulders, opened the front door and strode rapidly up the street to the car. He slid into the front passenger seat and blew a long lungful of air.

  Basche started the motor and pulled away from the curb.

  “How long was that son-of-a-bitch there before I came out?”

  “A minute or two. We were afraid he’d caught you.” “Jesus. I never saw him come back.”

  “He came down the alley next to the house.”

  “Well, I’m certainly delighted with the way you two great hunters came to my rescue.”

  “Well, we won’t have to now, will we?” said Basche. He slipped a pistol from his belt and shoved it into the glove compartment.

  “Huh,” grunted Lyons as he watched. “Is that what they call a silencer on the end of that thing?”

  “That’s what they call a silencer on the end of that thing,” said Basche.

  “Hm-m-m-m,” said Lyons.

  “O.K. O.K. O.K. with the hm-m-ms,” said Tyler. “What did you find out?”

  “He’s our boy.”

  “Yeah? How do you know?”

  “First of all, you know what he does for a living?”

  “Embalmer is what you told us.”

  “Nah. That’s the old Fleagle. He’s an anatomist with the Department of Pathology at the hospital. He does autopsies. He knows every single shred of human anatomy by heart. In fact, he’s got two great charts of the human body on his walls just in case he forgets a name or a place. For your information, he’s going to do a dissection tonight.”

  “So what else?”

  “A white billy.”

  “A what?”

  “A white billy. A white rubber tube loaded with ball bearings. It’s meant to help a policeman subdue a rampaging captive. It paralyzes any muscle it hits. Four or five quick shots with that and your man is down and unable to move.”

  Tyler sighed again. “Well,” he said, “we know Fleagle isn’t in the eighth at Hialeah.”

  “There’s just one other thing I’d like to know,” said Lyons.

  “What?” shouted Tyler. “For God’s sake, we have enough proof!”

  Lyons looked back at him. “Who’s he going to perform the autopsy on?”

  “Huh?”

  “Autopsy. Is Fleagle going to help out with an autopsy on Vinny Reece?”

  “Holy God in heaven!”

  This time Basche parked the car a block away from the apartment. With the patience of a hunter, he settled back to wait.

  “I talked to a watchman down on the piers of Brooklyn one time,” said Joe Tyler, staring thoughtfully out of the car window. He stroked his throat. “They have cats down there as big as a poodle. Muscle-bound, wild things. And this watchman told me how they hunt. At night they hunt rats. And you know what? The cat makes one pass at a rat. If he gets him, he has dinner right then and there. But if he misses his pounce, he keeps right on going. Because the rats down on the pier are big enough to chase the cats. The cats, you see, can’t afford to miss. There’s more than supper on the line.”

  “Meaning what?” said Roger Basche.

  “Meaning, don’t miss, Roger. Don’t miss. I have a feeling from seeing Mr. Fleagle that he is very good at what he does. And what he does is stalk people. Like us.”

  Roger Basche turned around in the driver’s seat and looked with bleak gray eyes at Joe Tyler. “I don’t miss,” he said.

  Joe Tyler studied his face. “I will pray,” he said slowly, “for your continued success.”

  Basche nodded silently at him, then turned back in the seat.

  Fleagle came out of his apartment at twenty after five. He got into his car at the curb and drove away. Basche followed him.

  “He’s heading for the hospital all right,” said Basche.

  “I resent,” said Joe Tyler, “every minute he goes on breathing.”

  “I hope I never get on your list, Joe,” said Dan Lyons.

  Joe Tyler did not answer. He sat back and watched the passing streets. He snorted finally, “Of the three of us, Dan, I’d say the most terrifying list to be on would be … yours.”

  “Mine!”

  “Yours. That fantastic inventiveness. You have the cunning of Ulysses.”

  Dan Lyons smiled at him.

  Roger Basche parked the car abruptly. Ahead, Fleagle had driven into the cobbled courtyard of the hospital. They watched him get out and descend to a basement door.

  Roger Basche turned to Tyler. “I wouldn’t want to be on your list, buddy.”

  “Yeah?” said Joe Tyler. “Why?”

  “Remorselessness, Joe. Remorselessness.”

  Fleagle mounted the steps from the basement shortly before eight o’clock. He got into his car and drove through the Saturday-night streets. He drove to Atlantic Avenue and followed it down and around to the Belt Parkway, along the long curve of the Brooklyn shoreline—Red Hook, Fort Hamilton to Coney Island, Sheepshead Bay to Flatbush Avenue. He turned toward the old Floyd Bennett Field, then turned onto a cinder track through the marshes of Jamaica Bay.

  They followed the bouncing lights of Fleagle’s car. They came to a large car turnout in a sea of nine-foot plumes of ditch grass. It was packed with cars. Fleagle parked his and walked toward an old shingle-covered frame building. A single neon light burned in a single window: “Tavern.”

  “Hey,” said Dan Lyons. “I know this place! It’s an old speakeasy. This used to be the garbage dumps. The Canarsie garbage dumps. Landfill into Jamaica Bay. Be damned if it isn’t still here. The Tavern.”

  Roger Basche looked at him solemnly. “I don’t know about you, Lyons, but I’m parched.”

  “Well, old buddy, with my cunning and his remorselessness, we ought to be able to find you a drink of something damp and mean.”

  “You know,” said Joe Tyler, watching Fleagle enter the building, “that s.o.b. just carved up Vinny Reece.”

  A mean, thin wind prowled across the parking area as they walked to the tavern. Hard frost by morning.

  Lyons looked up at the stars and shivered, thinking of the dissected corpse of Vinny Reece in a chilled morgue drawer of the hospital. The smell of hospitals and death roiled in his nostrils. From the inside of the tavern he could hear the sound of a banjo.

  He pushed open the tavern door.

  Roger Basche surreptitiously studied Fleagle, who sat by himself on the other side of the U-shaped bar. “Looks like a fanatical divinity student,” he murmured into his glass.

  The tavern was throbbing to the sound of a banjo. Fleagle looked impassively at the banjoist, who sat on the piano with an old brown derby over his eyes. Along the bar and in the booths, people clapped their hands rhythmically.

  “Saturday night is the loneliest night,” said Joe Tyler, looking at Fleagle.

  Lyons looked at Tyler w
ith surprise. “You sense that too?”

  “I sense cruelty. I can just see that sadistic bastard clubbing Reece. Knowing just how to lay it on for maximum damage. Deliberately creating pain.” He drew a deep breath. “I hate that man standing there with all my heart.” He looked at Lyons with seething eyes. “I hope he dies screaming.”

  Remorselessness.

  The gun went click! Roger Basche socked the clip of ammunition in with the heel of his hand. “And baby makes three.”

  Fleagle was still in the tavern, drinking. Basche had the motor running to heat the darkened car. He sat waiting with the patience of a lifelong hunter, feeling the freezing wind rock the car.

  Lyons sat in thought, slowly rubbing the crook of his sore arm. Tyler sat in the back seat, one arm around Basche’s expensive leather golf bag. “Jesus,” he expostulated finally. “You know how many hours we’ve spent in this car today? What time is it?”

  “You need a cool eye, a cool head and a steady hand for this business, Joe. Cultivate it.” Basche kept his eyes fixed on the front door. “Well, here comes that topless dancer. Not topless now, is she? Is that her bodyguard or boy friend?”

  “What time is it?” asked Tyler again.

  “Half past eleven.”

  “He could be in there all night!”

  “Yep.”

  “That miserable animal. How can a guy sit at a bar like that for an entire night and not speak to one single, solitary soul?”

  “It’s easy. Just beat up people and carve up corpses for a living. It makes you very antisocial.”

  “Then why mix with people?”

  “Maybe studying his next victim,” said Dan Lyons.

  Basche turned his head slowly to Lyons. “You’re pretty damned smart, Lyons. Our friendly psychopath is not one for the banjo and dancing bar girls.”

  “Of course he’s right,” said Joe Tyler. “God, what an animal we’re dealing with. Wouldn’t it be great to burn him at the stake?”

  “For a philosophy instructor, Joe, you’re a bloody-minded man,” said Basche. “Whose philosophy do you subscribe to?”

  “A fifteenth-century prelate by the name of Torquemada.”

  “Um,” grunted Basche. “Remorselessness.”

  “Yeah,” said Tyler. “Remorselessness. I wish he’d come out now.”

  “Bingo,” said Basche, sitting up. He opened the car door.

  “My God,” said Lyons.

  “Where did he go?” demanded Basche.

  “He’s gone. In the blink of my eye. Around the building. He heard the car door open.”

  “Well,” said Basche, standing up, “he can’t go far. We’re surrounded by a freezing marsh.” He reached an arm into the golf bag and withdrew an over-and-under shotgun. “Let’s go.”

  Lyons pulled out a rifle and stood up. His legs nearly buckled under him. He was trembling violently, shivering. And he wondered how he was able to keep moving. They’d been stalking Fleagle for seven hours.

  And now, in a freezing relic of a garbage dump in the midst of a stinking marsh, with his energy nearly spent, he was going to help kill a man for the first time in his life. Possibly kill him solely. They were really going to do it.

  He felt Tyler’s hand on his neck. “I’ll stop shaking if you will.”

  Lyons snorted.

  “Just keep telling yourself, Dan, that it’s a rabid dog frothing at the mouth. Nothing human. Nothing personal.”

  “Oh no, Joey. He’s human. And it’s very personal with me. If I can hold this rifle steady, I’m going to blow his goddam head off.”

  He ran. Fleagle ran for his life.

  In utter darkness, through the tall, stiff, dry sticks of plumed ditch grass that blocked his way, that dragged him, slowed him. Over slippery tufts and tussocks of marsh grass, across shoe-sucking wetlands, up several muscle-knotting banks, through a thicket of razor-slashing swamp maples. He ran. For his sweet life he ran. And ran.

  The marshes stank, his shoes and pants legs were clotted with cold mud, he was making enough noise to call the deaf, he could barely see in the moonless darkness, and this was harder running that he had ever done on the track at Fort Hamilton.

  Worst of all, Fleagle expected a bullet to tear through his head at any turn. His legs, trembling violently, refused to go farther. He paused. Disoriented. He’d lost direction. Was he circling back? Who were they? What did they want with him?

  How had they found him there? It was practically a private club, hidden in roof-high ditch grass and surrounded by pigsty huts at the end of a bad soggy road.

  The Fat Man had to be the finger. The beating didn’t kill that guy, Reece. He didn’t even crack a bone or a tooth. The heart. The guy took a deep six from a heart attack. That was Ha Ha’s fault—he fingered a guy with a bad heart. Heavy he was, that Reece. No muscle. So. A heart attack. The autopsy proved it.

  Fleagle wanted to protest. To take his case to some higher authority. Not to his three executioners. Not even to the Fat Man. But somebody. Fleagle yearned for justice.

  Tidal water, he knew, was behind him, swirling silently through the grasslands. But the road, the winding rutted road that led ultimately back to Flatbush Avenue and safety—where was that?

  In the stern air the sweat on his face dried stiffly, burning the grass cuts. He felt his legs stiffening. He was physically spent.

  After years of gymnastics, weight lifting, karate, running, swimming and strict physical training, he’d spent all his energy in a four-minute burst over broken terrain. He cocked his ear and was astonished to hear himself.

  He was whining.

  In the darkness he heard a slithering sound. Noisy. A squeaking. A plopping wet sound. A squeak. Rats. They made him shudder. He peered urgently through the darkness, seeking pinpoints of light. Nothing. He fought terror and waited, listening.

  A slow anger grew. This was not his game. A mat in a gym, or a barroom brawl. Yes. A man-to-man bone-breaker. Even knives. But a hunted animal in a marsh. Three against one.

  He looked up. A few pale stars in a smoky sky. Scudding black clouds. O.K. He’d make it. In the marsh. He picked three stars in a row that aimed him in the apparent direction of the parking lot and his car.

  If he couldn’t see, they couldn’t see. If they could keep quiet, he could. And if three could search for one, one had three times the odds of finding one of the three.

  If he could get one, he’d break him like a rag doll.

  He listened. And listened. Nothing. The cold night air bit deeper into his body. Then slowly the scream of a jet lifting off from Kennedy Airport. Rising—a string of lights rising, free and gone into the vast night of the continent. Silence again.

  There were paths in these marshes. Paths that crisscrossed—one of them leading to the lot, the car, sanctuary.

  He promised himself that he wouldn’t flee in the car. He’d trained for this all his life. He’d get them one at a time—the three who’d made him run, who’d made him crawl and whimper.

  Him. Whimper. One at a time.

  He reached up and opened his tie and felt along the neckband. Thin weights in the neckband of the tie. The necktie would swing like a bola, wrap around a human head and crack bone. It was also a garrote. Death without sound. It was something.

  He squatted down, feeling stronger, feeling his mind working, planning.

  They could sweep as a team, waiting for him to cut and run again. They could make noise and wait. Lights. They’d have flashlights—or else they’d go stumbling around in the dark with him.

  He heard himself doing that incredible whining again. He stopped it by gripping his throat angrily. He picked up the broken threads of his reasoning processes.

  With the necktie wrapped around a hand, he began to work his way in an arc away from where he thought the parking lot was, to get around them in the marsh and stalk each singly with the garrote.

  It was painfully slow going. He had to make each step in silence on dried twigs and leaves, through bram
bles, branches, reeds and vines, in darkness that was so thick he would have been sure he had been struck blind if he hadn’t had a few pale stars above him. He fought his increasing city man’s fear of rodents, snakes and biting animals, expecting to be fanged at the next step.

  He had to stop. To listen. To wait before moving again. To control his terror and his impulse to flee.

  Like an anchorite at beads, he recited parts of the human anatomy, starting with the brain. The forebrain, the cerebrum, left hemisphere, right hemisphere, the diencephalon, the hypothalamus, the subthalamus, the thalamus, the corpus callosum, the cerebral cortex, the basal ganglia, the frontal lobe, temporal lobe, parietal lobe, the occipital lobe, the limbic lobe. He was whining again. He stopped and listened, fearing he’d been heard. Silence. Complete silence. And now he saw, through the sedge and dead grass stalks, the beads of car lights parading across the marsh on the Belt Parkway. Good. He was getting his bearings.

  He was also shivering. Now, the fissures: the fissure of Rolando, the lateral fissure—the fissure of Sylvius. Sounds. The dry sound of grass parting. Listen. In several places. Then squeaks. Marsh rats. Chittering. In the water. Plop. Plop. Plop. The marsh was alive with sounds of animals. He was shivering violently. And he was going to puke. He was sure.

  Move. He had to move. They had time. They were dry and clothed. They could wait for him to stiffen up, to sicken, to grow bone cold, to run out of patience and try to scamp. It was astonishing how easily you could decide you wanted to die. A few minutes ago he was watching the antics of the topless barmaids dancing to the banjo, brimmed to the scuppers, full of life, and now moments later, soaked, mudcaked, cold, shivering, nauseated and exhausted, itching with dried sweat, he wished he were dead. Despair.

  Back to the brain. Where was he? The medulla oblongata? The loner, he was. Whimpering in a marsh. The outsider. If only he’d had money for the theological seminary. If only that physical-culture gymnasium had worked out.

  He stood up. Me. I’m Fleagle. Not some goddam animal. He walked quickly in a continuing arc, watching the noctilucent glow of the city around him on three sides. He’d catch the flanker on the left cusp and bring him down. He brandished the limp, wet, weighted necktie. He’d bygod get his bygod neck with this bygod tie. And then the other two. Then he’d get back to town and roust that Charlie Ha Ha and fry his ass. Nobody put the contract out on him. Not on Fleagle. He wasn’t like the others.