The Long Vendetta

by Clifton Adams

  Mildred Flagg spoke with calm professionalism to mask her own panic. “I'm sorry, Mr. Coyle. The accepted method of treating hysteria is to slap the patient sharply across the face. Somehow I couldn't believe slapping would be drastic enough in your case, so I took the liberty of striking your shin.”

  She had pulled a leg off a dilapidated chair and must have put all her strength behind the swing. For a moment I couldn't make a sound. I could only hug the leg and gasp in blue-electric anger. Finally, the pain began to recede and with it the anger.

  The killer waited in silence until a kind of stunned calm took hold of us. Then, almost absently, he asked, “You're not so tough, after all, are you, Sergeant? I was sure all along that you had a breaking point.”

  I said, when I could trust myself to speak, “Is that what you were doing when you killed Mary—probing for my breaking point?”

  “Something like that. And I think I found it, too. I would have killed you then, only I lost my chance. In a way, the deaths of all these other people are your fault, Sergeant. All I ever wanted was to see you broken—completely broken and helpless—and then I was going to kill you. That would have been the end of it, except that you left town right after your wife's funeral and I couldn't locate you for almost a month.”

  Now I understood him. He was like a sleek, well-fed cat with a sparrow in its teeth. It wasn't the death of the sparrow that the cat wanted, and it wasn't food. What it wanted was the long-drawn-out pleasure of killing. That was Deegan. Like he'd said, maybe he would have ended it a year ago if I hadn't left town to try to get Mary's flaming death out of my mind. But I didn't think so. I'd been gone just two weeks. He could have waited and finished it off, but I figured he just couldn't bring himself to end it so quickly. He had waited too long—fifteen years—with this one sick idea in his head. He couldn't end it, just like that, any more than the cat could kill the sparrow neatly, quickly, on the first lunging attack.

  Jeanie was crying, “Why, why, why!” over and over. There were tears in her voice, but they were tears of frustration, not fear. Jeanie still didn't understand about Deegan. To her, he was just a name that I may have mentioned at one time or other, the name of one of my tankers who had died long ago in a foreign land.

  She didn't know Deegan, the tanker with the magic eyes; the man who could spot roadblocks a hundred yards away in the dark of the moon. Those eyes— they had sounded a familiar note when I had first seen the artist's drawing. They were the brooding, empty eyes of a fanatic. But everything else was changed—the nose, the mouth, the hairline. It wasn't Deegan's face. Deegan's face had burned away, and the doctors had given him a new one. But not the eyes.

  I said to the vent pipe, “What are you after, Deegan? Exactly what is it you're after?”

  There was silence from above.

  Jeanie said wearily, “He's going to kill us. There's no way we can stop him.”

  I said, “Miss Flagg, what do you think? Is he crazy? I mean legally crazy so that he can't tell right from wrong.”

  She hesitated for what seemed a long time. Then, “No, I don't think so.”

  Somehow that was no comfort to me. “How about it, Miss Flagg? Do you think there's a chance of talking him out of this?”

  I could see the white cap moving from side to side. “... No. Talking won't stop him. Nothing will.” I think that Miss Flagg, after her brief spell of weeping, had made up her mind that she was going to die and she had held to the idea until it no longer frightened her. Miss Flagg, in her own mind, was already dead.

  But I tried again. “Look, you've had experience with cases like this. He has to have a weakness... something we can work on.”

  “He has no weakness, Mr. Coyle, because this is the moment he has been rushing toward for more than fifteen years.”

  “Rushing... And what exactly has been driving him all that time?”

  There was a small, bleak smile in her words. “The need for punishment, Mr. Coyle. Fred—I still think of him as Fred—judges himself as harshly as he judged you and the others in the tank that day of the... accident. In his own mind he is as guilty as any of you —more so, possibly, because from the beginning he suspected that it was wrong to destroy that German farmhouse, but he didn't try to stop you. Believe me, Mr. Coyle, his own sense of guilt has driven him to this violence.”

  Suddenly I was angry. “If he feels so damn guilty about it,” I said, “maybe you can tell me why he doesn't just kill himself and settle the question of justice once and for all?”

  In that same bleak voice, she replied, “I think, Mr. Coyle, that is exactly what he intends to do.”

  he takes care ofus,” I jeered.

  “After

  Gravely, the white cap bobbed up and down. “Probably.”

  “Maybe you can even tell us how he intends...”

  The sentence never got finished. A shadow sliced through the shaft of light. Suddenly a torrent of stinking oily liquid belched from the bottom of the vent pipe. Gasoline! Gallons of it. Hundreds of gallons, it seemed.

  The first gush of gasoline struck the front of my shirt and thoroughly soaked my clothing before I could jump back from the pipe. It was even in my hair and running down my legs into my shoes.

  “Jeanie!” At the first whiff of the stuff, I had pushed her away from me. “Jeanie, did any of that stuff get on you?”

  “Buck, I'm soaked!”

  “Miss Flagg?”

  “I was standing just next to you, Mr. Coyle.” In the same flat voice.

  And still that oily flood poured from the pipe. A sparkling pool shimmered in the disk of light on the cellar floor. Liquid snakes crawled off in all directions, into darkness.

  The floor was slippery with it, covered with it. The pungent fumes rose sluggishly and slowly filled every cubic inch of stale air. Then, as suddenly as it had started, the flow stopped.

  I yelled, “Deegan! For God's sake, let the women out of here!”

  He said nothing. A black knife cut across the shaft of light. He was putting an airtight cover over the vent. Now, for practical purposes, the darkness in the cellar was absolute. I splashed back toward the wall, feeling for Jeanie.

  “Buck, I can't see a thing!”

  “Whatever you do, don't touch that lighter or strike a match!” The warning wasn't as unnecessary as it might sound. People did stupid, fatal things when that were rattled and frightened.

  I found Jeanie. “Buck, why did he do it? All this gasoline?”

  “An eye for an eye,” Miss Flagg said almost to herself. “This is how those people died in Germany, isn't it, Mr. Coyle?”

  “Fire? No, not exactly.”

  “Violence, I mean. Great violence. That is what he must create.”

  One small spark... the smallest spark imaginable, and there would be violence, all right. The explosion would rattle windows all over the city.

  Jeanie said calmly, “So that is how it's going to be. And there's nothing we can do to stop him, is there? Nothing in the world.”

  I said, “You never know for sure what a psycho like Deegan is going to do. Maybe he just wants to scare us. Remember, once he kills us, it's all over for him. There would be no point in his own life once we're dead.”

  It was whistling in the dark. I knew it, and so did Jeanie and Mildred Flagg. Deegan's day had come.

  I said, “Miss Flagg, I remember bumping into a bundle of clothing a few minutes ago. Do you think you could find it?”

  She said she thought she could, and a few seconds later a piece of cotton material—a discarded dress or shirt—was thrust against my chest. Silently, we cleaned ourselves as well as possible.

  “Strange...” Jeanie said, very softly. “I don't hate him. I know he's going to kill us, but somehow I can't hate him.”

  I had found myself thinking the same thing. I understood the guilt that he carried with him. I understood how easily that guilt could twist a man's thinking. With a small push—a very small push—it could just as well have been me. I
f I hadn't had Mary to hold to, and now Jeanie.

  It seemed moronic to do nothing, to just stand there waiting for the end, but I couldn't think of a thing that might help us. Not even the old Infantry axiom helped. I was whipped. I was afraid to do anything, even move. Deegan would have enjoyed that— it was too bad he couldn't see it.

  That was when I heard the sound of steel on steel. Heavy steel. Not the smooth, oily sound that the bolt action on a rifle might make. I listened hard; there it was again. Jeanie heard it, too, and her hands tightened on my arm. That sound was familiar—at least it reminded me of something. But I couldn't think what. Then Mildred Flagg said hoarsely:

  “The crawl space! He's sliding the bars away. He's coming into the cellar!”

  Instinctively, I grabbed for the Luger. Deegan snarled, “Don't try it, Sergeant!”

  I grabbed, anyway, forgetting all about those freakish eyes of Deegan's. Forgetting for the moment that the very air we breathed was as explosive as dynamite. I jerked the pistol and lunged in what I thought was the direction of the crawl-space opening. And explosion almost too powerful to be believed knocked me back.

  I thought the gasoline had been set off. I expected the whole cellar to crack open and belch us out in a gusher of fire.

  Nothing happened. Except that I landed on my back in a pool of gasoline, stunned, the breath knocked out of me. And somewhere Jeanie was crying, “Buck, Buck!” and off in another direction I heard the rustle of Miss Flagg's starched uniform. Then I felt a hot wetness and a stinging along my side, just below my armpit on the left side, and I thought to myself, stupidly, “I'm shot. The crazy fool shot me!”

  If I could have seen him, I would have burned that last cartridge, gasoline or not. But I couldn't see. And Deegan could. Good old Deegan, the only tank driver in the Division who could thread an M-4 through an African cork forest at night without taking off enough bark to make a wine stopper.

  “Don't move, Sergeant,” Deegan said with an eerie gentleness. “I can see you just fine. I can see Miss Kelly, too. I've still got five shots in this revolver, so just don't move.”

  “Damn you, don't you know this cellar is full of gasoline!”

  “Yes... I know.”

  That was when we heard the quiet thunder above our heads—the sound of heavy shoes moving quickly through Miss Flagg's house. I forgot the sticky blood and burning under my armpit. Maybe it was Garnett, or Lavy. Suddenly I wanted to yell with laughter.

  But Deegan said mildly, “They can't help you, Sergeant. Your police friends are much too late to help you.”

  “Deegan, let the women out of here. Whatever quarrel you've got with me, we can settle it between ourselves.”

  “Sorry, Sergeant, there isn't time. Anyhow, this is the way it's got to be. You've got to be punished for what you did, and punishment's no good unless it hurts...”

  I could hear the heavy tramping overhead, straight through the house and out the back. Then big fists were pounding on the cellar door.

  “Coyle! Miss Kelly!” It was Garnett, and he sounded scared and angry. “Coyle, are you down there?”

  We could hear them tugging at the door and cursing, and a narrow slit of light appeared between the door and the facing. Not that it mattered. I still couldn't see Deegan. I couldn't see anything at all except for a ghostly shape almost directly ahead of me. That white uniform of Mildred Flagg's.

  “Fred, this isn't right. This isn't the answer.”

  “Stay away from me, Mildred.”

  The pale uniform continued to move. “I've got a lighter in my hand, Mildred. One little flick, that's all it needs.”

  Garnett was pounding again on the cellar door. Then the white shape darted forward. And Nurse Flagg shouted, “Now, Mr. Coyle! Shoot!”

  I heard Deegan grunt in surprise as Miss Flagg clawed at him. Instinctively, I started to shoot. But there was nothing to aim at but that white uniform. And even if I did shoot, the flash was an even bet to set off the gasoline. Still, if I held my fire, there was the dead certainty that Deegan would succeed in his plan to blow us up.

  The decision was mine. No one else could make it. Just as it had been my decision so many years ago to shoot that house off of that war-struck German hill.

  My left side had gone numb and I had to shoot from where I lay. Then I had an inspiration; I covered the Luger's muzzle with the tail of my coat and aimed squarely at that writhing white target. But at the last instant my nerve failed and I shifted the aim slightly off center and prayed as I squeezed the trigger.

  No man ever prayed harder for so many things at once. I braced for the inferno that would explode all around us if that muzzle flash set off those fumes. But that short pencil of flame spurted into the wool of my jacket and was smothered.

  There was no time to feel relief. We were still a long way from home. The Luger's bellow sent out shock waves that battered and deafened our ears. Then, sickly, I saw the hazy outline of the nurse's uniform sink slowly to the floor.

  She had marked the target for me—too well.

  I heard Jeanie stumble past me, toward Deegan. I tried to yell, but something had happened to my voice. I could only lie there and wait for Deegan to open fire with that gun of his, or flick his lighter. I waited a small eternity, a dozen lifetimes, for him to cut Jeanie down.

  Then, without warning, Garnett's men lifted the cellar door and the light almost blinded me.

  “Coyle, you down there!”

  I made a sound in my throat and tried to shade my eyes with my shoulder. I squirmed around as the cops pounded down the steps. Guns drawn, they probed the dark corners with their flashlights. That was when I saw Deegan—actually saw him—for the first time.

  He lay sprawled on the cement floor, his eyes wide and staring... those pale, vacant, eerie eyes of his. He worked his mouth and tried to speak, but the only sound was the bubbling of blood as it gushed up through the soft V of his throat. That was where my bullet hit him, just above the breastbone, through the throat and out through the base of his skull. For most purposes he was as good as dead. But not so dead that he couldn't have pressed that lighter if Jeanie hadn't been hanging onto his arm like grim death. If she hadn't clawed the lighter away from him at that last, almost-fatal moment.

  The cops came in. Lavy stopped to look at my side. Garnett knelt beside Jeanie and quietly pried her fingers away from the dead hand. Two uniformed cops went over to Miss Flagg and one of them said:

  “This one's hit, Lieutenant. She's out cold.” Then, after a brief inspection, “The wound looks clean, right through the shoulder muscle.”

  Right through Nurse Flagg's shoulder and into Deegan's throat and out the back of his head. That was a Luger for you.

  Sergeant Lavy looked at me for what seemed a long while, looked at me with eyes as hard as bullets. Then he said to Garnett, “I'll go call an ambulance.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I was right back where I'd started, in a hospital, but this time in a less expensive room. A room with plain white walls; an iron bed with what felt like a shot-filled mattress, and a scabby nightstand with a water pitcher just out of reach. Not the kind of room they put Bentley owners in. The kind of room, near the elevator, that they kept ready for gunshot cases.

  But one thing hadn't changed. The company was the same.

  Lieutenant Garnett sat in a metal chair near the foot of the bed. I told him all I knew about Deegan... the Deegan I had known before, during the war. Which wasn't much.

  “He was a quiet guy. Not shy-quiet. Grim-quiet. You see the type among the old-timers in New England and sometimes the Middlewest. His folks were farmers, I think, which would account for the nursery jobs he's been working at. He was religious, but in kind of a spooky way, even in those days. I remember once he put in for chaplain's assistant. The C. O. turned him down, and I think Deegan would have killed him for that if he'd ever got the chance.”

  Garnett nodded wearily. “I know; we've been checking his Army record.” Then, wryly, “
The head-shrinkers have got it all figured out, now that it's over. Here's a guy, they say, that was brought up in a strict, religious family and never knew anything else until the war jerked him up by the roots and put him in uniform. All this worldly wickedness was new to him. He didn't know how to deal with it. That's what kept him shut up, I guess. Kept it all inside him. Then, with the killing of that woman and kid, he cracked. It was too big for him. He had to change it around in order to live with it.”

  “Change it?”

  “Change the rules of the game, sort of. That woman and kid. He'd taken part in the killing, but he couldn't live with it afterward. He had to have somebody to blame, somebody to hang the guilt on.”

  “Me,” I said.

  Garnett nodded. “But not even that could take all the guilt off his own shoulders. Even after he'd set himself up as God's personal avenger, he still couldn't shake all the blame. Sure, you'd given the order, but he hadn't tried to stop you. At first, he probably thought that by killing you, that would sort of make things right again. But the more he thought about it, the more complicated the scheme became, and finally he decided that merely killing you wouldn't be enough. To really settle the score and salve his own guilt, he'd have to see that you paid your debt in full and 'in kind.' A new twist to the old 'eye for an eye'.”

  “So he went after Mary,” I said numbly.

  The lieutenant spread his fingers on one hand and studied his thickened nails. “Once he started, he played the avenging God part to the hilt, your Deegan. The obvious thing was to associate your wife with the German woman—a life for a life, the way he figured it. Also, according to the headshrinkers, it was easy to think of your wife as a part of you; killing her would be like killing you a little...”

  Garnett shot me a quick look when he realized what he had said.

  “Well...” he went on. “Even that went flat on him. That's the trouble with perversions—and that's what murder is, his kind of murder—there's no satisfaction in them. Anyhow, you left town and he couldn't find you for a while, and by that time he'd cooked up this other scheme of hiring a pro. This time, he was going to do it big, kill off everybody who had been in the tank that day—including himself. Miss Kelly was probably an afterthought, icing on the cake.”