by C R Trolson
And then an unexplainable urge filled him, an inexplicable rage, and he suddenly wanted a showdown. He wanted to show her who was the best man.
Should he hide in the closet and wait for the arm to hang the jacket? No. Reese was young, he might spend the entire night with her. The Hunger prodded him. Moved him. He heard the footsteps above, the springs of the couch compressing. He could almost hear the whiskey hitting the glass. Perfect. The perfect red cape to wave in the bull’s face.
Ten minutes before midnight, Rupert Amos put the basket of yarn next to his whiskey glass. He was slowing down. Now only a fifth a day, down from his usual quart. He’d laughed when the doctor told him that his liver looked like a waffle, but the VA doctor had not smiled. The asshole should have laughed when he told someone he was dying.
It was funny that after years of possible death by fire and gravity, he would die of a bad liver. He was not afraid, but he was curious. Would he see it coming? Or would it sneak up in his sleep? It did not matter. He would welcome it. He was tired of living, especially now that he was dying.
He could, he decided, beat the game. Well, he could control the timing. Shove the .45 against his head and see how many times he could pull the trigger. No, he’d rather go down fighting. But then, the prospect of lingering in a hospital bed, fighting for his last breath, fighting for his last minute while the nurses changed him and fed him with a spoon and laughed behind his back, was not encouraging.
Maybe he’d finish the sweater. Maybe he wouldn’t. He had been knitting for a year now and had one sleeve done. He wasn’t very good at knitting.
The shrink, another damned doctor, had suggested the knitting to keep his hands busy and keep the dreams of fire and spreading concussion rings at arm’s length.
He would probably feel a lot better if he could get his hands on a few doctors.
Ten minutes after midnight the knocking stirred him. He rolled off the couch and opened the door. At first glance he thought it was Death come to pay him a visit before realizing it was only Ajax, which could easily be the same thing.
“Aren’t you going to invite me in?” Ajax Rasmussen asked, his voice murky, as if speaking through a mask.
“Sure.” Rupert stood back, letting the door swing wide. “If you’ve got guts enough to show up here after dark, I can let you in.” He brought the .45 Colt from behind his back, letting it hang at his side in full view.
“You’d shoot me?” Ajax asked sincerely.
“I don’t aim on getting killed.”
“Killing? But this is merely a casual visit, old friend,” Ajax said. He was impeccably thin, wearing black. His eyes were a little jumpy, but Rupert saw no weapons. “I was in the neighborhood and I thought I’d drop by. I saw your light and merely wanted to say that though we’ve had trouble in the past there are no hard feelings.”
“Come in then, friend.” Rupert backed up to the couch. He had nothing to lose by killing Ajax, his speech to Reese Tarrant about honor and being a gentleman now seemed hilarious. Anyway, he’d be doing the town a favor. Was it kosher to kill a man you’d just invited into your home? The least he could do was offer him a drink. It did not seem unusual that Ajax had appeared tonight. Out of the blue, so to speak. But still a lot had been going on around town and none of it good. Rupert sensed a larger plan at work.
He nodded to the bottle of Jack Daniels whiskey on the table with glasses next to a bottle each of Ballantine’s and Beefeaters gin. The Beefeaters had been a present from a tenant, long gone, who’d skipped out on the last month’s rent. He’d never cracked the top and trusted no one who drank gin.
“Help yourself,” Rupert said. He liked it better this way, better than killing Ajax at a distance with the Lahti. He’d never killed up close. Never face to face. His heart felt lighter thinking about it.
“I can’t stay long,” Rasmussen said.
“Don’t worry about that,” Rupert said. He was now positive Rasmussen had come to kill him. He wasn’t sure why, unless it was because he’d refused to sell him the Palms, or maybe Ajax knew about the Lahti and was taking preemptive action. He smiled at the thought. Ajax turning his own strategy on him. “Have a drink,” he said as warmly as he could. “Make yourself comfortable.”
Ajax judiciously selected a tumbler, picked up the gin without hesitation, unscrewed the top, and half-filled the glass, holding the tumbler up to the light. “It’s clean,” Rupert said and cocked the hammer with his thumb, a solid click.
Ajax took no notice of being a five-pound trigger pull from eternity. He tossed the tumbler down cleanly, in that elegant way he had, and said, “I appreciate your hospitality.”
“It’s the way I was brought up,” Rupert said. “Good manners and getting to the point.”
“Precisely,” Ajax said. “Besides being bored and wanting to mend fences, I have no reason for being here. There is no point.” Ajax eyed the gun. “Are you planning to shoot me?”
“I’ve been thinking about it for a long time.”
Ajax raised his eyebrows. “How long?”
“Since I first laid eyes you.” Rupert brought the pistol in line with the billionaire’s throat. He squeezed the trigger. He brought the pistol down after the blast and recoil but amazingly Ajax had moved to the side, unhurt. Before he could fire again, Ajax stepped in, slapped the pistol to the floor, and shoved him onto the couch.
He fell, sprawling, trying to gather himself, thinking of the man he had once been, seeing just as quickly the portrait of himself and taking the stern look of his own long ago face as a sign of approval. He felt relieved. He was doing the right thing.
He jumped for the pistol and was almost to it when he saw the knife’s shadow falling, falling from far away, Ajax moving incredibly fast as the first blow staggered him.
28
She woke at seven.
Reese was snoring slightly, and when she touched his nose he opened his eyes. She hadn’t realized how blue his eyes were and in this light he almost looked pretty.
“What’s so funny?” he asked.
“Nothing. I’m happy. I’m a morning person.” She wasn’t happy, but she was not going to think about Thomkins, the body they’d found, the shredded coffin lining. The upside down cross. She was not going to think about Ajax or the rest of it.
He kissed her and smiled. He looked like he didn’t have a care in the world. They could have been somewhere nice on a honeymoon. “You know what I like in the morning?” he asked.
“Hot coffee and grease?”
“Before that.”
“Gee, Reese, you’re a man, so let me take a wild guess,” she said and laughed to herself. She reached under the covers. She smiled and moved on top of him.
Vladimir patiently stood in front of the nurse’s station, a ten foot square counter under florescent lights that gave off a bluish hue. The two nurses were chatting happily to each other in that blissful way the bourgeoisie assume, rolling their comfortable chairs from one pile of paperwork to the other. Vladimir guessed the paperwork was simply a blind for them to look busy while others, the real workers, toiled.
He cleared his throat, but they ignored him. They wouldn’t have guessed he’d once been a doctor in Vladivostok before revanchist schemes had brought him down, that he had once ordered the doing of things, and spent languorous hours busy over paperwork. He had once been a very important doctor and would have shaped up these two. He would have left them trembling.
He was lucky, though. He was lucky to be here and not rotting in some Siberian hellhole. He had not been stealing supplies as accused. He’d escaped, one step ahead of the KGB, on a trawler bound for Tokyo Bay. He’d stashed money in a Tokyo-Swiss bank, a numbered account. Not much, emergency funds, but enough to escape the dreaded KGB.
He’d come to America, but when he’d applied for status as a doctor, a professional with a so-called “green card”, fleeing the Soviet anarchy, they’d told him that political asylum was no longer applicable. Russia was changed. Russi
a was democratic. Yes, and half the taxis in Moscow still had a picture of Stalin adorning the backseat. Did you see pictures of Hitler in Berlin taxis?
And when the U.S. authorities had checked with Vladivostok, they’d been told that Vladimir Piotkin had never been a doctor, but only a lowly janitor with bourgeois aspirations. The schemers had a long arm. His hopes of renewing his medical credentials had been dashed. Even the AMA would not listen, writing him off as some crackpot with a bad accent.
But he was tenacious. He would learn good English. He would save his money. He would go to night school and become a nurse, possibly a physician’s assistant. It meant becoming the lackey of these capitalists and their meaningless positivism, but it meant survival. It meant a car, a house, and a bit of respect in this consumer state.
The nurses finally noticed him, and when he told them his purpose, one grudgingly handed over the key to the storeroom. “We’re missing three cases of toilet paper, Vlad. You know anything about it?”
“Yeah, Vladdie,” the other one teased. “You haven’t been stocking up, have you?”
He wanted desperately to denounce their bourgeois dictums, but now was not the time. He must move slowly and meekly. He had plans. “I am not aware of any discrepancies in the stock. I do not control the coming and going. I do not control the key.”
He tried to say this with a smile, but he knew he sounded officious, this language, and he nodded politely before leaving, but they still laughed at him as if he were a perfect fool and their laughter followed him down the hall. A fool on a fool’s errand.
The supply room was large, at least thirty feet long, and overflowing with materiel. There were boxes and boxes of disposable diapers, disposable syringes, disposable bed pans. Bottles upon bottles of alcohol and cleaning soap and latex gloves. Vladimir sniffed and shook his head. Everything was disposable in this new world. He ran his hand along the boxes. This much equipment would have lasted years in his former hospital. The doctors and nurses would have cried, would have celebrated to have seen so many latex gloves that the wasteful Americans snapped on and off into a trash can with joy and excess. In Vladivostok a pair of gloves would be resterilized and used for weeks, the holes patched with the silver tape. Such waste.
He found the shelf for restraints. Apparently, one of the patients, an old man, had been acting up all night and into this morning. The nurse who’d told him she needed extra straps had seemed afraid, claiming that the old man had broken all of the other straps, but he’d put it off as American emotionalism. He picked up a cardboard box containing ten four-foot straps with Velcro buckles. The extra-heavy duty ones. That should keep the old man in bed. He shook his head in wonder as he removed two straps from the box and slung them over his shoulder. In Vladivostok they’d used the trouser belts left by former patients.
When Vladimir opened the door to Mr. Edwards’ room, he noticed the nurse sitting stupidly on the floor in a pool of blood. In shocked consciousness, he remembered her name was Becky, a mean, complacent thug of the establishment. He then noticed she was sitting a few inches off the floor, supported by the rolling mechanism for the I.V. stand. He turned his head. The bed was empty. Stuck to the side of the bed he noticed a strip of white tape sprouting gray hairs.
With staccato movements he went to her, wondering how she had entangled herself and saw, with some shock, the top of the I.V. stand protruding from the soft tissue next to her collar bone. He knelt and brushed the hair from her eyes. He nodded to himself still in shock. She was very dead. But how? He stood up, staring at the apparition in front of him, slowly realizing that the nurse had somehow climbed on top of the apparatus, inserted the end of the pole into her-my God-and sat down, using her weight and gravity to push the pole through her.
Vladimir saw another body, another nurse, sitting in the corner, eyes open, smiling at him, blood from her eyes and nose dried black on her face. He began shaking uncontrollably and backing out of the room to call for help when he felt the large hand on his shoulder. He was turning to tell the person to get help, for-God’s-sake, there had been an accident, when the hand spun him with great strength. He felt the straps that had been on his shoulder wrapping around his neck. He looked deeply into the sad eyes of an old man whose hands were quickly tightening the straps, the rest of his face purposeful but offset by very slack and brown teeth. He heard the false teeth clacking and snapping and then realized he could no longer breathe.
“The sun’s shining,” she heard him, “it’s going to be a beautiful day.” He continued to lay there while she washed her face and got into the shower. She felt optimistic and hoped he was right.
When it was his turn to shower, she ordered coffee and eggs and waffles sent up. The waiter put the tray on the dresser. She signed the ticket, gave the waiter two dollars, and moved the tray to the bed. Reese walked out of the shower wearing a towel - an oddly domestic scene that made last night in the graveyard seem even more surreal to her. Oddly domestic except for the teeth marks on his chest. He put on the hotel robe and hung up his towel.
He removed the plate’s cover. “I’ll try not to get syrup on the sheets.” He plopped onto the bed, holding the plate level. “I hate it when the sheet rolls with you.”
“I hate it when you put your clothes on and the sheet’s stuck to your butt.” He smiled at her. “I don’t usually eat in bed,” she said and crawled in next to him with her own plate.
“Neither do I,” he said.
“Except for last night.”
“I made an exception.”
“You ate very well.” She balanced the plate on her thighs and spread the syrup with her fork. “You telling the Chief about finding Dean Everett in the casket?”
“I’d like to find out who put him there first.” He looked at her. “You mentioned a stone casket in Romania with an upside down cross and Ajax’s face carved on the top?”
“Did I?” She’d been thinking about it since daylight. Not as much considering it, the reality of it, as trying to keep it out of her thoughts.
“You did and when a missing man turns up inside a coffin with an upside down cross carved into the top, I think it’s time to ask Ajax if he put the man there.”
“At least Ajax’s face wasn’t carved on the top,” she said, thinking that it might as well have been, the upside down cross was far from subtle. “Isn’t that the Chief’s job?” she said between bites, “Questioning Ajax?”
“The Chief does what Ajax says.”
“Right,” she said. The waffle had grown cold. She caught herself thinking about Thomkins again and wondered if somehow she had caused his death.
“Father Ramon, the way he was killed, resembled an inverted crucifixion. An upside down cross. There are too many coincidences for me to keep straight.”
“None of it matters, Reese, because no one will believe Ajax is a vampire, much less that he’s a serial killer bent on poisoning the world.”
“Who else would do that to Everett?”
“Maybe his wife killed him. Didn’t she tell you that her husband was going to see Ajax when he got killed? That could be a lie. Her alibi.”
“She buried her husband in a fancy coffin behind the mission? A five hundred pound coffin? She weighs ninety pounds soaking wet with an anvil on her head.”
“Maybe she had help,” she said, already knowing it sounded ridiculous, but not nearly as ridiculous as the other. Reese shook his head. Chewed his waffle. “Look. I’ll agree there’s a killer in town. I’m pretty sure that the same person who killed Dean Everett also killed Ramon and everyone else. But what if it isn’t Ajax? No one, I guarantee, will believe us. And we could be wrong. You know it.”
“I don’t know anything.”
“That’s right. You don’t. So, we’re cherry picking the facts. We’re making the pieces fit the puzzle. We’re forcing a conclusion that is illogical. The only reason Ajax would be the killer is if,” she held up her index finger, “number one: he’s several hundred years old; two: he�
��s a vampire; three: he’s planning to contaminate the world’s blood supply. Otherwise, there is no reason for Ajax to be the killer. Your theory, or should I say your house of cards, is built on three absurdities.”
“House of cards?” he asked. “Okay. Point number one: You yourself believe he’s several hundred years old. You went to the trouble of stealing documents and renting that old movie to prove it to yourself.”
He was right, but every time she found proof, she realized it was proof of something that was physically impossible. “I believe that if Ajax was a Franciscan Father in 1796, and if he was Raul Pavoni, being a killer is within the realm of possibility. Point two: If he is a vampire, of course we might just as well say he’s God or the Devil, I see no reason why he couldn’t be a killer. In fact, by definition - ”
“ - Maybe he’s not a vampire. He only thinks he is.” He told her about the spring-loaded finger he’d found. The spring loaded blade as sharp as a fighting cock’s gaff. “He probably has a Freddy Kreuger-type glove sprouting blades, that’s how he killed Thomkins.”
“A fake vampire?”
“There’s a whole industry in this country devoted to people who think they’re vampires; tv shows, movies, books, you name it. It’s sexy. It’s deadly. It’s power.”
“Ajax is already powerful,” she said. “So now you figure that Ajax is not, in fact, a real vampire but only thinks he is? And that he might have faked his signature on the property deeds, and maybe had plastic surgery so that he looks like Raul Pavoni? Or maybe we should face the obvious conclusion: Ajax is a victim of circumstance and the killer is probably some whacked out priest.”
“A whacked out priest buried Dean Everett alive?”
“It’s possible. He was buried at the mission, wasn’t he? The mission is full of priests. It beats your theory that Ajax is a wannabe vampire.”
“I don’t think it matters,” he said. “The vampire thing is a side issue, part of his sickness. He wants to contaminate the blood supply. That is the center of the case.”