Bleeding in the Eye of a Brainstorm

by George C. Chesbro

  "Why don't these people go to the police?"

  "They're probably not even aware that they're being hunted; but even if they are, they'll probably still avoid the police. They're on an effective but very dangerous medication I'm sure our FDA has never even heard of, much less approved. Without the medication, they'll slip back into insanity and probably die inside twenty-four hours. They're afraid the drug will be confiscated. They have a limited supply of the medication, so I'm trying to identify the drug and get more of it in order to buy them more time. But it's all going to be a pointless exercise if they're killed before I can find a way to help them."

  "I understand."

  "Anything else you can tell me about Punch and Judy? Personal habits? Favorite haunts and restaurants?"

  "I'm afraid they're too professional to be that predictable, Mongo. I have heard the rumor that they are brother and sister as well as man and wife, but I can't see how that information would help you. They are very . . . how do you say? Kinky?"

  "That's as good a way of saying it as any."

  "It particularly interests me that you suspect the CIA of having hired these assassins. If it's true, there may be some irony in the situation."

  "How so?"

  "There are rumors that Punch and Judy were discovered and developed—if that is the proper way to describe the nurturing and training of assassins—by a department of the CIA called the Chill Shop."

  "The Chill Shop?"

  "Yes. That is what other CIA operatives with whom I have occasional dealings call it. These people I have spoken with don't much care for the operation, or the personnel who run it. That name derives from the acronym BUHR—the Bureau of Unusual Human Resources. I heard it was shut down some time ago because of budget cuts, but that information may not have been accurate."

  "This Chill Shop was—is—a school for assassins?"

  "No. Punch and Judy represent only one of their products. Chill Shop personnel were tasked to find people with unusual talents, skills, or characteristics—even subjects some of us might describe as 'freaks'—that might prove useful in covert intelligence work. That's all I know about it, Mongo. If you like, I will make discreet inquiries about this matter, and get back to you if I find out anything that I think could be helpful to you."

  "Thanks, Gerard. I'd really appreciate that, and I owe you."

  "You owe me nothing, Mongo. Speaking to you and possibly being of service is my pleasure."

  "Oh, there's one other thing. Since Garth is in the neighborhood, there's a good chance he may drop in again. If he does, I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't mention this conversation to him."

  There was a pause, then a hesitant clearing of the throat. "Are you sure, Mongo? Garth would certainly want to know if you're in danger."

  "I don't think I'm in any danger at the moment, Gerard, because the bad guys don't know I'm on to them; but even if I were, there's nothing Garth could do about it. I plan to proceed very carefully. If my brother gets wind of this, he'll head right to the airport and fly back here, and I don't see any reason right now to disrupt his and Mary's vacation. If I do need his help, I'll call him myself."

  "If the time comes when you need help, my friend, it may be too late to call."

  "I've given the matter a lot of thought, Gerard. Right now I can handle things myself."

  "I'll do as you ask, Mongo."

  "Thanks again, Gerard. Ciao."

  "Ciao," the Interpol inspector replied, and hung up.

  Step Three.

  It was time to mix my metaphors and go trolling for more lost sheep. I had plenty of room in the brownstone.

  Chapter 7

  I went back upstairs to check on Margaret again. She was sleeping, which was to be expected, but her color was returning and her pulsebeat was regular. I went in the other room to ask Michael to write down the names and descriptions of the other patients who had escaped with him on the bus. When he had done so, I memorized the information and tore up the paper.

  Although Sharon Stephens and the patients could be scattered through the five boroughs, and would be if they were acting logically, I still had the feeling that most of the people, if not the psychiatrist and her ward, had remained in Manhattan, in close proximity to the site where they hoped to rendezvous and receive salvation on Christmas Eve. So Manhattan was where I would begin my search.

  I took the A train to the northern end of the borough, and then slowly walked through the George Washington Bridge bus terminal, searching end to end and top to bottom, looking for anyone who might fit the descriptions Michael had given me. It was no easy task. The patients could have altered their appearance, and it wasn't as if all the homeless people and drifters in the terminal were standing up against a wall and facing me as if they were in a lineup; many were sleeping with their faces to the wall, or were covered with mounds of rags or surrounded by plastic garbage bags stuffed with their meager belongings. Finally, it came down to the question of how one could pick out a particular escaped mental patient from all the other mental patients wandering around the streets of the city as though it were some great, labyrinthine outpatient ward.

  I didn't see any man or woman who exactly fit any of the descriptions I had been given, but when I saw somebody who came close, or appeared relatively lucid, I would stop, offer the person a dollar or two, show them the black-and-yellow capsule I carried, and then begin asking personal questions about Rivercliff, Dr. Sharon Stephens, and Raymond Rogers. What I was looking for was a reaction, shadows moving in the eyes, a sharp intake of breath, or an attempt to move away. All I got were requests for more money.

  When I struck out at the bus terminal, I headed for the nearest homeless shelter, an armory. I slowly walked through the cavernous space, examining the faces of the men and women who had already checked in for the night and were resting on their cots as I discreetly held a handkerchief over my nose and mouth to try to protect myself from the new and virulent strains of tuberculosis that were now spreading rapidly through the city's population of homeless.

  As I worked my way downtown through shelters and other havens for the helpless, I developed a list of questions for any of the guards, volunteers, or social workers who would talk to me. Had they noticed anything "unusual" about any one of the people who had first come in during the past two weeks? That question always got a laugh. Had they noticed anyone displaying any unusual talents or traits, like being very skilled at chess, or being able to see particularly well in the dark, or anything at all peculiar? More laughs. I had no trouble getting people to talk to me, only in taking me seriously after I had asked my first few questions. I came to realize that, with the noticeable exception of three or four fresh volunteers who had only been on the job a week or two, few of the employees any longer "saw" much of anything around them at all. They simply could no longer distinguish individual faces in the vast, cruel tapestry of human misery that cloaked them, the tide of suffering that swept in each evening to overwhelm, and then swept out again the next day. Most of the staff, in the interest of self-preservation, had willfully allowed themselves to grow numb, half blind and half deaf. I couldn't say I blamed them in the least.

  I found nobody who matched any of the descriptions.

  By 10 P.M. I had worked my way south toward my own neighborhood, and I decided to visit the one city shelter and three Salvation Army and church relief centers in the area before calling it a night. I was getting more than a wee bit discouraged. If the patients had seriously gone to ground and were avoiding all relief centers, or were scattered in the other boroughs, I had little real hope of finding them even if I devoted all my time to the search. And that would be counterproductive, since come December 26 or thereabouts they would all be mad or dead or both anyway. The only solace I could take was in the knowledge that if I was having so much difficulty finding the lost flock, then so must the assassins on their trail.

  I was coming out of the shelter when I looked across the street and saw something that made me sto
p so abruptly I almost tripped over my own feet. There, standing at the curb under a streetlight, was a young couple—at least they certainly appeared young from a distance—with their arms around each other's waist, apparently engaged in earnest conversation. From the way they dressed and by their physical mannerisms, their gestures, the man and woman looked to be in their late teens or early twenties. From what I could see of their faces, they certainly appeared youthful—but there was no bus stop where they were standing, and it seemed to me that there were any number of other, more pleasant places where a young couple could go to chat rather than this forlorn, potentially dangerous block, across the street from a shelter for homeless men. I waited for a stream of cars to pass, then headed in their direction.

  They saw me coming, turned their heads slightly to regard me for a few moments, then resumed their conversation; as I drew closer, it sounded to me as if they were speaking Dutch, or perhaps some Scandinavian language. I stepped up on the curb next to the couple and waited for them to take notice of me, something which they at least pretended not to do. They were both about the same height, about five eight or nine, and what I saw when I looked into their faces amazed me and made the hairs on the back of my neck rise. While the man and woman had indeed looked like college students from where I had stood across the street, up close I could see that they were no spring chickens. Like an optical illusion gone sour, they had aged twenty years or more in the time it had taken me to cross the street.

  The longish, dyed blond hair of both the man and the woman hid the multiple scars I knew they both bore behind their ears from multiple visits to plastic surgeons; their flesh, which had the starched look and translucency of parchment, was stretched like drumheads across their skulls, lending both of them the expression, even when speaking, of a perpetual, faint grimace. The man had brown eyes, and the woman one blue eye and one green; the eyes of both protruded slightly from their sockets, and looked like glass marbles in the mercury glow from the streetlight. I had no idea what the man and woman would have looked like if they had allowed themselves to age normally, but they couldn't look any worse than they did now.

  I'd seen enough, and was about to retreat into the shadows when the woman with the mismatched eyes suddenly glanced down at me and asked me a question in what I now thought sounded like a German dialect.

  "Uh, excuse me," I said, smiling up into the stretched faces. "Could you tell me how to get to Carnegie Hall?"

  They conferred for a few moments in the language that was incomprehensible to me. Finally the woman looked at me and winked her blue eye. "You are perhaps trying to have some fun with tourists?" she asked in heavily accented English. "We have heard that joke. The answer is: Practice, practice, practice."

  "Uh, right you are. Well, thanks anyway. Have a nice evening."

  I didn't go far, south half a block and around a corner. Then I stopped and peered back around the edge of a building. The man and woman were still standing at the curb, talking. I was certain they were Punch and Judy, trolling the same shelters and relief centers I was, but avoiding the risk of identification by remaining at a distance to watch who went inside and who came out. They would have whole dossiers on the escaped patients, including photographs and behavior profiles. Taking out this decidedly unattractive duo could produce all sorts of dividends. They were unlikely to know anything about Rivercliff, the drug or the company that manufactured it, but they could tell me the names of their employers, people who presumably would know. Their forced retirement would also certainly make the streets a lot safer for the lost flock, and might even bring a faint smile to the thick lips of Captain Felix MacWhorter, perhaps even raise his level of tolerance for having me live in his precinct.

  But I was going to need more than my own conviction and evidence of plastic surgery to remove them from circulation. It was going to cost me valuable time to gather enough evidence for MacWhorter to take them in, but the effort certainly seemed worth it.

  Fifteen minutes went by, and upwards of twenty men entered the shelter without the couple giving any one of them so much as a glance. That surprised me, and took a bit of a nick out of my confidence that they were Punch and Judy. In fact, they seemed far more interested in each other than in who was entering the shelter across the street. Then they surprised me a second time by abruptly heading off down the block in the opposite direction. They were definitely not acting like the stalkers and professional killers I wanted them to be, but I followed them anyway.

  Since I was the only dwarf in the general vicinity, I had to keep a respectable distance between us or I would immediately be made if one of them happened to glance back. However, they didn't seem to be in a hurry to get anywhere, and they were easy to follow. They went north awhile, then turned east on 76th Street. Three quarters of the way down the block they paused outside an apartment building. They demurely kissed each other on the cheek, the woman disappeared into the building, and the man resumed walking. It seemed unlikely that Punch and Judy would be living in separate quarters, and the behavior of this couple was growing ever more depressingly unsuspicious. Still, I continued to follow the man, who disappeared down the steps into the subway station at Columbus Circle.

  I sprinted the rest of the way down the block, across the street, and scurried down the stairs, toward the almost palpable rumble of incoming and outgoing trains, hoping to at least catch a glimpse of him to determine whether he was going towards the uptown or downtown stairs. There was no sign of him. I dug a subway token out of the change in my pocket, dropped it into the turnstile, then hurried down another flight of stairs leading to the platforms for the downtown trains. I knew I was running a considerable risk of being spotted if he was on the platform, but I didn't see him anywhere.

  I hurried back upstairs then down another flight to the platform for the uptown trains, but I didn't see any sign of the man there either. I headed home, my thoughts once more turning to the image of a man with an ice pick, taking care to avoid dark areas, and paying close attention to anybody who passed close to me on the sidewalk.

  By the time I reached my block I had convinced myself that the couple had not been Punch and Judy, that it had simply been coincidence that both the man and the woman had undergone extensive plastic surgery, and that they had been standing in that particular spot across from the men's shelter. I had been very careful in tailing them, which meant that the woman most likely really did live in that particular apartment house, and the man had simply stepped onto a train that had been in the station and had almost immediately pulled out. In any case, whether or not the couple had been Punch and Judy was a moot question; they were gone now. At least I had gotten some exercise.

  As I crossed the street heading for the brownstone, I noticed that the light in the stairwell leading down to the belowground floor Garth and I used as a storage area was out, leaving the stairwell and half the stairs leading up to the main entrance in darkness. That was not good for my own security, or for the safety of my neighbors, and I decided I would replace the bulb before I went to bed.

  I was halfway across the street when I saw the figure sitting in the shadows on my stoop, in almost exactly the same spot where I had found Margaret Dutton. But this wasn't Mama Spit. I went a few steps closer, and my mouth went dry when I saw the dyed blond hair and pale sheen of the taut flesh of the woman's face; I'd not only been made but had, but good, by the two professionals. It was the last thought I had before the steel prongs of a stun gun probed into my back on either side of my spinal cord, sending a few thousand volts of electricity coursing through my body. It smarted pretty good; it felt like somebody had poured molten lead into a hole in the top of my skull, burning out my brain and severing every neural connection in my body. I dropped to the pavement like a stone. A powerful hand grabbed the collar of my coat and dragged me the rest of the way across the street; I was bumped up over the curb, hauled across the sidewalk, and unceremoniously bumpety-bumped down the steps into the darkened stairwell. Punch was no
w joined by Judy, and they used separate, thin ropes to lash my wrists and ankles. When they had accomplished this, Punch tossed the ends of both ropes over the street-level railing above my head. Then he pulled on the ropes and tied them off, leaving me drooping in the air like a hammock. It was an extremely uncomfortable position—which, of course, was precisely what they'd had in mind.

  My eyes had grown accustomed to the gloom, and it was useless to struggle, so I just sagged there, trying not to think about the pain that was already nibbling along my spine, and watched while the man, who I now realized was wearing a toupee, pulled a thick leather glove over his right hand. He removed a small glass bottle from his pocket, unscrewed the cap, and poured a small amount of a clear liquid into his gloved palm. Suddenly the air was filled with the fetid odor of feces.

  "It won't do you any good to try to cry out, Dr. Frederickson," the parchment-faced man with the blond toupee said in perfect English that no longer carried any trace of an accent. "I will immediately muffle any cries with my glove. Like this."

  Having made this pronouncement, Punch proceeded to cover my nose and mouth with the liquid-soaked glove. Whatever was on the glove didn't appear to be the real thing, but it might as well have been, because the smell and taste immediately made my mouth feel like a recently used toilet. After a few moments he took the glove away, and I spat.

  "That is really vile stuff," I said in as even a tone as I could manage from my extremely stressed, rather undignified position. "I certainly don't plan to cry out, and I hope you're not planning on doing anything that would make me want to change my mind. How do you know who I am?"

  "Don't be so modest," the woman said in English that was as perfect and unaccented as her husband's. "Doesn't everyone know Mongo the Magnificent, the famous ex-circus star, former college professor, karate expert, and renowned private investigator who also just happens to be a dwarf? You and your brother have made headlines all over the world."