Forever and a Death

by Donald E. Westlake

  “I don’t know, he was taking a picture of the front of the hotel, I thought we might be in it.”

  Jerry looked back at the street, where the man hunched again over his camera. Moving farther from the doors, he said, “Taking a picture of the front of the hotel. Can you believe it?”

  “Tourists take pictures of anything,” Kim assured him. “He wants to show his friends where he stayed in Singapore.”

  “A Polaroid?” Jerry said. “Of this place?”

  “I’m going to my room, Jerry, call me later.”

  “Wait wait, I’m coming.”

  Riding up in the elevator, Jerry thought, I’ll sleep until Luther comes home, and then I’ll be with Luther until it’s time to call Mark. Six? Yes; call Mark at six.

  He’d completely forgotten the tourist with the Polaroid camera.

  4

  Morgan Pallifer was nearing the end of his rope. Not only was he stuck on land, extremely dry land at that, with no significant body of water for hundreds of miles in any direction, but his job had somehow been reduced to that of babysitter. No action in it at all, no movement. Nothing to do, day and bloody night, but play nanny, with assistant nannies Steve and Raf. Now, there was nothing wrong with Steve and Raf, Pallifer had chosen them because they were professional and reliable in a crisis, but if you didn’t happen to have a crisis on your hands, those two were not what you might call stimulating company.

  As for George Manville, Pallifer found him a disgusting disappointment. Where was the fire, the resistance, the defiance? Where were the escape attempts, the maneuverings to get at a telephone or a vehicle, the confrontations with his jailers? But no; all Manville did was sit around and read.

  So Manville provided no diversion. The telly couldn’t hold him long (it could apparently hold Steve and Raf forever), and there wasn’t anything about ranch life that interested or amused him. He hadn’t spoken with Curtis or anyone else in the outside world since the hugger-mugger about pretending to be both George Manville and in Singapore. Except for the food, this was like being in jail.

  Pallifer was seated on the verandah of the spare barracks on Tuesday afternoon, squinting out at the dry brown land in all that sunlight, wondering if he dared leave Steve and Raf here on their own for a day or two, to watch over Richard Curtis’s favorite engineer while Pallifer found himself a town somewhere on this continent with some action in it, and reluctantly he was acknowledging to himself that the newly richer relationship with Curtis was too valuable to risk, when the ranch manager, Farrelly, came out of the main house across the way and walked in this direction in the baking sun, little dust puffs rising around his boots at every step.

  Pallifer watched him come, feeling mingled distaste and hope. He knew that both the Farrellys disapproved of him, as being some sort of unacceptable roustabout, and he returned the favor in spades; but would Farrelly be coming here with some sort of message? Something to end this damn inactivity?

  Yes. “Phone for you,” Farrelly said, when he was close enough. “In the office.” And he turned around and headed back.

  Pallifer rose to follow. He would have said a polite thank you, but the man had turned away too fast. Well, fuck you, too, Pallifer thought.

  The office was actually a two-room complex, the outer one with a pair of desks for the Farrellys and a number of filing cabinets, the inner one a kind of mailroom, with fax and computers. These rooms were being kept locked when not in use so long as Manville was a guest in the house, so this was only the second time Pallifer had been in here.

  Helen Farrelly sat at her desk, typing a letter on ranch stationery, but she stopped when Pallifer and her husband came in and said, “Good afternoon, Mr. Pallifer. The phone’s right there.”

  So the woman was at least making an effort to be polite. “Thank you, ma’am,” Pallifer said, and crossed to the side table where the phone waited off the hook. He picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

  “Mr. Pallifer?”

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “This is Otis,” said the dry and whispery voice, “from Unico Bank. Mr. Richard Curtis requested that we phone you about certain credit card information, concerning a Mr. George Manville.”

  Pallifer’s spirits suddenly lifted. The trail! The credit card trail that would lead to the missing girl, if she were still there. Well, we can only hope.

  A pen and notepad were by the phone. Picking up the pen, “Yes, go on,” he said.

  “On Thursday last,” the whispery Mr. Otis said, “Mr. Manville made two telephone calls from the Brisbane area to the United States, charging them to a credit card.”

  “Telephone calls.” Pallifer had been hoping for a hotel or some such thing, but of course hotels don’t put through the credit card slip until after the guest checks out. Hoping this might still be useful somehow, he said, “Can you identify where the call was made from?”

  “Yes, of course,” Mr. Otis said. “Both calls emanated from a pay telephone on the property of the Lee-Zure-Lite Motel in Surfers Paradise.”

  Bingo! “Surfers Paradise?” Pallifer asked, as he wrote the name on the notepad, “is that the name of a town?”

  “Oh, yes,” Mr. Otis said. “On the Gold Coast, I believe.”

  “Well, thank you,” Pallifer said. “That was Leisure Light Motel?”

  “Yes. It has a rather unusual spelling,” Mr. Otis said, and went on to spell it.

  Pallifer wrote that also on the notepad, thanked Mr. Otis again, said he wouldn’t be needing any more information, and hung up. Then he thanked Mrs. Farrelly, pointedly ignored Mr. Farrelly, and went outside, where Raf stood in the shade of the house, leaning against the wall. He straightened when he saw Pallifer, and said, “Our friend was here. He listens at windows.”

  Pallifer stopped. “Does he.” He didn’t like that, it suggested Manville might be up to something after all, not just obediently waiting, the way Mr. Curtis thought.

  Pallifer reflected; what, if anything, would Manville have heard? The phone table in the office was against a wall between two windows, but the windows were shut because of the air-conditioning. But say Manville could have heard his part of the conversation, what was there in it?

  The name of the motel. He’d repeated it when Otis said it.

  “Well, you know,” Pallifer said, “it might be a good thing to collect our pal and lock him away a while. I got to drive back to the coast, be gone overnight, that might excite Manville even if he didn’t hear anything. Where is he now?”

  “He went back in the house.”

  “You and Steve round him up, while I pack a bag.”

  “Sure thing.”

  Pallifer went back to the spare barracks and packed his smaller bag, and brought it to the main house. In the garage, he could choose between a green Land Rover and a white Honda Accord. The Land Rover appealed to him, but the Honda would be more anonymous once he got back around Brisbane, so he shrugged and tossed his bag into the trunk of the Honda. Then he went looking for Steve and Raf, to see how they were doing with Manville.

  Not so good. “Can’t find him,” Raf said. He sounded more irritated than worried.

  Pallifer felt the same way. “Well, where the hell could he be? He can’t go anywhere. If he’s hiding, it’s because he wants to catch somebody. So if he makes a move at you, just kill him and fuck the whole event. I can’t stay around here, I don’t want to lose the daylight. Tell the Farrellys I’ll call here tonight, find out what’s going on. If fucking Manville’s dead, so much the better.”

  “What if, when we find him, he’s peaceable?”

  Pallifer shook his head. “Then we go on babysitting,” he said. “And you lock him away till I get back.”

  “Okay.”

  Pallifer grinned, feeling better about things. “But if it turns out the job’s over,” he said, “that would be okay, too.”

  * * *

  Two hundred miles east of Kennison, with the sun low in the sky behind him, Pallifer pulled off the r
oad—he was the only car in sight—got out of the Honda, and went around a hillock to relieve himself. When he came back to the car, Manville was seated in back, giving him a calm look.

  “Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Pallifer muttered, and went around to get behind the wheel. Staring at the irritating bastard in the rearview mirror, he said, “Now what?”

  “Just keep going,” Manville said. “I like the way you drive, so keep doing it.”

  “And where do you think you’re going?”

  “Same place as you. Lee-Zure-Lite Motel.”

  Pallifer nodded. “So you did hear things at that window.”

  “If you’re going to that motel,” Manville said, “then Curtis still wants Kim Baldur dead, no matter what he said to me.”

  “So the deal’s off, is that it?”

  “That’s it. Drive, Mr. Pallifer.”

  He might as well; there was no point just sitting here, on an empty highway. He put the Honda in gear, and they started again to drive east.

  When he’d got into the car, back at Kennison, he’d put a pistol in the glove compartment, the one he figured to use on the girl. Now he glanced at the glove compartment, thinking about it.

  Manville said, “It isn’t there anymore.”

  “I thought not,” Pallifer said. He looked at that expressionless face in the rearview mirror, then watched the road. “You heard me on the phone, then you hid out till I put my bag in here, so you knew which car I’d be taking, and then you got in the trunk. Where were you, before?”

  “On top of the framework for the garage doors, between that and the ceiling.”

  “So you could look to see which vehicle I was gonna take. But what if I just got in it and drove away?”

  “At first,” Manville told him, “I was going to drop on you as soon as you opened the driver’s door. But then, when you came in and opened and closed the trunk, and went away again, I saw I could do it more quietly.”

  “Well, you’re pretty cute,” Pallifer said, and slammed on the brakes, sluing the wheel hard right across the empty road with his left hand while his right hand snaked inside his jacket to whip out his other pistol. Pressed against the door, he turned, whipping the pistol around, and Manville shot him in the head.

  5

  It was half an hour up the new dirt road through the jungle, twisting and turning up into the Mayan mountains of Belize. Colin Bennett, half asleep in his third-floor rear room in the Race Course Court Hotel, traveled in memory, however reluctantly, back to the day of the disaster. Outside the closed window here, the chattering sounds of Singapore continued as the day waned, but in the dim hotel room where Bennett sat beside the small radio receiver there was the heavy silence of the Belizean jungle, surrounding you as you drove up that yellowish white fresh dirt road, that new scar upward through the jungle to parallel the rushing cold Cobaz River. And at the end of the road was the worksite, the dam.

  The Cobaz River was small but powerful, tumbling down the steep slopes out of Guatemala and down across Belize to empty into the Caribbean Sea, and the hydroelectric dam being built across it up here was as ecologically correct as it was possible for any construction of man to be. True, it would create a small lake where no lake had ever been before, but that was only an improvement. Otherwise, they would merely borrow the water to make electricity, then return it to the river, and the river would remain unchanged.

  That had been the most difficult part to explain to the villagers downriver, that the dam had nothing to do with flood control, that the river would still occasionally flood as it always had, that from one-quarter mile below the dam the river would be exactly what it had been before.

  The generating system couldn’t have been simpler. A tunnel was cut into the ground beside the lake, twelve feet in diameter, leading downward at a gentle angle. When it came parallel to the dam, inside the mountain, the tunnel became a vertical shaft, tapering smaller, dropping straight down three hundred feet to the blades of the turbines. The water, compressed, hasty, pulled by gravity, pushed by the weight of the lake behind it, hit the turbine with incredible force, enough to generate more electricity than this part of the world would be able to use for years to come.

  A red light gleamed on the side of the radio receiver, to show it was working, but otherwise there was absolute silence. Jerry Diedrich had received one phone call earlier in the day from his partner, a man called Luther, merely saying he was on his way back, so Bennett knew the bug in the phone and this receiver were doing their job. But nothing was happening, no phone calls, nothing but the red light in the dusk inside the room, nothing to keep Bennett from reliving again the day of the disaster in Belize.

  He was drinking too much in those days, it was part of what made him so genial, such a pleasant guy to be around. He wasn’t a mean drunk or a sloppy drunk, he was a cheerful drunk who made other people happy by his presence. But he was a drunk.

  He’d wanted to get to the test. There was to be a test run, releasing the water into the tunnel for the first time, merely a five-minute test to be certain everything was working right, and he’d been eager to get to that test, to sense the power of the water rushing down, to see it come out into the daylight far below the dam, in the new channel they’d cut for it, so that the volume of water they’d borrowed would return to the main body of the river, restoring everything as it had been before. That’s what he’d wanted to see.

  The engineers were supposed to be the ones to run the test, but they were taking too long about it. So far as Bennett could see, they were ready, they were at that stage, why delay? He was up at the dam, running the site, while the engineers were half an hour below, in the camp, in the mobile homes they used for offices. He was up there, and he was drunker than he seemed, and he said the hell with waiting. He said seal off the service entrance to the tunnel, and open the entry from the lake. Let’s let that water go!

  Some of the workmen spoke Spanish and some Mayan. They all had a little English, which was the only language Bennett had (except for some Singlish, the staccato patois of Singapore, useless in Central America), but whatever language any of the workmen used, they didn’t have enough of it to make their objections plain. The boss insisted; eventually, they shrugged their shoulders and did what the boss said to do.

  What he hadn’t known, or possibly what he’d forgotten, was that the tunnel hadn’t yet been entirely cleared out after the construction was done. There were two long folding tables in there, and several chairs, and some Coleman lanterns, and a stack of lumber, and a few other odds and ends.

  Darkness fell inside the tunnel when the service entrance was closed, and then the water came thundering through. It snatched up everything that had been left behind, and hurled it all straight down three hundred feet of shaft to the turbine blades, smashing them into useless oars of twisted shining metal.

  That was the disaster, or that was as much of the disaster as Richard Curtis knew about, and it had been enough to get Bennett fired that same day, and blacklisted from the entire industry ever since. And Curtis and the others didn’t even know the worst. There had been one thing more left inside the tunnel when Bennett had shut that door and started the water through. A man.

  Sometimes in dreams he was that man, Daniel Foster, in that terrifying instant before the water hit. Wide-eyed in the darkness, hearing the roar, the rush of air that would have preceded the water. And then the slam.

  There hadn’t been a trace of him, afterward.

  “Hello, Mark?”

  Bennett sat up straighter. Belize fell away, Singapore crowded in. A new voice said, “Yes. Who’s this?”

  “It’s Jerry. Can you talk?”

  “Ho ho ho,” Bennett told himself, speaking softly, “is this it?”

  Yes, it was. Mark’s young voice said, “Where are you? Are you here?”

  “Yes, Luther and me. Can we meet somewhere? Is it safe?”

  “No, it isn’t,” Bennett said, and broadly smiled at that warming red ligh
t.

  “Sure it is,” Mark said. “Nobody suspects a thing, Jerry. Where shall we meet?”

  6

  Kim didn’t think it was fair. She was part of this, wasn’t she? She’d gone through as much as anybody on this; more. So why couldn’t she come along to meet this Mark person?

  She and Jerry and Luther were having dinner in one of the Indonesian restaurants on Orchard Road, and she spent the entire meal hammering this point. They were in this together, weren’t they? She had as much reason to pursue Richard Curtis as they did; more. So why were they refusing to let her come with them to talk to their friend Mark?

  At last, Luther gave her an answer. “Because,” he said, “it’s a gay bar.”

  “So what?” she said.

  Jerry said, “Kim, you don’t want to go to a gay bar.”

  “Why not?”

  “You wouldn’t like it.”

  “I’ve been in gay bars before,” she said airily.

  Sounding interested, Luther said, “Really? Why?”

  It had been a lie, of course, quick and thoughtless, and she saw no way to either defend it or explain it, so she pushed forward instead, saying, “Why do you have to meet in a gay bar anyway? Why not somewhere else?”

  “Because we are gay,” Luther said, “and so is Mark. So it won’t be suspicious if we all show up there at the same time.”

  “But if we showed up with you,” Jerry pointed out, “that would be suspicious.”

  “Maybe I’m in drag,” she said, and they laughed, and she saw she wasn’t going to get anywhere. “I’ll want to meet him later, then,” she insisted. “Somewhere that tourists go, or something like that, so it won’t be suspicious.”

  “We’ll arrange it,” Jerry promised.

  It wasn’t much comfort, but it was all she was going to get, and she knew it.

  They insisted on putting her in a cab. “I can walk,” she said. “It’s a beautiful night, it isn’t too far to walk.”