by John Lutz
"I'm pleased," Reverend Callahan said, stepping to the microphone and smiling his beautiful smile. Flashbulbs popped. "Pleased for myself and for my boys . . . the fellas who have succeeded against odds that had overwhelmed them before. I'm happy for all of us . . . and all of us thank you." He kissed the smiling Mrs. Dunhaker on the cheek and shook hands with the smiling commissioner. Flashbulbs popped again. End of presentation.
From a third floor window Reverend Callahan looked down at Commissioner Brell's taxpayer-purchased sedan as it slowed briefly for the corner stop sign, then made a left turn. Members of the press and Mrs. Dunhaker had likewise departed. A few area residents stood below, enjoying the sunshine and chatting. Then, still talking, they began to walk slowly toward the corner.
Reverend Callahan turned away from the window, toward Willie Clark, a short, sad-faced man who had recently been released from an eight to ten year sentence for bank robbery. Despite his plea of not guilty, there had been little doubt of his guilt — no doubt at all in the minds of the jury — as he had been surprised inside the bank's vault after closing time. He was the latest to be recommended to Care Halfway House.
"I'd like you to meet Ben Wert," Reverend Callahan said, nodding toward where the ex-safecracker sat in a corner with his legs propped up on a footstool. "He's something of an expert in your field and a member of our guidance staff."
"I know him by reputation," Clark said warmly.
"Then I'm sure you'll listen to what he has to say and accept his help."
"You got caught on that bank job because you used too much explosive on the safe and somebody on the street heard," Wert said with something like condescension. "And you left a window open where you'd shorted the alarm and entered. What you'll learn here is not only everything about safe-cracking but about breaking and entering as well.
"A good safe man needs some of the skills of a good house-breaker. Another staff member will instruct you in that." Wert let his legs drop from the footstool and sat up straight. "You've got to listen close here, Clark. We teach you everything you need to know, but then it's up to you."
"What he's saying," Reverend Callahan said with a reassuring smile, "is that when you leave here, we don't want you to become the wrong kind of statistic."
King of the Kennel
With his eyes still focused on the girl on the other side of the restaurant, Alex Goodnight watched the waiter approach, a mere shadow figure in the corner of his vision.
At precisely the right moment he turned and addressed the waiter. "Just coffee, please. Black."
Alex's voice was slightly but not very noticeably slurred. He sensed rather than saw the waiter nod and leave. Again Alex focused his attention on the girl, and again the gold ball point pen between his large fingers moved occasionally with surprising speed and deftness. The small notebook before him on the table, inconspicuous behind the sugar container and salt and pepper shakers, was a maze of shorthand.
The girl looked up for a moment and caught his gaze and he moved his eyes away casually, waiting a full half minute before daring to look again. When he looked back she was no longer interested in him, but was still talking animatedly to the man across the table from her.
Alex's sad but alert blue eyes watched her. She had well formed and mobile red lips across even teeth, rather pretty lips, easy lips for a deaf man to read. He watched the slight stretching motion of the e's, the rounded, almost pouting o's and the delicate touch of her tongue on the tips of her even teeth for the th's.
Whenever she said something that might be of interest, or mentioned one of the names Alex had been told to watch for, his gold pen moved idly but with nimble speed across the note paper.
The waiter arrived with the coffee, and Alex's fingers flipped the page of the notebook to reveal harmless looking business notes. The waiter left, the page was flipped back, and Alex nonchalantly sipped his coffee from the cup in his left hand.
The girl looked up and noticed him again. She looked away quickly, placing widely spread fingers in her short blonde hair in an unconscious gesture of distress.
"Don't turn now," Alex watched her say, "but do you know the man at the table by the window?"
Alex didn't give the man a chance to turn and look. He glanced at his watch, gulped the last of his coffee and stood. Without looking back, he placed the money for his bill on the table and walked out of the restaurant.
As soon as he entered his fourth floor efficiency apartment Alex removed his shoes and lay down on the bed. Lying on his back, he lifted his legs one at a time and peeled off his socks. He rested there for about ten minutes before rising.
Alex was still barefooted as he walked to the refrigerator, got out a frozen dinner and put it in the oven. Going without shoes and socks when indoors was a habit he'd acquired long ago.
As he walked about the apartment, feeling the cool tile of the kitchen floor, the softness and contrasting hardness of where the living room rug met the hardwood floor, he felt all the subtle vibrations of the tenant-crowded building below him. Perhaps it made him a little less lonely.
While waiting for the dinner to heat, Alex opened the case of his portable typewriter and sat down to transfer the shorthand in his notebook to conventional English. He typed smoothly, with the speed and accuracy of a professional.
After dinner he watched part of a baseball game on television; then he went for a long walk, came home, and went to bed.
Early the next morning Alex was driving his small car up the winding dirt roads that led into the hills above the city. He turned off onto a narrow white dirt road and followed it until it became too narrow even for his small car.
Alex twisted the ignition key, feeling the engine stop, then he walked the remaining hundred or so yards to the gate in a high chain link fence.
As he approached the gate he could see the roof of the expensive but secluded house built into the hillside among the trees. When he wasn't traveling, this was where Walther lived.
When Alex was within ten feet of the fence, Waither's companions and servants, three large black German Shepherds, ran and hurled themselves against the chain link gate.
They backed off, barking loudly, and with teeth bared hurled themselves again and again.
A tingling sensation ran through Alex's head as somewhere a high frequency whistle was blown. Immediately the dogs became calm, and in unison they turned and trotted off toward the house. Alex waited patiently, and in a few minutes he felt the second tingling sensation that was his signal to enter.
Alex walked up the driveway to the low brick house and entered a side door. For the first time in his life he felt a twinge of apprehension at what his orders would probably be, an apprehension he didn't understand. He walked down a hall and through an open door that led into Walther's office.
Walther was sitting behind his marble-top desk, methodically spelling out words with a tape gun. He had a fondness for labeling things, and Alex had seldom seen him behind the marble desk top when he wasn't turning the alphabet dial and squeezing the plastic trigger to indent the adhesive metal tape with classifications for file folders, personal or business possessions.
Walther finished the word he was working on, looked at the tape with satisfaction and squeezed the separate trigger that snipped it off. The tape fell face up on the desk, but Alex was too far away to read it.
"About the Joyce Chambers woman," Alex said in his slightly slurred voice as he laid his typewritten report on Walther's desk.
Walther nodded and smiled. He was a thin man, with even, angular features and a small but sparkling diamond ring on his little finger. He read through the pages swiftly while Alex waited, then he set the papers on a corner of the desk and looked up at Alex.
"Make yourself a drink," he said silently, pointing toward a small corner bar, and he watched as Alex did so.
Alex was one of several employees in Walther's small but unique and profitable "contracting" business. Like his fellow employees he had been adopted fr
om an orphanage for handicapped children when he was very young, and an old German couple who was in the pay of Walther had raised him. And since Walther paid well, they had raised him to Walther's specifications.
Alex had been tutored to get along in the world as unobtrusively as possible. At the same time he'd been taught to place very little value on any kind of life, human life in particular. He had begun by killing dogs and rabbits by hand when he was nine. His job was still to kill with his hands, but no longer dogs and rabbits.
But the main thing that had been drilled into Alex's head since childhood was the thing that held Walther's operation together — loyalty, complete and unquestioning. All Walther's employees had that in common, from Alex Goodnight to the blind man in London who could study the Braille blueprint of a building and find his way unerringly through darkness to a safe, then open it with the delicate touch of his fingers.
But the deaf ones, like Alex, with their one useless sense and their overdeveloped four others, must be the most loyal of all, for they were the most dangerous.
One of the prerequisites for Walther's employees was intelligence, and because of this intelligence they sometimes began to question, to wonder why. Usually by that time they were too deeply embroiled in what they were doing to protest too much, even to themselves. But at this crisis some of them did balk, and their loyalty could not be taken for granted.
When this happened there was no alternative but to destroy them. A million-dollar operation could not be jeopardized. Of course the one trouble with that drastic precaution was that able replacements were very rare. It was, Walther often mused, an age of specialization.
Alex had finished mixing his diluted Scotch and water, the only thing he drank, and returned to sit before Walther's desk. Walther began to spell out something on the tape gun again, and he had his head bowed so that Alex had to watch closely to read his lips.
"You will have to kill the Chambers woman," Walther said, twisting the alphabet dial. "Get her alone. Do it simply and quickly, as with the man in New York."
"Yes, sir," Alex said almost by reflex.
Walther looked up and smiled rather broadly. "When you're through with this one I think you'll deserve a nice vacation, say in Miami Beach."
Alex nodded. "That would be very good."
"Fine," Walther said. "I'll watch the newspapers and contact you when it's done." He turned his attention back to the tape gun and Alex stood and walked out of the office and back down the short hall. He knew that Walther had the dogs roaming the grounds only during night interviews.
As Alex neared the high gate he could feel Walther's eyes on him through high powered binoculars. Once before he had gotten this feeling and turned to see the glint of sunlight off the lenses behind a window, and the next time he'd visited the office Walther had purposely laid the binoculars with the personalized red name tape label out where he could see them.
Latching the gate after him, Alex caught a glimpse of the dogs up near the house, running toward him through the sparse trees. He walked toward his car, his shoes crunching evenly on the small white stones, and he didn't hear or bother to turn when the dogs hit the chain link fence behind him.
Alex was waiting the next evening when Joyce Chambers came home from work. From his small car across the street he watched her enter her apartment building and saw the light come on inside the third floor window. She'd taken off her thin, stylish coat, and her slim figure was silhouetted for a moment as she walked to the window and pulled the drapes closed. Alex waited patiently.
Two hours later she came out of the building, walking sprightly in a bright yellow dress through the near-arch formed by the large, untrimmed hedges on either side of the door. She got in her car and drove off quickly. As soon as she'd turned the corner, half a block up, Alex's car made a precision U-turn and followed.
She met the man again. This time at a tavern with outside tables gathered around a small colored fountain. Amber light played over her blonde hair as she sat with the man and they ordered their drinks. Alex didn't bother to watch them this time. Instead he went inside the tavern and sat in a booth near the window so he could keep an eye on her car. He knew that the man never drove to their appointments.
Joyce Chambers didn't leave with the man. Instead she walked across the street and got in her car alone. She walked slowly this time, thoughtfully.
Alex paid for his drink and left. He followed her for a while, until it became obvious to him by her aimless direction that she was driving with no destination. She didn't seem to be checking her rear-view mirror, Alex noted. Of course there was the possibility that she knew she was being followed, or perhaps she was simply driving idly while she thought.
Walther had said to do the job quickly, and it was getting late. There would be little chance to get her alone this way, Alex thought, so he turned his car abruptly and drove back toward her apartment. The entrance vestibule was fairly well concealed from outside by shrubbery and the light was dim. Even if she made some noise he could escape easily without anyone seeing his face. He decided to wait for her there.
She was waiting for him.
As he entered her pale hand touched his arm lightly. "Please, I want to talk to you -"
He read her lips with difficulty in the dim light.
He stared down at her. There was a softness about her features, a pitiable desperation in her large brown eyes;
Alex's mind raced. "I don't believe I know you, Miss," he said.
The desperation in her eyes shone. "But you do! You've been following me for days!" She looked at him carefully, realizing then, perhaps, that there was something different about him.
His faintly slurred, monotone voice spoke again. "Why would I follow you?"
She knew then. He could tell by the exaggerated enunciation when she spoke, angling her head slightly upward so he could see her lips. "Please don't play games. I only want to talk to you."
He stood thinking for a moment. "Where?"
Joyce Chambers looked around automatically. Even through her desperation there was a touch of self-consciousness. "Upstairs. In my apartment."
It might be better there, Alex thought. Easier, more private, and perhaps it would be a while before the body was found.
He nodded.
She led the way. He watched the liquid, rhythmic motion of her hips beneath the yellow dress as she took the stairs.
Her apartment was small, tastefully furnished, but with a worn, slightly threadbare atmosphere. Furniture that was just entering the last days of its usefulness. Joyce Chambers sat down on the sofa, but Alex remained standing.
Her frightened eyes, which fascinated Alex, grew larger. "I want to appeal to you — to them — for mercy."
Alex felt a twinge of pity. She wouldn't believe him if he told her that he was merely doing his job, that he neither knew nor cared who "they" were.
"I didn't mean to hurt anyone," she continued in a rush of words that Alex could hardly understand. "It started as a silly adventure, a harmless thrill, and then I got in deeper and deeper!"
Alex checked to make sure the drapes were still closed and sat down next to her.
"I'll promise to never talk, to go away -" she was saying, as Alex turned his body to face her on the sagging sofa. Tears glistened on her cheeks as she placed her small hands against his chest, her fingers clawing into the material of his jacket. "I'll do anything! Anything!"
Alex felt a fondness stirring in him, a fondness turning to desire, but a strangely protective desire. He told himself that he would not do this, would not snuff out the light in those beautiful eyes, but the silent voice in the back of his mind gripped his will like iron. Independent of him, his huge hands, his strong hands, rose like separate creatures to her throat and did their usual efficient job. The gouging tips of his thumbs felt no vibrations of a scream.
When it was over, Alex Goodnight bowed his head.
A week, an almost sleepless week after Joyce Chambers' death, Walther contac
ted Alex with a typewritten, coded letter, and at one the next morning, as a precaution against being seen at Walther's so soon after the murder, Alex was again driving his small car up into the hills beyond the city.
He went through the ritual of the dogs and found Walther behind his desk as usual, idly punching out letters on the tape gun by the shaded light of a desk lamp. Alex got his drink, took his chair in front of Walther's wide desk.
"You did a very good job," Walther said, concentrating on his tape.
Alex sat silently, and after punching out a few more letters Walther raised his eyes curiously.
"I didn't want to kill this one," Alex said slowly.
Walther's eyes narrowed with surprise and a certain wariness, as if one of his dogs had unaccountably growled at him.
"Well," he said smiling, "a few weeks of fun will make you forget it."
"I want to quit."
"Quit?" Walther's voice was amused and incredulous. "But you simply don't quit." He shrugged his shoulders as if Alex had suggested defying some irrefutable law of the universe. "You simply don't."
"I don't even want the money for this job," Alex said, "or the vacation."
"I see." Walther looked at Alex for a long time, coolly, appraisingly, a bit sadly. "Would you like to think about it for a while? Let me know later?"
Alex shook his head. "I've already thought. I'm sorry." Walther sat stiffly, soberly.
"Well," he said at last, with smiling resignation, "perhaps I shouldn't try to talk you out of it."
There was something strange, Alex noted instinctively, about the way Walther was holding the tape gun, the way his finger had slid up the plastic punch trigger, the way he was — aiming it! In an instant Alex saw the perforated circle on the plastic front of the gun, exactly the size of a small caliber bullet. Something in his mind flashed an instantaneous message, and without sound or warning Alex sprang.
Alex felt two bullets slice into his body as he crossed the wide desk and his huge hand circled Walther's throat. He felt two more bullets enter as they sprawled struggling to the floor and he looked into Walther's panic-stricken eyes. One of Alex's hands left Walther's throat for a split second, slapped the gun away, and then darted back to its previous position. Alex dug in with his thumbs.