Fury

by Farris, John

  He didn't try to catch up, however, as they walked the short stretch down Fifth and cut through the zoo grounds. Larue forgot about him. Gillian couldn't, but they chatted about other things until they were on the crowded ice of Wollman Rink.

  Gillian was a much more advanced skater than Larue; she worked with her friend until Larue was executing turns smoothly and seemed to have the hang of skating backwards. Despite the intense sun in the hard blue sky Gillian was cold to the bone out there on the ice, and she had to grit her teeth to keep them from chattering. Great, now she had chills to go with her fired-up head. But in a little while she'd take a taxi home and crawl into bed, tomorrow she would be fine. . . .

  A couple of times Gillian glanced up and saw the bum: he was just standing around, but at a reassuring distance. She was able to look calmly at him. Obviously he was still interested in her. Instead of disgust she felt empathy.

  —Like most of the women in his family, who were willing to forgive Raymond almost anything.

  Who? Gillian thought, startled.

  "My ankles are getting weak," Larue complained.

  Raymond.

  She had never seen him before in her life, Gillian was sure of that. Nevertheless he was Raymond. Ray . . . mond Dun . . . Dunwoodie! That was as clear as if he'd come up and introduced himself, instead of furtively hanging around.

  Gillian looked again for her bum, but the sun was in her eyes. And the walks and benches around the skating rink were crowded with people.

  This time she couldn't locate Raymond. Maybe he'd gone for good. "Gil, you don't have any color at all," Larue said.

  Gillian smiled gently. The face of her friend, and the skaters gliding around them, were slightly out of focus. She closed her eyes and almost lost her balance, but when she looked up her vision had sharpened.

  "Why don't we go up to my place and have something hot to drink?" Larue lived nearby, on Central Park South.

  Gillian nodded. "I'll just take a couple of turns around the ice, and then we'll go."

  She pushed off, circled smartly to avoid a gang of little boys chugging along on double runners, and found herself looking at the body of Raymond Dunwoodie sprawled a few feet away on the ice.

  The contents of his shopping bag had spilled: she saw a chipped perfume decanter with a few drops of amber liquid in it. Some wilted flowers. Old magazines. There were odds and ends of clothing, including a bra; a few galvanized nails. Raymond's stony smile of terror was ear to ear; his utmost brilliant eye, pleading happenstance, peered at a sky of reciprocating blue. There was a drooling hole in his forehead an inch above the left eyebrow and a starburst pattern of blood and brains on the ice around his head. Skaters flocked obliviously past him. He was dead, but no one seemed to notice, or care.

  What was left of her rational mind warned Gillian that it wasn't real, that if she was the only one who saw him then Raymond couldn't be lying there, but the taste of bile was bitter behind her locked teeth; she was already fainting as she made a clumping turn on skates and showed her ghastly face to Larue.

  At the precise moment Gillian's eyes rolled back in her head and she fell, with a little murmur of apology, to the ice in front of Larue, Raymond Dunwoodie was at a telephone three hundred yards away looking for a dime. Behind him a polar bear prowled in a sunlit cage.

  Raymond didn't have a dime on him. He had nothing in his pockets except a few pennies and three subway tokens.

  Raymond almost sobbed. He knocked his head against the cold metal phone box and shook with outrage. But, despite his habitual lack of control over himself, his hand went instinctively to the coin return cup, and—there it was, a dime someone had forgotten! Or maybe it had dropped late because of some mechanical disorder. Never mind, Raymond had spent entire days poking into the coin return cups of public telephones without finding a cent, but now just when he most desperately needed a break. . . . No doubt in his mind at all. On this day Ray Dunwoodie had been forgiven all his sins.

  For a few moments, after he'd dropped his precious dime, he was afraid his memory would betray him, and he wouldn't remember the unlisted number. His tongue dried up against the roof of his mouth. Then it came to him. He repeated the number twice before dialing to be sure he had it.

  The girl picked up with the proper four-digit response and Raymond's heart thudded as he tried to speak authoritatively.

  "This is Raymond—Raymond Dunwoodie. Now don't hang up! I've got one for you this time, no mistake. I'm absolutely certain!"

  "Raymond," she said, "we just can't put up with any more of your—"

  "No, no, listen! She's just a kid, fourteen, maybe fifteen years old—just the right age—I'm telling you, she's a sensitive—hasn't come through yet, but she's on the verge—so let me talk to him, Kristen."

  "Oh, Raymond, I feel for you if this is just more of your shenanigans."

  "No! God, this one's amazing! As worn-out as I am, she was reading me like a newspaper. But she isn't all that aware yet, she either blocks what she doesn't want to know or lays off her reading as a hunch, the usual reaction."

  Kristen hesitated. Raymond held his breath when he realized he was panting into the phone.

  "All right, Raymond, he's very busy but I'll try. I'll have to put you on hold."

  "Okay. But don't keep me waiting too long," Raymond said, with a touch of amor propio that pleased him. Then he remembered. "Hey!" he said frantically, "I'm calling from a pay phone. And I don't have another—"

  "What's the number you're calling from, Raymond?"

  He edged back and focused on the numbers printed on the dial, read them off.

  "Very good, Raymond. Expect him to call back within five minutes."

  Raymond hung up, then glanced around to see if anyone else was waiting. He was prepared to kill to keep them away from his telephone. He reached into the shopping bag for his last bottle of Annie Greensprings and fed himself gouts of wine.

  It was cold in the shade where he waited, and the cold penetrated the layers of sweaters he wore. He waited with a hand on the receiver of the telephone. He heard the oompah music of the park carousel. He heard a siren. It seemed to Raymond that he waited much longer than five minutes.

  At last the phone rang, and he snatched up the receiver.

  "Yeh, this is Raymond." He listened and grew ecstatic. "All right—right—and I promise you won't regret it." He listened longer and was cunning. "What do you want to know for? I mean, I can point her out to you when you get here, that's good enough, isn't it? Okay, I'll be on the deck that overlooks the rink. But you'd better make it soon."

  Raymond hung up. He trembled from happiness. He gathered up his belonging and trudged toward the ice skating rink, taking the long way to avoid climbing all those steps by the bears' cages.

  A square-backed ambulance was parked at the southeast gate to the rink, and a crowd of the curious had gathered. The ambulance crew was wheeling someone toward the opened doors. It was her. She was unconscious on the stretcher.

  Raymond froze in panic. Then he ran awkwardly toward the ambulance. He pushed the people aside. The other girl, tears in her eyes, climbed into the back of the ambulance with her friend. The doors were closed just as Ray got there.

  "Wait!" he cried. "Where are you taking her?"

  One of the men in white looked distastefully at Raymond.

  "She's—" Raymond said, and realized that anything else he might say would sound ridiculous. He panicked again and grabbed a white sleeve, smudging it. "I said where are you taking her?" He saw the approaching cop out of the corner of his eye. The ambulance driver shook him off and climbed in behind the wheel. Raymond tried to follow, but the cop got in his way.

  "Alright, fella. Don't make trouble for yourself."

  Raymond wept. "You don't understand! I have to know who she is!"

  The ambulance siren whooped. It was rolling, rolling away from him.

  "I said move on."

  Raymond got a little push from the hickory, not much of a
push but enough to set him down on his butt. By the time he got to his feet he could see it was hopeless. The ambulance was headed for the nearest park exit, that's all he knew, and he'd lost her, and what was he going to say this time? He'd deceived them before when he was desperate, they would never give him another chance.

  The cop was still watching him, so Raymond walked slowly away, brooding. High above the rink he sat on a graffiti-covered rock. There he finished his bottle of Annie Greensprings.

  "Mr. Dunwoodie?"

  Raymond turned, grinning, as he always did when startled or demoralized.

  A man of medium height in a trashy-looking trench coat was walking uphill toward him. The man was in his late thirties. He had a face like an anvil with skin stretched over it, untidy and prematurely silvered hair, deep-set eyes the color of tarnished nickel. Raymond had never seen him before.

  But the eyes told Raymond everything he cared to know about the man. He backed away, pointed west and started to babble.

  "They took her a few minutes ago! In an ambulance! She had an accident or something! That's the truth! Check the hospitals, you'll find her."

  The man slowed down as he approached Raymond, but Raymond continued to back away from him. He had arthritic knees, which made any sort of movement other than a straight-ahead shuffle painfully hard to manage.

  "You're Raymond Dunwoodie, aren't you?"

  "Sure! Sure I am. I didn't make it up, I swear! She was skating there on the rink ten minutes ago—"

  A flicker of puzzlement in the secluded eyes.

  "Who was?"

  "The girl—the girl I called up about. The sensitive." Raymond backed into a bench and stopped. The man stood a few feet away, hands in his pockets, just looking at him.

  "Oh, yes," he said softly.

  Raymond breathed deeply, and it sounded like a sob of relief. He sat down involuntarily. He realized he had to go to the bathroom. He hoped that this wouldn't take long, that the man would just give him twenty dollars and go away. But he began to have doubts.

  "Why didn't the Doc come himself? He said he would."

  The man shrugged. "You know how it is."

  "Well, I—" Raymond licked a fever blister. "He's going to pay me, isn't he? When you find the girl."

  "The truth is, Raymond—" He took a seat near Raymond on the bench. "It's another sensitive we're interested in. We need to locate this one fast."

  "You know better. You know I can't work long-range any more. Why don't you use Bruckner, or Helen Tavaglini?"

  Raymond found the nickel eyes unreadable. But in the last sixteen seconds of his life Raymond's powers focused accurately on the truth of the situation in which he found himself. His mind went blank from shock.

  "I don't have access to them, Raymond," the man admitted. "You're the only hope I've got. It's worth at least a hundred dollars to me, more if I can get it. Tell me how much you want."

  "No. I don't work anymore. The girl was an exception, she was so close and so powerful—"

  Raymond stood up; the man stood with him, a strong hand on Raymond's right arm, inches above the wrist. Raymond still weighed close to two hundred pounds, but his bones were light and he had no useful muscle. He sensed the man's demon, and he knew that the man would not be averse to tearing his arm off at the shoulder if Raymond displeased him.

  "I don't know you!" Raymond squeaked. "I only talk to the Doc! Nobody else!"

  He tried to jerk away from the man but only succeeded in giving his captive arm a painful wrench. So he moved the other way, throwing his weight against the man; Raymond half turned, losing his balance, and found himself looking at a gray sedan idling across a stone bridge fifty yards away.

  Psychically he recognized the shape of death in the nondescript sedan and automatically he grinned, a split second before the silenced pistol fired.

  The heavy slug hitting the ridge of bone above Raymond's left eyebrow had the impact of a piece of reinforcing rod hurled end-first by a strong man from a distance of six feet; Peter felt a wet sting of macerated bone and tissue as the back of Raymond's head exploded and the derelict sagged down hard and to the left, losing his grip on his shopping bag.

  Instinctively Peter let him go, turned and plunged downhill, getting off that bare hump of rock as fast as he could, reaching into his left coat pocket for a Kleenex to wipe his bloody cheek. He headed for the biggest crowd he could find on short notice. Twice he changed course abruptly until he was on a path with a couple of chestnut and pretzel venders between himself and the road, between himself and Raymond. He didn't look back until he was part of the larger crowd in front of the skating rink.

  Then he saw, at a glance, Raymond lying on his back on the rock and a couple of kids standing a respectful distance away, staring in fascination at Raymond's tap-dancing right foot.

  He also saw the gray car.

  It had traveled a hundred feet beyond the place where he'd been shot at and where Raymond undoubtedly had blundered the wrong way at just the right moment for Peter's sake. The driver had turned onto an access road and was trying to get around two park maintenance vehicles.

  Pressing question: how many cars did they have, and how many men on foot, and what were his chances of getting out of the park alive?

  Somehow it looked hasty and ill-conceived to him, the shot from the moving car. Poor strategy; acknowledging the fact that they would go ahead and kill him if they had the chance, the method chosen indicated faulty logistics. So they had Raymond Dunwoodie under surveillance for some reason, but his appearance was unexpected. One car, then. Two men likely.

  Peter put his hand through the right-side bottomless pocket of his trench coat and grasped the .38 Beretta automatic in his suit coat pocket, trying not to shove his way through the strolling mother's with perambulators, teenagers with radios grafted to their ears, old folks with peaceful sun-warmed faces. The car was coming after him, of course, but slowly because of the people. The range was now about ninety yards, so discount the marksman trying another shot from what must be a silenced pistol. To lose the car Peter jogged down a long flight of steps and walked through an underpass, emerging near the zoo's cafeteria. They had to know that if they left their car and tried to close in on foot they were in danger of being blown away. They must already have called for backup units, but that would take a few minutes. NYPD would not be a factor.

  Peter surveyed his options quickly. He had to get out of the zoo: wide-open spaces and too few people. He passed up the new Sixty-third Street crosstown subway station in favor of a more distant BMT station on Sixtieth. He raced across Fifth Avenue against the light; a taxi driver was still yelling at him when he reached the subway entrance. In less than sixty seconds he was on an EE train bound for Queens.

  As the cab in which Dr. Irving Roth was riding entered the park it was overtaken by two police cars going north toward Wollman Rink with yelpers wide open. Up ahead two more police cars were pulled off beside the road, dome lights flashing. There seemed to be an awful lot of blue uniforms swarming over a ridge of rock that overlooked the rink. And something else. Roth had only a glimpse of the tattered man lying flung out on his back, but a glimpse was enough. Something very serious had happened to Raymond Dunwoodie.

  He sat back in a corner of the seat and reached for a handkerchief; there were beads of perspiration on his balding head. The cabbie slowed the pile of junk he was driving.

  "I can let you off here; can't get no closer because of all the cops, mister. Mister? Hey! This is what you wanted, isn't it? The skating rink?"

  "Keep going," Roth said.

  On the subway train Peter changed cars twice to make certain he hadn't been followed; then he got off at the second stop across the river.

  Only then did he feel safe enough to go into the john, where he was sick for half an hour, so sick he could scarcely hold his head up, doubly shaken by the murderous way his hopes had died. His resistance to adversity had fallen very low. Part of the trouble was fatigue, he'd been on th
e run and on the skids too long. But it was weakness too; he knew he'd been both weak and stupid hoping for so much, for a miracle from another victim, a burnt-out case like the world-renowned Raymond Dunwoodie.

  Stupid, he thought, nourishing his anger, the only vital spark he could find. Stupid to go walking right up to him without making a thorough sweep of that area of the park. In a chance encounter they'd come so damned close. Childermass would be alerted now; after futile weeks of looking he'd be encouraged and impatient. How much had they spent so far, in pursuit of one man? A million? Childermass would spend another million if he had to. And, given his money and his manpower, he would take advantage of Peter's obsession and in the end he would win. It was just a matter of time.

  Peter left the john and went upstairs to cleaner air. He waited on the elevated platform for the city-bound train to come. He ate the last of the date-nut cookies Mrs. Roberta P. Edge had provided him. The cookies had kept his stomach quiet all day. Would she blame him when she heard the news about Raymond? Of course. And that might bring the police into this, if Childermass wasn't quick to silence her with a visit and a couple of thousand dollars on the table.

  Despite the shooting, it was possible that his moments with Raymond Dunwoodie hadn't been wasted. From the way Raymond had talked there was another one, somewhere. A girl, perhaps about the same age as his son.

  If she was as gifted as Raymond seemed to think then he had to find her. But he was hot, dangerously hot, and to get to the girl who had been taken away to one of the city's hospitals he'd need help.

  The sun was setting; it would be dark in half an hour. His train came and Peter got on.

  Peter had no watch but he knew he had plenty of time to reach lower Manhattan despite the rush-hour crowds. At precisely seven o'clock in the Canal Street IRT station a public telephone would ring. For three nights in a row he hadn't been there; he'd thought seriously of never getting in touch with her again, but tonight he knew he had to answer.

  And, very likely, just by lifting the receiver, he would condemn someone else to die.