Smoke

by Donald E. Westlake

  Too late, Freddie realized the cop wasn’t just talking, he was also moving; suddenly he made a dash for the front door, Freddie scampering after him.

  Too late. When Freddie got to the porch, the cop was crouched over Peg, and a long knife was pressed to Peg’s throat, and Peg was looking very worried. “Listen to me, Freddie,” the cop said, staring at the doorway. “If I feel one thing, one touch, she’s dead.”

  “Then so are you,” Freddie said.

  The cop swung his eyes to where Freddie had just left. “Maybe,” he said. “Second. But she goes first. Are you ready to talk?”

  Why wouldn’t somebody passing by see a man on a porch holding a knife to a woman’s throat? Why weren’t people more observant?

  The cop was saying, “Peg, untie those knots now, they’re real easy, just pull the loops. Move slow, Peg, then we’re all going back inside.”

  Freddie was already back inside, where the lawyer and the last plug-ugly were standing around in the hall, blinking a lot. Freddie went around them and back into the office, and this time he found the right damn key and used it to undo the chief’s right cuff. Pressing the key into the chief’s hand, he whispered, “Do something, okay?”

  The chief nodded, and Freddie turned, and the lawyer was in the doorway. “He’s in the office, Barney!”

  “That’s it,” Freddie said, crossing the room toward the row of hats. “I’ve had enough of you, pal.” He picked up the fire ax and headed for the lawyer.

  Who screamed, and flung his hands in the air, and ran from the room. Freddie followed, the fire ax out in front of him, and in the front hall were the cop and Peg, he behind her, one arm around her waist, the other hand still holding the knife to her throat as he backed them both into the parlor.

  “Leethe!” the cop yelled, forgetting to say “mister,” as the lawyer ran right by him and out the front door and off the porch and down the walk and away, his shoes apparently having thick enough soles so the thumbtacks and pushpins didn’t bother him. Or maybe they bothered him but he was too busy running away to be bothered by something bothering him—that was also possible.

  “Leethe!” the cop yelled. “Come back!”

  But Leethe was long gone, and Peg was staring in shock at the ax in midair, and then she shouted, “Freddie! Look out!”

  A heavy weight tackled him from behind. The ax went flying, and Freddie was driven face first into the carpet, very near the unconscious plug-ugly.

  He’d forgotten the third one, dammit, and the guy had snuck up behind him, guided by the ax. Of course, he couldn’t see Freddie, but now he could sure feel him, and had him in a bearhug on the floor.

  The cop was still backing away into the parlor with Peg, and he called, “Bring him in here! Hold on to him, and bring him in here! Alive!”

  Freddie writhed and twisted, and got his left arm free, and swung it up and back, and his elbow connected with something or other. He did it again, and hit the same something, so he did it again. On the fourth whack, the weight above him shifted, and he managed to twist around, and now he was faceup, with this bulky monster straddling him, trying to hold on to him with both hands.

  Freddie punched the guy in the face. The guy responded by taking a swing where Freddie’s head should be, and getting it absolutely right. Freddie’s head spun. He reached up, blindly, and his hand found the guy’s necktie, and he grabbed it in his fist and turned his fist over, tucking the fist in under the guy’s chin, then grabbing that fist with his other hand to make a bigger mass that he was pressing into the guy’s Adam’s apple while the necktie pinned him there, and now he was strangling the son of a bitch.

  Who reached down, pawed his fingers over Freddie’s face, found his neck, and now the son of a bitch was strangling Freddie. Neither would let go, and Freddie had no confidence that he would win this contest, but then all at once the son of a bitch said, “Ah,” and fell facedown on top of Freddie, and over his unconscious shoulder Freddie saw the chief, with the nightstick.

  “Ah-hah,” Freddie said. “You are good for something. Get this guy off me, will you?”

  The chief pulled, and Freddie crawled out from under, and looked over toward the parlor, and in the doorway were the cop and Peg, same as ever.

  “I’ll call the state boys,” the chief said, backing away toward his office.

  “Wait!” Freddie said, staggering to his feet. “Not yet.”

  The cop gave a sour laugh. “You don’t want more law, Freddie,” he said, “any more than I do.”

  “Chief,” Freddie said, “why don’t you handcuff those guys, before they wake up. And the one in the office, too.”

  “Good idea.”

  Moving toward the cop and Peg, as the chief went into his office for handcuffs, Freddie said, low and fast, “You’re screwed here, cop, it isn’t working. Let Peg go and I’ll get you out of here. Otherwise it’s a standoff until the state cops come, and then what? We’re all screwed. I don’t want law all over me and you don’t want law all over you.”

  The chief came back out to the hall and went to one knee, to handcuff the sleeping palookas. The cop stared at the chief while he tried to think out his alternatives, and of course, one of his alternatives was simply to use the knife on Peg, who’d caused all this trouble by bringing him here to the police chief; then maybe he could make a run for it in the confusion.

  Freddie didn’t want the cop to give serious consideration to that option, so he pressed a little, saying, “You don’t have weeks to make up your mind here. You let Peg go, she goes out and starts the van, and then we follow.”

  The chief was done with the handcuffs. Getting to his feet, he said, “I’ll let the fellas out of the basement, then call the state boys.”

  “Not yet, Chief, okay?”

  The chief looked toward Freddie’s voice, bewildered. “Why not?”

  “I’ll explain,” Freddie promised. “Just go along with me for a minute, will you do that?” To the cop, he said, “I know you’re just gonna keep after me, so when we get outta here we’ll talk it over, we’ll make a deal. Let her go, let’s get out of this place.”

  The cop glared into the air. “I wish I could see your face,” he said.

  “So do I, pal.”

  The cop made his decision. Lowering the knife, stepping back one pace, he pushed Peg forward and said, “Go start the van.”

  “Put the knife away,” Freddie said, as Peg ran out of the house. “You don’t need it.”

  The chief said, “What’s going on here?”

  “In a minute, Chief,” Freddie said, while the cop, still suspicious, closed up his knife and put it away. Freddie said to him, “You know I’m a thief, right?”

  “It’s what I like about you,” the cop said. “So far, the only thing I do like about you.”

  “Well, there’s another thing about me you oughta know,” Freddie said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m also a liar,” Freddie said, and punched him in the face.

  55

  It was the damnedest thing Geoff Wheedabyx had ever seen. For about three minutes, the fat bad guy called Barney apparently beat himself severely with parts of Geoff’s house, throwing himself on the floor, dragging himself backwards into the hall, flinging himself madly against the walls, knocking himself down repeatedly and repeatedly jerking himself back upright again, while making a lot of sounds like oof! and uh! and aak! Then, after having done a final tattoo of the back of his head against the office-door frame, Barney collapsed on the floor without a sound and stopped moving, a marionette when the show’s over.

  Geoff was still staring at this battered unconscious man when the voice of Freddie sounded over by the open front door, yelling, “Peg! Go home!” Then the door slammed itself.

  As if that weren’t enough, something grasped Geoff’s elbow and propelled him back into his office, while Freddie’s voice, now very close to him, said, “Chief, we gotta talk.”

  “What I’ve got to do,” Geoff
said, “is let my crew out of that basement, doggone it. They’ve got toilets to install.”

  “In a minute, Chief. Do you know what happened here today?”

  “I’ll be damned if I do,” Geoff said. “But after a couple weeks’ intense interrogation, I believe I’ll begin to get some idea of it.”

  “That bunch of guys came to this town to rob the bank.”

  Geoff wished he could give this fellow Freddie the look of scornful disbelief that remark deserved; it wasn’t anywhere near as satisfactory to give the opposite wall a look of scornful disbelief. “They never did,” he said.

  “And there’s no invisible man here,” the invisible man said.

  “I’m talking to myself, I guess.” But Geoff was too straightforward a guy to make sarcasm really work.

  “No, you’re not talking at all, you’re listening. And I’m telling you those guys came here to rob the bank, and they figured to neutralize the local law first, which is you, so they came over here and captured you and your construction crew—”

  “And my deputy, he’s down there, too.”

  “Your deputy, that’s good. But then you turned the tables on them, all by yourself.”

  “I can’t say a thing like that,” Geoff said, “even if there was a reason for it, and what’s the reason?”

  “I probably saved your life, Chief, how’s that for a start?”

  “I was thinking about that,” Geoff admitted, “while I was handcuffed to the chair there, and they sure didn’t act like they planned on leaving any witnesses.”

  “I just found out I’m gonna be invisible the rest of my life,” Freddie said. “Found out from the doctors who did it to me. So I could stick around here with you and tell the invisible man story and be a freak in a cage the rest of my life, doctors poking at me. Or I can take off and really disappear, you’ll never hear from me again, and Peg and me’ll have a quiet life somewhere.”

  “I sympathize with you,” Geoff admitted, and added, “Freddie, I do. But I can’t claim I beat up and knocked out and captured four tough guys all by myself.”

  Freddie, or the air around him, sighed. He said, “You don’t lie, is that right?”

  “That’s right, that’s the problem, I’m just no good at it.”

  “Chief, did you ever lie to your mom, when you were a kid?”

  Geoff felt his face turning red. He stammered, “Well . . . I suppose . . . you know . . . kids . . .”

  “With the construction company, ever lie to a customer?”

  “Well, you know, there’s things people don’t entirely understand, in a business like, you got your scheduling and your parts delivery, and, uh . . .”

  “Ever lie to a woman?”

  Two days ago, most recently. Geoff shook his head. “You want me to lie,” he said.

  “You bet I do.”

  Geoff thought about it. “I just can’t see it,” he said, “that I can look one of the state boys in the eye and tell him I did all this by myself.”

  “Just keep telling the same story, you’ll be all right.”

  “And what about the story these fellas tell?”

  “You mean, how they came up here to kidnap an invisible man? You think they’re gonna say that?”

  “They gotta say something,” Geoff pointed out.

  “They’ll claim misunderstanding, innocent victims, and they won’t get away with it. Chief, I bet you not one of them says a word about any invisible man. And if they do, they’ll be talking to nothing but psychiatrists the next twenty years.”

  “All right,” Geoff said, having thought it over. “I tell you what maybe I could do. I’ll explain things—I’ll explain some of the things—to the fellas in the basement. And then I can say I managed to unlock the door and free them, and that’s three, plus one, plus me, the five of us overpowered these fellas.”

  “Will they keep their mouths shut for you?”

  “We pretty much take care of one another,” Geoff said.

  “Fine.” The voice trailing away toward the door, Freddie said, “I’ll get out of the way now.”

  Geoff went out to the hall, where the fat man was stirring, half sitting up. “Barney’s coming around,” he commented.

  Whap! “No, he isn’t. So long, Chief. And thanks.”

  The front door opened and closed. Geoff went back into his office to get handcuffs for Barney before talking to the guys in the basement, but then he heard a sudden shout from outside. So he went back to the hall, and the front door opened, and Freddie’s pained voice said, “Could I borrow a broom, Chief? I forgot about those damn tacks.”

  “Better let me do the sweeping,” Geoff said. “I wouldn’t want the neighbors to think I’m doing The Sorcerer’s Apprentice over here.”

   

  * * *

   

  Geoff was just bringing the broom back into the house, where the tough guys were now conscious and rolling around on the floor, helpless because their hands were cuffed behind their backs, and here came Cliff and the construction crew, boiling in from the kitchen. “Where are they? Geoff, what’s happening? What’s the story here?”

  Geoff said, “You got out! That’s great!”

  The crew looked a little sheepish. One of them said, “We kinda had to go through the wall beside the door. Kinda demolition, you know.”

  Another one said, “We did it as neat as we could.”

  The third one said, “We can patch it up, Geoff, no problem.”

  “Well,” Geoff said, “this makes it a lot easier. Come on in the parlor and sit down, guys, let me tell you a little story before I call the state boys.”

  56

  When Mordon awoke, he watched the oval spot of sunlight rise slowly to the teak cabin wall, then sink slowly to touch the mounds of his feet beneath the creamy blanket, then rise again; and so did Mordon, shaking, pale, staggering as he went into the bathroom.

  It wasn’t the gentle slow roll of the yacht that had so unmanned him, nor drink (though last night he had taken onboard much drink), but fear. His fear of the floating ax, when yesterday he had run pell-mell from Chief Wheedabyx’s house and all the way out of the town of Dudley, had soon been replaced by the even stronger fears of exposure, ruin, and prison. His fears had been so powerful that his flight took place in a terrified daze, so that he barely remembered the pickup truck that had given him the lift, the diner in which he’d made the phone call to the car service in New York, the hours spent quivering over undrunk coffee in a rear booth of that diner, the hours spent quivering in the back of the town car that returned him to New York, the hours spent quivering in his office while he waited for Merrill Fullerton to respond to his call.

  But then Merrill did, at last, and agreed that Mordon should come to see him, not in the NAABOR offices in the World Trade Center, since Merrill had not yet consolidated his power there, but in Merrill’s apartment atop Trump Tower. When Mordon, in abject despair, related the events of the day to Merrill, fully expecting to be thrown into the street, his heart to be eaten by dogs, Merrill had instead leaped magnificently to his defense, saying, “Beuler will betray you, we know that much. Leave it to me.”

  And an hour later Mordon and Merrill and a dozen other people were sailing past Miss Liberty, out of New York Harbor, into the choppy Atlantic on the good ship Nicotiana, where all aboard were prepared to swear they had been disporting themselves for the last twenty-four hours, with distinguished attorney Mordon Leethe prominent in their midst.

  Would it work? Could it work? Could even Merrill Fullerton rescue Mordon from this far down in the deep pit of ignominy? His sleep last night had been tortured, and so were his bathroom experiences this morning.

  When at last he staggered back out to the bright cabin, with its roving spotlight of sun, as though the gods of rectitude were looking for him to wreak their own vengeance, there was a discreet tapping to be heard from the cabin door. “Come in,” he choked, but no one could have heard that croaking, so he went over to o
pen the door and found standing there a white-suited member of the ship’s crew, who actually touched a fingertip to a temple in what looked rather like a salute as he said, “Mr. Fullerton’s compliments. He awaits you on the fantail, sir. Whenever you’re ready.”

  “Fan—?”

  “Aft, sir. Stern. Back of the ship. That way, and up.” He pointed.

  “Thank you.”

  Mordon would never truly be ready, not fully ready, but in ten minutes he was sufficiently together to go in search of the fantail and his benefactor, who stood beside a groaning board of breakfast, a huge buffet table. No one else was around. “Good morning,” Merrill said, and gestured at the many foods. “Breakfast?”

  “Perhaps . . . later.”

  The fantail was outdoors, but shielded by a canvas roof, striped blue and white. The sea was huge, and everywhere, and nowhere flat. The day was sharply lit, with acute edges.

  “Probably,” Merrill said, with a smile, “you’d like to know what’s going on ashore.”

  “Yes.”

  “Sit down, Mordon, sit down.”

  They sat near each other and the white rail, on large and comfortable leather and chrome chairs. Mordon didn’t so much want to sleep as merely to lose consciousness, but he forced himself to remain alert, alert enough to listen.

  Merrill said, “I’ve been on the phone to New York a lot this morning. You were right about Detective Beuler, he did implicate you, and me, and poor old Jack the Fourth, and the doctors, and everyone else he could think of. However, we were lucky enough to get our people to Beuler’s home on Long Island before the police got there, and what a lot of evidence he’d built up against you, Mordon!” Merrill beamed at the thought of it.

  “He needed,” Mordon said, “to protect himself from everybody.”

  “The other way around, I should say,” Merrill commented, and added, “But not to worry. All of those tapes, all of that evidence that, I must say, could have disbarred you and probably put you behind bars for the rest of your life, is in my hands now, so you have nothing to worry about.”