A Safe Place for Dying

by Jack Fredrickson

  I waited, breathing shallowly, for the slightest change in the air around me. After a minute, I could stand it no longer. I was like a goat tethered to attract a lion, all fear and sweat and tingling instinct. I came out from under the stairs and moved in a crouch toward the furnaces along the west wall. He might not expect that, and in that tight space between the furnaces and the wall, I’d have a chance to cut him. It would be like a knife fight in a closet, its outcome determined more by chance than skill. But it was a chance.

  I touched the cold metal of the ductwork and slipped behind the furnaces. My skin prickling, my lungs starving for oxygen, I steadied myself against the duct, locked my eyes on the spot in the darkness where the man had been, and breathed in.

  The green light glowed back on, slightly brighter than before. The light was being run off a battery; someone had just changed it. I looked in the corner. The man was still there. Incredibly, he hadn’t moved.

  At best, it was Stanley Novak, bound and gagged, but alive. At worst, it was Stanley, dead. No, at worst it was someone with a knife, ready to slit my throat. I supposed the good news was the house might come down on both of us before he could do that.

  I came out from behind the furnace, low, knife tight in my right hand, eyes on the corner. Ten feet, eight feet, the shape didn’t move. At three feet, I stopped, reached to touch it with the knifepoint. The shape puckered. I bent down and touched cloth. It was the empty sleeve of a heavy jacket. I pushed at it. It fell to one side. It was just an empty jacket, tossed upright in the corner.

  I crouched down and felt familiar flapped pockets with Velcro closures and a zipper set into the collar where a thin hood was stored. I knew those kinds of pockets; I knew that kind of zipper. I’d bought a jacket just like it from a surplus store when I was a kid. They came in only one color: Army olive drab.

  I got down on my knees, grabbed the jacket, and crawled toward the green glow spilling out of the cutout. I needed to see; I needed to know. I stopped two feet to the right of the opening and turned the jacket so I could make out the nametape that every one of those jackets had sewn above the right pocket. I held it close to the light. JAYNES, it read.

  All my theories, all my smug posturing about Jaynes being long gone, had been crap. He’d come back. He was on the other side of the cutout, in the tunnel, twisting wires, connecting the circuits that would soon blow the rest of Gateville to the moon.

  But he had to know that Gateville was crawling now with cops and Feds. He couldn’t get away.

  The jimjams tittered, a sneering chorus: He wasn’t doing it for money, not anymore. He was acting out a different last act of the play he’d written in 1970. And this finale had him exiting in a blaze of twisted, deranged glory, taking the cops, the firemen, and everybody else outside with him. I saw Amanda among them, clutching her Monet.

  Something huge thundered upstairs, banging the ducts, ringing the pipes. For a second I let myself hope that the sudden loud noise might be pounding boots, Till’s men, storming down the hall with flashlights and guns. I turned toward the center of the basement, to the stairs I could not see, praying for the first flash of a handheld light. But nothing lit the staircase, and the noise upstairs stopped. Till’s men wouldn’t come, not into a house laced with explosives.

  I got to my knees and peered over the top of the roughly cut ledge. There couldn’t be much time left now.

  The tunnel was made of poured concrete, five feet high, four feet wide. Just big enough for a family to run through, single file, bent over. The only light came from the lone green bulb hanging by the tunnel opening, strung with two skinny wires that ran along the ceiling from deep inside the tunnel. Twenty feet in, the tunnel dissolved into darkness.

  The bulb flickered and brightened again, and I saw the wires to the bulb, one black, one white, jangle slowly below the tunnel ceiling. He was doing something with the wires, deep inside the tunnel, connecting them to something else.

  I looked down. Stacked low against the concrete wall were several spools of wire, a dozen black-box timers, and a dozen square batteries, each the size of a baking-soda box. Farthest in lay an object wrapped in silver carpet tape. It was another battery, this one attached to a timer, and to something else: a small cube wrapped in plastic. It was a timer bomb.

  I didn’t let myself think.

  I crawled over the jagged, chiseled ledge of the cutout and dropped down, hands first, onto the floor of the tunnel. The cement was chalky from being entombed for so many years. I moved to the pile against the wall.

  Each of the spools looked like it held hundreds of feet of fine thin wire, yellow, red, black, and white. I heard again the puzzled voice of the old electrician I’d hired to check out the lamppost. “These wires don’t belong here,” he’d said. “Too skinny for residential or commercial use.” Maybe, old friend. But they were all that was needed to carry a spark from a battery through a timer a few hundred feet to one of those little plastic-wrapped cubes of D.X.12.

  Just a few spools of that wire and some timers, batteries, and cubes of D.X.12 would be enough to blow all of Gateville to hell.

  I saw it all in a second. Jaynes would have told his crew the extra, thin wire was for battery lights, or alarms, or any of a number of low-voltage items. They wouldn’t have questioned him; he was their supervisor, and there were lots of things that were hush-hush about the construction of Gateville. They wouldn’t have been around later anyway, when he came back to attach the thin wires to the little cubes that he then covered with a few shovelfuls of dirt. The other ends of the wires, the trigger ends, he would have already had his men run into the labyrinth of the bomb shelter tunnels. He’d have left those alone, for later, when it was time to attach the battery-operated timers with the round dials.

  Next step was to test his plan. He sent the first note, demanding the ten thousand dollars. Then, after a few days, he hung around after his shift at Gateville, twisted a timer onto the pair of wires that led to the little cube he’d buried behind the guardhouse, set the dial, and was probably having the pot roast special at some diner when the back wall of the guard house blew off. He’d probably mailed the second letter after dessert, telling them where to leave the ten thousand. So simple, he must have thought. Plans that work are always simple.

  I squinted into the tunnel. Somewhere in there, dozens, maybe hundreds, of thin wires came together, needing only a battery and a timer and the final twist of a dial to make them lethal. Jaynes was in there, too, probably so crazy by now he didn’t give a damn about anything except twisting the last of his wires together. Maybe he had a gun and was hoping someone like me would come looking, so he could put a bullet into my brain and have a last giggle before he twisted the dial.

  Maybe I didn’t have to get that close. Maybe I just had to get to the wires.

  I clutched the carving knife tighter in my right hand and started crouch-walking into the dark of the tunnel. As an afterthought, I reached down and picked up the duct-taped timer bomb with my left hand.

  Frickin’ Rambo.

  The dry air stank of something acrid, something old, trapped long ago. It smelled like death. I wanted to run forward, find the wires, but he might hear me. I moved forward slowly.

  Every few paces, I stopped to look back, to make sure I could still see the green light. When it came time to run, I was going to need that light.

  But after twenty-five or thirty paces, the green bulb had disappeared in the darkness behind me.

  A faint speck of light appeared in the darkness ahead. I moved closer. It was the same green as the bulb by the tunnel entrance, but this was softer, more diffused. When I got within fifty feet, I dropped down and started crawling on my knees and elbows, the knife still in my right hand, timer bomb in my left.

  At twenty feet, I stopped. The light was coming from the left side of the tunnel ahead. I shut my eyes tight, opened them after a minute, and made out a wall straight ahead. My tunnel was dead-ending into a cross tunnel from another house. />
  And then I saw it, lying on the floor of the cross tunnel, to the right, directly across from the green light. I crawled forward, ten feet, five feet, and then stopped. It was a boot, a dusty, dirtclumped boot, poking out from denim jeans. It didn’t move.

  I set down the knife and the timer bomb and crawled forward. “Stanley,” I whispered. “Stanley.”

  I shook the boot. It was rigid, immobile. I slid forward on my left side, all the way into the green light at the intersection of the cross tunnel.

  White halogen light hit me from behind. In the sudden glare, the shrunken, bearded face with wild dark hair stared at me from empty eye sockets, screaming noiselessly from an open, dead mouth. His tobacco-colored flesh had pulled taut against his skull, mummified from the dry air in the tunnel. A foot below his chin, three black bullet holes had pierced his chest. Below his wounds, the yellowed T-shirt was stained with a long-dried torrent of crusted blood.

  “I stopped him,” the calm voice said.

  I rolled over to face the blinding light coming from his end of the cross tunnel. I couldn’t see him in the glare.

  But I knew the voice.

  Twenty-eight

  “He was no good, Mr. Elstrom.” He angled the super-white beam of the handheld spotlight off my face, down onto the cement floor ten feet in front of me, but still I could not see him.

  Suddenly I was tired, bone-heavy from being too stubborn to accept what my mind had been tiptoeing around since—hell, since the beginning. I pushed myself up to sit against the wall of the tunnel, two feet from Michael Jaynes’s dead foot.

  “I knew him from working security those nights.” Stanley spoke conversationally, his voice almost lazy behind the light. “Michael always stayed late, checking the work, I thought, and we’d get to talking when I came by on my rounds. He was your basic liberal lefty, but he seemed like a dedicated Joe on the job, working overtime after his boys had left, making sure things were being done right. We got along.”

  Clipping noises came from Stanley’s end of the cross tunnel, and above my head, something stirred. I looked up. Red wires, black wires, and white and green wires were vibrating an inch below the cross-tunnel ceiling. He was snipping at those wires with a wire cutter, attaching them in some lethal combination.

  “That April night in 1970,” he went on, “after I’d dropped off the ten thousand behind the restaurant, I came back to make my rounds. I got to the Phelps house, though it wasn’t yet called that, and went down to check the basement. I checked all the basements those nights, for kids at first, but then extra careful after the two letters. Anyway, somebody had pulled away the concrete forms from the tunnel entrance. It was odd, because they were scheduled to seal up those entrances the next day. I looked inside the tunnel, saw a faint light from far in. I supposed it was a worker making sure everything was ready, but I figured I ought to check to be safe. I crawled inside. That’s when I saw Michael, sitting right where he is now, working with some wires.”

  “‘What are you doing?’ I asked, thinking it was no big deal. But Michael smiled the sickest smile you’d ever hate to see, and I noticed his eyes were all sparkly. ‘Fixing things,’ he said. ‘What things?’ I asked. ‘They made a mess with their greed, Stanley: Vietnam, ghettos in the cities, rural poor. Everything is being bled to make rich people richer. Ordinary folks can’t do much. They march, they sing their songs, and the angriest of them riot and burn. None of that stops the greed, of course, but it does make rich people nervous enough to build places like this, thinking they can protect themselves from what they created.’”

  Stanley clipped faster behind the bright light. “It sounded like crap to me, Mr. Elstrom. I told Michael he was making up phony baloney just so he could get ten thousand dollars. Michael laughed at that. ‘The ten thousand is still in the Dumpster, Stanley. I’m just going to show those rich bastards they can’t hide in a place like Crystal Waters. They’re going to pay, more and more, but this place is still going to disappear, one house at a time. And when the last house is gone, they’ll realize that no amount of money can protect them behind their fancy walls, and they’ll act better.’”

  The wires above my head danced.

  I snuck a look down the main tunnel to Amanda’s basement. The knife I’d dropped next to the timer bomb was only a couple feet from my shoe.

  “So you shot him, Stanley? Just like that, you killed him?”

  “Small cluster right to the heart, as you can see.” He sighed. “He couldn’t let me get away. I knew too much, and I would stop his grand plan for world peace. So yes, I shot him, and the letters and explosives I found down here afterward would have justified it.”

  “But you didn’t report it.” I’d have no chance if I just took off. The tunnel to Amanda’s basement was too straight. He’d come to the tunnel intersection, find my back with his spotlight, and pump a few rounds into me before I was fifty feet down.

  “Report it, Mr. Elstrom? Why stir up a ruckus? If this place were known to be full of D.X.12, none of the Members would have moved in. They wouldn’t have gotten their money back, either, because the developers would have gone bankrupt. The town of Maple Hills would have lost, too—a sorely needed source of new income. Everybody would have lost.”

  “And you would not have become security chief,” I said, while I thought about what I could do.

  The snipping stopped. “I was not thinking of myself, Mr. Elstrom.” There was an edge to his voice. It was good. He was getting mad, maybe enough to distract him, from the wires, and from my legs. I’d started pulling my feet up under me.

  “Of course not, Stanley.” I laid it on thick enough so he couldn’t miss the derision in my voice. “Just like I’m sure you left that ten thousand in the Dumpster to get picked up as garbage.”

  “I went back and retrieved the money, sure, but it’s still in my garage, untouched after all these years.”

  The clipping began again.

  “Sounds like what you call phony baloney, Stanley,” I said to the glare. My feet were up under me, my knees high.

  “I told you. Michael Jaynes was going to keep blowing things up.”

  “Forget Jaynes. You’re the one who reactivated his plan. For money, Stanley. You’ve been planning your big score for years, thinking over every detail, right down to sending money to Nadine Reynolds, so that when you started bombing, people would think Michael Jaynes was still alive.”

  “I was helping her,” he snapped from behind the light. “Michael used to tell me his girlfriend was just barely getting by. I got her name and address from his wallet, sent her what I could, every now and then.”

  “That’s right, Stanley, just like when you called out to Clarinda every once in a while and left Michael’s name. You’ve been jerking Nadine Reynolds around for years, letting her go on believing Michael was going to show up someday. You’re a prince of a guy, Stanley.”

  “What would you have had me do? Send her a little note, telling her he was dead? You don’t know, Mr. Elstrom, but it’s better to live with false hope than to live with no hope at all.”

  “I know one thing, Stanley. I don’t believe you when you say this isn’t about money.”

  “I didn’t say that, Mr. Elstrom. This most certainly is about money.” He paused and then said, “You heard about my son?”

  “Nothing other than Anton Chernek said he died.” Slowly, I moved my hands down to the concrete floor.

  “We lost him one year, seven months, seventeen days ago. He needed an operation, but the insurance said it was an experimental procedure, and they wouldn’t cover it. I went to Mr. Ballsard, asked if I could get the money from my Crystal Waters life insurance. He said it was term insurance, no borrowing value. So I asked, can I borrow the money from the homeowners association? Know what Mr. Ballsard said?”

  “He’s a shit, Stanley.” My palms were flat on the floor now, my legs as tensed as I could get them. I started easing forward.

  “He said the association wasn’t
a bank. All those years of watching out for the Members, of driving their kids home from the police station after they’d been picked up drunk or goofy with dope. All those years of guarding their fancy homes when they were off on their cruises, skiing vacations, and shopping trips to London. After all that time, all he can tell me is they’re not a bank?”

  “So you decided to start killing people?” I’d have to grab the knife left-handed and then charge. And hope I could cut him before he could get to his gun. Or to the wires.

  Above my head, the air moved.

  “Nobody was supposed to die,” he yelled.

  I pushed off the wall.

  The spotlight swung on me; the gun flashed loudly from behind the glare. Something whispered past my ear.

  I dropped to my knees. I hadn’t even gotten close to the knife.

  “I’d hate to shoot you, Mr. Elstrom.”

  I backed up and immediately bumped the tunnel wall. I’d gotten three feet. I sat against the wall again, my ears ringing from the sound of the gunshot.

  The wires began to dance again above my head.

  “I like you, Mr. Elstrom. You’re not from here,” Stanley said in that same maddening conversational voice.

  He shifted the spotlight beam toward the floor at his end of the cross tunnel, and for the first time I saw him in profile. He was close enough to have killed me with that shot; he was only twenty feet from me, sitting under a nest of wires dangling down from the ceiling. He squinted at a blueprint on the floor.

  “Yes, sir. I always liked you.”

  “That’s crap, Stanley. You used me to keep the Board from calling in the Feds.”

  “No, sir, that was their own greed. Mr. Ballsard didn’t want the federal agencies in here because word of that would get out and destroy the house values.”

  “You played me for an idiot, sent me off to look for a dead man.”

  He reached up to twist some wires above his head. “You didn’t want the money, Mr. Elstrom? Even though you kept saying you weren’t qualified for the investigation, you didn’t need that money?”