Tunnel of Night

by John Philpin

  I watched as she struggled to free herself.

  “Predict, Ms. Walker. What am I going to do next?”

  I placed my hands across the back of her neck, feeling the bristles of her short hair where it had been razor-cut. A woman’s neck is so fragile. She cringed, as if I had hit her.

  I leaned close to her ear and whispered, “Will I slit your throat?”

  She pulled back as far as she could.

  I turned my attention to the project I had begun earlier—tinkering with the necessary wires, switches, and batteries. This was a simple assembly, a small device— just enough to level the building.

  “Many years ago,” I said to the back of her head, “I picked up a young woman who was hitchhiking. She was about your age, similar in appearance. The same build, eyes, hair color. Her voice wasn’t as shrill as yours, and she wasn’t quite so full of herself. She was a graduate student. Her worst flaw was that she talked incessantly. Where did I work? Did I like Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground’? Had I ever been to Europe? Endless chatter. Tell me what you think, Special Agent Walker. Predict. Use your Quantico training. Did I fuck her and kill her?”

  The agent remained still. Listening. The faucet continued its erratic drip.

  “I picked her up in Santa Cruz, California, at the same time that Edmund Kemper was beheading coeds. One would think that she would have had more sense than to be out there asking for it. What is your prediction, Ms. Walker?”

  Silence.

  “I dropped her at a theater entrance,” I said. “An old Frank Sinatra film was showing. I continued on my way I create my own opportunities. I don’t wait for luck to hand them to me.”

  My mechanical work was complete. It was time for a change of clothes, and of appearance.

  I turned the tap on the kitchen sink, splashed water into my face, then applied shaving cream.

  “Your former partner used my death to advance his career. He offended me. Just as the profile that you wrote offended me.”

  Walker sat as still as a corpse, listening.

  “The name of the car dealer—Featherstone Ford— was serendipitous. It was one of those things meant to be. Was that a detail that escaped you? I’m sure it wasn’t wasted on Lucas Frank. He is superior to you people, you know. That’s hardly a recommendation, but you really should heed whatever advice he has to offer. Otherwise, you may as well forfeit the game. As it is, there’s very little time remaining.”

  The mustache was gone. I rinsed my face, then twisted the taps closed.

  “I didn’t spend much time with Willoughby. It was simply one of those menial chores we all have to do.”

  Hair color was next, but I hesitated, my attention drawn to the immobilized special agent. Behind her mask of tape, she had to be thinking. This woman would have doubted my ability to rise from the dead.

  “When Alan Chadwick plummeted to the pavement, did you or your people at Quantico even think about me?”

  I looked at the tendons on her neck, like cords strung vertically, taut against her throat.

  “When they found what was left of my sister on the floor of the trailer, did you wonder?”

  Scrubbed, distinct blue veins decorated the spaces between her neck tendons.

  “What the fuck does it take for Quantico to start seeing a pattern? Should I have called it in?”

  Stupidity angers me. I could feel my rage building, and knew that I had to guard against it. Rage is always counterproductive, a threat to the successful completion of any design. I had to stay focused, on track. I took a deep breath. The sink began to drip again.

  “Have you ever been to San Francisco? I was there recently. I wonder why they call California ‘the golden state.’ The hills are brown.”

  I remember crossing the Bay Bridge and driving north on I-80. I was headed for Fourth Street in Berkeley where Spenger’s Fish Grotto is tucked down beside a highway overpass. The restaurant started as a seafood market in the 1800s, and has been there ever since. It was at Spenger’s that I tasted the finest French-style bouillabaisse in the world.

  “Have you ever read the transcripts of Theodore Bundy sparring with his interrogators during the early eighties?” I asked Walker. “I remember when they were discussing memory. Bundy feigned an attempt to recall individual victims and the details of their deaths. He used an analogy to bouillabaisse, saying that some people remember the taste of clams, others the taste of mullet. Bundy was a vulgar person. The whole is always greater than the sum of its parts. You understand that when you have bouillabaisse at Spenger’s in Berkeley. The experience stays with you, whole, to be savored forever. There is no breaking it into pieces. And Spenger’s puts neither clams nor mullet in their bouillabaisse.”

  That early evening in Berkeley, I had lingered over my meal—sipping a glass of red wine and absorbing the atmosphere. As I left, I bought a carnation from a street vendor, stuck it in my lapel, then drove up Telegraph Avenue to Rasputin’s, where I surveyed the two floors of music.

  Experiences have always returned to me in their entirety. Sometimes there’s a sense of distance, a fugue-like haze around them. I feel as if the memory belongs to someone else. My recollection of the trip to Berkeley is mixed. The early hours are clear, an experience that I can summon forth at will. Those later hours have lost shape and drifted just beyond my grasp. I’m not sure how long I stayed, or how the evening ended. I don’t know whether anyone died.

  I do know that the next morning I drove south to San Jose. My contact was a short, heavy, dark-haired woman who walked her dog in a park. She placed a shopping bag on a concrete bench, then reached down to release her dog from its leash and allow it to run. I did as she had always instructed: I stood ten feet away and waited. And as always, I imagined myself a child waiting for teacher’s permission to go take a leak.

  “I have to admit that I am more curious about you,” the woman said, “than about any of my other clients.”

  “Curiosity is not a healthy trait,” I said.

  She shrugged. “I always read the newspapers. I try to guess which of the world’s explosions originate here. I’m never sure.”

  She looked at me for the first time. “With you. I haven’t a clue.”

  I said nothing.

  “This one must be big,” she continued. “So many sheets of plasticized cyclonite.”

  She turned away and whistled for the dog. “Leave the money on the bench,” she said. “Take the bag and go.”

  Now, I tightened the kitchen taps, and looked at my reflection in the mirror. Reddish brown hair and eyebrows. Tinted contact lenses. Horn-rimmed glasses. A gray suit.

  “This has been a perfect dress rehearsal,” I said.

  She did not seem to be breathing.

  “I’m happy that you could attend.”

  I moved through the room, arranging wires, a timer, a toggle switch. I had completed my work.

  “Listen,” I said.

  There was a click—louder than the dripping faucet—when I threw the switch.

  “Did you hear that? You know how fond I am of explosive devices. You do have a chance, however—which is more than Lucas Frank gave me. I’ve drawn attention to myself in the time that I’ve been here. A police officer visited a while ago. It’s possible that hell return. Ill leave the door unlocked. Make all the noise you wish. No one will pay attention. People are woefully indifferent. Nobody seems to care about the welfare of others anymore.”

  I gathered up my briefcase and keys. “You’re probably wondering why I’m allowing you to live at all, even for a few brief tickings of the clock. Should you survive, Ms. Walker—should a miracle occur, and you walk out of here—please sit down and have a long heart-to-heart with Dr. Frank. Someone needs to tell him that he’s dealing with the perfect assassin. I can’t be stopped. Everyone falls this time.”

  I slipped into the hall, my hand on the doorknob behind me. I stood there for a moment, wondering why I didn’t just kill the woman. Then I heard the door click shut
in the front hallway downstairs. I had no wish to compromise my new appearance.

  Anyway, it really didn’t matter. I knew that if she survived, I would be seeing Susan Walker again.

  THE APARTMENT BUILDING, A BLACKENED STONE structure, was a relic, something from more prosperous ages past. It squatted three blocks from where police had gunned down a man named Billy, and Senator Harry Storrs had picked me up in his Lincoln.

  I stepped inside, onto a foot-worn landing. The heavy wooden door clicked shut behind me. As the street noises died, the building fell strangely silent.

  Then I heard the clanking of an elevator somewhere in the rear of the building. It was on its way down.

  A freight lift.

  A man delivering a carpet—especially one with a woman rolled up in it—would not have carried his load up these stairs. I wondered if he would descend the same way, with or without the load.

  I removed the nine-millimeter from my pocket, walked to the stairwell, and listened. The elevator rumbled past the first floor on its way to the basement.

  I walked down the single flight into a dark, dank corridor and followed the noise to my left. When I engaged the action on my gun, the snapping noise echoed, pinging off the walls ahead where a single light illuminated the junction of two passages.

  The elevator whooshed to a halt around the corner on the right, but the gate failed to crank open.

  What the hell?

  Adrenaline pumping, I flattened myself against the cracked plaster wall and moved slowly toward the hallways’ intersection. I could feel my heart thudding as I stole a quick glance around the corner.

  The freight lift was empty.

  I heard footsteps overhead—someone moving fast toward the rear. I ran the length of the corridor, expecting to find a rear door. Instead, I came to a dead end. There was only a casement window that allowed a dim view of the building’s back parking lot.

  I caught a glimpse of a man walking rapidly away from the light, past a van that bore the logo: Valley Carpet. He disappeared into the alley’s darkness.

  Once again, there was silence.

  As I began to climb up the steel-framed, concrete stairs, my gun still in hand, the place seemed vacant. Now, the only evidence of human occupancy was the melange of smells—onions frying, urine, the musky aroma of sweat. This housing for semitransients was a structure removed from the air and light of day.

  As I entered the top-floor corridor, I had no idea what I was going to find. I approached the door to the apartment and listened. There was a muffled noise and a scraping sound from behind the door.

  I tried the knob, and the door slipped open a crack. I leveled the gun toward the room as I poked the bottom of the door with my foot. It creaked open, revealing a young woman taped and bound to a chair in the middle of the room.

  “Is anyone else in there?” I asked. The woman shook her head.

  I checked out the bedroom and the bathroom, then used my pocketknife to cut away the bindings on the woman’s wrists and arms. She immediately yanked the tape and a gag from her mouth.

  “There’s a bomb,” Special Agent Susan Walker said. “I’ve got to call nine-one-one. We have to clear the building and get a bomb squad over here.”

  She struggled with the tape covering her eyes as I cut through the rope that held her to the chair. Together, we disentangled duct tape from her hair and eased it away from her skin.

  Walker was stiff but quick as she moved through the door into the hall.

  There’s a bomb.

  Reflexively, I looked up at the framing above the door. In the cellar of the house in Vermont, Wolf had placed the switch for his bomb on top of an arch. Now, I found a toggle switch where I expected to, then followed the wires down the side of the door, and across the floor under the sink where they ended, attached to nothing.

  It was a dummy.

  I took a deep breath and slowly exhaled as I walked back into the apartment to a table behind the chair where Walker had been restrained. There were bits of green and red wire on the floor and table, needle-nose pliers, wire cutters. The sadistic prick had terrorized the young agent.

  I heard sirens in the distance. Walker was back in the doorway. “Clear the building, Dr. Frank,” she said, then disappeared again before I could say anything.

  When I walked into the hall, I could hear voices below as the building’s few tenants were evacuated.

  Why would Wolf arrange a fake bomb? He wanted Walker dead. She was another player in his Vermont demise. He had killed a man for a van and a pair of coveralls, then kidnapped a federal agent and staged a hoax. What the hell was he doing?

  I began a slow descent of the stairs. It was a setup. The whole thing was a ruse. An elaborate stage setting. Why hadn’t he killed Walker?

  I turned on the landing to the last flight of stairs, picturing—

  the black and red wires extending down from the toggle switch, the green and red fragments of wire on the table—

  The wires didn’t match. There was a bomb.

  Wolf had concealed a real bomb somewhere else in the apartment, or even in another part of the building.

  I ran the last flight, plunging into the street that had filled with emergency vehicles. Hiram Jackson was moving away from Susan Walker toward me, as space-suited members of the D.C. bomb squad began their approach to the building.

  The pavement seemed to buckle even before I heard the blast, felt the thrust of hot air and debris blowing into my back. The explosion forced me against Jackson and slammed the two of us down.

  I SAT IN THE DINER, DIAGONALLY ACROSS THE avenue from my former apartment building, sipping the warm brown water that the management sold as coffee. I glanced at my watch, then at the street— where police cars, firetrucks, TV vans, and numerous unidentifiable vehicles congregated.

  Obviously, someone had found Agent Walker. They would not find the bomb.

  I was amused by the frantic activity, the collection of high-tech toys, the ludicrous outfits with shoulder-patch flags and designations of rank. They were Boy Scouts who had brought their badges with them into adulthood, never thinking for a second how childlike and irrelevant they continue to be.

  I wondered if Special Agent Hiram Jackson was out there. He was my contact at Quantico—the man who would allow me to enter the inner sanctum of violent human behavior.

  Jackson wasn’t at Quantico when I visited as Alan Chadwick four years ago. I lectured there—weapon selection and its relationship to personality in cases of multiple homicide. My tenure as consultant was something Agent Willoughby may have discovered, but could not possibly have revealed. That would have been too embarrassing for the Bureau.

  I also wondered whether any of them would make the connection—realize that they were the glue that held my design together. All of my players swung like planets in nonintersecting orbits around a small star. They were visitors to the homicidal mind, rescued from the task of cleaning up after a kill because they described and predicted with authority, if not accuracy.

  He will kill again. He drives an old car. He is disorganized. He masturbates with his left hand, while turning the pages of Hustler with his right. He resides with an elderly female relative. He works as a menial laborer.

  On a couple of occasions, the FBI had surged past me in their mad charge to nowhere. Lucas Frank was always right there. Even in the early days, he sensed a presence, but he could not give it a name or a face. I was the only one who moved freely from one orbit to another.

  Now I wanted all of these parallel worlds to smash together and fall, so I had shaped events to set them on a collision course. None of my players would make any connections as they careened through space toward their last convergence.

  Seventy-two hours remained.

  ALAN CHADWICK HAD BEEN STEP ONE. THERE WAS another with whom I’d had an even longer history.

  When I was in Florida, I spent a month listening to parrots cavort in the Fort Lauderdale morning. I walked on Dania Beach, wher
e I couldn’t distinguish the plastic-foam from the coral. For weeks, I didn’t know whether I was hearing mockingbirds or car alarms.

  Then, as Charles S. Weathers, I returned my Avis rental at the airport. Professor John Krogh, frugal as always, picked up an Alamo compact and drove to Orlando.

  I doubted that any of these machinations were necessary, but I knew that someone would piss away a couple of weeks tracking the cars and identities—if they were able to.

  I followed State Road 436 north, all the way to Winter Park Drive. Finding the turn for the trailer park was no trouble, although I was surprised to see that it had been paved since my last visit.

  There was another new addition. On the patch of crabgrass that passed for a lawn, a sign declared: HUMPHREY. It was one of those rectangular, wooden signs with jagged edges—the kind of thing a junior high student had to cut out with a jigsaw to pass woodworking for the term. Maybe her kids were that old. The sign was slopped with white enamel and had raised red letters.

  One summer night in the old house in Saxtons River, I left my bedroom and walked to Sarah’s. I was determined to do it that night.

  She was asleep. I could hear the soft intake and outflow of her breath. I watched the thin blanket rise and fall. This was to be the end of all the longing, all the nights spent staining my own sheets.

  I drove to the end of the cul-de-sac, turned around, then parked facing the exit. The kids would be at school. Her husband would be at whatever passed for work.

  I grabbed my duffel bag, then walked the half-dozen steps to the door. It was unlocked.

  I moved to the foot of her bed and slipped out of my pajama bottoms.

  I stepped into the kitchen, listening to the silence. The trailer was stifling—no air-conditioning—and smelled of eggs fried in butter. Next to a half cup of coffee, the Orlando Sentinel was open on the table—a story about a man on Florida’s death row. I dropped my bag, then sat down, facing the kitchen door.

  Her eyes were open, staring, but she said nothing.

  Her glasses covered the story. I pushed them aside and read. The key witness at the trial of “Crazy Joe” Spaziano had recanted, but Spaziano was still scheduled to die in Florida’s electric chair. He had been convicted of killing a young woman, then disposing of her body at a dump where it would decompose along with all the other trash. There was another body in the dump—an unidentified young woman—and Spaziano had not been charged with her murder. The proximity of these two meant nothing to the authorities. The stupidity of the law and its practitioners were evident in the story.