Floater

by Gary Brandner

  Alec nodded sagely, as though he were thinking over what the partners had said. He had anticipated something like this, and he was ready. By holding his trump card until he had apparently failed, he would score the highest possible points with it.

  He said, “That’s exactly the way I saw it. Scolari is a crook, and we could prove it, but the fact is, who cares. Unless he personally shot somebody’s mother in front of witnesses, people aren’t interested. Maybe not even then. But I turned up something better.”

  The partners leaned forward. Alec savored the moment. As he was about to speak, something pressed his neck right at the base of his skull. A wave of dizziness came and went as he froze for an instant.

  “Alec?” he heard Laymon say. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine, fine. Just an allergy.”

  “You were saying you had something for us,” Koontz prompted.

  “Right. You remember what finished Gary Hart a couple of months ago?”

  “You’ve got Scolari in a sex scandal?” Laymon asked.

  Koontz was doubtful. “I don’t know. Hart was running for President. You don’t have to be all that clean to be elected on the municipal level. It might stop him from going any further, but that won’t help us or Bo Walton now. Sleeping with a woman isn’t good enough, Alec.”

  “How about sleeping with a boy?”

  The partners leaned forward.

  “Scolari’s a faggot?” Koontz said.

  “You’ve got proof?” Laymon asked.

  “I’ve got the boy he was buggering,” Alec told them. “He workth at dhe youemn …”

  He realized the two men were staring at him a fraction of a second before he heard the distorted words from his own mouth.

  “I gom to sime appadapit …”

  “Alec, are you all right?” Laymon asked.

  Koontz just stared.

  Alec put a hand to his mouth. His tongue felt like a hunk of strange raw meat. It was swelling against his palate.

  “Allagy,” he mumbled. “Sowwy.”

  Laymon pushed out of his chair and came over to stand beside him. “Man, that came on suddenly. Is there something you can do for it?”

  “Mmm-mmm,” Alec shook his head.

  Koontz said, “Look, you better get out of here and have that taken care of. We can continue this later.”

  Alec nodded, hand still clapped over his mouth, and fled from the office.

  He stumbled out of the building and waved to a cab. He could barely keep his mouth shut now with the tongue forcing itself fatly between his teeth. The panic sweat was on him as he scribbled the address of his apartment on a card and shoved it at the driver.

  CHAPTER 9

  July 1987

  LINDY

  When Nicole’s friends, including the hunk from Beverly Hills, arrived to take her to the Forum, Lindy met them at the door. She kept them waiting while she went into her daughter’s bedroom.

  “Your friends are here,” she said softly.

  Nicole pulled the covers up over her head. “I don’t want to see anybody. I don’t want to talk to anybody.”

  “All right, honey, I’ll take care of it.”

  Lindy went back and invented a sudden case of the flu. When the others had left she debated whether to chew her daughter out or try to comfort her.

  On the one hand she was impatient with Nicole for making such a big deal out of what was, really, a small adolescent problem. However, she still remembered from her own girlhood how devastating a pimple on prom night could be, and decided to leave it alone.

  She poured a cup of coffee, took it to her cozy little office, and went back to work.

  At least she tried to go back to work. The intermittent wails from Nicole’s room as the girl explored anew her swollen nose destroyed concentration.

  When at last her daughter was quiet it was after nine o’clock. Moving softly, Lindy went back to the girl’s bedroom and eased open the door. Nicole lay on her side, breathing regularly, the pillow bunched beneath her head. Lindy tiptoed around the bed and knelt to examine her nose.

  Miraculously, the boil had subsided to almost nothing. Only a pink patch of skin remained where the swollen boil had been. Lindy decided against waking her daughter for the good news. It might just start a new lament that she had missed the rock concert for nothing. She slipped back out of the bedroom and softly closed the door.

  Lindy returned to her desk and began tapping out the scene she had left off earlier. It took a couple of seconds for her to realize that no corresponding green letters were appearing on the screen.

  “Oh, damn,” she said. She checked the power switch, the monitor control, the cable connections. Everything was as it should be.

  “Sonofabitch.”

  Writing with a computer could be a blessing in speed and ease of making corrections — a quantum leap from working with a typewriter. However, when something went wrong with it you were in trouble. Any work you hadn’t printed out was locked away from your reach as surely as though it were buried in the ocean floor. And whereas you could drop a busted typewriter off at the shop and take home a loaner, getting a computer repaired was a frustrating operation.

  In the four years Lindy had used the computer with word-processing software, she had had only one breakdown. She had learned then about the independence of computer repairmen. It had been just before the four-day Thanksgiving holiday, and with a deadline approaching she could not afford to sit idle the better part of a week. In the end it had cost her a hundred-dollar “priority fee” on top of the hefty repair bill to get her machine back in twenty-four hours.

  This would be a hell of a time for another breakdown — just as she was getting into the meat of her novel. She tapped experimentally at the keys again. The computer replied with a series of beeps and ominous grinding noises.

  “Goddamn sonofabitch!”

  HELLO, LINDY, the monitor screen spelled out.

  She stared. What the hell was this? Some kind of a joke? But whose? Only Nicole was in the house with her, and Nicole avoided the computer like she would a Pat Boone album.

  The marching green letters continued:

  WOLF RIVER INN

  SATURDAY, JULY 11

  BE THERE OR THE GIRL REALLY GETS HURT

  Lindy’s thoughts rattled around wildly. What the hell was going on here? She thought about the unexplained blooming boil on her daughter’s nose, and she thought about the weird look and the inhuman voice Nicole had spoken in a couple of weeks ago.

  She reread the message on the screen. She could go ahead and deny the reality of it. Try to convince herself it was some bizarre form of computer glitch. Wait and see if anything more really did happen to Nicole.

  Who was she kidding? Ghosts of the past ran spectral hands over her flesh. She knew for a certainty that the warning was real.

  Lindy reached under her desk for the telephone book and flipped through the Yellow Pages for a twenty-four-hour airline ticket service.

  ROMAN

  As soon as he had called Dr. Gaines and insisted on an appointment first thing in the morning, the inflammation and the itching of Roman’s crotch had started to subside. It was a damn good thing, because another hour or so without relief and he would have gone crazy.

  Now as he stood at the receptionist’s desk he had only a faint tingle around his balls. He was half tempted to call the whole thing off.

  “Doctor is expecting you,” the receptionist said. “You may go right in.”

  What the hell, he decided, it couldn’t do any harm to get it looked at. He went into the examination room and dropped his pants.

  • • •

  “Nothing I can see wrong with you,” said Gaines, studying Roman’s naked genitals as he sat on the examination table with pants and briefs down. “No crabs, no rash to speak of. You say it came on suddenly?”

  “Like a shot,” Roman said. “One minute I was fine, the next I’m itching like I sat on an anthill.”

  The doct
or determined there had been no change in Roman’s diet or clothing, negating the possibility of an allergy.

  “I’ll take a blood sample just to be sure you haven’t got one of the new exotic venereal diseases.”

  “I’ve never had VD in my life.”

  “That doesn’t make you immune, you know. Did you tell your wife about this episode?”

  “Stephanie? No way.”

  “It might be a good idea to refrain from sex until we get the results of the blood tests.”

  “That’ll be easy enough.”

  “I mean all sex, not just with your wife.”

  “How long till you get the results?”

  “Three – four days. Think you can hold out?”

  “It’ll be tough, but I’ll manage.”

  The doctor rubbed the back of his head and sat down heavily in a white enameled chair. His thoughts seemed to drift off for a moment, then he focused on Roman again.

  “You can put your pants back on now.”

  While Roman rebuckled his belt, Dr. Gaines scribbled on a prescription pad. He tore off the top sheet and handed it over.

  “What’s this?” Roman asked without looking at the prescription.

  “Just a mild antibiotic. Can’t do you any harm. Take it according to instructions and call me in three days for the blood test results.”

  Roman walked out of the doctor’s office feeling pretty good. He was back to normal, the itch was gone, and nothing serious had ever been wrong with him. It was foolish to worry. He was in great shape. What did he need with antibiotics?

  He glanced at the prescription blank before pitching it into a trash can, then came to a dead stop. He felt cold, and the breath seemed to have been knocked out of him.

  Instead of Dr. Gaines’s medical scrawl, the message on the paper was printed in heavy block letters. It read:

  ROMAN —

  WOLF RIVER INN

  SATURDAY, JULY 11

  BE THERE OR I’LL MAKE IT REALLY HURT.

  As weird as the whole thing was, the part that started Roman Dixon shivering was the way REALLY was underlined. His groin seemed to start aching even as he read it.

  Wolf River. Shit, what he would give never to hear the name of that town again. Memories filtered back of that fateful senior year. Memories he had kept sealed away for a long time.

  He never had any doubt that the threat was real. Someone … something knew about him and was out to get him. With a grimace he remembered the words that seemed to come from his senile mother-in-law: “It’s payback time.” He had no choice. He would have to go back there and try to make a deal.

  Stephanie would have to be given some kind of a story, and it would mean rearranging the work schedules at the stores, but on Saturday, July 11, like it or not, he was going to be in Wolf River.

  ALEC

  The wild panic that had seized Alec MacDowell when he feared he was about to strangle on his own tongue began to subside during the cab ride, along with the size of his tongue. By the time they reached Eighth Avenue he could feel some space inside his mouth and decided he wanted to be out on the street to breathe free air. “Me out here,” he mumbled.

  The cabby gave him a peculiar look and pulled over at the old entrance to the Edison Hotel. Alec overtipped him and hurried away to lose himself among the sidewalk traffic.

  Alec’s shirt clung to his body, and he could smell his own panic sweat. Nothing remotely like this had ever happened to him. Possible causes marched through his mind: Something he ate for lunch? Not likely, he had the same Swiss-on-white sandwich washed down with cream soda that he ate three times a week. Job nerves? Bullshit, he thrived on stress. Some exotic disease? He’d had a thorough physical just last month, and was found to be in excellent health. No, there was something … unnatural about the episode. Something Alec did not want to think about.

  So intent was he on his problems that he didn’t see the gypsy woman until he bumped into her. An orange-haired hag in a grimy flowered dress who might have been any age from twenty to sixty, she materialized in front of him, her red-rimmed eyes shining, gap-toothed mouth wide and smiling.

  Alec mumbled an apology and started around her, but the woman clutched at the sleeve of his jacket and held him.

  “Let go,” he snapped.

  “I have a message for you, Alec.”

  The panic sweat froze against his body. The grating voice was icily reminiscent of the old cleaning woman in his office a couple of weeks back. It’s payback time.

  “Come inside,” the gypsy said.

  With all resistance drained, Alec let the woman pull him into her storefront cubbyhole decorated outside with a badly painted palm and zodiacal symbols. He sat down dumbly across a rickety card table from her, his nostrils pinched against the mingled smells of incense, garlic, and urine.

  The woman’s hands clawed on the faded tablecloth. Her eyes burned into him.

  She said, “Saturday, July 11. Wolf River Inn. Be there or you will never speak again.”

  “What did you say?” Alec leaned across the table and grasped the gypsy woman by the wrists. Her bones felt frail as a bird’s through the dried skin.

  “How do you know my name?”

  But the gypsy’s eyes unfocused for a moment, and she was not hearing him. Then she came back to herself and smiled in a hideous parody of seduction.

  “What would you like, sir? A palm reading? The Tarot, perhaps? Your horoscope? Or maybe you would like one of my … special services?”

  Alec stared at her. The expression, the voice, the whole attitude was completely different from the crone who had confronted him.

  “Sir?” she said, looking at him strangely.

  Alec realized his expression must have startled her. He pulled a bill from his money clip, dropped it on the table, and hurried out of the foul-smelling room to Eighth Avenue.

  He still didn’t know what was happening to him, but he was sure as death that if he ignored the bizarre invitation to return to Wolf River he would, indeed, never speak again.

  THE FLOATER

  It had taken a great deal of effort, but the message was at last driven home to the three people. Threaten each of them with the loss of something they treasured dearly, and they will do your bidding.

  Touching each of them on his home ground had been satisfying, but the final scene had to be played out back where it all began.

  Today was July 6. In five days they would all be back in Wolf River for the first time in twenty years. It would be a reunion none of them would ever forget.

  CHAPTER 10

  Johnny Carson’s monologue was from a two-year-old repeat, and the topical references were sorely dated. Neither Lindy Grant nor Brendan Jordan paid any attention. While the Tonight show, at low volume, murmured away on Brendan’s bedroom television set, the two people in the bed were interested only in each other.

  Lindy turned in his arms to look back up at the dark window behind them. “Are the curtains all the way closed?”

  “I think so. Who cares?”

  “I don’t know … it felt cold on the back of my neck. I just had a creepy feeling somebody was looking at us.”

  “He’d have to fly by in a helicopter to do it,” Brendan said. “I live on the side of a hill, remember?”

  Lindy shivered. “I guess I’m just nervous about the reunion.”

  “You’re determined to go to that?”

  “I have to,” she said, then quickly added, “I’ve already got my ticket for tomorrow. I don’t expect to be there long, no more than the weekend. Maybe I’ll be back Sunday.”

  Brendan stroked her bare flank. “You know, in two years I’ve never heard you talk about your high school class, or your hometown either, for that matter,” Brendan said.

  “I don’t think about it much,” Lindy said. “Not any more than I can help.”

  “So how come now you’re all excited about a class reunion?”

  “You don’t mind, do you? I mean that I didn’t ask
you to come along?”

  “Oh, hell no. There’s nothing deadlier than going to somebody else’s class reunion. It just seemed to come up suddenly, that’s all.”

  “I know. It surprised me, too. I mean, I haven’t kept in touch with anybody from high school in all these years.”

  “So why are you going?”

  “I thought it might be, well, kicks.”

  “You wouldn’t kid me, would you, lady?”

  She pulled back and looked at him. Brendan had bright, searching eyes that didn’t miss anything. The kind of eyes a pilot should have.

  “I have to go back, Brendan. If I don’t, somebody is going to hurt Nicole. I told you what happened to her face.”

  “What’s her pimple got to do with your high school reunion?”

  Lindy sat up suddenly. Her eyes flashed with reflected light from the television. “It was more than a pimple, dammit! It was a warning. Then there was that message on my computer screen. I told you about that.”

  “All right,” he soothed. “Something funny is going on. And I don’t blame you for being upset.”

  Lindy eased back down beside him. “Upset is putting it nicely. I’m scared shitless.”

  They were silent for a moment, watching without paying attention while Johnny introduced a young female comedian who smiled too much.

  Brendan spoke quietly. “Have you considered the possibility that someone screwed around with your computer?”

  “Who would do a thing like that? Who would have access to it?”

  “Don’t get mad now, but what about Nicole?”

  “My own daughter?”

  “Kids do some pretty strange things.”

  Lindy touched his hand. “I’m not mad, Brendan, I know you’re trying to help. But even granting the possibility that she might have some crazy motive to do such a thing, I doubt Nicole even knows how to turn the machine on. She could no more program a computer than she could build a rocket engine.”