Sweet Dreams td-25

by Warren Murphy

  "Have it your own way," Smith said, rising from the table. "You're making a mistake, though."

  "At least it'll be my mistake."

  "One last thing. You don't keep the Dreamocizer in the house here, do you?"

  Wooley shook his head.

  "Good," said Smith. "And I'd suggest that you and your daughter no longer sleep here either."

  "Thank you. I've arranged that."

  Wooley watched as Smith left the kitchen and mumbled to himself, "Don't forget your soapbox next time."

  Wooley waited until Smith, Remo, and Chiun had left through a back door before he stepped out on his front porch. Eighteen people were waiting for him.

  "I'm sorry," Wooley said, "but I have reached a commercial agreement concerning the Dreamocizer. Therefore I will not be able to meet with you. I thank you for your interest and apologize for any inconvenience I may have caused you."

  The eighteen persons were still groaning when Wooley stepped back inside the door of his house and locked the door from the inside.

  "Leen Forth," he yelled, "I've got a class. I'm going to wash up."

  "Terrific," came her voice from upstairs. "Knock 'em dead." She said something else but her voice was swallowed up by the roar of a super-loud stereo.

  Wooley peeled off his shirt while walking into his bedroom in the back of the house. He opened the bathroom door and a blonde woman with big purple tinted glasses was rummaging through his medicine cabinet.

  "Don't you have any aspirin in this place?" Patti Shea said.

  Wooley stared at the twin peaks of her large breasts that poked through the coarse fabric of her bright shirt. Flesh that gleamed so brightly it appeared to have been shined peeked from the V-shaped gap of her unbuttoned shirt top. Wooley closed the door behind him.

  "No aspirin," he said. His voice caught in his throat.

  "Oh, take it easy, Tarzan," Patti Shea said. "Let me do my speech and take off. I've got a migraine you wouldn't believe."

  Her baby beautiful features pinched together behind her glasses and she pushed the palms of her hands against her forehead. "I’ve been standing out there for two hours," she said. "Now wait a minute, will you?"

  Wooley sat on the yellow laundry hamper beside the door.

  Patti Shea leaned against the sink and took a well-practiced deep breath. Her pain-wracked face turned, almost as if on cue, into an automatic smile.

  "Yeah, I've got it now. Television has been around for almost four decades now and has advanced at nothing less than a phenomenal rate. Amazing, isn't it? A little box turning into a multi-billion-dollar industry. That's right. Billions. But it isn't really amazing, not when you consider the hard work, knowledge, and experience of the men and women involved in the television art."

  She became even more earnest at this point, leaning in, threatening to attack him with her cleavage.

  "All this can be yours," she said.

  Wooley's head snapped up, but her eyes held only blank boredom.

  "The whole world of television can be yours," she said. "Who better than television to handle your television device?"

  Wooley sighed wistfully, then looked at her breasts again.

  "Only we would have the background to know how best to produce, distribute, and sell your invention. Go with the best. Go with experience. Go with television! Now here's how to order."

  She stopped short as if trying to call back the last sentence which was her peroration of a five-minute commercial she had filmed for an album of "Music That Made History."

  Finally she shrugged. "To hell with it. You sure you've got no aspirin?"

  "No aspirin," Wooley said.

  "Okay. Where do you keep the Dreamocizer?"

  "Hidden where no one can get at it."

  "Who have you sold it to?"

  "I'll release the details in a few days."

  "You know I can go on the air and label your device a fraud, don't you?" Patti Shea said. She was no longer smiling or breathing deep.

  "When it comes on the market, you'll be a laughing stock."

  "I suppose you're right," she said. "You know the chances are you're going to be killed for your machine?"

  "People keep telling me that. If that's so, why does everyone want it?"

  "Want it? We want it to bury it. You realize what the Dreamocizer's going to do to commercial TV? To me?"

  "Yes, I suppose it will. I hope you'll excuse me, I've got to shower," Wooley said.

  "You need your back washed?" Patti Shea said, rubbing her index finger across his bare chest.

  Wooley only smiled, afraid to hope, afraid to speak.

  Patty Shea laughed. "If you live, you'll be rich enough to afford a valet. He'll wash your back. Toodle-oo."

  She brushed by him and out of the bathroom. He heard her heavy wooden clogs clumping across the living-room floor, then he heard the front door open and slam.

  By the time he had stripped and stepped into the shower, Wooley was glad that he had made his half-million-dollar deal with Mr. Massello. He was already tired of the bargaining and the badgering that masqueraded as business negotiations. No more. He trusted Massello and that was enough.

  When Wooley left his home for the slow stroll across the campus to Fayerweather Hall where his morning lecture was being given, he was followed by Big Vince Marino.

  Dr. Smith saw the big hulking man lumbering along behind Dr. Wooley, and turned to Remo and Chiun who sat next to him on a concrete slab bench.

  "The man is insufferably stupid," Smith said. "But I think you and Chiun ought to protect him anyway. If we keep him alive long enough, maybe he'll change his mind."

  Remo grunted. Chiun watched birds fly overhead.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Patti Shea didn't need this crap.

  Ever since she had parlayed seven weeks of newspaper experience and a set of limber hips into a career as a TV journalist, she had been fighting a continuous case of jet lag. The back-and-forths across the continent, across the oceans, had put her out of sync with whatever world she was living in, and she paid the price with non-stop migraine headaches that she could relieve only by popping pills like a Harvard law student the night before a big exam.

  And the crummy assignments didn't help.

  She suspected that she got every traveling job that came up in the network because her boss was jealous of her talent and fearful of his job and wanted her out of town. The fact was, though, that she got those jobs because her boss knew that the more annoyed she was, the nastier and more insulting her reporting would be and the public lapped up the image of Patti Shea, media's Grand Bitch.

  But this hadn't even been a reporting job. Being told to go make an offer on the Dreamocizer to Dr. Wooley.

  Crap.

  Well, William Westhead Wooley had been a cleverer bastard than anyone at the network had given him credit for. He had made his deal and now he wanted to talk to no one.

  So much for that. There was more than one way to skin a cat.

  When she got back to the house she had taken over at the college, a young man was sitting at her kitchen table. He had light brown hair, parted in the middle, and he seemed more to be surrounded by, rather than wearing a large Army field jacket, sewn and patched in several places.

  He was playing with a hand grenade which he occasionally tossed from side to side before his steel-rimmed eyeglasses.

  Patti stared at him through tired eyes, then threw her arms around him.

  "Well, if it isn't the world's thirty-fifth greatest assassin," she said.

  "Thirty-third," said T.B. Donleavy. "Two others died last week."

  He backed off from her embrace as if she were a side of beef. He was a vegetarian.

  She discovered this when she offered him a portion of the bacon and eggs she cooked up for herself.

  "No thanks," he said, breaking open his second pack of cigarettes of the day. "I'm a vegetarian."

  As he lit the cigarette, he held the match close to the hand grenade
he was still holding and Patti wanted to shriek.

  "I never knew that," was all she said.

  "When you're in my business, well, meat just doesn't look the same anymore."

  Especially the way T.B. Donleavy carried out his business.

  Patti Shea had first run across him when she was interviewing the wife of a convicted Mafia hit man. The wife, infuriated at her husband's jailing, had threatened to tell all she knew, but when Patti Shea arrived, the woman would not say a word. She just kept fondling a small greeting card that Patti Shea was able to see was signed only "T.B."

  The wife's remains were uncovered three days later from the ashes of her governmentally protected building, along with the charred remains of three guards. The wife still clutched the small card in her blackened fist.

  Patty Shea began to dig into the records of law enforcement agencies to try to find out who T.B. was. She discovered an Irish-American with notable credits. His education had begun on a trip home to Belfast where he became involved with the northern Ireland strife. Not on any particular side, just involved. His scorecard read five Catholics and seven Protestants, which did not include the twelve schoolchildren and four adults he got when he blew up a school to get to three visiting anti-IRA speakers.

  Back in the states, he was in demand from people who appreciated his style and his impressive record. For every contract a kill. The only thing that kept him below the top rank of assassins was that for most of his kills there were no contracts.

  There had been a case where Donleavy was supposed to eliminate another professional killer who had written a book on Mafia practices, and to frighten a young publisher who had expressed interest in handling the book.

  T.B. waited until the two went to dinner at a French restaurant, to celebrate the New York Post's wanting to serialize the book. Donleavy showed up outside the entrance to the restaurant with a painter's tarpaulin covering a large object on his back. He waited there for two hours, smoking cigarette after cigarette, stirring cans of paint that he had stacked on the sidewalk, just out of view of the restaurant's main window.

  When the budding author opened the door to leave, Donleavy pulled the tarp off the .50 caliber machine gun mounted on his back and blew the front of the restaurant off.

  He ripped the man in half, nearly cut off the publisher's leg, killed a bartender, two waitresses, and three customers, wounded seven others and caused $150,000 worth of damages to the restaurant. When the smoke cleared, T.B. had gone.

  When asked later about the injury to the publisher whom he was only supposed to frighten, he said: "That's about as frightened as any man can get."

  Patti Shea had followed the trail of T.B. Donleavy through Ireland, New York, San Francisco, and Chicago. When she finally got to him, it was in a restaurant on New York's West Side.

  She mounted her courage and told him that she had been trailing him because she was going to expose him. Donleavy laughed so loud and long, he almost choked on his V-8 juice.

  "What's so funny?" she asked.

  "You," he sputtered.

  "What's so funny about me exposing you?"

  "I work for your network," he said.

  And he had. And still did.

  And now he was here, in her borrowed kitchen, playing with a hand grenade and waiting for her to tell him the target.

  Talking around a piece of bacon and a large hunk of gooey yellow yolk, Patti Shea described Wooley and said "He's got classes today. Right now. You can find him in the large lecture room in Fayerweather Hall."

  T.B. was pulling the pin out of the hand grenade, then replacing it. Patti Shea watched his thin long fingers with fascination. Pin out, pin in, pin out, pin in.

  "The hall has the college TV station in the cellar," she added as an afterthought.

  "You think I'm going to do it as a TV special?" T.B. asked. He got up, slipped the grenade into his pocket, and started for the door.

  "Hey," she called, bounding up after him. He turned from the door and she drew near, pressing her food-warmed body against him.

  "You coming back afterwards?" she asked, holding on to the lapel of his Army jacket.

  "Watch the hands," he said. "The grenade might go off."

  Patti jumped back as if she had been touching a rattlesnake and Donleavy went out.

  He walked casually across the campus to his car. When he reached it, he was well into his second pack of cigarettes of the day. And then the murmurs began.

  Just one at first, a soft one, as if a voice was being overheard from another room. Donleavy had heard the same thing when he handled his first killing for money.

  As it grew nearer the time to do the actual killing, the voice grew louder. Donleavy heard it saying, then shouting, "Kill for me."

  On his second contract, there were two voices. On his fourth contract, there were eight voices. He had accidentally killed five people on that contract. He knew the voices represented all the people he had killed.

  Now the voices sounded like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir without the harmony. And T.B. Donleavy didn't mind. As a matter-of fact, he liked the company. Killing was a lonely occupation.

  He sat on a bed of pine needles in the warm briskness of the May morning, smoking. Cigarette ashes fell on his jacket and he ignored it. Students passed him. Some waved to him, picking him as a student because of the Army jacket and the steel-rimmed glasses. He ignored the waves. He picked his nose.

  He saw an old Oriental and a young man with thick wrists walk by, talking to a middle-aged man who looked as if he had been carved from the trunk of a citrus tree.

  Donleavy thought nothing about them. The voices were getting louder.

  He was into his third pack of Pall Malls when he got up and went to the car. Opening the unlocked door, he pulled something from under the front seat and put it under his coat. He heard his first coherent chant of "Kill for us."

  He walked toward Fayerweather Hall as the chanting grew louder. He circled the hall twice, then walked through it twice, checking exit doors and counting class rooms.

  The main lecture hall was on the first floor. One class had just left, and Donleavy walked through the empty room. It had a high ceiling but no windows. There were two side doors and two exit doors in the front on either side of the blackboard. T.B. walked around the hall. He counted the seats. There were 445. He sat down in the middle of the hall, taking a seat on the left aisle.

  The first student showed up ten minutes later. Donleavy was on his fifty-fifth cigarette. As the room filled up, no one paid him any notice. The young face, cigarettes, steel rims, and Army jacket made him one of them.

  Wooley showed up twenty minutes later. He was wearing a short-sleeved yellow shirt, open at the neck, with double knit blue slacks.

  As Wooley came through one of the back exit doors the 300 students stood and cheered. None of them knew exactly why, but they had heard that Wooley last night had somehow embarrassed Lee (Woody) Woodward at a conference, and anybody who had done that rated a cheer.

  Wooley looked as if the cheers were only his normal due upon entering a classroom. The lecture began, and Donleavy thought that Wooley was a pretty good instructor. Sharp facts peppered with personal observations and experience. Occasionally, a humorous anecdote to illustrate a point. But after fifteen minutes, Donleavy could no longer hear. The chanting had grown too loud. All he could hear was "Kill for us."

  He heard the voices. He saw Wooley standing in the front of the room. He felt the weight of the object under his jacket. Sweat appeared on his forehead. The saliva built up in his mouth and he swallowed it. He pulled on a pair of black leather gloves.

  "Kill for us;" Donleavy looked at his watch. "Kill for us." It was twenty-five minutes into the lecture. All the other classes in the building would have been started by now. "Kill for us." The hallways would probably be empty. "Kill for us."

  Donleavy stood up in his seat. A few heads turned toward him, then looked away, toward one of the side doors. The faint buzz in
the room vanished away into silence. Entering through one of the hall's side doors was Lee (Woody) Woodward, director of college affairs. His hair was a white thicket around his reddened face. His clothes were wrinkled and baggy. His pants were stained dark at the crotch.

  T.B. Donleavy did not see him. He was walking down the aisle toward Wooley who was now writing on the blackboard. Donleavy heard a sound. He turned as the students yelled, and Lee (Woody) Woodward ran by him. Woodward pulled a pistol from his jacket pocket and shouted, "You bastard. You ruined me. You bastard."

  As Wooley turned, Woodward raised his pistol to fire at him.

  Donleavy saw the revolver in the man's arm and as the arm raised, Donleavy reached under his Army jacket, pulled out a medieval mace, and smashed it down across Woodward's arm. The revolver dropped harmlessly to the carpeted floor of the lecture hall. The students cheered, but choked on their cheer as Donleavy raised the mace up over his head and smashed it down, deep into Woodward's skull.

  The look of gratitude on Wooley's face as Donleavy had saved him from the shooting changed into a look of horror. And then there was no look at all as the metal spikes on Donleavy's mace ripped off Wooley's face.

  The first swing was right to left, splattering Wooley's face on the floor and left wall. The second swing was a vicious backhand stroke from left to right, pushing part of Wooley's head into a red spiraling arc, some splattering students in the first two rows.

  The quick first swings held the body upright. The third and last swing was up over Donleavy's head and came whistling down to cleave Wooley's head. Bone and brain bubbled up onto the carpeted floor and over the mace which had become a semi-permanent fixture on the neck of the late William Westhead Wooley.

  T.B. Donleavy left it there and ran out the nearest exit door. He had things to do now that the chanting had stopped.

  He had just finished his third pack and he had to find some more cigarettes. Quick.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  "Look," Remo said, "we'll protect this guy for you because you're going to buy me a house. But that's all. Just because you want us to. Not because this is important. This Wooley's invented a cartoon gadget is all. How the hell can you think that's important?"