by Farris, John
The approach of Honey didn't concern Joe. The problems of getting Abby out of the house and to the hospital in Charleston fully occupied him in the hour it took to reach Nimrod's Chapel.
Two conclusions were obvious: he didn't have much time; and the difficulties in neutralizing Dr. Lucas Thomason would decrease in proportion to the risk he was willing to assume. But a confrontation had to be avoided, because, if the drug in the ampule he had turned over to Nick Portuguese proved to be an analogue of Tetrodotoxin, the evidence would confirm that Thomason was, to put it mildly, bizarrely pathological, and probably psychotic in the exercise of his power over the helpless Abby. Charlene sensed, and maybe Frosty had found out for sure, how dangerous such a person could be.
It might have begun, Joe thought, simply and humanly, as a crush on the adolescent beauty growing up in his household. Thomason would have been in his mid-thirties when Abby came to live with him. Sexual maladjustment in adult males—the court jester in the rags and mask of Caliban—was hardly a phenomenon. Neither was the guilt that accompanied unfortunate fixations on the wrong objects of desire. If his sex drive was strong and uncompromising, then emotionally Thomason would have been required to maintain s comprehensive feat of balance: affection for and intimacy with the underaged adorée, the need to brutally possess her. Sexual conflicts properly energized could move armies or create masterpieces of art. Condemned to lightless depths of the psyche, the same conflict would inevitably raise appalling monsters.
Joe reasoned that Abby's accident had provided temporary salvation for a tormented man threatened with an unsupportable loss. For a while she had been fully in his care and keeping. Her paralysis would have had a calming effect; he might even have been impotent for a little while, an expectable transference. They probably never had been so close as during those months after misfortune. Signs of Abby's recovery would not have been welcome to Thomason. Realizing she would walk again after all, knowing there would be lovers to replace the dead boy, he metamorphosed from healer to jailer, implemented by rationalizations potentially more damaging to his soul than either guilt or shame.
The moon was gone; the wind blew strongly from the northeast when Joe reached the Barony. From the road that continued through the intertidal marsh to the shore Joe glimpsed the lights of the main house through swaying trees. He felt the drop in barometric pressure in the mended bones of his face. His heart ached for Abby. He drove on.
There was a car he didn't recognize parked on the shell-and-sand road behind the beach house. A lamp glowed in an upstairs room.
He got out of the Laredo quietly and warily, looking around. The sound of surf was loud beyond the dune. A night bird squawked in the marsh behind him. He felt alone in a lonely place, bowed down emotionally from fear and too much knowledge of the evils men do. All crimes were committed in the name of love. And the jester danced on, taking his pratfalls with an insolent leer.
She appeared at the railing of the porch as he was coming up the ramp at the side of the house, her wiry hair blown into an antic shape by the wind off the sea, sparks flying from a cigarette that smelled like cloves. Her affection for coarse black flavored tobacco, which had given away her presence the night Joe and Flora had gone for a walk in the far reaches of the Barony's garden, identified her before she spoke to him.
"Hey, it's just me, Adele Franklin! Thought I'd stop by for a beer. How're you doing tonight, babe?"
"Not too bad." The last thing he needed right now was company. He had planned to pack up and drive into town, then place a crucial phone call to Lucas Thomason, to lure him away from the Barony. He hoped he could quickly get rid of Adele.
Spume was in the air from the wind gusting off the ocean. Adele turned her back to it to save what was left of her cigarette.
"Getting rough out," she said. "I hear that hurricane's headed our way."
"It could turn north by morning, follow the coast up to New England."
They went into the house. Adele had turned on nearly all of the lights downstairs, and the television. A late-night talk show featured a damsel-harlot with a quasi-religious name whose success had gone beyond the merely phenomenal into the realm of the supernatural. Adele had fixed a snack for herself. On a coffee table enclosed by rattan sofas and chairs there was a plate with crusts of sandwich bread and a half-eaten pickle. A shell ashtray held several cigarette butts.
''Have I kept you waiting long?" Joe said dryly.
"Oh, I've been here about an hour," she told him, with a nonchalant wave of her hand. "Let me get you a beer."
"Thanks. What did you want to see me about, Adele?"
"I thought you might be able to clear up a couple of things," Adele said, opening the refrigerator.
"Look, Adele, it's getting late, and—"
"I'll try not to keep you up. But that depends on what you have to tell me."
She crossed the room to the conversation nook with two bottles of Killian's Red and put them on the coffee
"I don't think I have anything to tell you."
She patted the seat cushion of a chair next to her.
"Come on, sit down. Have a look at this."
From a pocket of her baggy pink cardigan Adele took out a passport and tossed it on the table. She looked up expectantly at Joe.
"It's yours," she said. "Found it when I was going through your things upstairs. Good likeness of you. The entry and exit visas appear to be authentic, but I guess only an expert would know for sure."
"What are you talking about, Adele?"
Adele reached for a pack of her rank-smelling cigarettes and lit one, settled back on the sofa.
"Well, I'm saying this is a phony passport. And your name is not Joe Bryce. And you're not a doctor from Winnetka, Illinois. I was there Monday and Tuesday, and I've already proved that beyond any doubt. I was a good journalist once, believe it or not. I know how to dig. I didn't bother with that hospital administrator again; obviously your group bought his cooperation. I just hung around and talked to nurses who had been at North Shore ten, fifteen years, and some of the pediatricians on staff there. My camcorder has a playback screen. I showed them videotape ofJoe Bryce from the barbecue the other night. Nobody could identify you. How do you explain that?"
Joe sat down in the chair next to Adele, picked up his passport from the table and put it away. He twisted off the caps of the Killian's Reds and handed one to Adele, smiling benignly. Then he glanced at her open purse, lying on the other side of the table. Unlikely that she was wearing a wire, but there would be a busy tape recorder somewhere.
"Why do I have to explain anything to you?" he said, sounding insulted and exasperated.
"Joe, Joe, now you're not being fair! I've been fair to you, so far."
"Walking in here and searching my luggage?"
"That's journalistic license, babe. What I'm saying is I could have been sitting here with a couple of guys I know from the State Attorney General's office when you came in. See, I don't mean you any harm. I just want to talk."
Joe had a couple of swallows of beer while he studied Adele and tried to decide what her angle was. He thought it might be beneficial to have her a little more on the defensive.
"You were spying on me the other night in the garden."
Adele expelled a cloud of smoke. "Pure happenstance. They don't let me puff away in the house. So I overheard enough of your conversation with Miz Birdsall to know that she's an old friend of yours. Or is it—colleague?"
Joe nodded, almost imperceptibly. "Then you went to the trouble to find out more about Flora Birdsall."
Adele grinned, the brown cigarette lolling in one corner of her mouth.
Joe leaned forward, put his bottle of Killian's on the table, assumed a serious pose with his hands clasped between his knees and gave Adele a long, level look. When she started blinking a couple of times a second, holding herself a little more erect, he sighed as if conceding.
"Because you're a good journalist, I'm reasonably sure that you've put
most of it together by now. You just want me to confirm, is that it?"
"What's your real name, Joe?"
"I am who I am, Adele. It doesn't have any bearing on your concerns."
"That sounds like doubletalk."
"There is information which may be relevant for you to have, and which I can confirm, to the extent I'm allowed to say anything at all."
"About your 'project'?"
"You've already come to some fairly specific sions, haven't you?"
Adele removed the spicy cigarette from her mouth.
"Damn right. But I don't understand how the CIA has license to get involved in politics on the state level. Their charter specifically prohibits—" She broke off and stared at Joe, in wonder and excitement. "So—that means you're not here in an official capacity."
"You're very, very clever, Adele," Joe said approvingly.
"Now I get the connection. And Senator Harkness has something to do with it, too."
"My presence could be in the nature of a favor. If you want to put it that way."
He had been looking around the beach house unobtrusively, and finally he saw it, Adele's small camcorder, inconspicuous inside a glass-front cabinet filled with oceanic bric-a-brac: polished driftwood, lacy sponges, a collection of shells. The cabinet was about ten feet from where they were sitting; the doors stood open a couple of inches.
Adele said, "You're trying to get something on Lucas, put him out of the running for the nomination."
"What I needed to know, I already know."
"How bad is it?"
Joe shrugged. "There are courts to decide that, Adele."
"Jesus," she pouted. "You're not telling me anything."
"I've told you enough."
"You're not doing me any good, Joe. I've got a job and my future to think about." Adele smoked furiously for a little while, then leaned toward him. "Okay. Let's lay it on the line, now. Who wants Luke out of the running? Is it Harkness yanking party strings? What is it they're all afraid of? Pull the skeleton out of the closet, and let me take a look at it. Don't be afraid to talk to me; we're off the record here, you've got my word on that."
It might have been a gust of wind catching the screen door and banging it sharply against the jamb; but the wind couldn't have been strong enough to throw Adele's head violently back against the sofa cushion. Joe was already turning in his chair to look behind him when it registered that the pulpy red spot in the middle of her forehead was a bullet wound.
A gray-haired man in a dark suit came in swiftly off the porch, the revolver in his hand aimed at Joe. He was wearing leather gloves.
Joe's breath turned to ice in his throat. When you're threatened with a gun; it is all you can look at, and sometimes the very last thing that you see.
Still walking toward Joe, the man said, "On your knees."
Joe looked from the bore of the big revolver to the man's face. He had a thin livid scar running from his receding hairline through one disrupted, whitened eyebrow. He had just murdered a woman, but his face seemed as empty of emotion as if he were there to mail a letter. When Joe failed to move fast enough, the man hit him over the ear with his gloved left hand.
The heel of the glove was reinforced with a steel plate, like the toe of a workman's boot. The force of the stiff-arm blow flung Joe over the back of the sofa where Adele Franklin lay gaping at the ceiling with her brains draining down the back of her neck.
Joe lay on his face on a sisal floor mat. The side of his head throbbed as if it were trying to explode. He was conscious, but without the power to move anything but his fingers. When he tried to lift his head he was overwhelmed by nausea. He blacked out for a few seconds, and came to retching and puking.
Someone else was in the beach house. Wearing old but well-cared-for riding boots. Joe could see that much, with his face a few inches off the floor.
"No need to put a bullet in him," Lucas Thomason said."When he gets done vomiting, I'll give him something that will leave him dead asleep for a few hours. In the morning they'll find Joe when they come around to make sure everyone's been evacuated off the beach. They'll find him.with that throw-down pistol of yours, and with poor Adele; and when they poke around in his rented Jeep they'll find Frosty's clothes. It makes a neat package for the police. Like everybody else, they don't want to work any harder than they have to."
"He saw me."
"Don't be concerned, Mr., Phipps. Midazolam wipes out memory twenty or thirty minutes prior to injection. The other drug I'm going to give him literally dissolves the ego and destroys normal perception. He won't make sense to anyone because his concept of reality will be as full of holes as Swiss cheese. It was the Swiss who came up with this, by the way, as a treatment for severe manic disorders. But the side effects tend to negate the potential benefits."
"Where do you want him?"
"Where he is. Hold him while I get the injection ready."
Joe tried to roll over on his back, but made poor work of it. Mr. Phipps kneeled beside him and put a gloved hand on the back of his head.
"Thomason..."
"Yes, Joe?"
"… Why?"
The doctor stood over him. "Lift his head," he said to Mr. Phipps. "So he can see me. That's good. Hello, Joe."
"Why?"
Thomason pressed his crimped lips together, as if the question required ethical consideration. Then he shrugged slightly.
"Why? Because you wouldn't go away. And because you found out things about Abby, didn't you? That's reason enough, but the plain fact is, I just don't like you."
"Don't… give her any more Tetrodotoxin. You've poisoned her. She'll die."
"Tetrodotoxin? Where did you get that idea?"
"Don't… shit me. I know."
"Doesn't matter what you think you know. Or who you gave the ampule to for analysis. You're out of the equation, Joe, and all that remains is unsubstantiated allegation. No one can ever prove a thing against me."
"Sick bastard."
"Abby and I have a love for each other that is beyond your ability to comprehend. Do you think she would have accomplished all that she has without my care? No, she would have devoted her life to some mediocre lawyer or insurance salesman and never answered the call of her ambition. I made that possible. She's had a richer and more fulfilling life by virtue of her incapacitation than she ever dreamed of when she was nineteen, and infatuated with that Huskisson boy."
"Was it really... an accident? Or did you have a means of getting Abby's lover out of the equation too?"
"Son, you don't need to know," Thomason said with mild contempt. He inserted the point of a syringe into an ampule and withdrew half of the contents. "Mr. Phipps, if you'll kindly get a grip on him now, we'll finish our business here."
Joe, at half-strength and with the right side of his head throbbing, attempted to fight. Mr. Phipps took a weak jab on a raised shoulder, then slapped Joe hard, but not quite hard enough to snap the jawbone with the steel-weighted glove. With Joe off-balance and comets rocketing through his field of vision, Mr. Phipps spun him around easily, kicked his feet out from under him and rode him into the coarse fibers of the sisal floor covering. Joe inhaled a noseful of his own vomit. Mr. Phipps held Joe facedown with a knee pushing his spine toward his gut and a hand on the back of his head while Thomason jabbed him between shoulder and collarbone with the syringe, injecting him with Midazolam.
"That will put him to sleep," he heard Thomason say. "It'll take a few minutes."
"I think it should appear he shot himself," Mr. Phipps said, perhaps impertinently; but from his tone of voice when he replied Thomason didn't take offense.
"You don't understand, Mr. Phipps. He came to my home; I am convinced, to take away the one who is dearest to me in all the world. And he was insolent in his assurance that there was nothing, nothing I could do about it. A bullet in the soft palate, well, that would be paying him respect I don't feel he deserves. I'm paying him instead with hours, days—a lifetime of disorientatio
n, crippled mentality and incarceration in the foulest institutions this state has to offer. What this other stuff here does, in sufficient quantity, to a man's parietal lobes is a fascinating lesson in the two-edged sword of pharmacology."
The last of his words were indistinct to Joe's ears, like a radio voice two rooms away. He felt the prick of another needle, a belated surge of terror, and bit his tongue savagely. Then he roared up off the floor, taking Mr. Phipps by surprise, and threw Mr. Phipps off his back. Thomason stepped back quickly. On his feet, moving like a drunken samba dancer who has lost the beat, Joe swiped at the syringe hanging down his collarbone and dislodged it.
Before Mr. Phipps could pounce and wrestle him down, Joe stamped at the syringe and crushed it. Then Mr. Phipps smacked him on the tender side of his head again with the loaded glove. There was a searing flash in Joe's brain, like an acetylene torch lighting up. Falling, his eyes unfocused, he saw Thomason stooping to retrieve the smashed syringe.
Then Joe was on his back, blinking up at both of them. He had no sense of how his body was positioned.His feet might have been twisted under him, or spread far apart. There was almost no sensation in his hands.
Thomason was saying, in a voice that alternately, roared and receded unintelligibly:
"No matter. Most of… Gun in his hand Mr. Phipps can't hurt us in the state he's"
Joe watched Mr. Phipps pick up his right hand and fit it to the revolver. He felt nothing. Mr. Phipps placed the muzzle against a pillow, and fired a shot. The report it made was a tiny pop to Joe's ears. Mr. Phipps let go of Joe's hand. Without his help to lift the revolver, it lay on the mat, smoking a little, the odor of gunpowder stinging Joe's nostrils. His finger was on the trigger, but he couldn't feel that, either. Shoot them, he thought, but the impulse never made it to the nerves of wrist and hand.
Mr. Phipps examined the fat pillow to make sure the bullet had stayed inside. He turned his head and said something to Thomason, who had pinpricks of light in his glass-blue and hollow eyes as he stared down atJoe.