He stopped dead.
What if the caller wanted a spectator, not a savior? What if he was waiting around the jog with the gun in his mouth, and when he saw Bunner, he’d pull the trigger?
BLAMMO... blood and brains all over the walls.
Or maybe the caller had it in for Bunner for some reason, and he’d called, then come here and pulled the trigger, and when Bunner rounded the jog, he’d slide in a slick of gore...
He leaned against the wall and a vicious, burning belch rose in his throat, leaving the taste of vomit, and he thought Happy Sunday and chewed a couple of the Rolaids he’d brought with him. He swallowed, took a deep breath, and rounded the jog.
The hall was empty.
He let himself into the office, sat down at Mrs. Meeker’s desk, and turned on the little fan she kept to move air when the system was on the fritz.
The caller had manipulated him shamelessly. Bunner had pleaded that he was sick and helpless, which would have stopped most people. They’d say they were sorry, that they’d call Mrs. Meeker in the morning, or ask him to tell them who else to call if things were really out of hand for them. But the caller had just kept at him with the utter self-absorption of a psychotic.
Only none of his office patients was psychotic. The only psychot-ics he saw were in Duyvilskill (Devil’s Brook), the state hospital north of Albany.
What if one of those poor, sad, sick sons of bitches had broken out, wangled a gun, and was on his way here?
Bunner’s mouth suddenly dried out, the undissolved grains of the Rolaid in his mouth felt like gravel, and sweat popped out all over him. If one of them was out, he was getting out. He’d call the cops from a pay phone on his way home.
He grabbed the phone and dialed fast; it rang and rang but someone had to be there even on Sunday. He looked up at the wall clock over the door. It was ten to twelve, ten minutes to go.
Finally the main switchboard picked up. “Duyvilskill.”
“It’s Dr. Bunner. Get Charlie Perkins on the line, fast.”
“Just one moment, Doctor.”
A click, then dead air. The hand on the clock clicked to eight of, then six of.
“Bunny?” It was Charlie.
“Charlie, are they all there?”
“Of course, they’re all here. What makes you think—” Charlie stopped, then said a little shakily, “Hold on, I’ll check.”
More dead air. It was two minutes of; Bunner found himself listening for the elevator. The building was silent; nothing moved except the sweat running down his face.
At two minutes after, Charlie came back.
“All present and accounted for. All in the lounge watching The Dirty Dozen for the fiftieth time. It’s their favorite, especially Telly Savalas as the nut. What made you think—Jesus, Bunny. What made you think...”
“I got this weird phone call.”
“Yeah, well, you scared the shit out of me.”
They were not men you wanted walking around loose.
“Scared the shit out of myself,” Bunner said.
They hung up and Bunner went into his inner office. It was ten after. The caller had changed his mind or gotten stuck in traffic past the mall. Shop until you drop, even on the Sabbath. Especially on the Sabbath, Bunner thought.
He’d give him ten more minutes, then go home.
It was a good chance to go over the journal tables of contents he’d gotten behind on; he pulled one out of the stack and noticed the recorder with the tape of her still in it. He’d rewind and record over her, because he never wanted to hear her voice again. He reached for rewind and heard the elevator mechanism inside the wall. It was a sound he’d never notice on a normal day with people’s voices in the other offices, phones ringing, the coffee cart rolling up and down the hall. But it was almost loud in the silence around him.
He had an impulse to run; he could he down the hall, out the fire door, down the stairs to the parking lot before the caller stepped off the elevator.
But doctors didn’t run from sick people any more than firemen ran from fires. And this poor bastard was sick, no matter what else he might be. Sick and in pain and crying out for help in the only way he knew how.
That compassion again, Bunner thought; it was really going to do him in some day.
He sat still, his hands resting loosely on the desk blotter. The blotter was stained with coffee, crumpled at the edges, with doodles all over it. Mrs. Meeker had been after him to change it or let her do it, but that meant moving everything on the desk.
He heard the hiss of the elevator doors opening. The hall was carpeted; he didn’t hear footfalls, but imagined he could feel them reverberate as the caller came down the hall... around the jog... to the door of Suite 44.
The outer door opened and a long thin shadow sliced across the floor, looking absurdly sinister in spite of the sun coming through the fixed windows. The shadow shortened and fattened as it came closer, then it slid into the office and Adam Fuller appeared in the doorway.
“Sorry about the histrionics, Bunny,” he said apologetically.
Fuller. The name was taped above the letter slot in the door. Latovsky rang the bell of the house on Barracks Lane (probably named for long-gone barracks of the Grand Army of the Republic), then stepped back and looked at it. It needed paint; the shades drawn in the front windows were yellow and crumbling at the edges, the porch tilted, the slats underfoot creaked.
All the houses on the block were small and a little mean, but this was the most neglected-looking.
No one came and he rang again, then used the knocker.
He could have called and made an appointment. But then they’d be ready for him, have their faces composed to show nothing, no matter what he asked. The questions would be neutral. Did they rent the house on Raven Lake? Did they have a son? Had their son played on that swing?
He couldn’t ask what he really wanted to know: Was there something a little odd, a little cruel about the boy? Did he pull the wings off flies? Set cats on fire? Did they think he could graduate from small-animal torture to murder?
They’d know the answers even without the questions, and whatever they felt or feared would show in their faces if they weren’t prepared.
But they weren’t even home and that was the downside of trying to catch people off guard.
He raised the knocker again.
“Looking for Don Fuller?”
He turned and saw a woman at the bottom of the porch steps looking up at him. She was in her seventies, with skin like a dry stream bed, hair like a sprung broom, and the brightest, clearest, bluest eyes he’d ever seen.
He crossed the creaking porch and went down the stairs to her.
“Yes, ma’am. Do you know where he is?” he asked.
“Might. Who’s asking?”
He gave her his card and her eyes brightened with delight. “Cops,” she cried. “Always knew Don would get into real trouble one of these days.”
He was not shocked by her malice; there were lots of malicious old ladies in these towns. Their husbands were dead, their kids had moved to the cities, and the women got by on meager pensions, bottom-of-the-line Social Security, and whatever their children could spare. They subsisted on beans, bacon, and potatoes, government handouts of surplus cheese... and malice. They never ate fresh fruit, never heard of oat bran or high fiber, wouldn’t jog unless their skirts were on fire... and most of them lived to be ninety.
Someone should do a study of the role of malice in longevity, he thought.
He took the card back and said, “He’s not in trouble, ma’am. I just wanted to ask him and Mrs. Fuller a few routine questions.”
“That right? Well, you can ask him when he shows up, but you’ll have to wait for the last trump to ask her. Barbara Fuller’s been dead near on to thirty years. Got hit out on Route Six, coming from Coleman’s Dairy. They put up a light afterwards. Always do... afterwards. But then it was just a stop sign, and I know she stopped. Barbara Fuller’d no more run a stop sign than she’d show her drawers on Main Street at high noon. She was the neatest, best organized, carefulest creature God ever made. Kept the cleanest house, baked the best cakes and pies, and brought ’em to church suppers and bake sales wrapped in enough plastic to go twice around the earth. Unholy bitch, of course. Takes more’n clean toilets to make a human being. But she stopped at that sign, bet on it, Officer—she stopped.”