“I am the lock,” Rossner said dully.
“How did it go?”
“As scheduled.”
“You missed the three-thirty call.”
“Only by five minutes.”
The man at the other end hesitated. Then: “Leave the turnpike at the next exit. Turn right on the state route. Put the Rover up to at least one hundred miles an hour. Two miles along, the road takes a sudden turn, hard to the right; it’s banked by a fieldstone wall. Do not apply your brakes when you reach the curve. Do not turn with the road. Drive straight into that wall at a hundred miles an hour.”
Rossner stared through the glass wall of the booth. A young woman was crossing from the restaurant toward a little red sports car. She was wearing tight white shorts with dark stitching. She had nice legs.
“Glenn?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you understand me?”
“Yes.”
“Repeat what I’ve said.”
Rossner went through it, almost word for word.
“Very good, Glenn. Now go do it.”
“Yes, sir.”
Rossner returned to the Land Rover and drove back onto the busy turnpike.
Holbrook sat quietly, patiently in the unlighted motel room. He switched on the television set, but he didn’t watch it. He got up once to use the bathroom and to get a drink of water, but that was the only break in his vigil.
At 4:10 the telephone rang.
He picked it up. “Holbrook,”
“I am the key, Mr. Holbrook.”
“I am the lock.”
The man on the other end of the line spoke for half a minute. “Now repeat what I’ve said.”
Holbrook repeated it.
“Excellent. Now do it.”
He hung up, went into the bathroom, and began to draw a tub full of warm water.
When he turned right onto the state route, Glenn Rossner pressed the accelerator all the way to the floor. The engine roared. The car’s frame began to shimmy. Trees and houses and other cars flashed past, mere blurs of color. The steering wheel jumped and vibrated in his hands.
For the first mile and a half, he didn’t look away from the road for even a second. When he saw the curve ahead, he glanced at the speedometer and saw that he was doing slightly better than a hundred miles per hour.
He whimpered, but he didn’t hear himself. The only things he could hear were the tortured noises produced by the car. At the last moment he gritted his teeth and shuddered.
The Land Rover hit the four-foot-high stone wall so hard that the engine was jammed back into Rossner’s lap. The car plowed part of the way through the wall. Stones shot up and rained back down. The Rover tipped onto its crushed front end, rolled over on its roof, slid across the ruined wall, and burst into flames.
Holbrook undressed and climbed into the tub. He settled down in the water and picked up the single-edge razor blade that lay on the porcelain rim. He held the blade by the blunt end, firmly between the thumb and the first finger of his right hand, then slashed open the veins in his left wrist.
He tried to cut his right wrist. He left hand could not hold the blade. It slipped from his fingers.
He plucked it out of the darkening water, held it in his right hand once more, and cut across the bridge of his left foot.
Then he leaned back and closed his eyes.
Slowly, he drifted down a lightless tunnel of the mind, into ever deepening darkness, getting dizzy and weak, feeling surprisingly little pain. In thirty minutes he was comatose. In forty minutes he was dead.
Sunday, August 7, 1977
After working all week on the midnight shift, Buddy Pellineri was unable to change his sleeping habits for the weekend. At four o’clock Sunday morning, he was in the kitchen of his tiny, two-room apartment. The radio, his most prized possession, was turned down low: music from an all-night Canadian station. He was sitting at the table, next to the window, staring fixedly at the shadows on the far side of the street. He had seen a cat running along the walk over there, and the hairs had stood up on the back of his neck.
There were two things that Buddy Pellineri hated and feared more than all else in life: cats and ridicule.
For twenty-five years he had lived with his mother, and for twenty years she had kept a cat in the house, first Caesar and then Caesar the Second. She had never realized that the cats were quicker and far more cunning than her son and, therefore, a bane to him. Caesar — first or second; it made no difference — liked to lie quietly atop bookshelves and cupboards and highboys, until Buddy walked past. Then he leaped on Buddy’s back. The cat never scratched him badly; for the most part it was concerned with getting a good grip on his shirt so that he could not shake it loose. Every time, as if following a script, Buddy would panic and run in circles or dart from from to room in search of his mother, with Caesar spitting in his ear. He never suffered much pain from the game; it was the suddenness of the attack, the surprise of it that terrified him. His mother said Caesar was only being playful. At times he confronted the cat to prove he was unafraid. He approached it as it sunned on a window sill and tried to stare it down. But he was always the first to look away. He couldn’t understand people all that well, and the alien gaze of the cat made him feel especially stupid and inferior.
He was able to deal with ridicule more easily than he could deal with cats, if only because it never came as a surprise. When he was a boy, other children had teased him mercilessly. He had learned to be prepared for it, learned how to endure it. Buddy was bright enough to know that he was different from others. If his intelligence quotient had been several points lower, he wouldn’t have known enough to be ashamed of himself, which was what people expected of him. If his I.Q. had been a few points higher, he would have been able to cope, at least to some extent, with both cats and cruel people. Because he fell in between, his life was lived as an apology for his stunted intellect — a curse he bore as a result of a malfunctioning hospital incubator where he had been placed after being born five weeks prematurely.
His father had died in a mill accident when Buddy was five, and the first Caesar had entered the house two weeks later. If his father hadn’t died, perhaps there would have been no cats. And Buddy liked to think that, with his father alive, no one would dare ridicule him.
Ever since his mother had succumbed to cancer ten years ago, when he was twenty-five, Buddy had worked as an assistant night watchman at the Big Union Supply Company mill. If he suspected that certain people at Big Union felt responsible for him and that his job was make-work, he had never admitted it, not even to himself. He was on duty from midnight to eight, five nights a week, patrolling the storage yards, looking for smoke, sparks, and flames. He was proud of his position. In the last ten years he had come to enjoy a measure of self-respect that would have been inconceivable before he had been hired.
Yet there were times when he felt like a child again, humiliated by other children, the brunt of a joke he could not understand. His boss at the mill, Ed McGrady, the chief watchman on the graveyard shift, was a pleasant man. He was incapable of hurting anyone. However, he smiled when others did the teasing. Ed always told them to stop, always rescued his friend Buddy — but always got a laugh from it.
That was why Buddy hadn’t told anyone what he had seen Saturday morning, nearly twenty-four hours ago. He didn’t want them to laugh.
Around that time he left the storage yard and walked well off into the trees to relieve himself. He avoided the lavatory whenever he could because it was there the other men teased him the most and showed him the least mercy. At a quarter to five, he was standing by a big pine tree, shrouded in darkness, taking a pee, when he saw two men coming down from the reservoir. They carried hooded flashlights that cast narrow yellow beams. In the backwash of the lights, as the men passed within five yards of him, Buddy saw they were wearing rubber hip boots, as if they had been fishing. They couldn’t fish in the reservoir, could they? There were no fish up there. Another thing… each man wore a tank on his back, like skin divers wore on television. And they were carrying guns in shoulder holsters. They looked so out of place in the woods, so strange.