“Six cars this time. Barricades. And a spotter plane. He hasn’t got a chance if he comes into the net.”
I guess I should have gone. Maybe hearing it again, glimpsing the dark shape, feeling the stir of the night wind, would have convinced me of its reality. They didn’t get him, of course. But they came so close, so very close. But they left just enough room between a heavy barricade and a live-oak tree, an almost impossibly narrow place to slam through. But thread it he did, and rocket back onto the hard-top and plunge off, leaving the fading, dying contralto drone.
Sergeant Lazeer is grimly readying next month’s trap. He says it is the final one. Thus far, all he has captured are the two little marks, a streak of paint on the rough edge of a timber sawhorse, another nudge of paint on the trunk of the oak. Strawberry red. Flecked with gold.
The Annex
Originally published in Playboy, May 1968.
A force he could not resist drew him through the huge, crumbling husk of a hotel, down its echoing corridors to the threshold of a room that held within it a terrible augury.
During the last hour of the night, the charge nurse looked in at the critical in Room 11, intensive-care section, coronary. She scowled and made an ugly, displeased mouth and hastened to replace the dislodged I.V. needle in the vein inside the elbow of the right arm, immobilized by the straps, the board and the side rail of the bed. She checked the glucose drip, made a small adjustment of the flow valve, checked oxygen supply, listened to the ragged labor of the pulse and went off and found the pretty little special drinking coffee in the treatment room and joking with the red headed intern.
After chewing her out with a cold expertise that welled tears into the blue eyes, she herded her back to her night watch over the patient.
“I wasn’t gone three minutes, honest,” she said.
“An hour before dawn they get restless,” the charge nurse said. “As if they had someplace to go, some appointment to keep.”
When the first gray light of the morning made the shape of the window visible, he dressed quickly and went out. He guessed that they would not be expecting him to leave that room so soon after arriving.
There were shadows of night still remaining in the empty streets, so that even though he knew his way and walked swiftly, the city seemed strange to him. They were changing it so quickly these past few years. The eye becomes accustomed to the shape and bulk of structures, giving them only a marginal attention; yet when, so abruptly, they were gone, one had the feeling of having made a wrong turn somewhere. Then even the unchanged things began to look half strange.
He turned a dark comer and saw the hotel lights in the distance. A taxi came swiftly to the crosstown comer, made a wrenching, shuddering turn and sped up the empty avenue, and he caught a silhouette glimpse of the sailboat hats of nuns in the dark interior, two or three of them.
He had not been in the hotel for years. He saw at once that it was quite changed. That certain quaintness of the lobby that once set off the high style of the moneyed people and the women of the theatre was now merely a shabbiness. He realized that he could have guessed it, because were it not changed, they would not be mixed up in this sort of thing. And his shabby assignment in an unknown room would have occurred in some other place, perhaps even in another city at another time.
There was no one behind the desk. He felt in his pocket for the identification he would have to present and felt fear and irritation when he did not find it at once. Then, among coins, he fingered the shape of it and took it out and held it in his clasped hand. As he wondered whether to tap the desk bell, he saw movement out of the side of his eye and turned and saw a man walking toward him out of the lobby shadows.
“Mr. Davis?” the small man said; and as he came into the light, his face was elusively familiar. He searched memory and finally recalled the image of the same face, a bellhop uniform in dull red and gray, big brass circle of the master key ring looped around the scrawny neck. And the name came back.
“Do you remember me, Leo? From before?”
“Sure,” the man said. He leaned against the desk and yawned. Davis knew the man did not remember him at all.
“You’re the manager now?”
“So they keep telling me.”
“Come up in the world, eh?”
“I guess so.” He yawned again. “You got that thing?”
He felt unaccountably shy about revealing what they had given him. He said, “I keep telling them that they should use ordinary things. But they get fanciful. It just makes everything harder to explain when things go wrong. What kind of a sentimental nut would have a gold miniature of his own dog tag made? A grown man is supposed to get over being in a war.”
“Look, I have to see it.” Leo’s tone was patient and bored, and Davis knew the man had no interest in what he thought and very little interest in why he had come here.
He held his hand out and the little wafer gleamed on his open palm. Leo took it, glanced at it and put it in his own pocket.
“They didn’t tell me you’d keep it.”
“The room you want is four-two-four-two.”
“Are you supposed to keep it? Did they make that clear?”
“Forty-two forty-two. Four thousand, two hundred and forty-two, Mr. Davis. OK?”
“All right. I’ll assume you’re supposed to keep it, Leo. It’s their problem, not mine. But you’re supposed to turn over the key, I know that.”
“I can’t, buddy, because the only keys here are the keys to the main house here. You should know that and they should know that. Right? What we’re talking about is the annex. Which is being tom down.”
“Then there isn’t anybody in it?”
“Did I say that mister? Did anybody say that?”
“There’s no reason to get ugly about it, Leo.”
“Who’s ugly? Listen, they got old foops in there living there since the year one, and lease agreements and all that stuff, so about the only thing they can do is work around them until they get sick of all the noise and mess and get out. There aren’t many left now. I think maybe your party is the only one left on that floor, but I don’t keep dose track. I’ve got enough to do here without worrying about over there.”
“So what do I do about a key? Am I supposed to go knock on the door, for God’s sake?”
“Mrs. Dorn is over there. She’s got a master key to the whole annex.”
“Does she know about me?”
“Why should she? Just con her a little, Mr. Davis. Play it by ear. OK?”
“I don’t have much choice, I guess.”
“Has anybody lately? Come this way.”
Leo led the way back through the lobby and through a huge empty kitchen, where night lights picked up the gleam and shape of stainless steel racks and tables. He pulled a door open and turned on a weak bulb at the head of a narrow flight of stairs.
“The regular way over there has been boarded up, so what you do is just follow the way a red pipe runs along the ceiling there, and when you come to stairs finally, go on up and you’ll find her around someplace.”
Three steps down, he turned to say his thanks in some massively sarcastic way; but as he turned, the door was slammed. There were distant lights in the vast reaches of the basement, just enough for him to make out the red pipe suspended by straps from the low ceiling overhead. There was a sweaty dampness in the basement. In some far comer, a laboring machine was making a slow and heavy chuffing sound. It made a vibration he could feel through the soles of his shoes as he walked. He noticed that the red pipe overhead was of some kind of plastic material, sufficiently flexible so that there was a perceptible expansion and contraction as the machine made its thick and rhythmic sound.