“Come on, Barbara, let’s get out of here,” the guy said. “This yahoo is crazy.”
Vic watched them walk across the floor and out the door. He let go of the Magnum reluctantly. He would just as soon have blown the two of them away.
Goddam this headache.
Norman Hastings sat cramped into a seat in the coach section as the jet waited on the runway at JFK to take off on the flight for Dallas-Fort Worth. It seemed as if they had been stuck there for hours while every other lousy plane in the world was given clearance to take off. When he got home, he would get off a letter to the president of the airline that would blister his ears. It was the last time they would get Norman Hastings into one of their tin cans.
You’d think that at least they could get the cabin pressure right. It was playing bloody hell with his headache. He massaged his pounding temples and shivered.
“Would you like a blanket, sir?”
He looked up at the smiling face of the young man wearing a blazer with the airline’s logo. Boy stewardesses. Flight attendants, they liked to call themselves now. Fags is what Norman Hastings called them.
“A blanket, sir?” the young man repeated.
“No. But you can get me a drink. Wild Turkey. With ice.”
“The drink cart will come around after we’re airborne,” the young man said, grinning, as if he were doing Norman Hastings a great big favor.
“When the hell is that going to be, next Tuesday sometime?”
“We’re next in line for take-off. It will only be a few minutes.”
A few minutes … Oh, sure, Norman Hastings believed that. Like he believed in the tooth fairy. The pilot was probably boffing one of the girl stewardesses up in the cabin and would get the plane off right after he got his rocks off.
The smiley young man moved away up the aisle before Norman Hastings could tell him.
This headache was a bitch. He had the beginning of it when he was checking out of the hospital. He was not about to mention it, though, or they’d want to keep him there another week. As long as he had a medical plan that was paying the bills, the hospital would like to make him a permanent guest. Norman Hastings was not having any of that. He was mostly healed, except for a few raw spots that were still bandaged, and he was not going to spend five more minutes in that shithole city of New York than he had to.
The pitch of the idling engines changed as the plane taxied around into the take-off pattern. About fucking time. The flight attendant made a last trip down the aisle to see that everybody’s seat belt was fastened. Norman Hastings unhooked his as soon as the fag had gone past.
His head was killing him.
The greaseball in the next seat looked over as though he wanted to talk. Norman Hastings glowered at him and turned toward the window. The last thing he wanted to do was to listen to a lot of pidgin Spanish gibberish from some bean eater.
The plane surged forward, gathering speed as it roared down the runway. The blue ground lights outside raced by in a stream that stabbed deep into the head of Norman Hastings. He could not remember anything that ever hurt as bad as this.
Jason and Nancy Dahlberg sat in the living room of their house in Seattle’s Green Lake district and tried to concentrate on “Dallas.” They had not missed an episode since the show went on the air. If they had to be out of the house, as they were the Friday before when they went out to dinner at the top of the Space Needle, they made sure to set the VCR so they could watch “Dallas” on tape when they got home.
Actually, the events at the restaurant the previous Friday had been so exciting that the Dahlbergs did not get around to viewing their tape until the next night. The sight of that girl running crazily through the tables waving a steak knife and screaming was something they would never forget. They hadn’t known until it came out in the papers the next day that the young man she left bleeding to death at their table was her husband of only a few hours. Then the most horrible part had been watching in horrified fascination as the girl hurled herself out through the heavy plate-glass window. It took her three runs at the thick double pane to do it. The first time she hit it, only the inner pane cracked. Then, when she did manage to break through, she got hung up on one of the shards of glass and had to rip off one of her breasts before she could fall to the ground six hundred feet below.
During the week that followed, both of the Dahlbergs had been a little under the weather. And that night neither of them could concentrate on “Dallas.” The sound was too loud, or the picture was blurred, or the color did not hold, or there was too much noise out in the street. They were both suffering from headaches that were growing rapidly worse.
“What’s wrong with the set?” Nancy Dahlberg demanded of her husband.
“Nothing’s wrong with it. You must be fooling with the controls while you watch those idiot daytime shows of yours.”
“I never touch your precious controls. Besides, I don’t have time to watch in the daytime. Don’t you think I have anything to do around here?”
“You have plenty to do,” he said. “That doesn’t mean you do it.”
“You son of a bitch,” she said.
Jason Dahlberg turned in his chair to stare at his wife of twenty-one years. Language like that was simply not a part of her makeup. He decided that she had changed in many ways while he was not paying attention. What a sloppy cow she had become.
“What are you looking at?” she said.
“What the hell do you think, you cow?”
Nancy Dahlberg gripped the arms of her chair. She turned a bared-teeth look of hatred on her husband such as he had never seen on a human face. That was not all that was wrong with her face. Even as he watched, her skin grew blotchy and swollen. God, she was ugly.
Jason Dahlberg’s headache threatened to explode inside his skull.
Vic Metzger groaned aloud, but nobody heard him. What with the racket those assholes were making at the pool table and the shit that was booming out of the jukebox, it was a wonder he could hear himself. No way anybody could stand it, especially not with the headache he had.
He planted both hands on the bar and leaned forward. “Hey! Shut the fuck up over there!”
The pool players looked at him in surprise. “What’s the matter, Vic? You talkin’ to us?”
“You goddam right I’m talking to you. Shut the fuck up or get out of here.”
“You’re kidding, aren’t you?”
That did it. Vic groped blindly under the bar for the gun. He found it and levered himself over the top of the bar, heedless of the drinks he spilled in the process. Holding the revolver out in front of him, he marched toward the pool table.
“I warned you!”
He started shooting.
The screaming began.
Norman Hastings clamped his teeth together to keep from crying out. The agony inside his head had grown worse since take-off. Undoubtedly, the plane was not properly pressurized. Why didn’t anybody else complain? When he had suggested to the fag boy stewardess that something was wrong, all he got was some standard bullshit about how the cabin pressure was exactly at its proper level. Then how come his head was exploding?
And the greaser in the aisle seat next to him, sitting there belching tacos and trying to start a conversation. Did he think Norman Hastings had nothing better to do than listen to some wetback’s broken English?
He had tried to find some relief by plugging in a pair of those little plastic earphones and turning on some of that stupid music they play on airplanes. All that did was make his head hurt worse. Now he tore out the earplugs and threw them into the aisle.