3
In Ludlow, five hundred miles away, Thad Beaumont turned over restlessly on his side. 'Blue smoke,' he muttered. 'Blue smoke.'
Outside the bedroom window, nine sparrows sat on a telephone line. They were joined by half a dozen more. The birds sat, silent and unseen, above the watchers in the state police car.
'I won't need these anymore,' Thad said in his sleep. He made a clumsy pawing motion at his face with one hand and a tossing gesture with the other.
'Thad?' Liz asked, sitting up. 'Thad, are you okay?'
Thad said something incomprehensible in his sleep.
Liz looked down at her arms. They were thick with goosebumps.
'Thad? Is it the birds again? Do you hear the birds?'
Thad said nothing. Outside the windows, the sparrows took wing in unison and flew off into the dark, although this was not their time to fly.
Neither Liz nor the two policemen in the state police cruiser noticed them.
4
Stark tossed the dark glasses and the cane aside. The hallway was acrid with cordite smoke. He had fired four Colt Hi-Point loads which he had dum-dummed. Two of them had passed through the cops and had left plate-sized holes in the corridor wall. He walked over to Phyllis Myers's door. He was ready to talk her out if he had to, but she was right there on the other side, and he could tell just listening to her that she would be easy.
'What's going on?' she screamed. 'What happened?'
'We've got him, Ms Myers,' Stark said cheerfully. 'If you want the picture, get it goddam fast, and just remember later I never said you could take one.'
She kept the door on the chain when she opened it, but that was okay. When she placed one wide brown eye to the crack, he put a bullet through it.
Closing her eyes — or closing the one eye still in existence — was not an option, so he turned and started back toward the elevators. He did not linger, but he did not run, either. One apartment door eased open — everyone was opening doors on him tonight, it seemed — and Stark raised the gun at the starey-eyed rabbit face he saw. The door slammed at once.
He pushed the elevator button. The doors of the car he'd ridden up in after knocking out his second doorman of the evening (with the cane he had stolen from the blind man on 60th Street) opened at once, as he had expected they would — at this hour of the night, the three elevators were not exactly in great demand. He tossed the gun back over his shoulder. It thumped onto the carpet.
'That went all right,' he remarked, got into the elevator car, and rode down to the lobby.
5
The sun was coming up in Rick Cowley's living-room window when the telephone rang. Rick was fifty, red-eyed, haggard, half drunk. He picked up the telephone with a hand that shook badly. He hardly knew where he was, and his tired, aching mind kept insisting all this was a dream. Had he been, less than three hours ago, down at the borough morgue on First Avenue, identifying his ex— wife's mutilated corpse less than a block from the chic little French restaurant where they took only the clients who were also friends? Were there police outside his door, because the man who had killed Mir might also want to kill him? Were these things true? Surely not. It surely had to be a dream . . . and maybe the phone wasn't really the phone at all but the bedside alarm. As a rule, he hated that fucking thing . . . had thrown it across the room on more than one occasion. But this morning he would kiss it. Hell, he would Frenchkiss it.
But he didn't wake up. Instead he answered the telephone. 'Hello?'
'This is the man who cut your woman's throat,' the voice in his ear said, and Rick was suddenly wide awake. Any lingering hope he'd had that this was all just a dream dissipated. It was the sort of voice you should only hear in dreams . . . but that is never where you hear it.
'Who are you?' he heard himself asking in a strengthless little voice.
'Ask Thad Beaumont who I am,' the man said. 'He knows all about it. Tell him I said you're walking around dead. And tell him I'm not done making fool's stuffing yet.'
The phone clicked in his ear, there was a moment of silence, and then the vapid hum of an open line.
Rick lowered the telephone into his lap, looked at it, and suddenly burst into tears.
6
At nine that morning, Rick called the office and told Frieda that she and John should go home — they would not be working today, nor for the rest of the week. Frieda wanted to know why and Rick was astounded to find himself on the verge of lying to her, as if he had been busted for some nasty and serious crime — child molestation, say — and couldn't bring himself to admit it until the shock was a little less acute.
'Miriam is dead,' he told Frieda. 'She was killed in her apartment last night.'
Frieda drew in her breath in a quick, shocked hiss. 'Jesus—God, Rick! Don't joke about things like that! You joke about things like that, they come true!'
'It is true, Frieda,' he said, and found he was on the edge of tears again. And these — the ones he'd shed at the morgue, the ones he'd shed in the car coming back here, the ones he'd shed when that crazy man called, the ones he was trying not to shed now these were only the first. Thinking of all the tears in his future made him feel intensely weary. Miriam had been a bitch, but she had also been, in her own way, a sweet bitch, and he had loved her. Rick closed his eyes. When he opened them, there was a man looking in at him through the window, even though the window was fourteen stories up. Rick started, then saw the uniform. A window-cleaner. The windowcleaner waved to him from his scaffold. Rick lifted a hand in a token return salute. The hand seemed to weigh somewhere in the neighborhood of eight hundred pounds, and he let it fall back onto his thigh almost as soon as he had raised it.
Frieda was telling him again not to joke, and he felt more weary than ever. Tears, he saw, were only the beginning. He said, 'Just a minute, Frieda,' and put the phone down. He went to the window to draw the drapes. Crying over the telephone with Frieda at the other end was bad enough; he didn't have to have the goddam window-cleaner watch him do it.
As he reached the window, the man on the scaffold reached into the slash pocket of his coverall to get something. Rick felt a sudden twinge of unease. Tell him I said you're walking around dead.
(Jesus — )
The window—cleaner brought out a small sign. It was yellow with black letters. The message was flanked with moronic smiley-smile faces. HAVE A NICE DAY! it read.
Rick nodded wearily. Have a nice day. Sure. He drew the drapes and went back to the phone.
7
When he finally convinced Frieda he wasn't joking, she burst into loud and utterly genuine sobs — everyone at the office and all the clients, even that goddam putz Ollinger, who wrote the bad science fiction novels and who had apparently dedicated himself to the task of snapping every bra in the Western world, had liked Mir — and, sure enough, Rick cried with her until he finally managed to disengage himself. At least, he thought, I closed the drapes.