The Dark Half Read online

  Sorry, fellows, Stark thought. I think this baby's talking days are over.

  He pushed to his feet and walked around the potted plant. Not a single leaf whispered. His feet were soundless on the carpet. He passed less than three feet behind the detective, who was bent over, pulling a .32 from a shin bolster. Stark could have booted him a damned good one in the ass if he'd cared to.

  He slipped into the open elevator car in the last whisker of time before the door began to slide closed. One of the uniformed cops had caught a flicker of movement--perhaps the door, perhaps Stark himself, and it didn't really matter--out of the corner of his eye and raised his head from Donaldson's body.

  "Hey--"

  Stark raised one hand and solemnly twiddled his fingers at the cop. Bye-bye. Then the door cut off the hallway tableau

  The street-level lobby was deserted--except for the doorman, who lay comatose beneath his desk. Stark went out, turned the corner, got into a stolen car, and drove away.

  2

  Phyllis Myers lived in one of the new apartment buildings on the West Side of Manhattan. Her police protection (accompanied by a detective wearing Nike running pants, a New York Islanders sweatshirt with ripped-off sleeves, and wraparound pimp shades) had arrived at half-past ten on the evening of June 6th to find her fuming over a broken date. She was surly at first, but cheered up considerably when she heard that someone who thought he was George Stark might be interested in murdering her. She answered the detective's questions about the Thad Beaumont interview--which she referred to as the Thad Beaumont Shoot--while loading three cameras with fresh film and fiddling with some two dozen lenses. When the detective asked her what she was doing, she gave him a wink and said: "I believe in the Boy Scout motto. Who knows--something might really happen. "

  After the interview, outside her apartment door, one of the uniforms asked the detective, "Is she for real?"

  "Sure," the detective said. "Her problem is that she doesn't really think anything else is. To her, the whole world's just a photograph waiting to happen. What you got in there is a silly bitch who really believes she's always going to be on the right side of the lens. "

  Now, at three-thirty on the morning of June 7th, the detective was long gone. Two hours or so before, the two men assigned to protect Phyllis Myers had gotten the news of Donaldson's murder on the police radios dipped to their belts. They were advised to be extremely cautious and extremely vigilant, as the psycho they were dealing with had proved to be both extremely bloodthirsty and extremely quick-witted.

  "Cautious is my middle name," said Cop #1.

  "That's a coincidence," said Cop #2. "Extremely is mine. "

  They had been partners for over a year, and they got on well. Now they grinned at each other, and why not? They were two armed, uniformed members of the maggoty old Big Apple's Finest, standing in a well-lit air-conditioned hallway on the twenty-sixth floor of a brand-new apartment building--or maybe it was a condo, who the fuck knew, when Officers Cautious and Extremely were boys, a condo was something a guy with a speech impediment wore on the end of his dingus--and no one was going to creep up on them or jump out of the ceiling on top of them or hose them down with a magic Uzi that never jammed or ran out of ammunition. This was real life, not an 87th Precinct novel or a Rambo movie, and what real life consisted of tonight was a little special duty one bell of a lot softer than riding around in a cruiser, stopping fights in bars until the bars closed, and then stopping them, until the dawn's early light, in shitty little walk-ups where drunk husbands and wives had agreed to disagree. Real life should always consist of being Cautious and Extremely in air-conditioned hallways on hot nights in the city. Or so they firmly believed.

  They had progressed this far in their thinking when the elevator door opened and the wounded blind man staggered out of the car and into the corridor.

  He was tall, with very broad shoulders. He looked about forty. He was wearing a torn sport-coat and pants which did not match the coat but at least complemented it. More or less, anyway. The first cop, Cautious, had time to think that the sighted person who picked the blind man's clothes must have pretty good taste. The blind man was also wearing big black glasses that were askew on his nose because one of the bows had been snapped clean off. They were not, by any stretch of the imagination, wraparound pimp shades. What they looked like were the sunglasses Claude Rains had worn in The Invisible Man.

  The blind man was holding both hands out in front of him. The left was empty, just waving aimlessly. In the right he clutched a dirty white cane with a rubber bicycle handgrip on the end. Both hands were covered with drying blood. There were maroon smears of blood drying on the blind man's sport-coat and shirt. If the two cops assigned to guard Phyllis Myers had actually been Extremely Cautious, the whole thing might have struck them as odd. The blind man was hollering about something which had apparently just happened, and from the look of him, something sure had happened to him and not a very nice thing, either, but the blood on his skin and clothes had already turned brownish. This suggested it had been spilled some time ago, a fact which might have struck officers deeply committed to the concept of Extreme Caution as a trifle off-beat. It might even have hoisted a red flag in the minds of such officers.

  Probably not, though. Things just happened too fast, and when things happen fast enough, it stops mattering if you are extremely cautious or extremely reckless--you just have to go with the flow.

  At one moment they were standing outside the Myers woman's door, happy as kids on a day when school is cancelled because the boiler went kaflooey; at the next, this bloody blind man was in their faces, waving his dirty white cane. There was no time to think, let alone deduce.

  "Po-leeece!" the blind man was yelling even before the elevator doors were all the way open. "Doorman says the police are on twenty-six! Po-leeece! Are you here?"

  Now he was wallowing his way down the hall, cane swinging from side to side, and WHOCK!, it hit the wall on his left, and swish, back it went, and WHOCK!, the wall on his right, and anyone on the goddam floor who wasn't awake already would be soon.

  Extremely and Cautious both started forward without so much as exchanging a glance.

  "Po-leeece! Po--"

  "Sir!" Extremely barked. "Hold it! You're going to fall d--"

  The blind man jerked his head in the direction of Extremely's voice but did not stop. He plunged onward, waving his empty hand and his dirty white cane, looking a bit like Leonard Bernstein trying to conduct the New York Philharmonic after smoking a vial or two of crack. "Po-leeece! They killed my dog! They killed Daisy! PO-LEEECE!"

  "Sir--"

  Cautious reached for the reeling blind man. The reeling blind man put his empty hand in the left pocket of his sport-coat and came out not with two tickets to the Blind Man's Gala Ball but a .45 revolver. He pointed it at Cautious and pulled the trigger twice. The reports were deafening and toneless in the close hallway. There was a lot of blue smoke. Cautious took the bullets at nearly point-blank range. He went down with his chest caved in like a broken peach-basket. His tunic was scorched and smouldering.

  Extremely stared as the blind man pointed the .45 at him.

  "Jesus please don't," Extremely said in a very tiny voice. He sounded as if someone had knocked the wind out of him. The blind man fired two more times. There was more blue smoke. He shot very well for a blind man. Extremely flew backward, away from the blue smoke, hit the hall carpet on his shoulder-blades, went through a sudden, shuddery spasm, and lay still.

  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 door 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 it 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 French-kiss 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, not 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 window-cleaner waved to him from his scaffold. Rick lifted a hand in a token return salute. His 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, be thought, I closed the drapes.

  Fifteen minutes later, while he was making coffee, the crazy man's call jumped into his head again. There were two cops outside his door, and he hadn't told them a thing. What in bell was wrong with him?

  Well, he thought, my ex-wife died, and when I saw her at the morgue it looked like she'd grown an extra mouth two inches below her chin. That might have something to do with it.

  Ask Thad Beaumont who I am. He knows all about it.

  He had meant to call Thad, of course. But his mind was still in free fall--things had assumed new proportions which he did not, at least as yet, seem capable of grasping. Well, he would call Thad. He would do it just as soon as he told the police about the call.

  He did tell them, and they were extremely interested. One of them got on his walkie-talkie to police headquarters with the information. When he finished, he told Rick that the Chief of Detectives wanted him to come down to One Police Plaza and talk to them about the call he had received. While he did that, a fellow would pop into his apartment and fit his telephone with a tape-recorder and traceback equipment. In case there were any more calls.

  "There probably will be," the second cop told Rick. "These psychos are really in love with the sound of their own voices. "

  "I ought to call Thad first," Rick said. "He may be in trouble, too. That's the way it sounded. "

  "Mr. Beaumont has already been placed under police protection up in Maine, Mr. Cowley. Let's go, shall we?"

  "Well, I really think--"

  "Perhaps you can call him from the Big One. Now--do you have a coat?"


  So Rick, confused and not at all sure any of this was real, allowed himself to be led away.

  8

  When they got back two hours later, one of Rick's escorts frowned at his apartment door and said, "There's no one here. "

  "So what?" Rick asked wanly. He felt wan, like a pane of milky glass you could almost see through. He had been asked a great many questions, and had answered them as well as he could--a difficult task, since so few of them seemed to make any sense.

  "If the guys from Communications finished before we got back, they were supposed to wait. "

  "They're probably inside," Rick said.

  "One of them, maybe, but the other one should be out here. It's standard procedure. "

  Rick took out his keys, shuffled through them, found the right one, and slipped it into the lock. Any problems these fellows might be having with the operating procedure of their colleagues was no concern of his. Thank God; he had all the concerns he could manage this morning. "I ought to call Thad first thing," he said. He sighed and smiled a little. "It isn't even noon and I already feel like the day is never going to e--"

  "Don't do that!" one of the cops shouted suddenly, and sprang forward.

  "Do wha--" Rick began, turning his key, and the door exploded in a flash of light and smoke and sound. The cop whose instincts had triggered just an instant too late was recognizable to his relatives; Rick Cowley was nearly vaporized. The other cop, who had been standing a little farther back and who had instinctively shielded his face when his partner cried out, was treated for burns, concussion, and internal injuries. Mercifully--almost magically--the shrapnel from the door and the wall flew around him in a cloud but never touched him. He would never work for the N. Y. P. D. again, however; the blast struck him stone deaf in an instant.