Roderick Thorpe - Nothing Lasts Forever

He was facing the Hollywood Hills. What did they see from up there? This building stood alone, with nothing around it rising as high as ten stories. The word KLAXON, in heavy, drawn-out capital letters, banded the roof: from a distance, the letters blended into a band of fluorescence. Lights were on all over the building. The lights of the thirty-fourth floor; flashing three long, three short, three long, would look as thin as a match-stick, almost indistinguishable from the background. And it was far from certain that the flashing would not be seen inside the building. You could see a faint flicker on the rooftops far below — but even if you were looking at it, you might not realize what you were seeing.

The lights disturbed his eyes — he had to fight to keep his mind from wandering. If you believed the popular magazines, for instance, the people living on those hillsides were about the last you would turn to for help. Leland imagined some whacked-out young actor in a Jacuzzi thinking he had picked up on the lights of a Christmas disco. Hey, dig it. Karen had always thought he sat in judgment on such people. Never.

They reminded him that what he did was not so important after all. There was a certain kind of life that went on in spite of politics and perhaps civilization itself. Karen had never believed that he could see the connections between whacked-out actors and the disconnected people on his own side of the line, like the doorman downstairs who had come alive with the prospect of rousting the guy in the Jag. The people of Los Angeles spent more money on cosmetics and beauty treatments than any other on earth. That was thought especially funny in San Francisco, where they spent more money on clothes...

Elevator: the humming was like an electric shock.

Lights out. Leland was down behind a desk, Browning in hand. He had a perfect view of the elevator bank. With a single, thin chime, the white light over the second set of doors announced the arrival of the ascending car Leland was gleeful. Whether they liked it or not, they even told you what doors they were coming through.

One. Just one; he had a Thompson, for God's sake. Leland had to draw the guy with the antique. The guy was fully out of the elevator now. He was about twenty-five. The doors closed behind him, but the car didn't move. Something else to remember. The kid stepped forward cautiously, his finger on the trigger. Twenty-shot clip. He was still a long shot for a handgun.

"Say, you! You come out with your hands up! We've been watching you flash the lights! Come out, we're not going to hurt you!"

Another German. Leland had to remember not to silhouette himself against the lights outside. He kept low, scuttling around to the west side, making it a long shot even for a submachine gun. What he needed was a paperweight, something twice the size of an ink bottle. The kid was groping for the light switch, still a good twenty feet from it. Now Leland headed toward the stairs.

"Come out! Don't make this difficult for you! We have guns! We are not afraid to use them!"

A flower pot. A little striated philodendron, with nice, white leaves. Leland kept his arm stiff and hurled the pot like a grenade toward the windows of the north wall. Dirt spewed out of the pot across the desks — it didn't sound anything like someone running, but it was enough: the kid was firing five or six shots even before the pot crashed on the floor.

Then something strange happened, a sputtering, popping noise. The windows were splintering. Tempered glass, they were dissolving in a million tiny opaque fragments. Outside air whooshed into the room. The kid moved toward them, springing from desk to desk.

Leland headed toward the stairs — and the light switch.

It was close enough to the end of the wall for Leland to reach it from cover. When the lights came on, the kid whirled, ducked, and fired all at the same time. The recoil knocked him on his backside, and the burst tore up twenty feet of urethane ceiling panels, which jumped out of position and fell down onto the desks. Leland waited until the kid came up again, blinking. The Browning was out of view. Leland was shaking: he had contracted with himself to kill this kid, but now he did not know if he could go through with it, at least on the terms he had planned.

"Hey, shithead, over here!"

Another burst, thudding into the plaster walls. Surely they were hearing this down below. Stephanie and Ellis knew what it was about. Leland ran up the stairs and out across the thirty-fifth floor. He had cut lengths of electrical cord, tied them together, and hoisted a chair draped with computer print-out paper up against the window. It was a lousy effigy, or scarecrow, or whatever it was, and now Leland thought that the kid already had made so many mistakes that he was going to start getting smart. Leland knew his luck could not hold indefinitely. He set his contraption in motion, then ran back for the stairwell.

The thing rotated slowly, catching the light. Leland heard a scrape on the stairs. He was around the corner, not six feet from the door. The kid appeared. He was not fooled. He stepped toward Leland's contraption, the Thompson up, ready to shoot. Leland ran at him, the Browning raised like a blackjack.

The boy almost got around in time. The Browning struck a glancing blow off the side of the boy's head, knocking him backward. He was still conscious, trying to get the Thompson up between them, when Leland hit him again, throwing his weight on him. The kid's head struck the vinyl floor; the submachine gun went flying. The kid got to his hands and knees. He was stunned, trying to crawl away. Leland locked his forearm around the boy's neck. He caught the windpipe. The kid's hands came up. There was no time to waste. Leland got his shoulder against the base of the skull.

They taught this with drawings and diagrams, not demonstrations. "Believe me, it works," the FBI instructor had said, almost a quarter of a century ago, "I hope to hell you never have to use it."

The human spine was as thick as the handle of a baseball bat. Focusing on what he had been taught made Leland lose sight of what he was doing to a fellow human being. There was no choice — not with Rivers lying upstairs. You had to throw your weight out behind you as you dove forward; your shoulder, with all your weight behind it, separated the skull from the neck.

Leland did it, flinging himself out as if from a diving board, and the boy's neck broke with a sound like a sapling being twisted in a strong man's hands.

His head flopped like a chicken's.

Leland felt his bladder open. He thought he was going to be sick. He had to relieve himself. He breathed deeply and held on. He could hear the kid's bladder spilling. The kid's legs were shaking, his hands clenching, as if they did not know they were dead.

Leland retrieved the Thompson and set it on the desk while he went through the kid's shoulder bag. Two more full clips — forty rounds. A small but promisingly heavy hand-held CB radio, civilian America's version of the walkie-talkie. Candy bars — a Milky Way and two Oh Henrys! No grenades.

Leland pulled the bag off the body and put it over his own shoulder. He would be crazy if he thought he had gained an advantage. He had passed from having been undetected to someone they had to hunt down. They would not underestimate him again.

He had to figure he had used up all the luck he was going to get. He had to figure he was a dead man; he had done it during the war, as much as he had wanted to live. It had been the thing about him that Karen had understood least. You forgot you had a personal destiny. Yes, when the mind and body were together, functioning as one, you forgot you had a personal identity. That was the trick of it.

He rolled a secretary's chair next to the body and then wrestled the body into it, struggling to get the weight onto the seat. The head hung face-down on the chest, almost face-inward. Leland scavenged the remaining cartridges from the clip on the Thompson, then fitted a fresh clip. He took paper and a marking pen from a desk.