Джо Горес - Mostly Murder - A Short Story Collection

Eric squeezed my arm with his left hand; there were tears in his eyes. How scared that poor cat must have been when he woke up in the hands of the fascist pigs!

“Christ, Ross, I can’t believe...” He shook his head. “Oh, Jesus, right out from under their snouts! You’re beautiful, man!”

I got an arm around his shoulders, as the little clock in my mind ticked off the seconds, weighing, measuring the pig’s native stupidity against his duty at the door. They have that sense of duty, all right, the pigs: but no smarts. We had them by the shorts now.

“Gotta get you to the window, cat,” I breathed. Eric obediently swung his legs over the edge of the bed.

“Why... window...” His head was lolling.

I unzipped my jacket to show him the rope wound around my waist. “I’m lowering you down to the ground. Help will be waiting there.”

I slid up the aluminum sash, let in the night through the screen. Groovy. Like velvet. No noise.

“Perch there, baby,” I whispered. “I want the pig to come in and see you silhouetted, so I can take him from behind, dig?”

He nodded slowly. The injection was starting to take effect. It was my turn to squeeze his arm.

“Hang in there, baby.”

I’d just gotten the night light switched off, had gotten behind the door, when I heard the pig’s belatedly hurrying steps coming up the hall. Too late, you stupid fascist bastard, much too late.

A narrow blade of light stabbed at the room, widened to a rectangle. He didn’t even come in fast, gun in hand, moving down and to the side as he should have. Just trotted in, a fat old porker to the slaughter. I heard his sharp intake of breath as he saw Eric.

“Hey! You! Get away from—”

I was on him from behind. Right arm around the throat, forearm grip, pull back hard while the left pushes on the back of the head...

They go out easily with that grip, any of them. Good for disarming a sentry without using a knife, I had been taught. I hadn’t wasted my Cuban sojourn chopping sugar cane like those student straights on the junkets from Canada. I feel nothing but contempt for those cats: they have not yet realized that destroying the fabric of society is the only thing left for us.

I dragged the unconscious pig quickly out the door, lowered his fat butt into his chair and stretched his legs out convincingly. Steady pulse. He’d come around in a few minutes; meanwhile, it actually would have been possible to just walk Eric down the fire stairs and out of the building.

For a moment I was tempted; but doing it that way wasn’t in the plan. The plan called for the maximum effect possible, and merely walking Eric out would minimize it. Danzer’s plan was everything.

Eric was slumped sideways against the window frame, mumbling sleepily. I pulled him forward, letting his head loll on my shoulder while I unhooked the screen and sent it sailing down into the darkness of the bushes flanking the concrete walk below. I could feel the coils of thin nylon around my waist, strong enough in their synthetic strength to lower him safely to the ground.

Jesus, he was one sweet guy. I paused momentarily to run my hand through his coarse, curly hair. There was sweat on his forehead. Last year he took my French exam for me so I could get my graduate degree. We’d met in old Prof Cecil’s Western Civ course our junior year, and had been roomies until the end of grad school.

“I’m sorry, baby,” I told his semiconscious, sweat-dampened face.

Then I let go and nudged, so his limp form flopped backward through the open window and he was gone, gone instantly, just like that. Three stories, head-first, to the concrete sidewalk. He hit with a sound like an egg dropped on the kitchen floor. A bad sound, man. One I won’t soon forget.

The hall was dark and deserted as I stepped over the pig’s outstretched legs. He’d be raising the alarm soon, but nobody except the other pigs would believe him. Not after the autopsy.

The first round of sirens came just after I had stuffed the thin surgical gloves down a sewer and was back in my car, pulling decorously away from the curb. The nylon rope, taken along only to convince Eric that I meant to lower him from the window, had been slashed into useless lengths and deposited in a curb-side trash barrel awaiting early morning collection.

On University Avenue, I turned toward an all-night hamburger joint that had a pay phone in the parking lot. I was, can you believe it, ravenous; but more than that, I was horny. I thought about that for a second, knowing I should feel sort of sick and ashamed at having a sexual reaction to the execution. But instead I felt... transfigured. Eric had been a political prisoner anyway; the pigs would have made sure he wouldn’t have lived to come to trial. By his necessary death, I would be changing the entire history of human existence. Me. Alone.

And there was Liz over in the city, always eager, a receptacle in which I could spend my sexual excitement before she went off to teach. But first, Armand. So he could tell Danzer it was all right to print what we had discussed the night before.

Just thinking of that made me feel elated, because the autopsy would reveal the presence of that massive dose of truth serum I had needled into Eric before his death. And the Establishment news media would do the rest, hinting and probing and suggesting before our underground weeklies even hit the street with our charge against the fascists.

Waiting for Armand to pick up his phone, I composed our headline in my mind:

PIGS PUMP REVOLUTIONARY HERO FULL OF SCOPOLAMINE; HE DIVES FROM WINDOW RATHER THAN FINK ON THE MOVEMENT

Oh yes, man. Beautiful. Just beautiful. Watch for it.

Riding the personnel transport belt up to the level of Rogul’s office, I wiped my hands down my thighs. I never had killed anyone before. Never had wanted to. Hell, I didn’t want to now. But since yesterday it had been sure. I wiped my hands again. Clammy, even though I had seen no one since entering the building. They all had gone, all had crowded to the heliports, all had been fed by aerial arteries into the residence blocks for the usual evening tele.

All except Rogul.

I stopped outside his office, wiped my palms nervously again; then I stepped forward to break the light beam. The tele-screen above glowed with the color image of Rogul, made familiar by two months of patient stalking and watching.

“Mr. Andrech?”

“That’s right.” I was amazed at the steadiness of my voice. “I hope I’m not too late...”

“Oh, no, no. I had a lot of work to catch up on. Come in please.”

I broke the second light beam and went through the opening door to his inner office. First time I’d been there, of course; wouldn’t do to have his secretarial robot able to identify me later.

Rogul was behind his desk, standing: a tall, gray-haired, well-conditioned man in his late forties. A self made man who had come up a dozen years before with a new design for mass transport of planetary settlers which had made him wealthy. We shook hands.

“So, Andrech. You claim to have developed cheap artificial atmospheres for small, low-gravity planets. Is that true?”

“I have.”

I’d needed a cover story, in case his secretary still had been switched on, or a business associate still had been present But we were alone. I seemed to see each second stretch out long and thin around us, thinner and thinner, until finally it snapped and fell away.

“I hope so, Andrech. Even if there is overlapping between your design and the encased bubble atmosphere, a workable new process would be worth a great deal of money.”

I went past him toward some abstract figurines on the window sill; I wanted him on his feet — with his back to me. I wasn’t sure I could do it if he were sitting, and I didn’t want to watch his face as the blade went in.