Джеймс Суэйн - The Man Who Cheated Death

“You too,” she said, opening her door.

“Wait a minute,” he said in alarm.

She followed his gaze. On the sidewalk in front of the hotel lay a smoldering cigarette butt. Someone had been there moments before, yet had managed to become invisible. Tawny shut her door, not moving. “He followed us,” she said under her breath.

“Sit tight.”

He got out and had a look around, then got back in. “Must of been my imagination. It’s okay; you’re safe with me.”

He wasn’t much to look at, but he cared, and Tawny liked that. Their eyes met, and behind the glasses she saw the wanting look that was always there in her line of work. She placed her hand on his left thigh. “Like that, Tom?”

“Yes. I think... you’re very pretty.”

She ran her forefinger up the pant seam to the growing bulge in his crotch and put her mouth up to his ear. “Want a BJ?”

“Sure.”

She pulled down his zipper. “I’m going to tell you a little secret. I’m not really a hooker. I’m an actress.”

“Really?”

“I was in Straight and Narrow . Do you remember the scene in the disco, and the girl who serves Brad Pitt a martini? That was me. I had a line.”

“That’s tremendous. Are you going to be in any more films?”

“Someday.”

“Wow. I always wanted to kill someone famous.”

“What did you say?”

“You heard me.”

Their eyes met, and Tawny knew right then she’d jumped into a car with a madman. She tried to scream, and he grabbed her by the throat. Reaching beneath the dashboard, he drew a knife, and in one swift, practiced motion, plunged it deep into her chest.

Tawny felt the life seep from her body as the Celica drove around the hotel, and her passenger door was opened. Felt a pair of hands drag her out of the passenger seat, and dump her body into an open garbage can, then heard the car pull away.

She grew weak, and started to pass out. She did not want to die like this. She thought of her poor mother, and how she’d react. She’d never cared how her mother felt, yet she did now.

She heard a man’s deep voice. Thinking she’d died and gone to heaven, she opened her eyes, and saw a homeless person standing over her, his hands rifling her pockets. She grabbed his arm.

“Please help me,” she whispered.

On their twentieth wedding anniversary, Wondero’s wife had given him a propane grill from Sears, and on the same day they had nearly gotten a divorce trying to assemble it. It had more parts than an automobile engine, and too many that did not fit the way the instructions said they would. In the end they had kissed and made up, and Wondero had slid the grill into a corner of the garage, hoping to never see it again.

But on a sunny Saturday afternoon a month later he pulled the grill out and fired it up, just to see if the home breaker actually worked. In a few minutes he was a convert: the flames were evenly distributed over the layer of lava rocks, the grid hissing like a cat. Going inside, he found a platter of raw hamburgers on the kitchen table, his wife fixing cole slaw, smiling at him. His kids raced past in their bathing suits, the dog on their heels, and before he could yell about dog hair in the pool, he heard the splash.

He groaned and Corey tossed him a cold beer.

“That’s what Saturdays are for,” she reminded him.

She was right; he needed to loosen up. Taking the portable radio outside, he turned the volume up so it competed with his kid’s screams. A few minutes later Corey brought out a plate of buns to be toasted. “You’ve got a phone call from downtown.”

Over the radio he heard the sweet sound of a baseball hitting a bat. The tone in her voice suggested it was nothing important. Irritated, he went inside to his study, and picked up the phone. “Hello?”

The line was dead. He hung up feeling a lump in his throat. The house had grown quiet and he went into the kitchen and looked outside. Everyone was gone. Corey, the kids, all the food, everything but the grill. In the pool he saw something floating, and sticking his face against the sliding glass door, realized it was the dog.

He shuddered, feeling all of his internal alarms go off. In the stillness he could feel a deadly entity lurking somewhere within his home. For a long moment he felt paralyzed; his worst nightmare had come true.

He stumbled through the downstairs, unable to find his gun in any of its usual hiding places, his stomach feeling like it was about to explode. Dread, he had learned long ago, was like nausea with horns.

He climbed the stairs knowing he was too late.

He found Corey upstairs in their bedroom. Death had ripped her clothes off, used nylon stockings to tie her wrists to the headboard of their bed, and slit her throat from ear to ear.

He found my son’s dismembered body in his room down the hall, the stereo turned up to a deafening roar. On the wall of his son’s room was a huge map of the United States. In blood Death had scrawled Everyone Dies!

He found his daughter in the bathroom, drowned in the toilet, the bottom of her bikini pulled down to her knees.

“Looking for me, Harry?” he heard a voice ask.

Wondero gently laid his daughter’s body on the bathroom floor and moved into the hall. Death stood at the other end, a 12 gauge shotgun cradled in his arms, rocking it like a baby. Wondero charged him as if fired out of a cannon, no longer caring about his own welfare, and saw the tiny ball of flame leave the gun’s barrel even before he heard the gun’s violent retort.

“What happened then?”

“Corey woke me up.”

“Have some water.”

Wondero took a sip of Evian. “Thanks.”

“What did Death look like?”

“Same as before,” Wondero said. “No hair, no eyebrows, pale white skin, really strange eyes.”

“Did anything about him stand out from the previous dreams?”

“He had this look on his face.”

“Can you describe it?”

“Gleeful. He was having the time of his life.”

His psychiatrist scribbled in the log he had kept of Wondero’s reoccurring nightmares, the entries dating back six months to when the dreams had first started, and Wondero had suspected he was beginning to lose his mind.

“Anything else?” Dr. Kaufman asked.

“It was like I told you before,” Wondero said. “It didn’t feel like a dream. It was all very real: the grill, the kids horsing around, the dog, I could even smell the burgers cooking. Most of my dreams are goofy, or have things out of context. Like I’m at the office walking around in my underwear and nobody says anything. This dream wasn’t like that. It was like watching a home video.”

His psychiatrist gave him a perplexed look. “Except none of those things you described have happened.”

“No,” Wondero said.

“Then it was a dream. Your subconscious is making you dream of this faceless man in response to your inner torment of not being able to catch this killer. It’s a common occurrence for people under stress.”

“I don’t know,” Wondero admitted, finishing his water.

“Don’t know what, Harry?”

“I feel like... I’m being warned.”

Kaufman gave him a measured stare, then glanced obliquely at his wristwatch, scowled dejectedly, and stood up. For the second time in as many weeks they had run over and squandered another patient’s precious minutes.

“Still fit for service?” Wondero said.

“I think so,” Kaufman said, showing him to the door.

“See you next week.”

Rittenbaugh was hurrying through the lobby of the station house as Wondero came in, and grabbed Harry by the arm.

“I think we hit pay dirt,” Rittenbaugh said.