Warren Murphy: Bidding War

Smith stood over the patch of tar wondering if under its dirty black surface lay the answer to a year's fruitless searching.

It seemed almost too convenient.

A gruff voice behind him caused his heart to skip a beat.

"What's your problem?"

Smith turned, his heart now in his throat, and his throat drying like summer rain on a flat rock.

The man's face was meaty and as black as burned steak. His sullen eyes glowered at Smith from under a blue uniform cap.

He was a cop.

Smith withdrew a card from his billfold that identified him as a field supervisor for NYNEX.

"Where's your crew?" the cop wanted to know.

"They are due shortly."

"This is a dangerous area to be loitering alone."

"I can fend for myself," Smith said matter-of-factly.

"Then why did you just about jump out of your skin when I spoke up?"

"Nervousness," Smith admitted.

The cop handed the card back. "Okay. Watch yourself, sir. The crack-heads would cut off your feet for your shoes."

"I understand," said Smith, standing in the alley and looking as out of place as an insurance salesman in the Gobi Desert, while the cop continued his foot patrol.

Smith breathed a sigh of relief after he was gone. It was time to get to work.

Returning to the station wagon, he opened the trunk and pulled out a metal detector like those beachcombers use to find old coins in the sand. That was his first mistake.

Walking back to the alley, he drew more than casual stares.

The three-card-monte dealer was doing a shuck and jive with his well-dressed accomplice. The accomplice was pretending to be a mark, and the dealer was pretending to lose twenty dollars.

"Hey you! Yeah—with the treasure finder. You feeling lucky today, my man?"

"No," said Smith.

"Then where you bebopping your scrawny white ass with that treasure finder?"

"Yeah. You think there's some kinda treasure in Harlem?"

"Pirate treasure, maybe."

"I am with the phone company," Smith explained.

"Where's your hard hat?"

"I am a supervisor."

"Then where's your company car? That shitbox you drove up in ain't no company car. NYNEX guys drive NYNEX cars. With the logo, y'know."

They were following him now. This wasn't good. Smith briefly considered abandoning the mission and leaving Harlem. But a year's toil had brought him to the brink of success. He wasn't about to turn back until he had satisfied himself one way or the other.

After glancing up and down the street in vain for the neighborhood cop, Smith turned into the alley.

"You looking for Rolle?" asked the dealer, following him in.

"Yeah, you looking for Officer Rolle? Well, forget it. Rolle he chowing down on jelly-filled and those bavarians he like so well."

"Once Rolle he start filling his gut with doughnuts, he don't stir until his gut be filled."

Smith flashed his false NYNEX ID and said, "I would appreciate privacy."

They looked at him as if he had stepped out of solid brick from another dimension.

One began to laugh. The other ducked around the corner. Smith assumed he was acting as lookout.

His assumption was verified when the dealer stepped closer and lowered his voice to a growl. "Give it up."

"Which?"

"All of it."

"Be specific, please," said Smith, his heart pounding.

"Don't be smart. I want it all. The case, the treasure finder and your damn wallet."

"There is less than ten dollars in my wallet. Not enough to make this worth your while."

"That fine-looking case will make it worth my while."

"I will fight before surrendering my briefcase," Smith said earnestly.

The dealer vented a short burst of derision, half laugh and half explosion of breath. He produced a Buck knife and growled, "You got something that stand up against this mother?"

"I am going to place my briefcase and the metal detector on the ground now," said Smith without emotion.

"Don't forget the wallet."

Smith lowered both objects to the concrete and, straightening, reached into his suit coat.

"Hurry it up," the dealer said, looking back over his shoulder hastily.

The dealer heard a click and felt a light pressure against his upraised Buck knife.

His head snapped around, his eyes focusing on the knife. He had a dim impression of a grayish face with gray eyes cold behind rimless eyeglasses very close to his own. But he wasn't looking at that. He was looking at the gray hand hovering before the blade. On either side of the blade gleamed two copper electrodes. The dealer's eyes were bringing them into focus when a gray thumb depressed a black stud, and a bluish white crackle of electricity arced viciously between the copper electrodes. The steel knife began jumping in his hand, and he began jumping with it.

Keeping the stun gun pumping out juice, Harold Smith drove the jittering dealer to his knees, pulled back and thrust the electrodes into his chest. The man went flat on his back, the knife clutched spasmodically but uselessly in his right hand.

When he gave the man relief, Smith got to his feet and quickly deployed the metal detector. He ran it along the patch of tar, got a beep at one end, silence in the middle and a beep at the other end.

There was a severed line below, he thought with satisfaction.

From the mouth of the alley, a nervous voice said, "Hey, Jones, snap it up!"

The dealer was still down, Smith noticed With a clinical eye. His entire body was jittery with the memory of the muscle-clutching voltage it had endured.

Smith walked quickly to the alley entrance, snapping his fingers once.

When the second mugger ducked back into the alley, he asked, "What's shaking?"

Then he saw. It was his partner.

Smith met him with the stun gun. It crackled when it touched the big brass shield of his belt buckle, and the second mugger threw his arms and legs out in all directions before slamming onto his back. The air smashed from his lungs, and while he lay there wondering what hit him, Harold Smith walked briskly back to his car, congratulating himself on a successful mission.

His sour-as-lemons face puckered up when he approached his parking space.

Smith found his station wagon up on concrete blocks, all but one tire rolling down the sidewalk, impelled by the hooded ghosts of a street gang. They were rolling the tires in through the gaping entrance of the XL SysCorp Building.

Furiously Smith strode up to a straggler who was fighting with the lugs of his rear tire.

"That is my car," he said coldly.

The thief couldn't have been more than fourteen but he uncoiled like a giant spring and jammed an old Army .45 into Harold Smith's gut.

"Get a clue, Jim."

"Where did you get that gun?" Smith asked in spite of himself.

"What's it to you?"

"It looks familiar."

"Found it in the building. Now back off or I cap you."

"That is my car, my tire and I am not backing off."

"Suit your damn self," snarled the fourteen-year-old, and he copied something he must have seen in a movie. He tried cocking the .45 with his thumb.

Smith grabbed it out of his hand and shoved it back into his face. The second his gnarled fingers wrapped comfortably around the walnut grip, Smith knew he was holding his old Army .45, which he had abandoned in the XL SysCorp Building because he had killed a man with it.

"Go," Smith said coldly.

The boy gulped. "I'm going." And he did.

Standing on a public street beside his immobile station wagon and holding a loaded .45 automatic, Harold Smith realized he looked like anything but what he was supposed to be: the director of Folcroft Sanitarium.

Dropping the weapon into his briefcase, he locked the metal detector in the wagon's back and carried himself, his life and his all-important briefcase to the West 116th subway station.