Warren Murphy: Bottom Line

Water. A watery grave. He felt sweat break out all over his body and then turn to a cold chill. He was a strong swimmer or had been before bourbon had turned muscle to fat but he knew now that he could not survive for a moment in water. The thought of it rilled him with dread. Water surrounding his body.

16

Blocking his nose. Making it impossible to breathe. His body struggling, gasping, trying to get breath, and when he opened his mouth, even more of the water pouring in, trying to fight its way down into his lungs, to blow them up like big balloons and then to burst them and spill his guts and his Ufe all over the sea where fishes could feed on him.

He fainted.

When he woke again, there was still the sound of a boat engine and still the sound of water, but he wondered why he felt no sense of movement if he was on

a boat.

He heard Dr. Gladstone's voice. "Still not afraid of anything, Mr. Meadows?" she asked mockingly. "You realize where you are? At sea. That's water all around you. Water. Cold, dark water."

Meadows tried to scream but the gag muffled all sound. Then the blindfold was removed and the gag was pulled from his mouth. He wasn't in water. He was standing near the edge of some kind of lake. Dr. Gladstone was in front of him and the two big men were standing behind him. Jasper Stevens was still unconscious on the ground.

"Help me. I'll do anything," Meadows pleaded. "Help me."

"Sorry, friend," she said coldly. "Enjoy your

bath."

Meadows felt the ropes being removed from his arms and legs and then he was lifted up into the air by the two men, swung back and forth and then tossed out into the lake. A moment later, Jasper Stevens followed.

Meadows hit with a splash. He could feel the water wet his clothes and he screamed. He was sur-

17

rounded by water. It was all around him. He tried to climb on top of Jasper Stevens to get away from the water, but Jasper fought him off and tried to climb on top of Meadows. Meadows felt the water all over him and the fear of it brought tears to his eyes and he could feel his heart racing in panic, and then as the water reached his neck, he could feel his heart stopping, but before his brain stopped too, he saw Jasper Stevens in front of him, floating, and the small man's eyes already had glazed over and Meadows knew he was dead and knew he himself would be dead in a moment and he welcomed death because anything was better than the water.

And so he died, and his body and that of Jasper Stevens floated among the orange peels and pop bottles on top of 17 inches of water in the lake in Central Park.

Dr. Gladstone picked up the tiny cassette tape recorder with the boat and water sounds on it, turned it off and put it into her pocket. She smiled at her two attendants and they left Central Park to go back to the Lif eline Laboratory.

The bodies of Zack Meadows and Jasper Stevens were pulled from the lake the next morning by police who had been called to the scene by the 262nd jogger to pass the lake and notice the two floating bodies. The first 261 hadn't wanted to get involved.

The medical examiner said both men had died of heart attacks. No one thought it strange that both men's fingertips had been mutilated to prevent fingerprint identification, or that two men should choose the Central Park lake in which to have simultaneous heart attacks. The commander of the Central

18

Park police precinct was happy when the heart attack report came back, because if the two floaters had been murdered, he would have had to put some men on duty investigating the murders, and all his men were now busy patrolling the park, giving tickets to people who failed to clean up after their dogs, and watching for other such serious crimes.

So with no identification and no investigation, no one ever thought to question Flossie, who lay in her bed, eating chocolates, drinking Fleischmann straight, and watching game shows.

When Zack Meadows did not come back to her for three days, she decided he was gone. She didn't think he was dead. Enough men had left her in her üfe for her to know that it didn't take death to bring it about.

On the fourth day, her last bottle of Fleischmann's was gone, so she got out of bed and dusted herself with a dry washcloth. She combed the front of her hair and put on lipstick. She looked around for a dress and found several in a pile of clothes in the corner of the room. She took the one that looked least dirty.

It was a red and blue flowered print that made her look like a sofa. But the neckline was cut low and her giant bosom and cleavage were visible, and since she had to find someone to buy her a bottle, the dress would do. Tit men, she had realized early in Ufe, were not terribly particular. Big was beautiful to

them.

As she picked up the dress, a light blue envelope fluttered to the floor. She picked it up and looked at it. She had never seen it before. It was addressed to

19

the President of the United States and had a stamp on it.

She wondered if she could get the stamp off and sell it to somebody. She tried a corner but the stamp was firmly glued down.

Anyway, the letter was addressed to the President It might be important.

She couldn't imagine how it had gotten into her apartment.

She held it in her hand as she slid the blue and red dress over her head and she was still squeezing the letter tightly in her hand as she walked ponderously down the three flights of stairs to the street. As she headed for the corner, she saw the red, white, and blue mailbox and it seemed appropriately colored to receive a letter for the President. She thought for a moment that perhaps the letter was some great spy secret and she maybe would get a medal and maybe a cash reward from the President, so she mailed the letter quickly, before realizing that her name and address weren't on it and they would have no way to track her down to give her her medal and her money.

The hell with medals and money. She wanted a drink. As she walked away, she decided that even if the President did send her a check, the post office would probably steal it. She didn't trust the post office. Somebody, a long time ago, had told her not to.

20

CHAPTER TWO

His name was Remo and he did not know fear. He knew the cold of the slick ice against his body in the dark mountains of New Hampshire. He knew the winds that could pop a person like a wicker ball down the midnight ravine, banging bones to pitiful chips in a skin-slit shell of organs that would no longer breathe or digest food or purify blood or pump that blood. He knew the winds. He knew force.

And because he understood it, not as some hostile deadly force, but as part of the same universe his breathing was part of, Remo Williams did not skid down the rock hard ice of the White Mountains in late December.

His body, lightly covered with black mesh, moved as if it had grown on this mountain, up with each reach and press, a perfect unity that needed no stairs or ladders or ropes, the things that other bodies, softer and unused bodies, required to move up a sheer ice cliff.

He moved now up the cliff, not even thinking of his breathing. He moved because he willed it and the many years of pain and wisdom that had brought him here with the winter taste in his mouth and the

21

low moan of the spruce down below, made him a part of this universe that frightened so many men, which made others stiff of joints and, even worse, robbed them of their rhythms and of the timing that gave some men power.

Those other men had learned the wrong ways because their food was mush and their lives starved for the daily spring of survival. They had not learned that fear was like a mild hunger or a light chill. They had become unused to fear, so that from them it stole strength.