Warren Murphy: The Final Death

"That's really none of your business, young lady," Vinnie said.

"Really, Daddy. I should think you would be much more respectful to this quadrant's representative from the United Federation of Planets. You're not doing much for intergalactic cooperation."

Vinnie Angus shook his head, despite the fact that he could almost see the smile on his daughter's face over the telephone. She was obsessed. Her room was filled with posters of the Star Trek crew, models of the Starship Enterprise, the Star Trek technical manual at $6.95, the Star Trek Concordance at $6.95, the Star Trek Reader, $10 in hardcover, six dolls of the Star Trek crew and one Klingon and cheap plastic replicas of the phaser, tricorder, and communicator.

"Try cooperating with this, Viki," Angus said, "I pay five thousand a semester to Yale so you can become a Trekkie?"

Victoria's voice lowered, conspiratorially. "You a spy, Daddy?"

"No. I've been doing this for years. For… for the Bureau of Agriculture."

"I never knew they had spies."

"Forget spies, will you. Here you are, 19 years old…"

"Almost 20."

"Almost 20 and you still play with Star Trek dolls. Stop it already. The show's been off for eight years."

"Nine," said Viki. "Do you know what those clicks were at the beginning and end of your call?"

"So they were taping the conversation. So what?"

"Not they, daddy. It."

"What?"

"You were talking to a computer, Daddy."

"So?"

"You don't get it, do you?"

"No," Vinnie shouted. "And I want you to forget it. You didn't hear that phone call, you don't remember it, and you won't mention it to anybody. Even your mother. Especially your mother. You understand?"

"I'm not a child, Daddy."

"As long as you love a man with pointed ears and green skin, you're a child."

Viki giggled. "Whatever you say, Daddy." She hung up.

Vinnie Angus smiled in spite of himself, thinking of the big luscious girl in tight jeans and sweater and harboring the strong suspicion that she had outgrown Star Trek a year earlier but still played at it just to annoy him. Why not? Daughters had done stranger things. Vinnie finished cleaning his weapons and after his wife had left the kitchen made two bologna-and-cheese sandwiches with pickles. He packed them in a bag with four cans of Uptown Soda, left out his red-and-black woolen hunting cap, and went to bed at 10.

The alarm buzzed at 3:58 a.m. His wife snored on as Vinnie slapped the buzzer off and got up quickly. He dressed rapidly, got his gear together, walked down the hall past Rebecca's room, the sewing room, Victoria's room, picked up his bag in the kitchen, went down the front steps, opened the garage door, started the Monte Carlo, drove off on his hunting trip, and never came back.

Parker Morgan, an old retired architect, was walking his dog, an old retired bloodhound, in the woods around his home.

He loved the trees in the winter, standing out starkly in the cold clear air. Morgan broke off a dead branch from a fallen limb and threw it with all his strength.

The dog puffed laboriously after the stick, up over a small rise and out of sight. Parker Morgan watched his own breath condense and soon the dog came back, the twig in his teeth, two white splashes of carbon dioxide puffing out his nostrils.

Morgan kneeled down and the dog planted his paws on the man's knee and stomach, waiting for the branch to be taken and thrown again. Morgan took the stick, stood up, and then frowned.

On his knee and stomach were two bright red pawprints. He looked at the dog who quivered with anticipation. The dog's four paws were red. The old architect examined the dog but could find no cut or injury.

"C'mon, boy, show me where the stick was." He started moving up the hill, the dog dancing around his side.

Morgan stopped when the hard frozen ground gave way to a patch of cold, moist earth. He touched the ground. His fingertips came up red. He smelled, then touched his tongue to his fingers, hoping desperately for the taste of berries. It was blood.

Parker Morgan stared at his hand. A small red drop splattered onto the bridge of his nose from above. He looked up in surprise, and saw trouser legs hanging down from the tree branch over his head. His eyes continued rising, until he stared into the empty sockets of the skeleton in bloody hunter's clothing.

America's quadrennial exercise in civility had just ended and the country had a new President.

All around Washington, D.C., the last few moments of the inaugural ceremonies were like a starter's pistol, marking the beginning of a string of parties that would culminate later that evening in a dozen or more formal balls.

But the new President of the United States was not yet party-bound. Instead, he sat in one of the private offices of the White House, facing the former President across a large wooden coffee table, sipping lukewarm coffee from a pair of white paper cups.

The new President was on the edge of his chair, uncomfortable because there were no aides or Secret Service men in the room. But the former President slouched back on the sofa, his feet crossed under the coffee table, his balding, moose-jawed head looking in repose for the first time the new President could remember.

"This office is yours now," the balding man said, bitterly munching a canned macaroon. "The world is yours now and you have to learn to use it."

The new President shifted a little bit, coughed, and said dully, "I'm gonna try my best." He had taken speech lessons once to get rid of the Southern accent but they hadn't taken and his speech still was marked by the soft slurred vowels of the South.

"I'm sure you will," the former President said. "We all do." He nonchalantly pulled his feet out from under the table to rest them on top of the wooden surface, but he caught the rim and overturned his container of coffee.

Some of the liquid splattered onto the rug from the table and the balding man knelt down by the couch and with his pocket handkerchief sopped up the coffee from the rug and then blotted the table dry. He threw the handkerchief in a wastepaper basket.

"You know what's going to be the nicest thing about not being President any more? It's moving into a different house where we're going to have linoleum on the floor and washable indoor-outdoor carpeting, so when I spill a frigging cup of coffee, it can be wiped up with a paper towel, and I don't have to worry about some commission telling me 10 years later that I destroyed a national rug treasure."

"I guess you didn't ask me here to talk about rugs," the new President said.

"Very perceptive," the older man said drily. "No, I didn't. You remember, in one of our debates, I said the President had to keep options open. Because he was the only one with all the information available to him?"

"What debate?" asked the new President.

"What the hell difference does it make? I don't know. The one where I made the stupid mistake and you spent all your time not answering questions. Anyway it doesn't matter. I asked to meet with you now to give you some of that inside information that only the President knows. Some of the duties of the job that you won't find out about listening to Congress or the New York Times, the bastards."

The new President sank back into the soft chair. He nodded. "Yes sir, I'm listening."

"Do you remember that convention that had all those people killed in Pennsylvania?" The former President waited for a nod. "Well, there was never any question about what killed them. They were poisoned."

"Poisoned? By whom?" asked the new President.

"I'll get to that. They weren't the first cases-either, but they were the most serious ones. Before that, for months, we were picking up reports of big groups of people getting sick. A party here. A wedding reception there. A church outing. Well, we put the medical boys on it right away, and they nailed it down quickly. It was poison. But the problem was that they didn't know what kind of poison or how it was administered."