Warren Murphy: Sweet Dreams

But this hadn't even been a reporting job. Being told to go make an offer on the Dreamocizer to Dr. Wooley.

Crap.

Well, William Westhead Wooley had been a cleverer bastard than anyone at the network had given him credit for. He had made his deal and now he wanted to talk to no one.

So much for that. There was more than one way to skin a cat.

When she got back to the house she had taken over at the college, a young man was sitting at her kitchen table. He had light brown hair, parted in the middle, and he seemed more to be surrounded by, rather than wearing a large Army field jacket, sewn and patched in several places.

He was playing with a hand grenade which he occasionally tossed from side to side before his steel-rimmed eyeglasses.

Patti stared at him through tired eyes, then threw her arms around him.

"Well, if it isn't the world's thirty-fifth greatest assassin," she said.

"Thirty-third," said T.B. Donleavy. "Two others died last week."

He backed off from her embrace as if she were a side of beef. He was a vegetarian.

She discovered this when she offered him a portion of the bacon and eggs she cooked up for herself.

"No thanks," he said, breaking open his second pack of cigarettes of the day. "I'm a vegetarian."

As he lit the cigarette, he held the match close to the hand grenade he was still holding and Patti wanted to shriek.

"I never knew that," was all she said.

"When you're in my business, well, meat just doesn't look the same anymore."

Especially the way T.B. Donleavy carried out his business.

Patti Shea had first run across him when she was interviewing the wife of a convicted Mafia hit man. The wife, infuriated at her husband's jailing, had threatened to tell all she knew, but when Patti Shea arrived, the woman would not say a word. She just kept fondling a small greeting card that Patti Shea was able to see was signed only "T.B."

The wife's remains were uncovered three days later from the ashes of her governmentally protected building, along with the charred remains of three guards. The wife still clutched the small card in her blackened fist.

Patty Shea began to dig into the records of law enforcement agencies to try to find out who T.B. was. She discovered an Irish-American with notable credits. His education had begun on a trip home to Belfast where he became involved with the northern Ireland strife. Not on any particular side, just involved. His scorecard read five Catholics and seven Protestants, which did not include the twelve schoolchildren and four adults he got when he blew up a school to get to three visiting anti-IRA speakers.

Back in the states, he was in demand from people who appreciated his style and his impressive record. For every contract a kill. The only thing that kept him below the top rank of assassins was that for most of his kills there were no contracts.

There had been a case where Donleavy was supposed to eliminate another professional killer who had written a book on Mafia practices, and to frighten a young publisher who had expressed interest in handling the book.

T.B. waited until the two went to dinner at a French restaurant, to celebrate the New York Post's wanting to serialize the book. Donleavy showed up outside the entrance to the restaurant with a painter's tarpaulin covering a large object on his back. He waited there for two hours, smoking cigarette after cigarette, stirring cans of paint that he had stacked on the sidewalk, just out of view of the restaurant's main window.

When the budding author opened the door to leave, Donleavy pulled the tarp off the .50 caliber machine gun mounted on his back and blew the front of the restaurant off.

He ripped the man in half, nearly cut off the publisher's leg, killed a bartender, two waitresses, and three customers, wounded seven others and caused $150,000 worth of damages to the restaurant. When the smoke cleared, T.B. had gone.

When asked later about the injury to the publisher whom he was only supposed to frighten, he said: "That's about as frightened as any man can get."

Patti Shea had followed the trail of T.B. Donleavy through Ireland, New York, San Francisco, and Chicago. When she finally got to him, it was in a restaurant on New York's West Side.

She mounted her courage and told him that she had been trailing him because she was going to expose him. Donleavy laughed so loud and long, he almost choked on his V-8 juice.

"What's so funny?" she asked.

"You," he sputtered.

"What's so funny about me exposing you?"

"I work for your network," he said.

And he had. And still did.

And now he was here, in her borrowed kitchen, playing with a hand grenade and waiting for her to tell him the target.

Talking around a piece of bacon and a large hunk of gooey yellow yolk, Patti Shea described Wooley and said "He's got classes today. Right now. You can find him in the large lecture room in Fayerweather Hall."

T.B. was pulling the pin out of the hand grenade, then replacing it. Patti Shea watched his thin long fingers with fascination. Pin out, pin in, pin out, pin in.

"The hall has the college TV station in the cellar," she added as an afterthought.

"You think I'm going to do it as a TV special?" T.B. asked. He got up, slipped the grenade into his pocket, and started for the door.

"Hey," she called, bounding up after him. He turned from the door and she drew near, pressing her food-warmed body against him.

"You coming back afterwards?" she asked, holding on to the lapel of his Army jacket.

"Watch the hands," he said. "The grenade might go off."

Patti jumped back as if she had been touching a rattlesnake and Donleavy went out.

He walked casually across the campus to his car. When he reached it, he was well into his second pack of cigarettes of the day. And then the murmurs began.

Just one at first, a soft one, as if a voice was being overheard from another room. Donleavy had heard the same thing when he handled his first killing for money.

As it grew nearer the time to do the actual killing, the voice grew louder. Donleavy heard it saying, then shouting, "Kill for me."

On his second contract, there were two voices. On his fourth contract, there were eight voices. He had accidentally killed five people on that contract. He knew the voices represented all the people he had killed.

Now the voices sounded like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir without the harmony. And T.B. Donleavy didn't mind. As a matter-of fact, he liked the company. Killing was a lonely occupation.

He sat on a bed of pine needles in the warm briskness of the May morning, smoking. Cigarette ashes fell on his jacket and he ignored it. Students passed him. Some waved to him, picking him as a student because of the Army jacket and the steel-rimmed glasses. He ignored the waves. He picked his nose.

He saw an old Oriental and a young man with thick wrists walk by, talking to a middle-aged man who looked as if he had been carved from the trunk of a citrus tree.

Donleavy thought nothing about them. The voices were getting louder.

He was into his third pack of Pall Malls when he got up and went to the car. Opening the unlocked door, he pulled something from under the front seat and put it under his coat. He heard his first coherent chant of "Kill for us."

He walked toward Fayerweather Hall as the chanting grew louder. He circled the hall twice, then walked through it twice, checking exit doors and counting class rooms.

The main lecture hall was on the first floor. One class had just left, and Donleavy walked through the empty room. It had a high ceiling but no windows. There were two side doors and two exit doors in the front on either side of the blackboard. T.B. walked around the hall. He counted the seats. There were 445. He sat down in the middle of the hall, taking a seat on the left aisle.