Karl Wagner - Why Not You and I?

Russ cursed and braked viciously to avoid the traffic stopped ahead at Malfunction Junction. Knoxville’s infamous rush hour tangle had the Interstate blocked solid ahead of them. Swerving onto the shoulder, he darted for the upcoming exit and turned toward the University section. Curtiss seemed about to bite his pipe in two.

“Stop off at the Yardarm? I don’t want to fight this traffic.” Stryker thought he could use a drink.

Safely seated in a back booth, stein of draft in hand, Curtiss regained his color. It was a favorite bar — just off the Strip section of the University area. When Stryker had first come to the area years back, it had been a traditional Rathskeller college bar. Styles had changed, and so had students. Long hair had replaced crewcuts, Zen and revolution had shoved fraternities and football from conversational standards, and there was a faint hint of marijuana discernible through the beer smell. Someone had once suggested changing the name of the Yardarm to the Electric Foreskin or some such, and had been tossed out for his own good.

Stryker didn’t care. He’d been coming here for years — sometimes having a round with his creative writing students. Now — well, if they wanted to talk football, he’d played some; if they wanted to talk revolution, he’d fought in some. The beer was good, and the atmosphere not too frantic for conversation.

His office was a block or two away — an upstairs room in a ramshackle office building only slightly less disreputable in appearance than the dilapidated Edwardian mansion turned community clinic where Russ worked. This was several blocks in the other direction, so the bar made a convenient meeting place for them. Afternoons often found the pair talking over a pitcher of beer (Knoxville bars could not serve liquor at the time), and the bartender — a huge red-bearded Viking named Blackie — knew them both by name.

“You were saying that your faith in the supernatural was fraught with skepticism,” Mandarin reminded, wiping foam from his mustache.

“No. I said it was tempered with rationality,” Stryker hedged. “That doesn’t mean I don’t believe in the supernatural. It means I examine facts with several of those famous grains of salt before I offer them to my readers.”

“I take it then you’re going to use this business today in your new book.”

Stryker nodded enthusiastically. “It’s worth a chapter, I’m certain.”

“Well, that’s your judgement, of course,” commented Mandarin, glancing at his watch. “Personally, I didn’t read any irrefutable evidence of the supernatural into all this.”

“Science scoffing under the shadow of truths inadmissible to its system of logic.” Stryker snorted. “You’re as blind in your beliefs as the old-guard priesthood holding the bastions of disease-by-wrath-of-God against the germ-theory heretics.”

“I suppose,” Russ admitted around a belch.

“But then, I forgot that you were back in Libby’s room while I was finishing up the interview with Gayle Corrington,” Stryker said suddenly. “Hell, you missed out on what I considered the most significant and intriguing part of her story. Let me read this off to you.” He fumbled for his notepad.

Mandarin had had enough of hauntings for the day. “Let me have you fill me in later,” he begged off. “I’ve got an evening clinic tonight, and I’d like to run back to the house beforehand and get packed.”

“Going out of town?”

“I need to see my high-priced lawyers in New York tomorrow.”

“That’s right. How’s that look?”

Russ frowned, said with more confidence than he felt: “I think we’ll make our case. Police just can’t burglarize a physician’s confidential files in order to get evidence for a drug bust.”

“Well, I wish you luck,” Stryker allowed. “There’s a few angles I want to check out on this business first, anyway. I’ll probably have the chapter roughed out by the time you’re back in town. Why don’t I give you a carbon then, and let you comment?”

“Fine.” Russ stood up and downed his beer. “Can I give you a lift somewhere?”

“Thanks — but I’ve got my car parked just down the block. You take it easy driving back though.”

Russ grinned. “Sure. Take it easy yourself.”

Two nights later Mandarin’s phone woke him up. Stryker hadn’t taken it easy.

Dishevelled and coatless in the misty rain, Mandarin stood glumly beside the broken guardrail. It was past 3 AM. His clothes looked slept in, which they were. He’d continued the cocktail hour that began on his evening flight from New York once he got home. Sometime toward the end of the network movie that he wasn’t really watching he fell asleep on the couch. The set was blank and hissing when he stumbled awake to answer the phone.

“Hello, Russ,” greeted Saunders, puffing up the steep bank from the black lakeshore. His face was grim. “Thought you ought to be called. You’re about as close to him as anyone Stryker had here.”

Mandarin swallowed and nodded thanks. With the back of his hand he wiped the beads of mist and sweat from his face. Below them the wrecker crew and police diver worked to secure cables to the big maroon Buick submerged there. Spotlights, red tail lights burning through the mist. Yellow beacon on the wrecker, blue flashers on the two patrol cars. It washed the brush-grown lakeshore with a flickering nightmarish glow. Contorted shadows wavered around objects made grotesque, unreal. It was like a Daliesque landscape.

“What happened, Ed?” he managed to say.

The police lieutenant wiped mud from his hands. “Nobody saw it. No houses along this stretch, not a lot of traffic this hour of night.”

An ambulance drove up slowly, siren off. Static outbursts of the two-way radios echoed like sick thunder in the silence.

“Couple of kids parked on a side road down by the lake. Thought they heard brakes squeal, then a sort of crashing noise. Not loud enough to make them stop what they were doing, and they’d been hearing cars drive by fast off and on all night. But they remembered it a little later when they drove past here and saw the gap in the guard rail.”

He indicated the snapped-off stumps of the old-style wood post and cable guard rail. “Saw where the brush was smashed down along the bank, and called it in. Investigating officer’s flashlight picked out the rear end plain enough to make out the license number. I was on hand when owner’s identification came in; had you called.”

Russ muttered something. He’d met Saunders a few years before when the other was taking Styker’s evening class in creative writing. The detective had remained a casual friend despite Mandarin’s recent confrontations with the department.

“Any chance Curtiss might have made it?”

Saunders shook his head. “Been better than a couple hours since it happened. If he’d gotten out, he’d’ve hiked it to a house down the road, flagged down a motorist. We’d have heard.”

Someone called out from the shore below, and the wrecker’s winch began to rattle. Russ shivered.

“Rained a little earlier tonight,” Saunders went on. “Enough to make this old blacktop slick as greased glass. Likely, Curtiss had been visiting some friends. Had maybe a few drinks more than he should have — you know how he liked gin in hot weather. Misjudged his speed on these slippery curves and piled on over into the lake.”

“Hell, Curtiss could hold his liquor,” Mandarin mumbled. “And he hardly ever pushed that big Buick over 35.”

“Sometimes that’s fast enough.”

The Buick’s back end broke through the lake’s black surface like a monster in a Japanese horror flick. With an obscene gurgle, the rest of the car followed. Lake water gushed from the car body and from the open door on the passenger side.