Donald Westlake - Smoke

Sounding flabbergasted, Peter said, "For Christ's sake, David, him not identify us ? Good God, why ?"

" I don't know," David said. "I'm no lawyer."

I'd like to see these idiots, just once, Freddie admitted to himself, but he still thought there might be some value in retaining whatever night vision he might still have with all this fluorescent glare greenish-red on his eyelids, so he kept his eyes squeezed shut and his hands cupping the VDT — which was beginning to get heavy — and waited for whatever would follow from here.

Which was Peter saying, "David, where did we put those handcuffs?"

Freddie couldn't help it; his eyes popped open, night vision be damned. Scrunching up his cheeks against the sudden onslaught of fluorescents, he said, "Handcuffs! What do you people want with handcuffs?"

Meanwhile, David was saying, " What handcuffs? We don't have any handcuffs."

Peter, the tall skinny one with fuzzy black hair, answered Freddie first. "I want them for you, of course. You can't stand there holding our office equipment all night." Then, to David, he said, "From that Halloween thing. You remember."

David, the blond one with the baby fat, said, "Do we still have those?"

"Of course. You never throw anything away."

"You don't need handcuffs," Freddie said.

Peter said, "David, look in the storage closet with all the costumes, all right?"

"I'll look." David glanced at Freddie again, and back at Peter. "Will you be all right?"

"Of course. I have a gun."

"You don't need handcuffs," Freddie said.

"Be right back," David said, and left.

"You don't need handcuffs," Freddie said.

"Hush," Peter told him. "Turn to face that desk there, will you?"

So Freddie made a quarter turn, to face what was probably by day a receptionist's desk, and Peter sat at the desk, put the pistol down on top of it, and searched the drawers for forms. Freddie looked at Peter and the gun on the desk. He thought about throwing the VDT and the keyboard at Peter, or at the gun, and running for the front door. He thought Peter seemed pretty self-confident. He decided to wait and see what would happen next.

Which was, surprisingly enough, that Peter took his medical history. "Now," he said, having found the form he wanted and a pen to go with it, "I'll need your date of birth."

"Why?"

Peter looked at him. He sighed. He put down the pen and picked up the pistol and aimed it at Freddie's forehead. "Would you rather I knew your date of death?" he asked.

So Freddie told Peter his date of birth, and his record of childhood diseases, and about his parents' chronic illnesses, and what his grandparents had died of. And no, he was not allergic to penicillin or any other medicine that he knew of. He'd had no major operations.

"Drug history?" Peter asked.

Freddie clamped his mouth shut. Peter looked at him. He waited. Freddie said, "Reach for that gun all you want."

"I don't actually need to know your entire drug history," Peter acknowledged, as a clicking of handcuffs announced the return of David. "I just need to know your current status in re drugs."

"They were," David said, "in your underwear drawer."

"I've been clean over two years," Freddie said.

"Absolutely clean?"

"That's what I said, isn't it? What's going on here, anyway?"

David, jangling the handcuffs, said, "Put those things down and put your hands behind your back."

"I don't think so," Freddie said. He held tight to the VDT, ready to throw it in whatever direction seemed best. "Why don't you guys," he said, "just call the cops and quit all this fooling around?"

"There's a possibility," Peter said, seated over there at the desk, "that we won't have to call the cops at all."

Freddie squinted at him. He understood that these guys were the kind who in prison were known as faggots but who out here in the allegedly normal world preferred to be called gay, even though very few such people were even moderately cheerful. He didn't know what they wanted with him, but if it turned out that he did have some sort of honor on which they had nefarious designs, he was prepared to defend that honor with everything he had, which at the moment was a VDT and a keyboard.

David, apparently reading in Freddie's face something of his thoughts and his fears, abruptly said, with a kind of impatient sympathy, "Oh, for heaven's sake, there's nothing to worry about."

Freddie looked at him sidelong. "No?"

"No. We're not going to deflower you or anything."

Freddie wasn't sure what that word meant. "No?"

"Of course not," David said. "We're just going to experiment on you."

Freddie reared back. He very nearly tossed the VDT. "Like hell!" he said.

Rising from the desk, holding the pistol pointed alternately at David and Freddie, Peter said, "That's enough. David, you have the bedside manner of Jack the Ripper. Look, you — What's your name?"

"Freddie," Freddie said. He could give them that much.

"Freddie," agreed Peter. "Freddie," he said, "we are medical practitioners, David and me. Doctors. We are doing very valuable cancer research."

"Good."

"We are at a crossroads in our research," Peter went on, "and just this evening at dinner—"

"A dinner," David interpolated, giving Freddie a reproachful look, "which I prepared, which you interrupted, and which is now stone cold upstairs."

"Sorry about that," Freddie said.

"And not entirely relevant," Peter said, pointing the gun at David again.

"Point it at him !"

"Stop interrupting, all right, David?"

"Just point it at him."

"I'm trying to explain the situation to our friend here."

"Fine. Point the gun at him."

Peter pointed the gun at Freddie. He said, "Just this evening at dinner, we were discussing the next step in our research program, which is to test our formulae on human volunteers."

"Not me," Freddie said.

"We weren't thinking of you in particular," Peter told him, "because we didn't know you yet. We were thinking of calling our friend, the governor of the state of New York, and asking him for some prison volunteers. You know how that sort of thing works, don't you?"

As a matter of fact, Freddie did. Every once in a great while, in the pen, not often, the word would come around that some pharmacy company or the army or somebody wanted to test some shit on some people, and who would like to volunteer to drink the liquid or take the shot, in return for extra privileges or money or sometimes even early parole. There was always the guarantee that the shit was safe, but if the shit was safe why didn't they try it on people outside these prison walls?

Also, those times, they also always guaranteed they had this antidote available if anybody turned out to be allergic or something, but if they couldn't know for sure the shit itself would work how come they were always so positive the antidote would work? Anyway, Freddie had never volunteered for any of that stuff, but he knew people who had, usually long-termers, and there was always something weird happened. They gained a lot of weight, or their pee turned blue, or their hair fell out. One guy came back to the block talking Japanese, and nobody could figure out how they'd worked that on him. Sounded like Japanese, anyway.

Peter was still talking while Freddie'd been skipping down memory lane. When Freddie next tuned in, Peter was saying, "— takes so long. We'll get our volunteers, we'll run our experiments, everything will be fine, but it's just going to add six months of unnecessary delay to get the paperwork filed and the state legislature to approve and all that."

"The thing is," David said, sounding more eager than his partner, jingling the handcuffs as he talked, "the thing is, we've gone through all this bureaucratic red tape before and it's so costly in terms of time lost, and when we're talking cancer research, time lost is lives lost. You can see that, can't you?"