Donald Westlake - Smoke

Martin called, "Freddie? Wouldn't you like to come out now? Isn't it getting a little cold in there? We could give you towels, a robe, we have lovely terry-cloth robes, one size fits all. No? Would you like a cup of coffee? Tea? A drink? We have a nice Spanish red that might warm you if you're feeling a bit chilly. Freddie? Forgive my informality, but I don't know your last name. You're going to make yourself sick if you stay in there much longer, you really are. Trust Nurse Martin, please do. Freddie? Darn it, you know, I can see you there, the parts of you that are under water, I can see you sitting there on that step, the least you could do, I mean, it is our pool, the least you could do is give us the courtesy of an answer. Freddie? No? Oh, Freddie, this isn't going to get you anywhere but a good case of the flu."

Reluctant, saddened, Martin dropped the pool-cover edge and got to his feet. He shook his head at Peter, nearby. "He's just stubborn, Peter, he's just very very stubborn."

Peter had decided to be coldhearted; it was the only way to handle the situation that he could see. He said, "Let him stay in there as long as he wants. Let him get really exhausted down in there, and when he finally does come out he'll be that much easier to deal with."

"I suppose so," Martin said, sorry to treat a fellow human being in such a way, and a gray van came tearing around the end of the house, over the lawn, through the hedges, with a sudden blaring squawk and ruckus of horn.

"Good God!" Martin cried. "What now?"

The van drove straight for the pool, horn screaming, regardless of whatever else was in the way. "My delphiniums!" screamed Robert.

People ran toward the van, but then they turned and ran away from it, because it was not veering out of the way. And the horn of the thing just kept blaring and blaring and blaring.

"There he is!" screamed Peter, pointing at the sudden bulge that had risen up at the side of the pool cover, and then the spray of moving water drops in the air, the sudden wet footprints on the deck.

"Stop him!" a lot of people cried, and a few tried. Gerald the talent agent happened to be nearest the expanding line of wet footprints; he ran over there, arms widespread to capture the invisible man, and suddenly he went, "Whoooffff!" and doubled up, clutching his midsection.

William the screenwriter stuck out a foot in front of the advancing prints, to trip the fellow, instead of which his ankle was grabbed by a hard hand, his leg was yanked up over his head, and he was dumped ass-over-teakettle over a folding chaise longue that then folded around him like a Venus fly-trap.

Peter came running at an angle to intercept the footprints, yelling, "Freddie, listen! Freddie, listen!" until he abruptly flipped over and fell on his back. When he sat up, his nose was bleeding. "He hit me," Peter said, in utter astonishment.

Meanwhile, the van was circling around and around, as near the pool as it could get, running roughshod over all sorts of plantings, while the grim-faced young woman at the wheel kept everybody from getting too close. Then all at once she braked to a stop, which did the lawn no good, and the passenger door snapped open and shut, and the van shot away, which did the lawn even less good.

It was gone. The van was gone. Without question, the invisible man was gone. The pool was covered, the lawn and the gardens were a wreck, the guests were staggering around in filthy disarray, the hosts were furious, nobody remembered the van's license number, and Peter's nose was bleeding.

And the weekend had just begun.

46

"How are you?"

Peg waited to ask that question until after they'd bounced over a lot of shrubbery and plantings and railroad ties and pebbly Japanese gardens and a lot of other stuff all the way around to the front of the house, and then out the weaving blacktop driveway, and then the sharp squealing rattly right turn onto the dirt of Quarantine Road, with all this time Freddie somewhere in the vehicle, no telling where, probably just holding on for dear life. "How are you?" she asked, as they settled down to the more or less straight and more or less even dirt surface of Quarantine Road.

"Iiiiii' mm freezing !"

"Oh, you poor baby!"

The voice had come from the passenger seat, and sounded much frailer and weaker than Freddie's normal voice. She reached out and touched a leg, and that was cold flesh she was feeling there. Cold and clammy. "What did they do to you?"

"In the pool," he said. "Forever, Peg."

"I saw them there," she told him. Here was the end of Quarantine Road; she made the left onto County Route 14. "I got back to the house," she said, "and saw your note, and the little map you drew up, and I came up here as quick as I could."

"Th-th-thank you."

"There were all those cars parked there, and I went first to the front door, but then I saw everybody was around back, so I snuck over and saw them around the pool, and listened, and finally figured it out they had you trapped in there."

"Boy, did they."

"When we get home, you'll take a nice hot tub, and I'll grill hamburgers, how does that sound?"

"Better than anything else I heard today."

Peg drove another half mile or so before that penny dropped. When it did, she said, "Oh? You got to talk to the doctors?"

"I got to listen to them. They didn't know I was there."

"And what did they say?"

"Well, the first thing I learned," he said, and she didn't have to see a face or body language or anything like that to know he was stalling, so that bad news must be on the way here, sooner or later, "the first thing I learned, if they do talk to me, they're gonna lie to me. They said they were, they told those other guys that."

"Who were all those people?"

"I dunno, some kind of house party. I got the feeling it was like Dracula's house, you wouldn't want to go there after dark."

" You don't want to go there in the daytime. What was the other thing you learned, Freddie?"

Long silence. Very long silence. How bad could this bad news be? And then at last he said it: "Well, Peg, what they told those other guys, this situation is permanent."

She stared at the road, appalled. Out there, five drunken teenage boys, flopping around beside the road, made some hopeless attempt at hitchhiking; she didn't give them a second's thought. "Permanent?"

"What they say now," came his deeply gloomy voice, "was that the thing they told me was an antidote wasn't an antidote, so they lied to me from the very beginning, it was their other experiment, and they never figured to put those two experiments together, so they're trying to put it around it's my fault."

" Your fault! Doctors!" Peg cried, curling her upper lip, a thing she rarely did because it didn't look good on her. "Blame the patient!"

"That's it. They lied to me before about it being the antidote, and they told their pals they were gonna lie to me about it being permanent. So the only way I can trust those guys is when they don't know I'm around."

"That's probably true of all doctors," Peg said. "But what about it, Freddie? Why not get a second opinion?"

"I wouldn't trust anything they said to me."

"From a different doctor, Freddie. Have a different doctor examine you, as best he can."

"Peg, those are the guys made up those experiments, they're gonna know better than anybody else what's what with them."

Peg scrinched up her face, as though at a bad taste. "So you really think they're right, huh?"

"Well, Peg, I've had this thing a month now, with no booster shots or nothing like that. If it was gonna wear off, wouldn't it start by now?"

"I guess. Probably."