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Authors: Jack Fredrickson

BOOK: A Safe Place for Dying
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Maybe I didn't have to get that close. Maybe I just had to get to the wires.
I clutched the carving knife tighter in my right hand and started crouch-walking into the dark of the tunnel. As an afterthought, I reached down and picked up the duct-taped timer bomb with my left hand.
Frickin' Rambo.
The dry air stank of something acrid, something old, trapped long ago. It smelled like death. I wanted to run forward, find the wires, but he might hear me. I moved forward slowly.
Every few paces, I stopped to look back, to make sure I could still see the green light. When it came time to run, I was going to need that light.
But after twenty-five or thirty paces, the green bulb had disappeared in the darkness behind me.
A faint speck of light appeared in the darkness ahead. I moved closer. It was the same green as the bulb by the tunnel entrance, but this was softer, more diffused. When I got within fifty feet, I dropped down and started crawling on my knees and elbows, the knife still in my right hand, timer bomb in my left.
At twenty feet, I stopped. The light was coming from the left side of the tunnel ahead. I shut my eyes tight, opened them after a minute, and made out a wall straight ahead. My tunnel was dead-ending into a cross tunnel from another house.
And then I saw it, lying on the floor of the cross tunnel, to the right, directly across from the green light. I crawled forward, ten feet, five feet, and then stopped. It was a boot, a dusty, dirtclumped boot, poking out from denim jeans. It didn't move.
I set down the knife and the timer bomb and crawled forward. “Stanley,” I whispered. “Stanley.”
I shook the boot. It was rigid, immobile. I slid forward on my left side, all the way into the green light at the intersection of the cross tunnel.
White halogen light hit me from behind. In the sudden glare, the shrunken, bearded face with wild dark hair stared at me from empty eye sockets, screaming noiselessly from an open, dead mouth. His tobacco-colored flesh had pulled taut against his skull, mummified from the dry air in the tunnel. A foot below his chin, three black bullet holes had pierced his chest. Below his wounds, the yellowed T-shirt was stained with a long-dried torrent of crusted blood.
“I stopped him,” the calm voice said.
I rolled over to face the blinding light coming from his end of the cross tunnel. I couldn't see him in the glare.
But I knew the voice.
“He was no good, Mr. Elstrom.” He angled the super-white beam of the handheld spotlight off my face, down onto the cement floor ten feet in front of me, but still I could not see him.
Suddenly I was tired, bone-heavy from being too stubborn to accept what my mind had been tiptoeing around since—hell, since the beginning. I pushed myself up to sit against the wall of the tunnel, two feet from Michael Jaynes's dead foot.
“I knew him from working security those nights.” Stanley spoke conversationally, his voice almost lazy behind the light. “Michael always stayed late, checking the work, I thought, and we'd get to talking when I came by on my rounds. He was your basic liberal lefty, but he seemed like a dedicated Joe on the job, working overtime after his boys had left, making sure things were being done right. We got along.”
Clipping noises came from Stanley's end of the cross tunnel, and above my head, something stirred. I looked up. Red wires, black wires, and white and green wires were vibrating an inch below the cross-tunnel ceiling. He was snipping at those wires with a wire cutter, attaching them in some lethal combination.
“That April night in 1970,” he went on, “after I'd dropped off the ten thousand behind the restaurant, I came back to make my rounds. I got to the Phelps house, though it wasn't yet called that, and went down to check the basement. I checked all the basements those nights, for kids at first, but then extra careful after the two letters. Anyway, somebody had pulled away the concrete forms from the tunnel entrance. It was odd, because they were scheduled to seal up those entrances the next day. I looked inside the tunnel, saw a faint light from far in. I supposed it was a worker making sure everything was ready, but I figured I ought to check to be safe. I crawled inside. That's when I saw Michael, sitting right where he is now, working with some wires.”
“‘What are you doing?' I asked, thinking it was no big deal. But Michael smiled the sickest smile you'd ever hate to see, and I noticed his eyes were all sparkly. ‘Fixing things,' he said. ‘What things?' I asked. ‘They made a mess with their greed, Stanley: Vietnam, ghettos in the cities, rural poor. Everything is being bled to make rich people richer. Ordinary folks can't do much. They march, they sing their songs, and the angriest of them riot and burn. None of that stops the greed, of course, but it does make rich people nervous enough to build places like this, thinking they can protect themselves from what they created.'”
Stanley clipped faster behind the bright light. “It sounded like crap to me, Mr. Elstrom. I told Michael he was making up phony baloney just so he could get ten thousand dollars. Michael laughed at that. ‘The ten thousand is still in the Dumpster, Stanley. I'm just going to show those rich bastards they can't hide in a place like Crystal Waters. They're going to pay, more and more, but this place is still going to disappear, one house at a time. And when the last house is gone, they'll realize that no amount of money can protect them behind their fancy walls, and they'll act better.'”
The wires above my head danced.
I snuck a look down the main tunnel to Amanda's basement.
The knife I'd dropped next to the timer bomb was only a couple feet from my shoe.
“So you shot him, Stanley? Just like that, you killed him?”
“Small cluster right to the heart, as you can see.” He sighed. “He couldn't let me get away. I knew too much, and I would stop his grand plan for world peace. So yes, I shot him, and the letters and explosives I found down here afterward would have justified it.”
“But you didn't report it.” I'd have no chance if I just took off. The tunnel to Amanda's basement was too straight. He'd come to the tunnel intersection, find my back with his spotlight, and pump a few rounds into me before I was fifty feet down.
“Report it, Mr. Elstrom? Why stir up a ruckus? If this place were known to be full of D.X.12, none of the Members would have moved in. They wouldn't have gotten their money back, either, because the developers would have gone bankrupt. The town of Maple Hills would have lost, too—a sorely needed source of new income. Everybody would have lost.”
“And you would not have become security chief,” I said, while I thought about what I could do.
The snipping stopped. “I was not thinking of myself, Mr. Elstrom.” There was an edge to his voice. It was good. He was getting mad, maybe enough to distract him, from the wires, and from my legs. I'd started pulling my feet up under me.
“Of course not, Stanley.” I laid it on thick enough so he couldn't miss the derision in my voice. “Just like I'm sure you left that ten thousand in the Dumpster to get picked up as garbage.”
“I went back and retrieved the money, sure, but it's still in my garage, untouched after all these years.”
The clipping began again.
“Sounds like what you call phony baloney, Stanley,” I said to the glare. My feet were up under me, my knees high.
“I told you. Michael Jaynes was going to keep blowing things up.”
“Forget Jaynes. You're the one who reactivated his plan. For
money, Stanley. You've been planning your big score for years, thinking over every detail, right down to sending money to Nadine Reynolds, so that when you started bombing, people would think Michael Jaynes was still alive.”
“I was helping her,” he snapped from behind the light. “Michael used to tell me his girlfriend was just barely getting by. I got her name and address from his wallet, sent her what I could, every now and then.”
“That's right, Stanley, just like when you called out to Clarinda every once in a while and left Michael's name. You've been jerking Nadine Reynolds around for years, letting her go on believing Michael was going to show up someday. You're a prince of a guy, Stanley.”
“What would you have had me do? Send her a little note, telling her he was dead? You don't know, Mr. Elstrom, but it's better to live with false hope than to live with no hope at all.”
“I know one thing, Stanley. I don't believe you when you say this isn't about money.”
“I didn't say that, Mr. Elstrom. This most certainly is about money.” He paused and then said, “You heard about my son?”
“Nothing other than Anton Chernek said he died.” Slowly, I moved my hands down to the concrete floor.
“We lost him one year, seven months, seventeen days ago. He needed an operation, but the insurance said it was an experimental procedure, and they wouldn't cover it. I went to Mr. Ballsard, asked if I could get the money from my Crystal Waters life insurance. He said it was term insurance, no borrowing value. So I asked, can I borrow the money from the homeowners association? Know what Mr. Ballsard said?”
“He's a shit, Stanley.” My palms were flat on the floor now, my legs as tensed as I could get them. I started easing forward.
“He said the association wasn't a bank. All those years of watching out for the Members, of driving their kids home from the police
station after they'd been picked up drunk or goofy with dope. All those years of guarding their fancy homes when they were off on their cruises, skiing vacations, and shopping trips to London. After all that time, all he can tell me is they're not a bank?”
“So you decided to start killing people?” I'd have to grab the knife left-handed and then charge. And hope I could cut him before he could get to his gun. Or to the wires.
Above my head, the air moved.
“Nobody was supposed to die,” he yelled.
I pushed off the wall.
The spotlight swung on me; the gun flashed loudly from behind the glare. Something whispered past my ear.
I dropped to my knees. I hadn't even gotten close to the knife.
“I'd hate to shoot you, Mr. Elstrom.”
I backed up and immediately bumped the tunnel wall. I'd gotten three feet. I sat against the wall again, my ears ringing from the sound of the gunshot.
The wires began to dance again above my head.
“I like you, Mr. Elstrom. You're not from here,” Stanley said in that same maddening conversational voice.
He shifted the spotlight beam toward the floor at his end of the cross tunnel, and for the first time I saw him in profile. He was close enough to have killed me with that shot; he was only twenty feet from me, sitting under a nest of wires dangling down from the ceiling. He squinted at a blueprint on the floor.
“Yes, sir. I always liked you.”
“That's crap, Stanley. You used me to keep the Board from calling in the Feds.”
“No, sir, that was their own greed. Mr. Ballsard didn't want the federal agencies in here because word of that would get out and destroy the house values.”
“You played me for an idiot, sent me off to look for a dead man.”
He reached up to twist some wires above his head. “You didn't
want the money, Mr. Elstrom? Even though you kept saying you weren't qualified for the investigation, you didn't need that money?”
“Not bad enough to follow the wrong lead while you killed a family.”
He dropped his hands from the ceiling and turned his head abruptly toward me.
“They weren't supposed to be home.”
“Sure, you liked me, Stanley,” I said, trying to find a button, any button. “When everybody was giving up on the idea of finding Jaynes, you liked me enough to give them a new candidate: me. You passed a quiet word to Till about my background, no doubt suggesting I was prone to irrational behavior. That got him to put a tail on me. And when I told you I was coming to get Amanda's paintings, you realized I might discover the hole you'd opened up to the tunnel. Then you liked me enough to set off a cube of D.X.12 in my shed, to tighten the link between me and the bombings.”
“There was no D.X.12 in your shed, Mr. Elstrom, just a slowburning fuse and an old can of paint stripper. Your own turpentine did the rest. Agent Till thinks somebody walking along the river tossed a cigarette into your shed.”
His hands worked in the nest of wires. There couldn't be any time left.
“You'll die, Stanley. And you'll take a hundred firemen, cops, and medical techs with you.”
And Amanda. She was out there, too. But I couldn't give voice to that.
“I don't know how much that matters, Mr. Elstrom. My boy is dead. My wife is dying because she can't bear that, and I'm dead, too. All because of Crystal Waters. Michael Jaynes was right. This place must be destroyed.”
Just around the corner, next to the knife that I'd never get close enough to use, lay the timer bomb.
I started getting up then, slowly. He raised his spotlight to shine right in my eyes.
I looked away from the light. “I liked you, too, Stanley. I liked you when the lamppost blew up, when I couldn't get past the idea that the bomb had been triggered from inside Gateville. I liked you when, miracle of miracles, you came up with the name of Michael Jaynes, and I didn't think to question the sudden appearance of such a good lead. I liked you when that family got blown up, when you kept waving that Member vacation roster around, insisting they weren't supposed to be home. I liked you, Stanley, too much to take a hard look at you.”
I was on my knees. “Even tonight, I liked you, when I was badgering Amanda to tell me it was you who had hit her. She wouldn't believe that, and I didn't want to believe it, either. Because I liked you. You weren't Crystal Waters. You were a working guy, a guy carrying a load, like me.”
I was all the way up now, hunched an inch from the ceiling. “But most of all, Stanley, I liked you because you didn't put a clown hat on me last Halloween. You took me away from Crystal Waters, paid for a room at the health center because I was too drunk and too broke, and you left me with enough dignity to get through the night. I liked you for that, Stanley, and it made me blind.”
He lowered the spotlight. His right hand, his gunhand, was raised, steady and motionless, but his head was moving, up and down, like he was laughing. Or crying.
“But I don't like you enough to sit here and watch you kill a hundred people.” I turned and stepped into Amanda's tunnel, out of his sight, and stopped—to pick up the bomb. I gave the dial the slightest of twists, turned back around, and straight-armed it around the corner, toward the spotlight. Then I ran, crouched, down the tunnel toward Amanda's basement.
I remember what came next, but the remembering takes longer
than the time it must have taken. I remember the sound of my lungs wheezing in the dry, cold air, and the incredible pressure of my heart thudding in my chest as I pounded down the tunnel, hunched over like a broken man. I remember the speck of green growing in the blackness ahead of me as I got closer, and praying that it wouldn't dissolve into a flash of orange. I remember hitting the concrete wall of Amanda's basement, hard, the pain stunning me for an instant before I thought to reach up. I remember the way the ragged, chiseled cement cut into my gut as I started to pull myself over the ledge.

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