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Authors: Frank M. Robinson

BOOK: Power, The
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He grabbed the pillow and used it as a shield when the figure lunged. The knife slashed through the pillow in a flurry of feathers and he felt a stinging in his cheek. Then he had the figure by the wrist and was bending it back to force the dropping of the knife.
The figure heeled him in the instep and he went down, still clutching grimly to the wrist that held the knife. They rolled against the bureau and he forced the wrist further back. A little more pressure and then a sudden crack and a thin, strangled scream of pain. They rolled once more, the figure trying to get its knees under his chest.
Then he had the knife and sent it skittering across the floor. When the figure started to scramble after it, he kicked it savagely in the groin. It doubled, moaning, and he yanked on the light chain.
A kid,
he thought,
a young kid .
. . Maybe nineteen, maybe twenty. A farm youngster with clean-cut features and a hard, muscular frame and ingrained dirt under his nails and in the palms of his hands. Just a farm boy.
And a fanatic. Tanner felt clammy with sweat and sick with pain and excitement. “What were you after, boy? I haven’t any money!”
The boy was in too much pain even to be sullen.
“ … didn’t want your money.”
“Then what were you after?”
The boy’s lips started to tighten into a hard, thin line. He wasn’t going to talk, Tanner thought, he wasn’t going to say a word.
His own anger caught him by surprise. He grabbed the boy by the jacket collar and held him up so that his toes were almost off the floor.
“You going to tell me, son?”
The boy started to shake his head and Tanner exploded his other hand deep into the pit of the boy’s stomach. The youth jackknifed and was abruptly sick. Tanner waited until the spasms had stopped and then lifted him again.
“Why were you trying to kill me?”
The boy didn’t answer and Tanner slapped him, hard. Hard enough to make the boy stagger against the bedstead. It was making
him
sick as well, Tanner thought.
But a moment longer and I would have been sliced like an apple.
“You going to tell me?” The boy shook his head and Tanner bit his lip and hit him once more. The boy doubled and dropped to the floor.
Tanner wiped his face with the back of his hand and swayed above the figure on the floor. He rolled the boy over with his foot and glared down at the blood-streaked face. His voice was low and flat. “I’ve been running for a week, son, and I’m tired. You either tell me why you were after me or I’ll kill you and plead self-defense. You understand that?”
The boy looked up at him, dazed. “You were asking too many questions,” he said in a choked voice. “You shouldn’t have been asking questions about Adam Hart!”
“Did Hart send you?”
The boy nodded.
Tanner looked at him contemptuously. “What do you take me for? Adam Hart hasn’t been in town for the last eight years!”
“He didn’t send me after
you!
” the boy whispered. “And he didn’t have to be in town—he told me eight years ago!”
Tanner stared at him, disbelieving, then got the picture. Adam Hart had been a cautious man. He had foreseen the possibility that some time in the future somebody might come back to his home town, looking for information.
So he had planted his booby traps, doing the delicate mental surgery that turned farm boys into deadly killers.
When they were triggered by somebody asking questions about Adam Hart.
 
THE
doctor’s name was Schwartz. He had rushed down to the clapboarded town hall which also served as a police station, took one startled look at Tanner and the boy who had tried to kill him, then hustled Tanner into a sideroom. He made him sit on the table, busied with his kit for a moment, then daubed at the dried blood on Tanner’s cheek with cotton dampened in alcohol.
“Does that hurt?”
“What do you think?”
The doctor smiled faintly. “Doctors have a litany, just like priests; it’s all part of the ritual.” He went back to his kit and found a small hypodermic and a bottle. “I better freeze it for you. You make a face and it will be hard to sew.”
A few moments later one side of Tanner’s face felt pleasantly dull and numb. “Thanks for being considerate.”
“Why not? You look like a cash customer.”
“I take it you don’t have many.”
“I could use more. Too many people out here pay off in ham hocks and home canning.” He was bending close to Tanner now, his fingers making expert passes with needle and surgical thread. “It was a knife, wasn’t it? I don’t think razors would be too popular in this town.”
Tanner jerked a thumb towards the door. “The kid out there did it, in case you were wondering.”
“So I gathered. He’s Jim Hendricks—most people in town think he’s a pretty good boy.”
“He’s very good. Particularly with a knife.”
The doctor took two more stitches and coated the cut with salve and lightly taped a strip of gauze across it.
“Be careful not to smile or frown—at least for a few days. I wish I could say it wouldn’t scar but it probably will. The cut went pretty deep.”
Tanner could already feel the pain thread back into his cheek. The doctor started to wash up at a basin in the corner. “Are you going to push charges?”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“Kids sometimes do funny things. I don’t think most people out here would want to see a boy punished for the rest of his life for something he had done on the spur of the moment.”
Tanner looked at him coldly. “Is that the way you look at it, Doctor?”
“No. But I’m afraid that’s the way a jury out here would look at it. The Hendricks boy is well liked in town, his father’s a respected member of the community—runs the feed store two blocks over.” He pulled some paper towels out of a wall rack. “You’ve got to realize that you’re a stranger. Country towns don’t care for strangers, especially those from the city. Before the trial was half over the town would have convinced itself that it was all your fault. They’d probably twist it around so they could rack you on a contributing charge.”
He crumpled up the paper towels and self-consciously potted them towards a wire wastebasket. “Why was Hendricks trying to kill you?”
Tanner’s cheek had started to throb and he felt weak. He wanted to go back to his hotel and sleep for twenty-four hours, then light out for a town that had never heard of Adam Hart or John Olson. But he realized he wouldn’t be permitted to do that. He was in the game all the way, and there was no getting out.
“Is it any business of yours?”
“No, but I can’t help being curious. Things like this don’t happen here very often.”
It might be an act, Tanner thought. Doctor Schwartz could be another booby trap that Adam Hart had left behind.
“When did you start practice in this town, Doctor?”
Schwartz looked at him intently. “Five years ago. But it would make a difference if I had been here—oh, say for more than eight years, wouldn’t it?”
Tanner said, “What do you know about him?”
Schwartz drummed his fingers on the table top. “I’m the only doctor in this town, I’m the only one they’ve had for the last five years. I know almost everything there is to know about everybody. I know all their virtues, I know all their sins. And believe me, both would fill a book.”
He brushed the sweat from a faint moustache. “I never met Adam Hart but I’m surprised how much I know about him. He must have been quite a guy. He borrowed money from everybody but so far as I can discover, he never paid it back and nobody ever pressed him to repay. They wrote it off the books and considered it an honor. For kicks, he used to start fights among the young toughs in town just to see what would happen. Nobody ever complained. If anybody else had done it, they would have been run in. When Adam Hart did it, it was just high spirits.
“That isn’t all. There were half a dozen bastard children in town at one time who could have claimed Adam Hart for a father.”
Tanner felt a little sick, thinking of a future twenty years away when there would be six Adam Harts running around. “You said ‘were’—what happened to them?”
“They were sickly kids—all of them. Nothing you could put your finger on, and nothing I could do for them. Maybe it was something in the genes, I don’t know, but they caught every childhood disease there was and they didn’t have any resistance. They died, all of them.”
Unsuccessful sports, Tanner thought. Mutations that hadn’t made the grade.
“The girls who had them didn’t care that it was out of wedlock,” Schwartz continued. “Neither did their parents. When Hart was younger he was precocious sexually and he experimented all over town—with everything and everybody. From the stories that went around, I can’t think of anything he left out. In a medical book he would have taken up a full page in Latin. Nobody ever thought it might be wrong.
For him.
”
Adam Hart had flagrantly and openly violated the taboos of human society, Tanner thought. And the members of that society had cheerfully forgiven him.
“As far as this town is concerned,” Schwartz said in a low voice, “the only citizen it ever produced worth talking about is Adam Hart. Ever since he left, Brockton’s been in an in-between state. It isn’t living and it isn’t dead. It’s just waiting. There’s a couple of other towns around here that are the same way, incidentally. Hart got around.”
“What are they waiting for?”
“For Hart to come back, of course. And some day he will.” Schwartz paused. “I sometimes wonder if Hart’s been traveling around the country.”
So a lot of other towns could get to know him, Tanner thought. It was something he hadn’t thought of before. The whole country, waiting for Adam Hart to come back …
“You’d have your man on horseback then, wouldn’t you?”
“That’s right, you would.”
Tanner slipped on his coat and started for the door.
Schwartz said, “What are you going to do when you find Hart, Professor?”
Tanner smiled faintly and the pain ticked back in his cheek. “Kill him.”
At the door, Schwartz said, “Dr. Pierce—I bought his practice just before he retired—was always going to tell me about the Hart family.”
“He never did, did he?”
“No. Six months after he retired, he had an accident. He fell down the cellar steps one night and broke his neck.”
“You so sure it was an accident?”
Schwartz hesitated. “I guess not. But if I found out for sure that it wasn’t, my life wouldn’t be worth much, would it?”
Tanner nodded. “You’re right, Doctor. It wouldn’t.”
 
HE
caught the train out of Brockton early Sunday morning. There was no sense in staying to push his case. The boy was a home-grown product, and he was a stranger. And the local judge, a man who had held the office for the last twenty years, could hardly be expected to favor him.
Adam Hart took care of his own, he thought.
The endless prairies and the low blur on the horizon that had been Brockton gradually disappeared and he felt some of the tenseness drain out of him. In many ways it had been a smart idea going to Brockton. He had learned a lot about Hart.
And it had also been the sheerest luck that he had gotten away alive.
It was an uncomfortable thought. So far he had made no move that Hart hadn’t anticipated. It was still cat-and-mouse, with himself cast in the role of the mouse. Sooner or later Hart would tire of the play, the claws would flash out, and that would be that.
The train felt hot and uncomfortable and he made a half-unconscious gesture towards his collar. In the end it would be either the pier, or life as a living-dead man, like Olson had been. A marionette.
Now he wondered if Hart was after anybody else on the committee and if not, why not? What was so special about himself?
“Nice day today, isn’t it?”
He glanced at his seat companion. A middle-aged woman, around forty-five or fifty, with graying hair and a face that wore its troubles like other women wore their lipstick. He grunted. She talked on in a sweet, determined voice.
“You get on at Brockton? That’s a real nice town. Jess does his banking there. We’ve got a little farm not too far away. Do right well, though since we’re country folks, we don’t need much.” She glanced sharply at him. “Were you in the service?”
“For a few years.”
She opened her purse and dug down among the wadded handkerchiefs and the keys and the compact that leaked powder. The photograph she came up with was just what he had expected—the boyish face beneath the overseas cap, a half smile, and a carefully retouched glint in the eyes.
“My Ralph. He was wounded in Vietnam.”
He didn’t know what to say and she stuffed the photograph away, her doughy face starching itself into a someone-will-pay expression.
“We fought that war all for nothing. Never had the right leaders …” She paused and he wondered how political she was going to get. God, he hated the type. She snapped the purse shut like she was operating a guillotine and the flesh drew tight over her cheekbones. “What we need is a leader, a strong, honest-to-goodness leader … .”
A
leader
, he thought.
Someone like Adam Hart?
It had been practically axiomatic that the human race would hate anybody or anything that was superior to it. That it would do its best to destroy it.
But would it really?
There was the very possible chance that people would welcome Adam Hart with open arms. And why not? For the last thirty years people had done nothing but play follow the leader. They were broken in, they were ripe. People were worshippers by nature. They worshipped movie stars, they worshipped athletes, they worshipped dictators.
People wouldn’t fight Adam Hart. They’d parade him down Broadway, they’d shower him with paper, they’d print his biography and buy millions of copies of it, every home would have his portrait.
What was it Marge had said?
I’m ready to build a little shrine in my living room just as soon as I know what to put in it.
“I’ve voted the straight ticket all my life … .” the woman was saying.
He sighed, bought himself a paper from the candy butcher and tried to bury himself in it. The same old news, he thought, blinking to keep awake. The same minor wars, the same tensions, the same murders and rapes and thefts—only the names had been changed, but not to protect the innocent.
Why did Adam Hart want anything to do with it?
And then he thought of the one person who might know, the innocent bystander who probably knew as much about Adam Hart as Olson himself. The one person who would know because she had been there … .
Olson’s sister.
Petey.
 
 
He dozed during the afternoon, partly because he was tired and partly because he wanted to get away from the conversation of the woman next to him. He had supper in the crowded dining car, read a few optimistic articles in a professionally optimistic magazine, and was wide awake when the train came into Chicago. It was early evening and a light fog had rolled in from the lake so the city looked like a dark, gray mass of cotton, shot through with black shadows and with a million lights glowing from the depths—lights that were yellowed and diffused by the damp fog.
The train slowed and abruptly the gray night was replaced by the brilliance of the train shed. The aisles filled with people struggling into their coats and stretching to get down their luggage from the luggage racks. He tipped down a battered aluminum suitcase for his seat companion, then pulled down his own and sat back waiting for the aisle to clear.
Outside, baggage men were driving their small trucks past the slowly moving train, porters were waiting to step aboard to help old ladies with their luggage, and a hundred people lined the concrete platform waiting for Mom and Dad or Uncle Harry and Sister Ellen.
The line started moving down the aisle and Tanner watched the people on the platform greet those getting off. The car was half empty before he noticed the two men standing on the platform, a little to the rear of the pressing group of greeters. Two men in brown business suits and conservative ties and well-shined shoes who intently inspected everybody as they got off but greeted no one. They were waiting, he thought.
For whom?
Now the aisle was almost empty. The two men outside had moved closer to the stream of people getting off. At the far end of the coach, a colored woman started to sweep down.
The palms of his hands felt wet against the upholstered arms of his seat. He didn’t know who they were or what they wanted but he was convinced it concerned him.
He made up his mind and ran to the opposite end of the car from the exit door.
“Hey, mistuh, you goin’ de wrong way!”
He brushed past her and ran into the next empty car. At the far end, he worked frantically at the door away from the platform. It swung open and he dropped the few feet to the concrete rail bed, bending his legs slightly to take up the jar.
The shed was so damned bright … .
He stood there for a brief moment in an agony of indecision. His suitcase … his clothes and his service pistol … everything he owned … left behind … .
He started running down the tracks.
“Stop that man!”
A whistle split the air of the shed. The police, he thought chaotically. For some reason they were in on it. He frantically tried to run a broken field down the rail bed.
Spang!
Cement chipped from a nearby pillar and he doubled his speed, the cool night air burning his lungs. The concrete of the rail bed showered chips once more and then he was running in cinders and he was out of the train shed. For a brief moment he was silhouetted between the fog outside and the bright lights of the shed. Something tore into the fleshy part of his thigh, almost dropping him to his knees. He staggered, then the thin tendrils of fog floated between himself and the shed and he was plunging down a cindered embankment.
The gritty cinders shredded the skin in the palms of his hands and ground into the side of his pants where he slid. He ended in a tangle of weeds and saw grass and oily water at the bottom of the slope. He lay there a moment, shaking, the greasy water seeping through his coat and shirt and crawling down his chest.
I can run for it
, he thought. But beyond the embankment there was only a well-lighted, broad avenue where he would make the perfect target.
He flattened himself out in the ditch. There were noises overhead and the slight rattle of rolling cinders as men walked along the rail bed ten feet above him. A flashlight cut through the fog and outlined a clump of ragged bushes two feet from his head. The light hovered for a second, then continued on down the track.
“I thought I saw him run on down …”
“Look for blood—I think I winged him.”
“None here. This damned fog—he must’ve gone off the side some place.”
The night was closing down and the fog was moving in thicker. The voices were a hundred yards down the track now but he knew in a moment they’d start back, watching the sides of the embankment. If he was going to leave, it would have to be now.
He got to his knees, wincing at the pain in his leg, and silently crawled the few yards to the sidewalk, taking advantage of the cover some bushes offered. The avenue beyond was a one-way street and cars were parked on the other side.
Forty feet of boulevard to cross, with no cover but the drifting fog.
He took off his shoes and felt around on the ground for a fair-sized stone. He threw it diagonally across the embankment so it clattered down the other side a good fifty feet from where he was.
“You hear it? Over here!”
“Where?”
“Down here—this side!”
The light bobbed towards him, then cut down the other side of the embankment. He stood up, crooking his arms so he held his shoes in front of him, and ran frantically across the street.
There was no sound but the soft slap of his stocking feet on the asphalt.
The cars, and then the blessed shadows … He turned south, to an alley, stopping for a moment in the darkness to wipe his hands on his trousers and probe the wound in his leg. A flesh wound that hurt like hell. He’d had a tetanus shot in preparation for the diggings in Colorado, but it would still have to be washed and bound.
He put on his shoes and cut through the alley for two blocks, then walked down to Madison Street. Skid Row, where nobody asked questions and where a man covered with blood and cinders wasn’t worth phoning the police about. He sidled through a rundown bar to the stinking washroom, scraped most of the dirt off himself, and combed his hair. The wound would have to wait until later. Washing it would start the bleeding again and he couldn’t travel through the city dripping blood.
He searched through his pockets. Half a dozen coins and a couple of bills and after that he’d have to pass the hat.
He walked back out to the bar and over to the phone booth. There was one person it was probably safe to call, though he couldn’t expect much help. He dropped in a coin and dialed.
“Hello?”
He leaned close to the mouthpiece. “Eddy? This is Bill Tanner.”
“bill!”
Deep silence for a moment. Too dead, as if somebody had put their hand over the mouthpiece. Then a jittery, almost hysterical,
“Long time no hear, pal. Where the hell are you?”
“Why are the police after me, Eddy?”
“Police? You’re kidding.”
Dead silence again, not quite muffling the sound of a door slamming. A screen door as somebody ran out to the neighbor’s to make a phone call?
“What do you mean the police are after you?”
Pause.
“Where are you?”
DeFalco had let him down at the funeral, he thought. Now he was turning him in.
“Bill? Something wrong? Why don’t you answer? Bill? Where are you?”
He had maybe five minutes before they traced his call and the police arrived. Maybe a little more than that.
He quietly clicked down the receiver and dialed again.
“Marge?”
She knew his voice but she didn’t hang up and she didn’t scream bloody murder.
“I want you to know that I’m going to call the police just as soon as you’re through talking.”
“Why are they after me, Marge?”
Her voice was dull.
“For murder.”
“Whose?”
“John Olson’s.”
“Do you believe I killed him?”
“I’m trying hard not to; I’m trying very hard.”
There was a sharp click at the other end of the line.
Hart had sicced the police on him, he thought, shaken. It wouldn’t have been difficult for Hart to forge evidence, to implant convictions that he had killed Olson. The rest of the committee members knew better but like DeFalco they had seen the handwriting on the wall and were scared to death. They were willing to go along, to throw him to the wolves … .

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