Inside, below street level, were private parking spaces, one or two out of a dozen of them occupied. From the sunken garage a large but fancy elevator very silently raised them to the floor above.
At the far end of a small, carpeted hall, another doorway was fitted with a wood-and-metal gate. This one stood open, and beyond it a luxurious though badly lighted apartment was visible. Silhouetted in the doorway was a man, very large, well-dressed, smiling at them both.
“Goodbye,” Joe said to Carol, taking her hand just briefly.
“Don’t say goodbye.” Her smile was warm.
“So long for a while, then. How about that?”
“Not even that,” she said. “You must come in for a visit.” She turned to flash the well-dressed man a merry wink.
Joe looked from one of them to the other. He wanted to smile at them but couldn’t quite. “Your father?” he asked, then realized that the man who was strolling toward them looked too young for that.
“Oh, goodness, not at all.” Carol’s green eyes danced, as if with some joke soon to be revealed. “Does the name Enoch Winter mean anything to you, Joe?”
“Enoch Winter. No.” The huge man was looming beside him now. A joke was coming. Or something was—
“Then how about—Leroy Poach?” And she giggled brightly, watching the slow progress of his reaction.
* * *
On the threshold of the luxurious apartment Carol and the giant man had laughed at him. Still laughing, the giant had reached for Joe in a leisurely, careless way. There had been nothing at all funny in the power of the grip that closed on Joe’s right arm. He had let go at once with a left hook that landed square on the other’s jaw. The only effect was a shock of pain through Joe’s fist, as if he had hit a wall. With that Carol stepped in and caught Joe by the left arm. She was still amused. Between them the two of them carried his kicking figure into the apartment as if he were an obstreperous two-year-old.
Inside, a vista of elegant though poorly lighted rooms seemed to stretch away for half a block. Carol closed a solid wood-and-metal door behind them, while the man held Joe by both arms. The man stood in front of him, grinning, daring him silently. When the girl left them, walking unhurriedly into another room, Joe tried again. Wrenching free was hopeless, clumsy though the other’s grip appeared to be. When Joe tried for a kick, the man with overwhelming power simply forced him lower. Joe’s knees buckled.
“Yeah, I know you’re a cop, sonny,” the man said, in answer to a choked-out, embarrassingly feeble protest. “I like the idea of you being one. I really do.”
He then let go of Joe’s arms so suddenly that his victim was left off balance and did a pratfall on the thick carpet. “All right, pull out the gun.” The huge man’s voice was perilously soft. “Go on.”
In eight years he’d never drawn it, except on the firing range. He was ready to use it now, except the big guy was just too willing. Some fighter’s instinct warned Joe to choose another tactic. There was a small end-table within arm’s reach, and as Joe crouched to get up he seized it by one leg. Whipping it ahead of him as he rose, he jabbed it into the giant’s face as hard as he could. He got the surprise he wanted, and felt the table connect with what ought to have been a knockout impact.
But his opponent came at him right through the blow. Again Joe scrambled backward; the table was knocked from his grasp. Now he tried in earnest to draw his gun, but the quickness of his enemy was as incredible as his strength, and again Joe’s arm was caught before his fingers could reach the holster.
This time, it seemed, the arm might in fact be twisted off—
“Stop!” the sharp command in the woman’s voice brought the torture to a halt. Joe was dropped to the floor, where he rolled helplessly for a moment, trying to verify that nothing in his arm was broken or seriously torn.
Somewhere above him, Carol lectured. “The object is to learn something from him, remember?”
“Whatta you want to learn? He’ll tell us.”
“I want him to speak to us freely, Poach. Giving little details that will be clues, though he may not realize it. And I want to waste none of his sweet blood, if we can help it.” Her voice, that had begun normally, ended in a ghastly whisper, and long before she had finished speaking, Poach had moved away. Joe, getting shakily to his feet, could see the other man’s forehead marked with an almost straight horizontal line, oozing red. Poach dabbed at his hurt with a finger, looked back at Joe with the eyes of a wounded predator.
But Carol was standing between them now, a hypodermic in her hand. “I have a little something here for you, Joe. It will only make you sleepy. Are you going to be a sensible young man and let me do it? Or are you going to try again to—”
He tried again. Ten seconds later he had a few more minor bruises, had discovered that a heavy metal ashtray made no more impression on either of his foes than knuckles did, and was being held down like an infant atop a great wooden table, a drafting or designing table of some kind, one place in the room where lights were bright. He could feel his shirt and jacket being peeled back partially from one shoulder. About all he could see from under an elbow that held his head immobilized, face down, was part of the nearest wall. What appeared to be a pair of harpoons were mounted there, crossed diagonally like fencing foils. Crude, early harpoons perhaps; even their heads were wood, or looked like wood, with pointy wooden barbs. . . .
The needle stung him in the shoulder and almost at once the world dissolved into a fog, a haze through which two pale faces hovered over Joe. One was haloed by red hair, the other blued with gun-metal stubble and blooded with a forehead crease. Both of them were made gigantic by his own helpless terror.
“Where is the old man, Joe? You know who I mean.”
He knew who she meant, all right, but nothing more. If he had, he would have told her. He had been relieved of all choice in what he said.
Carol was gentle and understanding. “If you don’t know where he is now, Joe, tell us where you saw him last.”
“That house . . . out in the country . . . the night we. . . .”
“The night Gruner was killed. Yes. And where before that?”
His mouth worked by itself. All he had to do was lie there on the table and observe the process. He mentioned the Southerland house, the parking lot of the Shores Motel, the Loop, the mausoleum in Lockwood Cemetery. . . .
“Enough,” said Carol when he started to repeat himself, and his mouth shut up at once. She turned to Poach. “That mausoleum ought to be worth a try. First, do you know where Lockwood Cemetery is? And, second, can you check it out before sunset? Do not try to meet him alone at night.”
“You tell me that about twice a day.”
“Because I don’t think you believe me, Poach. Look up the cemetery on the city map.”
“Okay, okay. Then what about the house? We got to try to get in there sometime.”
“Yes, the house too, today. If—”
“Before sunset. I know. I’m on my way.”
SIXTEEN
Sitting up in bed, Craig Walworth could feel on one side of his throat the paired coolnesses of two fresh drops of painless blood. No mirror at hand to see them in, but he knew from past experience they were so small that touching them would mark his finger with red specks barely visible.
“A couple of months ago,” he remarked, “you couldn’t have convinced me it was possible for people to really get their kicks doing this. I mean relatively normal people.”