“And yours too, huh?” Walworth smiled, unable to concentrate enough to decide which shoes he ought to wear; this was really getting entertaining.
“He knows my name already. He’s mentioned in the news stories, by the way, as a Dr. Corday of London. He’s called himself that before.”
“Oh? So, who is he really, Al Capone?”
“I see now you would only laugh like an idiot if I tried to tell you his real name, so never mind. Among other things he is an old friend of the Southerland family. And a very old enemy of mine.”
Sitting on the bed with one sock half on, Walworth paused. “You’re telling me, in this newly devious way of yours, that it’s not an accident after all that we picked the Southerlands.”
“Not a bit of an accident.” Carol folded her arms. She was not a nurse any more; maybe the president of a company.
“Now wait a minute. The object was, we were going to look for some new kicks, right? Pick out a family and just utterly destroy them. An ultimate kick, better than just a simple killing. Right?”
“So it was presented to you at the time. So you thought you were presenting the idea to me.”
“All right, say the idea was something you conned me into. Picking the Southerlands as the target must have been at random. Winter tore a page out of the Glenlake phone book—”
“A selected page.”
“All right, say you fixed that too. Then I pinned the page up on the wall myself, and you stood clear across the room and tossed the dart. Don’t tell me you could have hit a name on purpose from that distance. Hell, you couldn’t even have seen it. You were lucky to hit the page, even.”
“I can do many things, Craig, that you would not credit as being possible. So can the old man. I think I may send Winter over, after all, when he gets back.”
“I may not let him in.”
Carol stared at him a long moment, different emotions contending in her face. Then it was as if she gave up. Fought to keep herself from dissolving in laughter, but had to yield at last. “Oh, Craig, Craig, but you are such an innocent! Haven’t you yet understood the first simple truth about me? And the man you know as Winter? We are vampires, dear. You’ve asked us both in here already. Do you think that you can now simply tell us to stay out, and we will?”
Walworth stood up in his socks. He had a growing feeling of unreality, and if he thought about it, he would have to admit that fright was growing too. “I’ve got a gun. I tell you, I’ll blow that bastard Winter’s head off, right on my own doorstep if I have to.” The police would then come down on him for sure. His connection with the kidnapping would almost certainly come out, and he would be fighting in a courtroom for his life. Somehow he had always felt sure that, sooner or later, things would come to that.
She was calm and almost pleasant again. “Go get your gun, Craig dear. Right now. I want to show you something.”
He looked his uncertainty at her.
“Oh, all right, never mind the pistol. It would probably only complicate things anyway. You’d think we had loaded it with blanks, or something. Just watch this.”
And saying that, Carol disappeared, green dress and red hair and pink skin just swirling away to nothing. Not from a position where there was anything at all to hide behind: from right in the middle of his bedroom floor.
PCP, Walworth thought at once. He’d seen the elephant tranquilizer hit like this before, with heavy hallucinations. Not on himself, of course. He’d never used it on himself. But now Carol or someone had sneaked it into his food or drink. Intending to get rid of him . . . no, not in his food, an injection, that was it. A mainliner right into the jugular, managed somehow by Carol when she was supposed to be drinking his blood. No wonder she hadn’t wanted mirrors around the bed . . .
A spring-loaded panel in the wall near the head of his bed, a movieish gadget that no one would expect to come across in real life, delivered his .38 into his hand as he reached out and pressed the wood. He was reasonably sure that neither Carol nor Winter nor the maids nor anyone else who had been in the apartment recently knew it was there; it had been installed a year ago, and he hadn’t spoken of it to any of them—not even of the gun until just now. Nevertheless he suspiciously broke the revolver’s action open, slid the faintly oily cartridges one be one out of the cylinder and weighed them in his fingers, looked at them and tamped them gently back. Firing pin was in place too. He snapped the weapon shut, ready for business. The thing looked and felt awfully functional.
From behind him, in the direction of the huge bedroom window, there sounded a brisk, light tapping, as of something very hard striking on glass. Even as Walworth turned it seemed to him that he knew already, in some nightmare-hatching inner corner of his mind, just what it was that he was going to see.
Carol’s face hovered close outside the almost unbreakable glass, twenty stories in the air. Her feet were extended toward the lake. With lightly moving arms she swam, a great smiling fish in an immense aquarium . . . then she was gone again.
“How was that?” her voice asked, once more from behind him, this time from in the room. Before turning again, he noticed that the night-backed glass showed him a half-reflection of the lighted bedroom—but not of Carol.
He spun around again then, to face her across the wide, round bed. “Bitch.” His voice was low and murderous. “You stuck me with a good one, didn’t you?”
“Stuck you?” She pretended not to understand. “I see you found your pistol. If you think it will protect you against Winter, or the old man, then fire it at me. Right now.”
She sounded too eager. Whatever her game was, he wasn’t going to play it. He shook his head. But in his anger he moved toward her. He was expecting that when he got close enough she would try to kick him where it would hurt the most. He was expecting that and ready for it. But only when he swung his arm to club her with the pistol barrel did she move, and then only to lift her arm. Her little palm caught his forearm, and it felt like he had swung at a cast-iron statue.
And almost before the pain of the impact had time to register, Carol had grabbed him by both elbows, picked him up, and spun him in mid-air like some casually victimized infant. She spun him once more, in reverse, and ended the mad ballet by throwing him contemptuously into a chair, which nearly tipped over as he landed. He sat there blinking at her stupidly, for the moment unable to do anything more.
“You utter goddamned fool,” she said, and added something in the same withering tone, but in a language he did not know. She finished up in English: “I wash my hands of you.”
His rage had reached the point where his body acted of itself. His arm came up and fired the gun point-blank. The sound reverberated, the smell of burn explosive stung his nose, the fruitwood table behind Carol leaped up against the wall and came down on its side. She stood there, icily contemptuous.
At his elbow the phone was ringing.
He debated whether to fire at her again. She waited, perhaps also debating something in her mind.
Five rings, six.
He reached out his left hand and picked it up.
Winter’s voice, rough, excited, incoherent.
Carol came near him and snatched the phone away. Walworth spun away out of his chair, not wanting her to touch him now, and afraid of what she might do if she did touch him.
“Are you sure?” she said into the phone. What she heard from it then transformed her into a goddess of victory, standing tall with head flung back. “Are—you—sure—that—it—was—him?” Her lips looked rigid, driving the words like nails into the phone.