“What kind of stuff you on, pal?” teased Big Mike with a nudge and wink at Alfreda.
Bair saw the hopelessness of trying to impress these idiots. Indeed, who would believe him in his present circumstances? That fool of a director was mad. To inflict upon a person of Bair’s intellectual eminence such a degrading experience. The man didn’t deserve to profit from Bair’s genius.
Gruffly spurning the offer of a drink, Bair flung himself off the stool and headed for the door. Some impulse caused him to glance back as he was about to escape. A pair of dark, mocking eyes gazed at him from the pool table in the corner of the bar. Bair hastily looked away, pretending he hadn’t recognized Deuce.
There had been a change in the weather. It had turned warmer, although the sky was thick with clouds, costive and grey, and sad as a grieving face. Bair couldn’t stomach the prospect of another night at the Hope of the World Mission and wandered aimlessly in the direction of the river. Where the streetlights ended, he paused indecisively and was about to turn back when a figure loomed out of the shadows.
“You lost, fella?”
Bair narrowed his eyes, recognized Deuce. “You’ve been following me!”
“You looked like a lost dog back there, man. What’s wrong? You lookin’ for a place to crash? You don’t like the beds at the Mission? Or is it the company?”
“How do you know where I’ve been sleeping?”
“Where else would you go?”
“I won’t go back there,” said Bair. “I’d rather sleep in the rough.”
“No need, man. All you had to do was gimme a ring. Come on.”
“Where?”
“I know a place. You’ll love it.”
Meekly, Bair accompanied the young man back toward the town through a twist of streets and alleys to a rundown building in an area of factories and warehouses. Deuce motioned him up the steps and through a door into a dimly lighted hallway stinking of dampness and decay. Wallpaper hung in streamers from the mildewed walls. Bair followed his guide up several flights of stairs, arriving finally at a door which opened only with a vigorous kick from Deuce’s steel-toed boots.
Bair cried out, “We’re on the roof!”
“Yeah. Up above the world so high.”
Bair recoiled at the touch of something cold and sharp against his neck. Deuce’s other hand tightened around Bair’s arm. He tried to wrench free as Deuce frog-marched him toward the roofs edge.
“Why are you doing this?” cried Bair. “What do you want from me?”
“Ain’t what I want, man. I’m just a hired hand.”
“Let me go! I’m not what you think I am.” Bair, in a panic, remembered that serial killer in-some big city — was it New York? — who preyed on derelicts. “My name is Harvey Osgood Bair. I’m a scientist. You can’t do this to me. Important people know where I am. They—”
“Wrong, baby. They’ll never find you. They’ll look for you in Chicago when you don’t come back.”
“Chicago?” What madness was this?
“That’s where the Big Man will tell them he sent you. Nobody’ll think of looking for you here.”
“But this is crazy! Why?”
“Don’t ask me, man. I guess you had something they wanted.”
“The formula?”
By now they were at the edge of the roof, the knife still pressed against Bair’s neck. A cold wind chilled the sweat on his face. As he looked down, a merciful wave of giddiness swept over him. It was hardly necessary for the young man to push him over the edge.
Fed Up
by Marie E. Truitt
Demon Lover
by Suzanne Jones
Colorado resident Suzanne Jones began writing mystery fiction in 1985. Her short tales of suspense often find the protagonists pitted not only against others, but against themselves...
Dana had forgotten the matches. She rocked back on her heels and the familiar feelings swept over her: the irritation, anxiety, self-loathing. She stared at the gas stove. How could she have forgotten the matches? How stupid of her. In her mind, she followed that twisting road down the mountain the six miles into town. She sighed and stood up from the last of the boxes she had been unpacking. There was a price for solitude. There was a price for everything. Her fingers closed on the vial of pills in her pocket, and she measured her feelings against the need for their relief. Not yet.
She thought she remembered a cabin within walking distance. She had seen a car turning into a driveway as she drove herself carefully along that steep road, looking for the place that would be her home during the summer session. She couldn’t face repeating the ordeal of that drive so soon. She would walk. It was late afternoon, but there were still too many hours between her and sleep. Besides, “Exercise is one antidote for depression.” That was her doctor, Goldman, speaking. A calm, quiet, confident voice that verged on smugness. All right. She would walk.
The air was a little cold and thin this high above the town. So clean. It pleased her to walk along the dirt road that ran along the top of a steep cliff and then between the small pines and scraggly brush, the ground beneath them still streaked with the last snow of spring. There were, besides the steady crunch of her own footsteps, the cries of birds and an occasional rustle in the brush. Not snakes, like in Texas, it was too high for them. Just some small creature, startled by her approach, as startled as she.
She saw the mailbox now with “Keller” lettered inexpertly in bold strokes on its side. Dr. Keller, she thought. She had been told the chairman of the English Department had a cabin on the mountain, a place he went to in the summers, from which he would emerge only a couple of times a week to do seminars, a place where he would work on his publications for the Modern Language Association. It wouldn’t hurt her to meet him. In fact, it was desirable. She had been accepted into the doctoral program in English, but except for her stepsister Jane, she knew no one in the department. She had been accepted largely because of James’s recommendation. James, with his clever hands and very Catholic wife and two children.
Thunderheads were starting to build over the mountain and patching the road with light and shade. There was a freshening in the air. Rain was on the way, and soon large heavy drops began to dimple the dust in the road. She hurried, reaching the front door of the cabin as it began to rain with a violence that promised to spend itself shortly. A man appeared at the door.
“Dr. Keller? I’m Dana Greystoke—”
The rain drove her against the door.
He unlatched it and pushed it open for her. He was tall and thin, late forties or early fifties, with just the appropriate amount of gray to look distinguished in his close-cut dark hair. His eyes were large and brown, and now looked at her with what she took to be irritation at her intrusion.
She glanced about the room. The fireplace was larger than the one in her cabin, and the floors were stone instead of carpeted plywood. There was a large bookcase on the wall next to the fireplace and a carton of books on the large, heavy table near the window.