“That could be,” Zeke had commented wryly.
Now Dr. Faulkner said, “He has undergone a change in emotional climate that has caused a deep-seated aberration. He is fearful of the quiet that has fallen suddenly on his world, and seeks escape in sleep.”
“You mean I can set off my rocket?” Mike asked.
“If that is normal procedure, yes. I would advise that you restore this household to its customary routine.”
Zeke took another look at Dr. Faulkner and hastily revised his estimate of the psychiatrist. He might have a point there.
24
At eight o’clock, Helen Jenkins sat in the bedroom rocker where she had spent most of the day. Dan and Sammy had moved a card table in and were playing poker. They spoke only in weary monosyllables, and Dan, who faced her, swept her every few seconds with his eyes. Behind the men the air conditioner rumbled and groaned uncertainly, and on an end table by the bed a radio emitted a fairly high volume of talk and music.
Shortly after breakfast they had shoved her into the bedroom, first pulling the shades. She realized then that her earlier threat to scream was futile, what with the radio and air conditioner going. And besides, one of them would be upon her almost before the scream was out.
Twice that day Dan had left the room, at noon to bring in cold cuts, and in midafternoon when he had looked up the landlady. Returning, he told Sammy, “We’re okay. She asked where we were going, and I told her San Jose . She said she was sorry to see us go, after I paid her the extra month’s rent for running out on her. Said we’d been nice, quiet tenants.”
Sammy said to her, “You hear that, Jenkins? She’s sorry to see you go.”
She offered no answer. Her earlier bravado was gone, and a deep despondency had set in. Not that she was quite whipped yet. She still had three hours, perhaps four. She still might think of a way out, although she knew she was deluding herself. She was a condemned woman on Death Row, hoping and praying for a last-minute reprieve, and hearing the quiet ticking of time as it ran out on her.
How many times that day she had glanced at the alarm by her bed she would never know. But every few minutes her eyes had been drawn in that direction by a compelling force. Time was something to squander, almost to forget in life except for the routine of arriving on a job and leaving, going to church, watching a television program. It never bad any deep significance in itself except when one was about to die.
Sammy put down his cards and said, “What’re we waiting for? She gives me the willies sitting over there, rocking, rocking, saying nothing, doing nothing.”
‘Take it easy,” Dan answered. “She’s not hurting you/’
Sammy shouted at her, “Sit still, you hear me? Cut out that rocking.”
She quit. There was no point in antagonizing him and cutting short the three hours. Or rather, now, two hours and fifty minutes.
Sammy continued, “I dont trust you, Jenkins. I’m going to put a gag on you and tie you up. Okay, Dan?”
Dan nodded.
25
The television blared full blast as Ingrid, sprawled on the floor, studied about the scrape Cromwell got into back in 1649. In one corner Mike worked with rapt concentration assembling his Telstar satellite model.
They both swung about as the front door burst open and Patti charged through it, simmering. “I just told Mrs. Macdougall in the kind of language the old hag could understand to train her interceptor ears on somebody else’s bedroom.”
She turned to Mike, “And don’t let me ever hear you call any woman an old hag, not even Mrs. Macdougall. You hear me?”
Stunned, Mike nodded. “What’d I do?” he asked Ingrid. He caught it even when he didn’t do anything. “It’s like preventive medicine,” Ingrid had remarked once. “If you get told off before you do something, it helps you.”
Well, that was the way adults thought. Crazy, crazy.
At exactly nine thirty-seven, D.C. entered the living room and sat down. He pretended to wash an ear but was actually taking reconnaissance. The scene, he noted with satisfaction, was back to bedlam. He never could understand it. People made more racket than any other animal. Yet they would yell if a cat raised his voice during love-making, or if he expressed himself during a fight, although no cat created nearly the ruckus that cars and trucks did, or television sets, planes, or squalling babies, or even the garbage disposal.
So naturally the strange quiet in the household these last two days had worried him. People were quiet only when they were sick or dying, or sometimes when they were leaving on a trip. He could always tell when they were going away. He didn’t know exactly how, but there was a different rhythm in the household.
He completed drying the ear and treaded lightly toward the front door, which he seldom used, principally because no one was usually about to provide doorman service. Tonight, though, Ingrid anticipated his wish, opened the door on cue, and even switched off the porch light. He stalked warily forth and sat on the top step, scouting the area. Slowly the night air revived him. The bedroom had been intolerably stuffy, partly due to that jerk who sneezed incessantly. He wondered how much longer he would have to put up with him. If the fellow stayed, he would move back in with Ingrid.
A couple of cars passed, and a girl hurrying home, and an old man rocking along on a cane. Satisfied, D.C. set forth, shopping once to sniff at a yellow rose that had burst into bloom only that day. He stepped gently around a snail since they messed up your feet when you squashed them, and skirted a wet spot on the grass where a leaky sprinkler dripped. After that he moved along an old trail he had blazed as a kitten, one that led mostly through two and three-foot-high timber country.
From Patti’s bedroom window Zeke watched the front entrance, and when D.C. appeared, Zeke notified all units. The temperature stood at sixty-eight degrees, and the likelihood of rain was zero. A fog, however, was expected to roll in around midnight.
Zeke hurried to the front door, which he opened a slit to watch D.C. sitting quietly on the top step. Terribly worried, Ingrid said above the television, “Please, Mr. Kelso, don’t let anything happen to him. If there’s any shooting
.”
Zeke nodded, afraid if he spoke he might alert D.C., who always reacted, and usually unfavorably, to the sound of Zeke’s voice, Mike sought to reassure Ingrid. “Don’t worry, Inky, old D.C. can get out of any kind of a scrape. There may be bodies all over the street but old D.C. will be up a tree looking down on the slaughter.”
“Mike!” Patti said in reprimand. She added softly to Zeke, “Take care of yourself.”
“Yeah,” Mike said, “flowers cost a lot of money these days. Last time we sent a funeral bouquet, cost us ten dollars, and Dad said “
“Mike!”
“What’d I do?” Mike looked around in mystification. “What’d I say?”
Zeke motioned good-by and slipped out the door. He whispered hoarsely into the transistor microphone, “All units. Informant leaving house heading west toward unit sixteen. Come in sixteen when you sight informant.”
Throughout the area every agent tensed, ready to go into action the men in the radio cars, the sound cone experts, and the scopers. At street intersections in a radius about the Randall home, agents at roadblocks stopped cars entering the neighborhood to ask the drivers to hold their speed to twenty-five miles an hour, and anyone walking a dog was turned back. At a briefing session that afternoon, the SAC had said, “We learned last night that all we need to wreck this operation is one fast car or one dog. We’ve got to control every circumstance we possibly can.”
A sound cone unit reported. “Sixteen in. We’ve got him okay. He’s moving slowly. Now stopping.”