The Dark Half(58)

He slipped into the open elevator car in the last whisker of time before the door began to slide closed. One of the uniformed cops had caught a flicker of movement - perhaps the door, perhaps Stark himself, and it didn't really matter - out of the corner of his eye and raised his head from Donaldson's body.

'Hey - '

Stark raised one hand and solemnly twiddled his fingers at the cop. Bye-bye. Then the door cut off the hallway tableau.

The street-level lobby was deserted - except for the doorman, who lay comatose beneath his desk. Stark went out, turned the corner, got into a stolen car, and drove away. 2

Phyllis Myers lived in one of the new apartment buildings on the West Side of Manhattan. Her police protection (accompanied by a detective wearing Nike running pants, a New York Islanders sweat-shirt with ripped-off sleeves, and wraparound pimp shades) had arrived at half-past ten on the evening of June 6th to find her fuming over a broken date. She was surly at first, but cheered up considerably when she heard that someone who thought he was George Stark might be interested in murdering her. She answered the detective's questions about the Thad Beaumont interview which she referred to as the Thad Beaumont Shoot - while loading three cameras with fresh film and fiddling with some two dozen tenses. When the detective asked her what she was doing, she gave him a wink and said: 'I believe in the Boy Scout motto. Who knows - something might really happen.'

After the interview, outside her apartment door, one of the uniforms asked the detective, 'Is she for real?'

'Sure,' the detective said. 'Her problem is that she doesn't really think anything else is. To her, the whole world's just a photograph waiting to happen. What you got in there is a silly bitch who really believes she's always going to be on the right side of the lens.'

Now, at three-thirty on the morning of June 7th, the detective was long gone. Two hours or so before, the two men assigned to protect Phyllis Myers had gotten the news of Donaldson's murder.on the police radios clipped to their belts. They were advised to be extremely cautious and extremely vigilant, as the psyche they were dealing with had proved to be both extremely bloodthirsty and extremely quick-witted.

'Cautious is my middle name,' said Cop #1.

'That's a coincidence,' said Cop #2. 'Extremely is mine.'

They had been partners for over a year, and they got on well. Now they grinned at each other, and why not? They were two armed, uniformed members of the maggoty old Big Apple's Finest, standing in a well-lit air-conditioned hallway on the twenty-sixth floor of a brand-new apartment building - or maybe it was a condo, who the f**k knew, when Officers Cautious and Extremely were boys, a condo was something a guy with a speech impediment wore on the end of his dingus

- and no one was going to creep up on them or jump out of the ceiling on top of them or hose them down with a magic Uzi that never jammed or ran out of ammunition. This was real life, not an 87th Precinct novel or a Rambo movie, and what real life consisted of tonight was a little special duty one hell of a lot softer than riding around in a cruiser, stopping fights in bars until the bars closed, and then stopping them, until the dawn's early light, in shitty little walk-ups where drunk husbands and wives had agreed to disagree. Real life should always consist of being Cautious and Extremely in air-conditioned hallways on hot nights in the city. Or so they firmly believed.

They had progressed this far in their thinking when the elevator doors opened and the wounded blind man staggered out of the car and into the corridor. He was tall, with very broad shoulders. He looked about forty. He was wearing a torn sport-coat and pants which did not match the coat but at least complemented it. More or less, anyway. The first cop, Cautious, had time to think that the sighted person who picked the blind man's clothes must have pretty good taste. The blind man was also wearing big black glasses that were askew on his nose because one of the bows had been snapped clean off. They were not, by any stretch of the imagination, wraparound pimp shades. What they looked like were the sunglasses Claude Rains had worn in The Invisible Man.

The blind man was holding both hands out in front of him. The left was empty, just waving aimlessly. In the right he clutched a dirty white cane with a rubber bicycle handgrip on the end.

Both hands were covered with drying blood. There were maroon smears of blood drying on the blind man's sport-coat and shirt. If the two cops assigned to guard Phyllis Myers had actually been Extremely Cautious, the whole thing might have struck them as odd. The blind man was hollering about something which had apparently just happened, and from the look of him, something sure had happened to him, and not a very nice thing, either, but the blood on his skin and clothes had already turned brownish. This suggested it had been spilled some time ago, a fact which might have struck officers deeply committed to the concept of Extreme Caution as a trifle off-beat. It might even have hoisted a red flag in the minds of such officers. Probably not, though. Things just happened too fast, and when things happen fast enough, it stops mattering if you are extremely cautious or extremely reckless - you just have to go with the flow.

At one moment they were standing outside the Myers woman's door, happy as kids on a day when school is cancelled because the boiler went kaflooey; at the next, this bloody blind man was in their faces, waving his dirty white cane. There was no time to think, let alone deduce.

'Po-leeece!' the blind man was yelling even before the elevator doors were all the way open.