The Running Man(23)
A Wint pulled out of the space directly in front of the store and a Ford pulled in, settling to an inch above the pavement as the driver, a crewcut fellow smoking a foot-long cigar, put it in idle. The car dipped slightly as his passenger, a dude in a brown and white hunting jacket, got out and zipped inside.
Richards sighed. Counting cars was a very poor game. Fords were ahead of their nearest contender by a score of 78 to 40. The outcome going to be predictable as the next election.
Someone pounded on the door and Richards stiffened like a bolt.
"Frankie? You in there, Frankie?"
Richards said nothing. Frozen with fear, he played a statue.
"You eat shit, Frankie-baby." There was a chortle of drunken laughter and the footsteps moved on. Pounding on the next door up. "You in there, Frankie?"
Richards's heart slipped slowly down from his throat.
The Ford was pulling out, and another Ford took its place. Number 79. Shit.
The day slipped into afternoon, and then it was one o'clock. Richards knew this by the ringing of various chimes in churches far away. Ironically, the man living by the clock had no watch.
He was playing a variation of the car game now. Fords worth two points, Studebakers three, Wints four. First one to five hundred wins.
It was perhaps fifteen minutes later that he noticed the young man in the brown and white hunting jacket leaning against a lamppost beyond the bookstore and reading a concert poster. He was not being moved along; in fact, the police seemed to be ignoring him.
You're jumping at shadows, maggot. Next you'll see them on the corners. He counted a Wint with a dented fender. A yellow Ford. An old Studebaker with a wheezing air cylinder, dipping in slight cycles. A VW-no good, they're out of the running. Another Wint. A Studebaker.
A man smoking a foot-long cigar was standing nonchalantly at the bus stop on the corner. He was the only person there. With good reason. Richards had seen the buses come and go, and knew there wouldn't be another one along for forty-five minutes.
Richards felt a coolness creep into his testicles.
An old man in a threadbare black overcoat sauntered down the side of the street and leaned casually against the building.
Two fellows in tartan jumpers got out of a taxi, talking animatedly, and began to study the menu in the window of the Stockholm Restaurant.
A cop walked over and conversed with the man at the bus stop. Then the cop walked away again.
Richards noted with a numb, distant terror that a good many of the newspaper bums were idling along much more slowly. Their clothes and styles of walking seemed oddly familiar, as if they had been around a great many times before and Richards was just becoming aware of it-in the tentative, uneasy way you recognize the voices of the dead in dreams.
There were more cops, too.
I'm being bracketed, he thought. The idea brought a helpless, rabbit terror.
No, his mind corrected. You've already been bracketed.
MINUS 070 AND COUNTING
Richards walked rapidly to the bathroom, being calm, ignoring his terror the way a man on a high ledge ignores the drop. If he was going to get out of this, it would be by keeping his head. If he panicked, he would die quickly.
Someone was in the shower, singing a popular song in a cracked and pitchless voice. No one was at the urinals or the washstands.
The trick had popped effortlessly into his mind as he had stood by the window, watching them gather in their offhand, sinister way. If it hadn't occurred to him, he thought he would be there yet, like Aladdin watching smoke from the lamp coalesce into an omnipotent djinn. They had used the trick as boys to steal newspapers from Development basements. Moue bought them; two cents a pound.
He took one of the wire toothbrush holders off the wall with a hard snap of his wrist. It was a little rusted, but that wouldn't matter. He walked down to the elevator, bending the toothbrush holder out straight.
He pushed the call button, and the cage took a slow eternity to come down from eight. It was empty. Thank Christ it was empty.
He stepped in, looked briefly down the halls, and then fumed to the control panel. There was a key slot beside the button marked for the basement. The janitor would have a special card to shove in there. An electric eye scanned the card and then the janitor could push the button and ride down to the basement.
What if it doesn't work?
Never mind that. Never mind that now.
Grimacing in anticipation of a possible electric shock, Richards jammed the toothbrush wire into the slot and pushed the basement button simultaneously.
There was a noise from inside the control panel that sounded like a brief electronic curse. There was a light, tingling jolt up his arm. For a moment, nothing else. Then the folding brass gate slid across, the doors closed, and the elevator lurched unhappily downward. A small tendril of blue smoke curled out of the slot in the panel.
Richards stood away from the elevator door and watched the numbers flash backwards. When the L lit, the motor high above made a grinding sound, and the car seemed about to stop. Then, after a moment (perhaps after it thought it had scared Richards enough), it descended again. Twenty seconds later the doors slid open and Richards stepped out into the huge dim basement. There was water dripping somewhere, and the scurry of a disturbed rat. But otherwise, the basement was his. For now.
MINUS 069 AND COUNTING
Huge, rusted heating pipes festooned with cobwebs crawled crazily all over the ceiling. When the furnace kicked on suddenly, Richards almost screamed in terror. The surge of adrenaline to his limbs and heart was painful, for a moment almost incapacitating.