A Long Line of Dead Men

He came in, reached automatically to switch on the overhead light, turned automatically to lock the door behind him.

I said, "Severance!"

He spun toward the sound of my voice. I had the gun raised, and as he came around to face me I aimed it at his middle and gave the trigger a squeeze. It made the sound of a small twig snapping.

He looked at me, then down at his chest. A three-inch dart hung from his T-shirt. His hand groped for it in slow motion. The fingers would not quite close on the dart. He tried, God how he tried, but he couldn't do it.

Then his eyes glazed over and he fell.

I got another dart from the case, loaded the pistol. I stood watching him for a few minutes, then bent over him to check his pulse and respiration. I had brought two sets of handcuffs and I used them both, cuffing his hands together behind his back, cuffing his feet together with the chain looped around a table leg.

I went over and picked up the phone.

32

When he woke up I was the first thing he saw. I was sitting on a folding metal chair. He was lying on a mattress atop a low plywood platform. His hands and one leg were free, but there was a thick steel cuff fastened around one ankle. A chain was attached to it, its other end anchored to a plate in the floor.

"Matt," he said. "How'd you find me?"

"You weren't that hard to find."

"I spend two hours watching dinosaurs, I walk in the door, and whammo! What did you get me with, a tranquilizer dart?"

"That's right."

"Jesus, how long was I out? Couple of hours, it must have been."

"Longer than that, Jim."

" 'Jim.' That's not what you called me just before you shot me."

"No."

"You called me another name."

"I called you Severance."

"Any point in pretending I don't know what you're talking about?"

"Not really."

"Of course if there's a tape recorder ru

"There's not."

"Because I don't remember anybody reading me my rights."

"Nobody did."

"Maybe you ought to, huh?"

"Why? You're not under arrest. You haven't been charged with anything."

"No? What are you waiting for?"

"There's not going to be a trial."

"I get it. You son of a bitch, why didn't you use a real gun? Why not get it over with?" He sat up, or started to, and noticed the chain on his leg. With the discovery came the realization that he wasn't still lying on an Oriental carpet in the Tierneys' apartment in Morningside Heights.

He said, "What's this, fucking leg irons? Where the hell am I?"

"Red Hawk Island."

"Red Hook's no island. It's just a bad part of town."

"Red Hawk, not Hook. It's a small island in Georgian Bay."

"Where the fuck is Georgian Bay?"

"In Canada," I said. "It's an arm of Lake Huron. We're a couple of hundred miles due north of Cleveland."

"You're telling me a story, right?"

"Sit up, Jim. Look out the window."

He swung his legs over the side of the bed, sat up, got to his feet. "Whew," he said, sitting down again. "Little groggy."

"That's the drugs."

He stood again, and this time he stayed on his feet. Dragging the chain, he walked over to the room's single window. "Pine trees," he said. "There's a fucking forest out there."

"Well, it's not Central Park."

He turned to face me. "What the hell is this? How'd we get here?"

"A couple of men carried you out of the Tierney apartment on a stretcher. They loaded you into the backseat of a limousine. You were driven to a private airport in Westchester County, where they transferred you to a private plane. There's a small landing strip here on Red Hawk Island, and that's where we touched down. That was around noon when we got here, twelve hours or so after you came home from the movie. It's almost five in the afternoon now. You've been kept unconscious with injections while we got everything ready for you."

"And what's this? A cabin?"

I nodded. "There's a main house and several outbuildings. This is one of the outbuildings. The floor's poured concrete, in case you were wondering, and the metal plate you're chained to is anchored solidly in it. In case you were wondering."

"Message: I ain't going nowhere."

"Something like that."

He went back to the bed and sat down on it. "Lot to go through to kill a guy," he said.

"Look who's talking."

"Huh?"

"Look at all you went through," I said, "to kill all those men. Why, Jim?"

He was silent for a moment. Then he said, "You called me Jim all along. That's the name you met me under, Jim Shorter. It's fu

"What got you started?"

"Why the hell should I tell you a fucking thing?"

"It's been a lot of years," I said. "Isn't it about time you told somebody?"

"A lot of years. I got a bunch of 'em, didn't I?"

"Yes, you did."

"I shoulda just disappeared, you know? Time I met you, I already had this place rented."

"This place?"

"Can you believe it? I think I'm still back on Manhattan Avenue. I already had it arranged to sublet Tierney's apartment. I was just waiting for them to get on the plane. Soon as that happened, goodbye Jim Shorter, hello Joel Silverman. He's a nice Jewish boy, Joel is. You know you can trust him to water your plants and not piss on your carpet." He laughed. "Then you turned up. I couldn't disappear right away, not the way I'd pla

"And one meeting changed your life."

"Yeah, right, just like those lamebrains telling their stories. All of a sudden you're calling me on the phone, I'm calling you on the phone, and how do I get you off my back and quit being Jim Shorter? First I went and did Helen in Forest Hills, because that wasn't a load of shit about having an affair with her. Widows are pretty easy targets, you know. She's not the first I got next to after I did the husband. There was a guy named Bayliss you wouldn't even know was one of mine-"

"In a hotel room in Atlanta."

"Yeah, well, I looked up the wife afterward. Same thing with Helen, such a shock discovering your husband's body, blah blah blah, next thing you know she's got her knees up and I'm slippin' her the salami. I don't know if I can explain what a pleasure it was. It's like killing the husband a second time."

"And then you killed Helen."

"I thought I could keep you from finding out. You were talking about going out to see her, so I figured I'd better see her first. Then afterward I thought, shit, even a good accident's suspicious. You got to know I'm good at doing accidents. I realized I had to pull the plug on Jim Shorter and disappear, and the hell with whether or not you figured it out. So I thought let's go out with a bang, let's be dramatic, and I got that fucking clown of a weatherman."

"Gerry Billings."

"Asshole. Chirpy little fucker with his bow ties and his million-dollar smile. The look on his face when I shot him. He bought the scene, you know. Thought it was a traffic accident and he was an i