Recoil

“Strip down to your shirt-sleeves.”

“What for?”

“I want to find out if you’re bugged.”

“I’m not.”

“Want me to take your word for that?”

Pastor got out of his coat and threw it on the bed. He tossed his jacket on top of it and stepped back. He was unarmed. Inside his shirt he seemed surprisingly thin; he looked as brittle as a dead sapling.

Mathieson went through the coat and jacket carefully with especially close attention to the buttons. There were no microphones that he could find. He found nothing other than Pastor’s wallet; it contained nothing that interested him.

“Empty out your pockets. Let me have your belt.”

He proceeded methodically with everything including the shoes and shirt buttons and even the zipper of the trousers. When he was satisfied he tossed the shirt and slacks back to Pastor. “You can put them back on.”

Pastor got dressed without saying a word. Then he posted himself in the middle of the room, hands at his sides. “How many copies of that movie are there?”

“Quite a few. Benson has one. Fusco, Draper, each of the other three men you saw in the various shots.” Mathieson went to the window and looked out along the motel lot. Across the street he vaguely made out the shadow of a man inside the phone booth on the Exxon apron—Vasquez.

“You may have worked out some clever kind of trap for me,” Mathieson said. “If so, I think you should know that we’ve got your wife near here and if I don’t telephone at specific intervals to let them know I’m all right, she’ll be taken away to a place where you’ll never get her back.”

“There’s no trap. What’s your price?”

Mathieson studied him for a long time. There was no satisfaction in it but he detected the bitterness of defeat in his enemy. Finally Mathieson said, by way of a test, “You’re too calm to suit me.”

Pastor made a quarter turn on the carpet to face him squarely. His voice was utterly without tone. “I made up my mind I’d play your game. Whatever it takes to get A

“Freedom.”

“You already got that.”

“Only as long as I’ve got your wife. The real price is our freedom after you get her back.”

“You’ve got the floor.”

“We hooked her on heroin, Pastor. Your heroin, from one of your own pushers. We hooked her bad. She’s a falling-down freaked-out hopeless helpless junkie. She needs smack so bad she’d cut herself open and put her insides on exhibit if it would buy her a fix.”

In his coat pocket he gripped the Magnum but Pastor didn’t move off his stance. He blinked several times and looked at the floor.

Mathieson said, “You’ve seen some of the members of my group. On the film. There are others you’ve never seen. Do you get the point of all this?”

“Suppose you spell it out.”

“We can reach you, Pastor. You’re not impregnable. If they can assassinate presidents then people like you can be reached just as easily. Now I know about your laws of revenge. I know you can put up with the idea of an enemy who wants to kill you. What you can’t put up with is the knowledge that if anything ever happens to me or Paul Draper or John Fusco or Walter Benson, then the target for all the survivors will be not merely you personally but your wife and your two daughters and your child who’s about to be born. That’s my edge, Pastor, and that’s why we took your wife and made a junkie out of her. We did it to prove we could do it. To prove we can do it again if you force us to. All it takes is one bullet, aimed at any of us, and the rest of us will tear your family apart limb from limb. That’s the pact we’ve made among us. That’s what you’ve got to know.”

For a moment Pastor closed his eyes. Then they snapped open. “Suppose you get run over by a bus that has nothing to do with me?”

“That’s your hard luck.” Mathieson watched him warily—tried to see what was going on behind the eyes.

“Merle, everybody’s got to die.”

“I’m not offering you a way out. I’m offering you time. You can have your family as long as the four of us and our families stay alive. That’s all I’m promising. With some luck it might be twenty or thirty years. It’s more than you ever offered us.”

Pastor’s face gleamed unhealthily. He rubbed his thumb across the pads of his fingers. “When do I get her back?”

“When you see my point.”

“Hell, I see your point, Merle.”

Pastor’s face gave away nothing—not anger, not even contempt. It was too easy. Mathieson felt the need to provoke a reaction: He needed to know he’d struck bedrock. He said, “You might like to know I was the one who put Gillespie and George Ramiro out of the way.”

“Did you.”

“Don’t you care?”

“You’ll never know what I care about. What is it, Merle, you want to see me grovel? That what you want, the satisfaction? Look, you played the game and you won it. I haven’t got any surprises up my sleeve, I’m not a magician. I don’t like the way this turned out but all right, A

“I want to know I’m free of you. Now and forever. Wherever I go, whatever I choose to do. That’s what I want.”

“Merle, I’d kill you in half a second. I’ll hate you to my last breath and my grandchildren will grow up hating you and yours. And someday they’ll come for their revenge. But then you knew that before. You said it yourself—all you’re trying to buy is some time. All right, you’ve bought the time. I’ll see you around, maybe, in twenty or thirty years. In the meantime you got what you want—you’re free of me.”

Mathieson stared at him. Slowly he took it out of his pocket: the .357 Magnum. “I should have killed you after all.”

“You want to do it, do it now, get it over with.”

“George Ramiro’s gun. I could leave it here next to your corpse and they’d pin it on Ramiro.”

“You won’t use it.”

“What makes you think I won’t?”

“Because you had too much fun setting this up,” Pastor said. “Because I’m going to spend the next twenty years eating my guts out hating you and that’s why you set this whole fucking stinking thing up and you don’t figure to throw it all over for one lousy quick shot at me.”

Mathieson put the gun back in his pocket. Dismally he turned to the door. “Wait here. In a few minutes you’ll get a phone call telling you where to pick her up.”

“Sure,” Pastor said. “Good-bye, Merle.”

Mathieson walked out.

4

He got into the car and drove out of the motel. He drove two blocks and stopped in a shopping center and used the sidewalk phone. He dipped into his pocket for the number Vasquez had given him.

“Me.”

Vasquez said, “Roger and Homer are just getting into their car. They’re backing out now.”

“Pastor still inside the other room?”

“Yes. Here comes the car. I’ll go now. Give us three minutes or so. You’re in the shopping center?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t call him until you see us drive into sight.”

He broke the co

When the car rolled into the parking area he looked at it long enough to make sure all three men were in it. Then he dialed the number of the motel and said, “Mr. Johnson, please, Room Ten.”

Pastor answered the phone. “Yeah.”

“It’s Merle.”

“Go ahead.”

“One thing first. I lied about the heroin.”

“Come again?”

“We didn’t hook her on anything. The tracks on her arms are from a harmless glucose solution. She’s in perfectly good health. No addiction.”

“What the fuck are you trying to prove, Merle?”

“That we can do it to you if we have to. Any time at all. Remember it, Pastor. Write it high in letters of fire and never forget it.”