The Dead of Winter Read online

  The Dead of Winter

  William H. Hallahan

  For Marion

  PROLOGUE: THE DAY BEFORE CHRISTMAS

  IN MEDIAS RES

  He woke up. Abruptly. Frightened.

  He raised his head from the stuffed chair and looked around the dark room. Snow—heavy snow—tapped on the two basement windows of his apartment, pushed by light, frigid air through the window grates. Black snow shadows cast by the streetlight washed down the panes. And down the rug.

  Something ominous. Something inexplicable warning him. He rolled quickly off the stuffed chair, rolled onto the floor and crept into the shadowed corner near the apartment door, away from the pale light of the street lamp.

  The old wooden clock ticked firmly, measuring without compromise. 3:40. An hour and a half to go. Under the window his suitcases bulked lumpishly.

  His eyes were just level with the sidewalk. He peered intently through the grates, through the wrought-iron railing beyond, through the thickly falling thick flakes of snow, to the street.

  The street was filling with snow, strangely top-lit by the streetlight.

  Then the street lamp went out. Suddenly, soundlessly out.

  He crept quickly to the window and pressed against the wall. An aura of blackness shambled slowly over the railing and up to his window. A form? A wraith? A billow of smoke? At his window.

  The flash came just as the window crashed and the couch-bed snorted with buckshot. A stinking odor of gunpowder rolled into the room with freezing air. The second shot was louder, deafening. Just over his head. Buckshot rattled inside the room, churning the couch and crumbling the plaster wall and laths.

  The gunman broke his gun with the sharp click of metal, ejected the empty shells, reloaded.

  The gunman fired again. The shotgun rocketed another burst into the couch, churning it into a sea of torn cotton batting. He clung desperately to the wall and the hot radiator, fighting the urgent need to cough.

  The gunman was just above his head, outside the grating. Snow blew into the room, falling on him, chilling him, stinging his bare feet. He heard a gloved hand grip a bar of the grate, a dry, leathery scraping. Eyes must be searching the room, seeking the bloodied, shredded corpse on the couch.

  He said a silent prayer, trembling, expecting a full burst of shot to tear his head to a pulp. Confiteor. Oh my God, I’m heartily sorry for having offended Thee.

  Gone. The gunman was gone—over the railing, the diminishing sound of footsteps crunching in fresh snow. The world was filled with the soft, sandy sound of falling snow grains—and the majestic tick of his clock.

  He sat in the dark and waited—waited until the clock stroked the quarter hour. He was shivering, still sick from the great fear, feeling the snow drift into the room on frigid air. He wondered how many other ears listened in dark bedrooms along the street.

  He arose and in the dark looked out on the street. The tracks were pale gray spots in the clear white snow in a luminous white world, lit by a far-distant street lamp. Tracks that led to his window and away.

  He found the phone. He lit a brief match and, by its light, dialed. He heard it ring. And ring. And ring again. Five times.

  “Hullo.”

  “You missed.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s my turn. Don’t go away.”

  “Huh?”

  He hung up.

  1

  It was the pain in his arm that woke him. But the sudden pain in his eyeballs made him shut them again. And the pain at the base of his neck prevented him from turning his head.

  Hangover? No hangover. Lyons used his left hand to pull his throbbing right arm up on his torso, and, squinting painfully with his aching eyes, he studied the crook of his arm. A large, round red bruise with a dark-red hole in the middle.

  A hypodermic-needle hole in his arm. Alarmed—violently alarmed—Lyons rolled on his side and tried to rise. The top of his head nearly exploded and he floated momentarily in blackness. He struggled again and sat up. The entire inside of his head screamed with pain—the worst head pain he’d ever experienced, rising from the base of his neck up between his ears behind his eyes. His stomach turned and wanted to vomit.

  Out in the street, through the partially opened window, the dried leaves, moved by a cold wind, scranneled in the gutter. The clock ticked.

  Lyons decided he had to puke. Clutching his throbbing arm and squeezing his eyes shut against the exploding pain in his head, he stumbled into the bathroom and let go.

  The stink of vomit filled the room. And now he had to lie down. Lie down. Get the weight off that head or die. He lay down on the floor of the bathroom. The vomit was drying on his teeth and pasting his swollen tongue to the roof of his mouth. The tiles felt cool on the back of his head. Thirst, now, was overpowering.

  He waited for strength. Then with his left hand he grabbed a fistful of hair and pulled his head up as he rose. His right arm hung at his side.

  He brushed his teeth while laying his head on the side of the sink. Then he made his weaving way back to his bed and lay down again. Slowly the room turned on a vortex and he felt as though he were slowly spinning and descending. Sinking.

  He stumbled and crawled back to the bathroom. The dry heaves. He knelt, resting his head on the cool, soothing ceramic toilet bowl.

  He studied the incredible violation of his arm. Two questions hammered rhythmically with the throbbing of his swollen brain.

  Who put it there? How did they get into a locked apartment?

  Lyons got to the office by ten. He went because he had to write a report and because he was afraid he’d die alone in his apartment. By noon he’d eaten eight aspirins. His great thirst was diminished and the pain in his head and neck had subsided to a solitary steel bar behind his eyes. Just before noon he found he could turn his eyeballs without falling over sideways.

  There was still a faint roaring in his ears.

  By his own estimate he’d consumed five quarts of water.

  He’d made no progress on the report—a marketing recommendation for the sale of work gloves through a chain of independent wholesalers. His mind was hypnotically fixed on the needle hole in his arm.

  There were two pieces of yellow paper on his desk. One with the legend: Who? Another: Why? A third paper he held in his hand, staring at it: How?

  Martians had landed, had entered his room by molecular transference and injected a syringe with Martian fluid into his arm. At the next full moon he’d grow long green ears and …

  Dan Lyons is a split personality—a reputable marketing expert sharing a body with a heroin addict.

  No. Somnambulism. No. A secret passageway in the old building … No. What happened was there’s a pin in his mattress and he had jabbed his arm on it in his sleep, rolling over. … Mistaken identity. The local pusher had given him a fix in his sleep, thinking he was one of his regulars. He had used a nine-foot-long needle that he’d thrust through one of the wrought-iron grates on Lyons’ windows. No.

  The American Red Cross was desperate for a pint of blood, and Lyons, unbeknownst to himself, has a rare, rare blood type, one drop of which can save the lives of millions. They had reached a long stick with a rope noose through the grate, got it over his head, dragged him to the window, zonked him with a mallet, then withdrawn a whole quart of blood.

  By one o’clock he decided that there was no earthly reason why anyone should want to enter a locked and bolted room and inject a hypodermic of something into the arm of a nobody named Dan Lyons. He had no big sum of money, no inheritance, no valuable family heirloom, no avowed enemies, no jilted damosels, no business opponents. He was neither important enough to anyone nor hated enough by anyone for such a bizarre attack.

&n
bsp; He went down the elevator to street level and ate a bowl of soup in a cafeteria. After that, he walked back to his office, feeling ready to write the report. It was Friday afternoon. He decided to cancel the evening poker game.

  The evening air was chilly, and the lone man who paced rapidly around the quarter-mile cinder track panted a plume of vapor.

  He was into the near turn of his seventh lap when he first saw the car that had parked on the other side of the spectator benches.

  He watched the car as he began his eighth and last lap. Then he picked up his pace as he came off the curve into the flat, increasing the length of his stride. He leaned into the far curve, held his pace, straightened up at the final flat and touched up his pace another notch. At the last curve he let the string out all the way and lifted himself into his best sprinting pace. He hit the finish, feeling his legs trembling at the limits of their performance, his lungs gasping.

  He looked at his stop watch. 11:40. Two miles. A mile in 5:50. His lungs were jerking in and out, expelling steaming air. He looked again at the car as he calculated. Two miles plus five miles plus three plus five plus two. Seventeen miles for the week. It was Friday.

  An egg-shaped figure got out of the car—an ovoid head on an ovoid body. The air from the harbor stirred the tails of his topcoat as he waddled slowly toward the runner.

  “Very nice,” he said in a loud voice. “Very nice.” He solemnly applauded with fat, slow hands. The runner stopped, and his humorless eyes watched the man stroll toward him. Wordlessly, he watched.

  “I’d like to place an order for some meat,” said the egg-shaped man. “How many muscles did you say in the human body?”

  “Over six hundred and fifty.”

  “You should know. Yep. You should know. I want some ground beef, very little gristle and no bones.”

  The runner waited.

  “Remember. No bones. Just a little ground beef.” The egg-shaped man looked at the dark scallops of perspiration that stained the neck of the sweat shirt. Then he looked at the hard muscular legs, then at the wet blond hair and face and the steaming breath. “You’ll live to be a million. I predict, Fleagle. At least a million.” He put a piece of paper in the runner’s palm. Then he strolled slowly back to his car, coattails sailing, watching a freighter standing out to sea, down the Narrows under the Verrazano Bridge.

  A cold dusk was closing over the world.

  Fleagle looked at the name and address on the piece of paper. He allowed his lips to bunch once in surprise. Then he carefully tore the paper in many small pieces and watched them flutter away in the darkening air. His breath came in a barely visible cloud as he spoke the words from the paper to himself.

  Feeling the chill penetrate, he pulled on a bright red knitted cap and set off at a fast walking pace around the track, glancing at the freighter’s slow parade.

  Six hundred and fifty muscles.

  Roger Basche drew a bead on a wildebeest, and at a range of two hundred yards, bucking a five-knot crosswind, he tucked his shot just forward of the animal’s right ear, dropping it instantly.

  In the booth of the cocktail lounge near Grand Central, he lowered his illustrating arms. “Best shot I ever made,” he said to his two auditors.

  “Roger,” said one of the two men, “you ever hunt a lion?”

  “No. No lion. No tiger. Puma, yes. In Central America. With airedales. But African lion. No.”

  The other man picked up his briefcase from the plastic leather seating. “You ever hunt the most dangerous game?”

  “Man?”

  “Yep.”

  “Only as a salesman.”

  The man issued an amused snort. “What’s the toughest game you’ve gone after?”

  Basche thought. “Poker.”

  They laughed.

  “Really,” insisted Roger Basche. “Poker. Tonight I’m playing against a man with a memory so fantastic, he’ll tell me every card I’ve held in every hand for the entire night.”

  One of the men shook his head and stood. “Train time for all the Norwalk daddies.” The other man arose also.

  “Thanks for the sodee, Roger.”

  Roger Basche nodded goodbye, then walked sideways through the crowded cocktail lounge to the cashier and opened his breast-pocket wallet, revealing a dozen credit cards in slots.

  The cashier selected one with her long, long fingernails.

  Roger Basche looked through the penthouse lounge windows straight down Manhattan to the Verrazano Bridge as a freighter sailed on a blood-red harbor in last light.

  He received his salesman’s briefcase and coat from the checkroom and walked toward the elevators.

  The most dangerous game. Interesting idea.

  The schoolroom wall was painted a dull gray. In the middle of the wall was a window. The upper half of the window was covered with a dark-green shade. From the bottom of the shade depended an O-shaped finger pull.

  Joseph Tyler, instructor in freshman philosophy, squinted one-eyed through the finger pull, just centering the freighter in the harbor in the center of the O.

  He listened and nodded. “Yes,” he said to the student. “Yes.” He shut one eye again and sighted through the ring. By moving his head, he centered the ship again in the ring reaching through the Narrows with the tide. Ready, aim, steady now. Fire.

  “Yes,” he said again. The student arose from his seat and gathered his texts.

  “Thanks, Mr. Tyler.”

  Joe Tyler nodded. Acne. The boy’s face was covered with acne, and yet he used words like “eschatology” expertly.

  Joe Tyler sighted through the ring of the finger pull again. The freighter was running before the wind with the tide in white-capped water. Smoke from the stack was torn and shredded by the wind. Tyler wondered if his Friday-night poker games were good mental training for a philosopher.

  Dan Lyons watched the freighter.

  At 4:30 the head pain was gone. So were sixteen aspirin. The bowl of soup had stayed down. But the arm was sore and difficult to move.

  He spun the platen of his typewriter thoughtfully and looked straight down Manhattan at the streaming red frosty dusk. A runaway wind wheezed around the window.

  The freighter slid seaward under the Verrazano Bridge, aided by the flume of the Narrows. He stood up and left the office for a dinner with Vince Reece.

  Vincent Reece closed all the drawers in the old wooden desk and stood up, feeling tired.

  Two hundred forty-four tired pounds on a fifty-two-year-old frame. He prodded his stomach. With a soft gut. He smoothed the top of his gray hair. And with a big bald spot. Who cares? It’s better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. It was time to meet Dan Lyons for dinner. He removed his topcoat from the hook.

  It would be a good night for a poker game.

  He tried once more to recall that bank balance. No dice.

  He folded up the New York Daily News that he’d spent several hours reading, threw a soggy toothpick into the empty wastebasket and snapped out the light. He stepped slowly down the outside stair steps, smelling the stale odors of the restaurant below. The biting chill of dusk made him button up his topcoat.

  How do you get tired sitting at a desk all day reading a newspaper?

  Couldn’t remember that bank balance even if his life depended on it. He’d have to look it up. Or look it down.

  From the alley he saw a huge freighter deep in the water, running seaward with the tide, under the Verrazano.

  Something deep in his soft gut told Vincent Reece to run for his life.

  Dan Lyons walked head down against the wind, lugging the grocery bag.

  When he reached the brownstone apartment building he shifted the heavy package and reached out to open the wrought-iron gate. Before him stood the two tall and barred windows of his basement apartment. Above them, the windows of Vince Reece’s apartment.

  He frowned at Reece’s windows. They were dark.

  Lyons lifted the drop bar of the gate, stepped down and clank
ed the gate shut. With a key he opened the grated iron door under the brownstone steps and entered the vestibule. His foot nudged the iron door shut. With another key he opened the heavy carved door that led into the basement hallway.

  He shoved the entry door shut with his foot and, pressing the bundle against the wall with his body, unlocked his door with a third key. He stepped in and dropped the bulging paper sack on the couch.

  He rubbed the pulsing soreness of his arm and wondered if it had become infected.

  He cocked his head at a slight sound. He stood there in his dark apartment, waiting. Somewhere deep in the old building a heating pipe chattered. Inside his apartment he heard the stately ticking of his pendulum wall clock. He continued to listen awhile longer, standing there in the darkness. On his rug, two squares of light from the street lamp lay, casting shadows of branches. He shrugged and turned on his light and put out a rack of poker chips plus several boxed decks of cards.

  He opened the refrigerator, eyed the bottles of beer and added a dozen more from a closet. “Booze,” he said and checked his liquor supply. He looked at the trays of ice cubes in his freezer.

  He unpacked the food in the grocery bag. No Reece yet. Odd.

  He walked over to his day bed and slowly stroked the mattress, feeling for a pin. Scratch one theory. Then he walked over to the door and unlocked the chain lock. Impossible. It was not possible to unlock that door from the hallway, undo the chain, enter, then leave and relock and rechain the door. Couldn’t be done.

  He got several boxes of pretzels out and was indifferently dumping them into a bowl when he paused again. He raised his eyes to the high old Victorian ceiling with its border of white plaster roses.

  Something scraped. In Vincent Reece’s dark apartment. Dark?

  He crossed the room, opened his apartment door, stepped along the carpeted hallway, opened the heavy door, stepped into the understairs vestibule, opened the grated door and strode outside into the pale streetlight. It was getting colder, windier. He stepped up to street level by the iron railing and looked at Vincent Reece’s first-floor windows.