Kill Me Tomorrow (26 page)

Paul interrupted my thoughts, speaking gently. “That wasn't quite all of it, Shell. Miss Brizante was telling me to have you phone her as soon as you could, but then she changed her mind—decided right then, apparently—and said it was important enough that she wanted to talk to you herself, so she was coming to Mountain Shadows. She told me she'd be here within half an hour, asked me to find you if I could and keep you at the hotel, and hung up.” He stopped for a moment. “I looked around for you until seven-thirty, assumed she must have arrived, and went downtown.”

I said, my voice so tight Paul was obviously surprised, “She told you she knew who the man was, the one in—the other house. Did she mention his name on the phone?”

“No … just said she knew who he was. Maybe she was going to tell me, but that's when she decided to come in and see you herself.” He chewed on his lower lip. “Well, you say you remember now. Did she talk to you?”

“No. She didn't make it here. She …”

I was quiet for so long that Paul said, “Shell, what's the matter? Are you all right?”

“She's dead,” I said.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“Don't be an ass,” Paul growled. “I think you got slugged on the head so hard it scrambled what few brains you had. You sit there guessing—”

“Maybe I am, but I know the whole story now, except for maybe one or two little pieces, and it's a damn well-educated guess. I just didn't know until a few minutes ago what
reason
those slobs would have to kill her—”

“Shell, no bunch of crummy hoods is going to kill Lucrezia Brizante—everybody in the country knows who she is.”

“Sure, I thought of that. You wouldn't think the bastards would grab her, either. But they did.… Wait a minute.”

I got up, walked across the room and back, over and back again. They'd put the snatch on her, hauled Lucrezia out of her car. I still had no doubt about that—and I knew now it had happened right after she'd phoned Paul. But … I recalled thinking earlier, those bums wouldn't kill Lucrezia unless they felt they
had
to take the big chance, and in addition believed they could get away with it.

And suddenly I felt, almost knew, she must be alive.

The hoods had reason enough to kill her—if not, they wouldn't have grabbed her in the first place. But they damned well knew they couldn't get away with it as long as one man was alive: me. As long as I was alive, I was the boy who could tag them for the kill. And make it stick. Not that I was much different, to those creeps, from anybody else they'd be happy to hit. Except that I knew enough—at least, almost enough—right now to rip them up.

I stopped in the middle of the room. If it was true that those crumbs wouldn't kill Lucrezia as long as I was alive, the reverse was also true. And the other side of the coin wasn't so bright: as soon as they could kill me, Lucrezia was dead. But I was damned if I was going to sit on my can while they had her.

I strode into the bedroom and grabbed the second .45 off the table, and with it in my coat pocket and the other automatic still stuck in my belt headed for the open door.

Paul said—very sweetly—“Don't you say good-bye?”

I stopped. “Good-bye. Wish me luck. See you later.”

“And where do you think you're going?”

“I'll figure that out on the way. To wherever those boys are who clanged inside here tonight. Or any one of their pals. Only this time there won't be any polite fun and games. This time I'll start by breaking an arm or two. Then a couple legs. If it's Bludgett, I may temper action with wisdom and first shoot a hole in each of his kneecaps and elbows. But I am sure as hell going to find out where Lucrezia is, and then—”

“Sheldon, I have long cherished the hope that one day you would do the sane and sensible thing. But no. Invariably you do the foolish, and possibly at last suicidal, thing.”

“Go to hell. This is the kind of thing
I
do my way.”

“Wouldn't it help, just a little, if you knew what happened during those minutes you cannot now recall?”

“You're dumber than I am. I already told you, I remember. It has all come back,
all
of it.”

“Not the time between the second Bludgett tap and your arising, like a primeval monster, from the desert ooze.”

“That, Dr. Anson, is the time during which I was totally unconscious. When tapped by Bludgett, one does not recall anything between the tap and the awakening, hours or days or weeks later. Those moments are gone, irretrievably.”

I turned toward the door. Or rather the doorway. And then stepped on the door, starting out.

“Those minutes are
not
gone irretrievably. They are
not
, as you earlier said, lost in limbo. You can recall them.” He paused. “I
am
the doctor, Sheldon. However, if you're not interested …”

I turned and blinked at him. “You can't be serious.”

“Oh, but I am.”

I just stood there. So Paul rose slowly to his feet and said, “Come on. We go to my rooms. I wouldn't want to be telling you, ‘Your fat head is getting heavy, heavy,' and discover your friends had returned.” Out he went.

I still figured he was nuts, but I followed him. In his front room I sat down while Paul rummaged in his bedroom for a minute, came back carrying two books, one in hardcover and the other a paperback. “Our experiment may proceed more speedily if I first eliminate some of your disbelief. Which is to say, your abysmal ignorance.”

He thumbed through the hardcover book. “This is one of the excellent Prentice-Hall volumes,
Self-Hypnotism
, by Leslie M. LeCron. See the bottom of page eighty-two. This other one is
The Intimate Casebook of a Hypnotist
by Arthur Ellen with Dean Jennings, a Signet Mystic Book published by the New American Library. I direct your attention, Sheldon, to … wait'll I find it … pages fifty-four and fifty-five.”

While I obediently—but still unbelieving—glanced at the first line of an already underlined passage, Paul continued, “Some other time, if your already gratifying enthusiasm continues to grow, I shall provide you with other references, both in popular and technical literature, as proof that the unconscious mind forgets nothing and, even when under anesthesia, the patient hears and remembers—subconsciously remembers, to be sure—everything said and done in his presence.”

“You're kidding.”

“More, that it records those words and actions indelibly and in exact detail, with even greater fidelity than the conscious mind. When a man is unconscious as the result of accident, anesthesia, sleep, even—I hope—being sapped on the head or bludgeoned by a Bludgett, hypnosis by probing the unconscious mind can uncover,
and bring into consciousness
, that which was said and done to him or near him. Things, by the way, which may unconsciously have been making him ill, crippling him, bugging the hell out of him—”

“You really
are
kidding.”

“Read! That is, if—I never did ask you, Shell—”

“Yeah, I can read. If I move my whole mouth.” I read the marked passages in both books. I had to admit it: maybe Paul wasn't nuts. Either that, or he was not the only cuckoo about.

Paul said, “Ah-ha, my medical training leads me to believe a modicum of intelligence is leaking into your cranial disaster. Your eyes have less of their normal dull, glazed look.”

“I still don't believe it. Paul—seriously, that bit about patients totally snoozed eavesdropping on the sawbones … you're
quite
serious?”

“Of course. I've convinced some of my fellow surgeons. Others—well, some minds you can't open with a meat-ax. These colleagues of mine continue to yak in operating rooms and, unquestionably in some cases, continue to lose patients who might have been saved if their gabby healers had kept their mouths shut.”

“You mean, say Myrtle is under anesthesia, and they're carving away on her, if a doctor or nurse says, ‘Well, we might as well finish the job, but this one's going to kick the bucket for sure,' or, ‘Ugh, lookit that, I don't know how she lived
this
long,' or, ‘Hurryitup, willya, I gotta date in twenny minutes—'”

“You have the general idea. Some, who might otherwise have survived, kick the bucket. Shall we give it a go?”

“Hypnosis?”

“Of course, hypnosis. Quit stalling.”

“Well …”

“Consider: what have you got to lose? You've already
lost
it, have you not?”

“Yeah …”

“And you have everything to gain?”

“Well … yeah …”

“So? I do need your permission.”

I glanced at my watch. It was ten-four
P
.
M
. “So … OK. You've got it. Fire away.”

“OK,” I told Paul. “Fire away. Let the great experiment begin.”

“It began. It proceeded splendidly. And it has ended.”

“You mean I've
already
been hypnotized?”

“That's right.” I noticed a portable tape recorder on the floor near him, reels still turning, a small microphone on a table between us. Paul pressed the “Stop” button.

“I gave you a posthypnotic suggestion that when I say a certain key word you'll recall everything you revealed—you were talking quite a streak, by the way—during the twenty minutes or so you were under. You're a fine subject.”

I thought of checking my watch. When I'd last noted the time—it seemed only seconds ago—it had been ten-four
P
.
M
. on the tick. Now it was ten-thirty. Twenty-six
minutes
. It shocked the hell out of me.

Paul went on, “I could simply have told you to remember everything upon awakening, of course, but—under the circumstances—if you revealed something under hypnosis which could be traumatic I intended to prepare you for the fact. Didn't want to smack you with it cold.”

“If, for example, I'd heard one of the hoods saying Lucrezia was dead?”

“Something like that.” He hastened to add, “There was
not
anything like that, however.”

It was only now beginning to sink in. “You mean, I really
remembered
? I actually talked about what those hoods said—while I was
unconscious?”

“You most certainly did, Shell. I recorded it all in case you want to listen to yourself describing what happened to you—or as insurance should you get hit on the head again, which I feel is destined. But there's no reason for you not to remember it all right now.” He paused, then said: “Watchdog.”

It was fantastic.

I was sitting there, still watching his lips move as he completed the “g” of “Watchdog,” and instantly the blankness was filled. Every moment from the time when Bludgett's fist smashed against my forehead to awakening in the mud was in my mind again—or, to me, in my mind
for the first time
. It was an almost brain-bending thought, that all of it, the sounds and voices, even
feeling
, had been in my memory, traced in pathways in my brain, all the time; there, but unknown; and now known completely, not in separate little bits and pieces which gradually formed a whole but as a solid mass that leaped into my consciousness and was simply
there
.

It was not, of course, like living it over again. But it was a remembering of something I had lived through, had experienced. Just as when you've read a book you know the middle, end, beginning, and can think of any part of it or go through it mentally from beginning to end, so could I now examine any single part of that recovered forty minutes, or relive it all in mind from start to finish.

There was much of importance that I knew now and hadn't known before. But most important, still, was: Lucrezia. They'd grabbed her, all right—but she was alive. At least, when Bludgett and Ace and Fleepo and Lucky had been talking in those forty minutes or so she had been alive.

“Interesting, isn't it?” Paul said quietly.

“That's kind of an understatement.”

“Shall I play the tape? The recording only runs a few minutes. It took much less time to tell than to live it.”

“OK. If I go over it in my head while it comes in my ears it might help pin down something that'll give me an edge. I'm going to need all the help I can get tonight.”

Paul began playing the recording of my voice again, the words I'd so recently spoken during a state of—well, whatever hypnosis is. And I began one of the most unusual and oddly disturbing few minutes of my life.

I knew the words now, but I also knew they had only minutes ago been forgotten completely. So, even though I still winced or smiled once in a while, and thought about the goddamned hoods and for scowling moments wondered how I'd be able to get the bastards, at the same time another almost bewildered part of me roamed like a stranger in the endless reaches of the mind. Strange … how very strange it was. From the words audible in the room, my spoken and tape-recorded words, and from that indelible tape of neuron and synapse and cell within the living brain—the subconscious memory of unconsciousness made conscious—I could put it all together, like a script, or a story, or dialogue and movement from a play.…

“Madre de Dios!
I think you keeled him.”

“Nah. He ain't kilt, Fleepo. He was movin' away when I hit him.”

“He for sure was
after
you hit'm. I thod he was goin' to fly clear outside through where the door was at and land—”

“Prop him up and lemme bounce him again. Turn my brains into marblecules, will he? I'll learn the bastard—”

“No—hold it!” The hard flat voice of Ace. “Don't mark him up any more.”

“Why not? We're gonna kill him, ain't we?”

“Yeah, sure. But—it's better if it looks like a simple shooting, see? Besides, we got to get the hell
out
from this joint. Letch must be outa his crappy mind makin' us come
here
to get the crud. Bludgett, pick him up. Lucky, get out to the heap and open the back door, then start her up. Fleepo, go glim around, make sure there ain't nobody watching.”