More Stories from the Twilight Zone (27 page)

“Stanley? Oh, Stanley?”

No answer.

“I've got your lunch! Hot ham and scalloped potatoes. Green beans, too. Applesauce.”

Josh padded through the living room and into the kitchen, sucking in a great breath when he saw Stanley slumped at the table, facedown next to an empty Royal Copenhagen plate.

“Put the food out for him, on the plate, nicely arranged.” It was the female reporter. She'd come up behind Josh, so quiet he hadn't heard, leaned in the doorway, and leveled a pearl-handled antique pistol at his chest. He'd seen the pistol in a display case on Stanley's desk in the den. “Do it now.”

Josh did as he was told, his fingers brushing Stanley's face; the geezer was still a little warm, hadn't been dead all that long.

“I don't understand,” Josh said. “What is—”

“Going on?” she asked. Her head bobbed, reminding Josh of a
vulture this time. “Isn't it obvious? I helped Stanley become one of his statistics . . . victim of a burglar. Crimes against the elderly are soaring, you know. His book even hinted at that. He told me yesterday that in
Statistics
a number cruncher discovers a burglary ring and later tracks a serial killer. I figure he didn't realize it, but he was writing about you and his own demise. You
do
have your own little burglary ring running, Joshua, and you
are
something of a serial killer.”

Josh stepped back from the table and looked around for a weapon. She waved the gun. He wondered if it worked.

“So you're a thief, like me, not a reporter,” he said. “A con artist. You conned Stanley into thinking you were interviewing him.”

She smiled evilly. “I
am
a reporter, and I
did
interview Stanley. The article is running in tomorrow's edition. It'll go above the fold, right over his obit, which I'll volunteer to write, too. I am a very good reporter, an investigative one. Been following the statistics myself, the deaths of elderly people in this town . . . the ones dying after eating a Meals on Wheels–delivered lunch. And then I ran across the deliveryman who sells antiques on eBay under the handle GeezerGod.”

Josh paled, his gaze darting between Stanley and the gun. Were there bullets in it? “But . . . but . . .”

“So here's how it will play out. The housekeeper will arrive later this afternoon to find Stanley poisoned at this table, having finally joined those precious statistics he thought were chasing him. And you'll be dead on the floor . . . Stanley apparently had just enough energy to shoot you before he succumbed. Easy to believe, given the statistics on home invasions and crimes against old people.”

“But . . . but . . . why?” Josh's mind whirled. Should he rush her? Should he offer her a percentage? Was she really going to shoot? Would the gun fire? Should he—

“I don't care about the knickknacks, I care about the manuscripts Stanley Rossini collected. I learned about his collection
by accident from researching him in the newspaper morgue. He collected signed, antique manuscripts worth thousands upon thousands upon thousands. And now they're mine. All of those precious, priceless manuscripts . . . along with a half-finished novel about Alfonso before he made detective. All of them out in my car, waiting for me to sell them and start a new life far from here.”

Josh took a step toward her, trembling fingers reaching for the gun.

She fired and watched him fall.

“You're just one more of Stanley's statistics,” she said, firing again.

She'd hit him twice in the chest, below his heart. He felt the blood spill down his shirt, and he tried to hold it in with his fingers. Josh fought for air and stared up at her, seeing her wipe the prints off the gun and press it into Stanley's age-spotted hand.

“And I'm just filthy rich.”

 

 

Say good-bye, if you will, to Stanley Rossini and Joshua, men who embraced numbers and percentages, two disparate souls who were poisoned by the statistics they fed on . . . in the Twilight Zone.

 

Consider the mysteries of the human heart . . . a place where time knows no bounds, where more knowledge only leads to more questions, and where the spiraling strands of existence intertwine in a fine web that captures both fate and chance. A place quite commonplace in . . . the Twilight Zone.

The bar did not seem to fit in anywhere. It had the usual local-dive trappings—a half-dozen smoke-stained televisions high on the wall, two pool tables lit by funnel-shaded lights, and a beer-stained, pockmarked dartboard in the corner. Mounted on dark walls, a sun-bleached longhorn skull and a massively antlered moose head glared portentously at one and all. A pair of 1960s blue-striped downhill racing skis hung crossed on the front of the upstairs balcony alongside a set of crisscrossed poles. Both were strewn with lacy bras suspended in a silky swoop a few feet above the stage. Against the far wall, the Internet jukebox was decked out with the chrome and glowing tubes of some ancient machine harrowed out of jukebox hell.

The polished maple bar itself spanned the room. Behind it stood a dazzling array of bottles, their backlights illuminating the liquor with an ethereal glow. Large mirrors to the rear of the bottles magnified the bar's luminosity. Various lighting devices—ranging from candles to ancient oil lamps to futuristic cylinders roiling with brilliantly lit lava—completed the mood. Two separate rows of ten beer taps were at each end of the behemoth bar.
Photographs of the neighborhood and a collection of New York City–themed visual art adorned the walls. Local patrons had contributed these artworks, and they were the only indication that this was a New York City pub.

Otherwise the bar would not have looked out of the ordinary anyplace else.

“Can we bring it back to the here and now for a second?” the smirking young female bartender yelled down the bar at a prim college girl who was reading a thick book. “Beatrice, there are live men from this century here. You and Al Hamilton need to split up.”

Beatrice Baxter, the studious history major who spent most Monday nights sitting silently immersed in a book at the end of the bar, gave the bartender the finger without looking up.

The girl did have other entertainment options besides her tome. Old-style mind games—made of twisted steel rings to untwine and wooden Peg-Boards to negotiate—festooned the forty-foot bar, while nearby a beautiful imported foosball table featured two teams of painted foosball-kicking Irishmen, who were mounted and manipulated on swivel rods and looked like soccer players.
Big Buck Hunter
and
NYPD Shootout!
arcade consoles flanked each restroom. Then there was the artwork on the walls to look at, including the old rock 'n' roll posters and photos framed by thousands of shellacked pennies . . . the photos taken at long-ago shows in other long-forgotten New York bars. If anyone had the skill, they could have hammered out tunes on the black upright piano stage-left.

Tonight, however, the joint was unsettlingly empty.

When no one was on stage, the place always felt empty. It was a Monday, and the bar could only presently afford bands on the weekends, and only when the bands drew enough fans. In short, business was slow. None of this was lost on the bartender, a fetching twentysomething with an intricate sleeve of tattoos on
her left arm, dark skinny jeans, and a tight black T-shirt that read
TROOLEY'S TOURIST TAVERN.

As she poured a beer for Beatrice Baxter, the librarian major, she noted fleetingly that her love life was as empty as the bar. God, she was bored, and Library Girl was sure as hell not about to liven things up. Beatrice spent most Monday nights—including football season Monday nights—silently immersed in a book at the end of the bar, hair wound into a loose pencil-stabbed bun, reading glasses locked on the page, her long, slender legs crossed under a modest plaid tweed skirt. Her pale cashmere button-up sweater was probably the most demure garment any woman had worn in the bar since it had opened.

“You gonna do a few straight shots and stop sulking?” the bartender asked amiably.

Beatrice looked up. “I'm not sulking, I'm studying. You're sulking, Reli.” She pronounced the bartender's name as “Really.” They both took a good long gaze around the nearly empty bar. A few construction guys were shooting pool in the back over a pitcher of cheap beer. “Not that you don't have anything to sulk about here.”

“Yeah, well . . .” Reli trailed off. Trooley's Tourist Tavern had been a downtown watering-hole staple for over a century, slinging martini-and-beer breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and power meetings to local Wall Street hotshots who wanted to pretend they were slumming. With the economy nose-diving, many were slumming for real and no longer drank there. Some of the Freedom Tower construction workers—along with a few locals and music fans—would hang out but only if a band was playing. The Pussycat Pleasure Palace strip joint around the corner had recently sucked up most of them.

“Let's do a shot,” Reli decided, “before this library turns into a morgue.” She poured two four-ounce rock-glass shots of Jack Daniels and belted hers back. Beatrice sipped hers politely.

“Would you rather have the place full of creeps,” Beatrice asked, “who sit around with one drink and try and act cool? Or who dress like bohemians and try to talk like poli-sci professors?”

“At least they'd spend some creepy money,” the bartender replied.

“I still say you should have a poetry slam,” the college kid said, putting down her book and looking Reli in the eye.

“I'm
not
going to put on some hippy-poetry-folk-coffeehouse-acoustic-contest thing. I'm not
that
desperate. This isn't the Village. This is Tribeca—this district has more money than goddamn
countries.
I just gotta get it in here.”

As she said this, a tall man entered the bar, removing an archaic homburg from his head. He hung a long, black leather Gestapo-looking trench coat on a bar chair near the entrance, unbuttoned a dark olive suit jacket and sat down. He had long sideburns, an imperial goatee, and a pointed mustache.

“What's your very best whiskey?” the man asked.

“A hipster,” Beatrice whispered.

Reli nodded her agreement, but nonetheless treated the customer to her best booze-slinging smile. After topping off the two rock glasses, she brought him a very vintage Jameson's. Absorbed in her book, Beatrice didn't even notice. She still had a lot of work left on her master's thesis on American history.

Returning to Beatrice, Reli tossed her tip on the bar. “Think Al Hamilton would have liked this in his central bank?” she asked Beatrice, who stared incredulously at the shiny gold coin in front of her. “That guy just tipped me with this. It's like he just walked out of another century.”

Beatrice examined the coin. It was a fairly heavy chunk of gold emblazoned with a picture of a mountain, the words
PIKE
'
S PEAK
on one side, and $2.50
DENVER
1860 on the other.