Death Wish (13 page)

“But things aren't the same as they were then, Pop. It used to be a place where you could live.”

It was a bilious tone he had never heard from Jack before; but he shook his head. “I won't run. I just won't.”

“Why the hell not? What's keeping you here?”

It was too hard to explain. He wasn't going to allow himself to be driven from his home by a pack of savages who weren't fit to wipe his shoes. But how did you say that aloud without making it sound like a corny line from an old cowboy movie?

What he said was, “Then you won't help me get a gun permit?”

“I can't, Pop. I haven't got that kind of clout.”

“And I get the feeling from you that even if you did, you wouldn't use it. You don't approve of the whole idea.”

“No. I don't. I don't think adding to the arsenal on the streets is going to help calm things down any.”

“It's too late to calm anything down,” he said. “It's about time we revived our self-respect, don't you think? Nobody should have to walk down a public street half-paralyzed by fear that somebody could come leaping out of any doorway with a switchblade knife. Human beings just shouldn't have to live that way.”

“And you think having a loaded gun in your pocket would give you back your self-respect and make you feel ten feet tall. Is that it?”

Now who sounds like bad dialogue from an old movie?
But he didn't laugh; Jack had neither the imagination nor the sense of humor to appreciate it.

Jack said, “You're kidding yourself, Pop. Have you ever even handled a pistol in your entire life?”

“I was in the Army.”

“All right, so you were in the Army. You were a clerk-typist, not a combat infantryman.”

“We still had to qualify on the range. I've handled guns.”

“Rifles. It's hardly the same thing. A handgun's a very tricky job to handle, Pop. People who don't know them very well are always blowing holes in their own knees. And what happens if you're accosted by another man with a gun? What happens when he sees your gun? Christ, you'd get your ass blown off.” Jack spread his hands and ducked his chin toward his chest. “Look, you'd better forget the whole idea. Guns aren't panaceas, Pop. Bullets never answered any questions.”

“I don't want to ask questions. I want to protect my life. What is it in this day and age that makes that simple desire so incredibly immoral and wrong?”

He gave in because Jack wasn't going to; there wasn't much point prolonging it. He knew all the arguments to which Jack would resort; he had used them all himself, in the past. And to keep pressing the point would make Jack suspicious that perhaps Paul had something more than self-defense in mind.

On the way home he asked himself exactly what he did have in mind.

Revenge, he thought. It lay curled in the back of his mind like a poison snake.

But it was a meaningless fantasy, really. The police had got nowhere; they would never get anywhere. Esther's killers were free and there wasn't a chance in the world of anyone's ever finding them. Sooner or later they would be arrested for something, but it wasn't likely this crime would ever be pinned on them. No one knew who they were and there was no way to find out. So it didn't matter, that way, whether or not you went armed in the streets; you'd never have a chance to take a shot at them. You wouldn't know them if you walked right into them.

Still, he
had
wanted a gun. Jack's advice was simple to disregard, but he did know the facts; it was a keen disappointment to find out how impossible it was to obtain a pistol license.

It was dark when he came up out of the subway. The fear settled in his bowels again when he walked the single crosstown block to West End Avenue. No one accosted him, he reached the apartment without incident; but he was covered with oily sweat.

I just don't want to feel like this, he thought. Is it so much to ask?

13

A phone rang, closer to the bed than it should have been. He blinked. The surroundings were unfamiliar and with momentary disorientation he rolled over, saw the phone and listened to it ring again. His arm reached it and tipped it off and he heard a weary female voice whine, “Seven-thirty, sir, you left a wake-up call.”

The motel. The Arizona heat just beyond the whispering air conditioner.

He ate breakfast quickly in the coffee shop and went back to the diagonally ruled parking slot in front of his room where the rent-a-car sat; the sun shot painful reflections off its chrome, the dry heat was already building toward another suffocating noon. He climbed in and started the car. The steering wheel had sun on it; its rim was almost too hot to touch. He switched on the air conditioner but the engine hadn't smoothed out and it stalled. He cursed mildly and spent a while grinding the starter before it caught again.

He had always kept his driver's license up even though he hadn't owned a car in two decades nor driven one in several years. He still felt uncomfortable behind the wheel after nearly a week on these boulevards and freeways; it was a different style of driving out here, philosophically different from the kind of dodging and diving you got used to in city taxis. There was just as much aggression here but it was a high-speed kind and they came at you blinding fast from long distances away. Tucson had a main boulevard actually named Speedway; it had a green mall down the center, palm trees and lawn, several lanes on either side—the street itself was as wide as a New York city block and the drivers seemed to have cross-country racing in mind. Miles of it were lined with sportscar showrooms and speed shops and car-washes and gas stations. Everything glittered too much; even with sunglasses he had to squint.

Williamson had told him about the series of grisly murders. They were scared here too. No place was immune any more. You thought of muggings and murders as dark city things—as if wide boulevards and low rooftops and a brass desert sun would inhibit them—but the crime rate was alarming here too and Williamson carried a revolver in the glove-compartment of his Cadillac.

Paul envied him. Two days ago he had asked where Williamson had got the gun—how he'd got a license for it.

“Well, you don't need a license to buy one. You've got to register it, of course—the federal act—but they can't refuse to sell you a gun as long as you can prove you haven't got a criminal record. Technically you're not supposed to carry a concealed weapon, and the cops enforce that if they catch you with a gun in your pocket, but I never heard of anybody getting arrested for carrying a piece in his car or keeping a gun in his house. Course you can get a concealed-weapon permit from the local cops if you really want one. Not like back East, thank God.”

They were all right-wing down here, it was Gold-water country. He hadn't lost his contempt for their attitudes on almost everything. They supported free enterprise for the poor and socialized subsidies for the rich. They insisted on your right to die if you didn't have enough money to afford expensive private medical treatment. They saw Communists behind every bush and wanted to drop Nukes on Moscow and Peking. You had a right to good transportation if you had the price of a Cadillac; Tucson had no public transportation to speak of.

But they had a hard-nosed fundamentalist attitude toward crime and he knew now they were right about that.

Jainchill's head offices occupied the top three floors of a very new high-rise building near the foothills of the mountains that loomed over the city. The building was all plastic and glass, it had all the warmth of a digital computer. He put the car in the vast parking lot and went into the lobby and felt the blast of chilled air hit him like an arctic wind after the heat outside. He pressed the elevator's depressed plastic square and watched it light up.

They had assigned a conference room to him. The long table was littered with ledgers and documents. He spent the morning alone with columns of figures; at noon he left the building and drove to the restaurant to meet George Eng for lunch. On the way he got caught in a little knot of traffic; a fool blocked his way, one of those uncertain drivers who crept through the intersection and inevitably put on a burst and squirted through the traffic just as it turned amber, leaving Paul stranded at the stoplight. He looked at his watch and chafed.

On the corner beside him stood a small shop with fishing tackle and bicycles and guns in the display window. Hunting rifles, shotguns, more varieties of handguns than he had ever thought existed. He stared at them.

A horn blared behind him. The light had changed. He drove across the intersection, craning his neck to find the street signs. He couldn't see them. The idiot behind him blatted again and he drove on, never having found out what cross-street it had been. But he knew he was on Fourth Avenue; he'd be able to find it again. He dipped down into the sudden dimness of the railroad underpass and when he emerged from it he began to look for a place to park.

“The shrimp's pretty good here. It's Guaymas shrimp, they fly it up here fresh.”

“I bow to the wisdom of the East,” Paul said and closed the menu.

George Eng smiled at the little joke and gave the order to the hovering waiter. When they had been left alone at the table with their drinks he said to Paul, “How's it going?”

“Steady and tiresome. I haven't found anything shocking.”

“Kind of hoped you wouldn't.” George Eng was fleshy around the face and his movements were those of a heavy man but he was not overweight. Paul had only met him within the past year; he assumed Eng had done a good deal of dieting in the recent past but hadn't yet got used to being slender. He had a thin feathering of dark hair and a self-conscious Fu Manchu moustache that lent his Oriental features a sinister appearance. He had been born in Hawaii into a wealthy family; he had no discernible accent. He dressed with conservative care and had expensive tastes; he was a good businessman with a quick decisive mind. Paul had met him only at business affairs and gatherings associated with business—cocktail parties, luncheons. He knew nothing about the man outside of that context; Eng was a private person, he didn't open up. It had been months before Paul had screwed up the nerve to crack mild and inoffensive Oriental jokes at him, and he'd only started because it had become evident that Eng expected it and enjoyed it. He played the role of Chinese man-of-mystery with deliberate intent.

It was the sort of restaurant that did most of its business at the noon hour and attracted a business-lunch clientele of the kind that didn't stint on expense accounts: The drinks were generous, the menu straightforward but served with a proper elegance, and the tables were separated by pillars and rubber plants and discreet distances. The lighting was recessed and indirect but you didn't have to strain your eyes to read your partner's expressions.

“All right,” George Eng said, “let's wheel and deal. You've been at it all week. What can you tell me?”

“It's pretty much what we expected. Nothing alarming. Naturally they've done everything they can to put the company in the best light—they've seen you coming, for quite some time.”

“In a way we did that on purpose. Wanted to see how much skulduggery their management was willing to indulge in. We've given them ample opportunity to show their true colors, don't you think?”

“I'd say so, yes.”

“And what
are
their true colors?”

“I'd call it pale gray,” Paul said. “You've already seen the routine posting-and-footing audit; that was done back in New York with electronic data-processing. We already knew they'd done some mild fiddling with their earned surplus and net working capital and other vagaries like that.”

“You're suggesting I needn't be surprised to find they've carried that policy through to the rest of the company.”

Paul nodded. “I didn't think it would put you off.”

“What specifically are we talking about now?”

“I've found half a dozen points you can use for leverage, I think. For instance, they've tried to show a sharp increase in assets by reporting the company's subsidiaries at book value instead of original cost.”

Eng made a face. “That's a little cheap. I'm disappointed in Jainchill.”

“You can't really blame him for trying.”

“I had a sneaking hope he'd be a little less obvious than that. What else?”

“Well, they've started amortizing their research costs over a five-year span. They only started doing that last year—before that they were absorbing them immediately in each fiscal year. Nothing dishonest about it, but it does paint a brighter picture. The only other thing of any consequence I've been able to find is a sharp increase, within the past eighteen months, in stock options to their executives.”

“In lieu of cash bonuses, you mean.”

“Yes. They used to pay cash bonuses almost exclusively.”