The Death Gods (A Shell Scott Mystery) (21 page)

There was no landscaping,
no greenery to soften the bare whiteness, not a single shrub or
tree to relieve the sharp angularity. Just a ten yard wide strip of
pale-gray and dirty-white gravel fronting the complex, crunching
under the Cad’s tires as I slowed and turned left.

Seven or eight cement
steps rose toward double glass doors at the central building’s
entrance above me on my right. Over the doors, shiny steel letters
curving in an arch spelled out: O M E G A. I backed up, parking my
car next to the windowless wall at the right of those cement steps
instead of continuing on to the lot, then got out and trotted up to
the glass doors.

Inside—sudden coolness,
nostril-bite of anesthetics and unfamiliar chemicals plus
human-sweat and animal-fear smells, or so I imagined—and straight
ahead, cubicle resembling a nightclub checkroom, beyond its counter
a fortyish henna-haired lady sitting, writing something in a
ledger. She was still thirty or forty feet away, at the far side of
a hallway extending left and right, apparently bisecting the
building. It was very quiet, disturbingly so, as if everybody else
in the place was dead, unaware that I was visiting their
tomb.

As I zoomed to the counter
and skidded to a stop the lady raised her head, looked at me
disapprovingly. “Are you Mr. Scott?”

“
Yes. That’s me,
Shell—”

“
You’re late, Mr.
Scott.”

“
Not yet, I’ve still got
almost a minute and a half. Incidentally, I wish you wouldn’t say
‘late,’ not in this joint—”

“
Sign-in. You must sign
in.”

With one hand she’d
twirled a clipboard holding a sheet of paper, twirled it around
speedily as though urging me to hurry, hurry, stabbing a
white-painted fingernail at a spot on the paper. It was lined,
printed with numbers on the left, times of day, several names
already written on the page. The lady—Joanie, I presumed, whose
rather high scratchy voice I’d already heard on the phone—was
tapping that white nail next to the numbers “2:30.”

Hurry, hurry. Tap-tap-tap.
Yes, hurry, you bet. I yanked out my pen and jerked off its cap and
hastily scribbled “Mr. Sheldon—” and stopped.

What the hell was I doing?
So it was 2:29 and a tap...or a tick. So what? So if I was a wee
bit late, and Dr. Wintersong had a fit or a pout, would the world
end in a horrible crunch? I decided there was, already, something
unusually disturbing about this place, a tilting of normality, like
when you close your eyes after looking into a funhouse mirror, not
really seeing that too-fat or too-thin wiggly body and longer but
remembering the amusing, or maybe not quite-amusing, reflected
distortion or who you are, or were.

I sighed, placed the point
of my felt-tipped pen again on the paper, near the still-tapping
whiteness of dictatorial nail, and wrote “Scott” in a firm, heavy
hand. My name looked dumb. Yeah, that was a dumb signature, a
looping, tilting, stretched-out “Mr. Sheldon” next to the more
upright, neatly formed, bold “Scott.” It looked as if two people
had signed it.

A heavy printed line a
couple of inches above my name separated a.m. from p.m. There’d
been only one signer in the morning, at 8:00 a.m., somebody called
“Hobie” whose signature was even heavier and bolder than my
“Scott,” and two visitors before me this afternoon. At 1:00 p.m., a
signature less legible than my “Mr. Sheldon,” of which I could only
be half-sure of the first two letters—“D” and “r” or “O” and “e” or
“Q” and “c”—from which I deduced that the afternoon’s first visitor
had been a Dr. practicing penmanship for prescriptions.

After him, or her, at 1:30
p.m., a guy named “Dane Smith,” then the chap in the funhouse
mirror, me. Joanie, apparently a most unhappy lady, was looking
past me at something above the double glass doors. I took a peek.
The something was a large clock. A very large round clock, two feet
in diameter, with a circle of black numbers plus an hour hand, a
minute hand, and—you guessed it—a second hand. I had wasted so much
time it was now two-twenty-nine and twenty-five seconds.

“
You may go in,” Joanie
said, tap-tap. “In through the door marked ‘Director.’ It will be
on your right, twenty-two yards down the hall.” She was pointing to
her right, my left.

“
Twenty-two yards? Any
inches?”

Nothing. She was not
amused. I split speedily, zip down the hall to a solid-wood
windowless door marked “Director” in gilt letters, the first door
on my right. I reached for the doorknob, grabbed it. But I didn’t
turn the knob and leap through into whatever.

Instead, I was looking
behind me, at another door almost directly across the hallway. The
hallway, polished plastic floor gleaming the same shiny way they do
in hospitals, extended on for another thirty yards or so. Zipping
to here I’d noticed a white-smocked young gal coming this way, but
hadn’t taken time for leisurely appraisal. What held my attention
now was that she was bending forward and preparing to poke an
extended finger at something on the right side of that door. The
bending-away-from-me vista was fetching, but more interesting was
the thing she’d just poked for the first time.

It was one of those square
“computerized” combination locks, set into the door where normally
there would have been a knob and keyhole, looking somewhat like the
face of a touch telephone but with only nine numbers, in three rows
of three digits each. Even if I couldn’t see the numbers I could
commit the combination to memory just by watching. So I
did.

Upper left, lower right,
upper right two times, milled of the bottom row twice, upper left
once again, and the door clicked, moved an inch inward.
Sometimes—not always but sometimes—in a building similarly equipped
with poke-the-numbers locks, all of them share the same
combination. Even if that wasn’t true at Omega, I knew I could at
least get into that across-the-hallway room, if for any reason I
wanted to, simply by poking the numerical sequence:
1-9-3-3-8-8-1.

I also knew I was late,
many seconds late. Late for my “precisely” two-thirty p.m.
appointment with Doctor William Wintersong. The eminent Doctor
Wintersong. The frigid-voiced, ice-chomping, goddamned tyrant,
William Wintersong, who was going to be ticked the hell off because
it was two-thirty-one, maybe even later. But, so what? The hell
with him. Yeah, I thought, to hell with you Dr.
Wintersong!

Thus it came to pass that,
scowling, with my teeth crunched together and lips pulled back and
a little exhale wheezing out my nostrils, I twisted the knob, flung
open the door, and sort of bounded determinedly into the room,
hoping I wasn’t too late.

Correction. Bounded, yes,
but not exactly into the room, more like part of the way into it,
at which juncture I collided with something delicately scented and
composed of yielding softnesses and bouncing-away smoothness, plus
a sound that was approximately: Kkumph!

The umph! part was when
she—yeah, definitely she—recoiling in a flurry of whipping dark
hair and flailing arms and widening eyes and mixed expressions,
landed kerumph several feet from me and, now, below me, on the
shiny floor, landed there with her descent hopefully cushioned by a
derriere that had to be at least wonderful because everything else
I glimpsed in that kaleidoscopic instant was gorgeous—including the
only-briefly-exposed expanse of curving white thigh revealed when
the hem of her silvery-blue skirt flew up before being pulled down
by a rosy-tipped and very speedy hand, and the now-pooching red
lips that were extraordinarily sensual even when going “Ooohh” with
provocatively-pooching ooohhness in the creamy-white skin of a
shockingly beautiful face. There was a whole lot of other stuff,
but insufficient time for an exhaustive inventory.

Because, after smoothing
her skirt, the lovely, instead of leaping to her feet and socking
me, leaned back on both elbows—which attitude instantly emphasized
astonishingly abundant breastworks which, in case I hadn’t
mentioned it, I had already noticed with approval and a sense of
wonder—and, with what was almost a smile curving those incandescent
red lips, said:

“
How do you do?”

For a long beat, at least
two or three seconds, I simply continued to stand there eyeballing
her like a dummy, but then what she’d said, and the way she’d said
it, hit a funny nerve somewhere in my head, and I laughed
aloud.

But then I stepped
forward, extended a hand toward her, saying, “Not too well. Please
forgive me. May I help you up?”

“
Yes, if you’ll do it very
carefully.”

I smiled down at her,
thinking that this was one unusual lady. She took my hand—warmness,
softness, more than just flesh and blood and bone—and pulled, got
gracefully to her feet.

“
Thank you,” she said. “I
think. Now, let me get out of your way, and you can go ahead and
kill him.”

“
Kill
who...whom?”

“
Whomever or whoever you
dashed in here to assassinate. You did come here to kill
someone...” She pulled her head back slightly, looked me up and
down, returned those large luminous green eyes to my face, dark
brows rising. “...didn’t you?”

“
Of course not. I don’t go
around... Why would you say that?”

“
Well, the way you flew in
here like a monster bird shot out of a cannon. And, of course, your
strange expression, the way you looked.”

“
Looked? Well, umm...” I
fingered my chops, delicately. “Yeah, my nose was broken a couple
of times, and this little part of my ear—” I fingered it
absently—“got shot off, and... this and that. But I’ve never felt
really ug—”

“
No, I mean the way you had
your teeth gnashing together and your lips moving all over, and
that wild look of a mad beast in your eyes.”

“
Mad beast? What happened
to the bird? Never mind.” I stopped, started over. “Listen, it’s
not that I was actually upset with anybody in here, not that I
intended to demolish anyone or anything, certainly not such a
gorgeous and forgiving person as you.”

I smiled. She just kept
gazing at me curiously, waiting for my explanation. Which I didn’t
have one of. So I continued stoutly: “What happened is, I was a
little ticked off because I was late. That’s all there is to
it.”

“
Late?” she said, sort of
blankly. “You did all this, and catapulted in here like that,
because you were late?”

“
Yeah. I guess that’s the
best I can do. Doesn’t seem very convincing, even to me. See, I had
an appointment for two-thirty, and it was already two-thirty-one,
maybe even later, and...” I lifted my arms, let them plop down
against my sides. “There is no simple explanation.”

“
Well,” she said, with that
almost-smile again curving her lips, “I like a man who’s on time,
but...So that’s why you thundered in here like the Marines, flexing
all those muscles?” She let her eyes flick over me again. “You
really do have a lot of muscles to flex, don’t you?”

“
I don’t think I know how
to answer that, either,” I said. But then I gathered my scattered
wits, and changed the subject adroitly. “Miss—or Ma’am, or Ms., or
Mrs., Miss I hope—I have the solution to everything. I will explain
the entire truth behind my precipitous entry, assuming I can
remember what it was, and answer all your questions, and ask you a
bunch, when—if—you’ll have dinner with me tonight. Yes? Don’t say
no yet. I’ll take you to the most exciting restaurant in town, buy
you the most exciting dinner the chef is capable of inventing,
and...an exciting dessert? Yes?”

She smiled, but didn’t
speak. No matter, there was some yes in that smile. Or, if not
actually yes, it was at least noncommittal. “Make that two
desserts,” I said. “And three lobsters. Throw in some crabs,
oysters, steaks, roasts, goose liver, I care not. Plus—”

“
That is exciting. Where
are we going?”

“
Beats the hell out of me,
I was just working up to... Going? You mean you’ll go?”

She smiled, radiantly this
time. “I might be making a mistake. But, yes, I’ll go to dinner
with you—whoever you are.”

“
Who—oh, I’m Shell Scott.”
I started to ask her name, then remembered signing in at the desk,
the page with an illegible signature and one other name above mine,
and decided to impress her. “I’m a private detective. And I detect
that you must be Dane Smith.”

“
How did you know?” She
smiled brilliantly. “You’ve read my books?”

“
Books?”

“
You haven’t read my
books.”

“
No. But...but I will. I’ll
read them all. I’ll read them twice. I’ll bet they’re hot
stuff—beautiful, very good, I mean. Do you write them, or read
them, or publish them, or—”

“
I write them, of
course.”

“
Of course. Whatever you
say. Novels, romantic adventures where she meets the darkly
mysterious stranger?” This, I detected, wasn’t going over real
big.

“
Not novels. Non-fiction
books. Primarily in the medical field. My most recent one was Heart
Attacks Don’t Have To Happen, subtitled But What To Do If They Do.
It was number eight on the New York Times Best Seller List last
year. I thought you might have read it, and remembered seeing my
photograph on the dust jacket.”