Walk on the Wild Side - By Karl Edward Wagner Page 0,48
left him sitting upright with Monday Night Football just getting underway on the tube.
Marsden finished the vodka, then removed the silencer from the pistol and replaced the clip. Shoving the Hi-Standard into his belt, he checked over the flight bag and left it with Papa.
He heard the first screams as the elevator door slowly closed. Someone must have finally gone to clean Momma’s dinner off her.
A uniformed security guard—Marsden hadn’t known that Brookcrest employed such—was trying to lock the lobby doors. A staff member was shouting into the reception desk phone.
“Hold it, please! Nobody’s to leave!” The guard actually had a revolver.
Marsden shot him through the left eye and stepped over him and through the glass doors. Marsden regretted this, because he hated to kill needlessly.
Unfortunately, the first police car was slithering into the parking lot as Marsden left the nursing home. Marsden continued to walk away, even when the car’s spotlight pinned him against the blacktop.
“You there! Freeze!”
They must have already been called to the house, Marsden thought Time was short. Without breaking stride, he drew his .22 and shot out the spotlight.
There were still the parking lot lights. Gunfire flashed from behind both front doors of the police car, and Marsden sensed the impact of buckshot and 9 mm. slugs.
He was leaping for the cover of a parked car, and two more police cars were hurtling into the parking lot, when the twenty pounds of C4 he’d left with Papa went off.
The blast lifted Marsden off his feet and fragged him with shards of glass and shattered bricks. Brookcrest Health Care Center burst open like the birth of a volcano.
Two police cars were overturned, the other on fire. The nursing home was collapsing into flaming rubble. No human screams could be heard through the thunder of disintegrating brick and steel.
Marsden rolled to his feet, brushing away fragments of debris. He retrieved his pistol, but there was no need for it just now. His clothes were in a bad state, but they could be changed. There was no blood, just as he had known there would not be.
They couldn’t kill him in Nam, that day in the paddy when he learned what he was and why he was. They couldn’t kill him now.
Was it any easier when they were your own loved ones? Yes, perhaps it was.
Michael Marsden melted away into the darkness that had long ago claimed him.
Cedar Lane
He was back at Cedar Lane again, in the big house where he had spent his childhood, growing up there until time to go away to college. He was the youngest, and his parents had sold the house then, moving into something smaller and more convenient in a newer and nicer suburban development.
A rite of passage, but for Garrett Larkin it truly reinforced the reality that he could never go home again. Except in dream. And dreams are what the world is made of.
At times it puzzled him that while he nightly dreamed of his boyhood home on Cedar Lane, he never dreamed about any of the houses he had lived in since.
Sometimes the dreams were scary.
Sometimes more so than others.
It was a big two-story house plus basement, built just before the war, the war in which he was born. It was very solid, faced with thick stones of pink-hued Tennessee marble from the local quarries. There were three dormer windows thrusting out from the roof in front, and Garrett liked to call it the House of the Three Gables because he always thought the Hawthorne book had a neat spooky title. He and his two brothers each had his private hideout in the little dormer rooms—just big enough for shelves, boxes of toys, a tiny desk for making models or working jigsaw puzzles. Homework was not to intrude here, relegated instead to the big desk in Dad’s never-used study in the den downstairs.
Cedar Lane was an old country lane, laid out probably at the beginning of the previous century along dirt farm roads. Now two narrow lanes of much-repaved blacktop twisted through a narrow gap curtained between rows of massive cedar trees. Garrett’s house stood well back upon four acres of lawn, orchards, and vegetable garden—portioned off from farmland as the neighborhood shifted from rural to suburban just before the war.
It had been a wonderful house to grow up in—three boys upstairs and a sissy older sister with her own bedroom downstairs across the hall from Mom and Dad. There were two flights of stairs to run down—the other