Chapter IV

"I'll unfreeze your head so you can talk. You realize I ought to kill you."

His head tingled and he found that he could open his mouth, blink his eyes and twitch his nose. He couldn't turn his neck. From the chin down he was helplessly immobile. He was a disembodied brain with a face. He wished he were sober.

"Cripp still doesn't believe me," Tracy said. "He insisted I come back alone and apologize. So I came back."

"But not to apologize."

"To get some information, Darius. I could be wrong. I don't think I am."

"Out at the Fourth Estate yesterday, you knew what kind of proposition Wainwright had made me," McLeod said, stalling for time while he tried to summon a logical defense. His mind was almost a blank.

"Sometimes I talk too much. Yes, I knew. Never mind how. I'm doing the questioning, and I want answers. When I read about Cripp in the Internal Affairs section, I put two and two together. Wainwright's assignment had been vague, so I guessed you and Overman had decided some substitution might be in order."

McLeod was silent.

"I advise you to talk, Darius. If I killed you now, it would be a bit ahead of schedule, but I think that would still satisfy Wainwright. Don't you?"

"You're bluffing," McLeod said--and hoped. "You couldn't possibly be on assignment to kill me. So you'd be subject to the same laws which face the general public for murder."

"All right. Maybe I won't kill you. But you feel no pain under a parabeam, Darius. Remember that. I could start burning your hand with my lighter and work up to your elbow and you wouldn't even know--until I unfroze you."

"You wouldn't," McLeod said. "Maybe we don't see eye to eye now, but we're friends."

Tracy began nibbling at her lip. Her eyes were big and watery, as if she'd been fighting back tears. "Sure--I liked you. Maybe I still do. I don't know. I'm all mixed up. You know me, Darius. I'm liable to do anything--anything ... when I'm all mixed up like this. I don't want to hurt you, not if I can help it. I like you, Darius. We've had fun together. Great times."

"That's better." McLeod's confidence was returning. He'd be out of freeze in no time now. "Just unfreeze me, and we can talk about this like two sensible people."

"I like you, but I'm in love with Cripp." Tracy removed her lighter from a pocket of her blouse with trembling fingers. She lit a cigarette and didn't extinguish the flame. She came closer to McLeod.

"Cut it out," he said. He felt sweat rolling down his forehead from his hairline and making his eyes blink. Parabeaming did peculiar, unpredictable things to the metabolism. The room seemed furnace-hot.

"Then answer my question."

There was no sense being maimed, McLeod finally decided. Tracy knew the truth anyway. She just wanted to hear him say it. But now she brought a tiny mini-recorder into view from where it had been resting on a table and flipped the switch to on.

"What's that for?"

"Cripp. I want him to know. I want him to be able to protect himself from you. We're recording now, Darius. Answer this question: do you and Overman plan to use Cripp as a substitute corpse to satisfy Weaver Wainwright and the _World_? Is that why Cripp got his raise and all that unexpected publicity?"

McLeod licked his lips and tried to look down as Tracy's hand disappeared from view with the lighter. He saw no smoke but imagined his flesh beginning to crisp.

"Answer me. Did you and Overman plan to kill Cripp and give Wainwright his story that way?"

McLeod read nothing in her eyes, not even hatred. He said, "Yes. That's right."

Tracy shut off the mini-recorder, pocketed her lighter. She reversed the parabeam and McLeod felt his limbs begin to tingle with minute sparks of pain.

"Don't try anything," Tracy said. "I'm still pointing this at you." Her voice caught. She tried to speak again but sobbed.

McLeod brought his arm up slowly and examined it. No damage.

"I--I guess you know I couldn't do it, Darius. I couldn't hurt you. But I don't want you to hurt Cripp. I want to give Cripp a fair chance. Have you signed an application for his death yet?"

"No."

"Will you?"

They were friends again. McLeod couldn't sense it. Friends who might try to hurt each other, of necessity, but friends. "I don't know," he said.

"Give him a break, Darius. There must be another way out. I could tell you things, if I could only trust you...."

McLeod laughed easily, massaging his forearms. "Better not," he said. "Better get out of here."

"Maybe someday."

"Maybe. Thanks for telling me you couldn't do it. That's good to know." He shouldn't have said that. He was acting compulsively, striking back blindly.

The color left Tracy's face. "That was only because you haven't actually threatened Cripp yet. Don't rely on it, though."

She was striking back, too. He staggered to the door and watched her go. Crippens had himself a good woman there, the lucky s. o. b. Maybe that was why he hadn't rejected the idea of killing Crippens, McLeod thought.

* * * * *

Sleeping that night, after a dinner which felt like slag inside him, McLeod dreamed he had just signed an application for his own demise on the steps of City Hall while bands played and people cheered. Mayor Spurgess was there with a television camera and kept on pleading for McLeod not to renege, but Tracy clung to the mayor's arm and tried to lure him away to a co-respondent rendezvous. Weaver Wainwright and Overman lurked on the fringe of the crowd, both pointing at McLeod and laughing. Harry Crippens was the gunman.

When McLeod awoke, a gray dawn was seeping in through the windows. He showered and downed some bicarbonate of soda in water, but still felt like hell. A mantle of snow covered the silent streets outside and more snow was falling. Even the meteorologist's job wasn't guesswork now, McLeod thought wryly. Predicting snow, the _Star-Times_ had sowed the clouds for it.

It was suddenly very important for Mayor Spurgess not to die.

Early in the afternoon, McLeod called Jack Lantrel at home, but a pert-faced girl smiled at him from the screen. "I'm sorry, Mr. Lantrel is not at home. Is there a message?"

"It's important that I reach him," McLeod said.

"Mr. Lantrel is out. He left no number. What is it in reference to?"

"4-12-DJM," McLeod said, and waited while the receptionist disappeared from view.

"You're Mr. McLeod, aren't you?"

"That's right."

"You don't have to worry about 4-12-DJM, sir. Everything will be taken care of."

"There's been a change of plans. I want the gunmen called off."

The professional smile was replaced by a frown. "Only Mr. Lantrel can do that."

"That's why I want to reach him. I told you it was important."

"But I don't know when he'll be back. Confidentially, sir, Mr. Lantrel just hates snow. When he read in the paper it was going to snow, he said he was leaving town. I'm sorry."

McLeod asked if she knew where Lantrel usually went.

"That's hard to say. He likes to forget about business, you see. He's down south," she added brightly. "Someplace down south. Is there any message?"

"Yes," McLeod said. "I'll be home all day. If Mr. Lantrel calls, have him contact me at once."

But as the afternoon dragged on, McLeod thought it unlikely that the Gunman Chief would receive his message. He had reached the unexpected decision about Mayor Spurgess quite suddenly and now found it almost beyond analysis. He neither liked the mayor nor disliked him. It was not the man who must live, but the symbol.

Symbol? Of what?

McLeod found the idea mildly ridiculous, almost as if he were drumming up trade for the Anti-Newspaper League, self-proselytizing. It wasn't that for the first time in his life, he told himself, he found an intrinsic evil in the newspaper business. It was simply that the system had hit home for the first time, unexpectedly. He had set the machinery in motion for Mayor Spurgess' death; Weaver Wainwright had done the same for him; Overman had decided the _Star-Times_ could not afford to lose his services but could manage without Harry Crippens.

There was no logical connection. If Mayor Spurgess died, that was that. Flowers and a sad song for the widow. But the Wainwright-McLeod-Overman-Crippens problem still remained unsolved. Not to mention Tracy Kent.

Had he become anti-newspaper? The term almost defied definition. The Anti-Newspaper League was one thing, formal, organized, purposeful. But anti-newspaper could mean a lot of things. It could mean slight deviation, non-conformity, the simple desire to earn your keep in some other line. Such a desire was never realized, however. There were only three classes of newspapermen: working reporters, corpses and retired hounds and hens who lived on newspaper farms in old-folk luxury. A newspaperman simply knew too much to be allowed to change his line of work.

No, there was a fourth type. There was the Anti-Newspaper League. What was the old word--Quisling? It referred to politics or some other fields of endeavor, McLeod thought. He wasn't sure what. They were on newspaper payrolls but tried to gum up the works.

Logic was getting him nowhere. He belonged to no cut-and-dry category.

He wanted Mayor Spurgess to live.

Lantrel failed to call by dinner-time or afterwards. At twenty-hundred thirty, McLeod zipped on an insulined jumper, checked his parabeam and went out into the _Star-Times_ snow.