Doc Phillips!
“. . . and I looked out and these big black sewer rats were easing down the hall carrying files, dinosaurs, pictures, busts, statues, photographs. They stared at me from the sides of their little eyes. I shut the door and watched through the peekhole as they ran by on black rubber sneakers. I could hear them prowling for half an hour. Then the whispers stopped. I opened the door to an empty hall and a big tidal wave of that damn cologne. Did those guys kill Roy?”
I twitched. “What made you say that?”
“They looked like undertakers, is all. And if they killed off Roy’s apartment, well, why not undertake Roy? Hey,” Shipway stopped, looking in my face.“I didn’t mean—but, well, is Roy—?”
“Dead? Yes. No. Maybe. Someone as alive as Roy just can’t die!”
I told him about Stage 13, the ruined cities, the hanged body.
“Roy wouldn’t do that.”
“Maybe someone did it to him.”
“Roy wouldn’t hold still for any sons of bitches. Hell.” And a tear rolled out of one of Tom Shipway’s eyes. “I know Roy! He helped me build my first sub. There!”
On the wall was a miniature Nautilus, some thirty inches long, a high school art student’s dream.
“Roy can’t be dead, can he?!”
Then a telephone rang somewhere in Nemo’s undersea cabins.
Shipway picked up a large mollusc shell. I laughed, then stopped laughing.
“Yes?” he said into the phone, and then, “Who is this?”
I all but knocked the phone from his hand. I yelled into it; a shout to life. I listened to someone breathing, far away.
“Roy!”
Click. Silence. Hummmmm.
I jiggled the receiver wildly, gasping.
“Roy?” said Shipway.
“His breathing.”
“Damn! You can’t tell breathing! Where from?”
I banged the phone down and stood over it, eyes shut. Then I grabbed it again and tried to dial the wrong end of the mollusc. “How does this damn thing work?” I yelled.
“Who you calling?”
“A taxi.”
“To go where? I’ll take you!”
“Illinois, dammit, Green Town!”
“That’s two thousand miles away!”
“Then,” I said, dazed, putting the seashell down, “we’d better get going.”
29
Tom Shipway dropped me at the studio.