Occasional Demons Read online

  Murphy—whose name really was unpronounceable—steepled his fingers and silently stared into the pyramid they formed. For the first time, Rice noticed the expensive-looking watch the man was wearing. He made a mental note to take it from him before he kicked the jerk out onto the street or—better yet, he suddenly decided—wasted him.

  Yeah, Rice thought. If this guy keeps up this cockamamie story about traveling through time, and if he keeps making fun of the way I talk, I just may have to clip the son of a bitch. Maybe even do it right now.

  “Of course,“ Murphy said, speaking so suddenly it actually startled Rice, “there are numerous ways I could prove I am who I say I am. But truthfully, I am from what you call the future. I’ve journeyed back to your time to study you and your—ah, interesting, shall we call it, career?“

  Rice took another drag of his cigarette and flicked the ash into the ashtray. All along, he’d been figuring this guy was just another cop—maybe a fed, trying to nail him. But if that was the scam going on here, why all the mind games? Why make up this horseshit about traveling through time? Why not just arrest him?

  “Yeah,“ Rice said, “well, my career, as you call it—“ He paused and considered for a moment. “You know? I kinda like the sound of that. Career. Kinda gives me credit for what I am—a professional. But anyway—like you was saying, my career has had some interesting points.“

  “You have no idea how interesting, Rice. Honestly, you don’t. Our records indicate that you’ve been responsible for fifteen deaths—murders, that is—of which, my sources say, only slightly more than half were...shall we say business-related.“ He chuckled, but the fleeting burst of laughter did nothing to relieve the cold, humorless expression in his eyes.

  “What you’re saying is, I was paid to waste only some of them. Is that it?“ Rice grit his teeth as he smashed the cigarette into the ashtray, but he decided not to light another one. Twisting to one side in his chair, he let his right hand brush reassuringly against the bulge of the revolver under his coat. He knew he could draw it and shoot this stupid asshole right here on the spot. Hit him with three, maybe four slugs before the dope could even blink his friggin’ cold, green eyes. Rice reassured himself that he was just waiting for this guy to play his best card before he wasted him.

  “That is correct,“ Murphy said, raising his hand and pointing across the table at Rice. “You were hired to kill nine of your victims. It’s the latest one that my culture finds most interesting.“

  “Oh, you mean when I wasted my twin brother?“

  “Indeed,“ Murphy replied. “And that particular shooting was done for...for what? For pleasure?“

  “No. No way,“ Rice said coolly. He felt a sudden ache in his right hand—his shooting hand. “It was always for business. Always.“

  “Whether or not you actually got paid?“ Murphy asked. “I find that absolutely fascinating.“

  Rice made a fist with his left hand and slammed it onto the table again, hard enough to make the ashtray jump and almost spill over. “Yeah. That’s goddamned right.“

  “That very well may be,“ Murphy said, “but what interests me and my colleagues is that you never have been—and, I might add, never will be—brought to justice for your crimes. My culture finds you fascinating. If we were capable of experiencing some of your baser emotions, you might even say as a culture we are as obsessed with you, just as your own culture has been obsessed with such men as Jack the Ripper, the Englishman who brutally killed several prostitutes in England in the Nineteenth Century. He was—“

  “I know all ’bout Jack the Ripper,“ Rice said, “but what I do’s got nothing to do with him or anyone else. And I don’t unnerstand why you or anyone would find what I do so fuckin’ inneresting. Don’t you have any killers of your own in the future?“

  The man tilted his head to one side and sniffed with laughter. “Of course we don’t. It would be like...like stealing from yourself or committing suicide.“

  “Yeah, sure,“ Rice said. “But tell me, is that true what you said, that I’m never gonna get nailed for any of the clips I done?“

  “Yes. That is absolutely correct,“ Murphy replied, smiling emotionlessly. “There are no legal records and no mention in any of the literature that you ever were brought to justice. And our documentation of your era is quite complete.“

  Rice tilted his head back and let loose a roar of laughter, but suddenly he stopped and looked at Murphy with a stare as quick and hard as a rabbit-punch.

  “Wait a minute,“ he said. “Wait just one fucking minute.“ Rice stroked the side of his face. “You said I wasted fifteen people.“ He muttered to himself and counted on his fingers as he did some quick silent calculations. “The way I figure it, I only killed fourteen people.“

  Murphy’s smiled widened, and he nodded as he began to stand up from the table. “I did say fifteen. I want to thank you, Rice, and tell you what an honor it’s been to meet you and speak with you.“ He stretched his arm out and glanced at his fancy wristwatch. “I must be going now, but we are scheduled to meet again...or have already met again, if you’d like to think of it that way.“

  Although Murphy was rail-thin, and Rice was sure he’d have no problem taking him in hand-to-hand fighting, Murphy moved with a noticeable slowness that made Rice think he was used to carrying around much less weight.

  “Hold it right there, pal,“ Rice said smoothly as he brought up his right hand. It was full of mean-looking .38, and he aimed it at a spot just above the bridge of Murphy’s nose. Rice was satisfied to see Murphy blink with surprise at his quickness.

  “I see no reason to react like this, Rice,“ Murphy said, his voice still surprisingly calm. “Everything I have told you is—or will be—true.“

  “You ain’t leaving here ’till you tell me what you’re really after.“ Rice let the muzzle of the revolver make a tiny circle. “An’ you give me any more of this time travel crap, you’re good as dead. So start talkin’, an’ this time, give me the truth.“

  Murphy was still smiling as he straightened his shoulders and clasped his hands in front of his waist. The motion was quick, but not so quick that Rice didn’t see him depress one of the buttons on the side of his wristwatch.

  “You’re onta some kinda scam here, an’ I wanna know what it is.“ For emphasis, Rice clicked back the hammer of the gun. “Now tell me. How did you find out where I was holed up? Who sent yah? And I ain’t about to—“

  Rice stopped speaking as a faint whining sound gradually rose in frequency. At first, he thought it might be a fly, trapped inside the kitchen window. But it was January, and there weren’t any flies around even in a crappy joint like this.

  “What’s that sound?“ Rice asked. “What’d you do?“

  “I told you,“ Murphy said simply. “I must be going now. But I’ll see you again. Soon. I promise.“

  For a moment, Rice thought it might just be the dim lighting in the kitchen, but after another second or two, he realized that something was wrong with Murphy. He was getting transparent, slowly fading away like a ghost in a low-budget horror movie.

  The whining sound rose in intensity until it drilled Rice’s ears. Then it shot up so high it hit a frequency Rice figured only a dog would be able to hear. Realizing that he’d lowered his gun, he swung it back up and took aim to fire, but before he could get a shot off, a loud crackling concussion filled the kitchen. It ended with a muffled pop, and Murphy winked out of sight.

  Rice’s finger twitched, and the .38 kicked back in his hand. The slug ripped the air where—less than a second ago—Murphy had been standing. It tore through the chair Murphy had been sitting in and made a basketball-sized hole in the wall. A woman in the adjacent apartment began to scream.

  2

  Less than five minutes later, the Boston police burst through the locked door of Rice’ apartment. The wood exploded into splinters as they responded to a report of gunfire in Apartment 3-B. They found the apartment empty, so they rousted the building
manager, who told the cops that the man upstairs had rented the room under the name William Carroll. He fit their description of Anthony Ricci, so they knew who they were dealing with.

  At about the same time, Rice was boarding a Greyhound bus with a ticket for Worcester. The next morning, he read in the Boston Globe about the police raid on the apartment. It wasn’t hard to figure out who had tipped off the cops.

  3

  Over the next few months, things weren’t really that hot for Rice. But he hadn’t survived in his profession as long as he had by being careless or stupid. He never stayed in the same place more than one night, and for a while during the first week or two after the raid in Boston, he’d register under different names in two different hotels for the same night. Just in case.

  After a couple of weeks, though, he stopped thinking about the man named Murphy except every now and then when he would wonder how the hell Murphy had pulled off that disappearing act. It probably had something to do with that fancy wristwatch of his, and that’s probably how he’d signaled the police. With time, though, Rice rationalized what he had seen, telling himself he’d just had a little too much to drink and not enough sleep.

  One humid July night in Chicago, Rice was more than a little drunk again, stripped to his boxer shorts and sitting on his bed in front of the air-conditioning with the TV on. The volume was down low, so he perked up instantly when he heard a faint, rising whine that sounded all too familiar.

  “What the fuck?“ he muttered as he looked around the hotel room. In the flickering blue glow of the TV, he didn’t see anything unusual, but the sound became shrill, and the air between him and the closet door started to shimmer with distortion. The crackling sound grew louder and was then followed by a dull pop that hurt his ears.

  “Jesus H... Murphy!“ Rice sputtered, staring in total disbelief at the figure that had suddenly appeared in the room.

  “No. Simply Murphy will do,“ the figure replied with a slight nod of the head.

  A second ago, there had been no one but Rice in the room. Now, Murphy stood there, wearing the same translucent green tunic and trousers. He smiled coldly at Rice.

  Rice’s nostrils flared as he caught a powerful whiff of ozone, but he turned quickly and grabbed his gun from the dresser by the bed. With the bedspread tangled around his feet, he wheeled around and aimed it squarely at Murphy’s chest. The barrel didn’t waver a millimeter.

  “You have less than thirty seconds to live, so tell me how the fuck you found me.“

  Raising his hands with both of palms out, Murphy shook his head. “I’m not here to harm you, Rice,“ he said smoothly.

  “Yeah, right.“ Rice snorted and spit onto the floor. “Just like last time. You visit me with some bullshit story, and five minutes later the place is crawling with cops. I read the papers, you know. But now, I wanna know what you want. What’s your scam? And keep your hands away from that wristwatch of yours.“

  Murphy shifted his eyes to his wrist and then said softly, “I had nothing to do with the raid on your apartment. You must believe me, Rice. Why would I do such a thing? As I told you before, I...we find you fascinating and want to study—“

  “Shaddup!“ Rice barked as he kicked his feet free of the bedspread and stood up. He never let his aim drift for even a second. “Have a seat there.“ He pulled the chair out from the desk. “I’ll ask the questions, if you don’t mind. You follow?“

  “Where are we going?“ Murphy asked, looking momentarily confused.

  “Just sit your ass down.“

  Murphy nodded his understanding and sat down. Rice stepped up behind him and, leaning forward, expertly frisked him.

  “Well, ’least you ain’t packin’ any heat,“ he said once he was satisfied. He stepped around in front of Murphy. “Take off that wristwatch and give it to me. I meant to get it last time I saw yah.“ Rice pressed the revolver against Murphy’s temple, but the man appeared completely unfazed.

  “I’m sorry,“ Murphy said, “but that wouldn’t do at all. This is my—“

  “I don’t give a rat’s ass what it is,“ Rice said as he cocked back the hammer and pressed the barrel harder against the man’s head. He was pleased to see Murphy react—finally—to the sound. “You’ll take it off and give it to me unless you wanna be painting the wall with your brains.“

  Murphy’s green eyes suddenly glazed over as he gave Rice a long, steady look. He appeared to be trying to remember something, but after a moment, he shrugged his shoulders and raised his arm. As he undid the three small tabs on the watchband, Rice couldn’t read his expression, but he grunted with satisfaction when the man handed the wristwatch to him. He snatched it from Murphy’s grasp and inspected it for a moment.

  “Don’t look like much of a watch to me,“ he said, holding it up close to his face and squinting as he turned it over a few times in his hand. “How in the hell do you tell time with it?“

  Murphy cleared his throat and said, “There is a chronometric setting, but it doesn’t register time on a sequential basis.“

  “Cut the crap, al’right?“ Rice gave Murphy his icy stare right back at him. He was just waiting to hear that sarcastic, mocking tone of voice. His trigger finger was feeling mighty twitchy.

  “There is no crap to cut,“ Murphy said. “I’m trying to explain the functions of that unit to you.“

  “As I recall,“ Rice said, “just before you left me the last time, you were fiddling with the buttons on the side here. Is this the one?“ His thumb was on a small, red oval on the side of the watch as he held it up for Murphy to see, but not so close he could grab it.

  “I wouldn’t touch that if I were you,“ Murphy said. His voice remained flat, and his expression was unchanged, but Rice was sure he caught a flicker of worry deep with the man’s green eyes...like frozen algae, deep beneath the ice.

  “You know,“ Rice said, pressing the gun against Murphy’s head, “the firing pin on this baby’s been filed down so much it’ll go off if you so much as breathe wrong. So when I ask you a question, I expect an answer. Is this the switch that’ll make me disappear?“

  “The penalty for temporal tampering is quite—“

  “So this is the one.“ Rice’s voice cut Murphy off like the slash of a knife. He stepped back and studied the watch again. “Just imagine for a moment how valuable something like this would be in my line of work, Murf. You mind if I call you Murf?“

  Murphy didn’t reply; he didn’t even flinch when Rice pushed the gun so hard against his head he almost forced him out of the chair.

  “And if I press this button, Murf, just where is it I end up? Where do I go?“

  Murphy gazed up at Rice, staring blankly at him. He was trying to probe the man, but try as he might, he couldn’t get below the gross animal level of greed and anger—emotions that Murphy found foreign, never having personally experienced them. They simply didn’t make sense to him. Even with full eye contact—which Rice was foolish enough to let him maintain—Murphy found it pretty much impossible to control or even nudge Rice to do what he wanted him to do. The man’s mind was too simple, and for the first time since he had determined to travel back to the Twentieth Century to contact Rice, Murphy began to wonder if it might have been a mistake after all.

  “You know, Murf,“ Rice said, “the last time I saw you, you said there were fifteen people I wasted, an’ that I got away with all of ’em. By my count, I only killed fourteen people. It ever occur to you that you might be number fifteen?“

  “It has now,“ Murphy replied with an irritating calm in his voice. Rice tensed, hearing that faint, mocking tone again.

  “But you ain’t answered my other question yet,“ Rice snapped. “You ain’t told me where I go when I press this button.“

  “The chronoportic setting would return you to my present time which is the future to you.“

  “Murf, there ain’t gonna be enough left of you to scrape up and put into an ashtray if you don’t stop trying to bullshit me. Now tell
me—where do I go?“

  “I’m telling you the simple truth. The physics required to understand the full operation of the device are, I’m afraid, quite far beyond your capacity to understand. That device controls my movement through time. Actually, it’s what you would call a...a receiver. It’s connected to a much larger chronoportic device in my time frame of origination. But that button is the automatic return, so if you—“

  Murphy never finished what he had been about to say. Rice pulled the trigger, and the bullet blasted into his head, spraying blood and bone fragments onto the wall. The impact picked him clean up out of the chair and threw him against the closet door where he landed in a heap on the floor. What was left of Murphy’s head hung to one side like he was looking at something on his shoulder. His legs were splayed wide, making him look like a discarded doll. The dark splash on the wall was shaped a bit like an octopus.

  “Number fifteen,“ Murphy said, smiling as he raised the revolver to his pursed lips and blew down into the barrel, cowboy-style. The aroma of spent gunpowder filled his head, making him almost dizzy.

  Rice walked over to Murphy’s motionless body and nudged it with his bare foot. A puddle of blood was spreading across the floor beneath him, soaking into the cheap carpet. In the dim light, Rice thought it looked a little too dark, more like motor oil than real blood.

  “That shirt looks kinda comfortable, in spite of the color,“ Rice said, addressing the corpse. “An’ I don’t suppose you’ll be needing it anymore. Do you mind?“

  Murphy’s body was curiously cold to the touch as Rice pulled him forward and peeled off his tunic. The blood rolled off it like rain off a waterproof tent. In a few minutes, after struggling to remove the dead man’s pants as well, Rice was dressed and ready to go. He was surprised how well the clothes fit him even though Murphy appeared to be much smaller. The cloth of the shirt had a warm, silky texture that seemed to form against his skin. Only the color, which still reminded him of that frosty day when he was twelve years old, made Rice feel cold.