An Old Friend Of The Family (Saberhagen's Dracula Book 3), Fred Saberhagen [best large ereader .txt] 📗

“So, what do I do with you now, Katie? Just call the cops, I suppose. No, my lawyer first. Then the cops. Tell ’em you’re here. Say you just wandered in. I know you slightly.”

    He decided to take a look around the apartment first, because there were probably a few things he’d rather the cops didn’t see. He had better put the gun away, to begin with—suddenly recalling something else, Walworth turned his back on Kate and walked out of the kitchen again. When he reached his bedroom, the little shot-to-splinters table was lying just as he remembered it, on its side against the wall, dusted with a little plaster from the cratered wall above.

    So, the shooting incident had been real enough—except of course he must have been shooting at a drug-induced hallucination. Carol herself had doubtless been long gone before things started to get dangerous. Her idea in drugging him must have been that he would eliminate himself with his own crazed violence—an unreliable method, it would seem, of getting someone out of the way. And why should she want him out of the way anyhow? Maybe this was only her idea of fun. He himself, he knew, had some ideas on how to have a good time that would seem far out, to put it mildly, to most people. But Carol and her pal the ape-man must be completely crazy…

    He righted the little table. Still, there was no way that the damage wouldn’t be noticed if anyone came into the bedroom. I was cleaning my gun this afternoon, officer, and it just…they must here that pretty often. But still the gun had nothing to do with Kate, or with her brother’s kidnapping. So that would be all right. What he had to do now was show the world that Kate Southerland was still alive. After that, there ought to be lawyers around sharp enough to demonstrate to the world that whatever had been happening to Kate lately was not Craig Walworth’s fault.

    But this time, when he got back to the cheerful kitchen, his chronic fear was realized. Kate was gone. No trace of her. And the back door was still locked and bolted from the inside.

    Partial relief came with the realization that she must have wandered off somewhere, and still be in the apartment. He found his front door still chained up, too, when his hopeful search for Kate took him that far. He stood in the living room and called her name a few times, tentatively. He was completely certain that that image of Carol, with a hole shot in her dress but not the pink skin of her belly, had been a picture projected out of his own doped mind. That had to be. Tonight’s Kate, though, had looked worn and almost sick, and despite that—or maybe because of it—she had been very real.

    Of course Carol, now that he thought about it, never looked all that real anyway. Beautiful, God yes, but…

    So he went through the whole place once more, calling Kate’s name softly, peering into closets as he went and even under the beds. Doing this made him feel no sillier than anything else he could think of doing.

    Once the gun in his belt pinched his belly when he bent over to look under a bed, and he had a sudden almost overpowering impulse to draw it out and put the muzzle to his head and pull the trigger. Would death be a drug-delusion too, an unreal sleep? Was Kate really dead and was he sharing the ultimate bad trip with her? When people got up for the morgue and walked…

    His doorchime sounded distantly. Someone at the front. The lobby desk should have called up—or had he missed hearing the intercom?

    This time he didn’t even bother looking through the viewer first. He just undid the fastenings of the door and opened up, ready to take whatever came.

    It was Kate again, standing there dumbly, looking just as she had before.

    “How do you do that?” Irritably he reached out and grabbed her by the solid, real jacket sleeve and pulled her into the apartment. “Now stay put, will you, and let me think? I got a head full of shit and I got to try to think. Baby, I’ve got to be sure you’re real before I call the cops to try to show you off.”

    “He’s coming after me,” said Kate, in her dazed voice that assigned nothing any gradation of importance.

    “He? Who?”

    “I went downstairs just now, and there he was, coming along the walk. He wants me to go back with him. Give me orders, put me out of the way somewhere, that’s what he wants. But I’ve got to keep looking for Joe—”

    Reality was suddenly as unmistakable as an onrushing truck. “Winter’s coming? Up here?”

    “—and he won’t let me go on looking.”

    It was quiet enough now that Walworth could hear one of the front elevators running.

    He ought to show the world one Enoch Winter, dead, along with one Kate Southerland alive. Winter had forced his way in, trying to attack her. Tell that story, and then let the good lawyers guide him through.

    Quickly he closed his front door again, leaving it unlocked. His last look out into the lobby showed him the mirror with its draping raincoat. Show business, he thought.

    Waving Kate to stand back, he retreated just a few steps from the door and drew the gun and thumbed the hammer back very silently. He raised it in a two-handed aim, keeping his gaze squarely on the door.

    “What are you doing?” Kate’s voice was suddenly changed radically toward the normal, as if the sight of the drawn gun had acted as a tonic shock. “Craig!”

    The doorbell chimed. Somehow,