Smoke by Donald E Westlake

Author:Donald E Westlake [Westlake, Donald E]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-11-10T07:25:32.433000+00:00

31

Monday afternoon, three-thirty. Mordon Leethe watched Jack Fullerton the Fourth set flame to a cigarette from a Greek Revival lighter the size of a football. There was then a delay in the conversation for the ritual coughing, hacking, wheezing, gasping, spitting, eyeball-rolling, weeping, snorting, snot-spraying, drooling, and braying, Jack the Fourth being held and succored and rubbed down and wiped off all through it by his two silent dark-suited assistants. Then, once the storm had subsided and Jack was again capable of speech, the cigarette smoldering like some outlying district of hell in that huge ashtray on his desk, the oxygen tube once again in position beneath his nostrils, he turned his wet pale red-rimmed eyes on Mordon and said, "Where is he? I want to see this fellow."

"Well, that's the thing," Mordon ventured, fingers pointing toward various nonexistent fireflies, "you can't see this fellow. No one can. That's what makes him so hard to find."

"And so useful, dammit." Jack the Fourth thumped a meaty fist against his clean desktop, making the ashtray and Mordon jump, but not the stoic assistants. "I want that fellow now! I need him! So why don't I have him?"

"Being a thief," Mordon hazarded, fingers searching for a lost contact lens in a shag rug, "makes him adept, I presume, at hiding out. But I'm sure we'll find him eventually."

"I don't have eventually. What I have is an idea."

Mordon's hands climbed the escape rope of his tie. "Yes?"

"These mad medicos," Jack the Fourth wheezed, "they know now, don't they, if they put their two potions together, they make an invisible man?"

Surprised, his hands turning like sunflowers, Mordon said, "Well, yes, I suppose they do."

"Then let them make us one," Jack the Fourth demanded. "Keep looking for the original, but make us a copy."

The sunflowers grew. "They could, couldn't they?" But then the sunflowers died, and Mordon said, "But who? Who would take such a risk, and wind up like, like that?"

"One thing I've learned about money," Jack the Fourth wheezed. "If you have enough of it, somebody's gonna volunteer. And I need an invisible man, dammit. I need him right away!"

"Congressional hearings?" Mordon suggested. "Competitors' pricing plans?"

"All that, too, of course," Jack the Fourth rumbled, with a massive shrug of shoulder. "But that isn't the most important. I need him for something else, closer to home."

Suspected infidelity? Jack the Fourth's fifth wife? Mordon looked alert. "Yes?"

"The doctors!" Jack the Fourth cried, with sudden passion. "The doctors are lying to me!"

"Which doctors?" Mordon asked.

"You're right," Jack the Fourth told him. "They're all witch doctors!"

"No, I meant, which doctors are lying to you?"

"My doctors! Who the hell other pill pusher do you think I'd talk to? Do you think I like to talk to doctors? Grubby little handwashers? Don't you know I quit two different country clubs in my life because they let the pill pushers in? Measly little body mechanics, they get two dimes to rub together, they think they're class! Effrontery!"

"Uh, Jack," Mordon said. "What

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