No, that wouldn’t work either. His memory was once more digging up that business at Nanking Airfield in 1949. For a moment he almost decided to open his eyes and get rid of the picture, but then he figured he would take another look at it. There was quite a fascination about seeing it each time because it was like a movie, and he kept hoping that some day the camera would make a mistake and show him what had happened behind his back.
He kept his eyes shut and let the picture sharpen. There they were, all five of them: Frankie and Domenic and Russ and Cappy and Ken. His five partners. They had just crossed him up, but good. It was late April of 1949; the Red armies were closing in on Nanking and the Nationalists were clearing out. He and his five pals were clearing out, too. He had told the others to round up a bunch of refugees to take along. Then he had gone into the city to finish some business and when he got back he found his partners had rounded up one refugee. Quite a refugee, too. Nanking’s top black market operator. The plane was also loaded with a lot of boxes marked with Chinese characters saying they were medical supplies, and the Chinese black market guy was hovering over them as if he expected an epidemic.
He had kicked the guy off the plane and gone into their operations shack to have it out with his partners. He hadn’t gotten to first base.
Ken had said, “So what if this Chink is in the black market? He’ll pay ten times what a whole load of refugees will pay, if we fly him to Hong Kong.”
“The way I figured,” Russ said, “we got to look after ourselves.”
“We were gonna make a million, remember?” Domenic said. “We were gonna do it on the level. But every time we made some real dough, this lousy Chinese money dropped in value and we ended with nickels. This is our last chance to cash in.”
“We been out here almost four years since the war,” Frankie said. “I don’t want to go home broke.”
“This junk you give us about saving lives,” Cappy said. “What if we do leave a lot of refugees? We’re flying out all them boxes of medical supplies, ain’t we? Ain’t that gonna save lives?”
He could have taken everything except that stuff about medical supplies. He said angrily, “I’m going out and break open those boxes. And you know what? If they’re medical supplies, you can kick my teeth in and use some on me.”
His memory showed him the way they had stared back at him. Frankie leaned against the wall, watching him sideways out of faded blue eyes. Domenic sat on the edge of a desk, swinging one leg. His heavy-lidded black eyes seemed faintly amused. Big dumb Russ was frowning. Russ had gray eyes that blinked as if they found it hard to understand some of the things they saw. Cappy was mad. His brown eyes had the look of a guy picking a target for a right-hand swing. Ken’s eyes were hot, black, excited.
Right after his memory took that picture, he turned and marched out of the operations shack heading for the C-47. He had marched five steps when a slug from a .45 caught up with him and slammed him face down in the dust.
He studied the five pairs of eyes, trying for the hundredth time to figure which pair had looked down the barrel of the .45 at his retreating back. He couldn’t get the answer. The picture never gave him a hint of what had happened behind his back. As he studied it the picture faded until there was nothing but five pairs of eyes, watching him, watching . . .
He opened his eyes and yanked his thoughts back to the present. He had brought something with him out of the past, though. He brought a feeling that somebody was watching him now, years later, on the bus zooming across Nebraska.
He sat very quietly without turning his head or moving his eyes and tried to figure out who it was. Nobody in the front part of the bus was watching him. The seat across from him was empty, and that left only the seat back of him across the rear of the bus. Usually no one sat there. He counted the people he could see: the driver, Holly Clark, thirty passengers. There ought to be thirty-one passengers in sight. One of them was behind him, watching. It made the back of his neck twitch.
He jerked his head around suddenly and caught the guy at it. The watcher was sitting a little off to one side. He was a man in his fifties, with a round face and pink bald head and eyes that you might describe as kindly if you hadn’t caught them spying.
“Hello there,” the man said. “Finished your nap?”
“Yeah,” Bill said.
“I moved back here to get away from all the chatter up front. My wife and two other women are busy trying to dig up mutual acquaintances. They couldn’t track them down more grimly if they were detectives hunting a murderer. By the way, I’ve never met you properly. I’m Brown. Dr. Brown. General practice, in Columbus, Ohio. You’re Wayne, I think.”
“Yeah.”
“Mind if I move up beside you and chat awhile?”
“Yeah,” Bill said.
“You mean you do mind?”
“That’s right.”
The doctor gave an embarrassed laugh. “I’d better make a confession,” he said. “I didn’t come back here to get away from the chatter. I came back to take a look at you.”
“I could feel you watching me.”
“A lot of people claim they can feel people watching them, but I don’t really think it’s true. Your subconscious mind probably took in the fact that somebody walked past you and sat down here. When you awoke, that fact moved into your conscious mind and was translated into a feeling that you were being watched.”
“Very interesting. Where does that leave us, Doc?”
“Well. I ought to explain. That nice girl, Miss Clark, was talking to me a short time ago. It seems she used to know you way back when. She said you’d come on this trip to get over a nervous breakdown, and she was worried about you and didn’t think you were getting over it and wondered if I could help.”
Bill said disgustedly, “You know how you can help? You can go to work on her. She’s got a bad case of minding other people’s business. I don’t know if it’s curable.”
Brown chuckled and said, “You may be right. Nice girl, though. Matter of fact I wouldn’t have taken any action on what she told me except that my wife and I had the room next to yours last night. You may remember the walls in that hotel were thin, and I woke up a few times and heard you pacing around. And this morning I could see you hadn’t slept much.”
“Lots of people don’t sleep well sometimes.”
“This is very unprofessional of me, Wayne. But if there’s anything I can do, just on a friendly basis—”
“You want my case history, Doc?”
“If you’d like to tell me.”
Bill smiled. He wondered what the guy would say if he gave him the straight dope. It might go like this:
I don’t sleep well at night, Doc, because I just got back from hiding out in Red China for four years. Back in ’49 some pals of mine pumped a slug into my back and left me for dead. Some Chinese nursed me back to what we will laughingly call health, and then I started keeping one jump ahead of the Reds.
I got home to Philly a couple months ago and began sleeping better. But by lousy luck one of the newspapers printed a story about me escaping from Red China and I guess those pals of mine got to read it somehow and found I wasn’t dead. A week after the story ran, somebody took another shot at me at night in front of my family’s house. So now I don’t sleep well any more.
But I have a cure all worked out, Doc. I’m on my way to visit my old pals. I hadn’t figured on bothering them but if they won’t let me alone I have to do something. I wouldn’t say my life is worth much, but you know how it is, a guy often puts a sentimental value on staying alive. So those are the symptoms, Doc . . .
He said aloud, “You’re on vacation, Doc. Stay on it, will you? There’s nothing wrong with