Death Quest Read online

  Wister, Jerome Terrance: Name that Jettero Heller is using on Earth.

  Zanco: Medical and cellological equipment and supplies company on Voltar.

  PART FORTY-THREE

  To My Lord Turn, Justiciary of the Royal Courts and Prison, Government City, Planet Voltar, Voltar Confederacy

  Your Lordship, Sir!

  I, Soltan Gris, Grade Eleven General Services Officer, former Secondary Executive of the Coordinated Information Apparatus, Voltar Confederacy (All Hail His Most Imperial Majesty Cling the Lofty), am forwarding the sixth part of my confession pertaining to MISSION EARTH.

  I know that one who is in prison, as I am, should reflect upon and learn the error of his ways. You will be pleased to know that incarceration in your fine prison has allowed me to do this.

  While detailing my many criminal deeds committed while on MISSION EARTH for the Apparatus, including murder, extortion, and blackmail, I have learned a valuable lesson: Females are vicious, treacherous, lying beasts who spend every waking minute conniving amongst themselves, plotting and scheming how to destroy every single male. They should all be destroyed.

  Take those two Earth lesbians, Miss Pinch and Candy, for example. Miss Pinch took all my money and locked it up in a safe. I was broke and wanted it back. Earth psychology, which is never wrong, has something they call aversion therapy. (In the Apparatus we call it “torture.”) So I tied them up and despite their protests raped them both. What did they do? Did they adhere to the unwavering truths of psychology? No! They ended up liking it!

  “Inkswitch,” they said (addressing me by the alias I employ in the US), “we renounce Rockecenter’s Psychiatric Birth Control which advocates homosexuality to reduce the population and will pay you to live with us and do that again and again.”

  Just goes to show how you can’t trust women. They turn on you every time.

  And if there is any female that epitomizes the vicious evil of that species, it is the Countess Krak, Jettero Heller’s girlfriend. My task was simpler until her arrival on Earth. All I had to do was sabotage Heller’s mission. True, he had given me some trouble but it was nothing compared to the problems she caused. She was urging him on, urging him on, sabotaging my sabotaging at every turn. Not through any skill, mind you. She was just lucky. All women are. They just don’t have the brains. They just cause trouble for men. Especially me.

  That’s when I realized my problem. Although J. Walter Madison, that master of PR, was generating phony front-page stories about Heller (known on Earth as Jerome Terrance “The Whiz Kid” Wister), they weren’t affecting him. It was all because of Krak. She was holding him up. I realized that to stop Heller I had to first remove the Countess Krak.

  The opportunity was perfect. Heller was caught up in his crazy project to release spores into the atmosphere to clean up the air, not in protecting the Countess Krak. Besides, Heller didn’t have any reason to think she was open to an attack. And thanks to the visio and audio bugs they unknowingly carried, I could not only monitor everything they saw or heard but could pinpoint their locations at any given time. I could choose exactly when and where and how to strike.

  The decision was simple.

  I had found the solution to my problem.

  I would kill the Countess Krak!

  PART FORTY-THREE

  Chapter 1

  My plan was very simple.

  I would buy a hit!

  A long-range sniper rifle, expertly zeroed in, fired by a trained man, was a thing against which the Countess Krak would have no defense.

  All the clever tricks she knew were close-up things, face to face. An expert marksman, shooting from two to five hundred yards away, would not have to cope with darts or hypnohelmets or stage sleight of hand. He would simply pull the trigger and she’d be dead.

  How much did a hit cost? Ten thousand dollars seemed to be the going price.

  Where could I get a hit man? They were available from the Faustino Narcotici mob, right downtown.

  When could I get it done? As soon as I had ten thousand bucks.

  I counted up my money. I had less than four thousand.

  It was Sunday night. The apartment was in an uproar. Candy and Miss Pinch were trying to get things squared around. Sometime this coming week, I had not made out when, they were going to have a housewarming and because they both worked, they could only get the place into some kind of order by working late into the night. Almost all the major things were done but there remained curtain hanging and getting things just right.

  I had sort of been staying out of the way, afraid of getting pinned to a curtain rod or swept out into the dustbin. But my need for ten thousand dollars made me brave.

  They were both buzzing around in the back room. And I ran into a hornets’ nest—or, more exactly, a fleas’ nest.

  Miss Pinch, stripped to the waist and wearing a bandana on her head like some kind of a pirate, was tearing into something.

  “Miss Pinch,” I said, “I am in grievous straits. I need ten thousand dollars to speed up a business deal.”

  She whirled on me. “THERE you are!” All it would have taken was a knife between her teeth to complete the picture of a boarding party taking a ship by storm upon the Spanish Main. “FLEAS! God (bleep)it, Inkswitch, FLEAS!”

  Candy pointed a broom handle at me like a cannoneer. “We’ve been wondering and wondering why we itched. We’ve been looking everyplace!”

  “And there they are!” thundered Miss Pinch like a broadside.

  They were tearing my suitcase apart! They found the clothes I had stolen from that old man on Limnos island. And there in plain view was a nest of fleas!

  “It’s an invasion of privacy!” I squeaked.

  “Exactly!” said Candy with unaccustomed grimness. “They’re invading the hell out of our privates!”

  “Candy,” said Miss Pinch, standing on the quarterdeck in full command, “run down to the corner store and buy all the DDT on the shelf!”

  She sped like an arrow.

  “What about my ten thousand dollars?” I said.

  I didn’t get any answer.

  Miss Pinch began to tear my grip apart. In desperation, I began to rescue vital hardware and papers. She made me pile them in the middle of the floor.

  Then she made me take the whole grip and every stitch of my clothes and carry them into the back yard. She marched behind me as though she carried a prodding cutlass and made me stuff everything into the garden incinerator. With a grim glare, she poured charcoal igniter fluid in and touched it off with a match.

  They burned like a sacked town.

  “I think this is a little extreme,” I said for the tenth or twelfth time. “They’re only a few fleas.”

  But that was not all they had in store for me. Candy came back, staggering under a load of insecticide. They put me to work. They made me spray and dust the whole apartment while they stood back with cloths over their faces saying things like, “Brand-new decorator job and he . . .” and “Work our (bleeps) to the bone to make the place nice and he . . .” It was not a very hopeful atmosphere in which to get ten thousand dollars.

  I finally was even made to spray my hardware, papers and boots, and just when I thought I was finished, more horror awaited. I was dizzy from breathing in DDT and said I was feeling faint when both of them leaped on me, grabbed a Flit can and began to spray ME! They even rubbed DDT into my hair and answered my protests with “If you weren’t infested, then why are you leaping about?”

  They dumped me in the shower and then sprayed themselves. They locked me in the back room with only the floor to sleep on.

  The following morning, before they went to work, they let me out. Standing there with nothing on, I said, “Could I have ten thousand dollars?”

  Miss Pinch, coated and hatted and holding her purse, stood in the door and glared.

  I said, “At least let me have my daily thousand dollars.”

  The answer was a slammed door. They were gone.

&nbs
p; Forlornly, I checked my viewers and radio and other things. They were pretty fogged up with insecticide powder and I had to clean them off.

  The Countess Krak was drinking a cup of something, probably Bavarian Mocha Mint, and watching Heller busily putting things in glass jars.

  “What are those things, dear?” she said from her stool at the bar.

  “Spore cultures,” he said. “I’m just checking Crobe’s formula. In a few days I’ll know if they’re all right.”

  “Can’t you do it sooner, dear? I don’t think this planet is very good for us.”

  “Well, honey, some things take as long as they take. These people pretty well let this planet go down the drain. And this mission has got to be a success.”

  “Yes,” she said. “It has to be a success.” She looked into her coffee for a bit. Then she looked up and said, “Is there anything I can do to push it along?”

  He went over to her, put his arm around her and said, “You just go on being pretty and smile in the right places and it will all come off just fine.” He kissed her and she clung to him for a moment.

  She smiled suddenly and gave him a playful push. “Honey, you just better get back to work. In fact, I’m going to go out shopping to remove temptation.”

  They both laughed.

  I didn’t. She was egging him on, egging him on. She would ruin everything! I shut off the viewers angrily.

  This was certainly no laughing matter. As long as that fiend was with him and alive, he would go speeding along toward completion, ruining everything.

  The best thing to handle it was one well-placed sniper bullet. She was always walking around unescorted. Too easy.

  The thought of a Countess Krak lying dead was a vision which spurred me into action.

  PART FORTY-THREE

  Chapter 2

  Although some people do it, running around New York with no clothes on was no way to go about hiring a hit man.

  All my raiment was gone. But that is easily replaced in New York. All I had to do was catch a bus down Seventh Avenue to get to the Garment District. In all directions around 37th Street, there are shops, shops, shops that sell clothes, clothes, clothes.

  The first problem was clothes to buy clothes in. I still had my military boots even though they were a bit gray with DDT. The problem was with the upper areas.

  They had dusted their own clothes but despite copious coughing I finally found an old raincoat that was big enough. I put it on, stuffed my ID and money in a pocket and was on my way.

  Fortunately nobody ever looks at anybody in New York. Riding on a bus in a mauve woman’s raincoat did not attract too much attention.

  Shortly, I was in a shop whose signs proclaimed that it had everything for the gent. It was very nice. A sort of miniature department store. The proprietor himself waited on me. He was a very well-informed Jew. He knew what all the fashions were, from one end of the world to the other. He expressed only sympathy when I told him all my clothes had been lost in a fire. He went right to work. There was only one thing odd about the proceedings. He kept putting things on me and then calling to his wife—a charming lady named Rebecca—and asking her opinion. They never consulted me. They debated this and that about four-button sack jackets as opposed to two-button sack jackets for a man of my build, or theatrical collars as opposed to Ivy League collars for my face shape. But whatever the debate, she would finally stand back, rub her hands and say, “Oy, don’t he look handsome in that.” And the proprietor would say, “Good, he’ll take it.” They never asked my opinion once.

  I wound up with several suits, topcoats, shoes, assorted hats and haberdashery. I walked out very well dressed, carrying a tower of boxes. There was only one thing wrong: They had, by some mysterious calculation I could not fathom, estimated my bankroll to the penny. All I had left was a handful of bus tokens which they didn’t seem to want. A marvel of mathematical subtraction.

  I now had the whole ten thousand to go. But such was the lure of the vision of a dead and bleeding Countess Krak that I was not daunted in the least. Something would turn up.

  With my new wardrobe safely deposited in the apartment, I caught a bus downtown. With many a lurch and roar, I landed in the Bowery.

  I stood and looked at the black-glass-and-chrome high-rise with the sign Total Control, Inc., fanned out in a splendid arch: the office building of the Faustino mob. My plan was to hire a hit man on credit.

  My suit was charcoal gray with a banker pinstripe. My shirt was impeccable mauve silk. My tie was a patriotic red, white and blue. My topcoat was the finest black. I reeked prosperity. Credit should be easy.

  I walked past the murals depicting American history in drugs. I was not carrying a gun. And there was Angelina, her pretty brunette self. She remembered me. And why not? She had personally dumped me down the chute of the fake elevator.

  “It’s about time you showed up, Inkswitch,” she said.

  At last somebody had noticed I’d been gone!

  “Accounts has been raising hell since you skipped out of your hotel.”

  “I did no skipping,” I said stiffly. “Tell Faustino I have arrived.”

  “Buster, you ain’t seeing the capo today.” She had been punching a computer. She read the screen. “You’re several months overdue for an appointment with the consigliere.”

  “I’m sure there has been some misunderstanding,” I said.

  “Well, you just go misunderstand it with him.” She beckoned to a security guard and I found myself in an elevator. It was a real one this time. So I was making progress. We shot up to the fortieth floor. I was shoved into an executive office.

  Razza Louseini was sitting at his desk. His reptilian eyes fastened upon me. The knife scar that ran up from mouth to left ear went livid.

  “So you’re Inkswitch,” he said. “I was looking for a much more prepossessing man.”

  “I want to hire a hit man on credit,” I said. I didn’t want him to get into all that Italian circumlocution.

  “I’ll bet you do,” said Razza. “And that’s what I wanted to see you about. Credit. When are you going to pay?” He was waving a bill! “You hired two snipers last fall. You got them both killed. And you never even had the decency to show up and pay the compensation. This bill,” and he waved it with an Italian gesture for emphasis, “has been the subject of more legal correspondence than any other item on my desk! Attorney after attorney, collection agency after collection agency. Letters, letters, letters! I am sick of them! A consigliere has better things to do than mess around with delinquent accounts.”

  I was beginning to become uneasy. It must be an astronomical bill!

  He was, Italian-wise, carrying on. “You know the rules. Liquidate or get liquidated. So when are you going to get this god (bleeped) bill off my god (bleeped) plate?”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  He echoed that a few times. “Swindle and Crouch won’t pay it because they have no matching voucher. The Federal government won’t pay it because you never signed it. Octopus Oil won’t pay it because the third assistant vice president didn’t initial the requisition. Letters, letters, letters! Torrents of letters! And where are you? You can’t be found. Skipped out of your hotel . . .”

  “Wait a minute,” I said, “I wasn’t in any hotel.”

  “Well, whatever your story is, Inkswitch, you’ve had every (bleeped) computer in the organization so screwed up, it’s cost a fortune in fuses.”

  “How much is this bill?” I said.

  “Two thousand dollars,” said Razza Louseini. “It isn’t the money. It’s the organizational screw-up. We’ve got to get it paid just to straighten out the computers. They’re so crazy on the subject by this time that they gibber. Just yesterday we were trying to do a cost accounting for hit men for the CIA and all we could get on the printouts was the cost of Cape Canaveral. Pay this god (bleeped) bill!”

  I can be pretty cunning about these things. I said, “All right, Consigliere, I’ll tell you what
I’ll do. I’ll pay that bill, but you give me another hit man.”

  He thought about it. Sicilians are pretty quick to spot who has the leverage. “When?” he said.

  “In just two or three days. I have to go into some things for it.”

  His reptilian eyes were pretty slitted. “All right,” he said. “I’ll put all this on hold.”

  I walked out, practically treading on air. I wasn’t ten thousand in the red, I was only two thousand.

  Two thousand to go and one dead Countess Krak!