The Branch Page 4

  Moore produced the card and slid it across the desk to Pryor. “We’ll make that our next order of business. Leave someone here to keep an eye on things, gather up half a dozen security men, and let’s get this show on the road.”

  Half an hour later Moore, Pryor, and six security men turned onto the North 400 block on the fifth level of LaSalle Street. They walked past two back-number magazine shops and an exceptionally dirty soya restaurant, and then Moore pointed to a building some fifty yards away.

  “There it is!” he exclaimed. “What the hell were you talking about, Ben?”

  “All I see is an old religious-goods shop,” said Pryor, quickening his pace to keep up with Moore. “I checked it out this morning, and it’s legit.”

  The windows of the store were no longer covered, and as Moore looked in he saw nothing but a tiny shop, no more than fifteen feet deep, its walls and counters covered by Bibles, crucifixes, and other denominational keepsakes. An elderly woman stood behind one of the counters, looking through a pile of papers which Moore took to be invoices or index cards.

  “May I be of some help to you gentlemen?” inquired the woman as Moore and Pryor entered the store, followed by their security men.

  “Where is Krebbs?” demanded Moore.

  “Krebbs?” repeated the woman thoughtfully. “He must be one of our newer authors. I don’t believe we have any of his works, though you are of course welcome to browse through our stock of books yourself.”

  Moore unrolled a large wad of bills and laid them on the counter.

  “Last night there was a man named Krebbs working here. I want to know where he is.”

  “Here? Last night? You must be mistaken. No one works here except me and my daughter-in-law. We have no one named Krebbs here.”

  “Let’s try another one.” He stared coldly at her. “Does the name Solomon Moody Moore mean anything to you?”

  “No.”

  “Lie to me once more and it will,” he promised. “How do I get to the back?”

  “The back of what?”

  “The back of the store,” he replied. “It goes on for hundreds of feet.”

  The woman stared at him as if he could be expected to fall to the ground and begin foaming at the mouth at any moment.

  “The store ends at the wall right behind me,” she said at last, speaking as if to a child. “That’s all there is, except for a bathroom over there.”

  She indicated a door on a side wall.

  “I told you that’s all there was,” grinned Pryor.

  “How long have you been in business at this location?” continued Moore.

  “Thirty-seven years.”

  “Where were you last night?”

  “Right here, of course.”

  “How late?”

  “Until nine o’clock, as always,” she replied. “Are you sure you’re feeling well?”

  “No, I am not feeling well!” snapped Moore. “I am feeling angry as all hell, and getting angrier by the second!” He gestured to the bills lying on the counter. “I’m going to ask you one last time: where is Krebbs?”

  “I keep telling you—I don’t know anyone called Krebbs.”

  Moore picked up his money and put it back into his pocket, then turned to the head of his security team.

  “See that wall?”

  “Yes, Mr. Moore.”

  “Break it down,” he said, stepping back out of the way.

  “Have you gone crazy?” said Pryor. “It’s a goddamned Bible shop, nothing more!”

  “If you talk like a fool, I’m going to have to start treating you like one, Ben,” said Moore, deciding that it really was getting near time to dispose of Pryor. “I was here. I know what I saw.”

  “If you don’t get out of here and stop harassing me right this minute, I’m going to call the police!” shouted the woman.

  “On the contrary,” said Moore. “You’re going to stay right where you are until I say otherwise.” He turned to his security team. “One of you men come over and keep an eye on her.”

  “Will a laser be okay, sir?” asked the man who was examining the wall.

  “I don’t care how you do it,” replied Moore. “Just get it done.”

  The man pulled out a laser device and began tracing a line from left to right, about twenty inches below the ceiling. He came to a weak spot a couple of feet before reaching the southernmost corner.

  “That’s it!” he said, throwing a shoulder against the wall. It crumbled like the thin plasterboard it was, leaving a door-sized hole through which Moore, Pryor, and five of the security men passed.

  They found themselves in the main room of the Bizarre Bazaar, with its weapons and torture devices and grisly souvenirs. Moore walked through the room and went down a dimly lit corridor to the Unique Boutique.

  “What do you think of my adolescent fantasy, Ben?” he asked with grim satisfaction.

  Pryor shook his head. “I was wrong. But if it had happened to me and I’d found this Bible shop here the next morning, I would have thought I dreamed it all.”

  “That’s why I’m the boss of this outfit.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “I never fantasize,” replied Moore.

  One of the security men approached them. “There’s no one in any of the rooms, sir,” he announced. “We did find a number of long black boards, though, which must be the maze you described.”

  “Look around and see what else you can dig up,” said Moore, dismissing him. “Ben, if you’re all through sounding like a complete idiot, suppose you tell me what you think is going on here.”

  “Someone tried to kill you and missed,” replied Pryor, “and then decided that it wouldn’t be real healthy to stick around and wait for us to show up.” He shrugged. “Makes sense. I don’t imagine Al Capone ever gave anyone a second chance at him, either.”

  Moore shook his head. “Too simple. There’s a lot more to this than meets the eye. Let’s have a little chat with our religious fanatic up front and see if we can get some answers.”

  When they got back to the false front of the Bizarre Bazaar they found their security man lying dead in a pool of his own blood, a bullet lodged in his temple. The woman was nowhere to be seen.

  Moore yelled for other security men, who arrived seconds later.

  “Who knows anything about gunshot wounds?” he demanded. “Did the old lady do this?”

  One of the men examined the corpse. “Not a chance,” he announced after a brief inspection. “This came from an awfully powerful handgun. If she’d fired at close range, it would have taken most of his head off. I’d guess that somebody opened the door and fired from there. There must have been a silencer, too, or we’d have heard one hell of a bang.”

  “So we can assume Krebbs or the Dartboard was keeping the place under surveillance, just in case I came back,” said Moore. He turned to Pryor. “Ben, you got a good look at the old woman; see what you can do about tracking her down. Two of you men take this place apart and see if you can turn up anything that might explain what’s been going on. When you’re through, rig the whole place up with an electronic watchdog system. You other three, come with me and see to it that I get back to the office in one piece.”

  He walked warily to the monorail system, half expecting to be shot down at any moment and cursing the day that individual transportation had been outlawed within the city limits, but nothing unusual happened and he was back in his office fifteen minutes later.

  The moment he arrived, he ordered round-the-clock security forces to be posted throughout the building and had sleeping quarters set up just down the hall from his office. Then, because he was nothing if not thorough, he ordered still more security men to patrol all the possible approaches to the building.

  Pryor and his other agents reported in regularly, but nobody seemed able to turn up any information. Finally, when he found himself unable to concentrate on the mundane aspects of his business, he kept himself occupied by working out the
basic details of Dream Come True with a few members of his staff, and ordered them to put it into operation.

  Anyone would be able to walk in and order up a dream—but if the dream was illegal, as he expected most of them to be, a rigid check would be run on the potential customer to make sure he wasn’t working for any of the government or law enforcement agencies. If he was cleared, preliminary plans would be worked out, after which a price would be agreed upon. Moore decided to set up the first office at the Thrill Show on the assumption that a lot of people would go there with money to spend, and he wanted a broad cross-section of dream requests to see which particulars of the operation still had to be smoothed out.

  He spent the next two days involving himself in the administration of his little empire, and the next two nights tossing uncomfortably on a rollaway bed in the adjoining office. Then, when he had just about made up his mind to go home, one of his security men entered the office.

  “Yes?” said Moore.

  “We’ve got her, sir.”

  “The old woman?”

  “Lisa Walpole.”

  “Better and better,” commented Moore. “Where was she?”

  “At the airport. She had a one-way ticket for Buenos Aires.”

  “You did a good job,” said Moore. “There’ll be a bonus for everyone involved. Bring her in here, and then send for Abe Bernstein.”

  “Your doctor?”

  Moore nodded.

  “Any instructions for him, sir?”

  “He’ll know what to bring.”

  Lisa Walpole, dressed conservatively this time, was ushered into the office, her hands securely tied behind her back. Her left ear was swathed in bandages. Moore gestured toward a chair, and she walked over to it and sat down, glaring venomously at him.

  “Please leave us now,” said Moore to the security man. “Miss Walpole and I would like to be alone for a while.”

  As the door slammed shut, Moore leaned forward and studied the Living Dartboard. “I was right,” he said with a smile. “I would never have recognized you with your clothes on.”

  She stared defiantly at him, her lips pressed together.

  “I have a few questions I’d like answered, Lisa,” he continued. “For starters, suppose you tell me who hired you to kill me three nights ago.”

  “Go fuck yourself!”

  “Was it the late unlamented Mr. Thrush?”

  “You’d like to know that, wouldn’t you?” she said contemptuously.

  “Indeed I would,” agreed Moore. “And what’s more, I will know very shortly.”

  “Are you going to torture it out of me?” she asked with a sarcastic laugh.

  He shook his head. “No. I don’t think a little thing like torture would bother you, even if you hadn’t had your pain receptors severed. Of course,” he added conversationally, “I could always slash an artery or two and threaten to let you bleed to death if you didn’t tell me what I want to know, but it would stain the carpet—and besides, I suspect that you’re just a little too infatuated with death for a stunt like that to serve any useful purpose. And your unfortunate condition precludes the use of our Neverlie Machine; after all, there’s not much sense in shooting an electrical charge through your body every time you lie if you can’t even feel it.”

  “Then how do you expect to drag it out of me?”

  “I’m not going to drag it out of you at all,” said Moore. “You’re going to tell me of your own volition.”

  “Hah!”

  Moore pressed a button on his intercom. “Is Bernstein here yet?”

  “Yes,” replied a feminine voice. “He’s waiting in your outer office.”

  “Send him in.”

  The door opened a moment later and a small, portly, silver-haired man entered the room, carrying a dark leather bag in his right hand.

  “Thanks for coming so fast, Abe,” said Moore.

  “I was downstairs in the sauna, sweating off another one of my wife’s parties,” replied Bernstein with a smile. “I hear you had a pretty exciting weekend, Solomon.”

  “I’ll tell you about it later,” said Moore. “In the meantime, we seem to have a little problem that requires your talents,” he added, indicating Lisa Walpole.

  “I saw Ben on my way in, and he told me about it—though I assumed as much when you couldn’t use the Neverlie Machine.” As he spoke, Bernstein opened his bag and withdrew a syringe and a small bottle. He filled the syringe, walked over to the girl, and injected its contents into a vein in her forearm.

  “Give her about two minutes,” he told Moore. “Her eyes will glaze over a bit, but she’ll be able to speak cogently. Ask direct questions, and try to finish up within ten minutes.”

  “Thanks, Abe,” said Moore. “You’d better leave now.”

  Bernstein nodded and walked out of the office, as Moore counted off two hundred seconds on his watch, just to be on the safe side.

  “All right, Lisa,” he said, rising and walking over to the girl. “We’re going to have a little talk now. Did Thrush put you up to killing me?”

  “No,” she said emotionlessly.

  “Nightspore?”

  “No.”

  “Then it was Krebbs!” he exclaimed. “But why?”

  “It wasn’t Krebbs.”

  “Who was it, then?”

  “Jeremiah.”

  “Jeremiah?” repeated Moore. “Who the hell is Jeremiah?”

  “He’s a young guy who hangs out around the Thrill Show,” said Lisa, her voice a droning monotone.

  “What’s his last name?”

  “I don’t know. He calls himself Jeremiah the B.”

  “I never heard of him in my life,” said Moore, frowning. “What has he got against me?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Then why did he have you try to kill me?”

  “Thrush told me that you had forced your way into the business, and that you had plenty of money.”

  “And you relayed that to Jeremiah?” asked Moore.

  “Yes.”

  “When and where?”

  “In bed, the same night Thrush told me.”

  “He’s a fast operator, I’ll give him that,” said Moore. “Now suppose you tell me exactly what I was being set up for.”

  “Jeremiah figured you’d carry a big roll of cash with you.”

  “Then you were just going to rob me?” said Moore dubiously.

  “No. A plain robbery wouldn’t have been safe. We felt we had to kill you first.”

  “We? Does that mean you and Krebbs?”

  “No. Jeremiah and me. He was in one of the other rooms, hiding.”

  “Brave fellow,” Moore commented dryly. “How about Krebbs? Where does he fit in?”

  “Jeremiah knew him, and promised him a piece of the action if we could use the Bazaar.”

  “And the little old lady in the religious shop?”

  There was no answer.

  “Did you know that Krebbs camouflaged his store as a religious-goods shop the next morning?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know of an elderly woman who was involved with either Krebbs or Jeremiah?”

  “No.”

  “One last question: where can I find this Jeremiah?”

  “I don’t know. Probably at the Thrill Show.”

  “Thank you, Lisa,” said Moore, pressing a button on his intercom system that signaled for two security men. “You did very well. The fact that I’m going to let you live, at least for the time being, should not imply that I am a forgiving man. You’ll remain here, in this building, until I decide what to do with you.”

  He cut her bonds and ordered the security team to incarcerate her on another floor, then summoned Pryor to his office.

  “Abe mentioned that you were in. Any news?”

  “None,” replied Pryor. “I think we must have checked out every Krebbs in the city, and I had one of our porn artists, of all people, render a sketch of the old lady that I passed out to all of our agents. Th
ere’s nothing left to do now but sit and wait.” He lit a cigarette. “By the way, did you learn anything from the Dartboard?”

  “Plenty,” said Moore. “For one thing, Nightspore and Thrush had nothing to do with it.”

  “I told you they weren’t lying,” said Pryor smugly.

  “And I told you that you killed them for nothing,” replied Moore irritably.

  “What’s done is done,” said Pryor, shrugging off their deaths with a single sentence. “Did you find out who’s behind it?”

  “It’s hard to believe, but some Thrill Show grifter found out I carry a big bankroll, and the whole thing was just a setup to roll me.”

  “It must be catching,” remarked Pryor cheerfully.

  “What are you talking about?” said Moore.

  “Just that this grifter isn’t the only guy who’s decided to spread the wealth around. Dream Come True had its first customer this morning.”

  He withdrew a sheet of paper from his notebook and handed it to Moore. “Take a look.”

  Moore read it, then read it again to make sure his eyes weren’t playing tricks.

  Dream Come True, Inc.

  Preliminary Application Form

  HEIGHT: 6 feet, 2 inches WEIGHT: 187 pounds HAIR: Brown EYES: Blue DISTINGUISHING MARKS: None AGE: 22 NATIONALITY: American

  RELIGION: None CURRENT ADDRESS: Refused to divulge

  MARITAL STATUS: Single FINANCIAL STATUS: Unclear at present

  FIRST CONTACT: December 15, 2047

  DREAM DESIRED: To murder Solomon Moody Moore and take over sole ownership of Dream Come True, Inc.

  SIGNATURE: Jeremiah the B

  “Persistent son of a bitch, isn’t he?” said Moore, replacing the form on his desk.

  “I don’t think I follow you,” said Pryor.

  “Jeremiah the B just happens to be the guy who tried to set me up at the Bizarre Bazaar.”

  “And now he’s trying to use Dream Come True to do the same thing?” said Pryor, greatly amused by this revelation.

  Moore nodded. “He’s got guts, I’ll give him that.”