Midnight Man

CHAPTER TWELVE

ELMO WIMPLER ENTERED CENTRAL PARK near the East 72nd Street entrance a few minutes after 11 P.M.

Dressed in a white shirt and slacks and carrying a paper bag, Wimpler had as much chance of survival walking through the park as a piece of sirloin thrown into a cage of starving Dobermans.

But only seventy-five feet in the park, Wimpler darted from the pathway and into a cluster of bushes. He congratulated himself on being unseen.

But Wimpler was wrong.

He had been seen by Bats Agron. Bats was lounging against a pipefence, fingering the switchblade knife in his pocket and when he saw Wimpler enter the park, he wrapped around himself the dark cape which had given him his nickname and slid back in the shadows to watch. The little man in the white shirt had victim written all over him, and Agron had smiled as the man walked ever closer to him.

Then the little man had run into a clump of bushes. Probably some kind of fagola, Agron thought. Well, he might have been waiting to meet his boyfriend, but he was in for a surprise. He was going to meet Bats Agron.

The slim, smooth-faced, Latin youth took his knife from his pocket and held it in his right hand, his finger on the switch that flipped it open. He walked through the splash of sparse bushes into a small clearing, then looked around. It was a dark night, but that white-shirted man should have stood out like a lighthouse. Agron looked all around him, but saw no one.

“Shit,” he cursed softly to himself.

“Looking for someone?” came a soft voice. It seemed to come from behind Agron’s right shoulder. He turned, but saw nothing, just another silhouette of just another bush. He turned in the other direction, straining his eyes to see into the darkness.

He never had a chance to press the switch on his knife. He felt something metallic pressing against both sides of his head, then he heard a voice say, “So long, sucker,” and then there was a flash of pain.

And then nothing.

Elmo Wimpler was pleased. He wiped off the skull-crusher and replaced it into the waistband he had designed to carry his equipment. Since leaving his house, he had been giving a lot of thought to the problem of his invisibility. He was invisible in total darkness, but in anything less than that, he was visible as a silhouette, without features, almost a shadow, but still the silhouette of a man. He had realized that his protection would be much greater if he could change his silhouette, and out of a few pieces of cardboard, hinged along their long edges, he had fashioned a folding screen, shaped roughly into the outline of a bush. He had painted it with his invisible, black paint also. In a dark park setting, he could just open the screen and anyone glancing in that direction would see nothing but the dark silhouette of just another bush, instead of the outline of a man.

He had wondered if it would work. The body of Bats Agron, lying at his feet, his skull in pieces, had just given him his successful road test. It worked.

Whistling lightly under his breath, Wimpler folded the screen under an arm and began strolling off toward the Sheep Meadow to meet the people who wanted him to kill the Emir of Bislami.

He knew little about the Emir, except what he had seen on the television newscasts. But politics didn’t matter to him. What had mattered was that the people he had called were willing to pay a million dollars each for the Emir’s death.

Wimpler still hadn’t made up his mind. Should he kill the Emir and admit it to the world, challenging them to catch him? Or should he do it silently, as a professional, an anonymous hit man?

Why not? He could do both. He could take the credit for the Emir’s death. People would be lining up to hire him. Contract magazine was filled with ads from people looking for killers. He could pick and choose.

But first, his two-million-dollar job.

He realized now how foolish he had been on the Brooklyn dock to have asked for so little to kill that federal witness. But that was then. The person who asked for that little amount was a Wimp, and that Wimp was dead. Alive now, in his place, was Elmo Wimpler, Elmo the Invisible Killer, Elmo the Scourge of the World.

He laughed aloud with happiness. From sheer joy, he took the light oscillating device from his pocket and aimed it at one of the street lamps that lined the roadway through the park. He pressed the switch. The light sputtered and died.

He remembered “The Shadow” radio show. That’s what he was, a modern-day Shadow, striking fear into the heart of men.

The first meeting was scheduled to be held in the southwest corner of the Sheep Meadow. Wimpler was there a few minutes before midnight and when he saw that the area was empty, he found himself a dark spot near some bushes, opened up his screen and propped it onto the ground. Then he sat behind it, his head out, able to see around the entire clearing. He had his compressor on the grass next to him.

His thoughts went back to the evening with his unwilling neighbor, Phyllis. She had not been all that he had thought she would be. Maybe being gagged and bound had inhibited her. But that was in the past too.

He had no need to rape. The women would come willingly, once he had the money. That’s the way women were. All women. He thought of his mother who had cheated on his father for years, accusing the senior Wimpler of not being able to provide for her in any decent way.

Often she would come home wearing gifts other men had provided for her and so great was her contempt for her husband that she never even tried to explain the gifts away. Elmo never understood why his father had tolerated it and stayed with her, and when she was dying, he sat at her bedside, holding her hand, the devoted husband to the end.

As he, himself, grew up, Elmo was never treated kindly by women, because he was smaller and weaker than most men. He might still be smaller but there was no longer any weakness about Elmo Wimpler. The invisibility paint had changed all that. Women would flock to him and he would use them and humiliate them and then dump them.

He quickly checked his wristwatch, sliding it out from under his long black sleeve. Two minutes till midnight.

Soon.

He saw someone enter the edge of the meadow. Two men. The taller one was thin, dressed in black shirt and chinos. He had dark hair and his eyes were deepset. The man with him was an Oriental, dressed in some kind of yellow kimono. He had seen the two men before. As they stepped into the light, he remembered. He had seen them outside his old house in Brooklyn. They had gone in to question Phyllis. He remembered that the taller one had asked him a lot of questions.

Police? He hadn’t asked and the man hadn’t volunteered the answer. But what kind of cops wore kimonos? At any rate, they might be dangerous and he’d have to get rid of them before the person he was waiting to meet arrived. That these two men were here, after they had been nosing into Curt’s death, meant that they knew more about Elmo Wimpler than was good for them.

He aimed his electronic light oscillator at the nearest of the overhead lights and it sizzled out. Quickly, he zapped another nine lights and the Sheep Meadow was in blackness.

Holding his bush-shaped screen in front of him, he moved through the darkness toward the two men, feeling secure and safe, beyond their reach, beyond the reach of the law.

He heard the tall one say, “Dark,” as he sat on a bench.

“Especially for a pale piece of pig’s ear who looks only with his eyes and not with his other senses.” That made no sense to Wimpler. Stealthily, he moved around behind the two men. He would handle the taller one first.

He removed the compressor from his belt.

“I wonder if our friend is responsible for the doused lights.”

“No,” said the Oriental. “All the bulbs decided to burn out at the same time.”

“They don’t make things the way they used to,” the taller man said.

“Including disciples and students,” the Oriental said. “And bushes.”

Bushes? Had Wimpler heard right? But they couldn’t have seen him. He must have misunderstood what the small, yellow man had said. And why was he waiting? It was time to remove these two.

He was ten feet behind them, in the blackness. As he cocked the compressor, there was a small hiss as gas from a carbon-dioxide cylinder flooded the drum from which the skull-crusher got its power.

Elmo cocked it and stepped out from behind his cardboard bush and moved stealthily toward the two men. He extended the compressor to accommodate the taller man’s head.

As he did, he was startled to see the Oriental’s hand, moving through the darkness, reach behind his own head and grasp one of the arms of the compressor.

How could he have done that? The compressor was just as invisible as he was.

A coincidence, but one the old man would pay for. He would be minus his fingers.

Wimpler pulled the trigger, releasing the trapped compressed air, but the arms of the compressor did not move.

A malfunction.

Impossible.

He pulled the trigger again, but again the arms of the crusher did not work. Then there was a strange ripping sound as the inner workings of the machinery rebelled against not being able to do what they were built to do and they ruptured.

Wimpler dropped the compressor and ran back toward the safety of his ersatz bush. He heard the men stand at the bench, and suddenly he feared that he would not be safe, even behind the bush, even cloaked in invisibility in this blackness.

“That way,” he heard the Oriental say.

The two men were coming toward him. He peered out from behind the bush. Then he heard the sound and saw its cause. Fifty yards across the Sheep Meadow, eight men were racing toward them. They were carrying knives. Several of them waved them over their heads.

The taller man and the Oriental turned to look and Elmo scrambled away from behind his bush, running hard, back into the deeper darkness of the night.

When he was fifty yards away, hidden in the shadow of a tree, he turned. What he saw made his blood chill inside his body. The eight men with knives had surrounded the Oriental and the American with the hard face.

There was a sudden flurry of activity and then three of the armed men were down and motionless. For some reason, Wimpler knew they were dead, although he had not seen the tall man and the Oriental do anything.

He watched again. The five remaining men moved in, all attacking at the same time. Then two more of them were down. And Wimpler still had not seen the two potential victims move.

The three attackers who remained paused for a moment. This time, Wimpler was sure that the taller man did not move at all. He thought he caught a slight touch of movement on the part of the Oriental, and then three more men were down and the only ones left standing were the Oriental and his companion.

Wimpler didn’t wait. He turned and ran as fast as he could deep into the park. He would not stop until he came out the other side.

Those two were far more dangerous than he could ever have imagined.

He hated them. For they had, this night, brought back the Wimp, even if only for a few moments.

They had destroyed his compressor and worse, his sense of invulnerability.

He thought about it as he ran. It must have been luck. The Oriental could not have seen him. He had not even been looking in Wimpler’s direction.

Elmo was still an invisible man, and he would respond as the new Elmo Wimpler.

With hatred and with power.

He hated those two men, the tall-thin one and the old Oriental. They would pay for what they had done tonight to mess up his plan. He had two contracts scheduled and now both were gone.

He would devise a new skull-crusher. The two men might even have done him a favor exposing the malfunction in his weapon. But they had not done themselves a favor.

They had done themselves great harm.

They had put themselves at the top of Elmo Wimpler’s must-kill list.

He continued running. He had another meeting scheduled.