The Menace: A Thriller

Chapter 1

The day the doctor died began well.

Retired obstetrician Vernon Petersen, 75, awoke at six as usual, almost eerily on the dot despite his never setting an alarm. After a yawn and a stretch, he swung out of bed and began his morning ritual with the usual regimen of pills, orange juice, oatmeal, one cup of black coffee and a slice of the Today show with Tom Brokaw. Once feeling fully ready to take on the world — or at least his three friends in their regular foursome at the Peachtree Heights Country Club — he took care of his toiletries (he preferred bathing to showering) and got dressed.

Vernon no longer felt the malaise that had for six long months been his uninvited companion since the death of his beloved wife, Jean. Their condo with its scenic view of the Chattahoochee River suddenly had seemed unnecessarily large without her in it. The cancer had come for her quick, which was merciful in a way, but after fifty years of marriage made for a long recovery for the spouse left behind.

His three kids were grown and gone, none of them in the South any longer and he sensed their invitations to come live with their respective families — and both his boy and each of the two girls had offered — would only be a prelude to a nursing home. No one wanted a seventy-five year-old man to move in with them. At their stage of life, he wouldn’t have either.

His only concession to his grief was to place Jean’s framed picture — each a different one, at various stages of her life, lovely at any age — in every room of this very modern condo filled with her antique furnishings. And he still talked to her, out loud, a habit he did not consider worth breaking. Having her picture to smile at him as he groused about this and that was a comfort.

Dr. Vernon Petersen was a man of average height with a full head of white hair and decent eyesight, even now requiring only reading glasses. In his day, he’d heard it said he resembled Robert Taylor, but knew that wasn’t true anymore. And, anyway, no one remembered who Robert Taylor was these days, outside of Vernon’s own age group. He took no exercise other than golf, though if it got too cold for that in the winter months, he substituted regular walks. That was all, but his stomach was flat and he hadn’t been a smoker for thirty years and never a heavy drinker. A glass of wine before bed. Maybe a cocktail dining out.

In a pink short-sleeve polo and cream-color shorts, he set out for the country club. Soon he and the other three retired doctors were playing their regular eighteen holes in the crisp October air. The four men were evenly matched and all regularly scored in the low 90s. This made the competition friendly yet fierce.

Today Vernon shot 88 and felt like Arnold Palmer. The other three gave him crap, but they were clearly pleased for him. Only Merle seemed somewhat annoyed, but then he was one of those golfers who scored only misery on the course yet kept coming back for more.

Which of course Vernon and the others found endlessly amusing.

The four finished up around noon and took their regular lunch at their regular table in the clubhouse dining room. Their standing order was steak sandwiches and fries all around, after cocktails of course (Vernon usually just had a Coke, today no exception). Like many doctors, they didn’t eat particularly healthy, and Vernon was the only non-smoker. But at least his fellow physicians didn’t puff away at the table until after the meal.

All four men wore pastel polos and cream-color shorts and golf caps that they were classy enough to remove in the dining room, making them an exception.

“You know,” Walter Johnson said, a heavy-set retired heart surgeon who’d performed Vernon’s double bypass, “we’re getting to be a dying breed around this neck of the woods.”

“Who is?” Vernon asked.

Walter raised an untamed eyebrow. “You heard about Sam Carter.”

“No.” Vernon shrugged. “Haven’t kept in touch since he retired. He’s in Atlanta, isn’t he?”

Short stumpy Merle, an ophthalmologist, grunted, adjusting his glasses on the bridge of his bump of a nose. “He’s in the ground is where he is. You didn’t hear? Don’t you take the paper?”

“I take the paper, but I didn’t hear.”

“Fell down his goddamn stairs,” Jack Matheson said. The retired oncologist was Vernon’s height, bald, a one-time high school quarterback whose chin had long since disappeared into his neck, though only a protruding gut had otherwise impacted his physique.

“You’re lucky,” Merle said to Vernon, “that you only have one floor in that place of yours.”

“Well, Sam Carter, huh,” Vernon said, summoning a frown. “Isn’t that a damn shame.”

Actually, Carter — a recently retired pediatric surgeon who used devices to straighten limbs, a procedure that struck Vernon as sadistic — had been an awful man.

“Oh, he was a prick,” Merle said dismissively. “What’s a shame is what happened to Lee Meyer.”

Vernon nodded.

That death he knew about — it had made the local TV news and the paper. Meyer, also retired though not recently, had been a pediatrician. He’d gone out fishing on his cabin cruiser by himself (never a good idea) and had apparently fallen overboard and drowned. His boat had been found turning in a circle and he was washed up on shore. This was last week, and Vernon had almost gone to the funeral.

Walter, who had a dry, dark sense of humor, said, “Maybe we’re okay. Maybe it’s only retired kid doctors God has it in for.”

“Two accidental deaths,” Vernon said, a little disturbed by this talk, “isn’t an epidemic.”

“No, but still — it makes you think.”

“Does it?” Merle smirked. “About what? Not walkin’ down the stairs? Not goin’ out on the river? You gotta live your friggin’ life!”

“Till it’s over you do,” Walter said with a slight smile. “Then you can take the day off.”

Jack grinned. “Retired people take every day off.”

“Bullshit!” Merle said. “I’ve never been busier! My wife works me like a damn dog, like a goddamn dog! And I spend half my time babysitting the grandkids.”

Vernon smiled. “And you love it.”

Merle shrugged. “Yeah. I do. My point is, you can’t go through life like it’s a damn mine field.”

“But you should,” Walter said. The heart surgeon was big on diet and exercise, though he was lighting up his latest cigarette as he made this remark.

“What you should do,” Jack said, “is live every day like it’s your last.” The oncologist had been the one who discovered Jean’s cancer.

Walter started coughing, the smoke going down the wrong way. “You mean like I do?” he said, still coughing, and everybody laughed at that.

Back at the condo, Vernon took a nap. Then, returning to the world about an hour later, he watched The Match Game before starting the latest Sidney Sheldon novel, which he read until it was time to get decked out for his big night.

That big night was his third date with Jessica Hahn, the widow of his car dealership buddy Norm — actually, Vernon’s third date period, since Jean’s death. Right now he felt much as he had anticipating the previous two dates — exhilarated... and guilty.

In the hospital, in what would soon be her death bed, his lovely bride of fifty years had looked at him with those eyes as clear and blue as ever they’d been and said, “You need to date.”

“What?” he’d blurted.

“When I’m gone, you’re not to be lonely. I won’t have it. Promise me.”

“You’re not going anywhere.”

“Of course I am. And so are you, just a little later than me. I want you to promise me you won’t be lonely and just sit around and mope.”

That was from a song in Damn Yankees, a musical they both loved. She’d played the lead in college — Lola, who got whatever she wanted — and had been wonderful in the sexy role. He hadn’t known her, just another guy in the audience. But he’d gone out of his way to remedy that.

“Sure, baby,” he told her.

She squeezed his hand, harder than a woman dying of cancer should be able to. “Promise me.”

“Sure. Sure.”

But for almost six months, he hadn’t kept that promise. He in fact did, as she’d predicted, sit around and mope; also weep his eyes and heart and guts out. He’d gone around the place talking to her picture in every room and went to the cemetery every whip stitch and put on LPs of their favorite songs and watched old movies on TV that they’d seen first-run together. He would talk to his kids on the phone and pretend to be fine. And then he would cry and feel sorry for himself.

One small solace were the people who came up to him not to offer condolences — usually not even knowing about Jean’s passing — but folks twenty through fifty, with thanks and smiles at running into the doctor who’d brought their children or sometimes themselves into the world. It was the kind of thing that made a life of doctoring seem not only worthwhile, but special.

That wasn’t enough to warm a night, but it was something. Momentary, but something.

He ran into Jessica at the supermarket. She’d lost Norm a year ago. Ten years younger than Vernon, she looked very nice, her hair a believable blonde, her figure full but in a really good way. She did nice things to her yellow and black patterned polyester top and yellow flared slacks. She might have been forty, not sixty-something.

They chatted in the frozen food aisle. Pointedly, they said nothing about their respective late spouses. They asked each other what they’d been doing with themselves, and he was playing a lot of golf and she was in three bridge clubs.

But then she said, “Do you know what I miss?”

“No.”

“Going out to eat. Seeing shows. Movies. Plays. Just... getting out.”

So they’d been to the movies twice — The Spy Who Loved Me and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger. They shared popcorn. He kissed her after the second date, and realized he’d sort of forgotten how.

That evening they went to Oh, God! Which, coincidentally, is what she said, seeing he’d worn a denim leisure suit that accidentally matched her pant suit.

After, she invited him in for wine and they sat on her couch in a condo not unlike his, only no antique furniture. They kissed and petted a little, like the teenagers they’d been long ago, though not together at the time. Yet they were of similar enough ages to have shared the past. Finally she took him into her bedroom, where a photo had been turned face down, and she undressed. She gave him a low-lighting look at her at sixty-five and he undressed.

It hadn’t taken more than maybe ten minutes, from soup to nuts, and was wholly unremarkable as sexual experiences go, but he hadn’t felt this happy for a long time. When he started to cry, she just held him and patted him like the child he’d been even longer ago.

“You can stay the night,” she told him, when he finally swung around to sit on the edge of the bed.

“Not quite ready for that,” he said.

“Okay.” Her smile was small but he sensed she was relieved, not hurt. They’d gone from sharing popcorn to sharing her bed awfully fast, after all. They might have to back up now before moving forward.

In a robe, she walked him across her living room to her door as if they were outside and he was walking her to hers.

“That was wonderful,” he told her.

“It was.” She was smiling that same not-quite-sad smile.

They hugged.

With some spring in his step, guilt and elation wrestling to a draw, he strode to his car, a 1975 Ford Granada he’d bought from her late husband. They waved to each other and then he was driving away, feeling as if he’d been struck by a pleasant piano falling from a window.

In the condo, he took a shower this time and thought about how so many days just slid by blurring into the next, but this one, wow, this was a keeper. If God let him live one day over, out of these last six months, this would be it.

He got into some black silk pajamas Jean had bought him and didn’t even feel sheepish doing so. In his bare feet, he padded out to the kitchen, got himself a glass of Chardonnay and settled into his recliner to watch Johnny Carson. He didn’t always make it through Johnny, and if it was a guest host never, and often would wind up half-way through the night sleeping in the La-Z-Boy.

Not this time. He even watched some of the late news. And when he crawled into the queen-size bed, feeling only a twinge of guilt from his wife’s absence under these familiar sheets and covers, he had to read more Sidney Sheldon for half an hour before the euphoria of being with a woman again had worn off enough for him to set his reading glasses on the bedside stand, hit the light and drift off.

Then something woke him.

It felt immediate, but it wasn’t. The clock said 3:35, so he’d been asleep well over an hour, almost two. But a noise had interrupted a dream already forgotten, both the specific dream and specific noise, gone — leaving just the sensation of being jerked from somewhere else.

He leaned on an elbow and listened.

Nothing.

But he remained in a sitting position. He was not a light sleeper. It really took something to wake him. Of course, it might have been outside, an animal disturbing a garbage can, a car backfiring, drunken kids partying, any damn thing, if it was loud enough.

Only now... nothing.

He patted his pillow and drew the sheet and blankets up around him. Turning on his side, he willed thoughts away, other than a general sense that he wouldn’t mind returning to the pleasant dream whose specifics he’d lost...

This time he was not quite asleep when a noise sat him up straight in bed.

It sounded like a chair had been bumped in the kitchen!

What was it — had a damn raccoon gotten into the place or some damn thing? Or perhaps some unwanted company on two legs...

He threw the blankets off, and stared into the darkness for a few moments, enough moonlight from the windows on the river to give him more or less immediate night vision. Yet that wasn’t enough, so he clicked on the bedside lamp and swung around to sit on the edge of the bed. Frowning, he thrust his feet into his slippers.

For a long time he’d kept a gun, a Colt .38 revolver, in his bedside drawer. But he’d moved it to the bottom of the dresser, under a bunch of clothes, after he’d almost used the gun on himself a few weeks after Jean’s passing. He believed in having a gun in the house, of being able to defend oneself in one’s home. And drug addicts from time to time broke into doctors’ homes looking for supplies — that was common, though it had never happened to him.

So he’d shifted the .38 to the bottom dresser drawer to give himself fairly close access but at least the cooling off period of crossing the room before blowing his brains out in misery over his late wife’s absence.

For a while he just sat there, on the bed but with his feet on the wood floor in the slippers, looking through the yellowish glow of the bedside lamp, staring at the wall beyond which was the kitchen where the noises had seemed to come from.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Goddamnit, he thought, and stepped out of his slippers and slid under the covers again, got comfy, and a scraping sound, like a chair being pushed back, sat him up again. Then he was in his slippers and across the room and digging that .38 out from under some of his Jean’s clothes that he hadn’t been able to bring himself yet to get rid of.

He prowled the condo.

Slow, methodical, turning on lights as he went. Gun gripped in his right hand, like a cop in black silk pajamas and slippers, Vernon checked everywhere, even the stupid places — under tables, in closets, in back of the couch, behind the recliner. Periodically he would stand and listen and hear nothing but his heartbeat and the hum of kitchen appliances.

And in the kitchen, he found something that disturbed him — the double glass doors onto the deck weren’t locked. He didn’t remember locking them, but he also didn’t remember not locking them. Someone could have had got in.

But no one was here now. He was sure of that. He’d checked the premises as thoroughly as a security guard at a nuclear power plant.

Maybe someone had got in, realized Vernon was there and been scared away. But why wouldn’t a thief expect the condo owner to be home? And if the guy had done any casing of the joint, as they said in the movies, wouldn’t it be obvious an old guy lived here? Seventy-five-the-hell-years old? Or had a home invader gotten in while Vernon was away, at the movie, and at Jessica’s apartment cheating on his dead wife? (That was exactly how his brain told it to him and it made him laugh, bitterly.) And then after Vernon got home, the invader slipped out and bumped into something doing so? Maybe?

Well, he had searched the place thoroughly and no one was here. If a burglar had been here and gone, and looted him in any way, he would conduct an inventory tomorrow and see what was missing and call the police. What the hell — he was well-insured, wasn’t he?

Of course, he immediately locked the glass doors to the deck, and took one last, lingering pass around the condo just to make sure, shutting the lights back off as he went. In the bedroom, he compromised on the .38, leaving it atop the dresser but not tucking it away in a bunch of Jean’s clothes. By the time he was out of his slippers and under the covers, he felt confident. A little unsettled, sure.

Sleep was just taking over when a scuttling sound jerked him upright.

Good lord, something was under him!

Moving under the bed, like a giant goddamn crab! The moon was coming in through filmy curtains onto the river and Vernon sat on the bed with his legs far apart now, as if making room for whatever was under there.

Was it an animal?

If so, could he make it back to the dresser and the revolver before whatever it was had him?

But what was it?

Then the moon slid under a cloud and the thing beneath the bed scurried out from under, and Vernon still couldn’t make it out; it was as if some giant turtle or clam with limbs were moving across the parquet wood floor, scratching. Then the thing was out of sight again, just beyond the foot of the bed.

Vernon threw the covers off and was about to run, to get himself somewhere, anywhere else, when the dark form came clambering up onto the bed and clawing at the bottom sheet and coming right at him, on him, up from between his legs and, my God, it had arms and hands, and those hands were climbing Vernon’s torso like a ladder, forcing him back down, and then a face was staring right at him, nose to nose, a grotesque, twisted thing framed in a matted unruly mop, eyes glittering, yellow teeth bared and uneven, creased like a simian but no ape, no monkey, something worse.

And Vernon grabbed at him — this was no monster, it was a man! And a doctor knew how to hurt people, so he rallied himself and grabbed at this man, but then the turtle-shell form he’d seen reminded him that there was no man down there to grab, that this was half a man.

The doctor screamed, and the half-man grabbed the other pillow and pressed it into the screamer’s face and held it down and held it and held it until Vernon wasn’t struggling anymore — smothered to death in a pillow still redolent with his late wife’s perfume.