The Tornado Watcher
by Jeffrey Greene
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Table of Contents, parts 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
Dr. Morrison laughed, a sound as joyless as dice rattling in a cup. “That’s fortunate. By this time of night, my well of compassion has about dried up. For the hypochondriacs in my practice, I mean, not for people in real trouble.” The keen, assessing eyes flicked over Sutton’s face.
His insides turned over at the doctor’s choice of words. Nodding in the direction of the phone, he said, “They call you at all hours, eh? Your patients?”
Morrison smiled blandly, nodded. “Especially the older ones. I shouldn’t give them my home number, but... well, it’s not so much hope they want as reassuring lies. They’re past believing in miracles.”
“Aren’t we all?” said Mrs. Morrison, getting up to make herself a drink. “Another whisky, Mr. Sutton?”
“No thanks,” he replied, aware of the doctor’s gaze on him. “I was going to try to call a tow truck, but since it’s so late, I was wondering — really hate to impose — if I could stay the night and call the tow truck first thing in the morning?”
“I was just going to suggest that,” Dr. Morrison said. “No sense bothering with it now. Long as your car’s off the road, I don’t see any harm in not reporting it until morning.”
“It’s in a ditch. I even left a note for the police on the dashboard.”
“Fine. Then I’ll show you to your room. Is the guest room bed made up, Suzanne?”
“You know damn well it isn’t.”
The doctor looked at him with a tolerant shake of the head, smiling that sharp-cornered smile that seemed not his, as if he’d borrowed it off of someone else’s face for the occasion.
“Goodnight, Mrs. Morrison,” he said, following the doctor out of the room. “Thanks for the drink.”
“It’s ‘Suzanne,’” she said. “Nice not to drink alone for a change.”
Dr. Morrison touched his arm and led him up a carpeted stairway to a hall with three closed doors and a bathroom at the end. The last room was small and sparsely-furnished, smelling as if it had been shut up for a long time. There was a twin bed, a cedar chest, and a tarnished brass floor lamp. Beside the light switch was the grid of an intercom system set into the wall.
Opening the closet, the doctor pulled down a set of sheets and laid them on the bed. “You’ll want to take a shower. There are clean towels in the bathroom.”
“I do appreciate this.”
“After the scare my dogs gave you, it’s the least I can do. Where were you heading, Mr. Sutton, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Tampa.”
“Uh-huh. And what’s cookin’ down there?”
“I’m in sales. Fiberglass; mostly for boats.”
“Uh-huh, uh-huh.” He nodded with bird-like jerks of the head. “Little off course, aren’t you?”
“I have clients up and down the west coast.”
“Oh, I see. Well, I know most of the people around here. Bet I know your client.”
His palms began to sweat. “I wouldn’t be surprised.”
There was a tense silence, and then the doctor smiled. “Well, glad to be able to help a man in trouble. And my wife needs the company now and then, much more than I do. Tell you what: while you’re getting cleaned up, I’ll take your clothes and run them through the dryer. I have some old stuff that’ll probably fit you.”
“Thanks again.”
The doctor nodded and left the room, but for a long moment Sutton didn’t move. There was something ominously suggestive about the man’s conversation. Was it really a patient who’d called him? Suppose it was the sheriff, and the doctor was stalling him until they got there. No, he thought, they couldn’t have found the car that fast. He was here for the night and might as well make the best of it. Tomorrow he would worry about how to get down the road without being picked up or arousing the doctor’s suspicions any more than they already were.
He took out the money and counted it, finding that it came to just under four hundred dollars, then hid it under the mattress, undressed and stepped into the hallway. About to close the bathroom door, he stopped, listening. They were shouting at each other downstairs. He tip-toed down the hall and stood naked in the shadows at the top of the stairs.
Mrs. Morrison’s was the louder voice: “Think I give a shit what people think? What people? One stranded salesman! Who else has been here in the last five years? You’ve put me in a dungeon. You and your goddamn dogs.”
The doctor’s voice was a ferociously sarcastic yammer: “Ask him if he’ll take you with him. Go ahead, ask him if he wants a crippled, used-up sot tagging along with him.”
After showering, Sutton checked to make sure the money was still under the mattress, then put on the shirt and pants the doctor had left on the bed. He opened the window and looked out. The rain had stopped, but the still, humid air felt no cooler. He heard a sound below, and glimpsed the dobermans padding restlessly among the shadows of the big oaks, as if they smelled him nearby. He stretched out on the bed, his hands behind his head, watching a ragged moth spinning around the ceiling light.
You finally did it, he thought. After drifting into everything else, he had finally drifted into a capital crime. It didn’t matter who shot first. There was no such thing as self-defense in an armed robbery, and they electrocuted murderers down here. Murder. The word had a leaden gravity that dragged his thoughts into unfamiliar depths. He had fired reflexively, as he had in Vietnam. Did that make him a murderer, or just a fool, who for all these wasted years, without realizing it, had been busily wiring his own electric chair?
The doctor’s voice on the intercom, enveloped in static, startled him: “Mr. Sutton?” He got up and went to the intercom. Pushing the ‘speak’ button, he said, “Yes?”
“Didn’t wake you, did I?”
“No, just resting.”
“If you’re not too tired, why don’t you come down to the living room? Mrs. Morrison has gone to bed. We can have a cup of tea and a private talk.”
Private talk? He didn’t like the sound of that. “Okay, I’ll be down in a minute.”
He put on his shoes over his bare feet, took the money and stuck it in his back pocket, and headed downstairs. The doctor was standing beside the liquor cabinet, pouring two cups of tea from a silver service, and he was already through the French doors and into the room when he heard a low growl behind him. He froze.
“Rolf.” The doctor spoke in a casual, almost bored tone of voice. He heard the doberman move toward him, then felt its nose touch his hand. He flinched.
“Don’t do that. Let him smell you.” Dr. Morrison made a ticking sound, and the dog loped across the room and sat beside him. Smiling his false smile, the doctor handed Sutton a cup of tea, then gestured for him to sit.
Sutton backed up very slowly, not taking his eyes off the dog who, now that he’d been called off, showed no animosity and little interest in him.
“Don’t worry, he’s well-trained. You’re not an enemy unless you’re inside the fence without me, or unless I tell him you are.” He sat down and rested his hand on the dog’s shoulder. “Suzanne won’t have them in the house.”
Sutton took a sip of tea, his heart pounding thickly in his throat. “She’s right,” he said, appalled by how shaky his voice sounded. “A dog that size belongs outside.”
“I’ll take him out directly. I just wanted to have him here while we talk. So he can get used to you.” He sipped his tea, one leg crossed over the other, spare and neatly-dressed in his sport coat and bow tie, looking, if one failed to notice his eyes, like a country doctor of modest means relaxing in his favorite chair. “This is a night of nights, Mr. Sutton. A night of coincidence and opportunity.”
“Opportunity?”
He held up his hand for silence. “First, the coincidence. Less than three hours ago, there was a hold-up at Milbert’s Trading Post. It’s by a boat launch on the river near Branford, about twenty miles north of here. Two men pulled it, but poor old Dud Vinson got one of them with a shotgun before the other man shot him dead. Dud always was kind of a ten-watt bulb.” He paused while he set down his cup.
It’ll be worse now, Sutton thought, wincing involuntarily as the red hole bloomed in the face that gaped and stared and fell back out of sight. Now the face has a name.
“Anyway,” the doctor went on. “this man hauled the injured one out and got away in a stolen Ford Thunderbird that the store owner said had a bad knock to it. Didn’t get much money, apparently.”
Sutton watched the dog sniffing the air, wondering if his fear was what it smelled.
“Now, around here,” the doctor said, “a cow getting hit by a car is front-page stuff, so when something like this happens, everybody in the county knows about it an hour after the fact. Friend of mine in the sheriff’s office called and filled me in, while you were here, in fact.
“The coincidence, of course, was you showing up here in the rain, looking like you’d had a rough night, rougher even than a minor accident and being chased by dogs could account for. I looked you over, saw the mud on your knees, the blood that was smeared on your pants instead of seeped through from a cut, the scared look that nobody in your shoes could hide, the evasiveness, and, well...” He shrugged.
“You think pretty fast on your feet, Mr. Whoever-You-Are. But I’ve seen enough salesmen to know you’re not one. You don’t have the patter, the laying on of cards, you know. No offense, but you’re a little rough around the edges. How many tattoos you got?”
“All hold-up men have tattoos, huh?”
“This one does,” he replied, with his maddening smile.
“You’re lucky I’m just a fiberglass salesman. If I were the guy you’re talking about, I’d have to pull out my gun and shoot you, wouldn’t I?”
The doctor scratched behind the dog’s ears. “Yes, you would. But I’m feeling too lucky tonight not to bet my hunch. My hunch is you ditched the car and the gun and, probably, your buddy in the river. That’s what I’d do if I’d been dumb enough to rob a store in a county where most everybody’s poor and armed to the teeth.
“You saw the lights of my house and figured to steal my car. Trouble was, you didn’t have the tools to break in and hot-wire it. Then my dogs chased you inside, and here we are. Lucky night for both of us, Mr. Sutton: I usually lock the front door. You’ll never know how glad I am that Rolf and Ivan didn’t catch you.”
Sutton felt sweat was trickling under his clothes and down his forehead. “Like you said, doctor, a coincidence: this hold-up and my accident happening in the same area an hour apart. But that car sitting in the ditch isn’t a Thunderbird, and whether or not you think I’m the type, I am a salesman, with an appointment to keep in Tampa at ten o’clock tomorrow morning, so if you’ll just walk me to your front gate, I’ll be on my way.” He set down his cup with finality, but didn’t move.
Dr. Morrison laughed. “Well, we could confirm your story in the morning, couldn’t we? But we’re not waiting till morning.”
“You’ve called them?” he blurted.
“Who?”
“You know who.”
“The sheriff? And let him take away my once-in-a-lifetime opportunity? Hell, no. You’re going to help me, and then I’m going to give you the keys to my car and an eight-hour head start.”
“Help you?”
“Yes.” He took off his glasses and shook out his handkerchief. He wiped them with meticulous care, then put them on and looked up, the shadows of the lamplight settling deeply in the hollows of his cheeks and eye sockets. “You’re going to kill my wife.”
Sutton stared in horrified fascination at the doctor’s face. It was as if a mask of ice had melted off, leaving the gray, stringy flesh frozen in place, expressing a vast, almost impersonal contempt. It must have been a relief for Morrison to drop the pretense, the daily effort of maintaining an ordinary human face that had to smile and frown and express concern at the right moments and never let slip that it was all a ventriloquist’s trick, that the expressions were painted on and what lay behind them was something untouched, untouchable.
Sutton felt the hopelessness of his refusal even as he spoke, his voice sounding strangled and strange in his ears. “Look, even if I... even if I’d done what you say I did, that doesn’t mean I’d just kill somebody for no reason. You’re a crazy... You’re crazy if you think I’d do that.”
Dr. Morrison leaned forward, his chin on his folded hands. “You’ve got the best reason in the world, mister: your own survival. You don’t do this, you’ve got two choices: my dogs spread you all over that yard. Or a few years down the road, the government straps you into the electric chair. I don’t care either way; you’d better believe that. I happen to want my wife dead. Why is my business. You were born for it. My God, the way you stumbled in here! It’s the chance I’ve been waiting for. You do it my way, you have a shot at getting out of this.
“It’s perfect: you broke in, I was sleeping in my room in the back of the house, the dogs were locked up in the back yard, and Suzanne was in her room. You were looking for the car keys, she surprised you, you killed her. I don’t care how; that’s your problem. You leave your prints on everything, then take off in the car.
“I sleep through the whole thing, wake up, try to call the police and find that you’ve ripped the phone out. I’ve already done that, by the way. I run to the highway and flag down a car. By that time, you could be in Louisiana. Ditch the car as soon as you can, get on a bus, melt into the woodwork, and everybody’s happy.”
Sutton got up, keeping his eye on the dog, walked over to the liquor cabinet and poured himself a stiff whisky. “What about the dogs?” he asked, stalling for time. “How do I get out of the yard?”
“There’s a gate for the backyard fence. As soon as I confirm that you’ve done it, I’ll lock them in and you can be on your way.”
“On my way?” he almost yelled. “I’d never reach the gate. You’d tell them the dogs got me on the way out, avenged your wife’s death, some shit like that. It’s not in your interest to let me escape.”
Copyright © 2026 by Jeffrey Greene
