by Robert Bloch
Remember, Randall? “Hold it right there, mister,” the one with the gun said. Not loud. Just loud enough for you to make out the words. “Hold it right there!” If you hadn’t been in hell and recognized demons sent to escort you to the fires, you might have thought it was just two dressed-up punks with a gun, wanting money for drugs or something.
But no demons in red or any other color, with a gun or without one, were going to drag you to the fires. Not the Sergeant Roger Randall who had taught GIs how to handle themselves in such situations. Remember what you did? You chopped that weapon out of the gunman’s hand and put a knee in his groin and went to work on his face with your fists. The second demon turned and ran like a scared rabbit, but you had the head one on the floor of that tunnel where they’d waylaid you. That tunnel to the innermost part of hell, down which you’d have been led like a lamb to the burning.
Remember it, Randall? How you worked the red one over so he’d never be able to carry out Satan’s commands again? How you left him there and walked on, knowing you had to get away before any more of them came for you, but your foot kicked the gun you’d knocked out of his hand and you bent down and picked it up and took it with you in your pocket?
He remembered. And knew that the two demons he had encountered in that passageway to the fires of hell had been only a pair of wild teenagers named Colin Casserly and Sheldon Smikle.
He turned from the closet and looked at the boy on the bed. Sheldon’s gaze was fixed on the closet now. His mouth made wet bubbling sounds as though he were drowning. His hands clutched the bedspread so fiercely that pulling the spread away would have been impossible without breaking some fingers.
My God, Randall thought. Oh, my God. No wonder he’s scared. He knows I was the one.
In another part of the house a phone was ringing. He heard the voice of the maid answering it. Then he heard footsteps approaching, and the maid appeared in the bedroom doorway.
“Mr. Randall—”
“Yes?”
“Miss Rowe just called. Colin Casserly died a few minutes ago, at the hospital.”
She waited for him to say something. When he did not, she directed an odd frown at him, glanced at the boy on the bed, turned herself around and went away.
Randall went, too. Out of the room. Out of the house. Out to Manon’s car at the curb.
He drove to his own apartment building and left the car in a guest parking slot with the keys in it. She would know where to look for it. His unsteady steps carried him to the elevator, and while it rose to his floor he was a figure carved in stone, staring at nothing. From the elevator he walked like a zombie along the fourth-floor hall to his door, then through his apartment to the chest of drawers in his bedroom.
You killed him, Randall. You and your hand-to-hand-combat training. You were drunk.
The weapon was in the top drawer, where he now remembered having dropped it last night. He stood there looking at it through burning dry eyes that wanted so much to find relief in tears but couldn’t. A Smith and Wesson Model 46 .22 automatic. It had to be the boy’s gun. His own, on a shelf in the closet, was a .38.
Again like a zombie he went down the hall to the living room and sat by a window, looking out at the ocean. He hadn’t noticed, but the morning must be hot; the beach was crowded, and many in the crowd were high school kids like Casserly and Smikle. He sat there watching them without really seeing them. All that registered was a blur of color and motion against the sea’s restless backdrop.
He must have been sitting there an hour or more when the phone rang. He let it ring until it stopped. What could he say to anyone?
You did it, Randall. You were drunk. You killed a kid whose only crime was being stupid.
Ten minutes later the phone rang again. Again he ignored it, continuing to look at the young people cavorting on the beach and in the surf. There was only one thing he could do now.
He went into the second bedroom, which he used for a study. Sat at the desk there. Took paper from a drawer and began to write a letter.
Dear Manon.
No. With a fresh sheet of paper he began again.
My dearest Manon
I know now what happened last night to the Casserly boy. He and his pal confronted me when I was walking through the guest parking lot to my car. They pretended it was a stickup, though of course it was just some crazy kind of gag. But I was drunk and thought they meant it. You know what I was in Vietnam—the kind of training I had. They didn’t have a chance, even with a gun. The Smikle boy ran. Casserly wasn’t so lucky.
I can’t live with this, darling. The longer I sit here thinking about it, the more I realize there is only one decent way out.
I’m so very sorry. A life with you would have been the greatest—and you’re the only woman I’ve ever felt that way about. But I killed him, love. I was drunk and I killed him.
Forgive me. If I use his gun, there’ll at least be a certain twisted kind of justice.
Rog
With the letter in an envelope addressed to her, he walked back to the living room and placed it on a table there. Eventually she would get it. He went to sit in the chair by the window again. But the longer he looked at the gun, the more he knew he would not use it.
He placed it on the floor, returned to the table, and added a paragraph to his letter.
Hon, I’ve decided against the gun. It would have been poetic justice, but I just couldn’t. I must do this a cleaner, better way, with nothing like that for you to remember. Am going to take my boat out. Way out. Not to come back. So long, darling. I love you.
It was not far to the marina where he kept his boat; he often walked it. He walked it now, only dimly aware of the people he passed, the tall buildings towering above him, the sights and sounds of life in a beachside community. At the marina he nodded to people who spoke to him, but kept walking until he reached his boat. Taking it out alone was no problem. He went alone more often than not.
Just head out to sea, Randall. Just keep going until the fuel’s gone. You’ve a debt to pay.
The beach colors slowly receded and became just a blur of beige. The condos behind it faded into pale cubist shapes in a watercolor wash. Then there was only the gently heaving water on all sides of him and the brilliant blue sky above, and he thought of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.
Only he’d had a fish on the line and a chance to win. Something to hang on to life for.
It took the boat a long time to run out of fuel. Such a long time. When it did, and silence enfolded him, he simply let go of the wheel and sat down, staring eastward toward the invisible Bahamas. He must be about halfway between the coast of Florida and Northwest Providence Channel, he thought. When he started swimming, it would be toward the channel. He wouldn’t get there, of course. He was no long-distance swimmer.
At the stern he pulled off his shirt and slacks, knelt to take off his shoes. Because even though it was hopeless he meant to swim, not just to sink. To swim on—and on—and on—until he just couldn’t make his arms move any more.
When he straightened for the plunge, he heard a sound in the stillness. The pulsing throb of a helicopter approaching from the land he had left such a measureless time ago.
The Coast Guard? They had copters, of course. But this was not one of theirs. It came banking toward him, glittering in the sunlight, and he saw something white fluttering from a hand thrust out of it. A handkerchief? Being waved at him?
Being frantically waved at him?
Shoeless, in only his shorts, he stood scowling up at the machine while it maneuvered to a position directly above him and a rope ladder was lowered from it to touch the boat’s deck.
A slender, surefooted figure in white slacks and a bright orange shirt descended the ladder and dropped to the deck beside him. Turned swiftly to face him. Cried “Thank God!” and lunged at him and wrapped both arms around him.
The copter banked and headed back to Florida, its pilot waving.
“He’ll
send someone to tow us in,” Manon said. “You are out of gas, aren’t you?”
“Yes, but—”
“We figured that’s what you’d do. Listen. When you didn’t come back with my car, I borrowed a neighbor’s and drove to the Smikles’, thinking I’d find you there. You’d left. Young Sheldon went to pieces when he heard of Col-in’s death. He broke down and told me what happened. Sit down, Rog. Please.”
Standing before him, her gaze unblinkingly fixed on his face, she said, “You weren’t drunk, Roger. What happened was not your fault.”
“No. I knew you weren’t drunk because I had as much to drink as you did, and I didn’t even feel it. Sheldon said they spiked your drinks. That is, Colin did. They were—”
“With what?”
“Red Devils.”
“What?”
“Colin was forming a gang of kids out for kicks. This was their first caper. You were chosen because you didn’t know them. Spiking your drink was supposed to make it easier.”
“What did they use on me?”
“He wasn’t sure. Colin called it a Red Devils cocktail, he said—LSD, angel dust, MDMA. It could have been a mix.”
“Hallucinogens, all of them. No wonder I thought I was in hell.” Randall got hold of her hands and pulled her down to him. “After he told you this, you went to my place and found my note?”
“And called the Coast Guard to look for you.”
“That wasn’t a Coast Guard copter.”
“No. One of our patients flies it. I called him, too.”
“I owe you, love. Lord, how I owe you.”
She smiled against his lips. “When you’re able to forget all this, can we have that cruise?”
“And anything else I can give you, partner. Anything in this crazy, mixed-up world.” Randall spoke the words against her lips and hung on to her, telling himself she might change herself into a gull and fly away.
Just off the bow of the boat a dolphin leaped from the sea in a glittering arc, creating a rainbow of spray before it disappeared with a soft splash.
Pick Me Up
David J. Schow
I feel the way an executioner must feel, a heartbeat before he does the thing that kills. Every time I stick out my thumb, I feel.
I think of the surge button on the panel that feeds the electric chair. That special button with the hinged metal lid to prevent anyone from depressing it accidentally. I think of the drop switch that prompts the intermix of cyanide in the gas chamber. My thumb. I see it cocking the hammer of a Smith and Wesson Model 39, my favorite automatic. They haven’t manufactured that one for nearly a decade, now.
I stick my thumb into the rainfall and feel the usual good feelings. A flash of headlights passes me by. My thumb’s dripping. Rain does funny things to people. Some, it makes benevolent: Oh that poor man, stuck out there in the elements. Others wonder what brand of lunatic would be hitchhiking in the rain in the first place.
Those latter are alive today, generally.
I begrudge the discomfort, but not the coming of the rain. I get more rides in the rain. It’s those former people, running their little logic chains about me, and why they should pick me up just this once.
Once is enough.
Keep on rationalizing sez me.
KABOOM!
Lightning scritched across the night sky and I swear I can feel fork tines raking acrost the back of my skull from the inside. Shot past afore I could slam my eyeballs shut. Light strobed the wipers acrost the windshield of my Truck.
What a show; all for free.
The best things in life are low-cost and high-maintenance. That’s a joke.
Excepting my Truck. Tuck and roll costs, lifters and glass-packs cost. You think riders ever pitch in uncoached? It all comes out of my wallet, which is a Lord Buxton and weren’t no cheap billfold, neither. I got it for free when I bought two pair boots—one fancy lizard skin, the other regular black cowboy, which I’m wearing right now. My wallet is safe in my hip pocket.
All props. My Truck is the stage. The show usually goes on.
Ever try to clean blood off Mexican leather? I mean, even that thin hide they use for them one-day, in-and-out, south-of-the-border upholstery jobs? Sweet Jesus! I finally had to dye the stitching black with boot creme to make everything uniform. I used Meltonian. That ain’t cheap. But nothing but the best for my Truck.
Sometimes the only thing that makes any earthly sense to me is gobbling highway stripes as fast as my Truck can feed ’em to me and farting them out rearways. Zip in. Zip out. I’m on the high-speed high wire; stay outta my way because I don’t slow down until I feel what Grampaw used to call the grumble of honest appetite.
Shoot. Road’s picked clean. I eased down the footstomper and listened to my tires sing in the rain.
Even before the high beams slow and pull left I know this is a single guy, doing the white-line trance routine in the middle of the night. It’s never a woman, not on a night like this. If there is a woman, she is always accompanied by a husband of recent vintage, and she always vocally disapproves of giving a lift to a stranger. Domestic disagreements have been the foundation of some of my more exhilarating kills. I get picked up because the woman in the car says don’t pick that guy up, John in the wrong tone for her man’s mood.
Bang, bang, double zero, nobody gets laid. Sorry.
In girl/guy combos the man usually has to be killed first. Easy, because at this time of night the man is usually the driver. He makes his honey snooze across the backseat so the hitchhiker won’t get any ideas. . .just in case he’s a pervert or recently escaped mental case.
Okay by me. Girl or guy, alone or together, once those headlights slow down and pull over I know I’m going to reap some action. The ingredients don’t matter.
I try not to carry weapons. If the hypos roust me and rummage my pack (and they have, hundreds of times, never mind my rights, thanks), they’ll find my kit, my clothes, and whatever ID I care to flash them. I know sleight of hand. I can make a deck of playing cards do gymnastics in the palm of my right while juggling three golf balls with my left. I went to dealer’s school in Reno and once did a six-month gig on a cruise ship as the onboard magician. I was the guy who did tricks while chefs cooked at your tableside.
I can pluck out your larynx and show it to you before you realize I’ve twitched.
The killing part I learned from the army and jail. Fort Benning and Folsom. That’s some nasty business you don’t really need to hear about.
Anyhow, my clothes are always clean. And the ID cards—I have twenty, all for different states. I prestidigitate them and don’t spend too much vagrant time in the slam unless the local badgemen are hardcases who don’t like my hair or my looks.
I move on and they forget about me. Usually.
So the first thing I check on an incoming car are the lights. No flashbar. Then I check to see if it’s an unmarked cruiser. You can tell by the tires or the rear deck. If I can’t spot a bubble light, I can read the codex of municipal license plates.
Not cops. Not this time.
I lean out and shield my eyes from the rain and glare as the cabin light pops on to reveal a single guy. I win again. Late twenties or early thirties. Longish hair. Well-built. Good clothes, clean. Careful smile.
I smile right back. Showtime.
This dude looked like trouble waiting to happen, so at the first moment I cranked hard right, floored the footstomper and mashed him good. My Truck’s ram bumper ate his face and he pinked one of the headlights. Rain rinsed in clear in no time at all.
His stuff was soaked through. His backpack was cheap. He had twenty-seven bucks and some chicken change. Took nearly all of it just to gas up.
Rainspots hobble my Truck’s finish, but raintime means better hunting. When the elements sour, folks will hitch with fewer qualms. When they’re wet and shivering in the grip of a stormy night, they’re not so particular about the character of whomever pulls over to help them along. Storms make it si
mpler for me to help them along.
So to speak.
Along near eleven I hit the Stop ’N Go to get me a couple of them microwave burritos. A hypo growler was up front, parked acrost three spaces. Turns out the place had just been robbed.
Damn, but I do hate that. Them little joints is the only outlets open for night owls anymore. Guy works a dead-dog shift selling smokes and beer to unemployed ground-pounders, and for his trouble he gets a Smith and Wesson stuck up his nose by some pimply faggot with Underalls on his head.
The robber had shot the place up. No kills, though.
Guy working the counter had a name tag that said rocko.
But nobody works a detail like this using his or her real name. He seemed to take the robbery in stride, like it was all no strain. But I was mad and told him so. Cop glared at me. What good are the cops if they couldn’t respond while a robbery-in-progress was still in progress?
I’ve always had much more use for convenience stores than I’ve ever had for law enforcers.
Guy working the counter drove a big-block Camaro. Looked like he took care of it okay, and so it took care of him. Course, if it ever broke down and stranded him on the roadside, at night, in this kind of rain. . .well, things would be different.
I hit the driver in the throat, a good hard chop. The car is going forty; my hand, about seventy.
He gets this expression as though he is terribly disappointed in bad clichés, like the ones about picking up hitchers. Then he tries to kill me. At least, he thinks he does.
The essence of victory is total commitment.
Normal people never expect you to reach over and strike them while the car is moving. My advantage. What the hell do they think seat belts are for, anyway? Five seconds past that thought, things are usually academic.
And here I am.
But this chap wants the old struggle-for-life bit. Bared teeth in the face of imminent demise. The protohuman shucking his façade of civilization. Last-ditch time.