She gave me a playful gouge in the ribs. “You’re mean.”
“And you’re a little crazy.”
Her smile lit the room up some more. “Do you mind?”
I was smiling, too. For real. “No I don’t,” I admitted. “I kind of like it.”
“Do you think we could get together… later?” she said. “After this is over?”
“I think so. But we won’t tell your father.”
“Aw, screw him.”
“Isn’t that what we’ve been doing?”
And she laughed, and I laughed a little, too, and there was a noise at the door.
I turned on the lamp by the bed, wondering if maybe I shouldn’t have gone after my nine-millimeter-after all.
Janet said, “What…?”
The door opened.
It was Harry, all right. Just like I thought it would be.
Only he looked strange. He was still wearing the CUBS sweatshirt, but he had no trousers on, just boxer shorts with a loud pattern. He was holding his throat. Red was seeping between his fingers. His eyes were large. His face was pale. He spread his hands and they were smeared with red, garish red, like Technicolor before it was perfected; and now more red was pouring down onto the CUBS shirt, staining it, soaking it, and he was moving his lips. He was trying to speak. He was having trouble.
His throat was cut.
26
“Stop screaming,” I said, and Janet stopped screaming.
Harry was on the floor, on his belly, where he’d fallen, arms and legs splayed out, like he was something pinned down for a biology student to dissect. Blood oozed from either side of Harry’s head and made the carpet soggy; it was a puke-yellow shag, and Janet was over by the bed adding another layer. I didn’t bother bending down to check if Harry was dead or not. With his throat cut ear to ear, Harry wasn’t going to be making any miraculous recovery.
Janet had stopped retching, now, and was sitting on the bed, her face turned away from Harry, and from me, as well. Both hands were dug into her hair and she was pulling it, hurting herself, out of some instinct or other, to keep her from going into shock maybe, or perhaps to distract her from what she’d just seen.
A light had gone on out in the hall, shortly after Janet had begun screaming, and now Castile’s wife was in the doorway, in her green terry-cloth robe, her hair in curlers, her face white with some facial treatment. She looked a little worse than Harry.
“My God,” she said, in a small voice, as she touched a large breast with a medium-size hand. “Is that…”
“Harry,” I said.
“What…?”
“His throat’s been slashed. Where’s your husband?”
“I don’t know.”
“What?”
“He heard something.”
“When? Where?”
“We were in bed… he heard something, he said… out in the hall… five minutes ago… ten minutes ago.”
“Shit.”
“He has a gun. He was nervous, went out to see what the noise was
… with the gun…”
“Shit. We have to find him. Where’s that kid Richie? Why didn’t Janet screaming get him out of bed, like it did you?”
“I don’t know. He must still be in his room.”
“Where’s that?”
“Couple doors down.”
“Let’s check on him.”
“I… I don’t…” Her eyes were staring to take on a glazed look.
“You’re coming with me, so snap out of it. You, too, Janet.” Janet was sitting on the bed, weeping. “Listen, Mrs. Castile… Millie.. your husband’s in danger. We all are, but especially him. It’s important we find him.”
She nodded. She was still in the doorway and I was over by the bed, by Janet. Harry was on the floor between. It wasn’t smelling good in there: Harry, like a lot of people, had shit his pants when he died; and then there was the stench from Janet puking.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said to Janet. She took my hand, and got on her feet, a little wobbly, but on her feet, and she carefully stepped around Harry, like somebody walking through a yard frequented by dogs. She got her jeans and sweater, slipped into them. I’d already made myself decent.
Once we were all in the hallway, Mrs. Castile said, “What about him?” She meant Harry.
“He’ll be fine,” I said, and closed the door.
And with the door closed, both women seemed relieved, but it didn’t last long: Janet soon spotted Waddsworth, doing his Naked and the Dead impression down at the bottom of the central shaft area, which this open hallway overlooked.
This time, however, Janet didn’t scream: she just pointed, her mouth open, but no words coming out, yet.
Mrs. Castile wasn’t reacting at all. Her eyes seemed glazed over again, or maybe she was getting numb. Or maybe she already knew about Waddsworth: maybe Castile hadn’t listened to my advice and had told his wife about Waddsworth’s fall.
“Is he…” Janet said.
“Yes.”
“When did this… happen?”
“Not long after you came down and asked me to come up to bed.”
“But you didn’t say anything…”
“I didn’t want to alarm you. We decided, Castile and I, when it happened, not to go waking everyone up and upsetting them.”
“But I was already awake… and we… we were together… when he was… down there, like that… and you… knew.. ” She shivered and turned away.
“There’s no time for that,” I said. “Waddsworth’s death could be an accident, but not Harry’s. I mean, he didn’t cut himself shaving. Somebody’s in this joint knocking people off, and we’ve got to get hold of ourselves and deal with that. Got me, Janet? Millie?”
Janet, still facing away, consented to nod.
Mrs. Castile said nothing; she just looked blank, remote in her white face and curlers and green robe, like an extra in a science-fiction film.
But she wasn’t entirely gone. When I said, “Lead me to the kid’s room. Richie,” she did, a room identical to the other bedrooms in the place, and it was empty: the rumpled sheets showed the bed had been used, for something, if not sleeping. But no Richie.
Something else, though.
“Blood,” I said, and pointed at a puddle of it near the doorway, sogging up the yellow shag.
“It’s out here, too,” Janet said, her anger with me making her more coherent, less prone to vomiting and weeping and such. “We’ve been… walking through it…” And she shivered again.
“Harry got his throat cut here,” I said, following the trail of blood Janet had indicated, which led back to where we’d just been. “He staggered down the hall to…”
And I cut that short, because I didn’t want to mention that the room Janet and I’d been in had originally been Castile’s, as that would mean explaining why we had been in that particular room to both Janet and Mrs. Castile.
Downstairs, a door opened and shut. Noisily. An outside door.
“Who’s down there?” I called. Yelled, my voice echoing.
“Me,” Castile’s voice echoed back, and in a minute he was with us.
He was in the DIRECTOR sweatshirt and jeans, still, and his cheeks were red and his breath heavy.
I told him about Harry and he said, “God, no… I was afraid of something like that,” and he asked to have a private word with me, and we moved away from the two women for a moment, and Janet watched us with suspicion. Mrs. Castile looked at the wall.
“I saw him,” he said.
“Who?”
“Turner.”
“What did you do, go after him?”
“Yes. I heard some noise in the hall, and when I stepped outside the room, I practically bumped into him. Then he ran. Saw my gun, I guess. I went after him, but stumbled on the stairs, and he was outside before I’d even got a real look at him… it was dark in here, no lights on at all… I looked around for him outside, and didn’t see him, and finally got a litt
le scared… I mean, I got to thinking that even with a gun, I was out of my league… so I came back in.”
“That was very wise. Are you sure it was Turner? Could it have been Richie?”
“It didn’t look like Richie.”
“Bigger than Richie?”
“I think so. Not Richie. But I didn’t really see him. He was just a blur, a shape moving in the hall, running. He’d… just done that to Harry, hadn’t he…”
“Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t do it.”
“What?”
“Maybe he was just in here to check out the situation, talk to his partner a second. Harry was his partner, you know.”
“Harry?”
“I’m pretty sure he was. I think Richie killed Harry. I think it’s a case of Harry pushing Waddsworth, and Richie knowing about it, and reacting to it. It’s the only way it makes sense to me.”
“What do we do now?”
“Richie isn’t in his room, so we better see if he’s anywhere in the lodge. Fuck. This is getting out of hand. I don’t like this at all.”
“What do we do when we find Richie?”
“We’ll worry about that when we find him. Here. Give me that gun.”
He did. It was a nickel-plated snub-nose. 38.
“Ladies,” I said, going over to where they were standing. “We’re about to have a tour of the premises. Stem to stern. Stay close together at all times.”
Janet had a look of anger on her face, mixed in with confusion, and both reactions were justified; but she went along on the search without a word of complaint.
Which was also true of Mrs. Castile, who allowed her husband to guide her by the arm, but she was going deeper and deeper into herself, into an almost catatonic state.
The search of the lodge took twenty minutes. Nobody home but us.
No Richie. No Turner.
Just Castile and his wife, Janet and me, and of course Waddsworth and Harry.
And then, later than I should’ve, I noticed something about the gun: it seemed light. I’d never used a nickel-plated gun in my life, and rarely used a revolver of any kind, so it took me a while to pick up on it, but just as we’d finished searching the basement, the last and most unsettling stop on our tour, I noticed the gun being light and examined it and said, with some irritation, “Castile… there aren’t any bullets in this fucking thing.”
“What?”
“Bullets. Those little lead things that come flying out when you squeeze the trigger, remember?”
“Let me see it.”
I broke the gun open and showed him.
“It was loaded,” he said. With a little desperation. “There’s a box of ammunition upstairs, in one of my suitcases.”
“Let’s get it.”
We went up to the room he and his wife had recently moved to, and the box of slugs was not there: not in his suitcase, not anywhere.
“Gone,” he said: “Someone… got in here and unloaded the gun, and took the bullets. Jesus!”
Enough of this bullshit. Time to go out to the shed and get the nine-millimeter.
“Castile,” I said, “you and your wife stay here. Janet and I are going outside for a while.”
Castile nodded.
“No,” Janet said.
“We’re safer paired off,” I said. “You’re coming with me.”
“I… I’ll need my jacket… and my glasses…”
“Okay.”
“My jacket’s in the front closet, but…”
“But what?”
“My glasses are… are… in with Harry.”
“I’ll get them for you.”
And I did, and we got our jackets from the front closet and went outside.
27
It was still cold, but the wind had died. Now, instead of pushing you around, the cold air was settling for cutting through you. Still, it was not an entirely unpleasant sensation, not unlike a splash of water in the face in the morning, waking you up, getting you alert; giving clarity to things.
The sky was clear, now, and stars were out, and the moon, illuminating the white landscape, making the snow glitter in places where the light reflected, giving the grounds of the lodge an aura of peaceful unreality, which was a little disconcerting, at the moment.
Janet huddled close to me, hanging onto my arm like she expected the law of gravity to be revoked any time now. She’d apparently forgotten about being pissed off at me and was concentrating on being scared. She’d glance up at me every few seconds, her eyes somewhat vague behind fogged-up glasses, but there was affection and something resembling trust in the looks she gave me, and I found that oddly reassuring. I liked her. Everybody else around here was weird or dead or both. She was just a little crazy, and pleasantly so. She didn’t belong here.
Me either, but that was beside the point. I was here, and Janet too, and so, it would seem, was Turner. I could only think of two possible scenarios for what had been going on here. First, as I’d suggested to Castile, Turner might’ve come in to talk to Harry, his partner, about the final details of the coming hit, and instead had found Waddsworth dead and possibly his partner the same way, and Turner, like any pro who wandered into a situation like that, would have turned tail and run, which is precisely what he seemed to have done, according to Castile. Or second, perhaps Turner had in fact killed Harry, out of displeasure over Harry getting involved in that Gay Lib love triangle and killing Waddsworth and messing up the contracted-for job; and this made a kind of sense, because once Waddsworth had died, a sheriff’s investigation was a foregone conclusion, and Turner might not have wanted to leave a live partner behind, to talk to the authorities and play plea-bargaining games and eventually involve Turner himself.
While the latter explanation was marginally possible, I just couldn’t see Turner using a knife or razor or whatever and cutting somebody’s throat. Too messy. Just not professional at all. I’d seen the tool of Turner’s trade back in his room at Wilma’s: that Browning automatic with the silencer built in by a gunsmith. And I was not entirely satisfied with the first scenario, either, as it seemed unlikely to me Turner would come into the house prior to actually making the hit. His telephone communications cut off, Turner would signal his partner somehow and then meet him outside for a talk… but inside the lodge? Didn’t make sense.
Neither did the tracks in the snow.
The snow had drifted and in places didn’t come up over my shoes and in other places was up to my waist and to Janet’s boobs. Over in the parking lot the snow-heavy cars were strange shapes amidst rolling drifts of white, while the stretch of ground between the lodge and its tool shed was barely a foot deep. And that was where the set of tracks was visible, two pairs of overlapping footprints leading away from the lodge, another set, a single pair of footprints, leading back. The tracks headed toward the shed but stopped about halfway, where someone had apparently fallen; then a smooth path had been made from that point on, as if by a sled, right up to the double doors of the shed.
Janet and I studied the tracks in silence for a while, then exchanged puzzled looks, and I said, “I’m going in there and have a look.”
“What do I do?”
“Wait here.”
“What… what if somebody’s in there?”
“Then somebody besides me may come out.”
“What do I do then?”
“Make a run for it, wouldn’t be a bad idea.”
“You’re joking.”
“Yeah. Right. Me and Waddsworth and Harry’ll all have a laugh about it in the showers after the game.”
“Where… where would I run to?”
“I don’t know. Improvise. Down into the woods would be best. You’re just going to have to fend for yourself.”
“You’re a real comfort.”
“I’m going to work hard at not getting killed in there. That’s the best I got to offer you.”
“Jack…”
“What?”
“I’m just scared, that’s a
ll. Shook up, is all. Jack.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Go ahead. Go in your goddamn shed, will you?”
I walked toward the shed. The panel truck parked against it was engulfed in a drift and any thought I might’ve had about somebody hiding in the truck was immediately discarded. As I walked I checked my pockets for possible weapons. At one point I’d had wire cutters, but I’d tossed them away, after snipping the phone wires; I’d had a screwdriver, too, which I left in the shed. Terrific. Well, I had my car keys, and I slid each of three keys between my knuckles so that the jagged-edged little pieces of metal extended from the fist that seemed to be the only weapon I had on me.
I kicked the door open. Why fuck around. And I threw myself in, like you’d throw something down off a truck you were helping unload. The snowmobile stopped me. It’s what I knocked into, and bounced off of, rolling over against the wall and by that time I’d seen that Turner wasn’t in there, and neither was anybody else.
I put my car keys away.
Someone had been in here: apparently whoever it was had tried to start the snowmobile, because the tarp was off and lay bubbled over against the far wall.
I bent over the trunk-like tool chest and opened it and dug down, looking for the nine-millimeter. I came up immediately with the silencer, which I had detached and hidden in there separately, and kept digging and came rapidly to the conclusion that I wasn’t going to find it.
The nine-millimeter was gone.
I stood and indulged in a long sigh and went over and checked the other tool chest, the one with the garden tools, where I’d hidden the rotors from the cars, and checked the jar of nails, where I’d put the sparkplugs from the snowmobile and snowplow and everything was where I put it.
Just that one thing missing: the gun.
Like I told Janet, sometimes you have to improvise, so I dug back around in the tool chest and found a small crow bar, which was certainly a better makeshift weapon than my fist and some car keys, and as I was doing that, I noticed a red puddle over by the canvas tarp that had been flung against the wall, by whoever tried to start the snowmobile.
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