by Gil Brewer
So then I’d begun to hurt her. Not meaning to. Just hurting her every damned way, and hurting myself—and everybody I came close enough to speak with. With Sam always there to straighten things out. Until she began to talk about him and compare, and it was hell. And every time I tried to do something for myself, I fouled it up. Really stomped it into the ground.
“Morgan?”
So now this was my stab at righting everything. I knew it was crazy. I knew it as plain as I knew Gunnison right there was a bastard, not a really top safe man, like the old once who worked it like a business and treated it that way and held deep respect for everybody else and their type work, too.
“Morgan?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t stand behind me like that. You make me nervous. Why don’t you check around?”
“All right.”
He was packing the door. He was going to blow the damned thing. I stared at the back of his head and I knew right then that he wasn’t as good as he was supposed to be at all. Not even at his trade. This box didn’t need the juice. I knew enough to know that.
I started to say something, didn’t. I went out into the hall and back toward the anteroom. The place was ghost quiet, and I stood by the little table and pressed my hands down on the top and just shook. I shook all over. Then I quit that, but nothing seemed to help. I wanted eyes all over my head. There was too much futility. I couldn’t see around the building outside. I kept supposing this and that and the other thing, and the telephone over on the wall rang to beat hell.
I jumped for it.
Gunnison came out into the hall like a bull. He raced down the hall toward me.
“Get back you damned fool!” I called softly. “It’s the phone.”
He put on brakes, staring at me. His face was a fish belly, the eyes absolutely insane.
I grabbed the phone. It was Sam. My heart rocked and climbed and slid back and climbed again. I leaned against the wall, all the way out of breath.
“How’s things?” Sam said. “I’m hitting the sack, just thought I’d phone in and check.”
“Now what the hell for?”
I kept holding my breathing down. If I’d relaxed, it would have gusted into the phone like an air-pump.
“Damn it, Tate,” Sam said. “You’ve got to get rid of that defensive attitude. I called because I figured maybe we could at least talk over the phone. It might take some of the edge off it, not seeing each other when we talked.”
Gunnison stood at the end of the hall by the anteroom, staring at me with those damned eyes of his. His hair was all over the place, black and wild.
“Tate?”
“Yeah, yeah. Lemme sleep, will you?” I said.
“All right, Tate. Good night.” He hung up with a real hard slam.
Gunnison turned without a word and walked slowly back to the office and went on in.
Sam had really hung that phone up.
The sound of the explosion wasn’t loud. You couldn’t have heard it on the street. Where I stood by the door, looking toward the front gate, it was a heavy, blundering thud with a lot of rattles. I went back there fast. The excitement had me now.
Gunnison staggered into the hall, coughing. He reeled around and leaned against the wall, coughing to beat the band. He doubled over and his eyes stuck right out of his head like bloody thumbs. I thought for a minute he was going to heave all over the floor. He turned and braced both hands up over his head on the wall and sagged his head and coughed and sucked air and his shoulders shook the way they do. Pretty soon he quit that and without looking at me, went reeling back into the office. There was quite a bit of smoke tumbling out of the office door, and I breathed that and right away I had tickles in my throat and started hacking, too.
I went in there.
“Got it,” Gunnison said. He stood over by the safe. The safe door was open and there was smoke in the room and that was the only difference. I didn’t know how he’d done it, but he wasn’t so bad after all. He slung a canvas sack on the floor by his feet and went over and opened a window just a crack. Then he came back and closed the safe door.
“When do they pay off?”
“Some time in the afternoon,” I said.
“There’s the chance they won’t spot it.”
“You’re out of your head.” I reached for the canvas sack and he laid his hand on my arm, looking into my eyes, and right then I heard the shot. Then another. They were really loud, but you couldn’t tell where they came from.
Gunnison grabbed the sack and started running.
‘Wait, you fool!”
He didn’t say a word. He hit the hall and I went after him. I was sick all through me. I knew we were caught, and I kept trying to think of something to say, to explain it, excuse all this. There wasn’t anything. I ran after him down the hall. He turned away from the front entrance, drawing a gun and running toward the rear.
“Not that way!” I yelled at him. I didn’t give a damn about whispering anymore. I thought of my slicker hanging by the door. I thought of his hat back there on the floor, and the blue and gray satchel with the tools in it, and the smoke. I ran by the table in the anteroom and I was half-down the hall when I remembered the gun on the table back there. I kept going.
“Gunnison!” I yelled.
The door down there was wide open and you could see the night and you could smell it. Everything was wild. Gunnison hit the door’s opening running like hell, stepping high, and went on through into the alley.
I half-stopped. I didn’t know what to do. Then all it was, was get away—get away. I ran after him.
As I came through the door, I saw him get it in the alley. He was cut down with three shots. He stopped running on the first and the other two took him someplace in the chest—you could tell by the way he jerked and dropped the money sack and grabbed at himself. He let out a hell of a yell.
I was still running. I tried to stop. Somebody fired at me and I hooked my foot on something and sprawled onto the alley floor. I slid on the wet bricks, staring back. I had fallen over the body of Hornell, lying just beyond the doorway in the alley.
I heard a siren whining not too far away, high and smooth—and then angry.
Feet pounded away out there in the street beyond the alley entrance and I heard a car gun off fast, a door slammed.
I stood up, trying to get my breath, and looked at Hornell. He was dead. I had tripped over him just as somebody shot at me. A dead man had saved my life.
CHAPTER 5
It began to rain.
The sirens moaned to a halt at the far end of the alley, where the shots had come from. Doors slammed. I went over by Gunnison, moving in a sick kind of trance, and picked up the canvas money sack. Gunnison had rushed up against the wall and collapsed in a kneeling crouch, his head and shoulder pressed against the wall.
I stared stupidly at his body. It was like a statue. I could hear feet and voices at the far end of the alley, softly called orders out on the sidewalk, yet I couldn’t move. I could see where the rain puddled and mixed with Gunnison’s blood. A long string of already slightly coagulated blood purled down from his throat and met the ground, and it was as if this blood were a part of me.
“They’re not dead,” somebody said in a tight, frightened voice. “They can’t be dead.” It was a strange, horrified voice, but I recognized it with a slow shock. It was my own voice.
They were both dead. I hadn’t counted on death. Somehow death had never been a part of this to me, and now I saw the whole thing with me in the middle. I started to run.
I passed Hornell’s body, his face whitely gleaming in the rain, the rain splashing across his staring eyes. On the alley wall not far from the doorway to the plant, was a phone box. The receiver was dangling, swinging against the wall. Hornell must have called in the alarm.
Running, I looked back. Two cops were just entering the mouth of the alley. I got in close to the shadowed, rain-splashed wall and ran still harder. One of them sho
uted as I hit the sidewalk beyond the alley.
The canvas sack slapped against my legs, and suddenly I realized what I was doing. There was no turning back, and I couldn’t throw down the damned sack. What had happened had me blind. All I wanted to do was run, and I wanted the money.
I had to have the money. I had to keep it.
They were dead back there—both of them were dead: Two dead men, and I couldn’t get it out of my head—what it meant. What it was. Unreckoned with, and I suddenly realized I was sobbing. The money sack was like some huge block of lead banging against my knees, and I couldn’t let it go.
The alley I was in had a wing off to the right, downhill, the floor of dirt that right now was mud. I heard a police cruiser hit the alley I’d just left, engine churning, tires cutting into wet gravel. I was talking to myself, saying all kinds of things, cursing a lot. I couldn’t seem to stop that, either, running for where my car was parked.
I came out on the sidewalk. At the same time, I heard the cruiser hit the street in a wild tearing of rubber, across the other end of the block. I ran as hard as I could along the sidewalk, in against the front of an apartment building. There was nobody on the streets.
I crossed the street, and it seemed as if I were hemmed in by the angry searching sounds of sirens, like a madding rush of giant mosquitoes. From everywhere engines thrummed across the night.
I hit the street where the soft-drink plant was located again, and saw it down there two blocks. A police cruiser emerged from the opposite alley, coasted across the street and dipped into the alley by the plant.
The convertible looked a lonely, dripping thing, sitting there on the street.
It began to rain harder now.
• • •
They spotted me one block down from where I had parked. The sound of my engine starting must have warned them, because a cruiser shot out of the far street beyond the plant and nosed gleaming through the sudden, driving rain toward me. The siren rattled, then began to shrill, and the driver had it to the floor.
It was like a movie nightmare scene.
I took a fast left and the money sack rocked over against my leg. I hauled the convertible into the first alley on the left and set the accelerator to the floor. I was enclosed in a winding lane between high-roofed, windy-looking, wooden buildings. The lane dipped upward at a savage angle and the car struck loose boards across a rickety bridge and leaped off the far side. It dove downward. I stood up on the brakes and felt the brutal shocks as the car ripped through deep-shelved mud-sinks.
A spotlight swept across the end of the alley I was nearing, flickering against bricks that glistened in the rain. Another lane cut off to the right and I took this. It ran parallel with the stream I had crossed, but down a steep bank. To the left were the beginnings of the Negro tenement homes, rising like scattered shrouds against the haloed, raining night. Rain swept like a dragged curtain of broken glass, pounding against the convertible top.
The convertible burst out upon another dirt street and I cramped the wheels, sliding up across a grassy lawn. A dog leaped yelping out of the way and another car’s headlights swam blindingly in front of me. I cramped the wheel again, then straightened, figuring it was the cops.
It was a battered truck. Back on the road, I opened the car up again, the wheels slithering in rutted mud.
There was no place to go. All I could think of was those two bodies lying back there in the rain. The police would be hovering over them now, flashlights blinking, and by this time my name would have been spoken. Sam would have been warned. It was perfect.
Who had fired those shots and killed those men. And why? Whoever it was, the cops coming must have scared them away. They hadn’t had a chance to kill me, or get the money, if that’s what they were after. I had the police and maybe them to contend with. It was a bad thought.
I turned the car onto the main highway and set the gas pedal to the floor.
I had to hide the money.
But where?
I couldn’t think. It was like running frantically in front of a windstorm, knowing you had to stop, but being unable to stop. I didn’t know where to go.
There was a church up ahead on the corner, with a parking lane running up behind the building. I turned in there and drove up under a small shed and parked. It was a wooden-roofed room, cluttered with lawn-mowers and other grounds machinery—rakes, hoes, shovels. I cut the lights and sat there. Seeing the shovels made me think of burying the money. But I forgot it as quickly.
I could hear the sirens again.
My hands were frozen on the car wheel. I could feel the sloppy weight of the canvas money sack leaning against my leg. I flipped it across to the other side of the car, and sat there listening to my harsh breathing.
Christ, what was I going to do?
I knew I had to move. The entire area would be culled for this convertible in no time at all. A state wide alarm would be out. Road blocks would be set up. I didn’t know what to do. Where to go. My mind refused to come up with anything but the calm dredgings of death.
Somebody was walking down the lane behind the church.
I tried to see who it was. It was a man, a Negro, stooped behind a small wheelbarrow loaded with prunings from trees. He slopped along through the thin mud, rain dripping from a black hat. The streetlights shone gleaming on his black face. He looked toward the car. I ducked.
I waited.
The wheelbarrow ceased grinding in the mud. I could hear the steadied drip and fall of the rain. I kept absolutely still and there was no sound, nothing at all, but the rain, and the faraway call of the sirens. They were much fainter now.
He cleared his throat just above the car window.
I leaped back across the seat.
“That’s all right,” he said calmly. “I reckon you all got enough reason for setting there, ain’t you?”
I looked at him. The rain streamed around him. He wore a thick black raincoat, snapped high under his throat with heavy brass clasps. His teeth gleamed like carved soap.
“Ain’t you?” he said.
I still could not speak. There was a great patience in his face, the whites of his eyes showing in a bright flash as he looked off toward the rear of the church, then back at me.
“Why don’t you go home?” he said calmly, his voice deep and quiet. “What you running ‘round here for?”
“Nothing,” I said, too loudly. “Nothing. I was just sitting—out of the rain. The top leaks, you see?”
He did not so much as look at the top of the car.
“I reckon,” he said, standing there in the rain. “You hiding, ain’t you,” he said softly, stating it. “You running ‘way from something.”
I did not speak.
His great black hand clamped on edge of the door, glistening wet. The whites of his eyes flashed again.
“I was you,” he said. “I’d go on home. Running don’t get you no place—no place at all.”
His face was quite sober, watching me, the eyes blinking. He turned abruptly, sloshed back to the wheelbarrow. He hoisted the barrow handles and began trudging off along the lane, down toward the road.
I sat there a moment. Then I backed out of the lane, onto the road. The man was nowhere in sight. He had vanished.
I drove around past the front of the church and looked up across the lawn. I recalled it as a Negro church. The man must have been the caretaker, but what was he doing, wandering around at one in the morning? Where had he gone?
I didn’t know.
I did know he was right. I started for home. I took the back streets, and once I parked at a stoplight beside a police cruiser before I realized what I’d done. They didn’t seem to notice anything. As it drove on, I noticed that it was an out-of-town police car.
CHAPTER 6
The idea was to hide the money in our apartment. I worked on that all the way home. It would be best that way. More and more now, thoughts of the money began to come to me: what it was I had in that sack. Two
hundred and sixty-some thousand dollars. It kept seeming crazier and crazier to me. It was double the Halquist plant’s regular monthly payroll. Driving down the alley behind the apartment house, I kept bursting into laughter. It was not humorous. Because in my mind was a very real picture of those two dead men.
I knew I was running on fear. Fear in many different directions. I wondered if I was thinking clearly, and I couldn’t test myself in any way to find out.
They wouldn’t figure I would head for home. They’d have no idea where I was headed.
I parked the car on the opposite side of a fence across the alley from the apartment, beside a weathered aluminum trailer that had been there for some time. The convertible wasn’t easily seen.
Our rear windows could be seen from down here and they were dark. I knew I could leave the money down here someplace, but I didn’t want to. Something drove me to take it along up there. Something else told me I had to tell Janet about it now, only I knew I wouldn’t do that.
I got the money sack. It seemed heavier than before. I hurried across the alley and took the back stairs through the garage up to where we lived on the third floor.
I had already settled on the hall closet. Back in the right hand corner, where our winter clothes were racked. We never went back there for anything during the warmer months.
• • •
The apartment was dark. I let myself in as quietly as possible. It seemed as if everything inside of me had gone to mush. Once inside, I could hear Janet breathing from the bedroom. The steady rise and fall of sleep.
The instant I was inside, with the door closed, standing in the gray darkness of the living room, I knew I shouldn’t have come. I had the same feeling here as I’d had when that colored man had told me to come home. He had been right, and not right.