The Cypress House

by Michael Koryta

  “How much is your cut?”

  “He said I’d get a hundred dollars for this one.”

  A hundred dollars was a good month’s work for most men, but it also didn’t seem too hefty a cut when you considered the likelihood of a long prison stretch if you were caught. Arlen figured Wade had a carefully constructed alibi if anyone ever did take a bust and try to point back to him as the source of the money. He also figured the fool who tried to do such a thing would have a mighty short prison stay and wouldn’t be walking out of the cell when he left.

  “You’ll have this money a full day ahead of time?” Arlen asked.

  “That’s right. He doesn’t want to see me the day of the delivery. He won’t see anyone the day of the delivery.”

  That was good, though. It gave them some hours to work with, made this thing a hell of a lot easier than it would be if McGrath himself handled the money and they had to go through him and his pack of thug sons to get it. Having Owen serve as the money handler made things much simpler. They’d have the cash in hand from the start. All that remained to be done was to kill Wade.

  Shadows loomed in the headlights, and Owen slowed as they approached a group of black men and women walking along the road. They were barefoot, their eyes white in the headlights. One of the women was holding a child in her arms.

  Looking for work, Arlen thought. They’re out here wandering in the night, walking barefoot, looking for any form of work they can get. And Solomon Wade is waiting to put nine thousand dollars in a case and send it out to some Cubans on a boat in exchange for a drug that hides your pain—mental or physical varieties. This world.

  They roared on past the walking family, two white men in a convertible out here in the backwoods. He wondered what they thought of that. If they took one look and knew that crooked money had bought the car.

  “What’ll he do on that day?” Arlen asked. “Wade, I mean.”

  “I’ve got no idea. Keep his distance, like I said.”

  “Well, I’m going to need to find him. You know where he lives, where he works, that sort of thing?”

  Owen gave a nervous nod. He looked over at Arlen, his face pale in the darkness, and said, “You’re really going to kill him.”

  Arlen looked away. “I can’t let your sister end up like your father. I can’t let her stay here either.”

  “You ever killed anyone before?”

  “Killed plenty. Were days in the war I killed quite a few in just an hour.”

  “What about away from the war?”

  Arlen shook his head.

  “Well, I expect it’s awfully different.”

  Arlen said, “I don’t.”

  “What?”

  “It’s taking a life. Any time, and any way, it is always about ending someone’s life. There aren’t a whole lot of degrees to it. Not that I can see at least. People who haven’t done it, they can imagine all these differences. I might agree that the circumstances and defenses for the act shift around a good deal. But that act itself? It doesn’t change.”

  “You’re going to kill him,” Owen repeated, as if all the rest of the words had slid past him without impact.

  “Yes,” Arlen said. “I’ll kill him, and you’ll take your sister and get the hell away from this place. With the money.”

  Owen was silent. They drove along for a while, and then he pulled off the road and set to turning the car around, ready to head back.

  “What do you know about the men Wade’s connected to?” Arlen asked.

  “Not much. They’re in New Orleans.”

  “They the sort that’ll give chase over nine thousand dollars?”

  “If they know who to chase.”

  Arlen nodded. He expected they’d be looked for, at least in the early days, but with Wade removed he didn’t imagine the hoods in New Orleans would be willing to waste much time on the endeavor. They’d need to install somebody else to take his place, that was all.

  “Paul’s getting some of the money,” Arlen said. “Before we do a damn thing, he’s getting some of the money, and he’s getting on a train.”

  Owen said, “He thinks he’s going to be here for it. Helping.”

  “Well, he won’t be.”

  Owen nodded. “How much you figuring on giving him?”

  “Enough,” Arlen said. “Enough.”

  “What the hell are we supposed to do with the Cubans?”

  “Let them sit,” Arlen said. “They never see the lights that signal them that it’s all clear, then they think there’s a problem, and they go on back, right?”

  “That’s the point of the signal, I figure.”

  “Exactly. So they won’t know what happened, but they’ll know something went wrong. And they’ll be right about that.”

  “We’ll need to be gone before nightfall, then,” Owen said. “McGrath and his sons will come down about sunset. They’ll be set up in the inlet, waiting to unload. They’ll be watching everything. That old bastard doesn’t miss much.”

  “By the time he gets there, the place will be empty. So, sure, he’ll know something’s up, and what’ll he do? Go looking for Wade. And find his body.”

  “Then shit’ll get going fast,” Owen said, taking one hand off the steering wheel and rubbing it over his chin, a nervous gesture.

  “What’s to get going? They’ll come looking for us. We’ll be gone.”

  “Yeah, we better be. Just where in the hell is it you think we’re going?”

  “Does McGrath have a boat that can handle open water?”

  “No.”

  “All right. You and Rebecca will leave in the boat that day, then. That way if McGrath or one of his sons is keeping an eye on you, they won’t be able to follow anyhow. You know a port town you can get to easy enough where I can pick you up in the car once Wade’s been dealt with?”

  “There’s Yankeetown.”

  “That’s what we’ll do, then. You take the boat there and wait on me. We’ll use this car at first, but we’re going to have to switch it up fast. All that time you spent at Raiford talking to big-shot cons, you actually learn how to steal a car?”

  “I can steal one, sure.”

  “Good,” Arlen said. “You’ll need to steal a couple before it’s done.”

  Owen didn’t answer.

  “You having second thoughts?” Arlen said.

  Silence.

  “If you are,” Arlen said, “you might think about that box we dug out of the sand again. And you might think about your father.”

  This time Owen turned to look at him, and his eyes were steady. “I’m not having any second thoughts.”

  “All right.” Arlen turned and let the wind blow into his face and said, “You know where Solomon Wade lives?”

  “Yes.”

  “Take me there now.”

  “Why?”

  “I can’t just drive up and kill him,” Arlen said. “It’s going to require the right opportunity. I expect I’ll have to spend a good bit of the day following him. He live alone?”

  “He’s got a girl. I don’t know how much she’s there, though.”

  “We’ll need to know,” Arlen said. “I’m not hurting anyone else. He’ll need to be alone when I come for him.”

  He had a sudden vision of the sheriff of Fayette County and Edwin Main approaching in the night, Arlen standing there at the window watching them come, waiting on them.

  “Yes,” he said, “he’ll need to be alone when I come.”

  40

  THE HOUSE WAS A sprawling plantation-style place about a mile outside of High Town, resting at the end of a long drive bordered with cypress trees. Lights glowed inside a broad expanse of glass that made up one side of the front of the home. Behind it was a carriage house, Wade’s Ford coupe parked in front, along with another car. Arlen didn’t see the second vehicle clearly at first, but then Owen Cady said, “Sheriff is here,” and he remembered it well, remembered sitting in the back with handcuffs around his wrists and a notion tha
t all he needed to do was weather a little bit of a knockabout and he’d be back on the road to Flagg Mountain soon enough.

  It was a memory so strong and so strange it seemed the property of another man. Arlen would never see Flagg Mountain again. What had seemed reasonable once was gone now, taken from him by circumstances far from his control. He wondered if Wallace O’Connell and the other men from that train had felt similarly when they realized the hurricane was upon them. He wondered if any of them had remembered him, remembered that night at the station platform when he’d urged them to get off, assured them that danger lay ahead.

  They’d all been heading toward powerful storms, he realized. His had just been longer coming, that was all.

  “I don’t like sitting here,” Owen said. “They know this car; hell, it’s his car. One of them sees it out here, what are they going to think?”

  They were parked in the darkness a good quarter mile from the house, nobody was going to see them, but Arlen had no reason to hold him here either, so he told him to go ahead and drive away.

  “Awful lot of house,” he said as they cruised by for the final time, Owen keeping the headlights off.

  “Was the owner of the timber company that built it. He was the richest man around for miles in his time. Now Wade is.”

  So it went. Legitimate work disappeared and what stepped in its place were the likes of Solomon Wade. Arlen wondered what the locals thought when they passed by the place. Probably felt broken, helpless, the way Thomas Barrett seemed to. Arlen wondered what they’d think when Wade was dead. Would any good come from it here, or would another like him simply fill the void?

  “He have servants at the place?” Arlen asked.

  “None that stay there. People come and go during the day, but he doesn’t like anyone living on the property.”

  That would help. Now that he’d had a look at the house, Arlen was figuring it was the best spot he’d have, and dawn the best time. He’d done some killing in dawns of days past, had left men to bleed out as the sun showed faint in the east. He could do it again. As he’d told Owen earlier, all that changed was the circumstances, not the act. He’d never wanted a circumstance like this, but hell, he hadn’t wanted a war either. A man never did get as much say in this life as he wanted to have, as he’d expected he would when he was young. No, you took what was offered and you handled it best as you could.

  “How will you get the money?” he asked.

  “Sheriff will bring it.”

  “The sheriff?” It was all he could do not to laugh. Some law they had in Corridor County.

  “That’s right. He’ll drive it down Thursday evening.”

  “But the boat’s not coming in till Friday night.”

  “They like to have their distance,” Owen said. “And they have Tate McGrath watching. Tate’ll be watching the whole time. Basically from the moment Tolliver delivers the money, Tate will be around, watching. Who was it you think killed my father? It was Tate, I’d just about guarantee it. And my father went out on the boat just the same as you want us to.”

  His voice was rising, and the speed of the car right along with it, his foot pushing harder at the gas as his nerves took hold. Arlen said, “Ease up, son,” and Owen slowed the car but shook his head, still unhappy.

  “It’s a shit plan,” he said. “You’re sending us out just like my father went and somehow expecting it to go better.”

  Arlen didn’t have an answer for that. Hell, the kid was right. All he knew was that he wanted Rebecca gone by the time he moved on Wade, just in case anything went wrong. He wanted the two of them to be under way and prepared to keep going. Tate McGrath, the damned watchdog, was going to be a problem.

  “The boat’s a bad idea,” he admitted. “You leave in the boat any time ahead of when you should, they’ll not like it. Better idea is you and Rebecca climb into her truck in the middle of the afternoon, nothing packed. Make as if you’re just heading up the road to Barrett’s store. Be so damn obvious about it that he won’t imagine you’ve got any other plans.”

  “Doesn’t leave as much time, though.”

  “No, it doesn’t. But any time is better than none, and I think you’re right—we try to get too crafty while McGrath’s watching, it’ll go sour fast. The way to handle it is for you and Rebecca to drive off in that truck of hers like it’s just another afternoon, and I’ll stick right where I always am, down at the boathouse swinging a hammer. Long as we all don’t leave together, I imagine he’ll give it some time at least. Won’t expect something’s wrong right away.”

  “So we take off that afternoon,” Owen said, “and you wait to kill Wade until evening?”

  “What time do the Cubans get in?”

  “Long after dark.”

  “All right. Then I got a bit of time. Hell, I’ll have a word with Tate before I leave. Tell him you gave me instructions to clear out, that I wasn’t to be around the place. He’ll believe that; it’ll sound proper to him. He doesn’t trust me and he wouldn’t expect you to.”

  “So you’ll talk to Tate,” Owen said, “and then you’ll—”

  “Get in this car and drive up the road and kill Solomon Wade.”

  It would change the timing of things. He wouldn’t be able to wait on Wade as the sun rose, the way he’d imagined. No, he’d have to venture into town in daylight and find him and follow him and take the first opportunity that was there. He’d have to do it fast, too. Rebecca and Owen would have a few hours of head start, but by the time evening settled in and they still weren’t back, Tate McGrath would grow suspicious.

  When Owen spoke again, it took Arlen by surprise. Things had been that quiet.

  “It should be me,” he said.

  “What?”

  “That kills him. Shouldn’t be you. Ain’t nothing personal between you and him. Me and him, though? That’s plenty personal. Should be me that pulls the trigger.”

  Arlen said, “You realize you helped cause all of this?”

  Owen turned and gave him a confused look. “What?”

  “You read that letter from your father. You know what you’d gotten into with Wade. Sure, your old man might’ve led the way, but it was you who helped put the knife to his neck. Don’t forget that. You want to blame Wade, go on and blame him. Don’t forget your own decisions, though.”

  “You got some brass, saying a thing like that. Just because I did some work for the man doesn’t mean—”

  “You did more than work for the man,” Arlen said. “You wanted to be him. Wanted to run around in fancy cars with a gun in your belt and a pocketful of money, dirty money, blood money, just so you could feel like you got some power. Feel like you’re a big shot. Came swaggering in the day you got out of Raiford and never so much as thought about your sister, what she’s been through waiting on your worthless ass. No, all you wanted to do was tell tales about the thugs and hoods you knew. Except you don’t even know them. You got any idea how sad that is, boy? You’re pretending to be Solomon Wade. That’s what you want out of this life. To be just like the man who had your daddy’s throat cut.”

  Owen’s jaw had gone rigid, and his hands were tight on the steering wheel.

  “I’ve been places where words like that would get a man killed,” he said.

  “Son,” Arlen said, “you ain’t been anywhere. You don’t have so much as a rumor of what this world’s really like. You’re getting a taste now, and it’s your first. All that tough-boy bullshit aside, this is your first taste, and you know it.”

  Owen didn’t answer.

  “Look me in the eye and tell me if I’m wrong,” Arlen said.

  Silence.

  “There’s only one thing that you need to do now,” Arlen said, “and that’s take care of your sister. Try to make up for the mistakes you made and your father made that got you all into this fix. I’ll do your bloody work. You just be a man for a change.”

  That night he sat awake with Rebecca on the back porch, and they listened to the waves b
reak and roll back and break again, and neither of them spoke much for a long time. Owen had climbed the stairs as soon as they got back and shut the door to his room, never appearing again. There was a lot going on in his mind. Let him have his time, so long as he didn’t set the fool’s temper to work again.

  Paul had been in the barroom until Arlen entered, and then he stood and walked past him without a word and went up the steps as well. Arlen let him go. How he wished Paul had never come back. He had to make sure that he’d be gone soon, long before anything went into motion with Solomon Wade. That would require waiting on the money, though, and that would give Arlen only about twenty-four hours to convince Paul to hit the road… and only about twenty-four hours of distance between the boy and Corridor County. Arlen didn’t figure they’d pursue him, but there was a chance. Paul would need to travel smart, travel with a plan, and that would require a conversation between the two of them. Right now, the boy wouldn’t even speak to him.

  Rebecca laid her hand out in the darkness and put it on his arm, and the mere touch of her skin on his own broke some of the blackness loose inside him. He closed his eyes and felt the points of warmth where her fingertips lay, tried to focus on that and nothing else for just a few seconds.

  “You shouldn’t have to do this,” she said softly. “Shouldn’t have to be any part of it.”

  “Stop,” he said.

  “Well, it’s true.” She squeezed his arm once and then removed her hand and said, “I told Paul about your father.”

  He opened his eyes again. “What?”

  “He holds such anger toward you, Arlen, and I can’t stand to see it. I tried to talk with him about it, tried to apologize for what happened and the way that it happened and explain what you were trying to do. That you believed so deeply he was in danger that you would drive him away from this place at any cost.”

  “Let me guess,” Arlen said, “he wasn’t buying it.”

  “No. I told him that I believed you. He didn’t care for that either. He wanted to know how I could possibly believe you.”

  “So you told him.”

  “Yes. I hope you’re not angry. I knew it wasn’t a story you shared, but, Arlen… I wanted him to know.”