The brother stepped forward and, furious, hit her again, harder. A burst of electric pain just under her ears. Her vision went black and grainy around the edges. She slid down against the cornflower-blue wall. Tried to get up. Billy ripped the gun from her hands. Her head sagged against the wall.
Sam reached her, put his arms around her head. He screamed, "Go away, go away, you!"
The twin opened the door and shouted. "Yo, Bobby. It's under control. Come on in."
Bobby walked inside. Sniffed the air. "Stinks. Brimstone. Lookit that thing." He nodded at the Springfield in admiration. Then he saw the sheriff's body. "You have to do that?"
"He seen me coming through the window," Billy said, massaging his head where he'd struck it on the doorknob. "The fuck you think I should've done? Said 'Howdy-do'?"
Bobby closed the door, looked over at Sam. "Hey, young fella. Don't worry. You'll be okay."
His brother muttered, "Son of a bitch, I'm bleeding." He looked with satisfaction at Meg, whose head lolled back and forth against the wallpaper. Her face was white. He asked, "Where's Keith?"
Meg didn't answer. He slapped her hard. Still silence. She was only half conscious.
"No!" the boy cried.
"Where's your father?"
He hesitated then said, "He's at the office but he's coming home any minute and he's going to kill you."
"Any minute," Billy repeated, looking at his brother.
But Bobby was looking over at the little boy. "How 'bout you and me go watch TV or something. In the living room there? While we wait for him."
"No."
"You don't want me to hit your mommy again, do you?"
Sam didn't say anything, just shook his head, wiped tears.
Bobby smiled. "Come on. Let's you and me go in there."
Billy said, "We don't have time for that now."
Feeling good that he'd thought of something his brother hadn't, Bobby said, "We gotta wait anyway, don't we? May as well enjoy ourselves."
23
The roadside signs gave him messages. The scientist within Keith Torrens would see a yellow warning sign with a curve and a side road painted on it and he'd think of a sigma bond. And his mind would shift into thoughts about electron sharing and the unequal charge distribution in a chloride-bromine molecule.
Or he'd see a yield sign and think, delta, and, bang, there it would be in his thoughts: the Gibbs free-energy exchange formula.
Wandering, his mind. Going down those odd paths, just like it did when he was a pudgy kid with a slide rule. The Magic Moments happened then too, didn't they?
Another sign-this one on an old, abandoned White Castle hamburger stand. Castle… He saw the faded paint of the parapets as he sped past.
Castle. Medieval castles. Alchemists.
He thought about the location scout.
Pellam…
He was tired. It was nearly eleven and he'd put in a full fourteen hours at the plant. Another Sunday gone. Pushing the Cougar along the deserted, dark road, listening to the damn front-end squeak. A scientist. I'm a scientist and I can't fix a noisy hunk of metal.
But none of that mattered: the fatigue, the squeak, the headache. He didn't care. What was there to bitch about? He'd buy a new goddamn Cougar, a Cadillac, a Mercedes.
He was riding on a Magic Moment.
The answer had come all at once. At two that afternoon in a crisp unfolding of thoughts that he fought to put into numbers, Greek letters and scientific symbols. He had run from the factory into his office, closing the door, shutting off the telephone, and wrote furiously-frantic, terrified that he'd miss something. Keith had felt the shock of fear rise up to his scalp, like the first and only time he took speed-in college, struggling to get his master's degree project in on time. That warm clarity, everything focused, sweeping forward.
A Magic Moment.
That the problem solved-a new stabilizer for one of his company's cough syrups-wasn't exactly earth-shattering or in proportion to his euphoria didn't occur to him. And if it had, the excitement wouldn't be the least dampened.
The magic worked. He'd packed a problem into his brain, let it bake and out came a solution. He was high, he was alive. Those moments validated everything-all the business bullshit he put up with, all the long hours, the risks, the ulcers he was sure he was developing. All the time away from Meg and Sam.
All of that was paid for in one moment. A Magic Moment.
Thinking about Meg…
And he regretted for the tenth time that day, as every day, that she couldn't really be a part of what he'd done, his business. She'd benefit, of course. She'd be a millionaire too. But she couldn't be a partner.
That was Keith Torrens's greatest regret.
Castles, medieval alchemists.
Alchemy, turning gold into brighter gold.
Rings of gold. Wedding rings. Meg.
He remembered a line from some country-western station-one that she listened to all the time.
If we tell a lie while we're lying together, then that's nothing more than a port in bad weather…
He wondered again whether she was seeing anyone. He didn't think so. But Keith Torrens (who'd never cheated on his wife) believed that while men and women both had an equal capacity for deception, women were better equipped to cover their tracks. Keith (empirical, rational Cartesian-a scientist) had decided this was because as mothers, with broods to attend to, and possessing less physical strength than men they had honed their skills in guile for protection.
A tertiary basic nitrogen …
So, he'd found no circumstantial evidence. Nothing in her eyes. No Amex receipts (he could imagine what bastards those little blue tissue clues must be). Couldn't recall any times she was supposed to be at home when she wasn't (though how would he know? He was at the plant twelve hours a day). Sam had never referred to an uncle who'd come to help mommy with the yard, the gutters, the shopping.
… a quaternary carbon…
Who could be more devoted than he was? A better father? He never took long business trips, like some of the men who worked for the big companies by the Hudson. He didn't uproot Meg and Sam and drag them around the country. He wasn't like the fellow he'd met at the golf course one Sunday, a friend of a friend, who worked for IBM (I've Been Moved) down in Westchester. Four houses in six years.
… an ethylene chain and a ketone… Put them in the oven, and let them bake. Bang, a Magic Moment, and out comes something new.
No, she was faithful. Though questions of fidelity were the type you ask yourself in a certain way-fast, distracted-so as to avoid the possibility of a real answer. A scientist is not equipped to ask questions like that. Scientists aren't happy until they find the truth and he wasn't sure he wanted the truth.
Keith Torrens drove toward his home. He'd make it up to her. Make up for what?
He wasn't sure.
How?
He didn't know.
Pellam pulled the camper into the driveway.
He saw the beige car parked in the road just past the drive and thought: Oh, hell. No… He recognized the car. Knew who the visitors were.
Thinking about Big Mountain Studio's promise to put mobile phones in all the campers. None of Lefkowitz's minions had ever gotten around to it. And here the nearest house was several miles up the road. No time to get there.
No time for anything.
He doused the lights, parked on the grass, opened the camper door and climbed out.
No one inside seemed to have noticed him.
Everything seemed slowed up, the way they shoot karate fights in those charmingly bad Hong Kong karate flicks, or the way Sam Peckinpah shot his violent scenes. Pellam stepped out of the camper, breathing deeply. He started toward the house, avoiding the gravel.
At least he had surprise on his side.
Man, no question it was fall. That smell of the air's dry coldness, the sweet scent of oak or cherry fires.
Pellam was thinking how seasonless the big cities are. New York, L.A
. And it was odd how returning to the country during a blatant time of year-the first deep snow, the week of the most colorful leaves-is more than anything a return to youth. Painful nostalgia, a rearrangement of priorities and possibilities. Blatant seasons.
Pellam figured that was a pretty good observation and he wondered if he'd live long enough to use it in a film.
The sky was almost completely clear now, swept clean by the cold front. He glanced up, seeing the stars in the black vacuum that domed over him from one horizon of trees to another.
A perfect fall night in Cleary, New York. Home of the perfect cemetery.
That's how they'd ended up in Cleary in the first place, looking for the ideal, A-number-one cemetery.
A perfect fall night.
As he moved over the lawn. He saw shadows inside. The flicker of a TV screen. Keith's car was gone. So the twins were in there alone with Meg and Sam.
He hurried toward the house. He slipped the gun in his waistband. There was an open window to the right of the door, opening into a dark room. He could go up a rose trellis and through the window. Come around from behind.
Two of them, both armed, probably.
At least he had surprise on his-
A car pulled into the driveway, catching Pellam in its beams. It gave a long blare on the horn.
From the house, fifty feet away, security lights clicked on, blinding him.
"What's going on?" Keith called from the driveway. He'd parked and gotten out of the car.
Pellam called, "Stay there. Stay back."
He turned back to the house. The front door opened and one of the twins stepped out, holding a pistol at Pellam's chest.
So much, Pellam thought, for surprise.
24
Pellam supposed that he'd known all along it would come to this.
He walked to the right, out of the glare, onto the driveway, gravel scrunching beneath the worn sole of his Nokonas. He stopped and felt an odd sensation-growing into the drive, like roots going down, solid as the granite slabs the gravel used to be. "Hey, mister. Hey, Mr Torrens."
"What the hell-"
"Quiet," Pellam ordered Keith. The man froze.
This was definitely the ending of a film-not like one of his, though, in which viewers felt all that tension, then nothing happening, the principals moving vaguely off into the credits (boy, he took flak for those endings. Resolve it, John, resolve it. How the world hates the truth of ambiguity).
But here it was. Pretty damn clear to him. A man slouching out onto the porch, holding in his hand an automatic pistol. Meg said she didn't like handguns. They're man-killing guns, she'd have been thinking, no other purpose for them.
The man slouching.
"You interrupted me," the twin said. "Was just about to sit down and watch some TV with a little friend in there."
And where's the other one, Pellam wondered, his brother?
Behind him?
Behind me?
Inside, with Sam?
"Where's Meg?" Pellam asked.
"Whatcha doin' here, mister?"
"Which one're you?"
"Bobby. Hey, don't you move there, Mr Torrens. You do, I'll have to kill you too."
Pellam asked, "You the one who did it?"
"Did what?"
"Killed my friend."
"S'pose you know if I tell you I'll have to make sure that fact doesn't go any further."
"That's pretty much on the agenda anyway, isn't it?" Pellam asked.
"Heh."
"I just want to know if it was you killed Marty."
"Was a hell of a shot, I do say so myself." Not smirking. Just mentioning the fact.
"Whatcha got there?" Bobby asked. "In your belt?"
"It'd be a Colt Peacemaker."
"No kidding. Smokeless powder? Reproduction?"
"Nope. It's the real thing."
"No kidding. Forty-four?"
"Forty-five."
"Heh."
"Where's your brother?"
"Maybe he's behind you."
"So you'll die first," Pellam said.
"Heh."
"Please…" Keith was begging. "Where's my son?"
They both ignored him.
There was no motion. Pellam stood on the wet gravel, his feet, in scuffed black boots, slightly apart.
There was no noise.
There was nothing else in the world except a man standing in front of him with a gun in his hand. A tall Victorian house. With a woman and boy inside, her husband nearby. Under a canopy of a dry, clear fall night.
Pellam had shot ducks and geese and a number of Gila monsters and rattlesnakes and hundreds of Heineken bottles.
He'd never shot a man.
The security lights poured into his eyes, making Bobby a silhouette. (Pellam recalled that, on various target ranges, he'd shot as many silhouette targets as Gila monsters and rattlesnakes combined.)
No face, no motion, no sound.
In the stillness, in this dense peace, a thought came to him. Something he remembered from researching a script about the Indians of the Great Plains. The Sioux, he believed. Waking up on a beautiful day, they wouldn't think how good it was to be alive. What they'd say was, "It's a good day to die."
Good, Pellam. Good thought.
Well, Wild Bill himself hadn't lived to see forty.
Then, finally, motion intruded on the scene. It was a cliché-one that Pellam, if he were directing a Western, wouldn't have allowed the writer to use: He pulled his blue jean jacket open slightly wider to fully expose the grip of his pistol.
The way Bobby saw it (Bobby who had shot a man-several of them, in fact-but only in the backs of their heads after being paid ten thousand dollars each to do it) these were good odds. Pellam had glare in his eyes and he had a single-action gun so he'd have to draw and cock it before he could shoot. It was a six-shot gun and it would take probably three minutes to reload. If he had extra ammo on him. Which he probably didn't.
Also, he figured Pellam hadn't shot anybody in the back of the head or anyplace else for any money.
Bobby, on the other hand, was already holding a cocked Browning automatic.380 with twelve rounds in it. Which all you had to do was aim and pull the trigger. The light was behind him. He could reload the Browning in two seconds.
Torrens was in the yard, true, but he wasn't going to do diddly except stand there like a scared rabbit.
He hoped Billy was watching him. He never missed a chance to impress his smarter brother.
What he'd do is let the guy go for the gun then shoot him in his leg. Watch him fall. Then let him crawl a little. Shoot again.
Maybe he'd aim for Pellam's boots. They were a good contrast, black on the white gravel. But so were the man's eyes, which glinted two reflections from the yellow porch light. And his white shirt under the dark jacket.
But then he decided there was something about the way the man had opened his jacket that made Bobby uneasy. Don't play games. Do Pellam, do Torrens. Go back to the boy. Or the mother. Or both.
Go for a chest shot.
Without really deciding, or thinking, Bobby dropped into a crouch.
He swept the gun upward in an arc, keeping his arm straight the way he knew to do and practiced every week. None of this two-hand combat shooting that nobody who knows guns really ever does. Squinting, but leaving both eyes open, as the blade sight rose right toward the white slash of Pellam's shirt. He started to pull the trigger.
Thunk.
A shovel.
Bobby thought: Goddamn… who did that?
Somebody'd snuck up and hit him in the chest with a shovel. Or… Damn, it hurt. He coughed. Or maybe it was an ax handle. Bobby dropped his unfired gun. He looked down. Where'd it go? He looked behind him. There was nobody. He looked at his chest again and saw the blood. Oh, that hurts. He was getting dizzy. Then he saw Pellam holding the Colt at his hip, surrounded by a cloud of smoke. Bobby reached for his gun. He fell to the porch. He looked for the shovel.
He died.
Pellam spun around, looked behind him, into the fields to the side of the house.
No Billy.
He whispered to Keith, "Get down. Don't move." And started forward. But he didn't get very far.
The door crashed open and Billy, staggering out, dropped to his knees over Bobby, shrieking. He lifted his own gun and fired sloppily at Pellam.
Ragged blue flashes appeared in the man's hand, the huge crack of the shots filling the night. A bullet popped the sound barrier inches from his left ear with the noise of a huge snapping finger.
All Pellam had time for was one shot, from his hip. He felt the kick, smelled the sulfur from the black powder. He saw the slug dig out a chunk of the porch. Billy fired fast and Pellam dove to the ground. He hit hard, landed on his right elbow. There was a loud snap, followed by breath-taking pain. His vision went black and dusty from the dislocation. He rolled onto his back. His shoulder joint popped back into alignment. He fainted for a second. Sweat shot from his forehead and he felt nausea in a bristling wave.
He lifted the Colt. It fell from his hand. His right arm was useless.
"Bobby, oh, Bobby…" Billy was moaning.
More shots from the automatic. Bullets dug into the camper and the ground near him.
Six shots, seven, eight.
"Sonabitchsonabitch! Son… of… a… bitch!"
Pellam lifted the Colt again. But it was a replay-the gun did a double gainer to the ground.
Christ, how many shots in that clip?
Ten, eleven, twelve…
Click, click, click.
Empty. He was out. Thank you… Pellam raised his head and watched Billy reload.
Pellam felt the cold wet touch of the gravel, smelled the sour earthy-oily scent of the stone. He saw Billy coming closer. He lowered his head and heard the crunch of the gravel under the man's loafers.
Pellam grabbed for the Colt. He hit the butt with his fingers and knocked it out of reach.
He heard the man's breathing. Pellam looked up, opened his eyes. He saw the bore of the gun in the man's hand, six feet away.
Billy stopped.
A good day to die…
Billy stopped.
Shallow Graves Page 23