Soft Touch
Page 17
The toy knife was not a weapon. I remembered my .22 automatic, wondered why it had not occurred to me sooner. I hobbled to the bureau. It was gone from its usual place in the drawer. I had thrown it into … And the memory was gone. Something about darkness. I shook my head in a vain effort to clear it, but only awakened an area of pain behind my left ear. I touched it with my fingertips. It had the pressure and sensitivity of an infection, and the feeling of heat.
I took a sock from my bureau drawer and went into the bathroom, taking small quick steps on the damaged foot. When I turned the bathroom light on I saw Lorraine before me on the floor, her head at a sick angle. I gasped with shock and then she faded abruptly and was gone. It was as though I had stared fixedly at her for a long time and then turned quickly and saw the retinal after-image of her on the bare tile floor in that moment before it faded and was gone. I felt as if I were losing my mind.
I opened the medicine cabinet and took a jar of cream deodorant and slipped it down into the toe of the sock. It was of heavy glass. When I swung the sock it had a lethal weight.
There were two more of them. Two that I knew about. The big one and the one who had worked on my foot. But there could be more. I went into the bedroom and looked at the one on the floor. He seemed to be breathing very slowly and very heavily. I turned out the table lamp and went to the bedroom phone. I heard the dial tone. I dialed zero. The operator answered. I asked for police headquarters.
“Police headquarters, Sergeant Ascher.”
“Let me talk to Lieutenant Heissen.” I heard my own hushed voice ask for a name I had never heard before. Someone I did not know. There had been a Heissen a long time ago. Paul. A brave and stubborn and immovable high school center.
“He isn’t on duty.”
Fear came from some inexplicable source. Something in the guts. Frail and crackling, like paper too close to a fire, writhing and browning in the heat.
The sergeant was saying, “Hello? Hello?” as I gently replaced the phone on the cradle. I could not understand or rationalize the fear. I was in a train as it plunged through a long tunnel. I saw the tunnel lights whip by me, illuminating fragments of scenes I could not understand.
And I heard another one on the stairs.
I moved as quickly as I could and brought too much weight on my right foot so that for a few moments I was in a great hollow place full of echoes and little dots of brilliance whirled and swam behind my eyes. I did not fall. I moved to the far side of the door, and when the tall shadow came in through the doorway, I swung the heavy sock with all the furious strength of panic. And felt and heard the hard glass jar fragment against the skull. And sensed, beyond that, the sick crumbling of the skull itself. I moved to catch him, but my weight came wrong on my right foot and he was too heavy and he slipped away and fell with a heaviness that filled the night and the silence.
There was a hoarse call from downstairs, a call of panic and question and alarm. I was on my knees in darkness. Clumsy hands on his clothing, fumbling, pawing. He was on his face. Levered him over with grunt of effort. Bulk of metal under the breast of the coat. Cold serrated grip that fitted into the chill oiled sweat of the palm of my hand. The gun felt long and muzzle-heavy. I moved on my knees toward the doorway, struck the dead foot, fell forward, half in and half out of the bedroom. The lower hall light was on. When he reached the head of the stairs, an instant after I fell, he was in silhouette. The trigger pull was stiff. It fired. A most curious sound. A smothered sound. The way a man in church might muffle a cough in his Sunday handkerchief.
The man at the head of the stairs was taking a step forward. He touched his toe to the floor and then swung his foot back, so that it was like a dance step, quite slow. He took another step back and his back was against the wall and he made a long frightened sound. “Maaaaaamm!” he cried, lost and goatlike.
And I fired twice again. Each time the sound was appreciably louder, but the last was no louder than the sound a book would make dropped flat on a rug. Then he took half an aimless step toward the stairs, bowed with an antique grace, plunged. I listened to the inconsequential rattle and thumble of his fall, heard him come to rest in silence. Heard a tiny gagging noise and then nothing.
Tunes came into my mind and I felt my lips spread back in the kind of grin that you acquire when you bump into somebody with an awkward carelessness. Long long ago there was a picture of a murderer. With a song of his own. “Mighty Like a Rose.” I whistled it between my teeth, a tinny sound in the silent house. Just the refrain. Over and over. I backed on my hands and knees into the room and touched the muzzle of the gun to the head of the big one, backed off an inch and pulled the trigger. Don’t know what to call him but he’s mighty like a rose. And the same to the one with the ruined face. The big one did not move when I fired. The dark one bucked and drummed his heels and flapped at the floor with one hand and sighed. I wondered what dreams the leaden pellet had smashed, down into what dark corridors it had dived. Don’t know what to call him, but …
I turned on a light. I did not look at them. I put a sock on my torn foot with utmost tenderness, and edged it gingerly into my shoe, biting my lip against the pain. I laced it snugly. It was easier to stand on, but when I came to the stairs I inched down them, one at a time, good foot first. The third one lay in the front hall under the light, face down, arm buckled under him, ankles comfortably crossed. Eenie, meenie, minie mose—you’re all mighty like a rose. And drove a round hole into the back of his neck, directly in the center, neat as a strike into the pocket, a long putt, a threaded needle. Then looked up the stairs and saw, before she faded away, a woman naked, struggling with a robe.
By the electric clock in the kitchen it was quarter after four. The keys were not in my car. I had to go through their pockets. I had luck. They were in the pocket of the one in the downstairs hall.
I got into the car.
And suddenly a lot of it came back. It came in heavy clods and jagged pieces. I was like a man who stands under a collapsing building, shielding his head with his arms, waiting for the great roof section that will smash him against the ground. I waited under it until the sound of falling ended. And I looked at what had fallen. There was more to come down. But I had parts of it now. The copper Porsche turning in the air as it fell into the lake. Carrying Lorraine out to the station wagon. Tinker and Mandy. Paul Heissen.
And the money. The thick rich stacks of currency baled with wire, neatly fitted into the black tin suitcase.
I had to have the money, and I had to leave. Quickly
And I thought of the money and remembered where it was.
I drove out to Park Terrace. I parked by a high stack of cinder block. I used a broken piece of block to break the lock on a tool shed. I knew the right place. A pick and a shovel would be enough. There were stars to see by. The concrete was pale. I tried to swing the pick with great force, but there was no strength in me. I could do little more than lift it with great effort and let it fall under its own weight. When it landed tilted a little one way or the other, the haft would turn in my hands and it would clang on the concrete. After a long time I got to my knees and felt of the hole. It was half the size of an apple, with the concrete around it pocked by the times I had missed my aim.
There was nothing in all the world but the money in the ground and the need to get to it. My clothes were soaked with sweat. Sometimes I fell. When I fell I would lie there and wait until I could get up again and pick up the pick. Finally the point went through into the dirt underneath. I paused and looked around. The world was gray. I had not seen the night go, or the stars. The haft of the pick was sleek and sticky with blood. I walked to the shack and got a long pry bar. On the way back with it I fell and in a little while I got up again. With the pry bar I could break off pieces of the concrete. With the pry bar I was able to break the strand of the reinforcing mesh.
When the hole was as big as the top of a bushel basket, a voice said, “What the hell are you doing, Jerry?”
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sp; I turned and stared at him. It was Red Olin. And the sun was well up. I hadn’t seen it come up.
“I have to get the money, Red.”
“What money? What are you talking about.”
“I buried it here before you poured the slab. It’s in a black tin suitcase. It’s a hell of a lot of money.”
“You look sick.”
“It’s a lot of money, Red. Three million something. I forget just how much. In cash. I’ve got to get it and get away from here.”
He smiled at me. “Sure. You’ve got to get away from here. That’s right.”
I smiled back at him. I’ve always gotten along fine with Red. We’ve worked well together. We understand each other. “Once you start killing people, Red, you’ve got to get away.”
“That’s right.”
“How about helping me? I’ll give you some of it.”
“Sure. I’ll help you, Jerry. Glad to.”
“It’ll go faster with two.”
“I’ll be back in a couple of minutes, Jerry. You keep right on digging for that money.”
“Where are you going?”
“Well … I didn’t get my coffee yet. I can dig better after my coffee. I could bring you some.”
“Okay. But hurry. Like I said, I’ve got to get out of here.”
I’d dug down about a foot when Red came back with all the rest of them. Paul Heissen and the other cops and the doctor. They wanted to take me away. But I asked Paul. He made them let me stay. I stood where I could watch. The young cops dug very rapidly.
“Look for a black tin suitcase,” I told them.
But it wasn’t the black tin suitcase at all. And then they took me away.
About the Author
John D. MacDonald was an American novelist and short story writer. His works include the Travis McGee series and the novel The Executioners, which was adapted into the film Cape Fear. In 1962 MacDonald was named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America; in 1980 he won a National Book Award. In print he delighted in smashing the bad guys, deflating the pompous, and exposing the venal. In life he was a truly empathetic man; his friends, family, and colleagues found him to be loyal, generous, and practical. In business he was fastidiously ethical. About being a writer, he once expressed with gleeful astonishment, “They pay me to do this! They don’t realize, I would pay them.” He spent the later part of his life in Florida with his wife and son. He died in 1986.