She pulled herself up close to him. He moved his hands in her hair, and the excitement inflamed him. He bent down, lifted her in his arms, carried her to the bed.
He dropped the automatic on the bed beside them again. I saw the rifle on the floor beside it. He had forgotten the guns as he fought Lily's clothes off her. She was wild, clinging to him and he lifted her up to him, sinking his teeth into her throat.
She screamed and I sprang across that room, sliding into them. I sent my fist straight at Marve's face, not caring whether it landed or not. What I wanted was that gun.
My shoe bumped the rifle and I kicked it under the bed, praying it would give me another minute. My hand touched the automatic just under Marve's clawing fist. I had no time for anything except to flip it underhanded back away from us.
He growled and came up off that bed, meeting me as I thrust downward. We went sprawling back to the floor. He went for my eyes with his distended fingers and brought his knee upward into my groin. But I had already been initiated into the scrub brawl. I moved backwards, jerking my head aside and I put my fist into his face, feeling his nose crunch under the impact.
It stopped him only long enough for me to get set. He came forward, pulling me backwards.
Lily had scrambled around on the bed and for the moment sat there stunned, watching us.
Marve yelled at her, gasping for breath. "Lily. The gun. Get the gun, Lily."
She came off the bed. We were between her and the automatic. She had not thought about the rifle yet. Her gaze was fixed on the black gun on the floor.
Marve shifted to the right and I hit him beside the head with my fist. He kept crumpling to the right, clutching for support. I thrust out my arm, jabbing Lily on the side of the head. She reeled off balance and fell against the front door.
As I turned, I saw Marve move forward catlike from his knees, spring toward that automatic. I let him get almost to it and I kicked him in the stomach. The air burst from him and he curled up, arms pressed against his middle, head inches away from the automatic.
I picked up the gun and turned, leaning against the wall. Lily was just getting to her feet. I told her to sit down on the chair. She sat down, watching me.
Marve was writhing on the floor, trying to get his breath again.
I moved between them, knelt beside the bed. I got the rifle out, held it under the crook of my arm. I looked around the room, my gaze settled on Lily.
"That knife, Lily," I said.
She stared at me, black eyes chilled. She jerked her head toward the table. I found the sheathed knife, stuck it in my back pocket.
I leaned against the table, panting.
Marve got his breath. "If you think you're going to get away with this, Jake, you better kill me. Quick."
"Don't tell me, Marve. I'll tell you."
"No. I made a mistake. But when you make one, Jake, nothing is going to save you."
I looked around the shack.
"That money is not here, Jake." Marve laughed. "But worry about it. You ain't ever going to get it."
"I'm a lot closer to it now than I have been."
"Jake, you're dreaming. You ain't nowhere. You're just where you got by taking advantage of a lapse. Hell, I give you that. You moved in fast." He laughed. "What you did was caught me with my pants down."
"Go ahead, Loud-mouth. Run off at the mouth if that makes you feel better."
Marve laughed. "Man, what a fool you are. Every minute you stand there and don't pull that trigger to kill me proves it."
"Don't worry about me so."
"But I do, Jake. It's a hell of a spot to let you get in. If you don't kill me pretty quick, you're going to be in more trouble than you ever thought of. And if you do kill me-" he laughed, throwing his head back. "If you do kill me, there's nobody alive can tell you where to find that money."
I stared at him. In chess they call it checkmate. In baseball they call it a tie and called on account of darkness. I had the gun. He had the money. He had never been safer in his mother's arms.
His laughter told me just how safe he knew he really was.
"What I got, Jake, is old-age security."
"Sure you have," I said. "It's just that I'm weary of you, Marve. I'm tired listening to you."
I walked over to the pack on the table. I laid the rifle down, stood across the table from Marve, watching him. I took the roll of wire from the pack.
"All right, Lily. You go over there and sit in front of the fire. Lock your hands on top of your head. Stay that way."
She moved slowly. She sat down, locked her hands on top of her head. Her uplifted arms stretched her full breasts taut. I told myself to forget it.
I stood well in back of Marve, forced him to kneel. I wrapped his wrist with eight turns of the wire. I felt his shoulders slump. Nothing but a wire cutter was going to get him out of this. I carried the wire in three twisted strands across to his other wrist and made eight loops on it. I circled the connecting link and then carried the wire down between his ankles. I wired up his ankles and he was moored arms and legs.
I pushed him forward and he rocked on the floor. "Talk big, Marve," I said. "On you it's becoming."
He rolled over on his side. "You going to tie up Lily, too, huh?"
"Don't tell me, Marve. I'll tell you."
His mouth pulled into the savage caricature of a grin.
"It don't matter," he said. "What you've done is favored me kindly, Jake-boy. Now I can sleep." He laughed. "Isn't that lovely, Jake? Now I can sleep and you're the son of a bitch has got to stay awake."
***
I made myself four cups of coffee, drank it black. Marve slept on the floor, legs and arms tied behind him. I sat drinking the coffee, staring at him, hating him, listening to him snore.
"That's your lover boy," I said to Lily.
She shook her head, would not answer. She moved to the bed.
My voice woke Marve and he tried to sit up. He could not do it.
"Man, you look dangerous," I told him.
He licked his dry mouth with his tongue and stared up at me.
"Jake-boy, maybe you misunderstood me. Did I say your danger came from me? Oh no. And not Lily. Hell, if I told her to she might try to kill you. When a woman belongs to you, Jake, why she just can't help what she'll do for you. But it ain't Lily or me you got to worry about."
I tried to look as if I didn't care.
The dark and the silence was like unbearable pressure inside that shack. I got up, threw another oak log on the fire.
"They don't burn good, Jake-boy. They're too tough. Like iron. But I never wanted a big fire. Hard to hide smoke in the scrub. Never saw any sense in letting people know where I was. People that might have been looking for me." He laughed. "Now, when they get here, they'll find you, Jake."
"What are you talking about?"
Lily had lifted her head, listening intently, staring at Marve. I felt the hair standing along the nape of my neck.
"I been trying to tell you, Jake. You ought to have let me run this. You didn't know when you was well off, Jake. Now you got me tied up, and I think you're in trouble."
I didn't say anything.
He said, "Remember, Jake, that morning when we took the hundred grand from McAteer's? I wasn't alone, was I, Jake? Oh, no. There was Brycki. He came from Chicago. Real smart hood. Man, he knew all the tricks. And the other guy? A real brain. Name of Claude Piper. Piper and Brycki. They needed me. I was just a dumb country boy and they were smart but they cut me in. Man, the way they cast-off on old Marve, the country boy. We got the money. Only I got it now."
He laughed, remembering.
"I got to figuring, Jake. Here they were, smart guys, brains. The way they told it, they were smart. So smart it looked to me like they could figure another take like the one at McAteer's any day in the week. But me. I was just an old country boy and I might not get my hands on a hundred grand for a long, long time."
I stared at him. "Holy mother of Mary,"
I whispered.
"You crossed them. You took the whole hundred grand- and ran."
"That's why you came back here," Lily said.
"Baby, I came back for you. Sure, I figured I'd be safer in country that I knew. After all, I'm just a country boy. Those two guys are smart. Killers. They'd be on my trail. So I reckoned I'd be safer in the scrub until something happened to Brycki and Piper."
We sat there, the three of us, in the silent cabin.
Finally Marve laughed. "Only nothing happened to them. I hear they been looking for me. Back here in the scrub I'm pretty hard to find. But I figure it has to happen sometime. One of these nights they're going to find me. Oh, they ain't together. Hear they split, each thinking I'd crossed just one of them. But they're both after me. So I come back here to the scrub, but it ain't as roomy as I remembered it. It's a kind of a prison."
"Just waiting for them to find you."
"Not exactly. Last week I heard you were looking for me. My old friend Jake from the Crow Bar. The honest lad with the hurt look. Lord, Jake, I have to laugh right to this day when I think of how you looked when I called you by name that day at McAteer's. Man, you looked like the devil had you, sure."
"What have I got to do with Brycki and Piper?"
"Jake, what's the matter with you? Is it too late at night for you? Think, man. I'm hiding out in the scrub, knowing Brycki or Piper is going to find me. I can't even get out-not with that money. So I thought of you. I decided I'd rather cut old Jake in than those smart boys Piper and Brycki. So I told Lily when she was up here last time to bring you up."
I shook my head, unable to believe it but unable to doubt it.
"Why do you think I didn't kill you when you walked in this clearing?" Marve said. "Why you think I didn't kill you when you kept pushing me? I knew you could get that money out of here. Lily couldn't, because Brycki and Piper would hear that she was my girl. But you could. Nobody would ever believe I'd turn a hundred grand over to my pal Jake."
"I still don't."
"Might be touchy, Jake. But I figured you'd hold still for a deal. I even planned to go as high as fifty-fifty. I'd let you go with it, because you couldn't ever outrun me."
I sat there for a very long time. At last I shook my head and stood up.
"You're in a hell of a spot to be making me any deals," I said.
"Oh, no. I'm all right. Now I'm all right. You're here, Jake boy. I can sleep. For the first time in weeks I can rest. You're the boy in the bad spot, and you just don't know how bad until Brycki or Piper turn up here and find me wired together and nailed down."
***
Minutes dragged by. I poured another cup of coffee, using the last of the instant coffee. For a while I felt Marve's taunting gaze following me about the room, but then he fell asleep again, exhausted. I looked at him curled up like a bug on the shack floor.
I heard a noise in the scrub. I went tense. Marve came awake instantly. He lay there listening, with an odd faint smile pulling at his mouth. Lily sat up on the bed.
My mouth was dry. I heard footsteps out in the clearing. We listened, hearing them pad all the way around the house. He tried the windows, then stepped back and we heard him move away from the house.
He yelled. "Marve. You in there?"
Marve looked at me, laughing. He drew in a deep breath. "Yeah, Brycki. I'm here."
"Let me in, Pooser. We got some talking."
"I got nothing to say, Brycki." He lowered his voice. "You ain't got much time, Jake. Make up your mind. Get me out of this wire."
Brycki cursed out in the darkness. "I'm giving you three minutes, Pooser. You come out with your hands up or I'm burning the shack."
Marve laughed loudly, and I knew how that laugh must have struck like an abrasive against Brycki.
"No, you won't. A smart guy like you? Why, Brycki, people can see a scrub fire for ninety miles. The forest service would have planes in here before you could sweat me out. Man, you want money. You don't want me."
"All right. You throw out the money. We forget you crossed me."
Marve looked at me. "Think fast, fella. Time is running out."
"You think I'll put a gun in your hand?"
"Okay. Keep the gun. You're stupid. I can't change that. But cut me free. Fast. Let me out of here before he starts moving in. If he starts shooting in here-these walls are like dry paper."
"You hear me, Pooser?" Brycki yelled.
I knew what a sucker I was if I freed Marve Pooser. Nobody had ever been able to trust him. But I also knew that man out there meant business. He was primed, he had been crossed. Marve was a bad egg, but I knew he loved Lily. His jealousy was cut from the same cloth as mine. He cared enough for her that he would try to keep Brycki from killing her. Marve must have had a plan for handling Brycki. Anyhow, time was running out. I was a sucker if I freed Marve. I was a dead man if I didn't.
I knelt down, worked at the wires. Lily ran across the room and helped me.
He rubbed his wrists. "Now listen good. You won't give me a gun, okay. This is what you got to do. Hold a blanket up across that fireplace. Both of you. If you let a streak of light out of it, I'm dead, and you two are next."
Lily got two heavy blankets. We crouched on each side of the fireplace, secured the blankets against the rough stones.
"Hold that," Marve whispered.
Brycki yelled again. Marve moved across the blackened room, pushed open a window on the side away from Bry-cki's voice. Brycki had been smart, he wanted no gunfire from a suddenly opened window.
Marve let himself out of the window. We heard his feet strike the ground. Brycki heard it too, from the other side of the shack.
Brycki yelled and ran charging toward the cabin. He fired, the sound filling the room. I heard Lily gasp, and then Marve yelled out there in the darkness.
We stayed there, waiting for what would happen next. I heard something from deep in the yard and then a man screamed. It was a blood-clhilling sound. It was silent for a moment and then the screams started again, mixed with the thrashing sound of bodies against toppling wood.
I was on my knees when the window was pulled open and Marve chinned himself up and fell into the room. Those screams followed him.
We dropped the blankets and the faint light opened up the room and sparkled on Marve Pooser's smug sweated face.
"Man knows how to handle 'gators," he said, "can get right in the pen with 'em. Man don't though, he jumps over a fence in the dark and lands on a 'gator it can get messy."
I stared at him. But he was tense, listening to those screams. He nodded finally. "I knew it. Always have said it. Others say they won't but I always said a 'gator would attack a man-that is if he got hungry enough he would."
***
We came upon the old deserted house the next day. I had to get out of that shack as soon as it was daylight. I felt dead, but it was more than not being able to sleep. It was a hangover of the horrors. The screaming went on until I thought it would never stop, and then when it did, I stood there tense, listening for it.
I stared down at Marve, deeply asleep on the floor where I'd wired him up again. Even in sleep there was a depleted, sated look to his face and it showed pale under the deep tan. The kind of kicks he had got hearing that man scream last night was something I had never even imagined before.
I was sick of all of it, of Marve, the scrub, this chase for money. I had to think. I shook Lily until she woke up, told her to come with me.
"Where we going?"
"We're going to take a walk, going to look around."
Marve woke up, rolling on the floor. "Going to look for my money, Jake-boy?"
"Our money." I did not look at him.
He laughed. "Not until we get it out of this scrub, Jake. There's that little matter. Don't waste your time looking for it. You'll never find it."
I prodded Lily again. "Come on. I'm not leaving you here with him."
"Somebody has got to fix my breakfast," Marve said. "That's my wo
man, Jake. It's her job to feed me."
"You were free last night. You should have kept going."
He shook his head. "I wasn't free, Jake. No more than you are. We're trapped. Right here in this scrub-as long as we want that money. And I want it."
Lily walked ahead of me. I asked her what roads were near the shack, how far away was the river, where was the nearest house. She did not answer. She walked silently ahead of me through the jack oaks.
We stepped out into a clearing and ahead of us was this dilapidated old two-story frame farmhouse. In places the roof had caved in, and it looked as if hunters had used the sideboards for firewood. Ninety or a hundred acres had been cleared around the shaded yard, but it was grown high in dog fennel, beggar weed and wire grass. The old oak, magnolia and Cottonwood trees in the yard were strung heavily with moss so their limbs sagged under the weight of it.
"The Pooser house," Lily said. "This is where Marve and his brothers grew up. Their mother went insane. When she died old man Pooser moved away. He married again, but Marve came back, lived with some relatives."
We walked around the house. "Marve might have hidden the money here," I said.
She shrugged. The silence was intense.
I caught her shoulders, turned her around to face me. "Listen to me, Lily. You can't care anything about him. He's an animal. You heard what he did to that man last night."
"He was going to kill Marve."
"Sure. And Marve could have killed him. But he didn't want to kill him. He decoyed him into that 'gator pen. That was what he wanted. That's how he gets his kicks. Just as he gets kicks from degrading you."
She twisted free. "It's none of your business."
"It is, Lily. I'm crazy about you. We don't have to go back to that shack. Marve's going to get himself killed, get you killed. It's not worth it, Lily."
She laughed coldly. "I thought you wanted that money so badly you'd do anything for it."
"I thought so too."
"You don't have to stay here. Clear out."
A Moment to Prey Page 10