by Rex Burns
“Weren’t you?”
“What kind of question’s that? And besides, it’s none of your business.”
A shadow thinned the already dim light on the table and I looked up expecting to see the waitress. But it was a pair of wide, sloping shoulders in a plaid flannel shirt topped by a face that was mostly jaw.
“You folks having a good time?”
“Delightful.”
He pulled out a chair and wedged himself against the table to smile at Susan and prop a heavy arm in my face. “What’s your name, little lady?”
“If you’re selling something, we’re not buying.”
The head turned to show a pale, hot eye topped by a bushy black eyebrow. Two small white scars made tiny streaks through the hairs. “I’m not selling nothing, dude. But I just might give you something. Free.”
“It’s all right, Dev.”
“You hear that? The little lady says it’s all right.”
“She’s making a mistake.”
“Well now, that’s up to her. Why don’t you just take on off before you make a mistake, too.”
“It’s not me she’s worried about.”
That took some seconds to work into the cerebellum, then he leaned back and gave me his undivided attention.
“Dev, please.”
In the springtime, young bulls get hot and randy, but a short beer and a long look at Susan could make it rutting season all year round. For all her degrees in psychology, Susan didn’t seem to understand that—Bunch was all she wanted, and she assumed her lack of interest in anyone else was plain. Nor did she understand the two-by-four rule of gentlemanly discourse: try to get two in before you get one back. The jaw began to move: “You come in here wearing a goddamn coat and tie … you come in here to slum around and have a few laughs at the cowboys? By God, I’ll give you laughs!”
He didn’t hesitate; while he talked, he swung a heavy elbow at my head and followed with a lunging right that thudded off my forearm. Somewhere beyond the crash of breaking glass I heard Susan’s muffled scream, and beneath that a deep-chested bellow of pleasure as the figure loomed up against the ceiling and bore down, arms a blur of angry flesh.
I came up under him, a fistful of shirt over one shoulder and his flailing legs on the other. A quick twist and the heavy body flew in a high arc to crash against the table and send it wobbly and skewed into the scramble of cowboys dodging out of the way. A clubbing fist jarred my ear with a metallic ring and a second one swung hard toward my groin, smacking into the quickly lifted thigh and pushing me back against a wall of outstretched hands that shoved me forward. Everything except the man in front of me was blotted out by a gush of anger born of pain and, far deeper, hatred of the man’s arrogance.
Head down between his shoulders and knotty fists high, he came at me with the awkward grace of someone who has training enough to know the basics and strength enough not to worry about refinements.
“You son-of-a-bitch, I’m gonna kill you!”
Through the redness of my vision, I saw him try. A fist aimed for my head and a pointed boot swung at anything it could reach. I caught the leg on my crossed wrists and grabbed its heel, twisting and lifting to spread his body and snap a side-kick where his Wranglers advertised their reinforced inseam. The man didn’t scream but he did grunt and stagger back in a painful crouch and the outraged, blind fury of a moment past was replaced by a cold wash of pain and then calculating rage. Something was going on around me, the shouts of voices, yells of encouragement and scorn. But it made no impression other than a distant buzz beneath the rushing sound that was my anger throbbing in my ears. The whole universe narrowed down to that man getting slowly to his feet and to the eyes that measured the distance between him and what he would go for next. I feinted a left and he jabbed stiff fingers toward my eyes and raked clawing nails past my ear as he brought a knee up hard into my stomach and clubbed at my face again. I grabbed a wrist that my hand couldn’t close around; up-turn-pull-bend, the basic throw drilled into rote by hours of practice at Bellesville, and as his head rotated past he cursed me for not staying in one place to fight like a white man.
Down as hard as I could flip to stun him and then almost automatically go for his elbow. He screamed a hoarse shout as I levered his arm across my knee and bore down, but before I heard the snap of living bone, a pair of arms wrapped around me to haul back. I drove an elbow into the thick flesh and a startled, hot breath grunted at my ear, “Dev—Dev, hold it. It’s me: Bunch!”
“Let me go—let me go!”
“He’s down, Dev. You’ll kill him. He’s down.”
The man, making little gasping sounds through gritted teeth, held his arm tightly against his body and curled in a scooting circle of pain among the spilled beer and broken bottles. Slowly the shouting circle of faces came into focus and I straightened and felt Bunch’s arms slack a bit.
“You okay now? Can I let you go now?”
“You can let go.”
“He’s down.”
“I see him. You can let go.”
The arms fell away as the grunting man fought up to his knees, eyes tight with pain. “My arm—my fucking arm … “
“Devlin, if this is your lunch break, what do you do for supper?”
“You picked this place.”
“Leave some for next time.”
Two men helped the injured warrior to his feet and led him hunched tight as a snail toward the door. A balding man in a bartender’s apron stepped forward to survey the broken glasses and test the table leg. Then he turned to me. “Winner pays for damages. House rules. That’ll be twenty-five dollars.”
“The winner?” Bunch kicked a broken Coors bottle. “In a civilized country, the loser’s supposed to pay!”
“The losers don’t usually hear me. That’ll be twenty-five dollars. Payable now.”
“But I didn’t start it. He did!”
“Don’t make no difference. Winner pays. Twenty-five dollars.”
“Hell,” said Bunch. “It’s not worth winning if you got to pay for it.”
“Then maybe folks’ll realize there ain’t no winners and stop tearing up my place. That’ll be—”
“I know,” I said. “Twenty-five dollars. Here.”
Bright and tiny behind wire-rimmed glasses, the eyes glanced sharply at the bills. “Right. Thank you. You folks want another round?”
“Who with?” asked Bunch.
“Never mind—we’re just leaving.”
We sat in the car for a few minutes while a tensely quiet Susan dabbed a tissue at the blood seeping out of my cheek.
“Damn good thing he didn’t get his teeth in that ear. He’d still be hanging there—or have it chewed off by now. That’s the trouble with your kind of fighting, Dev. All those holds and throws. It lets a man get too close. A punching technique, now, that keeps them off.” Bunch filled the back seat and leaned forward to study the scratch. “It’s not deep but it’ll fester a bit. Fingernails are as bad as teeth for carrying dirt.”
“They weren’t any dirtier than his breath—ouch!” I pulled away from the sharp thrust of the tissue. “What’s that for?”
“Because you enjoyed hurting that man.”
“What?”
“I saw your eyes when you had his arm. You were actually enjoying it.”
“The only thing I enjoyed was being where I was instead of where he was. And don’t forget—he started it.”
“Hell, Susan, that was just a little scuffle. That guy’ll be back in an hour looking for another party. That’s what they call fun.”
“I could see that.” Her voice took on the reflective tone that meant she was moving her observations from categories to theory, the kind of generalization that always grated on me. “But his enjoyment was more … reflexive. It was exciting to him, like driving fast or jumping from heights. You were more calculating. You knew exactly what you were doing, how to do it, and how much to hurt him.”
“Good for Dev, I say. A guy
who keeps his cool in a fight generally wins it.”
“But it was a savage cool—a vicious one.” She wadded the tissue into the car’s trash bag. “That man was only a convenient target for all the rage and frustration you still haven’t gotten rid of.”
“I wasn’t tangled up with a theory, Susan. I was fighting a man who tried to kill me—and came damn close to it. All because I told him he couldn’t do what he wanted. I don’t feel one twinge of guilt for trying to break his arm—I should have tried for his neck.”
“Naw—you were right to go for the arm, Dev. I don’t think he had a neck.”
“It’s not the fighting, Dev. That’s excusable. It’s the cold pleasure I saw in your eyes when you were trying to break his arm. I find that disturbing.”
“I was pleased to be winning. If you find that disturbing or inexcusable, that’s too bad. And thoroughly unprofessional for a dispassionate observer of human nature like yourself.”
“To be scientific in method doesn’t mean I have to reject ethics.”
“All right, you two, that’s enough. Don’t get started again—I’m hungry.”
“It was unethical of me to fight back? Is that what you’re saying?”
“I’m telling you for your own sake to get professional help. You need to come to terms with your father’s suicide before you kill someone.”
“Hunger. Eat. Food. Now.”
I knew she wasn’t entirely wrong, and this wasn’t the first fight she’d seen me in. But it wasn’t the calculating wish to hurt that she had seen. It was blind rage—the berserker explosion of a kind of savage joy in attacking something tangible. Looking back, it wasn’t hurt that I had wanted to inflict, but destruction. The beast that slumbers within, a crack in the fragile crust of civilization—my father used to joke about the primitive behavior of human offspring, especially at the age of puberty, and then draw analogies to political movements or religious fanaticism. But Susan didn’t have the answers for what was the cause of rage in me or in society, and I resented being made a case study by her or by anyone else. For all her theorizing, she missed the simple, basic fact that once a man’s committed to a fight, he’d better finish it or be finished.
Bunch thumped the car seat to jar us toward a restaurant where the noon flow was beginning to ebb and we could have a quiet table.
“You guys cooled off now?”
“I wasn’t angry,” said Susan. “Just professionally interested.”
“And I wasn’t interested. Just professionally angry.”
“Glad to hear it. Now we can enjoy our food. And drink—waitress!”
Susan and I ate and finished and watched Bunch continue to eat while he told about the Haas home. “It’ll be no trouble getting into the grounds—we can go over the wall. The trouble’s the underground phone cables—a single post serves three houses, and I don’t have the code for which wire’s which.”
“The call-in trick?”
“Yeah. Probably our best shot. Eleven? Eleven-thirty?”
“What’s the call-in trick?” asked Susan.
“I get set up on the post and hook up the wires. Devlin calls their number and I see which wire lights up. Then we plant the bug and run. Don’t even have to go near the house itself.”
“I call at a prearranged time. Late at night’s best, when the other wires are least likely to be active.”
“And they don’t suspect anything?”
“What’s to suspect about a wrong number? Even unlisted phones get wrong numbers.”
“Did you get his office phone?” I asked.
“Sweat not. The security in that building is lousy. McAllister’s key opened everything including the executive toilet, and the rent-a-cop was off sleeping somewhere. All we have to do is dial in and listen to the tape.” Bunch winked at Susan. “I got a new toy—I can tap a phone and then call up and listen to the tape from anywhere in the world. And reset it, too. Works just like calling in to screen your answering machine.”
“Can’t they trace something like that?”
“They got to find it first. Then they could put a countertap on it, and if I was dumb enough to use our own phone—which I’m not—they could trace back.” He explained, “The beauty of this little jewel is that we use the telephone company’s own wires instead of our own. They can find it with a sweep—it’s your basic parasite rig that steals the phone company’s electricity—but McAllister’s not going to sweep, right?”
“That’s what he promised me.”
“Then we got no sweat.”
At least that’s what we hoped. When I called at eleven thirty that night, Haas himself answered the telephone, politely angry at being disturbed. At first I refused to believe it was the wrong number and that Haas wasn’t my old drinking buddy Swede. Then I apologized at length to give Bunch as much time as possible to locate the right wire. When we met in the shadows of a lilac hedge a couple of blocks from the walled enclosure, Bunch grinned and gave a thumbs-up.
“She works. But now comes the bad news. The only place for a remote’s in a culvert. And I don’t trust it—too many kids and bicycles going through.”
“We have to sit on it?”
He shrugged. “The transmitter only has a mile range. And there’s really no place to put a remote. Look around.”
Bunch was right. The Haas home sat near the middle of the enclosure, a half mile from the nearest wall, and beyond that was a tangle of homes and condominiums—nothing with a small room or office for rent by the week. We would have to monitor the tap from the van, setting up the recorder in the vehicle’s windowless interior and driving it periodically from point to point within the radius of the transmitter. It meant frequent checks of the vehicle—even in the sunny acres surrounding Belcaro Estates, cars were vandalized. And it meant tedious nights of uncomfortable slouching on the front seat of an alternative vehicle when it was used for variety. It meant that we brought in extra help to spell us—p.i.’s who were generally glad to pick up a few hours a week on surveillance—and it meant that we became familiar with Haas’s voice and those of his wife and son whose fifth birthday was coming up and who loved to answer the telephone whenever it rang. Finally, it meant that, half asleep in the car and sheltered from the clear autumn moonlight by the restless dark of a wind-tossed Cottonwood, I heard the call as soon as the police did: a woman’s tense but efficient voice asking the police to please hurry because her husband had just shot himself.
CHAPTER 3
FROM THE RIDGE of high land where the van was parked, I could see the flashing emergency lights zigzag through the late night flicker of traffic and dark streets. Discreetly without sirens but urgent in motion, the rescue unit led a blue-and-white quickly past the lit gate. Then, drawn like flies to the smell of blood, other vehicles began to converge: homicide detectives, forensics detectives, another team of uniformed police, a couple of civilian cars with, I supposed, the doctor or medical examiner and—inevitably—the press. It was too late for the television crews—the ten o’clock news hour was long past—but I recognized the careening Honda Civic that paused momentarily at the gatehouse and then sped through, the guard’s voice trailing it with a distant “Hey! Stop!” I waited another few minutes, but the ambulance did not leave in its rush for the emergency room; instead it sat. The motionless, erratic flash of the lights told me that the victim was in no hurry to go anywhere. Finally, I dropped the car in gear and turned away.
Using the radiophone in the van to roust Bunch, I asked him to meet me at the office. Anyone overhearing that transmission wouldn’t know what it was about, and Bunch didn’t ask questions. He said only, “I’ll be there.” But to explain it to McAllister, I used a pay phone.
Raymond the butler didn’t want to disturb the master at this hour.
“He told me to call at any time. Please put me through.”
“I shall be happy to give him your message in the morning, Mr. Kirk.”
“This is an emergency and he’ll have question
s about it. It’s something he’d better hear now. Right now.”
“ … One moment, sir.”
If McAllister had been asleep at 2 A.M., his voice didn’t reveal it. It was terse, energetic, and wide awake. “What is it, Devlin?”
“It’s Haas, Mr. McAllister. His wife just called the police. She says he shot himself.”
“My God! Is he dead?”
“I think so, but I’m not certain. I just monitored the call. The police got there about five minutes ago.”
The line was silent for a moment. “Did he find out about you?”
“Not that I know of. It’s always a possibility. But if he did, he kept it pretty well hidden.”
“Have you come up with anything?”
“Not on his house phone. We haven’t checked the last tape from his office phone.”
“Can you find out what the police know about it?”
“That’s my partner’s area. I’m meeting him in a few minutes.”
“Let me know what he says immediately.” The line was silent but McAllister didn’t hang up. “If it was a suicide, well, I guess that’s an admission of guilt, isn’t it?”
“Not necessarily. But possible. Do you want us to close the case or shall we stay on it?”
Another long pause. “There’s no sense attacking the poor bastard now, I suppose. No—damn it—you meet me here in half an hour. I’m going to see Margaret. You might as well come with me.” The telephone clicked off as his voice called for Raymond.
Bunch was waiting when I clanged up the open stairs that rose from the small lobby in an angled spiral. During the day, the sound was hardly noticeable because the foot traffic was so constant that it blended with the steady noise of trucks outside. But at night, when the offices in the old remodeled warehouse were closed and the streetlights outside shone on the empty, worn paving stones, the black iron rang under each step and echoed back from the dim corners of hallway and atrium to emphasize the loneliness of the hour.