"Get in," Kenner said. "The back seat."
I got in, leaned back against the leather upholstery. Kenner sat in front, next to the driver, and then turned on the seat so he could look at me. The car started with a quiet rumble.
We drove for what seemed like a long time, out of San Pablo and along dusty, rutted cart tracks. The car was air conditioned but I sweated anyway, great oozes of perspiration that soaked my shirt and matted my hair to my forehead. Kenner's face and clothing were dry. Except for the hate shining in his eyes, his face was an expressionless mask.
Finally the car slowed, came to a stop. We were on a long, flat plain—barren, dead. Kenner said, "This is it, Larson."
I got out and stood beside the car. Small hot currents of air shimmered above the hood, above the distant wastes. I looked at the heat waves to keep from looking at Kenner when he came around to stand in front of me. The driver stayed behind the wheel.
"All right," I said. "Get it done with."
"Just like that? No last words from the condemned man?" My hands had begun to tremble.
"Get it done with, Kenner," I said again.
"There's no hurry. I've waited two and a half years. A few more minutes . . ."
"Damn you, get it over!"
The words ripped out of me before I could stop them. They seemed to echo across the heat-shrouded desert, reverberate, as if they had been flung instead against the side of a mountain.
Kenner stared at me for a long while, and now I could not meet his eyes. When I did look at him again, he was smiling. It grew, that smile, until it split his face, until it became a kind of gargoyle grin. Then he said, "Get back in the car."
"No. Kenner, listen—"
"Get back in the car!"
He grabbed my shoulder, shoved me roughly into the rear. I sprawled across the seat and lay there, pressing my face to the cool leather. Then the car started to move again.
After a time I made myself sit up. Kenner was still looking at me; and I still could not meet his eyes. He knows, I thought. He knows.
We came back into San Pablo. The car stopped, and Kenner got out and pulled open the back door. When I was standing beside him he said, "For two and a half years I've lived with just one thought, Larson. Killing you. Seeing you dead. But that was before I came here, saw you again in this place. Now that I have, I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to put your blood on my hands."
"Kenner . . ."
"Because that's what you want, isn't it? That's the real reason you stopped running. You've been waiting here for me to find you, to do the thing you're not able to do yourself."
I tried to swallow into my parched throat, tried to find words. But there were no words, not anymore.
"It did something to you, didn't it? Letting Marilyn die that way. Do you think about her much? Have nightmares about her out there in the water, screaming—"
"Yes! Damn you, yes!"
"You're a bigger coward than I imagined, Larson. You don't have enough guts to put yourself out of misery, and you didn't have enough to come looking for me. So you just sat here for two years, waiting for me to come to you."
"Kenner, please, please . . ."
"I wanted to see you in hell," he said. "Well, now I have. You're already there, Larson. And you know it, don't you?"
I tried to claw at his arm, but he shook off my hand. Then he got back into the car, put the window down halfway. "Goodbye, dead man," he said.
"No!"
I tried to reach him through the window, but it was too late. Much, much too late. The car pulled away, raising a cloud of dust. I fell to my knees in the street, watching after it, watching it grow smaller and smaller, the demon sun shining madly off the polished black metal of its top, until it was gone.
The waiting was over.
But now it would go on, and on, and on . . .
PEEKABOO
Roper came awake with the feeling that he wasn't alone in the house.
He sat up in bed, tense and wary, a crawling sensation on the back of his scalp. The night was dark, moonless; warm clotted black surrounded him. He rubbed sleep mucus from his eyes, blinking, until he could make out the vague grayish outlines of the open window in one wall, the curtains fluttering in the hot summer breeze.
Ears straining, he listened. But there wasn't anything to hear. The house seemed almost graveyard-still, void of even the faintest of night sounds.
What was it that had woken him up? A noise of some kind? An intuition of danger? It might only have been a bad dream, except that he couldn't remember dreaming. And it might only have been imagination, except that the feeling of not being alone was strong, urgent.
There's somebody in the house, he thought.
Or some thing in the house?
In spite of himself Roper remembered the story the nervous real estate agent in Whitehall had told him about this place. It had been built in the early 1900s by a local family, and when the last of them died off a generation later it was sold to a man named Lavolle who had lived in it for forty years. Lavolle had been a recluse whom the locals considered strange and probably evil; they hadn't had anything to do with him. But then he'd died five years ago, of natural causes, and evidence had been found by county officials that he'd been "some kind of devil worshiper" who had "practiced all sorts of dark rites." That was all the real estate agent would say about it.
Word had got out about that and a lot of people seemed to believe the house was haunted or cursed or something. For that reason, and because it was isolated and in ramshackle condition, it had stayed empty until a couple of years ago. Then a man called Garber, who was an amateur parapsychologist, leased the place and lived here for ten days. At the end of that time somebody came out from Whitehall to deliver groceries and found Garber dead. Murdered. The real estate agent wouldn't talk about how he'd been killed; nobody else would talk about it either.
Some people thought it was ghosts or demons that had murdered Garber. Others figured it was a lunatic—maybe the same one who'd killed half a dozen people in this part of New England over the past couple of years. Roper didn't believe in ghosts or demons or things that went bump in the night; that kind of supernatural stuff was for rural types like the ones in Whitehall. He believed in psychotic killers, all right, but he wasn't afraid of them; he wasn't afraid of anybody or anything. He'd made his living with a gun too long for that. And the way things were for him now, since the bank job in Boston had gone sour two weeks ago, an isolated backcountry place like this was just what he needed for a few months.
So he'd leased the house under a fake name, claiming to be a writer, and he'd been here for eight days. Nothing had happened in that time: no ghosts, no demons, no strange lights or wailings or rattling chains—and no lunatics or burglars or visitors of any kind. Nothing at all.
Until now.
Well, if he wasn't alone in the house, it was because somebody human had come in. And he sure as hell knew how to deal with a human intruder. He pushed the blankets aside, swung his feet out of bed, and eased open the nightstand drawer. His fingers groped inside, found his .38 revolver and the flashlight he kept in there with it; he took them out. Then he stood, made his way carefully across to the bedroom door, opened it a crack, and listened again.
The same heavy silence.
Roper pulled the door wide, switched on the flash, and probed the hallway with its beam. No one there. He stepped out, moving on the balls of his bare feet. There were four other doors along the hallway: two more bedrooms, a bathroom, and an upstairs sitting room. He opened each of the doors in turn, swept the rooms with the flash, then put on the overhead lights.
Empty, all of them.
He came back to the stairs. Shadows clung to them, filled the wide foyer below. He threw the light down there from the landing. Bare mahogany walls, the lumpish shapes of furniture, more shadows crouching inside the arched entrances to the parlor and the library. But that was all: no sign of anybody, still no sounds anywhere in the warm dark.
He went down the stairs, swinging the light from side to side. At the bottom he stopped next to the newel post and used the beam to slice into the blackness in the center hall. Deserted. He arced it around into the parlor, followed it with his body turned sideways to within a pace of the archway. More furniture, the big fieldstone fireplace at the far wall, the parlor windows reflecting glints of light from the flash. He glanced back at the heavy darkness inside the library, didn't see or hear any movement over that way, and reached out with his gun hand to flick the switch on the wall inside the parlor.
Nothing happened when the electric bulbs in the old-fashioned chandelier came on; there wasn't anybody lurking in there.
Roper turned and crossed to the library arch and scanned the interior with the flash. Empty bookshelves, empty furniture; He put on the chandelier. Empty room.
He swung the cone of light past the staircase, into the center hall—and then brought it back to the stairs and held it there. The area beneath them had been walled on both sides, as it was in a lot of these old houses, to form a coat or storage closet; he'd found that out when he first moved in and opened the small door that was set into the staircase on this side. But it was just an empty space now, full of dust—
The back of his scalp tingled again. And a phrase from when he was a kid playing hide-and-seek games popped into his mind.
Peekaboo, I see you. Hiding under the stair.
His finger tightened around the butt of the .38. He padded forward cautiously, stopped in front of the door. And reached out with the hand holding the flash, turned the knob, jerked the door open, and aimed the light and the gun inside.
Nothing.
Roper let out a breath, backed away to where he could look down the hall again. The house was still graveyard-quiet; he couldn't even hear the faint grumblings its old wooden joints usually made in the night. It was as if the whole place was wrapped in a breathless waiting hush. As if there was some kind of unnatural presence at work here—
Screw that, he told himself angrily. No such things as ghosts and demons. There seemed to be presence here, all right—he could feel it just as strongly as before—but it was a human presence. Maybe a burglar, maybe a tramp, maybe even a goddamn lunatic. But human.
He snapped on the hall lights and went along there to the archway that led into the downstairs sitting room. First the flash and then the electric wall lamps told him it was deserted. The dining room off the parlor next. And the kitchen. And the rear porch.
Still nothing.
Where was he, damn it? Where was he hiding?
The cellar? Roper thought.
It didn't make sense that whoever it was would have gone down there. The cellar was a huge room, walled and floored in stone, that ran under most of the house; there wasn't anything in it except spider webs and stains on the floor that he didn't like to think about, not after the real estate agent's story about Lavolle and his dark rites. But it was the only place left that he hadn't searched.
In the kitchen again, Roper crossed to the cellar door. The knob turned soundlessly under his hand. With the door open a crack, he peered into the thick darkness below and listened. Still the same heavy silence.
He started to reach inside for the light switch. But then he remembered that there wasn't any bulb in the socket above the stairs; he'd explored the cellar by flashlight before, and he hadn't bothered to buy a bulb. He widened the opening and aimed the flash downward, fanning it slowly from left to right and up and down over the stone walls and floor. Shadowy shapes appeared and disappeared in the bobbing light: furnace, storage shelves, a wooden wine rack, the blackish gleaming stains at the far end, spider webs like tattered curtains hanging from the ceiling beams.
Roper hesitated. Nobody down there either, he thought. Nobody in the house after all? The feeling that he wasn't alone kept nagging at him—but it could be nothing more than imagination. All that business about devil-worshiping and ghosts and demons and Garber being murdered and psychotic killers on the loose might have affected him more than he'd figured. Might have jumbled together in his subconscious all week and finally come out tonight, making him imagine menace where there wasn't any. Sure, maybe that was it.
But he had to make certain. He couldn't see all of the cellar from up here; he had to go down and give it a full search before he'd be satisfied that he really was alone. Otherwise he'd never be able to get back to sleep tonight.
Playing the light again, he descended the stairs in the same wary movements as before. The beam showed him nothing. Except for the faint whisper of his breathing, the creak of the risers when he put his weight on them, the stillness remained unbroken. The odors of dust and decaying wood and subterranean dampness dilated his nostrils; he began to breathe through his mouth.
When he came off the last of the steps he took a half dozen strides into the middle of the cellar. The stones were cold and clammy against the soles of his bare feet. He turned to his right, then let the beam and his body transcribe a slow circle until he was facing the stairs.
Nothing to see, nothing to hear.
But with the light on the staircase, he realized that part of the wide, dusty area beneath them was invisible from where he stood—a mass of clotted shadow. The vertical boards between the risers kept the beam from reaching all the way under there.
The phrase from when he was a kid repeated itself in his mind: Peekaboo, I see you. Hiding under the stair.
With the gun and the flash extended at arm's length, he went diagonally to his right. The light cut away some of the thick gloom under the staircase, letting him see naked stone draped with more gray webs. He moved closer to the stairs, ducked under them, and put the beam full on the far joining of the walls.
Empty.
For the first time Roper began to relax. Imagination, no doubt about it now. No ghosts or demons, no burglars or lunatics hiding under the stair. A thin smile curved the corners of his mouth. Hell, the only one hiding under the stair was himself—
"Peekaboo," a voice behind him said.
WORDS DO NOT A BOOK MAKE
I went to the rear window, lifted the shade, and looked out. Then I pulled the shade down in a hurry and spun around to glare at Herbie.
"You fathead!" I yelled.
"What's the matter, boss?"
"The police station is across the street!"
"I know," Herbie said calmly.
"You know. Well, that's nice, isn't it?" I waved my hand at the telephones, the dope sheets, the rolls of flash paper, and the other stuff we had just unpacked. "Won't the cops be ever so happy when they bust in here? No long rides in the wagon. Just down the back stairs, across the street, and into a cell. Think of the time and expense we'll be saving the taxpayers. You fathead!"
"They aren't going to bust in here," Herbie said.
"No, huh?"
Herbie shook his head. "Don't you see? The setup is perfect. It couldn't be any better."
"All I see is a cold cell in that cop house over there."
"Didn't you ever read 'The Purloined Letter'?"
"The which letter?"
"Purloined," Herbie said. "The Purloined Letter.' By Edgar Allan Poe."
"Yeah?" I said. "Never heard of him. What is he, some handicapper for one of the Eastern tracks?"
"He was a writer," Herbie said. "He died over a hundred years ago."
"What's some croaked writer got to do with this?"
"I'm trying to tell you, boss. He wrote this story called 'The Purloined Letter,' see, and everybody in it is trying to find a letter that was supposed to have been swiped, only nobody can find it. You know why?"
I shrugged. "Why?"
"Because it was under their noses all the time."
"I don't get it."
"Everybody's looking for the letter to be hidden some place," Herbie said. "So they never think to look in the only place left—the most obvious place, right in front of them."
"So?"
Herbie sighed. "We got the sam
e type of thing right here. If the cops get wind a new bookie joint has opened up in town, they'll look for it everywhere except under their noses. Everywhere except right across the street."
I thought about it. "I don't know," I said. "It sounds crazy."
"Sure," Herbie said. "That's the beauty of it. It's so crazy it's perfect. It can't miss."
"What'd you tell the guy you rented this place from?"
"I said we were manufacturer's representatives for industrial valves. No warehouse stock; just a sales office. I even had some sign painters put a phony name on the windows, front and back."
"This landlord," I said. "Any chance of him coming up here when we ain't expecting him?"
"None, as long as we pay the rent on time. He's not that kind of guy."
"What's downstairs?"
"Insurance company. No bother on that end, either."
I did some more thinking. Herbie might be right, I decided. Why would the cops think of looking out their front door for the new book in town? No reason, none at all.
"Okay," I said, "we stay. But you better be right."
"Don't worry," Herbie said. "I am."
"All the contacts lined up?"
"I took care of everything before I called you, boss. I got eight guys—five bars, a cigar store, a billiards parlor, and a lunchroom. Phone number only, no address."
I nodded. "Put the word out, then. We're in business." Herbie smiled. "Of making many books there is no end," he said.
"Huh?"
"I read that somewhere once."
"Keep your mind off reading and on the book," I said. For some reason Herbie thought that was funny.
At nine the next morning, the first contact phoned in his bets. The other seven followed at ten-minute intervals, just the way Herbie had set it up. From the size and number of the bets, I figured this town was going to be a gold mine.
We split up the work, Herbie taking the calls and putting the bets down on the flash paper, and me figuring odds and laying off some of the scratch with the big books in Vegas and L.A. The flash paper is thin stuff, like onionskin, and the reason we use it is that in case of a raid you just touch a match to it and the whole roll goes up in nothing flat. No evidence, no conviction.
Small Felonies - Fifty Mystery Short Stories Page 12