I cut deeper into the woods and, walking a little less cautiously, widened my circle to the rear. Finally I came out in a clearing where there were several piles of cordwood. A path led from there to the back of the inn, probably to the kitchen. I followed it till I saw the light again, shining through an unblinded window at the back. My right hand hugged the butt of my gun, and my thumb took off the safety almost by instinct.
The howl that a coyote raises to the moon can be disturbing, but it’s a mindless lamentation, which really bothers only the superstitious. The scream of a hurt cat is ugly too, but it doesn’t echo long in the emotions. There are a lot of cats, and they do a lot of yelling, and one of them is always getting hurt. Of course, there are a lot of men, more than two billion of them, and one of them dies every second, or whatever the figure is. I had seen a hundred corpses lying in a field at once, and another hundred half-gone and making a noise about it. Still, when a man screams in agony, it shakes more than the eardrums.
I was at the window before the scream ended, careless about whether I’d be seen or not. The screams had divided the night into two countries, with a deep gulf between. I was on the side of the man who was being hurt, and the people who were hurting him were on the other.
Joe Sault was in the kitchen chair half-facing me, with Kerch in front of him and Rusty behind him holding his arms. His left ear hung down like a red rag, dripping blood rhythmically onto his stylish collar. His mouth was ragged and spongy. His body was naked from the waist down, and his shirt had been rolled up under his armpits. His lean belly, bisected by a line of dark hair, trembled steadily like a beaten dog’s. His genitals were blue and shrunken with fright.
Floraine was sitting with her fur-coated back to me, almost against the window. She didn’t move and she didn’t say a word. Garland was standing beside her, but all I could see of him was the gray elbow of his coat. The vibrating white light of a gasoline lamp on the table gave the room an ugliness as precise as a raw photograph.
Kerch put down the heavy iron spoon that he had been balancing in his hand, and picked up a paring knife from the table. Before he began to move, I sensed that he was going to turn, and ducked out of sight.
“You’re insane,” she said—“insane with vanity and jealousy.”
“Not at all, my dear. The regrets with which I look back to the handsome days of my youth are thoroughly wistful and mild, I assure you. And surely I couldn’t be jealous of an aging slut like yourself, could I?”
“You’re eaten up with jealousy,” she said. “Did you ever imagine I took pleasure in having a diseased thing like you crawl into my bed? Why do you think I left you in the first place?”
“You’re singing a new song, my dear. You have quite a repertory.”
“Toad!”
“You’ve become insolent, lately, haven’t you? You need a stern lesson, Floraine. Now take this knife and do what I tell you.”
“Toad!”
“I’ve tried to be agreeable to you for nearly two years. You can expect much more severe disciplining in the future.”
“Toad!”
“Don’t call me that.” His voice had risen gradually to a high, thin monotone. There was the sound of a blow on flesh. The woman gasped.
“All right,” she said dully. “Give me the knife.”
When she stood up I could see her red, tangled hair and broad shoulders. Sault uttered a loud groan, modulated by the half-formed syllables of words. Floraine’s right shoulder leaned forward slightly as she took the knife. Over her left shoulder I could see part of Kerch’s face. I saw him smile for the first and last time. It was a wide, toothy smile, like a shark’s, rendered unique by the tip of tongue that protruded between the teeth.
Her right hand holding the small, bright knife rose suddenly above her shoulder and descended into Kerch’s smile. A thin red line appeared in the cheek below the heavy right eye and widened. Kerch yelped, sprawled backwards across Sault’s bare knees, and rolled heavily onto the floor. Garland stepped between Floraine and the window, and pinned her arms behind her.
Kerch crawled across the floor and stood up with the knife in his hand. Half of his face was shining with blood. His eyes were unfocused, as dull as brown eggs. I couldn’t see Floraine’s face, but I could see the vigorous movements of his right arm and shoulder up and down, back and forth, as he worked on it with the knife. When I got back to my car a quarter of a mile away, I could still hear her screams—or thought I could.
chapter 14
“Couldn’t find him, eh?” the man in dungarees said when I stopped the car. “What’s the matter, friend? You look worried.”
“I couldn’t find the house. I’m not what you’d call worried, but I’d like to get out there before he leaves. Can I use your phone?”
“Yeah, but I looked it up and he ain’t in the phone book. Spell it ‘P-i-s,’ don’t you?”
“That’s right. I want to call another fellow that knows him.”
“If he lives in the city, it costs a dime to phone the city.”
I changed a ten and gave him a quarter. He pointed out the phone on the wall of his tiny office. “That’s the phone book there on the table.”
“Do you mind stepping out and closing the door?” I said. “This is a private call.”
He looked at me suspiciously. “You ain’t going to make a long-distance call? You can’t make no long-distance calls on this phone.”
I tossed him another quarter. “Go away for a minute, will you? I’m calling the city and I’m in a hurry.”
“O.K., friend. Long as it ain’t no long-distance call.” He walked out slowly, in token of his right to remain where he was, and slammed the door behind him.
I riffled through the first pages of the phone book and found the Al’s. Allbright. Allen. Allin. Allison. If Kerch and the other four in the Wildwood could be caught as they were, literally red-handed, the rotten core of the city would be smashed wide open. It had to be done now, before Floraine and Sault were silenced for good. But Kerch had two gunmen and I knew that, single-handed, I wouldn’t be able to take the five of them alive. Yet I couldn’t call the police. Allister was the only one I could count on.
Allister’s name wasn’t in the phone book. That meant he had a privately listed number! The City Hall? No, there wouldn’t be anybody there at this time. I called the operator and told her I had to talk to the Mayor. She told me she couldn’t give me his number, and cut me off with a lilting “Sorry.”
It looked as if I’d have to drive back to town. But that might give the people at the Wildwood time to clean up and get away. And if the city police picked me up driving a stolen car, it would be the end of everything—the end of me. I had a last chance, the number which Allister had called from his house when he got me the gun. I remembered it as well as the date I was released from the army—23748.
I asked for the number and chewed the inside of my lower lip while the phone at the other end of the line rang four times. A woman’s sleepy voice said: “Hello?”
I thought it was a voice I had heard before, but I was never good at recognizing voices over the telephone. “I have a message for Mayor Allister—”
“Call his house, why don’t you?” the woman said petulantly. “He’s at home, isn’t he?”
“I can’t get his number. Can you give it to me?”
“How am I supposed to know? I don’t know the Mayor. You’ve got your gall calling me in the middle of the night—”
“Don’t hang up,” I said quickly. “Listen to me. This is dead serious. Will you deliver a message to Allister?”
“Who are you, anyway?” the woman whined.
“I’m a friend of his. I need his help. Will you please give him a message?”
“What’s the message? Depends on what it is.”
“This is it. Come to the Wildwood Inn now. If you have any honest police, bring them. If not, bring a posse of citizens. There’s a murder going on.”
“What?”
/> I repeated the message. “Have you got that? Allister’s got to get it immediately.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I got it.” Her voice had been scraped bare of sleepiness. “Who shall I tell him sent it?”
“John,” I said. “He’ll know. You’ll tell him right away?”
“Get off the wire and give me a chance.”
I hung up.
“You find out O.K.?” the thin man said, as I climbed into the roadster.
“Yeah. Thanks very much.”
“You’re welcome. You know how it is about those long-distance calls.”
“Yeah.” I used every ounce of pickup the car had as I turned up the highway.
I found the lane and parked in the same place, leaving the motor idling. Instead of going back to the gravel road, I cut straight through the woods. The blue steel concavity of the sky was whitening at the edges, giving me enough light to see by. Before I reached the Wildwood it was chilly aluminum dawn.
The front of the inn, faced with roughhewn logs, had a certain rustic charm, especially at night. In the morning light its back kitchen looked like the underside of appearances, the pocked hindquarters of reality. Leprous yellow paint, blistered by summer and cracked by winter, peeled from the weather-warped boards. The broken steps to the back door were flanked by a row of rusting garbage pails, half of them overturned. At the end of the row there was a six-foot pile of empty cans and bottles, like a sardonic pyramid to a tinhorn Pharaoh.
While I watched from the trees beside the path, the back door opened and Rusty Jahnke came out carrying a spade over his shoulder. He set it against the wall, took off his topcoat, rolled it up, and left it on the stoop. Then he tested the bare earth with his spade in several places. Finally he found a soft spot beside the pile of cans, and began to dig.
He worked fast, breathing audibly through his nose, and the pattern of his excavation took shape. It was about six feet long and three feet wide. When it was a little more than a foot deep, he quit digging, leaned momentarily on his spade, and took off his suit coat. He folded it and put it on top of the other. But when he began digging again, his shoulder holster got in his way. He unsnapped the harness and took it off, laying it down carefully on the stoop.
He began working again, harder than before, and a dark blotch of sweat appeared on his shirt and spread gradually across his back. It looked like the best chance I’d ever have to put him out of action.
I stepped into the path and walked toward him. When the muzzle of my gun was four feet from his bent spine, I said: “Raise your hands. Don’t speak. Don’t move.”
His hands jerked above his head and the spade stayed where it was, upright in the earth. I clubbed the gun, took a long step forward, and swung it by the muzzle against the base of his skull. It made a sharp cracking sound like an axe on wood. He lay down quietly in the shallow grave he had dug.
I tossed the gun, caught it by the butt, and turned towards the closed door of the kitchen. There was no sound, no movement, as if all life had ceased with my single blow. I took a step towards the door, another, and another. The tarnished brass knob turned and the door sprang open. I fired twice through the center of the opening, then saw that there was nothing there to hit. Three long steps brought me under the window, where I crouched against the wall watching the door. The window flew up with a snap above my head. I wasted two more bullets through the open window. That left me two, or was it three? I couldn’t risk reloading. I was beginning to get frightened, and it made me a little trigger-happy.
I saw the shoulder of a gray coat edging around the corner of the door. I emptied my gun into it and saw the triangle of black holes appear in the cloth. Then the coat collapsed and fell across the doorsill. It was empty. I had used all seven bullets to drill air.
The gun in Rusty’s holster was a forlorn chance, but I jumped for it and got my hand on the butt. The harness was wrapped around it and the gun got tangled in the straps. I wrenched at them, infuriated by the animistic feeling that doors, windows, guns—all physical objects—were conspiring with Kerch against me.
“Drop it,” Garland said from the doorway. “I’m getting pretty tired of you.”
I hesitated a moment, holding the useless gun. He fired once and it flew out of my hand, leaving it numb. I looked at him and saw that he had done it from the hip. I could feel my nerve draining out of me like water.
“You should know by now that I mean what I say.” He tripped down the steps and walked around me. “Go inside. Take it slow. I’ll kill you for any reason at all.”
I climbed the steps on shaky legs and stepped inside the kitchen. My foot slipped on the floor and I almost fell.
“Take it easy,” Garland said. “You almost got it that time. I can put a line of slugs right up your backbone like a punch machine.”
“I know you’re good,” I said. “You don’t have to keep telling me.”
“No more cracks out of you, fellow,” he said from behind me. “I didn’t kill you, because Kerch might want to see you alive. But I can always change my mind. Or drill your fanny for you.”
I didn’t make the obvious retort. My throat was busy resisting the fierce pressure of nausea that clenched my stomach and squirted streams of saliva into my mouth. It may have been the slick of blood on the floor where my foot had slipped. It may have been the half-naked man in the corner with the discolored neck and dead, swollen face. It may have been the woman who lay on the table with her limp legs dangling over the end. The gasoline lamp had been moved to the stove and shone fully on the bloody towel which wrapped her face. The rhythmic bubbling sounds of her breathing were the only sign that she was still alive.
“Pretty, isn’t it?” Garland said. “You see what happens to boys and girls that try to buck our organization.”
I had conquered the nausea, but the effort had left me weak. I sat down with my back to the window. The soles of my boots were sticky when I moved my feet. Garland sat down facing me in the chair where Sault had died. He held the gun politely on his knee, like a cup of tea. I began to estimate the minimum time it would take for Allister to come with help. If everything went well, it seemed to me that he could get there any minute.
“You’re very foolish to come back, fellow,” Garland said. “Kerch isn’t going to like it a little bit.”
I looked at him, and didn’t answer. His slender fingers, delicate features, girlish mouth, made a strange contrast with the pleasure he took in killing. His gray eyes held no history. I couldn’t imagine behind him a boyhood of school, family life, ambition, or any kind of hope. He looked as if he had been always what he was, as if he had emerged from the womb murderous, cheaply elegant, and epicene.
“While we’re waiting,” he said after a while, “you might as well bring Rusty in. He’ll catch cold out there.”
“That would be a terrible pity.”
“Get going,” he snapped. “You go first now. Remember I can drop a man with this gun up to fifty yards.”
Rusty was lying where he had fallen in the raw earth, his arms outspread and his face turned awkwardly to one side. His knees were drawn up slightly, and, though his eyes were open, the lower rims of the pupils were barely visible under the lids.
Without taking his eyes or gun from me, Garland crouched and felt the great swelling under the red hair. “You hit him a nasty smack,” he said indifferently. “It’s a good thing Salamander’s coming.”
“Salamander?” I remembered the dried-up little man in the radio station who claimed to be the seventh son of a seventh son.
“He used to be a doctor,” Garland said in a gossipy way. “He lost his license when they sent him up. Now, pick Rusty up and be careful not to drop him.” He giggled. “Or I’ll drop you right in your tracks, fellow.”
Rusty was hard to handle, because his back was rigid and his bent legs refused to straighten, but I finally got him over my shoulder and up the steps into the kitchen. I laid him on the floor beside the dead man.
“They make
a pretty pair, don’t they?” Garland said. “Now go and sit down and be thankful there aren’t three of you on the floor.”
“Aren’t you going to do anything for this woman?”
“We did what we could. I wasn’t the one that cut her. If you ask me, it was a bad mistake. She’s still breathing, isn’t she?”
“Yes, but she’s losing blood.”
“Salamander should be here soon. I’m no doctor.”
After a pause, during which I sat and looked at his gun some more, he said: “Maybe you better finish that hole Rusty started. Kerch won’t like it if Sault’s still above ground.”
“Kerch won’t like it if anybody’s still above ground.”
“Maybe you’re right, fellow.” He smiled a sad little smile, and stood up again. “Walk ahead of me. You might as well dig it deep enough for two.”
I was sweating and digging with blistered hands, shoulder-deep in the grave, when the sound of the car came down the road and stopped in front of the inn. My first thought was that Allister had come, and I stopped digging and straightened up.
“Go on digging,” Garland said above me. “You want to make a good impression on Mr. Kerch, don’t you?”
Kerch came around the corner of the building, followed by the man who called himself Professor Salamander. There was a long gauze bandage on the side of Kerch’s face, held in place by strips of adhesive. He looked as worried and excited as his wide phlegmatic face could ever look.
“What’s this, Garland?” he said when he saw me.
“Boy friend here came along and hurt Rusty, so I put him to work. I told him to dig it deep enough for two, didn’t I, boy friend?”
“You’re very audacious,” Kerch said to me. “Your audacity will be the death of you.”
“Electricity will be the death of you. I think you’ll all die in a chair before long.”
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