by Devon, Gary;
Through the wet air, her hand went out until she was touching his sleeve. “You’re so tense and keyed up; you’ve been looking at your watch every five minutes.” Her fingers continued to search until finally she touched his hand; gently she closed her fingers on his. “What is it, Henry? I’ve had an awful feeling these last few weeks that you want to tell me something and you can’t. It’s something about you and me, isn’t it?” She tried to smile, but her whole body shivered. “So tell me, Henry … just tell me this is all the silliest damned thing you’ve ever heard of.”
He knew at once he had nearly revealed too much. “I swear to God, Faith—what are you talking about? There’s a lot of things going on. I’m a little strung out. I’ll be all right.”
“So you really have nothing you want to tell me? Nothing at all?”
“No,” he said. “Except I’m going back in there. I have to.”
He turned his head to look at the rain.
She saw the back of his neck where the hair whorled into a thin dark fold and it all came flooding back to her, the apartment in Chicago, the roughneck boy she had loved so recklessly, the disgrace and humiliation when he lost everything. “In a minute,” Faith said. “You can go in a minute. But first, is this something I’ve done?” She drew closer to him. “Or have you done something? Why won’t you tell me? Have you fallen in love with someone else?”
It was unnerving how close she came to the truth. He remembered holding Sheila’s face in his hands and her tentative, young kiss. There were moments when he thought how easy it would be to throw away everything he had worked for and escape with her.
But not this night.
His smile came easily. “Faith,” he said. “Who would I fall in love with? Who, but you?”
Sudden relief swept through her. His face, close to hers, seemed pale but he was smiling; that great warm smile flowed toward her from his eyes, his mouth, the tilt of his head, from all the stretches of the whispering rain. “Oh, I love you so much,” she told him. “I always will. Please don’t scare me like this.” She thought, Whatever it is, my darling, we’ll get through it. Impetuously, she kissed him and clasped him to herself a long time, letting the kindling of her love come again as once, years ago, she had known it, trusting only in that, believing in it and wanting to believe, with all her heart, in him.
She felt him start to pull away and let him go. “Oh, I nearly forgot,” she said. “Look.” She held out the two ten-dollar bills from her pocket. “Look what I found.”
He glanced at her outstretched hand and began to laugh. “Christ, Faith, it’s just money. This goddamned place is practically carpeted in ten-dollar bills.”
“Yes,” she said, “I know. But these two are mine.” And so are you, my darling. So are you.
Henry shrugged and then he put his arm around her shoulders. Moving her toward the door, he said, “You shouldn’t stay out here in this rain. Go on in with the others; I won’t be gone much longer.” He opened the door for her and let her pass, and as she stepped inside, ahead of him, Slater looked down at his watch.
Now.
5
Beecham laid the room key on the dresser, took up his gym bag and stepped out to the sidewalk, shutting the door behind him. It was ten past eleven. With the wind whipping around him, he went through the hedgerow of rubbery jade plants and, again, studied the low, swarming clouds. The night smelled heavily of rain and electricity. He shoved the oversized bag onto the passenger seat and climbed in behind the wheel of the Mustang. Raindrops were beginning to pepper the windshield.
Driving toward Canyon Valley Drive, he remembered his own grandmother, who had raised him, and how she had talked to him and read him stories from the Bible. She told him there was a book in heaven and that everyone’s name was written in that book and along with their names, a time was written—an hour, a minute—when each living thing would die. Beecham remembered her saying that nobody could tamper with that book or stop it or do anything about it, not even Satan himself—that we all lived until we died and that it was God’s will. Beecham wondered if what he was doing wasn’t something like keeping God’s timetables. The thought of it made him smile.
The second hand swept past eleven-fifteen as he staunched the car’s headlights, pulled the black Mustang into the churchyard of the San Lucia Mission and parked between the construction trailer and a stack of lumber. He shut the motor off, unzipped the gym bag on the seat beside him and began to remove its contents. On top was the snub-nosed .38 with the silencer attached. He set that out on the seat. Next was a denim field hand’s coat and two flannel-wrapped parcels, which he placed on the shallow floorboard. Now that the rain had started, Beecham put on the hip-length denim coat. Then he took a navy blue sock cap from the bag and tugged it smoothly over his head. He pulled on a pair of thin latex gloves.
Once his hands were covered, he unwrapped the flannel from the two parcels: the first contained the working mechanism of a double-barreled shotgun sawed off to fourteen inches, an old LeFever Nitro Special, a beast of a gun still smelling faintly of oil and camphor. The second parcel held the stock, handmade of tubular steel; with a quick twist of a wing nut, he attached it to the back of the shotgun. Outside, lightning flared, but it was dark as a closet inside the car. He worked quickly, from memory. When the gun was assembled, he sat listening to the rain drum on the roof of the car and watching the lightning flash closer and closer. The storm was moving directly over him and settling in.
A third square of flannel, which remained in the bag, contained a twin silencer that Beecham had tooled himself, but the thunder made the silencer unnecessary tonight and he preferred to work without it. Fire would spurt from the shortened barrels of the shotgun, but the shot would be cleaner.
Assembled, the gun felt amazingly light; he swung it up toward the passenger window, drawing the hammers back. His finger grazed the triggers and the hammers flew down, striking with a single empty clack.
He patted the two .00 bucks in his right denim pocket. They were three-inch, red-dot shells that he had loaded himself. He took the wire-rimmed glasses off and dropped them on the dashboard, squeezing the bridge of his nose with a pinch of his fingers. He returned the flannel pieces and the .38 Special to the bag and zipped it shut.
There was a strip of tape over the switch in the door. When he got out of the car, the ceiling dome light remained dark. He placed the shotgun inside his coat, snug under his left arm. Taking the gym bag, he closed the driver’s door, locked it, then stashed the bag in the trunk, tugging briefly at the trunk’s lid to make sure it was secure.
Beecham checked his watch. 11:23. The rain was falling harder now; his cap and coat were already wet with it. The lightning seemed to come in sheets and grow in intensity. Out over the Pacific, the storm was crossing the entire horizon like a volley of artillery fire. He set off on foot, following the short lane from the old chapel to the street and going across the street to the other side.
The Buchanan house was five houses away, and in the flashes of light from the low, rolling clouds he could see the outline of its tile roof through the wind-whipped trees. The curving lane was deserted at this hour; only the streetlights cast ghostly pools on the pavement. Most of the houses were completely dark, but Beecham stayed well off to the side of the road, the rainy wind rustling the grass around him.
When he was still a house away, he heard a car coming. Beecham looked back at the swell of headlights and quickly hid in a grove of dwarf fruit trees that served as a property marker. The rain struck his face: a cold drop ran down his cheek and trickled over his lips. He waited among the crooked, dripping branches until the car sped by, its tires throwing up a fine spray. Then he continued on, feeling his stomach beginning to draw inward, a deep quickening of anticipation and tension.
He came to the corner of the old iron fence and stepped over it. Streetlight painted the front of the house, and a small outside light had been left on above the double front doors. The danger lay in the h
ouse’s exposure to the street and he moved quickly across the yard into the shadow of the high eaves. The blowing rain lashed around him.
Again, he looked at his watch. 11:32. It had taken him nine minutes to get here. He would need less time than that to get back to the car. He immediately walked down along the side of the house and emerged in the woman’s backyard flower garden, neatly laid out with brick walkways and trellises and arbors, all familiar to him now. The rain softened the snap of twigs under his feet.
Beecham paused to get his bearings. Through the latticework and the vegetation, he saw that a light was on in the kitchen, and that Rachel Buchanan was in there, moving about. Rain dripped from the eaves and rushed down the drainpipes. With the edge of his forefinger, he wiped the trickles of rain from his eyebrows.
In the next shard of lightning, the entire backyard spread before him. Beecham saw the screened-in back porch and inside that, the back entrance to the house. He headed toward it. A moment later, the scene collapsed into utter darkness except for the lighted kitchen window which seemed, like a photograph, to emerge from negative to reality before his eyes.
She was baking; Beecham saw the woman lift a large pan from the oven to the counter. No one else was in the room with her. He thought it odd that she was still awake and baking so late at night. But then he couldn’t be bothered with the unexplained whims of an old woman.
The path was covered with leaves but there was gravel beneath them; he could feel the pebbles biting into the soles of his shoes. All of a sudden, she came to the window. It happened so quickly he could do nothing but stop dead still. She stepped up close to the glass and put her hand above her eyes, peering out into the night.
What’s she doing? Can she see me?
He could have shot her then; the storm would’ve swallowed the noise of the gun. If he had brought the .38, he could have fired straight through the window with the absolute certainty of killing her, but he knew a shotgun modified like his LeFever was not reliable or even predictable at more than ten to twelve feet. And yet, even as he deliberated against it, the shotgun swung down into his hands. He broke the breech, dropped the shells into the chambers and snapped the barrels shut.
The old woman left the kitchen, hurrying toward the dining room in the front of the house.
Did she see me? Again, thunder cracked; again, the yard was flooded with pale, shimmering light. In the blackness that followed, he reached the screen door, opened it, and crossed to the back door, wiping the bottoms of his shoes on the bristly welcome mat. Wooden tubs and stacks of clay pots were neatly arranged along the wall. He stood, listening.
Carefully, he grasped the doorknob—it turned without sound, the brass catch drew back, the door opened. Noiselessly, Beecham stepped into the house, pressing the door shut behind him.
He listened for the woman’s footsteps but all he heard was the noise of the storm outside. He inched forward, cautiously planting his weight, step after slow step, on the worn oak floor. He was in the long central hallway that ran to the front of the house, exactly as he had staged it in his mind. At the end of the corridor stood the double front doors, each with its oval glass, and the porch light left burning outside sent long pools into the hall. Near the front doors, the staircase curved up to solid darkness. But closest to him was the bright kitchen and through its open doorway, a wall of light angled across the hall.
Holding the shotgun cradled across his chest, Beecham edged up to the light from the kitchen, but he could see she hadn’t returned. If she had seen him, she could have run outside, although there was no evidence of that. Or she could have a gun of her own.
Then he heard her, from another part of the house, heard her muffled voice. Too late to turn back now. Using only the pressure of his thumb, he drew the twin hammers back, slowly, methodically. Clickclick.
She was talking. She must be talking on the telephone, he realized. But there was something else, too. At first Beecham thought it was the rolling thunder. Then it dawned on him: a motor.
He heard voices. Laughter. Car doors slamming in the night.
The door that led to the porte cochere flew open and the girl, the incandescent blond girl rushed into the house in a pink formal gown. “Gramma! Gramma!” she called breathlessly. “Where are you, Gramma?”
The old woman came to the dining room doorway; she was smiling, “That was Liz Jaffe, telling me you were on your way. What’s happened? Why’d you come home?” And there were other kids gathering behind the girl, two teenage girls and three boys, all formally dressed.
“We got drenched,” the girl exclaimed, lifting the wet hem of her gown. “On the way to the car. I’ll have to change; we all have to.”
To Beecham, it felt as though time had speeded up; the kids were milling around, switching places before his eyes.
“Well, my goodness,” the old woman said, “come in. Come in and close the door. Did you have a good time?”
Beecham stood riveted in the dark hallway, holding the shotgun poised against his chest. The kids were all talking at once; the girl ran to her grandmother, directly into his planned line of fire. “… a great time, Gramma!”
In the sugar the man had written, NOT THE GIRL, but the urge to go on lay inside Beecham like static. Slowly, he stepped backward.
“Oh, a really great time,” the girl cried, vibrantly. “Will you help me, Gramma? I have to hurry.”
I can’t get off a shot. He took another backward step, the cheerful ruckus in the kitchen masking any small noise he made. He kept his eyes fixed on the bright doorway: if anyone stepped through it, he would kill them in an instant, no matter who it was. He heard the old woman say, “I just took some muffins out of the stove.” Reaching back with his left hand, Beecham grasped the doorknob, turned it and steathily drew the door open. The rain had dripped on the floor, leaving a short trail of puddles around his feet.
Leave the door open, he thought, she’ll think the wind blew it in. Still watching the kitchen, he backed out onto the screened-in porch. The door remained ajar. Holding the hammers firmly under his thumb, Beecham released them back into place.
All at once, he was outside, catching the screen door so that it fell to silently. He fled from the house, moving out through the rain, trotting along the wet lawns then across the street to the hidden Mustang.
It was infuriating. He expelled a long breath. Taking his bag from the trunk, he got inside the car. “Stupid!” he said, talking to himself. Dropping the shotgun on the seat beside him, he pulled the latex gloves from his hands. “Stupid, stupid bastard!” A dry, bitter taste coated his mouth. He felt sick to his stomach; he was consumed by rage. Beecham threw his dark soaked cap to the floorboard, pulled a T-shirt from his gym bag and wiped the rain from his face. “Before twelve,” he muttered furiously. “You said, before twelve.”
Keeping the .38 out and ready for any eventuality, he quickly unloaded the shotgun, dropping the shells, then the gun into the bag. There would be time later to clean and wrap them.
Okay, he thought, play it safe. Around midnight, patrolmen checked the construction sight. He had to get away from here; then he would have to come back. Much later, three or four in the morning. He worried about leaving the car in the same place twice. He hated the thought of approaching the house on foot a second time. After she’s asleep, he thought. And the girl would be there. That would make it ugly. Very ugly.
He tried to think it through. Noise that late at night bothered him. He would have to use the .38 with the silencer. Or a knife.
The Mustang tore from the churchyard onto the street, pointed back toward Rio Del Palmos. With the butt end of his hand, Beecham smacked the wheel again and again, unable to displace his frustration. “No way,” he said, still talking to himself. “I couldn’t kill ’em all.”
The speedometer climbed to fifty-five, sixty.
“No fuckin’ way.”
Beyond the range of his watery headlights, thunder exploded and an erratic bolt of lightning struck
a transformer. As the wipers switched across his line of vision, Beecham watched a high shower of sparks spew through the night and disappear.
“I’ve gotta go back,” he said aloud, still mulling over it. And when he did it would be simpler to use the .38. But how would he do it? “No matter what,” he told himself, “by tomorrow, I’m out of here.”
As if cut by shears, the electrical cable snapped and swung downward with a faint whistle. With a deafening whack, the power line struck the Mustang.
Christ!
A hot blossom of light engulfed the car.
Beecham hit the brakes; the Mustang swerved; the tires blew, all four of them, instantaneously. Sparks drowned the windshield, blinding him. The crippled Mustang rocked forward a foot or two and stopped, still running but immobilized. The cable coiled down around the car, folding over the windshield, serpentine and deadly.
Beecham was shaking uncontrollably.
The stench of burning rubber filled the passenger compartment. The gauges began to hiss and smoke. His mind flew from one thought to the next without settling anywhere. He was unable to grasp what to do. It’s on fire! he realized wildly. Burning up!
Without thinking, he grabbed the handle and opened the door. It swung out into the rain.
Then it sank in—what had he done? He stared, aghast, at the metal door handle. My God! Yet, he hadn’t felt even the slightest shock. It must be okay, he thought. I could have been dead.
Afraid to move, Beecham tried to comprehend what had happened and decide what to do. Gingerly, he reached up and touched the metal surrounding the door. Again, he felt nothing. So something must have happened automatically, he thought, a breaker somewhere must have stopped the flow of electrical current.
He had to get out of there. With guns in the car, he knew he had to get away. A utility truck would certainly be on its way to start line repairs and when the Mustang was discovered, stranded in the middle of the street, the police would be called. Or a patrol car could show up while making its rounds. Beecham grasped the oversized bag and set it tightly under his left arm. He snatched up the snub-nosed .38 and pushed himself out of the car.