Great Noir Fiction

by Ed Gorman (ed)

  I lay there. He leaned down and smashed at me with the gun. Then he stood up and cleared his throat. Then he waited.

  ‘All right. I wasn’t going this far, Nichols. But now I am. I’m going to tie you up and I’m getting your wife over here. Then you’re going to watch something. And you’ll talk Nichols. They always do. It’s the last thing we try. We don’t have any other way. But it’s a good way. It produces.’

  I looked at him and I knew he meant it. There was nothing to do.

  ‘O.K., Nichols? You know I would?’

  ‘Yes. All right. I’ll show you.’

  ‘One wrong move. That will be all.’

  ‘It’s all right. I’ve got the money.’

  ‘Get up.’

  ‘I can’t, yet.’

  He waited. After a time the pain began to drift away and I got to my knees. Finally I got up on my feet. The blood was in my eyes and I rubbed my hands across my face, knowing it was all done.

  I’d let myself down. And Bess, too. I should have got Radan before, on my own. It had been the only way, and I’d missed it.

  ‘Coming, Nichols?’

  We went on out the door. I staggered off the porch and nearly fell. He stood back. He watched while I hung onto the porch railing, trying to see right. I couldn’t see right.

  ‘Around back, Radan.’

  We started down between the apartments. It was a cool night and the wind washed against my face. Everything was a big blank, and I had drawn it There was no use.

  We came around behind the apartments. I still couldn’t walk right. Something inside my skull kept crackling, and my teeth hurt bad. I knew I was spitting blood and I didn’t give a damn, not any more.

  We came by the garage and I reached up and grabbed the door and flung it open. ‘You climb on the hood of the car. Then pull yourself up by a beam and the brief case is up there under the far eave, under some loose boards.’

  ‘Stand right there, Nichols. Remember, I’ve got a gun. I can see you against the light. Don’t go away.’

  I didn’t say anything. I stood there waiting. I knew I was waiting for a slug. It was almost as if I didn’t care about that, either. He would kill me as sure as the night was dark. Then I thought, Maybe he won’t.

  He was up on the hood of the car. ‘Stay right there,’ he said. ‘I can see you.’

  I watched him pull himself up. Now was my chance to run. I didn’t. I waited. I heard him up there, prowling around in the darkness. He was on the boards, over against the eave.

  ‘God!’ he said. ‘I’ve got it.’

  He came down fast, in a single leap from the beams to the car’s hood to the ground. I turned and started walking toward the house.

  ‘Nichols!’

  ‘The hell with it.’

  I started up along the side of our apartment, heading toward the office door. I heard him coming fast on the grass.

  ‘Nichols!’

  Somebody else said, ‘Hold it right there, Radan!’

  I whirled and saw him lift his gun and fire at the dark. He fired twice and I flattened myself against the side of the house and he came by me, running like hell.

  He took a shot at me as he passed. It thocked onto the wooden side of the house. A car moved along out in front by the curb and a spotlight blinked on, coming slowly bright and it picked him up.

  I ran out after him. I saw him stand there on the front lawn all alone, with that brief case swinging and he fired at the spotlight and missed.

  ‘Stop—Radan!’ I recognized Gant’s voice.

  Radan didn’t stop. Somebody fired rapidly twice from down by the corner and Radan turned and knelt down and fired. Somebody fired from the car out there in the street. Radan stood and whirled on the car and his gun clicked empty.

  The front sign went on, bright and glowing. Then the floodlights came on and it was like daylight out there on the grass and he stood there holding his empty gun. He drew his arm back and flung the gun sailing at the car. He turned and started across the lawn, running toward the far comer and I saw the brief case come open. That broken clasp. Money streamed and tumbled out as he ran.

  They shouted for him to stop. They gave him every chance.

  But he didn’t stop. They cut him down. He skidded into a pile right by one of the floodlights, landing on his face.

  Then everything became still. It had been sudden. Now it was over. I walked out across the lawn.

  ‘You all right, Nichols?’

  ‘Sure.’

  It was Lieutenant Gant. He came across the lawn in a steady shuffle, putting his gun away. I walked over to Radan, lying on the ground. There was nothing left inside me.

  We stood there and looked at him. About six slugs had nailed him. He was crumpled over on his face, with his grip still tight on the handle of the brief case, only most of the money had spilled out. He’d left a scattered green trail of it all the way across the lawn.

  A cop started toward us, picking up the packets of money, softly whistling through his teeth.

  ‘Well?’ I said.

  Gant looked at me. He shrugged. ‘It was your wife. She knew about that money, Nichols. She saw you put it in the garage. She checked and found the money, only she didn’t tell us until just now, when she phoned. We’d freed you, thinking maybe you’d lead us somewhere. She wanted you to find it in yourself, to straighten it out without any help. That’s why she never said anything to you about the money. I don’t know. The hell with it. You know how women are. You should know how your wife is.’

  ‘Yeah. I know.’

  ‘She’s over there. I’m not sure whether she wants to see you, though. Can’t say as I blame her.’

  Bess was standing there by the royal palm at the near corner of the sign. She was watching me. I lifted one hand toward her and let it drop. She didn’t move.

  Three officers came across the lawn.

  The one who’d been picking up the money went over by the dead man and got the brief case loose from his fingers. He began packing the money inside the case, still whistling through his teeth.

  ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to come along with us,’ Gant said. ‘We know Teece killed the girl and Radan killed Teece, all that. We couldn’t move in any quicker because we didn’t really have anything on Radan, see? We’ve wanted him for a long while, Nichols. As I say, you’ll have to come along, too. There’ll be some sort of a trial. Maybe you’ll get a suspended sentence. Maybe not.’

  I turned and walked over by Bess. There was just nothing left inside me, but her. And she didn’t want any part of me.

  We looked at each other.

  ‘Lieutenant Gant says the highway’s coming through,’ she said. ‘He told me that tonight, when we were talking about you. Why you did all this.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Bess.’

  She looked up at me. We stood there that way for a second or two. Then I saw Gant coming toward us.

  ‘It’s all right, Roy.’

  I didn’t know what to say. It was all over.

  ‘It’s all right. I’ll be here, Roy.’

  Gant touched my arm. ‘Coming, Nichols?’

  We started off across the lawn toward the curb. ‘There are a few things you’ll have to clear up,’ Gant said. ‘I don’t exactly get it all yet.’

  ‘Me either, Lieutenant.’

  As we got into the car, I looked over across toward the sign. Bess was still standing there. She waved her hand.

  Gant slammed the car door. His voice reached me through a haze. ‘You care for a cigarette, Nichols?’

  But You’ll Never

  Follow Me Again

  Karl Edward Wagner

  Karl Edward Wagner’s fiction is almost always informed by a soft, quiet sorrow. Even in his action novels involving Kane, there a melancholy and a darkness you don’t soon forget. He’s a better writer than even his fans understand, and he’s never been better than in this story.

  First published in 1990.

  It wasn’t the smell of death th
at he hated so much. He’d grown used to that in Nam. It was the smell of dying that tore at him. Slow dying.

  He remembered his best buddy stuck to the paddy mud, legless and eviscerated, too deep in shock to cry out, just gulping air like a beached fish, eyes round with wonder and staring into his. Marsden had closed those eyes with his right hand and with his left he put a .45 slug through his friend’s skull.

  After that, he’d made a promise to himself never to kill again, but that was as true a promise as he’d ever made to anyone, and never-intended lies rotted together with the never-realized truths of his best intentions.

  Marsden found a moment’s solitude in the slow-moving elevator as it slid upward to the fourth floor. He cracked a zippered gash into his bulky canvas flight bag, large enough to reach the pint bottle of vodka on top. He gulped down a mouthful, replaced the stopper, and then replaced the flask, tugged down the zipper—all in the space of four floors. Speed was only a matter of practice. He exhaled a breath of vodka as the elevator door opened.

  Perhaps the middle-aged couple who waited there noticed his breath as he shouldered past them with his bag, but Marsden doubted it. The air of Brookcrest Health Care Center was already choked with the stench of bath salts and old lady’s perfume, with antiseptics and detergents and bouquets of dying flowers; and underlying it all was the veiled sweetness of urine, feces, and vomit, physically retained in bedpans and diapers.

  Marsden belched. A nurse in the fourth floor lounge scowled at him, but a blue-haired lady in a jerry cart smiled and waved and called after him: “Billy boy! Billy Billy boy!” Michael Marsden shut his eyes and turned into the hallway that led to his parents’ rooms. Somewhere along the hall a woman’s voice begged in feeble monotone: “O Lord, help me. O Lord, help me. O Lord, help me.” Marsden walked on down the hall.

  He was a middle-aged man with a heavyset frame that carried well a spreading beer gut. He had mild brown eyes, a lined and long-jawed face, and there were streaks of gray in his short beard and in his limp brown hair where it straggled from beneath the Giants baseball cap. His denim jacket and jeans were about as worn as his scuffed cowboy boots.

  “You’d look a lot nicer if you’d shave that beard and get a haircut,” Momma liked to nag him. “And you ought to dress more neatly. You’re a good-looking boy, Michael.”

  She still kept the photo of him in his uniform, smiling bravely, fresh out of boot camp, on her shelf at the nursing home. Marsden guessed that that was the way Momma preferred to hold him in memory—such of her memory as Alzheimer’s disease had left her.

  Not that there was much worth remembering him for since then. Certainly the rest of his family wouldn’t quarrel with that judgment.

  “You should have gone back to grad school once you got back,” his sister in Columbus had advised him with twenty- twenty and twenty-year hindsight. “What have you done with your life instead? When was the last time you held on to a job for more than a year?”

  At least she hadn’t added: Or held on to a wife? Marsden had sipped his Coke and vodka and meekly accepted the scolding. They were seated in the kitchen of their parents’ too-big house in Cincinnati, trying not to disturb Papa as he dozed in his wheelchair in the family room.

  “It’s bad enough that Brett and I keep having to drive down here every weekend to try to straighten things out here,” Nancy had reminded him. “And then Jack’s had to come down from Detroit several times since Momma went to Brookcrest, and Jonathan flew here from Los Angeles and stayed two whole weeks after Papa’s first stroke. And all of us have jobs and families to keep up with. Where were you during all this time?”

  “Trying to hold a job in Jersey,” Marsden explained, thinking of the last Christmas he’d come home for. He’d been nursing a six-pack and the late night movie when Momma drifted into the family room and angrily ordered him to get back to mowing the lawn. It was the first time he’d seen Momma naked in his life, and the image of that shrunken, sagging body would not leave him.

  “I’m just saying that you should be doing more, Michael,” Nancy continued.

  “I was here when you needed me,” Marsden protested. “I was here to take Momma to the nursing home.”

  “Yes, but that was after the rest of us did all the work—finding a good home, signing all the papers, convincing Papa that this was the best thing to do, making all the other arrangements.”

  “Still, I was here at the end. I did what I had to do,” Marsden said, thinking that this had been the story of his life ever since the draft notice had come. Never a choice.

  They hadn’t wanted to upset Momma, so no one had told her about the nursing home. Secretly they’d packed her things and loaded them into the trunk of Papa’s Cadillac the night before. “Just tell Momma that she’s going for another checkup at the hospital,” they’d told him to say, and then they had to get home to their jobs and families. But despite her advanced Alzheimer’s, Momma’s memory was clear when it came to remembering doctors’ appointments, and she protested suspiciously the next morning when he and Papa bundled her into the car. Momma had looked back over her shoulder at him as they wheeled her down the hall, and her eyes were shadowed with the hurt of betrayal. “You’re going to leave me here, aren’t you?” she said dully.

  The memory of that look crowded memories of Nam from his nightmares.

  After that, Marsden had avoided going home. He did visit Momma briefly when Papa had his first stroke, but she hadn’t recognized him.

  Papa had survived his first stroke, and several months later had surprised them all again and survived his second stroke. But that had been almost a year ago from the night Marsden and his sister had sat talking in the kitchen while Papa dozed in his wheelchair. That first stroke had left him weak on one side; the second had taken away part of his mind. The family had tried to maintain him at home with live-in nursing care, but Papa’s health slowly deteriorated, physically and mentally.

  It was time to call for Michael.

  And Michael came.

  “Besides,” Nancy reassured him, “Papa only wants to be near Momma. He still insists on trying to get over to visit her every day. You can imagine what a strain that’s been on everyone here.”

  “I can guess,” said Michael, pouring more vodka into his glass.

  “Where are we going, son?” Papa had asked the next morning, as Marsden lifted him into the Cadillac. Papa’s vision was almost gone now, and his voice was hard to understand.

  “I’m taking you to be with Momma for a while,” Marsden told him. “You want that, don’t you?”

  Papa’s dim eyes stared widely at the house as they backed down the driveway. He turned to face Michael. “But when are you bringing Momma and me back home again, son?”

  Never, as it turned out. Marsden paused outside his mother’s room, wincing at the memory. Over the past year their various health problems had continued their slow and inexorable progress toward oblivion. Meanwhile health care bills had mushroomed—eroding insurance coverage, the last of their pensions, and a lifetime’s careful savings. It was time to put the old family home on the market, to make some disposal of a lifetime’s possessions. It had to be done.

  Papa called for Michael.

  “Don’t let them do this to us, son.” The family held power of attorney now. “Momma and I want to go home.”

  So Michael came home.

  The white-haired lady bent double over her walker as she inched along the hallway wasn’t watching him. Marsden took a long swig of vodka and replaced the pint bottle. Momma didn’t like to see him drink.

  She was sitting up in her jerry cart, staring at the television, when Marsden stepped inside her room and closed the door. They’d removed her dinner tray but hadn’t cleaned up, and bits of food littered the front of her dressing gown. She looked up, and her sunken eyes showed recognition.

  “Why, it’s Michael! She held out her food-smeared arms to him. “My baby!”

  Marsden accepted her slobbery hug. “I’ve
come for you, Momma,” he whispered as Momma began to cry.

  She covered her face with her hands and continued weeping as Marsden stepped behind her and opened the flight bag. The silencer was already fitted to the Hi-Standard .22, and Marsden quickly pumped three hollow-points through the back of his mother’s head. It was over in seconds. Little noise, and surely no pain. No more pain.

  Marsden left his mother slumped over in her jerry cart, picked up his canvas bag, and closed the door. Then he walked on down the hall to his father’s room.

  He went inside. Papa must have been getting up and falling again, because he was tied to his wheelchair by a bath towel about his waist. “Who’s that?” he mumbled, turning his eyes toward Marsden.

  “It’s Michael, Papa. I’m here to take you home.”

  Papa lost sphincter control as Marsden untied the knotted towel. He was trying to say something—it sounded like “Bless you, son”—then Marsden lovingly shot him three times through the back of his skull. Papa would have fallen out of the wheelchair, but Marsden caught him. He left him sitting upright with the Monday night football game just getting underway on the tube.

  Marsden finished the vodka, then removed the silencer from the pistol and replaced the clip. Shoving the Hi-Standard into his belt, he checked over the flight bag and left it with Papa.

  He heard the first screams as the elevator door slowly closed. Someone must have finally gone to clean Momma’s dinner off her.

  A uniformed security guard—Marsden hadn’t known that Brookcrest employed such—was trying to lock the lobby doors. A staff member was shouting into the reception desk phone.

  “Hold it, please! Nobody’s to leave!” The guard actually had a revolver.

  Marsden shot him through the left eye and stepped over him and through the glass doors. Marsden regretted this, because he hated to kill needlessly.

  Unfortunately, the first police car was slithering into the parking lot as Marsden left the nursing home. Marsden continued to walk away, even when the car’s spotlight pinned him against the blacktop.