Easy Death

by Daniel Boyd

  “You may be right.” She seemed kind of surprised to see me do that much clear thinking, but whether it was because I was a policeman or because I was a man, period, I wasn’t sure. “And once we’re under the tower, we could stay warm in the truck he drove out here while he kept getting colder. But it’s not your job to run to the tower; that’s my job, isn’t it?”

  “Not like I see it, it ain’t.”

  “It’s my park.” She said it like she was doing seating arrangements for a tea party. “I’m responsible for what happens here, and to some extent it may be my fault that we’re in this situation. Had you known about Captain Scranton—had I told you earlier—you might have done something differently.”

  “Can’t figure what it’d be.” I sucked snot up my nose again.

  “Neither can I, but that’s neither here nor there.” She started squirming around in that big coat of hers, like a cow giving birth, and finally came out with her sidearm. “Take this.” She shoved the butt at me. “You’ll most likely fare better with two guns to shoot.”

  “I would,” I said, “but you’re doing the shooting—I’ll do the running.”

  “I hardly think so.” While she was talking, she got up to a half-crouch, like a sprinter getting ready to take off. “My boots are far better suited to running in the snow than yours, and if I’m not mistaken, my legs are somewhat longer.”

  “But you’re a woman,” I said, “and running into enemy fire… if ever something’s been men’s work…”

  She got a look on that big face like I’d slapped her and it hurt her some. But she got it under control quick.

  “It is the work of whoever happens to be best suited to it,” she said soft and slow, like every word was important to her, “and it’s my job; I fought to get here.”

  Well, I could see there was no point arguing with her, so I started to get up, figuring I could knock her down and get running before she did, or maybe keep her from even getting up in the first place.

  That’s when she stuck out her palm and stiff-armed me so hard I smacked down in the snow.

  “Besides,” she said down at me, “you’d best do the shooting; I don’t believe I could shoot a man—however great the temptation.”

  And then she was off, sprinting through the snow like a jackrabbit.

  And me, well there was nothing I could do but hunker around the corner of the Jeep and start shooting up at the cab on that tower.

  I got off a round quick, just to get him looking my way, then a second one, trying to aim a little closer. I used Callie’s big Army .45 ’cause I figured the barrel was maybe an inch longer than my Colt .38, and with the added power of the bigger shell I might put a round up a little closer. Not that I had any hope of hitting that cab accurately, not at that range, but I figured to get his attention, like I say, whoever was up there shooting at us and maybe spoil his—

  Didn’t work. Not even close to working. I only got about three rounds out and up into the wild blue yonder before there was a crack! from the tower and Callie yelped and spun around sudden and slapped down in the snow.

  Chapter 25

  Six Hours After the Robbery

  December 20, 1951

  3:00 PM

  Mort

  In the room back of Lola’s, Mort tried to blink the smoke out of his eyes and concentrate on his cards. Damn, he thought, how long I been here? Looked at his watch. I gotta get out and—

  “You staying in?” Ted, the grey-haired heavyset man on his left, fingered the deck and looked at him without emotion.

  Mort looked around the table. Howard had dropped out. Across from him, Boxer, the guy who never let his feelings show, seemed tense, irritated.

  He don’t get my luck, Mort thought, he don’t understand me being so lucky today. Hell, I don’t get it myself… He looked down at the pot. I been riding the cards all day. Look at that: more than three hundred dollars! All the money in the world. And I can take it…

  “The man wants to know are you staying in?” Boxer’s voice was different somehow. Not patient and mocking as usual, more like—Mort couldn’t put his finger on it.

  “Play ’em or fold ’em, dammit!” Yeah, Boxer was upset. Across the table, Howard looked at the big black man, startled.

  “Hospitality’s getting thin here,” he tried to joke. It went nowhere.

  As much good luck as I’ve had today, he’s had bad, Mort told himself, and I can take this pot if I want it. I can feel it already….

  He looked down at the table in front of him. He still had the fifty in his pocket, and there was a wrinkled ten still left from his betting money. He tossed the ten into the pot. “See you and raise five.”

  Boxer smiled. But it wasn’t his usual laugh-at-whitey smile; there was something mean inside it he didn’t usually let out. “See that,” he tossed two bills into the pot. “And raise you fifty.”

  “You trying to buy the pot, Boxer?” Ted folded his cards.

  “I just want to see what kind of bone ol’ Lucky Mort’s really got.” He was keeping his voice even, but he couldn’t make it sound friendly anymore. Whatever was inside him was straining at the leash now and snarling across the table at Mort.

  “How ’bout it?” Ted looked over at Mort.

  He’s bluffing me, Mort told himself, trying to scare me off the pot. But I can take this. I know it! All I need is…

  “Well, Mort?” Boxer wasn’t smiling anymore. Wasn’t even trying to pretend.

  He’s out for blood, Mort thought. Well he can drink this… He pulled the fifty from his pocket. Threw it on the table. “I call.”

  Boxer laid down his cards, showing two pair. “Kings and jacks.” They seemed to smile up at Mort with that mocking superiority Boxer usually showed.

  Everybody looks at me like that, Mort thought, Sweeney, Magruder, even Helen sometimes. They all look at me like they know I’m never going to make anything out of myself. Like they know it, and like I’m the only one that’s not in on the joke. Hell, sometimes I catch little Morty looking at me, and it’s like he knows it, too; knows his Daddy’s never going to amount to a hill of beans.

  He looked across the table at Boxer’s smiling face, then down at the two pairs of face cards again. He laid down his cards.

  Three fives, a joker and the ace of hearts. “I think I’ve got this pot, gentlemen.” He said it politely, like a big shot tips the doorman for hauling him a taxi. That’s me, a big shot now, with four hundred dollars and—

  “It stinks,” Boxer said.

  “I guess them’s the breaks,” Howard said it lightly, to break the obvious tension. It didn’t work.

  “It stinks out loud.” Boxer said it slow and low, but his voice sounded different from any way they ever heard it before. Howard swallowed.

  “Guess I better get back to work,” he said. He got up. Slowly.

  “Me, too,” Ted, the grey-haired man, said, and got up carefully, keeping his hands out and one eye on Boxer. “Time to catch some air.”

  “I better get going myself.” Mort hadn’t missed a thing. He rose casually, very casually, and reached out a hand for the money on the table. “Jeez, Helen’s gonna kill me for staying out all day like this. We’re supposed to be at her folks’ for din—”

  “Get your damn hands off my money.” Boxer’s voice hadn’t changed. “And get the hell out my place.”

  Mort felt dizzy. Like something had slipped away underneath him and he was falling. “Boxer,” his voice sounding high and nervous in his own ears, “this is my pot. I won—”

  “You cheated.” Boxer was on his feet. Howard was gone and Ted was putting on his coat, his back turned deliberately, not seeing anything, not hearing. “You cheated for it. Only way a nobody like you could win off me: cheated.”

  “But Boxer—” Mort’s voice jumped a notch higher. Like a man pleading. “Ted was dealing! You saw him! Weren’t you, Ted?”

  Ted still pretended not to hear. Didn’t turn, made no sign. Just walked out, being ext
ra careful not to look back.

  “Now how could I cheat?” Mort caught the tone in his own voice and it made him ashamed; almost like a whimpering child.

  “You had that joker tucked in your pants. I saw you sneak it out. Tried to cheat me!”

  “I never—”

  That was as far as he got before Boxer Healey’s open left palm swung out too fast to see and connected with the right side of Mort’s face.

  “Calling me a liar?”

  Mort didn’t hear the question. His ears were ringing too loud from the force of the open-hand blow. Boxer’s right hand swung out, just as fast, palm forward, and smacked against the left side of Mort’s face, sending him stumbling sideways in time to catch the backswing and the cutting edge of Boxer’s shiny gold ring.

  Mort went to his knees, dizzy, trying to think. Damn, I gotta… all that money…Helen…big shot… He reached out, grasping at the bills on the table.

  He never even felt the heavy beer mug come crashing down over his head.

  Chapter 26

  Four Hours and Twenty Minutes After the Robbery

  December 20, 1951

  1:20 PM

  Officer Drapp

  Surprised me, how sharp it bit me, seeing a woman gunned down like that. I guess I’ve seen my share of nasty, in the war and since then, but that tore me up some. I felt myself go hot all over, and my eyes blurred; it was almost like I was crying, and maybe I was, and I just kept shooting up at that cab, and finally on the sixth or maybe the eighth shot, one of the windows busted out.

  I didn’t figure I got him, though. This just hadn’t been that good a day. I put one more shot out the barrel of that .45, then dropped it in the snow and drew my Police Special and—

  And then I saw she was moving.

  Callie’d flipped herself over on her belly and was crawling through two foot of snow back towards the Jeep.

  Not sure what got into me then. Just stupid, I guess, but for some reason I got out from behind that Jeep and run up to Callie and started pulling at the hood of her coat to help her along faster. She flapped an arm at me.

  “Let go of me, you ignoramus!”

  Well, folks hurt like that get crazy sometimes and I figured she didn’t know what she was saying, so I kept pulling at her coat hood, and trying to keep an eye on the tower and get us back behind the Jeep, and then she cussed, like a refined college girl does—“Hug a duck!”—and got herself up on her right arm, and her left swung out and jerked my legs out from under me.

  “Can’t you see it hurts?” She said it like a mother bear snarls, only not sweet and patient like that. “Are you so stupid for tripe’s sake?” She looked like she wanted to say more, wanted to lay me out good and proper, but then she winced and groaned. Closed her eyes and made a face ugly enough like to stop a clock and set it back an hour. Finally she could talk again and—

  Crack!

  The noise came from the tower, of course, but I couldn’t say where it hit, or did it hit anything but snow on the ground. But I knew what I had to do.

  I started running for the tower. Then, when I’d got about as far as Callie had, I stopped dead, jumped to one side and started going at right-angle across the front.

  Crack!

  A puff of snow flew up from right where I had been, but I wasn’t anywheres close to there now. Not me. I’d stopped short and turned again and I was getting back to that Jeep like it was quitting time in Hell, and as I ran back I saw Callie had used the distraction to get back behind to safety, which is where we met up again—but not before that rifle came one more time—

  Crack!

  It sent a shiver up my spine like the Devil’s dog had got me by the neck and shook me hard, then flung me where I landed behind the Jeep, looking at Callie’s unhappy face again.

  “Well, curse my bones,” she said.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “Hardly,” she grunted, winced, then her eyes cleared up. “My goodness,” she said. “That does hurt a bit.”

  “Where you hit?”

  “In the left side somewhere.” She tried to put an arm inside her coat to check it, but the coat was too tight-buttoned and the sleeves too thick to get it in. I reached for it myself, but she quick grabbed my wrist. “Don’t touch me.” She said it quiet but meaningful. “I don’t want you to touch it. I’m not coughing blood so I don’t believe I was hit in a lung, and I certainly wasn’t hit in the heart, but there’s a bullet in me and it hurts.”

  “Okay.” I backed off, wondered what to do, then remembered what they always told us to say to a wounded man back in the war.

  “You’re going to be all right,” I said.

  “I’m most likely going to die here in the snow,” she said, “unless you can think of some probable alternative.”

  “I will,” I said, trying to figure it. “That’s my job now, to get you out of here.”

  She got quiet a minute. Then, “I rather suspect you’ll get in a bit of trouble for bringing me along with you.” She talked slow and thoughtful now, like she was trying to save her energy. “Awfully sorry about that.”

  “Don’t worry over it,” I said. “I’ll make up some story about how I found you out here, when we get back.”

  “If we get back.”

  “We’ll get back. I’ll get us out of this.”

  “I hardly think so,” she sighed. “I have one chance to survive the day, and quite frankly I don’t much fancy it.”

  “Whatcha mean?”

  “I mean if I lie here very still, the cold will help stop my bleeding. My body will start to shiver at first, and that won’t be pleasant, not with a bullet here inside me, but once that passes, and the effects of hypothermia begin to set in, my pulse and respiration will begin to slow, and that will increase my chances of survival…for a time.”

  “How long you figure?”

  “I should say about forty minutes. If I’m not out of the cold by then…well there are long-term effects as the organs begin to shut down and brain damage occurs.”

  “Doesn’t sound like much fun.”

  “I don’t imagine it is. They say freezing is an easy death, but frankly I’m not anxious to try it. So if you have any good ideas—” She broke off sudden-like and gritted her teeth together as a flash of pain went through her.

  Okay. It was time to figure something. And whatever I figured, I better try it quick ’cause I wouldn’t get another chance. Forty minutes. I checked my watch.

  Chapter 27

  Four Hours and Thirty Minutes After the Robbery

  December 20, 1951

  1:30 PM

  Officer Drapp

  That gave me till maybe 2:10. I looked over at Callie sitting there in the snow, but she was just staring off into space like she was trying to think about something besides the feel of carrying around a bullet in her. Then I twisted myself up, took a quick look up at the tower and got right back down again.

  No shooting. I wondered was it maybe whoever was up there had run out of bullets, and I thought about trying to rush the tower, but again, this hadn’t been such a good day that I should try my luck like that. So I looked around a little more.

  A hundred yards or so of open empty behind me, the jeep in front of me, the tower beyond that, and off to my left that snow-covered car I’d been following, there at the bottom of that steep slope….

  And then it come at me all at once: that wrecked car in the ditch down below was my ride out of here.

  I turned to Callie sitting in the snow. “Don’t go away,” I said.

  I jumped over to the Jeep door, flung it open, and grabbed the coiled rope from under the seat.

  And then I was running, falling, sliding down the slope toward that car.

  It took him by surprise—the guy in the tower, I mean. He wasn’t expecting it, and I was damn near down to the car before I heard the first shot, which didn’t hit me and I don’t figure it come close even, because it ain’t easy to hit a moving target when you’re
firing down an angle like that in the blowing snow. Not that I was about to stop and check. I just slid fast as I could, and when I slowed down I got up and ran a few steps, then flung down on my belly and slid some more till I was all the way down and safe on the driver’s side, with the car between me and the tower.

  Whoever was up there must have got kind of upset by that, because I heard a few more shots, and one of them ping’d off the car trunk, but I paid it no mind. The driver’s door of the car wasn’t bent any, just half-buried, so I kicked away the snow and pulled it open.

  There was a hole in the windshield, small and round and a little bigger than a bullet. And there was a man in there, facing that hole in the windshield, and his eyes they were wide open, but he wasn’t seeing anything.

  I stopped there a quick lifetime, just looking at the big black face with the purple knot on its forehead. His face was getting a thin coat of something shiny and grey—frost, maybe—and it looked awful big and empty.

  Couldn’t say, really, how it made me feel, but it wasn’t good. I knew I didn’t have time to squat there and look at him, but I just didn’t feel like I could do anything else.

  Then I saw it. A short puff of steam come from out his open mouth.

  And then another.

  “Hey!” I said. “You ain’t dead!”

  He did something that wasn’t exactly moving—more like kind of a flicker behind his eyes. Like somebody had turned the lights on in his head, someplace way in the back.

  “Wake up!” I said it sharp, and thought about slapping him, but that frost on his face looked like it could do him some hurt, and then I remembered something else they taught us in the army about what to do for injured folks.

  “Say your name!” I shook his shoulder some. “What’s your name?”

  “Wha—?” Sounded like it came up to his mouth from a long ways off, but it got there.

  “You got hit on the head,” I said it loud and slow, “you knocked your head on the steering wheel. Now say your name. What’s your name?”