The Walkaway

by Scott Phillips

  “It’s my house. If you don’t believe me you can check with the registrar of deeds.”

  “Fuck the registrar of deeds. You know goddamn well that ain’t your house anymore.”

  “Listen, shithead,” Tommy said. “Things have changed since you left town. Fuck with Sally Ogden and you’re fucking with plenty of other people you shouldn’t be fucking with.”

  “She’s my wife.”

  “The fuck she is. You took off on her years ago.”

  “I’m telling you we never got divorced.”

  “And I’m telling you I don’t give a shit if you’re divorced or not. You stay the hell away from her and her house.”

  We were heading out toward the city limits now. The businesses were few and far between, the houses even scarcer. This was land somebody ought to gobble up and develop, I thought idly. If I didn’t have an aversion to the place I might have looked into it myself.

  “Turn up there at the sign,” Tommy said. “Rory, you got the key?”

  There was a big metal sign to my left:

  FARRIS AUTOMOBILE SALVAGE YARD

  I turned in and Rory got out and unlocked the gate, pulled it open, and waved me in. I pulled ahead thirty feet or so, well away from Rory as he padlocked the gate back up. There were two Quonset huts, one straight ahead and one to my left, surrounded by a half-dozen or so auto bodies and a sea of cracked engine blocks; skeletal, rusted chassis; and stacks of bald tires, all of it ghostly yellow under the dim security lights. Leaning against one of the Quonset huts I recognized the frame of an Indian motorcycle like one I had owned briefly before the war, cannibalized for parts.

  “Now we’re going to explain a few things to you about civilian life,” Tommy said. I watched Rory in the rearview finishing up with the gate and turning to walk back to the car. “Get out.”

  “Now hold on a second, Officer. I have a proposition for you.”

  “Don’t tell me to hold on a second, you piece of crap. You’re no sergeant here, you’re just a piece of shit civilian far as I’m concerned. Now get out the car like I fuckin’ told you to.”

  “Take a look inside the envelope on the floor, there.”

  Behind me I heard tearing paper, followed by Tommy taking in a deep breath. “Holy shit,” he said. “There must be a couple grand in here.”

  I didn’t begrudge them the beating I was about to receive, but I by God was not about to let them take that money. It was mine; my wife earned it. Rory was six or seven feet behind the car, and with Tommy hypnotized at the sight of all that green I put the Plymouth into reverse and floored it. It was like hitting a moose; he thumped and fell backward, and I shifted into first, punched the gas, and dove out.

  I hit the dirt painfully hard, scraping my face and palms, and scrambled for the shadows. The Plymouth rolled forward faster than I’d expected and crashed into the farther of the two Quonset huts. I could hear Tommy cursing and trying to get out from the backseat, and I was goddamned glad I’d bought the two-door instead of the four.

  In a row next to the nearer of the huts were lengths of iron rebar sticking out of coffee cans filled with concrete. I grabbed a piece of rebar with both hands and ran to where Rory sat holding his head. His uniform cap lay next to him on the dust.

  “Fuck,” Rory said, drawing the word out into two syllables, the second an octave and a half higher than the first. I felt the first few drops of rain on my face, and in the distance I heard the gentle rumbling of thunder as I lifted the coffee can and smashed it into Rory’s skull. The rebar made a lousy handle and I lost control of it at the last second, just before the wet, cracking sound of the impact of the concrete and tin against his skull. It wrenched out of my hands and spun off to the side as he fell onto his side with a pathetic wheeze. I heard no corresponding intake of breath but I wasn’t able to give it the attention I would have liked.

  “You stand real fucking still, you sack of shit,” Tommy yelled, his revolver pointed right at my head. He was thirty-five, maybe forty feet away, and I dropped down to Rory’s level to make us a single target.

  As Tommy advanced I took a handkerchief from my shirt pocket, wrapped it around my hand, and took Rory’s service revolver. Behind me was a big galvanized trash can; I dove behind it and a shot went off, plowing right through the trash can, and from the ground I aimed carefully and fired.

  Rory’s gun was bigger than I was used to; the power of the report and the kick threw me off a little, but the smell of burnt powder was familiar and oddly comforting, mingling delicately with the slightly electrical odor of the light rain prickling the dusty ground. Tommy yelped in pain and surprise and fired in my general direction, a wild one this time. He sank to his knees but he still held the revolver and I had no way of knowing where I’d hit him or how badly, so I fired again, aiming square at his midsection. This time he screamed.

  “Jesus . . . Jesus . . . I’m gutshot . . . Jesus, Jesus, Jesus . . . in the office there’s a phone, call an ambulance, Jesus. . . .” The gun was on the ground now and I sauntered over to him.

  “You must take me for a fucking moron,” I said, kicking the revolver out of his reach, wincing at the appalling stench of shit and blood that began to emanate from his open gut.

  Just a few feet away I examined the front end of the stalled Plymouth. Not pretty, but not too badly damaged. I hadn’t busted the radiator, I didn’t think, since there was no steam escaping. I got in, started her up on the first try and backed up. Tommy was still whimpering and pleading for an ambulance when I passed by him, but Rory was already dead when I stopped to get the key to the padlock. I put the bloodied rebar and coffee can into the trunk and headed back into town. With any luck the junkyard would be closed until Monday.

  The rain was coming down good by the time I got back to the Ogden residence. I laughed at the forlorn sight of the squad car parked down the street like a faithful horse waiting for its dead rider to return. Inside the house I swiped a roll of stamps from Sally’s desk and addressed the manila envelope to DeWayne Atwell in care of general delivery in Tucson, Arizona; it was an alias I had papers for but hadn’t used yet. Neither McCowan nor, sadly, my own real name could be safely used any longer, thanks to Tommy and Rory. I stamped the envelopes, going a little over what I thought it would actually come to, though not so much as to attract undue attention, and then drove down to a mailbox in front of Ketteman’s bakery. As soon as I was done with my business here tonight I’d head out for Tucson and wait for the envelopes to arrive. It didn’t add up to what I’d left behind forever in Japan, but it’d be a hell of a grubstake for whatever I ended up doing next.

  It was coming down in sheets by the time I got to Elishah’s. I went inside cautiously; my note was still on the table, the house was dark and I saw no sign that anyone had been there since my departure.

  “Cocksucker!”

  The voice came out of the dark somewhere behind me, harsher and more nasal than usual. By the time I knew it was Beulah she was on my back, her legs wrapped around my hips, raking her nails down my face. I could feel skin peeling off in strips down both cheeks as I stepped backward, and it hurt like a son of a bitch. I spun, trying to knock her off, and finally toppled backward into the kitchen door, smashing her into it. She fell to the floor, rolled away, and rose again, crouching for another attack. In the feeble light from the streetlamp outside I could see her big, flushed, bony face, blood pounding in the temples, those strange little eyes bugging and angry. With her snaggly teeth bared, she looked like something from the Ice Age, not quite human yet. She climbed onto the kitchen table in her stocking feet, and I reached behind me and slipped the knuckles on. As she leapt at me I plunged them straight into her belly, and for just a second my hand was enveloped by cheap rayon and adipose tissue clear up to the wrist; it popped free and she hit the ground.

  I turned on the light, and in the bathroom I checked my face, which was bleeding but not as badly as I’d imagined. I put on some Mercurochrome and cleaned it up, hanging slig
htly out the bathroom door in case she got up again.

  “I don’t like getting ganged up on in roadhouses, Beulah.” She didn’t move. “Elishah’s going to have to go without for a couple days.” When she didn’t answer I flicked the light on and went to where she lay, careful not to get too close.

  Her eyes were half-open and so was her mouth, and a long trail of saliva reached from its corner to the floor. Her face was a shiny purplish red, and touching her carotid with my thumb I detected no pulse. Beulah was dead, and I had to get out of there before Snuffy Smith got home.

  Slinging her over my shoulder I carried her to a door which I correctly assumed led to the basement. I yanked on the chain and the lightbulb came on overhead; I propped Beulah up in a standing position at the top of the stairs with my left hand gripping the back of her neck and my right clenching the material of her dress at the waist. I gave her a good shove, pushing her midsection first. She fell beautifully, smacking her face on the wall with a solid splat as she went down, tumbling violently before finally coming to a rest at the bottom of the stairs with a crack that I took to be vertebrae in her neck breaking. I left the door open a couple of inches; I didn’t think my accidental fall tableau would fool anybody, but you never knew.

  Her purse was on the kitchen counter. There was no cash, just a lot of makeup and keys and facial tissues, a checkbook with a driver’s license stuck inside it. There was also a bottle of Dexedrine, with a prescription label made out to Mrs. Elishah Casper, though the driver’s license and the checks indicated that her name was Beulah Mae Vance.

  I put everything back but the bottle of pep pills, which I left open on the kitchen countertop. I was beginning to think I might get this classified as an accidental death after all. I was ready to go, abandoning my plans for Elishah and consoling myself with the thought that, inadvertently, I had more than gotten even with him.

  Then I heard him coming up the walk. I retreated to the living room as he entered the kitchen and listened to him, mumbling aloud to himself as he read the letter. There was a brief silence, then panic as he ran into the bedroom and started tearing the place up. Thinking he might have an emergency dose stashed somewhere I stepped in and pointed the revolver at his head.

  “Sit still, fuckhead.”

  He looked up at me, more gaunt than the last time I’d seen him, a sheen of perspiration on his face. I hadn’t dealt that much with junkies—narcotics was a concession I’d mostly parceled out to another outfit—but I knew he was in need.

  “Where the hell’s my dose?”

  “Some pimp you are,” I said. “Selling your old lady to support your habit and she ends up running the whole show, parceling out your smack every day like she was feeding a goddamn cocker spaniel.”

  “I ain’t a fuckin’ pimp,” he said.

  “You’re living off Beulah’s tits and ass, which is what I call pimping, whether you’re doing the hard organizational work or not. Where’s your straight job, anyway?”

  “Night shift at Murdock Clothes Cleaners,” he said. “Operate a shirt press.”

  “Couldn’t get work at the plants ’cause you got a record, is that right?”

  He was silent.

  “So what’s that pay, a buck an hour?”

  “Eighty-three cents,” he said.

  “Not enough to cover the rent plus a big, healthy monkey, is it? So every night you send your mule-faced Beulah out to sell that sweet thing she sits on.”

  “Don’t talk about Beulah that way.”

  “Don’t take it so hard. My wife’s a whore, too. In fact, she’s the one’s got your smack. We’re gonna head out to see her. Come on, get up.”

  Passing the kitchen table I grabbed his rig and put it back into its case and handed it to him. “Don’t forget this, you’re going to need it before the night’s over.”

  He looked at me sadly, hoping it was true, but said nothing. He didn’t suspect that the truth was even worse; I wasn’t going to let him come home again at all.

  Elishah did most of the talking as he drove, though he was distracted by the rain and the fact that I wouldn’t let him slow down to allow for it. He’d met Beulah in Detroit early in the war, where he’d ended up working in war production at Ford. In ’43 they’d headed for Wichita, having heard that the money was better, but before VJ Day they both had arrest records for narcotics, and Elishah had spent nine months in jail in ’47. That was when Beulah kicked it, and also when she started working at the Hitching Post. By the time he got out she was making close to what she would have on the assembly line; it was a touching story of stick-to-itiveness and good old American gumption that made me proud I’d fought for my native land.

  We parked by the side of the road and got out. The rain was coming down gently again, and out here it smelled sweet. I left the dead cop’s service revolver in the trunk; it was still loaded and I didn’t intend to hand it to Elishah for his prints until it was empty. I opened the barbed-wire gate and closed it again once we were through.

  In the distance was the cop boyfriend, as I’d expected. He sat on the ridge above the quarry in a bright yellow raincoat and hat, too dumb to get out of the rain, with his arms on his knees and his legs crossed at the ankles, probably brooding over the idea of Sally getting fucked by some drunken hull polisher right below him. If we crossed back into the woods directly behind the cabin we’d stay out of his line of sight until the very second we arrived at the door, but that wasn’t good enough; I wanted him out of the way first.

  “Come on this way.” I motioned for Elishah to follow me to the east end of the ridge. If we could keep quiet enough I intended to kill my third cop of the evening. “And remember, if you start feeling smarter than me: you don’t know where that dope of yours is and I do.”

  Elishah’s eyes were dry and flat like those of a dead trout, but he was listening. He nodded and followed.

  We were getting close to the cop, and I had the .38 out and ready to blow him into the next world when he turned and looked right at me, his round face beaming cretinously under the yellow rain hat.

  “Howdy, Mister McCowan,” he said. It was Carswell, the idiot farmer and would-be pornographer.

  A moment later I felt the barrel of a gun at the base of my skull. “Drop it,” a voice said, and I obeyed. Elishah stood there, smiling faintly and serenely.

  “You’re in a shitload of trouble,” the cop said. He cuffed my right wrist and yanked me to my feet, smashing me across the nose with the barrel of the revolver. I felt warm blood running down my face again as he brought my left arm around a young tree about eight inches in diameter and cuffed it so that I stood facing the trunk. Then he did the same thing to a docile Elishah a few feet away. When he was done he picked up my .38 and handed it to Carswell, who grinned moronically at me.

  “Either one of these sons of bitches so much as looks crossways at you before I get back, shoot their dicks off,” the cop said, and then he went down toward the cabin.

  I called out to him as he walked away. “Am I to assume we’re under arrest, Officer?” He didn’t answer. He had himself a dilemma; he wasn’t there in an official capacity.

  I smiled at Carswell. “Your friend got the wrong idea about us. You want to see those proofs? They’re out in the car.”

  “Proofs?”

  “The pictures I took.”

  “I thought you was shittin’ me, the way you left like that.”

  “I wouldn’t shit you. Those pictures are hot.”

  “How come you bringin’ proofs over this late of a Friday night?” He grinned, proud of himself for figuring that one out.

  “Well, hell, I thought I’d take a look at the whore activity down there,” I said. “Thought maybe I’d get some shots through the windows for you, but then the cop spotted us and went nuts.”

  “How’d you know he’s a cop?”

  “You told me the other day. Or maybe it was Amos Culligan, I don’t know.”

  He looked at me for a long time. “How c
ome you took off the other day?”

  “I ran out of film and I wanted to get to the lab. I thought you and Missy might be a while longer, the way you were going at it. You sure gave it to her good.”

  “Right up her rear. You get some shots of that?”

  “Sure did. Some good ones, too.”

  Lester seemed pleased at that, thinking back on his exploits. “Maybe we can get some more in a couple weeks with Lynn.”

  “You bet,” I said. We heard a car’s engine turn over, followed shortly by another. “So Lester, you got a hacksaw?”

  He looked at the ground, furrowing his brow like he was thinking real hard.

  “No, I ain’t. Not for you.” He walked off, and Elishah managed a low chuckle, despite his pain.

  I made fists so tight I could feel my nails digging into my palms, and that’s when I remembered the nail clippers. They were in my lefthand pants pocket; if I could reach them, I had myself a file.

  19

  Dot sat at the kitchen table in her bathrobe, drinking coffee. Ed Dieterle sat across from her, Tricia to her right.

  “That money came from somewhere. It wasn’t the pensions, and I know you didn’t have much in the way of savings.” Dieterle’s patient manner with her had begun a perceptible shift toward the interrogatory.

  Dot snorted. “Savings all went on the down for this house and that damn RV.”

  “Where’d the rest of it come from?”

  She sat there, looking like she hadn’t heard.

  Dieterle sat back. “Let him die, then.”

  Tricia was shocked, but again Dot’s face was blank and she said nothing.

  “What do you mean let him die?” Tricia asked.

  “He’s been at large what, thirty-five hours? Not many nursing home elopements last that long without ending up bad. He’s in that place for a reason, honey.”

  “But what do you mean let him die? It’s not her fault if they haven’t found him.”

  “It sure is if she knows where he is and won’t say.”

  “Moomaw, is that true?”