“What kind?”
“Dean was in charge. He was going to work something out.”
“What’s the woman’s name?”
“Irina Casak. The kid is Angie. The RFD box is out by the road next to the bridge. It says Casak on it in red paint.”
“What name does she know you by?”
“Good question. Maybe the way you took my guys out, it wasn’t all dumb luck. She knew me as Ben Smith.”
“What kind of car does she have?”
“Last year it was a yellow Volkswagen bug, pretty beat up. Maybe she’s got the same one now. I don’t know. Do you know him by sight?”
“From a publicity still. I wouldn’t forget the eyelashes.”
“So what we got now, McGee, I take you there and we have to figure out some way you get a look at him without stampeding him. You’re satisfied, we come back and you loan me the other ten and I give you the name you can sell him to. You’ll have to work out your own arrangements to keep from getting screwed on the payoff. Done right, you’ll end up smelling like roses.”
So we went to take a look. It took an hour and forty minutes to get there, first south and then west. A lonely road on the edge of the Glades. Lumpy asphalt running string-straight through wetlands past wooded hammocks where the white birds sat on bare trees like Christmas doodads, thinking white bird thoughts.
He told me when to start slowing. We cruised past the bridge and the mailbox at a sedate thirty-five. I saw a yellow beetle pulled halfway into the carport on the left side of the frame house. The house was gray with green trim, and I had a glimpse of a broken rocking chair on the shallow porch, bed springs in the side yard, a swing made of a tire.
“Same car as before, parked in front of his,” Cappy said.
Two miles down the road I found a shell road off to the right. It went about fifty feet before it went underwater. I pulled in and turned off the motor. I rolled my window down and heard ten billion bugs saying it was a nice warm day.
“We can’t risk going by more than one more time,” I said. “I didn’t know there’s no neighbors at all. Who would have a reason for stopping there?”
“Mailman, meter reader. Look, maybe the easy thing to do is you take my word he’s in there, and sell him.”
It was momentarily tempting. The shabby house in the swampy setting had an ominous look. And I didn’t want to sell Ruffi to the people who would take him out too quickly. I wanted to sell him to the law, for ten cents’ worth of satisfaction. I wanted to untie the knot in my necktie. I wanted Ruffi to make some ineffectual attempts to maintain his ego and his vanity in jail.
We had passed the supermarket and shopping plaza ten miles back, the other side of a village. So I headed back there as soon as I found out Cappy could remember Irina Casak’s phone number.
The plaza was anchored by a big Kmart. As I sat brooding in the car, Cappy began to get impatient with me. “What’s going on?”
“Deep thought. She have television?”
“Little old black-and-white RCA.”
When I told him the plan, he didn’t like it at all. The second time around he thought better of it. The third time I told him, he made minor changes. I would turn around after I came across the bridge and park heading out, and I would leave the Buick keys in the ignition. He assured me before I phoned her that there was just the one telephone.
“Hello?” she said, her voice soft and hesitant.
“Irina, this is a friend of Ben Smith. I want to help you. Is the man there?”
“Yes.”
“Can he hear you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You tell him you ordered a color TV from Kmart and it has just come in and they are coming out to deliver it in an hour.”
“But I …”
“You ordered it two months ago. I’m bringing it out.”
I heard a man’s voice in the background. “What’s going on.”
She turned to him and said, “The Kmart is sending out my new color TV.”
“Tell them you don’t want it.”
“But I ordered it …”
He came on the line. “She changed her mind.”
“It’s all paid for, Mr. Casak. I’m the manager of the television and electronics department here at Kmart and I have to come out that way on personal business and I thought I could kill two birds with one stone instead of having Mrs. Casak come in here to get it. It’s our best table model, guaranteed parts and labor for six months. A really beautiful reception even in fringe areas like you have out there.”
“Well … okay. Bring it out. Leave it on the front porch.”
I had counted on boredom to sway him. He was used to a wider world. I didn’t know what his plans were, but I imagined he wanted to stay right there until the trail was cold, and then go whizzing away in his little white car.
I took back the cash from Cappy to buy the set, $439 plus tax or $460.95 with tax. The clerk gave me a cash receipt form and a claim slip to present at Customer Services near the loading dock. Cappy grumbled about giving up the money. He said there was no way I was going to get into the house.
I found a place to pull off the road on the way back. The big cardboard carton was in the Buick trunk. An inch bigger and the trunk wouldn’t have closed. I opened the carton and got the set out, then took it out of the clear plastic that sheathed it. I put Cappy’s flat little .32 automatic in the plastic sack where it would be close to my right hand when I reached down into the carton and lifted the set out, with the screen facing away from me. Cappy didn’t like that part either. I had made certain there was a full clip and the safety was off. I had fired once into the woods to see how it felt. It had a nasty, flat, cracking sound. He said it was a spare, all he could pick up when he left in a hurry, and he didn’t like it either. He said it was Czech, and badly made.
I set off again with Cappy on the floor in back. I rumbled over the private plank bridge, turned around in the yard and parked with the front wheels inches from the bridge. I got out, whistling, and walked around to the trunk and opened it. Whistling is disarming. It can’t be done with a dry mouth. I had to gnaw at the inside of my cheek to get enough spit to whistle.
I lifted the carton out and carried it to the porch, put it down beside the front door and knocked. I knocked again and again. “Oh, Mrs. Casak! Mrs. Casak?” I called, and thumped the door.
“Go away!” yelled Ruffino Marino, Junior.
“She has to sign the delivery slip.”
“Sign it yourself, dummy!”
“But I can’t do that. Mrs. Casak has to sign.”
The door opened just enough for her to slip out. “Just sign right here,” I said cheerfully, putting the cash receipts on the carton and handing her a ballpoint. I pocketed the receipt and dipped and lifted the set in its plastic sack out of the carton. “Will you get the manual and guarantee out of the carton, please, Mrs. Casak? Thank you. Now we have to make sure there’s nothing wrong with the set. It wasn’t checked at the store. It’s better to check them out at the customer’s home. Open up, please.”
She was terrified. She was shaking. But she turned the knob and pushed the door open. I carried the set in. I caught a glimpse of Ruffi in the doorway to the kitchen. “You dumb bitch!” he yelled as he moved back out of sight. I had seen only that his hair was tousled and he had blue beard shadow on his jaws. Up until that instant I hadn’t been certain Cappy was pulling some kind of elaborate scam.
I ignored him. I had her move the black-and-white set off the low table it was on. I put the new set on the floor, reached down into the plastic bag and lifted the set out, with my fingertips holding the automatic pistol against the underside of the set. I put the set so far to the front of the low table I was able to ease the weapon out from under it and leave it on a couple of inches of table behind the color set.
Chatting merrily about what a good set it was, I plugged it in and I took the aerial leads off the black-and-white set and fastened them to t
he new one. When I turned it on I got a splendid picture on Channel 5, and I quickly jiggered one of the back side controls until I started the picture rolling slowly. And then, of course, I was very concerned.
“I can’t imagine why this is happening, Mrs. Casak. I’m very sorry about this. I don’t understand it.”
She stood near me, breathing through her open mouth, almost panting with nervousness. Her breath was sour. She was a flat-faced pallid woman with a wide flat nose and so much dark discoloration around her eyes she made me think of a raccoon. The cotton dress, sweaty, revealed a ripe, big-breasted, serviceable body. Her face was twisted with alarm. Her fists were clenched.
So I couldn’t depend on her to play her part in the original scenario. I fixed the horizontal hold and got the good picture back. I motioned her to back away from me. I yelled, “Mr. Casak! Hey, Mr. Casak. Will you please come see if these color values are okay? Mr. Casak!”
He had to know I had seen him in the kitchen doorway. And he had to know that if I had recognized him, I probably wouldn’t be hollering for him.
He came into the living room, and glanced at the screen. “It’s okay, dummy. Get the hell out!”
I said, “I can make an adjustment in the back here to give it slightly less vivid color values.”
As my right hand closed on the grip of the pistol, I sensed movement out the corner of my eye and knew before I turned that he was too close.
Nineteen
When I turned he was on the inside, clubbing my wrist away with a sharp and powerful swing of his left forearm. Before I could bring it back, he dropped away and kicked me on the point of the right elbow. Red-hot wires ran up into my shoulder and down to my fingertips, and the arm went slack, half numbed. The gun fell and skidded across the frayed grass rug. When he pounced toward it, bending to pick it up, I took one long stride and drop-kicked him in the stomach, lifting him clear of the floor.
Instead of quieting him, it galvanized him. He started bounding around like a big rubber ball, yelling sounds without words. I was in a small room with a crazy person. In hospital wards and precinct stations it takes six people to subdue one crazy. Six trained people. He came at me and drove me back against the wall, hit me a good one high on the left side of the head, and I went over, taking a tall cabinet with a glass door with me. When he spun to lunge for the gun, I dived forward and caught an ankle, hugged the foot to my chest and spun with it. He went down and turned with the foot, kicked me on top of the head with the free foot and tore loose. By then I had a glimpse of Irina holding the gun in both hands.
I yelled to her to throw it out the window. They were double-hung windows, the bottom sash up, screening across the bottom. As he reached for her she spun and flicked it through both layers of glass, out past the porch and into the dirt yard.
Roaring, he came back at me, swinging good punches. I could lift the numbed arm. I took the blows on my forearms and upper arms, protecting my head. It was like being hit with round rocks. When he saw what was happening, he came right down through the middle with an overhand right that hit the shelf of my jaw and knocked my mouth wide. My knees went loose and white rockets sailed behind my eyes. I bicycled backward and only the wall kept me from going down. I hit it hard enough to shake the house. Just as my head was beginning to clear I saw him coming at me again, and this time he launched himself into the air in some kind of strange scissor kick, coming at me feet first. I slid sideways along the wall, and with my good left arm operating well, I snatched at the heel of the lower of the two feet and whipped it as high as I could. The first thing that hit the floor was the back of his head. He rolled slowly up onto his hands and knees, shaking his head. Once again the dropkick. He came down on his back, rolled up, and as he came halfway up, I chopped him hard with the edge of my left hand, a diagonal blow just under the ear. He melted down onto the floor, eyes unfocused. And then he began to climb back to his feet, in slow motion. He was like some mythical monster that can’t be killed, blinking slowly, like a lizard.
As I was reaching to chop at him again, Cappy pushed by me, and with a wide swing laid the flat side of the automatic against the side of Ruffi’s curly head. It made a crisp, sickening sound. Ruffi lay down so hard his head bounced. There was a nearby scream and a plump young girl came running in to drop to her knees beside him. She had a fatty face, long straight brown hair, lipstick, mascara, little wide-apart breasts the size of baking-powder biscuits under a tight pink T-shirt. She wore short white shorts. “You kilt him!” she sobbed. “You shits kilt him!”
“Shut up, Angie,” said her mother in a tired voice.
“Don’t get too close to him,” I told Cappy. “He’ll play possum.”
“Not for a while, he won’t.”
“Something to tie him up with, Mrs. Casak?”
She took me into the kitchen and opened a large low drawer. It was full of odds and ends of string, tape, rope, chain, screwdrivers. As I was selecting some rope, I noticed two little tubes of Miracle Glue, still in the store pack that can only be opened by gorillas. It would be easier and quicker.
I took the Miracle Glue into the living room. I nipped the tip off one tube and divided it evenly between the palms of his slack hands. Then I pulled his shirt high, crossed his arms and pressed the hands against the sides of his torso, against the hairless skin just above belt level. I rubbed them around a little bit, then pressed them hard against his body. In a few moments when I released his hands, they stayed right there. I used the second tube on the inside of one thigh, after pulling his shorts high, spreading it from just above the knee to halfway to the groin. I pressed the thighs together and in a few moments they clung.
He coughed and rolled his head from side to side and then opened his eyes.
When he couldn’t move his hands or his upper legs he frowned and muttered, “What’s going on?”
“Miracle Glue has a hundred household uses,” I told him.
“Hey, Roof,” Cappy said.
He turned his head to see Cappy. “Getting a nice bonus, you freak?”
“Get away from him! Get away!” a child-voice said from the other doorway, which I assumed led to back bedrooms. The voice trembled. She held a Ruger longbarrel .22 target pistol in two fat tan hands.
“Atta girl!” Ruffi said. “At’s my lover girl. Shoot them, sweetie. Shoot ’em all and we’ll go away together and I’ll show you the whole world. Shoot the big bastard first.”
Cappy dropped to his knees and socketed the blued muzzle of his pistol in Ruffi’s left ear. He grinned at the child. “It better be me first, pumpkin. My finger will probably twitch, though, and it’ll come right out that other ear.”
Irina walked slowly toward her daughter, saying in a sing-song voice, “Shoot your mommy, dear. Go ahead, Angie. Shoot your mommy.”
The girl began crying. “But I love him and he loves me.”
Irina reached and took the target pistol out of the girl’s sagging hands. “He doesn’t love you, honey. He can’t love no eleven-year-old fat dumb kid. The only thing he loves is that thing that sticks out of the front of him. He stuck it into me a dozen times by promising if I let him he’d leave you alone. Then he got tired of me. So he started sticking it into you. He’d stick it into a gator if she’d lie quiet. And I know what I’m going to do to him so nobody else has to put up with him.”
She handed me the target pistol and as she did so her back was to Ruffi. She gave me a wink that screwed up the entire left side of her face. Some people can’t move the eyelid alone. It has to be half the face. I knew it meant she wanted to have her way. She went out into the kitchen and came back with poultry shears. They were slightly rusty but they looked able to cut through tough skin and chicken bone.
She knelt beside him and unzipped his shorts and reached in and pulled him out.
“Mom!” the child yelled. “Oh, Mom, no!”
Ruffi raised his head and looked down. “No, Irina, please.” He raised his knees and tried to scooch backward. S
he followed right along, moving sideways on her knees until his head reached the wall and he could move no further. He was circumcised and the glans was so bloodless with his fright it was a pallid lavender. She opened the shears and laid the penis between the blades.
He groaned, his face contorted, ashen.
“Want you to remember this, Ruffi or Roof or whatever they call you. Anytime the rest of your life you get a chance to stick this thing into anybody or anything, you’re going to remember how steel feels and it won’t get hard.”
She gave it a little pinch with the shears for emphasis, then tucked it back into his shorts and zipped him up. She grunted to her feet. Ruffi was trembling, his eyes leaking.
Cappy had put the gun away, probably back into his shoulder bag. He went over and put his arm around Irina. She turned toward him, rested her forehead on his shoulder. “Thanks,” she said in a low voice. “Thanks for helping me one more time.”
He patted her. “We gone sell this cat to the Peruvians. Won’t bother you again.”
In a husky voice, Ruffi said, “Cappy, I can make you a good deal. More than you can peddle me for. I know where you can get to one hundred thousand dollars. I can’t get to it, but you can. It’ll be a better deal for you.”
Cappy said to me, “You think of any reason we have to keep listening to all that shit?”
“None whatsoever.”
Cappy picked up the two tubes of glue, discarded one, squatted next to Ruffi and put one hand on Ruffi’s forehead to hold him still and dribbled the final bit of glue along his lips. He tossed the tube aside and then pinched the lips together, smiling up at me. He did too good a job. He left Ruffi all pooched out, looking as if he were about to kiss or whistle. Ruffi’s eyebrows went high and his cheeks hollowed as he tried to pull his mouth open.
The Lonely Silver Rain Page 18