“There was nothing available in prison?”
“Oh, there was stuff. The jungle juice cons made out of potatoes and raisins, and some good stuff that got smuggled in. But I wasn’t in population, so I didn’t have access. And anyway it seemed like more trouble than it was worth.”
“Well, you’re a free man now. Why don’t you drink to it? I’m driving or I’d join you.”
“Well...”
“Go ahead.”
“Why not?” he said, and uncapped the bottle and held it to the light. “Pretty colour, huh? Well, here’s to freedom, huh?” He took a long drink, shuddered at the burn of the whiskey. “Kicks like a mule,” he said.
“You’re not used to it.”
“I’m not.” He put the cap on the bottle and had a little trouble screwing it back on. “Hitting me hard,” he reported. “Like I was a little kid getting his first taste of it. Whew.”
“You’ll be all right.”
“Spinning,” Billy said, and slumped in his seat.
Paul glanced over at him, looked at him again a minute later. Then, after checking the mirror, he pulled the car off the road and braked to a stop.
Billy was conscious for a little while before he opened his eyes. He tried to get his bearings first. The last thing he remembered was a wave of dizziness after the slug of Scotch hit bottom. He was still sitting upright, but it didn’t feel like a car seat, and he didn’t sense any movement. No, he was in some sort of chair, and he seemed to be tied to it.
That didn’t make any sense. A dream? He’d had lucid dreams before and knew how real they were, how you could be in them and wonder if you were dreaming and convince yourself you weren’t. The way you broke the surface and got out of it was by opening your eyes. You had to force yourself, had to open your real eyes and not just your eyes in the dream, but it could be done.
...There!
He was in a chair, in a room he’d never seen before, looking out a window at a view he’d never seen before. An open field, woods behind it.
He turned his head to the left and saw a wall panelled in knotty cedar. He turned to the right and saw Paul Dandridge, wearing boots and jeans and a plaid flannel shirt and sitting in an easy chair with a book. He said, “Hey!” and Paul lowered the book and looked at him.
“Ah,” Paul said. “You’re awake.”
“What’s going on?”
“What do you think?”
“There was something in the whiskey.”
“There was indeed,” Paul agreed! “You started to stir just as we made the turn off the state road. I gave you a booster shot with a hypodermic needle.”
“I don’t remember.”
“You never felt it. I was afraid for a minute there that I’d given you too much. That would have been ironic, wouldn’t you say? ‘Death by lethal injection.’ The sentence carried out finally after all these years, and you wouldn’t have even known it happened.”
He couldn’t take it in. “Paul,” he said, “for God’s sake, what’s it all about?”
“What’s it about?” Paul considered his response. “It’s about time.”
“Time?”
“It’s the last act of the drama.”
“Where are we?”
“A cabin in the woods. Not the cabin. That would be ironic, wouldn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“If I killed you in the same cabin where you killed Karen.
Ironic, but not really feasible. So this is a different cabin in different woods, but it will have to do.”
“You’re going to kill me?”
“Of course.”
“For God’s sake, why?”
“Because that’s how it ends, Billy. That’s the point of the whole game. That’s how I planned it from the beginning.”
“I can’t believe this.”
“Why is it so hard to believe? We conned each other, Billy. You pretended to repent and I pretended to believe you. You pretended to reform and I pretended to be on your side. Now we can both stop pretending.”
Billy was silent for a moment. Then he said, “I was trying to con you at the beginning.”
“No kidding.”
“There was a point where it turned into something else, but it started out as a scam. It was the only way I could think of to stay alive. You saw through it?”
“Of course.”
“But you pretended to go along with it. Why?”
“Is it that hard to figure out?”
“It doesn’t make any sense. What do you gain by it? My death? If you wanted me dead all you had to do was tear up my letter. The state was all set to kill me.”
“They’d have taken forever,” Paul said bitterly. “Delay after delay, and always the possibility of a reversal and a retrial, always the possibility of a commutation of sentence.”
“There wouldn’t have been a reversal, and it took you working for me to get my sentence commuted. There would have been delays, but there’d already been a few of them before I got around to writing to you. It couldn’t have lasted too many years longer, and it would have added up to a lot less than it has now, with all the time I spent serving life and waiting for the parole board to open the doors. If you’d just let it go, I’d be dead and buried by now.”
“You’ll be dead soon,” Paul told him. “And buried. It won’t be much longer. Your grave’s already dug. I took care of that before I drove to the prison to pick you up.”
“They’ll come after you, Paul. When I don’t show up for my initial appointment with my parole officer-”
“They’ll get in touch, and I’ll tell them we had a drink and shook hands and you went off on your own. It’s not my fault if you decided to skip town and violate the terms of your parole.”
He took a breath. He said, “Paul, don’t do this.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m begging you. I don’t want to die.”
“Ah,” Paul said. “That’s why.”
“What do you mean?”
“If I left it to the state,” he said, “they’d have been killing a dead man. By the time the last appeal was denied and the last request for a stay of execution turned down, you’d have been resigned to the inevitable. They’d strap you to a gurney and give you a shot, and it would be just like going to sleep.”
“That’s what they say.”
“But now you want to live. You adjusted to prison, you made a life for yourself in there, and then you finally made parole, icing on the cake, and now you genuinely want to live. You’ve really got a life now, Billy, and I’m going to take it away from you.”
“You’re serious about this.”
“I’ve never been more serious about anything.”
“You must have been planning this for years.”
“From the very beginning.”
“Jesus, it’s the most thoroughly premeditated crime in the history of the world, isn’t it? Nothing I can do about it either. You’ve got me tied tight and the chair won’t tip over. Is there anything I can say that’ll make you change your mind?”
“Of course not.”
“That’s what I thought.” He sighed. “Get it over with.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Huh?”
“This won’t be what the state hands out,” Paul Dandridge said. “A minute ago you were begging me to let you live. Before it’s over you’ll be begging me to kill you.”
“You’re going to torture me.”
“That’s the idea.”
“In fact you’ve already started, haven’t you? This is the mental part.”
“Very perceptive of you, Billy.”
“For all the good it does me. This is all because of what I did to your sister, isn’t it?”
“Obviously.”
“I didn’t do it, you know. It was another Billy Croydon that killed her, and I can barely remember what he was like.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“Not to you, evi
dently, and you’re the one calling the shots. I’m sure Kierkegaard had something useful to say about this sort of situation, but I’m damned if I can call it to mind. You knew I was conning you, huh? Right from the jump?”
“Of course.”
“I thought it was a pretty good letter I wrote you.”
“It was a masterpiece, Billy. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t easy to see through.”
“So now you dish it out and I take it,” Billy Croydon said, “until you get bored and end it, and I wind up in the grave you’ve already dug for me. And that’s the end of it. I wonder if there’s a way to turn it around.”
“Not a chance.”
“Oh, I know I’m not getting out of here alive, Paul, but there’s more than one way of turning something around. Let’s see now. You know, the letter you got wasn’t the first one I wrote to you.”
“So?”
“The past is always with you, isn’t it? I’m not the same man as the guy who killed your sister, but he’s still there inside somewhere. Just a question of calling him up.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just talking to myself, I guess. I was starting to tell you about that first letter. I never sent it, you know, but I kept it. For the longest time I held on to it and read it whenever I wanted to relive the experience. Then it stopped working, or maybe I stopped wanting to call up the past, but whatever it was I quit reading it. I still held on to it, and then one day I realised I didn’t want to own it anymore. So I tore it up and got rid of it.”
“That’s fascinating.”
“But I read it so many times I bet I can bring it back word for word.” His eyes locked with Paul Dandridge’s, and his lips turned up in the slightest suggestion of a smile. He said, “ ‘Dear Paul, Sitting here in this cell waiting for the day to come when they put a needle in my arm and flush me down God’s own toilet, I found myself thinking about your testimony in court. I remember how you said your sister was a good-hearted girl who spent her short life bringing pleasure to everyone who knew her. According to your testimony, knowing this helped you rejoice in her life at the same time that it made her death so hard to take.
“Well, Paul, in the interest of helping you rejoice some more, I thought I’d tell you just how much pleasure your little sister brought to me. I’ve got to tell you that in all my life I never got more pleasure from anybody. My first look at Karen brought me pleasure, just watching her walk across campus, just looking at those jiggling tits and that tight little ass and imagining the fun I was going to have with them.’ “
“Stop it, Croydon!”
“You don’t want to miss this, Paulie. ‘Then when I had her tied up in the backseat of the car with her mouth taped shut, I have to say she went on being a real source of pleasure. Just looking at her in the rearview mirror was enjoyable, and from time to time I would stop the car and lean into the back to run my hands over her body. I don’t think she liked it much, but I enjoyed it enough for the both of us.’”
“You’re a son of a bitch.”
“And you’re an asshole. You should have let the state put me out of everybody’s misery. Failing that, you should have let go of the hate and sent the new William Croydon off to rejoin society. There’s a lot more to the letter, and I remember it perfectly.” He tilted his head, resumed quoting from memory. “‘Tell me something, Paul. Did you ever fool around with Karen yourself? I bet you did. I can picture her when she was maybe eleven, twelve years old, with her little titties just beginning to bud out, and you’d have been seventeen or eighteen yourself, so how could you stay away from her? She’s sleeping and you walk into her room and sit on the edge of her bed.’” He grinned. “I always liked that part. And there’s lots more. You enjoying your revenge, Paulie? Is it as sweet as they say it is?”
<
* * * *
1999
JAMES W. HALL
* * *
CRACK
James W. Hall was born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, but has lived in Florida most of his adult life. He received a BA in literature in 1969 from Florida Presbyterian College (now Eckerd College), an MA in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University (1970), and a PhD in literature from the University of Utah (1977). A full professor, he has taught literature and creative writing at Florida International University for more than three decades.
His writing career began with four books of poetry and several short stories in such literary journals as Georgia Review and Kenyon Review before he turned to the mystery genre with Under Cover of Daylight (1986), which introduced the character Thorn. Thorn, a cranky middle-aged loner who earns a modest living tying fishing flies, finds himself unexpectedly involved in mysteries when he’d rather be left alone to fish, but he cannot turn his back on friends, relatives, and neighbors who need his help. He is reminiscent of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee, but without the charm. He has appeared in ten novels, one of which, Blackwater Sound (2002), won the Shamus Award for Best PI Novel from the Private Eye Writers of America. The authors writing, both in the Thorn series and in his six nonseries novels, is clearly influenced by the hard-boiled style of Ernest Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett, and Ross Macdonald. Most of his books are set in Florida and often involve serious issues such as illegal animal smuggling and fish farming, but Thorn (and Hall) never gets on a soapbox.
“Crack” was first published in the anthology Murder and Obsession (New York: Mysterious Press, 1999); it was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award by the Mystery Writers of America and was selected for the 2000 edition of The Best American Mystery Stories.
~ * ~
W
hen I first saw the slit of light coming through the wall, I halted abruptly on the stairway, and instantly my heart began to thrash with a giddy blend of dread and craving.
At the time, I was living in Spain, a section named Puerto Viejo, or the Old Port, in the small village of Algorta just outside the industrial city of Bilbao. It was a filthy town, a dirty region, with a taste in the air of old pennies and a patina of grime dulling every bright surface. The sunlight strained through perpetual clouds that had the density and monotonous luster of lead. It was to have been my year of flamenco y sol, but instead I was picked to be the Fulbright fellow of a dour Jesuit university in Bilbao on the northern coast where the umbrellas were pocked by ceaseless acid rain and the customary dress was black—shawls, dresses, berets, raincoats, shirts, and trousers. It was as if the entire Basque nation was in perpetual mourning.
The night I first saw the light I was drunk. All afternoon I had been swilling Rioja on the balcony overlooking the harbor, celebrating the first sunny day in a month. It was October and despite the brightness and clarity of the light, my wife had been darkly unhappy all day, even unhappier than usual. At nine o’clock she was already in bed paging aimlessly through month-old magazines and sipping her sherry. I finished with the dishes and double-checked all the locks and began to stumble up the stairs of our 250-year-old stone house that only a few weeks before our arrival in Spain had been subdivided into three apartments.
I was midway up the stairs to the second floor when I saw the slim line of the light shining through a chink in the new mortar. There was no debate, not even a millisecond of equivocation about the propriety of my actions. In most matters I considered myself a scrupulously moral man. I had always been one who could be trusted with other people’s money or their most damning secrets. But like so many of my fellow puritans I long ago had discovered that when it came to certain libidinous temptations I was all too easily swept off my safe moorings into the raging currents of erotic gluttony.
I immediately pressed my eye to the crack.
It took me a moment to get my bearings, to find the focus. And when I did, my knees softened and my breath deserted me. The view was beyond anything I might have hoped for. The small slit provided a full panorama of my neighbors’ second story. At knee-high level I could see their master bathroom and a few feet to the le
ft their king-size brass bed.
That first night the young daughter was in the bathroom with the door swung open. If the lights had been off in their apartment or the bathroom door had been closed I might never have given the peephole another look. But that girl was standing before the full-length mirror and she was lifting her fifteen-year-old breasts that had already developed quite satisfactorily, lifting them both at once and reshaping them with her hands to meet some standard that only she could see. After a while she released them from her grip, then lifted them on her flat palms as though offering them to her image in the mirror. They were beautiful breasts, with small nipples that protruded nearly an inch from the aureole, and she handled them beautifully, in a fashion that was far more mature and knowing than one would expect from any ordinary fifteen-year-old.
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