Authors: Lawrence Block
“Three weeks,” Dave said.
“You picked a good spot. We been having good weather, cooler now than it was, with sun just about every day. A little rain the week before last, but not too much.”
“Have you been here long, Mr. Carroll?” Jill asked.
“Joe. Yeah, most of the summer. I’m just here by myself. You can go crazy for somebody to talk to. You kids been married long?”
“Not too long,” Dave said.
“Any kids?”
“Not yet.”
Carroll looked off at the lake. “I never got married. Almost, once, but I didn’t. I’ll tell you the truth, I never missed it. Except for kids. Sometimes I miss not having kids.” He finished his beer, held the can in one hand and looked at it. “But what with business and all, you know, a man stays pretty busy.”
“You’re in business.”
“Construction.” He waved a hand in the general direction of the lake. “Out on Long Island, Nassau County, the developments. We built oh, a whole lot of those houses.”
“Isn’t this your busy season?”
He laughed shortly. “Oh, I’m out of it now, for the time being.”
“Retired?”
“You could call it that” Carroll smiled as if at a private joke. “I may relocate,” he said. “I might pull up stakes, find a better territory.”
They made small talk. Baseball, the weather, the woman who managed the lodge. Carroll said she was a widow, childless. Her husband had died five or six years back, and she was running the place on her own and making a fairly good thing of it. He said she was a minor-league alcoholic, never blind drunk but never quite sober. “The hell,” he said, “what else has she got, huh?”
He told them about a steak house down the road where the food wasn’t bad. “Listen,” he said, “you get a chance, drop over to my place. We’ll sit around a little.”
“Well—”
“There’s more beer, I got a hot plate for coffee. You know gin rummy? We could play a few hands and pass the time.”
They ate at the steak house that Carroll recommended. It was just outside of Pomquit. The steaks were thick, the service fast, and the place had the atmosphere of a Colonial tavern, authentic without being intrusive. There was an old copper kettle hanging from a hook on one wall, and Jill wanted it. Dave tried to buy it but the manager said it wasn’t for sale. They stood outside for a few minutes after dinner and looked up at the moon. It was just a little less than full.
“Honeymoon,” she said. “Keep a-shining in June. But it’s September, isn’t it?”
“The drunken old woman said it’s better this way. You don’t want it too hot on a honeymoon.”
“Oh, no?”
“Now who’s the lecher?”
“I’m shameless,” she said. “Let’s go back to the cabin. I think I love you, Mr. Wade.”
On the slow ride home she said, “I feel sorry for him.”
“Who, Carroll?”
“Yes. He’s so lonely it’s sad. Why would he pick a spot like this to come to all alone?”
“Well, he said the fishing—”
“But all alone? There are livelier spots where the fishing must be just as good as it is here.”
“Listen, he just sold his business. Maybe he’s got problems.”
“He should have gotten married,” she said. She rolled down her window, let her arm hang out, tapped against the side of the Ford with her long fingernails. “Everybody should be married. Maybe he’ll marry the drunken old woman and she won’t drink any more and they can manage the lodge together.”
“Or tear it down and build up a tract of ugly little split-levels.”
“Either way,” she said. “Everybody should be married. Married is fun.”
“You’re incorrigible,” he said.
“I love you.”
He almost missed the turnoff for the lodge. He cut the wheel sharply to the left and the Ford moved onto the private road. He drove past the lodge itself and followed the path back to the cabin. The lights were on in Joe Carroll’s cabin. She said, “Mr. Carroll wanted us to stop in for coffee.”
“Some other time,” he said.
He parked the car and they walked slowly together up the steps to the cabin. He unlocked the door, turned on the light. They went inside and he closed the door and turned the bolt. She looked at him and he kissed her and she said, “Oh, God.” He turned off the light. The room was not completely dark. A little light came in, from the moon on one side, from Carroll’s cabin on the other.
He held her and she threw her arms around his neck and kissed him. She was a tall girl, a soft and warm girl. His. He found the zipper of her dress and opened it partway and rubbed her back with his fingers.
Outside, a car drew up slowly. The motor died and the car coasted to a stop.
She stiffened. “There’s somebody coming,” she said.
“Not here.”
“I heard a car—”
“Probably some friends of Carroll’s.”
“I hope it’s not some friends of ours,” she said, her voice almost savage. “I hope this isn’t some idiot’s idea of a joke.”
“They wouldn’t do that.”
“I just hope not.”
He let go of her. “Maybe I’d better check,” he said.
The bolt on the door was stuck. He wrestled it open, turned the doorknob, opened the door, and stepped outside onto the porch. Jill followed him, stood at his side. The car, empty now, was parked in front of their cabin by the side of the Ford. It was a big car, a Buick or an Olds. It was dark, and he couldn’t be sure of the color in the half-light. Maybe black, maybe maroon or dark green. The two men who had been in the car were walking toward Carroll’s cabin. They were short men and they wore hats and dark suits.
He turned to her. “See? Friends of Joe’s.”
“Then why didn’t they park at his cabin?” He looked at her. “They drove right past his cabin,” she said, “and they parked here, and now they’re walking back. Why?”
“What’s the difference?”
He took her arm and started to lead her inside again. But she shrugged and stayed where she was. “Just a minute,” she said.
“What’s the matter?”
“I don’t know. Wait a minute, Dave.”
They waited and watched. Carroll’s cabin was thirty or forty yards from theirs. The men covered the distance without making any noise. One of Carroll’s porch steps creaked, and just after the creak they could hear movement inside the cabin. The men did not knock. One of them yanked the door open and the other sprang inside. The man on the porch had something in his hand, something that light glinted off, as though it were metallic.
Sounds came from the cabin, sounds that were hard to make out. Then Joe Carroll walked out of the cabin and the man who had remained outside said something to him in a low voice. They could see what he had in his hand now. It was a gun. The other man came out behind Carroll and he was holding a gun in Carroll’s back.
They stayed on the porch and they stayed quiet. It wasn’t real—that was all he could think, that it was not real, that it was a play or a movie and not something happening before them.
They heard Carroll’s voice, crystal clear in the still night air. “I’ll make it good,” he said. “I swear to God I’ll make it good. You tell Lublin I’ll make it good, Jesus, just tell him.”
The man behind him, the one jabbing him in the back with the gun, began to laugh quietly. It was unpleasant laughter.
“Oh, sweet Jesus,” Carroll said. His face was awful. “Listen, please, just a chance, just give me a chance—”
“Crawl,” the man in front said.
“What do you want me to—”
“Get down on your knees and beg, you bastard.”
Carroll sank to his knees. There were fallen leaves on the ground, and pine needles. He was saying something over and over again in a weak voice but they couldn’t quite make it out.
The man in front stepped forward and put the muzzle of his gun against Carroll’s head. Carroll started to whine. The man shot him in the center of the forehead and he shook from the blow and pitched forward on his face. The other man moved in and shot Carroll four times through the back of his head.
Jill screamed.
It wasn’t much of a scream. It broke off in no time at all, and it was neither very loud nor very high-pitched. But the two men in the dark suits heard it. They heard it and they looked up at the porch of the Wade cabin.
And came forward.
They stood, the four of them, in Carroll’s cabin. The small room was as neat as if no one had ever lived in it. There was a hot plate on an oak table, with a large jar of Yuban instant coffee beside it and a half-finished cup of coffee off to one side. The bed was neatly made.
The taller of the two men was called Lee. They knew this, but they did not know whether it was his first name or his last name. He was the one who had made Carroll crawl, the one who had killed him with the first shot in the forehead. Lee had large brown eyes and thick black eyebrows. There were three or four thin scars across the bridge of his nose. His mouth was a thin line, the lips pale. He was holding a gun on them now while the other man, whose name they had not heard yet, was systematically going through Carroll’s dresser drawers, taking everything out piece by piece, throwing everything on the floor.
“Nothing,” he said finally. “Just what was in the wallet.”
Lee didn’t say anything. The shorter man turned around and nodded toward Dave and Jill. He was heavier than Lee, with a thick neck and a nose that had been broken and imperfectly reset. He looked as though he might have played guard or tackle on some college’s junior varsity.
Now he said, “What about them?”
“They didn’t see a thing. They aren’t going to talk.”
“What if they do?”
“So? They don’t know a thing.”
“We won’t make any trouble,” Dave said. His voice sounded odd to him, as though someone else were pulling strings that moved his lips, as though someone else were talking for him.
They didn’t seem to have heard him. Lee said, “If they talk, it doesn’t matter. They talk to some hick cop and he writes it all down and everybody forgets it. They put it in some drawer.”
“We could make sure.”
“Just let us alone,” Dave said. Jill was next to him, breathing heavily. He looked at the gun in Lee’s hand and wondered whether they were going to die, now, in this cabin. “Just let us live,” he said.
“We kill ’em,” Lee said, “it makes too much stink. Him out there, that’s one thing, but you kill a couple of kids—”
“Leave ’em alone then?”
“Yeah.”
“Just like that?”
“I don’t like killing nobody without I get paid for it,” Lee said. “I don’t like throwing any in for free.”
The man with the broken nose nodded. He said, “The broad.”
“What about her?”
“She’s nice. Stacked.”
Dave said, “Now listen—”
They ignored him. “You want her?” “Why not?”
The man called Lee smiled brutally. He stepped up to Jill and stuck the gun into her chest just below and between her breasts. “How about that,” he said. “You don’t mind a little screwing just to keep you alive, now, do you?”
Dave stepped out and swung at him. He threw a left, hard, not thinking, just reacting. The man called Lee stepped back and let the punch go over his shoulder. He reversed the gun in his hand and laid the side of the gun butt across Dave’s forehead. Dave took one more little step, a half-step, really, and fell to the floor.
His head was spinning. He got to one knee. The shorter man was pushing Jill toward Carroll’s bed. She was crying hysterically but was not fighting very hard. There was the sound of cloth ripping, Jill’s shrill scream above the tearing of the dress. He pushed himself up and rushed toward the bed, and Lee stuck out a foot and tripped him. He went sprawling. Lee stepped in close and kicked him in the side of the rib cage. He moaned and fell flat on his face.
“You better take it easy,” Lee said.
He got up again. He stood, wavering, and Lee set the gun down on the table. He moved as if he had all the time in the world. Dave stood there, staring dead ahead, and Lee moved in front of him and hit him in the pit of the stomach. He doubled over but he didn’t go down. Lee waited, and he straightened up, and Lee hit him twice in the chest and once in the stomach. This time he went down again. He tried to get up but he couldn’t. It was as though someone had cut all his tendons. He was awake, he knew what was happening, he just couldn’t move.
Jill had stopped crying. The shorter man finished with her and came over to them. He asked Lee whether Dave had tried to be a hero. Lee didn’t say anything. Then the shorter man said, “She was cherry. You believe that?” And he said it as though he had not known virgins still existed.
Lee said, “She ain’t now.” And took off his jacket and went to take the shorter man’s place with Jill.
She didn’t scream. She lay there, motionless, and Dave thought that they must have killed her. This time his legs worked, this time he got up. The shorter man hit him with the gun and pain split his skull in half. He went down. The world turned gray, and the gray darkened quickly to black.