How could this be? How could
he
be here?
—What does it look like? said Maurice. While you thought you’d get yourself some goddamn sleep I went to watch our backs. And look what I found. Look what the fuck I found.
Lee worked moisture into his mouth: He doesn’t look like nobody I know. Who is he?
—He’s Peter, said Gilmore.
—Peter.
Gilmore pointed at the name embroidered on Pete’s jacket.
—He didn’t have a wallet on him, said Speedy.
—Peter, said Lee.
He saw Pete’s eyes rolling in their purpled swells. The blood vessels of one cornea had all burst.
—Did he tell you anything? said Speedy.
—No, said Maurice. He doesn’t have anything to say at all. Maybe you should get your torch going.
The eyes rolled.
—He’s nobody I know, said Lee, and they looked at him.
He stepped backwards out of the locker. The other men resumed talking. Lee went across the floor to the tool bag and opened it and dug through it and came out with an eight-pound sledgehammer. He carried it mid-shaft in one hand and he went back into the locker. He shouldered his way between Speedy and Gilmore. He heard his name spoken. He pushed past Maurice and he stood above the kid.
—Lee, said Maurice.
Lee laid the sledgehammer over his shoulder and he leaned down. He tore the strip of tape off the boy’s mouth. He heard him suck in breath. Two of his teeth were missing.
From beside him Lee could see Maurice taking a step backwards. He had the shotgun at his hip and was not quite pointing it and he was looking to Gilmore.
—You’re nobody I know, said Lee.
He straightened up. He put both hands on the shaft of the sledgehammer. The cords in his arms drew tight. Through his gloves he could feel the wood grain in the hickory.
—You’re nobody at all.
Lee brought the sledgehammer down. It moved with all the motion his arms could put to it, with its own weight carrying it. The steel head crashed into the frozen dirt six inches from Pete’s skull. Fragments of earth cascaded into his face. He had his eyes and mouth squeezed shut. When Lee lifted the hammer, a grey dent was left where it had struck.
He turned around.
Speedy’s hands were pressed against the sides of his head. Maurice was pointing the shotgun at Lee but he’d not yet pumped the action. He was looking from Lee to Gilmore and back to Lee. Gilmore himself was unreadable.
Lee went out of the locker. He threw the sledgehammer away from him. It hit the ground and bounced and came to rest. He could hear Gilmore speaking to Maurice:
—… your kind of shit to deal with. You figure out what this little sack of shit thinks he saw. And then you figure out what you want to do with him. The plane will be here in an hour. And nobody says a word, a fucking word, to Arlene.
Gilmore came out of the locker and crossed through the shed. He slowed as he passed Lee and the two of them looked at each other and neither said anything, and then Gilmore went back outside into the gathering daylight.
The locker door was partially ajar but all Lee could see through the opening was Speedy’s back.
T
he business card he’d taken from his wallet was yellowed with age. It showed a cartoon man in coveralls holding an oversized wrench, and behind the man was a woodstove with two white eyes and a smiling row of teeth.
Gunter’s Maintenance & Restoration—All Makes.
There was a phone number and a concession address in Novar. He turned the card over and read a different phone number handwritten on the back. He was in the store, holding the cold receiver of the pay telephone to his mouth.
The man on the other end of the line had not spoken for a long moment.
—Do you understand? said Lee. If I call the bulls and they come with all their lights and sirens and all that shit, then these boys will kill him. If you don’t understand the rest of it then you have to understand that.
—I understand.
—Then …
—Yes. It’s a ways from me. I’ll need twenty minutes.
Lee closed his eyes.
—I’ll see you.
He hung up. He breathed slowly. He walked a lap around the interior of the restaurant. He opened the rusty tool box he’d seen the night before. The box contained wiring tools: a cable ripper, a selection of marrettes, screwdrivers, needle-nose pliers.
On one of the stripped grocery shelves he found an old pack of cigarettes. There was one cigarette in the pack. It was stale and dry and the smoke moved briskly through it when he lit it. He looked back at the telephone.
There was what might have been an office through a door past the round-top fridge. The smell of mouse shit was sharp.
One window in the office was unboarded, and Lee looked out on the white stillness of the property. The rising sun was slanting crosswise through the spruce. He could not see the shed or the campers from here. He opened his wallet again and looked at what little remained. One thing was his parole officer’s card. He balled the card up and threw it in the corner. Wade Larkin hadn’t ever been much use in the first place.
Lee drew on his cigarette.
He came back out of the empty office and went towards the tool box on the table. That was when he heard boots behind him. Maurice was standing in the opening between the rear storeroom and the restaurant. The shotgun was laid over his shoulder.
—What are you doing, Lee?
—I came down here to warm up.
—To warm up. What are you doing with that tool box?
Lee went past him into the rear storeroom. Over his shoulder, he said: The heater in the van is broken.
He took two steps and then he started to run for the back door. Maurice swung the shotgun by the barrel and the butt hit Lee in the back of the head. He pitched hard onto the concrete floor. The tool box crashed open in front of him and the wiring tools and marrettes scattered out.
—What in the fuck, Lee? I told you not to come down here. And why are you running?
Lee’s vision wavered. There was an immense throb pulsing out from where he’d been struck. The cigarette, pressed between his cheek and the floor, was searing his skin. He rolled his head off it. He got himself up onto his hands and knees and put his fingers down over a flathead screwdriver that had spilled from the tool box. Maurice stood beside him. He put the shotgun to Lee’s ear.
Maurice started to say something but Lee snapped the screwdriver into Maurice’s thigh and brought it back out. He surged up off the floor and into Maurice and both men scrambled backwards into the restaurant, coupled absurdly, grunting, seeking out
soft parts with knees and thumbs. Maurice still had hold of the shotgun in one hand but he hadn’t pumped it yet and his free hand was occupied with trying to crush Lee’s windpipe or drive his fingers into Lee’s eyes. Lee thrashed his head about. He pulled at any part he could get hold of. Maurice’s weight was enormous. He guided them by sheer size, both bodies colliding into tables and shelves.
Then Maurice backed Lee into the range and pressed his whole weight into him. He drove his knee up into Lee’s thigh and wrapped his hand around Lee’s throat and squeezed. But now they were fixed in one place. Lee rammed the screwdriver into Maurice’s neck, as many times as he could, as quickly as he could. Maurice’s fingers released Lee’s windpipe, and the big man moved backwards and found the refrigerator and sat down on the floor against it. He had his hand around his own neck now and he looked surprised. Doubtful. He was still holding the shotgun in his other hand.
Blood came out of Maurice’s mouth and between his fingers. It was all over his shirt. Lee staggered upright from the range, gagging air back into his lungs. His hand was slippery with blood.
Maurice said a nonsense sound.
Lee dropped the screwdriver and dug under the counter until he found a threadbare tea towel. He wiped the blood from his hand. He fingered the swelling on the back of his head. Then he went over to Maurice and pulled the barrel of the shotgun. Maurice held on. Lee planted his boot on Maurice’s arm and pushed, still holding the barrel, until the shotgun came free.
Maurice said the nonsense sound again. It might have been the word
you.
There was more blood than Lee could have believed possible. It was on the refrigerator and it was pooling on the floor.
Lee pumped the shotgun halfway, checking the gate to see the cartridge in the chamber, and then he finished the pump and thumbed on the safety. He knelt down a few feet in front of Maurice and leaned on the shotgun and continued to get his
breath back. Lee watched until Maurice had stopped moving and all the sight had gone from his eyes. The blood still trickled out of him.
Lee got up. His head felt like a cracked bell and his left eye was blurred where Maurice had pressed it. His windpipe was burning. He went through the storeroom and looked out through the open door, across the rise of snow-covered property, to the shed and the van and the campers. Nothing moved.
He went out. There were tracks in the snow. His tracks coming, Maurice’s tracks coming. Lee climbed the rise and turned the shotgun out in front of him. The treeline beyond the shed was a dark sketch between earth and sky.
He came first to the prow of the Airstream where the windows were shuttered. He could see the man-door into the shed, open and dark. He moved up on the stoop of the Airstream and tried the door. It was unlocked. He slipped inside. The galley was warm and smelled like cigarettes.
A passageway ran from the galley to the forequarters of the trailer. Just as he was about to step forward he saw Arlene come out of where he reckoned the bedroom was. She was wearing her robe and was combing her hair out of her eyes. Lee pointed the shotgun at her but she did not notice him. She went into the bathroom midway down the passageway and folded the door closed behind her.
Gilmore’s voice spoke from the bedroom.
—In the fridge, said Gilmore.
—I will, said Arlene.
Lee went down the passageway to the bedroom. There was a double bed with the sheets pulled up from the corners. The duffle bags packed with the take were heaped one on top of the other beside the bed. Gilmore was sitting on the edge of the mattress, paused in the act of either pulling on or removing his jeans, glancing curiously at what was now filling the doorway.
—Lee, said Gilmore.
Lee shot him in the chest and Gilmore dropped down onto the mattress. His arms were outflung and his jeans were still around his knees. Stuffing from one pillow swirled to the bedspread and smoke hung in the air and there was a shrill ringing in Lee’s ears. He pumped the shotgun.
He turned and went back down the passageway. Arlene was screaming in the bathroom. Lee opened the front door and went outside. The man-door into the shed remained unchanged and he kept it in plain sight.
He was on the bottom of the stoop when something slammed into the side of his abdomen and turned him halfway around. He became aware of a popping noise that broke through the ring in his ears. Once Helen had made popcorn on the hot plate and this sound was not dissimilar. He looked up.
There was Speedy at the back of the van, not coming out of the shed at all, and he was holding up the 9mm in both hands.
Lee fired the shotgun from his hip. The pellets punched into the side of the van. He pumped and fired again. Snow and dirt spewed up from the ground. Speedy had already turned and was fleeing. Lee walked towards the van, pumped the shotgun, fired again. Speedy was thirty yards away, running flat-out, head bent forward, not looking back. Lee pumped the shotgun and pulled the trigger and nothing happened. He had to lean against the van when he reached it. What was this thing bound around him? He looked down and saw a hole in his jacket, dark and small and singular, somewhat like a cigarette burn. He thought of the day he’d bought the jacket, the money that had gone out of his wallet. He looked up again and Speedy was out of sight.
Lee’s breath plumed out. He took a step away from the van and he faltered. The man-door into the shed was on the other side of the van. He inclined his ear but could hear nothing through the ringing. No airplane, no woman screaming. Nothing of the boy.
S
tan was two miles from the marina when he saw the man by the side of the road, waving his arms above his head. He slowed down and the man jogged forward. He slipped once on a patch of ice but kept his footing. He was a small man, moving quickly, and there was a scar on the side of his face. Stan glanced over his shoulder at the Marlin .410 he’d brought from home. It was laid behind the seat. The man came around the passenger side and Stan leaned across the seat and opened the door.
—What’s the trouble?
—Just listen, said the man.
He was pointing an automatic pistol. Stan could smell the metal of it, the gun oil. The man climbed into the truck. Up close Stan could see fine scratches on the man’s face and hands, as if he’d been running through the bush. His jeans were wet to the knees.
—Listen.
—I just stopped to see if you needed help.
The man wagged the pistol at him. His lips were pulled back over his teeth. He told Stan to shut up while he thought.
Stan looked in the rear-view mirror. The road behind him was vacant.
—Okay, said the man. We’ll go back.
The man turned forward on the seat. There would be no other chance. Stan hit him with a hard right cross into the chin, felt the man’s jaw move sideways against the impact. Speedy dropped his pistol in the footwell and toppled sideways out of the truck.
Stan started to move over on the seat and the truck lurched forward and he realized it was still in gear. He pulled the shift to park and slid across the seat and picked up the 9mm. The safety was engaged at the back of the slide.
He got out of the truck. There was a spot of blood where
Speedy had landed on his head on the road. He’d gotten up and was now shuffling away in an aimless, drunken fashion. Stan pointed the pistol at him.
—You son of a bitch. Stop walking.
Speedy stopped, turned around: You want to talk about this, man?
—Shut your goddamn mouth. Are you alone?