'I'm making drinks,' Karen said. 'Let's have one and then I'll get ready.' She started for the kitchen.
'Can I help?'
'You've been working all day. Sit down, relax.'
It took her a couple of minutes. Karen returned to the living room with a drink in each hand, her leather bag hanging from her shoulder. 'This one's yours.' Carl took it and she dipped her shoulder to let the bag slip off and drop to the coffee table. Carl grinned.
'What've you got in there, a gun?'
'Two pounds of heavy metal. How was your day?'
They sat on the sofa and he told how it took almost four hours to land an eight-foot marlin, the leader wound around its bill. Carl said he worked his tail off hauling the fish aboard and the guy decided he didn't want it.
Karen said, 'After you got back from Kendall?'
It gave him pause. 'Why do you think I was in Kendall?'
Carl had to wait while she sipped her drink.
'Didn't you stop by Florida Southern and withdraw twenty-eight hundred?'
That got him staring at her, but with no expression to speak of. Karen thinking, Tell me you were somewhere else and can prove it.
But he didn't; he kept staring.
'No dye packs, no bait money. Are you still seeing Kathy Lopez?'
Carl hunched over to put his drink on the coffee table and sat like that, leaning on his thighs, not looking at her now as Karen studied his profile, his elegant nose. She looked at his glass, his prints all over it, and felt sorry for him.
'Carl, you blew it.'
He turned his head to look at her past his shoulder. He said, 'I'm leaving,' pushed up from the sofa and said, 'If this is what you think of me . . .'
Karen said, 'Carl, cut the shit,' and put her drink down.
Now, if he picked up her bag, that would cancel out any remaining doubts. She watched him pick up her bag. He got the Beretta out and let the bag drop.
'Carl, sit down. Will you, please?'
'I'm leaving. I'm walking out and you'll never see me again. But first . . .' He made her get a knife from the kitchen and cut the phone line in there and in the bedroom.
He was pretty dumb. In the living room again he said, 'You know something? We could've made it.'
Jesus. And he had seemed like such a cool guy. Karen watched him go to the front door and open it before turning to her again.
'How about letting me have five minutes? For old times' sake.'
It was becoming embarrassing, sad. She said, 'Carl, don't you understand? You're under arrest.'
He said, 'I don't want to hurt you, Karen, so don't try to stop me.' He went out the door.
Karen walked over to the chest where she dropped her car keys and mail coming in the house: a bombe chest by the front door, the door still open. She laid aside the folded copy of the Herald she'd placed there, over her SIG Sauer, picked up the pistol, and went out to the front stoop, into the yellow glow of the porch light. She saw Carl at his car now, its white shape pale against the dark street, only about forty feet away.
'Carl, don't make it hard, okay?'
He had the car door open and half turned to look back. 'I said I don't want to hurt you.'
Karen said, 'Yeah, well . . .' and raised the pistol to rack the slide and cupped her left hand under the grip. She said, 'You move to get in the car, I'll shoot.'
Carl turned his head again with a sad, wistful expression.
'No you won't, sweetheart.'
Don't say ciao, Karen thought. Please.
Carl said, 'Ciao,' turned to get in the car, and she shot him. Fired a single round at his left thigh and hit him where she'd aimed, in the fleshy part just below his butt. Carl howled and slumped inside against the seat and the steering wheel, his leg extended straight out, his hand gripping it, his eyes raised with a bewildered frown as Karen approached. The poor dumb guy looking at twenty years, and maybe a limp.
Karen felt she should say something. After all, for a few days there they were as intimate as two people can get. She thought about it for several moments, Carl staring up at her with rheumy eyes. Finally Karen said, 'Carl, I want you to know I had a pretty good time, considering.'
It was the best she could do.
Hurrah for Capt. Early
THE SECOND BANNER said hero of San Juan Hill. Both were tied to the upstairs balcony of the Congress Hotel and looked down on La Salle Street in Sweetmary, a town named for a coppermine. The banners read across the building as a single statement. This day that Captain Early was expected home from the war in Cuba, over now these two months, was October 10, 1898.
The manager of the hotel and one of his desk clerks were the first to observe the colored man who entered the lobby and dropped his bedroll on the red velvet settee where it seemed he was about to sit down. Bold as brass. A tall, well-built colored man wearing a suit of clothes that looked new and appeared to fit him as though it might possibly be his own and not one handed down to him. He wore the suit, a stiff collar, and a necktie. With the manager nearby but not yet aware of the intruder, the young desk clerk spoke up, raised his voice to tell the person, 'You can't sit down there.'
The colored man turned his attention to the desk, taking a moment before he said, 'Why is that?'
His quiet tone caused the desk clerk to hesitate and look over at the manager, who stood holding the day's mail, letters that had arrived on the El Paso & Southwestern morning run along with several guests now registered at the hotel and, apparently, this colored person. It was hard to tell his age, other than to say he was no longer a young man. He did seem clean and his bedroll was done up in bleached canvas.
'A hotel lobby,' the desk clerk said, 'is not a public place anyone can make theirself at home in. What is it you want here?' At least he was uncovered, standing there now hat in hand. But then he said, 'I'm waiting on Bren Early.'
'Bren is it,' the desk clerk said. 'Captain Early's an acquaintance of yours?'
'We go way back a ways.'
'You worked for him?'
'Some.'
At this point the manager said, 'We're all waiting for Captain Early. Why don't you go out front and watch for him?' Ending the conversation.
The desk clerk--his name was Monty--followed the colored man to the front entrance and stepped out on the porch to watch him, bedroll over his shoulder, walking south on La Salle the two short blocks to Fourth Street. Monty returned to the desk, where he said to the manager, 'He walked right in the Gold Dollar.'
The manager didn't look up from his mail.
TWO RIDERS FROM the Circle-Eye, a spread on the San Pedro that delivered beef to the mine company, were at a table with their glasses of beer: a rider named Macon and a rider named Wayman, young men who wore sweat-stained hats down on their eyes as they stared at the Negro. Right there, the bartender speaking to him as he poured a whiskey, still speaking as the colored man drank it and the bartender poured him another one. Macon asked Wayman if he had ever seen a nigger wearing a suit of clothes and a necktie. Wayman said he couldn't recall.
When they finished drinking their beer and walked up to the bar, the colored man gone now, Macon asked the bartender who in the hell that smoke thought he was coming in here. 'You would think,' Macon said, 'he'd go to one of the places where the miners drink.'
The bartender appeared to smile, for some reason finding humor in Macon's remark. He said, 'Boys, that was
