The Best American Noir of the Century

“Oh, I know you don’t want to. You didn’t want your friend to kill anybody back there at the drugstore either. I could see that. But people got killed, and that ups the stakes. Right?”

And those eyes of his, they just dug into me, and I couldn’t say anything.

“But,” he said, “I’m going to talk you out of it.”

He sounded real certain and that made me feel better. ‘Cause I’d rather kill a cocky son of a bitch than a pathetic one. And so I laughed. “Talk me out of it?”

“I’m going to try.”

“Yeah? How you gonna do that?”

Weller cleared his throat a little. “First, let’s get everything on the table. I’ve seen your face, and I know your name. Jack Prescot. Right? You’re, what? about five-nine, 150 pounds, black hair. So you’ve got to assume I can identify you. I’m not going to play any games and say I didn’t see you clearly or hear who you were. Or anything like that. We all squared away on that, Jack?”

I nodded, rolling my eyes like this was all a load of crap. But I gotta admit I was kinda curious what he had to say.

“My promise,” he said, “is that I won’t turn you in. Not under any circumstances. The police’ll never learn your name from me. Or your description. I’ll never testify against you.”

Sounding honest as a priest. Real slick delivery. Well, he was a salesman, and I wasn’t going to buy it. But he didn’t know I was onto him. Let him give me his pitch, let him think I was going along. When it came down to it, after we’d got away and were somewhere in the woods upstate, I’d want him relaxed. Thinking he was going to get away. No screaming, no hassles. Just two fast cuts and that’d be it.

“You understand what I’m saying?”

I tried to look serious and said, “Sure. You’re thinking you can talk me out of killing you. Which I’m not inclined to do anyway. Kill you, I mean.”

And there was that weird little smile again.

I said, “You think you can talk me out of it. You’ve got reasons?”

“Oh, I’ve got reasons, you bet. One in particular. One that you can’t argue with.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“I’ll get to it in a minute. Let me tell you some of the practical reasons you should let me go. First, you think you’ve got to kill me because I know who you are, right? Well, how long you think your identity’s going to be a secret? Your buddy shot a cop back there. I don’t know police stuff except what I see in the movies. But they’re going to be looking at tire tracks and witnesses who saw plates and makes of cars and gas stations you might’ve stopped at on the way here.”

He was just blowing smoke. The Buick was stolen. I mean, I’m not stupid.

But he went on, looking at me real coy. “Even if your car was stolen, they’re going to check down every lead. Every shoeprint around where you or your friend found it, talk to everybody in the area around the time it vanished.”

I kept smiling like it was nuts what he was saying. But this was true, shooting the cop part. You do that and you’re in big trouble. Trouble that sticks with you. They don’t stop looking till they find you.

“And when they identify your buddy” — he nodded toward the couch where Toth’s body was lying — “they’re going to make some connection to you.”

“I don’t know him that good. We just hung around together the past few months.”

Weller jumped on this. “Where? A bar? A restaurant? Anybody ever see you in public?”

I got mad, and I shouted, “So? What’re you saying? They gonna bust me anyway, then I’ll just take you out with me. How’s that for an argument?”

Calm as could be he said, “I’m simply telling you that one of the reasons you want to kill me doesn’t make sense. And think about this — the shooting at the drugstore? It wasn’t premeditated. It was, what do they call it? Heat of passion. But you kill me, that’ll be first degree. You’ll get the death penalty when they find you.”

When they find you. Right. I laughed to myself. Oh, what he said made sense, but the fact is, killing isn’t a making-sense kind of thing. Hell, it never makes sense, but sometimes you just have to do it. But I was kind of having fun now. I wanted to argue back. “Yeah, well, I killed Toth. That wasn’t heat of passion. I’m going to get the needle anyway for that.”

“But nobody gives a damn about him,” he came right back. “They don’t care if he killed himself or got hit by a car accidentally. You can take that piece of garbage out of the equation altogether. They care if you kill me. I’m the ‘Innocent Bystander’ in the headlines. I’m the ‘Father of Two.’ You kill me, you’re as good as dead.”

I started to say something, but he kept going.

“Now, here’s another reason I’m not going to say anything about you. Because you know my name, and you know where I live. You know I have a family, and you know how important they are to me. If I turn you in, you could come after us. I’d never jeopardize my family that way. Now let me ask you something. What’s the worst thing that could happen to you?”

“Keep listening to you spout on and on.”

Weller laughed hard at that. I could see he was surprised I had a sense of humor. After a minute he said, “Seriously. The worst thing.”

“I don’t know. I never thought about it.”

“Lose a leg? Go deaf? Lose all your money? Go blind …Hey, that looked like it hit a nerve. Going blind?”

“Yeah, I guess. That’d be the worst thing I could think of.”

That was a pretty damn scary thing, and I’d thought on it before. ‘Cause that was what happened to my old man. And it wasn’t not seeing anymore that got to me. No, it was that I’d have to depend on somebody else for, Christ, for everything, I guess.

“OK, think about this,” he said. “The way you feel about going blind’s the way my family’d feel if they lost me. It’d be that bad for them. You don’t want to ‘cause them that kind of pain, do you?”

I didn’t want to, no. But I knew I had to. I didn’t want to think about it anymore. I asked him, “So what’s this last reason you’re telling me about?”

“The last reason,” he said, kind of whispering. But he didn’t go on. He looked around the room, you know, like his mind was wandering.

“Yeah?” I asked. I was pretty curious. “Tell me.”

But he just asked, “You think these people, they have a bar?”

And I’d just been thinking I could use a drink, too. I went into the kitchen, and of course they didn’t have any beer in the fridge on account of the house being all closed up and the power off. But they did have scotch, and that’d be my first choice anyway.

I got a couple of glasses and took the bottle back to the living room. Thinking this was a good idea. When it came time to do it, it’d be easier for him and for me both if we were kinda tanked. I shoved my Smitty into his neck and cut the tape his hands were tied with, then taped them in front of him. I sat back and kept my knife near, ready to go, in case he tried something. But it didn’t look like he was going to be a hero or anything. He read over the scotch bottle, kind of disappointed it was cheap. And I agreed with him there. One thing I learned a long time ago, you going to rob, rob rich.

I sat back where I could keep an eye on him.

“The last reason. OK, I’ll tell you. I’m going to prove to you that you should let me go.”

“You are?”

“All those other reasons — the practical ones, the humanitarian ones …I’ll concede you don’t care much about those —you don’t look very convinced. All right? Then let’s look at the one reason you should let me go.”

I figured this was going to be more crap. But what he said was something I never would’ve expected, and it made me laugh.

“For your own sake.”

“For me? What’re you talking about?”

“See, Jack, I don’t think you’re lost.”

“Whatta you mean, lost?”