“Don’t worry, baby,” he was saying. I heard the door close. I heard a thud, which I guessed to be the sound of his hunting jacket being tossed on the couch. “She works till two in the morning It ain’t even midnight. We got plenty of time.”
“If she finds us together,” the girl said, her voice sounding very young, “she’ll kill us.”
“Aw the hell with her. You going to let some fat old windbag run your fife?”
“She’s my aunt.”
“She can’t give you this.”
There followed considerable, moaning and groaning, most of it from the girl. In the background the radiator hissed.
“Here. Let me help you out of that stuff.”
“No… I’ll… I’ll do it.”
I was sitting on the floor. It was cramped in there. I decided I might as well enjoy myself, so I looked through the keyhole while the girl undressed. My view was partially blocked by the couch, but I saw everything, as the girl moved around a little, placing her clothing piece by piece over on the dresser.
She was small, tan and big-breasted, with a simple, pretty face that had those same blue eyes as fat Wilma. She had shoulder-length dark brown hair and an equally dark brown pubic tangle that started as a trail at her navel and turned into a dense undergrowth soon after; it was a place you could get lost in for weeks. I hoped her overage boy friend wouldn’t be quite that long.
Turner took his clothes off, then. That I didn’t bother watching. I felt stupid, like a husband who didn’t have it right: the idiot didn’t realize it was the lover who hid in the closet, not the cuckold.
Then the bed was making noise and so were they. The radiator got its two cents in, too.
Me, I was slouched quietly down in the closet, back to the wall, gun in my lap.
Still waiting for Turner to come.
5
He and the girl stayed in the sack nearly two hours. I didn’t watch much of it, though the keyhole provided an unexpur- gated if small-screen view of the proceedings. Between rounds he would teach the girl things to do to him, and watching her crawl around on the bed and him doing them certainly beat watching reruns of “Celebrity Bowling.” But eventually, inevitably, he’d get on top of her and stay on top, which meant the view I had was largely of him, and I wasn’t particularly interested in looking up that asshole’s asshole.
So I sat there, patiently, my state of mind remarkably serene for a guy hiding in a closet, and why not. Turner was in a tighter box than I was, and I don’t mean that in the sense of a pun. He was in a very bad situation and didn’t know it, which was part of what made it so bad.
I admit he was having a better time than I was, but that was largely because he was a man who thought he had a gun in a nearby dresser drawer and didn’t know that gun was still nearby but now in the possession of somebody in a closet a few feet away, waiting to possibly put that gun to use. Ignorance is bliss, all right, but it’s also a good way to get blown away. And that’s no pun, either.
The only reason I was sitting this out, of course, was the girl. Turner alone I could handle, no problem-or anyway not much of one. Turner in the company of an innocent third party was something else again. Particularly when that innocent third party was Wilma’s niece, whose honor I was here on the pretense of defending, even though from my occasional glimpses through the keyhole I could see there wasn’t much left to defend.
Contrary to what you might think, assuming you’ve read some of the bullshit fiction books written on people like me, or seen some of the ridiculous movies or TV things done on us, a paid killer is not usually a person who will be careless about killing, who would go out casually, heedlessly mowing down anyone who crossed his path in the course of a job. The killing of one person, if it’s handled with some intelligence and care, generally causes little commotion, unless the town is exceptionally small, or the mark exceptionally well-known. A murder is likely to be buried in the back of the papers the day it happens, in a major city, and on the front page and on TV for a day or so in a secondary-size city, and in either case consigned to the unsolved file of the cops after a few weeks of fruitless investigation.
But kill two people and the shit will hit the fan. Kill an innocent bystander, indiscriminately, without the planning that went into hitting the mark, and suddenly it’s on TV constantly and in the papers continuously and everybody’s hollering “Mass murder!” and the cops will have to go after it for however long it takes, because the media and the media-manipulated public will demand nothing less.
Even had I been on a job, out in the field somewhere, keeping all this in mind would have been necessary, important; here, at home, in my literal back yard, it was an overriding concern. Contact with Turner that involved Wilma’s niece would be unfortunate, even if the girl didn’t get killed.
So I sat, and I waited, and my back started hurting and the sweat started to roll down my face and everywhere else, because it was hot in there and stuffy, the air as stale as a political speech, and then I noticed them talking. Their voices were taking on a tone of normalcy, as opposed to the assorted sounds of sexual craziness that had been playing in the background during my confinement, like a pervert’s substitute for Muzak.
“It’s ten till two,” the girl was saying.
“Maybe you better go, then,” Turner said.
Who said chivalry was dead.
“I know, but… I don’t want to go. I want to stay with you. All night.”
“Nice if you could. But if you think you should go, you better.”
“I guess I better.”
“Here, I’ll help you get dressed.”
He had her dressed and out the door in three minutes; the poor little bitch had to ask for her goodnight kiss.
And then he stood in the middle of the room, right in my line of vision, stood naked, his sex shrunken like he’d just come out from swimming in very cold water, which wasn’t exactly the case, and he looked at the door the girl had just exited through and said, “Hee hee,” several times, and slapped his belly, as it wasn’t every day Turner got to diddle a sixteen year-old. He scratched his sides and yawned and left my line of vision long enough to switch off the lights and then a few seconds later I heard him crawl into bed.
Pretty soon he starting snoring, and that’s when I got to my feet, ducking the metal pipe that cut across the closet, the empty hangers presenting a danger, if I bumped into them and rattled them together. But I didn’t, and the closet door eased open soundlessly and none of my bones creaked either, despite the cramped position they’d been in for two hours, and I started across the room.
Some moonlight was filtering through the trees and in the window, bathing the room in semi-visibility. He was sleeping on his back, naked, on top of the blankets, possibly because the room was nice and warm from the radiator, or maybe he was still aglow from fucking his teenager.
Sometimes I think stupidity is contagious. I was so used to Turner doing dumbass things that I forgot he was a professional. An asshole, an idiot, but a professional. Which meant don’t underestimate him. Which meant you had to expect anything could happen. You had to be ready for a snoring man to suddenly whip an arm out at you and knock you over against the wall, and then come diving toward you like a linebacker going for the quarterback.
He buried his head in my chest and pinned me to the wall and threw some punches into my ribs and stomach and I batted him alongside his head with the Browning, caught some ear and got some blood going, and he stopped pummeling for a second and in that second must’ve realized I had his gun, or anyway a gun, and both his hands went for my gun arm, one hand around my wrist, the other catching me between shoulder and arm, his nails long and cutting the flesh of my wrist, a thumb digging up under into my armpit, and with his two hands he tried for a while to see if he couldn’t convince my right arm to abandon my body.
But I still had a left hand, and with it I grabbed a handful of wilted, exposed balls and squeezed and squeezed some more and twisted too and he released his grip on my arm and opened his mouth to scream but I put him to sleep with another whap on the head with the Browning before the scream got going.
