My past had come looking for me; the lingering feeling I’d had that I’d fucked up had been valid. I’d chosen the wrong fucking option.
Well, it wasn’t too late. All I had to do was get inside that house and get one of my guns, and I’d start exploring other options.
I went in the side, rear door, quietly as I could; it was after midnight, but I figured Linda would still be up, talking to her brother in front of the fire. Lights were on in the front part of the house, so that seemed a safe assumption. I hoped to get in and get my gun and go back out, without alerting Linda or our house guest I’d even been home.
I opened the drawer of the nightstand, felt inside; my hand touched the cold gun.
That was when I noticed that Linda was in bed already, but she hadn’t made a sound; I hadn’t disturbed or frightened her, either, coming in as I had.
Because she was dead.
4
He didn’t hear me come up behind him.
I had slipped out of my shoes. Left them in the bedroom, next to the bed, where what had been Linda was soaking up the sheets, getting them red. She hadn’t suffered; that was something. My guess is she’d been asleep. He’d put one in her head, and three more in her chest and stomach. But it was clear she hadn’t stirred. She was on her side, like a fetus. His first shot, the head shot, had been enough. Why the other three?
And so I had walked on shoeless feet in the darkness through my familiar house and had made not a sound. It was something I had learned to do a long time ago and apparently, like riding a bike, it sticks with you. I was right up behind him, before he sensed me, and before he could turn, my gun was in his neck.
“You fucked up,” I said. My voice sounded strange to me. Probably to him, too. But to me it sounded distant. Like something playing on television in another room.
He didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t blame him. He was just a dark shape standing over the corpse of my brother-in-law. Chris was seated in my big soft leather chair, facing the dying fire, which was the only light in the room; a beer that had been in his hand had spilled onto the floor, soaking our new carpet. Linda had picked it out just a few months before; carpet samples had littered the floor for days.
“You killed the wrong man,” I said.
“Please,” he said.
“He was my brother-in-law. I loaned him my jacket, and you took him for me. Nice piece of work, dipshit. Toss the gun to the floor. Underhand toss. Now.”
He did. It was a nine-millimeter, too, but not a Browning: a Luger with a rather bulky homemade silencer attached.
“Turn around, slow.”
He did, and as he did, I stepped back and had a look at the man who had taken so much from me. He wasn’t big, he wasn’t small-about my size, five-ten, heavy-set but not fat; he was perhaps thirty. He was in a black sweatshirt and black pants and black gloves. He had short dark hair and dark frightened eyes in a round, pale face dotted by several dark moles. His cheeks had Nixon shadow.
“He doesn’t even look like me,” I said, gesturing to dead Chris. “He’s got blond hair, for Christ’s sake.”
He didn’t know what to say. His lower lip was trembling. He knew he was going to die. He knew there was nothing he could say that would change that. Maybe I could make him believe otherwise.
“I understand,” I said.
“What?”
“I understand.”
“Understand?”
“That you’re just hired help.”
His eyes tensed.
“That this is nothing personal. I used to be in this business myself. I was a hell of a lot better at it than you, and I never killed a whole fucking family, but…” I got a hold of myself and smiled tightly at him. “… but I want you to think about telling me who sent you. If you do that, I might give you a pass.”
He shook his head. “They’d kill me.”
“What do you think I’ll do?” I said, and I whapped him on the side of the head with the nine-millimeter. He went down on the soft carpet, hard. He was out, or pretending to be, a trickle of blood like a red thread down his temple. I took off my belt and quickly lashed his wrists behind him. I kicked his gun under the sofa. I could have used the thing, the silencer would’ve come in handy, but I didn’t want to touch it. Not that gun.
I went to the door. Before I dealt with him, I had to deal with the back-up man. The man who’d been parked alongside the road. He might be gone, now. Seeing me come bopping along, when I was supposed to be home getting shot, might have sent him running. Or he might be coming in any minute now to help his partner. Those were pretty much the probabilities.
Thinking it over, I went back through the dark house to the side door. You could smell death in that house. I’d forgotten that, or anyway hadn’t thought about it in a long time. The smell of it. Of blood. Of shit. Of death.
I opened the back door and he was standing there, on the steps, about to come in, a ghostly pale presence in black, skinny and taller than me and with a revolver in his hand. A fucking revolver! Even his idiot friend knew enough to carry a silenced automatic…
Him standing there was a surprise to me, but then he was surprised to see me, too, so we both lost about the same amount of time and before he could raise and fire his revolver, I kicked his balls up in him. He howled and doubled over and I kicked the gun out of his hand, thankful that he hadn’t fired it reflexively. Then I slapped him with the nine-millimeter and he looked up at me with a face as pale as a sick child; cheek streaked with blood, eyes begging, he said, “No.. please no…”
I slapped him again with it and he went down on the small cement area, like so much kindling.
I really didn’t want to shoot him with the nine-millimeter. I hadn’t had time to map any of this out, but I knew I wanted to contain it; I knew I didn’t want to fill the night with gunfire. I was hovering over him indecisively when he reached out and grabbed my ankle and sat me down hard on my ass.
He didn’t want to stick around to fight; he didn’t even bother looking for the revolver he dropped. He just wanted to get away from me, from here, from everything. He ran, ran back toward the brush and trees that separated my house from the road, where his car waited. He was perhaps fifty feet away when I hefted the nine- millimeter and hurled it, hitting him in the back of the head, sending him face down to the ground. He didn’t move. Maybe he really was unconscious this time.
Enough fucking around. I went over to the woodpile and got the axe and went over to him and swung and it split his head like a melon.
Some of him splashed on my face and I knelt and untucked his sweatshirt in back and wiped myself off. On the ground around him, I felt around for the nine-millimeter; found it. Over nearer the house I found his revolver, which I heaved into the trees. Then I went back in the house where his partner was waking up.
“Your partner seems to have taken off without you,” I said.
“Oh God,” he said, quietly, pitifully. He was sitting up, hands still behind him. He was sitting next to Chris, who sat in my big comfortable chair staring with vacant eyes at the fire, which was damn near out by this time.
I untied his hands, put the gun in my waistband, slipped my belt back on. I stood over him, but didn’t want to wave the gun in his face. Wanted him to think he might have some chance, at some point, to overpower me.
“And now,” I said, “you’re going to tell me who sent you. I think I know. But you’re going to tell me…”
He shook his head. “You’re going to kill me anyway.”
“Let’s suppose that’s the case. What do you have to lose by telling me?”
“What… what do I have to gain?”
Good point.
“Well… you could buy some time. Maybe your partner is still out there, waiting to make his move. Waiting to
