'Do you love me?' Larry said. He picked up the hammer. And the most important part, the nails.
Betty Ann made it to the door, but Larry knew about how they tried to run. The first one had almost made it to the creek. Almost. But Larry had fixed the door after that.
She pressed against the wood, her eyes rolling around, looking for a place to hide. There was no hiding from promises. Larry approached her, holding out the hammer and nails.
'You promised,' he said.
This time her whisper wasn't the husky, practiced kind. 'Don't hurt me.'
'I would never hurt you. I love you, remember?'
'What do you want?'
'I did for you, now you do for me.' He pointed to the coffin, hoping she'd be impressed by the craft he'd put into it. 'I want you to seal me up.'
She didn't understand. They never understood. 'Bury you? But you ain’t dead yet.”
'I’m just trying it out beforehand. Dying’s too important a business to put off till the last minute. Need to check for size and comfort, and I can't do it alone. It takes two.'
'You're crazy.'
Larry stared at the lamp until his eyes burned. 'You love me. At least, that's what you said. I risk life and jail and reputation for you, and you won't do one little thing for me.'
He turned away. She was like the others. You ought to know better than to hope. You ought to know by now that love is just a word, a selfish, lying, hurting word.
Then her hand was on his shoulder. Something had changed between them. Maybe, seeing that Larry was willing to kill for her if necessary, Betty Ann had found a strange respect. 'I always knew you was weird.'
He smiled. Money didn't matter, not next to the other thing. 'It won't take but a minute. And I ain't got nobody else. Nobody I can trust, that is.'
He gave her a look like the one from that time in the hayloft, the one she seemed to get all swoony over. 'You'll have to put the lid on. Do you think you can drive the nails?'
Betty Ann nodded. He kissed her. She took the hammer and nails. He climbed into the coffin and inhaled the cherry. She looked so good in her red dress.
The lid fit perfectly. The first nail was awkward, she missed and busted her thumb. Her blood was likely soaking into the wood. He was glad he’d passed on the shellac.
Love was built on blood and nails. You had to have both, or it didn't mean a thing.
By the third nail, she was in the rhythm, and drove it home with four blows. Sixteen nails total, while Larry's heart pounded in time to the hammer.
Her voice was muffled, but he could understand her. 'Are you all right in there?'
He said nothing. The air was stale. The coffin was the perfect size. He could be buried in this, when the time came. It would be a proud way to meet the dirt.
'Larry?' she hollered.
He waited.
“Can you breathe?”
She wouldn’t hear him if he answered.
“I been thinking,” she said. “If I don’t let you out, I get the money all to myself.”
God damn. She was a keeper. Not like those others, the ones who folded when they hit a knot or caught a splinter. This might be the one he could trust sharing his land with, his life with, his death with. Two holes and two tombstones, side by side, forever.
They could get to that part later. First, he needed to see how good she was with a shovel.
He pulled the hammer and crowbar from the secret fold in the velvet and began loosening the lid from the inside, too excited to concentrate. Hope pulsed through his flesh.
This one might work out. She was the real thing, better than the others. A killer. Tight nails, warm blood, a wooden soul. And cold, cold dirt in her heart
A woman who could nail your coffin was worth keeping around.
One way or another.
THE NAME GAME
When Vincent awoke, he felt as if he'd been dropped headfirst from the Statue of Liberty's torch.
He moaned and rolled over into a stack of moldy cardboard and newspapers. The avenue tasted of Queens, smog stung to the ground by the long rains of the week before. A car horn bleated, amplified by the brick canyons so that the noise rattled Vincent’s eardrums. He tried to peel back his eyelids so that the brilliant green in his vision could be scrubbed away by the orange crash of daylight.
Damn this city, he thought, each word a hammer blow. And since he was bothering to think, he figured he might as well try to remember. That was a little harder. He was on his knees, supporting himself against the slick skin of a Dumpster, by the time he got past the previous two seconds and on into the last few hours.
It was morning. The aroma of bagels and coffee drifted from some back door along the alley, fighting with the stench of gutter garbage before mingling into a deeper smell of rot. And if this was morning, then Vincent was Late.
He was supposed to catch a pre-dawn flight, to be out of town before another sorry New York sun rose. No, he wasn’t supposed to catch the flight. He remembered harder, and more painfully. Robert Wells was supposed to catch that flight.
Robert Daniel Wells, his new identity, a boring tourism official from Muncie. The Feds had set it up that way. A tourism official could go places, sleep in a few motels, get lost in America’s excess. Los Angeles for a convention to pitch movie locations, then Oregon for a meeting of the Christmas Tree Growers Association, zippp down to, where was it? Oh, yeah, Flagstaff, Arizona, to sell Muncie to wealthy retirees. Good old Indiana, that scenic destination, that mecca of the masses.
Dumb damned Feds. Like Joey Scattione couldn’t figure that one out. With Joey’s resources, Vincent was meat no matter what identity they gave him. What he needed was a new face, new bones, a new brain, because his brain was halfway down the back of his neck. He touched the welt on his head.
Ouch.
He struggled to his feet, took a step, and nearly tripped over a pile of rags. The pile stirred, a bottle rolled to the asphalt, and a bleary eye opened amid a dark crack of cloth.
“Suh-sorry,” Vincent said. He waited a moment for the bum to acknowledge him, but the eye closed, extinguished like an ember dropped in mud.
His hand went to his back pocket. No surprise, his wallet was gone. It had contained nothing but cash, a few hundred bucks. No biggie. He hadn't dared carry his fake IDs in there.
Vincent took a couple more steps. Even if he missed the flight, he still had the ticket. They’d let him catch a later one. If he had a connector in St. Louis, maybe he’d slip out of the terminal and throw Robert Wells in the ditch somewhere, dig up some new papers. It could be done. Easier that way than screwing around and counting on the Feds.
That’s why he’d went alone. With a spook escort, Joey’s people would have spotted Vincent a mile away. Feds' shoes sparkled like skyscrapers, and they always looked as if they should be wearing sunglasses. Might as well carry a sandwich sign that said, “Hey, bad guys of the world! I’m a spook.”
So Vincent had talked them into playing it his way. Take up the tourism official act, gawk at the skyscrapers, do the same kind of dumb things an Indiana bumpkin would do. Like try to catch a cab at four in the morning.
Whoever had clobbered him must have been an amateur. Certainly wasn’t any of Joey’s muscle. Joey would want Vincent whole, uninjured, wide awake, and ready for some slow face-to-face. Joey's people would show Vincent ten thousand ways to die, all at the same time, and none of them easy. Joey would want it all on videotape, since he couldn't be there in the flesh.
And the Feds, they weren’t in for the double-cross. Not only were they too dumb, Vincent had given them the slip back at the hotel at around midnight. Sure, they probably would have a spook or two haunting the airports, but
