'You're willing to kill someone?' Hood shrugged. 'Whatever,' he said.
'I'd do it for him,' Newman said. He finished his beer. 'They did cop a little feel, didn't they?' There was sweat on his forehead. He felt that odd mixture of lust and horror he'd felt before when he'd found her on the bed.
Janet looked at him without speaking. She ran the ball of her index finger around the rim of her glass.
'Didn't they?'
She shook her head.
'Like hell,' Newman said. 'They touched you. Didn't they?' He felt desperation. He had to know.
Hood said, 'Aaron, for cris sake Newman said, 'Didn't they?' Very softly Janet said, 'No. They made me touch them.'
Newman slammed his open palm on the bar top. Hood said, as softly as Janet had spoken, 'Jesus.'
Newman said, 'How…' and stopped. Hood looked at him once and shook his head.
Janet said, very softly and with no apparent emotion, 'Yes. I want to kill them. This morning when I woke up I was afraid and didn't remember why. You know that feeling. You wake up and you think Oh something is awful but I forgot what and then you remember, and I remember how they made me touch them. And I remember how helpless I was first when they made me touch them and then when they tied me up and I couldn't move and they gagged me and I couldn't talk or even spit. I remember that feeling of nakedness and helplessness and every morning when I wake up I will be afraid. And all the time I walk around with that feeling in my stomach of sinking ness and afraid. All the time I think What if they come back and I feel helpless. It's not a good feeling for me. I need to control things. I need to feel that I am in control. You know that, Aaron. I've always needed to manage things, otherwise they frighten me. They get out of control. I can't function like this. I say 'I'll not let it happen.' I say I'll put it aside and go on and do my business and my work and not think about it,' but it's always there and every morning I'll wake up frightened.'
Hood put his hand lightly on her forearm. Newman was silent. Both men were leaning forward toward her to listen as she spoke very softly.
'I've got to get back in control,' she said. 'It will destroy me and destroy us. I can't be anything you'd want to live with unless I have control.' 'We'll get it back,' Newman said. He spoke very carefully so as not to slur his words.
'I want to shoot him,' Janet said. 'I want to shoot him and the two men who came and tied me up. I want them to die. I want to be free of this.'
'Could it be done, Chris?' Newman said.
'Sure. Sure it could.'
'Would you do it with me?' 'Sure,' Hood said. 'Sure I would.'
CHAPTER 6.
They had moved to a booth and a waitress had brought them a platter of sandwiches.
'If we shot him,' Hood said, 'it would solve a lot of problems. You'd bring him, in a sense, to justice.'
Newman had been drinking beer for two hours and it had begun to show in his speech. 'And we'd see to it that he hurt no one else.' He had trouble separating the to and the it. 'That would make me feel better.
It bothers me, he walks around loose.'
'And we'd be out from under,' Janet said. 'The son of a bitch.' 'Is it just revenge?' Newman said. He ate a triangular sandwich and gestured with his empty beer bottle toward the waitress. She brought him another.
Janet said, 'I want revenge and I want to be sure that what happened to me never happens again. I don't mind killing somebody. I don't give a damn about that.' 'Course you never have,' Hood said softly.
'Killed somebody? No. But the thought doesn't bother me.' Newman said, 'For cris sake Janet, keep it down.'
She cocked her head at him and the flint edge came into her voice. It always scared him when the edge came. 'Oh, you find me loud? Am I embarrassing you?'
'No, it's just that if we do it, we wouldn't want people to say they heard us talking about it.' He felt as if he'd been bad. His stomach ached slightly with apprehension. Her disapproval is devastating. She just looks hard at me and I get scared. Talk about pussy-whipped. 'We are talking about murder.' Hood said, 'He's right, Janet.'
She smiled at Hood and nodded. 'I know, Chris, it's one of the problems of the whole problem, isn't it? We have to kill this man Karl so that neither the police nor the gangsters know we did it, or even suspect us. I assume his friends or whatever would want to revenge him even if they only suspected.'
'And they're not concerned with rules of evidence, Janet,' Hood said.
'So we can't even be spotted,' Janet said. 'If they recognize us, we're dead.' Hood smiled. 'That sounds about right,' he said.
'We're still talking about murder here,' Newman said.
Hood sipped at his Perrier water. Even in the booth with the Newmans he seemed remote, partly in shadow. They each leaned forward, arms on the table. He leaned back in the corner of the booth.
'What difference does it make what you call it,' Janet Newman said. 'Don't play word games. We have a problem here and we're thinking about a solution. You had the original idea.'
Newman looked at his beer glass. 'This isn't a goddamned curriculum question. We're talking about a human life.'
Janet made a hissing sound. 'I know what we're talking about,' she said. 'I had a lot of chance to think about it last night while I was lying on the bed tied up. It's not going to happen to me again. That's a goal. I'm looking for a process by which we can achieve that goal.' 'Process-oriented,' Newman said. 'Really sharpened the old management skills being chairman of that curriculum committee. 'Scuse me, Chairperson.' Janet Newman said, 'Oh, Jesus Christ, Aaron.' Chris Hood said, 'Excuse me a moment.' He slid out of the booth and walked halfway down the bar. A heavy man in a white three-piece suit and a black shirt with no tie was leaning over the left shoulder of a woman at the bar. She was wearing an ankle-length flowered dress and sandals. As Hood approached, the woman said something to the man and shook her head hard.
Hood put his left hand gently on the man's shoulder and smiled and murmured something.
The man said, 'Who the fuck are you?' Hood murmured again to the woman. She nodded.
The man said, 'Get your hands off my shoulder, Jack, or there's gonna be trouble.'
Hood's hand tightened slightly on the man's shoulder, and he murmured again and nodded toward the door.
The man said, 'Fuck you, buddy,' and Hood hit him in the kidneys with his right fist. The punch traveled six inches. The man yelped. Hood's left hand slid down the man's arm, got the wrist, and levered it up behind the man's back. His right hand took hold of the man's collar, and Hood and the man in the white suit walked very fast toward the front door and outside.
The bartender put another drink in front of the woman in the long flowered dress, and Hood came back in the bar, walked down to the Newmans' booth, and sat down. He sipped at his Perrier.
'Sorry,' he said.
'I was about to rush out and join you,' Newman said. 'What happened out there?' Hood smiled and shook his head. 'Nothing,' he said. 'Man just decided to move to another bar.' 'What if the man is too hard to handle?' Janet said.
'They usually aren't,' Hood said. 'And besides-' he took a two dollar roll of nickels out of his coat pocket'I have a helper.'
Newman laughed. 'All right, Chris,' he said. 'Want me to work here on busy nights? We could really do a tune on some guy.'
'How about Adolph Karl,' Janet said. 'Can you do a tune on him?'
Newman finished his beer and belched. 'I bet we could,' he said.
'Chris and I? Huh? What you say, Chris. Can we take him?'
'What's that the man said once,' Hood answered. 'To kill a man you need three things: the gun and the balls?'
'We can get the gun okay,' Newman said. He ran get and the together.
