The Erection Set

then glanced back to me and smiled. I owned the biggest pile of garbage in the world because he owned all the access roads and the garbage pile could produce nothing. They were in Grand Sita drunk and hurting, but tomorrow they’d be sober and reconstructed while the living things came out of the garbage pile to devour me for having resurrected it to start with and the worst thing of all would be having to face the faces, the sad, deadened faces that had all the hope in the world there just a few days ago.

The voice behind me said, “You see, Dog, it doesn’t always work out, does it?”

I looked at Sharon, but she still had those deadly eyes that said if she couldn’t kill me, she’d be glad when somebody else did and I automatically reached out my hand and automatically she took it. My fingers ran around hers. She had taken off the ring that used to turn her finger green.

“He’s dead,” she said.

“Aren’t we all?”

“Yes, we are, Dog.”

The guy who walked in the light kept waving for those behind him to step on up and when I saw his face I said,

“Hello, Stanley.”

Stanley Cramer. From way back. There were four more with him.

“Mr. Kelly.” He nodded toward Sharon. “Ma’am.”

“Who’s going to tell them, Stanley?” I asked him.

“Mr. Kelly ... we all know. Sort of .. well, hell, kid, we’ve been back and forth before you was born, y’know?”

“Sure.”

One by one they all stepped into the light so I could see their faces. Old men, but grinning old men and there was still youth there that read like the old motto, DON’T TREAD ON ME!, youth that wasn’t fighting youth, but the youth of knowledge written into the crazy warped smiles and Stanley Cramer, elected the spokesman, said, “We kind of figured what you were looking for. Your cousins couldn’t find it, but they weren’t even sure it ever existed. We thought that package Jason gave old Pat was just a gag until you started the shakedown and we started thinking.”

He held out a box big enough to put a pair of shoes in. “The papers are all in there. They’ll tell you how it works. It ought to keep Barrin going a long, long time.”

“What will, Stanley?”

There was a quiet murmur of laughter and he held out a shiny little ball about an inch around. It gleamed metallically in the dull light, a bluish silver with little rays of refracted yellow bouncing from it. Cramer laughed again and took his hand away.

The ball stayed right there.

He barely tipped it with his fingers and it came drifting toward me.

“The antigravity device,” he explained. “Now we’re in clover.”

Someone farted.

It was Cross McMillan.

And then the old cypress pillar chipped right out between my head and Sharon’s, leaving a tiny .22-sized hole in the wood so close it could have gotten either one of us an inch in either direction and nobody noticed but Sharon and me and I pulled her back inside leaving the chuckles of all the winners standing there in the rain and all I could think of was that word to say again.

XXV

“Dog.”

She wasn’t asking my name. She wasn’t asking an explanation. She was just saying it. I pulled the overhead lights out and pushed her into the office where I could see the small crowd milling in the rain, still laughing, going toward their cars.

That shot didn’t miss. That shot was as deliberate as hell.

Get rid of the crowd scene and come on in, it said. Arnold Bell is here to claim his inheritance. The killer of killers. Don’t make me do it the easy way because they all have to know it was face to face and you were not nearly as good as I am. The price goes up, Dog. I get more for my kills than you ever did for yours. You can’t lose me, you can’t even find me. I pick the time and the place and maybe to make the job even more exciting, I take the little blonde along with you ... and what would be better than telling the story of how you both went down pissing your pants and hurting like a son of a bitch with Arnold Bell laughing and able to spend his money at last. They’ll pay me anywhere, even in Madrid. In Marseilles. In Istanbul. In Paris. Shit, they’ll pay me anywhere, even in Moscow because you’re out and I’m in. Pussycat, kiss the tiger’s ass.

“Bend over, Tiger, the pussycat has big teeth.”

“Dog ... what did you say?”

“Nothing.”

Her eyes had changed again. “Dog ...”

“Look ...”

“No. Please ... Dog.’

They were all gone outside and I snapped out the floodlights that illuminated the area. Someplace in the far reaches of the building a motor was humming.

“Was it true about Sheila?”

One of the slats in the Venetian blinds was crooked and I straightened it out. “Yes.”

“Was she ... good?”

“They’re all good.”

“You didn’t ...”

“I don’t fuck broads because I love them, kitten. Shut up.”

“They told me about ... the ball. Before they showed it to you.”

I looked at her. I was starting to burn now.

“I told them not to give it to you,” she said.

“Thanks.”

“Stanley laughed at me. He said I was only a ... a ... woman.”

Hell, I had to laugh at that one. “You sure are, doll.”

“A little while ago I wanted to see you dead.”

“Somebody should have stepped on my mother’s egg. Knock it off, kid.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Get the hell out of here is what.”

“I’m going with you.”

The dark was so nice. It didn’t show what I thought or felt and I could let my voice seep through my teeth with that same old whispery rasp that meant the game was in the last quarter and the outs still had a few minutes to beat the ins, only not many and if anybody got in the way they didn’t have any chance at all.

“No dice, my lovely.”

“Up your ass with a meat hook, man.”

“What kind of language is that from a lady?”

“I’m no fucking lady, Dog. All I am is your broad.”

I could see the whiteness of her hands in the darkness. “Don’t lay it on me because your guy is dead. That’s what you get for sending a fiance to war, lady.”

“How about that?”

“You’re getting out.”

The damn laugh she let out was soft and nasty and I felt her hand wrap around my arm and the heat from her body was a living, scented thing that spelled booby trap all the way and I still couldn’t push her away because it didn’t matter how I died anyway anymore.

“Where you go, I go,” she said.