The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

worries could get in the way of a man in his business, and he’d always felt fortunate to consider them a waste of his time.

Before today.

Even now, he wasn’t sure that he wanted to start thinking about those things. He’d never felt comfortable tackling life’s little intangibles.

He looked at the sandwich and his stomach growled.

The prospector wasn’t coming back for it.

The salami was greasy and good. Black ate the meat and threw away the bread, because the latter was salted with sand. He chased salami with warm Brown Derby beer and tossed the empty can over his shoulder. It bounced off of a filthy duffle-bag and rolled to a stop against the rusty blade of the prospector’s shovel.

Black wanted to sort through the old-timer’s duffle, but he didn’t want Whistler to come barging in while he was at it. Instead, he pulled up a chair and rested his feet on top of the desk.

Soon it was dark. Black lit a few candles and watched faint shadows dance on a map of the cemetery that was mounted next to the door. The map was dotted with black pins, except for one spot in the right-hand corner where a white pin stood out, as stark and unexpected as a corpse at a family reunion.

Black grinned, thinking I Bury the Living. He’d seen that movie late one night in a cheap hotel room in Denver. It starred Richard Boone, and that was the only reason that Black had stayed awake for it, because more than a few clients had told him that he resembled the young Richard Boone. He did, kind of— they were both all ruined around the eyes, and they both had noses that were of equal thickness from skull to tip, like carelessly fitted hunks of pipe.

Anyway, the movie was about a guy who thought that he was murdering people by sticking black pins in a map that marked presold cemetery plots. Boone was pretty good in it, worrying that he was some kind of psychic monster or something. It wasn’t Have Gun, Will Travel, but it was okay, until the ending.

Because the ending was a cheat — it turned out that Boone wasn’t a monster, after all. He hadn’t killed anyone. The deaths were only a cheap coincidence, nothing to do with God or the Devil. And while Black had certainly never believed in anything supernatural — or much of anything at all, for that matter — he thought that in the movies there should always be something spooky, something unknown or unknowable —

The wind whistled through the window’s corroded lips.

A dirty yellow halo bloomed on the glass.

Bright light seeped beneath the bottom rail of the door.

The glow of headlights.

Whistler’s limo.

Black reached behind him and straightened the knife that was tucked under his belt, then covered the weapon with his shirttail.

The cold steel felt good against the small of his back.

Black stepped to the window and watched a tall man ease out of a black Cadillac limousine. Even in the flat, uncritical light of the full moon, Black didn’t like the look of Diabolos Whistler, Junior. He didn’t like the man’s accountant eyes, and he didn’t like his spotless snakeskin boots, and he didn’t like the silver-and-turquoise studs that sheathed his collar like a couple of gigantic arrowheads.

Whistler came through the doorway, his distressed-leather duster wind-wrapped around his ankles, and stood poised in the center of the room like a shootist ready to slap leather.

“You’ve come to the wrong place,” Black said.

“Huh?”

“You want to go west on the interstate. Stop when you hit the water.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Beverly Hills. Rodeo Drive, to be precise. Looks like that’s where you belong, in that getup.”

“Okay. You’ve had your little joke.”

Black grinned. “Close the door, Tex.”

Whistler did, his nose wrinkling. “God, it stinks in here… We could have done this in Vegas, you know.”

“Too many tourists,” Black said. “Besides, I didn’t much notice the stink. Maybe because I stink too. Last shower I had was at the hotel, before I climbed aboard a taxi with four sweaty tourists. Then I had a two hour wait at the Baja airport. If you’ve ever been there this time of year you know it’s like a sauna. I flew out on Airo Mexico, which is like flying in a school bus. They fed me a lousy lunch and didn’t even have any coffee. I got mad and tossed the plastic cup on the floor, and the smart-assed stewardess got all huffy — told me that I was breaking up a matched set. Then came Vegas where I had to pay twenty-five bucks to get my Toy -”

“Okay. Okay.” Whistler dabbed his sweaty brow with a silk handkerchief that was supposed to look like a cowboy’s bandana but didn’t.

Black said, “I just wanted you to know that things haven’t been going according to expectations today.”

“Like I said: okay. Let’s drop it.”

Black shrugged.

“Well, did you do it?”

“Of course I did.” Black pointed at the ear. “Let’s do business, Junior.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Okay. No need to get testy.” Black looked away, at the map. God, he hated this guy. He didn’t care if Whistler had made the cover of Newsweek. That wasn’t anything to him. After all, hadn’t Newsweek put Max Headroom on the cover once? Hadn’t they run that silly story, IS GOD DEAD?

Maybe Time had done that one. Black thought about it but couldn’t remember, and he decided that it didn’t much matter.

Junior took a ziplock bag and a pair of tweezers out of his coat pocket and made a big production of bagging the ear. “We’ll run tests on this, you know. My lab people have Father’s complete medical records, and we’ll know if you’re trying to pull anything.”

“I fulfilled our contract,” Black said simply. “I brought the ear to prove that, per your instructions. It was a fairly easy job, except that it took me a week to find your father. He was staying in a beachfront condo at the tip of Baja, all alone, unless you want to count those mummies that were stacked in the bedroom closet. Anyway, I did him and buried his body at the end of a road that no cop will ever bother with. If you want to know the details, he went pretty easy. I came up from behind and stabbed him just above the first vertebra. He gasped a little bit. Then he started mewling… sounded more like a newborn babe than an eighty-five-year-old master of occult sciences. It didn’t last more than a second or two, but — ”

“That’s enough.”

“No, it’s not. It might be for you, but it’s not for me. If you want me to shut up about it, pay me.” Black grinned. “That’ll shut me up.”

“Come out to the limo.”

“No. That thing looks like a hearse.” Black pretended to scratch his back; his fingers closed on the hilt of the knife. “You put the money in my Toy. I trust you, Junior.”

“Have it your way, Mr. Black.” Whistler left the shack.

Black closed his eyes and used his ears, listening through the wind. He believed you could learn a lot by listening, especially if you knew what to listen for. He heard a car door opening. He was sure that it was a door, not the trunk, and that made him happy; Whistler was the kind of guy who would hide a gun in the trunk if he had one.

The door closed easily, smoothly. Junior was nice and relaxed. Then Black heard a long creak as Whistler opened the door of the Toy.

An instant later he heard a rusty slam.

Black chuckled. “Temper, temper.”

Black was surprised when Whistler returned to the shack.