April Evil (17 page)

“We’ll take it inside. While we’re in the house Sal will turn it around and have it heading out. We’ll empty clothes out of two suitcases and take them in empty. Round up the four of them in the study. From there we can play it by ear. We ought to have plenty of time.”

“One man could almost handle it,” Ronnie said meaningfully. “Two is plenty.”

“Then why don’t you go home, kid?” the Ace asked.

“Cut it!” Mullin said sharply. “Sal, go get some food started. We stay holed up here until we take off for the house tomorrow. Ace, we’ll go over that map right now. Go get a bottle and glasses and ice, Ronnie.”

“Yes
sir!
” Ronnie said. He followed the woman into the kitchen, patting the rear of her tight skirt as the door swung shut behind them.

“Stop it!” she whispered, turning away from him.

“You’re a dandy bowler, sis.”

“I like to bowl.”

“Come here a minute, sis.”

She backed away from him. He laughed at her and got the cube trays out and levered ice into a plastic bowl. He fixed her a stiff drink and gave it to her, and took the equipment back into the living room. Mullin and the Ace were huddled over the map. He looked at Ace’s thick neck, at the small roll of fat, brick-burned by the beach sun, at the crinkled tonsure of ginger hair around the bald spot.

He looked at the Ace’s neck and remembered the time in Brownsville. Rocco had fled to Mexico City and he was reasonably safe there, but he liked to return to stateside. It had taken a full month to take him. Ronnie had purchased the bench-rest twenty-two single-shot rifle in Houston. It had a special ten-power scope. He had broken it down and packed it in an outsize trombone case and taken the bus back to Brownsville. It had taken some time to get the right hotel room, a room on the eighth floor overlooking the walled court of a patio restaurant diagonally up the street. On the eighth night, two days later than the tipster in Mexico City had indicated, Rocco and party ate at the patio restaurant. They had come across the bridge in the blue and silver Cadillac. Ronnie sat on a straight chair in the dark room. Rocco had taken a convenient table. Three men and two dark lively Mexican beauties.

He remembered how it was in the dark room, rifle resting on the sill, watching the party through the powerful scope. It brought them vividly close, candles on the tables flickering inside the glass globes, the red lips and white teeth of the girls, Rocco leaning back when a great laugh split his dark tough face. Ronnie could have done it any time, but he waited. It would be awkward to shoot Rocco as he sat. The direction of the slug could be too easily traced. He watched the second round of coffee. Rocco began to look restless. He kept looking at his watch. As he made motions to get up, Ronnie cuddled the heavy rifle more closely. He allowed for the downward angle of the bullet. Rocco pushed his chair back and got to his feet. The cross-hairs were on his throat. As he started to turn, Ronnie touched the trigger. The spat of the rifle was lost in the traffic sounds. Rocco turned further, took a half step, caught
himself and fell on the flagstones. Ronnie watched through the scope and saw a dark girl’s mouth open wide in an unheard scream. People clustered around the fallen man. Ronnie dismantled the rifle and stowed it in the case. An hour later he went down on the street. He heard that a man had been shot through the head and killed. He slept well and checked out the next morning.

Looking at the Ace, he thought of the scene through the scope. He felt as if he were looking through a scope sight at the nape of the Ace’s neck. Tonight would be as good a time as any. It would be some time before the house was investigated. Days.

Mullin felt as though he walked on thin places. When he walked across the room he had the curious feeling that the rug was unsupported, that it would sag under his weight and drop him into darkness. He seemed to feel a trembling under his feet. Everything around him had an odd fragility. The world did not seem to have the substance or purpose he remembered. It had been this way since he had escaped. He found himself touching things to test their hardness and reality. He felt at all times as if, directly behind him, there might come without warning a hideous, ear-cracking scream, a great yowl that would collapse everything around him, the way he had heard that a violin can shatter a wine glass.

This unexpected aspect of the world he had regained was something he tried hard to conceal. It made him unsure of himself and his own reactions. In concealment he moved slowly and his face showed nothing. The people around him shared the insubstantiality of material things. The Ace, Ronnie and the woman—they seemed for a little time out of each hour to be clever character actors, laughing mutely at him as they planned to trap him. He moved slowly on a stage. The world fell away off to one side of him, always out of sight. But there was no audience out there. There was blackness. The stage he moved on was garish. All colors were too vivid. And fragile—with nothing behind the walls until stage hands placed other
rooms there. And the stage trembled constantly.

He felt an unreality in himself. As though he had ceased to be Harry Mullin, had become a creature quite different. For a time he had been able to return to his own skin when he made love to the woman, becoming complete for a little while, finding substance and reality in a known act performed upon gasping acquiescence. But of late this too had become unreal to him, her buttery flesh an illusion, his own avidity a careless imitation.

And always, directly behind him, was the threat of the scream.

There was one way he could escape from this world that had become alarming. That was the reality of the money. He knew that when he had the money, when he could hold it, count it, plan how to spend it, he would once again be Harry Mullin, a man who could laugh, a man who was confident, a man who knew his place. Until then he was unfocused, a double image upon his own retina. It could not go wrong. It could not be permitted to go wrong.

At the evening meal he knew that the hours would be interminable until they would be able to leave the next afternoon. After the woman had cleaned up, she sat in the kitchen and listened to a small plastic radio, snapping her fingers softly when the music had a pronounced beat. The Ace and Ronnie played gin rummy morosely. Mullin paced the house. He went in the bedroom to get a fresh package of cigarettes. As he turned to leave he saw a whisper of motion at the dark screened window. He did not turn back. He walked casually out of the room. He hurried to the living room and said, “Somebody looking in my bedroom window. Go out the front and around, Ace. I’ll take the back.”

The men moved quickly and silently. Mullin’s steps were soundless on the grass. After the house lights he could not see well. He saw the shadow move quickly away from the window. He heard Ace grunt, heard a shrill yelp cut off suddenly. There was a scuffling and the thick meaty sound of an open palm against flesh. He moved closer and saw that the Ace held a
motionless figure.

“It’s a kid,” Ace said.

“Bring him in the house. Don’t let him yell.”

They took him in through the back door, into the bright kitchen. The boy’s head lolled loosely and Ace had to support him on his feet. In the white fluorescence the smear of blood on the boy’s chin was dark and theatrical. He was a lean brown big-headed boy of about eleven. He needed a haircut. He wore a T-shirt and khaki shorts and sneakers. He became steadier on his feet and his eyes cleared. He looked at them. His eyes were a vivid astonishing blue.

“You didn’t have to hit him,” the woman said indignantly. “He’s only a little kid.”

“Shut up!” Mullin said.

“The little son of a bitch tried to bite me,” Ace said.

“It’s the same kid was on the dock the other day,” Mullin said. “What’s this with looking in windows, kid?”

The boy backed a half step so that his thin shoulders were against the broom closet. “I was just walking around,” he said too defiantly.

“Where do you live, kid?” Mullin asked.

“That’s none of your business.”

The Ace backhanded the boy across the mouth, knocking his head back against the broom closet door with a hollow thud. The boy’s face twisted up and he began to cry.

“Where do you live?”

Before the boy could answer, the Ace slapped him again, harder.

“Where do you live?”

“N-next door.”

“What’s your name?”

“Toby Piersall.”

“You’re a wise kid, going around looking in windows. What’s on your mind, kid?”

Mullin noticed that the boy was staring at his left wrist, at the scar there. The boy looked from the wrist into Mullin’s eyes. He pressed himself back against the door and he turned
pale. Mullin looked down at the scar.

“Learn something, kid?” he asked, his voice very soft.

“N-no sir. I … I …”

Mullin moved forward and caught the slim brown arm, twisted it in a cruel, punishing grip. As the boy started to scream, Ace clamped a big hand across his mouth. The two men stood close over the boy, staring down at him. Mullin nodded and Ace took his hand away. The boy was snuffling.

“You know who I am, don’t you? Say the name, kid.”

“M-Mullin.”

“You’re a smart kid. I bet you get good marks in school. So who else did you tell?”

“Nobody.”

Mullin exerted pressure again. Ace muffled the shrill yelp. They kept at it for some time. Finally they stepped back. The boy slid down and sat on his heels, all curled up, head against his knees, shoulders shaking.

“Okay,” Mullin said. “I’m satisfied. It was his own idea. His people don’t know where he is. He didn’t tell anybody. We’re still all right.”

“What are you going to do to him?” the woman asked.

“Glad to oblige,” Ronnie said in a voice curiously high, tense and strained.

“Hell no!” Mullin said harshly. “We won’t get cooperation if it starts off that way. Christ, who would get out on any kind of limb for us any place in the world if you start off killing a kid. Ace, go get one roll of that wide tape I had you buy. Pull those drapes across the windows in my room and put him in there. Tape him and gag him. Make sure he can breathe all right. Sal, after Ace tapes him, it’s your problem. Check on him every once in a while. Listen, kid. You hear me? Lift your head.”

The boy looked at him.

“We’re leaving here tomorrow. We’re leaving you in the house. They’ll find you later. You got a big nose and it got you in trouble. But the trouble won’t be any worse than it’s been already if you don’t try to get wise again.”

After the Ace said the boy was all set, Mullin went into the
bedroom and checked him. The boy was on his back on the floor in front of the closet door. He lay grasping his own elbows, forearms taped together from wrist to elbow. He could not reach the tape with his teeth and there was no way he could exert pressure against it. Tape encircled his ankles, and his legs just above the grubby knees. A wide piece of tape was pasted across his mouth. The eyes, full of tears, glinted in the light of the bed lamp. Mullin checked the tightness of the tape and grunted approval.

He went back out into the kitchen.

“I don’t like it,” Ace said.

“It isn’t good. But there’s no harm done,” Mullin said.

“Sure,” Ace said. “No harm. That’s a big house next door. The kid doesn’t come home all night. By tomorrow there’ll be a big yell about kidnapping. Maybe there’ll be road blocks.”

“So there’s a road block. The car isn’t hot. My papers are all okay. We’ve got no kid with us.”

“I don’t like it,” Ace said, his voice louder. “I didn’t feel right about it at first. I don’t like it. Let’s get the hell out of here now.”

Ronnie was leaning against the sink. He laughed. It was a bright boyish laugh. It broke the sudden tension between Mullin and the Ace. Both men looked at him in annoyance.

“Ace,” Ronnie said, “you’re getting old and soft and fat and slow. You should maybe get a new start selling brushes from door to door. Your brain is getting as soft as your gut. You’re in bad shape.”

Ace’s face darkened. “Bad shape! Look, I …”

“Sure you’re in bad shape. Look at the gut on you. Try this, Ace.” Ronnie bent over and touches his knuckles to the waxed floor, not bending his knees, doing it easily, lithely, coming up smiling.

“I don’t want to play games,” Ace said in a sullen tone.

“You can’t do it. So you won’t try.”

The Ace glared at Ronnie, and then he bent over, straining to reach the floor with his fingertips. He strained, getting a little closer each time. The other three watched him. Mullin,
puzzled and frowning. Sally with blank face. Ronnie with a half smile. With a movement as quick and practiced as a dance step, Ronnie took the short paring knife from the drainboard and moved close to the Ace. As the Ace, alarmed by the movement, started to straighten up, Ronnie plunged the knife blade into the nape of the big man’s neck.

There is no death more instantaneous when the thrust is perfect. The spinal cord is completely severed. All motors cease in that instant. The heart stops. The lungs stop. No dying messages can be given the great muscles of the body. It is as final as decapitation. The blade was at right angles to the spinal column, and the thrust was exact. Ace went from full-bodied life into the formlessness of one long dead. Perhaps the only awareness was a white flash behind the eyes, awareness gone forever before he struck the floor.

He raised himself not one fraction of an inch beyond the point where the blade struck him. He fell at once, sprawled, heavy, meaty face slapping the waxed floor. He did not move, twist. He was clay. Ronnie stood over him and did not breathe. Then he turned and tossed the knife into the sink. It clattered and came to rest.

“God damn it!” Mullin whispered. “God damn you!”

The girl was biting the back of her arm. Her eyes said nothing. She could have been stifling laughter.

“He was going to bitch it up,” Ronnie said. He was breathing deeply, slowly.

“I needed him.”

“You don’t need him. You never needed him. Two can handle it. The old man will open the box for you.”

“God damn you, Ronnie!”