Easy Death (13 page)

“Now how could I cheat?” Mort caught the tone in his own voice and it made him ashamed; almost like a whimpering child.

“You had that joker tucked in your pants. I saw you sneak it out. Tried to cheat me!”

“I never—”

That was as far as he got before Boxer Healey’s open left palm swung out too fast to see and connected with the right side of Mort’s face.

“Calling me a liar?”

Mort didn’t hear the question. His ears were ringing too loud from the force of the open-hand blow. Boxer’s right hand swung out, just as fast, palm forward, and smacked against the left side of Mort’s face, sending him stumbling sideways in time to catch the backswing and the cutting edge of Boxer’s shiny gold ring.

Mort went to his knees, dizzy, trying to think.
Damn, I gotta… all that money…Helen…big shot…
He reached out, grasping at the bills on the table.

He never even felt the heavy beer mug come crashing down over his head.

December 20, 1951

1:20 PM

Officer Drapp

Surprised me, how sharp it bit me, seeing a woman gunned down like that. I guess I’ve seen my share of nasty, in the war and since then, but that tore me up some. I felt myself go hot all over, and my eyes blurred; it was almost like I was crying, and maybe I was, and I just kept shooting up at that cab, and finally on the sixth or maybe the eighth shot, one of the windows busted out.

I didn’t figure I got him, though. This just hadn’t been that good a day. I put one more shot out the barrel of that .45, then dropped it in the snow and drew my Police Special and—

And then I saw she was moving.

Callie’d flipped herself over on her belly and was crawling through two foot of snow back towards the Jeep.

Not sure what got into me then. Just stupid, I guess, but for some reason I got out from behind that Jeep and run up to Callie and started pulling at the hood of her coat to help her along faster. She flapped an arm at me.

“Let go of me, you ignoramus!”

Well, folks hurt like that get crazy sometimes and I figured she didn’t know what she was saying, so I kept pulling at her coat hood, and trying to keep an eye on the tower and get us back behind the Jeep, and then she cussed, like a refined college girl does—“Hug a duck!”—and got herself up on her right arm, and her left swung out and jerked my legs out from under me.

“Can’t you see it hurts?” She said it like a mother bear snarls, only not sweet and patient like that. “Are you so stupid for tripe’s sake?” She looked like she wanted to say more, wanted to lay me out good and proper, but then she winced and groaned. Closed her eyes and made a face ugly enough like to stop a clock and set it back an hour. Finally she could talk again and—

Crack!

The noise came from the tower, of course, but I couldn’t say where it hit, or did it hit anything but snow on the ground. But I knew what I had to do.

I started running for the tower. Then, when I’d got about as far as Callie had, I stopped dead, jumped to one side and started going at right-angle across the front.

Crack!

A puff of snow flew up from right where I had been, but I wasn’t anywheres close to there now. Not me. I’d stopped short and turned again and I was getting back to that Jeep like it was quitting time in Hell, and as I ran back I saw Callie had used the distraction to get back behind to safety, which is where we met up again—but not before that rifle came one more time—

Crack!

It sent a shiver up my spine like the Devil’s dog had got me by the neck and shook me hard, then flung me where I landed behind the Jeep, looking at Callie’s unhappy face again.

“Well, curse my bones,” she said.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Hardly,” she grunted, winced, then her eyes cleared up. “My goodness,” she said. “That does hurt a bit.”

“Where you hit?”

“In the left side somewhere.” She tried to put an arm inside her coat to check it, but the coat was too tight-buttoned and the sleeves too thick to get it in. I reached for it myself, but she quick grabbed my wrist. “Don’t touch me.” She said it quiet but meaningful. “I don’t want you to touch it. I’m not coughing blood so I don’t believe I was hit in a lung, and I certainly wasn’t hit in the heart, but there’s a bullet in me and it hurts.”

“Okay.” I backed off, wondered what to do, then remembered what they always told us to say to a wounded man back in the war.

“You’re going to be all right,” I said.

“I’m most likely going to die here in the snow,” she said, “unless you can think of some probable alternative.”

“I will,” I said, trying to figure it. “That’s my job now, to get you out of here.”

She got quiet a minute. Then, “I rather suspect you’ll get in a bit of trouble for bringing me along with you.” She talked slow and thoughtful now, like she was trying to save her energy. “Awfully sorry about that.”

“Don’t worry over it,” I said. “I’ll make up some story about how I found you out here, when we get back.”

“If we get back.”

“We’ll get back. I’ll get us out of this.”

“I hardly think so,” she sighed. “I have one chance to survive the day, and quite frankly I don’t much fancy it.”

“Whatcha mean?”

“I mean if I lie here very still, the cold will help stop my bleeding. My body will start to shiver at first, and that won’t be pleasant, not with a bullet here inside me, but once that passes, and the effects of hypothermia begin to set in, my pulse and respiration will begin to slow, and that will increase my chances of survival…for a time.”

“How long you figure?”

“I should say about forty minutes. If I’m not out of the cold by then…well there are long-term effects as the organs begin to shut down and brain damage occurs.”

“Doesn’t sound like much fun.”

“I don’t imagine it is. They say freezing is an easy death, but frankly I’m not anxious to try it. So if you have any good ideas—” She broke off sudden-like and gritted her teeth together as a flash of pain went through her.

Okay. It was time to figure something. And whatever I figured, I better try it quick ’cause I wouldn’t get another chance. Forty minutes. I checked my watch.

December 20, 1951

1:30 PM

Officer Drapp

That gave me till maybe 2:10. I looked over at Callie sitting there in the snow, but she was just staring off into space like she was trying to think about something besides the feel of carrying around a bullet in her. Then I twisted myself up, took a quick look up at the tower and got right back down again.

No shooting. I wondered was it maybe whoever was up there had run out of bullets, and I thought about trying to rush the tower, but again, this hadn’t been such a good day that I should try my luck like that. So I looked around a little more.

A hundred yards or so of open empty behind me, the jeep in front of me, the tower beyond that, and off to my left that snow-covered car I’d been following, there at the bottom of that steep slope….

And then it come at me all at once: that wrecked car in the ditch down below was my ride out of here.

I turned to Callie sitting in the snow. “Don’t go away,” I said.

I jumped over to the Jeep door, flung it open, and grabbed the coiled rope from under the seat.

And then I was running, falling, sliding down the slope toward that car.

It took him by surprise—the guy in the tower, I mean. He wasn’t expecting it, and I was damn near down to the car before I heard the first shot, which didn’t hit me and I don’t figure it come close even, because it ain’t easy to hit a moving target when you’re firing down an angle like that in the blowing snow. Not that I was about to stop and check. I just slid fast as I could, and when I slowed down I got up and ran a few steps, then flung down on my belly and slid some more till I was all the way down and safe on the driver’s side, with the car between me and the tower.

Whoever was up there must have got kind of upset by that, because I heard a few more shots, and one of them ping’d off the car trunk, but I paid it no mind. The driver’s door of the car wasn’t bent any, just half-buried, so I kicked away the snow and pulled it open.

There was a hole in the windshield, small and round and a little bigger than a bullet. And there was a man in there, facing that hole in the windshield, and his eyes they were wide open, but he wasn’t seeing anything.

I stopped there a quick lifetime, just looking at the big black face with the purple knot on its forehead. His face was getting a thin coat of something shiny and grey—frost, maybe—and it looked awful big and empty.

Couldn’t say, really, how it made me feel, but it wasn’t good. I knew I didn’t have time to squat there and look at him, but I just didn’t feel like I could do anything else.

Then I saw it. A short puff of steam come from out his open mouth.

And then another.

“Hey!” I said. “You ain’t dead!”

He did something that wasn’t exactly moving—more like kind of a flicker behind his eyes. Like somebody had turned the lights on in his head, someplace way in the back.

“Wake up!” I said it sharp, and thought about slapping him, but that frost on his face looked like it could do him some hurt, and then I remembered something else they taught us in the army about what to do for injured folks.

“Say your name!” I shook his shoulder some. “What’s your name?”

“Wha—?” Sounded like it came up to his mouth from a long ways off, but it got there.

“You got hit on the head,” I said it loud and slow, “you knocked your head on the steering wheel. Now say your name. What’s your name?”

“Wha—?” There was a little more sense showing now in back of his big yellow eyes, and his lips moved and his tongue come out and finally he said, “Waultah.”

“Good,” I said, “your name’s Walter. Hang on to that. Just hold onto it—” I looked him over, felt around his body, looked over the front seat. No blood.

“Walter, you ain’t even shot.”

“Gummah—?” I could see he wasn’t going to be much up to intellectual conversation, but he added helpfully, “Walter. Name’s Walter.”

“Good man,” I said. “Now Walter, you just stay here a minute and try to think. Don’t go to sleep or nothing, just…” I looked beyond him, at the inside of the car and over to where the passenger door was still part-open. And I just then noticed it.

Someone had left a three-gallon can of gas inside the car.

I wanted to puzzle over that. I wanted to sit there in the snow and figure long and careful about who would have brought a can of gasoline down here—from that truck sitting under the tower, most likely—and what they might have been planning to do with it. But I didn’t have time for that or anything like it.

I looked in the back seat, behind Walter, and saw what I expected to see: bags and bags of money from the armored car, and a shotgun nestled comfortably among them.

I checked my watch.

December 20, 1951

1:38 PM

Officer Drapp

So I had maybe a half-hour left to do this did I want that Callie woman not to freeze to death. Would’ve liked a little more margin for error so maybe I could get me a lunch break or something, but this operation wasn’t run by no union rules. What I had was what I had, and I damn well better make smart use of it.

First thing, I squirmed over Walter and pulled that gas can to me and out the driver’s door. Then I shrugged the coil of rope off my shoulder and started pulling big bags of money out of the back seat. The first two I laid over on Walter, one on his lap to keep him warm, the other propped on his chest to hold him upright. Then I took four more, each about the size of a big man’s torso, and started running rope through the reinforced handles. Tying it off where I thought it would do the most good. I didn’t stack them; I pulled them close together and overlapped the sides, jerking the knots tight as I could, because I figured this might be kind of important. I kept wanting to look at my watch, but I didn’t dare slow myself up—besides Callie freezing to death, there was always a chance the guy in the tower might figure up something cute did I give him enough time for it—so I just worked fast as I could, trying to get past the cold growing in my fingers, cold making them tingle and hurt, till I had the four bags tied snug together, side to side, like kind of a blanket. Then for good measure I tied the gas can to one wrist and the shotgun up to the other, each with about a foot of slack so I could drag them through the snow.

And then I got that blanket of money bags over me and started crawling back up the slope, wondering how well this would work.

Didn’t take long to find out.

Nossir, I’d likely not crawled six feet before I felt a sharp jab in my back and heard the
Crack!
of that rifle. It hurt some, but nothing like getting shot so I just kept crawling. Six feet on, there was another jab, this time near my shoulder. That hurt too, but not so much. I shrugged it off and crawled a little faster, careful not to stick my arms or legs too far out from under my money-bag blanket. Another shot, this one like a punch in the kidney, and I heard myself groan, but I kept moving.

Kept moving through the snow, which was about up to my face when I crawled. Kept feeling the cold of it through my heavy gloves and the knees of my pants. Cold like a sharp-stabbing hurt. And for some damn reason I kept hearing that godawful, slogging Christmas song, the one that was playing when I first walked into that ranger station, right before everything went to hell on a fast horse. Like marching music in my head:

Westward leading
,

Still proceeding
,

Guide us to
,

Thy perfect light….

Guide us someplace anyhow. I raised my head to see where the hell I was going and got a quick splash of snow right in front of my face and heard the sharp
Crack!
of that damn rifle when the guy in the tower took another try at me.