Easy Death (6 page)

“Just about.” I opened the door and let the wrath of God hit me in the face. “It was pretty close.”

December 20, 1951

9:13 AM

Logan and Chuck

“Ahhhh! You bastard!”

Chuck screamed and kept on screaming, and as the noise went on, it began to slowly dawn on Logan that neither of them was dead. He looked up from where he lay face-down in the deep snow as Chuck sank to his knees, hand clamped to his right ear and filling with blood. He was bellowing with pain and rage and fear.

“Whudja do to me, ya sunuvabitch?”

“I shot your right ear off,” the man in uniform said. He took a careful step forward and retrieved Logan’s fallen gun from the snow, then pitched it into an even deeper snow drift a few yards off. “And did you think it was a lucky shot,” he continued, “just hold your head still and see me trim back the left ear to match it. But you best stop all that hollering first, ’cause it might spoil my aim.”

“Well it hurts, damya!”

“Maybe you figured it should tickle?” The man turned slightly to Logan. “Mister, shut him up before I have to do it.”

The way he said it—like a teacher telling you two and two makes four and no argument about it—kicked Logan into gear. He got up from the ground, wet snow still caked to his face, and reached out his arm to his brother.

“Chuck, for God’s sake, c’mere,” he said.

They were both on their knees, Chuck still holding his ear and sobbing, “Log’, look at what he done!”

“It’ll be all right,” Logan said evenly.

“It won’t!” Chuck whined. “We letting them
rob
us, dammit! We lose our damn jobs over this! Who gonna hire a man with just one ear? Who? Dammitdammitdammit they might as well just kill us now as—”

And Logan, still on his knees, knocked his brother out with one punch.

“Nice work.” The man in the police uniform looked down at Chuck, motionless and silent in the snow. “Now find something to tie up his head so he don’t bleed to death. And move slow when you do it.”

Logan got handkerchiefs from his pocket and from Chuck’s, unsnapped Chuck’s clip-on uniform necktie and untied the fake knot, then began bandaging his brother’s ear. It was slow work, and in the end he had to just hold the wadded cloth against Chuck’s head to stop the blood.

Behind him he heard the second robber pulling bags out of the truck and sliding them through the snow to the big trunk of the police car, which he could see now was just an old taxicab painted black and white, with a flashing light stuck to the top and a pair of towel-stuffed pants and boots underneath to look like a run-over body. Six bags fit in the trunk and another five in the back seat. That left one bag still in the armored truck, but there was no room for it.

“Get inside,” the policeman said, “and get your partner there with you.”

Logan dragged his brother through the snow, in the grooves left by the money bags, and tried to lift him by the shoulders into the back of the truck, but he was too heavy. The man in uniform watched him struggle with the weight for a few seconds, then pointed his revolver at Logan.

“See this?”

Logan nodded.

“Well remember I got it.”

He tucked the revolver into a pocket of his long blue coat, in easy reach, then grabbed Chuck’s legs at the knees and helped get him into the truck.

The man in the police uniform stood by the door while, inside the cargo bay, Logan towed Chuck to the back wall, propped him half-up, crouched beside him and looked at the handkerchief-bandages. The bleeding seemed slower now. He felt the truck shift as the man in the police clothes climbed in and drew his gun.

“How’s he doing?”

“He’ll be okay, I guess,” Logan said.

“Well, prop his head up.”

Logan took off his coat, shivering a little, and used it as a pillow to elevate his brother’s head.

“And make damn sure he don’t die, ’cause then I got to come back and kill you over it.” The man sat down on the bench at the front of the small money-cab. “Now take out your wallet and his too and slide them over to me.”

“The hell you say—robbing the truck ain’t enough, you gonna rob us, too?”

“I didn’t say we should discuss it.” The man in uniform said it like a lecture he had delivered many times. “I said get those wallets out and slide them over to me. And do it slow. Then turn your back to me.”

Logan did. A minute later, the man in the police uniform said, “This guy, he’s your brother?”

“That’s right.”

“He still lives on Gate Street there in Willisburg?”

“Yeah. How you know?”

“It’s on his driver’s license. And you still live on Plovis? In the new part there?”

“Yeah.”

“Get you a place on the on the G.I. Bill, did you?”

“Yeah.”

“Nice place is it?”

“I like it.”

“Any kids?”

“What the hell is it to you?”

“Nothing at all.” The man in the police uniform tossed the wallets back. They landed in front of Logan, next to the unconscious Chuck.

“But I’m going to give you this,” the man in the police uniform said, “I know where you live now. And I know where your brother lives. So when they come and find you, you tell the cops what you saw made you stop was an ambulance. Got that? You stopped for an ambulance. It was white with a big red cross and it was an ambulance you stopped for. And a man got out, he was dressed in white like a doctor or something and he was short and you think he was blonde and that’s as much as you saw of him. Hear me?”

“Yeah.”

“Then you say it back like I said it to you.”

“We was driving and Chuck he stops when he sees an ambulance ahead in the snow. And—”

“What’s the ambulance look like?”

“It’s white and there’s a big red cross.”

“Go ahead.”

“And a guy got out dressed like a doctor and he waved us down.”

“And what else did you see?”

“I don’t know.”

“What else did you see?”

“Nothing. The guy he was dressed like a doctor, kind of short and I think he was blonde, he pulls a gun on us and then he-he shoots….” Logan felt himself choking up. With surprise, he realized he was close to tears, holding his unconscious brother.

“That’s enough. That’s fine. You did real good,” the man said behind him. “So when your brother wakes up you coach him real good to say it just like you said it. And that’s the story you give come the time they find you. We got a police radio in the car there, and do I hear any descriptions get out that sound like us, well…” He paused.

Crouched with his back to him, Logan felt a shiver of fear.

“…we know where you live,” the man finished.

Logan didn’t trust himself to answer. He was too close to tears he couldn’t understand.

The man in the police uniform kicked the last bag of money gently with his foot. “Just a damn shame, having to give that up,” he said, “but I guess there’s no sense being greedy.”

Logan felt the truck shift as the man in the uniform got out, slammed the door and locked it from the outside.

Then there was just the darkness and Chuck breathing heavily as Logan held his brother’s bloody head. And cried.

December 20, 1951

9:30 AM

Mort

About the time Slimmy reached his rendezvous point on the far side of Boothe National Park and found a spot to pull off where he could begin his drunken vigil, Mort was standing in front of the big oaken desk inside Bud Sweeney’s Used Cars, feeling the warmth of the office-and-garage seep through his thin coat and dirty shoes. He held the long cross-cut saw awkwardly half-under one arm, while Sweeney rooted around in the cash register, pulled out a single five-dollar bill and laid it into his outstretched palm.

“A fin?” Mort blinked.

“The way I count, it makes fifty,” Sweeney said, “and that’s how you count it too.”

“C’mon, Mr. Sweeney,” Mort juggled the saw comically as he looked down at the battered bill and then up at the big man, “you said fifty! You said it just this morning and it was hard work….”

“And that’s what you’re getting,” Sweeney said. “But not now and not from me. You go flashing a whole lot of bills around and folks’ll think Christ hit town. Or Santy Claus come early to your place. Or maybe they’ll think something else funny come up about this time.”

“Guess you don’t want that, huh?” Mort sniffed and wished he had a spare hand to wipe his nose with.

“I don’t,” Sweeney agreed. “And you don’t, either. Understand it?”

“I guess.”

“So you take this fin and you go find Boxer Healey. He ought to be back of Lola’s today.”

“Healey?” Mort managed to shove the bill in his coat pocket, pull out a dirty handkerchief and blow his nose, all without dropping the saw. “What do I want with Boxer Healey?”

“He got a card game going, don’t he?”

“Healey’s always got him a game going,” Mort said. “Hell, he makes his living—”

“Well today ain’t his lucky day.” Sweeney said it like God passing judgment. “Because you’re going to take that five and put it in his card game and you’re gonna run it up to fifty.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, and then Healey’s gonna get mad and throw you out of the game. He just ain’t gonna play with you anymore. Not today, anyway. And if you got any brains, you’re gonna quit and walk out of there, and if anybody asks how a bum like you got his hands around all that money, you can say you got on a lucky streak back of Lola’s. And likely there’ll be witnesses.”

“Damn.” Mort almost gasped in awe. “Mr. Sweeney, you sure think things way ahead!”

“So now you know how to collect your fifty bucks, do you?”

“Sure do.” Mort smiled. “Hell, I already spent it!”

“How’s that happen?”

“I need ten bucks to square the rent, ten for the heat, I want to give Helen ten for groceries… We put some stuff on layaway, you know, stuff for the kids on Christmas, that’s seven-fifty more. And I plan on getting me some new shoes. Work boots, I mean. A good five-dollar pair. And a couple pair of those heavy work gloves: the dollar kind. Then I’m gonna ask Magruder to get me back on the tree-trimming crew.”

He looked outside as another white gust dumped more snow on a street that already had plenty of it.
Magruder’s gonna need men
, he thought.
And need ’em fast. He’ll put me back on, sure. I do this right, he’ll hire me on steady. Then I’ll be drawing a paycheck regular and we can feed the kids a little more and dress ’em up good so they don’t have to feel ashamed around the other kids at school, and…

He looked at Sweeney, but Sweeney had already lost interest.
…and I won’t have to work for no miserable sunuvabitch anymore!

He started out the door.

“Mort.” Sweeney used his I’m-being-real-patient voice, and it stopped Mort short in his tracks.

“Yessir?”

“Leave the damn saw here.”

December 20, 1951

11:50 AM

Officer Drapp

The Jeep outside the ranger station was a Willys Overland, the kind I spent two years taking apart and trying to put back together again for the U.S. Army, first in Italy, then France, then in Germany. Right after the war Henry Kaiser took a bunch of these and screwed metal boxes with windows to the top and tried to sell them like they were cars, but he didn’t fool anybody much; an Army Jeep is about as close to a real car as a three-legged Missouri mule is to Seabiscuit. Anyhow, the sight of this one, as we shoveled two feet of snow off the flat steel top, was kind of reassuring. It didn’t exactly bring back fond memories—I didn’t have any from those days, none at all—but it was good to know I’d have wheels I could handle in a job like this.

“Have you run it any today?” I had to shout over wind that bit the words out of my mouth and flung them across the park like a mean dog, but Callie nodded she’d heard me just fine.

“I opened the main gate about five this morning, before all this snow started,” she said, pitching her voice to reach me through the blowing white slop, “and I went out again about two hours ago to check the cabins.”

It shouldn’t take too much coaxing to start up then. I nodded and jerked the ice-frozen door open, pushed my way inside and behind the wheel as Callie shoveled out a track behind the rear wheels. I sat down, and sonuvagun if I didn’t get that old familiar feeling I used to get back in the war. When your butt hits down on the cold plastic seat of a Jeep like that, you can feel the devil bite your ass and tear him off a big hunk.

Okay, so it wasn’t warm in there, but it felt better just being out of the wind, and I took a few seconds to get my face thawed out while Callie stayed out there and dug up more snow. I looked around inside, and it was the stuff you’d expect in a park ranger’s Jeep: first-aid kit, a coil of rope under the front seat, army blanket, that kind of stuff. I checked the gearshift to see was it in neutral, jerked the parking brake from force of habit, set the choke and flipped the switch.

There was a short, tired growl from under the hood. Then a cough. Then a sputter. Then another growl, longer this time. Two more coughs, and all at once the engine was running, with that deep-throated whine that belongs to a Jeep, and underneath that the sound of a radio going,

…on the feast of Steee-phen
,

All the snow lay round about,

Deep and crisp and eeeven,

Brightly shone the moon that night…

I turned it way down while I let the Jeep get used to the idea of running for a minute. And while it was doing that, I got an idea myself about just driving away while Callie was putting the shovel back up against the ranger cabin. I didn’t do it, though. For one thing, she was packing a sidearm, and for all I knew she might just be able to get it out and object to the notion of me leaving like that. For another, this damn snow was getting awful deep, and could be I’d get stuck someplace and need something big and brutal to push me out. Like her.