The Favor (35 page)

The classic method is to shape the wire into
a wide loop you can pull tight by drawing your hands apart. It was
really better that way, because if the thing went all the way
around your victim’s neck, there was less chance he could somehow
slip free. Guinness simply waited, hardly daring to breathe as the
man reached up to take the cigarette from between his lips. With
his hands through the black taped coils at either end, Guinness
held the loop of wire delicately by his fingertips. For reasons he
would have found impossible to explain, he waited until the man had
exhaled the smoke from his lungs and had taken another breath
before, with a quick little movement that was like a start, he
slipped the loop over his head and pulled it tight.

19

It was a short, brutal struggle, made even
more terrible by its very hopelessness. Guinness dragged the man
down with him into the ditch, pulling for all he was worth at the
handles of the garrote; he had expected a terrific fight, but
Flycatcher’s sentry seemed to have no thought for anything except
trying somehow to claw the wire away from his throat—he hardly
seemed to recognize that Guinness was there.

And, finally, he was quiet. Guinness kept the
tension up until his arms ached, just to be sure, and when he
released his hold there was the ghastly mechanical sound of air
escaping out through the windpipe of a corpse. It was all over
within perhaps two and a half or three minutes.

The man’s face was several shades darker than
normal—almost like a sunburn except purplish rather than red—and
there was a thin trickle of blood from his left ear. His eyes were
wide and staring and his tongue, which looked like it had pushed
its way out of his mouth of his own accord, seemed at least twice
normal size. All around his throat were the deep claw marks left by
his fingernails as he had tried to get free. One didn’t imagine
that it had been a very nice way to die.

They lay side by side in the ditch, the dead
man and the living, while Guinness tried to catch his breath and
still the wild beating of his heart. He felt almost strangled
himself.

It was only then, after some semblance of
calm had returned to him, that he realized how tired he was. He
felt almost as if he could have curled up next to that corpse,
right there in a muddy ditch, and gone to sleep. He felt
spent—there was simply no other way to describe it.

There was a line of trees perhaps three
hundred yards farther on—in fact, it was something more than a
line; it seemed to be the margin of the cleared ground, beyond
which there was a thick, shrub clogged wilderness. He would have to
get to that and make his way down past the farmhouse if he was to
have any hope of bagging the man who, unquestionably, was guarding
the road. Three hundred yards. Three hundred yards of crawling
along on his hands and knees like a lizard. It hardly seemed
physically possible.

And then, as he tried to roll a little off
his right arm, which was beginning to feel slightly tingly from
lack of circulation, he found his hand resting on his dead
companion’s shoulder. He could feel the coarse texture of the plaid
jacket under his fingers.

Well, why the hell not? The farmhouse was
nearly as far distant as the line of trees, and from three hundred
yards a man is simply a blob on the horizon. Anyone looking that
way would see what he expected to see, a man in a plaid jacket,
with a rifle slung over his shoulder, walking toward the woods to
answer the call of nature. He would know who the man was—he
wouldn’t need to strain himself by checking too closely. It was
worth a try.

Still lying flat in the ditch, he worked the
jacket over the man’s shoulders and down his arms. It wasn’t a very
pleasant operation, but finally he managed to get the thing free
and to slip his own left arm into the sleeve. He stood up to finish
putting it on; it was much too big through the chest and perhaps an
inch too short, but no one was going to notice at three hundred
yards.

There was a nearly empty pack of cigarettes
in the right pocket, Camel filters. At the urging of his second
wife, Guinness had quit smoking; she had said she had no intention
of ending up as a middle aged widow clerking in an insurance
company, so he could just damn well take a few reasonable
precautions with his health. But Louise had been dead for nearly
four years now, the victim of her husband’s past, a past she had
known nothing about. And the man who lay with his face nestled in
the mud had been a chain smoker—there were cigarette butts and
smudges of powdery gray ash all around where he had been sitting—so
Guinness shook out one of the Camel filters and stuck it in the
corner of his mouth, lighting it from the book of paper matches
that had been inside the cellophane wrapper. Anything to improve
the disguise—and, considering the immediate alternatives, dying of
lung cancer didn’t seem like such a terrible destiny.

He picked up the rifle—it was nice to have a
rifle for a change; the best pistol in the world wasn’t worth a
damn at any distance that mattered—and started toward the cover of
the woods. No one took a shot at him, no one even showed his face.
So far, at least, his luck seemed to be holding.

There was something oddly comforting about
the presence of trees. You seemed somehow to make less noise
walking. You had the illusion that you might even be invisible.
Guinness tried to keep at least sixty or seventy feet inside the
woods; he even took off the plaid jacket and left it rolled up
behind a rock on the assumption that he would be harder to spot in
the black windbreaker—after all, hunters wore bright plaids so that
other hunters wouldn’t have any trouble distinguishing them from
the background, but the rules were a little different that
particular afternoon. He decided he would have another cigarette
and lit it with the still glowing remnant of his first.

It was almost twilight, and the trees made
long slanting shadows across the dark ground and their leaves
clattered together in the rising wind. In an hour, or perhaps a
little longer, it would be dark; the sun would simply go out, like
a candle someone snuffs between his fingers, and the only source of
light for as far as the eye could see would be the windows of
Flycatcher’s farmhouse.

In the darkness even the familiar becomes
strange. Numbers have no advantage then—or, at least, not as much.
The darkness would be in Guinness’s favor.

Provided he could pick off enough of
Flycatcher’s bodyguard before they realized they were under
siege.

That was the whole scope of the problem;
there were five of them left, if you counted Flycatcher himself—and
why shouldn’t you count Flycatcher?—and there was one of Raymond
Guinness. And he had the hour or so until sundown to whittle away
at the odds.

The border of the woods tended to slant in
rather drastically as you got more toward the front of the
farmhouse. Guinness could see now that the property was wedge
shaped; the back part, where he had come in, and across half of
which he had had to travel on all fours before he killed the first
guard, was the thick end, and the front narrowed until it was
nothing but the dirt road that led out to the highway.

The front was uncultivated—there were patches
of sparse grass, but no one would have mistaken it for a lawn. Some
past set of tenants, apparently, had been using it as a dumping
ground. There were several empty cardboard barrels lying around and
three or four pieces of derelict farm equipment—a set of tiller
blades sat rusting in the sun about a third of the way between the
woods and the farmhouse, and, farther down and near the road, lay
an old fashioned mowing machine, its saw-toothed blade sticking up
in the air like the battle standard of some aboriginal
chieftain.

The second guard, a thickset, hardened
looking young man with tarnished blond hair, stood leaning against
the tiller carriage with his arms folded across his chest as he
stared sullenly down to where the dirt road made a turn into the
trees and disappeared.

Guinness watched him for several minutes. He
sat behind a bush at the edge of the tree line and watched him,
precisely as a naturalist might have watched some interesting and
wary species of wildlife. He wondered what the hell the guy was
brooding about, or if perhaps that wasn’t simply the ingrained turn
of his countenance, the little sweetheart. He also wondered how he
was going to get close enough to him to kill him, since there were
no longer any irrigation ditches to crawl through. He decided that
probably he wasn’t.

No more than about sixty feet separated them;
it would have been the easiest thing imaginable to take him off
with the rifle, which seemed a nicely balanced article and fired a
308 high velocity cartridge that could be counted on to do a very
complete job on anyone. But that still left the odds at four to
one.

He had more or less made up his mind to wait
until the fellow’s relief came along and then try to nail them
both—he would hold his fire until the new man was in place, get him
first, and then get Blondie on his way back in to the farmhouse,
preferably while his back was still turned and before he had a
chance even to figure out that something was wrong, and to hell
with playing fair—when Blondie, all on his own, started heading
toward the woods, holding his rifle across its barrel in one huge
hand.

So that was what had been worrying him—he
needed to take a leak.

There wasn’t anything to do but wait.
Guinness couldn’t have moved without being seen, since the guy
seemed intent on hitting the bushes at a spot only about
twenty-five feet to the left of him. He really was a big brute,
dressed up like a lumberjack in heavy lace up boots and faded jeans
and a dark checked Pendleton shirt with the sleeves rolled up over
his heavy, matted forearms and the tail hanging out all the way
around. Guinness was just as glad there was so little chance of his
being called upon to wrestle him to death; the really massive ones
always made him wonder if he would be able to take them all by
himself or if he might not have to use a club.

He let him get about ten feet inside the tree
line, where, at least, they would be out of easy sight of the
house, before he stood up.

“Just keep walking,” he said quietly, only
just loud enough for his voice to carry the short distance between
them, as he brought up the automatic rifle. “A bad move gets you
cut in half.”

There was only an instant in which the big
man hesitated—he turned his head, saw the weapon that was pointed
at him, and did as he was told. When they were far enough into the
woods, Guinness told him to stop, and he did that too. He was still
holding his own rifle in his right hand.

“Set it down. Do it gently—bend at the knees
and put it down on the ground. That’s a boy.”

They were only about seven or eight feet
apart now. Guinness’s prisoner was still standing sideways; he
turned his head toward him, and there was an unpleasant glitter in
his eyes, whether of anger or fear or something quite different it
was impossible to say.

“I must take a piss,” he said, in a marked
accent—German, or Dutch, or perhaps even Scandinavian; at any rate,
Northern European—that contrasted strangely with the colloquial
vulgarity of the sentence itself.

“Who’s stopping you? I’ll just stand here
making notes.”

The man stepped around a quarter turn, so
that his back was to Guinness, and brought his hands around in
front of him as if to undo his fly. God, Guinness thought, how he
hated amateur productions—the guy was so obvious it was
painful.

Just to be sure his rifle wouldn’t go off by
itself from the jolt, he clicked the little safety catch up with
his thumb as he stepped forward. And then, with a quick circular
motion of his hands, he swung it around, catching the big goon just
behind the left ear with the stock. The concussion was surprisingly
loud, exactly as if he had struck the trunk of a tree rather than a
man’s head.

Blondie pitched straight forward and fell to
the ground at full length—he never even twitched; you might have
supposed he had been chopped down.

Both his hands were still tight against his
stomach as he lay there. Guinness knelt down, pressing his knee
into the center of the man’s spine, and, one at a time, pulled his
arms away from his body. Sure enough, when the right hand came into
view he found it dragged along with it a shiny pistol—shaped like
an automatic but really just a standard double action, with a
barrel no longer than the handle—the trigger guard still threaded
around the thick first finger.

“Nice try, pal.”

He turned the body over and was surprised to
see the eyes still open, still with their glittering expression. He
wondered if the guy had really thought it might work, if he had
really believed Guinness hadn’t spotted the pistol’s outline under
his shirt, or if he simply hadn’t cared. Some of them, they wanted
to make everything into a grandstand play—they just didn’t know
when to give up, or didn’t care.

Guinness took his fishing knife out of its
scabbard, set the point between the fourth and fifth ribs, just to
the left of the sternum, and, holding it steady in his right hand,
struck down on the butt with the heel of his left. Blondie
convulsed slightly when the blade went into his heart, as if a
current of electricity had passed through him, and then he was
still again. It was only a formality; he had been dead from the
moment he started fishing around under his shirt for that silly
little gun.

Guinness withdrew the knife—somehow they
always went in easier than they came out—wiped it off on the dead
man’s shirt, and put it back in its scabbard. The whole day, it
seemed, had been filled with corpses, and he was sick of killing.
Six people dead since the morning, four of them by his hand, and
there was no end in sight. The world was being turned into a
charnel house, a battleground littered with bodies; they would all
murder each other until no one was left and they were all stretched
out to rot in the sun. And then, when the crows had finally picked
their bones clean. . .