The Favor (37 page)

He weighed the beretta in his hand and then
decided that, no, it wasn’t the time to be firing off guns. After
all, he had no absolute guarantee that this man was so utterly
alone—it might be what Flycatcher was waiting for, the sound of a
shot to tell him where to send a wide stream of automatic rifle
fire from some safe distance. It would be the sort of thing that
would occur to Flycatcher, although it seemed unlikely that he
would have confided the plan to his subordinate. No, this wasn’t
the moment. He put the pistol back into his jacket pocket and
waited, his back flush against the trunk of a large tree, with
nothing separating him from the dim shape of his hunter but a
diminishing emptiness.

Twenty-five feet. Now less. Now still
less.

And it wasn’t Flycatcher. Guinness was one of
the few American operatives who had ever seen Flycatcher in the
flesh, and this wasn’t him. The shape, for that was all it was, was
too broad. And shorter—Flycatcher was a tall man, taller even than
Guinness, who was six two. And he moved wrong. There was none of
Flycatcher’s innate grace. This was someone else.

Guinness knew what he had to do, but somehow
he couldn’t seem to make up his mind to do it. Just push off and
rush the guy, hitting him like a football tackle before he had a
chance to know where he was. And then a few quick, disabling blows,
followed by whatever means of homicide happened to be ready at
hand. The distance was nothing—it would be over in an instant, and
yet, for several seconds, he couldn’t bring himself to move.

He didn’t know this guy, didn’t have any
reason to kill him except for the obvious one. The poor slob wanted
to murder him, but the inclination was perfectly impersonal—it was
merely his job, hardly the sort of thing you could hold against
him. It was an unhappy coincidence that they both happened to be in
that line of work, nothing more. Guinness didn’t want to kill him;
he just wanted him to disappear, to leave him alone so he could go
on with the work of killing Flycatcher, but it wasn’t to be. It was
all he could do to restrain himself from opening his mouth and
uttering an apology, right there in the black of night. What a
shock that would have been to everybody’s weak nerves.

At the last possible moment, when he was sure
that the man would see him in another few seconds, he made his
charge. He pushed away from the tree like a racer from his starting
blocks and, as his target began turning around to see what the stir
was, caught him just above the waist, driving his shoulder into the
solar plexus. There was a sharp gasp, a kind of muted bark, and
then the bushes rustling as they went down together, but nothing
anyone else would have heard even fifty feet away.

It was all done by feel—Guinness found the
jaw with his one hand and brought the other fist down like a hammer
blow to the throat, not enough to kill but certainly enough to give
the gentleman something else to occupy his attention while Guinness
searched for the gun.

It was like wrestling with an octopus—arms
flailing about wildly in an effort to do. . . what? Push his
attacker away? Fight back? Or just get to the choking pain in his
throat so he could hold himself tight where he was hurting? But in
his right hand, apparently forgotten, was a small revolver.
Guinness grabbed it around the cylinder—the thing can’t fire if the
cylinder can’t turn—and twisted it loose with a snap that he
assumed was the man’s finger breaking.

And then, throwing the revolver away with a
quick little spasm of movement, he simply started swinging, hitting
at the man’s face and neck with his clenched hands, like a maniac.
There was no resistance after the first few blows, but Guinness
kept on until he had to stop, until his knuckles felt like they
were breaking, until he couldn’t bear to keep his hand closed. And
then he stopped.

The man was out cold—there was no fight in
him, no strength in his body. But he was alive. Guinness put his
ear down close to his mouth and could hear his breathing. That had
to end.

It was a simple enough procedure to smother
someone; you simply pinched off the nostrils while you covered the
mouth with the heel of your hand—it was called “Burking,” after a
certain Burke who had been hanged in Edinburgh in 1829 because
people objected to the manner in which he procured unmarked bodies
for sale to the medical school there. The procedure was even
simpler when your victim was unconscious. Aside from a little
writhing around, this one hardly struggled at all. Guinness waited
until his thumb could no longer find a pulse as it pressed against
the carotid artery, and then he waited a little longer, and then he
let go

Once again, he had been a shining success.
Once again, he had graced the world with another corpse to lie
unburied in the darkness. It was a marvelous achievement.

There is no one so hardened, not even Raymond
Guinness, the celebrated killer of men—at least, no one who is not
actually and clinically insane—that he never experiences a moment
of remorse for the actions of his life. Guinness had his store of
haunting memories, the faces of the men he had killed, faces he
would carry with him down into the obscurity of his grave, but he
believed that this one, this mere shape beside him here in the
darkness, might be one of the ones. . .

But there was time for that later. Tomorrow
or the next day, if he should chance to live so long, he could
indulge his private conscience; he could enjoy the luxury of his
black thoughts, when there was less chance they might get him
killed. But for the moment there was no time—he was still at
hazard, he forced himself to remember; he had other business.

Because, of course, Flycatcher had read his
mind. Flycatcher had known that Guinness would come running down to
this place, where the trees closed in around the only road out; he
had known that Guinness would wait there for the car to come.
Flycatcher had understood the logic of the thing, had seen through
Guinness’s eyes. It reminded you that you were not dealing with an
amateur. It reminded you that you couldn’t trust anything, not even
your own instincts, because the intimacy that had grown up between
hunter and hunted had opened up the mind of each to the other.

God, his knuckles were killing him. In a
tentative way he felt them with his fingertips, and they were sore
to the touch. Especially the left hand. They felt about twice
normal size, but that was probably just an illusion. Already he
found it nearly impossible to make a fist; in another hour both his
hands might be perfectly useless.

What would Flycatcher expect him to do now?
Where would he be? He knew where Guinness was, at least at that
precise moment. Flycatcher could be anywhere. Guinness felt himself
to labor under some intangible disadvantage.

But the conditions of the struggle hadn’t
really changed. Flycatcher wouldn’t simply shinny out a back window
and take off into the covering darkness—he had had plenty of
opportunity to do that. Apparently he had it in mind to stay, to
finally have it out and, one way or another, rid himself of
Guinness’s intolerable presence. He would stick around.

But where? Was he out prowling around
somewhere, looking for Guinness while Guinness looked for him? No,
it would be too great a risk—he would send out his last remaining
thug, probably realizing that his private army was simply something
in the way, but he wouldn’t go himself. Flycatcher was a
strategist, not a hunter; he would realize that in an equal combat
he was no match for Guinness. He would not venture out into the
darkness. He would try to keep the odds in his favor.

So, once again, we came down to the farmhouse
and to the two cars in the little open garage.

And he had to find Flycatcher. He had to know
exactly where he was and fast, while he could still bend his
fingers enough to pull a trigger. Because now, it seemed, there was
a time limit.

Guinness found the spot where he had left his
rifle and sat down on the soft ground, cradling the stock across
his knees. He didn’t have a plan now—he didn’t really know what he
should do. If he waited where he was, there was a good chance
Flycatcher would be on top of him before very long—after all, there
weren’t any guarantees he would sit quietly in the front parlor and
wait on Guinness’s pleasure; in his present state of mind, whatever
that might be, he might just decide he had little enough to lose
from a little recklessness.

And if Guinness went back up toward the
farmhouse he opened up Flycatcher’s avenue of escape. It seemed a
choice between imponderables.

And, of course, Flycatcher was as aware of
the alternatives as he was. They were each waiting to see which way
the other would jump—and Guinness was at the disadvantage of being
committed to a particular course of action; Flycatcher could choose
either to fight or to run, but Guinness could only fight. He was
bound, Flycatcher was free.

Or maybe not. Maybe there was no choice for
Flycatcher now but to make his stand. Maybe he was sick of running.
How was Guinness supposed to know? He didn’t have a window into the
man’s soul.

But he knew this much, that had it been under
any terms possible he would have walked away from the whole sordid
business. At that moment he didn’t give a damn what happened to
Flycatcher; he felt like disappearing, taking his savings out of
the bank and retiring to a beach resort in Central America while he
waited for some thug with a grievance to find him out and put him
out of his misery. He was bone weary and disgusted with the terms
of his existence and couldn’t manage the slightest shred of belief
that it would make any difference at all who killed whom this
night. It just didn’t seem very important.

Which was fine, of course, except that he
really was, in fact, committed. There might be a momentary comfort
in imagining the possibility of chucking it, but that wasn’t really
something he had any choice about. Too many people had died—it
didn’t matter how they had died, whether he had killed them or
whether someone else had; Janine was just one more among the
others—and together they seemed to have a right to insist that he
play it out to the very end.

It isn’t your show anymore, they seemed to
announce with their silent voices. It’s ours now—you made it ours,
and you don’t get to call it off.

Guinness discovered that he could no longer
make a fist. His hands really were swelling up, both of them. The
left one, his good one, was much the worse—he must have broken
something.

And then, for no particular reason, he
glanced up and saw that the farmhouse lights had just come back on
again.

And then, of course, everything was made
clear to him.

In the pitch black, it took Guinness
something like five minutes to find that damned mowing machine
again. It had been standing not twenty feet from the road, right in
plain view, but that had been in daylight and daylight had been
quite another matter. Guinness stayed by the road, squatting down
every ten or twelve feet until he spotted the ragged outline of the
mower blade against the light from the farmhouse. Fortunately, he
was well outside its reach, so, unless Flycatcher had a searchlight
up there he wasn’t telling anybody about, there was little enough
chance of being seen.

The blade was hinged at the bottom, so you
could pick it up when you weren’t using it and keep it out of the
way, and the hinge piece was held together with an ordinary cotter
fastened with a pin. Guinness unhooked the wire that kept the blade
erect, eased the blade down to the ground, and took out the cotter.
That was the easy part—the fucking blade was about nine feet long
and probably weighed around a hundred twenty pounds, and Guinness,
with one hand probably broken and both of them tender and blown up
like bladders, had to drag it out onto the road, which somehow, by
the time he got it there, seemed a hell of a lot farther away than
twenty feet. And all this had to be done without making a
sound.

When he finally got it there, and after he
had sat for a while with his hands tucked up into his armpits,
rocking back and forth and feeling sorry for himself, he found a
couple of pieces of abandoned two by four and propped the blade so
that its huge teeth were sticking up at about a fortyfive degree
angle. It would do.

And then, with his little trap set, Guinness
picked up his rifle from where he had leaned it against the mowing
machine and headed back into the cover of the tree line.

It took him about forty minutes to work his
way up through the woods until he reached a point directly opposite
the farmhouse—he knew perfectly well that Flycatcher was expecting
him, and he couldn’t be absolutely sure the dear boy wasn’t
planning an ambush. But apparently all his elaborate precautions
were quite pointless; Flycatcher didn’t spring out at him from
behind a clump of bushes, and he wasn’t greeted anywhere by a hail
of automatic weapons fire. Apparently Flycatcher just wanted to
parley and to get him away from the road.

Because, of course, that was supposed to be
the whole idea. After all, Flycatcher wasn’t an idiot. He had sent
out his last boy, probably without much expectation of success, and
had sat back waiting for the pistol shot that never came. And after
a while, in the threatening silence, he had decided that now he was
absolutely alone, so he had turned on the farmhouse lights so
Guinness would know where he was—where he was, at least, at that
precise moment. They would have a little conversation, you see, and
try to arrive at an understanding by which they could both leave
the property alive.

Guinness didn’t believe it for a minute and
didn’t imagine Flycatcher did either. It was just a ruse, a means
of shifting the conditions of conflict. But, for their own separate
reasons, they might each be willing to maintain the fiction, at
least for a little while.