A Killer is Loose (2 page)

I stood there, watching her, still not knowing what it was doing to her, thinking only about my tough luck. “Ruby, I haven’t held down a steady job in over a year.”

“You’re a carpenter, Steve.”

“You should see me drive a nail.”

She grinned, then chuckled. Then I got what she was thinking and had to laugh myself, even if my heart wasn’t in it. It was a good thing you don’t need eyes for that. I guess I’d have shot myself. What a Ruby!

“That was some speech,” she said. “The most you ever talked in months. Steve.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “It’s all right about that.” I sat on the bed, holding the Luger between my knees, looking at it and thinking about Harvey Aldercook. I was beat, that’s all. I needed some raw meat or something. Then I stood up again. “I’m going downtown,” I told her. “You hold the fort.”

“Wish you wouldn’t, hon.”

I didn’t say anything. I went over to the closet, took off my shorts, and dropped them on a chair. I laid the Luger on top of the shorts and it always looked good. I put on a pair of gray gabardine pants and a lightweight short-sleeved sport shirt.

“I wish you wouldn’t,” she said again. “I’ve got a funny feeling, Steve.”

“You just hang onto it, then,” I said. “I won’t be long.” I got the Luger and went over and kissed her and she tried to smile and it was no good because of what was in her eyes. I couldn’t look at it, even. She was plenty worried, and not just about the baby, either.

I went into the dining room and over to the buffet. I stuck seven of the shiny Czech cartridges into the clip and slapped one into the breech and flipped on the safety. Then I worked the gun into my hip pocket, right side. It was heavy and anybody could tell I carried a gun, but what the hell? I went back and looked in on her. She hadn’t moved from that position on the bed. She wouldn’t look at me. She kept staring over there at the wall.

“Where you going, Steve?”

“Got some business,” I said.

“Please,” she said. “We’ll make out all right.”

“Better than you think,” I said, and she still wouldn’t look at me. “I’ll be gone about an hour. You need anything, holler for Betty Graham, next door. She’ll hear you.”

She didn’t say anything, just moved one leg a little.

I stood there a minute, watching her, and wishing I was somebody else with a steady job and a Cadillac. Only you’re thinking all wrong, I told myself. So cut it out.

I went back down the hall, through the living room, and on out the front door. I hoped Harvey Aldercook was down at the basin, on his boat. But no matter where he was, I’d find him.

Betty Graham, a chunky red-haired girl in blue shorts and a green sweater, was watering her front yard with the hose. I stopped there on the sidewalk.

“Say, kind of keep an eye on the house for me, will you? I won’t be gone long, but you know how it is with Ruby.”

“Sure, Steve.” She smiled and stood there watering her left foot, then she saw what she was doing and turned the hose onto the front porch. Cripes, I’d hate to be married to her, but she was a good scout. Her husband was a little nuts, too, so it didn’t matter.

“Soon’s I finish the lawn, I’ll go in and see her,” Betty said. “Don’t you worry, now, Stevie.”

“That’s fine.”

I went on down the street thinking about Harvey Aldercook, with the Luger pulling heavy at my hip pocket. It was a fine spring day and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Some ragged-looking kids were playing tag in the alley across the street, and I got to thinking about Ruby, when the bus came along. So I invested a dime for a ride to the yacht basin and sat down next to an old man with a long yellow-gray beard who had eyes like blobs of thick gray dust and dirty bony hands that shook like crazy across the handle of his cane. I felt as sick as he looked.

The bus jounced along out of the residential section, turned east past some gas stations, and it began to get warm. Pretty soon we were between buildings and it was really hot.

I knew that if this didn’t work with Harvey Aldercook, I was going to use the gun for something. That was for sure. Ruby wasn’t going to go hungry and neither was the kid and that doctor was going to be paid.

Then I realized I was carrying the bright green box with the rest of the shells for the Luger. There it was in my hand. I jammed it into my pocket.

“Going a hunting, son?” the old man said.

“Yeah, Pop,” I said. “That’s right. Hunting.”

“Used to do a mought of hunting myself, in the old days,” he said, talking slow and dry behind his beard. “Never could abide fishing, now, but hunting—say, that’s another thing.” Then he held up one hand and we sat there watching it shake and jump and twiddle.

He didn’t say anything else and I got to thinking how everybody has to get old like that, and die, and here he was, and here I was. Then I saw we were coming down along the yacht basin. I reached up and yanked the buzzer cord.

“So long, Pop,” I said.

He didn’t answer. He was way back there someplace in his dream, chewing his gums, his beard bobbing and curling where it lay down along his chest.

I
WALKED THROUGH
the wooden gate and out onto the pier at the slip where Harvey Aldercook’s yacht, the Rabbit-O, was moored. She still looked fine. The weather was touching her a bit here and there, but all that work I’d done on her was really holding up fine. I had scraped and sanded and painted and scraped and varnished and polished and refitted and painted and rebuilt and stripped both engines to nothing, overhauled them both, and put them back. She would need some work because Aldercook would let her go to hell. Only somebody else would get taken this time. Not me.

I stood there looking at her, thinking how he had paid me exactly ten dollars out of the two hundred and eighty that he owed me. That left two-seventy, and it would be like buying a pack of cigarettes to Harvey Aldercook, only he wouldn’t pay.

Well, the bastard would pay.

A woman with whisky on her tongue laughed, then said, “Harvey-honey! There’s a great big beautiful animal with yellow hair out there. I think he’s watching me. Are you a Peeping Tom?” she called. “Harvey-honey, he’s coming aboard just like a cat. Oh, boy, where’s that bottle! Here, there! He’s looking right at me. Hello, there.”

“Hello,” I said. “Is—”

“Fooled you, didn’t I?” she said. “It’s only Coca-Cola. I finished the bottle. Harvey’s got to get some more.”

She was an insult to the female gender, a short circuit in the voluptuous, tender woman flesh man dreams upon. She was one of these ash-blonde, bony, saucer-eyed, skull-grinning, jut-jawed, false-breasted, fake-fannied, angle-posing, empty-thighed in-betweens they stamp out like tin slats for Venetian blinds in some bloodless, airless underground factory to supply that increasingly bewildering demand for sexless models such as she for certain women’s fashion magazines, where they loll backward gaping and pinch-nostriled in tight red and silver sashes, over an old freshly varnished beer barrel, holding long skinny umbrellas, point down in a sand dune. Sometimes you see them swooning pipe-lidded, paper-pale over a swirling Martini in a triple-sized cocktail glass with their long fleshless golden-tipped claws clamped buzzard-like around the stem. Give me curves, dimples, and swollen thighs, every time. I’m an easy man to please.

“I’d like to see the skipper,” I said.

“Skipper? Skipper?” She went vacant, then erupted with vacant laughter and flipped her wrist. I wondered if maybe that’s where Harvey Aldercook had picked up the gesture. “Oh, you mean Harvey, don’t you?”

I nodded. All the time she’d been talking, she was stretched out on a padded beach chair behind the cabin screen door. She was dressed in one of these shorty nightgowns they wear and her legs were not like toothpicks, they were like matchsticks, with the heads of the matches her fine, full, excitingly curved hips.

“Logan?”

I turned and there was Harvey Aldercook. He must have gone forward, come up through the hatch, around the cabin deck, and into the stern.

“I’d like to talk with you,” I said.

“Go ahead, Logan. Go ahead and talk.”

“Honestly,” she said from in there. “You’re a scream, Harvey-honey!”

Harvey Aldercook was a big, droopingly handsome pale slug, dressed in white tennis shoes, blue linen slacks, white T shirt, and white yachting cap with a black bill. Somehow, even owning and living on a boat, he never saw the sun.

“Alone,” I said.

“Look, Logan,” Harvey Aldercook said. “I haven’t got all day. Get on with it. If you have something to say, get it off your chest.” He slapped both hands against his belly, glanced in over my shoulder at Spindleshanks, and winked at her, as if to say, “Be right with you, sweetheart. We’ve got a secret, haven’t we?”

The Luger was like a melting chocolate cake in my hip pocket.

“Well?” Harvey Aldercook said.

“I need some money,” I said, hating every minute of it, hating myself for forcing myself to ask him. “You owe me two hundred and seventy bucks. I’m here to collect,” I said.

“How do you figure?” Harvey Aldercook said. He was perfectly serious, a little amazed, maybe. His eyes even widened a little with astonishment and the whites of his eyes were perfectly white in a clean rim around the lids, but when the lids parted a bit it was all bloodshot and brown underneath. It was almost as though he had double sets of lids on each eye.

“You know how I figure,” I said.

“Really, Logan, you’re not joking, are you?”

“No.”

“But, see here, Logan. I don’t understand.” Absolutely serious, earnestly puzzled.

We watched each other for a minute, like two dead men strapped to chairs across the newly dry-cleaned green cover on a poker table beneath a brilliant white light. Then somebody stripped a clean deck and tossed it on the table.

“Four and a half months ago,” I said, “I worked on your boat, remember? For quite a time I worked. I have a list of the things I did, if you’d care to see it. For that job, you owe me two hundred and seventy dollars.”

“Why don’t you pay the poor jamoke?” Spindleshanks said from in there. “Or, better yet, send him for a bottle and tell him to keep the change.”

“Let me handle this,” Harvey Aldercook said.

“Well, for hell’s sake, handle it, then!”

He looked at me again, still with that profoundly puzzled air, touched now with a veneer of hurt.

“Logan,” he said, “you know as well as I that I paid you for that job.”

“Ten dollars. You paid me ten dollars.”

“Certainly,” Harvey Aldercook said. He broke into smile now. “You remember, after all, Logan. Gosh, for a time there we were both befuddled, weren’t we? How about a drink, now?”

“Wait,” I said. “The job was two-eighty, you paid me ten of it. You still owe me two-seventy.” I was onto his angle, all right, but I was going to play it to the end.

“See here,” he said, serious again and allowing a little anger to show in his eyes. “You’d better get off this ship. I paid you what that job was worth.”

“Yes!” Spindleshanks said from in there. “Tell him if he’s blown that ten dollars, it’s his worry. He shouldn’t be so careless with his money.” She broke into more vacant laughter. “What a jamoke!” she said.

“Besides,” Harvey Aldercook said, “the job wasn’t even done right. I had to do everything all over myself. It was a lousy job. You got ten dollars too much, Logan.”

I had been going to use the gun on him, at least point it at him, scare him, because I figured he would scare. Now, somehow, I knew I couldn’t even do that. He had me and he knew it, and he knew I knew it.

There was nothing to say. I could stand here and argue, but it would get me no place. I fumbled around for the gun, but it was jammed upside down in my hip pocket and I couldn’t get it out without a struggle. I let it go.

“Get off the ship,” Harvey Aldercook said.

“Listen,” I said, swallowing whatever was left of whatever pride had survived these last few months. “My wife’s going to have a baby—any day now. I need that money bad.”

He shook his head. “Everybody’s got troubles.”

“I’ll call it square for a hundred.”

“I ask you for the last time, get off this ship.”

“Why don’t you throw him off, Harvey-honey? Throw the rummy into the drink.”

“Maybe I will,” Harvey Aldercook said, with what was supposed to be a sneer. He stepped toward me. I blew up. It was like Popeye with his spinach.

I reached out, caught the back of his neck, then swung with my right fist and sank it hard into his gut, just right. He doubled over, his eyes praying. I put my other hand on the back of his neck, laced my fingers, and yanked his head down. I brought my knee up fast and his nose made a noise and I felt it go, like pretzels in a damp bag. Then there was blood and he wanted to fall face down. I propped him up with my left hand and brought my right fist up again from down under. He arched backward over the rail like a big dead fish and struck the water and sank.

“All right,” I said, turning to the cabin screen door. “You better do something, Gorgeous, or your boy friend will drown himself.”

She was plastered up against the tiller, with her hands stretched out, screaming in a whisper. “Get away! Get away! Don’t you
dare
touch me, you—
you horrid man!
”

• • •

Standing out there on the sea wall, I looked back at the Rabbit-O. Spindleshanks was helping a muddy, bleeding, soaking-wet Harvey Aldercook back over the side into the stern. As I watched, he flopped down onto the deck and lay there bleeding on the brightly varnished mahogany planks.

Then Spindleshanks saw his face and got sick.

I turned and started off toward town. As I moved along, two girls in bathing suits ran leaping across the lawn from the sidewalk and jumped from one of the piers onto the deck of a sloop. Both were really stacked firm and flashing and it was sure good to know they weren’t all like that one back there aboard the Rabbit-O.

I didn’t know what I was going to do. I was sick without being sick; numb and confounded and maybe a little crazy right then. Things could not get worse. I kept telling myself that, knowing all the time that I’d been telling myself that for months and it was getting worse all the time. I was confused. I walked, not knowing where I walked, and I was tired without reason.