A Moment to Prey (19 page)

    Lily was still against the wall beneath the window. The rifle was under the crook of her right arm.

    Marve was writhing on the floor. He had pressed his hand against his chest and blood leaked between his fingers.

    In the other hand he held a crumpled wad of hundred dollar bills. It was almost as if I recognized them. There were only a few of them, but one thing I knew for sure. They had come from McAteer's.

    

    

    Marve pushed his head up. It took all his strength. "God, Lily. Why'd you do it?"

    Her voice remained soft. "You wouldn't understand."

    He tried to push himself up. "My money, Lily. My God, that's my money." He fell forward, hard. He did not move any more.

    I looked at Lily. Tears were spilling from her eyes. She rolled her head back and forth.

    "Lily. We got to get you to a doctor."

    She did not hear me. Minutes dragged by. At last she looked up and there seemed to be a blue cast beneath the gold of her face. It frightened me.

    "Jake. You got to do something for me. You got to bury him."

    "I got no shovel. Nothing. We got no time. We got to start for the river."

    Her head moved. "The river." It was an alien sound to her. "There's a cistern out back, Jake. You'll find it. Take the lantern. You put him down there. It's deep. He-he'll be all right down there. I ain't going, Jake, not until it's done right."

    I looked at her, and I knew it had to be her way. I held the lantern in my left hand and dragged Marve's body through the old house where he had grown up-and where he had died. Bats flew up from the empty rooms, and field mice skittered in the darkness.

    The back yard was dismal, black and heavy with shadows. The buildings were crumpling. A crepe myrtle bush was dry and untended. I went down the back steps and beside the kitchen I saw the top of the cistern.

    The top was heavy. It took a long time to move it far enough so that his body would slide down into the empty cavern. I kept the lantern well back from it. I did not want to see inside it. I pulled Marve's body over to the hole and shoved him. He fell inside and I walked away, closing my mind to any sound. After a while I came back and pushed the cover in place. It landed heavily, a fine tight tomb.

    I picked up the lantern and walked back into the house thinking nobody would see Marve Pooser again, and there would be people who'd think he'd run with that hundred grand.

    I wiped the chilled perspiration from my forehead and went back in the empty room where Lily was slumped against the wall. The rifle was still across her lap and before her was the lantern where Marve had left it. Beside the lantern was the crumpled wad of bills.

    I tried not to look at the money, but for an instant my mind burned with the knowledge that the rest of it was here somewhere. Marve had told Lily where the money was, but she would not trust him any more. She had sent him for some of the money. He had gone quietly, prowling like some scrub-country wildcat, and had come back with this sample of the hundred thousand. That had been all Lily had been waiting for. She had shot him as he stood there with the bills wadded in his fist. She had loved him and she had killed him. Maybe she could never have escaped him except for the coral snakebite, and the fact that at last she knew where the stolen money was. She could be free of him then-but only if he was dead.

    I bent down and touched her. "Lily. We've got to go now."

    She looked at me. "It's no good, Jake. It's too far to the river."

    "I'll carry you."

    Her eyes brimmed with tears, swam in them, showing the fever. For this moment, my heart pounded. I wanted her to tell me where the money was. Get the satchel of money, Jake. Let's go. It's a long way to the river. Get the satchel of money, Jake, and let's go to the river.

    "It's too far. You couldn't carry me," she said.

    "I can carry you." I crossed the room, shoved the rifle into the fireplace. "We won't need that." I placed Piper's gun in there. I pushed the other automatic in my jacket pocket. "We'll travel light."

    I knelt beside her. I slipped my arms under her, stood up. She was very light. Her arm slipped around my shoulder. She pressed her fevered face against my throat.

    "God bless you, Jake," she whispered. "God bless you for trying."

    

    

    I walked out of the yard carrying her and started toward the river.

    We crossed the field, the fennel and the blackberry briars catching at my legs. I walked slowly but steadily, the lantern light bouncing a few feet in front of us.

    "Where is the nearest house or fish camp, Lily? Which way, upriver or down?"

    "We better go downriver. But don't try to talk. I won't talk to you any more. You sound so tired already."

    "I'm all right."

    I plodded forward, feeling the pulse throb at the base of my throat. That money was back there, either inside that old crumbling house or near it. Could I go back there and find it alone? I laughed bitterly at that idea. Once I might have thought I could, but now I knew Marve Pooser and knew the way his brain had worked. So far as I knew, the only fool thing he had done in this whole business was to love Lily Sistrunk.

    I shivered. She had known that Marve had no remedy for that coral snake poison. She had wanted him to see what he had done to her. She had wanted to look at him along the barrel of that rifle. She had wanted to kill him.

    Her weight dragged down on my arms. I stopped and put her down on the log trail. I sat beside her staring above the lantern through the silence and darkness toward the Pooser house.

    She lay, her head in my lap, looked up at me. The lantern light touched her face, showing its paleness, the cast of blue up under her skin, the darkness about her eyes.

    When I lifted her and started walking again, she pressed against me and now she was shivering as if chilled.

    I don't know how many miles we covered. I walked silently until my legs trembled and I began to stagger slightly as if drunk.

    "Jake. Put me down. You've got to rest."

    I stopped. This time I sank to my knees and she slid from my arms slowly. I flopped to the ground and she pulled herself over close against me.

    She moved upward until her mouth was against my face. Her lips were quivering but she pressed them against my cheek, hard. She sank against my shoulder. I put my arm around her, supporting her. She gave a soft laugh.

    "What's the matter?" I was panting.

    "Let me stay close to you a moment."

    She lay close against me and I felt the fullness of her breasts, the smoothness of her stomach pressing against me.

    She pressed upward again and kissed me, making a long stroke with her mouth across the line of my chin until her lips struck mine, sudden and hard and urgent. I forgot to be tired or afraid because her kiss tasted warm and there was so much excitement in it I could not think of anything except her mouth. I thought of Chinese firecrackers popping in a string, a chain reaction with radiation, and I thought about the way her breasts felt through the cheap dress, rich and full and hot.

    "I want you to forgive me, Jake."

    I traced my finger along the place where the tan of her throat faded into a triangle point in the whiteness of her breasts, rising cleanly white and soft from the brown where the sun had touched her.

    "I do. I understand."

    "Forgive me. Say it."

    "I forgive you."

    She sighed and that deep trembling wracked her again.

    We lay there together and we did not speak because we were too tired and too full of thoughts to speak. Her fever was higher now and my sense of desperation was worse than the feeling of tiredness. I pressed my hand against the fever of her and felt her heart throb against my hand. I wondered if her heart were as strong as it felt, pulsing quietly and steadily, pumping her blood and the poison through her. I wanted her heart to be strong because I wanted her to live forever with the steady beat of her heart against my hand. But that was not the way it was, the faster her heart beat, the quicker that poison spread.

    I got up, lifting her, and went hurrying along the trail again toward the river.

    I staggered and we had to stop again. There was not even a break in the gray scrub. Finally this log trail led to the river, but I held my breath listening and there was no sound to give me any hope.

    I sat down and she lay against me. I heard her teeth chatter and then she tensed herself so they stopped.

    "Jake… I'm afraid to die."

    Her teeth rattled again. "I don't want to die. For the first time in my life somebody is worried about me, thinking about me, carrying me when he is too tired to walk. Oh, Jake, if only I could have lived-knowing you like I do now-I'd make you happy. You'd never be sorry."

    "Look. We're going to get out of this. I'll take you places you've never been, you'll see things you never saw."

    "I'd love that, Jake. With you."

    "You'll have it. I told you. I'll buy you dresses, and fine underthings and shoes so fragile that you'll have to throw them away after you've walked in them once. In San Francisco, we'll climb those hills, or maybe we'll walk on top of them. I'll show you everything there is to see."

    "Jake, I'm not sorry."

    "What are you talking about?"

    "All of it. I'm not sorry. If it hadn't happened the way it did, I would never have known that someone could love me as you love me now, tonight."

    "We'd better get moving."

    "Soon." Her hands touched my face, fingers like hot wires. "Tell me, Jake. Have you ever loved many women like this-so you would carry them like this-even when it was no good?"

    "I always carry a woman around like this. Usually I carry a spare."

    "But you never loved them. Not like you love me?"

    "How could I?"

    "Stop joking. Say it."

    "All right. I say it."

    "Fine. Now let's talk about San Francisco some more." I got up, lifted her. She clung to me, but she was unable to hold on as tightly. I felt sweat run down my ribs, chilled.

    "Lily. How much further to the creek?"

    She looked around. "We'll be there soon."

    Ahead of us I heard the river. She lifted her head like a fevered child waking from a fitful nap.

    "Jake, the creek is to the left there."

    We thrust through the tangled elder and bay to the edge of the creek. I set her down beside the lantern and threw the broken limbs away from the boat. It was as we had left it, but it seemed a year since we had hidden it here. It had been a year, I thought bitterly, a lifetime for Brycki and Piper and for Marve Pooser.

    I lifted her and carried her out to the bow of the boat. I spread the tarpaulin, tried to make her comfortable.

    I stood up and poked the boat along the creek. The river was louder now. A branch slapped me across the eyes and I cursed.

    It was faintly daylight when I pushed the boat through the reeds that obscured the mouth of the creek from the river.

    I braced the pole against the bank, shoved hard. The boat cut through the reeds and hyacinth pads and we sailed cleanly out into the river. The current caught us and the whole boat lurched, dragged along by the speeding water.

    "Not long now, Lily."

    "No."

    I turned from where I knelt trying to start the motor. In the faint light I saw the blue cast of her flesh and I shivered.

    "I'm going to get you to a doctor. You're going to be all right."

    "And you, Jake, you're going to be all right too."

    "Sure."

    The motor caught, roaring. The boat lurched forward and I fought the controls, slowing it down.

    Lily sat up. Shadows of cypress trees made a black pool in the river. Along the shore, the water stood calm. Once in a while a fish struck near the lily pads.

    "Keep to the main river, Jake."

    "Sure. Fine. If I knew which one it was."

    She pulled herself up, laid her head down, staring forward. "I'll watch. I'll tell you."

    We'd gone less than a mile when she lifted her head. "Jake, I hear a motor ahead."

    I listened. After a moment I heard it too, the steady rumble that vibrated up through the bottom of the boat from the river.

    I cut the motor, slowing. At that moment a boat made the curve ahead and came directly toward us. I touched the gun in my pocket.

    The man stood up in the boat. It was Nat Sklute.

    He did not speak. He stood there watching us race downriver.

    I felt his eyes on me even after we rounded the curve.

    

    

    I did not slow down until the motor coughed and died. I drifted while I poured gas in the tank, spilling it in my feverish haste.

    The reserve gas barely filled the motor. I started downriver again, motor pounding, throttle wide open. The river wound endless and black through the scrub country. I watched for any house along the banks.

    The silence deepened. I felt a chill and jerked my head around and looked at Lily. She was curled up on the tarp, like a child asleep. I felt the emptiness spread in my stomach. "Lily."

    She did not move.

    A moan welled up through my choked throat. I cut the motor, crossed the thwarts to where she lay. I touched her shoulder. She was burning with fever, her skin flushed with it.