Step to the Graveyard Easy (21 page)

The two of them were in it together.

Now that Lacy had the gun, her eyes remained fixed on him, flat, cold, unblinking, like a bird’s or a reptile’s. Stacy Van-owen’s marble look was nothing more than a thin veneer; her sister was the hard one—hard all the way through, except for a core of dirty ice.

Stacy leaned against the back of a couch, wobbly now, pale. Cape had already ceased to exist for her; all her attention was on the older woman. She said, “He knows everything.”

Cape said bitterly, “I do now. Some act the two of you put on yesterday. Some act you put on just now. I fell for it both times.”

He might just as well have been talking to himself. Lacy said, “It doesn’t matter what he knows. Did he tell anyone else?”

“He says he didn’t.”

“Then we’re all right. How’d he get hold of Rollo’s truck?”

“I don’t know. But he found Rollo somehow.”

“Where?”

“Pine Beach. The place where he keeps his boat.”

“The one damn place I didn’t think to look. Where is he now?”

“In the hospital,” Cape said, “in police custody.”

Stacy said, “No, he’s dead…. He
has
to be dead.”

“Dead? How?”

“Drug overdose.”

“Well, well. Good. Saves me the trouble.”

“Lacy, please…”

“He wasn’t dead when I left him,” Cape said. “He’ll talk when he goes into withdrawal. He’ll sell out both of you.”

“Shut up, salesman.” Acknowledging him for the first time.

Stacy said, “What if he isn’t dead? What if he does talk?”

“Let him. Stupid drugged-out ex-convict—who’d believe him over the two of us? Take it easy, don’t worry so much.”

“I can’t help it, I’m scared.”

“I’ll take care of you. Haven’t I always?”

Cape said, “Sure you have. You’ve taken her right out of all this luxury and put her into a women’s prison for the rest of her life.”

“I said shut up.”

“Or else you’ll shoot me? You’re planning to do that anyway. Question is, have you got the nerve to do it face-to-face?”

“You think I don’t?”

“It’s one thing to send somebody like Rollo out to do your killing for you, another to do it yourself.”

“That’s right. But you won’t be my first.”

“No?”

“No. Remember what I told you about dear old Daddy, how he finally shot himself for his sins? Well, he didn’t. I’m the one who blew his head off. While he was sleeping in front of the TV, the night he raped my six-year-old sister for the first and last time.”

Stacy clapped both hands over her ears. “Don’t! Please don’t! You know I can’t stand any talk about that.”

“I know, honey. I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t get caught that time,” Cape said, “so you think you’ll keep right on getting away with murder. But you won’t.”

“Yes, I will. Only you won’t be around to see it happen.”

“Too many killings, Lacy. Too many dead people all at once. Vanowen, Judson, Tanya, maybe Rollo. And now me. The law isn’t stupid. They’re not going to buy it. Too many holes, too many leaky patch jobs.”

“Lacy…”

“Don’t listen to him, sis. He’s full of shit.”

“No, he’s right… too many dead people. My God, it was only supposed to be Andrew, nobody else. But then you had to make it all so complicated…. Tarles and Judson and the poker game. We
should’ve just done it with the boat, a simple accident, the way I wanted to in the beginning.”

“Don’t you start in on me now,” Lacy said. “It was a good plan, and it would’ve worked, nobody else would’ve gotten hurt, if Judson hadn’t brought that woman with him, Cape hadn’t shown up with the photos, Rollo hadn’t gone crazy on speed. None of that was my fault. What else could I do but make the best of things, keep you out of it as much as I could?”

Cape said, “Don’t believe it, Stacy. Her ass was the only one she cared about. She was afraid you couldn’t handle the pressure. She’s still afraid you can’t.”

“That’s enough from you.” A vein pulsed in Lacy’s forehead. “One more word, and I’ll kill you right now.”

“Not here!” Stacy cried. “Not in front of me!”

“All right, go in the bedroom. Wait for me in there.”

“Not in the house, Lacy,
please.”

“I’ll make it look like he broke in, tried to attack us—”

“Not in the house! Outside somewhere, the boathouse, I don’t care, just not in the house. I couldn’t stand to live here anymore….”

“Calm down. I won’t do it here.”

“Promise? Promise me.”

“I promise. Go in the bedroom. Take a Valium, no more than one.”

“A Valium. Yes. You won’t be long?”

“I won’t be long.”

Wobble steps, hurrying, and Stacy was gone.

Cape said, “She’s about as close to the edge as you can get. She’ll tip over when the police start throwing questions at her.”

“Not with me there to hold her up.” The gun flicked. “Stand up, salesman. Walk out to the front door.”

Cape got to his feet, slowly. But that was all he did.

“Go on. Move.”

“No,” he said.

“Move!”

“Fuck you, lady. For the last five minutes I’ve been listening to the two of you talk about killing me as if I were no more than a bug. I’m a human being, dammit. I’ve had all the abuse I’m going to take from you. You want to shoot me, do it right here, right now. Blood all over your sister’s expensive carpet.”

She bared her teeth at him.

“Go ahead,” Cape said. “Only Stacy’ll have hysterics when she hears the shot and sees my bloody corpse. Shell crack for sure then, Valium or no Valium. I’d lay a bundle you won’t be able to put her back together again.”

“You son of a bitch.”

“You can’t win this game, Lacy. You’re in way over your head. Both of you lose, whether you kill me or not.”

“We’ll see who loses!”

Cape took a sliding step toward her, watching the gun.

Reflexive pressure on the trigger.

He lunged, twisting his body sideways, just as the gun bucked. Slice of pain along his left side, noise like a thunderclap, stink of cordite, and in the next second he was on her. He smacked her arm with his forearm, drove it up as she fired again, the revolver close enough to set up a ringing in one ear. Then he caught a grip on the hot metal with both hands, wrenched it loose, threw it aside.

Lacy fought him like a cat, all claws and hisses and spit. Scratched him, tried to bite him. He threw her off; she came back with an upthrust knee that just missed his crotch. He lashed out with the heel of his hand—a sideswipe blow that caught her on the temple above the hairline, staggered her off balance into an end table. Some kind of urn flew off, shattered on the floor; Lacy went down with it, her feet tangled in the table legs.

Melon-thumping sound: the back of her head colliding with the thick wooden base of the couch.

Her body stiffened, seemed to draw in on itself. Her eyes rolled up until nothing showed but white. She flopped over on her side, twitching.

“Oh God what did you do to her?”

Stacy, in a doorway across the room. One hand hovered in front of her mouth, the other pressed an ear—speak no evil, hear no evil. He saw her chest heave, her whole body shake as if she were about to go into convulsions.

Cape backed away, looking for the gun. Found it, picked it up.

Lacy tried to lift herself up. Made it to her knees, fell back down. And twitched and tried to lift up and fell back down. Again, and again, more weakly each time, little scrambled sounds coming out of her throat. Concussion. Disoriented, no longer a threat.

“You hurt her you hurt her you hurt her…”

Sounds from Stacy as empty and senseless as the ones her sister was making. She stayed where she was, as if she’d been seized by paralysis. The convulsive movements slowed. All at once she slid down the wall, bonelessly, almost liquidly, to puddle on the floor. She sat there with her eyes squeezed tightly shut. See no evil.

Little sister, weak sister.

Weak link in this set of chains.

But all he felt was numb. He sat on the edge of the couch to catch his breath, inspect the wound in his side. Bloody, stinging, but not much more than a gash.

Bad-luck Cape had some good luck left after all.

He went looking for a telephone to find out just how much.

D’anzello said, “Cape, you’re a damn fool.”

“I won’t argue with that.”

“Six times over. You could be dead right now.”

“I know it.”

“Why’d you go after Lacy Hammond like that, with the gun in your face? You think she wouldn’t fire?”

“I told you why,” Cape said wearily. “I told the DA why. It’s all there in my sworn statement.”

“Tell me again.”

“I’d had enough, that’s why. It was either jump her or let her kill me.”

“You could’ve waited until you were outside. Used the cover of darkness to make your play.”

“Better odds if I could rattle her enough so she’d lose her cool. She really didn’t want to do it inside the house.”

“You were lucky. Beat the odds.”

“Sometimes you do, sometimes you don’t.”

“Pretty offhand reaction,” D’Anzello said.

“I’m not trying to be offhand or smartass, Captain. I’m tired… hell, exhausted. Are you going to let me leave here pretty soon?”

“I don’t know yet. I could charge you with any number of
felonies, you know. Withholding evidence, breaking and entering, car theft, assault.”

Cape said thinly, “Lock me up in a cage. Is that what I get for handing you three cold-blooded murderers?”

“I didn’t say I would charge you. I said I could.”

“I was being used. Boxed in. Everything I did was because of that.”

“And you’re a man who hates being boxed in.”

“That’s right. Look, you’ve got my statement and my apology. Stacy Vanowen confessed; it looks like Tarles is going to make it, and you’ll get a confession out of him if he does. You don’t need me anymore. It won’t do anybody any good to take away my freedom.”

“True enough,” D’Anzello admitted. “The DA pretty much agrees. He’s licking his chops over the two sisters; he’s not interested in you. He left it to my discretion whether to charge you or not.”

“Well?”

D’Anzello leaned back in his desk chair, tapped the edge of a pen against a front tooth. “You don’t strike me as the hero type, Cape.”

“Me? I’m not.”

“Took a lot of guts to do what you did. Most men wouldn’t’ve been able to rush into the muzzle of a gun like that, even to save themselves.”

“Are we back there again?”

“Most men wouldn’t have gone up against a purse snatcher with a knife, either, the way you did in New Orleans.”

Cape sighed. “I didn’t know he had a knife when I chased him.”

“Police report says you had no weapon, that you disarmed the man bare-handed. Sounds pretty heroic to me.”

“Reflex, that’s all.”

“Just being a good citizen.”

“Trying to be.”

“Good citizen, good Samaritan, hero—all wrapped up in one package.”

“If you say so.”

“But the Matthew Cape who lived in Rockford, Illinois, the one we ran the background check on, wasn’t like that at all. Quiet salesman type, Mr. Average. What changed that Matthew Cape into this one?”

Silent shrug.

“Come on, now,” D’Anzello said. “What made you quit your job, leave your wife, buy a Corvette, start gallivanting all over the country? What gave you the sudden horror of being boxed in? What changed Clark Kent into Superman?”

“Superman. Jesus.”

“Answer the question.”

“Midlife crisis,” Cape said. “Everybody has one, they tell me.”

“I don’t buy it.”

“All right, then. I needed a change. I’d had enough of the dull life, I craved some excitement.”

“That doesn’t explain going up against knives and guns. Mild-mannered salesmen don’t grow a new set of balls overnight.”

“Maybe I just got tired of all the injustice and suffering in the world, decided to do something about it in my own small way.”

“Crap.”

“Or maybe I’m atoning for past sins.”

“Uh-huh. Storing up points in heaven.”

“Something like that.”

“I want a straight answer. What makes Cape run?”

“I’m not running.”