The Ice Harvest (12 page)

“Jesus, are those cigarette burns?” He noted an odor of freshly smoked tobacco in the room.

She nodded, without a discernible trace of self-pity. “There’s a shotgun under the bar. You know how to use one?”

“Lot better than I do one of these things.” He put Roy’s gun back in his overcoat pocket.

“Go get it and wait. When he comes back in here, wait until I say ‘All right, I’ll tell you what I know.’ That’s your signal you’ve got a clear shot.”

“I’ll be outside, behind the stage,” he said. She nodded.

The shotgun lay easily handy on a shelf below the front bar. Charlie pulled it out and took a good long time opening the breech to avoid any audible clicks that might carry to Gerard’s stall. It was loaded and ready. He took an extra handful of shells from a small box next to where the shotgun had been and dropped them into his coat pocket. He hadn’t fired a gun of any kind since the army, and didn’t think he’d fired a shotgun since he was a teenager. He tried to think of the last thing he’d shot, but couldn’t put his finger on it. Maybe a duck, or more likely quail. He’d never been too keen on getting up before dawn to go sit in a fetid duck blind and wait for the ducks to come. He closed the breech and carried the gun, barrel up, to the small circular stage. A first attempt to kneel behind the stage brought on another terrible burst of pain in his hip, and he ended up lying on his side, ready to rise when Gerard crossed from the men’s room to Renata’s office.

His free hand brushed against something soft on the floor, and he picked up what he recognized as Amy Sue’s blue panties. He wondered why she hadn’t put them back on after her last dance, then decided he didn’t want or need to know. He rubbed the silky material between his fingers for a second, then hooked one of its legs over the barrel of the gun and began twirling it in a circular motion, watching the shiny blue panties gyrate in the cold, stale air of the club.

He stopped when he heard a toilet flushing, barely noticing as the panties slid midway down the barrel. He clicked the safety off and peered around the corner of the stage. The men’s room door opened and Bill Gerard strutted tall and potbellied out of it, buckling his belt, his normally immaculate silver hair a disheveled mess. Over his arm was draped the jacket of a brown three-piece suit, its vest hanging unbuttoned from his narrow shoulders. Even thirty feet away Charlie could see he had an erection and needed a shave. He followed Bill’s head with the end of the barrel, leading it just slightly. When the moment came to pull the trigger, Bill surprised him by yelling, and the moment was lost.

“You know what really pisses me off,” he bellowed into the office. “I’m going to miss my grandkids opening their presents this morning if I don’t get on the road soon. And by the time I get back I’ll be exhausted.”

He disappeared into the office and Charlie rose awkwardly and painfully to his feet. He heard Renata’s voice, but he couldn’t make out what she was saying. Bill Gerard had stopped yelling, but even at a normal conversational tone his nasal, braying voice was loud enough to hear from Charlie’s position.

“So how much longer are you going to keep me here on Christmas?” Charlie was twenty feet from the door. “Seems to me we could clear this up pretty easy if you decide to talk to me.”

Renata said something, but Charlie couldn’t hear what it was.

“Fair enough. Now you know what I want you to do for me? I want you to open that pretty little red mouth of yours, and when you’ve learned who’s in charge here maybe you’ll be a little more forthcoming with the information I require.”

Charlie couldn’t make out Renata’s reply, but he was close enough now to see through the doorway. Gerard had pulled his cock out of his fly and was holding it, erect, inches from Renata’s expressionless face. She showed no sign that she saw Charlie standing outside the door behind Gerard.

“Now open up for Bill,” Gerard said, and he moved a little closer to Renata as Charlie drew a bead on his head. “Come on, goddamnit, I’m not funning here.”

Gerard’s head was fifteen feet from the end of the barrel. Charlie hesitated. Pretend it’s a duck. A motionless, curly-haired duck with a hard-on. He squeezed the trigger and the gun went off, prompting a startled yelp of pain from Gerard and a speckling of red spots against the white of his hair instead of the explosion of skull and brains Charlie had anticipated. “What the fuck . . .” Gerard’s voice was up an octave as he turned around, his cock still in his hand. “Charlie? Jesus, the one guy down here I thought I could trust.” He took a look at the shotgun. “A four-ten? You tried to kill me with a fucking four-ten loaded for
snake
? I don’t know whether to laugh or be insulted.”

“Don’t move, Bill.” Charlie advanced on Gerard. “That was just to get your attention. At this range I’ll kill you dead.”

Gerard smirked, let go of his dick, and reached into his vest. He came out with a .22 caliber pistol and waved it at Charlie. “You really shit in your nest now, Charlie. Now set that fucking thing down.”

Charlie still had a bead on Bill Gerard’s head, and he tried hard not to glance down at Renata, who had discreetly moved off the chair and onto her knees, her head within striking distance of Gerard’s cock, still semierect and swinging.

“You half-assed farthammer, you haven’t even got both your shoes on. Come on, Charlie. I want to hear what all you’ve done to betray my trust before I shoot you. I want the details. I want—” Gerard’s voice cracked, his eyes went wide, and he lowered the pistol. “Oh, sweet Jesus . . .” Charlie finally allowed himself to glance down at Renata and found her with her mouth around Gerard’s joint, though not the way he’d intended. She had a good sideways grip on his shaft, her teeth bared and poised to bite it right into three separate pieces. Bill’s momentary panic turned quickly enough to rage, and he placed the barrel of the .22 against Renata’s right orbital bone. “If I even get the idea you’re thinking about biting down, you’re gonna be minus an eye.”

Charlie took three quick steps forward and fired, the end of the barrel less than a foot and a half from Gerard’s face. Snakeshot from the four-ten tore into it and Gerard fell backward. Renata released her grip, pulled away, and watched as he hit the ground, his face dotted with tiny, oddly clean holes that pooled quickly with blood and began overflowing as he lay there, raggedly sucking in air.

“I helped you a lot, Charlie. Goddamn.” His voice was sticky, his throat filling with liquid.

“Charlie!” She barked it, and there was no question of who was in charge. “Pick up the fucking pistol and finish him.”

He picked the pistol up off the floor and aimed it at Bill Gerard’s pocked, oozing face. Bill didn’t look like he much cared what Charlie did next. “He’s dying anyway.”

“Take that pillow and put it over his face.”

He picked up a green velvet throw pillow from a chair in the corner of the office and placed it over Gerard’s face as ordered. He didn’t resist; in fact he seemed only vaguely aware of Charlie’s presence. Charlie pressed the muzzle into the pillow and fired. The sound wasn’t too bad, he thought, but he started to worry about the noise the shotgun blasts had made. He almost lifted the pillow, then changed his mind. Renata looked coolly down at him.

“Why didn’t you tell me it was a four-ten? I almost got us both killed, firing at him from that distance.”

“That’s why I told you to wait until I said, ‘I’ll tell you what I know.’ ”

“I couldn’t hear what you were saying from out there. Anyway if I’d waited any longer he’d have had his dick in your mouth.”

“So fucking what? It ended up there anyway, didn’t it? The idea was for me to blow him until his guard was down; then I’d give the signal and you could get close enough to kill him.” She shook her head in wonderment at his in-ability to follow the simplest of instructions.

Charlie sighed. “In order to give me the signal, you’d have had to interrupt the blow job and he would’ve heard me.”

“I wouldn’t have said it until after he came.”

“What the hell are you doing with a pop gun like that behind the bar anyway? Loaded with
snake
shot, for Christ’s sake?”

“Sidney’s in charge of all that. He doesn’t want to kill anybody.”

“From a liability point of view, that’s pretty stupid, Renata. You’d both be in a lot more legal hot water for Sidney maiming somebody than for killing him.”

“Well, now I know.”

“So where’s the money?”

She nodded at a satchel like an old-fashioned doctor’s bag sitting on the floor of the office. Charlie picked it up and set it on the desk. “Go ahead and open it. Bill already showed me.”

Charlie took a deep breath. He undid the latches and opened the bag.

“How much money is it, Charlie?”

He almost wept at the sight of all the stacks of Franklins jumbled together in the satchel, held together with rubber bands. “It’s a whole lot of money.” On top of the pile was an envelope containing two plane tickets, in the names of G. and B. Newman. He tossed the .22 onto the pile with a little prayer of thanks. Bill Gerard had saved his plan.

“Is it enough to take me with you, or are you going to kill me, too?”

He looked up at her, stunned. “I’m not going to kill you.”

“A man’s just had his brains scrambled by a twenty-two-caliber slug on my office floor, Charlie. It’s going to make it difficult for me to stay in business. It’s going to be a neat trick just staying out of jail. Looks like you’ve got a lot more than this club is worth in that bag of yours. If you’re not going to take me along, I’d just as soon you killed me.”

“I’m not going to kill you.”

“Take me with you, then. I’d make it worth your while. I can be a
lot
of fun, Charlie.”

He looked at the tickets. Next to them in the envelope was an itinerary and an invoice indicating that they had been paid for in cash. Neither G. nor B. Newman had been assigned a full name or gender. They could be Mr. and Mrs. Gregory Newman. He had the name and address of a document artisan in New York who would supply him in two days’ time with a fake passport, and paying for another for Renata was easy enough. The very fact that there were two tickets in the bag was proof that Vic had planned to bring a woman along with him anyway, wasn’t it? The possibility lurked in the back of his mind that he’d been wrong about Vic’s plans, but he didn’t entertain it long.

“All right. You can come with me.”

Bill Gerard had more than saved his plan. He had made Charlie’s fondest fantasy come true, a fantasy he’d never even articulated to himself, but there it was, buried in the depths of his unconscious brain: him and Renata, in the tropics somewhere, screwing on top of his big pile of money with a fully stocked wet bar next to it.

“Pick up the desk, then.”

Charlie lifted the corner of the desk, the pain in his hip masked by euphoria. “You think anyone heard the shots?”

“Probably not,” she said, pulling the chain of the cuffs clear of the leg. “We’re pretty well insulated for sound because of the music. The four-ten’s not that loud for a shotgun, and you got a pretty good muffle on the twenty-two with the pillow. It’s probably best not to hang around any longer than we have to, though. Now why don’t you dig in his pocket for the key to the handcuffs and we’ll go to my house and I’ll pack a bag.”

He knelt down and stuck his hand in Bill Gerard’s pant pocket. The body twitched once, almost imperceptibly, when he touched it, and in a panic Charlie yanked the gory pillow away from its face. The wounds were no longer bleeding.

“Don’t worry, he’s dead. Just find the key.”

Again he slipped his hand into the pocket and pulled out Bill’s wallet, then an overloaded key ring, which he tossed to Renata.

“He’s not going to keep handcuff keys on the same ring as his house keys, now, is he? Check his shirt pocket.”

In the shirt pocket was a tiny pair of keys on a small wire ring. He opened the cuffs and she again pulled the collar of her sweater away from the burns. “I’d better get some antibiotic on these. Come on, let’s get going.”

“Could I get a beer before we go?”

She reached into her bottom drawer and handed him a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black. “Here. We’ll take it back to my place.”

“Hold on a second.” Charlie knelt again by Gerard’s feet and pulled off his shoes. Size eleven. He took off his one shoe and both socks and put on Bill’s dry socks, then tried on the left shoe, a burgundy wing tip. It fit better than his own. He put the other one on and took a walk around the room. His remaining problems seemed small.

16

I
t would take at least two and a half hours driving south to get to the airport, depending on the condition of the roads, but the eleven o’clock flight to New York was still a reasonable possibility, and if they missed it there would be others. He toyed with the possibility of getting a couple of first-class upgrades.

This time he parked the car right in Renata’s driveway. The sun wasn’t up yet, but the sky was lightening to a chalky gray as they came in through her back door.

“You wait in the living room while I pack, Charlie.”

He went in and sat down by the fireplace, placing the satchel safely at his feet. Again he picked up Renata’s paperback and tried to make out the language. The alphabet was Roman but there were odd characters and accents scattered throughout the text, and he found no name on the copyright page that corresponded to any city he knew. The paper was cheap and brittle, and a number of the pages were coming loose from the glue where she’d cracked the spine. On the cover was an amateurish painting of a farmer and his wife looking bravely out into the hazy future, suggesting a Soviet-bloc origin—Hungary? Poland? Lithuania?

“No time to screw, I don’t think, but if you feel like it I’ll blow you before we get going,” she yelled from the bedroom. Her accent was a shade more pronounced than usual, as though she sensed he was speculating on her origins. “In the meantime, why don’t you fix yourself a drink?”

He looked down at the satchel. Inside was the Johnnie Walker Black. He decided to wait until after the blow job and stood up. She was standing over an open suitcase on the bed. “Are you leaving the photos?”

She looked back at the framed photographs as though she’d forgotten they were there. “They’re not mine.”

“Whose are they?”

“How do I know? Why don’t you wait in the living room.”

“Where are you from, Renata? Originally.”

“Why are you asking me questions, Charlie? What’s it got to do with anything?”

“I was just curious. I always wondered where you came from.”

“It’s a long story. We’ve got plenty of time to get better acquainted, don’t you think?”

“Yeah.” He went back to the chair by the fire, opened the satchel, and twisted the cap of the Johnnie Walker Black, tearing the tax stamp. His eye was drawn to the .22. Was the safety on? Did a .22 pistol even have a safety? He set the bottle down and picked up the pistol. Before tonight he’d never killed anyone in his life, and now he’d killed two. Three, if you counted helping Vic kill Roy Gelles. Call it two and a half. He wondered between the three of them how many people Vic, Roy, and Bill had killed over the years. There wasn’t a single incident he could name with any certainty, except for Vic killing Desiray. Bill Gerard was supposed to have beaten one of his streetwalkers to death with his bare fists once for talking back, but Charlie had always suspected that the story had been exaggerated or even concocted wholesale to impress and frighten Bill’s colleagues and competition alike. In the end, Bill had turned out to be pretty easy to kill, even for a beginner. He weighed the pistol in his palm, thinking how close it had come to ending his life. A simple nervous reflex stemming from the shock of Renata’s teeth clamping down on the shaft of Bill’s penis had saved Charlie and Renata both from a bullet.

He dropped the .22 back into the satchel and was starting to picture the blow job when Renata’s plan came back to him with nauseating clarity: the idea had been for her to blow Bill and kill him while his guard was down. He looked around the corner past the fireplace, back toward the bedroom. Renata’s going away with him made no sense for her. Depending on his or anyone’s generosity for her survival wasn’t in her nature.

Fucking idiot. He set the bottle down again and approached the bedroom door.

“I’m almost done, Charlie. Go back and sit down.”

“I just wanted to ask you something.”

She stopped and looked up at him. “What?”

He didn’t really have a specific question planned. “Nothing. Sorry.”

“Go back and sit down. I’ll be done in a second and then I’ll come in and give you a blow job like you’ve never had in your life.”

He went back to the living room and sat down. He picked the .22 back up and waited. He’d almost allowed his giddy relief at getting the money back and the inconceivably beautiful prospect of a life with a spectacular, unattainable woman to cloud his good judgment. Renata had been in on it with Vic, and she’d most likely called the cops to report the burglary at Bonnie’s house. He had more than a quarter of a million dollars in a satchel, and he’d nearly traded it for a blow job that he wouldn’t have lived to see the end of.

He listened to her in the bedroom, singing a song he couldn’t identify. She had to be armed in some way. His only tactical advantage was her continuing belief that he was under her power.

“Almost done, Charlie,” she called. “You want me naked or in some kind of sexy underwear?”

Either way might have weakened his resolve. “Fully clothed.”

“What, like the suit I had on yesterday?”

That would have been even worse. He closed his eyes. “Whatever you’ve got on now. We’re running low on time.”

“Whatever you want, Charlie.”

He got up and moved across the room. He stood in the shadows near the kitchen door with the pistol.

“How long do you think we’ll be in New York? Two, three days? Then we’re out of the country? Charlie?”

She stopped by the fireplace, looking back toward the bathroom, and he raised the pistol. She was beautiful. Her face was softer than he’d ever seen it. It was almost sweet. “Charlie?” She chuckled, as though his absence signaled a game. She turned toward the bedroom, brow furrowed in playful curiosity. “Are you back there? Did you double back on me?” As she disappeared from sight he lowered the pistol. He followed her into the hallway.

“Charlie?” She had her head stuck into the bedroom, one leg outstretched into the hallway for balance. Now was the time, while he couldn’t see her face. Pretend she’s a duck. He fired, the sound cracking through the little house like a cherry bomb, and Renata fell into the door frame, a small wet spot on the back of her black sweater. She let out a quiet gasp as she slid to the oak floor. She turned enough as she did so to face Charlie when she hit the ground.

“What the fuck did you do that for? I think you hit me in the lung. Jesus, Charlie, call a doctor. Jesus. Jesus.”

“I’m sorry,” Charlie said, taking aim again, and he was. The second shot seemed louder than the first, and he knew he’d have to get out in a hurry this time. It, too, hit her in the chest.

“Why, Charlie, why?” The uncomprehending sorrow in her face and voice made him momentarily sure he’d made the wrong decision, but there was no changing it now.

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

“Call an ambulance.”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“Then sit here and hold me,” she whimpered.

He knelt down beside her, intending to comfort her for just a moment before finishing her off as an act of mercy. She began to wail as he put an arm around her shoulder, and as the wail became a curse he pulled away from her just in time to avoid taking a filleting knife in the throat. The knife grazed the side of his neck, and scrambling back to his feet he renounced any hope of getting close enough to make contact between the pistol and her head. He fired a third time and was close enough to put it into her forehead, interrupting in midsyllable a curse in Hungarian or Lithuanian or Polish. He stood over her weeping, disconsolate at her having proved him right. He dropped the pistol into the satchel and walked out the back door. The sky was brighter now, still overcast and dark, but the promise of the morning to come was there. None of the neighbors’ lights were on, but he assumed he’d been seen.

He drove to the Sweet Cage to get Bill Gerard’s car, on the assumption that the neighbors had probably heard the shot and that one of them might have had the presence of mind to take down the number of Betsy van Heuten’s Mercedes. He hated to give up the Mercedes, and he considered switching the plates, but it would take time and he might be seen. It was just a two-and-a-half- or three-hour ride down to the airport, anyway.

He parked the Mercedes next to the Lincoln and unlocked the side door with Sidney’s keys. He moved through the dark to Renata’s office where Bill’s body lay. The four-ten lay on the desk with Amy Sue’s blue panties still twisted, shimmering, around its barrel. Bill’s keys were next to it, where Renata had dropped them. He placed them in his side pocket with his own and Sidney’s. Hearing them clank, and feeling the jagged, unwieldy load cut into his thigh, he envisioned potential problems at the airport metal detector, and he pulled out his own key ring and tossed it onto the floor as the least useful set of the three. Not exactly a neat crime scene, he thought, with his keys on the floor next to the corpse, and his fingerprints all over a shotgun on the desk, but he didn’t have time to dispose of any of it, and in any case he’d be a distant memory by the time anybody found any of it and made sense of it all. In a way it struck him as funny.

He was pulling out of the driveway in Bill’s Lincoln when he had second thoughts about Sidney’s keys. They weren’t just keys to the club; they were house keys and car keys, things he’d have a hard time replacing. It was no skin off his ass to swing by and drop Sidney’s keys in his mailbox. Then he’d be on his way.

He got to Sidney’s house and parked. He got out and put the keys in the mailbox and got back behind the wheel, then opened the door and got out again. There was no mail on Christmas, and Sidney would certainly need his keys long before he’d have occasion to check for mail. He took them out of the mailbox and walked across the crunchy snow of the lawn to the front door. The storm door was loose and he put the keys atop its knob so that they’d fall if the door was moved. He was halfway back to the car when the door opened and the keys fell with a light metallic smack.

“Charlie?”

“Oh, Sidney, yeah, I accidentally took your keys.”

“My keys?” Sidney squatted down and picked up the key ring. “How’d that happen?”

“They fell onto the closet floor when I was hanging my coat up, and I picked ’em up, thought they were mine. You been to bed yet?”

“Why bother, the kids’ll be up in an hour anyway. Thanks for bringing these back. I’d have been screwed without ’em.”

“Well, Merry Christmas.”

“You too, Charlie.” Sidney turned and went inside.

He was beginning to feel tired, and for a minute he thought about driving out to the municipal airport in town and avoiding the drive south, but here was one part of Vic’s plan that did seem to hold water. If he did it, he’d be leaving a trail that would lead to him before he left New York, whereas it would ideally be several days at least days before anybody could place him on a flight that left a hundred fifty miles to the south. He took surface streets south and west toward the southernmost turnpike booth, an old habit he had, to avoid paying thirty or forty cents extra on the toll. He took a short, impulsive two-block detour into a residential neighborhood as he neared an old girlfriend’s apartment and slowed down to a stop in front of it. It was the end apartment of one of several identical redbrick buildings, cramped apartments in rows of four. He wasn’t quite sure which of the buildings hers had been, and he didn’t have the slightest idea what had become of her. In fact, he barely remembered anything about her beyond her name, what she looked like, and where she had lived, but it seemed to him as he sat there that he’d spent some of the best nights of his life with her in one of these ratty little apartments. The buildings had deteriorated since he’d been there last, and in the dull haze of the morning he saw that wood was peeling off the front door of the nearest apartment in long, thin vertical spikes behind a torn screen door. He pulled away and headed again for the turnpike.