The Lime Pit (29 page)

"I'm not dead, yet, Red," I said to him.

"Yes, you are. You just don't know it yet."

He tilted back on the chair and hefted the gun in his
hands.

I thought a second about rushing him. Now would be
the time, while Rafe was outside. The room was about thirty feet
square and he was in the middle of it. From where I was standing by
the door, it would take me three strides to reach him and pitch him
to the floor. Give him a second to react. And I'd just be on top of
him when the first slug exploded through my belly. He wouldn't be
able to get the barrel up much higher than that in a second. Hell, he
wouldn't have to.

"You're welcome to try, son," Red said and
grinned. "I would, too, if I was in your shoes."

"If I were in your shoes, you'd be dead."

"Why in hell'd you do it, son? That's what I
can't figure. Why'd you go down to the theater? You must've known I
wasn't going to let you leave." He grinned again, his teeth
yellow in the lamp light. "But, then, you figured you could take
a sixty-year-old man, didn't you?" He laughed spitefully.
"You're a fool, son. Getting yourself killed for a half-witted
old man and a girl that didn't have the sense of a hog. Porky'd be
plumb ashamed of you."

I had to try something. And soon. So I said, "Porky
already knows," and watched his reaction.

I couldn't have been entirely wrong about Bannion.
Even small town cops have a parochial sense of honor, a small spot of
sentimentality. And I was guessing that Porky was smack in the center
of Red's conscience, was also guessing that Porky wasn't a part of
Red's scam, and that Red didn't want him to know how he'd been
moonlighting. I guessed right, because Bannion clicked down on the
chair and peered at me over the rims of his glasses.

"You're lying," he said in a tough, steady
voice.

I leaned back against the wall. "Right after I
got through with the Jellicoes, Red. He knows all about you."

Bannion juggled the gun. "Rafe!" he
shouted.

A second later, the black bounded through the door.
"Take this son-of-a-bitch out back and kill him. I'm going back
to town."

"Yessuh," he said. "Whatchu want me to
do with the body?"

"In the lime pit, Rafe. I'll be back out here
tomorrow, early."

He started for the door. "Work him over a
little, Rafe, before you shoot him," he said over his shoulder.
"That boy needs to be taught to respect his elders 'fore he
dies."

He stepped out the door and off the porch. And, in a
minute, the woodland silence was broken by the sound of the engine.

Rafe watched me while the sound of the car faded
through the trees. His face was dull-eyed and vicious and I could see
the muscles in his forearms flexing a little. He had a pistol tucked
in his belt. I looked down at it, and he smiled.

"Why don' you try?" he said impartially.
"You big enough."

I showed him the cuffs.
He
shook his head. "Not yet. Git over to the table." I walked
over and sat down.

"You wanna drink, maybe?" He walked over to
a carton in the corner beside the door and fished a bottle out of it.
Rafe moved with a boxer's rolling gait. He bounced on his feet and
strutted in front of me. He was enjoying it--making me wait until he
was ready. He cracked the seal on the whiskey bottle, tilted it to
his lips, and took a long drink. His dull brown eyes never left me
for a second. Like most old boxers, Rafe had something soft and
childlike in his face. I was hoping it was stupidity and not simply
scar tissue. He didn't move stupidly, that was sure. He was quick and
lithe and agile. One of those rare men who are absolutely confident
about their bodies. He was about my height, maybe ten or fifteen
pounds heavier.

He had a gold tooth in the back of his mouth and,
when he smiled suddenly-his thick yellow lips opening in animal
rictus and his fat yellow nose splaying against his cheeks--it
glittered in the lamp light. Rafe dangled the bottle at his side,
walked over to my chair and, in one swift movement, broke the bottle
across the back of my skull.

I fell out of the chair to the floor, and he kicked
me hard in the chest.

I didn't know where to try to reach first. I could
feel the glass shards in my scalp, and my chest was burning. I
doubled up in the fetal position. He walked around me a few times,
kicking me at his leisure. Hard, swift kicks. When he got to my
groin, I passed out.

When I came out of it, I was still on the floor,
curled up like a baby. It was late. I could hear the night humming
outside the cabin windows.

He'd built a fire in the chimney and the room
flickered in the firelight. He'd turned the hurricane lamp down. It
was glowing softly on the table.

I wet my lips. They worked. It's hard to describe
what the rest of me felt like. There might have been a spot or two on
my torso that didn't burn with a bruise. I couldn't tell. I'd been
worked over before, but this was the worst I'd taken. I ached inside
and out. And I knew, at once, that I couldn't take any more--that if
he slugged me again I would hemorrhage all to hell on the inside and
drown in my own blood. It hurt to take a breath.

"I see you comin' around."

He was sitting at the table above me. There was
another bottle in his hand. Something bright and terrifying was
glittering beside the lamp.

I tried to roll over and groaned.

"H'm," he said. "That was jus' round
one, honey. Y'all goin' to hate round two."

He stood over me and grabbed me by the handcuffs and
dragged me to the second chair, which he'd set across from his at the
table.

"Git up!" he roared and yanked me to my
feet.

For a second, I thought I was going to pass out
again. He plopped me on the chair and sat down across from me. He
picked up the razor and teased it with his thumb.

"Please," I said. "Shoot me."

He laughed-a truly terrifying laugh and stared madly
at my face.

"No, honey. That's round three."

"Why?" I swallowed some blood and made my
eyes focus on him.

"Like the man said, I don't like you. When I was
in 'Nam, had me a boy like you in the outfit. Man you should have
seen what I did to that po' soul."

"What outfit?" I said stupidly.

"LURPs," he said. "Y'all in 'Nam?"

I nodded.

He leaned back and gazed at me. "Maybe we skip
round two," he said.

I had gotten a bit of body sense back. I knew which
way I was facing. And I could move my right arm. Given another few
minutes, I could stand. I wanted those minutes.

"I was with a Cav patrol got wiped out in la
Drang valley," he said. "You go back that far?"

" '65," I said.

"That's it!" He slapped the table. "Charley
killed every last soul in my outfit, 'cept me. Had to hide under the
bodies whilst they stuck 'em to make sure we was dead." I looked
over at his face. It was mournful and remote. "Some'n happen to
me after that. My mind ain't never been right since then. Then when
Tommy got hisself killed." He looked up at me. "Man, you a
mess."

"I feel like a mess."

"I ain't goin' to whittle on you none. You had
you beating. Kin you walk?"

I could, now. But I could never run. Whatever I
tried, I'd have to try it in that room. And quickly. "No,"
I said.

"Take you a swig of this."

He picked up the bottle and I flinched.

Rafe laughed heartily. "I ain't goin' to hurt
you no more. Go ahaid. Drink."

I showed him the handcuffs and he dug in his pocket
for the key. "Goin' to be all right," he said, unlocking
the cuffs. He held out the bottle again, and I reached for it
shakily. He was directly in front of me. The hurricane lamp was a
foot to my right. There was nothing else on the table. He'd pocketed
the razor.

I took the bottle by the neck and started carrying it
toward my lips. He was watching me, one arm on the table, urging me
with his eyes.

"Go on," he said, leaning forward a bit.

I brought the bottle up to my lips, then jabbed it
straight back in a stabbing motion, right into Rafe's forehead.

It broke instantly and Rafe shouted, "Jesus!"
as the blood sprang out.

He grabbed his head, red with blood and whiskey. And
I lunged for the lamp, burning my hands on the glass chimney, and
sent it hurtling into his face. It shattered in my hands, and then
Rafe's face just exploded in flame.

He threw himself backward off the chair, shrieking,
and rolled across the floor, clawing at his flesh. His T-shirt had
started up, too. And, for half a minute, his whole upper body was
jacketed in blue alcohol fire.

I would have helped him if I could have. But it took
me over a minute to get to my feet; and, by then, he'd stopped
shrieking and skittering across the floor like a dying moth and was
lying on his back about ten feet from the table, his knees up and his
arms spread on the floor. One side of his face looked like bubbling
brown sugar, and there were smoking patches of charred flesh on his
chest, his arms and his belly. The smell was hellish.

I was leaning on the table-barely standing. Rafe was
on the floor-lying still.

And then, he got up.

The dead, smouldering son-of-a-bitch got up!

At first I couldn't believe it--watching him turn and
heave and groan and lift again, pushing himself off the floor as if
he were doing a push-up with one blackened arm. I screamed when I saw
him half-standing. And, with a strength born of sheer terror, I
grabbed the chair beside me and swung it at his head.

It caught him across his chest and he crashed to the
floor, as if he'd gone down on wet ice. I pounced on him and dug the
pistol from his belt and held it to his head and pulled the trigger.
The gun snapped viciously, and Rafe's head cracked like an egg. A
gurgle of trapped gas came from his throat.

I pawed and lunged my way back to the table. And just
sat there, gun pointed at his corpse, waiting for him to get up
again. I just couldn't believe he was dead--on the floor of that
nightmarish cabin, flickering with red firelight. I must have
held the gun on him for twenty minutes before I realized that, this
time, he wasn't going to get back on his feet.
 

27

THERE WAS a third bottle of whiskey in that carton
beside the door. And that's how I spent the rest of the night,
drinking at the table in the dying firelight and dreaming, eyes open,
of Rafe, as his face exploded in flame--exploded like a wad of
crumpled newspaper, fattening with it, feeding on it as if it were
something black and rich and bloating. The smell in the cabin was
horrible. And the only reason I didn't go outside until first light
was that I couldn't move my legs again until first light and, then,
only with stomach-turning pain. I went outside on the porch and threw
up.

I sat there on the railing--one hand against the
house to steady me and the other crooked around the whiskey bottle
and watched it grow light in the east. It's Thursday, I told myself.
I looked at my watch. It's Thursday at 6:30 in the morning. And the
temperature is . . . I could feel it coming and I didn't try to stop
it. I just sat there, as the sky purpled and went white, and wept.
For Hugo and Cindy Ann and Jo and me, who had killed that thing lying
in the cabin like a dead fire.

The birds began to call among the trees. Jays and
robins and the dark hoarse caw of a crow. I sat and waited. My eyes
on the gravel road that wound through the trees. Waiting to hear the
sound of the engine. To see the sun glint off those bull's horns. I
held the pistol in my hand as I waited. Not a thought in my head. Too
exhausted to think or plan.

At nine-ten I heard it. Heard it before I could see
it through the trees. And I walked off the porch, swinging the
whiskey bottle and the gun in either hand, and crouched down beside
the east wall of the cabin, out of sight of the road.

The car was closer now. The tires scudding through
the gravel, making a loose, sodden sound. And then the engine was so
loud I wanted to hold my ears against it. And then it stopped.

The car door cracked open. And I could hear his feet
on the dry ground.

"Rafe?" he called from below the porch.
"Rafe?"

He started up the porch stairs and, suddenly, his
foot turned to stone. The stair creaked as if he were rocking on it.

"Harry?" he said softly. "Boy, you in
there?"

He had his gun out now.

"I'm comin' in," he shouted.

I crouched lower against the house, the white morning
sunlight blazing in my eyes and the parsley curl of ailanthus
cushioning my haunches and my back where the weed crawled among the
struts beneath the cabin and up the cabin wall. I heard his footsteps
on the porch, each one more tentative than the one before it, as he
paced there in front of the door-his gun in one hand and the other
hovering at the knob.