The Tiger Among Us

by Leigh Brackett

  The gray-haired woman approached the steps.

  "There she comes," said Francis. "Holy sister Mary. So goddamned holy she couldn't get herself a man." He said it malignantly, making sure she heard. "She's tried all the churches in the book, but they wasn't none of them holy enough for her. I don't know what she'll do now. Start one of her own, I guess."

  I stood up, wishing I hadn't come. But Francis' sister paid him no attention. She was looking hard at me, one of those iron, joyless women who seem never to have been young.

  "Did you give him any money?" she asked me.

  "No," I said.

  She was not convinced. "You might think you were doing him a kindness. He's shrewd about getting the drink."

  "I didn't," I said. "I just came to ask your brother a few questions," I explained, with those unwelcoming eyes of hers never shifting from my face. "I'm sorry if I've made any trouble for you, but it's important to find out what I can."

  She shook her head. "He whines a lot about that beating, but it wasn't that that rotted him inside and out. It was the drink that did it, and he was drunk that night. He doesn't remember anything."

  Her tone was calm and matter-of-fact. But it stung Francis into a foggy rage.

  "I can remember more than you damn well think," he shouted. "I can remember legs all around me. I remember a great big guy pulled me straight up to my feet and then threw me down again, and another one of 'em laughed. He laughed like a goddamn silly jackass all the time he was kicking my guts out. Don't tell me what I can remember."

  "I wouldn't put too much faith in anything he says," his sister told me. "His mind isn't good. Are you ready to go now? I have to get back to my work."

  "Aren't you interested in trying to find the boys who beat your brother?"

  "No," she said. "The Lord sent them to rebuke him. They were on the Lord's errand, and the Lord will deal with them as He sees fit."

  Francis began to mutter blasphemies. Suddenly he shouted at Mrs. Barnard. "Go inside, you old crow, the show's over!" His sister spoke sharply to him, and he cursed her. I went out to my car. Just before I drove away I looked up at the house again. They were still on the porch. She was ordering him to go inside and he was refusing to budge, grinning at her in toothless spite. They were happy. You could see it in every line of them, the way they reacted to each other. He had someone to worry and torment, and she had someone upon whom to practice her righteousness, and neither one of them could get away. They were a unit. They belonged.

  Koleski was out, but I left a note for him. It seemed beyond doubt to me now that it was the same gang, but cops are harder to convince. I thought he might want to question Francis himself.

  I picked up Tracey, stopping long enough to remind the children that they still had a father. "This is a hell of a way to live," I said to my parents-in-law, "but right now I don't know what else to do."

  "We love having the children," said Tracey's mother. "Just take care of yourselves, that's all." I knew she had fought it out with Tracey about staying at the house with me and she didn't mention it, but her eyes were dark and deep with worry.

  I kissed her and told her not to be afraid. I said I would take care of Tracey, and with the .38 weighing down my pocket it seemed that I ought to be able to. It took only about twenty minutes to remind me of the fact that there are times when a gun is no help.

  When you leave North Road on Laurel Terrace Drive you descend almost at once into the gully of a stream bed, paralleling the course of the water for a short distance and then making a fairly sharp left turn across a bridge. You can't take that turn too fast, and on both sides of the bridge the bank is grown thick with scrub willow and rough brush.

  I had made my turn onto the bridge and was just starting to pick up speed again when there was a sudden violent crack! and something flew past my ear. It hit the windshield. I saw a spider-web pattern spring out like magic on the glass. In the same fraction of a second Tracey said, "Oh!" in a son of startled, unbelieving way.

  She had clapped her hands over her face, and between the fingers I saw a red smear of blood.

  13

  I TRAMPED on the accelerator.

  "Get down," I said to Tracey. "Get down on the floor."

  The rear wheels spun and screamed in the scurf of gravel that was always on the bridge, kicked there by passing cars from the berm of the road.

  It seemed as though we hung there for an hour, with Tracey sliding down under the cowl, her hands still covering her face, and me with my head pulled down onto my shoulders until my neck hurt with the tension, my foot pressing that damned pedal into the mat.

  It could only have been, really, a second or two. Then the car jumped forward. There was another loud noise of something hitting it, but this time lower down, on the rear deck. I looked in the rearview mirror. We were travelling fast now, over the bridge and toward the winding road beyond. I couldn't look long. But I saw a big tall figure come out of the scrub bushes where it had been hidden and stoop and pick up stones and throw them after us, futilely, in a perfect fury of childish exasperation.

  Then we had swung around a curve.

  "Are you all right?" I asked. "Tracey, baby——"

  I was scared. I had never been so scared in all my life.

  "I think so," she said, in a weak uncertain voice. She was still huddled under the cowl. I glanced down. She had taken her hands away and was staring at the blood on them. Her eyes were wide.

  "It's just a nick," I said. "Only a little nick, honey, right above your eyebrow."

  I hoped I was telling the truth.

  "Here," I said, and gave her my handkerchief. "We'll be home in a minute. It'll be all right."

  She climbed back up on the seat, holding the handkerchief to her forehead. She looked very small. Far too small to be involved in violent happenings.

  "What was it?" she whispered.

  "I don't know. A bullet. No, I didn't hear any shot." That first loud crack had been when the thing drilled through the back window. There was a hole in it and the glass was all starred. "Never mind," I said. "We're all right now."

  I went up that road like a bat out of hell. I was still relatively calm. I hadn't even begun to get it yet. But it's just as well that nothing got in front of me. I had it in my mind to reach home and I don't believe I could have stopped.

  I didn't bother with the garage. I whirled into the drive on two wheels, rushed Tracey into the house, and locked the door behind us. I sat her down on the couch and made two phone calls, one to the police and one to Dr. Obermeyer. Then I went back to Tracey.

  She was not on the couch. I heard water running in the bathroom. She was washing her face and hands with an almost brutal haste, as though she had to get every drop of blood off them before some important deadline that only she knew about.

  "Maybe you better let that alone until Obermeyer comes," I said.

  "It's all right, Walt. Just a little nick." She dried her hands and face on a towel, except for the hurt place. She took tissues from a box and patted that, looking in the mirror. "It's already stopped bleeding. It startled me, that's all."

  Her lips were white. I was afraid she was going to fall over and I put my arms around her. She smiled at me in the mirror and said again, "It's all right, Walt. Nothing to worry about."

  "Come on," I said. "Let's go in the other room and sit down." Suddenly I was afraid I was going to do the falling over. I looked at Tracey in the mirror. "He might have killed you," I said.

  "He might have killed you," Tracey whispered. "He tried to. Oh, Walt." I had a vivid, terrible vision of that missile, whatever it was, hitting me in the back of the head and the car crashing through the flimsy railing of the bridge onto the rocks below, with me dead or senseless at the wheel, and Tracey—

  "This ends it," I said. "I don't give a damn who they are or if they're ever caught. We're leaving town. The hell with them. The hell with Valley Steel and this house and all the rest of it. All rolled together they aren't worth
you and the kids."

  I turned and hurried out of the bathroom, dragging her with me.

  "What are you going to do, Walt?"

  "Pack."

  I pulled her into the bedroom. "There. You sit down on the bed and rest." I kissed her. "You can tell me what you want." I began to pull stuff out of the bureau drawers and throw it in the big chair. Tracey watched me for a minute, holding the wad of tissue to her forehead.

  "Walt," she said.

  I was busy, hauling stuff out of the drawers and piling it up.

  "Walt!"

  Her voice was so sharp and strange that I had to look at her. And now she was not pale any more. Her cheeks were blazing and her eyes glittered.

  "I'm not going to," she said. "This is my house. They haven't any right. They haven't any right." She repeated that until she choked up and had to stop for breath.

  "He hurt me," she said, switching from the general to the particular. "I haven't done anything to him. He nearly killed you, and you haven't done anything to him except try to defend yourself. It isn't right. It isn't just." She began to hammer her two fists on the bed beside her. "You put those things back, Walt. Put them back! "

  I was standing with a pile of shirts in my hands, trying dazedly to argue with her, when the doorbell rang. It took me a minute to realize what it was, and then I was afraid again, afraid Chuck had followed and was going to try something new. But the car in the drive was a black sedan with MALL'S FORD P.D. painted on the door, and a uniformed policeman was standing by it, looking at the damage to my hard-top. I opened the door.

  They were the same two officers who had come before, when the boys tackled me in the yard. I didn't remember their names, if they had told me. Almost before I had the door open a police ambulance arrived and two more men came in, carrying a first-aid box. Tracey said she was all right, but they looked at her anyway, applied antiseptic and a bandage, and said the cut didn't amount to much. They advised me to call our own doctor to prescribe some sedation, and I said I had done that. They went away, and then Dr. Obermeyer and Koleski arrived almost simultaneously. I sent Obermeyer in to Tracey and joined Koleski and the policemen outside by the car. Koleski had another detective with him, a tall bony young fellow named Hartigan. It seemed that he worked with Koleski as a team, but I hadn't happened to meet him before.

  One of the cops was doubled over now, poking a flashlight under the front seat of my car. The other one was with Hartigan, examining the dents. They were all listening while I told Koleski what had happened. The Whites and the Thompsons had now come to offer help and find out what was going on, and kids I had hardly ever seen before from all up and down the street were swarming in, bug-eyed with curiosity. I was glad somebody was having fun.

  The officer with the flashlight said, "Look here."

  Koleski bent over and craned his neck: He grunted. The officer got a long twig and raked at something beneath the seat. He worried it out and into an envelope Koleski was holding. Then he held it out for me to see, and the others gathered round.

  It was a round steel ball, the kind they sell for the heavy-duty slingshots that are used for hunting small game.

  "At short range," said Koleski, "that could do you plenty of damage. Your wife's lucky she only caught it after it had spent itself. Nice and quiet and not traceable like a bullet—chances are that Chuck figured it and the broken window would be overlooked in the general mess of a wreck, and the thing would be put down as an accident."

  "Like Finelli."

  "Maybe." He turned to the two cops. "You didn't find anything?"

  "Nothing but the trampled place in the bushes where he hid."

  Koleski frowned at the metal slug. "I think there'll be another one of these around on the bridge. From your story, and the deep dent on the back there, he fired two of them."

  "And then he threw stones." That struck me as very odd, and I said so. "It was such a kiddish gesture, not like Chuck at all. He's always been self-controlled—you know what I mean, where he wanted to be. This time he acted like a child having a tantrum. So damned mad he hadn't killed us, I guess."

  I added, "He did another thing that's out of character too. He came right out in the open, in broad daylight. I might have shot him, or another car might have come along. He was taking a chance."

  Koleski nodded, as though he too thought that might be important. "And he was alone?"

  "There wasn't any sign of anyone else."

  The two officers who had checked the scene on their way out agreed with that. The trampled bushes only spoke of one person.

  "Well," said Koleski, "Chuck may be having troubles of his own, troubles we don't know about. Let's hope so." He put the envelope in his pocket. "The lab will check this, but I don't think we'll get anything. I'll arrange for a team of men to stake out on your place for a while, just in case."

  That relieved me, for the moment, of the necessity to make any decision about going or staying, and I was glad. I was tired. I didn't want to have to think about anything for a while.

  Koleski spoke to the cops for a minute, telling them to be on the lookout for a light-colored convertible. Then he said to me, "I got your message about Harold Francis. Either Hartigan or I will talk to him, but I doubt if we'll get any more out of him than you did. I'm amazed you got that much."

  "His sister jarred it out of him. It sounds like the same bunch, doesn't it?" '

  "It sure does. I believe if we could get hold of the stocky kid and make him laugh for us, we'd have all the identifications we want. Everybody seems to remember him."

  I said, "I suppose I might have got Chuck today, but my wife was hurt. It didn't seem important."

  "You did the right thing," Koleski said.

  He left with Hartigan. The cops left. There were still a lot of people around, staring and asking questions. I saw Joe Thompson and asked him please to get them the hell out of there. His wife was in the house with Tracey, and so was Andy White and his wife. Dr. Obermeyer was just leaving.

  "The wound is superficial," he said, "but Tracey's had a nasty fright, and from the looks of you, Walter, so have you. I have left four capsules. Give Tracey two of them and take the other two yourself. And give me a ring tomorrow."

  I thanked him. He went out, and finally the Whites left too, after we had convinced them there wasn't anything they could do. Both they and the Thompsons were very worked up about it all. It did seem a hell of a thing. As Tracey said, we didn't deserve it. As Tracey said, it wasn't fair.

  Nothing more happened that night. We even slept, thanks to Obermeyer's capsules. The next morning Tracey's forehead was puffed up and sore, but otherwise she seemed all right. I sat at the breakfast table watching her move about the kitchen in a flowered housecoat, as pretty as ever except for the patch of white gauze and tape above her eyebrow. It was an obtrusive thing. It stood out. It got bigger and bigger while I watched until I couldn't see anything else.

  "Tracey," I said. "I meant that last night. I'm quitting."

  This time she didn't flare up at me. She came over and stood beside her, her hand on my shoulder. "You're afraid, aren't you?"

  The sunlight fell hot and strong on both of us through the window, but I was cold. "Yes," I said. "I'm afraid."

  "So am I. I have been from the first. That was truly the main reason why I wanted you to give up. I know you didn't think so, but it was. I was afraid of what they'd do."

  She sat down across from me. "It seems a shame," she said.

  A flash of the old hot rage came up in me, but the white bandage on Tracey's head cooled it down again fast. It occurred to me to wonder why things had changed with me so suddenly, why fear had come to be more powerful than anger. The obvious answer was that Tracey had been hurt and endangered, and that was true. But there was something more.

  Chuck had changed too. He was no longer bent on frightening me or perhaps beating me up again. He was bent on murder.

  I had never had anyone come after me before to kill me. It w
as a new experience. I didn't have any prearranged, preconditioned attitude toward the situation. I didn't have any recommended social behavior to fall back on. I was simply and honestly yellow. There was a cold, cruel, bitter finality about getting murdered that I couldn't quite bring myself to face.

  "I was furious last night," Tracey said. She got up and poured coffee and brought the two cups to the table. Her hands shook a little. "But I don't know, this morning I feel different. Tired, I guess. I would like to go away and forget all this. Not to have to worry, worry, worry, every minute."

  Her voice had got away from her. She waited until she could control it again.

  "I just don't see," she said, "what we would live on."

  "It wouldn't have to be for long. Only until they're caught, or—well, until this thing blows over."

  "It's been nearly five months already. Do you know how much we've got in the bank?"

  I did, all too well. I drank my coffee slowly, trying to think. It was kind of funny in a way. We had made our gesture of defiance. We had blown our trumpets and waved our banners, and that was that. It was as though we felt we had done all that custom demanded, and the hell with it. Now we were basely considering the safety of our skins.

  "We'd get some money from the house," I said. "And maybe George Warren would be able to do something for me. There must be jobs in other towns. We'd make out somehow."

  "Dad might help, too, if we needed it. They'd keep the children for us, until we got——"

  "No," I said savagely, "the kids go with us. I may have to give up everything else but I'm damned if I give up my family."

  Tracey sat and looked gloomily into her coffee, shaking her head.

  I said, "It sounds crazy, doesn't it, when you say it right out in words? All because of five boys we never saw or heard of before."

  "I guess that's why people like that always have the advantage of people like us."

  "How do you mean?"

  "Well, they haven't anything to lose, and we do. They don't care what they do to other people, but we care what's done to us. It makes you wonder if they really are human like us, or if they're—I don't know. Throwbacks. Just animals."