It had grown quiet in the office now.
The door opened, not very far, enough for a cautious eye to see through.
I was halfway up the stairs, a sitting bird if they used the rifle. Even a light-caliber bullet is nothing to fool with, especially at close range. I put a shot in the wall beside the office door and it slammed shut again.
I clambered the rest of the way up to the balcony and lay down on it. It had an open front, with a fence-type railing. I had the strategic position now. I had five bullets left.
I wondered how I was going to use them.
Bill lay beside me between the overturned folding chairs on the bare floor, with the splinters and the dust and the dried rinds of mud and barnyard dirt fallen off the boots of farmers. After a while he whispered, "It's awful quiet. Where are they?"
I shook my head.
"Do you think they've gone?"
"I doubt it," I said, and wished to God they had.
I was getting a violent reaction. Now I was glad I hadn't killed them, or even hurt them, and I didn't want to be tempted again.
This was foolish, perhaps. If I killed all three of them it would be in self-defense and in defense of Bill. We were on the right side. Nobody would blame us.
But I didn't want to do it. I didn't want to be put in a position where I could do it.
You know why?
Because I lusted to kill them. Now, in the full light, in the coolness of reaction, I lusted to kill them. I never wanted anything so much since the day I was born. I wanted it beyond justice or reason or self-preservation.
The tiger stripes were showing on my own hide.
The office door burst open. Swiftly, suddenly, in one leap, Chuck was out and under the edge of the balcony, back in the one place where I couldn't cover him. He had the rifle now, in his own hand.
Roy Aspinwall came beside him, his indispensable shadow. I would have had to kill Roy to get at Chuck. I imagine Chuck had planned it that way.
Bobby Stillman came third. And he lost his nerve.
He started to leap from the dark office into the light, and it was as though the light was a barrier, driving him back. I saw him look up at the balcony, at me. I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking of the bullet hole beside the door, close beside where his head was now. Maybe he was remembering another bullet that had come looking for him in the dark outside, and thinking that a third one would not miss. Maybe he was thinking that it was an ill thing altogether to be shot at.
He froze halfway through the office door, his back against the jamb, his hands flung out and feeling along the wall for something, I don't know what. Salvation, perhaps.
Chuck screamed, "Come on, God damn you, jump!"
"Sure," I said, "come on, Bobby. What's the matter, don't you like the light? Don't you like it when you can't sneak up from behind?"
He didn't like it. I could see his face, the undistinguished, nondescript face of the photograph, but now with terror added, with a cringing whiteness, with glassy eyes looking from me to Chuck, from Chuck to me again.
He was a perfect target. I couldn't miss. I could drop him on the floor with one shot and watch him kick.
The sweat ran in my eyes, and I wiped it with my left hand. "Get out," I told him. "Get the hell out while you live."
He broke and ran. For a second or two I could hear him floundering in the office, his shoes scrunching on the broken window glass. Chuck yelled after him, "Chicken! Chicken! " But he was out the window and gone.
"All right," I said, "yellowbelly. Let's see how brave you are."
Chuck told me obscenely to shut up.
There was silence again in the barn.
Bill moved his head close to my ear. "They're whispering down there. I can hear them——"
"Keep down," I said. "Move back from the edge and keep down." I pushed him away. "Chuck," I said. "Chuck Landry. You're behind the times. We've known who you were since Wednesday. The cops are already on your tail."
He was talking hard and fast to Roy. He pretended he didn't hear me. He pretended he didn't care. Maybe he didn't.
"You're a real smart boy," I said. "Two killings on your hands already, and you want to make it two more. How do you think you're going to cover that one now?"
Now he answered me, contemptuous, sure of himself. Proud.
"Easy," he said. "Put your bodies in your car and shove it in the ditch and burn it. It'll still look like an accident."
"With our bodies full of .22 slugs?"
"I'll leave the rifle in Bill's hands and say he stole it from me. It'll give the police something to occupy their dim brains."
There was hardly any sound to warn me. Roy had taken his shoes off. He had crept to the other end of the balcony and now he whipped around the end post and was on the stairs.
I couldn't see him or shoot at him without raising up, and the minute I raised up or moved Chuck would step out and let me have it with the rifle.
"What's he got with him?" I asked. "A pocket full of stones and a slingshot?"
No answer.
I could hear Roy on the stairs, creeping up one step at a time on all fours, panting and snuffling with eager excitement.
"There's only one hitch in your plan, Chuck," I said. "How are you going to explain Roy's body? Because I'm going to kill him the minute he shows his thick head over that top step."
The movement on the stairs stopped. Roy was not very bright, but even a moron can understand a simple statement like that. I motioned to Bill and he slid up on his belly to where I could whisper in his ear.
Chuck said, "Go ahead, Roy. He can't hurt you."
"Yes, come ahead, Roy," I said. "You'll find out."
I spoke to Bill and he nodded and began to squirm away toward the top of the step, keeping down flat.
Roy said, doubtfully, "Hey, Chuck——"
I moved closer to the edge of the balcony.
"Go on," said Chuck furiously, "what are you scared of? I've got you covered."
"He's scared of dying," I said. "Aren't you, Roy? And you should be. Sure, he's got you covered. The minute I raise up to shoot you, he'll shoot me. But that won't save your life, will it?"
Bill was almost within reach of the stair now.
"Anyway," I said to Chuck, "what are you scared of, yellowbelly? I don't see you risking your tender skin."
Bill was making more noise now, and I raised my voice. It did not take any effort of acting.
"What's the matter with you both?" I shouted. "I don't hear you laughing and cracking funny jokes, like you did before. This isn't much fun, is it, when l'm ready and waiting for you?"
Bill shied a folding chair down the stairs with a crash and a rattle. He threw another and another, and Roy yelped, and when the fourth one hit him he scuttered back down the stairs. I put a bullet in the floor beside him as he came around the post. I meant to miss him.
I think.
Chuck did not mean to miss me but he did, firing from an angle under the balcony where he could not possibly have hit me.
The two shots made a tremendous noise in the place, and then there was another interval of absolute stillness while we all crouched and breathed and waited.
Into the stillness, faintly, from far off, a little sound came trickling.
The sound of sirens.
We listened to it.
It grew, coming closer.
"Hey," said Roy. "That's cops."
The sound turned, audibly and unmistakably, from the distant highway into the secondary road.
Chuck fired at the lights in the center of the ceiling. There was a cluster of them set in round white reflectors. He broke three of them before he ran out his magazine. Two of them still burned.
He dropped the rifle and made a run for the office door.
I put a bullet in the wall ahead of him.
He dropped into a crouch and whirled and darted back under the balcony. The sirens came wailing along the road. Roy said, "Hey, Chuck, what'll we do? I
thought you said——"
But Chuck was running.
I heard his feet pound over the wooden floor, and then he tried it again, this time from the other end of the balcony, toward the door Bill and I had come through. He started to tear and heave at the benches that blocked it.
I put a shot in the panel of the door.
He turned again. He was a big tall handsome boy, but he was not standing tall now, and the beauty of his face was something less than skin deep. He was afraid, and with him fear was a disease that twisted him out of all normal semblance.
He sprang over the railing into the pit and ran across the trodden dirt and straw to the double doors.
I put a shot over his shoulder, and he winced from the flying splinters and the nearness of death.
He stopped where he was, and I said, "I've got one left, Chuck."
"You won't shoot me," he said. "You didn't shoot Bobby. You let him go."
"Try it," I said.
He stood with his hands outstretched, hooked onto the edge of the door. It was close and ready to swing. Beyond it was the darkness of the stable shed, and possible escape. All Chuck needed was one fast step, and the guts to take it.
I lay watching the broad of his back. There were tears in my eyes, I wanted to shoot him so bad. So bad.
He did not take the step.
He let go of the door rather slowly. His head came around, as though drawn by the fascination of the cold round eye of my gun. Then his whole body turned, and then he began to shake. He bent down onto one knee and put a hand on the ground to steady himself and he stayed there. His eyes had become perfectly blank in a face as stiff and unreal as a painted mask.
Roy came padding on his sock feet out from under the balcony, carrying his shoes. He seemed to have forgotten all about me. He went hesitantly to the railing of the pit and looked over it.
"Chuck," he said. "Hey, Chuck . . . ?"
The police came in.
24
THE way in which the boys had known I was at my house was childishly simple. Literally. They had subsidized the boy up the street, the one with the bicycle and the brown-and-white dog. They had got the boy alone, and Roy had hurt his dog a little to show what would happen to the dog if he didn't do as he was told. Then they gave him some nickels and a phone number. They set him to watch my house and call them the minute I came back.
He had called them, of course, and they had come and set up watch themselves, still using the boy as liaison. When I stayed on and on, and it got dark, and I still stayed with the lights out, it became obvious that I was waiting for something, and Chuck guessed what the something was—either Bill in person, or a call from him. Bill had unwisely threatened once before to come to me, and that was when they had given him the bruises his sister had mentioned.
If Bill came himself, they could grab him. But if I went to meet him, they wanted to be able to follow. So Bobby sneaked into my garage and cracked the red lens of one of the taillights on my car, so it would show a white streak, making it easy for them.
They had had another boy similarly staked out on Bill's home. If he had come there, they would have got him. Meanwhile, they were holding out in a roadside camp by a small fishing lake five miles from Mall's Ford, staying out of sight by day and roaming by night.
It almost worked.
The phone call Bill and I made from Newbridge had brought the police looking for us. Koleski, working all hours on his holdup, had been at Headquarters, when Marthe Liebendorffer and he decided to take time off to be sure we made it. When he and Hartigan didn't meet us on the road, and it was fairly sure that something had held us up, he radioed the nearest highway-patrol car and started to scour the country. The sales barn stood on a high rise, and the lights from its windows showed a long way.
So that was that. My tigers were caged, and the shadow of terror that Tracey and I had lived under for more than four months was lifted. We moved back to our own house, and the kids played in their own yard, and we stopped, eventually, shivering every time a fast car went by or the wind shook the trees at night.
So what does it all prove?
You tell me.
The legal business went on longer, much longer, than the chase. With Roy Aspinwall it was simple. The psychiatrists took one look at him and sent him away to a suitable institution. His parents admitted that they had had trouble with him before. They had had to move several times because of Roy's activities, with smaller children and animals. But they kept hoping—— They were decent people. All they wanted to do was protect their son. Who can blame them? Certainly not Finelli. Not Artie Clymer.
Everett Bush was lucky. All he had against him was aggravated assault, and I was the only one to prosecute. He cried and said Chuck led him into it and he was afraid to stop, like Bill. They gave him a year in the Boys' Industrial School, sentence suspended pending good behaviour. I don't know whether he's behaved or not. I haven't seen him since. I hope he has. I hope he's learned his lesson. And I hope his parents take more interest now in what he does and who he runs with, instead of merely lying to protect him after it's too late, as they did before. But I doubt it. They seemed more angry with me for bringing the whole thing up and making trouble about it than they were with Everett for doing it.
Bobby Stillman was picked up just down the road from the barn that night and pretty soon he was trying to give evidence faster and louder than Bill, to get himself off the hook. He was a slimy kid. He came from a fairly wealthy family and he seemed to have been alternately spoiled and neglected by a silly mother and a father who figured that a big allowance was the answer to all child care, but this didn't seem to account for his turning vicious. At least not to me. Anyway, he talked fast, and his father talked faster, and it turned out that none of it was really Bobby's fault, he was forced into it and just went along for the ride. One year, suspended.
Bill got off light too, and that was fair enough. We're good friends. He does yard work for us, and he runs to me with his problems as though I was his father. I know he's stayed out of trouble. He'd never have got into it in the first place if he hadn't been so young and simple that a phony like Chuck could take him in.
But Chuck found himself on a harder road. He was eighteen and stood trial as an adult. And he couldn't talk himself out of it quite so easily. Roy had actually killed Clymer, but Chuck was the avowed leader of the gang. Chuck had engineered that accident that killed Finelli. Chuck had attempted to kill me with slugs fired from a hunting-type slingshot. Chuck had done a lot of things and he didn't have anybody to hide behind.
Except his parents.
They had money. They spent it for him. He had the best lawyers there were. They fought like lions to keep him out of prison. They had two other kids, a boy and a girl, both apparently nice normal youngsters, but Chuck was the crooked one and somehow more precious for that reason, or more vulnerable and so more in need of protection. They were decent people. This was their son. They wanted to help him. Again, who could blame them?
I could. I could blame them for shutting their eyes, like the Aspinwalls, to something they knew but would not face.
They admitted that Chuck had always been "different," moody and withdrawn, preferring to play secret games by himself or to sit in a dark corner and daydream. He did not get along well with other children when he was small. He was too intelligent for his age group. He was also too bossy. He had to order and domineer, and if anyone refused to obey him he would fly into furious tantrums. He could not endure to have his will crossed or his actions criticized. But he was such a handsome boy, so able in his studies, so bright, so full of promise——
He was a sadist too. Not in the crude physical way that Roy was, but subtly tormenting, choosing out smaller and weaker children and making life hell for them in ways they did not know how to combat. His own brother and sister testified to that. It was obvious that they feared and hated him. They also admitted that Chuck had always hated his parents because they were bigger than he when
he was a child, and later because they still exerted some authority over him. Nobody, but nobody could be bigger than Chuck Landry, or tell him what to do.
He and his parents seemed eventually to have reached a sort of tacit compromise, wherein he pretended to be a good and dutiful son, and they pretended to believe it. This avoided the scenes, the rages, the bitter sulking. They could stop worrying and he could let his hatred slide off into contempt—contempt for everything they stood for, for suburbia, for the solid undistinguished manner in which most people spend their lives, for husbands who cut the lawn when their wives asked them to. None of this was for Chuck. He was big. He was—different.
He was also a physical coward, and the psychiatrists had a lot of theories about how this was probably one of his basic troubles. He saw himself as perfect, had to see himself that way, but every time some resentful playmate threatened to poke him one he knew he was not perfect, because he could not fight on anything like even terms. So he had to bolster himself up with a gang of lackwits and go around acting like a king, compensating for the flaw.
Then, through the chain of circumstances that began that night at Noddy's, Chuck discovered his true forte. Safe in size and numbers, he could play something bigger than a king. When he beat me up, as means of re-establishing his importance after the ignominious failure of the foray into Beckman Street, he felt more big, more beautiful, more powerful and perfect than he ever had before. This was greater than tormenting children. This was the real true stuff, and hovering beyond it, veiled as yet but seductive, was the promise of the greatest act of all, the actual taking of human life.
Power. Violence gave it to him, and he loved it. He loved it the way another kid loves girls, or building hot rods, or playing ball. Through violence Chuck was able for the first time in his sterile life to create.
Crazy?
The defense said so. The prosecution said not. The prosecution said Chuck had a psychopathic personality, but was not psychotic. He knew perfectly well the difference between right and wrong. He simply didn't care.
And all through the trial Chuck remained as cool and unmoved as a chunk of marble. The most they could do on Finelli was second-degree, and so he had no death penalty to be afraid of. He would not admit anything. He scoffed politely at all the testimony, accusing us all of lying. He seemed perfectly secure in the belief that he was going to get away with it because he was Chuck Landry and for him there was no other possibility.
The Tiger Among Us Page 18
