by Ray Bradbury
Just near the edge of town I caught up with Jamie.
He never should have tried to fight me.
Crunch.
* * *
So now people sit around the Sheriff’s office on summer evenings dangling their shoes in a little laced pattern and speaking with smoke blowing from their easy mouths about how the Sheriff let me solve the case. And the Sheriff says he don’t care, he’s just as pleased that I caught the criminal as if he’d done it himself; but the Sheriff winces when he says this.
Kids on the street don’t kick my shins no more or throw rocks at me. They come ask to hold my hands as we walk downtown. They ask me to tell how I did it. Even ladies in pretty blue or green dresses look over back fences and ask. And I shine up the battered silver star the Sheriff had left over from twenty years ago, catch it on my chest where it sparkles, and I tell everybody again how I solved the Simmons case and caught the murderer Jamie MacHugh, who broke his neck trying to get out of my hands.
Nobody ever tells me to run get a skyhook or shore line or a left-handed screwdriver no more. They think my silences are thinking ones. Men nod at me from cars and say hello Peter and they don’t laugh so much, they sort of admire me, and just this morning asked if I intended solving any more cases.
I’m very happy. Happier than in all my days. I’m certainly glad now that Mr. Simmons died and I had a chance to catch Jamie MacHugh that way. No telling how much longer these people might have pestered me.
And if you’ll promise, cross your heart, hope to die, spit over your left shoulder, not to tell nobody, I’ll let you in on a little secret.
I killed Mr. Simmons myself.
You understand why, don’t you?
As I said at the beginning—I’m not so dumb.
Killer, Come Back to Me!
CHAPTER ONE
Ricky Wolfe’s Woman
If you’ve never watched an autopsy, then this is what they do. They cut the body down the middle. Not all the way, but far enough for you to see everything from collarbones to kidneys. When the peels of flesh are tethered back with bright surgical clamps, the various organs thus exposed are examined closely before being sliced out with an expert move of the scalpel. They are then set aside for chemical analysis. The brain is removed from its case by the simple expedient of lifting the skull off in a circle from the ears up.
If you’re a criminal, you get special attention. You’re not much different inside than anybody else, but the doctors keep looking, as if some day they’d actually find a criminal’s body that didn’t have a heart.
An interesting case turned up at our laboratory this morning. They brought in the cadaver of one John Broghman. He had little blue tattoos dinting his chest and pelvic regions. On second look, you saw they weren’t tattoos, but bullet holes.
I’d like to tell John Broghman’s story as it came to me, flat and cold and naked on an autopsy table. It’s not sugar. It’s carbolic and cyanide. It’s a heart beating like a tommy-gun, faster, faster and faster until—well.…
He had big lungs and good muscles. He had sponge sacs in his rib casings that maybe one day sucked in the air of the world and liked it. From the build of him you could see he was from a small town where those lungs could grow and get started. Then, you can see where his father and mother died; you can see where he had a younger brother who wasn’t much help; you can see where they moved in with an aunt and uncle who didn’t love them, and you can see where the uncle made Johnny Broghman work—too young and too hard—in a coal shaft. Those spots on Johnny’s lungs—that’s what tells you all about those years.
Then, you look at Broghman’s cold, inert stomach and you see the shaping hand of hunger that had bruised it. Right here. See?
And now, if you’ll look closer, deep in this cold, corrugated brain, you’ll find the hatred and the wondering and the wanting of Johnny Broghman growing and making a sort of tumor, a fester spot. Inside this brain you’ll find.…
* * *
Broghman stood on the corner of that dusty little town, watching grasshoppers sweeping over the hot blue sky in a curtain.
The bank was across the street. A stolen automobile, its motor still running warm, was parked in front of it. He’d parked it there with his own hands and then strode across the searing hot asphalt to stand here on this corner, sweating, thinking, knowing that there was something ahead of him that he wanted.
He wasn’t certain what it was. Maybe it was in the bank. Maybe it had to do with guns, power, danger and—something else.
The gun was heavy in its leather nest under his arm.
Something he wanted for a long time. What? Something he wanted.
A woman walked along with a slow, thoughtful walk. Her eyes went through him, away, and then slid back again to make a man of him, up and down, and her red lips parted as if she knew his mind. Broghman swallowed thickly, trying to look away.
She stood there, eyes narrowing. Then, she revolved slowly, put one foot after the other with a sort of measured rhythm, and went away with her hair like long fire on her neck, and her eyes like amber metal that could catch emotion and keep it there.
Broghman’s stomach muscles lay down like crouching animals. He began to walk. Across the streaming street, up the high curb. His big ears pricked, alert. There—the car motor, still muttering inside its casing. Now into the cool cavern of the bank. Cool expanse of marble. Shining cages that kept domesticated animals inside them with cool green money at their pale, domesticated fingertips.
Broghman lifted the dead weight of the gun, fitted into his calloused hand.
From there on, things resolved into slow, sludgy, underwater gestures of people suspended in a slow motion film. Lazily, his face slowly shading white under the regular pallor of his skin, the little teller shifted a slow hand to money stacked in green stratas, extracted it sluggishly, shoved it gradually forward until it sank with agonizing lack of gravity into Broghman’s palm. He pocketed the money. It took what seemed like three minutes to do it.
Then things speeded up to triple action. An alarm gong was like a kick of adrenalin setting things into blurred quickness. Echoes of the gong jumped back from marble cliffs, warning.
Broghman ran across smooth stone acres. People shouted. Everything whirled hotly in his eyes when the sun struck him as he entered the daylight.
He didn’t know if it was the sun or not, but when he twisted the car door open, he pulled back and gasped.
She waited for him in the car.
That woman with the hair like long fire and the eyes like yellow metal, who’d walked by him a few minutes ago, looking into him and knowing him and walking on. Her hard fingers gripped the steering wheel, so that the knuckles stood out whitely.
Recovering, he swung sideways into the seat, poking the gun. “Get out!”
“No,” she said it simply, and meant it.
He pushed the gun further, against her white blouse.
“I said get out!”
Her answer was to engage the gears, jump the accelerator, thrusting the car away from the curb, shrieking rubber. She flushed the car to seventy miles an hour before he knew what she was doing. He had glimpses of darting trees, spinning signs, buildings, with her voice biting through it all:
“I’m driving! Wherever you want to go, I’m driving!”
Sitting there, the color rose in his protruding cheekbones. He glanced back at the vanishing main street. “Move fast, that’s all. Take Highway 43.”
“Don’t be dumb,” she snapped it back at him. “That’s a graveyard road. We’ll go my way. I know this damned burg inside and out, like a book.”
He realized he was shuddering, and had to clasp his knees, bending to ease the sick pain in his belly, as if he’d been shot.
“What’s wrong?” she said. “They get you?”
“No.” He made himself straight. “I’m all right. I imagine things. Stomach. Like a hot hole in it. Guh.”
* * *
Then, while the miles
spun under them, he kept silent, nursing his pain. Once, glancing up, he saw her sharp profile against running sky-line, green trees, bright gas stations. Her lips were full to stubbornness, and hard like the even teeth backing them up. The eyes were the startling part, like feral things plucked from a lusting cat animal and caught in her shocking white face. They didn’t belong. Not with all that flame on her head falling in loose, whipping fingers of color to her shoulders, tucked behind almost man-like ears.
After about five minutes she said, “We’ve lost them.” She held the speed high, through hot desert. “How much money?”
He counted it. “Seven hundred.”
“Chicken feed.” He saw her trim ankle muscles tauten, pressing out more mileage. Slowly, he touched the curve of her leg with his blue eyes, coming up along her brown woolen skirt to the small breasts and the open neck of her white blouse where the cords of her throat went stiffly, yet beautifully up.
“Stop the car,” he said, quietly.
She ignored him.
“Who in hell are you!” he demanded, hotly, “running me around! This was my job!”
“It’s ours, now.” She gave him her brief, metallic glance. “You’re no killer. I know. It’s not in your face. Your eyes are open too wide for killing.”
“Stop the car.”
Parked, she looked straight ahead. “I’m cutting myself in,” she said to the road. “I been outside a little while, but I’m coming back in.”
He twisted her from the wheel.
“You’re damn well in.”
He kissed her so it hurt them both. The world went away. A siren, if it had whined, would not have been heard, or a gun shooting. Only her cynically stubborn lips existed, moving under his.
She pulled back, eyes angry and yet—puzzled—a moment.
“Don’t do that again,” she let him know, evenly. She made the wheels roar again. “I’m the one who does that! Remember from now on, you!”
It was his turn to be puzzled. “Okay, okay,” he said.
Desert wind came in the windows, searing, burning them.
She parked the car for the night on a little dirt road equipped with stars, a moon, and ranch lights hanging on the foothills.
She slid from the car, shoes rustling in dry thatches of bramble.
He said, “Why’d you climb in my car today?”
She had her answer ready.
“You were headed for the morgue. I put you on a detour. You need training. The way you walk, talk, hold a gun. You looked like a kid waiting for a ticket in front of a dime movie, today.”
“Yeah—”
“Let me finish. Remember Ricky Wolfe?”
“God, yes.”
“I was with him,” she said, “for five years.”
The name of Ricky Wolfe was like a hammer striking. Ricky Wolfe, the big-time, all-around gangman. A guy nobody proved nothing on, with a capacity for gin and blood that was legendary.
She stood there and told him about it. “Six weeks ago they killed him. In Iowa. Threw his body in the river. Only way you could tell it was him, was his wallet. They never had a print of his fingers.” She breathed deeply. “So I came west again, here to California, covered up awhile working as a waitress—”
“Then I came along.”
“Yeah. I saw you and knew that you needed training or you’d be dead too soon. Ricky was different. He was broken in when I got him. But I always wanted to see what I could do with a beginner.”
She turned to him. “You’re only good as your woman is good. If she’s a heller, a whiner, a baby, you’ll be on a dead-slab in no time. She won’t let you think clear.” She showed him her hard white fingers. “My nails are clipped short for a cat. I won’t rip your back. Now—it’s up to you. You want to die tomorrow or four years from now?”
“Is it that way?”
“That’s the way it is.”
He suddenly broke, standing there. He didn’t know why but he just had his arms around her, trembling.
“I’m glad you came. I wouldn’t want to be alone tonight.”
She kissed him, almost clumsily, and he thought he felt her tremble deep inside. Then, she slapped his face with her hands, twice, hard.
“A kiss’s for one thing! A slap’s for another! You’re not a kid! Learn that, if you stick with me! Grow up!”
He stopped shaking.
In his nostrils the warm clean smell of her body, with no dime perfume to spoil its cleanliness, became suddenly apparent.
He waited for her to make the first move.
“I’m not a kid now…” he said.
Their feet rustled in the dry sand.
CHAPTER TWO
L. A. Boss-Man
He was wanted. For the first time in his life people actually were seeking him. The same people who’d shoved him into gutters, starved his parents, ignored him in coal mines, refused him coffee dimes—these same people were horrifiedly aware of him now, and concerned with his welfare, and what he was doing each day. Sure. Sure.
Broghman, in angry, shocked rips, tore the morning paper down and across and down again.
Julie set a steaming coffee mug on the table of the Motel Inn room and ordered, “Drink it. And quit reading papers. They lie like hell.”
He felt of his big brown hands and the gun shining on the blue tablecloth. “God’s sake, Julie, I’m not a criminal. I’m a human being.”
“Sure. Both of us are. Self-preservation you know.”
He learned to walk tall, stiffer, with his guts tucked in. She told him how to talk faster, pull a gun by the swiftest, safest method, pressing it close to his body so only a few people would see it. She could have written a book about banks. She wrote on her tongue for him. There were ways of hitting people’s nerves with the knife edge of your stiff-hand to knock them out as good as a gun—she showed him. A moustache appeared sandily on his lip. His hair grew sandy on his neck, and grew the way she ordered it to grow.
It was acting, rehearsing for a bigger part.
In his dreams, her voice struck again and again at him:
“No, no, Johnny! Not that way, this way!”
The day Julie bought the new car and drove into Victorville, Broghman found himself sweltering in the little two-by-four room, rummaging idly through her traveling kit, sorting out handkerchiefs, a lipstick, a packet of photographs.
Shucking them from their envelope, he lined the pictures side by side on the bedspread in the sunlight, it took him a minute to understand what his eyes were looking at.
At first, they had looked like pictures of himself.
This one here, standing by the sedan in a dark suit. There was something about the dark cloth over long, muscled bones. Something suggestive in the posture. And this one. Himself, almost. In hiking breeches, a shabby hat cocked over rebellious hair. And the last one—Julie with her arm around this man who didn’t look at all like Johnny Broghman but at the same time did.
It gave him a stunned feeling like having a body in two places at once. “I’ll be damned,” he said softly.
The door opened a few minutes later, while he was still looking. Julie’s hard silhouette stood in a square of sunlight. There was just a flicker of surprise in her cheek muscles, then she shut the door, put one hand on a hip.
“Recognize yourself?”
“That isn’t me.”
“It’s enough like you to make it worth a hundred grand if we work it fast. Worth a million if we stick it a couple years. Those pics were snapped when you were Boss-man of L.A. When you cleared twenty grand a month or you thought things stunk pretty badly.”
He just sat there, waiting.
She stepped forward, slowly, her eyes full of funny, intense light. Her voice was like a sing-song prayer:
“Ricky Wolfe’s not dead any more. He’s back from the grave, in this room, now, sitting there, and he doesn’t know it. He’s going back. Back to L.A. to be Boss-man again.” She stared down into his features, and her eyes were burning amber.
“What do you think of that—Ricky Wolfe?”
He got it. He got what she meant and it was like a stiff kick in the teeth. He pulled back, yelling it:
“I know what you’re thinking. It won’t work!”
“Yes, it will. It has to!”
“You can’t fool people! Stuff like that happens in dreams, in books. Nobody’d believe I was him. I don’t look like him! We couldn’t get away with it. It doesn’t happen!”
“It happens to us, Ricky Wolfe! It happens to us!”
“Like hell it does.” He started getting up.
She cracked him across the face, hard, three times. Her lips were shaking, her eyes almost insane.
“It happens to us!”
* * *
The new dark suit fitted like grafted skin. One side padded out a little; Ricky’d been built that way. Higher heels added altitude to Broghman. He learned talking with a faint lisp, chewing a cigar; but the thing that he said to Julie was:
“I keep telling you it won’t work. I don’t look like him. For a moment, yeah, if you look quick, if the light’s bad, if you’re half-blind. You’re crazy. You want to kill us both!”
“Shut up!” she hissed. “Or I’ll do the killing now.”
He bit his cigar fiercely.
There were lists of facts, names, alibis to digest. Julie fed, crammed them down him. The leaves fell off the calendar like in a high wind. Then Julie, one day, elevated a stein of beer, yellow like her eyes and in a softer voice said:
“Tomorrow’s the big day. L.A. here we come.” She drank beer. “How’s it feel to be Ricky Wolfe?”
His hand shook. He looked at his face mirrored, distorted in the brown hip of the half-emptied bottle. The cigar. The moustache. He wanted to blurt, “It won’t work. An old gag like this won’t fool people.” But there was that look in her eyes, hot as boiling gold, so he shut up.
She was talking again, almost to herself. “I can’t say what it was like, that noon at the bank. You standing there. Something about the way you stood, your face, like Ricky made up in a slightly new package. Lord, how it yanked my insides.” He thought it was a nice gesture, this next. He clinked his glass against hers. “Let’s drink to our new life—together.”
