The Vengeful Virgin (Hard Case Crime)
Page 16
She fell over on me, bleeding and dead.
Somehow I finally got her off me.
Sixteen
I lay there and watched the fire die down, waiting to die myself. I knew that by the time all the flames were gone, I would be gone.
There was no pain now.
I had to look across Shirley’s body to see the fire. It leaped across her bare back, and up out of her hair, seething, and it looked as if she were breathing.
She wasn’t breathing. She was dead.
It was quiet. As the fire died and died, I gradually came to hear the river again, pulsing endlessly against the banks, and there was the sound of the wind high in the pines. The day became brighter and brighter outside. The sun yellowed the room. And with the sun, the fire died still more, and finally it was nothing but embers.
But I was still all right. Not even bleeding. I was full of lead. My side was ripped open. My left leg was broken. But I was still alive.
I didn’t want to be alive.
Then I heard them.
They called the cabin.
“Ruxton! Come out with your hands above, your head.”
I couldn’t answer them. I could see the gun, still in her hand. It was about two yards away. I tried to reach it, but I couldn’t. I tried to crawl to the gun, because then I could kill myself. It was ironic. They would fix me up, if they got to me—fix me up for their kill.
I kept trying to reach the gun. But I couldn’t make it.
“Ruxton. We’re coming, in!”
I shouted at them. “No! No!”
But it was just a sound in my head, it never came from my throat, nothing came past my lips but a whisper.
And then I knew that this was why I had never been able to make it, in all the years of trying, and this was what it had been coming to. Even when I went and took this beautiful gamble. It was simple. Some can make it, others can’t. It was that simple.
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t talk.
I waited.
They finally came across the porch. The door was open. They looked in and saw us lying there. They thought I was dead, too, at first.
An officer of the State Highway Patrol came in. I saw Doctor Miraglia out on the porch. Then a woman screamed, and ran into the room.
“Get her out!” somebody said.
It was Grace. She screamed again, and stood there looking down at me.
They led her back out again, fighting with her every inch of the way.
“Well, Ruxton,” Miraglia said. “It’s all over, isn’t it?”
I just looked at him.
I couldn’t figure what they were trying to prove. They all knew what had happened. I even told them the whole story, from the beginning. There was no use holding out. But they kept insisting there must be a trial. It seemed so damned stupid.
They kept me in the hospital, under guard.
Grace came to see me. Don’t misunderstand. She didn’t come to visit me. She came to see me—to stare at me.
She would get a chair and just sit there, staring at me, until they asked her to leave. Every day she did that.
“I’ll be there at the end, too, Jack.”
She said that every day. She was very nice, because they wouldn’t let her stay otherwise. There was nothing I could do.
Yes, that’s how it was. Grace, she was always burning. Then Shirley and I began burning. And then the money burned. And now there was time to burn.
Then, after there was no more time, they would burn me.
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