Step to the Graveyard Easy

by Bill Pronzini

  “Move!”

  “Fuck you, lady. For the last five minutes I’ve been listening to the two of you talk about killing me as if I were no more than a bug. I’m a human being, dammit. I’ve had all the abuse I’m going to take from you. You want to shoot me, do it right here, right now. Blood all over your sister’s expensive carpet.”

  She bared her teeth at him.

  “Go ahead,” Cape said. “Only Stacy’ll have hysterics when she hears the shot and sees my bloody corpse. Shell crack for sure then, Valium or no Valium. I’d lay a bundle you won’t be able to put her back together again.”

  “You son of a bitch.”

  “You can’t win this game, Lacy. You’re in way over your head. Both of you lose, whether you kill me or not.”

  “We’ll see who loses!”

  Cape took a sliding step toward her, watching the gun.

  Reflexive pressure on the trigger.

  He lunged, twisting his body sideways, just as the gun bucked. Slice of pain along his left side, noise like a thunderclap, stink of cordite, and in the next second he was on her. He smacked her arm with his forearm, drove it up as she fired again, the revolver close enough to set up a ringing in one ear. Then he caught a grip on the hot metal with both hands, wrenched it loose, threw it aside.

  Lacy fought him like a cat, all claws and hisses and spit. Scratched him, tried to bite him. He threw her off; she came back with an upthrust knee that just missed his crotch. He lashed out with the heel of his hand—a sideswipe blow that caught her on the temple above the hairline, staggered her off balance into an end table. Some kind of urn flew off, shattered on the floor; Lacy went down with it, her feet tangled in the table legs.

  Melon-thumping sound: the back of her head colliding with the thick wooden base of the couch.

  Her body stiffened, seemed to draw in on itself. Her eyes rolled up until nothing showed but white. She flopped over on her side, twitching.

  “Oh God what did you do to her?”

  Stacy, in a doorway across the room. One hand hovered in front of her mouth, the other pressed an ear—speak no evil, hear no evil. He saw her chest heave, her whole body shake as if she were about to go into convulsions.

  Cape backed away, looking for the gun. Found it, picked it up.

  Lacy tried to lift herself up. Made it to her knees, fell back down. And twitched and tried to lift up and fell back down. Again, and again, more weakly each time, little scrambled sounds coming out of her throat. Concussion. Disoriented, no longer a threat.

  “You hurt her you hurt her you hurt her…”

  Sounds from Stacy as empty and senseless as the ones her sister was making. She stayed where she was, as if she’d been seized by paralysis. The convulsive movements slowed. All at once she slid down the wall, bonelessly, almost liquidly, to puddle on the floor. She sat there with her eyes squeezed tightly shut. See no evil.

  Little sister, weak sister.

  Weak link in this set of chains.

  But all he felt was numb. He sat on the edge of the couch to catch his breath, inspect the wound in his side. Bloody, stinging, but not much more than a gash.

  Bad-luck Cape had some good luck left after all.

  He went looking for a telephone to find out just how much.

  30

  D’anzello said, “Cape, you’re a damn fool.”

  “I won’t argue with that.”

  “Six times over. You could be dead right now.”

  “I know it.”

  “Why’d you go after Lacy Hammond like that, with the gun in your face? You think she wouldn’t fire?”

  “I told you why,” Cape said wearily. “I told the DA why. It’s all there in my sworn statement.”

  “Tell me again.”

  “I’d had enough, that’s why. It was either jump her or let her kill me.”

  “You could’ve waited until you were outside. Used the cover of darkness to make your play.”

  “Better odds if I could rattle her enough so she’d lose her cool. She really didn’t want to do it inside the house.”

  “You were lucky. Beat the odds.”

  “Sometimes you do, sometimes you don’t.”

  “Pretty offhand reaction,” D’Anzello said.

  “I’m not trying to be offhand or smartass, Captain. I’m tired… hell, exhausted. Are you going to let me leave here pretty soon?”

  “I don’t know yet. I could charge you with any number of felonies, you know. Withholding evidence, breaking and entering, car theft, assault.”

  Cape said thinly, “Lock me up in a cage. Is that what I get for handing you three cold-blooded murderers?”

  “I didn’t say I would charge you. I said I could.”

  “I was being used. Boxed in. Everything I did was because of that.”

  “And you’re a man who hates being boxed in.”

  “That’s right. Look, you’ve got my statement and my apology. Stacy Vanowen confessed; it looks like Tarles is going to make it, and you’ll get a confession out of him if he does. You don’t need me anymore. It won’t do anybody any good to take away my freedom.”

  “True enough,” D’Anzello admitted. “The DA pretty much agrees. He’s licking his chops over the two sisters; he’s not interested in you. He left it to my discretion whether to charge you or not.”

  “Well?”

  D’Anzello leaned back in his desk chair, tapped the edge of a pen against a front tooth. “You don’t strike me as the hero type, Cape.”

  “Me? I’m not.”

  “Took a lot of guts to do what you did. Most men wouldn’t’ve been able to rush into the muzzle of a gun like that, even to save themselves.”

  “Are we back there again?”

  “Most men wouldn’t have gone up against a purse snatcher with a knife, either, the way you did in New Orleans.”

  Cape sighed. “I didn’t know he had a knife when I chased him.”

  “Police report says you had no weapon, that you disarmed the man bare-handed. Sounds pretty heroic to me.”

  “Reflex, that’s all.”

  “Just being a good citizen.”

  “Trying to be.”

  “Good citizen, good Samaritan, hero—all wrapped up in one package.”

  “If you say so.”

  “But the Matthew Cape who lived in Rockford, Illinois, the one we ran the background check on, wasn’t like that at all. Quiet salesman type, Mr. Average. What changed that Matthew Cape into this one?”

  Silent shrug.

  “Come on, now,” D’Anzello said. “What made you quit your job, leave your wife, buy a Corvette, start gallivanting all over the country? What gave you the sudden horror of being boxed in? What changed Clark Kent into Superman?”

  “Superman. Jesus.”

  “Answer the question.”

  “Midlife crisis,” Cape said. “Everybody has one, they tell me.”

  “I don’t buy it.”

  “All right, then. I needed a change. I’d had enough of the dull life, I craved some excitement.”

  “That doesn’t explain going up against knives and guns. Mild-mannered salesmen don’t grow a new set of balls overnight.”

  “Maybe I just got tired of all the injustice and suffering in the world, decided to do something about it in my own small way.”

  “Crap.”

  “Or maybe I’m atoning for past sins.”

  “Uh-huh. Storing up points in heaven.”

  “Something like that.”

  “I want a straight answer. What makes Cape run?”

  “I’m not running.”

  “I think you are,” D’Anzello said.

  “Listen, Captain, I’ve got to have some sleep. Either charge me, or let me go. Get it over with.”

  “I’m not going to charge you. You can leave, but not until you come clean about yourself. And give me some kind of guarantee that you can be found to appear as a prosecution witness when the case goes to trial in three to six months.”

&n
bsp; “I can’t do that.”

  “No? Why not?”

  Cape took a breath, dribbled it out. Then, “Okay. Okay, you want to know why I quit my old life and took up the new one, I’ll tell you. I did it for the same reason I went up against the knife and the gun, the same reason I have the horror of being boxed in, the same reason I won’t be available to testify at the trial, the same reason I hope to God you let me out of here quick. Because I’m living on borrowed time, and what little I have left is running out fast.”

  “Borrowed time? What—”

  “I’m dying,” Cape said. “I’ll be dead in less than a year, maybe as soon as four or five months.”

  Long silence. “From what?” D’Anzello asked in a different voice.

  “Rare blood disease. One hundred percent fatal.”

  “Sweet Jesus.”

  “Specialists in Chicago passed sentence nine weeks ago. I’ll give you their names if you want them.”

  “No, I believe you.” D’Anzello leaned forward, tight-lacing his fingers on the desktop. “What, uh…”

  “Symptoms? Headaches, back and joint pain, increasing fatigue—you really want the whole list?”

  “No.”

  “I can function more or less normally until the last stages, they tell me. Then it’s a hospital bed, painkillers, last rites.” Cape bent a smile in half. “Maybe I won’t get that far.”

  “Is that what’s really behind the heroics? Looking for a way to get yourself killed quick?”

  “Hell, no. I want as much time aboveground as I can get. But if it happens suddenly, I won’t shy away from it.”

  D’Anzello said slowly, “What about your wife? Your family?”

  “What about them? They don’t know.”

  “You didn’t tell any of them? People who care about you?”

  “I made damn sure none of them found out. You’re the only one besides the doctors who knows.”

  “Why not your family?”

  “My wife, my sister and her family, my father, all have their own problems. They don’t need mine to make their lives any worse than they are. You didn’t talk to any of them personally, did you? Tell them where I am?”

  D’Anzello shook his head. “You just walk out on your wife? Is that why she’s divorcing you?”

  “No,” Cape said. “I set it up so she caught me screwing another woman in our bed.”

  “… That’s pretty damn cruel.”

  “Not the way I look at it. The marriage was over anyway, hanging together by a thread. If I’d told Anna about my condition, it would’ve made her life even more miserable. She’d have tried to hang on out of duty, right to the end. She’s a nurse—she wouldn’t walk out on a terminal patient.”

  “There must’ve been another way—”

  “What way? Disappear? She’d have worried herself sick, blamed herself, tried to find me—put her life on hold. Same thing if I’d told her the truth and then walked away. I couldn’t let her suffer like that. I loved her once. Part of me still does.”

  Penetrating stare, as if D’Anzello was trying to cut away skin and bone to see inside his head. “I can’t figure you out, Cape.”

  “Look at it this way. One quick hurt, and you heal pretty fast. Long, slow hurt, and the wound stays open, maybe never really heals at all.”

  “All right. I see your point, even if I don’t agree with it.”

  “Same goes with the rest of the way I’m handling my death sentence, right? You don’t agree with the traveling, the lifestyle. Well, I’ll tell you, I’ve packed more living into the past few weeks, found out more about myself and this world, than in all my previous thirty-five years. And I’m hungry for more of the same.”

  D’Anzello opened his mouth, shut it again.

  “There’re a lot of different ways of dying,” Cape said. “But when you boil them down, they amount to only two.”

  “You think so?”

  “I know so. Hard and easy. I’m doing it easy.”

  “Doesn’t sound so easy to me. Not the past few days anyhow.”

  “Even those were better than moping around Rockford, waiting passively for the Big Dark.” He bent another smile, pushed back his chair. “Can I leave now?”

  “Go ahead.”

  Cape went to the door, turned, and came back a couple of paces. “Think about it, Captain,” he said. “See what kind of answer you come up with.”

  “Answer to what?”

  “If you knew you had only a few months to live, what would you do?”

  Also by Bill Pronzini

  BLUE LONESOME

  A WASTELAND OF STRANGERS

  NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT

  IN AN EVIL TIME

  Copyright © 2011 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  All the characters and events portrayed in this work are fictitious.

  First published in the United States of America in 2002 by

  Walker Publishing Company, Inc.

  This electronic edition published in December 2011

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Pronzini, Bill

  Step to the graveyard easy / Bill Pronzini.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978 0 8027 4359 6 (ebook)

  I. Title.

  PS3566.R67 S73 2002

  813’.54—dc21 2001055914

  www.walkerbooks.com

  www.bloomsburypress.com

  www.bloomsburyusa.com