Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51

by Humans (v1. 1)

  One less problem. What a scumbag. Get away from this creep, Frank told himself, do it the first chance you get.

  Stripping off his own ski mask, he moved to the back of the car and used the key still in his hand to unlock the trunk, now leaving the key chain to dangle from the lock as he lifted the trunk and looked inside.

  Bags, boxes. All jumbled in there with an umbrella and a can of STP and some other junk and the spare. Bags, boxes. Money.

  “Well, here it is,” Frank said, feeling heavy in his mind because of the old man. He reached in for a shoe box, glancing over at Joey, and Joey had a little shitty .22 in his hand. “Oh, you fuckhead!” Frank cried, and threw the shoe box as Joey fired, and the bullet zzizzed away into the world like a bee.

  The cocksucker’s gonna kill me, Frank thought, disgusted and scared and tired of the whole fucking thing, as he bent and ran down the side of the car, knowing Joey was coming around the trunk after him. Me with nothing, and no time, and nowhere to go, and he can’t miss me every time with that fucking gun.

  The old man. Frank reached in and gave him a yank and pulled him out of the car, holding him up against himself like a dress he was testing to see if it was the right size, holding the old man’s body with his left arm around the chest, forearm up along the chest, hand around the old man’s wrinkled neck, pressing that body close while his right hand frisked the guy's pockets and Joey came around the back of the car, the .22 held out in front of himself. He looked angry and pestered when he saw Frank standing there holding the old man up in front of himself. “What the fuck are you doing, Frank? Put the old guy down!”

  “Fuck you, Joey.”

  Frank backed slowly away, afraid of tripping over something, patting and patting the old guy's clothes, feeling something in the right side coat pocket. Let it not be a roll of quarters, okay, God?

  Joey tried a shot at Frank’s head, but couldn’t see enough of it. Frustrated and angry, moving forward after Frank, he pumped two shots into the old man’s body, but a .22 doesn’t deliver much of a wallop. He should have brought a .45; that would go through the old man and Frank and the tree behind him. But the .22 just made the old man’s body bump against Frank, as though he had the hiccups.

  And Frank’s hand was in that pocket, as Joey trotted toward him now, wanting to be close enough to bring him down regardless of the old man. Frank’s hand was in the pocket, and closing on it, and bringing it out, and it was a Smith & Wesson Chiefs Special .38 revolver. He stuck his right arm out, pointing at Joey’s astonished face as though to say, The joke’s on you, Joey! And scrambled his brains with two shots into that fat skull.

  * * *

  Switch license plates, pickup and the old man’s car. Throw all the boxes and bags into the pickup cab, on the floor and passenger seat. Drive like hell, don’t slow down, don’t even think, until outside Terre Haute, Indiana. Swipe a Honda off the street there, moving all the goddamn boxes and bags into its backseat, head for Indianapolis. Along the way, suddenly get the shakes, terrible shakes. Pull the car off the road, go behind some bushes, throw up, have diarrhea, cold sweats, uncontrollable trembling, blinding headache. Clean up a little, crawl back to the Honda, sit in there as weak as a kitten, finally get it moving again, go on to Indianapolis, around to Weir Cook Airport there. Go into the long-term parking, get the ticket on the way in, drive around, find a nice Chevy Celebrity with no dust on the windshield—so it hasn’t been here long, in the longterm lot—pull in next to it, switch the goods to the Chevy’s backseat, drive on out of there (little joke with the tolltaker about being in the wrong lot), head on into Indianapolis and buy a big cheap suitcase there. Then push the Chevy across Indiana and into the night, keep the foot hard on the accelerator until Welcome to Ohio. Three hundred twenty miles and two states away. Find a motel northwest of Dayton, put all the bags and boxes into the big new suitcase and schlep it into the room. Take a long shower. Stand there in the running hot water, thinking about childhood; haven’t thought about that shit for years. Think and think, remembering all different kinds of stuff, everything lost and gone. Cry a little in the shower, face all snotty. Tap the forehead against the tiles a little. But what’s the use? Nothing to be done, right? You’re where you are, and that’s where you are.

  Frank turned off the water and stepped out of the shower. Life goes on.

  * * *

  Frank’s underwear hung on the radiator, his socks were draped over a lampshade to dry in the heat from the bulb, and his shirt hung from the swag chain next to the hanging lamp over the round fake-wood veneer table. Wearing a motel towel, he called a couple of places that in the local phone book claimed they’d deliver food twenty-four hours a day. Three didn’t answer, one said the motel was too far away, and then a pizza place said they’d do it, but he’d have to pay a ten-dollar delivery fee, and it would take a minimum of forty-five minutes. “Sure,” Frank said. “Room 129.”

  He wasn’t even sure he could eat. His stomach hurt, all right, but not like normal hunger, though he hadn’t eaten anything now for maybe fourteen hours. But sooner or later this reaction to the incident with Joey and the old man would have to wear off, and then he’d be hungry.

  Meantime, he opened the boxes and bags, stacking the money on the round table, adding it up, and it came to $57,820. Less than the eighty grand he’d been promised, but more than the half that would have been his share if Joey hadn’t been such a total unrelieved piece of shit.

  He kept out a couple hundred for use, and when he stuffed it in his wallet he noticed that card in there from the lady lawyer in Nebraska. Mary Ann Kelleny. Well, she wouldn’t be much help in Ohio—or in Illinois, either, come to that—but still he hung on to the card. She’d been okay, Mary Ann Kelleny. The only decent thing that had happened to him since he’d got out this last time.

  He remembered her advice: don’t do the little jobs, do one great big job. Okay, Mary Ann, I did one great big job, and it wasn’t all that great, okay? Granted, it wasn’t five million, but I can retire for a while anyway, on fifty-seven grand. Is that what you had in mind, Mary Ann?

  Grinning at the idea of how the lady lawyer would react if she’d known how literally he was taking her advice, Frank put the rest of the money back into the suitcase, stacking it in rows. It took about half the space now as when it had been in all the different kinds of packages.

  The old guy probably had grandchildren. He probably had candy in some of his other pockets.

  Sure. At least he’d had a gun, there was that to say for him. No longer smiling, Frank put the gun in the suitcase with the money, and closed the suitcase, and put it on the floor in the doorless closet.

  He wasn’t sure why he was keeping the gun. He still didn’t believe in violence, in fact more than ever he didn’t believe in it, but now he’d been in violence, and somehow everything was changed. Of course he’d been around violence all his life, in the pen and on the streets, but never in that personal horrible way. It had been around him, but he’d never been in the middle of it, doing it and receiving it, feeling the bullets thud into a dead man’s body, using a dead man’s body like that. A simple burglar, slides in, slides out, like a raccoon in the attic; that’s what he was, that’s all he’d ever hoped to be. But now it was different. It was changed. He was in an altered landscape now, one he didn’t know about yet, and the gun was his talisman.

  The motel had cable, and cable had a semi-dirty movie about a kid comes home from college to his house in Beverly Hills and there’s nobody there but the new Swedish maid. Sure. cT’ll give you fifty-seven thousand dollars,” Frank told the set, “for every time that happened in real life.”

  Somewhere in through there he fell asleep, and when the knock came at the motel door, waking him, there was a black-and-white war movie on instead. He switched it off, readjusted the towel around his middle, and let in a black kid carrying the pizza in a box and wearing a cap with the pizza store’s name on it. He gave the kid a whole lot of money for one lousy pizza, an
d then when he opened it the smell was too strong. He shut the box and went back to bed and lay there awake, thinking.

  The pattern had changed. That was what had happened today, he’d gone through the looking glass like Alice, he was on the other side now, and the pattern was completely different.

  The lawyer lady had talked about the pattern, had talked about the rubber band attached to his back with the other end still in his cell, and all along he’d known she was right. He’d known it would happen again. He’d be out for a while and then he’d fuck up and then he’d be back in, the same old pattern, over and over, world without end, amen.

  No more. World with end. The law would surely fmd some way to tie him to the robbery of the old man and the shooting of fat slob Joey. He didn’t know exactly what it would be, fingerprints or saliva or threads from his coat or some damn thing, but something would lash him tight to that robbery-and- murder.

  Frank had an almost religious respect for the forensic scientists who worked with the authorities. He believed they were omniscient and omnipotent and damn near omnipresent. And that meant, if the law ever got its hands on Frank Hillfen again, they would drape that robbery-and-murder around his neck, and he’d be gone.

  I can’t go back, he thought. Not this time. That’s the change, that’s what’s different now. Now I can’t go back.

  I need Mary Ann Kelleny’s five-mil job. The big one.

  Hardly thinking about it, Frank got up and ate half the pizza, washing it down with cold water from the sink. The five-mil job. What would it look like?

  Ananayel

  Fantastic! He did all that on his own! I didn’t influence the proceedings in any way, I haven’t even had contact with Frank Hillfen since Mary Ann Kelleny gave him the ride to Omaha. (Isn’t it touching how he saves that business card? There’s something really very sweet and vulnerable about Frank. Hopelessly self-destructive, of course—of course!—but endearing, like a flea-ridden dog.)

  And he surely remembered what Mary Ann Kelleny had to say to him, didn’t he? And he made a mess of things absolutely on his own and without my help. He made himself ready so fast I don’t even have the others in position yet.

  Susan is still seeing Grigor Basmyonov sometimes, though less often than before. But she still phones him during the week when Andy Harbinger has monopolized her weekend. I’m afraid a vegetable love isn’t enough to distract Susan completely from Grigor. I’m afraid we’re going to have to become more deeply involved with one another.

  But why should this affect me so strongly? When adrift, of course, when in my usual self, I still am my usual self, calm and obedient, but when in Andy’s body I find myself increasingly nervous, expectant, apprehensive. As though there were things to be learned. Things to be learned? From Susan Carrigan?

  21

  There was a special on PBS that night about efforts being made to preserve the artistic heritage of civilization, the struggle against everything from acid rain to mindless looting, and a litde puff piece in the paper mentioned that the International Society for Cultural Preservation would be prominendy featured on the program. From the bank, that morning, Susan called Andy up at Columbia—he taught sociology up there— and left a message with the faculty secretary, as she had done before. He called back half an hour later, and she invited him to come watch the program with her. “The organization ids about is the one where I met Grigor, in Moscow. Remember the cocktail party I told you about?”

  “Sure. What time’s it on?”

  “Nine o’clock. I’ll make dinner, we can eat before.”

  “White or red?”

  Meaning the color of the wine he should bring. “You decide,” she said. “I’ll make chicken.”

  * * *

  Buying the chicken and the new potatoes and the baby green beans and the three kinds of lettuce on her way home from the bank, Susan found herself betting Andy would bring white wine, given that choice. Because it was bloodless.

  Immediately she rejected that thought, angry at herself. She knew she shouldn’t feel that way, so denigrating, knew she should be grateful she’d found a man happy to give her companionship without making demands, but then sometimes she couldn’t help wondering why it was supposed to be such a big deal to be around a person who never made demands. Maybe she wanted demands. Maybe she should demand demands.

  She grinned at herself over the lettuce bins, and a guy smirked at her and said, “You’re beautiful when you smile,” and she turned her back on him, heading for the cashier.

  * * *

  When Andy arrived, just after seven-thirty, he was carrying a brown paper bag up against his left side, and used his right arm to bring her close and kiss her cheek. How pretty he is, she thought yet again. He always surprised her with how goodlooking he was, as though his appearance faded slighdy every time they were apart.

  “A treat tonight,” he said, and reached into the bag, and brought out a bottle of French red wine; good stuff, from the look of it. “For dinner,” he told her, as she took it.

  So she’d been wrong. “Great,” she said, looking at the label.

  “And,” he said, full of repressed excitement, “this is for now!” And out of the bag came a bottle of champagne.

  “Why, Andy!” she said. “You surprise me!”

  His smile bubbled over with delight. “I hope to,” he said.

  * * *

  There’s something about knowing you’re going to, but you haven’t yet, nobody’s even made a move or a suggestion or a hint yet, and yet you both know it’s going to happen, this time it’s going to happen; there’s something delicious in those last moments before you fall into one another’s arms.

  Susan couldn’t remember when it was exacdy that she’d known, whether it was when he’d brought out the red wine, or not until he’d shown her the champagne, but somewhere in there she’d understood that he’d made a decision. And that she agreed with it.

  How will he do it? she wondered. He always seems so confident, but we’ve really known one another a while now with no moves at all, so what does that mean?

  And how will I do? Will I be a klutz? One or two incidents in her life when she’d been a klutz came into her mind, keeping her edgy, but over the edginess was the knowledge that it was going to happen.

  And tonight he didn’t at all do that sort of fading-out thing that happened with him sometimes when they were watching a movie or TV. He would be there with her, and then a kind of glaze would come over him, his eyes became dull, his face less expressive. It was as though he were taking a nap, asleep with his eyes open, but somehow it was more than that. Once, in a movie theater, she’d touched the back of his hand when he was like that, and it was so cold it frightened her. But then he’d responded immediately to her touch—he always responded immediately from the fading-out thing, if his attention was called on—and when he’d used the same hand a minute later to pat the back of her hand it was no longer cold. Had she imagined the coldness? She didn’t believe it, but she’d been reluctant to find out for sure. Since then, if she saw him fading out, she’d speak to him but not touch.

  But tonight he didn’t fade once. He was with her the whole time, admiring the dinner she’d thrown together (she was sorry now she hadn’t paid it more attention) and even showing interest in her retelling of the story about the Moscow cocktail party, this time emphasizing the International Society for Cultural Preservation rather than the meeting with Grigor.

  They sat on the sofa together to watch the program, and it seemed perfectly natural for him to put his arm around her and for her to nesde in against him, feeling the steady beat of his heart. They watched the program in silence for about twenty minutes, and then, during a boring bit—helicopters over imperiled green rain forest, portentous offscreen narration—he lifted her chin and kissed her lips. A great languor flowed into her from his mouth, a spreading softness and a heightened sense of her own physical self. His hand very gently stroked her body, and he whispered against her lips, �
�You are so amazing to me.”

  * * *

  He filled her as though his body were all molten, soft and flowing, as though she were a small mountain lake, hidden and unknown, and his presence turned her to nectar. She moved in slow motion, her arms boneless ribbons around him as he nuzzled within her, her body holding and releasing in long easy swells of a great warm tide, physical sensations and yearning emotions all braided together, coiling around her, a close compelling spiral of flesh and she an electric dot in the very center. It all made her so sad she thought she must be dying, she thought this must be the great sad fulfillment of death, but she didn’t care. She embraced the sadness, the salt of tears and birth and death, time contracting into that electric dot that was herself, everything contracting to that one infinitesimal point in the whole world, and she it, and then that point imploded and left nothing at all.

  They smiled solemnly at one another, stretched out together on her bed, the warmth rising from their bodies. And he said two astonishing things. No, not astonishing things, but said in an astonishing way:

  “I don’t want to lose you.”

  And, “I didn’t know about this.”

  Ananayel

  I didn’t know about this.

  I like being Andy Harbinger. I have made him healthy and attractive and reasonably strong. (I’ve tried a number of human types by now, and prefer comfort.) And he is human. I constructed him, from molecules of myself, so he is both me and human, and I am learning from him all the time, but I didn’t know about this.

  The experience of being with Susan was unlike anything I could have imagined. Not like that business with Pami at all, that brutal calisthenics. This was... this was like the best of the empyrean, distilled. How can humans spend their time doing anything else?