Hardcase

by Dan Simmons

  "Half a mile past County Road 93," gasped Kurtz. "Gravel road. Take it west toward the woods until it stops."

  Levine reached down, set the electrodes against Kurtz's testicles, and zapped him again. Kurtz's scream lasted long after Levine had slammed the trunk shut and begun driving again.

  Levine slammed the trunk up. Snow fell past him in the red glow of the brake lights. "Ready to show me?" said the dwarf.

  Kurtz nodded carefully. Even the slightest movement hurt, but he wanted to look more injured than he was. "Help me out," he croaked. This was Plan A. If he was going to lead, Levine would have to unchain him from whatever bolt held him in and undo his ankle manacles. Perhaps he would have to uncuff him while the miserable midget was close enough to grab. It wasn't much of a plan, but it was the best he'd come up with so far.

  "Sure, sure." Levine's voice was amiable. He reached over with the Taser and pressed it into Kurtz's arm.

  Flashbulbs. Blackness.

  Kurtz came to lying on his side on the frozen earth. He blinked his one good eye, trying to figure out how much time had passed. Not much, he felt.

  After Levine had zapped him, he'd obviously dragged Kurtz out of the trunk—not carefully, Kurtz thought, feeling a new broken tooth in the side of his mouth—and reworked the bondage arrangements. Kurtz's hands were cuffed in front of him now. Normally this would be good news, but the cuffs were attached by a chain to ankle manacles in state-prison manner, and a longer, fine-link steel chain—perhaps fifteen feet long—ran to a leather loop in Levine's hand.

  Levine was wearing a wool cap with earflaps, a bulky goosedown vest, a small candy-orange rucksack, and one of those night-hiking headsets with a battery-powered miner's lamp attached to colorful straps around his forehead. On a normal person, this would have looked absurd: on this dwarf, it looked strangely obscene. Perhaps it was the Taser in his left hand, the dog chain in his right hand, or the huge Ruger tucked in his belt that dulled the humor of it.

  "Get up," said Levine. He touched the Taser to the .steel dog chain. Kurtz spasmed, twitched, and almost wet himself.

  Levine put the Taser in his down-vest pocket and aimed the Ruger while Kurtz slowly, painfully, got to his knees and then to his feet. He stood swaying. Kurtz could rush Levine, but "rush" would mean shuffling and staggering the ten feet while the dwarf emptied the Ruger into him. Meanwhile, although the frozen ground was free of snow this far from the lake, flakes were beginning to fall through bare branches above. Kurtz began shivering violently and could not stop. He wondered idly if hypothermia was going to kill him before Levine did.

  "Let's go." Levine rattled Kurtz's chain.

  Kurtz looked around to get his bearings and began shuffling into the dark woods.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 44

  « ^ »

  "You know that Sammy raped and murdered the woman who was my partner," said Kurtz about fifteen minutes later. They had come into a wide, dark clearing, illuminated only by the beam of the lamp on Manny Levine's head.

  "Shut the fuck up." Levine was very careful, never coming closer than ten feet from Kurtz, never letting the chain go taut, and never dropping the aim of the big-bore Magnum.

  Kurtz shuffled across the clearing, looked at the huge elm tree at the far side, looked at another tree, crossed to a stump, and looked around again.

  "What if I can't find the place?" said Kurtz. "It's been twelve years."

  "Then you die here," said Levine.

  "What if I remember it was another place?"

  "You die here anyway," said Levine.

  "What if this is the place?"

  "You die here anyway, asshole." Levine sounded bored. "You know that. The only question now, Kurtz, is how you're going to die. I've got six rounds in the cylinder and a whole box of cartridges in my pocket. I can use one or I can use a dozen. Your choice."

  Kurtz nodded and crossed to a big tree, looking up at a twisted branch for orientation. "Where's the little girl… Rachel?" he said.

  Levine showed his teeth. "She's upstairs in her house, all tucked in," said the little man. "She's warm enough, but her legal daddy's pretty cold, lying facedown drunk in that fancy-schmancy kitchen of theirs. But not nearly as cold as her real daddy's going to be in about ten seconds if he doesn't shut the fuck up."

  Kurtz shuffled ten paces out from the tree. "Here," he said.

  Keeping the Ruger Redhawk leveled, Levine took off his backpack, unzipped it, and tossed Kurtz a stubby but heavy metal object.

  Kurtz's frozen fingers fumbled unfolding the dung. A folding shovel—an "entrenching tool," the army called it. It was the closest Kurtz would come to having a weapon in his hand, but it couldn't be used as a weapon in Kurtz's condition unless Manny Levine decided to walk five steps closer and offer his head as a target. Even then, Kurtz knew, he might not have the strength to hurt Levine. And chained and manacled as he was, there was absolutely no chance of throwing the shovel at the dwarf.

  "Dig," said Levine.

  The ground was frozen and for a few desperate moments, Kurtz was sure that he would not be able to break through the icy crust of old leaves and tight soil. He got on his knees and tried to put his weight behind the small shovel. Then he got the first few divots up and managed to start a small hole.

  Levine had tied the end of the chain around a sapling. This allowed his left hand to hold the Taser and tap it on the steel chain from time to time. Kurtz would gasp and fall on his side while his muscles spasmed. Then, without a word, he would get to his knees and continue digging. He was shaking so badly from the cold now that he was afraid that he wouldn't be able to hold the shovel much longer. At least the physical labor offered a simulacrum of warmth.

  Thirty minutes later, Kurtz had excavated a trench about three feet long and two and a half feet deep. He'd encountered roots and stones, but nothing else.

  "Enough of this shit," said Manny Levine. "I'm freezing my balls off out here. Drop the shovel." He raised the Magnum.

  "B-b-burial," Kurtz managed through chattering teeth.

  "Fuck it," said Levine. "Sammy'll understand. Drop the fucking shovel out of reach." He cocked the huge double-action revolver.

  Kurtz dropped the little shovel at the side of the trench. "Wait," he said. "S-s-something."

  Levine stepped closer so the headlight beam illuminated the trench, but he took no chances—standing at least six feet from where Kurtz crouched. The shovel was out of Kurtz's reach. The snow was falling heavily enough to stick on the leaves and black soil in the circle of light.

  A bump of black plastic protruded from the black soil.

  "Wait, wait," gasped Kurtz, crawling down into the trench and scraping away soil and roots with his shaking hands.

  Even in the cold night, after almost twelve years, a faint, loamy whiff of decomposition rose from the trench. Manny Levine took a half step back. His face was contorted with anger. The hammer was still back on the Ruger, the muzzle aimed at Kurtz's head.

  Kurtz uncovered the head, shoulders, and chest of a vaguely human shape wrapped in black construction plastic.

  "Okay," said Levine, speaking through clenched teem. "Your job's done, asshole."

  Kurtz looked up. He was caked with mud and his own blood and was shaking so hard from the cold that he had to force himself to speak clearly. "It m-m-may not b-be Sammy."

  "What the fuck are you talking about? How many stiffs did you bury out here?"

  "M-m-maybe it is," Kurtz said through chattering teeth. Without asking permission, he crouched lower and began peeling away the plastic over the shape's face.

  The twelve years had been hard on Sammy—his eyes were gone, skin and muscle turned into a blackened leather, lips pulled back far over the teeth, and frozen maggots filled the mouth where his tongue had been—but Kurtz recognized him, so he assumed Manny could. Kurtz's left hand continued peeling away black plastic around the skull while his right hand went lower, tearing rotted plastic around the chest.

  "Fu
cking enough," said Manny Levine. He took one step closer and aimed the Ruger. "What the fuck is that?"

  "Money," said Kurtz.

  Levine's finger stayed taut on the trigger, but he lowered the Ruger ever so slightly and peered down into the grave.

  Kurtz's right hand had already found and opened the blue steel hardcase where he had left it on Sammy's chest, and now he pulled the bundle out still wrapped in oily rags, clicked off the butterfly safety with his thumb, and squeezed the trigger of his old Beretta five times.

  The weapon fired five times.

  Manny Levine spun, the Magnum and Taser flew off into the darkness, and the dwarf went down. The headlight illuminated frozen leaves on the forest floor. Goose feathers floated in the cold air.

  Still holding the rag-wrapped Beretta, Kurtz grabbed the shovel and crawled over to Levine.

  He'd missed once, but two of the nine millimeter slugs had punched into the dwarf's chest, one had caught him in the throat, and one had gone in just under Levine's left cheekbone and taken his ear off on the way out.

  The little man's eyes were wide and staring in shock, and he was trying to talk, spitting blood.

  "Yeah, I'm surprised, too," said Kurtz. Strengthened by the adrenaline rush he had counted on, Kurtz used the entrenching tool to finish him off and then went through the dwarf's shirt pockets. Good. The cell phone was in his shirt pocket and hadn't been hit.

  Shaking wildly now, he concentrated on punching out the phone number he'd memorized in Attica.

  "Hello? Hello?" Rachel's voice was soft, clear, untroubled, and beautiful.

  Kurtz disconnected and dialed Arlene's number.

  "Joe," she said, "where are you? The most amazing thing happened at the office today…"

  "You all r-r-right?" managed Kurtz.

  "Yes, but—"

  "Then shut up and listen. M-m-meet me in Warsaw, the Texaco at the intersection, as soon as you can."

  "Warsaw? The little town on Alternate Route Twenty? Why—"

  "Bring a blanket, a first-aid kit, and a sewing kit. And hurry." Kurtz disconnected.

  It took a minute of pawing around the corpse to find the handcuff and manacle keys and the car keys. Even the goddamned, perforated, bloody goosedown vest was too small for Kurtz—he could barely pull it on and there was no chance of buttoning it—but he wore it as he dumped Levine, the Magnum, the phone, the backpack, the Taser, and his own Beretta—back in its blue-steel hardcase—back into Sammy's shallow grave and began the cold job of filling in the frozen dirt.

  He kept the miner's lamp to see by.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 45

  « ^

  Arlene pulled into the closed and empty Texaco station forty minutes after she'd gotten the phone call. Warsaw was literally a crossroads community, and it was dark this night. Arlene had expected to see Joe's Volvo, but there was only a large, dark Lincoln Town Car parked in the side lot of the Texaco.

  Joe Kurtz got out of the Lincoln carrying a dashboard cigarette lighter, fooled around by the big car's gas tank for a few seconds, and began walking toward her in the beams of her Buick's headlights. He was naked, bloody, limping, and smeared with mud. The right side of his scalp hung down in a bloody flap, and one eye was swollen and crusted shut.

  Arlene started to get out of the Buick, but at that second the Lincoln Town Car exploded behind Kurtz and began burning wildly. Kurtz did not look back.

  He opened the passenger-side door and said, "Blanket."

  "What?" said Arlene, staring. He looked even worse with the overhead light of the Buick on him.

  Kurtz gestured at the passenger seat. "Spread the blanket. Don't want to get blood on everything."

  She unfolded the red plaid blanket she'd grabbed from her window seat, and Kurtz collapsed onto the seat. "Drive," he said. He turned the car's heater on high.

  They were a mile or so outside of Warsaw, the burning car still an orange glow in the mirror, when Arlene said, "We've got to get you to a hospital."

  Kurtz shook his head. The bloody flap of skin and hair on the side of his head bobbled. "It looks worse than it is. We'll sew it up when we get back to your place."

  "We'll sew it up?"

  "All right," said Kurtz and actually grinned at her through the streaks of blood and mud. "You'll sew it up, and I'll drink some of Alan's whiskey."

  Arlene drove for a moment in silence. "So we're going to my place?" she said, knowing that Joe would never tell her what had happened this night.

  "No," he said. "First we go up to Lockport. My car's there and—I hope—my clothes and a certain leather bag."

  "Lockport," Arlene repeated, glancing at him. He was a mess, but seemed calm.

  Kurtz nodded, pulled the red plaid blanket around his shoulders, and held the flap of scalp in place with one hand while he turned the car radio on with his other hand. He tuned it to an all-night blues station. "So all right," he said when he had Muddy Waters playing, "tell me about this amazing thing that happened at the office today."

  Arlene glanced at him again. "It doesn't seem that important right now, Joe."

  "Tell me anyway," said Kurtz. "We've got a long drive ahead of us."

  Arlene shook her head, but then began telling him about her afternoon as they drove west toward Buffalo, the blues playing hard and sad on the radio and the snow falling softly in their headlight beams.

  * * *

  Since his first published short story won the Rod Serling Memorial Award in the 1982 Twilight Zone Magazine Short Fiction contest, DAN SIMMONS has won some of the top awards for the science fiction, horror, fantasy, and thriller genres, as well as honors for his mainstream fiction. He lives along the Front Range of Colorado, where he is currently at work on a new Joe Kurtz novel.