Hellbox

3

PETE BALFOUR

Verriker again. Verriker and those sons of bitches Ramsey and Lucchesi. Humiliating him in the cafe in front of all the locals and tourists. He could imagine what it’d been like in there after he stomped out. Verriker saying in that loudmouth voice of his, “There he goes, folks, there goes the Mayor of Asshole Valley,” and everybody hooting it up then, even the goddamn tourists, hooting and making fun of him behind his back.

Verriker, Verriker, Verriker.

He kept seeing that smug face, hearing that cackling laugh burn in his ears like acid. Saw that face and heard that laugh no matter where he went, in his truck, in his own house, in his sleep. Christ, how he hated that bastard! He’d never hated anybody as much as he hated Ned Verriker.

The only way he could breathe again, start living a normal life again, was to get rid of the hate by getting rid of the poison from that mayor label. But how? There wasn’t any way. Not as long as Ned Verriker was alive, there wasn’t.

As long as Verriker was alive.

But what if he wasn’t anymore? If Verriker was dead, the label would die with him. And so would the laughter. And Pete Balfour wouldn’t be a joke anymore.

Payback.

Payback in spades.

The notion came into Balfour’s head just like that after he got home, and he couldn’t of got rid of it then if he’d wanted to. And he didn’t want to. He’d never killed anybody before, nothing human, just deer and ducks and old man Henderson’s cat that kept coming around and making Bruno bark half the night so a man couldn’t sleep. He never wanted to kill anybody so bad before. But he had a real hunger for Verriker’s blood. Imagined him on the ground, the blood running out of him, eyes all wide and starey like a gutshot buck.

Verriker dead.

He grabbed up an invoice pad and a felt-tip from the table next to his chair, wrote Verriker dead half a dozen times in big black letters. The words looked good written down like that. Looked fine.

So fine that he said them out loud. “Verriker dead, Verriker dead.” Sweetest taste he’d had in his mouth in a long time.

That afternoon, sitting in his easy chair with his feet up and a cold Bud in his hand, he thought about ways to do it. A gun, sure, that was the simplest, and he had plenty to choose from. He liked guns, liked the feel of them, the recoil, the smell after he’d triggered off a round. He had revolvers, a couple of deer rifles, a regular pump shotgun and a sawed-off, the Bushmaster assault rifle and Sterling MK-7 semiautomatic pistol that he’d bought from that black market Russian, Rosnikov, who Harry Logan had steered him to down in Stockton.

But hell, he couldn’t do it with a gun, not any kind. If he just went out and shot the son of a bitch, no matter how careful he was, he’d be the number one suspect. Everybody knew how he felt about Verriker and having that mayor tag slung around his neck. Bugger turned up shot, the county cops’d come straight to his door. Same if he used a knife or a hatchet or a hunk of firewood.

Accident.

That was the ticket. Make it look like an accident. Accidents can happen to anybody, any time. They couldn’t blame Pete Balfour if he was nowhere around when Verriker had a fatal one.

Took him the rest of the afternoon and a full six-pack to work out a plan. It was a good one, slick and not too risky, and it’d fix Verriker better than a gun or some other weapon. The only problem with it was he wouldn’t be there to see it happen, but that was all right. He could live with that as long as Verriker died with it.

Verriker’s wife, Alice, would get it, too, but Balfour didn’t care about her. She was almost as vicious and mouthy as her husband, with a tongue as sharp as a razor. Humiliated him once herself, he remembered, that time in high school when he’d hit on her before she started going with Verriker. Laughed at him in front of a bunch of other girls, called him Frogface and told him his breath smelled bad, why didn’t he go home and drink a gallon of Listerine? Bitch. She had it coming to her same as Verriker did.

How soon? Hell, sooner the better.

Balfour popped another Bud and leaned back with his eyes closed, picturing how it would be. How he’d work it, step by step, and what he’d do afterward and the high he’d feel when he got the news. Biggest high of his life. It’d last a long, long time, too, he’d make sure of that. Go about his business, pretend to be real sad when somebody mentioned what’d happened. Keep a straight face and laugh like hell behind it, the way Verriker and the rest had been laughing at him.

Just thinking about it started him chuckling. And once he got started, he couldn’t seem to stop. The chuckles turned into snickers and the snickers into guffaws.

He laughed so hard thinking about Verriker dead, he almost peed his pants.