Manhunt. Volume 1, Number 3, March, 1953

Stop Him! by Bruno Fischer

It was a tough situation. He was helpless, and the escaped con had hungry eyes on his wife.

They came out of the woods in the late afternoon. I looked up, and there they were passing the crab apple tree, the hulking younger man and the shrunken old man.

They didn’t say hello. They looked at my right foot, which was in a plaster cast.

“Guess you’re Neal Taylor,” the big man said.

He wore denim pants and a soiled T-shirt tight to his barrel chest and he needed a shave. The old man was in nondescript rags that smelled.

“Yes,” I said.

“Where’s Lucy?”

I closed my book. “She’s gone to the city for a few days.”

Tiredly the old man said, “He’s lying. She wouldn’t leave him alone for long out here with that bum foot.”

“Sure thing, Pop,” the other said. He came on the porch and grinned down at me. “We’ll stick around. Where do we get a drink?”

“The pump is in the kitchen,” I told him.

They went into the bungalow. I reached for my crutches and stood up.

The hot afternoon was very still. There were no other houses on the mile-long road that was hardly more than a track through the woods. Nobody had come up it in the two weeks we’d been here, and nobody would except Lucy, who had driven to town for food and would be back any minute.

The bungalow belonged to my friend George Dunn. It had no modern conveniences, no electricity, running water or phone, so his wife wanted no part of it. He hung onto it for occasional week ends during the fall hunting season. When I broke my ankle in the city, he offered Lucy and me the use of the bungalow until I would be able to return to work. “If you don’t mind peace and quiet,” George had said.

We didn’t at all mind peace and quiet as long as we were together. We’d been married only ten months. Besides, this was the only alternative I could afford to convalescing in our stuffy city apartment.

Now, suddenly, there was too much quiet and no peace.

I hobbled into the living room. From there I could hear the pump squeak in the kitchen and the low muttering of their voices.

A rifle hung over the fireplace. It was merely there for show; it was unloaded, and anyway the firing pin was broken. But they wouldn’t know that. Resting my weight on my good foot, I reached up for it.

I had it in my hands when they charged into the room. Before I could turn around, the younger, bigger man drove his fist into my face. The one foot on which I could stand shot out from under me. The cast on my other foot struck the floor and pain knifed from it all the way to my heart.

“You all right, son?” the old man asked anxiously.

He was bending over me. A revolver was in his hand. Gasping for breath, I looked past him at his companion who also had a gun, a heavy black automatic. He stuck it inside his belt and picked up the rifle.

“You didn’t need to sock him,” the old man told him. “He’s crippled.”

“Hell, Pop, he’s lucky I didn’t plug him.”

The old man slipped an arm under my shoulders. “Can you get up, son?” His eyes were the weariest I had ever seen, but they were surprisingly kind. He helped me to the armchair.

I sank back, feeling my ankle throb in the cast. The man who had hit me was examining the rifle.

“Busted and empty.” He dropped the rifle and kicked it against the wall and stared down at me. “So you know who I am? You very sure?”

“Yes,” I said. “You’re Roy Kester.”

“When did you hear about us busting out of pen?”

“I didn’t hear,” I said. “We’ve no radio and I don’t see a paper often. I guessed. I knew you were serving a long term in Trevan State Prison and it’s only twenty miles from here. And there was the way you asked for Lucy and the way you acted.”

The old man had found a pack of cigarettes on the table and was lighting one hungrily. “You don’t have to worry, son,” he assured me. “We’ll be on our way soon.”

“Sure,” Roy Kester said. “Just take it easy, Taylor. You can’t blame a guy for wanting to stop off and see his wife after six years.”

I put my head back against the chair and looked up at him. He was about thirty, two or three years younger than I. He was bigger and handsomer.

“She’s not your wife,” I told him. “She’s mine.”

“Last time I saw her she was married to me. Sleeping with me.” A bleakness came into his face. “She pulled the divorce while I was in the pen.”

The old man sitting at the table said, “You was going to be in for twenty years, Roy. She had her life to live.”

“Yeah, I was inside and she was outside,” Kester said bitterly. He shook a cigarette from the pack and turned back to me. “What’s your line of work?”

“I’m a tax collector for the state.”

“Plenty of graft, eh?”

“No,” I said.

He laughed. “What d’you know, Pop, Lucy went out and got herself an honest working stiff.”

“She was always a good girl,” the old man said. And he put his arms on the table and his head on his arms and seemed to sleep.

Roy Kester went to the window where he stood looking out at the road. The stillness was back — the hot, cloying stillness in which I could hardly breathe. We waited.

Our jalopy could be heard approaching from quite a way off, its worn springs protesting against the rutted road. I listened to it come closer and stop. Kester stirred at the window and the old man lifted his head from his arms.

The car door slammed. Then there were her steps on the porch, barely audible because she wore rubber-soled sandals. Then she was coming through the screen door, and all three of us were turned to her.

Perhaps she said something, uttered some kind of sound far back in her throat. Her lips moved, but the slamming of the screen door behind her was louder than anything else. She had stopped just inside the doorway, and she stood there trim and lovely with a bag of groceries in her arm.

“Hello, Lucy,” the old man said.

She drew in her breath, and that made her breasts swell at the low, square neck of her gingham dress. And Kester’s eyes were all over her — the eyes of a man six years without a woman and six years without this woman who had once belonged to him.

“Baby,” he said, “you look as luscious as ever.”

She didn’t as much as glance at him. She moved to the table and put the groceries down and said, “Pop, did you have to come here?”

The old man lifted a hand and let it drop limply. “You hear what happened, Lucy?”

“I read it in the paper in town. You and Roy broke out of jail last night.”

“You got the paper with you?” Kester asked.

“I didn’t bring it home.” She spoke to the old man. “What do you want from us?”

“Please!” the old man said. “We got to lay low a couple days till the heat dies down a bit. Then we’ll go on. Ain’t that all we want, Roy, a place to stay a couple days?”

“Yeah,” Kester grunted, and he never stopped looking at her.

“Roy’s got a fine hideout,” the old man went on. “There’ll be nothing to worry about when we get there. Dough waiting for us too. But we got to get through this part of the country. The hideout is—”

Kester said, “Shut up, Pop.”

The old man nodded tiredly and lit another of my cigarettes.

“Neal, what happened to your face?” For the first time since her return Lucy spoke to me. She bent over my chair, touched the swelling on my left cheek. “What did he do to you?”

“It’s nothing,” I muttered.

Kester drawled, “He tried to pull a fast one. I had to learn him.” He tugged his gun out of the waistband. “Next wrong move he makes, or if you make one, he gets a slug in the belly. Understand?”

She straightened, trembling, beside my chair. She opened her mouth and then closed it without saying whatever she had intended to say to him. Her hand was on my shoulders and I could feel her fingers constrict.

“So you’re stuck with us, baby,” Kester said cheerfully. “Now how’s about something to eat? Pop and me ain’t had a bite since morning.”

Without a word she took her hand from my shoulder and picked up the groceries from the table and started toward the kitchen. Kester stared after the undulation of her hips, and I could sense the hunger in him that was not a hunger for food.

From my chair at the living room window I saw Roy Kester do something to the jalopy. He had the hood up; evidently he was disconnecting a wire. Pop was napping on the sofa, snoring with his mouth open, and Lucy was in the kitchen preparing supper.

Kester came through the screen door carrying a big chunk of ice. We had no deliveries of anything here, so whenever Lucy went marketing she picked up a piece at the icehouse in town. Up to now there had been a problem bringing it in from the car to the icebox because with my broken ankle I was absolutely no help to her. Now she had a man in the house to do the heavy carrying.

I heard her say, “Thank you, Roy.”

After a few minutes he came out to the living room with dishes and silverware and set the table for four. She was giving him the chores that I would be doing if I were able to get around — and that no doubt he had done when he had been her husband. Now, to some small extent and for a short time, he was back in the routine.

I knew very little about him, not even the crime or crimes for which he had been sent to jail for twenty years. She almost never talked about him, or about her own past, as if with her marriage to me she was starting a completely new life. I had never, in fact, met any of her family. As far as I could tell, she’d been pretty much alone in the world when she’d met me.

Kester shook the old man awake. “Soup’s on,” he called out cheerfully.

Lucy brought me my crutches and I hobbled to the table.

The meal was eaten pretty much in silence. The two escaped convicts were too busy wolfing down food, and Lucy and I had nothing to say.

Afterward Kester and Pop played gin rummy. I was back in the armchair, not reading as I ordinarily would have, just sitting there. Lucy was in the kitchen washing the dishes. The room darkened. Kester fetched the kerosene lamp from the fireplace mantle and set it on the table and lit it and the game went on.

Suddenly Kester’s head snapped up from his cards and that look was in his eyes, and I knew she was in the room. He followed the movements of her body to the tiny square hall that led to the two bedrooms.

A few minutes later she was back, telling them that she had made up the bed for them in the other room. “It’s a double bed,” she said. “You’ll have to sleep together.”

Kester grinned at her. “It ain’t Pop I’m hankering to share it with.” She looked at him and through him. She said tonelessly, “Neal, I’m tired. Let’s go to bed.” Then she turned and was gone.

I hobbled after her. When I entered our room, she was lighting the lamp. There were no keys to any of the doors in the bungalow, so I couldn’t lock this one. All I could do was close it. I sat down on the bed and watched her pull her dress over her head.

I said, “How did he know you were staying here?”

Her fingers paused at the snaps of her brassiere. She took it off and hung it over the back of the chair before answering. “I’ve no idea.”

“You must have kept in touch with him,” I said. “Written him.”

“No.”

She put on the peach nylon nightgown I had given her for her birthday. It had practically no bodice and was close to transparent. She looked very lovely in it.

“Then how did he find out?” I persisted.

“He must have heard somewhere.”

“From whom?”

“I suppose we have mutual acquaintances,” she said.

I didn’t believe her, but I didn’t say it. Things were bad enough without starting an argument at this time.

She was pulling off my sock when the door flew open and Roy Kester came in.

The bedroom was small, as were all the rooms in the bungalow, and the soft kerosene light reached his face. His mouth hung slackly open as he stared down at her. Kneeling and bent forward, her breasts showed over the nightgown, and his face bore the greediness of a man who had been a long time hungry.

“All the time I dreamed about you,” he whispered.

Lucy roused as if from a trance and threw her arms across her breasts. And he laughed.

My crutches leaned against the bed. I could use one of them as a club, I thought. A futile weapon, for he had two good ankles and a gun, but I would have to try. My hand crept toward the nearest crutch.

Laughing, he said, “Think of that, Taylor, all of a sudden the dame’s modest. And after all the times I’ve seen her stark naked.”

She cowered at my feet, hugging herself, and my hand reached for the crutch.

He saw it. “Don’t try making like a hero. All I’m here for is to remind you what happens if you pull anything. Maybe, Lucy, you got an idea sneaking out and bringing the cops. Well, get it out of your head. I’ll be looking in here every once in a while. If you’re not here, your husband catches lead. Understand?”

“You don’t have to worry,” she said.

“I’m just reminding you, that’s all.”

He left, leaving the door open. Slowly Lucy straightened up and I heard her sob under her breath. She went to the door and closed it and came back to me.

After the lamp was out, moonlight flooded the room. She lay in the circle of my arm in bed.

“Do you still care for him?” I asked her.

“I love you,” she said.

“But you loved him once.”

“Did I?” She seemed to be thinking it over. “I was very young when I married him. He was very handsome, and — and there was a certain virility about him.”

“Did you know he was a crook?”

“Not when I married him, although...” She stopped; she seemed to have trouble expressing herself. “But when I found out — well, he was my husband and I stuck to him. Then he and Pop — that armed robbery and getting caught.”

“Who’s Pop? He seems like a pretty good guy.”

“He was one of Roy’s cronies. That’s how I happened to know him. He and Roy were both given twenty years. And two years ago I divorced Roy. But please, I don’t want to talk about it now.”

“All right.”

I heard them go to bed in the room next door, and then I lay for a long time listening to the night.

“Lucy?”

She stirred against me. “Yes, darling?”

“We can both get out through the window.”

“I’ve been thinking of that, but he did something to the car.”

“Listen,” I said. “I can get into the woods if I go slowly. I’ll hide there while you run to the nearest house that has a phone and call the police.”

“He said he’ll kill you, and he will.”

“But if I hide in the woods...”

“It’s too much risk. They’ll leave tomorrow or the next day. We don’t have to worry.”

Maybe not, I thought. But just barely maybe not.

I held her close in my arms and the night wore away.

All next day Pop sat in the living room playing solitaire, but Roy Kester couldn’t stay in any one spot. He prowled the rooms and the grounds, and his restlessness was like a smoldering fuse. And wherever he went to, inside or outside the bungalow, he always came back to wherever Lucy happened to be at the time.

Usually she wore shorts and a skimpy halter in hot weather, but today she had put on slacks and a polo shirt. Because of Kester; because of the way he seldom stopped looking at her. But it made little difference what she wore. She looked just as beautiful; just as desirable. If she had been covered with a blanket, his brooding eyes would have stripped it off her.

Sooner or later something was bound to happen, I kept thinking. There was nothing I could do to stop it. I sat helpless, only half a man with that broken ankle, watching and waiting.

I had never known weather could be so sultry.

Shortly before lunch he touched her for the first time. He stopped her as she passed, holding her wrist with one hand and his other hand caressing her.

She froze and looked at me with frantic appeal not to do anything. Pop stopped shuffling cards. The tableau held for a heartbeat or two, then she yanked away from him.

“Set the table, Roy,” she said, trying to act as if nothing at all had happened. “It’s time for lunch.”

He passed the back of his hand over his mouth. Then he said, “Okay, where’s the stuff?”

I sank limply back in the chair and Pop started clearing the table of cards so that we could eat on it.

The second time Kester touched her was in the late afternoon. I was glancing through a magazine, and suddenly I was aware of the quietness. Both Lucy and Kester were outside. I took my crutches and went to the side window. He was talking urgently to her as she hung kitchen towels on the line.

His hand went to the back of her thigh. She moved away from him and he followed her.

“Only one day,” Pop said pleadingly to me. “One more day and we can leave.”

He stood beside me at the window, seeing what I was seeing.

Kester’s hand was again on her. If I had had anything to kill him with, I would have killed him then.

“One more day at the most,” Pop said, “and then you’ll have her all to yourself forever.”

She twisted away from Kester and ran to the bungalow. He didn’t follow. With his head down, he strode back and forth near the clothesline, as if he were still caged in a cell.

That evening Lucy and I went to bed even earlier than the day before. It was only twilight, but our room was the one place where we could close a door between us and Kester.

We didn’t sleep. We lay close together listening to them start to quarrel over their card game. After a while Kester said, “The hell with it!” and the screen door banged. Being a fugitive from the law, he couldn’t have gone anywhere, but he must have been outside in the dark at least an hour. We were still awake when he returned. He and Pop muttered to each other, and then there were the heavy footsteps on the way to the other room.

Except that he didn’t go to his room. There were the two bedroom doors in the little hall, and instead of opening the right door he opened the left. Our door.

Naked to the waist, he loomed immense in the moonlight. I couldn’t see his face clearly, but I could hear him breathe and I could sense the turmoil in him.

“What the hell you doing in his bed?” he said. “You’re my wife.”

Under the cover Lucy shrank against me.

“You hear me?” He advanced to the bed, his powerful shoulders hunched forward like those of a bull about to charge. “Get out of his bed!”

She found her voice. “Roy, don’t joke. You know very well Neal is my husband now.”

“I’m your husband. I never divorced you. They never asked me. You come to me where you belong.”

I knew there was nothing I could say to him, or that she could either. He had been too long without her or any other woman, and he had had too many tormenting hours of being under the same roof with her.

He took out his gun and pointed it down at me.

“I’ll kill him and then you’ll have only one husband. Me!” Moonlight flickered on his grinning lips. “You stay in bed with him, baby, and his blood will spatter all over you.”

“Roy, wait! I’m getting out.”

I tried to hold her, but I was too slow. She rolled to the edge of the bed and stood up in that clinging, transparent nightgown. Moonlight burnished her bare shoulders and her throat and her breasts swelling out of the low bodice.

His arm went about her waist. She shrank from him, but she didn’t fight him. She looked at the black automatic his other hand held pointed down at me, and she was limp as he drew her to him.

I jumped out of bed on one leg, dragging my other foot in the cast after me. There must have been a great deal of pain, but I don’t remember feeling it. I hopped to the crutches standing against the wall.

Lucy was screaming. She had put her body between us and was clawing at his gun. I got my hands on one crutch and raised it. I swayed, trying to brain him without hitting her.

He gave me the chance when he hurled Lucy away from him. I brought the crutch down then, but I was awkward and clumsy balanced on one foot and couldn’t take the needed step closer to him. He sidestepped and caught the crutch easily on the downward swoop and wrenched it away from me. Then there was nothing between me and his gun.

Lucy, sprawling half on and half off the bed where he had thrown her, screamed again.

He didn’t shoot me. I heard him laugh and I saw the crutch swing at me. I flung my arms over my head, but the crutch slammed through to my skull. He had used it on me the way I had intended to use it on him.

The floor jumped up at me. The moonlight was abruptly gone; everything was gone but the blackness in which I lay and heard somebody whimper.

Lucy, I thought. Lucy whimpering in despair. I tried to get to her, but the blackness held me and the whimpering receded and there was terrible silence.

The old man was bathing my head. I opened my eyes to find myself lying on the floor and the kerosene lamp was on.

“It’s only a scalp wound,” he said.

He squeezed out a washcloth in a basin on the floor. The water turned pink with my blood. What had saved me had been my arms breaking the full impact of the blow.

“Where are they?” I said.

Pop didn’t answer. I didn’t need an answer. There was only a plyboard partition between the two bedrooms, and through it I could hear Roy Kester laugh.

Lucy was absolutely quiet.

“Don’t take it so hard, son,” Pop said. “It’s not like they’d never slept together before.”

Tiredness possessed his wizened face hovering over me. I didn’t know how old he was, but he couldn’t have been as old as he looked.

I said, “I’ll kill him. There’s an ax under the porch.”

“You’re out of your head. He’ll see you coming at him. He’ll make sure next time you don’t wake up.”

“Then give me your gun.”

“You think I’m nuts?” He dropped the washcloth into the bowl and rose to his feet. “It’s just tonight,” he said. “Then you and Lucy will never see him again. Why should you take it so hard?”

I laughed, and I knew there was madness in my laughter. “It’s all right for you. She’s not your wife.”

“The young make too much fuss about things,” he said. “Roy was married to her. This is nothing new, them two together. If it wasn’t like that, I’d maybe let you. Maybe even give you my gun. But she and Roy — well, what’s once or twice more?”

He was a queer old man. He was a convict, a desperate fugitive from the law, but he had washed the blood off me and was begging me to understand.

I said, “You seem fond of Lucy.”

“Yeah. I knew her since she was a little girl. Her mother was the finest woman there ever was.”

“Then why don’t you help her?” Pop massaged his face with a vein-ridged hand.

“I’m old,” he said quietly. “If they take me back to jail, I’ll never get out alive. I’ll never see the outside again. That’s why I took the chance to bust out with Roy. I need him. He’s got the hideout and he’ll get the dough to see us through. Without him the cops will pick me up in no time. With him I got a good chance.” He turned his tragic face to me. “Don’t you see what it means to me, son?”

“What about Lucy? What about me?”

“She’s no kid. She’s a grown woman. And he was her husband first.” Anger touched his voice. “You make too much fuss over such a little thing. I need Roy bad.”

And as we spoke here, she was with him beyond the plyboard partition. Pop had a revolver in his pocket. I had to get it.

I sat up and grabbed at his legs so I could pull him down and get my hands on his throat and take his gun. But I had no more success with him than I’d had against Kester. He kicked me in the ribs and punched me in the face. Ordinarily I could have absorbed those blows and handled him easily, but I was too weak from what Kester had done to me. My head was spinning even before the kick and the punch.

Again I passed out...

Next time I regained consciousness Lucy was with me. She was sitting on the floor with me and holding my head and sobbing, “Darling, darling.” Then she saw that my eyes were open and held me tighter.

She still wore nothing but her nightgown — the flimsy bit of nylon in which she had gone to the next room and returned. It was ripped at the bodice.

After a while she helped me get into bed. When she straightened up, I saw that her nightgown was torn all the way down to the hem so that it hung from her shoulders like an open robe. She pulled it together and stood flinching under my gaze.

“He would have come back and killed you,” she said. “What else could I do?”

The alarm clock stood beside the lamp. It was more than two hours since Kester had come into the room.

“Are you looking forward to tonight?” I said.

She gasped as if I’d stuck a knife into her. “You mustn’t say such a thing. I love you. I’ll go through anything for you.”

“All right,” I said dully.

I moved to the bed and flung myself on it face down. She let me alone.

I didn’t go out for breakfast. When she called me, I said I didn’t want any. There was much I had to endure, but I didn’t have to endure seeing her and Kester together.

All morning I stayed in the bedroom. At noon she brought me lunch on a tray, as if I were sick. I suppose I was — sick with hate and helplessness. I hardly touched the food.

A couple of hours later she came in to tell me she thought they were about to leave. Both of them had shaved with my razor and Kester had asked her for the car keys.

“They’re going to take the car,” she said, “but that’s all right.”

So at least there wouldn’t be another night like last, and last night would recede in time like a bad dream. I pulled her down to the bed with me and she cried a little against my shoulder. After a while we left the bedroom.

Pop, cleanly shaven, was back at his solitaire game. He smiled at us, gently, and didn’t look nearly so tired. In the clear, quiet afternoon I heard the engine of the jalopy. Kester had repaired whatever damage he had done to it.

The sound of the engine died. A minute later Kester came in through the screen door.

“All set,” he announced. “Lucy, you get your things packed.”

All the air was suddenly drained out of the room.

Slowly Pop put down the cards. “What’s on your mind, Roy?”

“My wife’s on my mind, that’s what. I got her back. Where I go she goes.” He grinned at Lucy, who stood with her hands to her throat. “Going to be a long time at the hideout. Long nights and long days. But it’ll be fine with you there.”

She was so very quiet beside me.

Pop rose to his feet, a wizened, weary old man. “Let her be,” he said.

“Use your head, Pop. As soon as we’re out of here, Taylor will yell copper. I take her along as a kind of hostage. That’ll keep him quiet.”

“They’ll promise not to say we were here,” Pop said.

“A hell of a lot his promise is worth. He hates my guts. Anyway, I’m not arguing. She’s coming.” Kester stuck his thumbs in his belt.

“Baby, you pack your clothes and come along nice and peaceful if you don’t want to see me blow his head off.”

Her face showed nothing. She was going to do it, I thought. She had no choice, any more than she had had a choice last night.

Pop stood at my side, his gun hanging loosely in his hand. Kester was looking the other way, at Lucy.

“You’ve got to let her be,” Pop said very softly.

I knew he understood the situation now, realized there was only one way to stop Kester from taking Lucy. I snatched the gun out of his hand, and he didn’t even fight me when I took it. Then I pointed the gun at Kester.

“All right, Pop,” I said. “I’ll stop the bastard. I’ll stop him!” I fired the gun, and the bullet caught him in the stomach, and he doubled over and screamed like a woman. I kept firing the gun long after he was dead.

I stood on the porch with Lucy and watched the old man get into the jalopy.

Behind me in the bungalow lay the dead man, and the revolver that had shot him was on the table. We would give Pop quite a head start before Lucy went for the police. We wouldn’t mention him at all. I would take all the blame — or the credit. The police wouldn’t mind that I had killed an escaped convict.

Pop turned my car around on the grass. When it faced the road, he stuck his hand out of the window and waved at me. I waved back.

I hadn’t asked Lucy if he was her father. I hadn’t had to ask. I supposed I’d known since last night when he had begged me to understand that what remained of his life depended upon his sticking to Roy Kester.

We stood on the porch watching the jalopy until it was hidden by the trees.

“I couldn’t tell you about him,” she said suddenly. “I was too — ashamed.” She shivered, and I put my arm around her. “He won’t get far,” she said. “He has nowhere to go.”

“I know,” I said.

“He was always a thief,” she said. “He ruined his own life and my mother’s, and he almost ruined mine. He introduced me to Roy, and he let me marry him without telling me he was a thief, too. And he brought Roy here when they escaped. Pop knew where we were because I wrote him every month. A kind of duty to my father in prison, though I never felt anything for him. He—” She paused and turned her face away.

I didn’t say anything. What in hell was there to say? I tightened my arm around her shoulders, and we walked slowly back into the house.