Carny kill

15

The next day was like the day before. No problems, smooth as oil. That was the day. The night was something else.

I was working my stand and getting a good Saturday night play and my mind was as innocently blank as a two-year-old's. Then an arrow-paced whistle went by me and I glanced over at Gabby. When he saw me look he gave a slight nod with his head and I looked around and saw a couple of bad news birds coming my way.

I swept up my walnut shells and said, "That's all for now, folks. The hawks are about."

The two hard characters waited till my marks drifted off- which was considerate of them, I thought-and then one of them stepped up and drew his wallet and flashed a badge at me.

"Mr. Thaxton? Lieutenant Ferris wants to see you."

"Only two of you this time?" I said. "The rest of the storm troop on holiday?"

The man with the badge put his wallet away and said, "Let's make a deal, Mr. Thaxton. You don't make with the tired funnies and we won't tell you to keep your big mouth shut."

They were somewhat on the new breed pattern but not quite. The one who had flashed the buzzer was of medium height, spare built-a thin-faced dark man giving the impression of a steel hardness not wholly physical. I classified him as a tough baby.

The other one was maybe twenty-three. He had fair wavy hair like a halo over a youthful, almost girlish face. There was something a little wrong with his baby blue eyes and with the tense way he grinned at me.

"Has another body been found?" I asked, smiling.

"Ask me no questions, Mr. Thaxton, and I'll tell you no lies," the thin-faced man said. "Shall we go?"

It wasn't really a question. I shrugged at Gabby and the three of us walked out of the sideshow.

I started to turn south once we reached the hub of the central garden, thinking we would go on over to the bunk-house. But the thin-faced man took me by the elbow, lightly, and said,"No. We're going to headquarters."

Something was out of stride. I didn't know what and I didn't like what I didn't know. But I said nothing.

We went through the main gate. The parking lot was well lighted and I expected to see a squad car waiting in front but there was none. There were only two or three thousand cars parked out there.

We walked along the north drag until we came to aisle 10 and we turned down that and walked some more. Nobody said anything and every time I looked the pansy faced guy on my left was grinning the same tight, plastic grin.

I'm not simple-just slow. I started to lag my pace.

"Uh-maybe I better have another peek at your buzzer," I suggested to the thin-faced man.

He took me by the arm again.

"Let's not have any trouble, Mr. Thaxton," he said levelly.

"Naw," Pansy-face spoke for the first time. "He don't want no trouble, Chad. Do you, mouth?" He gave me an elbow nudge in the ribs.

I started to take in my breath. The thin-faced man, Chad, stopped short. He stopped me. We were standing by a dark new sedan. I can't tell one new American car from another but I could tell that this one wasn't a police car.

A third man was sitting behind the wheel. He looked out the window at me with bright little piggy eyes that were set in a face the color of uncooked dough. That's what the glaring bluewhite arc lights did for him.

"Okay?" he, the driver, said.

"Okay," Chad said.

Not by me it wasn't. I pivoted like a soldier doing an about-face and planted my right in Pansy-face's bread basket, and at the same time Chad gave me a chop behind the neck with the edge of his hand and Pansy-face and I leaned together like a couple of drunks holding each other up, or like a pair of lovers trying it English style.

Then Pansy-face gutted me and I swung to the left with a windy grunt and doubled over, and his upcoming knee brushed past my shoulder and caught me on the side of the face and straightened me out quick, sending my head toward the stars, and just then I heard Chad say "Enough!" and I felt the hard, positive business-end of a pistol barrel in the small of my back.

"Sonofabitch tagged me, Chad!" Pansy-face cried. "Ain't no bastard on gawd's earth goan lay hands on me!"

"I think I said it was enough," Chad said. "Is that right?" His voice was very flat, very impersonal, and when you heard it you knew you were dealing with a man of authority.

Pansy-face backed down grudgingly. I think he was on something. I didn't smell any booze so it was probably a needle.

"Get in the car, you -ing mouth!" He gave me a shove.

The dough-faced driver had reached back and swung open the rear door and I collided with the edge of it. Pansy-face got me under both armpits and gave me a heave from behind and if I hadn't ducked my head I would have lost the upper half of it as I was propelled into the backseat.

Pansy-face followed me in and slammed the door after himself.

"Okay," I said in a strained voice. "Okay, I've had enough."

"You gawddamn better believe it, boy," Pansy-face snarled. "Or I'll purely gouge your -ing eyes out!"

It was important to me that he believed he really had me cowed. I didn't want him reaching for his shoulder holster with the intention of subduing me further with his gun. If he reached, he would discover that the holster was empty.

I had palmed his Roscoe while we were hugging each other and had slipped it under my belt when I swung away and doubled up. It was a twentytwo with a snubbed barrel, the kind that is easy to pack and doesn't make much noise and is nice for close work. I let it rest where it was because there was no chance to unlimber it right then. The driver was holding another snubnosed revolver on me while Chad went around the back of the car and got in up front on the passenger side.

Chad pulled his own Roscoe and rested it on the top of his seat, aiming in my direction.

"Go," he said to the driver.

Dough-face turned the motor over and punched R and looked around and we backed out of our parking space. He braked and punched DI and swung the wheel andwe started cruising down the aisle, all the chrome bumper guards and exaggerated tailfins and red parking lights winking and gleaming and turning to a smear as we picked up speed.

"Slow," Chad said to the driver, watching me. "Let's not attract attention to ourselves. We don't need a speeding citation tonight. Is that right?"

"I've been here before, Chad, remember?" the driver said. He watched the headlight-illuminated aisle ahead. "I know what I'm doing."

"Yes you do," Chad said. His eyes never left me.

Pansy-face was starting to get jittery. He needed more action.

"What say we have Bob stop somewheres first, Chad?" he said. "The mouth here purely needs some working on."

He gave me a short vicious one in the ribs.

"Don't you, mouth? You need some exercise, huh?"

He worried me. His kind of bent-brain needed to feel power. He liked to intimidate helpless people. I was afraid he would want to pull his bobbed target pistol, to wave it in my face and make me cringe.

"Cut it out," Chad said. Then he said to me, "No hard feelings about this, Mr. Thaxton. It's the way the cookie crumbles."

"Or the ball bounces," I said.

We were out on the highway now and I could just make out the gray strip of beach with its pile line of foam running along on the left side of us.

"How serious is it?" I asked him. "Do I just get a working over from the hophead here, or are you going whole hog?"

"Oh, you're gonna be mine, boy," Pansy-face murmured.

"I wouldn't worry about it, Mr. Thaxton," Chad said. "One way or another, you've got to face it."

"Sure," I agreed. "But you don't have any objection about telling me why I've got to face it, do you?"

"I wouldn't know, Mr. Thaxton, I really wouldn't. And I'll tell you something else. I really don't care to know."

I had figured that. He was a sharp big-city hood and he did nasty little jobs like this on consignment. He tidied up other people's garbage for them and he never asked questions. That's what kept him in business.

"But you know who hired you," I said.

"Um," he said. "I know that somebody pays me. Beyond that point I don't sweat it."

"You know the name of the person who paid you this time?"

"Could be."

A night-owl kid on a bike missed death by inches as we whoomed by him-his gawk-eyed blob of face appearing briefly in our lights and streaming by to be swallowed up in the winged blackness. Chad's eyes flicked to the left.

"Didn't you hear what I said, Bob?" he asked quietly.

"I gave the bastard a mile's clearance," the driver said defensively.

"I said slow. Is that right?"

The driver eased up on the accelerator.

"Look," I said to Chad. "I figure you're passing up a bet."

"I've been known to do it before."

"Yeah, but I mean one from the horse's mouth. There could be money in this. Fat money."

He didn't say anything for a moment. Then he said, "They always say the same thing. Different words, may be, but it always comes to the same thing. I'm being played for a sucker. I could grab a bundle instead of settling for peanuts. I don't know my ass from a hole in the ground."

His teeth flashed at me in the dark. "Is that right?"

"I'd say so," I said.

"I thought you would. Because they all do. All right, I've got to kill time anyhow. Go ahead. Tell me how I'm throwing away a fortune this time."

"First you'd better tell me who hired you for this."

"Oh," he said. "I see. You're just guessing. Fumbling around for an answer."

"But suppose I get the right answer? There is such a thing as blackmail."

"I'm afraid you're not very smart, Mr. Thaxton," Chad said. "Elimination and blackmail are two divergent businesses. If you try to mix them you end up bankrupt."

At least he had made one point clear. I was to be eliminated.

We turned off the main drag and went down a lightless back road at a casual forty. It wasn't paved. I could hear the pebbles banging off the bottom of the frame and a lot of sand or dirt was hissing inside the fenders.

"What you say, Chad? We have some exercise with him first, huh?" Pansy-face made another eager appeal.

Chad didn't take his eyes from me. He said no.

Thinking back I realized that the only time he had removed his eyes from me was in that split second when the kid on the bike had flashed by the car windows. That was good. He could be distracted. And a split second was all I needed.

Chad watched me. He said, "We close?" to the driver.

"Uh-huh. Any place along here. Nearest farmhouse is five miles."

I glanced out the window. A continuous murky scar on the dark earth was running along our right side. A drainage ditch, I supposed. Some kind of coulee.

"This will do," Chad said, and the driver applied the brakes.

"I'm going to ask you to conduct yourself with a little dignity, Mr. Thaxton," Chad said. "I wouldn't want you to kick up a row and have to put a bullet in you."

I wet my lips. The car had stopped. The twin beams of light converged and showed us fifty yards of drab dirt road rolling flatly on into the mystery wall of night.

"I see," I said. "A little incident is going to be arranged, huh?"

"A hit and run accident," he said. "Too bad about this, Mr. Thaxton, but business is business."

"Yeah, I know. The crumbled cookie."

"I did mention I was sorry, didn't I?" He didn't sound like he had too much remorse.

Pansy-face made a little giggle and leaned on the door handle.

"Lemme square him away, huh Chad?"

The door had opened about an inch. I said, "Any of you know what became of the hophead's Roscoe?"

They did what I thought they would. Pansy-face slapped a hand to his left armpit and Chad's eyes leaped right after Pansy-face's gesture.

I had the twentytwo out and I pulled the trigger at Chad's chest but it kicked and he caught the slug spang in the Adam's apple and it must have been a dumdum because what it did to his throat and all over the windshield behind him was not pretty to see in the sheet of flame that roared from the pistol.

I lunged all of me against Pansy-face and the door shot open and we went sprawling through it and hit the road together, me on top, and then I started rolling like a log as the driver's snubnose went WOW WOW WOW out the window after me.

I got behind the car and came up in a crouch and I had to do something fast because in a second Pansy-face would have Chad's gun and then he and the driver would come after me around either end. I took a running jump into the coulee and it was like leaping into a well at night, only it was dry and it wasn't as deep.

I was afraid it would be loose shale but it was dint so I didn't make any noise as I started crawling along it, working parallel to the road and going in the same direction as the headlights. The driver was yelling at Pansy-face.

"Take the right side. I'll take the left. He must a jumped in one ditch or other."

"He's mine, gawddamn you, Bob! You hear me? Wait'll I get Chad's gun." And then, a second or so later, Pansy-face cried, "Aw gee-_sus_, Bob! You see what he done to Chad?"

I kept on crawling along the ditch till that blazing streak of opaque light overhead lost its power of penetration and started to dissolve in the darkness beyond. Then I snaked up to the edge of the parapet and looked back down the road.

The car's headlights glowered at me like jack-o-lantern eyes. Pansy-face's silhouette cut across them. He was holding Chad's pistol at hip-level. I eased myself out of the ditch and sat down in the road facing the car and tested my gun arm on my cocked right knee and gave it support with my other hand and took a sight and called, "Down here."

Pansy-face spun around with the front of the car at his back and gave me a beautiful fullfront silhouette. I squeezed off but it went high again and nabbed him in the neck and threw him back against the nose of the hood. Then his knees buckled and he went down in the road like a dropped shirt.

I only caught a flicker impression of the driver piling back into the car and I snapped one at him but God knows where it went. The motor was still idling and all he had to do was flip off the emergency and punch a button and give it the gas.

But he forgot about Pansy-face.

"_Jesus Christ, Bob, wa-!_"

The car lurched forward and went thump over the meaty obstacle and a shriek like I never want to hear again ripped the fabric of the night.

The driver was already rattled and the good-god realization that he had just mashed Pansy-face must have unglued him completely. He floored it and that big rumbling crystaleyed sedan came hurtling down the road at me, but it was already slated for crashvile when I started jerking off shots at the windshield, and it swerved out of control and to the left and I took a frantic roll back into the ditch.

The tires howled and the brakes started to scream and all of it went into a great metallic crash and seemed to surround me in a shivering glass ball of sound. Then it popped and all I could hear was the quiet, tentative giving of ruptured metal parts and the plippity-plip of draining liquid puddling. The headlights were burning steadily at a crazy tilt.

I climbed out of the ditch and went across the road and looked down the other side. The car had turned turtle on the slope. It was on its top and two of the tractionless wheels were still spinning. The driver was partly out the window and he was in a crumple on his head and shoulders. The black liquid running over his face looked like oil but of course it wasn't.

I went down the road and looked at Pansy-face. His legs were at an odd angle to his body and he was hemorrhaging from the mouth. I hoped he hadn't died right away.

I wiped off the pistol and pitched it in the field by the wreck. I didn't see any reason why I should get involved with the law-any more than I already was. I started hoofing back the way we had come.