Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 102, No. 4 & 5. Whole No. 618 & 619, October 1993

Layover by Ed Gorman

Ed Gorman is one of those figures whose presence is felt in every area of the crime field. He has distinguished himself as a writer, earning an Edgar nomination in 1991; he is the editor of many notable crime fiction anthologies, including the successful series Cat Crimes; and he is one of the founders and the publisher of Mystery Scene Magazine, an important journal of mystery fandom...

In the darkness, the girl said, “Are you all right?”

“Huh?”

“I woke you up because you sounded so bad. You must have been having a nightmare.”

“Oh. Yeah. Right.” I tried to laugh but the sound just came out strangled and harsh.

Cold midnight. Deep Midwest. A Greyhound bus filled with old folks and runaway kids and derelicts of every kind. Anybody can afford a Greyhound ticket these days, that’s why you find so many geeks and freaks aboard. I was probably the only guy on the bus who had a real purpose in life. And if I needed a reminder of that purpose, all I had to do was shove my hand into the pocket of my peacoat and touch the chill blue metal of the .38. I had a purpose all right.

The girl had gotten on a day before, during a dinner stop. She wasn’t what you’d call pretty, but then neither was I. We talked, of course, the way you do when you travel; dull grinding social chatter at first, but eventually you get more honest. She told me she’d just been dumped by a guy named Mike, a used-car salesman at Belaski Motors in a little town named Burnside. She was headed to Chicago where she’d find a job and show Mike that she was capable of going on without him. Come to think of it, I guess Polly here had a goal, too, and in a certain way our goals were similar. We both wanted to pay people back for hurting us.

Sometime around ten, when the driver turned off the tiny overhead lights and people started falling asleep, I heard her start crying. It wasn’t loud and it wasn’t hard, but it was genuine. There was a lot of pain there.

I don’t know why — I’m not the type of guy to get involved — but I put my hand on her lap. She took it in both of her hands and held it tightly. “Thanks,” she said, and leaned over and kissed me with wet cheeks and a trembling hot little mouth.

“You’re welcome,” I said, and that’s when I drifted off to sleep, the wheels of the Greyhound thrumming down the highway, the dark coffin inside filled with people snoring, coughing, and whispering.

According to the luminous hands on my wristwatch, it was forty-five minutes later when Polly woke me up to tell me I’d been having a nightmare.

The lights were still off overhead. The only illumination was the soft silver of moonlight through the tinted window. We were in the backseat on the left-hand side of the back aisle. The only thing behind us was the john, which almost nobody seemed to use. The seats across from her were empty.

After telling me about how sorry she felt for me having nightmares like that, she leaned over and whispered, “Who’s Kenny?”

“Kenny?”

“That’s the name you kept saying in your nightmare.”

“Oh.”

“You’re not going to tell me, huh?”

“Doesn’t matter. Really.”

I leaned back and closed my eyes. There was just darkness and the turning of the wheels and the winter air whistling through the windows. You could smell the faint exhaust.

“You know what I keep thinking?” she said.

“No. What?” I didn’t open my eyes.

“I keep thinking we’re the only two people in the world, you and I, and we’re on this fabulous boat and we’re journeying to someplace beautiful.”

I had to laugh at that. She sounded so naive, yet desperate, too. “Someplace beautiful, huh?”

“Just the two of us.”

And she gave my hand a little squeeze. “I’m sorry I’m so corny,” she said.

And that’s when it happened. I started to turn around in my seat and felt something fall out of my pocket and hit the floor, going thunk. I didn’t have to wonder what it was.

Before I could reach it, she bent over, her long blond hair silver in the moonlight, and got it for me.

She looked at it in her hand and said, “Why would you carry a gun?”

“Long story.”

She looked as if she wanted to take the gun and throw it out the window. She shook her head. “You’re going to do something with this, aren’t you?”

I sighed and reached over and took the gun from her. “I’d like to try and catch a little nap if you don’t mind.”

“But—”

And I promptly turned over so that three-fourths of my body was pressed against the chill wall of the bus. I pretended to go to sleep, resting there and smelling diesel fuel and feeling the vibration of the motor.

The bus roared on into the night. It wouldn’t be long before I’d be seeing Dawn and Kenny again. I touched the .38 in my pocket. No, not long at all.

If you’ve taken many Greyhounds, then you know about layovers. You spend an hour-and-a-half gulping down greasy food and going into the bathroom in a john that reeks like a city dump on a hot day and staring at people in the waiting area who seem to be deformed in every way imaginable. Or that’s how they look at 2:26 A.M., anyway.

This layover was going to be different. At least for me. I had plans.

As the bus pulled into a small brick depot that looked as if it had been built back during the Depression, Polly said, “You’re going to do it here, aren’t you?”

“Do what?”

“Shoot somebody.”

“Why would you say that?”

“I’ve just got a feeling is all. My mom always says I have ESP.”

She started to say something else, but then the driver lifted the microphone and gave us his spiel about how the layover would be a full hour and how there was good food to be had in the restaurant and how he’d enjoyed serving us. There’d be a new driver for the next six hours of our journey, he said.

There weren’t many lights on in the depot. Passengers stood outside for a while stretching and letting the cold air wake them up.

I followed Polly off the bus and immediately started walking away. An hour wasn’t a long time.

Before I got two steps, she snagged my arm. “I was hoping we could be friends. You know, I mean, we’re a lot alike.” In the shadowy light of the depot, she looked younger than ever. Young and well scrubbed and sad. “I don’t want you to get into trouble. Whatever it is, you’ve got your whole life ahead of you. It won’t be worth it. Honest.”

“Take care of yourself,” I said, and leaned over and kissed her.

She grabbed me again and pulled me close and said, “I got in a little trouble once myself. It’s no fun. Believe me.”

I touched her cheek gently and then I set off, walking quickly into the darkness.

Armstrong was a pretty typical midwestern town, four blocks of retail area, fading brick grade school and junior high, a small public library with a white stone edifice, a courthouse, a Chevrolet dealership, and many blocks of small white frame houses that all looked pretty much the same in the early morning gloom. You could see frost rimed on the windows and lonely gray smoke twisting up from the chimneys. As I walked, my heels crunched ice. Faint streetlight threw everything into deep shadow. My breath was silver.

A dog joined me for a few blocks and then fell away. Then I spotted a police cruiser moving slowly down the block. I jumped behind a huge oak tree, flattening myself against the rough bark so the cops couldn’t see me. They drove right on past, not even glancing in my direction.

The address I wanted was a ranch house that sprawled over the west end of a cul-de-sac. A sweet little red BMW was parked in front of the two-stall garage and a huge satellite-dish antenna was discreetly hidden behind some fir trees. No lights shone anywhere.

I went around back and worked on the door. It didn’t take me long to figure out that Kenny had gotten himself one of those infrared security devices. I tugged on my gloves, cut a fist-sized hole in the back-door window, reached in, and unlocked the deadbolt, and then pushed the door open. I could see one of the small round infrared sensors pointing down from the ceiling. Most fool burglars wouldn’t even think to look for it and they’d pass right through the beam and the alarm would go off instantly.

I got down on my haunches and half crawled until I was well past the eye of the infrared. No alarm had sounded. I went up three steps and into the house.

The dark kitchen smelled of spices, paprika and cinnamon and thyme. Dawn had always been a good and careful cook.

The rest of the house was about what I’d expected. Nice but not expensive furnishing, lots of records and videotapes, and even a small bumper-pool table in a spare room that doubled as a den. Nice, sure, but nothing that would attract attention. Nothing that would appear to have been financed by six hundred thousand dollars in bank robbery money.

And then the lights came on.

At first I didn’t recognize the woman. She stood at the head of a dark narrow hallway wearing a loose cotton robe designed to conceal her weight.

The flowing dark hair is what misled me. Dawn had always been a blonde. But dye and a gain of maybe fifteen pounds had changed her appearance considerably. And so had time. It hadn’t been a friend to her.

She said, “I knew you’d show up someday, Chet.”

“Where’s Kenny?”

“You want some coffee?”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

She smiled her slow, shy smile. “You didn’t answer mine, either.”

She led us into the kitchen where a pot of black stuff stayed warm in a Mr. Coffee. She poured two cups and handed me one of them.

“You came here to kill us, didn’t you?” she said.

“You were my wife. And we were supposed to split everything three ways. But Kenny got everything — you and all the money. And I did six years in prison.”

“You could have turned us in.”

I shook my head. “I have my own way of settling things.”

She stared at me. “You look great, Chet. Prison must have agreed with you.”

“I just kept thinking of this night. Waiting.”

Her mouth tightened and for the first time her blue eyes showed traces of fear. Softly, she said, “Why don’t we go in the living room and talk about it.”

I glanced at my wrist watch. “I want to see Kenny.”

“You will. Come on now.”

So I followed her into the living room. I had a lot ahead of me. I wanted to kill them and then get back on the bus. While I’d be eating up the miles on a Greyhound, the local cops would be looking for a local killer. If only my gun hadn’t dropped out and Polly seen it. But I’d have to worry about that later.

We sat on the couch. I started to say something but then she took my cup from me and set it on the glass table and came into my arms.

She opened her mouth and kissed me dramatically.

But good sense overtook me. I held her away and said, “So while we’re making out, Kenny walks in and shoots me. Is that it?”

“Don’t worry about Kenny. Believe me.”

And then we were kissing again. I was embracing ghosts, ancient words whispered in the backseats of cars when we were in high school, tender promises made just before I left for Nam. Loving this woman had always been punishment because you could never believe her, never trust her, but I’d loved her anyway.

I’d just started to pull away when I heard the floor creak behind me and I saw Kenny. Even given how much I hated him — and how many long nights I’d lain on my prison bunk dreaming of vengeance — I had to feel embarrassed. If Kenny had been his old self, I would have relished the moment. But Kenny was different now. He was in a wheelchair and his entire body was twisted and crippled up like a cerebral palsy victim. A small plaid blanket was thrown across his legs.

He surprised me by smiling. “Don’t worry, Chet. I’ve seen Dawn entertain a lot of men out here in the living room before.”

“Spare him the details,” she said. “And spare me, too, while you’re at it.”

He whispered a dirty word loud enough for us to hear.

He wheeled himself into the living room. The chair’s electric motor whirred faintly as he angled over to the fireplace. On his way, he said, “You didn’t wait long, Chet. You’ve only been out two weeks. You never did have much patience.”

You could see the pain in his face when he moved.

I tried to say something, but I just kept staring at this man who was now a cripple. I didn’t know what to say.

“Nice setup, huh?” Kenny said as he struck a stick match on the stone of the fireplace. With his hands twisted and gimped the way they were, it wasn’t easy. He got his smoke going and said, “She tell you what happened to me?”

I looked at Dawn. She dropped her gaze. “No,” I said.

He snorted. The sound was bitter. “She was doin’ it to me just the way she did it to you. Right?” he said and called her another dirty name.

She sighed, then lighted her own cigarette. “About six months after we ran out on you with all the money, I grabbed the strongbox and took off.”

Kenny smirked. “She met a sailor. A goddamn sailor, if you can believe it.”

“His name was Fred,” she said. “Anyway, me and Fred had all the bank robbery money — there was still a couple hundred thousand left — when Kenny here came after us in that red Corvette he always wanted. He got right up behind us, but it was pouring rain and he skidded out of control and slammed into a tree.”

He finished the story for me. “There was just one problem, right, Dawn? You had the strongbox but you didn’t know what was inside. Her and the sailor were going to have somebody use tools on the lock I’d put on it. They saw me pile up my ’vette but they kept on going. But later that night when they blew open the strongbox and found out that I’d stuffed it with old newspapers, the sailor beat her up and threw her out. So she came back to me ’cause she just couldn’t stand to be away from ‘our’ money. And this is where she’s been all the time you were in the slam. Right here waitin’ for poor pitiful me to finally tell her where I hid the loot. Or die. They don’t give me much longer. That’s what keeps her here.”

“Pretty pathetic story, huh?” she said. She got up and went over to the small wet bar. She poured three drinks of pure Jim Beam and brought them over to us. She gunned hers in a single gulp and went right back for another.

“So she invites half the town in so she can have her fun while I vegetate in my wheelchair.” Now it was his turn to down his whiskey. He hurled the glass into the fireplace. A long, uneasy silence followed.

I tried to remember the easy friendship the three of us had enjoyed back when we were in high school, before Kenny and I’d been in Nam, and before the three of us had taken up bank robbery for a living. Hard to believe we’d ever liked each other at all.

Kenny’s head dropped down then. At first I thought he might have passed out, but then the choking sound of dry sobs filled the room and I realized he was crying.

“You’re such a wimp,” she said.

And then it was her turn to smash her glass into the fireplace.

I’d never heard two people go at each other this way. It was degrading.

He looked up at me. “You stick around here long enough, Chet, she’ll make a deal with you. She’ll give you half the money if you beat me up and make me tell you where it is.”

I looked over at her. I knew what he said was true.

“She doesn’t look as good as she used to — she’s kind of a used car now instead of a brand-new Caddy — but she’s still got some miles left on her. You should hear her and some of her boyfriends out here on the couch when they get goin’.”

She started to say something but then she heard me start to laugh.

“What the hell’s so funny?”

I stood up and looked at my watch. I had only ten minutes left to get back to the depot.

Kenny glanced up from his wheelchair. “Yeah, Chet, what’s so funny?”

I looked at them both and just shook my head. “It’ll come to you. One of these days. Believe me.”

And with that, I left.

She made a play for my arm and Kenny sat there glowering at me, but I just kept on walking. I had to hurry.

The cold, clean air not only revived me, it seemed to purify me in some way. I felt good again, whole and happy now that I was outdoors.

The bus was dark and warm. Polly had brought a bag of popcorn along. “You almost didn’t make it,” she said as the bus pulled away from the depot.

In five minutes we were rolling into countryside again. In farmhouses lights were coming on. In another hour, it would be dawn.

“You took it, didn’t you?” I said.

“Huh?”

“You took it. My gun.”

“Oh. Yes. I guess I did. I didn’t want you to do anything crazy.”

Back there at Kenny’s I’d reached into my jacket pocket for the .38 and found it gone. “How’d you do it? You were pretty slick.”

“Remember I told you I’d gotten into a little trouble? Well, an uncle of mine taught me how to be a pickpocket and so for a few months I followed in his footsteps. Till Sheriff Baines arrested me one day.”

“I’m glad you took it.”

She looked over at me in the darkness of the bus and grinned. She looked like a kid. “You really didn’t want to do it, did you?”

“No,” I said, staring out the window at the midwestern night. I thought of them back there in the house, in a prison cell they wouldn’t escape till death. No, I hadn’t wanted to shoot anybody at all. And, as things turned out, I hadn’t had to either. Their punishment was each other.

“We’re really lucky we met each other, Chet.”

“Yeah,” I said, thinking of Dawn and Kenny again. “You don’t know how lucky we are.”