Manhunt. Volume 5, Number 1, January, 1957

The Rabbit Gets a Gun by John D. MacDonald

They were going to kill him. He saw it in their eyes, on their faces... and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do.

By the time he was ready to stop for the night, the good places were all filled up and he had to settle for a third rate setup — where he was charged five dollars for one of the sour little cabins back up on a slope behind a diner that smelled of grease and sweat.

He had parked beside the cabin, carried in a single suitcase, and now he sat on the sagging bed, looking down at the reflected glare of a naked light bulb on scuffed linoleum. He was full of the tensions and weariness of five hundred miles of driving in heavy relentless traffic. And this, he thought with bitter humor, is the first day of vacation.

When he had explained it to Marian, trying not to see the look of hurt in her eyes, he had imagined it would be very different. “I’ll just throw some stuff in the car, maybe some fishing tackle, and take off. No special destination.”

“But I thought we—”

He interrupted her quickly, saying, “I’ve got to get a chance to think things out.” He didn’t want her to have a chance to remind him that on his vacation he had agreed that they could look for an apartment, perhaps select some furniture, and make other plans for their marriage.

“I didn’t know,” she said carefully, “that you had to think this out, Frank. If you’ve changed your mind, or you want to change your mind, all you have to do—”

“It isn’t that. You know it isn’t that. It’s the job. It’s Aldrich coming in and taking over when I thought they’d give it to me. I thought they’d have to give it to me.”

Yet he knew that, in a sense, he had lied to her — and he knew she was aware of it. It was more than the job. It was her too. And the responsibilities of marriage.

He had thought that as soon as he left the city behind he would begin to think clearly and dispassionately, and he would feel a lift of spirits. But the twin problems had ridden with him throughout the long day. He still felt anger and resentment toward the firm. The least they could have done was give him warning, instead of sending Carl Aldrich in cold. But it was a big outfit, and a rough cold outfit, with branch offices in six states. They made small loans. Frank Lowell had started with them as a credit investigator, and, two years ago at twenty-six, had been made assistant office manager under George Syles. Three months ago George had been promoted to a job in the main offices, and before he left he told Frank in confidence that he had recommended him as new office manager, and it would only be a question of time until it was confirmed.

By then Frank had been going with Marian for eight months. She was a trim and pretty little dark-haired girl who worked in a large law office. They had agreed they would be married. He was confident of the future. They worked out a budget.

Then Carl Aldrich arrived, tall, breezy, confident, smiling — and at least a year younger than Frank. He was properly apologetic about being sent in to take over. He asked for Frank’s loyalty and cooperation. And his sudden arrival turned a promising job into a dead end. It struck a heavy blow at Frank Lowell’s confidence. It made their optimistic budget obsolete.

As he sat on the bed in the grubby cabin, he tried to understand the company’s point of view. He knew his own limitations. People always seemed to have trouble remembering his name and his face. He couldn’t make an impression like Aldrich could. Frank was not quite five foot eight, with sandy complexion, pale blue eyes, a voice that did not carry well. Yet he had felt he made up for his ordinariness by dogged diligence. Under his direction the office loss ratio had been very low, even with the increase in new business. When borrowers were in trouble he had spent evenings with them, working on plans and budgets, explaining in his quiet voice just how it could all be worked out.

Maybe, he thought, it had something to do with the new advertising program in which they tried to personalize their services by putting a picture of the office manager in the newspaper ads. You would think someone in the home office though would be aware of the performance figures of the office, aware of him as a good manager. If it was a dead end job, he did not feel that he could afford to get married. And he knew how hard it would be for him to find another job. Personnel directors were never impressed by him. He remembered how hard it had been getting into the company for which he worked.

He found that he was out of cigarettes. He walked out of the cabin and stood for a time in the night. It was getting cooler. A fragrance of pine woods drifted down the slope. He watched the heavy evening traffic on the highway. Nearly all of the other cabins seemed to be occupied. He walked down the dark slope, stumbling a few times in the ruts of the road, and went into the heat and noise of the diner. A heavy man in a soiled apron stood behind the counter.

Frank walked up to him and said, “Cigarettes?”

The man stared at him with heavy, weary, contempt. He yawned and let the insolent seconds pass and finally said, “The machine, bud. The machine.”

Frank flushed and turned and located the machine. He bought a pack and walked out again into the night. He was too depressed to be very angry. Perhaps the reaction of the fat man was a capsule demonstration of why this job, or any job, would be a dead end. Suppose Aldrich had asked the same question. “Right there behind you in the machine, sir.” Maybe when you have no look or air of importance, all the world treats you with bored contempt, forgetting you the moment you turn away.

So engrossed was he in sour self-analysis that he forgot to count the cabins as he came up the hill. He looked up and saw the familiar contours of his car in the night, faintly illuminated by the cabin light that shone through the side window.

He opened the cabin door and walked in and stopped dead three feet inside the door. There were three people in the room. They all stared at him with identical expressions of shock and alarm. One of them moved very quickly, and Frank Lowell found himself, for the first time in his life, staring at the muzzle of a gun. The man who held it was young. Perhaps nineteen. But his eyes were old and his mouth was cruel and old. He wore khaki pants and he was stripped to the waist. His arms and chest were heavy, muscular and deeply tanned. There was a flag tattooed on his upper arm.

“I told you to lock the door, Stel,” he said. He did not look at the girl as he spoke. She was young, heavy, with a swarthy face, dark brows, hair burned blonde-white by dye.

“Honest I locked it. I turned the key. Honest.”

“So I locked it too,” the other boy said. “We both locked it, Al, so that makes it unlocked.” The other boy was lean, blond, with a narrow face. He wore a T shirt and jeans. The girl wore dungarees and a red shiny shirt too large for her.

“You,” Al said. “Take a step toward me. Fine. Now reach back with your left hand and shut the door.”

As Frank did so, Al moved from the side of the bed. Frank looked at the articles on the bed. Wallets, lighters, jewelry, small wads of money. Al approached him casually, but carefully, stopping three feet away, the gun aimed at Frank’s middle.

“Now, little man, how do you fit in?”

“I–I got the wrong cabin. I’ve got the same make car, same model.” He heard his own voice with displeasure. It sounded painfully thin, scared and breathless.

“Turn slow and put your hands against the wall. Okay, now move your feet back toward me. That’s it.”

Frank found himself braced in such a way he could not possibly move quickly. He felt Al pat his pockets, take his wallet. He heard Al say, “Whitey, you go check for that car. Wait a minute. You got a wife or a girl friend with you, little man?”

“I’m alone.”

Whitey came back in about three minutes. “Like he said, same car. Next door. The next one down the hill.”

“Now lock the door and make sure it’s locked. Let me take a look here. It says Frank Lowell. Okay, Frankie. Let go the wall and you can sit down. No, not the chair. Right there on the floor.”

“What you going to do about him?” Whitey asked.

Al put the gun in the hip pocket of the khakis. He looked into Frank’s wallet, took out the money. “Thirty-four bucks,” he said. “And a lot more in travelers checks.”

“Aren’t they any good?” the girl asked.

“We don’t mess with those. I told you before. Here, Frankie. Catch.”

He missed the wallet. It slapped the wall beside his head, fell into his lap. He put it back in his pocket.

“What you going to do about this guy now?” Whitey asked.

“You’re getting yourself in a rut, boy. Come on. Let’s finish this up and I’ll be thinking about him. He isn’t any trouble the way he is. He won’t be any trouble. Take a good look if you get nervous. He’s up to here in rabbit blood.”

The three turned to the items on the bed. Frank sat and listened to them as they counted and divided. “It’s a low score,” Al complained. “Eight hundred and twenty-two bucks. And most of this stuff is junk.”

“This here lighter is real gold. Lift it,” Whitey said.

“Real gold, and with initials, you stupid punk. It gets buried with the wallets. You want to stay clean, you don’t mess with stuff like this. These rings and this pin are okay to fence. I’ll handle it like before and you get the cut later. Okay, four hundred eleven for me. You kids make your split any way you want. Whitey, you look like you don’t like me taking the full half.”

“Me? No, it’s fine with me, Al. It’s okay.”

“That’s good. Now wrap this stuff in a towel and take it out back. Take it off into those piney woods and bury it good.”

After Whitey had gone, Al got the bottle out of the small bathroom. He poured some in a glass and handed it to Stel. He took a long drink from the bottle. He looked broodingly down at Frank.

“So what in blazes are we going to do about you, Frankie boy?”

“He’s kinda cute,” Stel joined in.

“And so scared his eyes pop out. Now you’re seeing how the other half lives, Frankie. How do you like it?”

“What are you going to do?” Frank asked. He was obscurely pleased that he was able to ask the question so calmly, with no tremble in his voice.

“You got first names. You got descriptions. People like you love to yell cop. You get big attention. They take notes. They let you look at pictures. ‘Sure, that’s him. That’s the one they call Al.’ You just never should have walked in. You had bad luck, Frankie.”

Whitey came back and Stel let him in. Whitey said, “This Frankie makes me nervous. You got any ideas.”

They stood looking down at him.

“Now I got one,” Al said. “It’s getting cold enough so maybe somebody would use one of these gas heaters. Can’t leave marks. Can you do it so there’s no mark, Whitey?”

“Sure. Wrap the sap in a towel. But I don’t—”

“Because you’re stupid. We take him back to his place. Then he forgot to light the gas. And who’s going to care too much what happens to this little jerk? Look at him.”

The girl looked sick. “But we haven’t ever—”

“You want to be soft-hearted or you want to do some time?”

“We better do it just like he says, honey,” Whitey said to Stel.

And after a time of utter blankness in his mind, Frank Lowell realized that these three had every intention of killing him. He saw it in their eyes, on their faces. It was a grotesque realization. He had thought them people — rather twisted people, but still remotely human. He saw that he had been misled by their age. They were animal, not human. Their casualness had also misled him. And the indolent way his death had been discussed turned his mouth dry.

“I–I won’t tell,” he said.

Al smiled. “And on that we get a guarantee. Leave him sit for awhile. Later, there’s less chance of anybody roaming around when we carry him over.”

“Put him to sleep now?” Whitey said with too much eagerness.

“What’s the point? He’ll keep. He’ll be nice. He’ll wait right there for the F.B.I. to bust in. Only they won’t. Get the cards, Whitey. Maybe you feel lucky.”

They played cards. The girl kept looking over at Frank. She had a scared apprehensive look. It was only her frequent glances that kept him from coming to believe that this was some sort of cruel joke. She did not seem intelligent enough to put on an act. Al got up at one point and put on a plaid wool shirt. Frank sat in numbness, an apathy born of fear. At last he admitted to himself that it was true, that no miracle would stop it, that he would very likely die — and that investigation would probably indicate a verdict of suicide rather than accident. It would be a small and unimportant death, the end of a life that to others would also seem small and unimportant.

If anything was to be done, he would have to do it. He felt a tingling of excitement, yet he was careful to maintain a look of docility, of the cowed little man. With so much at stake, any gamble was valid. No odds could be too great. He stopped thinking of fear, of death, of himself. He became acutely observant. Al was winning consistently, and jeered at Whitey. The bottle was nearly empty. They had stopped playing gin and they were playing poker for higher stakes. Stel had stopped playing.

Frank was in a poor position. He could not scramble to his feet quickly enough. There was nothing close to him that could serve as a weapon. He had half decided that his best chance was to scramble to his left, try to hit the light switch on his way toward the window. There would be no time to try to unlock the door. He was rehearsing the movements this would require when he saw Al shuffle. It was a clumsy shuffle. The liquor was taking hold. A card slipped unnoticed, by everyone but Frank, into Al’s lap. Al was in profile to Frank. He could see the card. It rested on Al’s thigh. Frank’s angle of vision was low enough, so that he could see that the card was an ace.

“You got more damn luck,” Whitey said.

“Whitey!” Frank said sharply.

They all stared at him.

“Whitey, you’re losing every hand. He’s got an ace in his lap right now.”

Al looked down. Whitey grunted and shoved the rickety card table aside. Al picked up the card and turned it over. It was the ace of hearts. Whitey made a low sound and plunged from the bed toward Al. Al moved backwards and the chair upset. Frank saw the gun come out of the hip pocket as he scrambled to his feet. Whitey had hold of the front of the plaid wool shirt and he was cursing loudly. The girl screamed and in the middle of the scream the gun went off. It made less noise than Frank had expected. It was like the cracking of a very brittle stick. As Whitey took two unsteady steps backwards, his face slack, and as the girl screamed again, Frank snatched up the fallen chair with quick coordination. Al started to spin around. He was nearly all the way around when Frank hit him with the chair. The chair did not shatter as do chairs in the movies. One leg struck Al solidly across the side of the head. He went down heavily. The gun spun around and around on the linoleum floor. Whitey fell at least three long seconds after Al had gone down.

By then Frank had the gun. The girl looked at him, her mouth working, her eyes wide and unfocused. She ran around him, sobbing. She fumbled with the key, unlocked the door. He followed her out, moving slowly. She was running up the hill. He heard the dying sound of her footsteps, heard her blundering through the brush. No one seemed to have heard the gun or the commotion, or perhaps no one had the desire to investigate.

He did not look back into the room. He walked down the hill. He slipped the gun into his side pocket. There were no customers in the diner. The fat man was wiping off the bar top. He looked at Frank with heavy annoyance. “I’m closed, bud.”

“I’m going to use your phone.”

“I told you I’m — well, okay. Go ahead. Make it short.”

Frank straightened his shoulders, “I might talk a half hour.” He was daring the man to oppose him. “That’s going to be okay with you, isn’t it?”

The man looked at him, shrugged, looked away. “Suit yourself.”

He called the police. Then he made a collect call to Marian. Her voice was sleepy, but she soon began to understand. It was five hundred miles — one day’s drive away. He hung up when he heard the approaching cry of the siren.

He walked out and waited for them. He knew that he would talk well and they would remember him.