Shoot the Moon (and more)

The Love Rack

I guess I’m resigned to the fact that I’m going to die. Or as resigned to dying as a man can get, anyway. They’ve told me, you see, that they’re going to kill me. And I have no reason to doubt them. It’s as simple as that.

Haven’t eaten in quite a while but I’m not overly hungry. Wonder if it matters if you die on an empty stomach? At least there won’t be anything left in me to embarrass anybody. I hear a man’s bowels clean themselves out once he’s dead, and I’d hate like hell to be an embarrassing corpse.

I have had a woman, though, and not long ago. A very beautiful woman, too, with soft gold hair and warm brown eyes. Yes, yes, I’ve known her that way, I’ve had that much. Seems as if we made love all night long. Wonderful. I’ve got no complaints about that part of it. Haven’t known her long but I could love her if I had a while, I think. Hell, maybe I love her right now.

Her face is her face, but it’s also someone else’s. From a long time ago. It’s all very confusing.

She lies still, not far from me, as though she were dead.

Perhaps she is.

After a while it gets kind of hard to remember...

In the evening I went out with a young woman who wouldn’t. I dropped her off at her place and went back out into the city and got lost for a while and drank. Don’t own a car, so I walked the streets rather than take a cab. I don’t live far from the downtown anyway. It had been raining and the streets were shiny black like patent leather. Once I almost got hit when I decided to look at my reflection in the funny black mirror which turned out to be the middle of the funny black street. I called the driver who nearly clipped me a motherfucker — I sober up quickly — and tottered off in the vague direction of my apartment.

I got back around two or three in the morning. Not drunk, mind you, but not ready to take on a high wire act either.

I went into the bedroom, stripped down to my shorts, flopped down on the bed. Thought sleep would come easy, but no go. My head ached, and badly. Migraines hit me from time to time, and this was a time.

Got to sleep in an hour or so.

I dreamed. I dreamed I was spread out on a long wooden frame, my legs and arms tied to the ends of it. Then a girl, young and pretty, with the face of someone I loved once, began to twist a wheel which caused the frame to extend and started pulling my limbs apart from my body. I just lay there on the rack and screamed while she kept working the wheel, her face chiseled stone.

I awoke in a cold sweat, naturally, and shook off the damn thing as quickly as I could, before rolling over and back to sleep again. I had had to get used to the dream, because I’d had it as an unwanted bed partner for years.

When I got back to sleep the dream took over again and just as my right arm was being slowly stretched free of my shoulder, someone started playing kettle drums outside.

I sat up in bed.

Knocking. Someone at the door.

I said, “Damn,” and got up and threw on my trousers and kept on saying “Damn” till I reached the door.

When I opened it I found a man about my size, though not quite as heavy as I am, waiting for me patiently. He wore a rather handsome tweed overcoat and an air of having made it big in something or other. The only real catch was the undernourished look he had, complete with chalk-cheeked face with vein-lined bones jutting out from it at sharp angles. Also he seemed vaguely familiar, like something from an old newsreel, and he was smiling like a long-lost brother.

He said, “Hello, Smitty.”

“Okay. Hello. Who the hell’re you?”

“It’s been a while. Don’t you remember?”

“No.”

“Aren’t you going to ask me in, take my coat?”

“No.”

“Now, come on, Smitt...”

“Who the hell’re you?”

“It’s Vin, Smitt, Vin, don’t you know me?”

“Vin. Thompson? Vin Thompson?”

“Korea wasn’t that long ago, was it?”

“It’s been long enough.”

“Am I disturbing you?”

“Oh no, everybody drops in at three in the morning.”

“I didn’t wake up the wife or kids, did I?”

“I’m not married and don’t have any kids that I know of.” “You didn’t marry that girl back home? That Karen?”

“No. I got a letter from her while I was still over

there. Married somebody else, the bitch.”

“Sorry, Smitt.”

“Don’t be.”

“Well, Smitty?”

“Well what?”

“Aren’t you going to ask me in?”

“No.”

“Smitty, we fought together.”

“The hell we did. I was a lieutenant and you were a lieutenant colonel. I barely knew you. Besides, ask me if I give a damn about all that army shit.”

“Do you, Smitt? Do you give a damn?”

That didn’t deserve an answer. I started to close the door on this unwanted ghost when he reached into one of the large pockets on the handsome tweed coat. When his hand came back it had an automatic in it.

“Okay,” I said, suddenly giving a damn, “come on in.”

“Good to see you, Smitt. Close the door, will you?”

“Drop dead.”

He shrugged and kicked it shut.

I rubbed by eyes, belched, and collapsed on the davenport.

“You tired or something, Smitt?”

“What makes you think that?”

A deck of cigarettes appeared in Vin’s hand from out the other kangaroo’s pouch on the tweed coat. He gave himself a cigarette and tossed another in my direction. He lit his with a steelcase lighter but motioned for me to use the book of matches in front of me on the coffee table. I thought about firing the whole book and throwing it in Vin’s face for a minute. For a minute.

“We were in the army together, Smitt, you and me.” He puffed the smoke in and out dreamily. But his eyes were hungry in their hollow sockets.

“I hardly knew you, Vin. You were my superior officer.” “We spoke a few times. I liked you. That’s why I remembered you.”

“I was a lousy soldier.”

“You weren’t bad.”

“I stunk. I drew flies, I stunk so bad as a soldier. I hated it and didn’t give a damn about anything but my own ass. And I was scared as hell most of the time. All the time.”

“You’re a modest man, Smitt.” Half his face smiled.

“Everybody was scared.”

“Not the way I was.”

“You went home with an honorable discharge.”

“That’s a laugh. I went apeshit when I got that letter saying Karen was married. I went off my nut and went out and slept with every slant-eyed thing with two legs that came along. You know how I got that discharge? Discharge is right. I got it for the eight kinds of VD I caught over there.”

“Don’t make me sick, Smitt.”

“I’m making myself sick. If I’d been an enlisted man they’d’ve tossed my in the brig instead of home. Shit. I don’t exactly feel like taking a stroll down that memory lane. So why not let it alone, Vin. Okay?”

“Shut-up, Smitt.”

So now “war buddy” Vin turns nasty, huh? “Okay, pal, it’s your gun.”

“I said shut-up, Smitt.”

I did.

“Your full name is Phillip James Smith, you are a veteran of the Korean War, presently working as a freelance insurance investigator.”

He looked at me as if he expected an answer; since he hadn’t asked a question I didn’t have one for him.

“Well?” he asked. Demanded.

“Well what?”

“Is what I’ve said correct?”

“Yeah, yeah, so what?”

“And you carry a firearm?”

“No.”

“You don’t? Don’t try lying to me, Smitty.”

“I own a gun, but I’ve never carried it with me. It’s a little .32 revolver. I never even fired it once. Carried it on a couple jobs, few years ago, but that’s about it.”

“Go get it.”

“What?”

“The gun. Your gun. Go get it. But no shells, please. I’ve got shells for you. Then throw on some clothes and we’ll get moving. Hustle, Smitt.”

“What’s going on?”

He showed me a plastic I.D. of some kind which identified him as an FBI agent. Looked legit, as far as I could tell.

“So,” I said, “Uncle Sam wants me.”

“You might say that.”

“Well he can’t have me. He had me once and that was one time too many.”

“I’m got giving you a choice, Smitt.”

“I have to take the gun?”

“Yes.”

“But it’s just a .32, wouldn’t stop a fly...”

“If you have to shoot, aim at the head.”

“If I have to shoot... what kind of shit is this...?”

“Hurry up.”

The man driving the car kept his mouth shut the whole time. He wore a black suit which looked slept-in and a black tie which was food-stained and black shoes which looked like they’d just finished kicking somebody’s teeth in. I noticed all of that because I was practically sitting on top of him; Thompson, the driver and I were all piled into the front seat of a black Lincoln Continental. There was a solid partition, a black padded wall without a window or anything, separating the front from the back. So I didn’t know who or what the hell was back there. Nor by this time did I care. Still had the migraine, paisley spots floating in front of my eyes.

The heater was on heavy and it was hot in the car, as crammed together as we all were, though outside it was cold, crisp October. The driver switched off the heater and rolled down the window. Since I was sweating like a pig on a barbecue, I took this as a gesture of good will.

“I appreciate that, buddy, thanks a lot.” I gave him a cheerful look.

The driver cleared his throat and shot a clot of mucous out the window. Then he rolled it back up and let me sweat some more. He turned his head toward me for a moment and his face looked like a slab of cement with a single crack running across it. An unfriendly crack at that, surrounded by pockmarks.

I didn’t speak to him again.

“I don’t have to tell you I don’t like any of this, do I?” I asked Thompson.

“I didn’t exactly expect you to, Smitt.”

“How do I know this is on the level, really FBI and all?”

“You don’t.”

“How do you know I’ll even go though with the damn thing, whatever it is?”

“You will carry it out, just as I outline it to you, because if you don’t you’ll sour my entire assignment and I’ll be forced to eliminate you.”

“Just like that.”

“Just like that.”

“You motherfucker.”

“Shut-up, Smitty.”

I did.

We drove on through the cold crisp October night and I pretended I didn’t hear the sounds going on behind the black padded partition. Unidentifiable sounds, but sounds. Then I relaxed. Tried to ignore the press of Vin’s automatic in my side.

The whole damn set-up sounded far-fetched as hell, but then I didn’t have much say about it.

Vin and his men were assigned to guard the daughter of Edward Stewart, a United States Senator who’d been murdered a few weeks before. The daughter, whose name was Susan — Suzie to her friends — had seen the murderer, but hadn’t revealed her knowledge until recently, within the last several days. I’d seen the girl’s picture in the papers; it had been getting some big press. I asked Vin why she’d waited to talk and he told me that she was twenty years old and probably scared half out of her mind, which I could easily understand. After all, I was thirty-five and completely scared out of my mind.

Anyway, Vin and a couple other government agents were supposed to watch Susan Stewart closely, until proper steps were taken. Whatever the hell the proper steps were.

Now and then I would stop and ask Vin a clarifying question or two and Vin would tell me to shut-up. But I was pretty well convinced of all this. As you would’ve been, had someone with an automatic been doing the convincing.

The pay-off was that there’d been some related emergency come up in the past few hours which called for Vin and all of his men. And they needed someone to watch the girl for the hour they’d have to be gone, the exact hour being three-thirty to four-thirty a.m. Fifteen minutes away. And I was the lucky candidate. Why me, you ask? Don’t you think maybe I was asking that question enough?

Not that Vin didn’t have some answers for me. He and I had been friendly during Korea and he knew I lived in the city, since we’d exchanged goddamn Christmas cards for a few years after service. And, because I was an insurance investigator, I was in some vague way further qualified for the job. According to Vin he immediately thought of me when he’d gotten in this spot, and supposedly the “office” Vin worked out of had prepared a list of likely civilians to recruit in such emergencies. And I was the only one on this sucker list Vin knew personally.

So there I sat. In the front seat of a black Lincoln Continental, a manned automatic sitting on my one side and a hunk of pock-marked concrete on the other.

At five till four the driver brought the Lincoln to a halt in front of an aging brownstone.

It had to be said, and the nerve to say it came to me, God knows from where. “Damn it, Vin, what is all this crap you’re spoon-feeding me supposed to mean? How can you expect me to believe you? That you can’t spare just one of your men for this task? And how can you be sure I’ll be an obedient dog and not just head for the proverbial hills after you guys dump me off?”

Vin shrugged, backed the automatic off. The long-lost-war-buddy look took over his face again. “I’m not going to wave any flags, Smitt, but...”

“Put a hold on that crap, pal. It won’t take with me. You say for security sake you can’t call the cops, so you haul in a civilian, take him into your confidence and lay the whole bag on his shoulders. My ass! And why me, for Christ’s sake, Vin, I’m anything but a hero. Hell, man, you could’ve done better picking a bum off the...”

“You hold it, Smitt. I told you we couldn’t tell you everything. Do you want to know too much? It’s on your shoulders, you say, and why you? I said this was spur of the moment, Smitty, I’m taking a chance, a big one. Believe me, my head’ll be on the chopping block if you blow this. It isn’t the way I want it, Smitty, but so help me God it’s the only possible way it can be.”

I sat there for a moment.

“Well, Smitt?”

“Give me a cigarette, damn it.”

He did, lit it for me off the dash lighter.

“What would you do, Vin, if I got out of this car and walked away from it?”

Vin lifted his shoulders and set them back down. “Not a damn thing, Smitty. Not a damn thing.”

I bit my lower lip. Sure, sure he says I can walk away. But those eyes, damn flint-gray deep-socketed eyes say he’ll shoot me down as I get out of the car. Let me fall to the gutter as he drives off.

“I’ll do it.”

“Good, Smitty, good.”

Play the Star-Spangled Banner, why don’t you, you red-white-and-blue bastard? Damn you, damn, damn, damn this whole thing anyway. If security’s so important, doesn’t that mean I’ll be a loose end left to tie up, to make sure the secret’s still a secret? No, never — the FBI wouldn’t do that. Like hell.

“I’ll do it. Not that I really had a choice.”

Vin shrugged again. He did that a lot. “Okay, Smitt, let’s get out of the car and I’ll introduce you to Suzie Stewart.”

“That sounds like a new doll from Matel.”

“Just get out and we’ll get your babysitting over with. We’re on a pretty tight time schedule, you know, Smitt. Oh. Here’s a box of shells for you.”

Some babysitter.

When I got out of the Lincoln I tried looking into the back seat to see who or what was behind the black panel, but the windows were shaded, like a hearse. Vin tugged me along and we went up the half flight of stairs. Behind us concrete-slab sat at the Lincoln’s wheel, gunning it now and then. Sounded like a purring cat. Jungle cat.

Inside the brownstone, beyond the vestibule, were more stairs, four flights of which we climbed, ignoring dozens of closed numberless prison-gray doors on each different floor. The building was unnaturally soundless. Like a massive tomb. The smell of paint was in the air.

Finally, on the fourth floor around the corner and at the end of a narrow corridor, waited another of the unnumbered grey cells. Vin gripped the automatic firmly as he worked a key in the Yale lock. He eased the door open, whispered:

“Vin, Hal.”

“Okay. He with you?”

“Yeah.”

The room was dimly lit and sparsely furnished. It smelled musty, like a run-down funeral parlor. The color scheme of the room was in charming faded browns: two chairs, a bureau, a bed and a standing lamp wearing its shade crooked. There was a doorway to the left of the bed, either to a closet, I supposed, or to the john. Possibly the john, because there was no one in the room except Vin, his buddy Hal and me. And I didn’t think Susan Stewart would be waiting in a closet.

Hal said, “You Smith?”

I said, “Me Jane.”

Vin frowned, said, “Cut it out, Smitt.”

“Sorry,” I said to Hal, “just trying to brighten a dreary situation. Glad to meet you, Hal.”

I held out my hand to Hal and got a sneer in return.

“Don’t mind Hal, Smitty.”

But I did. I did mind Hal, Hal’s attitude, Hal’s B.O., and Hal’s neanderthal appearance. This was an FBI man? He wore a tacky brown suit two sizes too small for his five foot wide frame and white socks glared up over his brown shoes. All of him but the white socks blended in nicely with the room’s mud-brown decor.

“Where’s Miss Stewart?” I dropped a spent cigarette to the floor and ground it out.

Hal jerked a thumb toward the door by the bed. From behind the door came the sound of a flushing toilet, and I deduced that it concealed the john and not a closet and watched as it opened and Susan (a.k.a., Suzie) Stewart came out.

She wasn’t bad. Not the Playmate of the Month, mind you, not top heavy enough for that. She reminded me so much of someone else it shook me. But she wasn’t Karen. She was just a nervous young thing with hands moving around as if looking for someone to latch onto and full lips twitching and her lean long-legged body shifting uneasily as she walked over to me.

“You... you’re mister... mister Smith?”

“Yeah. Smitty’ll do. Glad to know you, Miss Stewart,” and she took my hand and shook it. She had a nice soft hand, smooth, but no fishy grip either. Who needed Hal?

“I’m going to have to lock the door, Smitty,” Vin told me. “You won’t have a key. In approximately an hour I’ll be back and relieve you of Miss Stewart and that will be all.”

“I turn in my badge so soon?”

“That’s right, Smitt.”

“Okay by me. What if somebody tries to get in?”

“Anyone who is supposed to get in will have a key.”

“What about... unwanted guests?”

“Better use that box of shells I gave you and get that .32 of your loaded up.”

“Now, come on, Vin, come on!”

“I’m leveling with you Smitt. Load it. And use it if you have to.” Half-smiled. “Aim at the head, remember?”

“Yeah, I remember.”

He motioned Hal out, patted me on the shoulder and give me his weird almost-smile and closed the door. I heard him working the lock on the other side. And that was it.

“Trapped,” she said.

She smiled, gently. Pretty girl, shoulder length hair, darkish blonde, eyes big bright and brown, wisp of a nose, nice lips, teeth with a sexy little buck to them, clean clear complexion, pretty girl.

“How did you... get into this, Smitty?”

I shrugged, a habit I picked up from Vin. “I don’t know, Miss Stewart. I don’t know. But I sure am in it.”

“You seem... seem different, somehow... than what they said... said you’d be.”

“Thanks.” As nervous as she was, I half thought they’d told her to expect the Boston Strangler.

“I... I didn’t mean anything bad... just... just that they said...”

“What did they say?”

“Nothing... nothing at all.”

“Tell me, kid. What have you got to lose?”

“I’m sorry... sorry... maybe I shouldn’t be talking to you... maybe we better... it’d be better not to talk... they’ll be mad.”

Shrugged again. “I don’t care, Miss Stewart. I’d rather talk to you, though. Might help me to piece some more of this together so I could understand it a little.”

Her mouth took on a slightly pouty look; eyes teary. “It’s better... better not to understand. Care if I... sleep a while?”

“Go ahead.”

She reclined on the bed. The short dress hiked up over long nyloned legs. Lovely legs.

I looked away.

I opened the box of shells and loaded the .32. It was coldly new, though ten years old. Unfired. I hadn’t shot a gun since Korea, and then unwillingly. Damn. Started filling the cylinder of the little revolver with the bullets. Looked over at the girl, who had fallen asleep. Nice girl. Pretty. Looked a little bit like Karen. Quite a bit like Karen.

Karen.

Karen, that bitch.

Married in some suburb with a bunch of brats hanging on her and her bastard Brad with his fifty thou a year. Fuck ’em.

I got a Christmas card from them once, had their picture on it, Karen, the bastard, the brats and a Collie who looked like the bastard only more intelligent. The bastard. Lucky bastard.

Damn Christmas cards anyway, Christmas cards to Vin Thompson helped get me in this hole in the first place. And damn Karen for being Karen.

Susan Stewart, pretty like Karen, so much like Karen, or like Karen was. So pretty. But nervous, so nervous.

And why not? Of course she’s nervous, her father dead and her the only witness. Her father was an important senator, too, by God what was it he was involved in? Hearings on organized crime, wasn’t it? A lot of people could have wanted him dead, and the kind of people who wouldn’t mind making him that way.

Not to mention some of the “straight” people involved with organized crime who sit at their fat corporate desks and tsk tsk the high crime rate. The kind of people who don’t like to look at the truth themselves, let alone let others look at it. Maybe Senator Stewart was clearing some of the fog away and somebody didn’t like that. A lot of people like fog.

And I was one of those people sitting in the fog and wondering just what the hell was going on.

The girl slept.

I laid the .32 on my lap and leaned back in the hard chair and stared at the door and at the girl and back again, shifting from one to the other every minute or so, girl, door, girl, door...

At four-fifteen my bladder beckoned and I headed for the can. It wasn’t the cubby-hole I’d expected, but was large, with tub, sink, head and even a window. Beyond the window, a fire escape. Good thing to know. The window was locked already, to my relief.

Back to the chair.

Four-twenty.

Outside the door, noise. Footsteps. Careful footsteps, but plainly footsteps, coming down the corridor. I eased over to the bed, placed my hand over Susan Stewart’s mouth and jostled her awake. Her eyes golf-balled and sounds tried to come out of her, but I wouldn’t let them.

“Trouble, maybe,” I whispered.

She began to tremble.

“Easy, Suzie, easy. Please. Stand over at the left of the door. Over in the corner. Quick!”

She rose and padded quietly across the room and molded herself as well as she could into the corner. She was terrified. Almost as terrified as I was.

Key in the lock, moving in the lock, working in the lock.

Door exploded open.

Hal.

Hal stood in the doorway and fired an automatic and fired it and fired it, not aiming at anything, not bothering to look at anyone. He emptied the gun. Then he looked to see if he had hit anyone. Which he hadn’t.

“Nobody’s that stupid, Hal,” I said, “except maybe you.”

I lifted the .32 at him, quivering, my face as tight as a clenched fist, my vision a searing, brilliant red. Squeezed the trigger. The gun belched fire at him and I squeezed some more and it belched more fire at him.

And Hal stood there and grinned at me.

I couldn’t be that bad a shot, good God no, not at six feet!

Yet there Hal stood, grinning, stuffing another clip of bullets into his automatic.

It was then that I realized that there wasn’t anything wrong with my gun, and probably not even with my aim: only the bullets. The bullets I’d been given were blanks.

I noticed too that Suzie was screaming, screaming a strange sort of a scream. Soft, sort of, and to herself. Almost distant.

And Hal was bringing the automatic up toward me and saying, “Now get the hell over against that wall and wait.”

He’s not going to kill us yet, I thought. He’d been aiming after all, aiming to miss us. Just trying to scare hell out of us, I guessed. Which he had. But, Sweet Christ, he was not going to kill us yet! There was time, time!

Time, time if only I wasn’t so God Almightily scared, my stomach such a queasy mass of jelly, but I had to keep my guts from flying apart somehow.

“Hand over the .32, Smith,” Hal told me. Softly, as to a child.

I just looked at him.

“I want that .32, Smith.”

I managed, “Go fuck yourself, Hal.”

Hal showed me his teeth, two rows of hard yellow pencil erasers. He backhanded me. Blood crawled down my chin from a half-mashed upper lip. I fought the tears but some rolled out anyway.

“Cry, you little chickenshit.” Hal spat on the floor. “Now hand me the .32. I’ve got some slugs that’ll work in it okay.” He laughed down low in his throat. The laugh sounded like a foot stepping in mud. “You’ll see how good that .32 works with live bullets.”

In neon letters the word formed in my tiny brain: frame.

“The neighbors, Hal,” I heard myself saying. “What about the neighbors?”

Suzie, who’d stopped screaming sometime ago, said, “Do you seen any neighbors around to help us? He shot that gun off over and over again and do you see anybody?” Her voice sound flat, a mixture of shock and reconciled doom.

Hal said, “This place was done over, not long ago. Remodeled. Used to be an apartment house, then sat for years vacant. But they made it back into an apartment house, ain’t it swell? Only nobody moves in till next week.”

“This is a well-planned mess. You going to tell me about it or anything?”

“What’s to tell?”

“Look, Hal, you’re going to kill me in a while. Don’t I have a right to know why? Humor Suzie and me, chum. Just a simple explanation.”

He shook his head. “I don’t give a damn why you die or what you know. And I ain’t going to stand around beating my gums so you can die happy. Not that you’d understand any of it, anyway. Got it? Now hand me the .32 like a good boy and go over to the wall and stand with your hands behind your head. You, too, honey. Now move!”

We didn’t move an inch.

“Look, chickenshit, hand me that .32 or I’ll make things tough on you.”

“You don’t hear so good, Hal. I said go fuck yourself.”

“Hand it over!”

I swallowed hard, grabbed in as much air as I could, and heaved the .32 at his head. It caught him, and he pitched backward, the automatic firing into the ceiling. Bits of plaster and wood rained on me as I leapt at him. I had an idea of getting the automatic away from him, but mainly just wanted to kill him any way I could. Tried for his groin, couldn’t get there, went after the throat, both hands, got there, dug in deep, tore at it, saw my hands go white, my nails red. Hand, his hand, came up at me with a gun in it, I batted it away with my elbow, lost grip on his throat. Got a good knee in his groin, finally, he screamed, high, but slammed in my nose with the gun barrel, didn’t break it but blood gushed out, kept gushing. Automatic’s single eye stared me in the face, in the eye, left eye, death staring at me. Gun went off, as I jerked my head to one side, sparks in my eye, burning, as gun went off to left of me. Punched my fist into his face, broke a knuckle, sent in a knee to his kidneys that drew him into a screaming ball. I grabbed up toward his arm, he had gotten to his feet now, grabbed his wrist and twisted it around.

The automatic went off and caught him square in the face.

I looked up and saw his face. What had been his face.

Watched as he dropped.

Suzie had started in screaming, only not so distant this time.

I went over to try and comfort her, but couldn’t make it. Ran to the bathroom and puked. Puked till I puked blood.

Then wept.

I fell to the floor and buried my head in my hands and wept and coughed a racking cough and lay there in the puke and blood and tears and wished I’d let Hal kill me.

A few minutes passed and I began to snap out of it.

I struggled to my feet, bracing myself on the bowl of the head, and went over to the sink and washed up as well as I could. My upper lip throbbed and hurt and looked like yesterday’s meat. I ached where I’d caught one in the kidneys and my nose was too sore to even think about. My knuckle was puffy-looking and numb, and my stomach felt weak from puking. And there was a taste in my mouth, an awful clinging terrible taste, a mouthful of pus and cotton.

But all in all I wasn’t so bad off for what I’d been through. When I went back into the room I found Suzie staring at Hal’s body. She’d covered his face with a pillowcase.

She said, “Somehow he doesn’t seem... quite so very dead that way... you know?”

I didn’t say anything. There’s only one kind of dead, and that’s dead, but I didn’t say anything. I just picked up my .32 and went over to Hal’s body to get the live ammunition for it. It was in his left inside sportscoat pocket. The pillowcase slipped and I had to see some of what was left of his face while I searched out the box of slugs, but my stomach seemed to hold on pretty well. Not that there was anything much left for it to retch up.

“Suzie,” I said. Softly. Very.

“Yes?”

“You’ll have to tell me about it. Everything.”

“I know. They’re going to kill us, aren’t they?”

“Sooner or later.”

“What’ll we do?”

“Try and make it later.”

“How?”

“Well, they’ll be all over the neighborhood before long. Unless we stumble on a cruising cop first, we’re had. I doubt we make it out of this section of the city alive, not at this hour, with them after us. The streets’ll be deserted and we’ll be like the proverbial...”

“The proverbial sitting ducks,” she said. And smiled.

And smiled, for God’s sake.

So did I.

“How about a public phone, there’s surely one around here someplace, Smitty,”

“No go, kid. Bars are long since closed, and as for a booth, we can’t stand around in one spot that long. If we could find one. No, we’ll have to find some place to hide till the streets get busy. Toward mid-morning, when the people are thick on the street, we can blend into the crowd and then maybe get away because it’d attract too much attention if they shot at us in broad daylight.”

“What will we do, Smitty, what can we do?”

I latched onto her hand. I pulled her in close and looked her right in her pretty Karen face and said, “You are on my side, aren’t you, kid? I killed a man tonight and if you’re not on my side I’m liable to do other things.”

Her thin arms wrapped around me and she held herself close to me, warm to me, soft to me, saying, “I’m on your side, Smitty. On your side all the way.”

I put my hands on her waist and held her away from me. “Then come on. Let’s get the hell out. In the john, out the window.”

“Huh?”

“Fire escape, kid, follow me.”

“All the way, Smitty.”

The scape got stuck toward the bottom and I had to jump half a story. Suzie eased down into my arms and I set her down and we stood and brushed ourselves off, looking all about us. No sign of anyone. I kept the .32 tight in my shaking hand, moving it in front of me back and forth in a steady swinging arc, a pendulum extending from my shoulder.

“You... scared, Smitty?”

“Shitless.”

She laughed. “So am I. Boy, so am I.”

I smiled at her. Going to get killed any minute and she’s laughing. Well, what the hell, and why not? Hadn’t I smiled back?

I turned and looked down the alley. A block down, a solid block down uninterrupted by streets, two tight walls of building on each side, the alley stopped in a dead end. The dead end was the back of an old factory of some kind: faded lettering read “Christie Brothers Manufacturing Company.” I could see steps presumably leading down to a back entrance.

“Come on, Suzie,” I whispered.

And we ran, footsteps echoing.

The door had an old-fashioned key-hole lock, and all it took was a good swift kick to pop it open and in we went.

It was a dusty dump, but it was home.

There were a couple dozen old wooden crates of various sizes scattered about the room. Which wasn’t very big, as rooms go: long and narrow and naked, a boxcar of a room. The floor held a good inch of dust and the cobwebs hung from the low ceiling like old lace curtains.

The first thing we did was barricade the door behind us with three of the sturdiest crates. Another door, opposite the one we’d just entered by and leading, most likely, into some part of the deserted old factory, we likewise barricaded with two heavy boxes. There were several windows, but they were smoked with age, so there was no sweat to that. I cleared a spot in one corner and dusted off two crates for us to sit on and piled all the others in front of us.

I sat down on one of the crates and she sat next to me and we smoked two of the ten cigarettes I had left. The burning tips glowed in the room like lights on a boat lost in fog.

“I like you, Smitty,” she whispered. All the rest of the time we talked it was in whispers.

“I like you too, Miss Stewart.”

“That... that isn’t really my name.”

“The hell...”

“I’m not Suzie Stewart.”

Shrugged. “I was kind of afraid of that. It was a sucker play, wasn’t it.”

“I don’t know what it was, Smitty.”

“Who hired you? Vin?”

“Mr. Thompson, you mean?”

“Yeah, him. Was it him?”

“Yes.”

“It’s coming slow, but it’s coming.”

“Smitty?”

“What?”

“Who do you work for?”

“Who do I work for? Well, starting alphabetically, I guess it’d be Ace Insurance, Acme Insurance, Atlas Insurance, Carolina Casualty...”

“No... I mean really. Really.”

“Really. Ace Insurance, Acme Insur...”

“I don’t get it, then, Smitty.”

“Look, Suzie, we’ll have to piece it together bit by weary bit, okay?”

“Okay.”

“First off, who the hell are you?”

“I’m Susan Wynn, a secretary.”

“Well, that’s something at least. I can still call you Suzie.”

She smiled a nice little smile. Nice even in the dust and dark. “Does it matter to you?” she asked, and I said it didn’t.

“Are you going to kiss me, Smitty?”

“Yes, and lots of other things as soon as we get this figured out.”

“Kiss me now, Smitty. We may not get it figured out at all.”

She was right, so I kissed her and it was fine. The dust and the cobwebs and the blood of somebody dead on my hands and all of it didn’t matter. It was fine.

“I hope I get to kiss you a lot more, Suzie. A million times more. I hope sometime next week you and I will be kissing each other in the hot sun on warm white sand somewhere. And since I’d like to be doing that with you next week somewhere, alive, I’m not going to kiss you for a while so we can figure this out and try to save our skins.”

But it was too late. She had started to cry and I had to kiss her again, soft and warm and with her tongue touching my teeth lightly and the salty taste of her tears, and then I was touching a white, rose-tipped breast, then kissing it, and her soft young body was all around me on the dusty floor and it was too late. Karen, I thought once, but only once.

“Will we be killed?”

“Shush. I’m thinking.”

She held tight to my waist and we lay huddled together in the dirty corner, behind the crates.

“Let’s go over it again, slowly,” I said, ignoring the dry coat of grime on my lips.

“All right, Smitty.”

“Thompson came to you as a representative of the government and asked your help. Very spur of the moment, as it was with me.”

“Yes... but how spur of the moment was it, really?”

“Not very. Obviously they’ve groomed us for our roles for quite some time. I was chosen because Vin knew me and knew I wasn’t the biggest hero the world had ever seen, knew I’d probably panic and blow sky high when thrown into a situation like this. And because he thought I could be easily browbeaten into it in the first place. My being a coward was his ace in the hole.”

“You’re no coward.”

“How many heroes do you know of run into the can and puke their guts out?”

“Life isn’t a movie, Smitty.”

“You call this living?”

“But Smitty, why’d they pick me for this?”

“You have a superficial resemblance to the real Susan Stewart. Who has a superficial resemblance to a girl named Karen, to whom I was almost married. Once. A long time ago.”

“Another reason why you were chosen for a leading role?”

“Right. And another reason why you were chosen for yours. You, too, have a superficial resemblance to Karen. Psychological warfare. Your resemblance to my Karen is the mental torture chamber those bastards have planned my breaking point around.”

“I’m following this... I guess. But what’s it all about?”

“Organized crime or someone involved with it trying to keep Senator Stewart’s death a mystery, I assume. Vin and his pals are either in it themselves, or hired by someone who is. Being involved in the murder of said senator makes it follow that they’re wanting to kill Susan Stewart, the only witness. I was supposed to be framed for it.”

“How?”

“Well, I was set in that room guarding you with a gun loaded with blanks. I suppose that set-up was meant to get me to fire that gun and plaster my hand with power burns and such, which, incidentally, I did. Then my gun, with live ammunition, would be used to kill the real Suzie Stewart — who was probably being held captive in the backseat of the Lincoln they brought me over in — and I’d be set up as the murderer.”

“On what motive?”

“Some Mob plant would point out Susan Stewart’s resemblance to Karen, and of my mental hang-up about Karen, supported by some stunts I pulled in the service following my getting jilted. And it would be assumed by all that I’d simple wigged out, killed Miss Stewart in the process of losing my marbles over her resemblance to an old love of mine.”

“Do you really think they could make that stick in a courtroom?”

“Hell no. They’d have to kill me and make it look like I shot the Stewart girl and then committed suicide or something. No, Hal wasn’t about to let me leave that room alive. Vin was used to lure me there; some time was allowed for Vin to get well away; and then Hal came back to do his number.”

“What about me?”

“They probably set it up so that various people in the neighborhood saw you going into that building earlier, of your own free will — and then the late Miss Stewart would be substituted for you in the dead of night. I guess. Otherwise I don’t really know why they chose to drag somebody else in who they’d just have to get rid of later, but they obviously did. Lives don’t mean a hell of a lot to them and to those guys you and me are just two more expendables.”

She gripped me tighter and quietly wept into my chest until she fell asleep. I sat and smoked and stroked her hair now and then and kept my shaking hand with the gun in it leveled at the center point between the barricaded doors.

I smoked down to two cigarettes.

I waited.

I tried praying for a while.

Dawn wasn’t far off, not more than half an hour.

Suzie woke up and we had the last cigarettes and talked for a while and kissed and made love again and talked for a while longer.

We talked on and on, and she asked what would happen if she got pregnant, and told her it was about the least of our worries at the moment. I got to know her pretty well, don’t really have time to tell you all about her; there are things you’ll just never be able to know, because you never got to meet her.

She was still holding on to me, tight, when the voices came.

“Hold your fire — police. All is under control. Hold your fire.”

I breathed a sigh of relief.

But then how the hell was I to know for sure?

Well, I didn’t care. I just didn’t care. I’d hold my fire for a moment while I saw if it was really the cops or not, what the hell could that hurt.

They came in and I held my fire.

It was Vin and two others and Vin fired an automatic and a tongue of flame came out of the end of it and settled in Suzie’s right breast.

She didn’t have time to say anything before she died.

I saw Vin coming at me starting to say something and I remembered what he’d told me and I raised the .32 and aimed.

The bullet went in his forehead and he died much too quickly.

They have left me in this room, unguarded and untied. They figure me too much a coward to make a break for it or try suicide. Or maybe just too unimaginative to kill myself with a bunch of wooden crates. And they think it’s amusing to make me share the room with the corpse of a woman whom I might have loved.

Dawn came, went.

They haven’t caught me writing on this notepad with this felt-tip yet, unless they know and think it’ll keep me out of trouble. I’ve been writing for hours now and it must be mid-morning. I have to write small but I have to write. I have to get it all said so I can leave it here where someone might find it and go after the men who’ve done these things.

One of them came in a while ago, one I hadn’t seen before, and asked me some things; in the process, he explained some of it. Most of it came out like Suzie and I had figured, but some of the details would never be revealed to me. Some of it had died with Vin.

I still don’t know for sure who these bastards are, but it’s safe to say they’re with the Mob or something. Hard to tell. Writing so small like this in the dark and all gets my head going off in different directions.

I have to write all the time and not stop much because when I do I look over at Suzie. And she’s dead.

A couple of them came in and were arguing about what exactly to do with me. One just wanted me dead, another was still trying to figure a way to use me to cement the cracks Suzie and I made in their plans. I get the feeling we really fouled up things up for them. That’s some reward, I guess, but damn little.

I wonder if the real Suzie Stewart is dead or alive?

Not that it really matters. None of it really matters, does it? Not now.

Karen? Is that you, Karen?

No?

Suzie? Suzie.

Hell, I like you better, anyway, Suzie.

They’re coming now, Suzie, I hear them in that other room, the one beyond this one, I hear them, Suzie and they’re—