Slice

STOBAUGH

Chaingang was wailing away at the vetch, what there was left of it, and sensed eyes on him. Slowly he let the swings of the weed slinger turn him around and squinted through darkened lenses at the image of Michael Hora walking up to him. He stopped what he was doing and wiped sweat from his neck and forehead.

“Yo."

“Hey."

“We gotta talk."

“Mmm?"

“See where they still haven't found them three dudes disappeared up around the New Cairo Drain. Man, that's really sompin'—people vanishing like that."

“Yeah.” Chaingang just looked at him.

“Hey, my man.” Chaingang not moving. “Awful lot of people goin’ up in smoke lately, ya know?"

“Yeah?” He noticed Hora had a hand back in his hip pocket. Probably a piece in there. He was well out of reach of a thrown chain or a whipsickle.

“Yeah,” he said.

“So.” Chaingang moved slightly and Hora tensed.

“Too many folks turnin’ up missing. Gonna have to call it a day, ya know."

“Whatdya mean."

“I think you all better be moving on. No offense, my man, but I don't want any problems. I've already had heat around asking questions and shit."

“I'm paid up for this month."

“That was then. This is now. This is different. You got to git."

Neither of them blinked. After a couple of heartbeats Chaingang said, “How much time you give me to get out?"

“Now. Pack up, my man. Got to do it. Sorry.” The hand still in the hip pocket. The eyes hard and cold.

“How much more to finish out the month?"

“Can't do it."

“Five thousand cash?"

“Wheeeew,” he whistled. “I might could handle that. Up front with the money, of course."

“Yeah."

“When?"

“I go get it now if you want it."

“Yeah. All right. But that's it, then. To the end of the month, but I make no guarantees if the cops come around again."

“Okay.” This was the longest conversation they'd ever had. Hora backed away carefully and when he was out of range turned and walked quickly in the direction he bad come from.

Chaingang walked back to the sharecropper's shack and surprised Sissy, who was washing out some clothing in a tub, washing by hand, slowly, with an old-fashioned washboard, her belly swollen like she was carrying triplets.

“Hi,” she said.

He grunted and went inside to get his money. He had about nine hundred dollars left. He tore up some paper and carefully cut it to look like bills, put the real money on the outside, and rolled it into a tight roll. It didn't look good enough. He smoothed out the bills and the cut paper and made a stack, put a rubber band tightly around it, and put that into an envelope. Then he quickly wrote something on a sheet of his ledger paper. Printing in heavy, firm lines that left clear marks on the next page.

The thing looked okay when he read it back, and the envelope felt right. Daniel took a small leather case not much larger than a shaving kit out of his duffel. There was a covered compartment that he kept the Colt Woodsman in, covered by a flap of yellowish vinyl that held it out of view. He laid the sheet of paper he'd written on and the envelope with the money and stuffing on top of the gun and it looked good.

He pulled a small red box out and his huge fingers as big as thick, steel cigars delicately removed a half-dozen of the .22 rounds. He took the cap out of the pistol and pressed the round down into it. They had the word “SUPER” stamped on their bases. He pushed the clip up into place and racked a round into the chamber, thumbed the safety on and off again, then slid the Woodsman back into the case, covering it with the money and the paper.

Hora was very good. He was experienced and he knew how good Chaingang was. It was one of those things where he'd just have to see what was what. If the time was right, then fine. Otherwise he'd use the contract to stall with and take the five-thousand-dollar mock-up package back under some pretext. No way would Hora sign anything.

He went up on the porch of Hora's house where the slow wife was sitting.

“Howdy doo."

“Uh,” she grunted.

“Michael here?"

“Yo,” a voice said from the yard. Hora watching him, the hand in the pocket as before. Nothing personal. Just letting him know.

“Hey.” Chaingang's face lit up in his least dangerous smile. Nice and natural. “Got it here."

“Bring it down if you don't mind."

Chaingang nodded pleasantly and tromped down the rickety wooden steps. He was pleased the boards didn't groan under his weight as badly as before. He held the case in two fingers the way you would if it was very light.

“Like to get you to sign something, you know, just to protect both of us.” Hora didn't say anything or move. Daniel reached in slowly and pulled out the envelope, which he held with the case between thumb and first finger and then went back in with his right hand where Hora could see and removed the sheet of paper.

It was very deft, the kind of move that a skilled killer practices the way other people work on a card trick. Doing it over and over in front of a mirror to get it slick, organic, so natural that it would put a move on anybody.

Like a real head fake that leaves the other guy coming out of his shoes as he tries to check himself in time. Hora tensed, waiting for whatever it was, his reflexes honed to a level of lightning-quick speed. Daniel going in as the muscles clenched up, tightened, coming out with something, something harmless-looking, jerking it back just as Hora reaches, then smiling, saying, “Guess you'd like the money first.” And the envelope coming out and pulling that back as he goes back and gets the envelope and the piece of paper that begins, “Upon recpt. of $5,000 I do hereby agree...” and making the two fakes, the offered item, pulling it back, the other offered item, going back again, now coming forward a third time with paper and packet of money, it sets up a reaction of tense apprehensive movement.

The third time the hand comes out you've bought it and the sudden thrust of the hand looks more natural and it is just in the first half-second of vulnerability that the trigger gets pulled. You have to know what you're doing, It's all in the timing. The fake-out depends on many things: position of the head, rapid eye movement, the mouth, the set of the chin, the upper torso, how you're holding your arms, the body language as you tell the other person without words just how nervous YOU are.

“Here's the ... Oh, sorry, I mean HERE it is. Well, shit I'm sorry.” I know you want the MONEY but look at THIS too, and the five thousand is coming out at you, and a piece of paper which is now the substitute threat and the interlocking moves and smiles and vocal tone is all very complex and manipulative and you can be very good but you can only look at the broad, blurred field of semicircular vision as the pass and the force are accomplished and you never look at the left hand—you just don't, it's not where the action is—and the trigger is squeezed and a .22 SUPER smacks into your chest and you go right to your knees trying to pull the Llama out and just never get that extra half-second because fire is jumping out of gunmetal blue, and putting out your running lights and that's the name of that tune. Adiós, muchachos.

And this is Michael Hora and so Chaingang goes right up close and puts one up in his ear and kicks the Llama away and is going up those rotten stairs but the slow lady she moves pretty good she's damn fast for being slow and she's already inside fumbling with a 410 when he plunks her in her pig back and she turns as if to say, Hey, watch it, and he plugs her right in her forehead and she goes down with one of the little chunks of dirty lead in her brain and he's grabbed the 410 and at a window, making sure Hora hasn't moved, and Sissy hasn't come outside but she could be looking out a window and he's got Hora by a boot and dragging him into the dilapidated tool shed in thirty seconds. It went all right.

He goes next door.

“Hear that shootin'?"

“Yeah,” she says, still washing a huge shirt by hand out in back. Stray hair down in her eyes. Sweat pouring from her. She looks whiter than he's ever seen her. Shooting, shmooting, her body said. “I feel like shit."

“Go to town. I want you to see the doctor. Ask him to give you something so you'll feel better."

“I'm okay. I'm just hot."

“Do as I say. Tell him you feel like you're gonna pass out."

“I do feel a little faint.” What an idiot.

“Right. Here's the keys. Drive carefully."

“Okay.” She goes out and heaves herself into the vehicle. She can barely get behind the wheel even with the seat pushed all the way back. She starts the car and drives off at about fifteen miles an hour. At that speed she'll be an hour just getting to town and back. Fine, he thinks, getting the keys to Hora's pickup and starting to clean up the messes. Get the slow sow and Hora loaded and covered. Start for the bridge. He puts them down in the graveyard and drives back. Takes a marking pen and makes a sign for the door of the house and starts packing. He has everything ready to load into the Caprice by the time she comes back from town to find they're leaving.

“He said I was okay."

“I don't trust small-town doctors. Now that you're getting this close I want us near a city doctor who really knows his stuff."

“Okay.” He seemed so considerate lately.

“I want somebody good nearby, in case there's any trouble with the, uh, delivery. First, though, I want to give you some more acting practice.” It was a word he hadn't used in nearly eight months, the whole time she'd been with him, and her face lit up with the luminosity of the eternally hopeful.

“Sure."

“Need some new wheels.” Also need some new money. He'd turned up nearly six hundred dollars squirreled away inside Hora's place, but that wasn't nearly enough now. He wanted a nice cushion. But he could go out and get what he needed that night ... Or the next day ... He'd get it.

Daniel Bunkowski almost never killed to rob. He had little intrinsic interest in material goods, and certainly none whatsoever in the accumulation of monetary wealth. But he enjoyed the sport, the challenge, and the RIGHTNESS of thievery. It was important to him to rob now and then. Those scum out there OWED it to him.

His precognitive computer of a mind stored his next steps for later retrieval. The distancing of themselves from Stobaugh County. The best way to get the next legal wheels and how he would coach Sissy to buy the car. How the second legally bought ride would insulate him. Next the new identities. Clothing. The physical make-overs. His, anyway, almost no point in wasting anything on this one. Let her drop the frog first.

Daniel understood the process of ovulation by which the female egg is fertilized by male spermatozoa. How it develops into an embryo and fetus and after the three requisite trimesters, what the doctor kept calling “the thirty-seven to forty-week gestation,” an infant is miraculously produced. It meant no more to Bunkowski than the lunar cycle. It was just something that was. He had never had any reason to come to terms with the fact that HE, this beast on two legs, was capable of producing a normal, human, viviparous response. When the time came, he would learn the meaning of the phrase “a sense of wonder."