The Cat, The Devil And Lee Fontana

26

Two hours after Brad Falon had slipped into Morgan’s blue Dodge, and Morgan pulled away from the tree-shaded curb near the automotive shop, Falon himself sat in the driver’s seat, with Morgan sprawled in the back, passed out cold. Leaving the Graystone, in front of which he had parked, and driving sedately through town, Falon returned to park behind the apartment. Making sure Morgan was still deep under, and seeing that the windows were down partway so the comatose man wouldn’t suffocate, Falon left the car. Walking across the few feet of tarmac, he entered the apartment building through the back door. He didn’t go upstairs to his girlfriend’s place where he’d been living, he’d fill Natalie in later. She’d go along with whatever he said, whatever he told her to say. Crossing the small lobby to the front door, the afternoon sun glittering in through its carved glass panes, he left the building and crossed the street to the little neighborhood market where he liked to buy magazines and sweets. He purchased a pack of gum and a candy bar, and talked idly with the owner, remarking on the time, which was just two-thirty, and setting his watch by the store clock. Leaving the market, he entered the lobby through the front door again as if he were going on up to their apartment. Instead he continued out the back, where he slid into Morgan’s car. He had left his own black Mustang in plain view parked in front of the building.

In the backseat of the Dodge, Morgan hadn’t moved, he was still deep under. Smiling, Falon drove the few blocks to the elementary school and parked in the alley behind the gym. Getting out, he dropped a small metal box into one of the refuse cans, and eased his hand in to pull a tangle of brown, wadded paper towels over it. Getting back in the car, he drove the nine blocks to Shorter Street, its maple trees shading the entries to several small businesses, the barber shop, a sandwich shop, a women’s clothing store, a bank, a dry goods and a five-and-dime, stores supplying most of the necessities of the small town except for livestock feed, lumber, and gardening supplies, which could be acquired just a few blocks over. Parking beneath a large live oak half a block from Rome Southern Bank, again he left the windows cracked open to the hot afternoon. Pocketing his loaded .38, he tossed a light windbreaker over Morgan so he wouldn’t be easily noticed from the sidewalk, and he left the engine running.

Rome Southern wasn’t the biggest bank in town but it was on the quietest street. Paradoxically, it was just two blocks from Morgan Blake’s house. Falon had driven by there just a couple of days ago, had seen the little Blake girl coming down the street, no mistaking her dark eyes, exactly like Becky’s. When he slowed, she’d looked up at him, startled. Becky’s eyes, yes, and even as she ran from his car behind the nearest house, something had twisted in his belly.

All during high school Becky had refused to go out with him—she was Becky Tanner then—using the poor excuse that she was dating Morgan. He told her she could be going with them both, that he’d show her a real good time, better than Morgan ever could, but she’d had a snotty, stuck-up attitude. She wouldn’t date him, wouldn’t give him a tumble—when a tumble was all he wanted. He hadn’t forgotten or forgiven that.

He left Morgan’s car at exactly two forty-five, and approached the bank. He had already changed shirts with Morgan and put on Morgan’s greasy work boots. To make his hands look like Morgan’s he had rubbed black watercolor paint from the child’s paint box into the creases between his fingers and around his nails and the cuticles, wiping off the excess. He had wiped his prints off the tin paint box, and smeared the colors all together in a wet mess. Who would think anything about a ruined paint box that some kid threw away? Earlier, getting Morgan settled in the backseat, he had pulled half a dozen hairs from Morgan’s head and placed them in an envelope, which was now safe in his jacket pocket.

Approaching the bank, he took from his other pocket a blue wool stocking cap, the kind you’d wear in winter, and pulled it on. The street and sidewalk were empty except for three small children bouncing a ball against a storefront a block away, paying no attention to him. Just out of sight of the bank’s glass doors, he pulled the cap down over his face, lining up the two eyeholes he had cut in the front. Then, with his hand on the revolver in his pocket, the hammer cocked, he shoved in through the bank’s front door.

The portly, uniformed security guard had been looking up at the wall clock checking it against his pocket watch. Adjusting the watch, which was five minutes slow, satisfied it was time to close up, he started across the tile lobby to lock the door and pull the shades. He glanced across to the teller’s window, where Betty Holmes was placing paper collars around packs of tens, putting away the last of her change. She, too, was eager to lock up for the evening. She smiled at the elderly guard, flipping her long, pale hair over her shoulder. She liked Harry Grogan, he had been at this job ever since he retired from the police force fifteen years before, long before she came to work here. She knew he could feel the years weighing on him, just as her father complained about the aches and discomforts of increasing age. She knew Harry meant to quit soon and help his wife, Esther, at home where Esther still took in sewing. Grogan planned to put in a bigger garden and try canning some beans and homemade vegetable soup which was, in every household with a garden, a favorite winter staple. Harry said Esther never had time for canning and she’d sure be glad of the help. Betty watched Grogan ease the heaviness of his service revolver, lifting his belt away from his body as he moved toward the bank’s front door—then everything happened fast, the sudden thrust inward of the heavy glass door, the masked figure exploding in jamming a revolver into Harry’s belly as Harry reached for his gun.

Two shots exploded. Harry’s gun never cleared the holster, the shots dropped him in a dance jig, he fell twisting and lay still. The gunman lunged past him straight at her window and before she could react he grabbed her hair, jerked her into the wrought-iron barrier. Pain exploded in her belly as her ribs cracked against the counter bending her double. He jerked her harder into the metal teller’s cage and rammed the gun in her face, the gun and the navy blue mask filled her vision, and his cold expressionless eyes.

Falon was pretty sure the guard was dead. As he rammed the muzzle of the .38 into the teller’s face, two women appeared from the back. They stopped, frozen, their faces going pale and dumb.

“Get the money,” he shouted. “In the drawers, in the vault. I want all of it. Do it now, or she’s dead.” The two women remained still with shock. Falon gestured the cocked gun toward a pile of empty canvas bags that lay folded on the back counter. “Move! Put the money in the bags. Now, or I blow the broad’s head off.”

They moved, scuttled like frightened rats to do as they were told. His new voice amused him, he had practiced for a long time to perfect Morgan’s deeper voice, his lower tones. The two tellers were unlocking and jerking open drawers, grabbing out money and dropping it into the bags. The younger, dark-haired one moved quickly but the old, skinny broad was slow and shaking. He’d started to yell at her again when a man, a bank officer, appeared from an inner office down at the end of the lobby. Looking surprised, taking it all in, he lunged for a phone.

“Back off. You touch it, they’re all dead!” Stepping around the end of the counter, Falon stood over the blonde. She was still conscious, holding herself and moaning.

“Get over here,” Falon shouted at the bank officer. “Get over here now behind the counter with the rest of them!” But when he grabbed the limp girl and jerked her up she came to life under his hands, clawing at him trying to jerk the mask off his face, her own face white with rage.

He jerked her off him, pulled her long hair, bending her backward, her face cut by the bars. The other two women had backed away from the cash drawers, they stood dumb and shaking again but the blonde still fought him, kicking at his shins, her fear wild and so exciting he laughed, fear had always thrilled him, as far back as he could remember, other kids’ fear of him, a helpless animal’s fear. Remembering grammar school, the puppy’s white silky hair filling his fist, he twisted the girl’s hair, jerking her up against him, contorting her body so violently that he felt her urine drench his leg. Enraged that she’d do that, he slapped her with the butt of the .38. She swung around, jammed her knee in his crotch. He doubled over. She scratched his arm deep and then went for his face. Hunched with pain, he threw her to the floor and screamed at the two tellers, “Get the rest of the money in the bag or I’ll kill her, kill all of you.” When the girl at his feet tried to get up he kicked her in the face, then in the ribs. “Get the money,” he snarled, “all three of you, all of the money. All of it!” He felt high and he felt good, he was filled with power.

When he had the two loaded money bags, he locked the bank officer and the women in the vault and spun the dial. Before he left the bank carrying the two canvas bags he dropped the hairs from the envelope into the blood on the marble floor. When he hit the door he had already pulled off the stocking cap and shoved it into one of the bags. Quickly he slid into the Dodge, pushed the bags under the seat. He was ten blocks away when he heard sirens; he never had heard a bank alarm, maybe it only sounded at the station and that didn’t seem fair.

The sirens grew louder but he eased on at a leisurely pace, heading north to the outskirts of Rome. He parked Morgan’s car in a patch of woods next to the red pickup he had “borrowed” earlier from a man that he knew would be out of town all week. He crammed the money all into one bag and dropped it into the cab of the pickup, left the other bag with a few scattered bills under the passenger seat of Morgan’s car. He changed shirts and boots with Morgan, hard to do, manipulating a limp body. He emptied the bottle of bootleg whiskey over Morgan’s clothes, smeared some in his mouth, the rest on the driver’s seat. He wiped his prints off the bottle, forced Morgan’s prints onto it in several handholds. Holding the bottle with his handkerchief, he shoved it under the seat with the canvas bag.

Pulling the red pickup out onto the narrow macadam road, he got out and picked up the four wide boards on which he had parked to prevent tire tracks in the raw earth of the shoulder. He scuffed leaves over the indentations the boards had made, threw the boards in the bed of the pickup, and headed around the outskirts of Rome, up toward Turkey Mountain Ridge. The way he figured, taking his time to hide the money in the one place where no one would ever look, he’d have the truck back in his friend’s driveway well before midnight, would be back in Natalie’s apartment in perfect innocence, fondling her in her warm bed. He had no thought for the dead guard or the girl he had hurt, he had no idea of the extent of her suffering nor did he care, his thoughts were on the damage he had done to Morgan Blake, for taking Becky from him, and on Becky for turning her back on him. Soon now Morgan would be hurting bad, as would Becky, and that was only right, that was as it should be, those who crossed him were meant to pay, and he was making it happen.

In Blythe, the ghost cat, as he accompanied Lee in the careful laying of his plans, was aware as well of Falon’s brutal robbery even as the iron door to the vault was slammed and the manager and tellers locked inside. Misto hurt for those who had been beaten, for the guard who had been killed and for his poor wife newly widowed. He hurt for Morgan, who would suffer long and hard, too, for Falon’s cruelty, and he hurt for Becky and Sammie. But at this juncture there was little he could have done. A momentum was building that was beyond the ghost cat’s frantic powers; this shifting of fate was now far too strong for one small and angry feline.

But he knew this: the lust of Brad Falon against the Blakes was inexorably drawing Lee in. Lee would soon become a part of the scenario, as surely as pressures could build beneath the earth toward an explosive cataclysm. The paths of Morgan, and Brad Falon, of Sammie and Lee were tangling ever closer; and the ultimate outcome, the final choice, would be Lee’s to make. Uneasily the cat watched and waited, often giving Lee a gentle nudge, rubbing warm against him, his purring rumble meant to remind the old convict where survival lay: Lee’s ultimate afterlife lay with those who could give of their love, never with that which destroys love and joy. Never with that which would leave nothing of Lee but dust, scattered and gone, swept to nothing by the winds of time.