The Girl With the Deep Blue Eyes

Twenty-one

He dropped her at the Chiefland Mall. She headed north in the Lexus, on her way to work, and he thought about a movie, but the four films on offer were aimed at a much younger audience. The films he liked were to be found on cable channels.

He drove home, checked his email, had a shower, drank a beer, watched a couple of Eastern European women play tennis. They were both blonde, they were both wearing white, and neither one had a name he could pronounce, so he found them essentially indistinguishable. He watched without really paying attention, hit the Mute button to shut up the announcers, then found he missed the sound of the bouncing ball. He took it off Mute and just ignored what they were saying.

And after the sun was down he found himself watching a movie, Double Indemnity on TCM. He’d recalled it a few days ago, while he was doing the job for Newhouser, and when channel-surfing brought it to his attention, he could hardly pass it up.

Barbara Stanwyck and — for God’s sake — Fred MacMurray, acting in what had to be the only dark role of his career, and playing the hell out of it. He was an insurance agent and she was married to a policy holder and they hatched a plot to kill her husband for the insurance. And there was Edward G. Robinson, on the side of the angels for a change, playing the tough claims investigator who wouldn’t let them get away with it.

All in black and white, which suited the film’s classic noir mood, and TCM showed it without commercials, and he started out appreciating it and wound up caught up entirely in the story. He had to go to the bathroom, his bladder was stretched to capacity, but he waited until the final credits had rolled before he got up from his chair.

The subject matter, of course, may have had something to do with it.

They were going to have to kill George Otterbein.

No way around it, really. The pre-nuptial agreement he’d had her sign had been drawn by one of the state’s foremost matrimonial lawyers. It defined her participation in her husband’s estate, specifying just how much and how little he could leave her. If he were to divorce her, it set the terms of the divorce settlement in advance. She’d get something along the lines of a half million dollars. That was certainly a substantial sum, but far less than she might otherwise have expected to receive.

On the other hand, if she were the one to institute divorce proceedings, or if she physically ceased cohabitation with him, she’d be cut off with fifty thousand dollars.

That was more money than she’d brought to the marriage, when her net worth had consisted of the clothes in her closet and her equity in the eight-year-old car she was driving. But it was roughly a tenth of what he’d have to pay her if he was the one who wanted the divorce, and the difference was enough to explain why he was comfortable sharing his bed and board with a woman who’d come to despise him. And it pretty much guaranteed that life with George was not going to get better for her, because he had every reason — well, every reason with a dollar sign in front of it — to make her unhappy enough to walk out.

Fifty thousand dollars. You could see all the options just by moving the decimal point around. Half a million if George got the divorce. Something in the neighborhood of five million if he died.

Sunday he spent most of the morning online. Around noon he got in the car, stopped at an ATM, then drove for a little over an hour to Quitman, Georgia. He filled the tank at a BP station and got directions to the local high school, where they were holding a gun and knife show. It seemed an unfortunate venue, with school shootings so frequently in the news, but maybe the local school board missed the memo.

He parked in the high school lot, where his Monte Carlo looked at home among a good batch of clunkers, and followed the signs to the school gymnasium. Some two dozen dealers had their wares displayed on folding aluminum tables, and at least that many prospective customers were looking at what was on offer.

He found the edged weapons more interesting than the guns. Most of the tables showed at least a few of them, and they were a specialty of one dealer, whose stock included everything from a Civil War cavalry saber and Nazi daggers to army surplus combat knives and bench-made hunters and folders.

Years ago he’d carried a pocket knife, but after it disappeared he’d replaced it with a Swiss Army knife. The replacement was wonderfully handy, it boasted a blade for every contingency, but the thing was too bulky to carry in your pocket, and his stayed on his desk. He thought he might like to have one of these custom-made folding knives, and checked out a few of them, noting the features that enabled them to be opened one-handed, and the various locking mechanisms that kept a blade from snapping shut on your thumb in the middle of a task.

Very nice, and it would handy to carry a pocket knife once again. He spent fifteen minutes narrowing his selection down to two specimens, and by then he decided he was just wasting his time, because he didn’t plan to stab George Otterbein, or slash his throat, and if he did he’d do okay with a ten-dollar chef’s knife from Walmart.

He drove back across the Florida state line with a revolver and a pistol and a box of shells for each.

“This here’s your Taurus Ultra-Lite,” said the bearded man who sold him the revolver. “Got your rubber grips, your stainless steel finish. Shoots the .32 H&R Magnum round. Six shots, two-inch barrel, goes in your pocket or her purse, don’t weigh you down, and you’ve got enough stopping power for most tasks.”

“I guess you know what you’re lookin’ at,” said the clean-shaven man who sold him the pistol. “That’s a Ruger, an’ of course it’s a niner, comes with a ten-shot clip. Be a pricey gun if you was to buy it new, and it’s not that far from new condition, as you can see. You sure you don’t want to add on a second clip? Saves having to reload when you’re, um, pressed for time.”

Back home, he looked for a place to stow the guns and ammo. He already owned one gun, a five-shot Smith & Wesson revolver that had come with a full box of .38 Special cartridges. Not long after he’d closed on the house, he’d bought the gun over the counter at a local sporting goods store. Paid for it with his Visa card, showed the requisite ID, signed his real name to the register.

That gun was in his nightstand drawer; the box of shells, full but for the five he’d loaded into the Smith, was on a shelf in the closet. He’d never fired it, not even to test it. He didn’t see that he needed to get the hang of it, as it wasn’t that different from the service revolver he’d carried on the job in New York.

And the last time he’d fired that particular gun, somebody had died.

At the same time that he’d bought the Smith, he’d picked up a gun cleaning kit, with solvent and oil and brushes and cleaning patches. It was on the same closet shelf as the box of .38 Special shells. He’d never opened it, but now he unfastened the canvas roll-up pouch and spent half an hour cleaning the two weapons he’d just purchased. They both looked clean enough to him, spotless in fact, but he’d bought these for actual use, not to sit in a drawer, and it seemed no more than prudent to make sure they were as close to immaculate as he could make them.

And the task itself was pleasantly mechanical. It gave his mind a chance to wander.

He hadn’t signed anything for the Taurus or the Ruger. The bearded fellow never even raised the subject, just conducted the transaction with no more ceremony than if Doak had been purchasing a can of window putty. The man with the Ruger had flashed him a conspiratorial look and said, “Now of course you’ve been a legal resident of the state of Georgia for no less than thirty days. Goes without sayin’, don’t it?” He didn’t wait for a nod. “And you’ve never been convicted of a felony, or spent any time in a mental institution, nor do you have any intent to commit a crime, harm another human being, or overthrow the lawful government of either the state of Georgia or the United States of America. We good with that?”

Cleaning the guns let him get used to them, their weight, the way they felt in his hand.

But where to keep them? Technically, their possession entailed a certain risk, in that they were unregistered handguns, but he wouldn’t have cared to guess at the percentage of Gallatin County households in the same position. From a practical standpoint, the guns posed no danger to him until he put them to their intended use.

Of course, he thought, their provenance was unknown to him. They’d come into his possession with no paper trail, he hadn’t requested or been offered a receipt for either transaction, and who was to say that a previous owner hadn’t used the Taurus in a holdup, or reached for the Ruger when an episode of road rage got out of hand?

Don’t put that gun in your mouth, son. You don’t know where it’s been.

Where he kept the guns was not hugely important, but working it out saved him from thinking about other more difficult questions. So he devoted more time to the matter than it probably required.

He ruled out the nightstand, where he kept the Smith, and the closet shelf that held the Smith’s spare ammo. Ditto the garage, where the most casual sort of prowler could walk off with them.

He’d never bought a safe, didn’t own anything that required that sort of protection. And the trouble with a safe was that it was the first and most obvious place for a person to look. Most of the time the person in question was a burglar who’d spin the combination dial twice and give up, but he was more worried about someone with a badge who could point to the safe and ask him to open it.

Easy enough to pry a baseboard loose and create a hiding place behind it, but wasn’t that likely to be more trouble than it was worth? It would take time to do, and so would retrieving the guns when he wanted them.

Nor would it stand up to a thorough search, and that was the sort that most concerned him. He’d been a part of enough efforts of that nature — looking for dealers’ drug stashes, more often than not — to know how many ways there were to hide something, and how futile most of them ultimately proved to be.

Hard to play innocent, too, when a couple of cops with x-ray vision move your dresser aside, pull up your carpet, pry a few floorboards loose, and find what you’d concealed there. Oh, that thing, Officer? Just a safety precaution. I didn’t want to leave it out where the neighbor’s kid might play with it.

He wound up tucking everything into a kitchen cupboard. The kitchenware he’d bought didn’t amount to much, and fit with room left over into those cupboards within easy reach. There was a top tier of cupboards, and to get into the one at the far left you had to either stand on a chair or play in the NBA. He’d stood on a chair once, to assure himself it was empty; he did so again now, and when he got down from the chair, his gun show purchases had a new home.