The Hit

Chapter Eight

The city patrol car, air-conditioned and overstuffed, slewed into the yard. The cop drove with more ferocity than skill; he sent a spout of dust forward when he stopped. I waited till then before I turned on lights and stepped out, holding the screen open for Joanne.

The cop sat in the car, switched on the spotlight and swung its lancing blade of light across the hilltop until it zeroed in on the two of us, blinding us. I shaded my eyes with one hand. After a moment I heard the car door open. The spotlight switched off and the man got out: Sergeant Joe Cutter. I had scars to remember him by.

Cutter was a wide brute, shaped like a fire plug. Hairy and heavy — maybe 225 swarthy pounds on a five-foot-ten frame, fierce and thickly muscular. His jaw was blunt, flesh thick around the lips and nose, eyes set back deep in crude massive bones. Cutter, musky and ugly as a rhino, radiated a constant force of danger like heat.

Speaking, he revealed a chrome-hued tooth. “All right, Sy. Where is it?”

“Where’s what?”

“Mike Farrell.”

“Does this look like a hotel? I don’t keep a register.” I could feel Joanne tense beside me. I didn’t look at her.

Joe Cutter said, “Okay, then we do it the hard way.” He reached into the car and brought out a long five-cell flashlight.

“Hold it,” I said. “Before you do any searching you can show me a piece of paper signed by somebody — and you can explain what you’re doing up here outside city jurisdiction. Since when are you working for the sheriff?”

Joanne said spryly, “No tickee, no lookee.” Her eyes danced — too brightly. I shook my head slightly.

Joe Cutter shook his head with an air of exasperated and disgusted patience. “Come off it, Sy. We can be friendly about this or I can get tough, whichever way you want it. You know better — this time of night I can’t get a warrant, but you make a stink and take it to court and I’ll have a warrant to show the judge with tonight’s date on it, and I’ll have some county cops to testify they gave me authority to work outside the city because the Aiello case is a joint effort, right? So why make a nuisance out of yourself? You butt out and shut your flap or I knock both of you right on your enchiladas, okay?”

As he spoke, Cutter pushed the button of his $80 holster; the molded clamshell popped open and he lovingly lifted his .357 Magnum, not pointing it at anything in particular.

I gave him a flat look and said, “Put that thing away. We’ve got a witness this time.”

Cutter shook his head again. “Where’s the dead guy?”

“What dead guy? Somebody gave you a bad tip.”

“Sure.”

“Tell me who tipped you and maybe we can get it straightened out.”

“Try another one, Sy. You killed Farrell and you haven’t had time to get rid of the body.”

I had put lights on in the house. The draw on the batteries brought the diesel generator to life. It began to thud and pound. I lifted my voice to carry above the racket: “Somebody lied to you.”

“Nobody lies to me,” he said, walking forward. “Not even you, Sy.” Straight-faced, he gestured with the Magnum. “Let’s go inside and look, okay?”

I gave in with an elaborate show of disgust; held the door for Joanne and went in ahead of him. Cutter went through the house with efficient speed, keeping the gun more or less pointed at us and herding us with him as he searched. Cutter wasn’t a ransacker; he had a compulsion toward military neatness; he left nothing disturbed, but didn’t miss a single place where a corpse might fit. He looked inside the refrigerator, checked the cabinets, opened every closet door and pawed through, got down to look under the couch and the bed, looked behind the Army-blanket drapes, poked his nose in every corner, even climbed on a chair to shine his flashlight into the swamp-cooler ducts.

When he was satisfied he exploded in a few choice phrases and took us outside. We went around the house, Cutter shining the flashlight in every direction. At the back of the house he lifted the lid of the generator enclosure and aimed the flashlight beam inside. The diesel exuded noise and heat and pollutant odors. He banged the lid down and went on around the house, making the full circuit, examining the edges of the stone foundation for signs of openings. He glanced into the Jeep, then shooed us up toward the rock-polishing shack. Joanne waited until he was looking the other way before she gave me a weak grin of relief. We went into the shack and Cutter stood still a moment, sizing it up. He found the light switch and turned it on.

The shack was cluttered with gear — workbench along one wall, most of the door occupied by tumblers driven by electric motors. The largest of the tumbler barrels was about the size of a ten-gallon keg. They rotated slowly on their tracks; the noise was soporific, a quiet swish and thud, gemstones revolving through viscous abrasive solutions of pumice and silicates. It took months to bring a tumbled stone to high polish; each stone had to be moved from coarser to finer solutions through the series of five tumblers.

Cutter said, “Where do you shut this stuff off?”

I pointed to the master switch. “Why? You expect we cut up your imaginary dead body and put the pieces inside?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said, deadpan. He opened the switch and lifted the lid on the large barrel. The polishing solution was the color of cement. He put down the flashlight, rolled up his sleeve, and plunged his hand inside. After he felt around, he withdrew his hand, shook it and looked around for something to clean himself with.

Joanne picked up a rag and handed it to him. “Thanks,” he said absently, wiped his forearm and hand meticulously, and tossed the rag aside. He followed pattern by sealing the barrel shut and turning the machinery on.

It was always hard to detect expressions on his immobile face but I had the feeling he was boiling with rage. It seemed a good time for it so I said, “What makes you think Mike Farrell’s dead? What makes you so sure it wasn’t Farrell himself who gave you this bum steer to keep you occupied while he gets out of the state? He probably killed Aiello and now he’s just making waves so he can get away in the confusion.”

He gave me his hooded glance and gestured with the Magnum. “Outside.”

He took us all around the hilltop, spending a half hour at it, walking a regular search pattern with flashlight and eyes to the ground. He didn’t find anything more than Ed Baker had found twelve hours earlier. Joanne slipped her hand into mine while we trailed along with him. Her fingers were slick with cold perspiration.

When we circled back to the front yard Cutter’s scarlet face was composed into such a parody of indifference that I was sure he was outraged. He lifted the lid of the galvanized trash can and poked around inside with the flashlight, replaced the lid and turned to face us, playing with the gun. He was standing with one foot crushing a rose stem.

He said, “I’ve got half a mind to run both of you in. Material witnesses.”

“To what? You’ve got half a mind, period.”

I baited him because he expected it, and because he knew as well as I did that he had no grounds to arrest us. Habeas corpus. He had already admitted to himself that he’d lost this round.

He said, “I’d like to pin the Aiello hit on you, by Jesus.”

Joanne said, “Simon didn’t kill Aiello.”

“I didn’t say he did. But I can pin it on him if I take a notion to. Maybe I won’t take a notion to, Sy, if you do what you’re told now — don’t mess in the Aiello thing any more, okay? We’ll find Farrell, or whoever did it. We don’t need amateur help. Understand?”

I said, “You had a bum steer. You’ve had your fun. Now you can go.”

He stepped across the roses and stood close before us, shaking his head like a patient father chastising an errant child. “You got to learn manners, Sy,” he said, and plunged the barrel of the Magnum into my stomach just under the ribcage.

I hadn’t been expecting it. It knocked me back against Joanne. She lost her balance and fell.

I choked down a sudden belly-lurching heave; pain flooded me. I should have been ready for it: Cutter was a creature of grudges.

I gave him a dismal stare and braced, knowing he wasn’t through. The .357 Magnum gave him total control of us, but knowing it, he did not smile — his sadism didn’t take the form of visible amusement. He grunted, blinked, feinted with the gun and kicked me in the shin. His boots had metal combat toes. Agony exploded in my shin; off-balance, I went down.

Joanne was on her knees, hissing words, and Cutter whipped the gun around toward her. “Freeze.”

The heavy boot came swinging at me; I rolled away but he took one step and kicked again. It caught me on the shoulder blade. He knew just where the tender spots were; he worked with scientific, methodical brutality. He crouched, elbows on knees, waiting for me to complete my roll; when I did, he cracked the steel Magnum lightly against my kneecap just a tap, but enough to blind me with pain. I felt coiling spasms.

Cutter’s voice was a soft low insinuation: “You’re digging yourself a grave, see? Next maybe I break a few bones you need the most. Sy, you know you’re going to talk. Don’t make me crack you.”

Joanne said, spitting it, “All you need is thumbscrews and a rack to complete the picture.”

He ignored her; he said to me, “If you can’t talk when I get through, you’ll write it with your toes. How about it, Sy?”

I was half blind. I managed to shake my bead. Joanne, keeping herself under thin control, spoke through her teeth: “How does it make you feel to torture an innocent man?”

“About as guilty as the President feels killing them by the thousands overseas,” he replied without heat, without even glancing at her. “Now that’s all the idle conversation we’re going to have. Sy?”

“I don’t know — anything now that I didn’t know the first time you asked.”

He bounced the Magnum suggestively in his fist, stood up and suddenly plunged the weighted boot-toe into my ribs.

I stifled a cry of anguish. He kicked again and I made a grab for his leg, got it, hung on, twisted his foot until he fell. I got my knees under me but then the Magnum came whipping across, flat along the side of my head. I fell over, lights flashing inside my skull; I heard Joanne yell something. I rolled away from him — anything to get beyond the reach of his steel — rolled across a rosebush and felt thorns cut through my shirt, lacerating my chest. A red wash filmed my vision. I heard the crunch of earth, somebody moving quickly. There was an abrupt white-hot blade of pain where my neck joined my shoulder — he had whacked me across the collarbone with the barrel of the gun.

I never thought it possible to feel such pain. I scrambled away, blind; my mind jumped the track and I felt the unreasoning helplessness of real blindness, the panic and terror. My nerves twanged, a desperate mindless compulsion to retaliate — to smash and slash, kick and maim. For the first time I fully understood the compulsion to kill, the unthinking fury of total rage.

I shook my head violently, trying to clear my vision. My shoulder banged against the rock wall of the house; I clawed my way upright, turned, plunged my hand into a hip pocket and tugged out the .25 Beretta, the automatic I had taken from Dr. Brawley.

As the red wash drained from my eyes I saw Cutter, on one knee, frowning in a crazy, dazed way. He looked stunned. Beyond the doorstep Joanne was stooping, her face white; she was clawing a fist-sized rock out of the ground and I saw a depression beside it where there had been another rock. She must have thrown a rock at Cutter and hit him in the head.

Cutter was shaking his head; I saw the spittle running from his mouth. He wiped it off with the back of his wrist and turned the Magnum toward Joanne. He had forgotten all about me.

I pushed the Beretta out in front of me and bellowed at him:

“Hold it!”

He froze; his small eyes shifted toward me. For a long broken moment nothing stirred. Then Cutter took a deep breath. He lowered the Magnum and got up, stuffing the long flashlight under his elbow and rubbing his right temple with his free hand. He had the Magnum at arm’s length, down at his side; with slow stubborn movements he pressed it into the clamshell holster and snapped the holster shut. He shifted the flashlight from one hand to the other and said expressionlessly, “Okay, Sy, put that thing away.”

I didn’t move the gun a half-inch. I gave Joanne a quick glance: sweat dripped from her face and there was a white, knotted bulge at her jaw hinges.

Cutter gave me his long deadpan stare, as if fixing my face forever in his dark mind. He turned without saying a word, opened the car door and got in. The engine came on, then the headlights; the car wheeled around, throwing dust, and crunched away downhill. Darkness swallowed it.

Joanne made sounds in her throat. I put the Beretta in my pocket and croaked, “Jesus, he knows how to hit.”

“The bastard. I wish I’d killed him.”

“Yeah.” I staggered to the front step and sat down, all my movements slow; I felt like a hundred-year-old man. I closed my eyes and stifled a moan. Red waves of pain pulsed through my bones. I felt Joanne’s warm hand on my shoulder.

After a little while I summoned strength and got to my feet. I felt rickety and weak. Still throbbing with angry, hot pain. I climbed into the house and went around shutting off all the lights. I felt my way back to the front door and found Joanne on the step, fooling with her handbag. She pulled my .38 out and held it pointed at the place where Cutter had stood. I sat down by her and put my hand over hers, depressing the gun. “Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

“He’ll come back.”

“No. He’s too conceited. He thinks if he searched the place and didn’t find what he expected to find, then it isn’t here. He wouldn’t have given up if he hadn’t been convinced. Showing a little muscle before he left — that’s just his way.”

“He’s an animal.”

“Yeah.” With cops like him, who needs gangsters? I guess if you’re far enough away from the Cutters, if you haven’t actually come under their guns, you can find all kinds of Freudian explanations for them. It’s a cop’s job to handle garbage. He has to deal with vicious, ignorant, hysterical, self-important gutter people. He sees so much casual violence he becomes indifferent to cruelty. You could look at it that way. You could, but I couldn’t. To hell with the psycho-sociological explanations. I didn’t want the Joe Cutters in the same world with me. They didn’t have any right to life.

Then, I thought, why hadn’t I used the Beretta on him?

There had been a time when I understood killing. I’d have understood it, without questioning, if I’d shot Cutter, or if he’d shot me. But something along the years had taught me words — mercy, justice, responsibility, pride, dignity. I had learned the words and I didn’t understand any more. The words had turned me into a human being. Simon Crane vs. the inevitable.

I became aware of the soft rhythm of Joanne’s breathing beside me. I had been thinking — compulsively, to mask pain, to hold myself together. Angry, I stood up fast. Weakness flowed along my fibers. I walked around, testing my legs. I felt needles; there was a little tremor behind my knees. Tender here, stab of pain there. I walked a small circle, waving my arms around. When I came back to Joanne she pushed her lower lip forward to blow hair off her forehead and then turned her face away from me; I didn’t understand why until she said, with a lurch in her voice, “I wish somebody would invent a mascara that wouldn’t run.”

She had been through so goddamn much in a few hours. I lowered myself beside her and turned her head with one finger, at her chin. Her face hovered before me. The wind kept a mesquite branch scratching on the side of the house. I felt the faint touch of something we had once had — the soft warm, nesty feeling of love.

The lights had been off long enough; the diesel generator had stopped. I squeezed her and said, “Maybe you’ll want to stay here, I’ve got to take care of — Mike.”

She shook her head. “I couldn’t be alone, Simon.”

“It’s got to be done.”

“I know. I’ll help. Oh, God, poor Mike.”

We buried Mike far back in the desert mountains, near a place where some hopeful hardrocker had tried to strike it rich. We had tugged the tarp-wrapped body out from under the diesel generator platform in back of the house. Cutter hadn’t been able to look down there while the engine was running; he would have risked an ear against the engine’s whirling, bladed fan. We had loaded the body into the Jeep and come lurching across country, using four-wheel drive.

It was three in the morning and the ground was full of stones under its thin layer of dusty topsoil. I ached in all my joints; every stab of the shovel into the resisting earth plunged pain through me.

I tucked the tarp around him as tightly as possible and piled high-mounded rocks over him, to keep the animals away. It didn’t matter if someone found the grave; the body could not be traced to me, now that it was away from my home. The tarp was Army surplus, ten years old; in work gloves I left no fingerprints, even if there had been surfaces smooth enough to retain them.

When it was done we both stood by the mound, not speaking. An owl drifted above the saguaro cactus and the wind rubbed itself against us, cooling the sweat on my unclad torso. I was caked with dirt; my hair was matted when I ran fingers through it. Back here in the hills it felt as if civilization was a thousand years away.

In the moonlight Joanne was wan and pinched, near her limit of endurance. I told her to get in the Jeep and drive it down as far as the old rutted mining road a quarter of a mile below. I came along after her on foot, sweeping away tire tracks with a mesquite branch, taking agonizing punishment from the simple exercise of stooping and walking backward to sweep. When I climbed into the Jeep I put my shirt on and let Joanne drive us home. Her hands were locked white-knuckled on the wheel but she drove with steady competence. She astounded me; she seemed to have no breaking point.

We reached the old rock fort before dawn. Getting out of the Jeep and letting her reel past me into the house, I said, “You’re fantastic.”

There was a trace of her old laugh, hearty and mellow — just a trace; she shook her head at me, the laugh dwindling to a wan smile. I said softly, “You’re pretty deep in my guts, you know.”

She rubbed her face with both hands, closed her eyes very tight and let them spring open. She said, “I know you don’t like coffee but you need some.” She went into the kitchen, turning on lights.

I sat down by the phone. I had to think but my brain was stunned. Finally I fished from my pocket the number I had jotted down and dialed long distance. The line rang five or six times before Jerry Sprague grunted fuzzily into the mouthpiece and I identified myself.

“Jesus Christ. You know what the hell time it is, Simon?”

“I know. I’m damn sorry about it, but I’m telling you the literal truth when I say it’s a matter of life or death.”

“Crap. Whose?”

“Mine,” I said. “About Raiford and Colclough — what have you got?”

“A headache,” he said. “I waited at the office till damn near two o’clock, expecting your call.”

“What about Raiford and Colclough?”

“Neither one of them has left the city in the past forty-eight hours. They’ve been here straight through. I know it positive, because — oh, hell, you want the details?”

“No. As long as you’re sure neither one of them could have come down here for a few hours.”

“And bumped off Sal Aiello. Simon, what’s the score down there?”

“Nothing to nothing,” I said, and added with addled wit, “two hits, no runs, a million errors. Go back to sleep Jerry. Profound apologies. If I live long enough I’ll buy you a steak dinner at Porfirio’s.”

“I’ll hold you to it. Listen, Simon, is there anything I can do? I mean, this has got to be something serious, and if I can help—”

“If I think of something I won’t hesitate. Jerry — thanks.”

When I hung up I sat, drained, my hand draped forgotten over the telephone. Joanne came in with coffee. I took one swallow and put the cup down. I said, “I’ve got to wake up. Maybe a shower.” I went into the bathroom and stripped and turned on the water, full cold; stepped in, holding breath against the icy shock, and stayed just long enough to soap away the larger cakes of sand-grit. When I went dripping into the bedroom Joanne was standing by the door, unclothed, indifferent to her own nakedness and mine. She said, “You’re too beaten to think straight, Simon. Go to bed. Don’t try to think about it — don’t think about anything. Forget. Sleep.” She walked into the bathroom and shut the door. I heard the shower begin to splash.

I thought with dismal rage of Mike Farrell, maimed and murdered. Why? Had he found out something and confronted the murderer with what he knew? Had Aiello’s killer murdered him? But why the maiming, the evidence of torture? Somebody had tried to force him to talk. To talk about what? Earlier in the day I had left Mike, convinced I knew everything he knew. What piece of information was there in Mike’s story that could point to the killer who had robbed Aiello’s vault?

Images of pink Cadillacs, guns, open vaults spun kaleidoscopically through my brain. I lay back on the bed and tried to concentrate. My muscles throbbed with pain. Trying to focus my mind, I closed my eyes — and sleep struck me like a club.