One Monday We Killed Them All (27 page)

I knew somebody was running, running back toward me. I wanted to look at him. I knew it was McAran. But I couldn’t take my eyes from my wife. She seemed to be running with an unbearable slowness. I glanced at McAran just as he took the quick shot at her, and out of the corner of my eye I saw the long and horrid limpness of the way she fell, and as I swung the muzzle of the revolver toward McAran, something hit me high on the left shoulder, a quick, sharp, stinging blow as though I had been hit by a tack hammer. It turned me off balance, and seemed to daze me for a moment, and he went by me, fifteen feet away, running hard, weaving in an illusive way. People were yelling my name. It made no sense. I found out later they wanted me to drop so they could knock him down. But I went running after him. They were still yelling at me. I was still in the way. I ran in a straight line. He weaved and dodged. We made about the same speed. A few were at a good angle to try for him. They missed.

He ran beyond the house, and he swerved and headed for a barn. The big door had been off the rails for a long time. It lay rotting on the ground. He ran into the gloom, and I ran after him without breaking my stride. There were holes in the floor. There was a ghost smell of hay, of animals. He he ran by empty stalls, through patches of light from the holes in the roof, he tripped, caught his balance, turned, came up hard against the far wall, faced me as I, too, came to a stop fifteen feet from him, both breathing hard, both aiming hand guns at each other as in some ridiculous western standoff.

“Had to get cute,” he gasped.

“I’m going to kill you. I have to tell you first, so you’ll know.” I heard voices outside, heard footsteps inside the barn, coming toward us.

He looked beyond me. Suddenly I saw that familiar rocky grin. He flipped his gun aside. It thumped and skidded across the old worn planking. He put up his hands. “What could I do? Those guys moved in on me. They took over. They borrowed my car. What could I do? I guess you’ll try
me for something, but I don’t know as it’ll be something real important.”

“You shot her.”

“A lot of people were shooting, Fenn. A lot of people. Why should I shoot my loving sister? Anyhow, even if you thought so, you wouldn’t shoot me. You’re a cop, fella. I got my hands up. You follow the rules. Take me in.”

The footsteps had stopped not far behind me. I looked at McAran, my brother-in-law. I knew he read it on my face. His mouth and eyes went wide.

“No!” he said. “Hey! Fenn!”

The gun nudged back against the heel of my hand and the barrel kicked up as it always does. The hole appeared in his right cheek, close to the nostril. He took a step back. His eyes were out of focus. He sat down with a surprising care, with but the smallest of thumps, made a shallow coughing sound, bowed his head down toward his knees, then spilled over easily onto his left side, flattening against the floor, making a last sound that was like somebody trying not to cough in church.

“Get back!” Larry Brint yelled. “Get back, all of you!” I turned. I saw them in the wide doorway, in silhouette against the daylight. They moved out of the way, and the doorway was empty. I don’t know how he had moved so fast, or who he had bluffed out of his way.

He trudged forward, holding the Magnum he treasures. “Too bad you missed him that time, boy,” he said. He put the revolver McAran had dropped back in the slack hand, aimed it toward the wall, fired it twice. He straightened up, put his heel against the body and shoved it over onto its back.

“Then he missed you.”

He took aim. The Magnum made it’s heavy-throated, authoritative bark, and he put one slug into the facial hole where mine had entered. He put a second into the belly. Each one bounced the body off the floor an inch or so, and raised small clouds of ancient dust.

“But then I got him, Lieutenant,” he said. He came toward me and looked at me in a puzzled way. He reached toward my shoulder and pulled his hand back and nodded. “He hit you one time. That’s good.” He gave me a slightly vacant smile, and then he made a giggling sound, totally out of character for him.

“He had his hands up, Larry, and I—”

“No, he didn’t. He didn’t give up. I killed him. She wouldn’t want to know you killed him, boy, no matter how it was done. She raised him. She’d think about that. It’s better she’d know I did it.”

“But he shot her, Larry.”

“If she’s dead too, son, then it doesn’t matter, does it? But we don’t know that for sure.”

“But you saw me do it. He’d thrown his gun away—”

“Shut up, Lieutenant. You beat me by a tenth of a second.”

They came in and they looked silently at the dead animal on the floor, a splendid animal, muscled like the dreams of boyhood. I noticed the revolver in my hand when I turned away. I lowered the hammer, holstered it, clicked the flap down, hitched it back out of the way and walked slowly to the big doorway and blinked out at the sun. There was traffic on the road. Keepsafe was busier than it had been in years, perhaps busier than it had ever been before.

I walked slowly across the field toward the dooryard of the house. I had never felt so tired. I saw Rice with his walkie-talkie trooper—the communications link he’d told Miller he didn’t have—and I knew he’d cleared the logging road and called the standby ambulance in. I saw it on the road, following a state car, heading for the house, and I lengthened my stride.

She was where she had fallen, nested in the grass, a blanket over her. Her face was slack and bloodless, and her lips looked blue. I knelt beside her. Somebody behind me said, “It’s a head wound. She’s still breathing.”

There was an ugly tear in her right cheek, bleeding slowly. I stood up as they moved her with professional care. A young man in a white jacket appeared in front of me and said, accusingly, “You’re hurt.”

I looked stupidly at my left shoulder, at the oily gleam of the soaked fabric. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I guess so.”

D.D. Wheeler’s face appeared. It materialized the way faces do when you are very sick or very drunk. He looked angry. “Exposed yourself! You and the damn fool with the smashed knee. I didn’t want anybody hurt in this thing!”

Somebody turned me away from him and guided me, holding my right arm, leading me toward a car. I wanted to stretch out somewhere and go to sleep. I wanted to make a nest in the spring grass, and sleep the summer through. I
wanted to be so sound asleep, so deeply asleep, there would be no dreams at all.

The car they put me in could not move out until the ambulance was out of the way. So I saw the professional gentleness with which they eased the two women into the ambulance. I saw Cathie Perkins rolling her head from side to side, her eyes wide and blank. But Meg was without motion.

Cathie survived a severe concussion, so severe her memory was impaired for a long time. But in time she recovered, and married a man in his middle years and bore his children.

We followed the ambulance as it moved so slowly and cautiously through the forest shadows of the old logging road, and then down out of the morning hills, down into the city. We followed the high constant scream of the sirens, and it seemed to me that every face was turned toward us and every face wore the same expression.

xiii

It was a small wound. It had taken a tiny bite out of the top of the collar bone and been deflected up at a small angle, and ripped out through the muscle. It was not enough to cause shock, yet by the time they brought me in, I was gray, trembling, sweating profusely, icy cold and unable to think clearly.

The damn fools would not tell me whether she had died yet. They kept giving me their medical smiles and saying she was fine. They had dressed the wound. They were giving me plasma for shock. I lost patience with them. I pulled the needle out of my arm and got off the table and started away to find her, but as I reached the door the room lurched, tilted and blurred, and I felt the cold tile floor smack my cheek just as the world faded from gray to black.

I awakened into a drugged nighttime, into an underwater feeling, where each thought was a massive labor to create, and once it had been made tangible, drifted like a heavy fog in a slow current, nudged its way past me and was gone.

“You hear me, Fenn? You hear me okay?”

I raised fifty-pound eyelids and looked at the moon face of Dr. Sam Hessian. “Help me get up, Sam,” I mumbled.

“You lie still. You’re giving these good people too much trouble around here. Can you understand what I’m saying?”

“Help me up.”

He reached and pressed one finger against the back of my head, high on the left side. “The slug went into her right there.”

“Watching her,” I said laboriously. “Frozen. Damn fool thing. Could have taken him—taken him easy.”

“Shut up! It went in here. Made a little radial fracture like a BB will do to a window.” The finger began to move up and over the crown of my head. “Traveled under the scalp, boy.” He traced the line down across the right side of my forehead, down the right temple, close to the eye. “All the way along this line.” His finger touched my cheekbone.
“Hit the bone here and was deflected out through her cheek. Can you hear me? She’s resting. Pulse, respiration, everything checking out fine.”

I held my eyes open with a monstrous effort, staring at him. “Lying,” I said.

“It’s the truth! I swear it by—by my county pay check.”

I was holding onto the bottom rung of a ladder suspended in space. It was very tiring. I closed my eyes and let go.

Angela Frankel and Herman Deitwaller were as sure-fire candidates for murder in the first as you could ever hope to find, and after a courtroom circus which made and unmade some minor political reputations, and after the usual ritualistic legal delays, they were sent on their delayed way to join McAran, Kostinak and Morgan Miller. But before it was over for them, Deitwaller disclosed their plan of operation. In appropriate coveralls, he was the one who had been assigned to check over the presses in the basement of the Hanaman Building, and leave the timed explosive charge Miller had brought to their rendezvous, the heavy and lethal tool box found in the hiding place inside the apparent load of lumber on the station wagon, found resting on the broad dark staining where Kelly had bled. The proximity of the Hanaman Building to the Merchants Bank and Trust Company guaranteed a maximum confusion at the bank and in the street, enough to make Brint believe the bank job might have worked.

No one directly involved in that final violence on that summery Monday morning in that abandoned hamlet in the hills can properly describe the concentrated attentions of the national news media. It did not last long. The world moves, and news fades as quickly as the retinal image of a flash bulb. But Johnny Hooper has observed that while it was going on, it was like being trapped in a burning fireworks factory along with ten thousand starving ducks, after having been rolled through an acre of poison ivy. As Albert Einstein once observed, the ideal news photographer should come from a very large family where the battle for nourishment and attention precluded any possibility of learning taste, sensitivity or manners. The gatherers of our news shout so many simultaneous questions, they never hear the answers. So the odd role Meg played in the whole affair was lost, because it was too intricate to be told loudly, and in the
absence of any other plausible explanation, they inferred she had been kidnapped and that made it easier for both of us. The national coverage made much more of the ingenuity of the hiding place in the station wagon than of the emotional involvements.

With our national compulsion to find Huck Finns in every walk of life, Willy Danielson emerged as a national hero, grinning into a hundred lenses, showing up on television programs carrying “my girl” in his big hands, quickly learning to give the right Aw shucks quality to the scripts they made him memorize, and doing nothing to contradict the stirring legend that when the men in command had decided the only thing they could do was let the criminals leave with the girl, Willy had begged for the chance to show his skill, had shot the gun out of Deitwaller’s hand, had killed Kostinak and Miller micro-seconds later, and would have nailed the remaining two if the girl hadn’t fled directly toward him. His cold, jolly, sniper’s smile enchanted millions, and when a heroic script was written for him, he turned his leave of absence into a permanent resignation, quietly divorced his wife, and moved into the congested nasal passage world of serial television, where the scripters taught him to hit the “o” in option at fourteen hundred yards—offhand.

An agile promoter put the appropriate parcels of land together, improved the logging road, set up a ticket booth, a parking area, a refreshment stand, hired a cast, dressed them appropriately, and re-enacted his version of the seige and slaughter six times a day all summer long, and quit right after Labor Day with a substantial profit. Five shots had been fired in that barn to which McAran had run. In the new production, enough blanks were fired to make it sound like an infantry fire fight.

Three sturdy and lovely young hill girls played the parts of Angela, Meg and Cathie. They screamed enthusiastically, and the scantiness of their clothing was enhanced by strategic rips in the fabric.

For me there were two endings, or two beginnings.

Meg recovered more slowly than the doctors anticipated. There was a listlessness about her. Several times I tried to tell her that the whole thing had been my fault, that she wouldn’t have been in danger if I’d refused to ask her to lead us to McAran, but she wasn’t interested in whose fault
it was. She had bad dreams, many of them based on that moment when Cathie had tried to run and Miller had struck her down. Meg tired easily. She seemed remotely affectionate, but more out of a sense of duty than desire. Outwardly, except for the star-shaped scar on her cheek, she was unmarked.

One day in late September I suggested we leave the kids with somebody and drive up to Keepsafe the next day, if it was nice. “If you’d like to,” she said indifferently. I don’t know why I wanted to take her up there. I knew it might hurt her. I think I wanted to shock her back to life.