The Ax (10 page)

Three blocks farther on, closer to the river, Nether Street crosses a main north-south road, and there’s a gas station. I stop there, fill the tank, and use the pay phone to call EBD.

A male voice answers, on the third ring: “Hello?”

Trying to sound very cheerful and friendly, I say, “Hi, Everett?”

“Yes, hello,” he says.

“This is Chuck,” I say. “By golly, Everett, I didn’t think I’d ever track you down.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “Who?”

“Chuck,” I say. “Everett? This
is
Everett Jackson.”

“No, I’m sorry,” he says. “You’ve got the wrong number.”

“Oh,
damn
,” I say. “I’m sorry, I beg your pardon.”

“That’s all right. Good luck,” he says.

I hang up, and go back to the Voyager.

There’s no trouble parking in this neighborhood. Parked cars take up about half the curb space on the westbound side, facing away from the river, as I am now. There’s no parking at all on the other side, where EBD’s house is, the street not being that wide. It would have been laid out before there were cars.

The horse: a transitional technology.

I park almost a block away from 264, in front of a house with a For Sale sign on the lawn and no curtains in the windows. Today I’m not trying to pretend I’m a potential buyer, I simply don’t want a housewife peering out at me from behind her blinds, wondering who that is, just sitting there in his car in front of her house.

EBD is home. Sooner or later he’ll come out. The Luger is under the raincoat on the passenger seat. If he drives off in the Camry, I’ll pull up beside him at a red light and shoot him from the car. If he comes out to mow his lawn, I’ll walk across the street and shoot him there. One way or another, when he comes out, I’ll shoot him.

On the drive, all the long time coming up, I never thought about EBD or what I had to do here. I just thought about historical forces and all that stuff. But now, seated in the Voyager, watching the front of that house, all I think about is EBD. Quick and clean, and get it over with. Get the bad taste of the Ricks experience out of my mouth. Make this one simple, like Everly.

Quarter to four. The father and daughter and bicycle have long gone. The mailman has walked down the block, pushing his three-wheeled cart with the long handle. Clouds have come in from the west, and it’s getting cool inside the Voyager.

I am patient. I am a leopard in the shadow of a boulder. I can stay here, without moving, until the night comes. And then, when it’s dark, if he still hasn’t emerged from his house, I will go in after him.

That is, I will circle the house on foot, I will look in the windows, I will find him and shoot him. I won’t actually go indoors unless it’s absolutely necessary, and even then with extreme caution. I have no desire to meet the wife, or the three almost-grown children.

I’ll adapt myself to circumstance, but I am determined…

Movement, at 264. The door is opening, obscured by the shadow of the wide porch roof. A man comes out, pauses to call to someone inside, pulls the door shut, comes down off the porch. He stops there, on the slate walk that makes a part in his lawn, and looks up. Will it rain? He adjusts his windbreaker collar, pulls his cloth cap down more firmly on his head. He continues to the street, turns, and walks this way.

It’s my man, EBD. The right age, coming from the right house. He’s walking toward me, on the far side of the street. I can pick up the Luger, hold it against my leg, walk across the street, ask directions. He will turn aside, pointing, head raised. I will shoot him in the near eye.

My left hand is on the door handle, my right reaches under the raincoat for the Luger. Half a block away, EBD pauses and waves at a house. He stops. He speaks.

I frown and peer, and now I can see a couple seated on the porch there. I’d never noticed them before. Have they been there all along? This light is difficult, with the sun gone.

I can’t do it, not in front of witnesses. My left hand leaves the handle, my right comes empty out from under the raincoat.

Across the way, EBD touches his cap and walks on. He walks past me, on the other side of the street, no parked cars over there to block my vision. He’s a tall man, gaunt, with rounded shoulders. His head is thrust forward and down, so that when he walks he looks at the sidewalk directly in front of himself. His hands are in his windbreaker pockets.

Those people on the porch; a couple, I think. Still there. When I start my car, they’ll notice me. I have to wait here as long as possible, I have to try to minimize any connection between the passing of EBD and this car driving away.

I see EBD in my outside mirror, walking steadily away. He’s more than a block off by now, and still moving steadily on. I can risk losing sight of him for a minute or two.

I start the Voyager. Without looking at the people on the porch, I drive forward, away from EBD. I drive briskly but not crazily down to the corner, where I turn right. I drive rapidly down that block and turn right again, and then a third right, which brings me back to Nether Street.

Only a few major streets go through here, north to south; the rest, including the street I’m now on, end at Nether. I stop at the Stop sign there, then make the left turn onto Nether, and EBD is perfectly plain, still walking along, out ahead.

Where I got the gasoline and made the phone call, up ahead on the right, is the intersection with Route 8, my road up. Diagonally across Route 8 from the gas station there is a diner. I can park in its lot, and trail EBD from there. How far can he be going, on foot?

I drive slowly by him, and he simply walks methodically along, a man with a destination but in no real hurry to get there. I continue on.

The diner, called SnowBird, faces Route 8, with its blacktop parking lot in front of it and spreading around to its left side, away from Nether Street. There’s a traffic light at the intersection, and it’s red against me when I arrive. I stop and wait.

In my mirror, EBD walks diagonally across Nether Street behind me, and keeps coming.

The light turns green. I turn left onto Route 8 and then right into the diner’s parking area. I drive on around to the side, and take a space near the front corner, where I can watch the intersection. The parking area’s almost empty.

I switch off the ignition, and look up, as again the light turns red for Route 8, and EBD comes walking across the road. He almost looks as though he’s coming to
me
.

No. He’s coming to the diner. He crosses the parking lot, goes up the three brick steps to the entrance, goes into the glass-enclosed vestibule—the severe winters up here have surely caused that to be built there—and I can see him as he pushes open the inner door and goes inside.

All right, this is easy. He’s here for a late lunch or a mid-afternoon snack. When he’s finished, I’ll see him as he comes out to the vestibule. I’ll have time to start the engine, lower the window, pick up the Luger. As he comes down those brick steps, I’ll drive by and stop in front of him. I’ll call his name, and when he looks at me, I will shoot him.

There are exits from the parking lot both onto Nether Street and Route 8. Depending which way the traffic light is green, after I shoot EBD I’ll take one or the other of those exits, and head straight down Route 8. No witness will have any idea what was going on.

I’ll be home for the eleven o’clock news.

Four-fifty. He’s been in there almost an hour. Does he have a girlfriend in there? How much longer do I have to wait? How long can you spend in a diner, in the middle of the afternoon? He wasn’t carrying a newspaper, but I suppose he could have a paperback book in a pocket of his windbreaker. Maybe his wife is doing the housecleaning, and he’s agreed to stay away from home for a few hours.

I have to find out what’s going on. I make sure the Luger is completely concealed by the raincoat, and then I get out of the Voyager to find that the day has become raw, with a sharp wind rushing down Nether Street from the west. I lock the car, and walk into the diner, and he isn’t there.

I have a mad instant of dislocation, something out of a melodrama. He’s snuck out a back entrance and into a waiting car and he’s off…

Doing what? An assignation with that girlfriend I’d given him earlier? Is he robbing banks while waiting for a new job to come through? (I’d thought of that.)

Is he after
me
?

All of which is ridiculous. He’s undoubtedly in the restroom, and I see the sign for it down to the left, so I go to the right, find a place at the counter, take the menu out of the metal rack that sticks up there.

There’s only five people in the place, three solitaries drinking coffee along the counter, and an elderly couple having dinner in a booth. I think, when he comes out of the bathroom, why not just shoot him here? Who would be able to identify me, in the shock and suddenness of it? I’ll have to go back to the Voyager, get the Luger, wear the raincoat—it’s chilly enough for that, anyway—and then come back and wait till he comes out of the men’s room, and do it right then.

No. Wait. Wait until he’s seated again, wherever he’s sitting, that would be best.

He comes out of the swing door behind the counter. He’s wearing a green apron and he’s carrying a plate of fish and chips, which he places in front of a customer down to my left.

He works here.

I’m so stunned I’m still sitting there when he comes over to me. “Afternoon,” he says. He has a pleasant smile. He looks like a nice guy, with an honest glance and an easygoing manner.

Middle management, and he’s working the counter in a diner. It won’t pay his mortgage on that house three blocks from here. I’m sure it helps, the way Marjorie’s days at Dr. Carney’s office help, but not enough. And it isn’t the same thing as your own real life back.

I’m still stunned. I don’t know what to do, what to think, what to say, where to look. He keeps smiling at me: “Know what you want?”

“Not yet,” I say. I’m stammering. “Give me a minute.”

“Sure,” he says, and goes on down the counter to ask somebody else if he’d like a refill. The answer’s yes, and he reaches for the glass coffee pot.

Don’t get to know them. That’s what I told myself when I started this.
Before
I started this. Don’t get to know them, it’ll be that much harder to do what you have to do. It will be impossible to do what you have to do.

He’s a counterman in a diner. That’s all he is. I don’t know him, I don’t have to know him, I’m not going to know him.

He’s back. “Decided?”

“I’ll, uh, I’ll have the BLT. And french fries.”

He grins. “Comes with fries,” he says. “We’re top drawer here. Comes with fries and cole slaw, little slice of pickle. Okay?”

“Sounds good,” I say.

“And coffee?”

“Yes. Forgot that. Right. Coffee.”

He goes away to the kitchen, and I struggle to control myself. He hasn’t noticed anything yet, or at least nothing he can’t put down to highway daze, the result of somebody traveling alone for hours in a car.

But what am I going to do now? How long does he work here? Am I going to have to sit in the Voyager in that parking lot for eight hours? Six hours? Twelve hours?

He comes out through the swing door, goes to get a cup and saucer and spoon and the glass coffee pot, brings them all over to me, pours me a cup of coffee. “Milk and sugar on the counter there.”