The Axman Cometh (15 page)

Four-oh-five a.m.

Gilmore Hill sits up suddenly on the living room couch, having snorted and slobbered himself into a state of conditional wakefulness. Earlier he had a lot to drink, but he is accustomed to heavy drinking, then rising from long habit well before dawn.

He knows instantly that he is not alone downstairs. Clears his throat and mutters, "Who's there?" His eyelids are sticky and he rubs them, turning his head just in time to catch a fleeting glimpse of someone in the hall. It is still full dark outside, no cockcrow as yet, no restless dogs or lovelorn cats disturbing the peace of West Homestead Avenue. The moon is in its last phase, but enough street-shine comes through the oval of glass in the front door and the partly shaded living room windows to give definition to doorways, picture frames, furniture, the curve of the bannister at the foot of the staircase.

He saw someone, all right, disappearing in the direction of the kitchen. Not Ernestine. And too slender to be Dab. One of the boys, maybe the younger one—Chap?—with the morning paper route. Gilmore is unaware that the local paper, which Chap delivers in partnership with Aaron
Wurzheimer
, does not have a Saturday edition. He cannot know that Chap is fast asleep, bundled up against his sister in Shannon's bedroom.

Gilmore reaches for an already well- used paisley handkerchief and attempts to clear his sinuses, a futile task after nearly a fifth of whiskey. His throat feels and tastes like rust. Without putting on the boots he has left beside the sofa, he gets up, his knees popping painfully, and gives his stiff left shoulder a probing massage before proceeding to the dining room and then to the kitchen to put coffee on, such an ingrained routine he hardly notices, at this stage of wakefulness, that he is in another man's house. Until he discovers the six-quart enameled pot is not on the back of the stove where it usually is. Shit. Looking around but he can't see much, and doesn't know where to find the light switch. Holding himself now below the belt because all that whiskey is like an ocean in his bladder. The nearest relief is off the back-porch steps. His prostate enlarged by years on horseback, it takes a while to void. Dribble, dribble. Shakes it in a melancholy way, stuffs it back behind the fly which he doesn't bother to zip up and returns to the kitchen. Where do they keep the damn coffeepot around here? Two doors. One sticks. He quits tugging at it, turns to the second door, opens it. Pantry. Oh, and somebody's in there.

The shock nearly blows the gaskets out of Gilmore. His mouth flies open but he can't make a sound. He stares for a second too long at a hard hat, at clear plastic goggles. At the man, moving, hands coming up chest-high; and at the butt end of an ax handle. Of the ax itself he has only the merest glimpse and no chance to react as he is struck in the throat above the collarbone notch. His larynx is crushed. The blow sends him straight back as if whiplashed and crashing down on the kitchen table seven feet away. Pain ignites his brain as he struggles, futilely, to breathe, rolls slowly to his right off the table and fetches up on all fours on the floor. Collapses as he raises a hand to his broken throat. Sees, standing over him, the axman, goggles a glassy gleam, shoulders lifted for the forceful stroke. The ax, when it appears, is not even a blur, just a sharp curved sliver of light that is mysteriously, secretively
there,
then gone, in a fraction of a second before his scrawny body is jolted as powerfully as if he has been hit by a car. The back of his head strikes the floor, his feet fly up, and before his heels touch the floor again, Gilmore is dead.

The bedroom directly above the kitchen is Allen Ray's. He is ordinarily a sound sleeper, and has been known to go on snoozing peacefully after being pulled, bedcovers and all, to the floor. Tonight he had sex (twice) with Sondra, which relaxed him greatly. But the clatter and thumping in the kitchen is sufficient to cause a vibration, as if the house has been jolted by an earthquake. The sleepers in the front of the house are not aware of the momentary disturbance, but Allen Ray, roused from a dream of foggy dirt tracks, bugs as big as flying mice around the light poles and battered cars in a slewing, fender-to- fender finish, sits up befuddled, wondering what he heard or if he heard it. The luminous hands of the big alarm clock on his dresser tell him that there is still more than an hour to go before dawn.

Allen Ray sinks back in a daze, limbs heavy, and he would be almost instantly asleep again except for a couple of physical distractions. His mouth is still very dry from French-kissing, his tongue sore where Sondra, in her excitement, bit it. He is momentarily suspended between the urge to plunge back into sleep and a craving for a cold quart of milk. Once he begins to actively think about the milk the prospect of sleep recedes. Allen Ray sits up again, stretching. Four-thirteen a.m. He is naked except for the pair of clean boxer shorts he pulled on after taking his shower. He stands up, takes a couple of steps toward the door, stumbles over the wet towel he dropped on the floor earlier, kicks it aside and goes out to the hall.

The shortest distance to the kitchen is by the back stairs, which, for some reason, the family members seldom trouble to use. For one thing, no matter how many times Allen

Ray and Dab have worked on it, the door on the first floor doesn't open easily. It is necessary to apply upper pressure on the knob with one hand, then push with the other about three-quarters of the way down on the right side. Easier just to go the long way around, particularly if you're carrying a load. But Allen Ray is intent on getting back to bed quickly. He takes the backstairs and goes through the routine of springing the stubborn door open, which on this occasion works like a charm. He is two steps into the kitchen on his way to the refrigerator when he becomes aware that the pantry door is standing open, a chair is overturned, there is a sharp odor of vinegar in the air from a broken cruet on the kitchen table. And someone is lying on the floor on the other side of the table.

Allen Ray, sharp-eyed, heart leaping high in his throat, identifies him immediately: Uncle Gilmore, who was slugging down the Jack Daniels all evening. Now he's lying there passed out, or worse. Because he's so
still.
Allen Ray can't swallow the lump of his heart —his chest has constricted, there's no room for it. His face feels cold, the back of his neck tingles.

Better get Dab. But if Uncle Gilmore is only sleeping, not unconscious, then—

He circles the table, staring at the upturned face. Oh-oh.

Gilmore's eyes are open. His mouth is open too, the lips dark, and there's a dark stain down his shirt front, as if he's spilled whiskey or vomited all over himself. But Allen Ray should be able to smell it if it's whiskey- puke; no, what it looks like—

Allen Ray turns, lunging at the refrigerator. Knocks a lot of the little magnets off along with Ernestine's penciled reminders to herself and other family members as he snatches open the door and looks back at Uncle Gilmore.

God dog it
is
blood! Gilmore's drenched in it. Blood is welling from some sort of large hole or gash right down the middle of his chest. Perhaps as recently as a minute ago the split heart was spurting, because in the light from the refrigerator there are
stipplings
everywhere: on kitchen cabinets, the linoleum floor . . . the ceiling drips.

Allen Ray is only nineteen, but he has courage; it is something he has always taken for granted. The ability to act coolly in a crisis. He has proved himself in football, in fistfights, in racing. Unfortunately there is no precedent for the horror he now faces: a newly dead man, probably murdered (although this dangerous factor has not yet registered in his stunned mind), in the most familiar of surroundings. He is enveloped in a billowing mist from the refrigerator, yet colder than anything on ice. Sickened, too. He knows he must do something, get help. His most powerful impulse is childlike, inevitable—to run away. He stiffens and resists the impulse, fights it while the time for decision-making ticks away and the Axman cometh.

Four-fifteen a.m.

In her bed at the front of the house, Shannon wakes up as Chap, made uneasy in his dreams, convulsively tightens an arm around her. True to his style, he has pushed her nearly to the edge of the bed by the windows. The sheets are in a tangle. She pushes him back to somewhere around the middle of the bed. On his back, the mildly asthmatic Chap begins to snore.

Shannon fussily straightens out the covers, then presses a pillow around her head so she won't hear him. Glass shatters in the back door of the kitchen, but she doesn't hear that, either. Nor the liquid coughing sounds that Allen Ray, with his throat sliced open, makes as he tries to pull his arm free of the glass shards and attempt a last desperate run for his life.

Four-eighteen a.m.

Chap snores, one foot thrashing.

Shannon dreams.

In the other bedroom at the front of the house, Dab with his cigar breath burbles, not unpleasantly, in his slumbers on his side of the bed. Ernestine, on her stomach, a hand trailing nearly to the floor, is soundly in the grip of her favorite tranquillizer, a heavy shot of vodka—two shots tonight, one shortly after retiring to their room, another an hour later when she realized, what with the ache in her prematurely old knees, that she wasn't going to be able to sleep without another friendly infusion.

Dab has known about the vodka, which Ernestine keeps in a hatbox on the back of the closet shelf, for a long time. Worries about it, but doesn't say anything.

Four-nineteen a.m.

A creaking on the back stairs that no one hears.

The Axman Cometh.

"Carnes!"

It's him again. Papa. Old Humming- buffer. Don tries to ignore his presence— wherever he may be. The rain won't quit and the city, at least this part of the city south of Twenty-Fourth Street, is in blackout. There is traffic on Sixth Avenue, proceeding very slowly through intersections, headlights of taxis and buses. But there are only occasional vehicles on the cross streets, Eighteenth and Nineteenth, that bracket what had been, in more gracious times for the neighborhood, the Woodrow
Lavont
department store. Elegance is apparent in every line of the architecturally significant building, despite recent abuses. Since he arrived, walking and sometimes running all the way down from Thirty-Second Street, Don has worked his way around three sides of the building looking for a way in. All of the metal doors he has located require one or more keys for entry. Accessible windows are blocked by wire grills bolted to stone. The former store's large, street-level display windows deep within the facade and facing Sixth are boarded up, plastered over with several years' worth of handbills. Where double revolving doors once admitted women with parasols and men in derbies and spats, the entrance is now through a plywood tunnel blocked by an iron gate. No watchman is on duty; at least he hasn't been able to raise anyone by repeatedly rattling the gate, banging on side doors. Calling until he is afraid his throat is about to give out.

The temperature is still dropping; Don's thoroughly soaked and shivering, and he's always been susceptible to bad colds at any sudden change in the weather. Already he's woozy, beginning to feel feverish. At least it's dry under the facade, which is supported by thirty-foot bronze columns on granite bases as high as his head. But what is he supposed to do now?

"Don't overlook the obvious," Papa says, closer but still somewhere behind him.

Don sneezes into a damp handkerchief, sniffs forlornly, looks around as the headlights of a passing bus illuminate one of the fluted pillars, the size of a young redwood tree, and the wise old hunter standing at the base, buttoned up to his whiskers in foul weather gear, cozy and at home in the elements.

"What do you mean?"

"Fornicating rain's coming down hard. Plenty of homeless in this burg. Where do they all go to get in out of the rain, get warm, grab a night's sleep?"

"Subway."

"Use your canoodle. What did Miss Petra say about this building when you talked to her?"

"She said—oh, I get you. She said there were some unfinished floors, and she thought probably some derelicts, or maybe drug addicts, are holed up on those floors. But I haven't seen—"

"Haven't seen any rummies under this facade, even though it's decent shelter. None of their usual trash, either. Rummies leave their bottles where they empty them. They piss where they've a mind to. Piss on stone, it soaks in, stink rises whenever it rains. Ought to smell like a
cageful
of
cotsies
under here, but there's no rummy spoor. What does that tell you?"

"I...
I don't know."

"I walked away from a plane crash with spinal fluid leaking out of my ears, and I could still do a better job with what brains I had left than you're doing tonight."

"
Thangs
a
lod
," Don says resentfully, and blows his nose again. Too hard. His ears block. He looks helplessly at the plywood runway, the padlocked gates, and thinks of rummies.