The Moonlight (39 page)

Phil left the apartment just before six in the morning.  The streetlights were still on, but their yellow light had already faded to nothing in the pale gray dawn.  Old River Road was deserted.  The loudest sound was the rattle from the air conditioning unit at the Grand Union, two blocks away.

“Don’t go back,” Beth had said.  “Forget about the money.  We’ll get by.”  She had kissed his face, guiding his hands to her breasts, letting him feel the urgency of her body.  They had made love right there on the living room floor, because they couldn’t help themselves—because for those few moments there was nothing else that mattered except their need for each other.

But with sunrise the rest of the world came back, the world into which they would have to make their escape and which was so very unforgiving.  They would need money, and the few thousand Phil had in his checking account wouldn’t carry them very far.

Besides, he would not be cheated of his inheritance.  He could not bring himself simply to walk away and abandon everything.

“It’s mine,” he kept telling himself.  “All of it—the house, the money—it’s all mine. It belongs to me.”  He repeated it over and over in his mind, hoping to drown out the voice that said,
No, you belong to it.

The awning over the drug store window was still dripping with last night’s rain, and black pools had collected here and there on the pavement.  Beyond the gas station on the other side of the street, the sidewalks stopped abruptly and Phil had to walk on the road to avoid the long grass, which was still very wet.  Overhead, in the trees, he could hear the clatter of water drops making their tortuous way down from leaf to leaf, as if the rainstorm were still going on.

He did not hurry.  He had told Beth he would be only a short time, but he did not want to reach the Moonlight before it was broad day again.  He would feel safer there in daylight.

Nevertheless, there has to be a limit on how long it takes to walk a mile.  At twenty minutes after six he was standing at the entrance to his driveway.

The Moonlight seemed possessed of a terrible stillness.  The trees in the yard threw their shade across the whole front of the house, creating a sullen, withdrawn atmosphere, as if the place knew of his betrayal and, like a jealous lover, would not look him in the face.  Phil stood there on the road for a few minutes, not quite daring to step over the line onto his own property, wondering if perhaps, after all, he shouldn’t just turn around and go back.

Had any of it been real?  Standing there, with a patch of clean morning sunlight falling across his back, it was not difficult to imagine that it might all have been just some hideous dream, nothing more than the nightmares spawned by some dreadful illness of the soul which he had at long last shaken off.  None of it could really have happened.

He told himself he was just a pathetic coward and tried to feel ashamed of his own weakness.  There was nothing in there.  It was only a house, a construction of wood and plaster and glass, no threat to anyone.  And Charlie Brush didn’t exist.  His dreams had called up a ghost out of a piece of underdone fish or a surfeit of fried foods.  “More of gravy than of grave. . .”  Scrooge had been right the first time.  There was no Jacob Marley and there was no Charlie Brush.

He forced himself to smile at his own credulity.  It was just a bad joke.  He would have liked to expel all his doubts in one great riot of laughter, but somehow it wasn’t in him.

“Don’t think, just do it,” he said, out loud, as if the sound of his own voice could chase away the demons.  He was lying to himself and he knew it, but it didn’t matter.  What mattered was the money, and buying a fresh start.

He was halfway up the driveway before he realized that he had stopped being afraid.

He took the padlock off the garage doors and pushed them wide open, letting in the daylight.  The dark red Lincoln, which somehow always contrived to look as if it had just been polished, glowed angrily in the sunshine.  The key was in the ignition.  Phil turned it and the motor instantly came to life.  He listened to its throaty purr for a while and then switched it off.

Last night nothing he did could make the engine kick over.  He would turn the key and there would be a loud click, but nothing else.  Now it was fine.

So much the better.  Now he and Beth wouldn’t have to call a cab and risk being traced.  They could drive to the airport and leave the car in the parking lot.  It would probably be days before the police would find it, and by then they could be anywhere.

Not that it made very much difference—it wasn’t the police he was running from.

He opened the fuse box and checked the breaker switch that was marked with a spot of yellow paint.  It was something he did compulsively, every time he went into the garage, even if he had been in there only the hour before.  The switch was off.

He closed the garage doors behind him but did not put the padlock on again, since he expected to be back in another fifteen or twenty minutes.

As soon as he was inside the front door, he felt better.  It was just a house after all—he could sense no sinister presence.  He crossed the entry hall and went directly up the staircase to the second floor.

The bed in his room was still as it had been made up by Beth the day before yesterday.  He had not slept in it since.  He had not slept at all for nearly thirty-six hours, and his nerves felt as if they were stretched to the breaking point.

He stood in the middle of the bedroom floor, listening, his eyes on the ceiling overhead.  There was nothing to hear.  No one was pacing back and forth in Uncle George’s old apartment.  The whole house was perfectly still.

He dragged his suitcase out of the closet and emptied the contents of his drawers into it.  There were just a couple of sport coats and three or four pairs of trousers that had to be folded and packed—the new brown suit would stay behind.

His kit was already packed when he looked at himself in the bathroom mirror and decided that he needed a shave.  When he was finished with that he thought he might as well take a shower.  He nearly fell asleep under the warm water.

He left his old clothes, which were still damp from the rain, in the bathtub and changed into a pair of tan wash pants and a clean white shirt.  The effort of dressing left him feeling exhausted.  He would have given anything just to be able to lie down for two hours’ sleep.

“Don’t do it, Phil,” he thought.  “Don’t push your luck.  Just get the hell out of here.”

He could sleep anytime.  All he had to do was get the money, throw his stuff in the trunk of the car, and drive away.  After that, he could sleep all he wanted.

He went down to the kitchen and put his suitcase on the table, popping it open.  Then he got a paper bag from under the sink—he would put the money in that and hide it under his shirts.  He opened the door to the pantry, half expecting . . .

But the room was empty.  There was nothing except the broad, gray-green circle of the gaming table, surrounded by half a dozen heavy wooden chairs.  He could feel his heart knocking painfully in his chest as he pulled at the shelves.  They rolled aside to reveal the safe door.

There were twenty-eight bundles of money in the safe.  He took them out and dropped them into the paper bag, one after the other.  By the time he finished, the bag was filled almost to the top.  It wasn’t going to fit in his suitcase.

As the closed the safe door, he thought,
“It’s done.  I’m out of here—I’m free.”

But when he turned around his blood froze in his veins, because there was Charlie Brush, leaning back in a chair, grinning like the devil.

“Now you weren’t gonna skip on me, were you, Phil?”

. . . . .

He looked different—younger, more vital.  This was a living man, not a corpse who somehow contrived to walk and talk.

There was a deck of playing cards spread out on the table in front of him and he was idly turning them over, one at a time, using his left hand, laying them out in rows.  He didn’t seem even to glance at the cards, and yet as they turned face up they fell into patterns—queen of hearts, jack of clubs, ten of diamonds, nine of clubs . . .

Was he waiting for an answer?  It was impossible to tell.  He just grinned and went on arranging his cards.  Five of spades, four of hearts, three of clubs. . .

Phil couldn’t speak.  He kept trying to think of the words, but he couldn’t.  His mind seemed frozen.

Finally Charlie laughed, as if he just couldn’t keep the joke to himself any longer.

“You know, Phil,” he said, really enjoying himself, “in the old days, if a guy tried to walk on me, scoopin’ up all my hard earned dough like that, I’d ’ve screwed the muzzle of a shotgun into his nostril and blown out the back of his head.”

He flipped over a card and held it.  It was the ace of spades.  He laid in on top of the two of diamonds.

“Sit down.  We’ll play a hand.”

For a moment Phil couldn’t bring himself to understand what that meant. 
Sit down.
  Still clutching the paper bag full of money, he stared stupidly at the chairs on his side of the table as if he had forgotten what they were for. 
Sit down.
  His body wouldn’t function.  He seemed to have a choice—either stand still or try to move and have his legs buckle under him. 
Sit down.

At last, by a tremendous exercise of will, he managed to take a step.  By the time he reached the chair he almost collapsed into it.

With a single deft motion, Charlie gathered up the cards that were face up on the table and flipped them over.  Then he swept up the whole deck in one hand.

“Your Uncle George and I used to make a lot of money runnin’ card games.”  He shuffled the deck with machinelike efficiency, hardly seeming to move his hands at all.  “You can learn a lot about people by watchin’ ’em play cards.  It’s a real education.  George, for instance, was the cautious type.  He always played the straight percentages.  Me, on the other hand, I’m a plunger.  That’s my weakness—I like to take risks.  I’d either win big or lose big, but George always managed to come out just a little on the right side.”

He smiled wolfishly.  It was a smile that said he knew all your secrets.

“That why I should’ve guessed he’d sold me to the Dagos.  It was the smart move—the careful move.”

He set the deck back down on the table, cut it once, and with one hand slid a card off the top and tossed it across the dusty felt towards where Phil was sitting, staring back at him with frightened, disbelieving eyes.

“What do you say to five card stud?  Tell you what, if you win the hand I let you walk out of here and take that bag of money with you—goodbye and good luck, no hard feelin’s.  If you lose, I don’t.”

He slid another card off the deck for himself, leaving it face down on the table.  Then he turned one over, a queen of hearts, and pushed it towards Phil.  The next, which he kept for himself, was a four of clubs.

“Look at your hole card, Phil.  Play the game.”

His hands were shaking as Phil turned up one corner of the face down card.  It was a jack of hearts.  He had the jack and queen of hearts.  Was that good or bad?  He was playing for his life, and yet somehow he couldn’t bring his mind to focus on the game.  It just didn’t seem to mean anything.

“You’re goin’ great,” Charlie announced.  “Jack high to my four—too bad you can’t up the bet, isn’t it.”  He showed his teeth in a savage grin.  His teeth looked like old fragments of bone, broken and dead, but his eyes fairly glowed.

“I’ll bet you played a lot of cards in the Navy.  I heard someplace that sailors are always gamblin’.  Were you lucky, Phil?  Did you win a lot?”

He turned over another card and pitched it across the table.  It was a five of hearts.  Then a jack of spades for himself.

“You’re still lucky—jack five to jack four.  Maybe you’re buildin’ a heart flush.”

The next two cards were the six of hearts and the seven of diamonds.  Charlie paused for a moment, looking at him as if he were waiting for some signal to go on, and then turned over the jack of diamonds and the jack of clubs.

“Look at that—we’ve both got a pair of jacks.  Isn’t that somethin’.  Well, Phil, I guess it comes down to what you’ve got in the hole.”

He turned over the card face down in front of him.  It was the ace of spades.

“Too bad, Phil.  You lose.”  The expression on his face was not so much of triumph as a deep, pitiless hatred.

“Of course you’ve probably already guessed that I cheated.  I stacked the deck, but that’s somethin’ I’ve been doin’ that a lot lately.  You could say I’ve gotten into the habit.  But don’t expect it to weigh on my conscience.  I don’t seem to have one.”

“What are you going to do with me?”

It was the first time Phil had spoken and his voice sounded rusty with disuse, or maybe just with simple fear.

“Do with you?”

Charlie reached across the table and swept up Phil’s cards.  Then he shuffled and went back to arranging them in columns, this time holding the deck in one hand and peeling cards off the top with his thumb.

“Do with you.  What do you think?”  He glanced up for just an instant, and it was like being hit with a searchlight.  “We had a deal and then you tried to take a walk.  You tried to chisel me, pal.  I guess it must run in the family.”