Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“Now I looked at those eyes, and at the way he was holding that gun, and I knew he wasn’t going to take the wallet and wave bye-bye at me. He was going to kill me. In fact, if I hadn’t turned around when I did he might well have shot me in the back. Unless he was the sort who liked to watch a person’s face when he did it. There are people like that, I understand.”

Mowbray felt a chill. The man’s voice was so matter-of-fact, while his words were the stuff nightmares are made of.

“Well, I went into my pocket with my left hand. There was no wallet there. It was in the glove compartment of my car, parked off the road in back of the sand dunes. But I reached in my pocket to keep his eyes on my left hand, and then I brought the hand out empty and went for the gun with it, and at the same time I was bringing my knife out of the sheath with my right hand. I dropped my shoulder and came in low, and either I must have moved quick or all the drugs he’d taken over the years had slowed him some, but I swung that gun hand of his up and sent the gun sailing, and at the same time I got my knife into him and laid him wide open.”

He drew the knife from its sheath. It was a filleting knife, with a natural wood handle and a thin, slightly curved blade about seven inches long. “This was the knife,” he said. “It’s a Rapala, made in Finland, and you can’t beat it for being stainless steel and yet taking and holding an edge. I use it for filleting and everything else connected with fishing. But you’ve probably got one just like it yourself.”

Mowbray shook his head. “I use a folding knife,” he said.

“You ought to get one of these. Can’t beat ’em. And they’re handy when company comes calling, believe me. I’ll tell you, I opened this youngster up the way you open a fish to clean him. Came in low in the abdomen and swept up clear to the bottom of the rib cage, and you’d have thought you were cutting butter as easy as it was.” He slid the knife easily back into its sheath.

Mowbray felt a chill. The other man had finished his cigarette, and Mowbray put out his own and immediately selected a fresh one from his pack. He started to return the pack to his pocket, then thought to offer it to the other man.

“Not just now. Try me in nine or ten months, though.”

“I’ll do that.”

The man grinned his wide grin. Then his face went quickly serious. “Well, that young fellow fell down,” he said. “Fell right on his back and lay there all opened up. He was moaning and bleeding and I don’t know what else. I don’t recall his words, his speech was disjointed, but what he wanted was for me to get him to a doctor.

“Now the nearest doctor was in Manteo. I happened to know this, and I was near Rodanthe which is a good twenty miles from Manteo if not more. I saw how he was cut and I couldn’t imagine his living through a half-hour ride in a car. In fact if there’d been a doctor six feet away from us I seriously doubt he could have done the boy any good. I’m no doctor myself, but I have to say it was pretty clear to me that boy was dying.

“And if I tried to get him to a doctor, I’d be ruining the interior of my car for all practical purposes, and making a lot of trouble for myself in the bargain. I didn’t expect anybody would seriously try to pin a murder charge on me. It stood to reason that fellow had a criminal record that would reach clear to the mainland and back, and I’ve never had worse than a traffic ticket and few enough of those. And the gun had his prints on it and none of my own. But I’d have to answer a few million questions and hang around for at least a week and doubtless longer for a coroner’s inquest, and it all amounted to a lot of aggravation for no purpose, since he was dying anyway.

“And I’ll tell you something else. It wouldn’t have been worth the trouble even to save him, because what in the world was he but a robbing, murdering snake? Why, if they stitched him up he’d be on the street again as soon as he was healthy and he’d kill someone else in no appreciable time at all. No, I didn’t mind the idea of him dying.” His eyes engaged Mowbray’s. “What would you have done?”

Mowbray thought about it. “I don’t know,” he said. “I honestly can’t say. Same as you, probably.”

“He was in horrible pain. I saw him lying there, and I looked around again to assure myself we were alone, and we were. I thought that I could grab my pole and frying pan and my few other bits of gear and be in my car in two or three minutes, not leaving a thing behind that could be traced to me. I’d camped out the night before in a tent and sleeping bag and wasn’t registered in any motel or campground. In other words I could be away from the Outer Banks entirely in half an hour, with nothing to connect me to the area, much less to the man on the sand. I hadn’t even bought gas with a credit card. I was free and clear if I just got up and left. All I had to do was leave this young fellow to a horribly slow and painful death.” His eyes locked with Mowbray’s again, with an intensity that was difficult to bear. “Or,” he said, his voice lower and softer, “or I could make things easier for him.”

“Oh.”

“Yes. And that’s just what I did. I took and slipped the knife right into his heart. He went instantly. The life slipped right out of his eyes and the tension out of his face and he was gone. And that made it murder.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Of course,” the man echoed. “It might have been an act of mercy, but legally it transformed an act of self-defense into an unquestionable act of criminal homicide.” He breathed deeply. “Think I was wrong to do it?”

“No,” Mowbray said.

“Do the same thing yourself?”

“I honestly don’t know. I hope I would, if the alternative was leaving him to suffer.”

“Well, it’s what I did. So I’ve not only killed a man, I’ve literally murdered a man. I left him under about a foot of sand at the edge of the dunes. I don’t know when the body was discovered. I’m sure it didn’t take too long. Those sands shift back and forth all the time. There was no identification on him, but the police could have labeled him from his prints, because an upstanding young man like him would have had his prints on file. Nothing on his person at all except for about fifty dollars in cash, which destroys the theory that he was robbing me in order to provide himself with that night’s dinner.” His face relaxed in a half-smile. “I took the money,” he said. “Didn’t see as he had any need for it, and I doubted he had much of a real claim to it, as far as that goes.”

“So you not only killed a man but made a profit on it.”

“I did at that. Well, I left the Banks that evening. Drove on inland a good distance, put up for the night in a motel just outside of Fayetteville. I never did look back, never did find out if and when they found him. It’d be on the books as an unsolved homicide if they did. Oh, and I took his gun and flung it halfway to Bermuda. And he didn’t have a car for me to worry about. I suppose he thumbed a ride or came on foot, or else he parked too far away to matter.” Another smile. “Now you know my secret,” he said.

“Maybe you ought to leave out place names,” Mowbray said.

“Why do that?”

“You don’t want to give that much information to a stranger.”

“You may be right, but I can only tell a story in my own way. I know what’s going through your mind right now.”

“You do?”

“Want me to tell you? You’re wondering if what I told you is true or not. You figure if it happened I probably wouldn’t tell you, and yet it sounds pretty believable in itself. And you halfway hope it’s the truth and halfway hope it isn’t. Am I close?”