Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“Royce, you still didn’t finish your morning shave. What’s got into you, boy?”

“I killed my wife, Mr. Washburn.”

“Royce, why don’t you just have a seat and I’ll get you a cold glass of Royal Crown. Take my chair.”

So Royce pointed the gun at him. “You better give me that money,” he said, “or I could go and blow your dang head off your dumb shoulders.”

“Boy, does your pappy have the slightest idea what you’re up to?”

“I don’t see what my pa’s got to do with this.”

“Because your pappy, he wouldn’t take kindly to you carrying on this way, Royce. Now just sit down in my chair, you hear?”

At this point Royce was getting riled, plus he was feeling the frustration of it. Here he went and burned his britches by shooting Essie and where was he? Still trying to hold up a bank that wouldn’t take him seriously. So what he did, he swung the gun around and shot out the plate-glass window. You wouldn’t think the world would make that much noise in the course of coming to an end.

“Well, now you went and did it,” Buford told him. “You got the slightest idea what a plate-glass window costs? Royce, boy, you went and bought yourself a peck of trouble.”

So what Royce did, he shot Ruth Van Dine.

Now that doesn’t sound like it makes a whole vast amount of sense, but Royce had his reasons, if you want to go and call them by that name. He couldn’t kill Buford, according to his thinking, because Buford was the only one who could authorize giving him the money. And he didn’t think to shoot Miz Cristendahl because he didn’t notice her. (Maybe because she closed her eyes. Maybe those ostriches know what they’re about. I’m not going to say they don’t.)

On top of which Ruth was screaming a good bit and it was getting on Royce’s nerves.

He wasn’t any Dead-Eye Dick, as I may have pointed out before, and although he was standing right close to Ruth he didn’t get a very good shot at her. A twelve gauge casts a pretty tight pattern as close as he was to her, with most of the charge going right over her head. There was enough left to do the job, but it was close for a while. Didn’t kill her right off, left them plenty of time to rush her to Schuyler County Memorial and pop her into the operating room. It was six hours after that before she died, and there’s some say better doctors could have saved her. That’s a question I’ll stay away from myself. It’s said she’d of been a vegetable even if she lived, so maybe it’s all for the best.

Well, that wasabout the size of it. Buford fainted, which was plain sensible on his part, and Miz Cristendahl stood around with her eyes shut and her fingers in her ears, and Royce Arnstetter went behind the counter and opened the cash drawer and started pulling out stacks of money. He got all the money on top of the counter. There wasn’t a whole hell of a lot of it. He was looking for a bag to put it in when a couple of citizens rushed in to see what was going on.

He picked up the gun and then just threw it down in disgust because it was full of nothing but two spent shells. And he couldn’t have reloaded if he’d thought of it because he never did bring along any extra shells when he left the house. Just the two that were loaded into the gun, and one of those took out the window and the other took out poor Ruth. He just threw the gun down and said a couple bad words and thought what a mess he’d made of everything, letting the first half of his life just dribble out and then screwing up the second half on the very first day of it.

He would of pleaded at the trial but he had this young court-appointed lawyer who wanted to do some showboating, and the upshot of it was he wound up drawing ninety-nine-to-life, which sounds backwards to me, as the average life runs out way in front of the ninety-nine mark, especially when you’re thirty-eight to start with.

He’s in thestate prison now over to Millersport. It’s not quite as far from his home as Franklin County where he went once, but he didn’t get to stay overnight that time. He sure gets to stay overnight now.

Well, there’s people to talk to and he’s learning things. His pa’s been to visit a few times. They don’t have much to say to each other but when did they ever? They’ll reminisce about times they went fishing. It’s not so bad.

He thinks about Essie now and then. I don’t know as you’d call it remorse though.

“Be here until the day I die,” he said one day. And a fellow inmate sat him down and told him about parole and time off for good behavior and a host of other things, and this fellow worked it out with pencil and paper and told Royce he’d likely be breathing free air in something like thirty-three years.

“Means I’ll have five left to myself,” Royce said.

The fellow gave him this look.

“I’m fixin’ to live until I’m seventy-six,” Royce explained. “Thirty-eight now and thirty-three more in here is what? Seventy-one, isn’t it? Seventy-six take away seventy-one and you get five, don’t you? Five years left when I’m out of here.” And he scratched his head and said, “Now what am I gone do with them five years?”

Well, I just guess he’ll have to think of something.

“So,” Loebner said.“You continue to have the dream.”

“Every night.”

“And it is always without variation yet? Perhaps you will tell me the dream again.”

“Oh, God,” said Hackett. “It’s the same dream, all right? I get a phone call, I have to go to Cleveland, I drive there, I drive back. End of dream. What’s the point of going through it every time we have a session? Unless you just can’t remember the dream from one week to the next.”

“That is interesting,” Loebner said. “Why do you suppose I would forget your dream?”

Hackett groaned. You couldn’t beat the bastards. If you landed a telling shot, they simply asked you what you meant by it. It was probably the first thing they taught them in shrink school, and possibly the only thing.

“Of course I remember your dream,” Loebner went on smoothly. “But what is important is not my recollection of it but what it means to you, and if you recount it once more, in the fullest detail, perhaps you will find something new in it.”

What was to be found in it? It was the ultimate boring dream, and it had been boring months ago when he dreamed it the first time. Nightly repetition had done nothing to enliven it. Still, it might give him the illusion that he was getting something out of the session. If he just sprawled on the couch for what was left of his fifty minutes, he ran the risk of falling asleep.

Perchance to dream.

“It’s always thesame dream,” he said, “and it always starts the same way. I’m in bed and the phone rings. I answer it. A voice tells me I have to go to Cleveland right away.”

“You recognize this voice?”

“I recognize it from other dreams. It’s always the same voice. But it’s not the voice of anyone I know, if that’s what you mean.”

“Interesting,” Loebner said.

To you perhaps, thought Hackett. “I get up,” he said. “I throw on some clothes. I don’t bother to shave, I’m in too much of a hurry. It’s very urgent that I go to Cleveland right away. I go down to the garage and unlock my car, and there’s a briefcase on the front passenger seat. I have to deliver it to somebody in Cleveland.

“I get in the car and start driving. I take I-71 all the way. That’s the best route, but even so it’s just about two hundred fifty miles door to door. I push it a little and there’s no traffic to speak of at that hour, but it’s still close to four hours to get there.”