Sara Paretsky - Burn Marks

“You’re no little innocent, Vic, so don’t get me shedding tears for you.”

We got to the hoist and they bundled us in. Cray operated the controls while Ron and Ernie hovered close to Elena and me. I wished futilely that I’d learned enough Polish to do more than greet my grandmother Warshawski at Christmas. I could have told Elena about the gun and gotten her to slip it out of my back before Ron or Ernie found it, but if I muttered the news to her, they’d hear me and disarm me.

As we rode slowly up my terror and helplessness increased. I could imagine our end, tipped over the side of the building, the accidental death of an unstable wino and her eager but unhelpful niece. I stopped trying to goad the boys with my bright chatter and slumped down on my heels against the elevator wall, my head in my hands.

“What’s she up to?” Ron demanded.

“I’m sick,” I groaned. “I’m going to throw up.”

“Be my guest,” Ernie said sardonically.

I made retching noises and collapsed on the floor of the hoist, clutched my stomach with my cuffed hands. Elena fluttered down next to me. “Oh, my poor baby, what would Gabriella say if she could see you? She’d never forgive me. I hope I don’t go to heaven when I die, I couldn’t bear to see the look on her face for knowing I got you into trouble like this. Come to Elena, baby, come here, Vicki, just lean your head against old drunk Elena and maybe you’ll feel a little better.”

I sat up and leaned my head against her shoulder. With my voice muffled against her scrawny neck, I told her about the gun. “Wait until we’re out of here and in the dark, then pull it out and hand it to me.”

Fear had sharpened her wits. She didn’t give a sign of having understood me. “Oh, Vicki, yes, whatever you say, baby, just don’t cry. That’s a good girl.”

Maybe she hadn’t understood me. I wondered if I should try to repeat the message, but the hoist had slid to a stop and Ernie was urging me to my feet. Still clutching my stomach and moaning, I lurched on the way out and stumbled against the concrete.

We were on the open deck at the top of the building. Around us steel beams sent blacker fingers against the dark sky. We were up twenty-five or thirty stories. A stiff wind made the girders sway and froze my marrow. The sight of open air in all directions brought on a genuine attack of nausea. I fell down, almost swooning.

Elena was on me like a shot, weeping over her poor little Vicki. While Ron tried to wrestle her away her bony hands felt behind me for my gun. He pulled her up, but she had the Smith & Wesson loose and dropped it in front of me. The sharp sound of metal on concrete echoed a thousandfold in my ears.

Ernie and Ron didn’t immediately realize what had happened. The only light came from the hoist. I could just make out the glint of the metal and scrabbled madly for the gun. I reached it just as Ernie yanked me to my feet. Fumbling it into my right hand, I slid the safety off with my thumb. I wrenched myself from Ernie and turned and shot him.

Cray was still standing in the hoist. When he heard the shot and saw Ernie fall, he closed the doors and started back down. Ron started dragging Elena toward the edge of the platform. I couldn’t make him out except as a bundle of darkness moving along the paler sheen of the concrete. I forced myself to follow him, to fight down the spinning in my head, to place the muzzle in his back and pull the trigger.

A yard from the edge Ron collapsed, falling on top of Elena. I had never killed a man before, but I knew from the way his body lay, crumpled as a dark blob on the concrete deck, that he was dead. I couldn’t bring myself to walk close enough to check-but what would I have done even if he had been alive? My hands were still cuffed and the hoist was somewhere below us.

My aunt began thrashing about, trying to move away from him. That finally brought me over to the body. Even a yard from the edge of the deck my head swam, I shut my eyes and managed to roll Ron from my aunt’s torso, I brought her with me to the center of the platform.

Behind us the crane loomed up. The pale light of the midnight sky glinted from its long swaying arm. I thought of the hole underneath, going down thirty stories to the bottom of the elevator shaft, and shuddered.

Ernie was still alive. I’d shattered his shoulder. He was losing enough blood to want to get help, but he told me there wasn’t any way to bring the hoist up myself. Ernie wasn’t inclined to talk much. I tried asking him about his relations with Boots and MacDonald and why he and Ron did so much for them, but he told me I was a nosy interfering bitch and to mind my own business before it was too late. At the same time he was peeved with me for not climbing down to the ground-he told me they nailed ladders into the openings where fire stairs would eventually be poured.

“You could at least try to get some help,” he complained. “You shot me-you owe me something.”

“Ernie, sweetie, I shot you because you were going to throw me over the side of the building. I’m not climbing down thirty stories of ladders in the dark, specially not with my hands not working.”

At that Wunsch cursed some more, this time at his partners. It seems Furey had given Cray the key to my handcuffs-he’d been supposed to undo me right before I went over-they didn’t want to run the risk of not getting to me before some passerby did. “Now look at that jerk. Takes off and leaves us alone up here to die.”

“I thought you were a real macho kind of guy,” I said disapprovingly. “John Wayne would never have lain around pissing at how rotten his pals were just because he’d taken a bullet.”

Ernie swore at me, then asked me to take off my sweatshirt to wrap him up, he was getting so cold with blood loss.

“Ernie, I can’t get it over my hands. Remember? They’re locked together. Anyway, I don’t want to hang around up here all night with nothing but a bra between me and the cold cruel wind.”

Ernie flung a few more unimaginative epithets at me, then lapsed into silence. I wished Elena would too. Playing a heroine’s role for once in her life, my aunt grew loquacious. She went on as though shot full of pentobarbital, talking about her childhood, her quarrels with her mother, what Tony-my father-said when he cut all the hair off her dolls when she was eight.

After a while I thought I might scream at the emotional inconsequential torrent. Ernie found it so intolerable, he demanded I shut her up.

“She’s driving me round the bend with that drivel,” he announced. In his own living room this probably got instant results. I could picture LeAnn giggling and saying “You’re so cute, Ernie,” but taking her offending friends or children or mother off to the kitchen. I wondered what LeAnn and Clara would do now.

“She’s not doing anything to you, Ernie. Listen to her- it’ll take your mind off your troubles.” I asked Elena to repeat a particularly tangled narrative involving my uncle Peter, a dog, and the neighbor’s flower garden.

I don’t know how much time passed that way when I heard the hoist returning. It can’t have been long, but in the dark, surrounded by the wounded and the babbling, it felt like hours.

I persuaded Elena to stop talking and move with me behind one of the girders. “Just be quiet, Auntie. They may have come back to shoot us and we don’t want to give them any help finding us.”

“Sure, Vicki. You know what you’re doing. Whatever you say. I was never so scared in my life as I was when that boy with the gorgeous eyes picked me up at the liquor store-”

I put a hand over her mouth. “Shut up, darling, for now. You can tell me about it later.”

The hoist groaned to a stop. My hands were thick with cold, I was having trouble remembering which was the right hand and which the left. I counted painfully in my head, trying to figure out how many shots were in the clip. I tried to subdue the tremor in my right hand so I could make all of them count.