John MacDonald - The Good Old Stuff

The long night hours went by without incident. She did not come to the kitchen door. He waited longer than usual and then went over.

“I want to search the house,” he said harshly.

She stepped aside without a word. As before, the house was empty.

He went back into the kitchen and said, “I could use some breakfast, Marra.”

“I can sell you coffee, eggs, and bacon for a half a buck, if you want it.”

“I... I’m sorry I acted like I did yesterday, Marra.”

She looked directly at him. “You was ugly.”

“I had a reason.”

“What reason?”

“You said you might go away with — with him. Marra, I don’t know what’s happened to me, but...”

She moved a half step closer to him and, with dignity, lifted her face to look directly up into his eyes. He felt the warmth of her breath against his chin. As he bent to kiss her, her hands fastened with hard force around his arms above the elbows. His reactions were delayed. He twisted away, reaching for the revolver.

“I wouldn’t try that,” a man said softly. The army Colt in his hand was aimed at Barry’s belt buckle. “You did right well, Marra, and I thank you for it. Back real slow against the wall next to the stove there, mister. Hands way up. That’s right. Go git me some cloth, Marra, a wad of it.”

Craik Lopat wore an expensive-looking suit, but the knees were stained with dirt and one button was missing from the suit coat. He wore no tie, and his white shirt was open at the collar. He was thick in the shoulder, slim and flat in the belly and hips. Black eyebrows met over the bridge of his nose, and the mouth was heavy with cruelty and sensuousness.

“A cop,” he said, “trying to love up my woman! They musta got you outa the bottom of the barrel, sonny. I been here for two days, lay in’ up in the hills until I figured out your hours. When you looked around, I was outside the bedroom window. And it’ll be nearly two hours before the next one shows up. You couldn’t find me before, and you won’t find the two of us either. I got a good car stashed over beyond the grove.”

Marra came back into the kitchen with a wad of sheeting.

“You want me to tear it into strips, Craik?” she asked.

“No. Give it here. I got to wad it around the end of this here forty-five because it makes too damn much noise. You want to see me shoot him, you kin stand over there, ‘f you want. Sonny gets it low down in the gut. He woulda got it in the head except for what I seen him trying to do to you.”

Barry Raymes felt the sweat run down his ribs. His mouth was dry and he was dizzy. Some of it was genuine fear. More of it was anger and frustration that he should have been taken in so easily. He looked at Marra. Her face was pale, and she moistened her lips.

“Right... right here in the kitchen?” she asked weakly.

“You got no more use for this little old shack, honey. You don’t like it, go on in the next room.”

“They’ll never give up if you kill me, Lopat. Never,” Barry said. He despised the tremble that came into his voice.

“They got no pictures of me, sonny, and no prints. I got a nice new name and a lot of good neighbors in a place you’ll never find. I told ’em all I was going back to pick up my wife.” He wrapped the barrel in the sheeting. “Brace yourself, sonny.”

“Craik,” she said. “Wait a minute. Let me get my stuff together afore you kill him. It’ll make some noise, and I don’t want to have to run for it without my things.”

“I’m going to buy you new stuff, honey.”

“After we get married?”

Craik Lopat frowned. “If we get time to make out the papers, honey. You’ll get the new stuff anyway.”

“I’ll hurry. Don’t shoot him yet. I want to see it, Craik. I never did see a man get hisself killed yet.”

She smiled, quite merrily.

“Make it fast, baby,” Craik growled.

She hurried out of the room. Craik stood, whistling tonelessly, the muzzle, shrouded in sheeting, steady as a boulder. Barry made his plans. They hadn’t taken the revolver. That was an oversight. He’d watch Craik’s eyes. They might flick over to the girl when she came back into the kitchen. At that moment he’d throw himself to the left, snatching the revolver as he fell, hoping to get in at least one shot.

He heard Marra’s quick footsteps. She appeared in the bedroom door. She lifted the shotgun, and the full blast at short range caught Craik Lopat in the back of his thick, tanned neck. The big man stumbled one step forward, his head nearly severed from his body, and fell heavily, full length, the .45 spinning out of his dead hand, his face smashing against the worn floorboards.

Barry Raymes bent stupidly and picked up the .45. Marra Allen knelt beside the body, picked up the dead hand, sat back on her heels, and crooned — a low, sad tone that was without tears.

“You were going to go with him.”

“He was changed, mister. Changed. He was like a dog I see once in town, with suds on his mouth and his eyes crazy.”

“Was it because he was going to kill me?” he asked softly.

She turned her head slowly and looked at the wall against which Barry had been standing. Her voice sounded far away. “You see that blue color, don’t you? Last year I wanted to fix the place up. He bought the paint and painted it. I got those little red things. Funny little things. You wet the paper and then they slide right off onto the wall. He thought they were pretty. And we were going to live here, you know.”

She still held the lifeless hand. He saw the expensive band of the watch, the black hair curling harshly on the back of the hand, between the knuckles of the fingers.

“That’s where he was going to kill me, against that wall.”

“It didn’t mean anything to him, mister. It didn’t mean a damn thing to him.”

He shifted his weight uneasily and said, with mock joviality, “Well, no matter why you felt you had to do it, I want you to know that I really feel...”

She wasn’t listening. She had started that toneless crooning again, and he suddenly realized that it was the sound many women make when they wish to soothe infants, wish to send them off to sleep.

He walked out the open kitchen door, then turned, saying, “Did you say something?”

“I just said, mister, that it’ll scrub off the floorboards. It sure would have messed up that wall.”

He walked through the dooryard and across the vegetable patch, careful not to step in the freshly planted rows. The night mist was drying on the hood and top of the black government sedan. When the sending set warmed up, he lifted the hand mike off the prongs, knowing as he did so that not only had Craik Lopat died but also a girl who had existed almost entirely in his mind, and said, “Raymes reporting, Raymes reporting in.”

“Go ahead, Raymes.”

He licked his lips and planned how he would phrase it.

He was working in the far corner of the yard, sorting the jumbled shipment of aluminum sheet which had arrived in the morning, working hard and fast because the November wind was cold. He caught a glimpse of movement out of the corner of his eye and straightened up, saw Stella Galloway hurrying across the yard toward him, picking her way around the sorted piles. He saw her smile, saw the papers in her hand, and felt the familiar embarrassment as he realized that she could have sent one of the men out with the orders but preferred to come herself.

As protection against the chill wind, she had slung her gray coat around her shoulders. He smiled at her, anxious to see her, knowing that somehow she had become a necessary part of this new life.