Лесли Чартерис - Manhunt. Volume 1, Number 3, March, 1953

“Roy, wait! I’m getting out.”

I tried to hold her, but I was too slow. She rolled to the edge of the bed and stood up in that clinging, transparent nightgown. Moonlight burnished her bare shoulders and her throat and her breasts swelling out of the low bodice.

His arm went about her waist. She shrank from him, but she didn’t fight him. She looked at the black automatic his other hand held pointed down at me, and she was limp as he drew her to him.

I jumped out of bed on one leg, dragging my other foot in the cast after me. There must have been a great deal of pain, but I don’t remember feeling it. I hopped to the crutches standing against the wall.

Lucy was screaming. She had put her body between us and was clawing at his gun. I got my hands on one crutch and raised it. I swayed, trying to brain him without hitting her.

He gave me the chance when he hurled Lucy away from him. I brought the crutch down then, but I was awkward and clumsy balanced on one foot and couldn’t take the needed step closer to him. He sidestepped and caught the crutch easily on the downward swoop and wrenched it away from me. Then there was nothing between me and his gun.

Lucy, sprawling half on and half off the bed where he had thrown her, screamed again.

He didn’t shoot me. I heard him laugh and I saw the crutch swing at me. I flung my arms over my head, but the crutch slammed through to my skull. He had used it on me the way I had intended to use it on him.

The floor jumped up at me. The moonlight was abruptly gone; everything was gone but the blackness in which I lay and heard somebody whimper.

Lucy, I thought. Lucy whimpering in despair. I tried to get to her, but the blackness held me and the whimpering receded and there was terrible silence.

The old man was bathing my head. I opened my eyes to find myself lying on the floor and the kerosene lamp was on.

“It’s only a scalp wound,” he said.

He squeezed out a washcloth in a basin on the floor. The water turned pink with my blood. What had saved me had been my arms breaking the full impact of the blow.

“Where are they?” I said.

Pop didn’t answer. I didn’t need an answer. There was only a plyboard partition between the two bedrooms, and through it I could hear Roy Kester laugh.

Lucy was absolutely quiet.

“Don’t take it so hard, son,” Pop said. “It’s not like they’d never slept together before.”

Tiredness possessed his wizened face hovering over me. I didn’t know how old he was, but he couldn’t have been as old as he looked.

I said, “I’ll kill him. There’s an ax under the porch.”

“You’re out of your head. He’ll see you coming at him. He’ll make sure next time you don’t wake up.”

“Then give me your gun.”

“You think I’m nuts?” He dropped the washcloth into the bowl and rose to his feet. “It’s just tonight,” he said. “Then you and Lucy will never see him again. Why should you take it so hard?”

I laughed, and I knew there was madness in my laughter. “It’s all right for you. She’s not your wife.”

“The young make too much fuss about things,” he said. “Roy was married to her. This is nothing new, them two together. If it wasn’t like that, I’d maybe let you. Maybe even give you my gun. But she and Roy — well, what’s once or twice more?”

He was a queer old man. He was a convict, a desperate fugitive from the law, but he had washed the blood off me and was begging me to understand.

I said, “You seem fond of Lucy.”

“Yeah. I knew her since she was a little girl. Her mother was the finest woman there ever was.”

“Then why don’t you help her?” Pop massaged his face with a vein-ridged hand.

“I’m old,” he said quietly. “If they take me back to jail, I’ll never get out alive. I’ll never see the outside again. That’s why I took the chance to bust out with Roy. I need him. He’s got the hideout and he’ll get the dough to see us through. Without him the cops will pick me up in no time. With him I got a good chance.” He turned his tragic face to me. “Don’t you see what it means to me, son?”

“What about Lucy? What about me?”

“She’s no kid. She’s a grown woman. And he was her husband first.” Anger touched his voice. “You make too much fuss over such a little thing. I need Roy bad.”

And as we spoke here, she was with him beyond the plyboard partition. Pop had a revolver in his pocket. I had to get it.

I sat up and grabbed at his legs so I could pull him down and get my hands on his throat and take his gun. But I had no more success with him than I’d had against Kester. He kicked me in the ribs and punched me in the face. Ordinarily I could have absorbed those blows and handled him easily, but I was too weak from what Kester had done to me. My head was spinning even before the kick and the punch.

Again I passed out...

Next time I regained consciousness Lucy was with me. She was sitting on the floor with me and holding my head and sobbing, “Darling, darling.” Then she saw that my eyes were open and held me tighter.

She still wore nothing but her nightgown — the flimsy bit of nylon in which she had gone to the next room and returned. It was ripped at the bodice.

After a while she helped me get into bed. When she straightened up, I saw that her nightgown was torn all the way down to the hem so that it hung from her shoulders like an open robe. She pulled it together and stood flinching under my gaze.

“He would have come back and killed you,” she said. “What else could I do?”

The alarm clock stood beside the lamp. It was more than two hours since Kester had come into the room.

“Are you looking forward to tonight?” I said.

She gasped as if I’d stuck a knife into her. “You mustn’t say such a thing. I love you. I’ll go through anything for you.”

“All right,” I said dully.

I moved to the bed and flung myself on it face down. She let me alone.

I didn’t go out for breakfast. When she called me, I said I didn’t want any. There was much I had to endure, but I didn’t have to endure seeing her and Kester together.

All morning I stayed in the bedroom. At noon she brought me lunch on a tray, as if I were sick. I suppose I was — sick with hate and helplessness. I hardly touched the food.

A couple of hours later she came in to tell me she thought they were about to leave. Both of them had shaved with my razor and Kester had asked her for the car keys.

“They’re going to take the car,” she said, “but that’s all right.”

So at least there wouldn’t be another night like last, and last night would recede in time like a bad dream. I pulled her down to the bed with me and she cried a little against my shoulder. After a while we left the bedroom.

Pop, cleanly shaven, was back at his solitaire game. He smiled at us, gently, and didn’t look nearly so tired. In the clear, quiet afternoon I heard the engine of the jalopy. Kester had repaired whatever damage he had done to it.

The sound of the engine died. A minute later Kester came in through the screen door.

“All set,” he announced. “Lucy, you get your things packed.”

All the air was suddenly drained out of the room.

Slowly Pop put down the cards. “What’s on your mind, Roy?”

“My wife’s on my mind, that’s what. I got her back. Where I go she goes.” He grinned at Lucy, who stood with her hands to her throat. “Going to be a long time at the hideout. Long nights and long days. But it’ll be fine with you there.”

She was so very quiet beside me.

Pop rose to his feet, a wizened, weary old man. “Let her be,” he said.

“Use your head, Pop. As soon as we’re out of here, Taylor will yell copper. I take her along as a kind of hostage. That’ll keep him quiet.”