Эд Горман - Moonchasers and Other Stories

“Leave him alone!” Barney said.

“You get down there and help him,” Cushing said, and shoved Barney down next to me.

I didn’t want to get kicked again, so I got to work. I worked fast and I worked good and in less than five minutes, I had the long, square box sitting up on the ground. There was a padlock on it the size of a catcher’s mitt.

Cushing threw me a key. “Open it up, girls.”

We got it open. Inside was the bag filled with cash.

“Take it out of there.”

We took it out.

“Set it on the ground.”

We set it on the ground.

“This time when I hide it, you little girls’ll never find it. Believe me. Now stand up.”

We stood up.

“Next time I see you little girls around here, you’re really gonna get hurt. You understand me?”

I couldn’t talk real well. I just sort of nodded. Barney just sort of nodded, too.

All I could think of was how much I hated Cushing, how smug and violent he was, and how he’d killed Roy when Roy had no chance of defending himself—

And that was when I remembered the lighter, Roy’s lighter, in my pocket.

“Now you two little girls get the hell out of here and never set foot on my property again.”

He waved his gun at us.

We got.

My ankle hurt and my mouth hurt and my head hurt. I felt angry and humiliated and terrified.

We went maybe a quarter mile and I said, and it wasn’t any too easy for me to speak, “I’m going back, Barney.”

“Huh?”

“Back into his house.”

“For what?”

I told him.

“You’re crazy, Tom.”

“Maybe so but I’m goin’ back.”

I turned around and started back in the darkness toward the house. Cushing wouldn’t have had time to hide it yet.

A minute or two later Barney was right alongside of me.

“I know you’d be pissed if I didn’t go along.”

He was right.

Cushing’s police car was parked along the side of his house. The kitchen light was on. I could see him, more shadow than substance, moving around in there.

We went to the back of the house and got on the latticework and went up real quiet. It wasn’t difficult at all, not even with my ankle in the condition it was.

We got in his bedroom and then stood very still. All I could hear was our ragged breathing; all I could smell was our sweat.

I remembered right where it was, what drawer it was in, and where he kept the bullets, too.

Barney stood by the door watching and listening while I got Cushing’s extra gun and loaded it up. My brother, Gerald, had taught me how to shoot, even if I didn’t want to kill animals, which he said I’d “grow out of someday.” Then I grabbed the small yellow can of Zippo lighter fluid, which Cushing kept in the drawer below.

When I got the gun all loaded up we crept down the hallway and then crept down the stairs and then crept across the darkened living room and crept out to the kitchen.

Cushing’s back was to us. In the bright light, he sat at the table. He poured Old Grandad straight from the bottle into a small water glass. His gun was on the table. So was the bag of money.

“You make one move, Cushing, and I’m going to blow your fucking head off. You understand me?”

I thought I sounded pretty good for a guy with a mouthful of blood.

I moved into the kitchen fast, so that he could see that I held a gun on him.

Barney came in right behind me.

“Well,” Cushing said, smirking, “if it isn’t my two little girlfriends.”

“Get the money, Barney, and put it over in the sink.”

Mention of the money ended Cushing’s smirk.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

He started to get up from his chair but I eased the hammer back on the pistol.

“I’m not real good with firearms, Cushing. I might just blow your head off by accident.”

He saw the wisdom of that.

Barney took the sack over to the big white sink. He unzipped the top of the sack and started filling the sink with small bundles of cash.

“What the hell’re you two doing?” Cushing said.

“Douse it, Barney,” I said.

Barney took the can of Zippo lighter fluid I’d given him and squirted clear fluid all over the money.

“You crazy bastard,” Cushing said to me, now that he’d figured out what we were going to do.

From my pocket I took Roy’s lighter and held it up for Cushing to see.

And then I set the money on fire.

It went up in this huge whoof of flame and smoke.

Cushing jumped up and tried to get past me at the money.

But he was already too late. Barney had done a good job of soaking all the bills.

“You stupid little bastard,” he said.

And that’s when he made his lunge for his gun and that’s when I shot him.

He screamed and dropped immediately to the floor, his gun falling away from his grasp.

I’d shot him somewhere in the shoulder, apparently in a place that was pretty painful judging by the way he kept rolling around and moaning.

“You little prick,” he said when he saw me walk around the table and stand over him. “All that money — wasted.”

“We better call somebody,” Barney said.

I nodded, looked down with great disgust at Cushing and then remembered what Barney had said the other night — about feeling sorry for him.

And I did, too, just then because his face was different now — instead of rage and arrogance, there was this terrible sorrow.

I thought of the hawk that day, and how the hunters had brought him down.

“You had it coming, Cushing. You killed Roy.”

I started to walk back to where Barney stood in the kitchen doorway, setting the gun down on the counter on my way.

I started to go call the chief but then Barney saw something behind me and shouted, “Watch out, Tom! He’s got his gun!”

Cushing had inched his fingers to his gun and had tightened his hand around it.

I looked over to the gun I’d just set on the counter. And realized that I’d never be able to reach it before Cushing killed us.

“The chief’s gonna know about you, Cushing,” I said. “He’s gonna know you killed us and know you killed Roy, too.”

And then something pretty strange happened. Cushing tried to pull himself to an upright position, the way Roy had right before he died... and when he did this, just for a second, he looked just like Roy. And even a little bit like Mitch.

And then something even stranger happened.

Cushing raised his gun and started to point it straight at my heart but then stopped and pointed it right at—

He was—

putting it—

tight against his—

forehead—

and pulling the—

trigger and—

And I heard Barney scream. And then I heard myself scream, too, and I heard the boom of the weapon discharging and heard the splat and splatter of his brains splash against the bottom of the wall like dishwater being emptied—

Then there was just this silence.

I’d only heard this silence one other time, those moments right after I realized Roy was dead and I was trying to call him back from eternity, shouting down this long dark endless corridor—

“God,” Barney said. “God.”

Because there really wasn’t anything else to say. There really wasn’t.

Here Roy hadn’t had nerve enough to kill himself and was killed by Cushing who, in the end, did have nerve enough—

I tried not to think of how Cushing’s folks had both been killed when Cushing was only ten. I didn’t want to be like Barney. I didn’t want to feel sorry for people I should hate...

Well, it took several long weeks to learn what the county attorney had in mind, but finally he told Clarence that he wasn’t going to press any charges after all, and that given how it had all ended, we’d probably learned our lessons, Barney and I.