Эд Макбейн - Guns

The door opens.

He cannot see the door from where he is lying in the corner, but he hears it opening, and then he feels the floorboards moving with the weight of the man who comes into the room.

“Over there,” a voice says, and he recognizes it as the voice of the man who hit him with the shotgun, and he realizes there are two men, or maybe more, coming into the room — their combined weight is what causes the floorboards to tremble beneath him.

“He’s got a dirty mouth,” the woman says.

“He get funny with you, Myra?”

“No, but he’s got an awful dirty mouth,” she says, and laughs.

Colley keeps his hurt arm pressed to the wall, fearful she will try to step on it again. He wonders what he is doing in this shack with these hillbillies. Before the hound came leaping out of the woods Colley’d been counting his money, which was a civilized enterprise, and before that he was running and laughing. Now there are three hillbillies standing around him — the woman Myra with her hairy legs and her soiled slip, and the man Sam in his dirt-encrusted bib overalls, and another man wearing glasses and a pair of khaki pants and a sports shirt patterned with big red flowers. Fat man. Fat legs bunched in khaki pants, fat arms hanging from the short sleeves of the shirt, fat face. Cigar in his mouth. He takes the cigar out now and looks down at Colley.

“What’s your name?” he says.

“What’s yours?” Colley answers, and sits up.

“Will Hollip,” the man answers, surprising Colley.

“I’m Jack Wyatt,” Colley says, giving them Jocko’s name; what the hell, Jocko is dead.

“Mr. Wyatt,” Will says, “you shot Sam’s dog here for no good reason...”

“The dog attacked me,” Colley says.

“You were on posted land,” Will says.

“That don’t give anybody the right to turn a killer dog loose on me.”

“That’s the gentlest dog ever did live,” Sam says.

“He sure is,” Colley said. “You see what he did to my arm?” he says, and stands up and shoves the arm at Will. “How you like that, Mr. Hollip? Does that look like I killed him for no good reason?”

“Sam says—”

“Sam wasn’t there, Sam didn’t get there till it was all over. And while we’re on Sam, look what he did to my face here.”

“You do that, Sam?” Will says.

“He killed my dog,” Sam says.

“And also Sam took three hundred and twenty-eight dollars from my pocket...”

“That’s a lie, Will.”

“And two pistols for which I have licenses. Carry licenses. They’re restricted to hunting, but they’re carry licenses, anyway.” He is lying, but he doesn’t think Will Hollip will realize it. He doesn’t know who Will Hollip is, but he is pleading to him now as he would to a higher authority, as though he’s been busted for the offense of killing a vicious dog, and has been brought to trial for it, and is now brilliantly pleading his own case to a benign fat judge who only needs a camera around his neck to be a tourist in Hawaii.

“You take two guns from this man?” Will asks.

“I did, Will. They’ll help pay for the dog.”

“If that mutt cost more than five dollars...” Colley says.

“Just watch it, mister,” Sam says.

“Well, Mr. Wyatt,” Will says, “I can understand how maybe the dog scared you, he’s a big dog. But—”

“Scared me? He came flying out of the woods...”

“But I got to agree with my brother here that what you did was illegal. Sam, we better take him over to the trooper station.”

Colley looks at fat little pot-bellied Will Hollip in his tight-fitting khakis and his flowered shirt, and he sees the resemblance now, the same blue eyes, the same shaggy brows — Will is simply a short, stout version of his big brother Sam. The three of them are watching him now, maybe waiting for him to make the move he should have made before it got too late, the way it is beginning to look too late now. Sam Hollip has taken the shotgun from Myra, who is either his wife or his sister, Colley can’t tell which. There seems to be no family resemblance except for maybe the hairy legs. He has hung the shotgun casually over his arm, but his finger is inside the trigger guard and Colley suspects he will not hesitate to shoot him if he makes a break for it. Or, if Sam doesn’t care to waste ammunition, he might simply hit Colley with the stock of the gun again, this time maybe breaking the cheekbone, whereas last time he merely bruised it. Colley does not want to get shot, nor does he want his cheek broken or even bruised. He only wants to get out of here.

If these dopes take him to the troopers with a complaint that he killed their hound, it’ll take the troopers ten seconds flat to realize that Colley is the man who held up the diner a mile and a half down the road, and then it’ll take them another ten seconds to find the teletype the New York fuzz undoubtedly sent out, and here we have Nicholas Donato, folks, bona-fide cop killer — is there maybe a reward? old Sam Hollip will ask. Colley cannot allow them to take him in. He cannot allow these country hicks to be the cause of his going back to jail forever. Because this time it will be forever. He has killed a cop, and for that you get either forever in jail or else you get the death penalty. That is one of the crimes you can still be executed for in the glorious, glamorous State of New York — cop-killing. Yes, the sentence for murdering a “peace officer,” as he is described in the criminal law, can be death, provided “there are no substantial mitigating circumstances which render the sentence of death unwarranted.” Kill a cop, and you are in trouble. Colley was in trouble even before he met these dopes. Now he is in even more trouble because these dimwits are going to lead him at gunpoint into the arms of the law and there goes the ball game.

He decides to make his move. His right arm is dangling uselessly, and dripping blood onto the wooden floor of the shack. As soon as he gets out of here, he will have to do something about the arm. But meanwhile, he has to get out of here. He has already tangled with old Sam Hollip, blue-eyed Death himself, and with the wiry, hairy woman who is either his sister or his wife — Colley would not be at all surprised if she’s his sister, and he’s humping her nightly here in the middle of the woods; ladies who can’t stand the word “fuck” are sometimes ladies who are not too terribly shocked by incest. Either way, husband and wife or brother and sister, they are tough customers and he is not eager to come up against either one of them ever again. Which leaves fat Will Hollip, brother to Sam, perhaps brother or at least brother-in-law to Myra, fat Will Hollip of the tight khakis and flowered shirt. How do I get to you, Will? How do I use you to get out of this dumb situation that can cost me my life?

He does not know.

The shotgun is looking him in the eye, but he has got to make his move because the next thing that will happen is he’ll be taken out to a car or a truck and driven to the state-trooper station. Or else he’ll be marched through the woods to the highway and then to the trooper station, but either way he is going to be in the hands of the cops, and this time it will be forever. There is no way he can possibly explain to a judge and jury that he was returning fire in self-defense in that liquor store. They will say that’s very nice to hear, Mr. Donato, but you shouldn’t have been inside that liquor store committing a felony in the first place, next case.

He decides to faint. All he wants to do is get his hands on that shotgun. He’s got only one good arm, and that’s enough to hold a shotgun and fire it, provided it’s been cocked — he suddenly wonders if the shotgun has been cocked. He is not as familiar with shotguns or rifles as he is with handguns, but this one looks like a slide-action repeater, and he wonders if the slide has been pulled back, cocking the gun. With only one good arm he will not be able to fiddle around with the slide and then get the gun in position again after he has it in his possession. He hopes it is cocked. He is about to give an Academy Award-winning performance, and the Oscar is the shotgun and he doesn’t want it to turn out to be brass instead of gold.