Макс Коллинз - Spree

He closed the suitcase up; it was filled with perfume and other such niceties. He slipped one last bottle of Giorgio in a coverall pocket. That would be for Cindy Lou. He would have to settle things with the child tomorrow, back at home; after he got back from Sedalia. A peace offering would be needed, first. And then he could teach her about the beauty of the love act.

And tomorrow night would be as memorable as tonight.

Nolan was heading toward the back room again when his bartender, standing at the end of, and just inside, the bar, reached a hand out and stopped him.

“You okay?” Chet asked; the older man sometimes treated Nolan paternally, which irked Nolan no end.

“I’m fine.”

“You been in the back more than out front.”

“I got gas. You want me to fart in here?”

Chet smiled. “And drive out what few customers we got tonight? No way.”

“Well,” Nolan said, “I’d stay out of the back room, if I were you. Unless you light a match.”

“What, and risk an explosion?”

And Chet returned to his handful of customers at the bar.

Nolan checked in with Jon.

“Anything?” he asked into the walkie-talkie.

“Nothing,” Jon said. “They aren’t even loading my truck yet.”

“Well, it’s too early for that, anyway. They started at one end and they’ll get that truck loaded, and then move toward the center of the mall and start loading yours.”

“When’ll that be?”

“Around one, one-thirty.”

Somebody started knocking on Nolan’s back door.

Jon said, “What was that?”

“That’s what I’d like to know,” Nolan said.

He tossed the switched-off walkie-talkie on the desk and covered it with a newspaper. He got a long-barreled .38 from a desk drawer and held it in his left hand, behind him, as he cracked the door open.

Where he saw the flushed and very wide-eyed face of Andy Fieldhaus.

Nolan looked out at him and said, “Well, hello, Andy.”

Puffing, his breath visible in the cold air, Andy said, “Jesus Christ, Nolan, let us in.”

“Us?”

“Heather and me. Let us in!”

He closed the door for a moment, stuck the gun in his waistband, buttoned his jacket over it, let them in.

“Thank God for back doors,” Andy said, breath heaving.

They were barely dressed: Andy had his brown leather bomber jacket over his bare chest and wore his pants but carried his shoes and shirt and underthings and such in his hands. The buxom Heather was in a coat, clutched to her with one hand, her shoes in the other, and wadded up under one arm were the rest of her clothes. She was shivering, mostly from cold, but not entirely.

It was a bitter night to go barefoot.

Heather dropped her clothes to the floor and, her coat opening, she flashed Nolan, inadvertently; she had really big tits — also really erect nipples, from the cold, not Andy. She and Andy huddled together, hugging, shaking.

“What can I do for you?” Nolan asked. It was clear they’d gotten dressed — sort of dressed — in a hurry.

Now Andy and Heather broke apart and began, hurriedly, getting fully dressed. This Heather did without shame, and it was fun watching her.

“Are you my friend?” Andy asked Nolan, desperately, hopping on one foot, as he tugged a shoe onto the other foot.

“Sure,” Nolan said.

“Good,” Andy said, smiling tightly. “If my wife asks, will you say we’ve been here all evening?”

“Sure,” Nolan said.

Andy was dressed now, and so, nearly, was Heather.

Rather frantically he went on: “She could show up any minute. Can you keep your cool and cover for us?”

“Sure.”

“God bless you,” Andy said, grinning.

Heather smiled at Nolan and kissed him on the cheek and said, “You’re a saint.”

Nolan followed them as they went out through the bar and watched silently from a window as they made their way to the parking lot, Andy getting in his Corvette, the girl in her Mustang, driving off separately.

Nolan went to the back room and returned the .38 to its drawer and sat at the desk.

“What was that about?” he said, aloud.

He was digging in the moonlight, sideways.

She didn’t know what it meant: it was simply the image before her eyes, as they slowly opened. A man was digging, shovel crunching into cold ground, washed in ivory moonlight, and she was on her side, so it was a sideways view, and out of focus. Still groggy, she moved her head just slightly and looked up. She saw the skeletal branches of a tree — the tree she lay under — and through them she could see clouds moving quickly across a blue-gray night sky, like a scrim of smoke gliding across the stationary partial moon. It didn’t seem real.

But the pain in her head did; it ran across her forehead, over her eyes, like a headband of hurt. And the still, cold night air seemed very real; she was only in her sweater and jeans and anklets — her bed was the snowy ground. And the sound of the shovel, that was real too, as it chopped at roots and cut through frozen earth. She moved her head back to where it had been and looked through slits and saw him, digging, in the moonlight.

Lyle.

Handsome Lyle, wearing a brown leather jacket and gray designer jeans, digging, basking unwittingly in shadows from the moving clouds.

He was, she knew at once, digging a grave. It was the right shape; he’d roughed it out and was now only a few inches in. But it was a grave. Her grave.

The pain and the cold were her friends. They made this surreal landscape real. They were something to hold on to, to steady her, while her thoughts raced, while she peeked through the slits of her eyelids and wondered what she could do to keep from sleeping forever in the hole Lyle was making for her.

She lay perhaps ten feet from the foot of the grave. This was not as far as she would have liked. As Lyle walked around the grave, working on this end and that, he often came very close to her. He seemed frustrated. The temperature had fallen; apparently this ground was harder than he had anticipated.

She wondered if she should just get up and bolt and run. She had no sense of where she was — other than lying on her side under a tree near a grave an imbecile was preparing for her. The ground didn’t seem to slope, so they were a ways away, anyway, from the cabin and the hill at whose foot were the highway and the Mississippi. Lyle stood in a small open area, but mostly there were trees, here. Some evergreens but mostly gray, winter-dead ones; more death than life in these woods.

Was she supposed to be dead already? Did he think whatever he’d hit her with had killed her? Or had Lyle simply not got around to the deed as yet; the wood-stock revolver was still in his waistband, the metal catching moonlight and winking at her, occasionally. Perhaps she’d got through to him sufficiently these past few days to make killing her not so easy a chore for Lyle. Maybe he was putting it off.

No. That wasn’t it. He was working at that grave with a mindless diligence; nothing was bothering him. He was that most frightening of men: a guileless dope who meant you no harm but would kill you without blinking. Lyle would do that because his pa had so ordered. To Sherry, in that frozen, surreal moment, Lyle embodied the banality of evil. It was the ultimate empty irony: she would be killed by someone who didn’t even dislike her.

After fifteen minutes or so, Lyle got tired and sat at the edge of the grave, which was now perhaps five inches deep everywhere, more or less. He put the shovel down, so that it was between him and Sherry, whose eyes seemed to be closed. He sat on the ground, hugged his knees to him and looked up at the moon and the smokelike scrim of clouds and didn’t see it coming when Sherry smacked him in the side of the face with the shovel.