Роберт Беллем - Pulp Frictions

The gun lay solidly against my chest as I walked. It was a .45, Barney’s .45. It would do the job. And it gave the whole thing a sense of rough justice.

Keenan’s house was an architectural monstrosity spread over half an acre of land, all slanting angles and steep-sloped roofs behind an iron fence. The gate was unlocked, as I’d hoped. The Sarge would be showing up later.

I walked to the driveway, staying close to the shrubbery and listening for any strange sound over the cutting whine of the January wind. There wasn’t any. It was Thursday night, and Keenan’s sleep-in maid would be out having a jolly time at somebody’s Tupperware party. Nobody home but that bastard Keenan. Waiting for Sarge. Waiting for me.

The carport was open and I slipped inside. The ebony shadow of Keenan’s Impala loomed. I tried the back door. It was open. I got in, sat down, and waited.

Now there was the faint sound of music. Jazz, very quiet, very good. Miles Davis, maybe. Keenan listening to Miles Davis and holding a gin fizz in one delicate hand. Nice for him.

It was a long wait. The hands on my watch crawled their way from eight-thirty to nine-thirty to ten. Time for a lot of thinking. I thought about Barney. About how he looked in that small boat when I found him on that day late last summer, staring up at me and making meaningless cawing noises. He’d been adrift for two days and looked like a boiled lobster. There was black blood encrusted across his midsection where he’d been shot.

He’d steered towards the cottage as best he could, but still it had been mostly luck. Lucky he’d gotten there, lucky he could still talk for a little while. I’d had a fistful of sleeping pills ready if he couldn’t talk. I didn’t want him to suffer. Not unless he could tell me something.

And he did. He told me almost all of it.

When he was dead, I went back to the boat and got his .45. It was hidden aft in a small compartment, wrapped in a waterproof pouch. Then I towed his boat out into deep water and sank it. If I could have put an epitaph on the square of piney woods where I buried him, it would have been Barnum’s: ‘There’s one born every minute.’ Instead, I went out to dig up what I could on the men who had done him. It had taken six months to get a file on two of them, and here I was.

At ten-twenty headlights splashed up the curving driveway and I hit the floor of the Impala. He drove into the carport, snuggling up close to Keenan’s car. A VW by the sound. The little engine died and I could hear Sarge grunting softly as he got out of the little car. The overhead went on, and the sound of the side door clicking open came to me.

Keenan’s voice: ‘Sarge! You’re late! Come on in and have a drink.’

‘Scotch.’

I’d unrolled the window before. Now I stuck Barney’s .45 through it, holding the stock with both hands. ‘Stand still,’ I said.

The Sarge was halfway up the cement steps. Keenan was looking down at him. They were both perfect silhouettes in the light spilling through from inside. I doubted if they could see much of me in the dark, but they could see the gun. It was a big gun.

‘Who the hell are you?’ Keenan asked.

‘Flip Wilson,’ I said. ‘Move and you’re dead. I’ll put a hole in you big enough to graft a tv set in.’

‘You sound like a kid,’ Sarge said. He didn’t move, though.

‘Just don’t move. That’s all you’ve got to worry about.’ I opened the Impala’s back door and got out carefully. The Sarge was staring at me over his shoulder and I could see the glitter of his little eyes. One hand was spidering up the lapel of his 1943-model double-breasted suit.

‘Get your hands up.’

The Sarge put his hands up. Keenan’s already were. Instinct.

‘Come down to the foot of the steps. Both of you.’

They came down, and out of the direct glare of the light I could see their faces. Keenan looked scared, but the Sarge was utterly composed. He was probably the one who had jobbed Barney.

‘Face the wall,’ I said. ‘Both of you.’

‘If you’re after money—’

I laughed. It was a sound like cold clinkers being scraped out of a furnace. ‘Yes, that’s what I’m after. One hundred and eighty thousand dollars. Buried on a little island off Bar Harbor called Carmen’s Folly.’

Keenan jerked as if he had been shot, but Sarge’s concrete face never twitched. He turned around and put his hands on the wall, leaning his weight on them. Keenan followed suit, reluctantly. I frisked him first and got a cute little .32 with a brass-inlaid stock. I threw it over my shoulder and heard it bounce off one of the cars. Sarge was clean — and it was a relief to step away from him.

‘We’re going into the house. You first, Keenan, then Sarge, then me. Without incident, okay?’

We all walked up the steps and into the kitchen.

It was one of those germless tile and formica jobs that looks like it was spit whole out of some mass-production womb in Yokohama. A pony glass half full of brandy was sitting on the counter. I paraded them through into Keenan’s living-room. It had apparently been done by some pansy decorator who never got over his crush on Ernest Hemingway. There was a flagstone fireplace with a moosehead mounted over it, staring at the mahogany bar across the room with eternally sparkling eyes. There was a buffet with a gunrack over it. The stereo had turned itself off.

I waved the gun at the couch. ‘One on each end.’

They sat, Keenan on the right, Sarge on the left. The Sarge looked even bigger sitting down. There was an ugly, dented scar up in a crewcut that had grown too long. I put his weight at about two-seventy. I wondered why he owned a Volkswagen.

I grabbed an easy chair and dragged it over Keenan’s quicksand-coloured rug until it was running distance from them. I sat down and let the .45 rest on my thigh. Keenan stared at it like a bird stares at a snake. The Sarge, on the other hand, was staring at me like I was a bird. ‘Now what?’ he asked flatly.

‘Let’s talk about maps and money,’ I said.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Sarge said. ‘All I know is that little boys shouldn’t play with guns.’

‘How’s Cappy MacFarland these days?’ I asked casually.

It didn’t get anything from the Sarge, but Keenan popped his cork. ‘He knows. He knows, Sarge.’ The words shot out of him like bullets.

‘Shut up!’ Sarge cracked at him. ‘Shut up your goddamn mouth!’

Keenan shut his eyes and moaned a little. This was the part of the deal no one had told him about. I smiled. ‘He’s right, Sarge,’ I said. ‘I know. Almost all of it.’

‘Who are you, kid?’

‘No one you know. A friend of Barney’s.’

‘Don’t know him,’ Sarge said indifferently.

‘He wasn’t dead, Sarge. Not quite dead.’

Sarge turned a slow and murderous look on Keenan. Keenan shuddered and opened his mouth. ‘Shut up,’ Sarge said. ‘I ought to break your goddamn neck.’ Keenan’s mouth shut with a snap. Sarge looked at me again. ‘What does almost all of it mean?’

‘Everything but the fine details. About the armoured car. The island. Cappy MacFarland. How you and Keenan and some bastard named Jagger killed Barney. And the map. I know about the map.’

‘It wasn’t the way he told you,’ Sarge said. ‘He was going to cross us.’

‘He couldn’t cross the street,’ I said. ‘He was just a patsy who could drive a car fast.’

He shrugged; it was like watching a minor earthquake. ‘Okay. Be as dumb as you look.’

‘I knew Barney had something on as early as last March. I just didn’t know what. And then one night he had a gun. This gun. How did you connect with him, Sarge?’

‘Someone who did time with him,’ Sarge said. ‘We needed a driver who knew eastern Maine and the Bar Harbor area. Keenan and I went to see him. He bought it.’