Lawrence Block - A Dance at the Slaughterhouse

"Open the safe," Ballou told him.

"I don't think so."

"I'll hack her fine tits off," he said. "I'll chop her into cat meat."

"That won't put money in your pocket, will it?"

I thought of the drug dealer in Jamaica Estates, and the bluff he'd felt safe enough to call. I didn't know if Mick was bluffing and I wasn't eager to find out.

He grabbed her by the forearm, yanked her toward him.

"Wait," I said.

He looked at me, fury glinting in his eyes.

"The pictures," I said.

"What are you talking about, man?"

I pointed at the little Corot. "That's worth more than he's got in the safe," I said.

"I don't want to try to sell a fucking painting."

"Neither do I," I said, and I swung the gun around and snapped off a shot that caromed off the wall just inches to the side of the painting. It chipped the concrete, and it put a dent in Stettner's sangfroid. "I'll shoot the shit out of it," I told him. "And the others." I swung the gun toward the pair of portraits and squeezed the trigger without actually aiming. The bullet went through the portrait of the woman, making a small round hole just inches from her forehead.

"My God," Stettner said. "You are vandals."

"It's just paint and canvas," I said.

"My God. I'll open the safe."

He worked the combination swiftly and surely. The turning of the dial was the only sound you could hear. I was holding on to the Smith and breathing in the smell of cordite. The gun was heavy and my hand ached slightly from the gun's recoil. I longed to put it down. There was no reason to point it at anyone. Stettner was busy with the safe, Olga frozen with dread and incapable of movement.

Stettner hit the last number, turned the handle, drew open the twin doors. We all looked within at the stacks of bills. I was to the side, my view partly screened by the other two men. I saw Stettner's hand dart into the open safe and I cried out, "Mick, he's got a gun!"

In a film they would show the scene in slow motion, and what's curious is that's the way I remember it. Stettner's hand reaching in, fastening on a little blued-steel automatic pistol. Mick's hand, gripping the huge cleaver, poised high overhead, then flashing down in a deadly arc. The blade biting cleanly, surgically, through the wrist. The hand appearing to leap forward, away from the blade, as if liberated from its arm.

Stettner spun around, away from the open safe, facing toward us. His face was white, his mouth wide with horror. He held his arm in front of him like a shield. Arterial blood, bright as sunrise, spurted wildly from his mutilated arm. He lurched forward, his mouth working soundlessly, his arm spraying blood at us, until Ballou let out an awful sound from deep in his throat and swung the cleaver a second time, burying it in the juncture of Stettner's neck and shoulder. The blow drove the man to his knees and we stepped back out of the way. He sprawled forward and lay still, pouring out blood onto the gray broadloom.

Olga was standing still. I don't think she had moved at all. Her mouth was slack and she had her hands poised at the sides of her breasts, her nail polish a perfect match for the color on her nipples.

I looked from her to Ballou. He was turning toward her now, his apron crimson with fresh blood, his hand locked on the handle of the cleaver.

I swung the Smith around. I didn't hesitate. I squeezed the trigger, and the gun bucked in my hand.

The first shot was rushed, and wide of the mark. It took her in the right shoulder, I tucked my elbow in against my ribs and fired a second shot, and a third. Both entered the center of her chest, between the rouged breasts. The light was gone from her eyes before she hit the floor.

"MATT."

I was standing there, looking down at her, and Mick was saying my name. I felt his hand on my shoulder. The room reeked of death, the smells of gunfire and blood and body wastes merging to foul the air. I felt an awful weariness, and there was a dull cramp at the back of my throat, as if something was trapped there and wanted to get out.

"Come on, man. We've got to get out of here."

I moved quickly once I shook off whatever it was that had immobilized me. While he cleaned out the safe, sweeping stacks of money into a couple of canvas sacks, I wiped away any prints either of us might have left. I retrieved the cassette from the VCR, stuck it in my coat pocket, and tossed the coat over my arm. I stuck the.38 back in my belt and put Mick's SIG Sauer in my pocket. I grabbed the attaché case and followed Mick down the hall and up the stairs.

Tom was right next to the door, propped into a sitting position against the wall. His face looked bloodless, but then he was always pale. Mick set down the sacks of money, picked Tom up in his arms, and carried him out to the car. Andy had the door open and Mick tucked him into the back seat.

Mick came back for the money while Andy opened the trunk. I tossed in everything I was carrying, and Mick returned and added the sacks of cash and slammed the trunk lid hard. I went back into the arena and checked the room where we'd done the killing. They were both dead, and I couldn't spot anything I'd overlooked. At the top of the stairs I found the two guards, and they were both dead, too. I wiped the whole area where Tom had been sitting on the chance he'd left his prints there, and I dug most of the chewing gum out of the lock so that it wouldn't be stuck open. I wiped the lock, and parts of the door we might have touched.

They were motioning to me from the car. I looked around. The neighborhood was deserted as ever. I ran across the pavement. The Ford's front door was open, the front passenger seat empty. Mick was in back with Tom, talking softly to him, pressing a wadded-up cloth against his shoulder wound. The wound seemed to have stopped bleeding, but I didn't know how much blood he'd already lost.

I got in, closed the door. The engine was already running, and Andy pulled away smoothly. Mick said, "You know where to go now, Andy."

"That I do, Mick."

"We don't want a ticket, God knows, but step as lively as you dare."

MICK has a farm in Ulster County. The closest town is Ellenville. A couple from County Westmeath, a Mr. and Mrs. O'Mara, run the place for him, and their name appears on the deed. That's where we went, arriving somewhere between three and three-thirty. Andy drove with the radar detector switched on, and even so didn't stray too far over the speed limit.

We got Tom inside and made him comfortable on a daybed in the sun parlor, and Mick went out with Andy and woke up a doctor he knew, a sour-faced little man with liver spots on the backs of his hands. He was with Tom for almost an hour, and when he came out he stood for a long time washing his hands at the kitchen sink. "He'll be all right," he announced. "Tough little bastard, isn't he? 'I been shot before, Doc,' he tells me. 'Well, my boy,' I said, 'will you never learn to duck?' I couldn't get a smile out of him, but he's got a face that doesn't look as though it's smiled much. He'll be all right, though, and live to get shot again another day. If you're on speaking terms with the Creator you might want to thank Him for penicillin. Used to be a wound like that'd turn septic on you, kill you a week or ten days down the line. Not anymore. Innit a wonder we don't all live forever?"

While the doctor worked the rest of us sat at the kitchen table. Mick cracked a pint of whiskey, and most of it was gone by the time Andy ran the doctor home. Andy made a beer last as long as he could, then had a second one. I found a bottle of ginger ale in the back of the refrigerator and drank that. We just sat there and nobody said much of anything.

After Andy dropped off the doctor he came back for us and pulled up next to the house and tapped the horn. Mick rode up front with him and I sat in the back. Tom stayed at the farm; the doctor wanted him to spend the next several days in bed, and planned to see him again over the weekend, or sooner if he got feverish. Mrs. O'Mara would nurse him. I gathered she'd performed that function before.