Andrew Shaw: $20 Lust

Neither did I.

I swung the gun again and smashed Casper’s head for him.

Twelve hours to wait for Reed and Baron. Twelve hours to sit on our hands.

We didn’t sit on our hands. We were lucky — there was plenty to do. Packing, for example. We had plenty to take along with us. The press, the plates, the ink, the blank paper, the chemicals.

Before we packed I put the few counterfeit twenties I was still carrying through the chemical bath. I was suddenly sorry I hadn’t brought the whole satchel along — the bills were worth a dollar a piece now. They would have made fine blanks. But it wouldn’t have been worth the risk of getting picked up with the satchel in our possession.

I also tumbled on a stack of singles — money they hadn’t gotten around to bleaching yet. I packed those. I put the twenties already printed up in my wallet. There was a little over three hundred dollars there, enough to take us wherever we were going.

The press had a carrying case of its own and the rest of the stuff fit into an old suitcase someone had thoughtfully left behind. We got everything ready to go. Once Reed and Baron came back anything could happen. There could be gunshots, in which case we would have to leave in a hurry. I didn’t want to have to waste any time, not when time was important.

Cindy was calmer now. The human being is a remarkably adjustable mechanism — it can adjust to murder. She still didn’t like it, but then neither did I. She accepted it, though. If nothing else, there was consolation in the argument that we hadn’t killed anybody remotely worthwhile. Craig and Casper were lice, thieves, murderers.

We too were thieves and murderers. But that was something we didn’t want to dwell on.

“We’ve got to do a job on this house,” I told Cindy. “Sooner or later somebody’s going to come around and find the stiffs. No one’s going to be able to figure out who killed them or why. That’s fine. But we can’t let the world dope out the fact that there was a counterfeiting operation here. We have to cover up all the traces.”

“How do we do it?”

“Room to room,” I said. “Attic to basement. If they left any papers around, get rid of them. If they have anything, anything at all that smells of counterfeiting, dump it. Don’t pass up a thing.”

She nodded, then suddenly looked very worried. I asked her what was the matter.

“Fingerprints,” she whispered. “All over the place. We’ll have to wipe them off.”

I got a mental picture of the two of us trying to wipe our prints off of everything we may or may not have touched. “Hold on,” I said. “Get a grip on yourself. Have you ever been arrested for anything?”

She shook her head.

“Ever hold a government job? Ever get fingerprinted for any reason at all?”

“No.”

“Ever in the WACs? WAVEs? Anything like that?”

“Of course not.”

“Then relax,” I told her. “If your prints aren’t on file there’s no worry there. If they pick us up they can tie us in, but if they pick us up we’re dead anyway. We wouldn’t keep our mouths shut very long.”

“But—”

“Listen to me,” I said. “No one in the world knows about us. No one can tie us in. We hit and we run and we’re clear. All the fingerprints in the world won’t do them any good. They’ll never catch us and they’ll never print us. Forget fingerprints. Just make sure there are no traces behind us. I don’t want anybody looking for counterfeit twenties.”

We started in the attic and we worked our way to the basement. There wasn’t a hell of a lot to clean up but we didn’t miss any bets. Reed was one of those planners, a compulsive note-taker. Most of his stuff was meaningless to anybody but Reed. I burned it anyway.

There were a few impressions of the original plates lying around, bad stuff that would pass but wasn’t perfect. It went in the chemical bath, then in the suitcase. Every room and every closet got careful attention. It did two things — it covered our tracks, most important, and it also gave us something to do. That was important in itself. You can go batty in an empty house waiting for something to happen. This way we kept moving, kept working.

“Ted—”

“What?”

“We’ve got to do something about the bodies.”

She was right. If they were out of the way, there was the chance that somebody could get suspicious, enter the house, and leave without tumbling to the fact that it held four corpses. I didn’t have any tremendous desire to lug dead bodies around but it was necessary. I had to get them out of the way, put them someplace dark and quiet.

Bunkie Craig was heavy. I lugged him up to the attic, found an empty trunk and stuck him in it. I closed the trunk and locked it.

And hoped the smell wouldn’t seep through when he started to rot.

Casper was light, easy. He was in the cellar already and I didn’t particularly want to drag him up all those flights of stairs. He fit in the furnace, snug and cozy. Thank God it was summer. I hoped they would find him before they lit the furnace.

And then there was nothing to do. I broke the gun, checked it, closed it up again. We had too many hours to go and we were nervous. Not frightened, not scared, just tense. Very tense. I wished Reed and Baron would hurry up.

“Ted—”

I looked at her.

“We have the stuff,” she said. “We could leave now. We could just get out and run.”

“And forget about Reed and Baron?”

“Why not, Ted? We could forget them. They’d never find us. They’d be stuck here and we wouldn’t have to take any chances.”

I looked at her. “We could run,” I said.

“That’s right.”

“And run and run and run. For the rest of our lives. Is that what you want, Cindy?” She didn’t say anything.

“Running forever. Running and never feeling safe. Always having Reed and Baron somewhere in the background. Always worrying over it, always wondering when they were going to turn up and kill us. That what you want?”

“Ted—”

“Not that way,” I said. “Besides, we couldn’t ever run. How far do you think we’d get without a car?”

“A car?”

“We’re taking their car,” I said. “Reed has a new car by now. Not a stolen one. He wouldn’t take chances like that. It’s an odds-on bet he already bought a car, a properly inconspicuous car. If we’re taking the plates and the press and everything, we need a car.”

“I suppose so.”

“And we have to kill them,” I went on. “We have to kill them or die trying. I’d rather die now, here, than wait for them to find us and kill us.”

“You’re right,” she said.

“Of course I am.”

“I guess I wasn’t thinking.”

“You’re nervous,” I said. She wasn’t the only one. There were two of us.

We killed the lights at six o’clock and sat waiting for them. It was dramatic as all hell. I crouched by the window with the shade up about an inch and kept my eye at the opening waiting for something to happen. Every once in a while she would spell me at the window.

Time crawled along and so did my skin. By seven we weren’t talking any more. We weren’t mad at each other or anything like that. It was just that talking only made everything that much harder to take: Silence was better, silence and our own private thoughts.

A few minutes past eight the phone rang. It rang seven times while we sat and panicked. Then it stopped, and a minute later it rang again.

And stopped after five rings.

I prayed Reed wouldn’t be suspicious. Maybe he would figure they were out for a bite, or sleeping, or drunk. The again maybe he could figure it was us. It was farfetched but the guy was by no means stupid.