Donald Westlake - The Ax

"Whyn'tcha use the phone?"

I give a wry grin and a little shrug. "Be some nut on the phone? I figured, if I come here, I can explain myself. But then you weren't home."

"So you busted in."

"The door isn't locked, Mr. Fallon," I say. "Honest, it isn't."

He thinks about that, nodding slowly, and then says, "Let's go see."

"All right."

He steps back from the doorway, and makes a waving gesture with the revolver. It's not pointed at the floor any more, but it's not quite pointed at me either. "You first," he says.

I go first, through the house, which now has lights on in every room, all the way to the door beyond the TV room, which I open onto the black night outside. I turn to him and say, "See?"

He glares at the door. "The goddam thing isn't supposed to be open like that." He comes over, switching the revolver to his left hand so he can slam the door, open it, slam it again, and then peer closely at the lock mounted on the inside of it. He tries to turn the lock's little handle, but it won't move. "Damn thing's painted stuck," he says. "Stuck open. Be a son of a bitch."

During this, I could hit him about seven times with the iron pipe in my windbreaker pocket, but I don't. I think things are going to work out better than that.

He slams the door again, turns to me, shakes his head. "I gotta get that fixed," he tells me. "Anyway, you see how it looked, I come home, there's you right there, asleep in my den."

"I'm sorry I fell asleep."

"Well, you had a long drive. Wha'd you say your name was?"

"Burke," I tell him. "Burke Devore."

"Burke," he says, "I know you won't mind if I have a look at your wallet."

I say, "You still think there's something wrong with me? All right." And I take out my wallet and hand it to him.

He takes it from me with his left hand, gesturing again with the revolver in his right. "Whyn'tcha have a seat on the sofa in there?" he suggests.

So I do, and he walks across to the other side of the room, weaving a little, to put the revolver on top of the TV set while he looks at all the cards and papers in my wallet, peering owlishly at them, having trouble focusing, I suppose, because he's had too much to drink.

Well, this can only help. Not only will he see I've told him the truth about my name, but I now realize my old employee ID from Halcyon is still in there, I never did find a moment to throw that away. (I probably didn't want to throw it away.)

I see the instant he finds the ID; his brow clears at once, and he's grinning in a much more friendly fashion when he next looks over at me. "Well, Mr. Devore," he says, "it looks like I owe you an apology."

"Not at all," I say. "I'm the one to apologize, walking in here, falling asleep…"

"Over and done with," he says, and crosses the room to hand me my wallet. "You want a beer?"

"Very much so," I say, and that isn't a lie.

"You want a little something in it?"

"Only if you are."

"Come on to the kitchen," he says, then looks at the revolver on the TV set as though surprised and not pleased to see it still around. Picking it up, pointing it away from me, toward the hall, he says, "Let me get rid of this."

"Fine by me," I tell him, with a shaky smile.

He laughs and starts off, saying, "I'm Ralph, by the way. You're Burke?"

"That's right."

I stand in the hall while he stows the revolver in his bedside table drawer. Coming back out, he says, "Be damned if I know what help I can be, but I'll try. A lot of these owners— Come on along."

We walk toward the kitchen, and he continues, "A lot of these owners are what I would call pricks. I've heard about them. Got no more loyalty than a ferret."

"That's about right," I say.

"Fortunately," he says, slurring the word, "we got good owners at Arcadia."

"That's good to hear."

In the kitchen, he pulls two cans of beer from the refrigerator and hands me one, then opens an upper cabinet door and brings out a bottle of rye. "Sweeten to taste," he suggests, putting the bottle on the counter.

I follow his lead. He opens the beer, takes a deep swig, then fills up the can from the rye bottle. I open and drink, and when he hands me the bottle I do a trick a bartender showed me at a company party years ago. One of the people on my line was getting drunk on vodka and grapefruit juice, and when I had a word with the bartender he told me, "I already cut him off." "But you're still pouring," I objected, and he grinned and said, "Next time, watch." So I did, and if you weren't looking for it you wouldn't see it. He put in the ice cubes and then tipped the vodka bottle over the glass, slipping his thumb over the open top just before it would pour, and pulling the thumb back again as the bottle came upright, all in one easy sliding pouring movement. Then he filled the glass with grapefruit juice and handed it to the drunk, who didn't get any more drunk at that party.

So that's what I do now. I drink some of the beer, and then, half turned away from Fallon, I tilt the rye bottle over the hole in the top of the can, keeping the rye in the bottle with my thumb, then stand the bottle on the counter.

Fallon wants to click beer cans, so we do, and he says, "To the bosses, the rotten ones. May we piss on their graves," and we drink. "Come on and sit down," he says, and staggers a bit as he pulls a chair out at the kitchen table.

We sit across from one another at the table, and he says, "Tell me about your line there. What kinda extruder you got? No, wait a second." And he gets up and reels over to the counter to grab the rye bottle and bring it back and plunk it on the table between us. Then he reels to the refrigerator and gets two more beer cans and smacks them down at our places. "For later," he says, and sits down and says, "So? Tell me whatcha got."

I'm sorry when, at last, he does fall asleep. I shouldn't be sorry, because it's very late, past midnight by his kitchen clock, but to tell the truth, I enjoyed our conversation. He's okay, Ralph Fallon. More crude than most of the people I know, because he came up from the laborer ranks instead of out of college like most of us, but a bright guy and very knowledgeable about the job. In fact, he told me a couple of things he's done on the line there at Arcadia that are very interesting, methods I'll certainly keep in place when I take over.

And he can definitely drink. He was already drunk when he came home, and since we've been seated together here at his kitchen table he's had eight more beers, each of them well laced with rye. I haven't kept up at all (I don't think he expects people to keep up with him), having only five beers and not adding any whiskey — though I did fake it every time — but I'm feeling it. I'm feeling a lot of things, really; the beer, the lateness of the hour, the knowledge that I'm almost at the end of this series of trials, and a stupid sentimental attachment to Ralph Fallon.

In my wooziness, my weakness, I even try to imagine scenarios in which Fallon lives and yet I get what I want. I talk him into retiring, or I explain my situation and he offers me a job as co-manager on the line, or he suddenly wakes up and tells me Arcadia is going to two shifts and will need a night manager on the line.

But none of that happens, or is going to happen. My long pleasant beery shoptalk session with Ralph Fallon is over; it is time to be serious.

Weary, feeling as though I weigh a thousand pounds, I get to my feet and reach for my windbreaker, on the back of the chair to my right. In the right pocket is the small roll of duct tape. I take it out and look at it, and then look at Fallon, slumped in his chair across the table from me, chin on chest, left hand on the table, right hand in his lap.

I don't want to do this. But there are always things we don't want to do, and we do them.