Donald Westlake - The Ax

I walk around the table, go to my knees beside Fallon, and very gently tape his right ankle to the chair leg. Then I crawl around him on all fours — it's too much effort to stand and walk and kneel again — and tape his left ankle to the other chair leg. Then, with a small groan, I do stand.

It would be safer, surer, if I could tape his wrists together, but I'm afraid if I tried to move his arms he would wake up, so instead I run tape around the chair back and his torso, just above the elbows. It's tricky doing this without letting the tape make too much noise when I pull it from the roll, but at last I get it around him twice, snug and secure. He'll be able to move his hands and forearms, but not, I think, effectively.

With what I do next, he's certainly going to wake up, so I'd better do it fast and clean. I pull off two small lengths of tape, stand over him with a piece of duct tape in each hand, then with an abrupt motion slap the first piece against his mouth, pressing it against the flesh.

He does wake up, startled, eyes popping open, all of his limbs jerking. He's still trying to understand what's happening and why he can't move when I press the second piece of duct tape over his nose, squeezing the nostrils shut. Then I step back from him and turn away, to search the kitchen drawers while he dies.

What I need is a candle. Like the flashlight, and for the same reason of unreliable electric service, every country kitchen keeps a stub of candle somewhere.

Yes, here it is, in the drawer with the balls of string and the extra twisties and the spare keys, a short fat candle of the kind people light in church when they want their prayers answered. I take down a saucer from an upper cabinet, put it on the counter near the stove, put the candle on the saucer.

Meantime, Fallon is making terrible noises. Now that I've found the candle, now that there's nothing to distract me, I hate those noises, and so I leave the room, carrying my windbreaker with me.

I put on the windbreaker as I walk through the house. The gloves and the iron pipe are in the other outer pocket. I won't be needing the pipe, but I will take it away with me; in the meantime, I put on the gloves. Starting at the far end of the house, at the front door, I use my gloved hands to wipe everything I can think of that I touched, and I turn off the lights as I go, except that I leave the bedside lamp lit in his bedroom.

Fallon is quiet now, slumped again. I remove the duct tape from his ankles and then his torso, and he falls forward so his head hits the table. I have to lift his head, trying not to see those staring eyes, and when I pull the last two pieces of duct tape away I discover he's thrown up, into his mouth and then into his nose and lungs because it couldn't come out through the tape. So he didn't suffocate, he drowned. A miserable end, either way.

I use one of his small plastic trash bags for the pieces of duct tape, then put the bag in my windbreaker pocket. I use one of his wooden kitchen matches to light the candle.

In New York State, gas stoves don't have pilot lights, they have electric igniters. I switch on the front two burners of his stove, leave them on high, and blow out the flames. I then leave the kitchen, closing its inner door behind me, so there are now no openings from the kitchen.

By the light from the bedroom, I make my way back through the house and out the door that Fallon hadn't known was unlocked. I walk briskly past the front of the house, seeing the low winking light of the candle flame, and the four tall skinny metal bottles of propane gas tucked into the corner of the outside wall where the enclosed porch ends. I continue on out the driveway and down the road to the Voyager.

I have no idea how long it will take. I don't want to be here when it happens, but I want to be close enough to know it did happen. And I assume, when the stove blows, it will set off the propane bottles as well. There shouldn't be too much of Fallon or the kitchen left, but there should be just enough to make it clear what happened. A drunk fell asleep, unaware that he'd miscalculated in turning on the stove. I don't suppose anyone who knows Ralph Fallon will be surprised.

I get into the Voyager and drive slowly past the house and on the few miles to the intersection where I should turn right for Arcadia. I stop there, and look in the rearview mirror, and then make a U-turn in the middle of the intersection. There's no other traffic at all.

I'm about half a mile from the intersection, on the way back to Fallon's house, when the sudden yellow light switches on some distance ahead of me, showing woods and houses in silhouette. It begins to die down, as though someone had switched on a bright light and then smoothly rotated the dimmer, but then it flares brighter than before, with red and white mixed into the yellow, and again dims down, and the double blast rolls over the car like a wave, like a physical thing.

I stop the car. I make another U-turn. I drive home.

Every era, and every nation, has its own characteristic morality, its own code of ethics, depending on what the people think is important. There have been times and places when honor was considered the most sacred of qualities, and times and places that gave every concern to grace. The Age of Reason promoted reason to be the highest of values, and some peoples — the Italians, the Irish — have always felt that feeling, emotion, sentiment was the most important. In the early days of America, the work ethic was our greatest expression of morality, and then for a while property values were valued above everything else, but there's been another more recent change. Today, our moral code is based on the idea that the end justifies the means.

There was a time when that was considered improper, the end justifying the means, but that time is over. We not only believe it, we say it. Our government leaders always defend their actions on the basis of their goals. And every single CEO who has commented in public on the blizzard of downsizings sweeping America has explained himself with some variant on the same idea: The end justifies the means.

The end of what I'm doing, the purpose, the goal, is good, clearly good. I want to take care of my family; I want to be a productive part of society; I want to put my skills to use; I want to work and pay my own way and not be a burden to the taxpayers. The means to that end has been difficult, but I've kept my eye on the goal, the purpose. The end justifies the means. Like the CEOs, I have nothing to feel sorry for.

The weekend following the death of Ralph Fallon, I spend in a kind of contented daze, not thinking, not worrying, not making plans. The call will come, I know it will. The position is open, and the call will come.

But the call does not come on Monday, and by midafternoon, alone in the house, Marjorie at Dr. Carney's, me pacing and pacing, listening for the phone that doesn't ring, I'm beginning to picture troubling alternatives. Was there some other resume I didn't pay close enough attention to, and he got the call instead of me? Are they promoting from within their work force, over there at Arcadia?

Am I going to have to go back over there and kill some other son of a bitch? How much do I have to do before I get my fair chance?

I'm not going to stop, I know I'm not. I'd love to stop, I want desperately to stop, but I'm not going to stop until I've got that job.

I know how to protect myself now. I will not be made a victim, never again. Anyone who tries to make trouble for me, from now on, with what I now know, anyone at all, corporate or personal, is in for a surprise.

It would be better all around if that fucking phone would ring.

Tuesday, I'm very distracted during the counseling session. Unless Quinlan or Marjorie speaks to me directly, I don't listen to what they're saying, and I add nothing. Fortunately, they're both involved enough in whatever they're discussing not to notice my absence.