Scare Tactics (48 page)

The screen door opened an inch, a sound that chilled Practice.

He’s coming in.

Did any of them look dead? Would the Major recognize the sham and raise his rifle again to place a last bullet in each of their heads?

The crack of the rifle nearby jolted him. He didn’t know if his muscles had jumped convulsively at the sound or not. He lay still, wanting to scream to dispel his tension, not daring to ...

“Get up,” the Major said. “Get away from the boy.”

So he knew. Slowly Practice raised his head, feeling the stiffness of his neck and the slow noose of fear around his throat. He wanted to plead, to make this fierce, indefatigable man leave them alone, but he was too exhausted with the knowledge of sure death.

“Stand,” the Major said; and Practice rose, staring into those implacable yellow eyes. The Major stood directly in front of the screen door, half in darkness, half illuminated by the brightness of the moon outside, the rifle cradled in his arm as steadily as ever.

On the floor, Chris sobbed.

“Stand away from the boy,” the Major said.

“No.”

“Don’t be a fool. I don’t want him to die in pain as my daughter died. But I’ll shoot through you to get to him.” 

“I’m coming for you, Major,” Practice said. “I know I won’t make it. I won’t get two steps before you stitch me up 
and down with that Winchester. But still I’m going to come.”

“If you choose to do it that way,” the Major said unemotionally, and he adjusted the aim of his rifle with his left hand.

Outside, the motor of Practice’s car roared.

The Major flinched, and for a moment his expression was bewildered, but he didn’t take his eyes off Practice. He took a step back, and, not losing sight of Practice, turned his head to look out.

The sound of clashing gears was loud and jarring in the night.

Light filled the doorway, and the Major’s malevolent eyes glittered. His lips stretched away from his teeth and he cried out, vaguely, but his cry was barely audible over the noise of acceleration as the car raced toward the house.

The rifle arced away from Practice, who snatched Chris from the floor and backed away with him. The Major stood stiffly and calmly within the blinding headlights as the car came on. He fired round after round into the light.

He was still firing as the car jumped the two concrete steps outside and smashed into the house at a speed of more than fifty miles an hour. The Major literally disappeared in the explosive impact of metal and wood, and the whole house seemed to buckle as if it were the center of an earthquake. Practice braced himself for the collapse of the roof and walls that would kill them as surely as the Major’s bullets, but miraculously the house absorbed the impact of the two-ton automobile, survived its seizure, and remained standing. There was a huge hole in the front wall, and part of the upper floor had fallen in. Pipes were burst and water spurted upward in a cloud of steam that mingled with the heavy dust of plaster and debris. The car was badly wrecked, but as Practice stared, the door on the driver’s side opened with a squawk of bent metal and John Guthrie got shakily out, his eyes fixed intently on Practice.

“All right?” he asked. “Is everybody ... ?”

“I think so.”

Guthrie looked down at the rubble piled up under the wheels of the car. The stock of a rifle was visible and Practice thought he could see one of the Major’s arms, but he didn’t really want to look.

Blood rolled down Guthrie’s left cheek from a long but apparently superficial wound. He dabbed at the blood with his fingertips and leaned against the side of the car he had driven into the house.

“Only way,” he said, horrified. “There was nothing else I could do.”

“You did enough,” Practice told him.

T
he train was late.

Osage Bluff’s station, a block below the hill on which the Governor’s mansion stood, was an antique, and had never looked prosperous even in the days when trains ran more frequently. Years ago, the parking lot in front and alongside the station would have been packed with cars and taxis, and the waiting room would be full, anticipating the arrival of the eight o’clock from Fort Frontenac; but the airlines gradually had taken their share of the passengers, and now fewer than a dozen people waited outside on the platform under the long roof. They gazed impatiently down the tracks for the headlight of the diesel as the streamliner came around the bluff beneath the penitentiary and slowed to the sound of its great strident bell.

Practice had been able to park only a few feet from the cobblestone walk along the tracks, and he waited fretfully, with one cigarette and then another, looking out at the black river and at the lights of the river bridge. It was summer, and hot. He wiped his forehead with an already smudged handkerchief and wondered if she had really come at last.

He felt and heard the train’s approach simultaneously, looked at his watch, grunted, and got out of the car as the diesel bore down on the station, headlights revolving. The lighted cars slid by quickly. It was one of the few luxury trains left on the line. The conductors and porters Practice glimpsed standing behind half-doors were ancient men in starched white or baggy blue suits. He searched the windows of the coaches anxiously for Lucy, but didn’t see her.

The train ground to a stop and the porters jumped down quickly from two coaches directly in front of the station. The passengers began to get off, and Practice walked along the platform, eagerly watching them appear.

Lucy was one of the first to get off. She wore a blue traveling suit and carried a small overnight case. The porter pulled a larger white suitcase off the train for her and with a smile set it down out of the way. Lucy thanked him, and as she turned, Jim was aware that her hair was different; she was wearing it in a more sophisticated style. He came up to Lucy feeling slightly disheveled in the heat, and out of breath, and as flustered as he had ever been in his life.

“I’ll take that, lady.”

She turned quickly, tried to smile, but couldn’t. They looked at each other for an awkward few moments, then she reached out and touched his sleeve and said softly, “Oh, Jim.”

Lucy was jostled by departing passengers and she stepped out of the way. Practice picked up her suitcase.

“This way,” he said. “How was your trip?”

“Long. I think I ought to get used to flying, but ...” She stopped and stared up the hill, at the lights of the city and of the Governor’s mansion, just visible through the trees.

“There have been some changes,” he said. “But not as many as you might think. Cities don’t change much in a year and a half. Just people.”

They walked side by side to his car, a used Plymouth, and he put her suitcase in the back seat. He had an opportunity to look more closely at Lucy as she got in. Her clothes were expensive. He knew from John Guthrie that Lucy made close to forty thousand dollars a year in Washington. Guthrie had arranged the job for her, and seen to it that she had a full social life almost from the moment she’d arrived. Lucy hadn’t had much to say about herself in the few letters she and Practice had exchanged, but it was obvious to Practice that she had prospered in new surroundings. And he was glumly certain that she had all the male attention she could want. He wondered if there was a particular man by this time, one whom she was thinking about even now. He felt years older than he had just minutes ago, uncertain, and a little drab.

He was aware of how shabby the interior of the dusty Plymouth looked. There were crumbs of tobacco on the dashboard, and the back seat was littered with scraps of paper and legal pads.

Lucy took a deep breath and smiled at him.

“Well, tell me all the news. I never hear anything from the Guthries, except for a few lines John sometimes scrawls at the bottom of his letters to Senator Toneff.”

“He has this ranch in Montana, seven hundred and some acres in a place called Sourwater Valley, which looks better than it sounds. He’s got beef cattle, sugar beets, and wheat, and wants for nothing as far as I know. Dore’s happy, too. He bought her six pairs of blue jeans as soon as they moved away from here, and the nearest civilization is thirty miles away in Billings.”

“And Chris?” she asked eagerly.

“At first Chris didn’t want any part of the ranch. He hated horses and so forth. Stayed in his room and sulked most of the time. But this spring he finally came around to the point where he admitted he might like to climb on a horse. Just a matter of time for Chris.”

Lucy laughed. “Do you think they’ll ever come back to Osage Bluff?”

“John swears not. But he’s a politician, and his politics are rooted here. Maybe in three years, or four, when he has the ranch under control, he’ll divide his time between there and Osage Bluff. Now, tell me, before I bust—you write the most uninformative letters, by the way, welcome as they are—how’s Washington? What are you doing? Is it—a permanent sort of thing?”

She laughed again. “Let me catch my breath. I love Washington. It was far different from anything I’d known, or thought I could get used to. But John’s friends took me in hand and helped me over the rough spots. Senator Toneff is a dream to work for. We have fierce arguments over everything and he’s fired me a dozen times. Always apologizes with a big vase full of roses. I’m rooming with a girl from Atlanta who won a lot of beauty contests and speaks an unbelievable language I haven’t caught on to yet. The pace is furious, most of the time. That has its good and bad points. Aren’t we going to the hotel?”

“Yes. First I had—I wanted to show you—something,” he finished lamely.

On a narrow street, just a block from the downtown area, he pulled into a parking place beside an old five-story building with a pitched roof and three gables. He opened the lobby door with a key and they took the elevator, which was not much larger than a telephone booth, to the top floor. Under the sloping roof he led her to a white door set in a red wall. Lucy was smiling in a strange way. On the door, in black letters, was a sign,
JAMES TYLER PRACTICE, ATTORNEY AT LAW
.
He hesitated a moment in front of the door, not daring to look at Lucy, then opened it and turned on the light in the small foyer. There was just room inside for a secretary’s cubicle, a couch in yellow, and a small rug on the floor with wide olive and green stripes.

“Jim ...”

“Wait.” He crossed the anteroom and opened the door to his office. There was one big window in the room, framing the lighted Capitol and a portion of the river below it. He didn’t turn on the lights but stood looking toward the Capitol. Lucy came into his office and he glanced back over one shoulder at her.

“I pay too much for it,” he said. “The kind of business I do, I should have a booth in a lunchroom uptown. Things are slow but gradual.”

“It’s—wonderful, Jim.”

“No. But my own. Oh, not even my own, if I want to be technical. John Guthrie gave me a lot of help. Maneuvered some business my way when he left his own law office in the hands of his partner. That got me started. I’ve been hard at it ever since.”

“Talk about uninformative letter writers!” Lucy said.

“I could have bragged, I suppose. I was desperate enough to write a lot of stuff that hadn’t come true yet. I could have kept repeating over and over what a big man I was going to become. I wanted to, but somehow it would have been dishonest. I didn’t want you to come back that way, Lucy. I didn’t want to lure you back. You know something, Lucy? I’m forty-two years old. And I’m starting to lose my hair.”

“Oh, shut up,” she said softly.

He suddenly felt severely short of words. “Well, this is what I’ve done. What I’ve always wanted, Lucy. I can’t wait to get down here in the morning and make twice as much work out of the work I have. I hate to leave and go home at night. Because it gets lonely where I live. I’m forty-two years old and a man who’s missed a lot of chances. I don’t have any right to expect not to be lonely, but that’s the way it is.”

“There’s Steppie,” she murmured, and he wished he could look back at her. But he was afraid to.

“Didn’t I tell you? She married again about two months ago. The doctor who was treating her for headaches. She told me the other day she was going to get pregnant by the end of this month. Or else.”

“I thought you and Steppie would ...”

“Maybe we tried, Lucy. But there was too much against us, from way back when. And my heart wasn’t in it. I didn’t really want her, I guess. I wanted you.”

“You’re forty-two years old,” she said. “And you’re starting to lose your hair.”

“There’s something else. I can drink again. Apparently I wasn’t a real alcoholic; the condition was mental. So now and then I have a cold beer when I get home, if I feel like it. It means no more to me than a cold beer should. Lucy?” There were tears in her eyes. “You miserable—bastard. Why didn’t you tell me anything? A bunch of polite letters, and I never knew ...” 

“Trying to be honest with you, I guess, Lucy. I suppose that’s a part of the way toward saying that I love you.”

“It’s an important part,” Lucy said.

“But I don’t know how the rest should go.”

She walked carefully away from him, around the other side of the desk, and stood close to the glass, looking out at the Capitol blazing white and beautiful against the sky.