The end of the night (27 page)

"And they know . . . who has me?"

"Yes.**

"What pure hell for my people. And Dal." She stared at me with obvious conjecture. "AU right I want to get out of this. Is there any chance at all?"

"Hardly any."

She closed her eyes again, but not for long. "So I'll be killed. For kicks. Isn't that the reason you people have?"

"We're expressing aggression and hostility, miss."

"What if it were up to you? You alone? It wouldn't happen then, would it?"

"You're judging a book by the cover.*'

"I'm asking you. Do you have any desire to help me? If you don't, III have to take any chance I can. It would be the same with me as it is with you—nothing to lose."

No tears, no begging, no hysterics. Yet a complete awareness of mortal danger. This was a woman. A woman in the same sense that the Spanish call a man muy hombre. A bright unquenchable spirit, the kind that won't break. Gallantry is a fitting word. You can't find many of those. I wondered if that architect knew what a wondrous thing he almost acquired.

I found another balk line across my soul, and knew I would help. I was becoming a veritable tower of virtue.

"Maybe I can help. Maybe. But you have to be a hell of an actress."

"I guess you can say I've got a hell of a motivation."

"We'll be leaving at dusk. You've got to be barely able to

move. You've got to be semi-conscious. The head injury is getting worse. You're damn near in a coma, and going deeper all the^ time. You cannot let yourself respond to anything. Can you do that?"

"Yes, I can do that.*'

"When the time is right, I'll give you a signal of some kind, and then you have to start to die. We'll be rolling along m the car. I don't know how the hell to tell you to do it, but make it convincing. Then it'll be my problem to get you out of the car without injury. It's the only chance you have."

She thought it over. "Suppose, because of the way I act, they get careless and give me a good chance to make a run for it Without high heels, I can run like the wind."

"It could be okay for you, but bad for them and bad for me. I'll watch so you don't get a chance to do it that way. It has to be my way."

"What if I started screaming this minute?"

"I'd knock you unconscious with my fist. And if you think you've picked a good time to start screaming when we're in the car, the girl with us will have a knife into your heart at the first bleat."

"What are they hke?" she asked me.

"You'll see."

"How did . . . someone like you get into such trouble?'*

I smiled at her. "When I was a young girl I got raped by my uncle and ran away from home and I've been in this place ever since. You wanna buy me another drink before we go upstairs, Mr. Barlow?"

"You aren't what you look like, are you?"

**Not lately."

**But you were, once upon a time."

"I was?"

"Now it's the eyes, I think. That's the wrong part. They don't fit the rest. It's your eyes that give me ... a strange feeling."

"And your teeth are so big. Grandma."

"Please, please help me," she said.

"I told you I'm going to."

"It would be such a crummy stupid way to die."

I heard somebody stirring around at dusk. Then I heard Nan's voice. Somebody rapped on the door. I unlocked the

door and opened it, after signaling Helen to lie back. Sandy looked in and said, "Kiss her awake, sweet prince."

"She doesn't seem to want to wake up."

"Get her up, man!" I looked at him in astonishment. He had snapped the order, but with an obvious uncertainty. He was a little man, posturing, posing, trying to regain lost authority. Last night he had been relieved of command. No matter how hard he strained, he couldn't get it back. And I suspected that the same thing had happened in all the other groups he had joined during his lifetime. With all his brisk energies Sandy would run things for a little while. Until finally he was pushed and he backed down. And then he would become the group clown. Good old Sandy. He's a gasser.

I shrugged and went over and shook Helen. She simulated a return of semi-consciousness. I got her up into a sitting position and slipped her shoes onto her slack feet. She mumbled inco-herencies. I pulled her up onto her feet and, half supporting her, walked her out into the sitting room.

"Bad shape?" Sandy asked.

"She doesn't seem any better to me."

Nan took her and guided her into the bathroom. As they passed Shack he reached out and gave Helen a massive, full-handed pinch on the buttock and winked at me with relaxed, expansive good cheer. "You make it good, doc?" he asked me. He had never been as friendly.

Nan, supporting Helen, looked back over her shoulder at him and pulled her lip up away from her teeth. "Good like you made it, you ox bastard?"

But there was no real rancor in her voice, and Sandy should have sensed that. He said, "I'U keep the monster tied up so he can't get to you again, darlin' Nano."

"Go chew a pill, you sick spook!" she snapped.

Shack gave a roar of laughter and clapped Sandy on the back. Sandy's glasses jumped off his nose and swung by one earpiece.

"She found herself a man," Shack said proudly. "She made a switch. You and Stassen spht the blonde, Sandy."

"Don't bang my back, you goddam oaf!" Sandy yelled.

Shack banged him again and laughed. Sandy went over and sat down, brooding.

When Nan came out with Helen, the blond girl's eyes were almost closed, and her head lolled loosely. She was doing well, but she was almost overdoing it. We put the meager luggage in

the trunk and got into the car, Nan in front between Sandy and Shack, with Sandy at the wheel.

Within a half hour the big jolt of dexedrine and the other wild range of happy pills had built Sandy back up to his usual level of joyous optimism. He wanted a new car, and he wanted to prove a theory of his. So we cruised a big residential area of Pittsburgh which seemed like damn foolishness to me. When he found what he wanted, he parked a block beyond and went back alone. He said he didn't need help. Within a shockingly short time he was back with a new Mercury. He said with roosterish pride that he had proved his theory that the last one to get to a private party doesn't want to block the cars in the drive, so he leaves his keys in the ignition like a good feUow. Hurray for the good fellow.

We brought both cars along, Sandy had another sparkling idea. We found a big auto dump, ran the Buick far back into the clatter, stripped off the plates and threw them into the night.

"Let them figure that the hell out. It's like confusion, man,'* he said. "How's baby doing, Kirboo?"

"I don't know. Maybe not so good."

We had another hot, fast car. We moved east, digging deeper into the night, never missing the little roads that Sandy had looked up and remembered. He had a complete map inside his head, and we were a little light moving along it.

I had to have a thoroughly empty road. If we were rushed by an oncoming car, it could go sour. And finally we were on a road that suited me. I took her hand and squeezed it hard. She squeezed back. And suddenly she began to breathe in a deep, rasping way, articulating each exhalation.

"What the hell?" Nan said, looking around.

"I don't know," I said. "I think she could be dying."

The great raw breathing went on, very audible over the sound of the motor and the tires and the night wind. It stopped abruptly.

"Is she dead?" Sandy asked.

Before I could answer, the breathing began again, slowly at first and then picking up the previous tempo.

"The next time," I said angrily, nervously, "it may stop for good, and the last thing I want back here with me is a dead blonde. Let's leave her the hell off, Sandy. This looks like a good place."

He slowed the car, then suddenly swung off Lato a wide and

level dirt road. He deftly worked it around until we were heading out, and turned off the lights and the motor. The breathing seemed three times as loud.

"Jesus, that's a terrible noise," Shack said.

I got out quickly and went around the car and opened the door on her side and got her out. She was completely limp. I got her under the armpits and dragged her. Her shoes came off. I could see them, and the tracks her heels made by the hght of a high half moon.

Sandy was beside me. "Where you taking her?"

"Off in the bushes."

We were talking in whispers. I heard Nan say, back in the car, "Hones' ta God, Shack, with you it's a disease."

And that cut the problem way down. I had been most nervous about Nan and her httle knife, and her high delight in using the httle knife.

I heard the sound of a brook as I pulled her into the bushes. And suddenly the ground dropped away and the girl and I went crashing and roUing down a short, steep bank into an icy stream. I cursed and hugged my elbow and got up onto my knees, in about five inches of water.

I suddenly realized that the harsh fake breathing had stopped. I got hold of the girl and wrestled her clumsily over to the muddy bank. There vras an entirely new quality to her inertness, and I realized that this time it was genuine. She had gone headlong onto the rocks,

"You okay?" Sandy called in a hushed voice. He came cautiously down through the brush.

"Got wet and hit my elbow. Let's get out of here.**

"Hold it," he said. He bent over the girl and put his ear on her back. "Heart's still thumping, man."

"So what?"

He found a rock the size of a softball and forced it into my hand. "Finish it up, man. Take it all the way."

I balanced the heavy stone in my hand. I touched the roundness of the back of her head with my other hand, under the softness of her hair.

Sandy made a noise Hke a chicken.

I turned in a way that partially blocked his vision, and I struck down hard with the rock. I hit the hard mud close to her head. It made a convincing noise that would turn stomachs.

I stood up so abruptly I knocked him back against the slope. "Let get the hell out of here."

"Is she .. r

"Get moving!" I yelled at him. We scrambled up the bank. Sandy kicked her shoes into the brush. Shack and Nan had moved onto the back seat. They didn't know or care whether the car was moving or standing still. We got back on the highway, and soon we were keening down around the curves of a long and dangerous hill.

A long time later Nan asked, leaning over between us, "Is she dead?"

"Like stone cold," Sandy said.

"And I'm living," Nan said.

"She had better legs, man," Sandy said.

"So where is she? Walking, running?" Nan asked.

She leaned back. We rushed through the small hills, drifted through the silent, ugly, sleeping towns. Our headlights unraveled the patched roads.

"Fee fie fiddly-I-oh. Fee fie fiddly-I-oh, oh, oh, oh."

We were with it We rode right out there on the forward edge of it, like a dog with his nose in the wind. The square world was noplace. We were a fly, and a blind man sou^t to catch us in Ms fist

I have been asleep and I resent most bitterly the waste of the thin edge of time I have left. I would have told all of it, right up to the end, but I guess not much of it is pertinent, not after the time we drove away from the girl. I reached for a paper tray of hamburgers and they snapped steel around my wrists. They were large, tough pros, and when they did look at me, it was the way a doctor might look at an abscess. Cool professional curiosity, plus the innate distaste of one who prefers to look at healthy tissue. Their stare turned me from a man into a thing. Put it another way. Maybe I had turned from a man into a thing, but had not known the transition was complete. Their eyes were cruel mirrors, so I soon learned to stop looking directly at anyone.

There is the temptation to drag this out. But I have said it all. TOMORROW has become TODAY and this is the end of me. This third day of April.

Ill try to get through what's left without slamming myself. I don't think I can. It must be a lot easier to die for something you believe in.

THIRTEEN

On the fifteenth day of April, twelve days after the miil-tiple execution, Dallas Kemp took an attractive couple in their late thirties out to see the hillside lot he owned. The man had that manner and assurance of money and success. A large corporation had recently transferred him to Monroe, and as he suspected he might spend many years in Monroe, he wanted to build the first house they had ever built. The wife was poised, and she had warmth and charm. When they talked together, there was about them that special aura only good marriages have.

They pulled the two cars over onto the shoulder of the country road and walked up and looked at the lot. Snow clung in a few low, shadowed places. The earth was moist, the first buds showmg.

The couple was pleased with the land, with the privacy and the view. Dallas Kemp left them standing where the house would be, and went down to his car and brought back the blueprint of the floor plan and turned it so that it was in the same position the house would be, so they could see what the windows would look out upon.

The man said, "Isn't it a little unusual? An architect owning the land and selling it to his client?"

"It's getting hard to find land with an contour. I picked it up myself because it's such an attractive site. I had ... a particular couple in mind, but they weren't able to use it."

"Then," the woman said, with a small frown, "if this house was designed for this site, then it was really designed for somebody else, not for us."

"Yes, it was. But the people I designed it for never even had a chance to see it. I like the house well enough so that ... I would like to see it built. I could design one for you, but I don't know if it would be this good. I know it wouldn't be better."

"It's a beautiful house, Mr. Kemp. As we said in your 189

oflace, it would have to be larger," the woman said. *'We have four very active children."

"It was designed so that the new wing can go off the north side," Kemp said.

"This is sort of a package deal," the man said