Curtains (6 page)

She pressed against the wood, her eyes
rolling around, looking for a place to hide. There was no hiding
from promises. Larry approached her, holding out the hammer and
nails.

"You promised," he said.

This time her whisper wasn't the husky,
practiced kind. "Don't hurt me."

"I would never hurt you. I love you,
remember?"

"What do you want?"

"I did for you, now you do for me." He
pointed to the coffin, hoping she'd be impressed by the craft he'd
put into it. "I want you to seal me up."

She didn't understand. They never understood.
"Bury you? But you ain’t dead yet.”

"I’m just trying it out beforehand. Dying’s
too important a business to put off till the last minute. Need to
check for size and comfort, and I can't do it alone. It takes
two."

"You're crazy."

Larry stared at the lamp until his eyes
burned. "You love me. At least, that's what you said. I risk life
and jail and reputation for you, and you won't do one little thing
for me."

He turned away. She was like the others. You
ought to know better than to hope. You ought to know by now that
love is just a word, a selfish, lying, hurting word.

Then her hand was on his shoulder. Something
had changed between them. Maybe, seeing that Larry was willing to
kill for her if necessary, Betty Ann had found a strange respect.
"I always knew you was weird."

He smiled. Money didn't matter, not next to
the other thing. "It won't take but a minute. And I ain't got
nobody else. Nobody I can
trust
, that is."

He gave her a look like the one from that
time in the hayloft, the one she seemed to get all swoony over.
"You'll have to put the lid on. Do you think you can drive the
nails?"

Betty Ann nodded. He kissed her. She took the
hammer and nails. He climbed into the coffin and inhaled the
cherry. She looked so good in her red dress.

The lid fit perfectly. The first nail was
awkward, she missed and busted her thumb. Her blood was likely
soaking into the wood. He was glad he’d passed on the shellac.

Love was built on blood and nails. You had to
have both, or it didn't mean a thing.

By the third nail, she was in the rhythm, and
drove it home with four blows. Sixteen nails total, while Larry's
heart pounded in time to the hammer.

Her voice was muffled, but he could
understand her. "Are you all right in there?"

He said nothing. The air was stale. The
coffin was the perfect size. He could be buried in this, when the
time came. It would be a proud way to meet the dirt.

"Larry?" she hollered.

He waited.

“Can you breathe?”

She wouldn’t hear him if he answered.

“I been thinking,” she said. “If I don’t let
you out, I get the money all to myself.”

God damn. She was a keeper. Not like those
others, the ones who folded when they hit a knot or caught a
splinter. This might be the one he could trust sharing his land
with, his life with, his death with. Two holes and two tombstones,
side by side, forever.

They could get to that part later. First, he
needed to see how good she was with a shovel.

He pulled the hammer and crowbar from the
secret fold in the velvet and began loosening the lid from the
inside, too excited to concentrate. Hope pulsed through his
flesh.

This one might work out. She was the real
thing, better than the others. A killer. Tight nails, warm blood, a
wooden soul. And cold, cold dirt in her heart

A woman who could nail your coffin was worth
keeping around.

One way or another.

###

THE NAME GAME

When Vincent awoke, he felt as if he'd been
dropped headfirst from the Statue of Liberty's torch.

He moaned and rolled over into a stack of
moldy cardboard and newspapers. The avenue tasted of Queens, smog
stung to the ground by the long rains of the week before. A car
horn bleated, amplified by the brick canyons so that the noise
rattled Vincent’s eardrums. He tried to peel back his eyelids so
that the brilliant green in his vision could be scrubbed away by
the orange crash of daylight.

Damn this city
, he thought, each word
a hammer blow. And since he was bothering to think, he figured he
might as well try to remember. That was a little harder. He was on
his knees, supporting himself against the slick skin of a Dumpster,
by the time he got past the previous two seconds and on into the
last few hours.

It was morning. The aroma of bagels and
coffee drifted from some back door along the alley, fighting with
the stench of gutter garbage before mingling into a deeper smell of
rot. And if this was morning, then Vincent was—

Late.

He was supposed to catch a pre-dawn flight,
to be out of town before another sorry New York sun rose. No,
he
wasn’t supposed to catch the flight. He remembered
harder, and more painfully.
Robert Wells
was supposed to
catch that flight.

Robert Daniel Wells, his new identity, a
boring tourism official from Muncie. The Feds had set it up that
way. A tourism official could go places, sleep in a few motels, get
lost in America’s excess. Los Angeles for a convention to pitch
movie locations, then Oregon for a meeting of the Christmas Tree
Growers Association,
zippp
down to, where was it? Oh, yeah,
Flagstaff, Arizona, to sell Muncie to wealthy retirees. Good old
Indiana, that scenic destination, that mecca of the masses.

Dumb damned Feds. Like Joey Scattione
couldn’t figure that one out. With Joey’s resources, Vincent was
meat no matter what identity they gave him. What he needed was a
new face, new bones, a new
brain
, because his brain was
halfway down the back of his neck. He touched the welt on his
head.

Ouch.

He struggled to his feet, took a step, and
nearly tripped over a pile of rags. The pile stirred, a bottle
rolled to the asphalt, and a bleary eye opened amid a dark crack of
cloth.

“Suh—sorry,” Vincent said. He waited a moment
for the bum to acknowledge him, but the eye closed, extinguished
like an ember dropped in mud.

His hand went to his back pocket. No
surprise, his wallet was gone. It had contained nothing but cash, a
few hundred bucks. No biggie. He hadn't dared carry his fake IDs in
there.

Vincent took a couple more steps. Even if he
missed the flight, he still had the ticket. They’d let him catch a
later one. If he had a connector in St. Louis, maybe he’d slip out
of the terminal and throw Robert Wells in the ditch somewhere, dig
up some new papers. It could be done. Easier that way than screwing
around and counting on the Feds.

That’s why he’d went alone. With a spook
escort, Joey’s people would have spotted Vincent a mile away. Feds'
shoes sparkled like skyscrapers, and they always looked as if they
should be wearing sunglasses. Might as well carry a sandwich sign
that said, “Hey, bad guys of the world! I’m a spook.”

So Vincent had talked them into playing it
his way. Take up the tourism official act, gawk at the skyscrapers,
do the same kind of dumb things an Indiana bumpkin would do. Like
try to catch a cab at four in the morning.

Whoever had clobbered him must have been an
amateur. Certainly wasn’t any of Joey’s muscle. Joey would want
Vincent whole, uninjured, wide awake, and ready for some slow
face-to-face. Joey's people would show Vincent ten thousand ways to
die, all at the same time, and none of them easy. Joey would want
it all on videotape, since he couldn't be there in the flesh.

And the Feds, they weren’t in for the
double-cross. Not only were they too dumb, Vincent had given them
the slip back at the hotel at around midnight. Sure, they probably
would have a spook or two haunting the airports, but they wouldn't
want to make a scene. Better to let Vincent get out of town and
track him later.

Vincent neared the end of the alley, the
traffic thick on the street in front of him. Pedestrians clogged
the sidewalks, hustling off to make the nine o’clock ritual. He
felt better already, though his pulse was playing “The War Of 1812”
in his temples. Safety in numbers, and nowhere were numbers more
numerous than on a Manhattan street.

He attempted to whistle, but his throat was
too dry. He put on his indifferent grimace, the mask that New York
wore, and slouched into the crowd. He fell in behind a woman
walking her poodle. He nearly stepped on the poodle when it stopped
to relieve itself. The woman pretended not to notice either Vincent
or the steaming brown pile on the concrete.

Vincent reached inside his jacket, to the
inner pocket. He stopped. The ticket was gone.

Someone had taken his papers. The social
security card, the Indiana driver's license, the credit card made
out to "Robert Wells," even a blood donor card. All the FBI's
clever forgeries, along with four more bills, were now in the hands
of some idiot mugger. Or mugger of idiots, whichever way you wanted
to look at it.

Vincent had been so wrapped up in worrying
about Joey Scattione that he hadn't considered falling victim to a
less ruthless and much more random predator. His predicament hit
him like a wrong-way cab. If he were forced to be Vincent
Hartbarger, he wouldn't last a half a day in this city. Not with
Joey's people on the hunt. And Vincent Hartbarger at the moment was
broke, no way out, no standby plane ticket, no bulletproof vest. No
gun.

"Out of the way, dude," growled a kid with a
skateboard under his arm. The kid shoved past Vincent, greasy black
hair shining in the lights from a nearby shop window. Vincent moved
against the glass, out of the main crush of foot traffic. He
glanced at the passing faces, on the lookout for Joey's people.

Calm down, take a breath. Think.

Thinking brought the headache roaring back.
Goon must have used a tire iron.

He fumbled for a cigarette, then remembered
that Robert Wells didn't smoke. But he wasn't Robert Wells anymore.
He searched for the secret folds in his coat, the place where he'd
kept his Vincent effects. Because he'd planned all along that, once
he blew this town and shook the spooks, he'd return to being
Vincent, at least until he could scrape together a new identity. He
didn't have much faith in the Feds and their "witless protection
program."

But the worse got worser. His fingers came
away empty. The mugger had taken his Vincent stash, along with the
extra fifty he'd tucked back for hard times. Vincent closed his
eyes and leaned against the wall, inhaling car exhaust as if the
carbon monoxide would dull his headache.

I'd rather be anywhere than right here, on
Joey's turf, in Joey's town. Hell, I'd even take Muncie. At least
in Muncie, the only thing I'd have to worry about would be dying of
boredom. And I hear that takes YEARS...

Voices to his right pulled him back to the
morning street. Two people were shouting, pointing into the shop
window. In New York, two people talking on the street either meant
a drug deal, a sex solicitation, or the beginning of a murder. But
these seemed like ordinary folks, the kind who talked to windows
instead of invisible demons.

Vincent looked into the storefront. It was a
pawn shop, bars thick across the window, a bank of surveillance
cameras eyeing the street like hookers on payday. A Sanyo
television lit up the window, the flickering images reflected in
the glass. It took Vincent a moment to register what he was
seeing.

A shot of the East River, a harried-looking
reporter trying vainly to control her hair in the breeze, a cutaway
to emergency response and fire vehicles, then a wide shot of
Kennedy Airport. Back to the river, a small orange speck in the
water. Zoom in. A torn life jacket.

A computer graphic popped up in the corner of
the screen, the station logo a leering eye. Underneath, in slanted
red letters, "Flight 317 Crash."

Poor bastards
, Vincent thought.
Imagine what kind of headache you get from dropping a
mile-and-a-half from the sky.

He was turning back to the street, his pity
for the victims already fading, when the number "317" bounced back
into his roaring head. He froze, got shoved by a balding man in a
suit, yelled at by a package courier.

317. Hadn't that been
his
flight? The
one that was supposed to whisk Robert Wells to a new life?

He went into the pawn shop. A bank of TVs
filled one wall, half of them tuned to news coverage of the crash.
The anchor had her hair in place now, must have snagged some hair
spray during the cutaway. The computer graphic now read "Live!"
under the station logo, in those same blood-red letters.

"We're at the scene of the crash of NationAir
Flight 317, which plummeted shortly after takeoff from Kennedy
Airport this morning—"

"What a mess, huh?" said a voice behind
Vincent. He thought at first it was one of Joey's boys. But it was
the pawn shop proprietor, a small man with glasses and a scar
across one cheek. His nose looked like an unsuccessful
prizefighter's.

"Yu—yeah," Vincent agreed.

"Took about a minute for it to hit the
water," the shop owner said, leaning over a glass case of watches.
"Just enough time for them to pray and crap their pants."

The man starting laughing, the laugh spasmed
into a coughing fit. The news anchor's voice fought with the racket
of the man's lungs.

"—no survivors have been found. The Boeing
747 was reported to be carrying a full contingent of 346
passengers, according to NationAir records. F.A.A. authorities are
arriving on the scene—"

"It was one of them Aye-rab bombs, I bet,"
said the shopkeeper. "Don't see why the rest of us got to suffer
'cause the kikes and the ragheads can't get along."

"They said the plane was full," Vincent said,
half to himself.