Hard Case Crime: The Vengeful Virgin (19 page)

“You’re drunk, Jack.”

“So what?”

“Well, I’d like a drink, too. You might at least offer me one.”

“Okay, okay.” I got up and lurched out into the kitchen, found the other bottle of whisky. “Little one?”

“No. A big one.”

I poured her half a water glass full, splashed some water on top of it, and took it in to her. I drank another long one out of the bottle. It socked me hard. I sat down with the money. The whole room was going.

I heard a noise and looked up.

“You still here?” I said.

“Yes. I’m still here. Pour me another.” She handed me the empty glass.

“Well,” I said. “An old toper, eh?”

“No.”

I poured her another big one and she took it and drank it. I looked at the money and heard a crash. I looked up. She had thrown the glass into the fireplace. She stood there grinning at the fireplace.

“Watch it,” I said, “You’re getting plastered.”

She turned and looked at me, and her eyes were glazed a little.

“Jack, let’s go to bed.”

“I don’t want to go to bed. The hell with it.”

“Not even with me?”

“Not right now. Jesus Christ, lay off, will you?”

“I just asked you to come to bed.”

“I want to sit here.”

I looked up at her. She was glaring at me. She was mad as hell. I thought, The hell with it, then.

“What I wanted to tell you,” she said. Her voice was flat and level. “When you went out to the store. I saw a car.”

“Good for you. Good eyes. Take care of ’em. Precious possession. You’ll never know when you need a good pair of eyes. Saw a car—what kind of car?”

“A yellow hardtop.” She came closer. “Jack, I swear it was the same car I saw going up and down past the house the other night. The one I told you about.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before?”

None of it was coming through very well. I fought to clear my head, but it only became worse.

“Jack?”

“Yeah? What now?”

“Who is it owns a yellow car? You know somebody who owns a yellow hardtop. I think it’s a Buick. Who?” She paused and I tried to hold my head up, but I couldn’t seem to do it. The hell with it. I was stoned.

“It’s that Grace, isn’t it,” she said. “She owns a yellow hardtop Buick, doesn’t she?”

“Yeah. How’d you guess?”

“Now I know why you took so long at the store.” I twisted my head up at her, trying to see her. It frightened me deep inside someplace, but I couldn’t seem to do anything about it. She blurred and I said, “You’re crazy as hell,” and everything went away, and I came to, still trying to see her, still trying to say something, only it was daylight.

“Shirley?”

I felt panic. My head was bad. I came to my feet, running, calling her name.

“Shirley. What was that about a yellow car?”

She wasn’t in the bedroom.

I ran back across the living room, jumped the pile of money, then damned near fell over the bottles. They were on the floor and they were both empty. The last one had been nearly full, I remembered that. I knew I hadn’t drunk it all.

She must have.

And right then I remembered something she’d said a long time ago, it seemed like years.
“When I drink, it makes me go out of my head.”

I went outside. It was misty and chill with morning, but the sun was coming up over there, a yellow ball. I could feel the faint warmth of the sun.

“Shirley!”

Nothing. She wasn’t around. The car was there.

I ran on around the outside of the cabin, and down along the riverbank.

“Shirley?”

There was no sound except the dark purling of the water and the slow wind in the pines. High in the pines. I thought I saw something. I moved on down along the riverbank, calling her name, feeling the panic.

She had said something about a yellow car. Only what? There was one yellow car. Grace’s.

“Shirley?”

She didn’t answer. I kept moving along the riverbank.

Then I remembered, all right. She had said she’d seen a yellow hardtop Buick when I was over at Wilke’s Corners.

And she had said something about knowing it was Grace.

It couldn’t have been.

But I wouldn’t put anything past Grace.

If it had been Grace, then we had to get out of here. We had to leave right away.

I turned and looked back toward the cabin. Smoke was coming out of the chimney.

“Shirley?”

She didn’t answer.

I started back toward the cabin. I don’t know what made me run, but I did. I ran back along the riverbank, my feet sliding in the grass and mud. You could hear the black water pulsing against the banks. No other sound. Just my breathing and my feet pounding.

“Shirley?”

The cabin door was open.

I went up on the porch and inside.

She was in front of the fireplace, naked, and she was very drunk. You could see that right away. She didn’t stagger, but she was wild-eyed drunk.

The fire was the biggest we’d had, the flames leaping savagely up the chimney. The whole fireplace was a blazing sheet of white flame.

“Shirley?”

“Yes, Jack?”

She stood there in front of the fireplace. I looked over at the shiny white leather suitcase, at the pile of money.

The money wasn’t there. I looked around. The money wasn’t in sight anywhere. She must have put it in the suitcase.

“Where’s the money?” I said.

“I burned it.”

“You what!”

“In the fireplace,” she said. She turned and pointed at the flames. “In there, Jack. I burned the money. See it? It’s burning right now....” I went straight out of my head. I ran to the fire and sprawled across the hearth. I heard myself cursing, and above the cursing I heard the way she laughed. It was something terrible to hear. Then she didn’t laugh anymore.

I lay there on my belly, with my face thrust into the flames, scrabbling with my hands. The fire seared my hands and wrists and arms, but I kept snatching and scraping at the flames.

There were a few loose bills strewn around the hearth. But you could see all the rest of them in there, curling and seething and shriveling in the white flames. Crisping and roaring up the chimney flue. The chimney roared and shook, and it was a kind of wild laughter, too.

The heat drove me back. It became more intense.

I turned in a crouch.

“Don’t Jack. Don’t come near me.”

She stood across the room, facing the fire and me, and she had the P-38 in her hand.

I heard myself say it, but it didn’t really sound like me at all. “What are you trying to do?”

There was no expression in her voice, and none at all on her face.

“You don’t love me,” she said. “I know that now. If I’d only known it before, this would never have happened. You don’t love me. You love the money.”

“You’re drunk—you don’t know what you’re doing.”

“You’ve always loved only the money, and you can’t have the money. Don’t you know that? That’s how it works, Jack. See?”

“Put down that gun, Shirley.”

“No.”

I looked at my hands. They were burned badly, and beginning to pain. I was clutching two or three one hundred dollar bills.

“You may as well throw them into the fire with the rest of it,” she said. “They’re not going to do you any good. You’ll never be able to spend them.”

“What do you mean?”

“They’re coming after us, Jack.”

I stood up very slowly, watching her. Her eyes shone, glistening in the fierce light from the fireplace.

“It’s the whisky, Shirley. You’ve done this because you’re drunk.”

“Maybe. I told you about that, but you kept offering it to me. I warned you. But I was going to do this anyway.” She paused. “It came over the radio, Jack. I was right. That woman of yours was here. She followed us—she ran back and got her car and followed us, when we left town that day. Jack—she’s been hanging around outside, hiding ever since we got here. Isn’t that rich?”

“What are you trying to say?”

“On the radio, while I was burning the money. While you were outside. She told the police, and they’re on the way here right now. They didn’t say where we were, but they know. We can’t get away.”

“They can’t know.”

“She told them. Want to know what she said? She told them the truth, what I suspected, Jack. God, and I loved you—I love you, Jack. I believed in you. She told them you had done this because you loved her. She said you pleaded with her to stay with you, and that you told her you were working a deal where you’d have a lot of money, so you and she could go away together. But when she realized what you had done, she couldn’t bear knowing.” She took a step toward me. “So she told them. Isn’t that just too rich for words, though?”

“You don’t believe that.”

“Yes. I do believe it, Jack. I’ve had tiny doubts about you all along. Now I know. You never loved me. It was a way to get money, that’s all.”

She breathed deeply, and her breasts rose and fell. I saw the way her belly worked. She didn’t move that gun, either, and she was just as beautiful as ever, the way she stood there.

“Jack. I’ve a confession, I want you to know. I had never had a man before. All that was talk. I did it to impress you, because you were the kind of guy you were. I had to be like you—your type, so you’d like me. See?” She took another step toward me. She looked like a savage. “But, I loved you. There’s that for you to remember. I really did love you—with every bit of me.”

“This is all a lot of—”

“No, Jack. I’m going to kill you. Then I’m going to take my own life, too. Because, that’s how I want it. I’ll have that much, anyway. I won’t go back there and face them, have them look at me with dirty eyes and hear them talk. They’ll never know how cheap and false and empty all this was. I’ll have that.”

“Shirley, listen to me. You’re wrought up. You’re thinking all wrong. You’ve got to listen to me. We can get away, if we leave right now. We’d have each other.”

“Don’t lie to me! No!”

“Shirley, please.”

“Jack, Victor was right. You’re a son of a bitch. That’s all you are. Not a good son of a bitch. A bad son of a bitch. You didn’t even take my word on anything. A girl named Veronica Lewis told the police you had her check on Victor’s bank account. Was she another hot number, Jack?”

I dropped the bills from my hands. They fluttered to the floor at my feet, on the blankets. My hands burned horribly now and the pain seethed up my arms. I had to reach her, somehow. Maybe I could jump her and get that gun away from her. Because she was
mad!

“There’s lots more,” she said. “But why talk about it?”

“Shirley. Honey.”

“It’s a suicide pact,” she said. “That’s what it will seem. I’ve left a note outside, tacked to the door,explaining it. The note is a lie. Like everything else is a lie, since I met you. I told them we burned the money together, because we couldn’t have it, and nobody else would. I told them it was a symbol of our love. Isn’t that rich, Jack? A symbol of our love. But they’ll never know what that really means—how it means emptiness and nothingness. We knew we couldn’t escape the law. So we burned the money and killed ourselves. We would be together. We would never return to be sullied by the world.”

I stared at her. Then I leaped at her.

She fired. She fired the gun four times, and she hit me three out of the four. I never reached her. I stumbled with the pain in my legs and my side, and sprawled across the blankets. The pain was bad.

“Shirley!”

I was bleeding. I lay there and watched the bleeding and the pain was much worse than I thought pain would ever be. I hadn’t thought pain came so swiftly. But it did. It came in blinding white sheets, in hot waves, up and down my body.

I tried to move toward her. I couldn’t move. I was too weak and there was too much pain. I lay there looking at her through the reddish film that seemed to spread all through me and I knew that I would die.

She stood looking at me, holding the gun.

Then she stepped softly toward me and knelt on the blankets. Her face was hell to see. She reached out and touched my head, then snatched her hand away. All I could do was look at her. I kept trying to say her name.

“Goodbye, Jack. You son of a bitch.”

She thought I was dead.

She put the muzzle of that gun to her head and pulled the trigger. For a long moment she just sat there with half of her head torn away. I heard myself scream. It didn’t do any good. I couldn’t move.

She fell over on me, bleeding and dead.

Somehow I finally got her off me.

I lay there and watched the fire die down, waiting to die myself. I knew that by the time all the flames were gone, I would be gone.

There was no pain now.

I had to look across Shirley’s body to see the fire. It leaped across her bare back, and up out of her hair, seething, and it looked as if she were breathing.

She wasn’t breathing. She was dead.

It was quiet. As the fire died and died, I gradually came to hear the river again, pulsing endlessly against the banks, and there was the sound of the wind high in the pines. The day became brighter and brighter outside. The sun yellowed the room. And with the sun, the fire died still more, and finally it was nothing but embers.

But I was still all right. Not even bleeding. I was full of lead. My side was ripped open. My left leg was broken. But I was still alive.

I didn’t want to be alive.

Then I heard them.

They called the cabin.

“Ruxton! Come out with your hands above, your head.”

I couldn’t answer them. I could see the gun, still in her hand. It was about two yards away. I tried to reach it, but I couldn’t. I tried to crawl to the gun, because then I could kill myself. It was ironic. They would fix me up, if they got to me—fix me up for their kill.

I kept trying to reach the gun. But I couldn’t make it.

“Ruxton. We’re coming, in!”

I shouted at them.
“No! No!”

But it was just a sound in my head, it never came from my throat, nothing came past my lips but a whisper.

And then I knew that this was why I had never been able to make it, in all the years of trying, and this was what it had been coming to. Even when I went and took this beautiful gamble. It was simple. Some can make it, others can’t. It was that simple.