"Jeepers, this is really sad," Sarge said. "I"m gettin, like, all soft and mushy inside."
I picked up the gun and showed him the muzzle, and for a second or two he was the bird and it was the snake. "One more wisecrack and I"ll put a bullet in your belly. Do you believe that?"
His tongue flickered in and out with startling quickness, lapped across his lower lip, and disappeared again. He nodded. Keenan was frozen. He looked like he wanted to retch but didn"t quite dare.
"He told me it was big time, a big score," I resumed. "That"s all I could get out of him. He took off on April third. Two days later four guys knock over the Portland-Bangor Federated truck just outside of Carmel. All three guards dead. The newspapers said the robbers ran two roadblocks in a souped-up "78 Plymouth. Barney had a "78 up on blocks, thinking about turning it into a stacker. I"m betting Keenan put up the front money for him to turn it into something a little better and a lot faster."
I looked at him. Keenan"s face was the color of cheese.
"On May sixth I get a card postmarked Bar Harbor, but that doesn"t mean anything - there are dozens of little islands that channel their mail through there. A mailboat does the circuit, picks it up. The card says: "Mom and family fine, store doing good. See you in July." It was signed with Barney"s middle name. I leased a cottage on the coast, because Barney knew that would be the deal. July comes and goes, no Barney."
"Musta had a terminal hard-on by then, kid, right?" Sarge said. I guess he wanted me to be sure I hadn"t buffaloed him.
I looked at him remotely. "He showed up in early August. Courtesy of your buddy Keenan, Sarge. He forgot about the automatic bilge pump in the boat. You thought the chop would sink it quick enough, right, Keenan? But you thought he was dead, too. I had a yellow blanket spread out on Frenchman"s Point every day. Visible for miles. Easy to spot. Still, he was lucky."
"Too lucky," Sarge almost spat.
"One thing I"m curious about - did he know before the job that the money was new, all the serial numbers recorded? That you couldn"t even sell it to a currency-junker in the Bahamas for three or four years?"
"He knew," the Sarge rumbled, and I was surprised to find myself believing him. "And n.o.body was planning to junk the dough. He knew that, too, kid. I think he was counting on that Lewiston job you mentioned for ready cash, but whatever he was or wasn"t counting on, he knew the score and said he could live with it. Christ, why not? Say we had to wait ten years to go back for that dough and split it up. What"s ten years to a kid like Barney? s.h.i.t, he would have been all of thirty-five. I"d be sixty-one."
"What about Gappy MacFarland? Did Barney know about him, too?"
"Yes. Cappy came with the deal. A good man. A pro. He got cancer last year. Inoperable. And he owed me a favor."
"So the four of you went out to Cappy"s island," I said. "A little n.o.body-on-it named Carmen"s Folly. Cappy buried the money and made a map."
"That part was Jagger"s idea," Sarge said. "We didn"t want to split hot money - too tempting. But we didn"t want to leave all the swag in one pair of hands, either. Cappy MacFarland was the perfect solution."
"Tell me about the map."
"I thought we"d get to that," Sarge said with a wintry smile.
"Don"t tell him!" Keenan cried out hoa.r.s.ely.
Sarge turned to him and gave him a look that would have melted bar steel. "Shut up. I can"t lie and 1 can"t stonewall, thanks to you. You know what I hope, Keenan? I hope you weren"t really looking forward to seeing in the new century."
"Your name"s in a letter," Keenan said wildly. "If anything happens to me, your name"s in a letter!"
"Cappy made a good map," the Sarge said, as if Keenan were not there at all. "He had some draftsman training in Joliet. He cut it into quarters. One for each of us. We were going to have a reunion on July fourth, five years later. Talk it over. Maybe decide to wait another five years, maybe decide to put the pieces together right then. But there was trouble."
"Yes," I said. "I guess that"s one way of putting it."
"If it makes you feel any better, it was all Keenan"s play. I don"t know if Barney knew it or not, but that"s how it was. When Jagger and I took off in Cappy"s boat, Barney was fine."
"You"re a G.o.ddam liar!" Keenan squealed.
"Who"s got two pieces of the map in his wall safe?" Sarge inquired. "Is it you, dear?"
He looked at me again.
"It was still all right. Half the map still wasn"t enough. And am I gonna sit here and say I would have preferred a four-way split to a three-way? I don"t think you"d believe it even if it was true. Then, guess what? Keenan calls. Tells me we ought to have a talk. I was expecting it. Looks like you were, too."
I nodded. Keenan had been easier to find than the Sarge - he kept a higher profile. I could have tracked Sarge all the way down eventually, I suppose, but I"d been pretty sure that wouldn"t be necessary. Thieves of a feather flock together . . . and the feathers have a tendency to fly, too, when one of the birds is a vulture like Keenan.
"Of course," Sarge went on, "he tells me not to get any lethal ideas. Says he"s taken out an insurance policy, my name in an open-in-event-of-my-death letter he"d sent his lawyer. His idea was that the two of us could probably dope out where Cappy"d buried the money if we put three of the four pieces of the map together."
"And split the swag fifty-fifty," I said.
Sarge nodded. Keenan"s face was like a moon drifting somewhere in a high stratosphere of terror.
"Where"s the safe?" I asked him.
Keenan didn"t say anything.
I had done some practicing with the .45. It was a good gun. I liked it. I held it in both hands and shot Keenan in the forearm, just below the elbow. The Sarge didn"t even jump. Keenan fell off the couch and curled up in a ball, holding his arm and howling.
"The safe," I said.
Keenan continued to howl.
"I"ll shoot you in the knee," I said. "I don"t know from personal experience, but I"ve heard that hurts like a mad b.a.s.t.a.r.d."
"The print," he gasped. "The Van Gogh. Don"t shoot me anymore, huh?"" He looked at me, grinning fearfully.
I motioned to Sarge with the gun. "Stand facing the wall."
The Sarge got up and looked at the wall, arms dangling limply.
"Now you," I said to Keenan. "Go open the safe."
"I"m bleeding to death," Keenan moaned.
I went over and stroked the b.u.t.t of the .45 up the side of his cheek, laying back skin. "Now you"re bleeding," I told him. "Go open the safe or you"ll bleed more."
Keenan got up, holding his arm and blubbering. He took the print off its hooks with his good hand, revealing an office-gray wall safe. He threw a terrified glance at me and began to twiddle the dial. He made two false starts and had to go back. The third time he got it open. There were some doc.u.ments and two wads of bills inside. He reached in, fumbled around, and came up with two squares of paper, about three inches on a side.
I swear I didn"t mean to kill him. I planned to tie him up and leave him. He was harmless enough; the maid would find him when she got back from her lingerie party or wherever it was she"d gone in her little Dodge Colt, and Keenan wouldn"t dare poke his nose out of his house for a week. But it was like Sarge had said. He did have two. And one of them had blood on it.
I shot him again, this time not in the arm. He went down like an empty laundry bag.
Sarge didn"t flinch. "I wasn"t c.r.a.pping you. Keenan jobbed your friend. They were both amateurs. Amateurs are stupid."
I didn"t answer. I looked down at the squares and shoved them into my pocket. Neither one had an X-marks-the-spot on it.
"What now?" Sarge asked.
"We go to your place."
"What makes you think my piece of the map is there?"
"I don"t know. Telepathy, maybe. Besides, if it isn"t, we"ll go where it is. I"m in no hurry."
"You"ve got all the answers, huh?"
"Let"s go."
We went back out to the carport. I sat in the back of the VW, on the side away from him. His bulk and the size of the car made a surprise play on his part a joke; it would take him five minutes just to get turned around. Two minutes later we were on the road.
It was starting to snow, big, sloppy flakes that clung to the windshield and turned to instant slush when they struck the pavement. It was slippery going, but there wasn"t much traffic.
After a half hour on Route 10, he turned off onto a secondary road. Fifteen minutes later we were on a rutted dirt track with snow-freighted pines staring at us on either side. Two miles along we turned into a short, trash-littered driveway.
In the limited sweep of the VW"s headlights 1 could make out a rickety backwoods shack with a patched roof and a twisted TV aerial. There was a snow-covered old Ford in a gully to the left. Out in back was an outhouse and a pile of old tires. Hernando"s Hideaway.
"Welcome to Bally"s East," Sarge said, and killed the engine.
"If this is a con, I"ll kill you."
He seemed to fill three-quarters of the tiny vehicle"s front seat. "I know that," he said.
"Get out."
Sarge led the way up to the front door. "Open it," I said. "Then stand still."
He opened the door and stood still. I stood still. We stood still for about three minutes, and nothing happened. The only moving thing was a fat gray squirrel that had ventured into the middle of the yard to curse us in lingua rodenta.
"Okay," I said. "Let"s go in."
Surprise, it was a dump. The one sixty-watt bulb cast a grungy glow over the whole room, leaving shadows like starved bats in the corners. Newspapers were scattered helter-skelter. Drying clothes were hung on a sagging rope. In one corner there was an ancient Zenith TV. In the opposite corner was a rickety sink and a stark, rust-stained bathtub on claw feet. A hunting rifle stood beside it. The predominant odors were feet, farts, and chili.
"It beats living raw," Sarge said.
I could have argued the point, but didn"t. "Where"s your piece of the map?"
"In the bedroom."
"Let"s go get it."
"Not yet." He turned around slowly, his dipped-in-concrete face hard. "I want your word you ain"t going to kill me when you get it."
"How you going to make me keep it?"
"f.u.c.k, I don"t know. I guess I"m just gonna hope it was more than the money that got you cranked up. If it was Barney, too - wanting to clean Barney"s slate - you did it, it"s clean. Keenan capped him and now Keenan"s dead. If you want the bundle, too, okay. Maybe three-quarters will be enough, and you were right - my piece has got a great big X on it. But you don"t get it unless you promise I get something, too: my life."
"How do I know you won"t come after me?"
"But I will, sonny," the Sarge said softly.
I laughed. "All right. Throw in Jagger"s address and you"ve got your promise. I"ll keep it, too."
The Sarge shook his head slowly. "You don"t want to play with Jagger, fella, Jagger will eat you up."
I had dropped the .45 a little. Now I lifted it again.
"All right. He"s in Coleman, Ma.s.sachusetts. A ski lodge. Is that good enough?""
"Yes. Let"s get your piece, Sarge."
The Sarge looked me over once more, closely. Then he nodded. We went into the bedroom.
More Colonial charm. The stained mattress on the floor was littered with stroke-books and the walls were papered with photographs of women who appeared to be wearing nothing but a thin coating of Wesson Oil. One look at this place and Dr. Ruth"s head would have exploded.
The Sarge didn"t hesitate. He picked up the lamp on the night-table and pried the base off it. His quarter of the map was neatly rolled up inside; he held it out wordlessly.
"Throw it," I invited.
The Sarge smiled thinly. "Cautious little pencil-neck, aren"t you?"
"I find it pays. Give it up, Sarge."
He tossed it over to me. "Easy come, easy go," he said.
"I"m going to keep my promise," I said. "Consider yourself lucky. Out in the other room."
Cold light flickered in his eyes. "What are you going to do?"
"See that you stay in one place for awhile. Move."
We went out into the main room, a nifty little parade of two. The Sarge stood underneath the naked lightbulb, back to me, his shoulders hunched, antic.i.p.ating the gunbarrel that was going to groove his head very shortly. I was just lifting the gun to clout him when the light blinked out.
The shack was suddenly pitch black.
I threw myself to the right; Sarge was already gone like a cool breeze. I could hear the thump and tumble of newspapers as he hit the floor in a flat dive. Then silence. Utter and complete.
I waited for my night vision, but when it came it was no help. The place was a mausoleum in which a thousand dim tombstones loomed. And the Sarge knew every one of them.
I knew about Sarge; material on him hadn"t been hard to spade up. He"d been a Green Beret in Vietnam, and no one even bothered with his real name anymore; he was just the Sarge, big and murderous and tough.
Somewhere in the dark he was moving in on me. He must have known the place like the back of his hand, because there wasn"t a sound, not a squeaking board, not a foot sc.r.a.pe. But I could feel him getting closer and closer, flanking from the left or the right or maybe pulling a tricky one and coming in straight ahead.
The stock of the gun was very sweaty in my hand, and I had to control the urge to fire it wildly, randomly. I was very aware that I had three-quarters of the pie in my pocket. I didn"t bother wondering why the lights had gone out. Not until the powerful flashlight stabbed in through the window, sweeping the floor in a wild, random pattern that just happened to catch the Sarge, frozen in a half-crouch seven feet to my left. His eyes glowed greenly in the bright cone of light, like cat"s eyes.
He had a glinting razor blade in his right hand, and I suddenly remembered the way his hand had been spidering up his coat lapel in Keenan"s carport.
The Sarge said one word into the flash beam. "Jagger?"
I don"t know who got him first. A large-caliber pistol fired once behind the flashlight beam, and I pulled the trigger of Barney"s .45 twice - pure reflex. The Sarge was thrown back against the wall with force enough to knock him out of one of his boots.