Vickery took a step toward him, and Hannigan could not tell if it was involuntary or menacing. Immediately McLain swept the tail of his suit jacket back and slid a gun out of a holster on his hip, centered it on Vickery’s chest. The coldness on Hannigan’s back deepened; he found himself holding his breath.
“Outside, mister,” McLain said.
Vickery had gone pale and the sweat had begun to run on his face. He shook his head and kept on shaking it as McLain advanced on him, as he himself started to back away. “Don’t let him do it,” Vickery said desperately. He was talking to Hannigan but looking at the gun. “Don’t let him take me out of here!”
Hannigan spread his hands. “There’s nothing I can do.”
“That’s right, Mr. Hannigan,” McLain said, “you just let me handle things. Either way it goes with this one, I’ll be in touch.”
A little dazedly, Hannigan watched McLain prod Vickery into the hall, to the door; heard Vickery shout something. Then they were gone and the door slammed shut behind them.
Hannigan got a handkerchief out of his pocket and mopped his forehead. He poured himself a drink, swallowed it, poured and drank a second. Then he went to the door.
Outside, the night was silent except for the rhythmic hammering of the breakers in the distance. There was no sign of Vickery or McLain. Hannigan picked up the shovel and the lantern from where he had put them at the house wall and made his way down the steps to the patio, down the fogbound path toward the tule marsh.
He thought about the two men as he went. Was Vickery the lunatic? Or could it be McLain? Well, it didn’t really matter; all that mattered now was that Vickery might say something to somebody about the grave. Which meant that Hannigan had to dig up the body and bury it again in some other place.
He hadn’t intended the marsh to be a permanent burial spot anyway; he would find a better means of disposal later on. Once that task was taken care of, he could relax and make a few definite plans for the future. Money was made to be spent, particularly if you had a lot of it. It was too bad he had never been able to convince Karen of that.
At the gravesite Hannigan set the lantern down and began to unearth the strangled body of his wife.
And that was when the third man, a stranger carrying a long sharp kitchen knife, crept stealthily out of the fog...
His Name Was Legion
His name was Legion.
No, sir, I mean that literal — Jimmy Legion, that was his name. He knew about the Biblical connection, though. Used to say, “My name is Legion,” like he was Christ Himself quoting Scripture.
Religious man? No, sir! Furthest thing from it. Jimmy Legion was a liar, a blasphemer, a thief, a fornicator, and just about anything else you can name. A pure hellion — a devil’s son if ever there was one. Some folks in Wayville said that after he ran off with Amanda Sykes that September of 1931, he sure must have crossed afoul of the law and come to a violent end. But nobody rightly knew for sure. Not about him, nor about Amanda Sykes either.
He came to Wayville in the summer of that year, 1931. Came in out of nowhere in a fancy new Ford car, seemed to have plenty of money in his pockets; claimed he was a magazine writer. Wayville wasn’t much in those days — just a small farm town with a population of around five hundred. Hardly the kind of place you’d expect a man like Legion to gravitate to. Unless he was hiding out from the law right then, which is the way some folks figured it — but only after he was gone. While he lived in Wayville he was a charmer.
First day I laid eyes on him, I was riding out from town with saddlebags and a pack all loaded up with small hardware—
Yes, that’s right — saddlebags. I was only nineteen that summer, and my family was too poor to afford an automobile. But my father gave me a horse of my own when I was sixteen — a fine light-colored gelding that I called Silverboy — and after I was graduated from high school I went to work for Mr. Hazlitt at Wayville Hardware.
Depression had hit everybody pretty hard in our area, and not many small farmers could afford the gasoline for truck trips into town every time they needed something. Small merchants like Mr. Hazlitt couldn’t afford it either. So what I did for him, I used Silverboy to deliver small things like farm tools and plumbing supplies and carpentry items. Rode him most of the time, hitched him to a wagon once in a while when the load was too large to carry on horseback. Mr. Hazlitt called me Ben Boone the Pony Express Deliveryman, and I liked that fine. I was full of spirit and adventure back then.
Anyhow, this afternoon I’m talking about I was riding Silverboy out to the Baker farm when I heard a roar on the road behind me. Then a car shot by so fast and so close that Silverboy spooked and spilled both of us down a ten-foot embankment.
Wasn’t either of us hurt, but we could have been — we could have been killed. I only got a glimpse of the car, but it was enough for me to identify it when I got back to Wayville. I went hunting for the owner and found him straightaway inside Chancellor’s Cafe.
First thing he said to me was, “My name is Legion.”
Well, we had words. Or rather, I had the words; he just stood there and grinned at me, all wise and superior, like a professor talking to a bumpkin. Handsome brute, he was, few years older than me, with slicked-down hair and big brown eyes and teeth so white they glistened like mica rocks in the sun.
He shamed me, is what he did, in front of a dozen of my friends and neighbors. Said what happened on the road was my fault, and why didn’t I go somewhere and curry my horse, he had better things to do than argue road right-of-ways.
Every time I saw him after that he’d make some remark to me. Polite, but with brimstone in it — I guess you know what I mean. I tried to fight him once, but he wouldn’t fight. Just stood grinning at me like the first time, hands down at his sides, daring me. I couldn’t hit him that way, when he wouldn’t defend himself. I wanted to, but I was raised better than that.
If me and some of the other young fellows disliked him, most of the girls took to him like flies to honey. All they saw were his smile and his big brown eyes and his city charm. And his lies about being a magazine writer.
Just about every day I’d see him with a different girl, some I’d dated myself on occasion, such as Bobbie Jones and Dulcea Wade. Oh, he was smooth and evil, all right. He ruined more than one of those girls, no doubt of that. Got Dulcea Wade pregnant, for one, although none of us found out about it until after he ran off with Amanda Sykes.
Falsehoods and fornication were only two of his sins. Like I said before, he was guilty of much more than that. Including plain thievery.
He wasn’t in town more than a month before folks started missing things. Small amounts of cash money, valuables of one kind or another. Mrs. Cooley, who owned the boardinghouse where Legion took a room, lost a solid gold ring her late husband gave her. But she never suspected Legion, and hardly anybody else did either until it was too late.
All this went on for close to three months — the lying and the fornicating and the stealing. It couldn’t have lasted much longer than that without the truth coming out, and I guess Legion knew that best of all. It was a Friday in late September that he and Amanda Sykes disappeared together. And when folks did learn the truth about him, all they could say was good riddance to him and her both — the Sykeses among them, because they were decent God-fearing people.
I reckon I was one of the last to see either of them. Fact is, in a way I was responsible for them leaving as sudden as they did.