He looks at her face. She looks like a hillbilly, what are hillbillies doing here in Jersey, he thought this was a civilized state? Her hair looks like rats are nesting in it, there is something crusted on her right check, pus or whatever, her lips are thin and cracked, the eyes are blue and cold and hard over the thin long nose and the smiling mouth, gold tooth in the corner. Behind her the clock ticks away minutes, throws minutes into the room onto the dirty floor; there are minutes twisting and turning on the floor.
“What do you want with me?” he says.
“Me? I don’t want nothin with you.”
“Then put up the piece and let me go.”
“Sam told me to keep you here.”
“I’ve got money,” Colley says. “I’ve got more than three hundred dollars,” he says, and reaches into his pocket and discovers the money is gone. “Where’s my money?” he asks the woman.
“Sam took it. That was a valuable dog,” she says.
“That was a killer dog,” Colley says.
“Even so,” the woman says, and shrugs and smiles. “He was a valuable dog.”
“Okay if I get up?”
“No, you better stay right where you are.”
“I’m cramped, I want to get up.”
“That’s too bad,” she says. “Stay put.”
“Fuck you, lady,” he says, and is about to stand up when the smile drops from her mouth, the gold tooth winks out. He thinks for a moment she will squeeze the trigger and end it all right then and there. He is immediately sorry for what he said, but he is also too late. She comes up out of the chair, and before he can turn away, before he even realizes what her intention might be, she kicks out at his wounded arm. She is wearing worn and faded, laceless white sneakers, and her kick does not hurt as much as it might if she were wearing Army boots, but it sends immediate pain shooting into his skull nonetheless. He tries to roll away from her, but she lifts her foot and stamps on his arm, and then stamps on it again as if she is trying to squash a persistent bug, until finally he manages to turn the arm away from her so she cannot reach it. Her legs are unshaven, her slip is soiled, there is pus on her face, she lives in a filthy shack in the woods — but she objects to his language. She is a censor, this fuckin hag, and she has stamped her opinion onto his arm, causing it to bleed again, making her point much more emphatically than if she had, for example, merely washed out his mouth with soap. Satisfied, she sits again. Against the wall, Colley whimpers in pain.
The door opens.
He cannot see the door from where he is lying in the corner, but he hears it opening, and then he feels the floorboards moving with the weight of the man who comes into the room.
“Over there,” a voice says, and he recognizes it as the voice of the man who hit him with the shotgun, and he realizes there are two men, or maybe more, coming into the room — their combined weight is what causes the floorboards to tremble beneath him.
“He’s got a dirty mouth,” the woman says.
“He get funny with you, Myra?”
“No, but he’s got an awful dirty mouth,” she says, and laughs.
Colley keeps his hurt arm pressed to the wall, fearful she will try to step on it again. He wonders what he is doing in this shack with these hillbillies. Before the hound came leaping out of the woods Colley’d been counting his money, which was a civilized enterprise, and before that he was running and laughing. Now there are three hillbillies standing around him — the woman Myra with her hairy legs and her soiled slip, and the man Sam in his dirt-encrusted bib overalls, and another man wearing glasses and a pair of khaki pants and a sports shirt patterned with big red flowers. Fat man. Fat legs bunched in khaki pants, fat arms hanging from the short sleeves of the shirt, fat face. Cigar in his mouth. He takes the cigar out now and looks down at Colley.
“What’s your name?” he says.
“What’s yours?” Colley answers, and sits up.
“Will Hollip,” the man answers, surprising Colley.
“I’m Jack Wyatt,” Colley says, giving them Jocko’s name; what the hell, Jocko is dead.
“Mr. Wyatt,” Will says, “you shot Sam’s dog here for no good reason...”
“The dog attacked me,” Colley says.
“You were on posted land,” Will says.
“That don’t give anybody the right to turn a killer dog loose on me.”
“That’s the gentlest dog ever did live,” Sam says.
“He sure is,” Colley said. “You see what he did to my arm?” he says, and stands up and shoves the arm at Will. “How you like that, Mr. Hollip? Does that look like I killed him for no good reason?”
“Sam says—”
“Sam wasn’t there, Sam didn’t get there till it was all over. And while we’re on Sam, look what he did to my face here.”
“You do that, Sam?” Will says.
“He killed my dog,” Sam says.
“And also Sam took three hundred and twenty-eight dollars from my pocket...”
“That’s a lie, Will.”
“And two pistols for which I have licenses. Carry licenses. They’re restricted to hunting, but they’re carry licenses, anyway.” He is lying, but he doesn’t think Will Hollip will realize it. He doesn’t know who Will Hollip is, but he is pleading to him now as he would to a higher authority, as though he’s been busted for the offense of killing a vicious dog, and has been brought to trial for it, and is now brilliantly pleading his own case to a benign fat judge who only needs a camera around his neck to be a tourist in Hawaii.
“You take two guns from this man?” Will asks.
“I did, Will. They’ll help pay for the dog.”
“If that mutt cost more than five dollars...” Colley says.
“Just watch it, mister,” Sam says.
“Well, Mr. Wyatt,” Will says, “I can understand how maybe the dog scared you, he’s a big dog. But—”
“Scared me? He came flying out of the woods...”
“But I got to agree with my brother here that what you did was illegal. Sam, we better take him over to the trooper station.”
Colley looks at fat little pot-bellied Will Hollip in his tight-fitting khakis and his flowered shirt, and he sees the resemblance now, the same blue eyes, the same shaggy brows — Will is simply a short, stout version of his big brother Sam. The three of them are watching him now, maybe waiting for him to make the move he should have made before it got too late, the way it is beginning to look too late now. Sam Hollip has taken the shotgun from Myra, who is either his wife or his sister, Colley can’t tell which. There seems to be no family resemblance except for maybe the hairy legs. He has hung the shotgun casually over his arm, but his finger is inside the trigger guard and Colley suspects he will not hesitate to shoot him if he makes a break for it. Or, if Sam doesn’t care to waste ammunition, he might simply hit Colley with the stock of the gun again, this time maybe breaking the cheekbone, whereas last time he merely bruised it. Colley does not want to get shot, nor does he want his cheek broken or even bruised. He only wants to get out of here.
If these dopes take him to the troopers with a complaint that he killed their hound, it’ll take the troopers ten seconds flat to realize that Colley is the man who held up the diner a mile and a half down the road, and then it’ll take them another ten seconds to find the teletype the New York fuzz undoubtedly sent out, and here we have Nicholas Donato, folks, bona-fide cop killer — is there maybe a reward? old Sam Hollip will ask. Colley cannot allow them to take him in. He cannot allow these country hicks to be the cause of his going back to jail forever. Because this time it will be forever. He has killed a cop, and for that you get either forever in jail or else you get the death penalty. That is one of the crimes you can still be executed for in the glorious, glamorous State of New York — cop-killing. Yes, the sentence for murdering a “peace officer,” as he is described in the criminal law, can be death, provided “there are no substantial mitigating circumstances which render the sentence of death unwarranted.” Kill a cop, and you are in trouble. Colley was in trouble even before he met these dopes. Now he is in even more trouble because these dimwits are going to lead him at gunpoint into the arms of the law and there goes the ball game.