“Easy, shit,” Colley says.
“Easy now.”
“Get over here, Will!” Colley says.
“I didn’t do nothin,” Will says.
Sam has a coil of clothesline in his hands. He stands on the stool like a man who’s supposed to be making a speech in Union Square, probably a speech about how inhuman it is to hang people. There he is with the rope, ready to demonstrate his propostion, but all he’s got by way of a crowd is a skinny hairy lady, a fat man in a flowered sports shirt, both relatives, and a stranger who has already killed his dog and who is looking at him now as if he’s ready to kill him, too. Colley would like to kill the son of a bitch. It is Sam Hollip who allowed a vicious animal to roam free in the woods, it is Sam Hollip who smacked him in the face with a shotgun stock. Colley would like to kill him and Myra both; he has not forgotten that Myra stamped up and down on his arm a few times, nice lady.
“Give me that rope,” he says to Sam. “Get down off that stool. Will, you come here.”
“I didn’t do nothin,” Will says again.
“Get over here, Myra. With your brother here.”
“He’s my husband,” Myra says.
“Congratulations,” Colley says, and hands the clothesline to Will. “Will, I don’t have to tell you I want them tied so they can’t get loose,” he says.
“That’s right,” Will says, and nods.
“You understand me, don’t you, Will? If they can free their hands...”
“No, no,” Will says, “I’ll tie them real tight.”
“Good, you do that,” Colley says. “I want them back to back.”
“Myra, would you step over here, please?” Will says. He sounds very tired.
Colley would prefer doing the tying-up himself, but the fingers on his right hand feel numb, and his arm is bleeding again from Myra’s fancy footwork. He thinks maybe the numbness is psychological, but the blood certainly isn’t. He does not even want to look at the arm. He will have to do something about the arm, but first things first. He watches as Will ties Sam’s hands and then Myra’s hands, and then wraps brother and sister-in-law with clothesline as though he is wrapping a pair of back-to-back mummies for burial. “Good and tight,” Colley says.
He remembers the times he’s been busted, that first time he shot Luis Josafat Albareda in the throat, and then the time he was running away after the tailor-shop holdup and the cops surprised him. Both times they clamped the cuffs on his wrists like they wanted to go clear through to the bone. The way a pair of handcuffs is made, there’s a sawtooth edge that slides into the other side of the cuff. You squeeze the cuff onto a person’s wrist, the sawtooth edge is engaged and can’t be reversed unless you unlock the cuff. Makes it quick and easy for a cop to slam the cuffs on a man, zing, zing. They throw a cuff on one wrist, they whip your arms behind your back, they squeeze the cuff on the other wrist, you think your arms are going to break behind your back there, and you think your circulation is going to stop, you are going to die of your blood stopping there at your wrists.
They throw you in the squad car like you were a plastic bag of garbage.
The minute those cuffs are on your wrists, you stop being a human being. To a cop, you are the perpetrator. Perpetrator is a word out of police manuals. It is not a human being. You are the perpetrator all the while you are in a police station, and after they book you and take you downtown to the Criminal Courts Building to be arraigned, you become the accused and/or the defendant, and once you are convicted and sentenced, you become the prisoner. When you add all those things together you are nothing but a plastic bag of garbage.
“Tighter,” he says.
Outside the shack, there are rows and rows of corn and what looks like cabbage. He has left Myra and her husband Sam trussed on the floor back to back, and he has locked Will in the storage shed behind the shack. He is wearing the only clean clothes he could find in the whole filthy place, a pair of blue trousers and a white shirt and a plaid sports jacket. Under the sleeve of the sports jacket, he has wrapped a pillowcase around his arm. He thinks the blood has stopped, but he is not sure.
From Sam’s bib overalls he has taken the three hundred and twenty-eight dollars Sam stole from him earlier, and he has also taken the Smith & Wesson revolver. There are six bullets in that revolver, and he can fire it very nicely, thanks, with just his left hand. He would have taken whatever other money Sam had, but Sam didn’t have a nickel of his own. His brother Will had seventeen dollars and forty cents, and Colley relieved him of the bills but left the forty cents as a tip for his assistance in tying up Mr. and Mrs. Sam Hollip, newlyweds in Colley’s mind, since he’s only learned of their marriage quite recently.
The pickup truck is parked near what looks like a pigpen, but there aren’t any pigs in it. Sam has promised him the keys are in the ignition. He has told Sam that if the keys aren’t in the ignition, if he has to come all the way back here again and go through Sam’s pockets again for the keys, why, he will just leave Sam on the floor with a broken head. But the keys are here, and Colley starts the truck and feels a sharp pain in his arm, and wonders if he’s going to be able to drive the thing. He wants to find a phone booth. He has to get some help for his arm. There was no telephone in the shack, and no directory, and he wants to find one now so he can call a doctor and get some help. He doesn’t know what town he’s in, except that it’s somewhere near the Pennsylvania border, and he doesn’t know if it’s big enough to have a hospital, but he doesn’t want to go to a hospital anyway. That’s where he should go, to a hospital emergency room, he knows that. But he suspects a hospital would have to report an animal bite, don’t they have to call the Board of Health or something? For rabies? He doesn’t know, but he can’t take the chance. All he wants is a regular doctor, general practitioner. He’ll go in, tell the doctor he got bit by a dog, tell him the dog’s dead. Doctor wants to report it, he’ll do it tomorrow, this is Sunday, no rush. Be different at a hospital, everybody crisp and efficient in white.
Colley puts in the clutch and manipulates the gear shift till he feels certain he knows where reverse and the various drive positions are. He backs around the pigpen toward the side of the shack. The place is silent. Sun is shining on the cornstalks, the sky behind them is blue and cloudless. He brakes the truck, shifts into first, and drives down the dirt road to the highway. At the highway, he turns right, heading north, driving past the diner he held up not four hours ago. There are no police cars outside; the hubbub probably died down a long while ago. He wonders if they’ve taken Jeanine into custody.
If they’ve got her in custody, they’ll be asking her what Colley meant in the diner when he said “That’s my wife.” She’ll tell them that’s all bullshit, she never saw the man in her life, she was sitting out there deciding whether to go in for a hamburger. But they’ll search the car, which is their right because a crime was committed and they have good reason to believe she was an accomplice, since the holdup man did after all say she was his wife. They’ll search the car without a warrant, they won’t need a warrant, and they’ll find two boxes of cartridges in the glove compartment — a box of 9mm Parabellums and a box of .32 Longs. And they’ll already know from Ballistics that the bullet that hit the short-order cook in the shoulder was a 9mm Parabellum, so already there’s a connection between the woman who was sitting in the Pinto outside and the man who was in there shooting up the joint.