I laid my finger alongside the trigger guard. The metal was only a little chilly. The clip, which holds eight rounds, was already in place. I snapped the first shell into the chamber and flicked the safety off. I curled my finger lightly around the trigger and took aim.
The first shot broke Ahab’s right foreleg at the middle joint. He collapsed heavily. The second shot missed. The third passed high through the rear of his body, but did not break the spine. With difficulty and in obvious pain he struggled to his feet and limped toward me on three legs. “Don’t,” he called. “Oh please don’t.” I fired again. He fell, but continued squirming forward. “Please,” he said, “I love you. Don’t.” His blood was trickling and spraying bright red onto the dirty gray snow. I kept firing. “Please, I love you. I love you, I love you.” The seventh round split his skull. He spasmed and lay still, his broken leg bent beneath him.
I ejected the last round. It broke through the crust of rotten ice and disappeared, unspent. I went home.
It is summer now. Voraciously, I am eating life.
He intended this.
This is what he intended.
He did.
The interceptor
by Barry N. Malzberg
Death wore five faces that grim night. Could I pierce those grinning, evil masks and spot the real murderer?
Upper West Side
(Originally published in 1972)
He has been in the hotel room for a long time. No pleasure that but he thinks he has the crime figured out at last. It must have been his wife.
Everything, everything points to her. She must have killed Robinson in temper; then, when the placement of the securities next to the corpse would have tied the murder to her, turned the thing around and implicated him with that phone call which brought him to the scene just three minutes ahead of the police.
“Come over,” she said. “Something really terrible has happened; I appeal to you” and linked to her in the end, unable to understand what was going on he had come and had nearly been apprehended.
If he had not run immediately — but no sense in thinking about that now. He had gotten away from the police, just barely, and now at last he had solved the mystery. No time for speculation. No need for it either.
The motives were clear. Robinson and his wife must have been having an affair, had carried it on under him for a long time, his business partner and wife, and Robinson, bored, had been looking for a way out. Wryly he thinks that he could have warned Robinson about entrapment if only the man had been frank with him. In fact, regardless of consequences, Robinson might well have broken off the relationship if only given a little more time. And she could not bear to see it end that way, being that kind of a woman.
Yes, that must be it. He has nailed it to the ground. He lights another cigarette, looks around the room, paces to the window and looks at 72nd Street three floors below him, addicts milling in front of the hotel. He had been smart to have selected a location like this to be hidden although the circumstances were not of the best. If nothing else, living in this hotel for some weeks has made him socially conscious.
Perhaps it was not merely a crime of passion, though. His wife must have known that sooner or later Robinson would let slip news of the affair and the divorce would have been shattering. At all costs the woman believed in appearances. She would not even have a bedroom fight unless she was made up for it.
He sighs, walks away from the window. Relief overtakes him. It is good to know that he has the matter straightened out for himself at last and not a moment too soon. The police are closing in; even with the help of the inspector he could not remain in flight from the authorities forever. And to be apprehended in a hotel like this—
He picks up the phone to call the inspector and give him the explanation that will, at last, set him free. As he inhales deeply to brace himself, a fragment of dust in the foul hotel room penetrates his lungs in the wrong way and he coughs. He coughs repeatedly, wheezing, feeling the first stab of an asthma attack. Enough. Enough of cigarettes. In his new life he will definitely give up the habit. He stubs out his forty-third cigarette of the day and dials the inspector’s home number.
He thinks at last that he has got the thing clear in his mind. Not soon enough to have saved the agony of flight but not too late. Not by a damned sight too late. He lights a cigarette to celebrate this. When everything is over he will give up the habit but now he will indulge himself. The murderer was Robinson. Robinson! It all ties together. His business partner and his wife must have been having an affair for many years until his wife had lost interest and had told the man that she had reached the end, that the worn-out affair was not worth the risk of a lost marriage.
In a fit of jealous rage Robinson must have killed her in the offices, then planted the incriminating securities next to her and fled.
The securities had led the police inevitably to him and with his wife dead and Robinson out of the country he did not have a chance. It had been clever of Robinson to arrange that illness of his father in Italy, diabolically so, and no details had ever been checked. Did Robinson even have a father?
And so he had no choice but to become a fugitive while he tried to piece the crime together himself. He had to find the explanation that would free him of the authorities and restore him to the life that for so long he had taken for granted. But it had been difficult. Now the police had infiltrated into the hotel itself. The dope traffic in the halls and outside might distract them for a while; still it could be only a matter of time until they traced down his room number, poured into his door holding guns, and arrested him.
Fortunately, he had at last worked out the true explanation of the crime. He would be saved. If he could only reach the inspector quickly enough to start the process in motion — He coughs. The air in this old and vicious hotel, once elegant, now destroyed, located in an undesirable area of the city he has always hated even in the good years when he and his young wife lived here, this air has become increasingly foul and in the bargain, due to the terrible impact of the murder and then the building pressures on him he has been smoking too much, even beyond his normal excess.
He has always had a morbid fear of getting lung cancer and dying slowly, although his own doctor had assured him just two months ago, shortly before the nightmare began, that for a man of forty-seven he had been in perfect health. Slight elevation of the blood pressure; suspicious fullness around the area of the spleen, yes, but these were not serious problems and could be controlled. Lung cancer was contradicted under all circumstances.
He thinks now of his doctor, a thin, nervous internist who had also treated his wife, been taciturn about her own condition, had insisted on the sanctity of that relationship and of his files.