Panic came in and took Rudell, then. He couldn’t just stand here, he had to do something, didn’t know what. Get out of this goddamn place, that’s what he had to do, get out there on top of one of those low hills where he could, hunker down and see anyone coming at him, where he could spot anything that moved out of this town. Good.
He swung the door, open and looked out. Nothing stirred but the wind. Down the rise from his lay the town, its ancient shadows cutting deep gouges into the moonlight. Over on the right was Tod’s house with the light on. No movement at all from over there, no sound, nothing. Rudell leveled his rifle straight ahead and stepped through the doorway.
The man was waiting for him against the outside wall. He gripped the rifle’s barrel and twisted and heaved, and Rudell was lying flat on his back, disarmed, staring open-mouthed and gasping with fear at a black head and impossibly wide shoulders silhouetted above him against the sky.
Rudell had known all along who it was. He’d shaken with fear inside, remembering those cold, dead eyes looking for targets, and he knew he was going to die. He closed his eyes tight.
Black said, “Get up.” Rudell heard the sound of the lever cocking the Savage. He opened his eyes just as Black kicked him hard in the calf of the leg. “Get up, I said.”
Suddenly, strangely, they were back inside Warren’s front room. Neither of them paid any attention to the body. Rudell could see Black clearly in the moonlight. He was dressed as before, only the windbreaker was zipped all the way up, hiding the white T-shirt. The big hard hands were out of sight inside tight dark gloves.
The rifle clattered against the opposite wall as Black tossed it away and confronted Rudell with empty hands. Rudell wondered where the other gun was, the one Black had used to kill the others.
“Where is he?” There wasn’t a trace of civility in Black’s voice. It was the snarling voice of an animal.
“Who?” Rudell faltered.
Black gritted his teeth and said, “Okay.” He snatched Rudell by the front of his dirty shirt. “You are making me mad, punk.” He slammed Rudell against the wall and kicked him in the pit of the stomach. Rudell pitched to the floor, wanting to breathe, to dry out.
“When I get mad I break things.” Black picked up the ranger’s chair and smashed it against the desk, flung most of the remains through the window. The shattering glass shocked Rudell and made him look up through his pain. Black was holding the leg of the chair and advancing. “I think I’m gonna start with your hands.”
The rough treatment had shaken all resolution out of Rudell. He knew he had no chance against this man, that this savage individual was his master, who would gleefully break every bone in Rudell Foster’s body if he wanted to, and that Rudell could do nothing to stop him.
“I’ll tell you,” he gasped, wanting to weep, “I’ll tell you—”
Snarling obscenities, Black reached down with one hand and hauled Rudell to his feet. The strength in the man was terrifying. Rudell would have handed over his mother to him if asked. “Save it for later. Right now you show me the money.”
Rudell didn’t want to go down there, but the presence of Black was an imperative he couldn’t think of defying. He merely nodded and led the way to Tod’s house.
The lights were still on. The card game had still be in progress. They’d been playing for poker chips, that’s all. Joe Morgan had been holding the bottle of Seagrams when Black’s bullet found him, and the room stank of whiskey. The others were all there, too. Rudell tried not to look at them as he and Black walked back to the pantry.
Rudell pulled a case of Spam onto the floor and removed the top layer of cans, and there was the money, neatly stacked, on the bottom with Tod Spender’s ledger book.
“Siddown over there,” murmured Black, and Rudell obeyed, easing himself down into a corner and drawing up his knees. He watched as Black picked up each stack, fanned it with his thumb like a deck of cards to check the denominations, and replaced it.
“We ain’t hardly touched it,” Rudell ventured, like a child trying to please an agry parent. “We wasn’t going to spend it but a little at a time.”
Black ignored him and opened the ledger. He grinned without humor and remarked, “Had a hundred and twenty thousand to start with and got it down to one-nineteen-eight. You guys are big spenders.”
The animal seemed to have gone out of Black, now. The terrible raging energy had left him, to be replaced by the affability he’d shown earlier that day, right out there on Tod’s porch. Now that Black had what he came for, Rudell dared to hope, maybe he might be softened. Maybe now Rudell might get on his good side. Maybe now Rudell could live. He cast about for something to say, trying to engage in small talk with a mass murderer.
Black dropped the ledger back on top of the money and stood. “Okay,” he said in the same civil tone as that morning, “put the cans back in the box.”
Rudell did so, then looked at Black for further instructions. Black raised his eyebrows at him. “Micchiche, remember? If you’re gonna need a shovel, you better find one.”
Black carried the shovel and made Rudell carry the box with the Spam and the money. Walking over to the ancient cemetery, Rudell plucked up his courage and asked, “How’d you know?”
Alongside him, Black smiled. “The guy who runs the gas station down by the turnoff remembered Micchiche coming in. Never saw him leave, and there’s only one road to Glory. Only reason Micchiche would bother with this dump was to hole up, so I just asked the residents. The ranger got scared and tried to throw me out. You guys lied to me. Every goddamn one of you had to be in on it. You stashed his car in the mill, right?”
“Yeah, but — oh! You saw the marks on the dirt road where we swept out the tire tracks, didn’t you? Pretty smart.”
“That ain’t it, Rudell. You guys were just too stupid about the whole thing. Handled it like amateurs.”
“You’re in that Mafia, ain’t you?”
Black smiled again. “There’s no such thing.”
“You’re one of them hit men, huh?”
“Been called that once or twice.”
The grave looked like all the others, except that this leaning headstone had nothing carved on it. Rudell put the box down while Black stood away from him and tossed the shovel.
“I sure hope you clowns didn’t put him a full six feet under. Gonna be a lot of digging for you if you did, Rudell.”
“Nope. We didn’t.” Rudell got to work with the spade.
Black said, “You make sure you toss all the dirt over there on the other side, right?”
Well, he still wasn’t taking any chances, but Rudell could see he was getting friendlier. Most men warmed up by talking about themselves to a willing listener, Rudell knew. So he continued to get on Black’s good side. Between spadesful, he asked, “How you think we did it? I bet you got that all figured out, too.”
For a moment, Black just stood there in the moonlight, watching. Then, “What’s to figure? Micchiche came into town, found out who the residents were, and buttonholed a couple of you. Maybe he flashed some money. He offered you good cash to let him live here, out of sight.
“You guys added it up, decided he had a big pile with him and no one would ever know if you hid him really good and kept everything for yourselves. After you snuffed Micchiche, you scared the ranger into keeping his mouth shut, maybe forced him to take a piece of it so he’d be involved.
“So all six of you buried him, shoved his car in the mill, brushed out the tracks, and played dumb to anybody coming looking for him. Right?”
Rudell’s spade struck wood. He started shoveling the dirt swiftly now. “Mainly. There was a while there we thought we might have to kill Warren, too. Make it look like an accident, you know. But we didn’t have to, he went along.” Rudell bent, scooped, threw. Bent, scooped, threw. “What’d this Micchiche fella do, anyhow?”