4
By the time Steve Arnette reached the back of the shack, his khaki clothes were soaked with sweat and creek water.
He came up from the creek bed with his rifle aimed directly at the back of the shack. He moved slowly, certainly, in a crouch.
But while his rifle was fixed on the shack, his mind was fixed on the reward money. By now, he’d pretty much decided he’d kill Richie McGuire. Helen Cummings could handle any legal hassles that might arise.
He came to a stand of jack pines and stopped, raising himself up. His bones cracked and his thigh muscles were sore from crouching so long. It had taken fifteen minutes of crouching to reach this point. Jimmy appeared briefly in the window — then vanished.
The day was beautiful as ever, the intoxicating smell of burning leaves making him melancholy for the better times of the past. The hoot of a distant train in the autumn-blazing hills filled him with an almost enjoyable loneliness. Maybe some long day from now, when the death of Richie McGuire was long behind him, when the town of Crystal Falls was also long behind him... he would call Susan and she would see, at long long last, that he was the person she should be with. And then she would join him...
He inadvertently put his weight on the end of a small fallen branch. The snapping sound seemed as loud as a gunshot in the woodsy silence.
The thing to do now was to swing wide, get in position to charge the front door of the shack, kick it in, and then move quickly to the trapdoor and Richie.
Richie might think he was tough. But he wouldn’t be tough after a minute or so of what Arnette had in mind...
He circled wide, leaving the protection of the jack pines to arc about twenty yards directly in front of the shack.
Then, hefting his rifle, patting his holster to make sure that his magnum was still comfortably in place, he put his head down and began running straight for the cabin door.
Rotting wood gave beneath his shoulder, wood that ripped away from the doorframe with a nasty tearing sound.
The smells of the cabin rushed at him: decades-old water-soaked wood; dog shit and cat shit and squirrel shit and raccoon shit; the sweet-smelling soil beneath the floor where wood and linoleum alike had rotted through; and the ancient, shocking scent of death... so many, many creatures having died in here in the past eight decades.
The sights were no more pleasant, the floor littered with crumpled-up cigarette packs, McDonald’s wrappers, Trojan packages, Hostess Twinkie wrappers, crushed Pepsi cans, stray pages torn from girlie magazines, and tin cans that had held everything from baked beans to SpaghettiOs, the cans being the sustenance of hobos and drifters and fugitives...
The trapdoor was at the back of the cabin, concealed by an empty metal cabinet so rusty that it had rotted through in many places. You had to push the cabinet away to get to the trapdoor... and then pull it back in place when you were down on the ladder.
He had to work quickly now.
He tossed the once gray and now empty cabinet aside with no more effort than he would have a cardboard box.
Then he dropped to his knees, threw open the trapdoor.
The chill, fetid smell of grave-darkness...
He pushed the barrel of his rifle down there and opened fire...
This was the only way he’d ever get Richie out of there... to scare him out so he could get a clean daylight shot at him...
The gunfire was noisy in the old shack. Three... four... five shots... the sound harsh and violent in the surrounding forest silence.
There were shouts, curses, cries, gunshots fired in response.
Arnette jumped back from the edge of the trapdoor while Richie fired off his rounds...
Richie was an amateur. He wouldn’t be carrying the extra rounds Arnette was... and he wasn’t a marksman, either. Every summer in Des Moines, at the police academy where Hadley sent each of his officers for further study, Arnette took first place on the firing range.
Arnette waited for silence from below. Richie would quit firing for a time and then Arnette would shove his rifle down there and fire some more. He didn’t especially give a damn if he killed Richie down there... but it would definitely look better if Richie died out in the sunlight with his weapon in his hand... making it look as if Arnette had had to fire in self-defense.
Then he heard, from below, Jimmy whimpering.
But Richie surprised him.
After a few moments of silence, Arnette leaned cautiously forward and poked his rifle in the trapdoor opening.
He was just about to squeeze off a few shots but Richie beat him to it, fired off three quick shots of his own.
This time, the cries and curses belonged to Arnette, who jerked back from the opening as the bullets tore into what was left of the roof.
The son of a bitch.
The thing was to move now. Not to give Richie any more time.
Arnette moved.
He squeezed off three shots.
This cry was different. This was not a cry of fear. This was a cry of pain.
But the voice — teary, horrified, frightened — didn’t belong to Richie. It belonged to Jimmy.
There was some luck for you, hitting that crazy bastard.
Jimmy began sobbing.
“You asshole!” Richie shouted. “You hit Jimmy.”
“Bring him up, then.”
“Yeah, and have you shoot us both?”
By this time, Jimmy was wailing. “Am I gonna die, Richie?”
“You’ll be fine, Jimmy.”
“You got to get me to Doc Klever. You gotta, Richie, or I’ll die.”
Jimmy was getting more scared by the moment. This was actually to Arnette’s advantage, of course. This just put additional pressure on Richie to come up from the cellar.
“C’mon up, Richie.”
Jimmy was sobbing.
The sound aggravated Arnette. He hated this kind of weakness. It was his wife’s kind of weakness. She had no reserve of strength to call on in times of crisis. At least Jimmy had the excuse of being retarded or whatever the hell he was.
“C’mon up, Richie,” Arnette said again.
There was no response from Richie.
“It hurts real bad in my side, Richie,” Jimmy said. “Real bad.”
“You son of a bitch!” Richie shouted up.
His exasperated tone made Arnette smile. Richie would soon enough give in. Richie would soon enough come up from the cellar.
“Tell him to get you to Doc Klever, Jimmy,” Arnette shouted down into the darkness.
Jimmy blubbered some more. “He’s right, Richie. You gotta get me to Doc Klever.”
Then there was a great cry of pain. Wherever he’d been hit, Jimmy’s wound was starting to take a major toll. Richie didn’t know what he was going to do. Jimmy could very easily die down there.
“He’ll kill us if we go up there, Jimmy,” Richie said. “Don’t you understand that?”
Arnette smiled again. Richie really was getting desperate. He was trying to reason with Jimmy, for God’s sake. Who could reason with Jimmy?
“You’re losing a lot of blood, Jimmy,” Arnette said. “Ask Richie if he’s just going to let you die down there.”
“Richie, please!” Jimmy wailed. “Please help me!”
“You bastard!” Richie shouted up at Arnette.
“You’re running out of time down there, Jimmy. You really are.”
Jimmy fell to sobbing, then, a wretched, pathetic sound that spoke implicitly of how desperately human beings cling to life... even human beings like Jimmy, who really didn’t have much to live for...
“Oh, Richie!” Jimmy cried. “It really hurts! It really hurts!”
This time, significantly, there was no epithet from Richie.
Just the echoes of Jimmy’s painful scream.