It looked like a howitzer.
“Why?”
“I... oh, I don’t even know. I’ve been dreaming about him, John. He’d kill me if he knew, I know he’d kill me, and I can’t even think about it without turning cold inside. I thought it would be good to... to have something. In case something happened. I don’t know.”
“Where did you get it?”
“It’s his.”
“How come you’ve got it?”
“I took it. He kept it in his desk for years. Then it got switched to one of the filing cabinets. He’ll never miss it. I don’t think he’s looked at it once in the past eight months.”
“Ever shoot it?”
She shook her head.
“Ever handle any gun?”
“No.”
“Then you probably couldn’t do anything with it if you had to. Nine people out of ten can’t hit the side of a garage at twenty feet with a handgun. The only time you might ever shoot this would be if you panicked. You would probably miss and be in deeper than ever. Or else you would kill somebody and get tagged with it.
“But chances are you’d never fire the gun at all. You’d just carry it, and you’d get unlucky and he’d just happen to look in your purse the way I just did. Or someone else would look in your purse, anyone. Or you’d drop the bag and the gun would go off. Or any of a thousand other damn fool things that wouldn’t happen if you didn’t do a harebrained thing and carry a gun along.”
She stood wordless, and about to cry. The teakettle had been whistling throughout the tail end of my speech. I turned the burner off and the whistle died.
I said, “I didn’t mean to fly at you like that. Guns make me as nervous as a virgin bride on opening night. They scare the hell out of me. I won’t even work with anybody who carries one. All they buy you is trouble. A bank robber needs one, a killer needs one, all the thickheaded heavies need them. Nobody with a brain has to have a gun on his hip. Not even you.”
“I feel—” I reached for her arm. She drew away. “I feel like an idiot,” she said.
“Forget it. I’m just glad I found this thing.”
“I almost wish you hadn’t. You must think—”
“I think I’ll be glad when this is over. And when you don’t have to worry about anything more terrifying than what pattern glassware to buy for our little cabin in the pines. Is this loaded, by the way?”
“I think so.”
I sat down on a kitchen chair, holding the gun gingerly. Guns do bother me. I hunted now and then when I was a kid, but nothing beyond birds and small game. I’ve never used a handgun. I do not like them at all. This one was a Smith and Wesson, 38-caliber, three-inch barrel, a safety on the grip. I shook my head at the last and thought she would never know to depress the grip safety before firing. The gun was all risk and no reward. I fumbled it open. It was loaded all the way, with a slug waiting there right smack under the hammer, which proved that Wally Gunderman didn’t know a hell of a lot more about guns than she did.
I pulled its teeth, set the shells upright on the table top. I put the gun back together again and held it out toward her. She drew away and shook her head.
“I don’t even want to touch it,” she said.
“Should I leave it here? I could take it with me and dump it somewhere, but it would be better if you put it back in his files. If you’d rather not—”
“I don’t mind. I just... put it on the counter, John. I don’t want to touch it now. I’ll take it with me when I go to work.”
“I’ll get rid of the shells for you.”
“How?”
“I’ll put them down a sewer. No problem.”
“I’m nothing but problems tonight, aren’t I?”
“I’m not complaining.”
“Dragging you all the way here for nothing, and then this—”
“I’m glad I came. And glad I found out about the gun. It’s worth the trip just keeping you from toting it around. You don’t have to be scared of him, baby. He won’t know a thing until you’re a million miles away. He may never find out, he may drop dead long before he’d figure out that he’s been had.”
“It’s this waiting—”
“You won’t have to wait much longer.”
We weren’t any of us going to wait much longer. I had been laboring on details like Michelangelo on that Roman ceiling. I was so busy getting everything utterly perfect that I’d lost sight of a fairly important fact. Every extra day was just that much more hell for Evvie. I was hard at work on my masterpiece, and she was the one getting all that paint in her eyes. A bad mistake.
Not that day but the next I told Doug we were ready. And the following afternoon he called Gunderman and said yes to the deal, a firm yes, an all-the-way yes. An hour later I called Wally. Everything was set, he told me. In five days time he and Mr. Douglas Rance would put it all on paper. The deal was already being set up.
“I’ll come in the night before,” he told me. “You and I, John, we have some celebrating to do. You can show me that town and I’ll teach you how to put a coat of paint on it.”
I told him that sounded like a good idea.
So the days crawled by and the nights dawdled but passed, and he came to Toronto like Caesar to Rome. He wanted to hit every bar. We very nearly made it. He drank steadily and steadfastly refused to get bombed enough so that we could call it a day. I drank less than he did but not little enough to stay especially sober.
He did most of the talking. Some of it was about money, some of it was about Evvie. Once he gripped my arm and winked owlishly at me. “Some woman,” he said. “Some wonderful woman.”
I looked around to see who he meant. “Not here,” he said. “I mean Evvie. One in a million.”
“One in a million,” I echoed. We were in complete agreement on that point.
He let go of my arm and dumped his face into one hand. He scratched idly at his earlobe. “If you only knew,” he muttered secretly.
If you only knew, I thought.
And in some other remarkably similar bar he winked conspiratorially at me. I smiled politely and returned the wink, and he threw back his big head and roared.
“Easy,” I said. The waiters were beginning to stare at us. “Easy, old pal.”
“All mine,” he said.
“Easy.”
“Signed and sealed. All mine.”
“All yours, old buddy. But take it easy.”
He grabbed all the checks, overtipped all the waiters, winked at all the girls, and was the goddamned life of every goddamned party. “A celebration,” he said, at least four hundred times. “A celebration.”
I almost told him it was just a shade premature.
Back in my room, I was hanging my jacket over the back of a chair when the phone rang. I answered it, talked for a while. Then I got the rest of my clothes off and fell into bed, and the next thing I knew it was morning and the phone was ringing again.
Fifteen
Maybe I was getting old. When they rang the room in the morning the phone set little devils dancing in my head. I grabbed the phone and said all right, damn it, all right, and put the phone in the cradle and found my way to the john. The demons kept doing the twist inside my skull. I went through the standard wake-up ritual and tossed in a pair of aspirins and a Dexemil. All of this helped me wake up, and this in turn did little more than make me more aware of my headache. Too much Scotch, too little sleep — I was definitely getting too old for the life. The roadhouse in the mountains beckoned.