There is nothing to be afraid of, Mullaney said to himself, knowing he was lying, and turned toward the open cemetery gate again, reasoning it might be safer to face a thousand caterwauling but possibly benign specters rather than one obviously enraged and accusing demon, which K most certainly was. As he ran into the cemetery, he began to regret his decision. He tried to tell himself that his grandmother’s tales had only been fictions calculated to delight a young and excitable wee turnip like himself (“You’re a wee cowardly turnip,” she would laugh and say, after he had almost wet his pants in her lap), but whereas he was willing to exonerate old Grandma of any malicious intent, he was now beginning to think her stories had contained the unmistakable ring of truth. Yawning pits opened before his feet, gravestones moved into his path, trees extended clutching branches and roots, faces materialized on the air, laughter sounded in his ears and faded, screams permeated the night, dogs howled and bats hovered, skeletons danced and specters drifted on the wind, oh my God, he was scared out of his wits.
This is not what I bargained for when I said I’d take the gamble, he thought, beginning to sober up and becoming more and more frightened the more sober he got. I did not bargain for the mummy’s curse or the witch’s tale or the monkey’s paw. All I bargained for was a life of romantic adventure, and not K loping along behind me there wrapped in ceremonial funeral rags and shouting whatever the hell it is he’s shouting. I did not bargain for things that go bump in the night, or in the daytime either, I did not bargain for terror, I do not want terror in my life, I want peace and happiness and calm, I want it to be dawn, I want all these crawling things to go back into their holes, I want the sun to shine, “or I’ll shoot!”
He caught the words carried on the wind, words shouted in K’s unmistakable voice, and then heard the full sentence shouted again, “Stop or I’ll shoot!” and wondered why a ghost would have to shoot, and simultaneously became cold sober, and simultaneously realized that K, whatever else he was, was definitely not a ghost. He realized, too, that if anybody shot him, K or Kruger or anybody else, then nobody would ever learn where he had left the jacket, which was undoubtedly very important to all concerned, though he still couldn’t understand why, especially in its tom and tattered shape. The jacket, of course, was back in the stacks of the New York Public Library, resting on the dusty floor where he and Merilee had made love only a short time ago, and that’s where it would stay until tomorrow morning when the library opened. The trick then, he thought, as K shouted again behind him, was not to avoid getting killed by these people because he was certain they weren’t going to kill the only person who knew where the jacket...
Merilee, he thought.
Merilee also knows where the jacket is.
Well, he thought, that’s okay because Kruger only knew the money was supposed to be in the coffin, but not in the jacket. So chances are six to five he doesn’t know what else is important about the jacket, as neither do I. Besides, why shouldn’t he imagine the jacket is still on my back, which is where he saw it last, unless Merilee decides to tell him about our brief, ecstatic (for me, anyway) episode on the library floor? Well, hither thither willy nilly, let’s say he does ask her why the back of her velvet dress is covered with dust, and let’s say she does tell him what happened, which is doubtful, why should she mention the jacket at all, except to say that I had slit it open and found only cut-up newspapers in the lining? Why would she possibly mention I had left it on the floor back there, when she — no more than Kruger — has any knowledge of its importance?
Things were getting terribly complicated, and besides K was once again shouting “Stop or I’ll shoot!” which Mullaney knew very well he would not do.
A shot rang out.
The shot, carried on the wind, broke into a hundred echoing fragments of sound, put to rout the screaming banshees of the night, rushed away on the crest of its own cordite stench, and left behind it a stillness more appropriate to cemetery surroundings. Mullaney knew the shot had been intended only to frighten, but he was now impervious to fear because of his knowledge of the jacket’s whereabouts. Besides, he was beginning to realize something he had suspected all along, that his grandmother was simply full of shit, there were no ghosts, in or out of cemeteries. And since there were no ghosts to worry about, and since K could not harm him without eliminating the sole source of information about the jacket, he decided to play the same trick he had used to such marvelous advantage on Forty-second Street. He decided to reverse his field and charge K, knock him head over teacups and then run out of the cemetery and vanish until tomorrow morning. The wind was blowing fiercely as he turned, billowing into his jasmine shirt, causing the fabric to balloon out from his body. K stopped some twenty feet away from him and extended his arm again, the blued revolver in his hand pointing like an accusing finger. You can’t scare me, pal, Mullaney thought, and permitted himself a grin as he rushed toward K. An orange spark flared in the night, there was the sound of the gun going off and then nothing, and then a whistling tearing rush of air, and Mullaney was surprised to see a neat little bullet hole appear in his jasmine shirt where it ballooned out not three inches from his heart. He was surprised to see the bullet hole because if K was trying to frighten him, he was carrying things just a trifle too far. Didn’t K realize Mullaney was the source? Didn’t K realize Mullaney knew where the jacket was?
A third shot sounded on the air, and this time the bullet whistled past Mullaney’s left ear in terrifying proximity. He decided he had better knock K down before K did something he would be terribly sorry for later, like maybe killing Mullaney and therefore never finding out where the jacket was. Mullaney stepped to the left in a broken-field tactic he had learned from the encyclopedia, FA-FO, just as K fired again. Then he threw a block he had learned from the same volume, shoulder low, legs piston-bent, shoving up and back, catching K in the ribs and sending him tumbling over, the gun going off wildly in his hand for the fifth time, more than enough for an empty revolver if the gun was any one of a half-dozen or so in the Smith & Wesson line, but leaving yet another shot or more if the gun was one of the other Smith & Wessons, or a Colt, or a Ruger, or — oh boy there were too damn many of them, volume PA-PL, see also Handguns, Revolvers, Weapons and Warfare.
Mullaney ran.
He ran with uncontrollable glee, cavorting between the gravestones, laughing to the night, delighted to have learned that his grandmother was full of shit, delighted to have knocked K on his ass, and delighted to be the only person in the entire world who knew the jacket was important and who also knew where it was — which was to say, delighted to be himself, Andrew Mullaney.
It was funny the way Mullaney got to be a fugitive from the law within the next ten minutes. Oh, not funny the way Feinstein’s death had been, but funny in a fateful sort of way that caused him to reflect later upon the vagaries of chance and the odds against drawing to an inside straight.