Bartels climbed into the big-finned convertible’s passenger side. Roy propped the shotgun between them. They drove down into the village, cruised the main road looking for Imogene’s beige van. The family house was dark, and the parking pad at the Wig-Wam was empty except for an inch and a half of snow.
“Let’s check out the mini-mart,” Roy said.
They drove back to the mini-mart and gas station, which was locked and dark. Theirs were the only tire tracks crossing the lot. Bartels got out and looked into the repair bay. Snow was starting to pile up against the door, but he looked anyway. The interior was empty.
He got back in the car. “Where next?”
“We’ll try Howard’s place.”
Roy drove back the way they had come, past the tilting frame houses, up along a ridge that had a few big trucks parked on one side, then past a low institutional building that looked like a regional school, and a mile or so later — where Bartels could guess at the snowy road only because there were mailboxes and utility poles — Roy Hanigan started steering with one hand and pointing past Bartels. “It used to be their parents’ place, but then Imogene threw Bob Everly out, made him live behind the restaurant, so Imogene and Howard live there now. See the lights? And there’s the van.”
Roy doused the headlights, cut the engine, and drifted to a stop. “Let’s pay our respects to the widow. Maybe you should go up to the door first, Mr. Bartels.”
“Why me?”
“I want to know if they’re jumpy enough to shoot.”
“Let’s assume they are. You got the shotgun, you lead.”
Roy stepped past him and Bartels slammed his pistol into the back of the man’s head. Roy went to his knees, and Bartels hit him again. Roy sprawled in the snow. Bartels picked up the shotgun, patted the man’s bulky jacket and pants, and found a revolver that he stuffed into his pocket.
He took a roundabout route to the house, but his first guess was right: There was no easy way inside unless someone opened a door, which he didn’t think was likely. So he hunkered down beside the front porch and waited.
A sheriff’s cruiser arrived twenty minutes later. Lou hit the brakes hard when he saw the big fins parked in the road and jumped out. Roy Hanigan was lightly dusted with snow but still visible as a human lump. Lou ran to the porch, shouting, and the door opened before he got there. A big woman in a heavy wool jacket stared in alarm in the direction the deputy was pointing.
“It’s Roy’s car,” Lou gobbled. “And it’s Roy in the snow. Did you shoot him?”
“I ain’t shot no one. Neither’s Katie, not tonight. We better look around for Jeanie.”
“Or that out-a-towner,” Lou said. He was catching his breath, starting to think. “Did Joey say where the money was?”
“Yeah. Dummy had it in the ceiling at the bank. Katie and I got it. We been counting ever since.”
“How much you count?”
“Two hundred five, plus a little. Wouldn’t of guessed Joey had it in him. Lotta money.”
“Not enough,” Lou said and shot her. Imogene Cross pitched through the doorway and Lou followed, catching Katie at the table with her hand six inches from the big revolver she had used on her husband. “Howard and I agreed we couldn’t trust you gals,” he said and fired again.
Bartels, who had come onto the porch right behind him, pressed the shotgun against the center of the deputy’s back.
When Howard Cross arrived a few minutes later, he walked into the house and found Lou sitting in a straight-backed chair with a stack of money in front of him. He noticed the women on the floor. “Any trouble?” he asked.
From behind the door, Bartels answered. “Not much.”
He got them both handcuffed, took the loose guns out to the car, then pulled Roy Hanigan out of the snow. The big man had trouble walking but no trouble cursing Bartels. “Knew I couldn’t trust you.” When he saw the pile of money, he said, “You gonna shoot everyone and keep it all?”
“I wish,” Bartels said. The antiques shop was slipping, so he had to moonlight. Insurance companies paid fifteen percent of what he recovered. He did the math for the big guy. Thirty thousand.
“We helped. You oughta cut me and Jeanie in,” Hanigan protested.
“How much do you want?”
“Half.”
“When I found the money, you were asleep in the snow.”
“A quarter. I drove.” His eyes shifted to the two deputies. “It’s getting so it ain’t much money for any of us. If we could figure what to do with Howard and Lou, we’d do better. Just a thought.”
“How much would you want?”
“A quarter?”
“But we’d have to kill them.”
Roy reminded him, “I never liked ‘em much.”
Bartels spent the rest of the night at the motel, gun on the pillow. When Roy and Jeanie Hanigan started thinking about it, they might decide the other three-quarters was worth paying him a visit.
Copyright © 2008 John C. Boland
Past Imperfect
by Jim Ingraham
That warm morning on the coast of Maine I parked my Jeep and walked on hard clay through a salt marsh to the stone steps of Elric Hoagy’s cottage. I hadn’t been here in a while and stood on the porch enjoying the briny wind coming in off Casco Bay, the cries of seagulls, the glints of sunlight on the swaying acres of grass, the fragrance of the marsh.
Elric was asleep in his old Morris chair by a fireplace, a white-haired man in his seventies wearing corduroy pants, bare feet resting on a pillow. Frenchie, his hound, was on a rug at his feet, jaw on his paws, watching me with mild interest. The wind stirred gauze curtains at an open window across the room.
I rapped on a post at the staircase. Elric didn’t budge. Frenchie thudded his tail, got up and came over to smell my hand, get his head scruffed, then went back to the rug.
“Leave your door unlocked like that,” I said, “someone’s gonna come in and steal you.”
Elric smiled before he opened his eyes. “Ain’t seen you in a while.”
I moved newspaper off a chair and sat down facing him. “Looking for Eloise,” I said.
He yawned, found an itch under a layer of shirt, and scratched it. “She’s out on the rocks, painting. Want something to drink?”
“Just ate,” I said.
“Don’t mean you can’t drink, Duff.”
He hitched himself up in the chair, glanced past me. “Sure that door was unlocked? Thought I locked it.”
“Wasn’t locked.”
“Thought I locked it,” he said, getting up.
He kicked his leg a few times, curing a cramp I supposed, then paused in the kitchen doorway. “You gonna sit a while? Or you just come to see her?”
“Can’t stay,” I said.
“Well, she’s out there,” and he left the room, not in the least offended.
I walked down a clay path to the end of the marsh, stepped through yellow patches of grass onto gray ledge, and watched a boy just offshore standing on the stern sheets of Elric’s renovated Jonesport dumping bait from a firkin, noisy seagulls fluttering over him. Like me twenty years ago, a high school kid earning summer pay hauling traps. I noticed Elric’s dory propped under hanging buoys against his fishing shack. The tide was out and a heavy odor was coming in off the mudflats.
Elric’s daughter Eloise was hunched forward on her stool, her back to me, easel in front. She was studying lobster buoys in the choppy water beyond rocks draped with seaweed. Across the inlet were the bleached barnacle-coated pilings of an abandoned wharf on an empty stretch of sand.