“And if he came in, you’d pull that out... be willing to use it?”
“Hey,” Jerry says, blustering a little now. “I’ll do what I have to do, you know.” Then, as an afterthought, “I was in the Army.” Clerk typist at Fort Sheridan for two years, but why go into that?
“I guess you’ve got it covered,” Mick says, taking another sip. “You make a good martini.”
Jerry nods.
They sit there for a moment.
“Unless—” Mick says.
“Unless what?” Jerry asks.
“Well, what if he doesn’t come in. But somebody else comes in... for him?”
“For him?”
“In his behalf.”
“You mean, some other guy could come in and...?”
Mick nods. “You mentioned the mob earlier. What if they sent somebody in to tie up the loose ends?”
Jerry considers it a moment, then shakes his head. “I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not saying another guy couldn’t come in here, for the very reason you’re saying. But he wouldn’t have any way of knowing I was the only witness. I mean, there were a half dozen people nearby when it happened.”
“But none of them saw him.”
“Well, no. But he wouldn’t know that. The police didn’t release that fact to the press. So essentially, no one knows I’m the only witness.”
“Except for me,” Mick says.
Mick laughs, and Jerry relaxes. He’d felt a little twinge there.
Mick’s finishing his drink. Jerry hopes he doesn’t want another.
“Quite an experience,” Mick says.
“I’ll never forget it,” Jerry says. “Afterwards... looking at that gun, right there on the bar.”
“A .44 magnum.”
Jerry nods. “That’s what they told me,” then knitting his brow in thought. “How would you know that?”
There’s that twinge again. Some earlier pieces of their conversation are replaying in Jerry’s mind.
“I guess you wouldn’t forget that, seeing a .44 magnum lying on the counter, hearing a .44 magnum. Must have sounded like a cannon in here.”
For reasons he doesn’t fully understand, Jerry is feeling anxious, but he maintains a cordial tone as he looks at his watch and says, “Look at the time. I appreciate your stopping by, but I’m afraid it’s closing time. City ordinance and all.”
“I won’t keep you any longer,” Mick says. “Thanks for your service.”
“My pleasure.”
Mick reaches inside his jacket. But instead of a wallet, he pulls out a silenced.22 automatic.
Despite the subtle vibes he has been picking up about something being not quite right, Jerry isn’t expecting it. Neither would he have expected, had he had time to consider it beforehand, that he would have reached for the drawer beneath the bar... and much more quickly than either he or Mick could have imagined.
But not nearly quickly enough.
Two in the head.
Mick reaches over the bar and picks a bar towel off the sink.
He carefully wipes down his glass and the metal arms of the barstool.
He leaves the.22 right there on the bar. Pistol grip taped. Serial numbers filed off.
No witnesses this time.
Old Cedar
D. A. McGuire
“There it is; that’s the house. Now might take you a day, a week, but that’s what I want you to do, boy, what I can’t do, damn it all, because of these worthless legs of mine.”
Well, I didn’t understand, but that was more usual than not when it came to Mr. Horton. He’d give me a task to do with some half-baked instructions, as if I could see inside his head and figure out exactly what he wanted. So this time I just stood there and watched as he twitched a bit in the hot sun — he’d forgotten to wear his cap — and turned the walker around in slow, incremental steps to face the house, or houses.
We were on Long Bay Causeway Road. Most of the houses here fronted Manamesset Bay; many had smaller cabins facing the road. In fact we were looking at two houses — one on the road directly, and a bigger one farther back behind a grove of red cedars. The first one was an unimposing Cape Cod cottage of weathered gray clapboard and a dark-shingled roof. Of its two entrances, the front one faced the road and led into a small screened-in porch; the other, around to the left, probably entered into an equally small kitchen.
Three large hydrangeas in front of the cottage were just coming into blossom, and Mr. Horton was muttering about them. It seemed to me that hydrangeas — proper Cape Cod hydrangeas, that is — should only come in a sky-and-water blue, but these...
“Purple, damn it,” Mr. Hornton was still going on; I had sort of tuned him out. Must have been the heat. July first and we were already in the fourth day of a ninety-degree-plus heat wave. “She told me how to do it, and I wrote it down but damned if I lost the directions.”
“Directions? Mr. H., I think the heat is getting to you. Why don’t we go back to your place, I’ll make some lemonade and you can explain again—”
He turned to glare at me, his sharp blue eyes as penetrating as a knife blade.
Paint, repair, mow, rake, hammer, haul — that’s how I’ve spent most of my summer, well the last few summers, since around my twelfth birthday. Most of my work came from this man, Mr. Hornton, seventy-five years old (that’s all he’d admit to though I knew he was at least eighty), a retired sign painter, fisherman, and jack-of-all-trades who found me odd jobs when he didn’t have any for me himself. Today he had dragged me down Long Bay Causeway to show me my next job, and according to him, I damn well better take the job because a boy with nothing to do all summer is a boy just looking for trouble.
“I explained it already,” he snapped at me. “Molly Windsor, that’s her house, Old Cedar, up there on the bluff.” He indicated the much bigger house at the top of a gravel driveway that was barely visible behind the cedar trees. “She’s dead, told you that, too, you stupid boy. I’m paying good money for you to do this and why the—” He stopped suddenly to have a gagging-coughing-choking fit. It took him a few seconds to get out his handkerchief, then use it to mop his brow and his mouth, then to blow his nose. He swore a few more times too.
I said nothing. Patience would win. We made our way back to his house while he swore again at the walker. His house wasn’t much bigger than the little one with the purple hydrangeas.
“Easiest money you’ll ever make,” he told me over iced coffee and clam rolls. “I’ve been taking care of Old Cedar for, oh, fifty years, maybe longer.”
I added sugar to my coffee. He frowned, grunted, went on:
“Molly passed away last January, born in 1911, so...” A moment to contemplate the grandeur of extreme old age, another cough. The radio, tuned to the Red Sox, played in the background as he leaned over the kitchen table and looked me in the eye, “Woman was a saint! But I never in my life knew someone of so few words. You saw the little house with the hydrangeas? That’s where she lived. The big one, she rented that out. Anyhow, we could sit out on the porch all night playing cribbage or gin rummy, and I swear to you, mine would be the only voice I’d hear!”
“All night?” I laughed and pushed back, balancing the chair on two legs. “She was how much older than you? You had a thing going on with an older woman? You sly—”
He slammed his hand down on the table so hard it made me jump and spill coffee on my shirt. Suddenly, all four chair legs were on the floor.
“You listen to me, Herbert Sawyer Jr., I’m throwing an opportunity your way, and it’s all coming out of my pocket!” More coughing, hacking, the handkerchief produced.