She ran her fingers through her dark hair and shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t even care any more.”
“Look, sweetheart. You know it’s coming, I know it’s coming. As long as Lou is the big man, I have to follow orders. It won’t always be that way — I’ve got plans — but it is that way now. Six months ago if you’d offered me a hundred grand and you, I’d have jumped at it. But I got a district now, and I’m moving up, and all because I follow orders. So, it’s up to you, baby. You can have it quick, and feel nothing; or you can have it slow and painful.”
She looked puzzled. “But I...”
“The money, sweetheart. The money!”
A look of disbelief came over her. “But I thought... don’t you already have...?” she started laughing hysterically. “You stupid, ignorant slob. The fireplace — the money was in the fireplace!”
Joe jumped out of the chair to see flaming thousand dollar bills drop into the crackling flames. The laughing grew louder. He tried to pull out some of the scorched bills, but the flames leaped at him, singeing the hair on his arm. The high female laughter was breaking his eardrums! He had to shut her up! He crossed the room and grabbed the slender white throat with his left hand. Then he began pounding his right fist into the laughing face. The sound kept ringing in his ears. Even after the laughter had stopped, he kept pounding.
He stopped and let the limp form slide to the floor.
Panting and sweating, he flopped onto the couch and waited for calmness to return.
The rest was fairly simple. He loaded her into the front seat of the car, backed down the dirt path to the road, and shifted her into the driver’s seat. Then, after carefully wiping all his fingerprints from inside the car, he started the engine. He pushed the cold, slim foot onto the accelerator until the engine was screaming. The car was aimed at the six-hundred-foot drop bordering the road. Standing as far away from the car as possible, he reached inside and hit the gear selector into “Drive”. Engine screaming, back wheels spinning, the car lunged forward. It hit the edge, and for an instant seemed to be suspended. Then it dropped, bouncing once and exploding, the pieces falling into the dry rock valley.
It was done.
The headlights went on, and Joe waited for the black sedan to pull alongside him. When the car stopped, Joe saw what it was that had puzzled him. The lights of the passing car on the freeway had showed three shadows inside the car. Joe had expected only Nick, the driver. Why would Lou send three men just to drive him back to Los Angeles?
“Did you get the money, Joe?” Nick asked. He was a blond-headed kid who always smiled.
“It’s gone,” Joe said. “She burned it.”
“That’s a shame,” Nick said. The back doors of the sedan were opening. Joe saw the punched-in faces of the two goons getting out.
“What is this, Nick? I told you she burned it!”
“I know, Joe. I know. And I believe you. But it doesn’t make any difference. Sure, Lou will be disappointed, but it just doesn’t make any difference. You gotta go.”
The goons were coming towards him, backing him to the cliff.
“Please,” Joe said. “Maybe we can make a deal.”
Nick smiled. “No deals, Joe. Lou says you got plans, big plans, plans that maybe don’t include him. He says maybe you’re gettin’ too big. Sorry, Joe, but you understand, don’t you? It’s nothing personal. We’re just following orders.”
This Day’s Evil
by Jonathan Craig
Doubtless, there are some persons for whom “truth is a poison”. Conversely, equally disastrous effects may result from the opposite view, given a literal interpretation.
It had been a near thing. It had been so near that even now, as he crouched there in the bushes behind the small frame house of the man he had come to kill, there was still a taut queasiness in his stomach, and the sweat that laved his ribs was chill.
Half an hour ago, he had been five minutes away from murder. He had stood at the back door of the house, one hand on the heavy automatic in his pocket, the other raised to knock. Then, through the barred but open window, he had heard the hollow pound of heavy boots across the front porch, the hammering of a big man’s fist on the door, and the lazy rise and fall of Sheriff Fred Stratton’s singsong voice calling out a greeting to the man inside.
“Charlie!” Stratton had said in that fond, bantering tone he always used with Charlie Tate. “Charlie, you no-good rascal, your time has come. Open the door before I break it down.”
He hadn’t heard Charlie’s reply. He had already been running toward the bushes in the backyard, his knees rubbery and his stomach knotting spasmodically with the realization that if the sheriff had come five minutes later he would have caught him in the house with a dead man.
Now, hidden from the house by the bushes, his fear-sharpened senses acutely aware of the incessant drone of insects and the sickening sweetness of lilacs, Earl Munger shifted his weight very slowly and carefully, trying to still the tremor in his legs.
To have been caught in the act by that lazy, fat slob of a sheriff would have been just his luck, he reflected. Sheriff Fred Stratton was the laziest, slowest man in the county, with a maddening, syrupy drawl that made you want to jam your hand down his throat and pull the words out for him.
They made a good pair, Fred Stratton and Charlie Tate. Stratton had lots of fat, and Tate had lots of money. Not that Tate would have the money long; just as soon as the sheriff left, Tate would have neither the money nor his life.
There were sure some strange ducks in this world, Earl thought sourly. Take Charlie, now. Here he was, seventy if he was a day, with nobody knew how much money hidden in his house, and living like a pauper. He didn’t trust anybody or anything, unless maybe it was the sheriff, and he especially didn’t trust banks. If all the cash money he’d collected in rent from the property he owned all over the county was in the house, as it almost had to be, there’d be something pretty close to fifty thousand dollars. Charlie never spent a dime. He was a crazy old miser, with bars and bolts on every door and window, just like in the story books, and for all the good his money did him, he might just as well be dead.
And he would be, Earl promised himself again. The money might not do any good for Charlie, but it would sure do a lot of good for him. At twenty-three, he owned the clothes he had on, and another outfit just like them, and nothing more. But after today things would be different. There’d be no more conversations like that one night before last with Lois Kimble, when he’d asked her to go for a drive with him.
“A drive?” Lois had said, the perfect doll’s face as innocent as a child’s. “A drive in what, Earl?”
“The truck,” he had said. “It’s more comfortable than it looks.”
“You mean that old thing you haul fertilizer around in all day?”
“It doesn’t smell,” he said. “If it did, I wouldn’t ask you.”
“I’ll bet.”
“It doesn’t. And it rides real good, Lois. You’d be surprised.”
She looked at him for a long moment, the wide gray eyes inscrutable. “I’d be ashamed,” she said. “I really would, Earl.”
“You figure you’re too good to ride in a truck? Is that it?”
She started to turn away. “I meant I’d be ashamed if I were you,” she said. “I’d be ashamed to ask a girl to... Oh, it doesn’t matter anyhow. I’ve got to be going, Earl.”
“Sure, it matters. Listen—”
“Not to me,” she said, walking away from him. “Good-by, Earl.”
And an hour later he had seen her pass the feed store where he worked, beautiful in her thin summer dress, wide gray eyes fixed attentively on the well-dressed young man beside her, the low-slung red sports car growling arrogantly through the town as if it were affronted by the big unwashed sedans at the curbs, impatient to be back with its own kind in the city where the bright lights and the life and the pleasure were, where there were places that charged more for a dinner than Earl made in a week.