Jack Riley? It would have to be Jack Riley, but what the hell would Jack Riley want with a gun? Fighting that off, fighting his mind’s habit of digression—that’s what made him the first-rate loner mechanic he was, in a job that let his mind wander wherever it would while his hands and some other parts of his brain dealt with the particular problems of this particular automobile of the moment—Brian yelled, or tried to yell in a raspy hoarse croak that was all he seemed to have right now, “Suzanne, shut up and get off me! Mister, I’m putting the gun down, see? On the floor here, I can give it a push if you— Suzanne, get off me!”
She managed it, finally, rolling rightward off him, rolling over completely in a flurry of legs and tossing hair. She was dressed in black slacks and a gray wool sweater, so she didn’t flash any parts of herself, but Brian’s digression-ready brain did notice there was something very nicely womanly about that body in motion.
The hardcase hadn’t moved, but now he pointed a finger of his left hand at Suzanne while holding the revolver still trained on Brian, and said to Suzanne, “Right there’s good.”
Suzanne had wound up in a splay-legged seated position, and did move some more, folding her legs in close into something like a loose lotus position while she glared up at him, but at least she didn’t say anything else.
Then, as though Suzanne had been by that order effectively locked into a cage and put out of play, the hardcase looked at Brian again and said, “Tell me about her.”
Tell me about her? She’s right here; why doesn’t he ask her himself?
He’s the man with the gun, Brian, he gets to do it any way he wants. Brian said, “Her name’s Suzanne Gilbert. She works nights at Holy Mary Hospital in emergency room admittance. Her grandfather lives just down that way.”
“Jack?”
“Jack Riley, yeah, that’s her grandfather.”
And now Suzanne spoke up again; doesn’t she understand the situation here? Apparently not, because, sounding aggrieved, she said, “Why did you take Jack’s gun?”
He looked at her, and though his face didn’t change into anything you could call a smile, Brian still had the feeling the question had given him some kind of amusement. “Just in case Brian here,” he told her, “would draw down on me. You didn’t stop to see your grandfather last night.”
Last night? Brian looked from the hardcase to Suzanne, who didn’t even look worried, much less scared, and he thought, What about last night? Now there was some other story here, and he wasn’t in on it.
She said, “No, I just drive by, on my way home. Sometimes he can’t sleep, and, if that happens, he’ll sit out on his porch with the light on and I stop and we talk awhile. He knows I’ll be there and it makes it easier for him, so these days he’s sleeping more than he used to. Last night when I went by he was asleep in front of the television set, so that was fine, so I just went on home. I suppose that’s when you broke in and stole his gun.”
For Christ’s sake, Suzanne, Brian thought, leave it alone. But the hardcase didn’t mind. He just shrugged and said, “He didn’t seem to use it much.” Then he switched those cold eyes to Brian, considered him a minute as though he might decide after all he was the kind of pest you might as well shoot, and said, “When did you decide?”
“To be a hero?” Brian, beyond embarrassment, shrugged and looked away. “When I did it.”
The truth was, it had grown in him. The customer had come in the door, had given him two twenties and said he was at pump number three, and went out again. Brian had gone back to the brake drum repair he meant to finish before four o’clock closing time, and as he’d worked, his wandering mind gradually put together that customer’s face with one of the two Wanted posters he’d put in his desk drawer because he hadn’t wanted to throw away something given to him by the troopers but on the other hand didn’t want to put those two faces on the wall to be an irritation and a distraction all the time. In very short order, the two faces had blended into one and he’d known the customer out there pumping gas was one of the bank robbers everybody was looking for. Driving Tom Lindahl’s car, so God knows what had happened to Tom.
What to do about the bank robber? He’d decided it was a toss of the dice. If the guy pumped his forty bucks’ worth and drove away, then the next time Brian stepped into the office he’d call the state troopers and tell them he believed he’d just seen one of the bank robbers in Tom Lindahl’s car, and leave it up to them to catch the fellow. But if he came back in for change, that would be a message to Brian from On High that it was up to him to do the citizen’s arrest thing himself. He had his little automatic in the drawer, and the sequence seemed simple: pull out the gun, hold the robber, call the troopers, wait.
Well, that sure worked out well, didn’t it?
The hardcase must have been thinking the same thing, because he next said, “You’d have done better to wait till I was gone, then call the law.”
“Oh, I know that,” Brian said. “If you’d used up the forty and didn’t come back in, that’s what I was gonna do.”
“Well, then, Brian,” the hardcase said, “that should use up your stupidity for today, shouldn’t it?”
“I sure hope so.”
“So if I tell you to call your wife and say you’re gonna be late, don’t hold supper, might be nine or ten o’clock, you aren’t going to be cute, are you?”
“Well, I never do that,” Brian said. As long as he was relatively safe, he wanted to go on being relatively safe. “If I say that to her,” he explained, “she’ll know something’s wrong, I won’t have to try anything cute.”
The hardcase waved that away, shaking his head and the pistol, focusing Brian’s attention. “You got an important customer,” he said, “or a close friend, somebody’s got an emergency, got to drive to a wedding somewhere tomorrow, you’ve really got to get his car done.”
Surprisingly, Suzanne spoke up at that. “Dr. Hertzberg,” she said.
The hardcase looked at her. “Who’s that?”
She said, “He treats a lot of the people around here. My grandfather.” She looked at Brian. “And you.”
“I suppose,” Brian said. And he realized she was right, it was plausible.
The hardcase studied him, thinking about it. “If your wife doesn’t buy it,” he said, “I can’t leave you two here.”
“I know that,” Brian told him. “Suzanne’s right, Dr. Hertzberg’s the one man I’d stay here for, work late. All right, I’ll call her.”
“Good. Suzanne, you stay where you are. Brian, get up and sit at the desk, and make every move slow and out in the open.”
“Oh, I will,” Brian promised, and did. His ribs gave him a few nasty jolts as he struggled upward, using the same corner of the desk for support that had earlier punched him, and when he was at last on his feet, he was breathing hard, as though he’d been running. The hard breaths were also painful, so he turned slowly and eased himself down into his desk chair, and then the pain receded and the breathing got easier.
“Give me a minute to catch my breath,” he said, “think out what I want to say.”
“Go ahead.”
Brian looked over at Suzanne, and she was frowning at him with some sort of question in her eyes, but he couldn’t figure out what. He’d known her for years, a pleasant if somewhat bossy woman, a granddaughter of a neighbor, but he didn’t actually know her very well. He wasn’t the sort to chat up a divorced woman, living on her own the last few years, so when she frowned at him like that, her eyes full of some sort of puzzlement, he had no idea what she might be thinking, what it was she wanted to know.