Then it was just me and McCracken.
He took off his suitcoat and rested it on the stacked beer cartons. A.38 revolver was shoulder-holstered under his left arm. He unbuttoned his cuffs and rolled up his sleeves. Then he plucked something off a shelf-he was outside the cone of light, and I couldn’t make out what it was-and stepped into the light, right in front of me, the hand with the object, whatever it was, behind his back.
His battered fighter’s mug worked up a smile. “We already tossed your hotel room, didn’t find ’em. Didn’t find ’em in your car, neither….”
The noise of drunken merriment, from out in the saloon, leached through the wooden walls.
“I don’t have the goddamn bullets,” I said.
“Sure you do. You said you did. I heard ya tell Seymour and Dickie.”
“I was bluffing.”
He frowned; thinking was an effort. “Bluffin’?”
“There are no bullets. I was just tryin’ to extort some dough out of Seymour for Mrs. Long.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s the truth, goddamnit! George, listen to me-I knew those sons of bitches rooked Mrs. Long outa the ‘dee-duct box’ money. Asking around, I figured out Carl Weiss just punched Huey, and set you guys off!”
“I’ll ask ya again,” he said, and his hand came out from behind his back.
A rubber hose.
“Please don’t,” I said. In Chicago, it was called getting fed the goldfish; and it was a meal I’d been served before.
It hadn’t agreed with me.
“George, goddamnit, I’m telling you the truth….”
The hose swished through the air and whacked into my left forearm; the sting was followed by a deep ache.
“I want those bullets, Heller. Where are they?”
It swished again, and again, and each time I cried out, but nobody out there having fun could hear me, and the sting would be followed by the ache, and he kept questioning me and I kept telling him I didn’t have the goddamn bullets and he moved on to my right arm and then my thighs and my calves and shins and by that time I had stopped yelling and started whimpering and then I stopped whimpering and started crying my fucking eyes out, and then, thank God, I passed out.
Somebody threw water in my face and I came out of it, coughing, choking, sputtering, spitting, not knowing whether I’d been out a minute or an hour or a week; but the pain was living agony and I began to scream and McCracken slipped a hand over my mouth and I screamed into it.
The sound of drunken revelry continued from the next room.
McCracken took his hand away from my face. “Keep your voice down, Heller, or you get the next one in the jewels.”
And he whapped me on the thigh, alongside my balls, and the pain shot through me like an arrow, but I clenched my teeth. Didn’t scream. Just moaned.
A hillbilly scarecrow in coveralls and no shirt on his hairless sunken chest stepped into the shaft of light. He had an awful, crooked, bucktooth smile that was black and yellow and green-everything but white; his eyes were large and yellow and his nose was straight and pointed, like a bee stinger. His sunken cheeks were stubbly, but his chin was nowhere in sight; his Adam’s apple was prominent and bobbed as he laughed, which he was doing right now, watching me suffering in my chair.
“This is Bucky Boy,” McCracken said. “Bucky Boy’s gonna he’p me out.”
“I’m the fella ’round here what makes the Yankee gumbo!” Bucky Boy chortled. He kicked the big gray washer tub. “Mix ’er up in there, I do.”
McCracken folded his arms; the rubber hose hung limply, but threateningly, from his right hand. “Why don’t ya ask Bucky Boy what Yankee gumbo is?”
But I didn’t have to.
“I dump me a Yankee in this here tub,” he said, and kicked it again, and laughed idiotically, deep in his throat, making his Adam’s apple bob some more, “and then I pours in lotsa lye! Then I let ’im soak a spell!”
Leaving a partly decomposed, liquefied corpse….
McCracken picked up the recipe from there: “Before long, all we got to do is pour that fool Yankee into the swamp.”
Ingenious way to dispose of a corpse; send it flowing into a waterway.
“I…I don’t have the damn bullets. I told you. I was bluffing.”
McCracken beat on me a while. Every blow sent pain shooting through my system until I was drunk with it; I started to laugh, to join in with the good time that was leaking in from the saloon out front.
“He’s gettin’ slaphappy,” Bucky Boy said, a frown indicating some degree of thinking ability.
McCracken was rubbing his right arm with his left hand. “I’m gettin’ wore out. You wanna pound on him some, Bucky Boy?”
“Shore!”
“Don’t kill him, now.”
“Try not!”
Bucky Boy had pipe-cleaner arms, but he found power somewhere; the wiry hillbilly had the sense to get behind me, and find new territory, slamming the rubber hose into my shoulders, even whapping it through the rungs of the chair. I wasn’t laughing anymore, but he was, filling the little storeroom with raucous, down-home glee.
When my body was one enormous sea of anguish, I did myself a favor and passed out again.
When I came to, I was alone. I was throbbing with pain, like my body was covered with boils about to burst; though they hadn’t touched my face or hit me on the head, my head was splitting.
I tried to stand. Maybe I could make it over to that door, if I could get my feet and legs to work. It took all the effort I had, but I stood. My legs were flimsy things under me, like a card table that wasn’t put up right, but I dragged myself over to that door, hunching over, carrying the chair on my back like a slave with a cotton bale, and turned my back to the door, and, with no more effort than it takes to thread a needle with your toes, tried the knob, turned the knob.
But it was locked.
Now what?
I could try to smash the chair against the wall-it was spindly enough that it might come apart-but would the racket attract somebody out there? The sounds of drunken laughter and honky-tonk piano continued; it had covered my screams-would it cover this?
The walls that weren’t lined with shelves were either blocked by beer cartons or that Yankee-gumbo tub, so the door itself, which was a solid-looking slab of wood, was the best bet. I rammed myself into it, and the chair didn’t give, though every bone and muscle in my body seemed to; but I did it again, and again, and tears were rolling down my face, mingling with sweat, when McCracken came bolting through that kitchen door and dragged me back over toward the middle of the little room and slapped me, twice, hard. My mouth was bleeding, but I was starting to go generally numb.
When he began waling on me with the rubber hose again, I hardly felt it; I was just a big dead slab of meat, barely holding onto consciousness.
“I want those fuckin’ bullets! I want those fuckin’ bullets!”
I could have told him about Vidrine, and if the pain hadn’t turned to numbness, maybe I would have; but I knew, punchy as I was by this point, that telling him about Vidrine would only get the doc killed. It wouldn’t help me. Oh, maybe McCracken would stop beating on me. But he was going to kill me, anyway. I knew that.
So did he.
Because you have to kill a man you give a beating like this to.
Or he’ll kill you.
My chin was on my chest. McCracken was standing talking with Carlos; beanpole Bucky Boy was looking on.
The washer tub had been moved out from the wall; it was filled within a few inches of its rim with a cloudy liquid. An acrid aroma flared my nostrils.
“I don’t care whether you do this thing or not,” Carlos said, “but dawn’s comin’…and Sunday’s my big mornin’, you know, The cops and the crooks and the boodlers be comin’ by, to pay Carlos his cut’a de week’s take. So eider way, I want ’im outa here. ’Live or dead, sho’ ’nuff.”