He surprised me by smiling. “Don’t worry, Chet. I’ve seen Dawn entertain a lot of men out here in the living room before.”
“Spare him the details,” she said. “And spare me, too, while you’re at it.”
He whispered a dirty word loud enough for us to hear.
He wheeled himself into the living room. The chair’s electric motor whirred faintly as he angled over to the fireplace. On his way, he said, “You didn’t wait long, Chet. You’ve only been out two weeks. You never did have much patience.”
You could see the pain in his face when he moved.
I tried to say something, but I just kept staring at this man who was now a cripple. I didn’t know what to say.
“Nice setup, huh?” Kenny said as he struck a stick match on the stone of the fireplace. With his hands twisted and gimped the way they were, it wasn’t easy. He got his smoke going and said, “She tell you what happened to me?”
I looked at Dawn. She dropped her gaze. “No,” I said.
He snorted. The sound was bitter. “She was doin’ it to me just the way she did it to you. Right?” he said and called her another dirty name.
She sighed, then lighted her own cigarette. “About six months after we ran out on you with all the money, I grabbed the strongbox and took off.”
Kenny smirked. “She met a sailor. A goddamn sailor, if you can believe it.”
“His name was Fred,” she said. “Anyway, me and Fred had all the bank robbery money — there was still a couple hundred thousand left — when Kenny here came after us in that red Corvette he always wanted. He got right up behind us, but it was pouring rain and he skidded out of control and slammed into a tree.”
He finished the story for me. “There was just one problem, right, Dawn? You had the strongbox but you didn’t know what was inside. Her and the sailor were going to have somebody use tools on the lock I’d put on it. They saw me pile up my ’vette but they kept on going. But later that night when they blew open the strongbox and found out that I’d stuffed it with old newspapers, the sailor beat her up and threw her out. So she came back to me ’cause she just couldn’t stand to be away from ‘our’ money. And this is where she’s been all the time you were in the slam. Right here waitin’ for poor pitiful me to finally tell her where I hid the loot. Or die. They don’t give me much longer. That’s what keeps her here.”
“Pretty pathetic story, huh?” she said. She got up and went over to the small wet bar. She poured three drinks of pure Jim Beam and brought them over to us. She gunned hers in a single gulp and went right back for another.
“So she invites half the town in so she can have her fun while I vegetate in my wheelchair.” Now it was his turn to down his whiskey. He hurled the glass into the fireplace. A long, uneasy silence followed.
I tried to remember the easy friendship the three of us had enjoyed back when we were in high school, before Kenny and I’d been in Nam, and before the three of us had taken up bank robbery for a living. Hard to believe we’d ever liked each other at all.
Kenny’s head dropped down then. At first I thought he might have passed out, but then the choking sound of dry sobs filled the room and I realized he was crying.
“You’re such a wimp,” she said.
And then it was her turn to smash her glass into the fireplace.
I’d never heard two people go at each other this way. It was degrading.
He looked up at me. “You stick around here long enough, Chet, she’ll make a deal with you. She’ll give you half the money if you beat me up and make me tell you where it is.”
I looked over at her. I knew what he said was true.
“She doesn’t look as good as she used to — she’s kind of a used car now instead of a brand-new Caddy — but she’s still got some miles left on her. You should hear her and some of her boyfriends out here on the couch when they get goin’.”
She started to say something but then she heard me start to laugh.
“What the hell’s so funny?”
I stood up and looked at my watch. I had only ten minutes left to get back to the depot.
Kenny glanced up from his wheelchair. “Yeah, Chet, what’s so funny?”
I looked at them both and just shook my head. “It’ll come to you. One of these days. Believe me.”
And with that, I left.
She made a play for my arm and Kenny sat there glowering at me, but I just kept on walking. I had to hurry.
The cold, clean air not only revived me, it seemed to purify me in some way. I felt good again, whole and happy now that I was outdoors.
The bus was dark and warm. Polly had brought a bag of popcorn along. “You almost didn’t make it,” she said as the bus pulled away from the depot.
In five minutes we were rolling into countryside again. In farmhouses lights were coming on. In another hour, it would be dawn.
“You took it, didn’t you?” I said.
“Huh?”
“You took it. My gun.”
“Oh. Yes. I guess I did. I didn’t want you to do anything crazy.”
Back there at Kenny’s I’d reached into my jacket pocket for the .38 and found it gone. “How’d you do it? You were pretty slick.”
“Remember I told you I’d gotten into a little trouble? Well, an uncle of mine taught me how to be a pickpocket and so for a few months I followed in his footsteps. Till Sheriff Baines arrested me one day.”
“I’m glad you took it.”
She looked over at me in the darkness of the bus and grinned. She looked like a kid. “You really didn’t want to do it, did you?”
“No,” I said, staring out the window at the midwestern night. I thought of them back there in the house, in a prison cell they wouldn’t escape till death. No, I hadn’t wanted to shoot anybody at all. And, as things turned out, I hadn’t had to either. Their punishment was each other.
“We’re really lucky we met each other, Chet.”
“Yeah,” I said, thinking of Dawn and Kenny again. “You don’t know how lucky we are.”
One Small Step
by Reginald Hill
Copyright © 1990 by Reginald Hill. Reprinted by permission of the author and Ellen Levine Literary Agency, Ltd.
Many series characters seem never to age, or to age at a quite different rate from the rest of us, leaving us to wonder what they’d be like in their golden years. Reginald Hill gives us a hilarious forward look at his Detective-Superintendent Andrew Dalziel in the year 2010. Dalziel is not yet in his dotage, but his protegé Pascoe now calls the shots in a case that takes the duo to — of all places — the moon. “One Small Step” is a revised and shortened version of a novelette by Reginald Hill published in the U.K. in 1990...
1.
The first man to land on the moon was Neil Armstrong on the twentieth of July, 1969. As he stepped off the module ladder, he said, “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”
The first man to be murdered on the moon was Emile Lemarque on the fourteenth of May, 2010. As he fell off the module ladder, he said, “Oh mer—”
There were two hundred and twenty-seven million witnesses.
One of these was ex-Detective-Superintendent Andrew Dalziel, who was only watching because the battery of his TV remote control had failed. What he really wanted to see was his favorite episode of Star Trek on the Nostalgia Channel. By comparison, Michelin men bouncing dustily over lunar slag heaps made very dull viewing, particularly with the Yanks probing to the edge of the solar system. But the Federated States of Europe had waited a long time for their share of space glory and the Euro Channel had been ordered to give blanket coverage.