And he felt stronger seeing that. A sliced throat and a knife in the heart. That was the way he’d take Morales down, because the Mexican wasn’t the type of bastard you’d want to play around with. You bumped up against his action—straight ahead, from the back, or sideways—you’d have to be sure you finished him, because a guy like Morales wouldn’t quit until the devil himself had boxed up his sorry excuse for a soul.
Keyes wished he’d killed the man a long time ago, when he’d had the chance, when Morales wouldn’t have been expecting it. But he knew that wishing was a waste of time. As he hurried down the road at an unsteady trot, looking for Morales’ car, he concentrated on reality.
The car had to be around here somewhere, because he hadn’t seen it at Murdock’s place. Morales had been careful about that. Obviously, he hadn’t wanted Keyes to know that he was anywhere near the old man’s cabin. He’d wanted to get the drop on Keyes, the same way he had on Murdock.
But it didn’t look like that was going to happen. Keyes came around a bend, and there it was—Morales’ old Dodge Charger. He grinned, knowing that he’d hit the jackpot. Because wherever Morales went, he went armed. And not just with the .45 he’d most likely used to ventilate Murdock’s front door. No. Morales kept his own private arsenal in the Charger’s trunk—a sawed-off shotgun, a couple German machine-pistols, and enough ammo to stop a platoon.
Keyes pictured the stash as he jimmied the trunk.
It didn’t take long.
A soft thunk, and the lid rose before him.
He saw the guns, all right. But he saw something else, too.
Morales’ corpse was crammed into the compartment along with all that hardware. The Mexican was curled in a fetal ball around a pile of bloodstained cartridge boxes. His throat had been cut to the bone, and there was a knife buried in his heart—a knife just like the one that filled Keyes’ hand.
Keyes stumbled away from the car. The stitched hole in his belly had never felt so empty, and he dropped his knife without even knowing he’d done it. By the time he recognized the trap he’d fallen into, it was already too late.
Keyes didn’t want to turn around, but he knew that he had to.
Behind him, from a tangle of ferns beneath a thick-trunked redwood at the edge of the road, there came a sound.
It was a sound that Keyes knew all too well.
The long, cool whisper of deeply drawn breaths passing over dry lips.
The ferns parted, and the man who had set Keyes up for a perfect ambush stepped from the shadows. He held a pistol in his hand, and he didn’t limp at all because his knee had never been peppered with buckshot, and he approached Keyes with a slow, even gait.
Keyes jolted at the sight of the guy. He took a stumbling step backward. He didn’t know how to react...not at first. And then he knew. Suddenly and exactly, because there was only one thing he really cared about anymore, and it wasn’t the guy standing in front of him.
“Where’s Danni?” he asked. “Is she all right?”
“She’s fine,” the man said. “But she couldn’t stand to see this. That’s why she didn’t come.”
Keyes nearly closed his eyes, just for a second, wondering how much he could take. The man’s voice seemed to rise from a gut lined with steel. It was so strong. So sure. And the funny thing was that Keyes almost didn’t recognize it. But he did, because you had to recognize the sound of your own voice, even if you hadn’t really heard it in the last four months.
“And the money?” Keyes found himself asking.
“Murdock can’t hold out much longer. I’ll get the money, and that means Danni will have it. And I’ll take care of her. You, better than anyone, should understand that.”
Keyes did understand. He understood everything now, but he didn’t say anything else. There wasn’t anything else to say. And as the man’s shadow washed over him, so did a series of sounds: the low whisper of the things he’d lost echoing in his skull along with the gunman’s words, and the ritual chanting of a broken woman whose magic was much more powerful than Keyes had ever dared imagine, and the words of a woman he had loved.
The words of a woman he would always love.
“I love you,” Danni had said.
And Keyes knew that it was true. Even now.
He stared at the man Danni loved.
“It’s really nothing personal,” the man said, and Keyes couldn’t help it. A laugh bubbled up inside him as he stood there in the heavy redwood shadows, but it was a laugh he didn’t even own anymore. And the man who owned it joined in, and they laughed together, sharing the joke in the shadows.
They didn’t laugh long.
Maybe a handful of seconds.
After that, the man didn’t hesitate.
He pulled the trigger.
Norman Partridge
ICK LAYMON HAD a way with short, nasty stories that took a bite out of your hide by the time you hit the last line. That’s a harder trick to pull off than most people (especially most aspiring writers) suspect. The preceding story, “Second Chance”, is the first time I’ve tried to nail anyone’s eyeballs to the page with a twist ending in quite awhile. Hope I managed to do the job. Hope I gotcha!
That was definitely something Dick liked to do. He obviously enjoyed writing gotcha! fiction. From the time I first noticed his work in the late eighties, I could see that. Back then I was trying to get started writing fiction of my own, and I can remember gobbling up several Laymon novels as well as the numerous short stories that regularly appeared in the top anthologies of the day.
I admired more than a few of Dick’s short stories (“Dinker’s Pond” from Razored Saddles has always been a particular favorite), and I learned more than a little about pacing from reading his work. Dick was a master of that, and the talent carried over to his novels. You can see it in The Cellar, and you can see it in Resurrection Dreams, and you can see it in Funland...all barn-burner novels that bore the distinctive stamp of Dick’s personal narrative drive.
Dick was especially generous to new writers who were trying to get a foothold in the business. I sent him a copy of my first novel, Slippin’ Into Darkness, when it appeared from CD Publications. I’d never met Dick—he was simply a writer who’d taught me a few things through his work—and I got his address from Rich Chizmar and sent him a book as a way of saying thanks.
Shortly thereafter, I met Dick at an HWA event in Las Vegas. Much to my delight, he told me how much he enjoyed my novel. We spent the better part of an evening talking, and I told him about one particular section of my novel that his work had inspired. Slippin’ was told in third person shifting-viewpoint, and there was a moment in one particular section toward the end of the book where I tricked the reader into thinking the viewpoint character was one guy when it turned out to be another. When I told Dick I’d swiped that idea from one of his novels, he laughed and said, “Well, I stole it from William Goldman, so I win, because he’s a better writer than both of us!”
After the con, Dick dropped me a line and told me he’d sent a copy of Slippin’ to his U.K. publisher, hoping to pave the way for a foreign sale for me. It didn’t pan out, but that’s the kind of generous guy he was. I learned a lot about writing from him—both about the craft and the business, and especially about the power of tenacity.