I put the bloody hand in my coat pocket and dug through his pants for his car keys, didn’t come across them. I went inside the cabin and found them on the table. I drove the Cadillac to the back where Jack lay, pulled him into the backseat, almost having a hernia in the process. I put the hatchet in there with him.
I drove the El Dorado over close to the pond and rolled all the windows down and put it in neutral. I got out of the car, went to the back of it, and started shoving. My feet slipped in the mud, but I finally gained traction. The car went forward and slipped into the water, but the back end of it hung on the bank.
Damn.
I pushed and I pushed, and finally I got it moving, and the car went in, and with the windows down, it sunk pretty fast.
I went back to the cabin and looked around. I found some candles, turned off the light, then switched off the generator. I went back inside and lit three of the big fat candles and stuck them in drinking glasses and watched them burn for a moment. I went over to the stove and turned on the gas, letting it run a few seconds while I looked around the cabin. Nothing there I needed.
I left, closed the door behind me. When the gas filled the room enough, those candles would set the air on fire. The whole place would blow. I don’t know exactly why I did it, except maybe I just didn’t like Jack. Didn’t like that he had a Cadillac and a cabin and some land, and for a while there, he had Loodie. Because of all that, I had done all I could to him. I even had his six-fingered hand in my pocket.
By the time I got back to the car, I was feeling weak. Jack had worked me over pretty good, and now that the adrenaline was starting to ease out of me, I was feeling it. I took off my jacket and opened the jar of pickles in the floorboard, pulled out a few of them, and threw them away. I ate one, and drank from my bottle of water and had some cookies.
I took Jack’s hand and put it in the big pickle jar. I sat in the front seat, and was overcome with nausea. I didn’t know if it was the pickle or what I had done, or both. I opened the car door and threw up. I felt cold and damp from the rain, so I started the car and turned on the heater. Then I cranked back my seat and closed my eyes. I had to rest before I left, had to. All of me seemed to be running out through the soles of my feet.
I slept until the cabin blew. The sound of the gas generator and stove going up with a one-two boom snapped me awake.
I got out of the car and walked around the curve. The cabin was nothing more than a square, dark shape inside an envelope of flames. The fire wavered up high and grew narrow at the top like a cone. It crackled like someone wadding up cellophane.
I doubted, out here, that anyone heard the explosion, and no one could see the flames. Wet as it was, I figured the fire wouldn’t go any farther than the cabin. By morning, even with the rain still coming down, that place would be smoked down to the mineral rights.
I drove out of there, and pretty soon the heater was too hot and I turned it off. It was as if my body went up in flames, like the cabin. I rolled down the window and let in some cool air. I felt strange; not good, not bad. I had bounty hunted for years, and I’d done a bit of head whopping before, but this was my first murder.
I had really hated Jack and I’d hardly known him.
It was the woman that made me hate him. The woman I was gonna cheat out of some money. But $100,000 is a whole lot of money, honey.
When I got home, the automatic garage opener lifted the door, and I wheeled in and closed the place up. I went inside and took off my clothes and showered carefully and looked in the mirror. There was a mountainous welt on my head. I got some ice and put it in sock and pressed it to my head while I sat on the toilet lid and thought about things. If any thoughts actually came to me, I don’t remember them well.
I dressed, bunched up my murder clothes, and put them in a black plastic garbage bag.
In the garage, I removed the pickle jar and cleaned the car. I opened the jar and stared at the hand. It looked like a black crab in there amongst the pickles. I studied it for a long time, until it started to look like $100,000.
I couldn’t wait until morning, and after a while, I drove toward Big O’s place. Now, you would think a man with the money he’s got would live in a mansion, but he didn’t. He lived in three double-wide mobile homes lined together with screened-in porches. I had been inside once, when I’d done Big O a very small favor, though never since. But one of those homes was nothing but one big space, no rooms, and it was Big O’s lounge. He hung in there with some ladies and bodyguards. He had two main guys. Be Bop Lewis, a skinny white guy who always acted as if someone was sneaking up on him, and a black guy named Lou Boo (keep in mind, I didn’t name them) who thought he was way cool and smooth as velvet.
The rain had followed me from the bottomland, on into Tyler, to the outskirts, and on the far side. It was way early morning, and I figured on waking Big O up and dragging his ass out of bed and showing him them six fingers and getting me $100,000, a pat on the head, and hell, he might ask Be Bop to give me a hand job on account of I had done so well.
More I thought about it, more I thought he might not be as happy to see me as I thought. A man like Big O liked his sleep, so I pulled into a motel not too far from his place, the big jar of pickles and one black six-fingered hand beside my bed, the automatic under my pillow.
I dreamed Jack was driving the Cadillac out of that pond. I saw the lights first and then the car. Jack was steering with his nub laid against the wheel, and his face behind the glass was a black mass without eyes or smile or features of any kind.
It was a bad dream and it woke me up. I washed my face, went back to bed, slept this time until late morning. I got up and put back on my same clothes, loaded up my pickle jar, and left out of there. I thought about the axe in Jack’s head, his severed hand floating in the pickle jar, and regret moved through me like shit through a goose and was gone.
I drove out to Big O’s place.
By the time I arrived at the property, which was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, and had driven over a cattle guard, I could see there were men in a white pickup coming my way. Two in the front and three in the bed in the back, and they had some heavy-duty fire power. Parked behind them, up by the double-wides, were the cement trucks and dump trucks and backhoes and graders that were part of the business Big O claimed to operate. Construction. But his real business was a bit of this, and a little of that, construction being not much more than the surface paint.
I stopped and rolled down my window and waited. Outside, the rain had burned off and it was an unseasonably hot day, sticky as honey on the fingers.
When they drove up beside my window, the three guys in the bed pointed their weapons at me. The driver was none other than one of the two men I recognized from before. Be Bop. His skin was so pale and thin, I could almost see the skull beneath it.
“Well, now,” he said. “I know you.”
I agreed he did. I smiled like me and him was best friends. I said, “I got some good news for Big O about Six-Finger Jack.”
“Six-Finger Jack, huh,” Be Bop said. “Get out of the car.”
I got out. Be Bop got out and frisked me. I had nothing sharp or anything full of bullets. He asked if there was anything in the car. I told him no. He had one of the men in the back of the pickup search it anyway. The man came back, said, “Ain’t got no gun, just a big jar of pickles.”
“Pickles,” Be Bop said. “You a man loves pickles?”
“Not exactly,” I said.
“Follow us on up,” Be Bop said.
We drove up to the trio of double-wides. There had been some work done since I was last here, and there was a frame of boards laid out for a foundation, and over to the side there was a big hole that looked as if it was gonna be a swimming pool.