She saw it then, and she stopped abruptly. Her eyes widened. Her breath caught in her throat and seemed to stay there. She stood still as a statue and didn’t say anything.
Jassie talked. He told her everything. “I killed him, Sarah. I know you’re glad he’s dead. And I know you wanted to do it. But I had to be the one. Because I didn’t want them to hang you. It’s all right if they hang me.”
He spoke earnestly. But he couldn’t tell whether she was listening. She gave no sign that she was. She kept looking at the body, couldn’t seem to take her eyes away from it.
“Now everything’s all right, Sarah,” he went on. “That’s why I wanted to kill him here. So they’d find the body here and know it was me. And I wanted to kill him the way I did, choking him with my two hands, so he’d be killed in a way that they’d know you couldn’t have done it to him. That way they’d know it was me too. You see, I figured all that out, Sarah. I can do that, you see, because I know how they work when they’re deciding who killed somebody.”
If she heard him, she gave not a twitch of response. Perhaps there wasn’t room in her mind at this moment for anything except plans of her own.
“Now here’s all you have to do, Sarah,” he was telling her. “You can drive the truck, remember. So you drive it into town now and tell the Sheriff that the hired hand has killed your husband. And I’ll wait right here for the Sheriff to come and look at the body and pick me up. And I’ll tell him too that I killed Van, you see. That way there can’t be a mistake. Nobody’ll think that you killed him. That way they won’t hang you. They won’t put a rope around your little neck...”
He stood up for the first time, and took just one step toward her. But it was enough to jar her back to life again. It was as if she hadn’t even breathed all the time Jassie was talking. Now the breath was released, and it came out in a scream.
Or perhaps it was just because he had reached out and touched her soft little white neck with the fingers which had stopped the breath forever in Van.
She screamed and ran from him. She lifted her skirt and ran as if the devil were behind her. Jassie didn’t understand, but it did occur to him that very possibly she hadn’t been listening to him.
Then he would have to explain it again. He would have to tell her to get the truck and go after the Sheriff. So he ran after her. He didn’t run as fast as he might have. He didn’t try to catch her exactly, because there wasn’t any place she could go to get away from him.
When she ran around toward the front of the house he followered her. When he arrived there, he saw that she must have gone inside. But she’d left the door open, and he started to follow. He didn’t see her standing in the middle of the living room with the shotgun in her hands until he was well past the threshold.
The blast ripped into his chest and belly, but there was no pain. He only knew that he could go no farther and that he would have to lie down there on the floor and die.
“You got to tell them, Sarah...” He was on his knees, and he tottered there for a moment. “...Tell them you shot me because I was trying to kill you too. It looks that way, you see. That’s all right. Because they won’t hang you that way...”
He perhaps would have had something else to say to her, but she fired the second barrel.
And he needn’t have worried about it at all. They didn’t put a rope around her little white neck. Nobody thought about doing anything like that, because of the other thing that Jassie had neglected to tell her.
The Sheriff had to tell her after he found out about it himself. “This guy was a killer. He murdered a man and a woman in cold blood, and then a guard when he escaped off the train. Your husband made it four. You’d have made five...”
He was wrong, of course. About the last part anyway. But then Jassie had kind of planned it that way.
The Death of Arney Vincent
by C. L. Sweeney, Jr
The kid only had a couple of hundred bucks, but that didn’t matter. I was getting $7500 for working on him.
I sat and looked at the kid’s picture with the “Wanted For Murder” caption over it there on the front page of the Evening Herald and smoked a couple cigarettes while I tried to piece together the little fragments of thought that were whirling around in the back of my head. When they began to take shape I got up and walked past the old operating table to the battered cabinet at the far side of the room. I opened a drawer and took a picture out of it and switched on the strong light over the table and held the picture up beside the one in the paper. Remarkable, I thought. About the same age, same hair, same height, same build, same general head and facial contours. It should be easy. Then I put the picture back in the cabinet and stuck the paper in my pocket and made a little call on Arney Vincent.
I drove over to the other side of the city and parked a couple blocks from the apartment house and walked down through the alley and in the back door. I went up the stairs and down the hall with the fly-specked bulb at one end to the room where Arney had been laying low since he pulled the bank job. You’ve got to lay low after one of those. Cops don’t like people who stick up banks. Even more, cops don’t like people who shoot other cops. Arney hadn’t exactly made himself a candidate for Queen of the Policeman’s Ball with that one.
I knocked and heard someone move up behind the door.
“Let him in.” That was Arney.
I walked in and across the littered room to where Arney sat in the big easy chair with a drink in his hand. It almost gave me the willies. It was Arney all right only it didn’t look like Arney. I couldn’t get used to it. But what else would you expect? I’m not the best plastic surgeon in the city for nothing, even if they have got my license. I’d done a beauty of a job on Arney — for five grand. His own mother wouldn’t have recognized him.
“Well, Doc? Come to give a quick look at your handiwork?” Arney rubbed his hand down his face, young and tough, feeling for traces of the scars that should be there but weren’t. My jobs are strictly the best.
I took the paper out of my pocket and unfolded it and tossed it to him. “There’s your answer,” I said.
He looked at it for a minute but I could see that it didn’t register. “Cut out the riddles,” he said. “I got no time for games.”
So then I explained the whole thing to him. Arney is a cute customer and I knew he liked it. Why shouldn’t he? A guy never found a way to get the heat turned off him any easier.
“Okay,” said Arney. “How much — if it works?”
“It’ll work,” I said. “Ten thousand.”
“Five,” said Arney.
“Cut it out,” I said. “I get all the risk and you get all the gravy. Ten thousand.”
“How do you know he’ll go through with it, even if you find him?”
“He’ll go through with it. He’ll be glad to. Ten thousand.”
“Seventy-five hundred,” said Arney.
“Sold,” I said. “When do I get it?”
“When it’s over.” Arney was watching me closely.
“How about a couple grand now?” I asked.
“When it’s over,” said Arney again, softly.
“Suit yourself,” I said.
I went back to my office in the rear of the old tenement and thought about it. The next thing was to find the kid. That only took about three days. After all, I’ve been in and out of the rackets for better than twenty years and I know most of the places where a frightened kid could hide from the cops. Or I know how to find out about them.
He was standing behind the filthy bed in the riverfront hotel and he was a very scared boy when I busted in. I closed the door behind me before he could move.