The girl began to cry. Not much sound but those big blue eyes were spilling tears that rolled down her cheeks. She began to shiver.
I lowered the gun. “I can’t do it.”
“Huh?”
“She’s crying. Look at her. She’s scared silly.”
“Don’t be afraid,” Sam said, turning in his chair to face her. “It’ll be so fast you won’t feel a thing. Just think... you won’t have to pay taxes. No worries about anything.”
The girl began to cry harder.
“I don’t think she’s sold on death, Sam.”
“I’ll do it.” Sam took his gun and aimed at her head. He closed his eyes and for a moment I thought he’d pull the trigger while he wasn’t looking. But he opened his eyes again and dropped the gun on the table. “Let’s think of some other way. A gun is so damned messy.”
“We don’t have any.”
“Suffocation?”
Sam looked at the girl and wrinkled his nose. “That might work but she’ll make some sickening sounds while she’s suffocating.”
He didn’t have to elaborate. I knew he meant we were both too soft-hearted to listen to the sounds of her dying. “The same goes for strangulation...”
“Why can’t you do it with the damned gun?!” Sam said suddenly, slamming his fist against the table. He glowered. “You killed so many men in combat, what’s one life more or less?” The glower turned to a reproachful expression.
I shrugged. “They were men, not women. They weren’t crying like she is. And they were trying to kill me. That makes a hell of a difference, you know. She’s as helpless as a kitten.” I wondered if I could turn the tide. “Why’d you shoot that cop in the chest? I thought we agreed to aim for the stomach. If you like to kill so much, why can’t you kill her?”
Sam shook his head. He grimaced. “You said you’d aim for the stomach. I didn’t say I would.” He shut his mouth and I thought that was the end of it. He crossed his arms and settled into a stony silence as he relaxed in the chair. About four or five minutes later, he added, “I was aiming at the cop’s stomach. I’m a lousy shot.”
“Hit her over the head?” I suggested.
Sam’s face whitened. “Can you imagine the sickening sound that would make?”
“I don’t think it’ll make much sound.”
“I read a book once where—”
“OK, OK, OK. How about breaking her neck?”
“No! I couldn’t stand that snapping sound!”
“Sam,” I said as patiently as I could, “I don’t see how we can kill her without making some sound. If we’re going to worry about sounds—”
“There must be a silent way of doing it.”
Speaking of silence, we both fell into silence awhile.
“Electrouction,” Sam said, his eyes bright. In addition to other things, Sam was a licensed electrician.
“I don’t think I could stand the smell of an electrocuted body.”
More silence.
I snapped my fingers. “Knife.”
Sam left the bomb shelter to get a hunting knife and returned, placing it on the table. “Cut cards to see who does it?”
“OK.”
Sam went to get a deck of cards. He lost the cut.
“Find her heart first,” I suggested. “Do it in one stab.”
Sam picked up the knife and held it in his right hand while he unbuttoned the girl’s blouse with his left. He slipped the hand over her bosom. “Slightly to the left of center, right? Her left... Ah...”
“You found it?”
“The’re real. Oh. Here’s her heart. Beating fast. Beating faster. Hey.” The girl slumped in the chair.
I guessed, “She’s either had a heart attack or she’s fainted.”
Sam removed the bandage from around her mouth. He slapped her cheeks. He went and brought her a glass of water. He talked to her until she regained consciousness, then giving her some water to drink.
“You won’t kill me, will you? This is all some kind of wild joke, isn’t it?” She stared at us, her eyes as wide as saucers. Hopeful expression on her face.
“It isn’t a joke,” Sam said.
She began crying again. Crying silently with a gag around her mouth was bad enough. Crying with sound was downright awful. Sam tried to calm her. He kept talking. He asked what her name was. Susan. They started to seem so friendly, I butted in. “I don’t think you should get real chummy with her if you’re going to knock her off. It’s easier to kill strangers.”
“I guess you’re right.” Sam picked up the knife.
“Please! Please! Please don’t use a knife!” It was easy to see she was horrified of knives.
“She doesn’t want us to use the knife,” Sam said sadly.
“Let’s go hide the money and come back to the problem. They say that works sometimes.”
We went upstairs and concealed the money in the wall as we had planned. It didn’t take long. In a couple of hours we had the whole livingroom paneled, Sam’s money on one side, mine on the other. I didn’t worry about Susan, our hostage. The bottom door to the bomb shelter was a strong one and we had it locked from the outside. We’d left her tied to the chair and even if she managed to free herself, she couldn’t break out of that room. There was an air vent to her room but the line had such strong filters in it that anyone screaming their head off couldn’t be heard in the cottage or nearby.
“I think I’ll go down and untie Susan so she can stretch her legs,” Sam said.
I nodded OK. He came back two hours later with a strange expression on his face. “She said she’d do anything we want if we don’t kill her.” Sam sighed and leaned against a wall, sliding down it, sitting on the floor, looking exhausted. This thing was taking a lot out of him, I saw. I sat on the floor nearby. We hadn’t moved any chairs into the cottage so far and we’d decided to fiddle with the renovation, taking as much time as possible.
“I thought of an ideal way to kill her,” Sam said.
“How?”
“Let her starve to death. She can’t break out of there. And there’s no food down there. Just the table and the chairs we carried down. I think she’ll starve in two weeks or less.”
I thought about the idea a few minutes. “Sounds good,” I said.
We didn’t talk about the hostage during the weeks that followed. We’d work on the cottage an hour or two some days, but sometimes skipping two or three days in a row. The cop that Sam shot managed to live, thanks to modem surgery. I think we were both a little relieved. But the rap for armed robbery and shooting two policemen was bad enough that it still seemed to warrant killing the hostage so she couldn’t identify us.
Our lives other than working on the cottage were on widely diverse paths during which we seldom saw each other. Sam was still single but liked to horse around with a young crowd full of lively chicks. As a widower, I preferred quiet evenings, occasionally with a woman approximately my own age. Sam and I had little in common other than having once worked for the same company. It was strange in a way — we’d become closer friends because he’d inherited the cottage from his uncle and because I had some skill as a carpenter — a skill he lacked. The summer cottage and its concealed bomb shelter had spawned the whole idea of the bank robbery.
I intended to, visit the cottage alone about two weeks after we began starving the hostage. It stretched to two months before I finally got up the nerve. I’d decided to bury the body myself and spare Sam the unpleasant task since he’d seemed to like the girl.
I dug a grave in the woods not too far from the cottage and then went down to the bomb shelter, unlocking the door with my key. Nobody could live two months without food. Starvation had been the perfect solution. I’d decided to wrap the girl in a blanket to carry to the grave and was holding the green blanket under one arm as I opened the door.