I shook my head, irritably. The truth was, his own soldiers had held the line. I’d tracked down a couple of them (one slurping pho in a noodle bar under a bridge in Queens, the other sleeping in a tree deep in Central Park) and leaned on them hard-to the point where one of them would not be working for him, or anyone else, ever again. Both had merely looked up at me with their cold, strange eyes and waited for whatever I was going to do. It was not they who’d told me to go and stand in Times Square at the end of any December afternoon, and wait there until this man appeared, arriving there from directions unknown.
“So, who, then?”
“It’s too late for you to be taking names,” I said, with some satisfaction. “That’s all over now.”
He smiled again, but more coldly, and I saw something in his face that had not been there before-not on the surface, at least. The steady calm of a man who was used to making judgment calls, decisions upon which the lives of others had hung. A man who had measured, assayed, and who was now about to pay the price, at the behest of people who had fallen on the wrong side of the line he had believed it was his God-given right to draw.
“You think you’re this big, bountiful guy,” I said. “Everybody’s old man. But some understand the real truth. They realise it’s all bullshit.”
“Have I not made my rules clear? Have I not looked out for the people who deserved it?”
“Only to make them do what you want.”
“And what do you want? Why are you really here tonight, Kane?”
“Someone paid me to be. More than one, in fact. A syndicate. People saying that enough is enough. Getting back for what you did to them.”
“I know about that,” he interrupted, as if bored. “I can even guess who these people are. But I asked why you’re here.”
“For the money.”
“No. Otherwise you’d have done it from ten yards away and be on your way home by now.”
“So you tell me why, if you’re so fucking wise.”
“It’s personal,” he said. “And that’s a mistake. You’ve made a good living out of what you do, and have something of a life. On your terms. That’s because you’ve merely been for hire. But you want this one for yourself. Admit it. You hate me on your own account.”
This man was smart enough to know a lie when he heard it, so I said nothing.
“Why, Kane? Did something happen, some night, when there was snow on the ground outside and everything should have been carols and fairy lights? Did your presents come with conditions, or costs? Payments that came due in the middle of the night, when Mom was asleep?”
“That’s enough.”
“How many people have you killed, Kane? Can you even remember?”
“I remember,” I said, though I could not.
“When you let it get personal, the cost becomes personal too. You’re opening your own heart here. You sure you want to do that?”
“I’d do it for free. For the bullshit you are, and have always been.”
“Disbelief is easy, Kane. It’s faith that takes courage, and character.”
“You’re out of time,” I said.
He sighed. Then he tipped the cup, drained the last of his coffee, and set it down on the table between us.
“I’m done,” he said.
In the fifteen minutes we’d been talking, nearly half the people had left the park. The necking couple had been amongst them, departing hand in hand. The nearest person was now about sixty yards away. I stood up, reached in my jacket.
“Anything you want to say?” I asked, looking down at his mild, rosy face. “People do, sometimes.”
“Not to you,” he said.
I pulled out the gun and placed the silenced end in the middle of his forehead. He didn’t try to move. I took hold of his right shoulder with my other hand, and pulled the trigger once.
With all the traffic around the square, I barely even heard the sound. His head jerked back.
I let go of his shoulder and he sagged slowly around the waist, until the weight of his big, barrel chest pulled his body down off the chair to slump heavily onto the path, nearly face-first.
A portion of the back of his head was gone, but his eyes were still open. His beard scratched against the pavement as he tried to say something. After a couple of times I realised it was not words he was forcing out, but a series of sounds. I put the barrel to his temple and pulled the trigger again. A portion of the opposite temple splatted out onto the stones.
Yet still he was trying to push out those three short syllables, each the same.
I pulled the trigger a final time, and he was quiet. I bent down close to make sure, and to whisper in the remains of his ear.
“Check it twice, right, asshole?”
Then I walked out of the park. A few blocks away I found a cab, and started the long, slow journey home to New Jersey.
I WOKE EARLY THE next morning, like most fathers, to the sound of my son hurrying past our bedroom and down the stairs. On his way to the fireplace, no doubt.
Good luck with that, I thought, though I knew his stocking would be full nonetheless.
A few minutes later Lauren levered herself into a sitting position. She pulled on her robe and went to the window, yanking aside the drapes.
She smiled at something she saw out there, then turned and quickly left the room.
By the time I’d got my own robe on and gone down to the kitchen to make coffee, I knew what she’d seen through the window. It had snowed overnight, covering the yard and hanging off the trees. The whole nine yards of Winter Wonderland set dressing. Probably I would have to help build a snowman later, whether I felt like it or not.
In the living room my wife and child were sitting together Indian style in the middle of the floor, cooing over the stockings they’d already taken down from the fireplace. Candy, little gifts, pieces of junk that were supposed to mean something just because they’d been found in a sock. I noticed that the cookie left on the table near the hearth had a large bite taken out of it. Lauren has always been good with detail.
“Happy Christmas, guys,” I said, but neither of them seemed to hear.
I stepped around them and went to the fireplace. I took down the remaining stocking. I knew something was different before it was even in my hand.
It was empty.
“Lauren?”
She looked up at me. “Ho ho, ho,” she said. There was nothing in her face.
Then she smiled, briefly, before going back to chattering with our son, watching for the third or fifth time as he excitedly repacked and then unpacked his stocking. Her smile went straight through me. But then they always have.
I left the stocking on the arm of one of the chairs and walked out into the kitchen.
I opened the back door, and went to stand outside in the snow.
It was very quiet, and it was nothing but cold.
Joe R. Lansdale. THE STARS ARE FALLING
BEFORE DEEL ARROWSMITH CAME BACK from the dead, he was crossing a field by late moonlight in search of his home. His surroundings were familiar, but at the same time different. It was as if he had left as a child and returned as an adult to examine old property only to find the tree swing gone, the apple tree cut down, the grass grown high, and an outhouse erected over the mound where his best dog was buried.
As he crossed, the dropping moon turned thin, like cheap candy licked too long, and the sun bled through the trees. There were spots of frost on the drooping green grass and on the taller weeds, yellow as ripe corn. In his mind’s eye he saw not the East Texas field before him or the dark rows of oaks and pines beyond it, or even the clay path that twisted across the field toward the trees like a ribbon of blood.
He saw a field in France where there was a long, deep trench, and in the trench were bloodied bodies, some of them missing limbs and with bits of brains scattered about like spilled oatmeal. The air filled with the stinging stench of rotting meat and wafting gun smoke, the residue of poison gas, and the buzz of flies. The back of his throat tasted of burning copper. His stomach was a knot. The trees were like the shadowy shades of soldiers charging toward him, and for a moment, he thought to meet their charge, even though he no longer carried a gun.