Cutter’s voice was a soft low insinuation: “You’re digging yourself a grave, see? Next maybe I break a few bones you need the most. Sy, you know you’re going to talk. Don’t make me crack you.”
Joanne said, spitting it, “All you need is thumbscrews and a rack to complete the picture.”
He ignored her; he said to me, “If you can’t talk when I get through, you’ll write it with your toes. How about it, Sy?”
I was half blind. I managed to shake my bead. Joanne, keeping herself under thin control, spoke through her teeth: “How does it make you feel to torture an innocent man?”
“About as guilty as the President feels killing them by the thousands overseas,” he replied without heat, without even glancing at her. “Now that’s all the idle conversation we’re going to have. Sy?”
“I don’t know—anything now that I didn’t know the first time you asked.”
He bounced the Magnum suggestively in his fist, stood up and suddenly plunged the weighted boot-toe into my ribs.
I stifled a cry of anguish. He kicked again and I made a grab for his leg, got it, hung on, twisted his foot until he fell. I got my knees under me but then the Magnum came whipping across, flat along the side of my head. I fell over, lights flashing inside my skull; I heard Joanne yell something. I rolled away from him—anything to get beyond the reach of his steel—rolled across a rosebush and felt thorns cut through my shirt, lacerating my chest. A red wash filmed my vision. I heard the crunch of earth, somebody moving quickly. There was an abrupt white-hot blade of pain where my neck joined my shoulder—he had whacked me across the collarbone with the barrel of the gun.
I never thought it possible to feel such pain. I scrambled away, blind; my mind jumped the track and I felt the unreasoning helplessness of real blindness, the panic and terror. My nerves twanged, a desperate mindless compulsion to retaliate—to smash and slash, kick and maim. For the first time I fully understood the compulsion to kill, the unthinking fury of total rage.
I shook my head violently, trying to clear my vision. My shoulder banged against the rock wall of the house; I clawed my way upright, turned, plunged my hand into a hip pocket and tugged out the .25 Beretta, the automatic I had taken from Dr. Brawley.
As the red wash drained from my eyes I saw Cutter, on one knee, frowning in a crazy, dazed way. He looked stunned. Beyond the doorstep Joanne was stooping, her face white; she was clawing a fist-sized rock out of the ground and I saw a depression beside it where there had been another rock. She must have thrown a rock at Cutter and hit him in the head.
Cutter was shaking his head; I saw the spittle running from his mouth. He wiped it off with the back of his wrist and turned the Magnum toward Joanne. He had forgotten all about me.
I pushed the Beretta out in front of me and bellowed at him:
“Hold it!”
He froze; his small eyes shifted toward me. For a long broken moment nothing stirred. Then Cutter took a deep breath. He lowered the Magnum and got up, stuffing the long flashlight under his elbow and rubbing his right temple with his free hand. He had the Magnum at arm’s length, down at his side; with slow stubborn movements he pressed it into the clamshell holster and snapped the holster shut. He shifted the flashlight from one hand to the other and said expressionlessly, “Okay, Sy, put that thing away.”
I didn’t move the gun a half-inch. I gave Joanne a quick glance: sweat dripped from her face and there was a white, knotted bulge at her jaw hinges.
Cutter gave me his long deadpan stare, as if fixing my face forever in his dark mind. He turned without saying a word, opened the car door and got in. The engine came on, then the headlights; the car wheeled around, throwing dust, and crunched away downhill. Darkness swallowed it.
Joanne made sounds in her throat. I put the Beretta in my pocket and croaked, “Jesus, he knows how to hit.”
“The bastard. I wish I’d killed him.”
“Yeah.” I staggered to the front step and sat down, all my movements slow; I felt like a hundred-year-old man. I closed my eyes and stifled a moan. Red waves of pain pulsed through my bones. I felt Joanne’s warm hand on my shoulder.
After a little while I summoned strength and got to my feet. I felt rickety and weak. Still throbbing with angry, hot pain. I climbed into the house and went around shutting off all the lights. I felt my way back to the front door and found Joanne on the step, fooling with her handbag. She pulled my .38 out and held it pointed at the place where Cutter had stood. I sat down by her and put my hand over hers, depressing the gun. “Okay,” I said. “Okay.”
“He’ll come back.”
“No. He’s too conceited. He thinks if he searched the place and didn’t find what he expected to find, then it isn’t here. He wouldn’t have given up if he hadn’t been convinced. Showing a little muscle before he left—that’s just his way.”
“He’s an animal.”
“Yeah.” With cops like him, who needs gangsters? I guess if you’re far enough away from the Cutters, if you haven’t actually come under their guns, you can find all kinds of Freudian explanations for them. It’s a cop’s job to handle garbage. He has to deal with vicious, ignorant, hysterical, self-important gutter people. He sees so much casual violence he becomes indifferent to cruelty. You could look at it that way. You could, but I couldn’t. To hell with the psycho-sociological explanations. I didn’t want the Joe Cutters in the same world with me. They didn’t have any right to life.
Then, I thought, why hadn’t I used the Beretta on him? There had been a time when I understood killing. I’d have understood it, without questioning, if I’d shot Cutter, or if he’d shot me. But something along the years had taught me words—mercy, justice, responsibility, pride, dignity. I had learned the words and I didn’t understand any more. The words had turned me into a human being. Simon Crane vs. the inevitable.
I became aware of the soft rhythm of Joanne’s breathing beside me. I had been thinking—compulsively, to mask pain, to hold myself together. Angry, I stood up fast. Weakness flowed along my fibers. I walked around, testing my legs. I felt needles; there was a little tremor behind my knees. Tender here, stab of pain there. I walked a small circle, waving my arms around. When I came back to Joanne she pushed her lower lip forward to blow hair off her forehead and then turned her face away from me; I didn’t understand why until she said, with a lurch in her voice, “I wish somebody would invent a mascara that wouldn’t run.”
She had been through so goddamn much in a few hours. I lowered myself beside her and turned her head with one finger, at her chin. Her face hovered before me. The wind kept a mesquite branch scratching on the side of the house. I felt the faint touch of something we had once had—the soft warm, nesty feeling of love.
The lights had been off long enough; the diesel generator had stopped. I squeezed her and said, “Maybe you’ll want to stay here, I’ve got to take care of—Mike.”
She shook her head. “I couldn’t be alone, Simon.”
“It’s got to be done.”
“I know. I’ll help. Oh, God, poor Mike.”
We buried Mike far back in the desert mountains, near a place where some hopeful hardrocker had tried to strike it rich. We had tugged the tarp-wrapped body out from under the diesel generator platform in back of the house. Cutter hadn’t been able to look down there while the engine was running; he would have risked an ear against the engine’s whirling, bladed fan. We had loaded the body into the Jeep and come lurching across country, using four-wheel drive.
It was three in the morning and the ground was full of stones under its thin layer of dusty topsoil. I ached in all my joints; every stab of the shovel into the resisting earth plunged pain through me.