“They can’t know.”
“She told them. Want to know what she said? She told them the truth, what I suspected, Jack. God, and I loved you—I love you, Jack. I believed in you. She told them you had done this because you loved her. She said you pleaded with her to stay with you, and that you told her you were working a deal where you’d have a lot of money, so you and she could go away together. But when she realized what you had done, she couldn’t bear knowing.” She took a step toward me. “So she told them. Isn’t that just too rich for words, though?”
“You don’t believe that.”
“Yes. I do believe it, Jack. I’ve had tiny doubts about you all along. Now I know. You never loved me. It was a way to get money, that’s all.”
She breathed deeply, and her breasts rose and fell. I saw the way her belly worked. She didn’t move that gun, either, and she was just as beautiful as ever, the way she stood there.
“Jack. I’ve a confession, I want you to know. I had never had a man before. All that was talk. I did it to impress you, because you were the kind of guy you were. I had to be like you—your type, so you’d like me. See?” She took another step toward me. She looked like a savage. “But, I loved you. There’s that for you to remember. I really did love you—with every bit of me.”
“This is all a lot of—”
“No, Jack. I’m going to kill you. Then I’m going to take my own life, too. Because, that’s how I want it. I’ll have that much, anyway. I won’t go back there and face them, have them look at me with dirty eyes and hear them talk. They’ll never know how cheap and false and empty all this was. I’ll have that.”
“Shirley, listen to me. You’re wrought up. You’re thinking all wrong. You’ve got to listen to me. We can get away, if we leave right now. We’d have each other.”
“Don’t lie to me! No!”
“Shirley, please.”
“Jack, Victor was right. You’re a son of a bitch. That’s all you are. Not a good son of a bitch. A bad son of a bitch. You didn’t even take my word on anything. A girl named Veronica Lewis told the police you had her check on Victor’s bank account. Was she another hot number, Jack?”
I dropped the bills from my hands. They fluttered to the floor at my feet, on the blankets. My hands burned horribly now and the pain seethed up my arms. I had to reach her, somehow. Maybe I could jump her and get that gun away from her. Because she was mad!
“There’s lots more,” she said. “But why talk about it?”
“Shirley. Honey.”
“It’s a suicide pact,” she said. “That’s what it will seem. I’ve left a note outside, tacked to the door,explaining it. The note is a lie. Like everything else is a lie, since I met you. I told them we burned the money together, because we couldn’t have it, and nobody else would. I told them it was a symbol of our love. Isn’t that rich, Jack? A symbol of our love. But they’ll never know what that really means—how it means emptiness and nothingness. We knew we couldn’t escape the law. So we burned the money and killed ourselves. We would be together. We would never return to be sullied by the world.”
I stared at her. Then I leaped at her.
She fired. She fired the gun four times, and she hit me three out of the four. I never reached her. I stumbled with the pain in my legs and my side, and sprawled across the blankets. The pain was bad.
“Shirley!”
I was bleeding. I lay there and watched the bleeding and the pain was much worse than I thought pain would ever be. I hadn’t thought pain came so swiftly. But it did. It came in blinding white sheets, in hot waves, up and down my body.
I tried to move toward her. I couldn’t move. I was too weak and there was too much pain. I lay there looking at her through the reddish film that seemed to spread all through me and I knew that I would die.
She stood looking at me, holding the gun.
Then she stepped softly toward me and knelt on the blankets. Her face was hell to see. She reached out and touched my head, then snatched her hand away. All I could do was look at her. I kept trying to say her name.
“Goodbye, Jack. You son of a bitch.”
She thought I was dead.
She put the muzzle of that gun to her head and pulled the trigger. For a long moment she just sat there with half of her head torn away. I heard myself scream. It didn’t do any good. I couldn’t move.
She fell over on me, bleeding and dead.
Somehow I finally got her off me.
Sixteen
I lay there and watched the fire die down, waiting to die myself. I knew that by the time all the flames were gone, I would be gone.
There was no pain now.
I had to look across Shirley’s body to see the fire. It leaped across her bare back, and up out of her hair, seething, and it looked as if she were breathing.
She wasn’t breathing. She was dead.
It was quiet. As the fire died and died, I gradually came to hear the river again, pulsing endlessly against the banks, and there was the sound of the wind high in the pines. The day became brighter and brighter outside. The sun yellowed the room. And with the sun, the fire died still more, and finally it was nothing but embers.
But I was still all right. Not even bleeding. I was full of lead. My side was ripped open. My left leg was broken. But I was still alive.
I didn’t want to be alive.
Then I heard them.
They called the cabin.
“Ruxton! Come out with your hands above, your head.”
I couldn’t answer them. I could see the gun, still in her hand. It was about two yards away. I tried to reach it, but I couldn’t. I tried to crawl to the gun, because then I could kill myself. It was ironic. They would fix me up, if they got to me—fix me up for their kill.
I kept trying to reach the gun. But I couldn’t make it.
“Ruxton. We’re coming, in!”
I shouted at them. “No! No!”
But it was just a sound in my head, it never came from my throat, nothing came past my lips but a whisper.
And then I knew that this was why I had never been able to make it, in all the years of trying, and this was what it had been coming to. Even when I went and took this beautiful gamble. It was simple. Some can make it, others can’t. It was that simple.
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t talk.
I waited.
They finally came across the porch. The door was open. They looked in and saw us lying there. They thought I was dead, too, at first.
An officer of the State Highway Patrol came in. I saw Doctor Miraglia out on the porch. Then a woman screamed, and ran into the room.
“Get her out!” somebody said.
It was Grace. She screamed again, and stood there looking down at me.
They led her back out again, fighting with her every inch of the way.
“Well, Ruxton,” Miraglia said. “It’s all over, isn’t it?”
I just looked at him.
I couldn’t figure what they were trying to prove. They all knew what had happened. I even told them the whole story, from the beginning. There was no use holding out. But they kept insisting there must be a trial. It seemed so damned stupid.
They kept me in the hospital, under guard.
Grace came to see me. Don’t misunderstand. She didn’t come to visit me. She came to see me—to stare at me.
She would get a chair and just sit there, staring at me, until they asked her to leave. Every day she did that.
“I’ll be there at the end, too, Jack.”
She said that every day. She was very nice, because they wouldn’t let her stay otherwise. There was nothing I could do.
Yes, that’s how it was. Grace, she was always burning. Then Shirley and I began burning. And then the money burned. And now there was time to burn.