A Dance At The Slaughterhouse Part 32

"Neither do I," I said, and I swung the gun around and snapped off a shot that caromed off the wall just inches to the side of the painting. It chipped the concrete, and it put a dent in Stettner's sangfroid. "I'll shoot the s.h.i.t out of it," I told him. "And the others." I swung the gun toward the pair of portraits and squeezed the trigger without actually aiming. The bullet went through the portrait of the woman, making a small round hole just inches from her forehead.

"My G.o.d," Stettner said. "You are vandals."

"It's just paint and canvas," I said.

"My G.o.d. I'll open the safe."

He worked the combination swiftly and surely. The turning of the dial was the only sound you could hear. I was holding on to the Smith and breathing in the smell of cordite. The gun was heavy and my hand ached slightly from the gun's recoil. I longed to put it down. There was no reason to point it at anyone. Stettner was busy with the safe, Olga frozen with dread and incapable of movement.

Stettner hit the last number, turned the handle, drew open the twin doors. We all looked within at the stacks of bills. I was to the side, my view partly screened by the other two men. I saw Stettner's hand dart into the open safe and I cried out, "Mick, he's got a gun!"

In a film they would show the scene in slow motion, and what's curious is that's the way I remember it. Stettner's hand reaching in, fastening on a little blued-steel automatic pistol. Mick's hand, gripping the huge cleaver, poised high overhead, then flashing down in a deadly arc. The blade biting cleanly, surgically, through the wrist. The hand appearing to leap forward, away from the blade, as if liberated from its arm.

Stettner spun around, away from the open safe, facing toward us. His face was white, his mouth wide with horror. He held his arm in front of him like a shield. Arterial blood, bright as sunrise, spurted wildly from his mutilated arm. He lurched forward, his mouth working soundlessly, his arm spraying blood at us, until Ballou let out an awful sound from deep in his throat and swung the cleaver a second time, burying it in the juncture of Stettner's neck and shoulder. The blow drove the man to his knees and we stepped back out of the way. He sprawled forward and lay still, pouring out blood onto the gray broadloom.

Olga was standing still. I don't think she had moved at all. Her mouth was slack and she had her hands poised at the sides of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, her nail polish a perfect match for the color on her nipples.

I looked from her to Ballou. He was turning toward her now, his ap.r.o.n crimson with fresh blood, his hand locked on the handle of the cleaver.

I swung the Smith around. I didn't hesitate. I squeezed the trigger, and the gun bucked in my hand.

Chapter 23.

The first shot was rushed, and wide of the mark. It took her in the right shoulder, I tucked my elbow in against my ribs and fired a second shot, and a third. Both entered the center of her chest, between the rouged b.r.e.a.s.t.s. The light was gone from her eyes before she hit the floor.

"MATT.".

I was standing there, looking down at her, and Mick was saying my name. I felt his hand on my shoulder. The room reeked of death, the smells of gunfire and blood and body wastes merging to foul the air. I felt an awful weariness, and there was a dull cramp at the back of my throat, as if something was trapped there and wanted to get out.

"Come on, man. We've got to get out of here."

I moved quickly once I shook off whatever it was that had immobilized me. While he cleaned out the safe, sweeping stacks of money into a couple of canvas sacks, I wiped away any prints either of us might have left. I retrieved the ca.s.sette from the VCR, stuck it in my coat pocket, and tossed the coat over my arm. I stuck the.38 back in my belt and put Mick's SIG Sauer in my pocket. I grabbed the attache case and followed Mick down the hall and up the stairs.

Tom was right next to the door, propped into a sitting position against the wall. His face looked bloodless, but then he was always pale. Mick set down the sacks of money, picked Tom up in his arms, and carried him out to the car. Andy had the door open and Mick tucked him into the back seat.

Mick came back for the money while Andy opened the trunk. I tossed in everything I was carrying, and Mick returned and added the sacks of cash and slammed the trunk lid hard. I went back into the arena and checked the room where we'd done the killing. They were both dead, and I couldn't spot anything I'd overlooked. At the top of the stairs I found the two guards, and they were both dead, too. I wiped the whole area where Tom had been sitting on the chance he'd left his prints there, and I dug most of the chewing gum out of the lock so that it wouldn't be stuck open. I wiped the lock, and parts of the door we might have touched.

They were motioning to me from the car. I looked around. The neighborhood was deserted as ever. I ran across the pavement. The Ford's front door was open, the front pa.s.senger seat empty. Mick was in back with Tom, talking softly to him, pressing a wadded-up cloth against his shoulder wound. The wound seemed to have stopped bleeding, but I didn't know how much blood he'd already lost.

I got in, closed the door. The engine was already running, and Andy pulled away smoothly. Mick said, "You know where to go now, Andy."

"That I do, Mick."

"We don't want a ticket, G.o.d knows, but step as lively as you dare."

MICK has a farm in Ulster County. The closest town is Ellenville. A couple from County Westmeath, a Mr. and Mrs. O'Mara, run the place for him, and their name appears on the deed. That's where we went, arriving somewhere between three and three-thirty. Andy drove with the radar detector switched on, and even so didn't stray too far over the speed limit.

We got Tom inside and made him comfortable on a daybed in the sun parlor, and Mick went out with Andy and woke up a doctor he knew, a sour-faced little man with liver spots on the backs of his hands. He was with Tom for almost an hour, and when he came out he stood for a long time washing his hands at the kitchen sink. "He'll be all right," he announced. "Tough little b.a.s.t.a.r.d, isn't he? 'I been shot before, Doc,' he tells me. 'Well, my boy,' I said, 'will you never learn to duck?' I couldn't get a smile out of him, but he's got a face that doesn't look as though it's smiled much. He'll be all right, though, and live to get shot again another day. If you're on speaking terms with the Creator you might want to thank Him for penicillin. Used to be a wound like that'd turn septic on you, kill you a week or ten days down the line. Not anymore. Innit a wonder we don't all live forever?"

While the doctor worked the rest of us sat at the kitchen table. Mick cracked a pint of whiskey, and most of it was gone by the time Andy ran the doctor home. Andy made a beer last as long as he could, then had a second one. I found a bottle of ginger ale in the back of the refrigerator and drank that. We just sat there and n.o.body said much of anything.

After Andy dropped off the doctor he came back for us and pulled up next to the house and tapped the horn. Mick rode up front with him and I sat in the back. Tom stayed at the farm; the doctor wanted him to spend the next several days in bed, and planned to see him again over the weekend, or sooner if he got feverish. Mrs. O'Mara would nurse him. I gathered she'd performed that function before.

Andy got on the Thruway and retraced our route. We picked up the Saw Mill and the Henry Hudson and wound up in front of Grogan's. It was six-thirty in the morning and I had never been more wide awake in my life. We carried the sacks of money inside and Mick locked them in the safe. We gave Andy our guns, the ones that had been fired; he'd drop them in the river on his way home.

"I'll settle with ye in a day or so," Mick told him. "Once I count it all and figure out shares. 'Twill be a decent sum for a good night's work."

"I'm not worried," Andy said.

"Go on home now," Mick said. "My love to your mother, she's a fine woman. And you're a grand driver, Andy. You're the best."

WE sat at the same table again, with the doors locked and only the light of dawn for illumination. Mick had a bottle and a gla.s.s but he wasn't hitting it hard. I had drawn a c.o.ke for myself and found a piece of lemon to cut the sweetness some. Once I got it the way I wanted it I barely touched the d.a.m.ned thing.

For over an hour we spoke scarcely a word. When he got to his feet around seven-thirty I got up and went with him. I didn't have to ask where we were going, and he didn't have to go in back for his ap.r.o.n. He was still wearing it.

I went with him to collect the Cadillac and we rode in silence down Ninth Avenue to Fourteenth Street. We parked in front of Twomey's, mounted the steps, entered the sanctuary of St. Bernard's. We were a few minutes early as we took seats in the last row of the little room where they hold the butchers' ma.s.s.

The priest this morning was young, with a smooth pink face that looked as though it never needed a shave. He had a thick West-of-Ireland brogue and must have been a recent arrival. He seemed confident enough, though, before his tiny congregation of nuns and butchers.

I don't remember the service. I was there and I was not there. I stood when others stood, sat when they sat, knelt when they knelt. I made the indicated responses. But even as I did these things I was breathing in the mixed scent of blood and cordite, I was watching a cleaver descend in its furious arc, I was seeing blood spurt, I was feeling a gun buck in my hand.

And then something curious happened.

When the others queued up to receive Communion, Mick and I stayed where we were. But as the line moved along, as each person in turn said Amen and received the Host, something lifted me up onto my feet and steered me to the end of the line. I felt a light tingling in the palms of my hands, a pulse throbbing in the hollow of my throat.

The line moved. "The Body o' Christ," the priest said, over and over and over. "Amen," each person said in turn. The line moved, and now I was at the front of it, and Ballou was right behind me.

"The Body o' Christ," the priest said.

"Amen," I said. And took the wafer upon my tongue.

Chapter 24.

Outside the sun was bright and the air crisp and cold. Halfway down the church steps Mick caught up with me and gripped my arm. His smile was fierce.

"Ah, we'll burn in h.e.l.l for sure now," he said. "Taking the Lord's Communion with blood on our hands. If there's a more certain way of getting into h.e.l.l I don't know what it is. My sins unconfessed for thirty years, my ap.r.o.n still wet with that b.a.s.t.a.r.d's gore, and I'm up at the altar as if I'm in a state of grace." He sighed at the wonder of it. "And you! Not a Catholic, but were you ever baptized anything at all?"

"I don't think so."

"Sweet Jesus, a f.u.c.king heathen at the altar rail, and I'm following after him like Mary's lost lamb. Whatever got into you, man?"

"I don't know."

"The other night I said you were full of surprises. By G.o.d, I didn't know the half of it. Come on."

"Where are we going?"

"I want a drink," he said. "And I want your company."

We went to a meatcutters' bar on the corner of Thirteenth and Washington. We had been there before. The floor was covered with sawdust, the air thick with smoke from the bartender's cigar. We sat at a table with whiskey for him and strong black coffee for me.

He said, "Why?"

I thought about it and shook my head. "I don't know," I said. "I never planned it. Something picked me up off my knees and set me down in front of the altar."

"That's not what I mean."

"Oh?"

"Why were you out there tonight? What sent you to Maspeth with a gun in your hand?"

"Oh," I said.

"Well?"

I blew on my coffee to cool it. "That's a good question," I said.

"Don't tell me it was the money. You could have had fifty thousand dollars just by letting him have the tape. I don't know what the shares'll be, but they won't reach fifty thousand. Why double the risk for a smaller reward?"

"The money didn't have all that much to do with it."

"The money had nothing to do with it," he said. "When did you ever give a s.h.i.t for money? You never did." He took a drink. "I'll tell you a secret. I don't give a s.h.i.t about it either. I need it all the f.u.c.king time, but I don't really care about it."

"I know."

"You didn't want to sell them their tape, did you?"

"No," I said. "I wanted them dead."

He nodded. "You know who I thought of the other night? That old cop you told me about, the old Irishman you were yoked up with when you first started out."

"Mahaffey."

"That's the one. I thought of Mahaffey."

"I can see how you would."

"I thought of what he'd said to you. 'Never do something you can get somebody else to do for you.' Isn't that how it went?"

"That sounds right."

"And I said to myself that there was nothing wrong with that. Why not leave the killing to the men in the b.l.o.o.d.y ap.r.o.ns? But then you said you wanted more than a finder's fee, and for a moment there I thought I had you wrong."

"I know. And it bothered you."

"It did, because I couldn't see you as a man with that kind of money hunger. It meant you weren't the man I thought I knew, and that did bother me. But then in the next breath you cleared the air again. Said you wanted to earn a full share, said you wanted to go in with a gun."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"It seemed easier that way. They'd be expecting me, they'd let me in the door."

"That's not the reason."

"No, it's not. I guess I decided Mahaffey was wrong, or that his advice couldn't apply in this particular situation. It didn't feel right, leaving the dirty work to somebody else. If I could sentence them to death the least I could do was show up for the hanging."

He drank and made a face. "I'll tell you," he said, "I serve a better gla.s.s of whiskey at my own bar."

"Don't drink it if it's no good."

He tasted it again to make sure. "I couldn't call it bad," he said. "You know, I don't care much for beer or wine, but I've had my share of both, and I've had beer that's thinner than water and wine that's gone to vinegar. And I've known of meat that's turned and eggs that are off, and food poorly cooked and poorly made and spoiled. But in all my life I don't think I've ever had bad whiskey."

"No," I said. "I never had any."

"How do you feel now, Matt?"

"How do I feel? I don't know how I feel. I'm an alcoholic, I never know how I feel."

"Ah."

"I feel sober. That's how I feel."

"I bet you do." He looked at me over the top of his gla.s.s. He said, "I'd say they deserved killing."

"Do you think so?"

"If anyone ever did."

"I guess we all deserve killing," I said. "Maybe that's why n.o.body ever gets out of here alive. I don't know where I get off deciding who deserves killing and who doesn't. We left four people dead back there and two of them I never even met. Did they deserve killing?"

"They had guns in their hands. n.o.body drafted them, not for that war."