Hit and The Marksman (2 page)

Six months ago, I thought, she would have added a comma and “darling.” Now it was just a polite question, edged with remote concern and crowded by her obvious agitation. I had an image of her face, framed tight by short dark hair. Acidly resentful, I said, “I'm surprised they let you get near a phone. Where are you?”

“In a phone booth on Corral Drive. Simon, I have to see you—but now I think it would be better not to talk about it on the phone. Something's happened at—at the place where I work.”

“I'm not having any, Joanne—I'm keeping out of it.”

“I don't know if you can.” She did sound terribly subdued. “You may already be involved. Look, if it was just something personal—do you honestly think after what we went through last winter that I'd come running to you to hold my hand? Simon, if I could think of another soul on earth—God knows I don't want to impose on you, but there just isn't anyone else. I'm in trouble, I need help.”

“What is it, then?”

She said, almost in a whisper, “I'm shaking like a leaf.”

“Trouble with the organization?” I said stupidly.

“Trouble isn't the word for it. Simon, you used to be a policeman, you'd know what to—”

“I told you,” I said dully, “I don't intend to get within a mile of the cops or your boy friends, either one.”

“I can't talk on the phone,” she said, sounding drained. “Please, Simon.”

I closed my eyes. “Suit yourself. I'll be here.”

When she hung up I sat on the side of the bed with my eyes shut, pinching the bridge of my nose. After a stretch of time I batted into the bathroom to shower and shave and scrape thickness off my teeth. The face in the mirror was weathered more square than long, not remarkable. A textured face that took a dark tan and kept it; scarred and busted here and there because I was once a cop, subscribing to the idea of justice before realities had canceled my subscription.

They had retired me compulsorily on half pension “due to 20 percent incapacitation from bullet injury incurred in line of duty.” Encysted in my right thigh, under the crowfoot scars, were the fragments of two .357 bullets, special homemade softnoses that had splintered on impact. Now and then a twinge of sciatica lanced through the leg, but I was hardly among the walking wounded; the disability was more like .02 percent than 20—a hardly perceptible limp on damp days. It had been an excuse, not a reason, for them to get me off the force.

The slugs had been put in me by a cop named Joe Cutter, by mistake—he said—one night when we had split up to come at a team of burglars from opposite ends of a hardware store. Cutter had a zealot's pride in his .357 Magnum hand cannon. He had paid for it himself. He spent evenings in his soldier-tidy antiseptic apartment devising sophisticated recipes for homebrewed ammunition.

My retirement, which I had not fought, had been a separation without sorrow. They probably still had a dossier on me in the Inactive file: Simon Crane, 30, ht 6 ft 2 in, wt 185, eyes gray, hair black, unmarried, parents deceased. City grade and high schools, state university—bachelor's in History, minor in Journalism, letters in tennis and in baseball the two years we'd gone to the College World Series at Omaha. University ROTC, two years an Army Intelligence lieutenant. Then three years a newspaper reporter while I decided what I really wanted to do with my life, to justify my existence. Finally, with zeal to the police force. Rookie to patrolman to detective 2/G—and back to patrolman. I had bucked too many bagmen.

There were a few others like me. Cops who cared about one or two other things besides grease and the pension you got after twenty years on the force. Cops who believed in the notion that the law was a fine precision mechanism designed to right wrongs. They learned. Some stuck it out, trying to reform from the inside; some quit, joined the FBI, became juvenile probation officers or set up their own private detective agencies; some, like me, forsook the rat race. They all quit for the same reason: they ran up against the organization. You got evidence on a hood and it looked ironclad and then the hood's protectors stepped in: the organization's battery of attorneys marched into the courtroom, the organization's bagmen got to the judge. One honest cop's testimony against the paid perjury of half a dozen hired witnesses—where could you find legitimate citizens to testify in Mafia cases? Good citizens didn't know anything about the organization's operations; how could they testify? If you had a corroborative witness, he was likely to be another hood, and the organization's attorneys didn't mind ruining his reputation to get the client off. Then it went to the jury—what Darrow called “twelve men of average ignorance”—and even if you got past that obstacle, got past all the obstacles of appeals and delays, achieved the nirvana of a conviction—even then you ended up with a judge who passed a sentence of fifteen weekends in the House of Detention on the hood, who laughed at you when he walked out of the courtroom. The public bought the mockery with the “It's God's will” sophistry of small minds; the legal system had been satisfied because the system thinks a lot about the rules of the game but never asks whether the game itself has any meaning.

In the end it became just another entry in a file someplace. You brought them in and they went right out again through the revolving door. You came to loathe the organization, and that kind of deep hate was a fervor that got stronger with time and frustration; there was nothing to do, in the end, except quit. To preserve whatever was left of sanity.

When I left the force, feeling as if I had lived through it merely because I happened not to have died from Cutter's .357 fusillade, I considered going to work as a private operative—one of those eyes who investigate husbands who play golf when it rains. I couldn't work up any enthusiasm for the idea, or for going back to newspapering, a jungle of scrambled copy in which every edition ought to have eight-column banners on the front page: “ENTIRE CONTENTS FICTION.”

When I tried to explain it all to Joanne, she had told me my point of view was sophomoric and misanthropic. Maybe so. For six months I edited a slick regional monthly that sandwiched gorgeous color photos of southwestern scenery between articles that tried to justify the Paleolithic right-wing notions of the rich ranchers who owned the magazine. The views weren't mine but the salary was high. I thought, at first, money would make a difference.

But after a while I sickened of the idea of spending money I didn't have to buy things I didn't need to impress people I didn't like. That was when I gave up the job, and job-hunting, and took my indefinite sabbatical. I moved out of my downtown, semi-detached, split-level, modern, air-conditioned bungalow garden court apartment (with pool privileges), and bought the old rock fort in the hills with the last of my severance pay.

It came cheap; nobody wanted an ugly stone house so far off the main-traveled roads. No one seemed to know who had built it, or when. It was old, squatting sunblasted and craggy on the desert hill, with its own well and its six rooms, or seven depending on your method of counting, and its sizable population of centipedes and black widows which congregated in the seams between the rocks. The lights, refrigerator and noisy rooftop swamp cooler were powered by electricity from a small Koehler diesel generator bolted on a wooden platform in a lean-to against the back wall. The enclosure looked like the cover on a coal chute; the little two-cylinder engine sat two feet off the ground on its platform to keep dust out of the works. It thumped and clattered incessantly; it was an intolerable gnashing of pistons and valves, pulsing out unsteady direct current.

The nearest neighbor was three miles away; the hills were all rocks and dust and cactus. A hundred feet behind the house was a square stone shed that had once been a carriage barn. Inside it, I kept the rock equipment—tumblers, grinders, barrels, diamond saws, drills.

I supplemented my pension by rockhounding. As a business it was pointless—an individual with secondhand, backroom machinery couldn't make much of a living … But its pointlessness was part of its beauty. Out of the tumblers came brilliant gems—for rings, pendants, earrings, rock-bolo desert neckties, all the gimcracks tourists picked up in curio shops. The rocks didn't bring in much money but they made me a time and a place: time to wander the desert and mountains in search of the garnet and agate and countless other semiprecious stones that littered the canyons in uncut, unpolished disguise.

It was a land of heroic proportions. It was dangerous if you took it for granted; you shook out your boots in the morning before you put them on, to avoid scorpion stings, and you kept the legs of the bed in half-f cans of kerosene to dissuade the bugs from crawling in with you. The sun burned wherever it struck. But when you took a breath, it tasted clean and you knew nobody had ever breathed that lungful of air before you.

I poured a glass of milk—I have never liked coffee—and took it outside. The dry heat made my cheeks sting with shaving rash. I brooded on the rose bushes Joanne had planted along the gravel walk. She had left herself all over the place. The roses were starting to bloom again; in the desert you could get five or six blooms in a year if you kept them watered. I turned on the faucet and watched the water make mud, flowing along the shallow trenches from bush to bush. I had spent a month self-disciplining myself into the conviction that it hadn't been important enough for me to bother tearing out all the reminders of her by the roots. But her phone call brought it all back, very whole, very sharp and vivid.

It was going to be a scorching hot day. In the shade on the front step I drained the milk and thought about what we had said six months ago. It had been one of those miserable conversations where neither of us could meet the other's eyes. “Darling,” she had said, “I wish we could have kept it casual, the way you wanted it, but I'm not made that way. It's my fault—I know you didn't want it to get too intense.”

I had tried to persuade her to change her mind. She had lashed out (afterward I understood why): “Simon, you're hiding away up here, you just can't commit yourself to anything or anyone. You tried to fight city hall and you lost, so you quit. You haven't got room left in you for me or anything else outside yourself. I've already had that with Mike, more than I could take. I haven't the strength left.”

The Jeep had been packed with my rock chisels and canteen. I had acted tougher than I felt, because I couldn't fathom my own contradictory feelings. I had climbed into the Jeep and she had walked over to me and said, “I won't be here when you get back.” I had driven on down the hill without looking back to see if she was watching. It turned into a rotten day—I wanted to call her but wasn't sure whether she wanted me to. Sometimes it was hard to be sure of Joanne's meanings; she was changeable: sometimes she told you only part of the truth because she thought the whole truth would hurt.

I had seen her only once after that—a week later, an accidental meeting. She had let it slip; I never knew whether it was deliberate or an honest slip—She'd said something that had given me a foothold and I had pried the rest out of her, questioning her roughly like an interrogating cop, and finally there it was: Aiello. I was an ex-cop—an ex-honest cop—and Aiello had told her to stay away from me. She hadn't told me before because she knew my temper; she didn't want me to go gunning for Aiello because I wouldn't have a chance against the organization.

I knew better than to ask her to quit working for Aiello. I had never even asked her how she'd got mixed up with the organization in the first place. Those were questions you just didn't ask. It went without saying they had some hold over her. They always do.

I had told myself, angrily, it was her choice and I had to honor it. We had to avoid each other for however long it might take to blunt the edges of dangerous emotions. I had to acquiesce because I could not compromise her with the organization; Aiello was not an understanding or forgiving type and his organization played rough.

Now I saw the dust of her car coming up the dirt-road from the county highway. I felt ill at ease, betrayed; I had steeled myself against her absence but now she was coming back, not for the reason I would have wanted.

It was impossible to ignore my anticipation—I wanted to see her.

I waited in the shade until she drove the beige convertible into the yard and parked beside my Jeep. She had the top down; she turned and watched through her sunglasses as I walked out of the shade to open the car door. She didn't smile. “Thanks for letting me come.”

Very gravely, I said, “Is it bad?”

“As bad as it can get.” She swung her legs out, stood and smoothed down the tight skirt—it was white poplin; she wore a green sleeveless blouse that clung to the curved undersides of her breasts and showed off her smooth brown arms. She had a dancer's hard little body, superb legs; her face was small, heart-shaped and lovely.