Hand me the suture, nurse.
Next!
Dead Men Rise Up Never
When Sherry began to scream I gripped the steering wheel and started sweating. I smelled her sweet and warm in the backseat between the stale smell of Willie and the sharp smell of Mark, and my nostrils took Hamphill into account too. Hamphill smelled soap-clean up in the front seat with me, and he tried to talk to her, calm her. He held her hand.
“Sherry, this is for your own good. Please listen to me, Sherry. We only got you away from your house in time. Finlay’s men, the ones who threatened you, would have kidnapped you today. I swear it. In God’s name. Sherry, we’re only protecting you.”
She didn’t believe Hamphill. I saw her dark shining eyes caught, held like crazy, wild things, in the rearview mirror. The car’s speed was up to sixty-five. Listen to him, Sherry, I thought, damn you, he loves you, so give him a chance!
“No! I don’t believe you,” was what she said. “You’re gangsters too! I know you!”
She tried to fling herself out of the car. Maybe she didn’t know how fast we were traveling. The ground ran past in a windy blur. She struggled. Mark held on to her. There was a shouting, a sudden scream, and silence.…
Sherry relaxed too suddenly in the backseat. Willie must have blinked at her dully, not understanding.
“Stop the car.” Hamphill groped at my elbow.
“But, boss…” I said.
“You heard me, Hank, stop it.”
The car sound died away and all you could hear was the ocean moaning along the skirt of the cliff. We were on top of it. Hamphill stared over into the rear seat and Willie’s dull voice said, “She’s gone to sleep, boss. Guess maybe she’s tired.”
I didn’t turn around. I looked at the gray clouds in the sky and the seagulls looping and crying—at Hamphill’s long lean face next to me, bleached to a beaten, shocked white, like a carved wooden mask left to bake and crumble on the sands.
The ocean came in once, twice, three times. Each time Hamphill breathed through his tiny, constricted nostrils. Then, holding her wrists, searching for a pulse he couldn’t find, he shut his eyes—tight.
I stared ahead. “There’s the cliff house, boss, just ahead. We better get inside it, in case Finlay and his men are following us. I bet they’re damn mad at us for this trick.…” I trailed off.
Hamphill didn’t know I was alive. He resembled something as old suddenly as that ancient wind-shaped, paint-flaked mansion standing on the rim of the stony cliffs.
Loving Sherry had made him young awhile. Now the salt sea wind was at him, rimming his hair above the ears, peeling away his new youth; the tide pounded his guts and sucked away his thinking.
I started the car and drove the last half mile to the cliff house very slowly. I climbed out of the car and slammed the door to waken the boss from his nightmare.
We walked into the house, the four of us carrying her. The front steps groaned when our feet touched them.
Upstairs in a west room with a view we laid Sherry on an old overstuffed sofa. A fine dust puffed from upholstery pores, hovering over her in a powdery sunlit veil. Death had quieted her features and she was beautiful as polished ivory, her hair like the color of waxed chestnuts.
Very slowly Hamphill sank beside her and told her what he thought of her, soft, like a kid talking to a fairy goddess. He didn’t sound like Hamphill, the beer baron; or Hamphill, the numbers man; or Hamphill, the racing boss. The wind whined behind his voice, because Sherry was dead and the day was over.…
* * *
A car passed on the highway and I shivered. Any minute now, maybe, if we hadn’t ditched them, some of Finlay’s boys might show up—
The room felt crowded. There were only two people who needed to be in it. I pushed Willie and nodded at Mark. We went out and I closed the door and we stood with our hands deep in our pockets, in the hall, thinking many thoughts.
“You didn’t have to scare her,” I said.
“Me?” asked Mark, jerking a match on the wall and putting the flame unevenly against his cigarette. “She started yelling like a steam whistle.”
“You scared her with your talk,” I said. “After all, it wasn’t a regular kidnapping. We were shielding her from Finlay. You know how soft the boss was on her—special.”
“I knew,” said Mark, “that we’d collect money on her, then frame Finlay for the deal, have him jailed, leaving us in the clear.”
“You got the general idea,” I said gently, “only let me bring out the details. The whole thing depended on Sherry’s cooperation, once she learned our intentions were for her own good. There wasn’t much time to explain today, when we heard Finlay was coming after her, so we grabbed her and ran. The blueprint was for us to hide her, then trap Finlay, let Sherry get a look at him and tell the police it was Finlay kidnapped her. Then they’d salt Finlay away and the whole business would be over.”