“To call the police.”
“Hold on a minute.”
“Why?”
Jack glanced at Gus and saw how his eyes were flicking back and forth between Ceil and him.
“Because I’m thinking, that’s why!”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “I can smell the wood burning.”
“Hey!” Gus stepped toward Jack and raised the pistol as if to club him. “Another word out of you and–”
“You don’t really want to get that close to me, do you?” Jack said softly.
Gus stepped back.
“Gus, I’ve got to call the police!” Ceil said as she replaced the poker by the fireplace, far out of Jack’s reach.
“You’re not going anywhere,” Gus said. “Get over here.”
Ceil meekly moved to his side.
“Not here!” he said, grabbing her shoulder and shoving her toward Jack. “Over there!”
She cried with the pain in her back as she stumbled forward.
“Gus! What are you doing?”
Jack decided to play the game. He grabbed Ceil and turned her around. She struggled but he held her between Gus and himself.
Gus laughed. “You’d better think of something else, fella. That skinny little broad won’t protect you from a forty five.”
“Gus!”
“Shut up! God, I’m sick of your voice! I’m sick of your face, I’m sick of – God, I’m sick of everything about you!” Under his hands, Jack could feel Ceil jerk with the impact of the words as if they were blows from a fist. A fist probably would have hurt less.
“But – but Gus, I thought you loved me.
He sneered. “Are you kidding? I hate you, Ceil! It drives me up a wall just to be in the same room with you! Why the hell do you think I beat the shit out of you every chance I get? It’s all I can do to keep myself from killing you!”
“But all those times you said–”
“Lies, Ceil. Nothing but lies. And you’re such a pathetic wimp you fell for them every time.”
“But why?” She was sobbing now. “Why?”
“Why not dump you and find a real woman? One who’s got tits and can have kids? The answer should be pretty clear: your brother. He got me into Borland ‘cause he’s one of their biggest customers. And if you and me go kaput, he’ll see that I’m out of there before the ink’s dry on our divorce papers. I’ve put too many years into that job to blow it because of a sack of shit like you.”
Ceil almost seemed to shrivel under Jack’s hands. He glared at Gus.
“Big man.”
“Yeah. I’m the big man. I’ve got the gun. And I want to thank you for it, fella, whoever you are. Because it’s going to solve all my problems.”
“What? My gun?”
“Yep. I’ve got a shitload of insurance on my dear wife here. I bought loads of term on her years ago and kept praying she’d have an accident. I was never so stupid as to try and set her up for something fatal – I know what happened to that Marshall guy in Jersey – but I figured, what the hell, with all the road fatalities around here, the odds of collecting on old Ceil were better than Lotto.”
“Oh, Gus,” she sobbed. An utterly miserable sound.
Her head had sunk until her chin touched her chest. She would have fan folded to the floor if Jack hadn’t been holding her up. He knew this was killing her, but he wanted her to hear it. Maybe it was the alarm she needed to wake her up.
Gus mimicked her. “‘Oh, Gus!’ Do you have any idea how many rainy nights you got my hopes up when were late coming home from your card group? How I prayed – actually prayed – that you’d skidded off the road and wrapped your car around a utility pole, or that a big semi had run a light and plowed you under? Do you have any idea? But no. You’d come bouncing in as carefree as you please, and I’d be so disappointed I’d almost cry. That was when I really wanted to wring your scrawny neck!”
“That’s about enough, don’t you think?” Jack said.
Gus sighed. “Yeah. I guess it is. But at least all those premiums weren’t wasted. Tonight I collect.”
Ceil’s head lifted.
“What?”
“That’s right. An armed robber broke in. During the struggle, I managed to get the gun away from him but he pulled you between us as I fired. You took the first bullet – right in the heart. In a berserk rage, I emptied the rest of the clip into his head. Such a tragedy.” He raised the pistol and sighted it on Ceil’s chest. “Good bye, my dear sweet wife.”
The metallic click of the hammer was barely audible over Ceil’s wail of terror.
Her voice cut off as both she and Gus stared at the pistol.
“That could have been a dud,” Jack said. “Man, I hate when that happens.” He pointed to the top of the pistol. “Pull that slide back to chamber a fresh round.”
Gus stared at him a second, then worked the slide. An unspent round popped out.
“There you go,” Jack said. “Now, give it another shot, if you’ll pardon the expression.”
He pointed the muzzle at Ceil again, and Jack detected a definite tremor in the barrel now. Gus pulled the trigger but this time there was no scream from Ceil. She only flinched at the sound of the hammer falling on another dud.
“Aw, man!” Jack said, drawing out the word into a whine. “You think you’re buying good ammo and someone rips you off! You can’t trust anybody these days!”
Gus quickly worked the slide and pulled the trigger again. Jack allowed two more misfires, then he stepped around Ceil and approached Gus.
Frantically Gus worked the slide and pulled the trigger again, aiming for Jack’s face. Another impotent click. He began backing away when he saw Jack’s smile.
“That’s my dummy pistol, Gus. Actually, a genuine government issue Mark IV, but the bullets are dummy – just like the guy I let get hold of it.”
Jack brought it along when he wanted to see what somebody was really made of. It rarely failed to draw the worst to the surface.
He bent and picked up the ejected rounds. He held one up for Gus to see.
“The slug is real,” Jack said, “but there’s no powder in the shell. It’s an old rule: Never let an asshole near a loaded gun.”
Gus charged, swinging the .45 at Jack’s head. Jack caught his wrist and twisted the weapon free of his grasp. Then he slammed it hard against the side of Gus’s face, opening a gash. Gus tried to turn and run but Jack still had his arm. He hit him again, on the back of the head this time. Gus sagged to his knees and Jack put a lot of upper body behind the pistol as he brought it down once more on the top of his head. Gus stiffened, then toppled face first onto the floor.
Only seconds had passed. Jack spun to check on Ceil’s whereabouts. She wasn’t going to catch him twice. But no worry. She was right where he’d left her, standing in the corner, eyes closed, tears leaking out between the lids. Poor woman.
Nothing Jack wanted more than to be out of this crazy house. He’d been here too long already, but he had to finish this job now, get it done and over with.
He took Ceil’s arm and gently led her from the living room.
“Nothing personal, lady, but I’ve got to put you in a safe place, okay? Someplace where you can’t get near a fire poker. Understand?”
“He didn’t love me,” she said to no one in particular. “He stayed with me because of his job. He was lying all those times he said he loved me.”
“I guess he was.”
“Lying...”
He guided her to a closet in the hall and stood her inside among the winter coats.
“I’m just going to leave you here for a few minutes, okay?”
She was staring straight ahead. “All those years... lying...”
Jack closed her in the closet and wedged a ladderback chair between the door and the wall on the other side of the hall. No way she could get out until he removed the chair. Back in the living room, Gus was still out cold. Jack turned him over and tied his wrists to opposite ends of the coffee
table. He took two four by four wooden blocks from his duffel and placed them under Gus’s left lower leg, one just below the knee and the other just above the ankle. Then he removed a short handled five pound iron maul from the duffel. He hesitated as he lifted the hammer, the recalled Ceil’s eyes as Gus methodically battered her kidneys – the pain, the resignation, the despair. Jack broke Gus’s left shin with one sharp blow. Gus groaned and writhed on the floor, but didn’t regain consciousness. Jack repeated the process on the right leg. Then he packed up all his gear and returned to the hall.
He pulled the chair from where it was wedged against the closet door. He opened the door a crack.
“I’m leaving now, lady. When I’m gone you can go across the street and call the police. Better call an ambulance too.”
A single sob answered him.
Jack left by the back door. It felt good to get the stocking off his head.
*
When Jack dialed his answering machine the next morning there was only one message. It was from Oscar Schaffer. He sounded out of breath. And upset.
“You bastard! You sick, perverted bastard! I’m dropping the rest of your money off at that bar this morning and then I don’t want to see or hear or even think of you again!”
Jack was on his second coffee in Julio’s when he spotted Schaffer through the front window. He was moving fast, no doubt as close to a run as his portly frame would allow, clutching a white envelope in his hand. Perspiration gleamed on his pale forehead. His expression was strained. He looked like one frightened man.
Jack had told Julio he was coming so Julio intercepted him at the door as he did all Jack’s customers. But instead of leading him back to the Jack’s table, Julio returned alone. Jack spotted Schaffer hurrying back the way he had come.
Julio smiled as he handed Jack the envelope.
“What you do to spook him like that?”
Jack grabbed the envelope and hurried after Schaffer. He caught the developer as he was opening the door to a dark green Jaguar XJ 12.
“What’s going on?” Jack said.
Schaffer jumped at the sound of Jack’s voice. His already white face went two shades paler.
“Get away from me!”
He jumped into the car but Jack caught the door before he could slam it. He pulled the keys from Schaffer’s trembling fingers.
“I think we’d better talk. Unlock the doors.”
Jack went around to the other side and slipped into the passenger seat. He tossed the keys back to Schaffer.
“All right. What’s going on? The job’s done. The guy’s fixed. You didn’t need an alibi because it was done by a prowler. What’s the problem?”
Schaffer stared straight ahead through the windshield.
“How could you? I was so impressed with you the other day. The rogue with a code: ‘Sometimes I make a mistake. If that happens, I like to be able to go back and fix it.’ I really thought you were something else. I actually envied you. I never dreamed you could do what you did. Gus was a rotten son of a bitch, but you didn’t have to...” His voice trailed off.
Jack was baffled.
“You were the one who wanted him killed. I only broke his legs.”
Schaffer turned to him, the fear in his eyes giving way to fury.
“Don’t give me that shit! Who do you think you’re dealing with? I practically built that town! I’ve got connections!” He pulled a sheaf of papers from his pocket and threw it at Jack. “I’ve read the medical examiner’s report!”
“Medical examiner? He’s dead?” Shit! Jack had heard of people with broken legs throwing a clot to the heart. “How?”
“Aw, don’t play cute! Gus was a scumbag and yes I wanted him dead, but I didn’t want him tortured! I didn’t want him... mutilated!”
It was time for Jack’s fingers to do a little trembling as he scanned the report. It described a man who’d been pistol whipped, bound by the hands, and had both tibias broken; then he’d been castrated with a Ginsu knife from his own kitchen and gagged with his testicles in his mouth. After that he’d undergone at least two hours of torture before he died of shock due to blood loss from a severed artery in his neck.
“It’ll be in all the afternoon papers,” Schaffer was saying. “You can add the clippings to your collection. I’m sure you’ve got a big one”
“Where was Ceil supposed to be during all this?”
“Locked in the hall closet. She got out after you left. And she had to find Gus like that. No one should have to see something like that. If I could make you pay–”
“When did she phone the cops?”
“Right before calling me – around three a.m.”
Jack shook his head. “Wow. Three hours...she spent three hours on him.”
“‘She’? Who?”
“Ceil.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Gus was trussed up and out cold with two broken legs but very much alive on the living room floor when I left. I opened the door to the closet where I’d put your sister, and took off. That was around midnight.”
“No. You’re lying. You’re saying Ceil–” He swallowed. “She wouldn’t. She couldn’t. Besides, she called me at three, from a neighbor’s house, she’d only gotten free–”
“Three hours. Three hours between the time I opened the closet door and the time she called you.”
“No! Not Ceil! She...” Schaffer stared at Jack, and Jack met his gaze evenly. Slowly, like a dark stain seeping through heavy fabric, the truth took hold in his eyes. “Oh...my...God!”
He leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes. He looked like he was going to be sick. Jack gave him a few minutes. “The other day you said she needed help. Now she really needs it.”
“Poor Ceil!”
“Yeah. I don’t pretend to understand it, but I guess she was willing to put up with anything from a man who said he loved her. But when she found out he didn’t – and believe me, he let her know in no uncertain terms before he pulled the trigger on her.”
“Trigger? What–?”
“A long story. Ceil can tell you about it. But I guess when she found out how much he hated her, how he’d wanted her dead all these years, when she saw him ready to murder her, something must have snapped inside. When she came out of the closet and found him helpless on the living room floor, she must have gone a little crazy.”
“A little crazy? You call what she did a little crazy?”
Jack shrugged. He handed back the ME’s report and opened the car door.
“Your sister crammed ten years of pay back into three hours. She’s going to need a lot of help to recover from those ten years. And those three hours.”
Schaffer pounded his mahogany steering wheel.
“Shit! It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this!” Then he sighed and turned to Jack. “But I guess things don’t always go according to plan in your business.”
“Hardly ever.”
Jack got out of the car, closed the door, and listened to the Jag roar to life. As it screeched away, he headed back to Julio’s. A new customer was due at noon.
introduction to “The Long Way Home”
Toward the end of May, 1990, Joe Lansdale called, looking for a story for Dark at Heart, an anthology he was editing with his wife Karen. He wanted it dark but without any supernatural. I suggested a New York mean-streets story starring Jack. He loved the idea. “The Long Way Home” was the result. I started it in late May but due to a crowded plate, didn’t finish it until the end of July.
Fifteen years later my agent contacted me about Amazon Shorts, a new feature at Amazon.com that would allow readers to download a short story for a nominal fee. Could I write something for them?
What was on my plate at the time: The tenth Jack novel, an RJ short story for ITW’s Thriller, scripting five issues of The Keep graphic miniseries, adapting four short stories for Doomed, revising the text and writing a foreword to the Infrapress edition of Wheels Within Whe
els, revising Reprisal for Borderlands Press, revising The Tery and “The Last Rakosh” for Overlook Connection Press.
No, I couldn’t do a short story.
But I did have a long-lost Repairman Jack piece called “The Long Way Home” from Joe and Karen’s four-hundred-copy anthology that hadn’t been seen since 1992. I showed them that.
On the morning of May 11, Amazon, adamant about no previously published material, rejected it. By afternoon they’d reversed themselves. I was told that Jeff Bezos himself had said to screw the technicality in this case.
So I revised the story to bring it into the twenty-first century and sent it in. Amazon Shorts launched in August. “The Long Way Home” became the second most downloaded piece (and the #1 fiction download) during the program's first eighteen months.
The Long Way Home
1
Jack saw the whole thing. Another minute’s delay in leaving for home and he’d have been a block away when it went down. And then a different man would have died on the pavement.
But Julio had held him up, detailing his current bitch about all the yuppies chasing out his tavern’s regular customers. He was especially irate about one who’d offered to buy the place.
“You believe that?” Julio was saying. “He wanna turn it into a bistro, meng. A bistro!”
An incomprehensible stream of Puerto Rican followed. Which meant Julio was royally pissed. He was proud of his command of English and only under extreme provocation did he revert to his native tongue.
“He was only asking. What’s wrong with that?”
“Because he offer me a lot of money, meng. I mean a lot of money.”
“How much?”
Julio whispered it in Jack’s ear.
Right: A lot of money.
“I repeat: What’s wrong with that? You should be proud.”
“I don’ know ‘bout proud, but I was tempted to take it.”
“No!” Jack said, genuinely shaken. “Don’t say that, Julio. Don’t even think it.”