$20 Lust

10

Twelve hours to wait for Reed and Baron. Twelve hours to sit on our hands.

We didn’t sit on our hands. We were lucky — there was plenty to do. Packing, for example. We had plenty to take along with us. The press, the plates, the ink, the blank paper, the chemicals.

Before we packed I put the few counterfeit twenties I was still carrying through the chemical bath. I was suddenly sorry I hadn’t brought the whole satchel along — the bills were worth a dollar a piece now. They would have made fine blanks. But it wouldn’t have been worth the risk of getting picked up with the satchel in our possession.

I also tumbled on a stack of singles — money they hadn’t gotten around to bleaching yet. I packed those. I put the twenties already printed up in my wallet. There was a little over three hundred dollars there, enough to take us wherever we were going.

The press had a carrying case of its own and the rest of the stuff fit into an old suitcase someone had thoughtfully left behind. We got everything ready to go. Once Reed and Baron came back anything could happen. There could be gunshots, in which case we would have to leave in a hurry. I didn’t want to have to waste any time, not when time was important.

Cindy was calmer now. The human being is a remarkably adjustable mechanism — it can adjust to murder. She still didn’t like it, but then neither did I. She accepted it, though. If nothing else, there was consolation in the argument that we hadn’t killed anybody remotely worthwhile. Craig and Casper were lice, thieves, murderers.

We too were thieves and murderers. But that was something we didn’t want to dwell on.

“We’ve got to do a job on this house,” I told Cindy. “Sooner or later somebody’s going to come around and find the stiffs. No one’s going to be able to figure out who killed them or why. That’s fine. But we can’t let the world dope out the fact that there was a counterfeiting operation here. We have to cover up all the traces.”

“How do we do it?”

“Room to room,” I said. “Attic to basement. If they left any papers around, get rid of them. If they have anything, anything at all that smells of counterfeiting, dump it. Don’t pass up a thing.”

She nodded, then suddenly looked very worried. I asked her what was the matter.

“Fingerprints,” she whispered. “All over the place. We’ll have to wipe them off.”

I got a mental picture of the two of us trying to wipe our prints off of everything we may or may not have touched. “Hold on,” I said. “Get a grip on yourself. Have you ever been arrested for anything?”

She shook her head.

“Ever hold a government job? Ever get fingerprinted for any reason at all?”

“No.”

“Ever in the WACs? WAVEs? Anything like that?”

“Of course not.”

“Then relax,” I told her. “If your prints aren’t on file there’s no worry there. If they pick us up they can tie us in, but if they pick us up we’re dead anyway. We wouldn’t keep our mouths shut very long.”

“But—”

“Listen to me,” I said. “No one in the world knows about us. No one can tie us in. We hit and we run and we’re clear. All the fingerprints in the world won’t do them any good. They’ll never catch us and they’ll never print us. Forget fingerprints. Just make sure there are no traces behind us. I don’t want anybody looking for counterfeit twenties.”

We started in the attic and we worked our way to the basement. There wasn’t a hell of a lot to clean up but we didn’t miss any bets. Reed was one of those planners, a compulsive note-taker. Most of his stuff was meaningless to anybody but Reed. I burned it anyway.

There were a few impressions of the original plates lying around, bad stuff that would pass but wasn’t perfect. It went in the chemical bath, then in the suitcase. Every room and every closet got careful attention. It did two things — it covered our tracks, most important, and it also gave us something to do. That was important in itself. You can go batty in an empty house waiting for something to happen. This way we kept moving, kept working.

“Ted—”

“What?”

“We’ve got to do something about the bodies.”

She was right. If they were out of the way, there was the chance that somebody could get suspicious, enter the house, and leave without tumbling to the fact that it held four corpses. I didn’t have any tremendous desire to lug dead bodies around but it was necessary. I had to get them out of the way, put them someplace dark and quiet.

Bunkie Craig was heavy. I lugged him up to the attic, found an empty trunk and stuck him in it. I closed the trunk and locked it.

And hoped the smell wouldn’t seep through when he started to rot.

Casper was light, easy. He was in the cellar already and I didn’t particularly want to drag him up all those flights of stairs. He fit in the furnace, snug and cozy. Thank God it was summer. I hoped they would find him before they lit the furnace.

And then there was nothing to do. I broke the gun, checked it, closed it up again. We had too many hours to go and we were nervous. Not frightened, not scared, just tense. Very tense. I wished Reed and Baron would hurry up.

“Ted—”

I looked at her.

“We have the stuff,” she said. “We could leave now. We could just get out and run.”

“And forget about Reed and Baron?”

“Why not, Ted? We could forget them. They’d never find us. They’d be stuck here and we wouldn’t have to take any chances.”

I looked at her. “We could run,” I said.

“That’s right.”

“And run and run and run. For the rest of our lives. Is that what you want, Cindy?” She didn’t say anything.

“Running forever. Running and never feeling safe. Always having Reed and Baron somewhere in the background. Always worrying over it, always wondering when they were going to turn up and kill us. That what you want?”

“Ted—”

“Not that way,” I said. “Besides, we couldn’t ever run. How far do you think we’d get without a car?”

“A car?”

“We’re taking their car,” I said. “Reed has a new car by now. Not a stolen one. He wouldn’t take chances like that. It’s an odds-on bet he already bought a car, a properly inconspicuous car. If we’re taking the plates and the press and everything, we need a car.”

“I suppose so.”

“And we have to kill them,” I went on. “We have to kill them or die trying. I’d rather die now, here, than wait for them to find us and kill us.”

“You’re right,” she said.

“Of course I am.”

“I guess I wasn’t thinking.”

“You’re nervous,” I said. She wasn’t the only one. There were two of us.

We killed the lights at six o’clock and sat waiting for them. It was dramatic as all hell. I crouched by the window with the shade up about an inch and kept my eye at the opening waiting for something to happen. Every once in a while she would spell me at the window.

Time crawled along and so did my skin. By seven we weren’t talking any more. We weren’t mad at each other or anything like that. It was just that talking only made everything that much harder to take: Silence was better, silence and our own private thoughts.

A few minutes past eight the phone rang. It rang seven times while we sat and panicked. Then it stopped, and a minute later it rang again.

And stopped after five rings.

I prayed Reed wouldn’t be suspicious. Maybe he would figure they were out for a bite, or sleeping, or drunk. The again maybe he could figure it was us. It was farfetched but the guy was by no means stupid.

So I prayed.

Nine o’clock.

Nine-thirty.

Ten.

Ten-thirty.

A quarter-to-eleven a car pulled into the driveway. At firs I thought it was somebody else turning around but the car went straight into the garage. It was an Olds, two or three years old, black.

Two men inside. I saw their faces as they went by. Reed and Baron.

I lowered the shade the rest of the way and Cindy and I headed for the side door. Then I remembered there was a back door and ran to the window. That’s where they were heading. We went to meet them.

I took out the gun, held it so tightly I was afraid the metal would melt in my hand. We stood behind the door and waited. I could hear Cindy breathing and I wanted to tell her to stop. It was that type of scene.

Then I heard them talking.

“Punks. Probably stoned out of their heads, too blind to answer the phone. You tie up with punks and you got to expect that.”

That was Baron. Then Reed: “I don’t know. I don’t like it. Craig’s a lush half the time but I expect better from Casper.”

“A punk.”

“I still don’t like it. There’s something in the air. I can damn near smell it.”

I didn’t like it either. Why didn’t the son of a bitch open the door already?

Baron’s voice: “C’mon, we don’t have all night. Open the damn door already.”

A key scratched its way into the keyhole, turned the lock. The door opened halfway and I stood behind it, unable to breathe. They came in slowly, moved past me. I wanted to shoot but I didn’t dare. Not with the door open.

I swung the gun.

It caught Reed on top of the head and sent him to the floor. Baron turned and I had the gun on him. “Don’t move,” I said. “Or you’re dead.”

“Lindsay!”

“Don’t move,” I croaked. “Stand where you are.”

He looked at the gun and ignored it. He came at me like a bull and gave me a shove. Somehow I held onto the gun — but I went halfway across the room.

I pointed the gun at him, aimed it at his chest. The son of a bitch didn’t give a damn. He charged right at me, head down, arms out.

I wanted to shoot and I couldn’t. It was all over now, I thought. All over but the dying.

He was almost on me. I sidestepped just in time, brought the gun down as hard as I could on top of that thick skull of his. I got lucky. I connected.

It didn’t knock him out. That would have been too much to hope for. But it stunned him and that, as it turned out, was enough.

He was on hands and knees, steadying himself for another move. I looked at him and I hated him. Craig and Casper had been necessary but this was a pleasure. I hated Baron, hated him for the beatings and the threats, hated him for the miserable bastard he was. I didn’t even have time to reverse the gun in my hand. I had to hit him with the muzzle, and I hit him and hit him and hit him. His skull was like rock but the gun barrel was harder. I beat him across the top of his fat head until he was dead.

Reed.

I had forgotten him and I looked up expecting to get shot any minute. I saw Reed then. There was a gun in his hand. There was also a knife in his back.

“He was going to shoot you, Ted. I couldn’t give him a chance. I—”

She was in my arms, soft and warm and crying. I held her and stroked her and told her everything was going to be all right now. She calmed down, finally.

“I love you,” I told her.

She forced a smile. “I’m all right now,” she said. “It’s just that I never killed a man before. That’s all.”

First I washed the knife and put it in a drawer in the kitchen. Then I found a closet for Reed and stuck him in it. There was very little blood on the floor — she had gotten lucky and stuck the thing in the spine, killing him at once. I mopped up what blood there was and put the bloody rag in the closet with Reed.

Baron weighed a ton and I felt like leaving him there. It was a good thing the house was lousy with closets. Cindy gave me a hand with him and we put him away for a while.

Then we got the hell out of there. I carried the press and the suitcase, left the gun in the closet with Baron, loaded the stuff in the trunk of the car. The keys weren’t in the ignition and I had to go back and get them from Reed. I also went through their pockets, took their money. We’d need all we could get until the presses started rolling.

I locked the back door, tossed the key into the bushes. If anybody wanted in they were going to have to break their way in. Somebody might do that the next morning, but with luck we had a month, maybe more.

Plenty of time.

I drove the Olds, backed it out of the driveway, hit the street and got going. I kept well under the speed limit, drove in the right lane, and got us the merry hell out of beautiful San Francisco. We both felt a hell of a lot better once we were on the open road, better still when we were across the state line.

We stopped at a place called the Golden d’Or Motel, a last-chance affair on the outskirts of a small Nevada town named Madison City. The name was fancier than the place itself. There were a string of a dozen tourist cabins, none of them painted since the owner bought the place, which must have been around the turn of the century. The owner’s shack stood to one corner, a little larger than the cabins and, paradoxically, a little more run-down — maybe because it got more play. The VACANCY sign was permanently attached to the big sign announcing the name of the place. I don’t think they had a NO VACANCY sign. I’m sure they never needed one.

I hit the brakes, killed the engine and tapped the horn. The owner came out, a long lanky man with a hawk nose and a pair of dusty blue jeans. He was wearing a ten-gallon hat and I guessed that he fancied himself a tourist attraction. He shuffled over to the car.

“Lucky for you,” he said, “I got a cabin left.” He had eleven like it, and they were also left but we didn’t bother telling him this. Instead I signed the book — I think I used the name Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Harrison — and paid the guy, and we piled out of the car and into the cabin. Luxurious it was not — old furniture scarred with cigarette butts and bottle rings, a creaking bed, walls that wouldn’t stand up for a minute if a good wind ever blew across that section of Nevada.

We dropped into Madison City for a meal. There was one excuse for a restaurant in the town. I had eggs and coffee; Cindy had toast and tea. Neither of us was very hungry. Not for food.

So we left the excuse for a restaurant and returned to the excuse for a cabin, and we went into the cabin and locked the door behind us, and I turned to look at Cindy and she looked back at me and it began.

“We made it,” she said. “We made it, Ted. We... did it, we finished it, we did the job. We’re all set now, Ted. We’re rich.”

She was shaking like a leaf. This wasn’t too hard to understand. All the pressures had piled up on her and she’d never fully cracked up. Now that we were safe, now that it was over, she was letting herself fall apart a little. I held her close and stroked her hair. It was unbelievably soft to the touch.

“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s okay, baby.”

“We did it. We did it, Ted.”

“Easy, baby. Just relax, everything’s all right, it’s all over. Just relax.”

She was shivering. “Suppose they find the bodies, Ted. Then what?”

“They won’t find them for weeks.”

“They might have found them already, Ted. You can never say for sure. Maybe somebody had to deliver a package to that house and decided something must be wrong.”

“Why would they do that?”

She gave a little shrug. “I don’t know,” she said. “But it could happen. Or some nosy neighbor could decide something was wrong and call the police. You never know what’s going to happen. I’ve read about cases that get solved that way. One slip of luck like that and the whole ballgame is over.”

“It won’t happen.”

“But what if it did?”

I held her closer and rubbed the back of her neck. Deep down inside she wasn’t as excited as she seemed. It was just the damned pressure.

“Listen,” I said, “let’s suppose the cops have already found the bodies. Personally, I think the odds against that are sky-high, but I’ll concede the possibility. As you said, it could happen.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Even so,” I went on, “we’re about as safe as a government bond. They can’t follow us. They don’t know a thing about us, not a damned thing. As far as they’re concerned, we’re nameless and faceless. They don’t know if there’s one of us or ten of us. Nobody’s looking for a man and a woman and nobody will.”

“How about the car?”

“It’s safe.”

“Maybe somebody spotted it.”

I shrugged. “It could happen,” I said, “but don’t stay up nights worrying about it. The car was clean when they drove up. It wasn’t there very long before we were in it and out of the city. If it’ll make you happy, we can get rid of it tomorrow.”

“I think we should, Ted. There’s no sense taking chances.”

That was all right with me.

“And the money, Ted. The... counterfeit. That’s another chance.”

“It’s no chance at all,” I told her. “The bills will pass banks, for God’s sake. And there’s no way to tie up the job in San Francisco with counterfeiting. We got rid of all the junk in the place. Face it, baby — we’re one hundred percent pure. Not even Ivory Soap can make that statement.”

“I know, but—”

“But what?”

“But I’m scared.”

She was scared — and she would go on being scared no matter how much talking I did. Her fear was emotional, not rational. It demanded an emotional solution rather than a profound logical argument.

Which was fine with me.

“Come here,” I said.

She came to me and looked frightened.

“Me Tarzan,” I said. “You Jane. That Bed.”

She looked at me, at herself, and at the bed. A slow smile spread on her face. She understood completely and she was all in favor of the idea. But she stood there looking young and scared and virginal and left me to take good care of her.

While she stood there like a statue, motionless and beautiful and frightened, I took her in my arms and kissed her. Then I undressed her, taking her clothes off slowly but surely, my hands deft and clever. As each article of clothing left her person and became part of a crumpled heap on the cabin floor, more of her beauty was uncovered. It was like seeing her for the first time. I’d made love to her before — how many times? — but it seemed now that I had never realized quite how lovely she was.

It was uncanny. I had seen her on the street, then followed her only to discover she lived in the building right across from mine. And that little odd coincidence had led us to hell and back, from New York to Phoenix to Frisco to a broken down cabin on the outskirts of Madison City, Nevada.

And now we were going to make love again.

She stood stock still in bra and panties. I reached behind her, got my fingers on the hook of the bra. I took it off and saw the radiant beauty of her breasts. I wondered again why she bothered to wear a bra. She didn’t need it.

Then the panties.

And then my goddess was nude. I took off my own clothes while she watched through sightless eyes. Then I picked her up in my arms without noticing her weight at all, and I carried her to the ramshackle bed, and I set her down on top of the sheet and stretched out beside her.

I kissed her. I kissed her mouth and her nose and her eyes. I stroked her cheek, her throat. I touched her breasts, felt the firmness of them, pinched the hard little nipples until they stiffened under my touch.

I ran a hand over her stomach. In time, when we were married, that stomach would swell up and blossom out with the weight of the child I would implant there. She would be pregnant with my son or daughter, and the two of us would have managed to create new life.

I touched all of her, her legs and thighs, her back, her shoulders. And throughout the process she remained entirely calm and completely motionless.

“I love you,” I said.

And then it began. I took her once more in my arms, held her tight against me, and passion took over from fear. At once she came alive, alive for me, and I knew that everything was going to be all right. Her breasts cushioned me and her body made a place for me, and then it began in earnest.

It was a new kind of lovemaking for us. It was born in desperation, but it grew and developed with something not desperate or hectic at all. We were in love and nothing was going to stand in our way. We had it made — we were rich and free and nobody was chasing us.

Our lovemaking mirrored this. It was contained and yet unrestrained, passionate but gentle, complete but somehow calm.

There was no rush now, no need to hurry. For the first time in our relationship we were not pressed for time. Instead we had all our lives ahead of us, all the time in the world. And so we didn’t rush. We took things easy, and we moved gently but firmly together, and I lay with the woman I loved and the world was now the best of all possible worlds.

She spoke my name and I spoke hers. She told me that she loved me and I told her it was mutual. But we did not talk very much because it was not very essential. Our bodies were telling each other everything that had to be said.

The bed strained under the weight of our love, its springs echoing the rhythms of passion. Outside, a wind was blowing up and it wouldn’t carry the cabin away. I think if a wind had blown the cabin free from us we would have gone on doing just what we were doing. We’d never have noticed the difference.

Her body locked tight around me and our mouths merged in a kiss. It was going to happen now — our love was snowballing to a climax and no force on earth could have stopped it. The world was about to end — not with a whimper but with a bang.

And, at the crest of passion, she broke. She came to fulfillment with a rush of tears and a heave of sobs, and I knew that her fear and nervousness were over now that the crisis had been reached and surpassed.

Everything was going to be all right.

We slept well for the first time in a long time.

We found a dealer who wouldn’t care about the fine points and traded dead-even for a cheaper car that was not in Reed’s name. That gave us a clean car, which we traded again on a better model when we crossed another state line. If we had left any kind of trail it was covered.

We kept going. Heading east, leaving California as far behind as possible. The little tension that had remained with us was gone entirely when we hit Boston. Cindy was completely calm. I wasn’t, not entirely, and I knew I wouldn’t be as long as we had the plates and the press.

In a Boston hotel room I ran off two grand in twenties for spending money.

I opened a checking account in Rutland, Vermont.

I bought a weekly in Belfast, Vermont. Bought a house in Belfast, set up shop in the basement. Married Cindy, of course. That ought to go without saying.

Then I saved one-dollar bills.

And bleached them.

And turned them into twenties.

I printed a million dollars in twenties. Yes, a million dollars.

Then I got rid of the plates. I pounded them out of shape, tossed them into the hell box at the paper, made type out of them. It was better than throwing them in the river. I still own the press, however, and we use it for job printing at the Sentinel office. Handbills, stationery. Anything but money.

I make a damned good editor, the way it has worked out, and Cindy has developed into a damned good secretary. The paper needed money behind it to get out from under, and with the money I’ve poured into it, things are going pretty well.

Most of the million has been going into stocks and bonds, a little at a time. When it’s all invested we’ll probably leave Belfast, head somewhere else, some other town in some other part of the country. Buy a bigger paper, a bigger house, come in with more money and spend it without looking suspicious at all.

Sometimes we remember that very short period of time when we were hunters and hunted, criminals, murderers. Sometimes I remember Cindy putting a knife into Reed’s back, killing him. She is pregnant now, and it is difficult to reconcile this lovely incipient mother with a murderess. Just as it is difficult to believe that I myself killed four men, one with a bullet in the throat, three more with a gun butt. I don’t feel like a killer, or a criminal, or anything other than what I am — a small-town editor and publisher, a husband, an up-and-coming father.

A strange life. But a good one.

It’s ironic, building a life of good from a life of sin and evil. It’s not only ironic, it’s impossible. Things like this just don’t happen. Except maybe in fiction. But what’s the old saw about truth sometimes being stranger than fiction?

Cindy and a hell of a lot of $20 bills kind of prove it.

I’m not complaining.