NO MATTER HOW DARK THE night, there is light in it somewhere. And when there is snow in the night, that light is reflected in each flake. Standing beside her, he saw the shapes of the men, the shadows they cast, darker than the night, like ghosts or premonitions, flickering. They stood under a huge, leafless oak tree in the front yard. The tree’s shadow clawed its way toward the house. They paced in and out of the shadows. Max had his hands thrust deep in his overcoat pockets. They had had to pass Cassidy’s car, rammed down into the snowbank. Max’s big Chrysler would have made short work of the snow, the chains grinding toward the house. And now … Cassidy took a deep breath. It would all be over soon.
He watched them for several minutes while Cindy got into slacks and a heavy sweater, which belonged to her unsuspecting hostess. She brought him his clothes. They’d dried out before the fire.
Bennie was out there, kicking snow as he walked. He was wearing a bowler hat and it made the top of his head look like a planetarium rising from the crown of a mountain. Then there was Bob Erickson, who looked less like a banker in the middle of the night with a tommy gun cradled through one arm. There was a fourth man, tall and thin, a lanky black shadow Cassidy took to be a longtime favorite iceman of Max’s, Cookie Candioli, strictly muscle with a sense of humor you could have found with Madame Curie’s microscope. Of course, he hadn’t come to laugh.
Cassidy went to the gun rack hung on the knotty-pine wall and took down two Purdeys, both with chased stock and metalwork. Bobby Vanderlipp had had them made in London after the Great War. Bobby was rich and therefore somebody was going to die at the business end of the best goddamn shotgun money could buy. The first was a side-by-side double barrel, the other an over-and-under. They were probably worth five grand apiece. In the top drawer of the chest beneath the rack he found neatly stacked boxes of shells. He loaded both shotguns and dropped some extra shells into his shirt pocket. He handed the side-by-side to Cindy.
“Can you use this if you have to?”
She hefted the gun, which looked absurdly large and brutal in her delicate hands.
“Don’t worry about me,” she said. “Stiff upper lip, there’ll always be an England. Greer Garson. I can do whatever needs doing … to get out of here alive. Damn, it is heavy, isn’t it?”
He went back to the window. They were coming across the deep snow, sinking in almost to their knees, closing in on the house. They stopped before the porch and conferred among themselves. They weren’t worried. They had two sitting ducks in a country house, unwarned and helpless.
“How could they find out?” she whispered.
“Terry’s the only one … They must have torn it out of him with pliers. You can bet he’s dead, Cindy. Old Terry’s dead.”
Adiós, amigo …
“Max wouldn’t, never. Not Terry. He thought of Terry as a son.”
“That’s the old Max,” he reminded her. “Not this character. I’d say they tortured him until he talked. That would have been the only way to stop the pain. Tell them so they’d end it with a bullet … Max’d end it with a bullet if he loved Terry so much.”
“I want to kill them,” she whispered tonelessly.
He smiled at her in the darkness. “Speaking for myself, I’m sure as hell gonna enjoy it.”
There were footsteps—only one man—on the porch. The snow squeaked as he walked slowly toward the door. There was no point in taking chances even if your prey was helpless, asleep.
“Cindy. Go to the light switch and flick it on just for an instant once he comes into the room. He’ll be blinded, frozen in his tracks. I’ll take him out.”
She navigated in the darkness while he knelt and rested the bottom barrel on the back of the couch, pointed directly at the doorway. He saw his watch glowing in the dark. It was four o’clock.
The first guy through the door was going to pay one hell of a price.
The footsteps stopped.
The storm door was pulled back, wheezing on its hinges. The doorknob began to turn, rattling ever so slightly. The door was easing open, inch by inch by inch …
Cassidy heard the footfalls in the darkness, one, two steps into the room, the shape black on black, too hard for him to center the barrels on. Snow blew noisily along the porch.
Now, now, he willed her to do it …
She hit the wall switch and all the lamps in the room came on in a blinding flash.
The man stopped dead, threw an arm across his eyes.
Just as suddenly the darkness engulfed them again, like the hood dropped over a parrot’s cage, but the afterimage of the man hung suspended before him as he adjusted the barrels.
The man with the long pistol in one hand, wearing a black-and-red-plaid parka, a matching hat with the earflaps turned down …
Cassidy centered on the memory of the man imprinted on his eyeballs and squeezed off both barrels and took the kick.
The shell casings ejected onto the floor and he slid two more into the chambers while the man was being sprayed back out into the night. Wood splintered, glass exploded, and he heard the corpse smack heavily onto the porch, slide across the slippery snow dusting, and crash off the edge, through the thick crust. The door had been blown off the hinges. It banged noisily, clattered off a wooden pillar, and pitched off into the snow. A blast of cold air poured in and the sound of the blast echoed and slammed off the walls and then after a while it was silent again.
She came and knelt beside him.
“They’ve got to come inside to get us,” he said. “It’ll be a war. We’ve got to dig in.”
They pushed the couch over to the stairwell and got in behind it, hunkered down in the nook below the stairs. They sat with their backs to the wall and she shivered against him. He kissed her hair and wondered if he’d ever see her face again.
He looked around the room, trying to get a clear picture of where they could get in. There was the front door from the porch. Four windows in the room they were in, God only knew how many other windows on the ground floor. They’d have to break them, however, which was noisy. They were bound to be frozen shut even if not locked. Also, the back door into the kitchen. They were going to have to make noise and the misfortunes of Candioli had impressed upon them that they were in a fight. The night’s prey wasn’t going to die quietly in bed.
“Since we can pick them off, they’ll create a diversion while they come in somewhere else.” He felt around for the blackthorn stick, picked up the Purdey. He got up and hit his head on the bottom of the staircase and pulled the couch closer. The wind from the blasted doorway scoured the room, left it cold and trembling.
The tommy gun began its unmistakable burping and suddenly there was flying glass everywhere. Bullets chewing at the wall, slivers of wood spraying like tiny swords, splintering the knotty pine. He could see the flash of muzzle fire, like live electricity darting out, in the darkness beyond the holes in the wall where the windows had been. Slugs were thudding into the couch. He pulled her down on the floor. Slugs were ricocheting off the stone fireplace. It sounded like a Panzer division rolling through the house. They hunkered down, trying to pull the world over their heads. The gun kept chattering. Cindy was grabbing at his hand, her fingers ice cold, frantic. The blasting just kept on. The Fighting 69th could have marched past them up the stairs without fear of detection but in fact nobody charged through the doorway where Cookie had made his final exit.
Suddenly silence, nearly as oppressive as the noise, broke out. He thought he’d heard some extra creaking and glass breaking upstairs and maybe he had, but now it was quiet. An occasional bit of plaster or wood made a noise as it dropped to the floor, an afterthought.
They waited and nothing happened.
The chattering of the tommy gun came again, spraying the room from the doorway. He tried to get himself in front of Cindy and caught his bad leg on the sharp corner of something. He went sprawling into the darkness from behind the couch, the tongues of flame skittering across the room as the gun kept firing. As he hit the floor, bits of broken glass ground into his palms.
He felt the rush and thump of heavy shoes brushing past. He’d lost the shotgun, lost the sense of where he was in the room. It was like floating in an ocean.
He couldn’t find Cindy but he heard the heavy snorting of the man who’d just come in, rushed past him. Bennie wouldn’t leave Max for anything, so it had to be Bob Erickson, who had definitely laid to rest all ideas that he was a banker. Cassidy lay still, trying to hold his breath.
Cindy sneezed from all the plaster dust in the air. She was behind him. He heard Erickson shift his weight as he turned. He pulled the trigger and stitched the wall with another long burst.
Cindy yelled something and hit the floor. Cassidy made a dive across an armchair, reaching for those jabbing orange and red tongues where the gun had gone off.
Cindy was yelling a blue streak, throwing ashtrays and vases and picture frames. Everything was breaking and smashing in the dark while he came down hard on Erickson. He went over bellowing with surprise.
A good deal of the air in his lungs whooshed out past Cassidy’s ear. He smelled Erickson’s Yardley. He rammed his head into the middle of the Yardley smell. Erickson grunted hard and fell back against something hard and howled with his finger jammed in the trigger guard. Half the ceiling fell down, plaster everywhere. The tommy gun was jumping between them. Cassidy stuck a finger in his eye. Erickson tried to twist the gun away but his arm didn’t want to bend that way. Another burst of fire went bouncing around the room and then, whack, it jammed.
He was a resourceful son of a bitch. He turned the gun into a club and was swinging at Cassidy like Mel Ott going for the short fence at the Polo Grounds. The butt bounced off his forehead a couple of times, long foul balls, two strikes, and he rolled away with plaster chips in his eyes, fumbling with the blackthorn stick, reaching for the little button. He found it and felt the heavy knob pop into his palm, working the bits of glass deeper into the flesh. Erickson was struggling trying to get some leverage to have another swing but Cassidy knew where he was, had his sleeve in his left hand, and had a pretty fair idea of where the center of his body might be.
He drove the sword home, felt it enter something solid. Erickson sucked in a terrible gasp compounded of surprise and pain and Cassidy yanked it out as he grabbed the blade, closed his hand around it. Cassidy pushed hard again and Erickson grunted. Cassidy tried to get it back out but the dying man toppled sideways and the sword went with him, twisting out of Cassidy’s hand.
Bob Erickson of Saint Louis was making gagging noises and his heels beat a sad little tattoo on the floor as he fought a lonely, losing battle with the blade hacksawing its way through the contents of his chest. The flapping lessened and his breathing got wetter and sibilant as he blew bubbles, his life expanding like a membrane and bursting on his lips, and then Bob Erickson was still.
Cassidy lay there trying to get his breath back, trying to wipe the plaster out of his eyes, trying to figure out which end was up. He couldn’t get the sword back. Erickson had somehow rolled over on it, like a man ritualistically embracing his killer. He curled around it, then flattened out on top of it. Cassidy felt around and found the point. It had gone all the way through him and was sticking up out of his back like a steeple.
The tommy gun was useless. The shotgun he’d used on Candioli was somewhere in the wreckage, among the broken glass and flaked chunks of walls and ceiling and the smears of blood and the chewed-up furniture. Where the hell was Cindy?
He straightened his bad leg and began to realize just how much it hurt. He pulled himself up to his knees, fighting the illusion that they were somehow out of the woods. He felt like he’d bagged his limit, two bad guys per night. But he was only half the way home.
He realized Cindy wouldn’t know which one of them was alive. He had to say something. He couldn’t have her using that Purdey on him by mistake. She’d never forgive herself.
“Cindy?” he whispered. “It’s me. I’m okay.”
Something moved. He crawled toward it, smelled her perfume. She was shaking. He felt the tremors across the space between them. “Are you okay?”
“Why not? I haven’t done anything yet but scream like a dumb girl.” She was trying to be tough.
He found the gun he’d dropped and picked it up.
“They’re upstairs,” she said. “I heard them clumping around like a comedy team. There must have been an outside stairway … I don’t know. What’ll we do?”
“Beats hell outa me. I’m not in much of a mood to go get them. They’ll have to come downstairs to get us. Let’s just wait. We got ’em right where we want ’em.”
They sat down in the rubble.
The house made so much noise as it withstood the wind and blowing snow, it was impossible to tell what was going on above. An hour must have passed, maybe more, and his heart went back to beating like God had intended. He tried to figure it out. Bennie and Max were upstairs. They’d outfoxed themselves. Now they were trapped. They’d have to make a move.
As usual he hadn’t considered all the possibilities.
Cindy was leaning against the couch which was losing its stuffing, dribbling it out through the bullet holes. They kept calm by touching hands. He kissed her and held her head to his chest and told her it would be all right. Not for Terry, not for everyone … Terry. He shook the thought out of his mind and faced the stairway and the balcony. The darkness of night began to fade almost imperceptibly and the grayness tinged with pink began to seep across the void. Snow blew past the window holes. The room had gotten colder with the door gone and the windows blown out. The fire was dead.
“Drop the hardware, Lew.”
The voice came from behind him. He hadn’t thought of everything. He never did.
Bennie the Brute was standing where there had once been a door. Now, as he swiveled to look, Cassidy saw his huge shape in the long black overcoat with the bowler on top. The polka-dot bow tie peeked out from behind the scarf. He was holding a Luger.
“Oh, shit, Bennie,” he said.
“Ain’t it the nuts, Lew?” A ghost of a smile played across his face. It was the same face Cassidy had seen out there on the corner selling funny toys to the kids. A big sweet psychopath and you could get Ed Murrow on the plate in his head, “I don’t like this any more than you do, Lew. Let’s face it. It’s an imp-p-perfect world.”
In the old days when Bennie was at his best he might have had some kind of chance. It would have been closer, anyway.
As it was, he was talking to Cassidy with this kind of sad, nostalgic look on his face, when Cindy turned toward him and fired the Purdey.
He never even noticed it. The twin explosions came almost simultaneously and the recoil blew Cindy backward against the wall.
Bennie left this imperfect world in a blur of black wool courtesy of Brooks Brothers, his bowler hat sailing away like youth and memory and hope getting out just in time. Both shells caught him waist-high. The top half of Bennie spun sideways and backward, following a trajectory not unlike that of Cookie Candioli’s final flight. The bottom half of Bennie stood there for a while like a doubtful guest, then tipped over.
Cassidy got up and stood looking at him, part of him, amazed at what had just happened. He felt as if Bennie had been interrupted to death. Poor Bennie had made the same mistake twice. Twice when he had Cassidy down he’d have been better off just killing him. But he was a sentimental galoot, a softie at heart, and he hadn’t taken the situation seriously enough. Maybe he didn’t think a nice girl like Miss Squires would actually kill him. Cassidy could hear him saying it. Hell of a thing, Lew, hell of a thing. He wondered if Bennie would make it through the Gates of Heaven, if he’d meet him one day walking the Streets of Glory. Maybe they needed a guard up there.
The next thing he knew he was lying facedown in somebody else’s blood and yet another pool of pain, brand-new shining pain. It felt like a sledgehammer had hit him in the back. He heard Cindy screaming. He heard the crack of the shot that hit him. He squirmed sideways like a crab and came up against Bennie’s legs, his face in the wet snow on Bennie’s galoshes.
When he’d rolled over onto his back and hitched up against the wall, he looked up and saw Max Bauman coming down the stairs one at a time. He had a .45 in his hand and he was crying, tears streaming down his sallow, sunken cheeks. He was wiping his nose on his sleeve.
“Bennie,” he sobbed. “Jesus, Ben …”
He’d shot Cassidy in the back but high and to one side. He figured his shoulder was crushed. The pain was making him sweat in the cold. He had no feeling in his right arm. His fingers wouldn’t move. He felt like a burning blade had been plunged into his back. He was seeing lots of little bright stars and everything was fuzzy.
Max came down the stairs slowly, a tired old man. He was still wearing his tux under his long formal evening coat, a homburg, black gloves, none the worse for wear following his hike through the drifts. All the snow had long since melted from his trousers and coat and he looked much as he always did. Except that now he was a ruin, old and sick and tired and shambling as he came down. Cassidy had seen him cry once before, a million years ago when he’d sat before the fire at the end of a long party and told the story of his son Irvie dying a hero. Going down with his ship.
Now Max was coming down the stairs to a room that looked like a battlefield, the men who’d been doing his bidding strewn dead at his feet. It was Max’s kind of war and it had been going on a long time. Everybody was tired or dead. As if he were reading Cassidy’s mind, he said, “Are they all dead now, Lew?”
“I sure as hell hope so.”
He looked over at Cindy, smiled wearily. “Cindy. I’ve missed you, baby.”
She tried to smile back, brushed her hair away from her face. “Well, we’re all in quite a mess, aren’t we, Max?”
“Funny the way things turn out, Cin. Who’da thunk it?” He shook his head, chuckled. “I’ll be dead soon, you didn’t know that, did you? Why did you always lie to me, Cin? Was I so awful?”
“Oh, Max, you were good to me. And I didn’t always lie to you. I hardly ever lied to you.”
“Only about the big things, I guess,” he said. “Love, death … sure, death, baby. Harry Madrid and I had a little talk the other night, Cin. All about that shoot-out in Jersey that time. I couldn’t believe it, Cin, couldn’t believe you’d do that, set me up … ah, hell, it’s all over now, anyway, isn’t it? Put down the gun, Cin. It’s empty. You used both barrels on Ben. You shouldn’t have killed Ben—”
“But why not?” she asked. “Isn’t that what this is all about? Who lives and who dies? You’ve already decided to kill me—”
“I’m not so sure of that now I see you. That’s what I hoped for, that I’d see you and remember the good times and then I couldn’t kill you. Oh, hell, Cin … if you’d have humored me another couple months I’d have died and you’d have come out safe and sound and rich. Instead”—he pointed with the gun at the carnage in the gray light of dawn—“it’s the last act of Hamlet. And you killed Ben … But, then, how long can I miss him? Coupla months? Big deal.” He wiped sweat from his forehead, looked over at Cassidy. “And you, Lew. Whattaya got to say for yourself? I hear tell you’ve been fucking my little girl here while you were supposed to be looking for her boyfriend. Hey, the joke’s on Max! God damn you, how I hate that kind of double-dealing crap! It’s not worthy of you, Lew. Your father’d be disappointed in you … say, you shot up bad, Lew?”
“I’ll live,” he said.
Max laughed, coughed into his fist. It was cold. His breath hung like smoke between them. “Well, now you mention it, I don’t really think you will.” He pulled a pigskin cigar case from his pocket, bit the end from a cigar, and lit it with the flame from his gold lighter. The gun never wavered. He coughed again, a man coming down with a cold that didn’t matter anymore. “Come over here, baby. Sit on the steps by me.” She went and they both sat down. “Are you sorry, Cin?”
She shook her head. “Maybe. I don’t know, I wish it gone fifteen with Tony Janiro. He managed a broken, cracked smile. There was a black space where one of his front teeth had been. Harry Madrid was close now. He moved to steady Terry but Terry shook him off. Somehow they were allies for the last act …
“Max, your army’s dying off. Looks like old Bob Erickson over there. Swordplay, Lew—I’m proudaya.” Terry tried to laugh and winced. Max stared up at him, slowly puffing. “Listen, Max, this is serious. I just tripped over something out there on the porch. Looked like about half of Bennie to me. Pieces of Cookie Candioli out there, too. I’d say the old Cooker man has boosted his last hubcap. Some party you guys been having.”
“Harry,” Max said. “Whose side you on, anyway?”
“Always on the side of the angels, Max. Had to get you one way or another. Matter of principle. This was the best way. You’re gonna have to die now, Max.”
The sun was coming up behind Harry Madrid, a bright pink glow stretching across the snow. It hurt Cassidy’s eyes. Maybe nothing awful could happen on such a beautiful morning.
“Put the heater down, Max. Give us all a break.” Terry winked at him, good-natured.
“No, I can’t do that, son. I’m a very sad old man this morning but I don’t feel at all benevolent. I know you’re supposed to get all soft and easy at the center when you get ready to cross over … but I just don’t feel that way, Terry. Maybe I’m bitter about the deal I’m getting—you think? So I die now, I die in a coupla months, what’s it to me?”
He pushed the gun’s thick, blunt muzzle up under Cindy’s chin. She looked into Cassidy’s eyes. He could have lost himself in the sapphire ocean of her eyes. He saw her and he saw a memory of Karin … Cindy, Cindy … The muzzle pressed into her white flesh. She was eternal, all women, he knew it as Max had known it. The Daughter of Time. Her eyes were speaking to him. She wasn’t afraid.
“So, we got a Mexican standoff,” Terry said.
“No.” Max shook his head. “I win.”
Her eyes weren’t blinking. Her patrician face was expressionless. Her eyes were speaking to Cassidy. She saw him, she saw past him, she saw the limitless future called forever.
Then he knew what she was saying.
She was saying good-bye.
Max pulled the trigger and blew her head off.
A long sigh escaped from Terry.
Then the noise began and Cassidy let it roll over him and there was no escape.
Terry was shooting Max, breaking him up into chunks with the slugs, and it was taking forever. The cigar, the hat, the toupee, the face. The explosions came one after another and Cassidy just didn’t give a shit. Terry had come back from the dead and Cindy was gone … all gone …
Finally the trigger was going click, click, click, one empty chamber after another.
Terry was kneeling beside Cassidy, his arm around his good shoulder.
“Time to call it a day, amigo.” His gun clattered to the floor. Harry Madrid bent down and together they helped Cassidy to his feet.
They went outside.
The sun was glaring on the snow and then it was fading away and Cassidy was colder than he’d ever been.
Everybody was dead.
Everybody but Harry Madrid and Terry Leary and Lew Cassidy.