His car was this year’s Buick, cream and blue, half a block away in a tow-away zone. He had a special permit in the windshield that let him park there.
He drove across 110th westward and turned north and boarded the Henry Hudson Parkway. I sat beside him, Smitty’s gun in my lap. We didn’t talk.
He took the George Washington Bridge into Jersey, and 17 a while. General Motors cars are all very much alike. The last time I rode this way, it was with Dad in an Oldsmobile one year older than this Buick. I was sitting in the same seat. I felt the nervousness creeping up from my stomach.
He left 17 and crossed the Jersey border back into New York State, still heading north. I said the first words spoken by either of us in the car: “How much farther?”
He looked quick at me, and then out at the highway again. “A little ways beyond Monsey,” he said. “Up in Rockland County.”
“What’s this Monsey? A town?”
“Yes. Small town, built up in the last few years.”
“Then they’ll have a shopping center. Stop at a sporting goods store.”
“All right.”
After a while, he turned off the highway on a curving exit that took us under the road we’d just been on and, a little farther, over the Thruway. Then we were on 59, which was lined with newish stores fronted by blacktop parking spaces. Cheever braked nose-in before a sports shop with shotguns and hip boots displayed in the window.
I took the key out of the ignition. I’d already checked the glove compartment and it was clean. I said, “You wait here.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. He had some of his bounce back. “All I can count on now is you and Eddie Kapp. I won’t try to run away from you.”
“Glad to hear it,” I said. The fact that, under other circumstances, I might have liked this smooth and quiet collegian only irritated me.
I bought, in the store, a .30-.30 rifle and a box of cartridges. It cost me a hundred eighty dollars, almost all I had with me.
Back in the car, Cheever drove again while I read the instruction booklet and practiced loading the rifle. Then Cheever said, “About a mile more up this way.”
We were passing an intersection. There was undeveloped land around us, and a general store called Willow Tree Corner. I said, “Is the house right out on the road?”
“No. It’s set back about half a mile. All uphill from the road. There’s a dirt road in.”
“Will there—slow down a minute—will there be people watching out at this end of the dirt road?”
“Yeah, there will. That’s why I had to get permission to come up. I wouldn’t want to turn in there without permission.”
“All right. Then go on by. But point it out to me.”
“All right.”
“You can drive faster again now.”
A couple of minutes later he said, “That’s it. On the right.”
I saw a dirt road that jolted down a bank and curved into the trees. There was a thick wood along here, climbing a steep slope away from the road toward the Ramapo Mountains. I caught just a glimpse of an automobile parked in the road under the trees.
Cheever said, “Now what?”
“Make the first right you can.”
About a mile farther on we turned right. It was a smaller road, asphalt, climbing steeply upward. Incongruously, there was suddenly, to our left, a small gravel parking area and a fireplace and picnic table and mesh rubbish basket. I said, “U-turn, and stop over there.”
The car was too big and the road too small. He had to back and fill. No other cars came along. It was Monday, the tenth of October, the wrong time of year for traffic on this road.
Cheever stopped on the gravel and pulled on the emergency brake. I got the keys out of the ignition and climbed out of the car. I carried the rifle and Smitty’s revolver over and set them on the picnic table.
Cheever came over after me. I said, “Sit down here.”
Something in my face or voice tipped him off. He stopped, across the table from me, and looked at my face, warily. His hands were out in front of him, the fingers splayed wide apart. He said, “What is it? What’s the matter?”
I said, “Do you know who I am?”
“You were with Kapp. Up at Lake George. You were the one came up to the car.”
“But do you know my name?”
He shook his head.
I said, “Ray Kelly. Will Kelly’s son.”
He kept shaking his head. “It doesn’t mean a thing to me. I don’t know what you think, but you’re wrong.”
“Kill the Kellys,” I said. “That’s what I’m thinking. Somebody whispered that in Ed Ganolese’s ear. Kill the Kellys, kill them all. The old man and both sons and the daughter-in-law. The whole tribe, because Eddie Kapp is coming out of Dannemora, and we can’t be sure—”
He cried, “No! You got it all wrong! It wasn’t me!”
“Because we can’t be sure,” I finished, “which boy is Eddie Kapp’s son, and even if we get the right one, some other member of the family might stand in for him, and Ed you know how sentimental those old wops can get. Isn’t that right, Cheever? Somebody whispered that to Ed Ganolese, and then he pointed the finger.”
His head was shaking again, and he was backing away from me, away from the table. “Not me!” he was crying. “You got it all wrong, Kelly, you got to believe me! It wasn’t like that, it wasn’t like that!”
“You set the whole thing in motion, Cheever,” I said. I picked up Smitty’s gun.
He turned and went running off into the woods, away from the road. In just a second, he was out of sight, and I could hear the sounds of his thrashing getting farther away.
I should have killed him. I could have. When he took his first running step, I had the revolver on him. There was one fraction of a second there when I was sighting down the top of the revolver barrel right into his left side, under his arm, his arm up in the running motion, and my brain told my finger to squeeze the trigger. And it didn’t.
I lowered my arm, and listened to him tumbling away through the woods, ripping his trouser legs, catching his shoelaces in the tough weeds, falling and scrabbling and running scared.
I couldn’t kill him. I told myself it was because I wasn’t sure of him, because there was still a chance it was somebody else who’d done the whispering in Ganolese’s ear. There were other reasons why he might have been the one picked to go up to Lake George.
It was true. But it wasn’t the reason. I hadn’t killed him because I couldn’t kill him.
He was gone. The woods were silent. Right doesn’t make might.
I went over and tossed the keys on the front seat of the car. I picked up the rifle and the revolver, and went across the road and into the woods on the other side, heading toward where the farm hideout should be.
I had to kill Ed Ganolese. I had to.