361 - Donald E. Westlake [62]
It got dark almost as suddenly as turning off a light. Then it got colder. The jacket and raincoat weren’t enough to keep the cold out. I stood and walked back and forth, flapping my arms.
From time to time, a light went on in one of the back rooms. Whenever that happened I stopped my prowling around to study the room and the people in it. I saw the kitchen, and a number of bedrooms. There were a lot of people in the house, men and women both. But it was almost ten o’clock before I finally saw Ed Ganolese.
He came into the kitchen and got a glass from the cupboard and ice cubes from the refrigerator. There were bottles on the drainboard. He stood with his back to me and made himself a drink.
I’d been out there nearly five hours. My hands were cold and I hadn’t chanced smoking a cigarette. Now I was afraid my aim wouldn’t be any good. I’d always done well with the carbine in the Air Force, but this was a different weapon and I was shivering and I was nervous for need of a cigarette.
So I let him go the first time. I hunched over with my back to the house and lit a cigarette, and stood behind a tree smoking it, my hands under my jacket pressed against my sides. When the cigarette was gone, I checked through the scope again. The kitchen was empty.
This wasn’t any good. I hadn’t been able to kill Cheever. Now I’d seen Ganolese in the sights, the chiefest devil, and I’d found another reason not to pull the trigger.
I couldn’t let that weakness come over me again, the way it had with Cheever. I had to do this, and get it over with.
The sky was overcast, with no moon. I moved down the slope closer to the house, until I was nearly down to the level of the kitchen windows. I was in the open now, but I couldn’t be seen from the house. I was beyond the rectangles of light from the windows.
I crouched, the rifle leaning against my shoulder, my hands kept warm against my sides beneath my jacket. And when Ganolese came back to the kitchen, the empty glass in his hand, I refused to think of excuses.
I was so close now that his white-shirted back filled the scope. I got into kneeling position, as I’d been taught in the service. Right knee on the ground, left knee up, left elbow over left knee. I sighted down to his left shoulder blade in the white expanse of his shirt, and when I fired, the barrel kicked up and for a second I couldn’t find the kitchen window through the sight. I didn’t hear the sound of the shot at all.
When I found the window again, Ganolese was slowly folding forward over the drainboard, bottles skittering away down the slope into the sink. A tiny dot of darkish red had stained the back of his shirt, low and to the right of where I’d aimed.
I fired again, a bit high and to the left, and this time I was ready for the recoil, and I kept the target in the sight, and saw the bullet kick him forward, and the second red dot form, and then he slid down out of sight and I got to my feet, the rifle slack in my right hand.
Then sound came back to the world. I hadn’t heard either shot, or anything else between them, but now all at once, as though a radio volume knob had been turned up, I heard men calling and shouting to one another, and even the sound of heavy feet running on wooden floors inside the house.
I turned and went back up into the woods and over to the right, moving slowly in the blackness. I kept moving for half an hour or more, only the slope of the land keeping me going in a straight line. When I stopped, I was alone in silence. There was no pursuit.
I sank down against a tree to wait for dawn. It got deadly cold. I slept fitfully, dreaming of ogres and childish things. Every time I awoke again, I smoked a bitter cigarette, cupping my hands around it for warmth.
With dawn, I stood and moved around, trying to get warmth back into my body. But I kept near the same tree until the sun was up. Then I walked back