Murder

I rested the barrel of the rifle on the hood of the car and peered through the scope, adjusting the focus so I could see everything. The driver’s side door opened, and a man dropped down to the ground. He had a bullet-shaped head, covered with a thick fuzz of dark hair. He was in his mid-thirties, and was definitely not Shaheen. Just a driver.

I moved the scope back to the cab of the truck. As I did, the passenger opened the far door and hopped down. He was shielded from me by the body of the truck, but the quick glimpse I had caught as he climbed out revealed the grizzled pompadour of Henry Shaheen.

A couple of the men who had been milling around on the pier walked over, and Shaheen reached out to shake the hand of the older of the two. A sharklike grin creased his face, and his eyes glinted under his horn-rimmed glasses. I was sure this was Shaheen. There was no point waiting.

I centered the crosshairs on Shaheen’s temple. There was no breeze. I eased off the safety and took in a soft breath. They couldn’t have possibly heard me from this far away, but I was quiet anyway.

In the dead of the night. An hour before dawn. The phone.

Suddenly demanding immediate attention.

Insisting.

“Yes.”

The voice was quiet. Measured. Unhurried. Almost a whisper. But there was something in the voice—something dark and lurking. Something deadly. Something incredibly deadly.

“Listen, Smitty. You got to stop him. Now—tonight! Before it’s too late. Jesus Christ, this is crazy. Fucking crazy!”

“Stop who?”

“Vinny. He’s gone nuts. Ever since that cop arrested his brother and sent him up to prison, he’s gone off his rocker. Got just enough alcohol in him to go nuts. He’s gone. Said he’s gonna make that fucking cop pay. Make ’em all pay for screwing his brother over. Stop him, Smitty. Stop him before it’s too late!”

“Where?”

“Cop lives on Melrose. That’s all I know. But Smitty… listen. Vince says he’s going to kill the cop’s family first. One by one and make the cop watch. Took a friggin’ axe with him. He’s gonna chop ’em all to pieces, for Chrissakes! I’m tellin’ ya, Vince has flat gone off the deep end!”

Click. The phone went dead.

“I did it alone,” he said. “I did it because I hate you—I hate all your kind. I was kicked out of your shipyard at Santa Monica. I was locked out of California. I am an I. W. W. I became a German agent—not because I love them, for I hate them too—but because I wanted to injure Americans, whom I hated more. I threw the wireless apparatus overboard. I destroyed the chronometer and the sextant. I devised a scheme for varying the compass to suit my wishes. I told Wilson that I had seen the girl talking with von Schoenvorts, and I made the poor egg think he had seen her doing the same thing. I am sorry—sorry that my plans failed. I hate you.”

He didn’t die for a half-hour after that; nor did he speak again—aloud; but just a few seconds before he went to meet his Maker, his lips moved in a faint whisper; and as I leaned closer to catch his words, what do you suppose I heard? “Now—I—lay me—down—to—sleep” That was all; Benson was dead. We threw his body overboard.

The wind of that night brought on some pretty rough weather with a lot of black clouds which persisted for several days. We didn’t know what course we had been holding, and there was no way of finding out, as we could no longer trust the compass, not knowing what Benson had done to it.

Suddenly the door in front of him opened, and he heard a familiar voice saying crossly, yet anxiously, “What on earth are you doing out there, Bunting? Come in—do! You’ll catch your death of cold! I don’t want to have you ill on my hands as well as everything else!” Mrs. Bunting rarely uttered so many words at once nowadays.

He walked in through the front door of his cheerless house. “I went out to get a paper,” he said sullenly.

After all, he was master. He had as much right to spend the money as she had; for the matter of that the money on which they were now both living had been lent, nay, pressed on him—not on Ellen—by that decent young chap, Joe Chandler. And he, Bunting, had done all he could; he had pawned everything he could pawn, while Ellen, so he resentfully noticed, still wore her wedding ring.

He stepped past her heavily, and though she said nothing, he knew she grudged him his coming joy. Then, full of rage with her and contempt for himself, and giving himself the luxury of a mild, a very mild, oath—Ellen had very early made it clear she would have no swearing in her presence—he lit the hall gas full-flare.

That was another reason Sonia was the artist; she always thought of things like this. Arthur covered their garage floor with a plastic tarp and suspended a quart can of white paint on a rope from the ceiling, hanging about six inches directly over the black square he had painted. Again, at Sonia’s suggestion, he offset the can somewhat from the center of the square.

Now, it was time for Sonia to take over. She held the can away from the square while Arthur first drilled a small hole in the bottom of the can. Then, as Sonia covered the hole with her finger, he drilled another hole in the top of the can, allowing a thin stream of paint to begin flowing once Sonia removed her finger from the bottom. Sonia took careful aim and sent the can slowly flying in an arc over the tarp and black square. They watched in amazement as the swirling paint created geometric results on the black canvas below.

That was two years earlier and one of the last few pieces she had made before… before the unimaginable tragedy. Arthur had been away on business for a few days when that low-life bastard had broken into their home, raped and beaten his precious Sonia to death, then robbed their home of whatever he could find. They were not wealthy by any means, but they had a few nice things of value. The murderer had even taken a few of Sonia’s works of Art.

Here in Acme City the noise can be unbearable.

For Willie, the sound of buses and trains are nothing in comparison to the noise his neighbor makes. The constant construction, the cars stuck in traffic on the overpass just outside his apartment building can be hard on one’s ears, often drowning out the television, radio. Over the last year Willie Coyote was okay with it. He learned for the most part to tune it out. Even if it was hard for Willie to concentrate on his writing.

But that neighbor and his loud jazz playing at two in the morning, the hammering and sawing. Willie hated it, but there was the one thing he heard, even in his sleep, that Willie hated more than anything was the honking.

Willie often found himself sitting at his desk stuck for a word and he would hear “Beep-beep!”

It was more than he could bear.