Mark flicked ashes on the rug. “Only trouble is, Sherry’s dead now. Nobody’ll believe we didn’t kidnap her ourselves. Ain’t that swell!” One of Mark’s little pointed, shiny black shoes kicked the wall. “Well, I don’t want nothing else to do with her. She’s dead. I hate dead people. Let’s load her in a canvas tied with weights and put her out in the bay somewhere deep, then get out of here, get our money and—”
The door opened. Hamphill came out of it, pale.
“Willie, go watch over her while I talk to the boys,” he said slowly, not thinking of the words. Willie beamed proudly and lumbered in. The three of us went into another room.
Mark has a mouth the shape of his own foot. “When we gonna get the money and scram, boss?” He shut the door and leaned on it.
“Money?” The boss held the word up like something strange found on the beach, turning it over. “Money.” He focused dazedly on Mark. “I didn’t want any money. I wasn’t in this for the money—”
Mark shifted his delicate weight. “But you said—”
“I said. I said.” Hamphill thought back, putting his thin fingers to his brow to force the thinking. “In order to make you play along, Mark, I said about money, didn’t I? It was a lie, Mark, all a lie. Yes. All a lie. I only wanted Sherry. No money. Just her. I was going to pay you out of my own pocket. Right, Hank?” He stared strangely at me. “Right, Hank?”
“Right,” I said.
“Well, of all the—” Angry color rose in Mark’s cheeks. “This whole damn setup’s nothing but nursemaiding a coupla love-birds!”
“No money!” shouted Hamphill, straightening up. “No money! I was only kicking down the Christmas tree to get the star on top. And you—you always said it was wrong for me to love her, said it wouldn’t work. But I planned everything. A week here. A trip to Mexico City later, after she got to know me, after fixing Finlay so he wouldn’t bother her again! And you, Mark, you sniffing your damn nose at me, goddamn you!”
Mark grinned. “You should’ve said about it, boss, how you never intended getting money from kidnapping her, to make me understand. Why, sure, there was no use lying to me. Why, no, boss; no, of course not.”
“Careful,” I muttered.
“I’m sure sorry,” said Mark, lidding his small green eyes. “Sure am. And, by the way, boss, how long we going to be here? I’m just curious, of course.”
“I promised Sherry a week’s vacation. We stay here that long.”
One week. My brows went up. I said nothing.
“One week here, without trying to get the money, sitting, waiting for the cops to find us? Oh, that’s swell, boss. I’m right in there with you, I sure am, I’m with you,” said Mark. He turned, twisted the doorknob hard one way, stepped out, slammed it.
I put my right hand against Hamphill’s heaving chest to stop his move. “No boss,” I whispered. “No. He ain’t living. He never lived. Why bother killing him? He’s dead, I tell you. He was born dead.”
The boss would have spoken except that we both
heard a voice talking across the hall behind the other door. We opened the door, crossed the hall, and opened the other door slowly, looking in.
Willie sat on the couch-end like a large gray stone idol, his round face half blank, half animated, like a rock with lights playing over it. “You just rest there, Miss Bourne,” he said to Sherry earnestly. “You look tired. You just rest. Mr. Hamphill thinks a lot of you. He told me so. He planned this whole setup for weeks, ever since he met you that night in Frisco. He didn’t sleep, thinking about you—”
* * *
Two days passed. How many seagulls cried and looped over us, I don’t remember. Mark counted them with his green eyes, and for every seagull, he threw away a cigarette butt burnt hungrily down to a nub. And when Mark ran out of smokes he counted waves, shells.
I sat playing blackjack. I’d put the cards down slow and pick them up and put them down slow again and shuffle them and cut them and lay them down. Maybe now and then I whistled. I’ve been around long enough so waiting makes no difference. When you been in the game as long as I have you don’t find any difference in anything. Dying is as good as living; waiting is as good as rushing.
Hamphill was either up in her room, talking like a man in a confessional, soft and low, gentle and odd, or he was walking the beach, climbing the cliff stones. He’d tell Willie to squat on a rock. Willie’d perch there in the foggy sun with salt rime on his pink ears for five hours, waiting until the boss came back and said to jump down.
I played blackjack.
Mark kicked the table with his foot. “Talk, talk, talk, that’s all he does upstairs at night, on and on, dammit! How long do we stick here? How long are we waiting?”
I laid down some cards. “Let the boss take his vacation any way he pleases,” I said.
Mark watched me walk out on the porch. He shut the door after me, and though I couldn’t be sure, I thought I heard the phone inside being ticked and spun by his fingers.…
Late that evening the fog crept in thicker, and I stood upstairs in a north room with Hamphill, waiting.
He looked down out of the window. “Remember the first time we saw her? The way she held herself, the way she took her hair in her hand, the way she laughed? I knew then it would take all the education and smartness and niceness in me to ever get her. Was I a fool, Hank?”