In Laymon's Terms

Norman Partridge

O ONE ANSWERED his knock, so Keyes kicked in the door.

He’d healed up pretty good over the last four months, but a couple ounces of buckshot were still buried deep in his left leg, so it took three tries to do the job. When he finally hit the sweet spot the door sprang fast, same way a rattrap does when it slams shut on a rodent’s skull.

Keyes sucked a quick breath, gathering his courage. The door smacked the inside wall and swung back in his direction with a stuttering creak. He stopped the door with his open palm, and it shut up, and he stepped over the threshold and into the silence. It was dark in Murdock’s cabin, but not dark enough, because Keyes had gotten used to the dark in the last four months. And that was why he had no trouble spotting Murdock over there in the corner, even though the old man wasn’t moving.

Murdock couldn’t move. Not if he knew what was good for him. He was lashed to a chair. Someone had used heavy-test fishing line to do the job. That line was fastened to dozens of fishhooks, and those hooks were set in Murdock’s skin—in his eyebrows and upper lip, in his throat and in his thighs and in the joints of his fingers—and Keyes immediately recognized the cruel cunning involved in the process. Right now Murdock was a living, breathing definition of misery. One twitch and the old man would flip a couple hundred dictionary pages, straight to another word favored by brutal men who’d inflict any amount of pain to get what they wanted: agony.

Keyes’ gut churned at the sight. He pulled a knife and flicked it open as he crossed the room, and the old man took one look at him coming and gasped. Murdock paid for that gasp because the simple action set off a half-dozen fishhooks, and he jerked in his chair like a fat salmon taking the bait, and a pathetic little whine rose from deep inside him.

“Take it easy, Murdock,” Keyes said. “I’m not here for revenge. I’m only here for—”

And that was when Keyes heard the sound that Murdock must have heard a couple seconds before, the sound that had made the old man suck wind like a scared kid: footsteps on the gravel drive that led to Murdock’s place, coming soft and easy at first—just a slow percussion riding the middle-of-nowhere silence that blanketed the redwood forest—and then getting louder, faster, as the intruder spotted the open cabin door.

Whoever it was didn’t like the look of that. Outside, gravel crunched like broken molars under heavy boots as the stranger broke into a run. Keyes knew he couldn’t waste a second. He whirled toward the cabin door just a little too fast, and his bum knee jolted him. By the time he was halfway across the room his palms were slick with sweat.

He gripped the knife tightly, cursing himself for leaving his .45 in the Jeep. Outside, footsteps mashed over gravel. Favoring his bad knee, Keyes neared the open door. Behind him, Murdock whined again. Keyes glanced at the old man for just a second, and—

Three bullets chewed holes in the cabin door, and Keyes dodged for cover.

The door slammed the wall and swung back, once again, with a stuttering creak.

This time, Keyes didn’t hear it.

This time, he was already gone.

And that was something Keyes had been good at just lately. Getting gone, that is. He’d spent the last four months that way, burrowed deep in a dark little rat-hole, hiding from everyone he knew while he healed up.

Everyone except Danni. She was the only one he trusted anymore. After all, Danni had stood by him through thick and thin. The armored car holdup was no different. When the whole deal turned into a blood-spattered nightmare, she didn’t cash in her chips and walk away from the game. She played her hand, and she played it the way fate had dealt it.

A state highway cop with a shotgun surprised them in the middle of the job, and Keyes had hesitated a second too long before using his gun. It turned out to be a very precious second, because the cop left Keyes with a tattered hole in his belly and a chewed-up leg peppered with buckshot.

Before Keyes even hit the ground, Murdock and Morales had burned rubber out of there. But Danni stuck, the same way she always did, and she didn’t waste any time. Before the lawman knew what hit him he was just a long red smear on a two-lane county road, and Keyes wasn’t in much better shape because he was bleeding all over the tuck-and-roll upholstery in the back of Danni’s Chevy, and Danni’s foot had buried the gas pedal in the floorboard, and the white line down the middle of the road was a blur.

Without Danni, Keyes wouldn’t have survived. She always knew what to do. Trouble came and she kicked into gear. She didn’t waste time thinking, the way Keyes did. He drove her crazy that way. That’s why Danni was the one driving after things went bad, and Keyes was the one bleeding.

Keyes knew that.

Same way he knew that he loved Danni like he’d never love anyone else.

It was the same for her.

Keyes was sure that it was.

Keyes worried as he hobbled through the woods. He hadn’t wanted to come to Murdock’s cabin. He’d wanted to lay low a little bit longer and he’d given Danni a mouthful of reasons explaining why that was a good idea, but she wouldn’t buy any of them.

No. Talking didn’t work with Danni. It might have worked on her sister Elise, but Elise was a new-age mystic who loved jabbering on about chakras and spirit guides and shit that even Ripley wouldn’t believe, and Danni read The Wall Street Journal. The way she saw it, waiting four months to split up the swag from the armored car job was way too long. Danni insisted on arranging a meet with Murdock and Morales before the calendar flipped another page. And she also insisted that she and Keyes arrive at said meet separately, so they wouldn’t end up like the two birds who’d gotten into trouble with that one proverbial stone.

Keyes had gone along with the plan, even though he was only running at half speed. He knew that he wouldn’t be ready if trouble came, and come it had. Trouble had lashed Murdock to a chair with fishhooks and line, and trouble had drawn a gun and opened fire on Keyes. Yeah. Trouble had hit him right between the eyes...figuratively, if not literally. And he wasn’t ready for it. Not at all.

That was the damned shame of the thing, and it was more than enough to put Keyes’ insecurities on the boil. A few months ago he’d hesitated for just a second, and some cop had pulled a trigger a couple of times, and he’d ended up in a feverish limbo for four months. During that time he’d suffered through Danni’s long silences as the moon hung heavy in the night sky, and he’d listened to her sister rattle on about a whole bunch of mystical shit that never existed beneath the bright sun that he lived under. And now someone else had taken a couple of shots at him, and the whole cycle seemed to be starting up again.

Here he was, scared, limping through the woods like a wounded rabbit. That wasn’t the smart way to do things. Keyes knew it. He wasn’t thinking straight, like he used to. That was something he had to start doing again, and right now.

Keyes pulled up short and crouched in a tangle of ferns at the edge of the path. That low growl—that middle-of-nowhere silence—closed around him like the dark redwood forest. The only other sound was the long cool whisper of deeply drawn breaths that passed over his dry lips. He concentrated on that sound as he watched the path.

Even, steady breaths. That long cool whisper. Concentrating. Thinking things through...

It didn’t look like anyone was following him. And that was too bad. Crouching in the ferns, Keyes had good cover. If the guy who’d tried to drill him at the cabin came along, it would be easy to surprise him from behind, easier still to draw his knife across the bastard’s throat—

But the bastard in question obviously wasn’t that stupid, and the knowledge twisted in Keyes’ scarred guts like an angry snake. He knew that he couldn’t be stupid, either. He had to get a handle on the situation...and quick.

Okay. Someone had tried to kill him at the cabin. That someone had also done a job on Murdock. Whoever it was wasn’t fucking around, not even a little bit. Keyes had seen that pretty clearly in Murdock’s eyes.

Keyes considered the possibility that he was the cause of Murdock’s fear. After all, he had pulled a knife as he entered the cabin, but only because he wanted to cut Murdock loose. He’d as much as said so to Murdock. So it had to be the sound of those footsteps outside that had set the old man off. That was why Murdock was afraid. He’d realized that his pal Mr. Fishhooks was coming back, probably to do something worse—something that would make Murdock reveal the location of the hidden cash from the armored car holdup.

In the meantime, Mr. Fishhooks was using Murdock for bait. It wasn’t a bad plan, really—lure Murdock’s partners in crime into a trap one by one and slap the lid on them. It had nearly worked. A couple more inches to the left, and the gunman’s bullets would have drilled Keyes’ forehead, not a stuttering door.

So who was Mr. Fishhooks? It wasn’t much of a question, really, because there were only four members of Murdock’s gang, and Keyes could easily account for three of them—Murdock was bound to a chair, and Danni wasn’t even due at the cabin for another couple hours, and Keyes...well, Keyes knew the exact location of his own ass—right there with the banana slugs, crouching in a stand of ferns in the middle of a cold, wet redwood forest.

That left Morales.

Keyes shook his head, thinking about the crazy Mexican...and the fishhooks set in Murdock’s skin.

Keyes wouldn’t have trouble killing that nutty little bastard.

He wouldn’t have trouble at all.

All right. There it was. Those long cool breaths whispered over Keyes’ lips as he waited with a knife clutched in his hand. His breaths were even and steady, but he was the only one who heard them.

He waited two minutes. Maybe three, but Morales didn’t show.

Keyes couldn’t afford to wait any longer than that.

He started moving.

Keyes hadn’t done much moving in the last four months. The cop’s shotgun had torn him up good. Even if he could have hobbled around on his injured leg the first couple of weeks—which he couldn’t—it wouldn’t have mattered. The wound in his belly had put him flat on his back.

That stitched-up mess felt like a black hole of misery hollowed out inside him, and it hurt worse than anything Keyes could imagine. It felt like someone had taken a rusty trowel and shoveled out a pound of his guts, and he’d lie there at night listening to Danni’s sister chanting outside under the stars while he tossed and turned, sweating through fevers that left him delirious, imagining that he could hear that missing part of himself laughing there in the shadows of the dark little room where he made his stand against death and fear.

The room didn’t have any windows. It was actually a shack that stood behind Elise’s ramshackle house, which was halfway up the side of the mountain on a dirt road no one ever bothered with. Keyes spent his nights alone there because he couldn’t lie still, but Danni always joined him in the morning. She took care of him, and so did Elise.

Elise was an ER nurse. Or she had been once. Life in the city had burned her out, and so had the prescription drugs she’d stolen and abused for years.

After a couple of failed stints in rehab, she ended up back on the north coast reservation where she and Danni grew up. It wasn’t that far from anywhere as the crow flies, but it was far enough if you needed more than a twelve-step program to stay away from drugs. The way Keyes saw it, Elise had traded one dead-end addiction for another. She spent most of her days performing rituals and chanting prayers, but they hadn’t gotten her anywhere but the same damned shithole where she’d started out.

Elise claimed that some of the rituals were for Keyes’ benefit. A couple times she nearly smoked him out of the shack with some nasty-ass smudge stick ceremony. Keyes went along with most of it to humor Elise. He figured it was just so much new-age bullshit, even though she claimed her rituals had been old when Columbus set foot on these shores.

Keyes didn’t give a shit about Columbus, but he had to admit that Danni’s sister knew what she was doing when it came to tending his wounds. Soon he was up and walking. And a little while after that the night fevers started to go away, though the empty feeling in Keyes’ belly never did.

And then Danni started pushing him to meet up with Murdock and Morales. He knew she was right, but he couldn’t get himself to make a move. He kept thinking about the cop who’d ended up a red smear on the road, how the guy had gotten the drop on him. He kept remembering the sound of the shotgun, the big empty boom that still echoed in his nightmares.

It got so he liked it in the dark little room. He felt comfortable there. The room was an empty space, like the hole inside him carved by a dead cop’s buckshot and Elise’s scalpel. Sometimes Keyes wanted to take a big needle and stitch up the doorway, the same way Elise had stitched up his wound, but he knew he couldn’t do that. He knew he couldn’t stay in that little room, not if he wanted Danni to stay in his life.

“Trust me,” Elise said. “Let me try those other rituals.”

“Are they the same one’s you’ve tried on yourself?” Keyes asked too sharply. “The same ones that keep you up here on this mountain, living like a hermit?”

“We’re different, Keyes.”

“You bet we are.”

Her eyes flared at the slight, but she swallowed it. Instantly, Keyes regretted his words.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“You don’t have to be. I know how things are. What I’m missing is something I never had, but that’s not your problem. You lost something. Maybe I can find it for you.”

Keyes only laughed at that. And it was strange, because his laughter sounded like the shadowy laughter he’d heard in his fever-dreams. And that made him laugh some more.

“You can’t let this thing get to you,” Danni said. “You do that and all of a sudden you’re someone else, and everything’s different.”

“I know,” Keyes said, and he looked for more to say. Sometimes he tried to tell Danni how he felt, but he didn’t like the tremor that crept into his voice when he talked about his fears. Sometimes, he’d try to brush the whole thing off and say that the problem wasn’t in trying to fix what was left of him, the problem was getting back the pound of guts that Elise had carved out of his belly. Most of all he knew that he’d lost something, something important and vital, something more than flesh. But most of the time he couldn’t find the words to make Danni understand that, and he felt like he didn’t even know where to look for them.

Danni did. She always found the right ones.

“I love you,” she said, and Keyes knew that it was true.

But late at night, when the fever returned and the shadows started to laugh, he wondered how Danni felt about the wounded man who lived in the dark little room.

Keyes doubled back to the road that led to Murdock’s cabin. He figured fifteen minutes had passed since Morales opened fire on him...maybe twenty at the outside. That was good, because it meant Danni wouldn’t be due at Murdock’s place for at least another hour.

If Keyes had anything to say about it, Morales would be dead by then, going cold as the banana slugs that crawled across the forest floor. Keyes liked the thought of that. He pictured Morales crumpled on the ground, curled up in a fetal ball with his throat cut and a knife buried in the gristly hunk of muscle that passed for his heart—

And he felt stronger seeing that. A sliced throat and a knife in the heart. That was the way he’d take Morales down, because the Mexican wasn’t the type of bastard you’d want to play around with. You bumped up against his action—straight ahead, from the back, or sideways—you’d have to be sure you finished him, because a guy like Morales wouldn’t quit until the devil himself had boxed up his sorry excuse for a soul.

Keyes wished he’d killed the man a long time ago, when he’d had the chance, when Morales wouldn’t have been expecting it. But he knew that wishing was a waste of time. As he hurried down the road at an unsteady trot, looking for Morales’ car, he concentrated on reality.

The car had to be around here somewhere, because he hadn’t seen it at Murdock’s place. Morales had been careful about that. Obviously, he hadn’t wanted Keyes to know that he was anywhere near the old man’s cabin. He’d wanted to get the drop on Keyes, the same way he had on Murdock.

But it didn’t look like that was going to happen. Keyes came around a bend, and there it was—Morales’ old Dodge Charger. He grinned, knowing that he’d hit the jackpot. Because wherever Morales went, he went armed. And not just with the .45 he’d most likely used to ventilate Murdock’s front door. No. Morales kept his own private arsenal in the Charger’s trunk—a sawed-off shotgun, a couple German machine-pistols, and enough ammo to stop a platoon.

Keyes pictured the stash as he jimmied the trunk.

It didn’t take long.

A soft thunk, and the lid rose before him.

He saw the guns, all right. But he saw something else, too.

Morales’ corpse was crammed into the compartment along with all that hardware. The Mexican was curled in a fetal ball around a pile of bloodstained cartridge boxes. His throat had been cut to the bone, and there was a knife buried in his heart—a knife just like the one that filled Keyes’ hand.

Keyes stumbled away from the car. The stitched hole in his belly had never felt so empty, and he dropped his knife without even knowing he’d done it. By the time he recognized the trap he’d fallen into, it was already too late.

Keyes didn’t want to turn around, but he knew that he had to.

Behind him, from a tangle of ferns beneath a thick-trunked redwood at the edge of the road, there came a sound.

It was a sound that Keyes knew all too well.

The long, cool whisper of deeply drawn breaths passing over dry lips.

The ferns parted, and the man who had set Keyes up for a perfect ambush stepped from the shadows. He held a pistol in his hand, and he didn’t limp at all because his knee had never been peppered with buckshot, and he approached Keyes with a slow, even gait.

Keyes jolted at the sight of the guy. He took a stumbling step backward. He didn’t know how to react...not at first. And then he knew. Suddenly and exactly, because there was only one thing he really cared about anymore, and it wasn’t the guy standing in front of him.

“Where’s Danni?” he asked. “Is she all right?”

“She’s fine,” the man said. “But she couldn’t stand to see this. That’s why she didn’t come.”

Keyes nearly closed his eyes, just for a second, wondering how much he could take. The man’s voice seemed to rise from a gut lined with steel. It was so strong. So sure. And the funny thing was that Keyes almost didn’t recognize it. But he did, because you had to recognize the sound of your own voice, even if you hadn’t really heard it in the last four months.

“And the money?” Keyes found himself asking.

“Murdock can’t hold out much longer. I’ll get the money, and that means Danni will have it. And I’ll take care of her. You, better than anyone, should understand that.”

Keyes did understand. He understood everything now, but he didn’t say anything else. There wasn’t anything else to say. And as the man’s shadow washed over him, so did a series of sounds: the low whisper of the things he’d lost echoing in his skull along with the gunman’s words, and the ritual chanting of a broken woman whose magic was much more powerful than Keyes had ever dared imagine, and the words of a woman he had loved.

The words of a woman he would always love.

“I love you,” Danni had said.

And Keyes knew that it was true. Even now.

He stared at the man Danni loved.

“It’s really nothing personal,” the man said, and Keyes couldn’t help it. A laugh bubbled up inside him as he stood there in the heavy redwood shadows, but it was a laugh he didn’t even own anymore. And the man who owned it joined in, and they laughed together, sharing the joke in the shadows.

They didn’t laugh long.

Maybe a handful of seconds.

After that, the man didn’t hesitate.

He pulled the trigger.