Boot Tracks Read online

  He jumped over the sinkhole.

  How, after everything, a part of him—as unbelievable and infuriating as it was to another part of him—longed still to hear that other voice, the one she sometimes talked to him in when it was just the two of them, when there was no son of a bitch coming between them, running her fingers over his face where it lay on the pillow, telling about Humpty Dumpty or Mother Hubbard or, her favorite, Alice in Wonderland.

  He played the light to his right.

  He followed the shaded beam through the tightly spaced trees, mostly oak and maple according to their downed leaves, along the drainage ditch, until he came to a three-strand barb-wire fence. He climbed carefully between the strands, directly onto a path extending from the hilltop toward the golf course. He pictured himself buying with some of Buddha’s cash a ride that wouldn’t embarrass him to be seen in—a Trans Am or Mustang maybe—tracking her down, and driving up to her place blowing the car’s horn, then taking from its backseat and giving to her all sorts of nice gifts, clothes, jewelry, a big screen TV. Then he thought, nah, if she was even alive, if some Chester Rhimes type by now hadn’t killed her, he hadn’t a clue to finding her and, anyway, he couldn’t picture anything after the part where he gave her the gifts.

  Saplings, briers, berry bushes filled the spaces between the trees. In the damp shellacking of near-snow his light delineated occasional paw marks and at least one set of larger, indistinct tracks. By morning, he guessed, the night’s prints, including his own, would be obliterated by, depending on if the temperature rose or fell, rain or denser snow. Roots, stumps, the tops of buried rocks marred the path. Tripping once, he kept from falling only by catching himself with his extended left hand while releasing a loud grunt. He thought were he someone nearby hearing that ape-like sound in the dark he’d have been the hell up a tree. He smeared with his foot his glove print, then wiped the hand wearing the glove on a branch. He resumed walking. Rounding the next corner he saw the house not thirty yards above him, now showing one light upstairs and one down, overlooking the course to the west. From a corner of a second tier deck a spotlight bathed in soft yellow tones the woods immediately beneath it. Rankin snapped off his light. He stepped off the path. He crouched down facing the structure behind a Juneberry bush. The out of synch thought occurred to him that since getting out of prison he’d not looked around even a little bit to see how the world might’ve changed in four years.

  The house was an octagonal shape.

  The second floor’s four back sides, fronted by the rounded deck, stood like a ship’s crow’s nest over the treetops, providing a view of the fields past them. The walls he could see looked to be mostly glass, covered by curtains. In the part of the upstairs farthest from him a small, lighted area glowed orange through its drapes. A larger room toward the center of the lower level was lighted too. A big, circular hot tub sat in the deck’s near corner. He could make out a section of metal fence to the building’s far right looking as if it might, in its entirety, surround an in-ground swimming pool or— though he hoped not—a dog paddock. He wasn’t in for killing a dog. He thought of how for four years he’d gone on believing Mister Full Boat would be waiting for him when he got out and how hollowed out inside he’d felt when a week before his release he’d called Sam Jenkins about picking up Mister from him to find out Mister was dead. “Didn’t he tell ya?” said Jenkins’s wife, then on came Jenkins with some shit about Mister running out in front of a lumber truck a month or so back and, gee, he’d guessed he’d forgot to write Rankin with it.

  That, thought Rankin, was what came from knowing only criminals; he’d had to trust a reprobate with the only life out in the world he’d cared enough for to want to see again. The more he thought on it the more convinced he became that not long after Rankin had gone inside—maybe on the very day he had—son of bitch Sam Jenkins had shot Mister dead for the thirty bucks a month Rankin for forty-eight months thereafter sent him for dog food. Something died in him from that phone call even prison hadn’t killed. He’d had no home waiting, no wife, no family, no girlfriend. After hanging up he’d passed by Buddha’s cell and given him the thumbs-up.

  He looked at his watch. 11:20.

  He brought out the .38, checked again to make sure it was loaded. He put it back in his belt, reminded himself, just in case— God forbid—somebody was there with the guy, to use the ski mask. He stood up and, confident he couldn’t be seen through the closed curtains, started up the path, which curled around to his left toward the front of the house. He recalled the Mechanic gassing to a Mechanic trainee about the Mechanic’s craft, as if murdering someone took a special skill, as if anybody alive couldn’t do it and get away with it, as if it didn’t count unless it was done in some halfassed, complicated way, as if the mechanic wasn’t just a blowhard puffing himself up for the young guy. He came around the corner of the house and stopped.

  A dark-green Saab sedan sat at the top of the drive, before one of two bay doors in the base of the house. Rankin wondered if why the car was outside on such a nasty night was because the garage held other vehicles. A backboard and hoop stood on a pole to one side of the pavement. A snow-topped ball lay beneath the hoop. He pictured kids shooting baskets in the drive. His worry that he’d botched the count, that he was at the wrong place, was renewed. The house suddenly looked to him big enough for ten people. No kids, Buddha had promised. That he’d been for sure on. But what if after Buddha had gotten his information the situation had changed? What if the guy had married a lady with kids and the whole slew of them lived here? Or what if a family was visiting him? He should have gotten more poop from Buddha on the set-up. But Buddha himself had seemed short on poop, at least on poop he’d cared to share with Rankin. Then too Rankin hadn’t wanted to know much. He still didn’t want to know much, not even why Buddha wanted the job done; but, Chrissake, he needed to know he had the right guy.

  The Mechanic would have known way ahead of now where the right guy was and wherever that was the Mechanic would be.

  The Mechanic could have walked around with a blue flame coming out his ass because the mechanic was Goddamn Charlie Bronson in a Goddamn movie.

  He tiptoed to the edge of the blackness. A lamp over an archway to a flagstone patio at the front of the house shed residual light onto the drive past him. He thought the guy himself could be the hoops player; the garage might be filled with junk, a boat, a million things; how people tell other people they’re rich is by having homes, maybe even more than one— like the Buddha with places in Florida and up here—ten times bigger than they need. He took a few steps into the dull light. He halted at the entrance to the patio, a sunken area containing wrought-iron furniture and what looked to be statues of animals and little naked people. Lawn grew on both sides of the patio. A row of rhododendron bushes, their wet leaves drooping like hounds’ ears, filled the space nearest the house. A shaded downstairs window several feet left of the front door showed the only internal light.

  Rankin proceeded down the walk from the drive, into the patio, peering at the house entranceway for something with the guy’s name or the building number on it. He saw no sign or marker in the area; no lettering at all on the door.

  Now he wasn’t sure what to do.

  If he buzzed and anybody but the guy answered he wouldn’t know if he had the right house; if somebody other than the guy answered and told him the guy lived next door, he could forget going there and getting the job done after being seen here; and if whoever answered told him the guy was inside, to do the guy he’d have to do the person who told him the guy was inside to keep that person from describing him to the cops later. He might have tried jimmying a darkened window, then, if he’d succeeded, gone inside and poked around for evidence of the guy, only he’d bet his life this place had the latest security system.

  Instead, he headed for the lighted window, the half-frozen grass crackling beneath his boots, thinking if the shade wasn’t all the way drawn he might see something past it that would
allow him to make a more informed decision on whether to chance ringing the doorbell. Three-quarters of the way to the window he stepped on an object that let out a high-pitched squeak; the sound instantly gave rise to a rustling noise ahead of him, like that made by a person or similar-sized creature moving through some brush.

  A moment after it began the rustling quit.

  Rankin stopped breathing.

  Lying night after night in the same darkness as her and whoever—on the floor or couch of some shithouse motel room or efficiency apartment—afraid to sleep for fear of making an unconscious noise that would remind them of his presence or of the world exploding the moment his guard was down.

  He squatted, not shifting his gaze from the dark void the rustling had come from. Holding his breath still, he played his fingers blindly over the crystallized lawn until they located a solid, apple-sized, rubber ball. He brought the ball up to his eyes. Small gashes, like teeth marks, in the rubber.

  Breathing as only Poof Man could breathe, so noiselessly that even to them (her and whichever son of a hitch of her countless sons of hitches) in that same dark space with him he was dead or not even there.

  He squeezed the ball. It squeaked, only more softly, as it had when he’d stepped on it.

  More rustling. Then a mewl or whimper.

  Cut the whining shit, ya Goddamn baby, or I’ll cut it for ya.

  He became conscious of the owl’s hooing again, each hoo striking him as a message he couldn’t decipher; of the thin, nearly transparent, falling spherules, not exactly of snow, rain or sleet, dampening his skin; of a faint shit odor coming from the yard past the lighted window, where he envisioned, in a paddock formed by the fence he’d seen on the property’s lower side, a large creature of some kind—a dog probably, though he’d heard of rich people making pets of wild animals, of lions and tigers even. Placing the ball back on the ground, he quietly stood.

  Praying to be Poof Man, able to snap his fingers and disappear to the son of a bitch, disappear to her and to them all, to the whole Goddamn world.

  He resumed walking, hoping the animal had reacted only to the squeak of the ball it appeared it was used to chewing on and not from having detected Rankin’s scent or footfalls. No matter how lightly he tread he couldn’t avoid making a slight crunching noise. He took half of the six good-sized steps he figured would get him to the window’s near ledge, heard more rustling, so froze again. He pictured the animal, at the edge of its paddock, nervously pacing, sensing his presence even as its eyes staring out through the spaces in the fence failed to penetrate the same blackness blinding Rankin.

  He took another step; then another.

  A twig or twig-shaped object snapped sharply beneath his foot.

  He braced himself for an eruption from the animal. He heard before him only more rustling.

  He thought a guard dog—most any dog—should be barking its fool head off. His realization that the animal might not be a dog, but something less prone to raising a ruckus, relieved him until the thought struck him that maybe whatever was out there wasn’t in a paddock either, that maybe the creature so quietly allowing him to approach it was as free as were most of the world’s predators to go wherever and do whatever the hell.

  Imagining whichever son of a hitch and her being unable to see him, staring right through him even while looking point-blank at him, angrily searching for him in the very places in the room he, Poof Man, was watching them from; keeping himself awake until he was certain they were asleep with visions of them stumbling about, lost, blind, petrified, in the same darkness his X-ray vision permitted him to easily move through.

  Lions, tigers—any vicious meat-eating pets—he told himself, would be caged (he was quite certain the law even required it); and actual wild animals—bears, say, or panthers— if they even existed in this part of the country—steered mostly clear of civilization. He got out the .38 anyway.

  He put it into his right hand.

  He was reminded that he’d never fired a .38, that he’d never fired but three pistols of any kind—a .22 target gun he’d owned for awhile, Sam Jenkins’s 9 millimeter (he couldn’t help wondering if the same weapon had later killed Mister Full Boat), and a pearl-handled .45 he’d taken from a Dirty Harry loving asshole after the asshole, on the one burglary he’d talked Rankin into joining him on, had pointlessly blown off with it half the door of an unoccupied house, bringing most of the neighborhood and the cops down onto them—that he’d not fired any of the three at a living target, that he’d never fired a gun period—pistol or rifle—into a person.

  The .38 wouldn’t become his weapon of choice.

  It didn’t fit his hand as comfortably as he’d heard a weapon ought to. Because of the smallness of the trigger guard and its nearness to the gun’s handle, he had to severely contort his index finger to get it behind the trigger; then, to reach the safety at the guard’s bottom left corner, he had to completely withdraw his finger from the guard.

  Holding the gun ready to shoot in front of him he slowly moved the rest of the way to the window’s near edge. From the forward blackness he heard nothing. He wanted to believe the creature had left; his sixth sense warned him that, facing the same uncertainty he was, it was where it had been when he’d first heard it, trying to envision Rankin as Rankin was trying to envision it.

  Stained molding divided the large, rectangular pane into several smaller rectangles; a closed Venetian blind covered all but the lowest two or three inches of glass; slipping from the opening, a dull yellow light landed on, in the space where the column of rhododendrons ended, staked rose bushes growing to within a foot of the sill. Careful not to put his head directly in front of the window, Rankin peered at the shrouded glass above the opening.

  Inflamed eyes in a fiery-red face met his.

  He recoiled.

  Pressing his back against the house wall, panting, he recalled the stranger he’d first encountered in a bathroom mirror when he was twelve, who, instead of going away, had kept showing up until Rankin finally had had to accept the stranger was him. The reflection he’d just seen in the semi-lucent glass was, he understood, of him too, with a chapped face, flecked with ice; at the same time it seemed to him to have been of another person he couldn’t place. Then he remembered the guy shown roasting on the front of Elmer Fudd’s pamphlet, the guy he’d mistaken at first for Biggins.

  An overwhelming urge to bolt, not just from that spot, but literally out of his skin, came over him.

  Buddha telling him in the whole world the only sin a man could commit was to deny his niche if he’d been blessed enough to be shown it.

  Next time, and every time after this, thought Rankin, he’d use a gun more personalized to him than the .38, a weapon that would feel as much a part of his hand as the keloid scar traversing his palm did.

  He crouched next to the rose bushes.

  More mewling from the blackness, as if whatever was out there might be sick or in pain.

  Buddha saying (in what context Rankin couldn’t remember, he hardly ever could remember the context of Buddha’s words, just that voice and those hands and those eyes assuring Rankin that Rankin was a special somebody, at least in them) that God and the devil were both ventriloquists so telling them apart in the dark was nearly impossible.

  He realized now that what he’d taken for mewling might also have been a low-pitched, throaty snarl; or human laughter muffled by a hand.

  If it’s Jack the Ripper it can’t see me no more than I can it, he told himself, and it likely ain’t got a loaded .38.

  He looked into the house through the unshaded sliver of glass; he wondered how he’d not noticed smoke coming from the chimney; in a high-ceilinged room lined with bookshelves and hanging paintings a fire burned in a big fireplace; in a chair angled at the window a man read a book before the flames.

  Clean shaven, a brushcut, gold wirerims on the guy.

  For Chrissake, thought Rankin.

  In Buddha’s photograph Maynard Cass had a
thick mustache, black hair pushed straight back from his temples, no glasses at all.

  This guy did have the same health club sort of build and looked around the same age as the guy in the picture from what Rankin had been able to make out of the guy in the picture.

  Could be him, he allowed, could be Cass, with a shave, a haircut, reading glasses.

  Could be not him too.

  After several seconds of studying on the guy he pulled back from the window.

  He considered getting the photograph out of his shirt pocket and reexamining it under the flashlight but, with his uncertainty of what was in front of him, he was especially wary of showing a light and doubted, anyway, another look at the photograph would tell him if or not it was of the guy before the fire.

  In his frustration, he considered too, to get things over with, shooting the guy through the window, hoping he was the right guy.

  Then he thought of the hell shooting the wrong guy would cause him and, anyway, that he wasn’t some cowboy went around shooting just anybody, that he was hired to shoot only a particular guy, a guy who needed shooting, according to Buddha, which, with the money he’d been paid, was enough to convince Rankin of it.

  He peeked again into the house and saw the guy looking up from his book, directly at him. Forgetting in his surprise at being face-to-face with the guy how difficult it was to see anything in the darkness out of a lighted room, Rankin jumped back from the building. On the slick grass he lost his footing and, making a startled yelp, fell hard on his backside into the rose bushes.

  A baying, screechy cry suggestive of a rusty gate-hinge closing onto a screaming person’s finger sounded directly in front of him.

  Trying to stand Rankin pressed his forearm onto a cluster of rose thorns. He yelped again. Rising to his knees, he yelped louder from a shooting pain in his back. Shut up, he told himself.

  A persistent banging commenced as if the animal before him was ramming against a stall or fence. Certain its hue and cry, and probably his own thrashing about, was being heard in the house, Rankin, freeing himself of the rose bushes, catapulted away from the window. He sat against the house, his lower back throbbing, watching for the room light to go off or a human shadow to appear in the window. Neither event occurred. He crept back to and returned his eyes to the crack at the shade’s bottom.