Mad Money by Max Allan Collins

Author:Max Allan Collins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags:  
Publisher: Titan

19

He was digging in the moonlight, sideways.

She didn’t know what it meant: it was simply the image before her eyes, as they slowly opened. A man was digging, shovel crunching into cold ground, washed in ivory moonlight, and she was on her side, so it was a sideways view, and out of focus. Still groggy, she moved her head just slightly and looked up. She saw the skeletal branches of a tree—the tree she lay under—and through them she could see clouds moving quickly across a blue-gray night sky, like a scrim of smoke gliding across the stationary partial moon. It didn’t seem real.

But the pain in her head did; it ran across her forehead, over her eyes, like a headband of hurt. And the still, cold night air seemed very real; she was only in her sweater and jeans and anklets—her bed was the snowy ground. And the sound of the shovel, that was real too, as it chopped at roots and cut through frozen earth. She moved her head back to where it had been and looked through slits and saw him, digging, in the moonlight.

Lyle.

Handsome Lyle, wearing a brown leather jacket and gray designer jeans, digging, basking unwittingly in shadows from the moving clouds.

He was, she knew at once, digging a grave. It was the right shape; he’d roughed it out and was now only a few inches in. But it was a grave. Her grave.

The pain and the cold were her friends. They made this surreal landscape real. They were something to hold on to, to steady her, while her thoughts raced, while she peeked through the slits of her eyelids and wondered what she could do to keep from sleeping forever in the hole Lyle was making for her.

She lay perhaps ten feet from the foot of the grave. This was not as far as she would have liked. As Lyle walked around the grave, working on this end and that, he often came very close to her. He seemed frustrated. The temperature had fallen; apparently this ground was harder than he had anticipated.

She wondered if she should just get up and bolt and run. She had no sense of where she was—other than lying on her side under a tree near a grave an imbecile was preparing for her. The ground didn’t seem to slope, so they were a ways away, anyway, from the cabin and the hill at whose foot were the highway and the Mississippi. Lyle stood in a small open area, but mostly there were trees, here. Some evergreens but mostly gray, winter-dead ones; more death than life in these woods.

Was she supposed to be dead already? Did he think whatever he’d hit her with had killed her? Or had Lyle simply not got around to the deed as yet; the wood-stock revolver was still in his waistband, the metal catching moonlight and winking at her, occasionally. Perhaps she’d got through to him sufficiently these past few days to make killing her not so easy a chore for Lyle.

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