The Ax Read Free Page A

once.
    That’s good. The waiting, the tension, the second thoughts; I hadn’t been looking forward to all that.
    I turn in at a driveway to let the Jeep go by, then back out onto the road and head uphill once more, back the way I’d come. I pass the mailperson, and continue on. I pass 835, and continue on. I come to an intersection and turn right, and then make a U-turn, and come back to the Stop sign at Churchwarden. There I open my road atlas, lean it against the steering wheel, and consult it while watching for the appearance of the mailperson’s white station wagon. There is almost no traffic on Churchwarden, and none on this side road.
    The dirty white car; coming this way, with stops and starts. I close the road atlas and put it on the seat behind me, then make the left turn onto Churchwarden.
    My heart is pounding. I feel rattled, as though all my nerves are unstrung. Simple movements like acceleration, braking, small adjustments of the steering wheel, are suddenly very hard to do. I keep overcompensating, I can’t fine-tune my movements.
    Ahead, a man crosses the road from right to left.
    I’m panting, like a dog. The other symptoms I don’t object to, I half expect them, but to pant? I’m disgusting myself. Animal behavior…
    The man reaches the mailbox marked 835. I tap the brakes. There’s no traffic visible, either ahead or behind. I depress the button, and my driver’s side window silently rolls down. I angle across the empty road, hearing the crunch of tire on roadway now that the window is open, feeling the cool spring air on my cheek and temple and hollowly inside my ear.
    The man has withdrawn letters, bills, catalogues, magazines; the usual handful. As he’s closing the front lid of the mailbox, he becomes aware of my approach and turns, eyebrows lifted in query.
    I know him to be forty-nine years old, but to me he looks older. These past two years of unemployment, perhaps, have taken their toll. His mustache, too bushy for my taste, is pepper and salt with too much salt. His skin is pale and drab, without highlights, though he has a high forehead that should reflect the sky. His hair is black, receding, thin, straight, limp, gray at the sides. He wears glasses with dark rims—tortoise?—that look too large for his face. Or maybe his face is too small for the glasses. He wears one of his office shirts, a blue and white stripe, under a gray cardigan with the buttons open. His khaki pants are baggy, with grass stains, so he’s perhaps a gardener, or helps his wife around the place, now that he has so much free time. The hands holding his mail are surprisingly thick, big-knuckled, as though he’s a farmer and not a white-collar worker after all. Is this the wrong man?
    I pull to a stop next to him, smiling out of the open window. I say, “Mr. Everly?”
    “Yes?”
    I want to be sure; this could be a brother, a cousin: “Herbert Everly?”
    “Yes? I’m sorry, I—”
    … don’t know me, I think, finishing the sentence for him in my mind. No, you don’t know me, and you never will. And I will never know you, either, because if I knew you I might not be able to kill you, and I’m sorry, but I really do need to kill you. I mean, one or the other of us must die, and I’m the one who thought of it first, so that leaves you.
    I slide the Luger out from under the raincoat and extend it partway through the open window, saying, “You see this?”
    He looks at it, expecting no doubt that I want to sell it to him or tell him I just found it and ask if it’s his, or whatever happens to be the last thought that crosses his brain. He looks at it, and I squeeze the trigger, and the Luger jumps up in the window space and the left lens of his glasses shatters and his left eye becomes a mineshaft, running deep into the center of the earth.
    He drops backward. Just down and back, no fuss, no lunging, just down and back. His mail frets away from him in the breeze.
    I make a sound in the back of my throat