Small Felonies - Fifty Mystery Short Stories by Bill Pronzini Read Free Book Online

and set there like a cold dead hand. I closed my eyes and listened to the last singing of the wheels fade away.
    It weren't long before I heard footfalls on the slope coming near, then the angry sound of a stranger's voice, but I kept my eyes shut until they walked up close and Billy Bob said, "Granpa." When I opened 'em the floater was standing three feet in front of me, white face shining in the moonlight—scared face, angry face, evil face.
    "What the hell is this?" he said. "What you want with me?"
    "Give me your gun, Billy Bob," I said.
    He did it, and I held her tight and lifted the barrel. The ache in my stomach was so strong my knees felt weak and I could scarcely breathe. But my hand was steady.
    The floater's eyes come wide open and he backed off a step. "Hey," he said, "hey, you can't—"
    I shot him twice.
    He fell over and rolled some and come up on his back. They wasn't no doubt he was dead, so I give the gun back to Billy Bob and he put it away in his belt. "All right, boy," I said.
    Billy Bob nodded and went over and hoisted the dead floater onto his shoulder. I watched him trudge off toward the bog hollow, and in my mind I could hear the train whistle as she'd sounded from inside the tunnel. I thought again, as I had so many times, that it was the way my boy Rufus and Billy Bob's ma must have sounded that night in 1947, when the two floaters from the hobo jungle broke into their home and raped her and shot Rufus to death. She lived just long enough to tell us about the floaters, but they was never caught. So it was up to me, and then up to me and Billy Bob when he come of age.
    Well, it ain't like it once was, and that saddens me. But they's still a few that ride the rails, still a few take it into their heads to jump off down there when the St. Louis freight slows coming through the Chigger Mountain tunnel.
    Oh my yes, they'll always be a few for me and Billy Bob and the sweet fever inside us both.

PERFECT TIMING
     
    T he first call came at ten o'clock Saturday morning. Carmody had just returned to San Francisco from Barstow, over which Angela's Cessna had exploded at noon on Thursday. A solemn representative of the Federal Aviation Administration had shown up Thursday evening to give him word of the mishap and of Angela's death. He'd flown directly to Barstow with the representative, even though there was really nothing for him to do there.
    He had had a bad time in Barstow with Angela's brother, Russ Halpern. Halpern was one of these dim-witted high school dropouts, a heavy construction worker; once he got an idea in his head you couldn't get it out. He hadn't liked Carmody from the moment Angela first introduced them, had even tried to keep them from getting married. He thought Carmody was after the stocks and securities she'd inherited from her first husband, a Montgomery Street broker whose passion for handball had netted him a fatal coronary one afternoon on the courts. And now he thought Carmody also wanted the $200,000 double-indemnity insurance on her life; that that was another reason Carmody had decided to murder her.
    Halpern had flown to Barstow, too, after getting word of the accident, and made a scene in front of a dozen witnesses. Claimed Carmody had talked Angela into flying alone to Tucson to visit her sister; claimed he must have put a bomb of some kind on board the Cessna. He'd been ranting like a lunatic and they'd had to restrain him from attacking Carmody. Later, the FAA people had thrown some hard questions at Carmody—questions that had finally ended when their preliminary investigation uncovered no evidence in the wreckage to indicate sabotage. He'd stayed over an extra day, at the FAA's request, and gotten a flight back early this morning.
    So he had been home less than ten minutes when the telephone rang. He was making coffee in the kitchen; he finished spooning freshly ground Vienna roast into the Mr. Coffee before going into the front room and catching up the