The Art of Arrow Cutting Read online

  “Not really, not for long,” he said and shrugged. “The pictures never really look as good as I think they should, and if they did, the magazine probably wouldn’t want them anyway. And most of the women you see down there are trying to raise some money after their husbands have blown it all at Vegas, or divorcées who think they’re being independent, or losers who have never learned to do anything else with their bodies, let alone their minds. Would-be starlets on their way to Hollywood, small-time strippers, waitresses who got tired of waiting—”

  “Are you sure you’re Italian? You don’t sound like one.”

  “You mean my accent? I’ve got what they call a quick ear.”

  “No, you’re just … not full of macho bullshit, I guess.”

  He grinned. “I was about to finish up with ‘but never anyone who looks as good as you,’ but I guess you hear that a lot.”

  “No, not really,” she replied. “Not recently.”

  “What is it with this place? Everyone under sixty split?” He’d seen too many small country towns and bankrupted cities where that had happened — and others where it hadn’t, which were often worse. In his experience, little towns were even less friendly than the big cities, especially to impoverished strangers and beautiful young women.

  “No … I just don’t get out much, I guess.”

  “Well, let me know when you check out of the hospital and we’ll change that. Or are you too busy?” No reply. “Studying? What’re you studying?”

  “Mathematics. Probability theory.” There was the crunch of gravel behind them and the bus pulled into the parking bay, the door opening with a depressing wheeze. “Thanks for everything, Mage,” she said and stood.

  “My pleasure.” He walked with her to the bus door, kissed her hand—it felt unusually cool—as she gave the driver her ticket, then stood back and craned his neck to watch her choose her seat. “The Lord giveth and Greyhound taketh away,” he muttered, still wishing he could have made her smile more. He glanced at his watch: not quite 9:30, and over an hour and a half before Carol was due, but at least the bank should be open.

  The senior cashier was mid-twentyish, with a city girl’s bearing, a Northeastern accent, a pleasant smile, and no wedding ring; Mage guessed that some officious bastard had banished her to this ghost town and called it a promotion. He cashed a twenty-dollar traveler’s check and asked for directions to North Street. Number Forty-four was seven blocks away, farther than he cared to walk carrying the pack. “Thank you kindly.”

  “You staying here long?”

  “I don’t know. How about you?”

  “Until Christmas. Then I’m being transferred back to Toronto.”

  “Home?”

  “Uh-huh. How about you?”

  He shrugged. “I drift. I was in Toronto a week ago. Nice place.”

  “No home?”

  “Not really.” He grinned. “Most people say, ‘That must be exciting,’ or something like that. You look like you’re sorry for me.”

  “I am. I mean, I just can’t imagine that, not calling anywhere home.”

  “At least you’re honest. Most people don’t know what they want, and they don’t dare wonder.”

  “And you?”

  “I don’t know either,” he replied. “But I’m going to keep looking ’til I find it. Ciao.”

  He returned to the wall at eleven, armed with a cherry Danish and a new Vangelis cassette. He listened to the tape on his Walkman, watched the sky, and waited. A few minutes before noon, he removed the headphones and heard Carol’s car, an ancient VW Beetle, long before it turned the corner and chugged to a stop. The door flew open without restraint and Carol emerged—she was short enough to get out of a Beetle quickly, if not gracefully— smiling broadly.

  “Hi. Just put that in the hood and we can get home. I’ve been up since five and I’m just about dead; it’s my week for mornings. How’re you?”

  “I’m fine.” She was moving too quickly for Mage to grab her, so he picked up his pack and swung it into the luggage compartment. “Where d’you work?”

  “The Stop-and-Rob down near the highway.” She slammed the hood down and opened the door for him. “Four of us rotate, which isn’t too bad, and we’re all very dangerous during the graveyard shift. And I need the money—I mean, I kept the house and it’s on the market, but you can’t sell a house in this town and get enough to move anywhere there’s any work. Okay, let’s go. I’m going to make some breakfast and hit the sack immediately—and sleep. You must be bushed yourself after the bus trip. Oh, yeah—Jeannie, who has the shift after mine, wants to know if you can do a photo of her. She saw that thing you did of me, not the one for the magazine—you know, the one you took in that red dress—and she really liked it.”

  “I never wore a red dress in my life,” muttered Mage, but Carol didn’t hear him over the noise of the engine.

  “So, what d’you want for breakfast?”

  Now I really am going to go to sleep,” she said nearly three hours later. “I oughta make you drink that coffee, too.” She stretched lazily. “So, how come you’re even better during the day? I thought magic needed a full moon or something.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, smiling. “Maybe I’m solar powered. And you’re pretty magical yourself; it felt like you really do rotate.”

  “What? Oh!” She laughed and kissed his biceps—sliding up (or down) the bed to kiss him anywhere else would have been too exhausting. They lay there for several minutes silently, and then she asked, “What’re you thinking?”

  “Who says I’m thinking? I don’t have the energy left to think—not that I’m complaining.”

  “Balls.”

  He stared at the ceiling. “You’ve got good shadows.”

  “Oh, yeah? What can you see up there that you can’t see down here?”

  “There’s a leopard—see the spots?—and the Venus de Milo … well, she’s a little lopsided. Maybe it’s the Venus de Willendorf instead.” She looked up, obviously puzzled. “The Willendorf Venus is a Cro-Magnon figurine, a fertility—never mind.”

  He rolled over and kissed her. She was twenty-nine, he knew, six years his senior, and she’d never been beautiful. She was proud of her body, particularly of her large, big-nippled breasts; he loved her smile, which was honest and almost pretty. When he’d photographed her for Bandit, he’d made sure that she smiled, joking and flirting and flattering her. Not that most of the readers gave a damn about prettiness—they wanted glands and genitalia—but Mage was a photographer, not a dissector. To him, a shot that didn’t include the woman’s face had all the erotic appeal of a guillotine. Despite his first name, no one had ever called him an artist, and he would have denied it if they had—but he had some of the vision that makes an artist, though not the technique, nor much desire to learn it.

  “You know how to live,” he said. “Nothing I know is of any use.”

  She laughed. “I’m lying here hardly able to move at half past three in the afternoon, and you say that nothing you know is of any use? If Roy had known how to do that, I would never’ve let him leave.”

  “Thanks.” He kissed her again, then flopped back onto his side of the bed and yawned. “Guess I’d better get some sleep, too.”

  “What do you want for dinner?”

  “Oh, God …”

  “I don’t feel like cooking, either. Pizza suit you?”

  “Are you kidding? I used to live on the stuff, I love it. With extra anchovies, right? And tomorrow I’ll go shopping and I’ll cook dinner: Spaghetti Bolognese a la Magistrale.”

  Four nights, he thought. Four wouldn’t hurt either of them. And then where?

  3

  Packer

  George Packer had learned to fire a shotgun on his father’s farm at the age of seven. Thirty-one years later he was an almost fanatical collector and target shooter, an itinerant farm-machinery salesman who also sold black-market firearms. He was of average intelligence, with a modest talent for mathematics
, and no doubt he had a good Freudian reason for wanting to blow wet, messy holes in living beings.

  At ten to midnight he sat in his car thinking of how much he’d enjoy blowing a hole in Gacy, the employer he didn’t mention on his tax return. Gacy had told him to look for this blonde—which was okay by Packer—and given him a list of little towns on the Greyhound route. He’d also given him half the payment in advance—which was more than he’d get in a good month of selling combine harvesters—but he hadn’t told him about the boredom. The girl had been missing for nearly two weeks now, and Gacy doubted that they’d ever find her at all—which, Packer guessed, was why he wasn’t freezing his buns in Totem Rock, Saskatchewan, population 330, a few minutes before midnight.

  And to cap it off, the Greyhound station and café were closed. Packer looked at the timetable and eventually deduced that since the bus was arriving at twenty to one, the station would probably open at 12:30 or so. He yawned, set the alarm on his watch for 12:25, pushed his seat back as far as it would go, loosened his belt and closed his eyes. His left arm dangled down, brushing against the stock of his favorite gun, a Mossberg 12-gauge with a winter trigger. He also had an HK-4 in his pocket “for luck.” The rifles and SMGs in the trunk were unloaded and nominally for sale; the ammunition, much of it hand-loaded and illegal even in the U.S., was in his other suitcase.

  He woke when the bus arrived, scratched himself and walked to the dingy office. Not surprisingly, no one was boarding or disembarking, but the clerk was busy with a few parcels. Packer bought himself a Dr. Pepper from the machine and waited.

  “Help you?”

  “Yeah, maybe,” Packer replied and brought out the picture. The clerk was only a kid, nineteen at the most, which was good; he wouldn’t have forgotten a girl that beautiful. “You seen this girl come through here? It’s not that great a shot, I know, but she’s about so tall”—he held his hand level with his mustache—“long blond hair, unless she’s done something to it… .”

  “You her father?”

  “Uncle,” Packer replied glibly. He was muscular and thick-featured, with colorless eyes and receding chestnut hair, and resembled the pretty blonde not at all. “She was running away from her father—you can probably guess why. But he’s just died, and her mother—my sister—wants her home. You understand.” The story was a good one, maybe too good for Gacy, and Packer wondered who’d thought of it. “You’ve seen her, haven’t you?”

  “I don’t know. Like you say, it’s a lousy photo. But there was a girl like that, a blonde, stopped off here …”

  “When?”

  The boy looked at him, his face darkening slightly with suspicion. “When did she run away?”

  “Last year. She was working in Salt Lake City for a while. Least that was the postmark on her letters until a couple of weeks back, when she said her job had finished and she was looking for work somewhere else. I hoped she might come and see me, but like I said, it’s been two weeks now… .”

  The boy stared at him, then nodded. “About a week ago. What is it now, Wednesday?”

  “By about half an hour, yeah.”

  “It must’ve been early last week. Monday, I guess. I haven’t seen her since.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Sure. No offense, but I’d remember her.”

  “No offense taken, you’ve been a great help. You wouldn’t know where she would’ve gone?”

  The boy shrugged. “Maybe to the motel, unless she’s staying with a friend. Or there are rooms out at the other end of town you can rent by the week.”

  “Thanks,” said Packer and returned to his car.

  He’d neglected to ask one question. The boy only worked nights and so hadn’t seen the girl catch the morning bus the day before.

  Carol slipped out of bed as gently as she could and dressed in the dark. Mage, who had grown up in a small apartment with paper-thin walls, slept on without stirring.

  He looked years younger with his eyes closed, she thought. Not boyish—he was too tall to appear boyish—but innocent, or cute, or peaceful. She wasn’t sure there was a word for it. Words weren’t her native language. He slept soundly, snoring very softly. She felt that she could sit there for hours and watch him sleep—wait for a shadow of beard to appear on his chin, maybe. He was a sloppy dresser, but he was as fussy as a cat about the rest of his appearance; his first action on leaving the bed had been to shower and wash his shoulder-long black hair. She finished dressing, blew him a kiss from the doorway and quietly closed the door behind her.

  He would, she thought, make a terrible husband—not that she was looking for a husband, of course.

  A few hours later, Mage emerged from a dream of Amanda—an unsatisfying, vaguely disturbing dream of the scent of her hair and the sadness in her eyes—and remembered where he was. He lay there for a few minutes, then guessed that the day was about as warm as it was likely to get and hauled himself out from underneath the blankets and into his robe and size eleven moccasins. A moment later he was prowling around the apartment with a large mug of coffee. It was a small apartment, and thus the prowl was rather badly cramped.

  She wasn’t at the motel and she hadn’t been there—unless the old man who ran the place was lying, of course. But that, Packer thought, was unlikely. He didn’t know very much about people, but he was used to dealing with liars. That left only the apartments and then, he hoped, he could get the hell out of Totem Rock. He donned his army-surplus greatcoat, which—apart from being warm and weatherproof—was the only garment he owned that could hide a silenced MAC-11. Then he packed his bag and took it out to the car.

  The car, he suddenly realized, might be recognized—it had Edmonton license plates and was newer than anything else he’d seen in town. Walking the necessary seven blocks would make him less conspicuous. It wasn’t as though he was going to need the 12-gauge or the AR-15. Gacy had specified that the girl was to be brought in alive and uninjured; stressed it too, though he hadn’t told Packer why. Packer suspected, quite rightly, that Gacy didn’t know, and wondered who he was working for.

  He pulled the cover back over the trunk and locked it down. It was weatherproof, like the greatcoat, but its real purpose was to hide the shotgun in the back seat. Then he shrugged, feeling the reassuring weight of the MAC-11 on its sling, and set off.

  It was midday before Packer had his answer, and he didn’t like it. The girl had been living there, briefly, but the caretaker hadn’t seen her in three days. The rent was paid until the end of the week though, and she might be back. Who is she, your daughter?

  Packer reassured the caretaker with the same story he’d told the Greyhound clerk and the motel manager (town this small, he thought, they probably compare notes on everything that happens, probably be talking about this for months), then decided to ring Gacy. He spotted a booth less than a block away and fumbled in his pocket for change.

  “I think I found her,” he said as soon as he recognized Gacy’s voice.

  “What d’you mean, ‘I think’?” came the weary reply.

  “Well, I found her.”

  “O-kaay! Where is she?”

  “Uh …”

  “She got away, didn’t she?” Gacy didn’t say “You dumb asshole,” but he thought it very loudly.

  “No … I don’t know where she is, but she was here. I found her apartment, and I know the name she was using. It may even be her real one.”

  “What is it?”

  “Well, it looks to me like that should be worth a bonus.”

  “Yeah. Maybe. If it helps us catch her, now you’ve let her go. What was it?”

  “Sharmon. Amanda Sharmon. And I didn’t let her go; I don’t even know she’s gone.”

  “What you don’t know isn’t worth shit.”

  “She’s paid the rent here ’til the end of the week.”

  “She can probably afford to do that in every pissant town in Saskatchewan, you jerk. Could probably have bought the place. Why d’you think these guys want
her?”

  “I don’t know. But she must be here. She didn’t catch the Greyhound and there’s no other way out of town.”

  Gacy sighed. “Maybe she bought a car. Maybe she hitched a ride—she’s a looker, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “A place this size, away from the highway? No cars for sale that I’ve seen, and nobody ever goes through here, not slow enough to notice.”

  “Hmm … so maybe she’s shacked up with someone there. Have you seen inside the room?”

  “No.”

  “Do it. Break in if you have to. And keep looking around town; if you’re right, she’s still there. Call me again tomorrow. At least now we know where she was—that’s something.”

  Packer found himself wishing he was wrong. “Okay. Thanks. Talk to you tomorrow.” Bastard, he thought.

  Carol glanced at the bedside clock, did a double take and then sat up, clutching the quilt to her chin. “You better get moving. Jeannie’s coming over at seven.”

  “Jeannie?”

  “The girl at work? Wants you to photograph her? She’s coming over for dinner. You remember.”

  “Tonight?” he asked lazily.

  “She’s coming to dinner tonight. The photo you can do anytime you’re here, or do you do that better in the daytime too?”

  He grinned and sat up, stretching luxuriously. “Actually, yes. You don’t have the lights here for portrait work, so I’ll have to rely on the sun and use a flash for fill. She has the afternoon shift, hasn’t she?” Carol nodded. “So I guess I’d better do her one morning. While you’re at work. Is that okay?”

  “You’ll have to ask her,” replied Carol offhandedly. “It’s okay with me.”

  Mage disentangled himself from the bedclothes for the second time that day and walked toward the shower. “Is dinner formal?”

  “No, but it’s going to be cold. You’d better wear something.”

  He laughed. “That’s what I meant. I only have one set of clean clothes left. I meant to go looking for a laundromat this morning, but you didn’t leave me a key.”