I could imagine Vangie had known what was going to hit her. I could guess she might have even ridden in the car they killed her with. And she had stood there in the shadows, waiting for it to go around several blocks after they let her out, her and the man who stood behind her, big hands clamped on her elbows. Two or three blocks perhaps, to get up the speed to make it absolutely certain, then she’d see the headlights coming fast, maybe with some blinking to make identification certain, and then she’d feel the grasp tighten, and she would try to brace her feet, but the brutal shove would send her floundering out, while the man who held her dodged swiftly back to avoid being spattered, then walked swiftly to the corner, walked another half block, got into his own car and drove sedately away. I wondered if this time Vangie had broken, if she had begged and blubbered and wet her pants and had to be held upright to be shoved out into the path of the juggernaut.
I had the strange conviction somebody was going to tell me all about it some day. Unwillingly.
So here we go again, noble brave name Key-Hoc-Tee? Wasn’t the world maybe just a little bit better off minus one slut? Did it grab you that much, boy, to have that seasoned meat offered to you on a platter? Did it squinch your sentimental Irish heart to see the lassie roll her lonely hips in the solitary dance? How can you know the whole thing wasn’t all lies, that she didn’t try to cross up her fellow assassins and grab all the loot for herself and that’s why she got dropped off a bridge? How do you know the whole scheme, whatever it is, isn’t something she cooked up all by herself?
Maybe, for me, the only true knowing of her was down there in the black press of the outgoing tide, my fingers wrapped in her hair, feeling the frail questioning grasp of the girl-hands on my wrist, then feeling the girl-shapes of her as I pulled myself down her body to the wired ankles. All right. So that was it, the awareness of the life down there, going out of her quickly, the desperation and the stubborn wire and the haste. It was a difficult thing to do. You feel good to do a thing like that. And then when they take what you saved and see how high they can splash it against a stone building, you get annoyed.
Okay, hero. Tip the cops. It’s their job.
But there is thirty-two thousand floating around somewhere. It needs a new home. And you’ve invested two hundred already.
It was quarter to ten that night before Meyer rang my bell and came aboard. He handed me a big manila envelope and said, “It took a goodly amount of sweet talk. Homer’s wife expected to be taken to the movies. The last thing she wanted was some old camera club churn to show up with a problem. As a photographer, Homer is curiously limited. He takes macro-photographs of wild flowers of the southeast. He has thousands. But he has a very sure touch in that darkroom.”
I pulled the pictures out. There was the big one, and I looked at that first. It was black and white, on semigloss paper without borders, a vertical shot, about eleven by fourteen, a closeup so extreme her features were larger than life size. It caught just the area from above her eyebrows to just below her chin, in quarter profile half turned toward the lens. You could not, of course, tell that she was dancing. She was looking down, the wing of dark hair nearest the lens swinging forward, covering part of her cheek. Her eyes were half closed. It had a luminous loveliness, the way the light lay across her face, the delicacy of it, a slight softness of focus, a look of dreaming. The angle somehow emphasized the oriental look of her. I looked at it a long time.
“This is a dandy, Meyer.”
“Better than I could have hoped. That is about thirty percent of the frame. Sooner or later that one will win me a small piece of change. You might enjoy the title I’ve decided to give it. ‘The Island Bride.'”