Ghost / Writer #3

Later that day, long after the rug-shampoo and the strange visitor, Butch Kerns sat basking and thinking in the dead man's sprawling master bathroom. The tub was twice as big as some pools he'd been in, and the bathroom itself was a fever dream of dark wood, mirrors, porcelain, and polished stainless steel. As he soaked, Butch looked out a vast and frameless bathroom window at sunset on Narragansett bay. He thought he could see seals, leaping and playing on a chain of rocks jutting far into the sea from the writer's back yard. None of it did him any good, because despite the luxury and the seals, Butch was stressing.

It wasn't the guy at the door. That
guy - as problematic as he seemed at the time - was long gone. He himself would be gone in a few days with the house, and everything that happened there, locked up behind him forever. It wasn't the guy.

It wasn't the plan either. How many times could the visitor return before flight 83? Not enough. No, the plan was sound - thought Butch - the plan would do. The problem was Coop.

Butch's "partner" had been jumpy from the first about the job, the place, the time, the amounts and the planning. The guy complained and needled him at every bend in the road, and his over-think was contagious. Twelve straight hours he'd endured, Coop guessing, raving and pacing and stage-whispering through each fabricated betrayal:

"Who the fuck WAS that guy?
Is it a cop? A fed? He'd rolled up on a deserted house on a cold autumn day. He didn't have a car, Butch. "

He went on and on, seemingly more put-off by the second, as if the stranger's visit spelled his certain, painful arrest and incarceration or worse. 'clueless fuck hadn't even recognized the guy. The "coincidence" - when and if Cooper eventually discovered it - would send him off into total fear vapor-lock.

Butch figured he'd have aced Coop already under more cooperative circumstances, but in light of the stranger's promise to return, Butch now sensed unnecessary risk. In a perfect world, he'd have done the stranger as well, but who'd miss the guy and how soon? Before flight 83 non-stop Westerly to Bermuda was airborne and away?

"Nah"

Butch spoke out loud in the porcelain cloud of the bathroom:

"Two days, flight 83, 10am from Westerly."

If the guy came back, Butch would meet him at the door with the Colt. When he'd first shown up, Kerns had been busy cleaning the writer's blood and brains out of his wall-wall shag. At the bell-tone, he picked up the Colt, moved to cover. Coop - eating standing up in the kithchen - flashed him a silent look over his shoulder as he moved from the kitchen to the door. He opened it, and two things happened at once:


Butch recognized the man at the door, and - at the same time - realized that the the bloody smudge on the writer's eggshell carpet was plainly visible from the front door.

It was twenty feet away across two big, bright rooms, but from his vantage looking over Coop's left shoulder, the visitor would be looking directly at the spot where the writer had bled his last. Butch had left the bucket there when the doorbell rang, along with a sponge-mop marking a sprawling crimson blotch on the carpet. Butch held his breath, pulled the hammer on the heavy revolver in his hand, and concentrated on not breaking for the cleaning supplies. Instead he leaned an ear to the edge of the door and tried to listen...