Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 40, No. 6, June, 1995

“Tell you what,” I said, getting to my feet. “You catch some sleep while I do some shopping, and when you get up, I’ll make you a Spanish omelette that will be a poem.” I grabbed her hands and pulled her up. “Deal?” I asked, with my face an inch from hers.

She agreed in a manner that suited us both.

Later, with Loretta asleep in my bed, I sat drinking coffee — instant, but real — in front of the fire I’d built in the fireplace, and finished the decision-making process I’d started earlier.

Deciding among other things that although a prudent man indeed takes Nietzsche in small doses, when he was right, he was right.

“Like every good thing on earth,” he’d written, “justice ends by suspending itself. The fine name this self-cancelling justice has given itself is mercy. But mercy remains, as goes without saying, the prerogative of the strongest, his province beyond the law.”

Which, if knowledge was power, and power characteristic of the strongest, made mercy my prerogative.

At least for the moment.

At dusk, I walked down the highway and found Mac lounging against his cab in his usual place in front of the restaurant. After I’d climbed inside and after he’d gotten in behind the wheel and asked me where to, I said, “Just down the road a ways, Mac. There’s something I want to check out.”

He took me down the hill, and I directed him to the lookout where I’d first come across the corpse on the bench.

The sun had set by then, and after he stopped the cab, I got out and looked at the lights in the houses, plainly visible through the pines that covered the face of the mountain.

I waved at Mac, who was still sitting in his cab with the motor running, and said, “Could you step out here a minute, Mac?”

He hesitated for a second or two, then killed the engine and got out, coming over to stand where I stood near the railing.

“It’s like I figured,” I told him.

He frowned at me.

“He might have been lost, but he could have gotten help at one of those cabins. You can see the lights easily enough.”

I pointed out the obvious, and Mac looked at the house lights, then back at me.

“The only real danger he was in was the danger he was to himself.” I nodded toward the bench. “He killed himself, Mac. He just sat down here and gave life up.”

“Oh,” he said, as if just getting what I was driving at.

“Vietnamese,” I said. “We made life hell for them in their own country, then we made it hell for them here.” I took a deep breath and looked out over the railing at the darkening sky. “You married, Mac?”

“No.”

“Ever been?”

“No.”

“He was,” I said.

Mac started to say something but changed his mind.

“The way I see it,” I told him, “you got him up here in his own cab, made him get out, and you left him. You drove his cab down the mountain and ditched it.”

Mac was quiet.

“I don’t think you intended to kill him. I figure you thought you were just teaching him a lesson in turf protection.”

I turned back to him and saw him staring at me wide-eyed.

“The thing is, Mac, he’d been taught that lesson before. More than once. Texas. San Diego. San Francisco. Everybody protected their turf, and there was no place for him.” I waved my hand at the world immediately around us. “He’d just run out of places to go.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mac whispered.

I smiled and said, “I’m not the police, Mac. You don’t have to say anything to me. This is just — soldier to soldier.”

He snorted, then frowned a brave look of disparaging disbelief.

I smiled again. “But if I did have a talk with the sheriff — who is a close personal friend of mine, by the way — and I told her that you knew that the body I found was of a Vietnamese before that bit of information got in the newspaper, she might want to ask you a few questions.

“And,” I went on easily, “if I told her that the manager of Fear Mountain Lodges had seen you threaten Long Van Doan about driving his cab on your mountain, I imagine she’d have a few questions to ask him.”

He swallowed and began breathing a little roughly.

“And the sheriff,” I continued, “being a good cop and a very smart woman, would probably ask around, fixing your whereabouts Tuesday night, and before too long she’d put two and two together — and you’d find yourself in kind of a tight spot.”

His mouth sagged open.

“Trying to explain to a jury how you only meant to scare the man.”

He looked away from me, down at his shoes.

I scooped some snow from the ground and said, “Now, I don’t know if they could make a murder case out of this, Mac, but I’m damn sure they’ll get you on something.”

He said nothing.

“And you’ll do some time,” I told him.

He heaved a big raggedy sigh but kept his head down.

“And you’ll never be the same after that,” I added.

He looked up at me with a what-now look on his face.

I worked the snow I held into a tight white ball. “On top of which you will never get a liquor license with a felony conviction in this state, which ends the idea of Mac’s Tavern.”

His swallowed and looked a little sick.

“You following me, Mac?”

He said nothing, but he was.