The Deep Read online

  “Please, Helen.”

  She shook her head, the futility of the whole tragic moment caught in a single gesture. “What is there to say, Deep? I had to go and love you. I had to fall crazy in love with you. I should have known. All this senseless disregard for life and peace and happiness was part of me in the beginning too ... but I got away from it. I hated it. I never wanted any part of it ... I even tried to stop it. Then I came back because of you.”

  She stopped me with a wave of her hand when I went to speak. “It’s no good, Deep. It’s over now. I would have waited for you forever if I had to. You were my man. You knew that, didn’t you?”

  I nodded silently.

  Her eyes were bright with tears and she touched my face. “I didn’t care what you did. I didn’t care what you were wherever you came from because you were mine and I was yours and when it was done we would be together, even if it was for a little while and we were very, very old.”

  I said, “I didn’t come from so far away, Helen. Not in distance. Just in time.”

  She listened, but didn’t truly hear. “But you spoiled it, Deep,” she told me. “You committed the one crime there’s no turning back on. You did the one thing you said you wouldn’t do. You threw all our love and our promises to the wind when you killed him.”

  The tears spilled from her eyes, shining wetly against her cheeks. “If you could have been ... just anybody ...” she hesitated a second before she spoke ... “it wouldn’t mean anything. It wouldn’t be so bad. But when you’re part of something like ... all this ...” she stopped, sobbed and pressed her hand to her mouth again.

  You could hear them coming down the stairs now, being very careful.

  “... then it’s over. There’s only death now. You committed the one crime there’s no turning back on. There’s no possible defense. You’re one of them, Deep, and when any one of them kills, the law kills back.

  “And now the law is going to take you and when you die, I’ll die too. That’s what you did. In one second you threw away everything we ever had. You should have let him kill you. You did anyway. You should have let him.”

  A voice called for a riot gun and there was a shuffling on the stairs. Others were standing by, ready to fire and step by step they started down.

  I said, “Helen ... I love you.”

  She smiled, sadly, her eyes a little cloudy with tears that had a bitter sting. “I know,” she said, “and now it’s too late. There isn’t even any hope left and we had so much. So very much.”

  Behind us they reached the bottom of the stairs.

  Then I grinned, real big, and in a brief moment she knew that because years ago two kids had decided to split the world between them didn’t mean that both of them had to keep the pact and that somewhere along the line the worse one had found out that to hop off the trolley wasn’t the way to abandon hope. In that one brief second she knew the reasons and the answers for a lot of things.

  They were there, guns out, all of them. Sergeant Hurd in front with the riot gun and the rest with service revolvers. There was only a second left now.

  In that one scant second, that tiny particle of time, she had a glimpse of that flash of gold pinned to the wallet I held in my hand when they all came up behind us and lowered the guns and knew. She knew.

  Sergeant Hurd said, in a tired command voice, “Nice going, Lieutenant.”