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Western Sunset
Lynette Lyon Hollow liked money. Because she had never had any of
her own before, though, having it around made her nervous, and so she
spent it whenever she saw something she thought worth spending money
on. When more money kept coming in anyway than went out, she spent
faster and faster on bigger and bigger ticket items to make herself
feel better, until presently she was feeling very, very good. So was
Hasty, who hardly ever had to crawl out of a Johnny Walker Black
bottle anymore, even to talk to his money managers. Lynette had fired
all of them.
Right after Hasty's divorce from Happy and his immediate remarriage
to Lynette in Las Vegas, the Hollows had closed up the house in
Durango and flown to Jackson, Wyoming, where the new Mrs. Hollow sold
the condo at Spring Creek Ranch and moved them into a much bigger
home, with pasture for her champion cutting-horse adjoining the
property, next door to the Rockefeller compound between town and the
airport. The new house had a magnificent view of the Grand Tetons and
also on occasion a Rockefeller, which Lynette found still more
imposing, even it was wearing shorts and a T-shirt and riding a
bicycle. (She'd stopped off at the compound once to see if she could
interest anyone in Western Swing lessons, but found no takers.) Her
sister Lisette and Lisette's husband Slim lived on a ranch outside
Soda Springs, Idaho, not more than a couple of hours away; while Happy
was safely settled in Durango where Lynette confidently expected her
to stay put, with her Carrera marble floors and a Johnny Walker bottle
of her own. She never minded when Hasty, in his confusion, mistook her
for his first wife, because it meant he wouldn't notice anything when
her boyfriend Rick invited her into the caretaker's house after supper
to dance to swing records.
Lynette and Hasty enjoyed what most people would call a good
marriage, neither one of them given to interfering in the other's
life, and with nothing to quarrel about except for the cat Puddy that
Lynette had brought with her from Colorado. Lynette had had Puddy
around for ten years now, ever since she was a kitten. Puddy was white
with a black patch on her back and about the size of a small beaver,
weighing thirty-five pounds and requiring an insulin shot daily for
her diabetes, which hardly ever caused her to wake up. When not
crouched at her feeding station which Lynette kept supplied with
delicacies purchased from a gourmet shop in Jackson, Puddy slept most
of the day in out-of-the-way places, an offense to no one except
Hasty, who couldn't bear the sight of her. He'd never cared for cats
much anyway, and this particular specimen, with its grossly distended
stomach, pendulant dugs, and infuriating air of self-indulgent
entitlement made him see red every time he laid eyes on it. When
Lynette wasn't around and he was relatively sober, Hasty was fond of
playing it mean tricks: sprinkling cayenne pepper on its favorite
morsels, picking it up by the scruff of neck the way no cat weighing
thirty-five pounds ought to be picked up, and rolling it onto its back
for a violent game of patty-cake until in fear it lost control of its
rectal muscles and slowly soiled itself.
After only a few months of marriage Puddy had become an obsession
with Hasty, though Lynette seemed not to notice, what with her romance
with Rick the caretaker and the fact she was drinking more than she
used to do. On top of everything, the notes had started arriving-a
couple at least a week, all of them post-marked "Durango CO" and
hand-written on elegant letter paper bearing the Tiffany watermark
that contrasted oddly with the inelegant messages inscribed there.
"You dirty little man-rustler," the latest--in part-had read. "Think
you're a real Western swinger, don't you? You deserve to be swung
around til you're silly, then thrown away with your throat cut."
Lynette, recalling Happy's psychotic spells in which she'd seen the
Johnny Walker figure with his cane on his arm standing in the
driveway, had tossed the first two or three notes contemptuously into
the wastebasket. Later, she became slightly nervous and shared the
most recent ones with Rick.
"I don't get it," Rick said. "The rich bitch lives in Durango,
don't she? Most of the time, she don't know where Durango's at,
and you can forget Jackson Hole-right? Finally, she's a woman, ain't
she? You think some broad's gonna get past me in the middle of
the night? What the hell you worried for, baby?" he added, folding a
pinch of chew under his lower lip.
Lynette tried telling herself she had nothing to worry about, that
the one thing Happy required to have herself poured aboard an
airplane-besides a bottle, of course-was Hasty, and that Hasty was
here in Jackson with her, Mrs. Hasty Hollow the Second. The
thought gave her comfort before the terrible night when, sitting in
her powder-blue cowgirl outfit opposite her husband with a bottle of
Dom Perignon between them in Jackson's most elegant restaurant a block
north of the Antler Arch, she glimpsed Mrs. Hasty Hollow the First,
seated alone in a corner of the diningroom where two rows of relucent
plate-glass windows met at a perpendicular angle, three or four tables
away.
The Old Yellowstone Garage was one of those New West restaurants
that seemed to be a cross between an old-money, off-Lower Fifth
establishment in Greenwich Village and a glitzy Hollywood bar. About a
fifth of the diners looked like movie stars, and every seventh or
eighth face, children excepted, appeared to have been lifted. The
middle-aged woman in pale pink, peering with ancient eyes from behind
a mask of taut-stretched and pancaked skin at the side of her escort,
a big-nosed gentleman twenty years her senior, looked demonic. She was
not half as frightening, however, as the frail figure of Happy Hollow,
doubled in the window beside herself and bent as if half asleep above
her Johnny Walker-and-soda with a lime twist. Almost for the first
time in her life, Lynette knew what fear-real fear-was.
"What's the matter with you?" her husband wanted to know. "Is the
Dom Perignon corked? I'll send it back, together with a big piece of
my mind. They want more for the stuff here even than I'm used to
paying in Chicago."
"The champagne's okay," Lynette told him. "Here comes the guy to
scrape crumbs from the table cloth with a knife. It kind of gives me
the creeps. I was raised in a barn, you know? Pour me another glass
while I'm in the powder room, will you?"
She understood before she was halfway across the floor she'd made a
mistake, but Lynette wouldn't let herself be intimidated. She'd just
got her lipstick out when, in the mirror, the lavatory door opened
behind her and Happy Hollow came floating through it like a ghost.
Happy wore on her ring finger the canary diamond the size of a small
potato and surrounded by emeralds Lynette remembered, nuzzled against
her platinum wedding ring, and in her right hand she carried the
half-finished drink she had brought away with her from the table.
Without looking at Lynette or acknowledging her presence, she walked
up to the basin beside her and, very deliberately, poured the whiskey
into the sink, until only the ice cubes and the lime twist remained
above the drain. Then she turned, and walked straight out of the
lavatory, on her way back to the restaurant.
After that evening, odd things began happening around the Hollowses'
new home. Overnight letters arrived almost every morning by Priority
Mail and the phone rang constantly; it seemed to Lynette that every
time she lifted the receiver to place a call, Hasty was on the line to
a party who had quit speaking abruptly. Once, she saw him hook his
shoe under Puddy's abdomen and kick her violently away from her
feeding station. They had a big fight about it, ending in Hasty
cracking a fresh bottle of Johnny Walker Black and Lynette running out
to the caretaker's lodge and into Rick's consoling arms. "I'd ought to
shoot the sonofabitch," Rick said, but Lynette told him no, they
couldn't afford to have anything happen to Hasty, just yet. She also
let him know that, in case he happened to catch Happy hanging around
the place, she wouldn't mind his arranging for a little accident that
would leave the ornery old bitch just a little dead. Then a castrophe
occurred that caused Lynette to put every other trouble out of her
mind. She came downstairs one morning to find the door of the laundry
room, where Puddy slept in a gilt basket on top of a tanned sheepskin
with the wool left on, ajar, and Puddy herself gone.
Lynette, who had slept behind locked doors since she'd watched a
rerun of the movie In Cold Blood ten years before, couldn't
understand how the back door had come to be left open. The lock wasn't
jimmied, and nothing but the cat appeared to be missing. Her first
thought was to blame Hasty, before she decided he had an alibi, as
usual, in Johnny Walker Black. That left the maid, a Mexican girl in
the country illegally, who broke down in tears when confronted by the
Seņora and invoked the Mother of God as her witness. The ransom
note arrived the following morning in a plain white envelope
postmarked Yellowstone Park. "I don't keep a supply of insulin around
the house," it said in neat printed letters. "Pack your stuff and
leave Jackson by Friday, if you want to see Fat Cat-ALIVE!--again."
The note was unsigned but bore the print of a cat's paw, dipped in
ink.
Tearfully, Lynette carried the note into the caretaker's lodge and
showed it to Rick. "It's Her," she wailed. "I know it is! Poor
Puddy--she can't survive a week without insulin and fresh shrimp. What
are we going to do, Rick?"
Rick did a bad impression of a thoughtful person, lasting no more
than a few painful seconds. Then he tucked a pinch of tobacco inside
his lower lip. "Looks to me like you got some kind of problem," he
agreed finally. "You can trust me, baby: I'll handle it for you.
A few days is all this boy ever needs to get a situation figgered
out."
"We don't have a few days," Lynette retorted bitterly, and
left him.
She phoned the Jackson police station. The dispatcher referred her
to the Animal Control Center, and hung up when she demanded the force
take action itself. Lynette thought-briefly-of asking Hasty for
advice, then poured herself a glass of Johnny Walker Black instead.
The phone rang while she was drinking it and Lynette picked up to hear
a woman's low voice, unnatural sounding as if it were strained through
silk pantihose, as in the movies.
"Be at the front gate at eleven o'clock Friday night," the voice
intoned. "Have your luggage with you. You will be met by a black car.
That.creature of yours will be in a travel case on the floor behind
the front seat. You will be driven to the airport, where a private jet
will be waiting for you. Speak a word of this to anyone, and the
animal will be butchered, pronto, and its remains donated to the
Raptor Center. You have been warned. Goodbye."
Lynette knew only one person who used the word "pronto."
Even before the speaker finished, she had a plan. Lynette hung up
the receiver and ran across the grounds to the caretaker's lodge
where, finding that Rick had devised no plan yet, she told him hers.
He acted unimpressed, but allowed that it might work, anyway. "A guy
don't ever want to think too fast," he explained. "He needs to chew,
like, on an idea, like it was a chaw, and spit it out, if need be."
Lynette was in a hurry for Friday night to come, but she tried to
stay calm and work deliberately. Hasty helped, by keeping mostly to
his room and out of her way. They saw each other only at supper, when
they were waited on by the maid who was still so terrified by Lynette
that she fumbled things and served from the right side instead of the
left, the way Hasty had repeatedly instructed her not to do. He
appeared more than usually fuddled Friday evening, and announced after
the meal that he was going up to bed.
Shortly before eleven Lynette was at the gate, with two large and
quite empty suitcases on the ground beside her. At a distance of only
a few yards, Rick sat crouched behind a young pine tree, fondling a
.40 semi-automatic pistol in his hand. They had not waited long when
two parallel light beams panned the darkness and held them briefly in
their twinned glare, before a black Buick sedan pulled up and, having
narrowly avoided running over the suitcases, stopped with a lurch.
This was the moment, Lynette thought. She lifted her luggage in two
hands, glancing sideways as she did so for Rick, who was just then
emerging from the shadows.
"Get in the car," he ordered, motioning to her with the gun.
"Do what?" Lynette gasped.
"What I tell you-get in the car. Drop them suitcases, first."
She climbed onto the rear seat and sat, astounded. A catbox rested
on the floor behind the driver. Rick opened the trunk, placed the
luggage inside, and closed the lid. Then he came around to the
driver's side. The driver pressed a button to lower the window and
passed Rick a roll of bills through it.
"But.why?" Lynette protested weakly.
"The goddamn cat--that's why," the driver said, with violence. The
voice was the voice of her husband, not really sober. "It's enough to
drive a man to drink, for God's sake. Don't worry: Happy sent along a
bottle to take with you for carry-on."
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