The Murderer Vine by Shepard Rifkin

others.
    Gary Cooper disintegrated from the top down.
    George showed me how to set it for single-shot action. He clipped on another drum, took it off, had me clip it on, nodded. He was satisfied I knew how to do it. I squeezed off one shot. It made a hole in poor Greta’s stomach three inches in diameter. The gun coughed quietly once and subsided. Bits of cardboard were floating in the air.
    “God,” I said.
    I took it apart and put it in the case. We walked back silently. At the house George gave me a full drum. I put it in the case. He asked me if I wanted another one. I shook my head. I gave him twenty fifty-dollar bills.
    As I got into the car, I said, “That’s a terrible thing.”
    “So don’t buy it.”
    He watched me drive down the road. When I reached his letter box, which was mounted on a cedar post with morning-glory vines blooming all around it, I paused and looked up the hill. He was still standing on the porch. Neither of us waved goodbye.

19
    I took the bus down to Jackson rather than the plane. I wanted the extra time for Kirby to worm herself into the town, and if I got there too early, I’d only gum up the works.
    So I took one small suitcase, the Kim, and the attaché case down to the Port Authority Bus Terminal. The attaché case had a leather partition in the middle which divided the contents equally. There were two buckles by which it could be attached so that the golf-club side was permanently covered. The empty half had three slots into which I stuck a couple of books on speech, a notebook, and a couple of ballpoint pens. As soon as the bus started down the ramp leading to the Lincoln Tunnel, Mr. Wilson (who had decided he would like to be called Hal rather than Harold) began to catch up on his homework. He also had an excellent reason for keeping the case on his lap at all times rather than placing it in the overhead rack.
    I read all the way through New Jersey and Maryland. It wasn’t as hard sailing as I thought it might be. It was pretty interesting. Brid became bird because the effort it took to slide the mouth from b to r was just too much. So some lazy forebear stuck in an i between them to bridge the gap, and it took. The same thing with thrid, which became third. Am not became amn’t which became ain’t, which was once used in polite society. It ain’t permissible now, although George Foglia uses it all the time. Then I came to the symbols they have dredged out of mathematics and other languages in order to represent sounds not covered in English. I made notes on them. They weren’t the kind of notes that any Ph.D. candidate in my chosen field would have on him at this late stage in his career, but it was the only way I could remember all the junk. Later on I would tear them up.
    I read grimly on as our headlights drilled across Virginia. Somewhere near the southern border of the state I couldn’t take it anymore. I put my book and notes in their proper slots, closed the case, and reached up to turn off the little bull’s-eye light that was focused on my lap. I levered my seat back, stretched my legs with a groan of pleasure, leaned back with my hands clasped on the case, and closed my eyes.
    I couldn’t sleep. I stared at the dark country as the bus cruised at seventy. A sudden thought jumped into my head. I could open the case, spend thirty-five seconds on the contents, and then kill everyone on the bus. Forty-seven people. And the driver wouldn’t even turn around. He’d think the studious gentleman in seat 27 was just having a quiet little coughing fit.
    It was the kind of thought a psychopathic kid might have. For a second I thought that the most intelligent thing I could do would be for me to get out at Fayetteville, walk to a bridge over the Cape Fear River, and drop in the nine little parts plus the drum, go on to Jackson, pick up Kirby’s note at the general delivery window, tell her to pack up, withdraw the money from the Okalusa bank, and meet me at the bus depot