WEST ON 66

by James H. Cobb

  I had to go after him again. I couldn't let him get himself together. Tools make great ad hoc weapons, and there was enough potentially lethal ironmongery scattered on that garage workbench to stock half a dozen good East LA gang fights.

  I tried to take him down with another kick, but Claster shoved my rising boot aside and it was his turn to come in at me. We were back between the pickup and the bench now, and there was no room to maneuver, just fist and skull and batter 'em down.

  Brother Ira was bad news. He was as tough and stringy as old boot leather, and he had a pair of shoulders on him like a medium tank. He'd also obviosly graduated from a pretty tough school of street and bar fighting. Well, so had I, but then I'd gone on to do postgraduate studies in paratrooper and cop.

  I blocked a few punches and weaved around a couple more. Then I spotted him a wild swing that raked my jaw and put sparks in my vision. However, it also got me inside his defense far enough to drive a knee into his gut. Claster went green and gagged. Falling back against the workbench, he scrabbled for a rack of screwdrivers.

  Not today, buddy. I peeled him off the bench, drove another fist into his belly, and spun him around. Wrenching his right arm up behind his back, I slammed him forward over the fender of his truck, his head extending out over the open engine compartment. I took a single deep breath and wished for a set of handcuffs.

  Claster got his wind back, too, and began to struggle again, screaming some really interesting variations on a few of the more potent standard cusswords. Then another county was heard from. From the other side of the truck Lisette reached across the engine compartment and grabbed two handsful of Claster's lank hair.

  "Where's your brother?" she demanded over the engine rumble.

  Claster replied with a suggestion, something a lot of men would probably like to do with a lady like Lisette, but reduced to its ugliest gutter form.

  The girl's eyes flashed and suddenly she wrenched his head downward, pushing Claster's face toward the truck's spinning radiator fan.

  Claster yelled and tried to rear back, but Lisette bore down with all of her strength.

  "Where . . . is . . . your . . . brother!" It was a scream of an­ger to match Claster's scream of fear.

  "Go to hell!" Claster's neck muscles bulged as he tried to lift his face away from the glinting fan blades. Lisette had the leverage, though, and she was merciless. Cold fire danced in her eyes, and her fine-lined jaw was set in a soundless snarl. Once more she shoved his face deeper into the engine com­partment.

  "Where!"

  Jesus! She was meaning it! "You know, man," I said slowly, "you're probably really going to miss your nose."

  Claster screamed as Lisette bore down again, but this time it was a single word.

  "Arizona!"

  "Arizona is a big place!" I prompted, tightening up on his

  arm.

  "Peerless! West of Winslow!"

  I didn't think he was lying, not two inches short of a face­lift by a '40 Ford engine fan. If he was trying to fake a fast story, he would have grabbed for some bigger, better-known city, not a whistle-stop in the middle of the Arizona desert. I met Lisette's eyes and gave her a nod. "Grab loose, Princess."

  She released Claster's hair and stepped back from the truck, instinctively wiping her hands on the seat of her shorts.

  "Listen to me, man," I said into his ear. "Like I said, we just want to talk. No trouble. You can tell your brother that. Now I'm going to turn you loose and everybody's friends,

  okay?

  Yeah, in a pig's ass. I could feel him still straining to break out of my hold, and I knew that the instant I backed off he was going to blow up all over me again.

  I released him and stepped back.

  Sure enough, he came off that fender and spun toward me, just about as pissed off as a freshly altered tomcat. I'd used that instant of time, though, to get my range and to get set. As he came around, I lifted him off the floor with a right cross that had all the steam behind it I could muster.

  Claster slid under the workbench and went night-night for a while on an uncomfortable-looking bed of old oilcans. I switched off the pickup's engine—no sense in letting a really nice mill like that overheat—and we left him to his dreams.

  Back in the car, Lisette had my Arizona road map dug out of the glove compartment in seconds. "Okay, we're set," she said. "There is a Peerless; it looks like just a little tiny place only a couple of miles off Route 66. It's right along where we're going. It couldn't be better. . . . What?"

  She'd noticed that I hadn't started the engine yet. It was my turn to sit there studying her.

  "Where in the hell did that move come from?"

  She lifted her brows at me. "He wasn't going to tell us any­thing otherwise."

  She had a point. "Yeah, I guess he wasn't."

  Lisette shrugged demurely, her cool deb demeanor sliding back into place as smoothly as a sheath over a bayonet.

  "This is one of those things above and beyond the quarter of a million bucks you were talking about back in Saint Louis. Finding this guy, Jubal, is a really big deal for you, isn't it?"

  "Uh-huh, it is," Lisette replied with one of those sober little nods of hers. "More than you know. Maybe even more than I do."

  It's never a good idea to hang around after a fight. Not that I was too worried about a guy like Ira Claster running to the cops about us. However, I did figure him to be the kind of guy who might just dig out a shooting iron and come hunting. We grabbed a sandwich and something to drink back in Baxter Springs and then moved on.

  We crossed the Kansas-Oklahoma line just as serious dark started to settle. We were beginning to leave the "Mid" part of the Midwest behind now; the terrain was flattening out, the hills shrinking down to just a low rolling of the land.

  "Kevin, would you turn on the dome light for a second, please?"

  Over on her side of the seat, Lisette had the Rittenhouse guide open again. I flipped the light switch to the right notch and watched out of the corner of my eye as she hunted up a page. The Princess looked somber.

  "Okay," she said after a moment, "tell me when we've come two miles from the border."

  I glanced down at the odometer. "We're just about there now."

  Without being asked, I started braking the '57 to a halt. At the two-mile guidepost I pulled us off the pavement and onto the narrow shoulder of the two-lane.

  There wasn't all that much to be seen. There were only the lights of the little reservation town of Quapaw gleaming in the dusk a few miles farther down Route 66. That and a single-lane dirt road that entered the highway on our left. Punching through a gap in a tangled wall of brushy ground cover, it led off toward a shadowy bluff to the east.

  I guess that poets and other such five-dollar-a-word writers would call this part of the evening the gloaming. You could see, but not all that well. The scrub woods seemed to have a faint gray luminescence to them, and the sky overhead wasn't an honest black. It was more of a deep and dull green with an indefinable brassy tint to it, as if the zenith had been tarnished by the fiery passage of the day's sun.

  I found myself wishing that the nightfall would get on with it so that a few friendly stars could show up.

  Lisette indicated the side road. "We need to go down there."

  For some reason, I didn't much dig that concept. "Why?" I asked succinctly.

  "I'll tell you when we get there," she replied in a near-whisper.

  The '57 didn't think much of the idea, either. As we nosed into the marrow lane, Car growled deep in her pipes like a wary police dog.

  Bumping slowly over the ruts and potholes, we traversed a narrow passage through a laurel hell. Beyond that, things wid­ened out again with barbwired pastures on either side of the road. The fences looked rusty and untended in the sidelobe of our headlights, and no livestock moved out in the fields.

  Nothing moved except for a trickle of dry summer lightning along the horizon.

  The road ran back a mile and a h
alf to the base of the bluff. There it ended abruptly at an abandoned mine head. Our head­lights swept beyond a padlocked gate and disintegrating rail fence to reveal a few warped and collapsing buildings and an expanse of torn, baked soil too contaminated with lead to even let the weeds and brambles invade. The towering gritty bulk of a tailings pile loomed on the edge of our perception, like a sand dune that had lost its desert.

  I backed and filled, turning us around. If the urge suddenly struck to honk out of here, I wanted to be aimed in the right direction. I shut off the engine and the lights and let the silence flow in through the windows.

  Quiet? Man, I'll tell the world. Even the tree frogs and ka­tydids were keeping their mouths shut. And there was some­thing out there ... I dunno. Maybe it was the way the shadows back under the trees seemed to almost have a tangibility to them, like if you walked into one, you'd be stuck in blackness like a fly in amber.

  "Okay, Princess," I asked, slouching back in the seat, "what's going on?"

  " I'm checking out a notation in the guidebook," Lisette re­plied. She'd curled up in the seat with legs tucked under her, hugging herself, as if she were trying to keep out a chill. "You see, when my father stole his gang's war chest, it wasn't any spur-of-the-moment thing. He was working to a plan. Something he'd thought out and set up long beforehand."

  "How do you know?"

  "Because none of the notations he made in the Rittenhouse guide are random. He must have known that eventually they were going to move the money out to Los Angeles by car and that Route 66 would be the way they would go. He prepared for it. On his earlier trips out to the coast, he made notes about the ground they'd be covering on that last run."

  She held up the little book. "He recorded them all in here. As we've been going along, I've been cross-referencing what's written in the guidebook with what we've been seeing along the way. I figure that if we can see how my father had his plans laid out and get a feel for what he thought was important, it might help us to find the money."

  "Is that what we were doing with that Lincoln agency back in Springfield?"

  Lisette nodded. "It was. There's a notation in the guidebook, 'Line A.' It's shown up in a number of places, Springfield, Saint Louis, Joplin. In every one of those towns there's been a Lin­coln agency. Dad was driving a Lincoln."

  "I get it. He was keeping track of where he could get fast repairs made if he needed them."

  "Exactly." I could see her as only an outline in the dimness now, huddled in the corner of the seat with her head lowered. "There are a whole bunch of other notes, too, relating to things like state police barracks, all-night gas stations, and what towns have doctors in them. All of them recording things a man on the run might need to know."

  It made sense. Johnny 32 was a careful planner. He didn't like leaving things to chance.

  "And he made a notation about this place?" I asked

  "Yes. Between the Kansas and Oklahoma state line entry and the one for Quapaw. It just said: 'Two miles from border,' and it was underlined. And this road is all that's there."

  "If your dad arranged to link up with his hired gun in Baxter Springs, then he must have planned on making his move on the money somewhere right in this vicinity. This turnoff could have been the place set for the hit."

  Could be? I was damn well sure it was. If you ever wanted a nice, quiet spot to 86 somebody, this was the place.

  "I suspect it was," Lisette agreed bleakly. "I think my fa­ther's partners were probably killed somewhere right along this little road. According to the newspaper accounts, the bodies of Aaron Leopold and Nick Valessio were found just outside of Quapaw, Oklahoma, buried in a chat heap."

  She glanced back over her shoulder at the looming mound of the tailings pile. "That could be the one right back there."

  I gave a low whistle. "I've got to give your old man credit, Princess. He could sure pick a good place for a murder."

  Lisette's head snapped up. "It might not have been mur­der!"

  I gave a snort. "Okay, give me another name for it. You were the one saying they found your father's partners planted around here. What the hell else could it have been?"

  "A lot of things!" Lisette spun around to face me. "Sure, I know that my father set out to rob his partners! But beyond that, a lot of different things could have happened. There might have been a fight over the money, and my father might have been forced to kill Leopold and Valessio in self-defense. Or maybe it was this Jubal Claster who killed them, maybe to keep himself from being identified. Dad might not even have been here when it happened. Claster is the only man who might know. That's why we have to find him as well as the money."

  A desperation crept into her voice as she tried to make me see the subtleties of this thing the way she did. I understood the other piece of the program now. If Lisette Kingman was reaching out for the Leopold gang's war chest with one hand, she was grabbing for a straw with the other, hoping to find evidence that her father wasn't quite the total back-stabbing son of a bitch he appeared to be.

  What could I say to that? Not a whole lot at the moment. Lisette looked away from me, gazing out into the newborn night beyond the windshield.

  And gave a yelping little gasp.

  I looked up as well. And man, I could actually feel my hair start to stand on end.

  There were two of them, rising out of the ditch at the side of the road about a hundred yards away. Try and imagine an orange toy balloon, but with a lit candle inside of it. A candle that burns with a particularly clear and crystalline white light. Lazily they began to bounce back and forth across the dirt ruts of the lane as if some kids were playing a slow-motion game of catch with a pair of luminescent basketballs.

  Only there weren't any kids out there. There wasn't anybody there except for Lisette and me, and we were all of a sudden wishing we were somewhere else.

  The Princess became a scared little girl, sliding across the seat to huddle against me "What are they?" she asked in a strangled whisper.

  Hell, I didn't know what they were! Although for a second I had some pretty wild suspicions about who they might be.

  Then the good old National Geographic magazine came to my rescue. And am I glad that I actually read the articles in­stead of just looking for pictures of topless native girls.

  "Easy, Princess," I said, putting my arm around her. "It's okay. They're called spook lights and they're just something that comes with this part of the country."

  Lisette straightened a little, not all that much reassured. "But what are they?" she insisted, warily eyeing the flickering spheres as they bobbed and weaved above the road.

  "Nobody knows. They crawl all over the place down here where Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma butt together. The Army Corps of Engineers did a study on them right after the war, but all they ever came up with was 'mysterious lights of undetermined origin.' You've got all your usual legends about phantom Indian maidens looking for their lost lovers and de­capitated Civil War soldiers looking for their heads with a lan­tern, but for sure nobody knows."

  As if showing off, one of the spook lights shot a hundred feet into the air, then descended in a slow spiral. Its partner contented itself with rolling slowly along the top wire of the left-hand fence.

  "What do these 'spook lights' do?" Curiosity was replacing fear in Lisette's voice, so I knew she was going to be okay. She didn't seem to object to having my arm around her shoulders, though, and I didn't object to leaving it there.

  "I guess about what they're doing now. They pop up after dark in an empty field or along a deserted road somewhere, zip and bounce around for a while, then disappear. They've been reported in these parts ever since the middle of the last century. Some scientists figure that the start of the mining operations might have had something to do with stirring them up. On the other hand, they may have been here for a long time and there just wasn't anybody around to see 'em."

  We sat there and silently watched the eerie interweaving dis­play. If you stared at them
long enough, the twin balls of light almost seemed to display a kind of intelligence. They'd sidle away from the road to play hide and seek in the scrub woods for a time. Then they'd bust back into view, racing closer, but never quite close enough to let you see if there was a shape or form behind the glow.

  After a while, Lisette shivered a little in the curve of my arm. "I guess we should get going," she said.

  "I guess so."

  The spook lights hovered low over the dirt ruts of the road as I fired the '57 up, pulsating, as if ready to block our escape.

  "Can we get past those things?' Lisette asked a little ner­vously.

  "No sweat. If you get close to a spook light, it just goes somewhere else."

  At least according to National Geographic.

  Even so, we cranked our windows up and I charged us down that cow path a little faster than I normally might have. The spook lights held position as if daring me into a game of oth­erworldly chicken. I kicked on our high beams, and the clean white light glare of the '57's headlights reached out toward the luminescent orbs. As it touched them, they suddenly stopped being, snuffing out of existence like twin candles on top of a birthday cake.

  As we passed through the spot where the spook lights had been, I thought I felt something brush me. Something like a faint chill or a low-grade static shock. Then again, maybe it was just my imagination.

  Still, as we bounced out through the barrier of the laurel tangle to the highway, it was hard not to wonder, just a little.

  Aaron Leopold and Nick Valessio. Is there any chance at all that it might actually have been you back there? Could this be the sentence handed down when you couldn't beat the rap at the last big trial? Three to five eternities hard time, chained to the spot where you were betrayed and killed by your partner?

  As we turned onto 66, I thought I caught a last lonely flicker of yellow-white light in my rearview mirror.