WEST ON 66

by James H. Cobb

  "Remember what I told you, boy? I told you, you were in­terfering with my family." His arm tightened possessively around Lisette. "This is my family, and what's mine stays mine."

  I saw it coming, but there wasn't a hell of a lot I could do about it. The punch lifted the chair off the floor and threw me down on my side. My ears rang and I could taste the blood in my mouth. The world started to crawl away down a long gray tube, and I clung to the pain like a drowning man to a lifeline. I couldn't let myself go unconscious, not now. Come on, God; give me a break here!

  I saw events in the cabin as if I were looking in through the wrong end of the telescope. A distant Spanno herded Lisette toward the door. "Okay, Nate," I heard him say faintly. "I'll get her in the car. You follow us out."

  "No!" Lisette struggled wildly in the big man's grip. "We all leave here together! And cut him loose before we go."

  Spanno laughed and that was even worse than his smile. "Whatever my little girl wants. Cut the punk loose, Nate, and let's get out of here."

  Temple holstered his gun and came to lean over me. I heard the snick of a knife opening, my own knife. "There you go, pal," Temple said under his breath, slashing through one of the loops of cord binding me. "When you get out of here, go find a church and light yourself about fifty candles."

  The switchblade thunked into the floorboards a couple of feet away, upright and quivering. And then they were gone, Temple, Spanno, and Lisette, and I heard the black Chrysler pulling away into the night.

  The world came back into scale, and I spat my own blood onto the floor. Spanno had just screwed up sooo royally. He'd left me alive and that mistake was going to cost him everything he had and everything he was. In a frenzy, I tore my left hand out of the tangle of cord. Dragging myself to the knife, I cut myself free.

  They'd taken my gun and they'd probably disabled my car. But there were other guns and cars in this town, and there was sure as hell a telephone. Now was the time to have Jack call out the cavalry. I was going to sic every brother cop in Arizona and California both on Mr. Son of a Bitch Spanno, and I was going to lead the pack as we ran him down. And when we got hold of him I was going to rip the living, greasy guts out of his belly and use them to pack the '57's wheel bearings.

  I folded the paratrooper's knife and stuffed it in my pocket. Then I hit the door and charged out into the darkness, starting for the court office and that telephone. However, I'd barely jumped down from the cabin steps when a harsh whisper came out of the shadows beside me.

  "Freeze, wiseass."

  Grinning, Ira Claster leveled the gun in his hand.

  There is more than one Route 66. All along the current high­way there are older alignments that have been bypassed. Some, like at Peerless, dead-end. Others live on as county and state roads and byways. One such bypass leads up onto a desolate plateau northwest of Needles. Once it was part of the big high­way; now it was just a little feeder loop leading out to a quasi-ghost town called Goffs.

  That was the road we followed, a slow, winding climb past shaggy clumps of palm and jagged lava outcroppings, our head­lights the only ones piercing the night. I sat behind the wheel of the '57 with Ira beside me, a revolver shoved in my ribs.

  Life hadn't been too kind lately to the younger Claster boy. Between our fight and his car crash, he'd looked pretty chewed up back in Peerless. Now, though, he resembled something out of an American International horror flick. He'd picked up some mean-looking burns in the fire, and his sweat was lifting the Band-Aids he'd used to hold his face together. The claw marks underneath were starting to fester. There was also a madness in his eyes beyond what had been there before.

  "So," I inquired, "are you working for Spanno now or are you on your own time?"

  "I guess you could say both." Claster grinned again. "When he come back to look around in Peerless, him an' me, we made an agreement. We figured that we both wanted you dead just about as bad, so we decided to help each other out. Hell, I told him I'd be happy to kill you for free. But he made me the offer of coming in on his payroll, so why not make a few bucks on the side?"

  "Waste not, want not."

  "That's it, wiseass!" He gave a short, shrill laugh. "That's it!"

  Oh, yeah. Definitely this guy was no longer firing on all cylinders. Fan-damn-tastic!

  "You mean he drug you clear out here to Needles just to ax me? God, that was a waste of effort."

  Come on, man; get pissed and keep talking. Let me know what the game plan is.

  "Shut your mouth, wiseass!" Claster snarled. "I'm the one who set you up today."

  "What are you taking about?"

  "Who do you think tracked you down to that motel? Last night, that Spanno man fixed me up with a car in Flagstaff while he went on ahead. When you come through, I just climbed on your tail and stayed there all day. Did you know he has a radiophone in that big old 300 Chrysler of his? Every time you'd stop, I'd hit a pay phone and give him a call about where you were."

  Now I remembered the nondescript gray Ford that had kept popping up in my rearviews all afternoon. I hadn't worried about it too much at the time. It's not uncommon to pass the same car half a dozen times in the same day if you both happen to be going the same direction on the same highway.

  I'd become so fixated on watching out for that damn black Chrysler that I'd totally missed the kindergarten move of having a different tail car slipped in on me. Damn! And I'd been sneering at Spanno for screwing up.

  "Is that when Spanno set you up to kill me?"

  "Naw. From the sound of it, I figured he was going to do it himself and I'd just get the chance to piss on the corpse. I didn't get the job until only a little while ago. He had me keeping a lookout outside of that cabin you and that bitch-kitty daughter of his were staying in. When he's getting set to leave he comes out and he offers me ten thousand dollars to kill you and lose your body in the desert."

  In the dashboard glow I can see Claster patting his shirt pocket with his free hand. "The same price my brother got, and I only got to dig one grave. I get to keep your car as a bonus. I guess I can get to like Chevys."

  I nodded to the night. I was starting to think a little like Spanno, and that concept alone spooked me. Now I understood about the big production number he'd put on back at the auto court for Lisette. The one about letting me live. The big man was going to have his cake and eat it, too.

  Spanno had pretended to allow Lisette to buy my life in return for her promise of obedience. A promise that he'd use to keep her under his control, probably combined with the im­plied threat of having me hunted down if she attempted to escape again. He'd know that Lisette's own sense of honor would be the strongest leash he could keep on her.

  What the Princess wouldn't know was that her stepfather had kept a spare killer in his hip pocket. The last time she'd seen me, I'd been alive and more or less well. She would have no idea that she was staying Spanno's slave for the sake of a dead man. And Spanno would still have his vengeance on me for daring to take her away.

  And what was worse, should the day come when Spanno would ever want to destroy Lisette for some slight or trans­gression, all he'd need to do was tell her the truth. That all of her sacrifice had been for nothing.

  I could see him smiling.

  The bones in my hands ached with the grip I had on the steering wheel. Everything inside me went as empty and black as the Mojave night. I had to get out of this. I had to get out of this, and I had to kill Mace Spanno. Not for the law or for me or even for Lisette. I had to kill him because he was too evil to let live.

  A half-moon was rising as we passed through the finger count of darkened houses that made up Goffs. The flats glowed dull silver, rimmed unevenly by the shadowy, broken-glass mountains. There were no lights at all except for the distant ones in the sky.

  "Slow down." Ira lifted his gun to emphasize the order, and I eased up on the gas. He was looking for a place now.

  Soon enough, he found one. There was a turnout ahead. Maybe an o
ld maintenance turnoff or something. Just an open half-acre of packed gravel and hardpan by the side of the road.

  Claster gestured with the pistol barrel. "Pull in there."

  This was where I was going to die.

  The turnoff was on the right side of the road. As I wheeled into it, my headlights played out across the low tufts of rab-bitbrush and across a shallow ridge of sun-baked clay not quite a foot high along the edge of the clearing. I let the '57's front tires roll up onto this ridge as I brought us to a stop.

  Killing the engine, I switched off the car lights. I put my hands back on the steering wheel, being careful not to touch the floor shift, making sure that Claster could see that I'd left the car in gear. It was quiet out there, so quiet you could hear God breathe.

  "Okay, now what?" I said.

  Hell, I knew what. I was just praying that he wouldn't want to get blood on the upholstery.

  Out of the corner of my eye I looked on as Claster took the keys out of the ignition. "Now," he said in a low voice, "you make up for my brother dying. Now you make up for giving me a whole lot of grief."

  "I don't suppose it would do any good to point out that none of this was our idea. You and your brother brought it all down on yourselves."

  Claster shook his head. "Nope, wouldn't do any good at all."

  Watching me intently from behind the leveled revolver, he reached back and flipped the door handle. "Now you keep your hands on that steering wheel till I'm ready to tell you to move."

  The passenger door swung open, and Claster started to ease backward out of the car, keeping me covered. He was so busy keeping an eye on my hands that he didn't notice that I had both the brake and the clutch pedals shoved to the floor. When he had his feet on the ground but was still leaning into the passenger compartment, I slipped my foot off the brake.

  The '57 lurched backward off the mound of dirt, the pas­senger door sweeping over Claster, taking him down with a startled cry. At the same instant, I bailed out of the driver's side. I was ready for the movement, and I stayed upright. Tak­ing one fast stride back, I got my left hand on the rear fender of the '57, and I vaulted and rolled across the trunk of the still-moving automobile.

  The paratrooper's knife was in my right hand as I came off the far-side fender. As I hit the ground in a crouch, my thumb closed on the release stud and I felt the little knife jerk as the fighting blade extended and locked. The one advantage a gun has over a knife is range. And Claster didn't have any.

  He was staggering to his feet in the gray and shadow of the moonlight. Wildly he tried to bring his gun up as I moved in on him. The outside of my left wrist impacted against the in­side of his right, sweeping the weapon aside and sending his last-chance bullet crashing away wasted.

  My right hand hooked upward, targeting on that critical point just beneath the joining of the breastbone that marks the shortest path to the heart. There was that indescribable wudge of steel driving through flesh and cartilage, and I gave the knife handle that twist they teach you that opens the blood channel. Life splashed out hot on my wrist.

  The difference between a gun and a knife is that with a gun, you smash the living out of a man. With a knife, it slips away. For a few seconds you stand there eye to eye with the person you're in the process of killing. And even though you are his killer, he reaches out to you, because you are the only person there at that last and loneliest moment of his existence.

  "I'm sorry about your truck, man," I whispered.

  I cleaned my blade off by driving it into a patch of soft dirt, and I reclaimed my car keys and Claster's gun. It was an old .38-caliber Iver Johnson top-break revolver, its barrel sawn back to two and a half inches and its bluing worn through from a lot of carrying. It was a five-shot with four live rounds left in the chambers. Ira Claster was also one of those overconfident individuals who didn't bother to carry reloads.

  Oh, well. I guess a whole beltload of ammo wouldn't have helped him this time. I left Claster lying out there beside the road. Maybe I'd be able to send somebody back for the body before the coyotes and ravens worked him over too bad. I had other things to worry about at the moment.

  I took the '57 back out on the old alignment, following it as it curved south, never letting the needle of the speedometer drop below a hundred as we wailed through the night. Goading me on was the terrible wrongness of the empty seat beside me. The Princess was riding elsewhere tonight, staring out into a darkness that was eternal, feeling it as every minute and mile took her farther away from light and life. Or maybe her eyes were closed and she was praying for God to be a nice guy and just let her heart stop beating.

  The lights of another one-horse-two-gas-pump wide spot called Essex marked the junction with the current Route 66. My foot wavered uncertainly on the gas for a second as I con­sidered stopping and calling the situation in. Then I stood on the throttle once more. It would take time to make someone open up and let me use a phone, time to tell my story to the local law, and more time while my story was verified. And I didn't have the time to spare.

  All I had left was the location of John Kingman's hidden money. That was the sole hard link I had with Lisette and her captors. If they beat me to it, they'd be gone. With his gang's old war chest in his possession and both a border and a coast within reach, Mace Spanno could drop off the face of the earth, taking Lisette with him.

  God, what a lonely old road it was out there. The occasional set of headlights flickered weakly out across the flats like a star blacklisted from heaven. Half a dozen times I saw the taillights of another car ahead of me. Half a dozen times I watched them grow as the '57 closed with them. Half a dozen times they didn't belong to the black Chrysler.

  Chambless . . . Amboy . . . Bagdad . . . more towns that were nothing but an arc light by the side of the road. As I blasted past each one, I prayed that a set of red flashers would appear in my rearview mirrors and the howl of a siren would announce the presence of a CHP cruiser or a sheriff's patrol car. But of course you know what they say about cops.

  "Mount Pisgah Volcanic Crater, whose lava flow comes to the very edge of Route 66 . . ." I'd memorized the entry out of the Rittenhouse guide along with the mileages. One hundred and twenty miles west of Needles. Seventy-six miles west of Essex. Twelve miles west of Ludlow. Even running flat out, it would take the better part of an hour to get there. And what would be there to find?

  Ludlow! At long damn last the town sign blazed in my high beams. Twelve miles to go and still no sign of Spanno. Ten miles left. My eyes kept flicking down to the spinning disks of the odometer. Eight . . . four . . . two ... I started backing off on the throttle.

  And then the land changed. The desert to the south of the highway had been pale in the light of the rising moon, just hard-packed sand and a few clumps of spiny brush. Now, in the space of a few yards, everything went dark. I stood on the brakes, and the '57 shuddered to a stop.

  The darkness was a lava flow, a vast flattened sheet of broken and boiled rock. The tip of it, like the guidebook had said, just reached the edge of Highway 66. And farther south, outlined against the stars, was its origin, Pisgah Crater, a looming lop­sided scab on the face of the planet. We were there.

  There was no sign of Spanno. We; were alone, the '57's en­gine ticking over softly as we sat in the middle of the highway. Jesus! Could we have beaten him here somehow? My head ached dully and I had to force the thoughts out of it.

  No way we could have passed him on the road. No way we could have gotten ahead of him unless he'd been delayed for some reason. Maybe car trouble. Maybe he'd had to stop back in Needles or at one of the two-bit -turnout towns strung out along this stretch of 66. Damn, what if they had spotted me going by!

  Or maybe Lisette was holding out on them. Refusing to tell them where the war chest was.

  Or maybe they'd already come and gone.

  I pulled the '57 over onto the narrow left shoulder of the road and shut her down. Grabbing the flashlight, I bailed out. Slamming the car do
or closed behind me, I ran out into the shadowed black rock.

  I wildly panned the flashlight bearrn around me, looking for— hell, I didn't know what I was looking for. Some sign of anyone else having been here. Some indication that Lisette had been right and that this was the place. Some clue that I could grab and get a little hope out of.

  There wasn't anything. Wind ripples of glistening white sand lapped against the coal-colored lava like ocean waves against a rocky seashore. No footprints. No marks. No sign that anyone had been here, ever. I might as well have been the first man on the moon. The place even looked like it. I forced a dry swallow down my throat, and I ran on, my boots ringing metallically on the ropy stone.

  I was about twenty yards back from the highway, just com­ing over the crest of another lava spine, when I brought myself up short, almost falling on my face in the sand beyond. Beyond the main flow, my light had flashed over another small mount of lava rock. Half-covered by a shallow dune, it was identical in every way to the half a hundred other lava mounds I'd seen in the last two minutes.

  Only instead of being dull black, this one was a dull, rusty red. And ten feet away, half-buried in the sand, was an old paint bucket. Right where Johnny 32 must have tossed it ten years before.

  For a second I stood and marveled at the sheer, blank-faced audacity of the man. And yet when you thought about it for a minute, it made sense. It made perfect sense. Why fuss with some overcormplicated and sneaky hiding place? Over the past decade, how many people had followed through with Ritten-house's suggestion? How many had braved the 120-degree tem­peratures of the Mojave and actually stopped and walked out into this literal hellhole? Five? Six? Ten? And of them, how many would be inclined to fool around with one particular pile of rocks amid an infinity of piled rock, just because it happened to be kind of a funny color?

  John Kingnnan had been a smart man and a meticulous plan­ner. He'd put his money down on human nature, and that's always a solid bet.

  I jumped down off the flow and dropped to my knees beside the rock pile. I pushed the tube of the flashlight into the sand beside me, letting its beam illuminate my task as I feverishly tore the pile a.part.