by Jim Thompson
I asked him what the story was, and he told me in his know-it-all way. He’d warned them, he said (whoever “them” was), he’d warned ’em that you couldn’t make a deep ditch out here without shoring. Because any damned fool knew that wherever you found a lot of blackjack and scrub-oak, you were going to find water not too far down. Yes, by Jesus, there’d be water-sand, which meant that your ditch would seep on you. And if you didn’t have shoring in it…!
“Caved in more’n a mile, Tommy. Them poor stiffs is going to be digging out ’til midnight or longer, the way I figure!”
I figured that the way he figured wouldn’t be more than half-right, but they’d be gone a long time. The Longs would be gone a long time, and an hour was all I needed.
It was a good night for what I had to do. Dark enough for cover, but light enough to let me move right along. I headed across the prairie at a fast walk, and the wind came up at my back, seeming to want to help me along.
I could have done without the wind. It made too much noise as it raked through the grass and scrub brush, keeping my nerves on edge, constantly looking this way and that. Perhaps smothering sounds that I needed to hear.
Because, of course, the Longs weren’t my only problem.
The Longs would be tied up for several hours, and possibly the members of their gang would be, too. Possibly Higby had told them to move out with the rest of the work party, and they would have had no choice but to go or get.
The odds were that they’d been drafted along with the others—if they had been in camp. They’d be strong, able-bodied men, naturally, and they’d hired on as unskilled labor. So Higby would have grabbed them, if they’d been there to grab.
But if they’d been out here.…If they were out here.…Well, then I was in trouble.
And they were, and I was!
How many there were I don’t know. But the first one suddenly rose up in front of me when I was less than a quarter mile out of camp. I whirled around, and there was a guy there, too. He’d come up behind me and now he was almost on top of me. I darted right then left, and still others rose up to head me off.
They closed in, arms outspread, a tightening circle of death. There was no way of getting past them, no way of getting around them. My one hope, a puny one, was to break through them.
They came on silently, confidently. Very sure of themselves, a gang of professional killers against one overgrown kid. A rattler couldn’t have been surer of a fear-frozen rabbit than they were of me, and I could almost hear their unvoiced laughter.
Ever so slightly, I bent my knees. I drew my leg muscles tight, levered my feet into the dirt and suddenly dived straight ahead.
My head slammed into the guy’s guts. He went down, and my momentum shot me over him in a wild somersault. I came to my feet, running. The downed guy groaned and writhed, getting in the way of the others and causing them to stumble and collide. They’d been bunched up, and it had cost them a big advantage. They were no longer a circle of men, just men. And the way to camp was open.
I ran, man, did I ever run! I’d been as good as dead a minute before, but now I was free and running. And I knew they’d never be able to catch me.
They knew it, too, and they didn’t even try.
I don’t know who threw it—the rock or whatever it was. But the Dodgers could have used him. He was throwing at a moving target in the dark, a throw of almost a hundred feet. But he nailed me like di wa didy.
My whole head seemed to explode. I was out cold before I hit the ground.
During the next hour or so—however long it was—I moved briefly back into consciousness a couple of times. A dim, foggy half-consciousness where everything was blurred and run together and everything that mattered seemed not to matter.
I came to the first time when I bumped into the bottom of some kind of declivity. I couldn’t see anyone; probably I didn’t even open my eyes. But there was a murmur of voices, blurred and run-together like the rest of my half-conscious world.
Longie warned him. The girl. Stop ’em in the first place. Didn’t think they’d tumble f’r each other. Well get the son-of-a-bitch buried.
Something splashed into my face. Dirt. Then more dirt. I began to struggle for breath, to try to fight my way upward, but kind of indifferently, you know, like you do in a dream. I heard foggy faraway laughter. I seemed to be laughing myself. Then, abruptly, I lost consciousness.
I came back into it, or half-way into it, laying out on the prairie. My face was cleared of the strangling dirt. The foggy murmur of voices had taken on a different note—of argument. And another voice had been added.
…settle with Longie.…Hear me good. Aah, now, look. You look. Take a good look. This thirty-thirty is the last thing you’re going to see if you don’t start making tracks.…
I blanked out again.
I came back into full consciousness with a rush; lunged to my feet, looking wildly around me.
I was alone and little more than a hundred yards from the rear of my sleeping tent. Not far from the place where Four Trey and I had talked and shared whiskey only a few hours earlier. I could almost have believed that I had fallen asleep and had a nightmare. And I wished to God that I could have believed that, but it just wasn’t in the cards.
There was my throbbing head for one thing; I hadn’t gotten that from any dream. Then there was that voice I’d heard—the voice of the man who had argued with the others and undoubtedly saved my life.
“…settle with Longie.” He’d said that and a number of other things, things I’d forgotten, but which clearly indicated one thing. He’d known the people he argued with; not in the casual how-you-doin’ way you knew most people in camp, but intimately. Almost the way he and I knew each other.
Because, of course, we did know each other. I had split a half-a-pint of whiskey with him that night and I had planned to tell him the terrible mess I was in with the Long gang. And he was a member of that gang.
26
But was he a member of the gang?
Couldn’t it just be that he knew them, like he knew a lot of people, without actually being mixed up with them? He’d been knocking around in out-of-the-way places a long time before I bumped into him. He was a gambler, and when you gamble you look at a guy’s money not the guy. He minded his own business and kept his mouth shut, so he got to know a lot of people who didn’t ordinarily let themselves get known. And some of those people could have been the Longs.
That’s the way it could have been. Whether it was or not I didn’t know, and I didn’t know how to find out.
I mean, how could you ask your best friend a thing like that? I figured the best way was to kind of ease into the question, come at it sort of sideways. But I didn’t know how to begin. I was still trying to figure it out the next morning when we were back shooting powder together on the line. And I guess I must have been frowning pretty hard, looking like I was sore, because he spoke to me kind of apologetically.
“I’m afraid I haven’t been very thoughtful, Tommy. I’ve kept you puzzling about some things that I should have explained to you.”
“Well,” I shrugged. “I, uh, figured you’d get around to it.”
“I knew you were going to be cleared of killing Lassen because that girl, Carol, told me you would. She didn’t say how, but she was so positive of it that I passed the word to you.”
“I see,” I said. “A pipeline hustler tells you that I’m going to be cleared, and.…Well, let it go. I guess the important thing is that I was cleared, not why.”
He looked at me, then looked back at the dynamite he was capping and fusing. “Maybe she told you how she swung it. Or have you seen her since?”
I said she’d given me a pretty good idea of how she did it, the one time I’d seen her. “I’ve only seen her once, but I reckon you know that. You know I’ve never had a second chance to see her.”
“It figures,” he nodded casually. “A man doesn’t go calling after he works mormon board and dope.”
/> I said I wasn’t working mormon board and dope now, so I guessed there wasn’t anything to stop me from seeing her, was there? He spoke without looking at me, slowly tamping down the charge of dynamite.
“I’ll check it back to you, Tommy. I certainly couldn’t think of any reason that you can’t. Now, let’s fire this powder.”
We fired it and scampered for cover. We came back to the ditch, and I started to pick up the conversation. But he shook his head firmly.
“Dyna’s a jealous girl, Tommy. You give her all your attention or you wind up with half an ass.”
“But we’ve got to talk!” I said. “You know we have to!”
“Mmm?” He cocked a brow at me. “Exactly what about?”
“Well, I, uh…I mean, I want to talk,” I said. “You know, I think we ought to.”
“So do I,” he nodded. “But I think I can resist the temptation until lunchtime. Of course, if you don’t feel that you can.…”
I said I thought I could probably make it. He said he was glad to hear it, and we went on with the job. I couldn’t push him, you see. I didn’t really have anything to push on and I guess I was probably afraid of finding out what I might. So I let it ride, and the morning passed. And then it was lunchtime.
We filled our trays along with one of the main work gangs, then carried them back up-line to where we would be alone. We began to eat, with me fumbling for words, trying to find the right kind of opening. I was still hunting for it when he gave me one himself.
“Do any writing in jail, Tommy? You know.…” He went on before I could answer him. “I think you ought to try a novel sometime. Maybe a crime story. Take this pipeline, for example. Wouldn’t it make a hell of a background for a payroll robbery?”
“It sure would,” I said. “But I don’t know where you’d get your story. It’s too simple, I mean. You just appear in camp with a dozen armed men—you’ve got them planted there ahead of time—and grab the loot.”
“A dozen men against six hundred?” he shook his head. “You couldn’t do it with six dozen. They’d scatter on you, spread all over hell and back, and you couldn’t protect yourself against them. You’d get our brains beat out before you could say, Fire in the hole.”
“But…” I hesitated, “I don’t see that, Four Trey. You’re armed and they’re not. The money’s insured. Why should they risk getting killed for dough that they’ll eventually get, anyway?”
“Eventually? You mean in a month or two?” Four Trey grinned wryly. “You tell a pipeliner that he’ll get his pay eventually and see what happens to you.”
“But, dammit, I know damned well that…!” I broke off, swallowing the rest of the sentence. “All right,” I said. “You don’t wait until the money is in camp. You grab it before it gets there.”
“How? Wait now.…” He held up a hand. “This is a true-to-life story, remember, so you can’t twist your facts. You can’t drag in an armored truck or have the money carried by a three-car caravan of deputy sheriffs.”
“Of course not,” I said. “They’d be hanging a bull’s eye on themselves. The gang could just stake themselves out along the way, almost a hundred lonely miles in this case, and when the armored truck or whatever it was showed up, they’d knock it over. I don’t claim that they wouldn’t have some trouble, but.…”
“But it could be done,” Four Trey nodded. “So you don’t use armored trucks or cop caravans in your story. On a job as far out as this one, the money would have to be brought in secretly in one of the company pick-ups or trucks. That’s not positive protection against holdups, but it’s the best that anyone’s come up with.”
I said, “Yeah, sure, I know. Pickups and trucks are going back and forth all the time. When they’re not in use here, they’re going into town or over to Matacora. They keep the road hot all day, hauling supplies and so on. So the money is concealed in one of ’em, and when it comes back.…”
“Which one is it concealed in? There are maybe twenty-five or thirty vehicles involved. How do you know which one is the money wagon?”
“Easy,” I said. “The big boss is working with the gangsters. He tips ’em off.”
Four Trey laughed. “Someone like Higby, you mean? He tips ’em off and points the finger right at himself?”
“Well…well, then, the driver tips ’em off!”
“Same deal. He’d be in the can before sundown, if the gang didn’t kill him first. He’d have it coming to him, in my book, if he was stupid enough to expect any split but a split skull.”
“But, uh.…Well, how about this? The company’s field office is in Matacora; the bank is there. So the pickup or the flatbed would have to go all the way over to Matacora to get the payroll. Which means that it would have to get a darned early start out of camp to get back the same day.…”
“I’d say it would probably leave late the night before, wouldn’t you? To play it absolutely safe, I mean. You can’t have that much money on the road after dark, and it has to be here in plenty of time to pay the men.”
“All right,” I agreed, “it leaves the night before, which means that it’ll be the first one back in camp.…”
“Oh, no, it doesn’t mean that! What about all the company vehicles that are only running between here and town? They could get back a lot earlier than one coming all the way from Matacora.”
“How about this?” I said. “The gang takes the license number of the truck or pickup when it leaves camp.…”
“Ah, Tommy,” Four Trey sighed. “Tommy, my friend, don’t you suppose the payroll insurers and the bankers and the pipeline big shots your gang is bucking would anticipate that? Don’t you suppose they would take the very simple steps necessary to prevent identification by the license number or anything else?”
They would, of course. I hesitated a moment, then came up with a final idea: the gang would have a man posted in Matacora. When the money was picked up, he’d phone the town here and.…
“A question,” Four Trey interrupted. “Just where in Matacora is your gang member going to be posted? At the bank or the company’s field office? And what if the money driver didn’t show up in either place? He wouldn’t have to, you know. The money could be taken to him at some previously arranged meeting place. A hotel room, say.”
The work whistle blew. Four Trey took a final swallow of coffee and emptied the rest onto the ground. He got to his feet, and I also stood up.
“Look,” I said hoarsely. “Let’s stop playing games. You’ve proved that the payroll can’t be robbed; you tell me it can’t in so many words. But I happen to know that.…”
“We’re on company time, Tommy.” He jerked his head upline. “Let’s start earning it.”
“But I’ve got to know what’s going on! Why tell me just enough to get me more mixed up than I already am?”
He sighed, hesitated. “Possibly because it’s all I can tell you. I knew you were worried and I was trying to reassure you in the only way I could. But…that’s all I can say. Now, let’s get back to work.”
“Is there going to be a robbery or not? What’s going to happen when payday comes tomorrow?”
“You won’t be here for it, Tommy. Not unless you get back on the job like I told you to.”
He waited, staring at me evenly.
We went back to work.
We had to work overtime that night, and the chow flunky was late bringing grub to us. It was pretty sorry chow, too, by pipeline standards, and the flunky wasn’t at all apologetic.
“You boes are lucky to be getting anything at all. You’ll be getting a hell of a lot less tomorrow for breakfast and lunch.”
“Says who?” I said.
“Says the man, that’s who. We’re jumping camp forty miles. How you goin’ to fix chow when you’re making a forty-mile jump?”
I looked from him to Four Trey. He didn’t seem at all surprised.
“It makes sense,” he murmured, pointing out that camp was more than twenty miles back of us now. “We can
work both ways from the new camp and not have to jump so often.”
“If it’s so smart,” I said, “why didn’t we work both ways from the beginning?”
“Possibly because we have to learn from experience. Most of us do at least.” He lighted a cigarette and passed the package to me. “Of course, you occasionally find a bright young man who knows all the answers in advance.”
The chow flunky packed up and drove away. And I said I didn’t pretend to know all the answers, but I’d sure like to know some.
“And I don’t need any kidding,” I said. “I need help. You know why I need it, and I’ve got no one to turn to but you.”
“I am helping you. I have helped you.”
“I know,” I said. “I, uh, well, I was conscious part of the time last night, Four Trey. I…”
“Oh,” he said softly. “I can see how that would throw you. Well, I thought you’d be better off not knowing certain things. But.…”
He wasn’t a member of the gang, he said. He knew none of its members, although they all apparently knew him. As for the men who’d tried to kill me last night, well, it had been dark, and it was doubtful that he’d ever be able to identify them.
“But I do know Longie and his brothers, indirectly, through him. I’ve known Longden Long for almost ten years. We served time together. I’m responsible for bringing him and his gang here.”
He pinched the fire from his cigarette, smashed it into the ground with his heel. Around us the silence deepened, the unearthly silence of prairie twilight. I gulped and my ears seemed to ring with the sound.
“You,” I said, at last. “You’re a friend of that killer?”
“I didn’t say that. Only that I’d known him for a long time. I saw this setup coming up here and I got word to him about it. He liked the looks of the deal, so he moved in with his gang.”
“What about Higby? I figure you must have done a little fixing with him, too.”
“Tommy…” He hesitated troubledly. “Forget Higby. I’m only putting the bug on my own back. I brought Longie and his gang here, but I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known there was going to be a girl involved. In fact, I didn’t know that he was taking me up on the deal until I spotted him in camp. I hadn’t heard from him and I was kind of relieved that I hadn’t, Tommy. I was glad—sort of—and then he showed up. And.…”
