Dead Man's Tunnel

by Sheldon Russell

  “Alright, Scrap. I’ll try to keep it quiet so people won’t think you’re an idiot.”

  “You’re a true friend, Hook.”

  Hook lit a cigarette and blew out the match.

  “Then you wouldn’t mind me borrowing the jeep tonight. I need to make a trip to town.”

  “What’s a ruined man like me need a jeep for?” he said. “It ain’t like I’ll be using it for business. And don’t worry about putting no gas in it ’cause I got nowhere to go.”

  * * *

  Hook pulled Mixer’s ears and let him into the caboose. Mixer stretched and then crawled under the bunk for a nap. Hook searched around for something to eat. Finding nothing worth the effort, he had a whiskey instead.

  After taking off his prosthesis, he put it on top of the stove. His bunk, not having been made in a few weeks, didn’t look so inviting. Too exhausted to care, he lay down and listened to the pusher chug and thump from the siding. Scrap’s crane soon roared into life across the yards.

  He dropped his arm over his eyes and struggled to make sense of things, to put the facts in order. What could account for a man standing in a tunnel with a train speeding down a 3 percent grade? Why did Erikson have a backpack and a fistful of money under his bed? While he couldn’t be certain the flashlight was Erikson’s, it was army issue and a good possibility. What was it doing outside instead of in the tunnel with Erikson? And why did the replacement guards’ account of their duty assignment differ from the lieutenant’s, and what were captain’s bars doing in one of their briefcases, anyway? Who the hell was John Ballard and what did he have to do with the lieutenant?

  He turned over, and fatigue washed through him. Maybe when he awoke, things would clear up. For now, he would sleep. Come dark, he planned to be at Linda Sue’s place just in case a visitor came calling again.

  27

  THE JEEP SAT in front of Scrap’s office, and the keys had been tossed onto the floorboard. Hook double-checked the tires and tried out the reverse before pulling out.

  As he drove away, he looked back at West’s Salvage Yard. Piles of trash loomed against the setting sun, and deep in their innards, fires smoldered. Scrap’s fires were perpetual, like eternal flames marking the graves of the dead.

  What Scrap couldn’t sell, he burned. What he couldn’t burn found its way into a natural gorge that cut through the back of the yards. Someday archaeologists would puzzle over the strange society that must have existed there.

  The evening breeze had cooled with dusk and blew Hook’s hair across his eyes. He lit a cigarette as he turned onto the highway to Ash Fork. The old jeep hummed down the road as smooth as a showroom Cadillac. Hook figured that Scrap’s propensity for robbing Peter to pay Paul must be on the decline. But then Scrap’s week had been tough, first the hog debacle and then the disgrace of being duped into buying back his own copper. For a man known as a skilled haggler, it had all, no doubt, been humbling.

  As the sky darkened, Hook clicked on the headlights, but nothing happened. He pulled over and worked the switch. No lights. He got out, walked to the front of the jeep, and discovered both headlamps missing from their sockets.

  He kicked the bumper, and his sore toe fired off a bolt of lightning.

  “Damn it, Scrap,” he said, hopping about on one foot. “What the hell did you do?”

  Night had fallen like a black curtain by the time he reached Ash Fork. He’d gotten there only by tracking the white line down the center of the highway.

  He stopped at the intersection on the outskirts of town and rubbed the kink out of his back. Maybe he’d kill Scrap West, put his body in the gorge. Nobody would ever find it, except maybe some archaeologist a million years hence. Even so, he’d probably assume they were the remains of the missing link, which wasn’t far from the truth.

  Just as he started to turn toward Linda Sue’s trailer, lights pulled up behind him. The door opened, and a man got out. When he stepped into his own headlights, Hook recognized him as Ben Hoffer. Ben walked to Hook’s door and leaned in. He smelled of booze and swayed a little as he peered at Hook.

  “Runyon,” he said. “And all by hisself. You afraid to turn on your lights?”

  “What do you want, Ben? I’m in kind of a rush.”

  “Guess you would be,” he said. “What with no woman to hide behind.”

  “Look, Ben, I’m sorry about all this misunderstanding. Let’s you and me call a truce.”

  “Our business ain’t finished, Runyon. You got an ass kicking coming.”

  “I’d be happy to accommodate you some other time, Ben. Thing is, I need to get somewhere, and I have this busted toe. It just isn’t a good time for me to whip your ass, again.”

  Ben hissed, and spittle blew from between his teeth. “Hook’s toe hurt?” he said.

  “Yeah,” Hook said. “You’d be surprised. Now, why don’t you move on? You and me can dance some other day.”

  “Climb on out of there, Runyon,” he said. “Nobody clips me and gets by with it.”

  Hook lit a cigarette and looked at Ben.

  “Some other time,” he said, shifting into low and pulling over Ben’s foot.

  Ben threw his hands in the air, his mouth agape. Hook shoved the jeep into reverse and backed over it again. Ben fell to the ground and began squealing. Hook flipped his cigarette onto the road.

  “Hurts, doesn’t it?” he said.

  * * *

  Hook parked in the trees outside Linda Sue’s trailer. Unable to see the window from there, he climbed the old elm that sprawled over the driveway. Once up, he leaned back to catch his breath. As a kid, tree climbing had been his specialty, but it had turned into a tough job.

  Linda Sue’s yard had grown into a tangle, and no lights could be seen in the trailer. But from the tree, he could make out the back door and the window in question. He reached for a cigarette, only to discover he’d left them in the seat of the jeep.

  “Damn it,” he said.

  Within the hour, a sound emanated from the darkness. Hook held his breath and listened. It came again, a whishing sound like footsteps in the grass.

  A figure appeared in the darkness, little more than a shadow slinking along the side of the trailer. The shadow moved, paused, moved again. At the window, it lifted the screen and disappeared into Linda Sue’s trailer without a sound.

  Hook drew his sidearm and started down the tree. Suddenly, he lost his grip, dropped the gun, and slid down the tree trunk. Desperate to stop the descent, he grabbed at a passing limb.

  The momentum propelled him outward and onto the limb, and he dangled by one arm like an orangutan. He struggled in vain to pull himself up. Sweat ran into his eyes as he calculated the consequences of letting go. Long ago he’d established a rock-hard policy against unimpeded falls and saw no reason to abandon it now. But his arm burned with fatigue, and all feeling in his fingers had disappeared.

  Reaching up, he swung his prosthesis hook over the limb above him. With luck, maybe it would hold him long enough so that he could managed a new grip.

  But the second he let go, he knew that he’d made a big mistake. The shoulder harness tore away first, followed by his shirtsleeve, and he shot downward through the darkness like a rogue meteorite.

  He landed on his back, and it knocked the wind out of him. He gasped for air. Above him, the first stars of night winked through the tree leaves. He could smell damp earth, and a cricket sawed from the bushes.

  He had no idea where his P.38 had dropped or if he’d been heard falling from the tree. But when he rolled over, his hand dropped onto his P.38. He took a deep breath and shoved it into its holster, a bit of luck that had come in mighty small doses lately.

  * * *

  He figured that the window accessed the sleeping area of the trailer, but he couldn’t be certain. His visit to Linda Sue’s house had been brief, and he hadn’t paid that much attention.

  On top of that, without his prosthesis, climbing through the window turned out to be especially dif
ficult, but once he’d gotten a leg in, he managed to struggle through.

  He squatted in the darkness and oriented himself. A faint light bled through the beaded curtain at the end of the hall, and he could hear a tune being played on Linda Sue’s record player.

  He slipped out his sidearm and edged along the hallway until he could see into the kitchen. Corporal William Thibodeaux stood at the stove.

  “What’s for dinner, Corporal?” Hook asked through the curtain.

  Thibodeaux spun around with the skillet in his hand. His shirt hung loose about his neck, and his beard had grown dark and scraggly.

  “What the hell,” he said.

  “Wouldn’t move if I were you,” Hook said.

  “Who are you, mister?” he asked.

  “Mind telling me what you’re doing in here, Corporal?”

  “Linda Sue said I could stay here while she was gone.”

  “That right? Where’d she go?”

  “I, uh … her mother’s. She went home to see her mother.”

  “I heard she’d gone to jail,” he said. “I heard some bastard blacked both her eyes and left her behind to fare for herself.”

  “I didn’t think she’d mind if I used the trailer,” he said.

  “Right,” Hook said. “Why would she mind you making yourself at home while she’s sitting in the county jail?”

  “Can we talk about this?”

  Hook stepped out from behind the curtain. “Sure,” he said. “We can talk. Let’s start with why you killed Erikson.”

  “Hook Runyon,” he said.

  “I’d say you killed him over Linda Sue and that you set him up by changing the train schedule and then made the whole thing look like an accident.”

  He waited as Thibodeaux gathered himself up.

  “I didn’t kill him,” he said.

  “You’re out there walking the tunnel while Erikson’s in town playing house with your girlfriend. On top of that he derails your promotion. Sure would make me mad.”

  Thibodeaux shook his head. “I admit that the more I got to know Erikson, the more I hated him. But I didn’t kill him.”

  “Some man steal your girl and your promotion. Enough to make a fellow fighting mad, I’d say.”

  “I didn’t,” Thibodeaux said, pausing. “I wanted to, but I didn’t have the grit for killing a man.”

  “You had the grit to cash his check, to go AWOL, to commit armed robbery, and then to let your girl take the heat for it. Things just don’t wash, Thibodeaux.”

  “She never shut up,” Thibodeaux said. “She was at me every second. How I ruined everything and how she’d be on the run the rest of her life because of me.”

  “So you smacked her around and left her in the john. And when you ran out of money and a hiding place, you came back to steal what she had left. You’re a goddang prince, Thibodeaux.”

  “I’ve been sitting on that tunnel out there ever since the war started,” he said. “This country owes me something.”

  “I could see how you might think that way, given the sacrifices you made.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  Hook patted his pocket. “You wouldn’t have a smoke?”

  “Pall Malls,” he said.

  “Left mine in the jeep. Mind lighting it for me? My arm’s swinging from a tree at the moment.”

  Thibodeaux lit a cigarette and held it out to him, but when Hook reached for it, Thibodeaux lunged, knocking him off balance. Hook recovered and reared back just as the skillet whizzed by his head.

  He leveled the sidearm and took aim, only to discover that he hadn’t cocked it. Cocking a gun one-handed had limitations even with a prosthesis. Without one, it bordered on the impossible.

  The corporal hesitated just long enough for Hook to stick him under the rib cage with the gun barrel. Thibodeaux honked and snorted and gasped for air. Hook wrenched the skillet away and backhanded it across Thibodeaux’s nose. Thibodeaux’s legs wobbled, and he tumbled onto the floor.

  “They tell me cold steak will help those eyes in the morning,” Hook said.

  He searched out the cigarette from under Thibodeaux’s leg and puffed it back. Pall Malls were not his favorite, but then that’s the kind of day it had been.

  28

  HOOK PICKED UP Linda Sue’s phone and checked the dial tone. He called the operator and asked for Sheriff Mueller’s office. The deputy on duty answered and said that the sheriff had been called out on something but that he’d radio him.

  Hook hung up and called Eddie Preston, collect.

  “This call is coming out of your pay, Runyon,” Eddie said.

  “What pay?” Hook said.

  “So what’s so important that you have to call collect?”

  “Corporal Thibodeaux’s lying here on the floor. Just thought you might like to know.”

  “Dead?”

  “No, he isn’t dead, Eddie.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Linda Sue’s house.”

  “Linda Sue who?”

  “His girlfriend, Eddie, the one Blue Boy called you about.”

  “Oh, her. You didn’t break in, did you?”

  “The corporal invited me in for coffee.”

  “So, what do you want from me?”

  “A transfer.”

  “Like I told you before, I need you out there.”

  “Look, Eddie, I caught the copper thieves. Linda Sue’s in county. Corporal Thibodeaux’s taking a nap right here at my feet, and there isn’t a criminal within a hundred miles of this place.”

  “That tunnel is critical to the war effort. I want you to keep an eye on things.”

  “I don’t have reliable transportation, Eddie. How about getting a decent popcar over here?”

  “So you can leave it on the main line,” he said.

  “Copper thieves, Eddie. What’s a man to do?”

  “You’ve already wrecked more equipment than the Germans, Runyon.”

  “I can’t take care of security afoot, you know.”

  “There’s a popcar sitting on the siding over to Bellemont. She’s a little on the old side, but she runs well. I’ll have the rip-track crew drop it by. They’re pulling ties up there. Try not to kill anyone with it. In the meantime, hitch a ride if you have to. You’ve had lots of experience at it.”

  “They got the whole army guarding the tunnel now, Eddie, and the war’s over. Send one of those Baldwin Felts graduates out here. It would be damn good experience.”

  “Have you thought about another line of work, Runyon? ’Cause you’re about one second away from losing this one.”

  “What I’ve thought about this work could send me to prison, Eddie,” he said, hanging up.

  He checked his watch and poked Thibodeaux in the ribs with his foot. Thibodeaux moaned and turned his head.

  Hook opened the refrigerator. Thibodeaux had stocked it with bread, milk, and hard salami. By the looks of it, he’d been checking in at the Linda Sue Hotel for a while now. A pint of Hill and Hill bourbon sat next to the sink. He poured himself a shot in a water glass and downed it.

  Just then car lights flashed through the window. Hook looked at his watch. Sheriff Mueller and a three-toed sloth would clock about the same response time.

  He clicked on the porch light and opened the door. “Glad you could make it, Sheriff,” he said.

  Mueller’s shirt gaped about his neck, and the hair on his ears shined in the light.

  “An accident out at the intersection,” he said, rolling his shoulders. “Had to make a run to the hospital.”

  “What happened?”

  “Ben Hoffer ran over his own feet. I ain’t figured yet how he managed that.”

  “Ben’s peculiar that way,” Hook said.

  “I says, ‘Ben, how can a man run over his own feet with his own car?’ And he says, ‘Did I break the law, Sheriff?’ And I says, ‘Not so’s I can tell. If you’d broke the law, I’d be arresting you, Ben, ’cause the law’s applied equal around here.’ And
he says, ‘Then it ain’t none of your damn business, is it?’ So I says, ‘I hope they cut both of them feet off at the ankles, Ben, you son of a bitch.’ And he says, ‘I do, too, Sheriff, ’cause I’m going to mail them to you in a box for Christmas.’”

  “Ben can be unreasonable,” Hook said.

  “So where’s this corporal, Hook?”

  “Taking a nap in there on the floor.”

  Mueller went in and turned Thibodeaux on his side. “Looks like he came up on a sudden stop.”

  “Think you could give him room and board while I get the charges gathered up, Sheriff?”

  “I got a vacancy, I guess. Jim Holstead’s old lady bailed him this morning.”

  Mueller cuffed Thibodeaux and led him out to the patrol car. When he came back in, he said, “I hear you landed those copper thieves, Hook.”

  “It’s like fishing,” Hook said. “Sometimes they bite. Sometimes they don’t.”

  “I don’t suppose the railroad could help with the groceries on this fellow?”

  “Been my experience, the railroad doesn’t do much helping with anything, Sheriff. Might try the army.”

  “Uh huh,” he said.

  “I figure he’ll be on his way to Leavenworth before he gets his breakfast finished anyway,” Hook said. “The army’s plenty worked up over this guy’s disappearance.”

  “I better get back, Hook. That deputy cries like a newborn if he pulls overtime. Maybe you could lock up around here?”

  “Listen, Sheriff, I hate to ask, but suppose you could get my arm before you go?”

  Mueller ran his finger around his collar. “I been wondering what happened to it but didn’t want to ask.”

  “Come with me,” Hook said. “I’ll show you.”

  Hook stood at the bottom of the elm and shined the light onto the prosthesis that still hung from the limb. It swung a little in the breeze, like a man waving good-bye.

  “I’d go get it myself, but I can’t climb with one arm,” he said.

  Mueller took out his chewing tobacco and loaded his jaw.

  “How did it get up there in the first place?”