The Preacher

by Ted Thackrey, Jr.

  She looked at me again to see if I wanted to take over, but I kept my mouth firmly shut. The lady was doing just fine.

  “So by keeping this mysterious other bidder on the string even though the helicopter business is off the market,” she said, “Preacher is just playing a hand of poker without using cards. He’s sitting there in the forced-opening position, backing a good strong pair and waiting to trap a big one!”

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  Satisfaction, then, lies elsewhere.

  Some seek it in spiritual exaltation, some in the life of the mind, others in the inner satisfactions of personal integrity…

  SEVENTEEN

  About an hour later I joined Marilyn and Dana in Deke Pemberton’s law office to have him draw up the bill of sale.

  But he balked.

  “I’ll do no such fool thing,” he said when the proposal and its price were outlined for him.

  “But it’s what I want to do,” Marilyn said. “And if I’m willing—”

  “Then it’s my duty as your legal adviser to change your mind,” Pemberton interrupted, throwing me a glance that should have melted my boot heels. “You tell me you have a perfectly legitimate, financially adequate offer for the property and are rejecting it in favor of one that does not even make a full statement of purchase price. Mrs. Prescott, even if I were to draw up such an instrument, I must tell you it could not possibly be made to stand up in court—and I would quite rightly be defending myself against a disciplinary action for having been associated with such a thing. No, thank you very much indeed!”

  Bravo.

  Dana’s judgment of people seemed to be right on the money. Pemberton’s attitude here was intelligent, ethical, client-protective, and fully justified by the only facts at his disposal. It was up to me now to change his mind, if possible, while feeding him only as much information as he absolutely had to have in order to fall in with our plan. My plan.

  She’d been right about something else, too.

  Playing poker for a night with Leonard Kenneth “Deke” Pemberton—under less-than-brilliant lighting so that the faces were obscured in the accepted convention of the game—had not in any way prepared me for the eyes he wore in the clear light of early afternoon. They were gray almost to the point of being without color, and their gaze did, as Dana had said, seem well and truly capable of penetrating the clothing, skin, and skeleton. No wonder he did so well in a courtroom: Even a federal judge would think twice before incurring their wrath.

  “There are three good reasons,” I said, “for listing the price of the helicopter property at one dollar.”

  The eyes said I was a stranger, a liar, and a swindler of widows, but he held his peace, listening with that peculiar quietness that I had noticed two nights earlier, as I went on.

  “First,” I said, “it’s that way because that’s the real price. I have it in my pocket, and I’m going to pass it across to Mrs. Prescott in your presence so there should be no doubt that it is paid in full.”

  I had expected another objection. It never came, but the eyes continued to bore into me.

  “The second reason is more important: I don’t anticipate having to register the sale either now or in the immediate future. I have other plans for the document. But if push comes to shove and it does become a public record, I don’t want any other people to know any more about the deal than they absolutely have to know. And that particularly includes the price.”

  Still no change in the eyes or the face around them.

  “And most important of all, there are going to be two bills of sale…”

  That finally got a visible reaction. Pemberton drew in a breath to tell me he wasn’t about to draw up any phony bills of sale either. And he meant to follow it, I suspect, with a curt order to get out of his office. But I forestalled him by finishing my own sentence.

  “…the second one undated but signed and properly witnessed, conveying everything back to Mrs. Prescott for the same one-dollar bill.”

  I shut up to let him think.

  The eyes still wanted to throw me out. But the mouth still had questions to ask. I could feel the chilly tendrils of his wa turning the proposition this way and that.

  I used the time to take a better look around the room.

  Jake and Dana had both left me with the impression that Deke Pemberton’s law practice was a busy and successful one, and so I had been a bit surprised when Marilyn was able to make an immediate appointment. Most of the lawyers I knew liked to keep clients waiting, whether there was any real need for it or not. I later discovered that Pemberton seldom made a personal appearance in court or at his office in Farewell. He had a phalanx of bright young law school products eager to handle those cases that didn’t really interest him. And he was also a rare sight at the office he maintained in Santa Fe.

  Only major clients or those whose problems rated special attention were invited to this room.

  It was hard to see why.

  Most lawyers’ inner sancta are designed either with an eye to the comfort of their chief occupant or to impress his visitors. Careful stage dressing runs to Victorian legal prints and heavy red-leather furniture to lend an air of old-world solidity, while the professional ego is bolstered behind an oversize walnut desk. Somewhere—in Los Angeles, I suspect—there is a factory churning out such fripperies by the job lot.

  But Pemberton’s working headquarters contained no such trappings. If he thought about them at all, I decided, he had aimed at antithesis. And hit the ten-ring.

  Pemberton lived outside Farewell on land that Marilyn and Dana told me he had bought when he returned from the East. They said they could remember a house and ranch buildings on the land long ago. But there was no trace of them now. Pemberton had obliterated all spoor of the original inhabitants, except for a few trees clustered near the shallow pond, and had replaced them with…nothing.

  “Or as near to it as you’d want to get,” Dana said. “Everyone expected him to build a house, at least, but he didn’t do it. One day, after the land was cleared off, a couple of trucks came through town towing big, long trailers. Not mobile homes, either. I’m talking hook-them-up-and-drive-them-away-type trailers. And Deke Pemberton met them out at his place and showed the drivers where they were supposed to go. One for the office. A few people have been inside it, and that’s where we’re going to see him today.”

  “But if anyone has ever seen the inside of the living-quarters trailer,” Marilyn said, “they certainly haven’t told a soul about it. And the only car you ever see parked over there is his.”

  I thought about that now, using my limited peripheral vision to scan the office. It occupied most of the trailer—one end was blocked off, probably for the bathroom and storage area—and was almost featureless. No photographs, artworks, or citation plaques on the neutral biege walls—not even the framed licenses required by law. I later learned that the licenses were on display in the office reserved for his use in Farewell, a room he had not entered for at least five years.

  In lieu of the usual legal library and personal files, Pemberton’s trailer office contained a single cabinet that I decided must be a holding pen for data disks that could be run in the IBM computer that squatted, dark and mute, in the corner. A few chairs—bare, wooden, and not too comfortable, including the one behind the desk—completed the amenities. Traveling men, carnival bosses, and site supervisors for major construction projects have similar office arrangements. But all of them pick up more signs of human habitation in a single weekend than Pemberton’s office had acquired in a decade. Twenty minutes’ effort would have been more than sufficient to obliterate all trace of occupant and occupation.

  “All right.” The lawyer’s voice broke into my impertinent speculations. He turned his head to face Marilyn. “Do you have a dollar bill?” he asked.

  Marilyn hesitated for a puzzled moment and then nodded.

  “Give it to me.”

  Pemberton took a yellow envelope
from the center drawer of his desk while she was getting the bill out of her purse and, when she had handed it to him, sealed it inside and wrote her name and the date on the front.

  “Now,” he said, putting the envelope back in the drawer, “these people witness that money has changed hands and I am now your retained counsel—which means I can offer advice and keep secrets.” He glanced at me again with a trace of impatience.

  “It means,” he prompted, “that she can tell me what you’re up to without having to worry about whether I can keep my mouth shut. And unless you’re planning a patently criminal act, I not only can but must.”

  I let him see my best poker-table face. “Marilyn Prescott’s secrets,” I said. “Not mine.”

  The eyes blinked and registered a moment of irritation, but it didn’t last, and I could have sworn to the tiniest lift of appreciation at the corners of the mouth.

  “Fair enough,” he said.

  “Fair enough, what?” Marilyn wanted to know.

  “He means,” Dana said, “that he hasn’t told us everything he’s planning to do—and he’s not going to tell Deke Pemberton, either.”

  Dana had driven out to the lawyer’s office with her sister. But after the sales contracts had been drawn up and printed out on the computer, signed in three copies, and distributed to all concerned, she decided to ride back into Farewell with me.

  “Maybe,” she said to Marilyn, “I can get the son of a bitch to talk about what he has in mind for the million-dollar company he just stole from you.”

  Once we were under way, however, she seemed to have other things on her mind.

  “Okay,” she said, leaning back in the bucket seat of the little red skate and gazing out the windshield, “now tell me that man isn’t some kind of refugee from the loony bin.”

  I couldn’t give her much of an argument.

  “Odder than a square grape,” I conceded.

  “That trailer has got to be fifty or sixty feet,” she went on. “All that space—and there he is, using up about ten percent. Or less. A person could go blind staring at those bare walls.”

  I grinned at her, looking away from the road for a moment. “Maybe he heard that old maxim about how less is more and took it for the word of prophecy?”

  She snorted. “I don’t think he’d take it for gospel unless it came out of his own mouth,” she said. “Lord, if that’s all he has in the one he uses for an office, what do you think the inside of the trailer he uses for a house looks like?”

  I considered the proposition for a moment.

  “Army cot and a box of crackers?” I suggested. “With a small altar hidden in the rear where he makes sacrifices to obscene gods.”

  It broke her up for a moment—all my friends tell me I’m a panic—but the mood passed and suddenly she was quiet, looking at her hands to avoid looking in my direction.

  “I keep forgetting,” she said.

  “Forgetting?”

  “That you really are what they call you. A preacher.”

  “You’re also forgetting that it’s past tense. I turned in my collar and knee pads a long time ago.”

  “Helen Spence doesn’t believe that.”

  “Doesn’t believe what?”

  “That you really…resigned or unfrocked yourself or whatever it is you do. She said you still run some kind of a church out in California. Up in the mountains.”

  I paused for a moment to deal with a sudden surge of resentment that I hadn’t known was there, covering the upset by checking the little car’s rearview mirror. A pickup truck was on the road behind us. It looked vaguely familiar.

  “Helen,” I said when I was sure my voice was fully under control, “hasn’t seen or talked to me for more than ten years.”

  “But it’s true, isn’t it?”

  I took another time-out and checked the mirror again.

  The pickup was closer.

  And now I knew where I had seen it before.

  As a general rule I try to avoid explanations. They can be painful. They do not satisfy. They get in the way of normal human relations. And besides, I’m not absolutely sure I know all the answers myself. Or that the answers I know are true.

  This time, however, I was spared even the minor annoyance of inventing an evasion.

  “Check your seat belt,” I said, giving a tug at my own. “And pull that chest strap tighter.”

  She hesitated for an instant, but did it.

  I checked the little red skate’s instrument panel. There were no oil pressure, amp, or temperature gauges—just warning lights to let you know when everything had already gone wrong—but the manufacturer had given a passing nod to sports-car tastes by including a tachometer. I wondered what function it was supposed to serve in a car with automatic shift.

  “We are going to have a little race now,” I said, putting the pedal to the metal and trying not to show how I felt when nothing much seemed to happen.

  “Race?”

  “The truck behind us,” I said.

  The tachometer needle didn’t seem to be going anywhere at all. I down-shifted from automatic to manual second, and things got a little better; the speedometer and tach began to move around the scale more or less in sync. The tachometer was only calibrated to 6000 and there was no red-line indication, so I took it to 5500—cursing myself for not having found out more about the car before I tried to drive it anywhere—and then dropped it back into automatic. The engine and transmission didn’t like it and called me dirty names, but the speed kept climbing and there were no immediate signs of collapse. I took another peek in the rearview mirror.

  No comfort.

  The pickup was still gaining.

  “Last time I saw that truck,” I said, “it was a real mess. Barely chugging along on four cylinders. And the driver wasn’t in such red-hot shape, either. But it sure looks as though they got both of them running again, doesn’t it?”

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  Some courses run more smoothly than others.

  Digressions occur.

  Now and then a trial balance is struck; the unexpected threat of immediate extinction has changed more than one life…and not always for the better…

  EIGHTEEN

  The road was two lanes of fresh gravel over an old blacktop bed. Not exactly a wagon track, maybe, but far better adapted to the racing needs of a light truck than to those of a somewhat underpowered imitation sports car.

  I checked the tach and speedometer.

  Still no comfort.

  Flat out and with all the time in the world to do it, the little car still wouldn’t be pushed much beyond ninety miles an hour, which wasn’t even close to being good enough to stay out of trouble. The pickup was now less than a hundred feet behind us, and its driver seemed to think we were already meat on the table. He made no attempt at deception as he swung left, gunned his engine, and prepared to crowd us off the world. I moved my left foot to be ready with the brake and dropped my hand to the gear selector.

  Dana’s eyes were showing quite a bit of white at the tops and bottoms as she glanced at the truck in her side mirror, then at me, and then back at the truck again. But she didn’t ask any distracting questions, and I was grateful as the front of the mud-spattered vehicle pulled into range of my good eye.

  Wait…Wait…Wait…

  Now!

  The gutless little toy bucked and wobbled as I swung the wheel, slamming my foot down on the brake and dropping the gear all the way back to manual first. But the suspension was—just barely—equal to the strain of the sudden skew-turn. The bed of the pickup trundled out of the way with inches to spare, and my right wheel played with the lip of the drainage ditch as we swung around to the reverse course.

  “That truck,” I told Dana conversationally as we climbed back through the gears, “has the weight and speed on us. We’re a little more maneuverable, maybe, but we won’t be able to surprise him that way again. So I guess we’re going to have to try something else.”<
br />
  She tore her gaze away from the mirror where the pickup truck’s image was beginning to grow again.

  “Such as what,” she said. “A rocket launcher?”

  I nodded appreciatively. “That would be nice,” I agreed. “But dang if I didn’t forget to pack one in the lunch hamper.”

  “So?”

  “So. You grew up in these parts; tell me, would you happen to know if the kids around here ever play a car game called chicken?”

  Dana’s eyes got even wider and they begged me to tell her I was joking. But I couldn’t do that, and after a moment or two she turned back toward the mirror.

  “Oh, shit!” she whispered.

  I surely couldn’t argue.

  Looking down the road and measuring speed against distance, I decided the best chance was about a thousand yards ahead. A dry wadi had cut its way through the land there, and the roadway angled steeply upward over a culvert that had been designed for cloudburst conditions. I thought it might be just high enough for what I had in mind. Better than nothing, anyway…

  I down-shifted but kept my foot off the brake as we hit the upgrade, then herded the little car through another skew-turn to reverse our course one more time as soon as I thought we were out of sight on the other side. The pickup was invisible to us now, as I hoped we were to it, and I forced myself to wait through a slow three-count.

  “Close your eyes,” I said.

  “Crazy…bastard!” she replied in a choked whisper, and I couldn’t help laughing as I steered the little red car into the exact center of the road and slammed the hammer down.

  For a split second I thought I had made a mistake.

  I had assumed that Greenteeth was driving the pickup, and that he would come charging over the incline at full throttle to find himself facing a head-on collision with no time to think. If it was anyone else—or if his reactions were a little slow—there would be precious little time for apologies.

  But I wasn’t wrong.

  We were still nearly a hundred yards from the culvert when the pickup appeared. I had a single flash of Greenteeth’s face as it registered a combination of shock, rage, and fear; could see his hands move as he twisted the steering wheel. And then he was gone.