The Preacher

by Ted Thackrey, Jr.

  “But…?”

  “But it could be something else. Yeah. With the controls set that way, the bird could kind of fly itself for a while. A very damn short while—but maybe long enough. These jets are a lot easier and safer to handle than the old piston types. You don’t have to use both hands and both feet every damn minute. I mean, you can even scratch your nose or eat a sandwich without having to land while you’re doing it.”

  “So someone else could have been flying the helicopter and then got out of it just before the crash. Or even set the controls for a short flight with Prescott unconscious in the pilot’s seat?”

  “Well…”

  “Could you do it, Robbie?”

  “Hell, yes! But that doesn’t mean every damn fool on the face of the earth could bring it off. You couldn’t do it, for instance.”

  “Because I can’t fly a helicopter.”

  “Right.”

  “But someone with helicopter experience—maybe not a licensed pilot, but with enough training to be able to get a bird off the ground and down again without killing himself—someone like that could get it done?”

  Robbie turned the idea over in his mind for a moment or two and then nodded. But slowly. “With luck,” he said. “A lot of luck and good flying conditions, and if he didn’t have to take the bird too far before he put it back on the earth. Maybe, with all that going for him.”

  We both took time out to look again at the wreckage, trying to imagine how it might have been.

  “The crash site,” I said, “was less than a mile from here.”

  Robbie nodded absently. “What time of day?”

  “Early morning.”

  “How early?”

  “About six, I think. Would that be important?”

  “It could be.” He looked at the twisted bits of machinery again and moved one of his hooks to scratch behind an ear. “I told you these jets are fairly easy to fly,” he said. “I should have added that they can be a real bitch and a half to start sometimes. Especially at higher altitudes.”

  Farewell’s part of New Mexico is a little less than a mile above sea level. He gave me a moment to recall that bit of information and let it sink in.

  “Also,” he said when he decided I was beginning to get the idea, “ambient temperature is a major consideration with jet engines. Remember the trouble we had a month ago getting the Forest Service bird to wake up and cook? All because we live at seven thousand feet and the temperature that day was a degree or two below zero, Celsius.”

  I remembered. It had been an emergency medical evacuation—some woman over at Twin Forks whose baby was coming a month early. The whole town had turned out with blowtorches to help Robbie get airborne.

  “What I’m getting at,” he continued, “is that high altitude and low temperature mean a real hassle when you’re starting the day, and sometimes it’s more than a one-man job, even if you know the bird pretty well and have all the experience in the world.”

  “So maybe Pres started the engine himself?”

  “Maybe.”

  I gave it another moment’s thought. “Or,” I said, “maybe he had a little help…from a friend?”

  Robbie smiled. “Someone he knew, anyway,” he said. “Someone he would trust to give him a little casual assistance.”

  “You’re saying he might have flown to the crash site himself. With the killer in the passenger seat beside him.”

  “It would work out easiest that way.”

  We stood staring at each other, occupied with our own thoughts. But after a while Robbie shook his head with a slow and heavy finality. “No,” he said.

  “No what?”

  “No way.”

  The splendid whiteness of the de Bonzo incisors flashed once more, sardonic and challenging below the length of the Roman nose. “This,” he said, “is all a crock. You never met the dude. I never met him. We never saw this old bird before it crashed. And here we are standing around making up a whole second-rate television script about it. Who you wanta be…Eliot Ness or Barnaby Jones?”

  “Well, Ness is prettier.”

  The smile again.

  “In that case, amigo mío, the role was clearly written with me in mind.”

  We spent the better part of the next hour inside the hangar, checking out the remaining physical assets of Prescott Helicopters, Inc., and trying to make sense of the books and business papers strewn around the office.

  In the end, Robbie leaned back in the bookkeeper’s chair and made sounds of sighing.

  “Guy was losing his ass,” he said.

  “And all his fixtures,” I agreed. “But the thing we’ve got to decide now is, would the family be better off trying to run the business or just selling it? Not necessarily as an entity; we might peddle the various components—the two remaining helicopters and the tools and the rest—and wind it up that way. You’re the helicopter expert. What do you think?”

  His answer was instantaneous: “Oh, Christ, start it up again, of course! You got to!”

  I was surprised and I suppose my face showed it.

  “I said this Prescott guy was losing money, not that he was out of business,” Robbie explained. “We still have that JetRanger and the little Robinson. And the parts inventory. And that alone, compadre, is a gold mine.”

  He had unconsciously begun using the pronoun “we” in speaking of the business, and that was all to the good—in line with something I’d had in mind almost from the beginning—but I let him keep talking, and got a minor education in one facet of the fixed-base helicopter business.

  “Running a parts inventory in a big town like Los Angeles or even Albuquerque is one thing,” Robbie said. “Something goes bad on the bird, you can pick up the phone and the only question is do you want to pick up the part yourself or do they send someone over to deliver it. But out here in the boondocks, fifty miles from land or water, it’s a different story.

  “These birds are too expensive to let them sit on the ground, even for a day. So when a part goes sour, it’s always panic time. You need to stock enough spares, and just the right ones, to keep flying. Make all the normal, predictable repairs. The hell of it is, those parts are damn expensive in themselves, and having too big an inventory can kill you just as quick as not having them on hand when you need them.”

  He got up and paced across the office to look out at the tool-and-parts shack, a small room closed off from the rest of the hangar by corrugated steel walls and heavy wire mesh window grids. The room was high security, two locks plus an electronic burglar alarm that was cut into a response grid at the sheriff’s office. We had needed the keys and a phone call to the sheriff’s dispatcher to get Robbie inside for a quick glance-and-guess inventory, and I had noticed the care with which he replaced the locks and rearmed the alarm when he was finished.

  “Prescott must have sweated blood in the beginning, learning what he had to have ready on hand and what could safely be left to order as needed,” he continued. “But he damn sure learned, and the inventory here shows careful attention. That was one big thing I noticed, by the way: Everything about this place is first-cabin. Clean and professional. Well maintained. You know there is a kind of a smell about half-ass fixed-base operations—dingy and rank, even when they’re prettied up for company. But this place is just the opposite. It just doesn’t make sense to me…” His voice trailed off.

  “That the man who set it up and ran it this way would kill himself?”

  Robbie growled, shaking himself out of the mood, and grinned at me again.

  “Always, we come back to that.”

  “Seem to, don’t we?”

  “Well, then, since you’ve got a one-track—”

  But he never got to the zinger, because that was when the first bullet hit the window beside him and we both hit the office floor.

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  We are the arbiters of our own fate. For we are the creators of our own dreams…

  TWENTY
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  Some little towns are livelier than others. I had an opportunity to ponder on this during the moments Robbie and I spent belly-crawling toward what seemed like relative safety in the blind area just below the window.

  Since arriving in Farewell three days ago, I had been threatened by a pistol-packing punk, set upon by three thugs, beaten by a deputy sheriff, nearly killed in a back-road drag race, and now I was under fire from a bushwhacker. A good, full social schedule. Exhilarating. But I couldn’t help wondering what people had done for kicks before I came to town.

  Another bullet angried through the window and buried itself in the opposite wall close to the plaster-dimple made by the first one.

  “Shit!”

  Robbie came to his feet like a spring-loaded knife blade, sprinted two steps into a rolling somersault, and came down on his feet, still running outside the office. I heard an occasional light footfall as he made for the access gate at the rear of the hangar.

  That left the side door for me, and I decided to wait for the next bullet on the theory—not necessarily valid but better than nothing—that a man using the kind of rifle favored by snipers usually has to take time to work the bolt before each shot. Make the bastard hurry. Maybe spoil his aim.

  I’ve always been an optimist.

  The wait was a short one. My legs had already taken on a sprinter’s set, and I didn’t spare a glance to mark where the next slug landed as I let the sound push me along Robbie’s track out the office door, jinking left and picking my way around the remains of the LongRanger en route to the parking-lot entrance, where I crouched and waited with my hand an inch or two from the knob.

  Robbie was biding his time in a similar position at the back of the hangar, ready to go for broke. No need for talk. The two of us might be a bit out of our element trying to take a logical approach to the question of who was playing games with whom in the interbred business community of small-town New Mexico. But long-range rifle fire was something else again. A firefight is a firefight is a firefight, and this was a routine we knew by heart.

  The fourth shot, when it finally came, had a slightly different sound, and I decided after a moment’s consideration that it had probably not landed inside the building. But it was all pretty academic by that time. By then, Robbie was already out the back door and making quiet eel-like progress toward the covert rifleman via a weed-choked ditch we had both noticed at the edge of the helipad when we drove up, and I had popped out into the parking lot, run two quick steps, and taken a flying headfirst leap over the hood of my little rental car, landing in a roll and putting its none-too-substantial bulk between me and the sniper.

  If all went according to the book, the next moves for Robbie and me would be a feinting pincers intended to whipsaw the rifleman, moving in on him step by step from two directions until one or the other of us was in position to do him some damage.

  But we might have saved ourselves the trouble.

  By the time I was ready to make my first diversion—no fun, but safer than it looks; the run would start at the sound of the next shot and was intended to put me at an angle that would make for awkward shooting if the sniper’s nest was where it seemed to be—an automobile engine started up, just out of sight behind a hump of New Mexico landscape, and the sound of tires spraying gravel told us the war was over. For a while.

  It could have been a little head game, of course. Many a hopeful lad had found his way into a body bag by forgetting that not all trappers wore fur hats. Our sniper might very well have had a friend primed to make going-away noises that would lure us into breaking cover prematurely. Surprise party is the name of the game for a bushwhacker. But somehow I didn’t think anything like that was on the menu today.

  In fact, I was beginning to have second thoughts about the whole scene.

  Robbie was still out of sight, presumably working his way toward the sniper’s shooting stand, when I noticed that our playmate had given me a little extra chore for the late afternoon. The left front tire of the rental car was flat, and I could see that one whole section of the tread and sidewall had been sheered away as if by the stroke of an outsize battle-ax. The damage tallied with the caliber of ammunition that had knocked holes in the office wall, and explained why the final shot had sounded different from the others. The shooter didn’t want any company on his way back to Farewell.

  “Let it go, Robbie,” I called. “He’s split.”

  “I know it.”

  Robbie’s head and shoulders emerged from the ditch about twenty feet from where he would have been within rock-throwing range of the sniper’s presumed firing point. He was so damn good. I hadn’t spotted a single false movement among the tall-grown grasses of the ditch.

  If only the rifleman had stayed put for a minute or two longer…

  “Son of a bitch.” His voice and posture were eloquent of disgust as he ambled over a little knoll to where the shooter had been hidden. He poked around for a moment, picked something up, and came back to where I was standing.

  “Careless mother,” he said. One of his steel hooks was clamped delicately on the bright brass end of a cartridge case. “Must’ve picked up the other three but missed this one. Or just didn’t give a damn.”

  He held the empty up to catch the dusk-slanted sunlight and examined it with close professional interest.

  “Thirty ought-six,” he said. “Nothing fancy, nothing expensive. But good enough. Hand loaded, which makes sense. Even sleeved and sporterized—if that’s how it was, and it sure looks that way—those old service pipes like a slightly underweight charge.”

  He handed me the evidence.

  I haven’t Robbie’s expertise, but even my unpracticed eye could make out the telltale reloading scratches and the slight imperfections near the base that are the mark of the reused center fire casing. It helped confirm the thought that had been forming in my mind ever since I’d seen the second shot group itself so neatly on the office wall.

  “Piss-poor shooting for someone who went to such a hell of a lot of trouble,” Robbie said, his voice still audibly irritated. “Four tries, easy distance, all the time in the world—but no meat. Awful!”

  I handed the brass back to him. “Or very damn good,” I said.

  It brought him up short and cut off whatever else he’d had to say. He looked at me and then followed my line of sight to the flattened front tire on the little car.

  “Remember when the shooting began?” I said.

  He nodded, squatting to get a better look at the damage.

  “We were talking,” he said. “Something about…hell, I can’t remember…oh, yeah: about Prescott and whether a guy like that would kill himself.”

  I nodded. “You were walking back and forth,” I said. “Right in front of the window. Not thinking about it, just moving. Like a metronome. Three paces one way, three paces back. Robbie, you’ve been shooting rifles almost as long as you’ve been alive. Given the angle and the distance, could you have made a shot like that?”

  He thought about it, but not for long. “Piece of cake,” he said.

  “And the next two rounds—you happen to notice what a pretty little group they made with the first one, there on the wall of the office?”

  He could see where I was headed now. “Cover all three with a half-dollar,” he agreed.

  “And then the car tire…”

  We both looked at it, double-checking the probable angle, lighting, and distance the rifleman would have been up against.

  “Took that shoe off without so much as denting anything else,” Robbie said meditatively.

  “Not too shoddy, would you say?”

  “It’ll pass.”

  We took a few moments for private ruminations. Mine were unpleasant. And judging from the blank austerity that had spread over Robbie’s features, his were no better.

  “Whoever was doing the shooting,” I said, spelling it out for both of us, “could have touched us off anytime he felt like it. His option. But he didn’t feel like it.
He wanted to send someone a message, not make work for the coroner.”

  Robbie was incensed. “That sucks,” he said.

  “We’re alive.”

  “Still sucks!”

  “Beats being dead.”

  He looked back at the empty cartridge, hating the inanimate brass in default of its late owner, and threw it as hard and as far as he could. He got a nice distance on the throw. Robbie’s steel-arm accuracy with light missiles is myth and legend in our part of the mountains.

  “Playing games,” he said, watching the cartridge bounce on the concrete apron in front of the hangar. “Miss us close and watch us scramble. A fun-fragger!”

  His face set in planes of grim rage, and the eyes, usually so warm, were like frozen coal.

  “Never did get used to being shot at,” he said. “You remember how some did? Even got to like it, thought it was the best game since Cowboys and Indians. Crazy! But I never did and I still don’t, and whether you miss me or hit me is a detail; the main thing is how I feel when I hear the stuff whizzing around my head, and it makes me want to puke, and any son of a bitch thinks it’s funny could get to be a total stranger…”

  I saw no reason to interrupt.

  He was playing my song.

  “So…he wasn’t really trying to hit either one of us. Just wanted to see us hit the dirt and fill our shorts? Terrific! Remind me to add his goddamn name to the Christmas list. I don’t suppose you’d happen to have any idea how it might be spelled?”

  “Not even a clue.”

  “Uh-huh.” The eyes didn’t believe me, but we’d known each other too long and too well to argue the point. “Well,” he said, “if you ever do get one, maybe you could kind of let an old buddy in on the secret. Just for old times’ sake. Think you could do that?”

  “You’ll be the first to know,” I said. “But meanwhile…”

  I let the word hang there, and after a long moment the icy face melted into another of those mega-candlepower smiles.

  “Meanwhile,” he picked up the sentence and finished it for me, “I don’t suppose we are going to say a damn word about this to the local law, are we, amigo?”