Clad in our socks, we adjourned to the oversized bed.
I loosened the tabs above my ears and lifted up my wig. Hazel ran her palm lightly over my skull, still serrated from the transplants. “You look like Yul Brynner’s younger brother,” she whispered, then kissed me.
“Thanks for the ‘younger’ part of that remark.” I replaced the wig. Hazel rolled onto her back and pulled me down on top of her. I played with her for a moment, but I could feel her restlessness. I moved her with my hands, and she wriggled into position eagerly. Her big arms enfolded me as I sank down comfortably upon that most solid of platforms.
I didn’t have to think, plan, or worry.
It was really like coming home.
* * *
We talked later while sharing a cigarette. “What comes next, horseman?” she asked, using her pet name for me.
I knew she didn’t mean what came next in her bed that night. “I don’t know,” I answered. “I’ve been spinning my wheels in San Diego for a month. I can’t seem to get off dead center.” I thought about it for a moment. “Maybe I’ve lost my nerve. I never used to feel this way.”
“Why don’t you bunk here for a while?” she suggested. “It’s not as though you had a train to catch in San Diego, is it?”
“No, but—”
“Relax,” she urged. “You’re as bad as Pa.” Her head came up from the pillow. “That reminds me—” She slipped from the bed. I heard the pad-pad of her footsteps, and then silence. When I looked to see what she was doing, her bell-shaped bare behind was pointed right at me as she stood doubled over at the bedroom window, staring out.
“What is it?” I asked when she remained there.
“There’s no light in the barn.” Her tone was troubled. “I don’t think Pa’s come back from the feed shed yet.”
I sat up in the bed. “D’you think—?”
“I don’t know. It’s probably nothing, but—”
I swung my legs onto the floor. “Let’s take a look. You’re worried. We can replay this scene later. Blow by blow.”
We dressed hurriedly and left the bedroom.
CHAPTER TWO
Outside the house Hazel headed for the vehicles in the old stable. The night air was bracingly chilly after the heat of the bedroom. Its effect was to dash cold water upon my first reaction to Hazel’s alarm. I reached for her arm to slow her down. “Don’t you feel you’re just imagining—”
She stopped so suddenly I ran into her. We both stared at an orange glow haloing the crest of a distant hillock. The shrill neigh of a frightened horse and the thunder of pounding hooves echoed through the darkness around us. “Those damned kids have let the horses loose and set fire to the feed shed!” Hazel cried. “And Pa’s still out there!”
She started to run toward the stable. “With you in a second!” I called after her. I sprinted to my car, opened the passenger-side door and the glove compartment, took out the.38, and slipped it inside my belt. I snatched up a handful of loose cartridges from a box in the glove compartment and dropped them into my pocket. When I reached the stable, Hazel had the pickup backed out.
“Have to use this instead of the Corvette,” she said as I climbed into the front seat. “This is a cross-country run and there’s a deep gully between us and the shed.” She rammed the pickup ahead after spinning its rear wheels in the loose dirt of the yard.
The orange glow ahead of us seemed even brighter. The pickup bounded from high spot to high spot, throwing me around in the cab. “How do they get away with this kind of thing?” I asked as the headlights picked up a yawning split in the earth. Hazel dragged the wheel hard over and the straining pickup slewed as it paralleled the gully, whose bottom I couldn’t see. “These kids can’t intimidate everyone in the county, can they?”
“Nobody will testify against them.” Hazel was hunched down over the wheel. “The sheriff says the only thing he can do is catch them at it. I don’t think he tries too hard. Some of them are from influential families. Their folks take the attitude that boys will be boys.” The pickup ran across the flattened-out bottom of the gully and boomed along through what looked like the remains of an orchard. “We’ll come up behind them and do a little catching of our own.”
If we get there, I thought. Twice we just missed trees. A low-hanging branch slapped the windshield with an explosive sound like a fistful of hard-driven hail. There was no orange glow ahead of us now. I sensed that we were circling the hill I had seen from the ranch yard. Then we burst through a scattering of scrub brush, made a hard right turn onto a short straightaway, and spurted ahead toward a scene straight out of hell.
The fire wasn’t in the feed shed. It was in a pile of logs off to one side, obviously to illuminate what was taking place. The firelight and our headlights picked up the figure of a man suspended by bound wrists from a spike more than head-high on the side of the shed. A tall boy in rodeo costume stood near the bound man, apparently talking to him. Another half-dozen kids were fanned out in a loose semicircle, watching.
Hazel scattered the watchers with the pickup. She braked to a sliding stop and we piled out the doors on either side. She ran toward the limp, dangling figure, which at close range I could see was the old man. I moved a few feet closer to the shed and then stopped. Gunnar Rasmussen’s white head lolled loosely on one shoulder. From the waist down his overalls and underwear were in tatters. His welted arse hung out of the overalls like fresh-butchered beef in a freezer, marbled and veined. The gang had whipped the overalls right off him.
Our sudden appearance had frozen the action for an instant. Then the rodeo-type standing near the old man moved toward Hazel as she tried to remove the old man’s bound wrists from the spike. He was a big kid, almost good-looking. He had a manila rope in his right hand. Its end was frayed and discolored. He reached for Hazel. I started to draw the.38, but at his touch she turned and belted him with a left hook to the chest that moved him back three feet. The kid started to raise the rope-whip. “Hold it!” I rapped at him.
He turned in surprise. When he looked back at Hazel, she had eased the bound wrists from the spike and lowered the old man to the ground. It was so quiet I could hear the crackling of the burning logs. The flamboyantly dressed tall boy smiled at me. “You picked a poor night to come sightseeing,” he said. His voice was soft. Almost pleasant. “Because I think he’s dead.”
He motioned with his left arm, and the scattered semicircle began to close in on us. “So we just can’t let you walk away from here, can we?” the boy continued. His smile widened as he returned his attention to Hazel. “Nice of you to come along and make our evening complete. Eh, gang?” There was a muttered chorus from the group — whether of assent or not, I couldn’t tell.
The kid stared at the old man’s prostrate body. When he first spoke to us, there had been a touch of uncertainty in his voice, but he had regained his confidence. “He must have had a bad heart,” he said.
“How’s your heart, sonny?” I asked him.
His tone sharpened. “Take him, Van!” he barked to a bushy-haired husky. The semicircle surged toward me.
Even with the evidence of my own eyes, I guess I still didn’t believe it. I hesitated long enough before pulling the.38 that I had to duck the first charging teen-ager. I had to pull it with my left hand because I had been facing the speaker instead of Van. The second kid hit me with a fullback block that rolled me over in the dust. A pair of boots landed on my hand. I felt fingers breaking, but I didn’t lose the gun. I switched it to my right hand as I came up on my knees. The kid in the rodeo clothes was a dozen yards away. He was standing there, laughing.
I put a slug into his upper lip, right under his nose. Lip, nose, and teeth disappeared in a red blotch. He went backward into the shed wall, rebounded, spun around, and flopped on his back in the dirt. A thin scream filled the night air while his heels drummed the ground, kicking up dust.
The flat crack of the.38 had again frozen movement around me. “He — he shot Wall
y!” a voice said incredulously.
“Your friend can dish it out, but he doesn’t seem to be so good at taking it,” I said to the bushy-haired Van as Wally’s screams continued to furnish a high-pitched background. My left hand was throbbing, but I didn’t look at it. I was watching Van.
The sound of my voice brought him out of his state of shock. “You bastard!” he exclaimed hoarsely. “You’re for it!” He started toward me again. I put a bullet into his left shinbone. He went down as though ax-stroked. Another of the group was in motion. I snapped a shot into his right collarbone. He pitched heavily to the ground.
The four still on their feet had halted again in grotesque poses of arrested movement. I climbed erect and walked toward them, reloading as I went. The left hand hurt like hell, but I managed. For a second the clickity-click of metal on metal drowned out the crackling of the burning logs. Closest to me was a skinny, mean-faced character with a scraggly beard. “Still think your fun was worth it?” I said to him. He swallowed hard but said nothing. His eyes were on the gun. I held it out and showed it to him more plainly. “Arm or leg?” I asked him. He didn’t answer. “Arm or leg?” I repeated.
“Arm or leg what?” he asked. His voice was a rasping whisper.
“You’re going to take one in an arm or a leg. Like a souvenir of the occasion. Take your pick.”
His features contorted in frustrated fury and his voice thickened to a screech. “Fuck you, you goddamn—!”
He gasped and then shrieked as the bullet smashed his right kneecap. He crawled in the dirt, dragging the leg, his continuing screams blending with Wally’s. I turned to the next closest. “Arm or leg?”
“Arm!” he got out in a choked gasp. I ticked off his left upper biceps. He yelped and pivoted in a tight, doubled-over circle before he plunged to the ground.
The other two were running. I got the first in an ankle. The crack of the gun seemed to elevate him from a springboard. He did a one-and-one-half forward somersault before he plowed up the dirt with his face. The last one was beyond accurate placement range. I let go at his arse, and he slid on his side, wailing, both hands grabbing at his buttocks. He’d run far enough so that he ended up almost outside the perimeter of light.
I looked around. No one was going anywhere. I walked over to Hazel, who was just getting to her feet. She had been cradling the old man’s head in her lap. Her face was white. “He’s gone,” she said tonelessly. “Reload that thing again and give it to me. I’ll give each one myself.” I shook my head. “Give me the gun!”
“No gun, Hazel. You’ve got to live here.”
“The hell I’ve got to live here!” Her mood changed swiftly. “Your hand’s broken, isn’t it? It’s a good thing it wasn’t your right hand, or we’d have been dead, too. Unpleasantly.”
I didn’t say so, but it wouldn’t have made that much difference. My left-handed shooting isn’t all that bad.
Her mind was ranging ahead. “You’ve got to get away from here before the sheriff comes.”
She was right about that. Even if the kids didn’t talk, my staying around to answer police questions could open up a nasty can of worms. The gang could hardly talk without incriminating themselves, but neither could I, and not only about what had just taken place. My visit was definitely over. I went to the pickup and backed it up as close as I could to the old man’s body. Hazel and I slid him into the back of the truck, and I chained up the tail gate again.
“What about these creeps?” Hazel asked, gesturing at the battlefield. The various screams had died down to moans.
“They’ve got a car out in the brush somewhere. Let them get themselves to a hospital. What are you going to tell the sheriff?”
She flared up like a roman candle. “That I’ll see to it that he’s beaten at the next election if I’m still around here! And that’s all. He can draw his own conclusions.” She had seen me favoring my left hand when we lifted Gunnar Rasmussen’s body into the pickup. She took my hand and examined it, shook her head, removed a kerchief from her throat, and bound the fingers together. “That’s all I can do. I know something’s broken.”
“I’ll get it set,” I promised.
We got into the pickup. I took the wheel and drove back to the ranch house at a much slower pace than Hazel had set en route to the feed shed. During the first part of the return trip she spoke only once. “Where do they get the hate?” she asked quietly.
I didn’t answer because I didn’t know.
We were almost at the house when she spoke again. “I suppose this means I won’t see you again?”
I’d been thinking about that. “When things quiet down here and you’re sure they’re paying no attention to you, why don’t you come down to the city for a visit?”
“I’d like that,” she said promptly. “When?”
“I’ll call you.”
“Just be sure you do.” She was silent for a moment. “Go ahead and tell me it’s none of my business …” She hesitated, then resumed. “Earl. Damn it, I’ve got to get used to that name.” She turned to face me squarely as I parked the pickup in the ranch yard. “How are you fixed for cash?”
“Fine,” I lied.
“You know that no matter how hard I try, I’ll never be able to spend even the income from what Lou Espada left me?”
“I know. I’m saving you for my old age.”
She put her hand on my arm. “Why don’t you … retire?”
“Retire? Retire to what?”
“To a life of peace and quiet!” she said spiritedly. “Damn all men, anyway! Always running against the bit—”
I opened the pickup’s door and slid out from under the wheel. “I’ll call you,” I repeated. “Take care, now.”
“Be careful,” she called after me. I was already moving toward my car.
I drove out the ranch road to the highway.
At the gate I stopped and painfully reloaded the.38 again, then put it back into the glove compartment.
I remained in Ely only long enough to have my fingers set. Two were broken. “If you hadn’t told me you’d dropped a tire on the back of that hand, I’d have said it looked like the imprint of a bootheel,” the doctor said.
“You M.D.'s have vivid imaginations, Doc,” I told him.
I got back out on the road and headed for San Diego.
CHAPTER THREE
In Dago I had a room that was just a room. I stayed in it until I got over the worst of the awkwardness in dealing with the splint on my left hand. There’s nothing like a couple of broken bones, no matter how insignificant, to make a man aware of his mortality.
I didn’t really know why I was in San Diego. I usually sign on as a tree surgeon somewhere when I’m presenting a low silhouette to the law after a job. I can cut the mustard anywhere working with an ax and a crosscut saw. Generally I keep the job two or three months. This time it had lasted almost a year. It lasted, in fact, until the interval began to tell me something about myself. My nerves weren’t the same after the botched job that had me lying low. When a man gets older, he doesn’t rebound as well.
Everything about the last job had gone well except the getaway. Well, no, I couldn’t really say that. I’d had two partners on that bank job, and one had been killed because he couldn’t keep his mind off women. The other partner and I got away with the cash.
We each had a car, but the money was in his. Then I had to stand in pouring rain on a slick hillside curve and watch a quarter million burn up in the trunk of my partner’s car that hadn’t made the curve. He died of a broken neck. If I hadn’t already mailed $10,000 to the plastic surgeon who’d made me a new face, the job would have been a total loss. It wasn’t the type of operation that bred confidence for the future.
I hadn’t known much about either partner. I’d taken them on unwillingly only because I needed quick money after my departure without benefit of clergy from the south Florida prison hospital. Then the partnership job went wrong. It left me at a low ebb, mentally and financi
ally. Hazel had struck a nerve when she asked how I was fixed.
So with two fiascos back to back, a short bankroll, a new face, and a new name, I’d come to San Diego. There’s a waterfront bar called Curly’s, which has operated as an underworld meeting place since shortly after the time of the forty-niners. Curly’s was a good place to reestablish contact, I felt.
Before the trip to Hazel’s I’d been dropping in almost every night. Not mixing but sitting at the bar and watching the room behind me in the backbar mirror. Looking for familiar faces and not finding any. I’ve been in the business for fifteen years. After that length of time prison cells and unmarked graves claim a lot of familiar faces.
When I was able to have the lengthy wooden splint on my left hand removed and replaced with a finger cast, I started hitting Curly’s again. It was better than getting cabin fever sitting in the room and staring at four walls.
The tavern had a bulletin board in one corner of the low-ceilinged, smoky room. It was always covered with thumbtacked messages, some cryptic, some not. My first night out after the episode at the ranch I stopped as usual to look the board over. There were the usual assortment of cars for sale, apartments for rent, and GWENDOLYN, PLEASE CALL BEAUREGARD personals. And there was a new message I read three times. Or had I missed seeing it before?
IMPORTANT! said a three-by-five card lettered in red ink. WILL CHARLIE GOSGER CALL AREA CODE 815, 479-2645. IMMEDIATELY. IMPORTANT!
That was all. There was no signature or initials. I moved along to the bar and ordered a Jim Beam on the rocks. About ten years before I had used the alias Charlie Gosger for a short time. I couldn’t even remember the details. Probably I’d used it for a specific job, then dropped it. Could someone from that period be trying to contact me now? It hardly seemed likely.
Operation Fireball d-3 Page 2
