by Bill Crider
9
The house was hot, and the humidity was just as bad inside as out, but it wasn't stuffy, what with all the window glass missing, and I must have fallen asleep. I was dreaming something about a storm in the Gulf, with Jan drowning and me struggling to get to her through the surf, when I woke up and realized that the noise in my dream wasn't the surf at all but the sound of a car engine.
I had the presence of mind not to sit up, though I'm usually not especially alert when I first come out of sleep. The car passed by the window as I lay there.
I tiptoed across the rotten, slanted floor as if there might be someone to hear me and looked around the side of a door. Ransome's car turned in the direction he'd been heading before, and he drove away.
I went out and started down the ruts. It was mid-afternoon now, and there was a slight breeze out of the south. I imagined I could smell the refineries and chemical plants from down on the coast.
I wasn't quite to the trees when I heard another noise. I stopped where I was and listened. It sounded like another car coming from the woods. I hadn't thought that Ransome might be meeting someone. I hadn't thought there was anyone there to meet.
What the hell, maybe there really was a grocery store back there.
And even if there wasn't, there was really no place for me to go. It was too far back to the house, and the weeds weren't really high enough to hide me.
Suddenly the sound got louder. I peered into the trees, but I didn't see anything.
Standing out where I was in the sunlight, I was easy to see from back in the trees, though, and someone must have seen me.
I recognized the next sounds. Someone was gunning an engine, winding it up, and then letting off the clutch so that the tires spun on the hard caliche soil. There was a crackling and popping as if some rotten tree branches were being run over and crushed. Then the vehicle exploded out of the trees and came straight at me.
It was one of those jacked-up 4 X 4 trucks with reinforced springs and pumped-up shocks that raised it so high that you practically needed a stepladder to get up into the cab. The tires were huge spinning rings of heavily-treaded rubber that looked as big as tractor tires and were moving much faster than most tractors ever traveled.
The silver bars of the truck's grille grinned at me like the teeth of some gigantic alligator from Fred's lake, and the bumper looked as high as my head. I could imagine my skull splitting like a rotten watermelon when it hit me, my teeth being mashed to the back of my neck.
I didn't stand around waiting for that to happen, though. I threw myself to the side and rolled through the grass and weeds.
Then I was up and running, praying that my bum knee wouldn't give way and throw me to the ground.
The driver of the truck made a magnificent skidding turn that I would have thought might be extremely dangerous to him. In fact, I was hoping that the truck would turn right over on top of itself, thanks to the high tires.
It didn't happen. The tires gouged huge chunks of grass and dirt up and threw them into the air behind the truck as the driver changed course and came after me, moving his vehicle along a lot faster than I was capable of moving myself.
My knee was starting to twinge, but there was nothing I could do but run.
If I had been calmer, say if I had been watching the scene in a movie, I might have thought of things like getting the license number of the truck or of getting a look at the driver.
And I did think of those things, even in my situation, but only vaguely. Even in less stressful circumstances, doing either one would have been next to impossible.
For one thing, there was no front license plate.
For another, the windows were so heavily darkened that there was no way to see inside. Even the windshield was darker than normal.
All I could really see was that the truck was black and that the silver letters FORD were stretched across the front of the hood.
Meanwhile, I was running as fast as I could across the field toward the ramshackle house, stepping in holes, stumbling over hillocks, tripping on vines, and cursing myself for ever getting into this mess in the first place.
The truck was right behind me, bouncing along as if it were on some kind of crazy trampoline, not bothered at all by the things that were giving me such grief.
I was pretty sure I was going to make it to the house, however, and I thought that if I could get inside, I would be safe.
It was a close race, but I won it, throwing myself into the house through an open window and scrapping across the floor on my hands and knees before rolling over and bumping into a wall.
I lay there trying to catch my breath and noticing that my bad knee felt something like a piece of steak that had just been put through the grinder. At least it had held up, though I knew that if I had taken many more steps, it would have collapsed and I would have been mashed like a June bug under the truck's gigantic tires.
I got my breath back soon enough. All the jogging I do is good for that, if for nothing else, and maybe it had even strengthened the knee. For a second I wished I was down on the Galveston seawall, doing my daily run and looking at the women in their microscopic bathing suits as the season drew on toward fall.
The sound of the truck brought me back to where I was. The driver was revving up the engine again, and I could hear the dirt flying from under the wheels and striking the metal wheel coverings.
Surely he wasn't crazy enough to--
He was.
I got a quick glimpse of the truck through the window I had just entered before the driver rammed the house.
It would be nice to say that the house exploded like a building made of matchsticks, but that wouldn't be true.
That's exactly what I thought would happen, given the condition of the house, but it was more solid than it appeared to be.
There was a rending and tearing, accompanied by the sound of very old and very rusty nails being pulled from the boards where they had been embedded for years. The wall opposite of where I was sitting, alarmingly bulged inward. But everything held together.
The truck backed up.
Whoever was driving it had to be crazy. He was going to give it another try.
Well, that was his privilege, but I wasn't going to be there when he did it.
I slithered on the floor into the other room, trying to keep below the level of the windows, and slid out onto the porch which was slanting even more than it had earlier.
I was rolling off the porch when the truck hit again, and I stumbled through the dust far enough to avoid the porch supports as they toppled. The roof slid off and crackled into a heap just before the walls fell over on it.
I was choking in the dust and hoping that the driver of the truck wouldn't be able to see me rubber-legging it toward the Subaru.
He did see me, though.
I heard him coming and stumbled forward, trying to ignore the pain in my knee, which was making me list dangerously to the right. There was no way I could get to the car before he flattened me.
I wished I had an elephant rifle, and for a fleeting second I imagined myself turning to face the truck, leveling my large-bore rifle on the stunned driver's vehicle and sending two or three shots through his engine block.
It was a fine fantasy, but in reality I didn't have the tools. I didn't even have a pea shooter.
The truck was nearly upon me. It was time to do something really stupid.
I stopped, turned and faced the truck, trying to clear my eyes with the back of my hand.
He was coming at me and he was coming fast.
I charged him.
I'd thought he might be so surprised that he might stop, but of course that didn't happen.
He was surprised enough, however, that he at least took his foot off the accelerator and slowed down a bit.
I didn't. I kept right on going.
He pressed the accelerator again, but by then I was very close. I hoped that I was so close he couldn't see me over the hood.
I threw myself forward and lay flat, my face pressed into the dirt.
He sailed right over me.
I knew he wouldn't be fooled for long, if he was fooled at all. There had been no impact, and he would realize that very soon, but I was up and following him as fast as I could.
The brake lights came on, but I was almost close enough to touch the back bumper. There was a license plate whose numbers I couldn't read. It was smeared with mud.
If only he didn't back up.
Turn, I thought. Turn, you bastard.
He did, and I followed the bumper, trying to reach out and grab the ball of the trailer hitch I saw there.
I couldn't reach it, but as he swung the rear end around, I followed. When he started forward toward the place where he thought I might be lying, I ran on toward the Subaru in the bushes.
He would be looking for me in the field, and his gaze would be occupied for a few seconds.
That was the theory.
And while he was looking for me where I wasn't, I would be getting the Subaru out of the bushes and making my getaway.
The problem with that idea was of course that the truck would mash the Subaru flatter than a steamrollered pancake.
Well, that wasn't true, but it certainly wouldn't be an even match-up.
I got to the Subaru with the side of my knee throbbing and swelling. I could almost see the skin splitting open and the kneecap spilling out and landing on the ground beside me. Obviously I was getting hysterical.
I forced the car door open against the brush and squeezed in. The Subaru started immediately, just as always, and I backed into the field.
The black truck was already on the job, rolling after me. I suddenly recalled a picture I'd seen in a book when I was a kid, a book about dinosaurs. The picture was of Tyrannosaurus Rex pursuing its hapless prey, some smaller, bird-like creature. I wondered what a photograph of the truck and the Subaru would look like to someone a few million years from now, but I was bouncing around inside the car too much to worry about it. It was all I could do to keep my hands on the wheel and my foot on the accelerator.
It was obvious that I wasn't going to be able to escape, not by a long shot, so once more I decided that I'd have to do something that the other driver didn't expect.
I couldn't charge him again; small as the Subaru was, it wouldn't quite make it under the truck's bumper.
So I turned and drove into the woods.
What I hoped was that I could avoid clumps of brush big enough to stop the car but find my way between some trees that were growing so close together that whoever was following me in the truck wouldn't be able to follow.
If I could avoid a puncture to any of my tires, I might make it out alive. It wasn't a great plan, but it was all I could come up with. It was better than getting plowed under by Truckosaurus.
The opening I found and drove into was small, but not small enough. The Ford was crashing along behind me like a drunken rhino, and I looked for another turn while trying to avoid trees whose branches whipped across my windshield and whacked against my headlights.
I wanted to get back to the field somehow and then back onto the road. I was afraid that if I got too deep into the trees I might get lost and never find my way out. I didn't have a merit badge in woodcraft.
It was almost like a nightmare, weaving around among the trees and trying not to hit any of them, sort of like being lost in an enchanted forest in a Disney movie, with trees that have arms and faces and that reach out for you as they twist and writhe. I was never going to curse about driving on the Gulf Freeway at rush hour again. Even that was better than those trees.
And my car would never be the same. The old paint was being raked off in record amounts by the scratching of the tree branches, and I could only guess what might be happening to the undercarriage.
Somehow I managed to get turned around, ding enough openings, and get back to the field. I came out near the ruts that Ransome had been on, the very ruts I'd started to investigate only a few minutes before, though it seemed like hours now.
I realized that I could no longer hear the truck behind me, and I gave the car all the gas I could. It shuddered down the ruts a little faster, and I turned onto the county road and headed in the direction I hoped would lead me to Fred's house.
I liked to think that the truck was stuck back there in the woods with a tree trunk through its radiator grille. I wasn't going back to look for it, though. Not even on a bet.
~ * ~
"Sounds like you've had an interestin' day, all right," Fred said when I'd filled him in on the events in the jail and afterward. "You think Tolliver can do anything with that bullet?"
"Not unless we get one to match it," I said.
It was only about thirty minutes later, and I was sitting in Fred's kitchen, drinking a Big Red and wondering if we hadn't had this conversation before. I was also wondering why my good knee still felt like jelly and why my thighs seemed weak and trembly. I didn't have to wonder why my bad knee was throbbing; I knew the answer to that one.
"Where exactly was this place where you found the road to the woods?" Fred said. He was smoking a Camel and drinking lemonade from a glass beaded with drops of water.
I tried to tell him.
"Sounds a little like the old Overton place. Not too far from here," he said.
"It's not too far, that's for sure. I would've been back sooner if I hadn't made a wrong turn or two."
"Ought to be easy to find, that old house fallin' down and all." He took a drink of lemonade and tapped his cigarette into the sink.
"Mary'd give me hell if she saw that," he said. He turned on the tap and washed the ashes down the drain. "I bet that old house is a sight to see."
It finally dawned on me what he was trying to suggest. "You want to go back there and look around?" I said.
"I wouldn't be goin' back. I ain't been there yet."
"Well, I have, and I'm not so sure I want to go back."
"You won't be able to find what's at the end of that road if you don't," he said.
It was hard to argue with that, but I wasn't sure that whatever was at the end of the road was any of my business. I said as much to Fred.
"You might be right, at that," he said. "Only thing is, and this is what interests me, some of my land joins the Overton place back down in there. There's some real swampy land in those river bottoms, places I don't hardly ever get to. I'd like to know what's goin' on back in there if I could find out."
"You think there's some connection to the dead gator?"
"Can't ever tell." He took the butt of the Camel, turned on the tap, and ran water over it. Then he tossed the butt in the trash. "'Less you go look, that is."
"First the phone calls, then the noises, then the dead gator," I said. "Then the dead people."
"How about Perry Stone? You think he did it?"
"Did what? All of the above?"
"Let's just say killin' the people."
"No," I said. "I don't think he did that or any of the other things, and I wonder why Jackson was in such a hurry to arrest him. Stone told me he had plenty of witnesses to say he was in town all day on the day Holt was shot."
"Murder's kind of rare around here," Fred said. "Maybe they were just in a hurry to make an arrest."
I drank the last of the Big Red. "Maybe so. But that Jackson bothers me. Stone was bruised up."
I gave Fred the throwaway bottle, and he put it in the trash with his cigarette butt. "Jackson's a little mean. That's not very unusual around here."
"Then there's the matter of that bullet in the alligator. The one he didn't look for," I said. "He looked for the brass, though."
"You like diggin' in that gator?" Fred said.
"Not much," I said.
"Well?"
"I guess you're right," I said. But I still wondered.
"And what about this Gene Ransome?" I said. "You ever heard of him? Ever seen him around?"
"Nope."
"Wel
l, he knows you. And he knows Hurley Eckles."
Then I thought about that. Ransome had said that he knew Eckles and Fred. That didn't mean he was telling the truth. This was getting more complicated by the minute.
"Hurley knows lots of folks," Fred said. "You could ask him. You could ask him about that big black Ford truck, too, but I bet there's more of them around than you'd think."
He was probably right, but there couldn't be more than two or three of them. I didn't think Eckles would tell me anything, though. He didn't like me very much.
"Well, we gonna check out that road in the woods or not?" Fred said.
"I guess so," I said.
I was beginning to wish that I was at home with my cat and a good book. I hoped Dino would feed Nameless, but I wasn't going to call and ask again. I needed all the friends I could get.
10
We didn't go straight there, however.
I talked Fred into going by Hurley Eckles' place, just in case the Ford truck had turned up there.
"Hurley don't own a truck like that," Fred said. "I'd know about it if he did."
"What about his buddy?" I said.
"Which one is that?"
"Temp," I said. "Or something like that. Doesn't have much to say."
"Tall, skinny fella?"
"That's the one."
"Temp Stansell. He and Hurley talk and spit a lot, but Hurley does most of the talkin'."
They were still sitting where I'd seen them the day before. Or they were sitting there again. I assumed that surely they'd moved at one time or another. It was hard to tell, though.
We parked the jeep and got out. I was going to take the direct approach this time, but Hurley beat me to the punch.
"You still lookin' to buy some land around here?" he said, spitting snuff on the ground.
Fred looked at him and started to say something, but I cut in. I didn't want Hurley calling him a horse turd to his face and cause a fight. Hurley was younger and heavier, but I thought Fred had a pretty good chance against him if it came to that. I just didn't want to be the cause of it.
"I'm investigating a crime," I said. "I'm sorry about trying to mislead you earlier, but I was afraid you might not cooperate if I told you what I was really looking for."
