Hoodwink nd-7

by Bill Pronzini

  The trail twisted upward for a time, slid sideways, and then hooked around and along the wall of a limestone cliff. There was a pretty steep dropoff on one side; I tried not to look down in that direction because I’m a coward when it comes to high places. Then the track began to descend in a series of sharp curves that were almost switchbacks. And pretty soon it straightened out again, and I was in another hollow, not large enough to be called a valley but large enough nonetheless to contain Colodnyville.

  It was not what I had expected. When you think of ghost towns you think of open spaces, two or three blocks of crumbling false-front buildings, tumbleweeds everywhere, a saloon with one of its batwings canted at a rakish angle, hitchracks and horse troughs and broken signs flapping in the wind. But that was Hollywood stereotype, not Colodnyville. Now I knew why Mrs. Duncan had said, “Ghost town. That’s a laugh.” Because it wasn’t even a town-not unless you can call four buildings huddled more or less together in a small sea of cactus and rocks a town.

  All the buildings were plaster-faced adobe ruins, three of them with glassless windows, the other one with rusted iron bars like a jail and a crisscross of boards tacked up inside. The one with the window bars was the largest, maybe forty feet square, with a roof that had a little peak in front and slanted downward to the rear. There was nothing else to see except for a well dug off to one side, sporting a crooked windlass that looked about ready to collapse, and the remains of a crude wooden sluice box set up alongside it. In the crags above and beyond, there was evidence that mining had once been done here-tailings, the boarded-up entrances to at least two pocket mines. But it had never been a rich lode, judging from the ruins, nor had the miners who’d worked it stayed on for more than a few years.

  I eased the Duster forward until the road began to peter out among the rocks and cacti, twenty yards or so from the nearest building and sixty yards from the nearest crag. When I got out it was like stepping into a vacuum: dead silence everywhere. Not a breathless hush, but a complete absence of sound, the way it was supposed to be on the moon. And the heat was thick, smothering, under that murky sky, acrid with the smell of dust. Sweat came popping out again and made me feel soiled and gritty.

  Carefully I picked my way across to the largest building. Enough sunlight came through the haze to put a gleam on the cracked plaster facing; it looked like thin icing on a crumbled and petrified cake. There was a door cut off-center in that front wall, and when I got close enough I could see that it was made out of heavy timbers reinforced and bound with rusted iron straps. Above the latch was the hasp for a padlock, and set into the adobe was the ring that it fastened over. But it was not fastened now; the hasp stood out from the door at right angles. And lying in the dust to one side was the remains of a thick Yale lock.

  I leaned down to pick up the padlock. It had been sawn through with what might have been a hacksaw, and recently: the cut ends were still shiny. Had the local police done it when they were here? Or had someone else been around?

  I dropped the padlock where I’d found it, moved over to try the door. It opened, creaking a little like the door in the old Inner Sanctum radio show. At first I couldn’t see anything except gloom streaked with thin shafts of light that came through gaps in the window boarding. I stepped inside, blinked several times to help my eyes adjust from the outside glare. Then the ulterior began to take shape-a low single room beneath a slanted beam ceiling-and I got my second surprise of the past few-minutes. Or second and third, because this one was double-barreled.

  The first thing was the way it was furnished. What I had expected to find was spartan prospector’s digs: bunk beds, and old potbellied stove, a table and a few chairs-that sort of thing. What I found instead was something out of an 1890s whorehouse. The room was jammed with wine-red, velvet-covered settees and chairs, rococo tables, glassed-in cabinets, a four-poster bed with a lace canopy, a fancy nickel-plated, high-closet stove, even a hanging oil lamp with what looked to be a Tiffany shade. The wine-red carpeting on the floor was worn and coated with dust, but you could tell that it had once been expensive. Colodny may have moved out here into the middle of nowhere, but it was not to live in squalor; he had taken esoteric New York tastes with him. And created a kind of decadently elegant private world for himself and his wife.

  The second part of the surprise was that the place was in a shambles-it had been turned upside-down by somebody looking for something. The bed and most of the cushions had been ripped open, the canopy was in tatters, the carpet was strewn with hundreds of hardcover and paperback books that had once occupied space inside the glass-fronted cabinets; drawers had been pulled-out and emptied, the stove emptied of ash and charred wood fragments; wall cupboards stood open and their contents lay scattered everywhere. A four-foot stack of pulp magazines in one corner was about all that had been left undisturbed.

  The Cochise County law would not have done anything like this. So who, then? The person who had killed Colodny and Meeker, the accomplice in the “Hoodwink” plagiarism? It added up that way. And what he’d been looking for figured to be the same thing I was here to look for: evidence that would ruin him as a plagiarist and establish his motive for murder. The big question was, had he found it?

  Either way, I was here now and I was not going to leave without conducting my own search of the premises. Technically I was trespassing, but with Colodny and his wife both dead, and no next of kin, there was nobody to prosecute me. This was one time I could bend the rules a little with a clear conscience.

  But even with the door open it was gloomy in there, full of shadows. I didn’t have any matches, or any particular inclination to light the oil lamps, so I would need the flashlight clipped under the Duster’s dash before I started in. I went back to the open door, through it into the hazy afternoon glare. I stood for a moment, squinting, rubbing wetness off my forehead, as my eyes readjusted to daylight. Then I took three steps toward the car.

  On the fourth step something went whistling over my right shoulder, just under the ear, and made a chinking sound in the plaster facing behind me. At almost the same time, noise erupted from the rocks across the clearing, a small echoing clap of it like thunder from a long way off.

  Gunshot.

  Somebody’s shooting at me! And then I moved, on reflex and instinct- turned and dove headfirst back through the open doorway just as a second bullet slashed the air above me, rained chips of plaster down on my back, and another hollow explosion rolled out of the rocks like the Biblical crack of doom.

  TWENTY

  I landed on my forearms on the rough wood floor beyond the threshold, scrambled forward until I had my ass-end out of the doorway. A third bullet came winging inside, but it was well over my head; I heard it smack into something on the far side of the room. I rolled out of the wedge of light that slanted in through the open door, across the carpet, and into the shadows, — came up on my knees. And caught the edge of the door and threw it shut so hard it rattled in its frame.

  Shaky-legged, I got up and stumbled over to the wall beside it. There was no key latch or tumbler lock on the door, but what it did have was a pair of angle irons bolted to the wood, with another pair on the wall parallel; and down on the floor was a heavy two-by-six about four feet long. I caught up the bar and shoved it through the angle irons. Once it was wedged in tight, ten men wielding half a tree couldn’t have battered the door down. Then I leaned hard against the wall, grip ping it with my hands, and tried to get my breathing and my pulse rate under control.

  A minute or two passed in silence. There had not been any more shots, and that made me wonder if he’d left his hiding place up in the rocks, come down onto open ground. If so, I wanted to know it. And I wanted a look at the son of a bitch in any case-Ivan Wade or whoever he was. He must have been here all along, searching the damn place, and he’d heard me coming down that winding road. He’d had enough time to get his wheels and himself out of sight before I appeared-and more than enough time to draw a bead on the front of.this bui
lding. If he had been a marksman, I would not be alive to think about it right now.

  A pair of narrow windows flanked the door; I went to the nearest one and peered through one of the chinks in the boards. The clearing-what I could see of it-looked as still as before, and nothing seemed to stir among the rocks beyond. But the sun had broken through the milky haze, and its glare off the Duster’s hood was dazzling enough to create blind spots from this vantage point.

  I moved across to the other window and found a gap to look through there. A little better; I had a wider range of vision and not so much reflected glare. As I looked, something glinted up above, between a pair of boulders that leaned toward each other at forty-five degree angles, like two drunks on a park bench, to form a cavelike open space at the bottom. Two or three seconds later, I heard the report of the rifle as he squeezed off, saw the pale muzzle flash. But he was not shooting at me or the building this time; he was shooting at the Duster. It was a stationary target and he had better luck with it than he’d had with me: he hit what he’d been aiming at, which was the right front tire. The faint hiss of escaping air was audible after the echoes of the shot faded.

  His reason for flattening the tire was obvious enough, and it made me dig my nails into the palms of my hands. He did not want me opening the door and making a run for the car and driving the hell away from here. He wanted me right where I was, trapped inside, where he could finish me off one way or another, sooner or later.

  He put a second shot into the right rear tire, just to make sure the Duster was crippled good and proper. When he did that I shoved away from the window and went groping through the dark room, looking for matches and some kind of weapon. The matches were no problem; I found a box on top of the stove’s high closet. But a suitable weapon was a lot harder to find. There was a rifle lying half under the canopied bed, but the firing pin had been removed; I threw it into a corner. Over against the south wall, I found a wood hatchet with a rusted blade-and that was all I found. A hatchet against a rifle. Some odds.

  I took it and the matches over to where the Tiffany-shaded lamp hung from the ceiling. But there was no oil in the fount, and the wick was dry as dust. The only other lamp in there lay shattered near the bed; it was matchlight or nothing.

  I went back to the window, peered out again. Stillness. What was he up to now? Sit up there and watch and wait? If he had water, food, and enough time and patience, he could wait for days until thirst and starvation forced me out; there wasn’t anything at all to eat or drink among the wreckage. There were other things he could do, too. He could come down and break through the boards over one of the windows and shoot me through the bars. Or toss in some sort of incendiary device, then sit outside and pick me off when the fire drove me out.

  And how was I going to prevent him from doing any of those things? How was I going to get out of here alive, armed with a hatchet and with all the windows barred and the only exit this one door?

  The irony of it was bitter. Both Colodny and Meeker had. been killed in locked-room situations, and now the murderer had me trapped in similar circumstances-closed up inside a box, with no evident means of escape. He didn’t need any gimmicks this time; the juxtaposition of events had done it all for him. All he needed was that frigging rifle of his and a little patience, and afterward he could bury my body up in the rocks somewhere or toss it into a ravine. Who would ever find out what had happened to me? Who would ever know I had become victim number three?

  It seemed futile, hopeless, but I refused to let myself think that way. If I did, it would lead to panic, and as soon as you panicked in a crisis like this, you were a dead man. I leaned back against the rough adobe wall and shut my eyes and tried to concentrate on ways and means.

  I managed the concentration part of it all right, and right away my mind began to throw up answers. Click, click, click, like tumblers falling one by one in the combination lock to a safe. The only problem was, my brain works in mysterious ways, and none of the answers had to do with a way out of here.

  What they did have to do with was the deaths of Colodny and Meeker. Inside of five minutes I knew-Christ, I finally knew-how both of them had been killed, or seemed to have been killed, in locked rooms. Both of them, because the answer was the same in both cases. Not who, yet-I still wasn’t sure if it was Ivan Wade or not. But Who was outside and I was in here, and how the hell could I tell Eberhardt or anybody else how Colodny and Meeker had died if I couldn’t get myself out of this locked room?

  I began to prowl again, chain-lighting matches. The furniture shapes reared up out of the gloom; the flickering matchlight crowded shadows into corners and up against the ceiling beams. There was no window in the back wall, where the bed was, but one was cut into each of the left-and right-hand walls. Getting the boards off them would be no problem; could I get the iron bars off too? Maybe. The adobe was old and cracked and I might be able to chip the bars loose with the hatchet. But then what? Even if I could get out through the window, I still had a good sixty yards of open space to cross, no matter which direction I took, before reaching any kind of cover. He could sit up there with his rifle and pick me off when I-

  The ceiling, I thought.

  Not the windows-the ceiling, the roof.

  I fired another match and followed it back to where the bed was. The downward slant of the ceiling’s construction put it about seven feet from the floor where it joined the rear wall; the space between the last beam and the joining was a good three feet wide. I was getting old, not to mention fat and scruffy, but I still had some strength and dexterity of movement left. And I could still fit through a hole a couple of feet wide.

  If could make the hole in the first place …

  When I climbed onto the bed, dust blossomed upward from the velvet coverlet, clogging in my sinuses, clinging grittily to my face and arms. The heat in there was stifling; sweat drenched me, and I had to pause to wipe it out of my eyes before I lit another match. I was half crouched, but I saw in the matchglow that I could stand all the way up. And when I did that, my head was a couple of inches below the ceiling, between the beam and the wall joining. Which made an awkward position to try doing demolition work. Even crouched again, it would not be easy to get any leverage into my swings.

  I held the burning match up close to the ceiling and banged on the adobe with the hatchet’s blunt end. Dust and small chips showered down on me, put out the flame, and set me off into a spasm of coughing for the next several seconds. Another match showed me gouges in the adobe, a seaming of small cracks that spread out from them. I could break through it all right for the first few inches, but what if it had been reinforced with wood or heavy wire? What if it was too damn solid for me to penetrate all the way to daylight?

  The hell with that, I told myself. Get to work, for God’s sake. You think too much.

  The match had gone out; I scraped another one alight and started to bring it up. But I was looking past the gouges I’d made, toward the beam, and in the wobbly flame I saw something that caught and held my attention. It was a three-sided mark near the top of the beam, where it was set into the adobe; it shone up faintly and blackly in the matchlight, like a scar. When I moved the flame closer to it I realized that it wasn’t a mark but three cutlines sanded smooth and painted over so that you had to be where I was to see them. From down on the floor and away from the bed, they would be invisible.

  I switched the hatchet to my left hand and probed over the cutout area with my fingertips. And as soon as I pushed against the upper left-hand corner, the whole section popped out like a lid on a hinge. Inside was a space-a hidden cache-that had been hollowed out of the top of the beam and part of the ceiling. And inside the space was an iron strongbox about eight inches long and six inches wide.

  With the aid of another match, I fumbled the box out of there and managed to get it open; it wasn’t locked. It contained several papers, some of them yellowing, at least two photographs, three small gold nuggets, and a packet of ten-and twenty-dolla
r bills that looked as if they would add up to at least two thousand. I closed the box again, without looking at the photographs or any of the papers, and laid it down on the pillow end of the bed. Then I straightened back up and went to work on the ceiling.

  It was slow, hard going. Pieces of adobe and clouds of powder poured down on me, forcing me to duck away after every swing, to stop every minute or two until the air cleared. The muscles in my arm and shoulder began to ache from the awkward strokes. My chest tightened up, the way it used to when I was still on cigarettes; I could feel each breath, little shoots of pain in the lungs. I made a lot of noise, too, but I did not care if the sounds carried up to where he was in the rocks. He wouldn’t know what I was doing, and unless I kept it up too long and made him suspicious, I doubted he would come to investigate. The real worry I had was whether he could see the back part of the roof from his vantage point. Those two leaning boulders had not seemed that high up, but from ground level height angles can be deceiving. None of this would do me any good at all if he had vision of the roof from front to back.

  But I was making progress with the hole, widening it out to better than two feet. I came across a layer of chicken wire, but it was so old and brittle that I had no trouble whacking through it with the hatchet. At the center of the hole, where I had penetrated farthest, it felt four or five inches deep. I told myself the roof couldn’t be any more than six inches thick and kept on methodically slugging away at the adobe.