Pay Here

by Charles Kelly

  “High time,” I said. “What’s our destination?”

  “My place,” Morrison said.

  I laughed. “So you have a place, then?” I said. “I thought you were a pilot fish, fastening yourself to any shark drifting by.”

  “There’s no need for insults,” Morrison replied, and I knew I was for it then, because of his sudden boldness. I crunched my left shoulder down, to reassure myself with the feel of the .45 scratching my armpit. The Americans say “butterflies in the stomach,” “big game jitters,” “stage fright.” I had them all now, but I was glad. Give me information or give me death. Morrison delivered the directions, and then we were out of the parking lot, speeding to our fate. Bring on the chill. In the middle of a Phoenix summer, the only way to cool off is to die.

  * * * *

  Twenty minutes later in the antiquated Willo neighborhood south of McDowell Road, Morrison surprised me. The home he pointed out was English Cottage style, built in the 1920s. A middlebrow palace that should have been set in a copse of elms in the Cotswolds, with hares hopping about on dewy grass and the sound of church bells echoing across the rolling English countryside. Instead, it huddled on a postage stamp of grass in a Valley straight out of the Arabian Nights—fiery rock and cruel sun and dateless palm trees. Even so, it was the real thing—walls of massive, rusticated stone combining brick and stucco, a large brick chimney, small-paned casement windows, a medium-pitched gable roof, segmented window and door openings. A few spindly trees guarded it, gasping for water.

  I cruised to a stop. “Not yours, surely?” I said.

  He lifted an eyebrow. “Why not?”

  “Because it’ll go $400,000 if it’ll go a penny,” I said. “And you spinning nickel and dime fantasies, waiting for Rhea to cash in and wet your beak.”

  He didn’t even answer—another bad sign. I reviewed the last two hours. Had he gotten a chance to call someone and set me up? Of course. He’d ducked out of the corpse carve-up. When I’d emerged, he’d looked done in. But he had a cell phone and it would have been the work of a minute to alert a confederate. Sweat sparked on my palms. Morrison cranked the door open and climbed out, giving me his back. He must have done some fast talking, either to Bracknall, or to someone. So be it. I braced up and joined Morrison on the pavement.

  “I’ve got a big dog, so you’ll have to be careful,” he said. “Doberman pinscher. A strong attitude, and a reluctance around strangers. We’ll need to stroll around back, and I’ll soothe him.”

  I nodded, not believing this for an instant, but also not wanting to argue within earshot of whoever was inside. A weak-kneed type like Morrison would never share living space with a Doberman pinscher. A dog like that would make him brown his briefs. Encouraged by my silence, he urged me toward the driveway—one of those old-fashioned, split affairs, with two concrete tracks for the wheels of a car. The ground was graveled. Our shoes squeaked and scratched as we skirted the house and made for the wooden gate in the picket fence closing off the back yard.

  Morrison unlatched the gate and in we went. A densely grassed yard, heavy with shade under shaggy oleanders, a few ornamental orange trees scattered about, trunks white with the paint that discourages insects. Two floral-print deck chairs and a patio table with a round glass top, quite clean. The brick patio swept, a candle in a tin holder pinned to the back wall of the house. The dirty sweet odor of compost. Something was wrong, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Morrison slipped up a step to the nearest back door—there were two. He fumbled with his keys.

  Over his shoulder, he said, “Don’t see that dog under the bushes, do you? Sometimes the maid lets him out.”

  I shot a glance over my shoulder, heard the clink of his key in the lock as I did so. I saw nothing. What had that been about? I turned back as he jerked open the door. A small kitchen, black-and-white tiles, a narrow wooden counter, flowers in a vase, a breakfast set of blond wood. A bit . . . feminine. Like the neatness of the yard, the floral deck chairs. Feminine, and with a Doberman pinscher supposedly ranging through the rooms. Quite a contrast. Be ready, I told myself. Be ready to step lively and shoot quick.

  As Morrison flicked his head to invite me through the doorway, I undid my Colt automatic and used it to direct him. His expression didn’t waver. He’d been expecting trouble. Still, he wasn’t happy about the situation.

  “We need a certain amount of trust here,” he said.

  “You’ll get into that house,” I told him, prodding him under the floating rib with the Colt’s muzzle. “And you’ll make the acquaintance of that dog, if he exists.”

  “Exists?”

  “There’s no dog house in the yard. A great, walloping dog that needs its exercise, and no dog house.”

  “Built a special place for him,” Morrison said. “In the second bedroom.”

  Without bothering further, he stepped into the kitchen, with me right behind. The room was clean as a whistle. Freshly redone and repainted cabinets, polished aluminum light fixtures, melon-colored walls. A spanking modern microwave installed above the electric stove. Spice rack above the counter. I kicked the door shut behind me, frustrating the heat snarling at my back. The inside air was icy. An air-conditioner compressor pulsed and sighed.

  “Live here long?” I asked.

  “The records are in the office,” he replied. “If you’re interested.”

  His head bobbed to our left, toward a narrow hallway.

  “Is that what we’re after here, records?” The unlighted hallway was gloomy. “I came up here on faith, you know.”

  He didn’t answer. Instead, he gave a little hop to jumpstart himself and pottered off down the hallway, inviting me to follow. I moved close with him, the gun half-slanted down. The house was cubbyholed with rooms, and I wanted my flesh-and-blood shield in front of me when the spray of gunfire began. To our right, a cove-shaped opening gave on the living room, which was filled with the Art Deco shapes of soft furniture, chintz-shaded lamps and an odd large lump on the floor, something like a rug bundled. Curious. It drew me through the open doorway, with only a quick glance around as I went. A heavy, animal smell. Then I reached and touched the lump. A dog. I caught one ear and pulled back the gouged head, and saw blood oozing past the ivory teeth onto my trousers. The Doberman.

  Behind me, Morrison blurted in amazement, “There was a dog.”

  What was making his breath whistle? I dropped the beast’s head and looked up. A tiny automatic fluttered in his right hand, its muzzle reflecting light, winking at me. He knew the house, all right, and its hidden places.

  “Not your dog,” I said. “I hear no remorse in your voice.” He hadn’t told me to drop the Colt, stupid bastard, but I kept it low and away to the side. Morrison was no killer, and that made him dangerous. He was likely to pop one off by accident.

  “Not your house, either,” I said. “The door was open, and you had to distract me so you could fake using your key.”

  “Stop talking,” he snapped, his head tick-tocking toward the darkened end of the hallway to his left. His situation was clear. There was supposed to be someone down there to handle me, because Morrison clearly could not. Where was his back-up? And who was his back-up? Bloggs X?

  “Bracknall’s a shy boy, isn’t he?” I said. I didn’t move my gun an inch. As soon as Morrison’s relief stepped out of the shadows, the con man would back off, and I’d have a perfect pot at the real bad person. If I wanted it. What I really wanted was information. I wouldn’t get that through slaughter.

  Silence. What in Christ was going on? Morrison started toward the end of the hallway. The stress had pushed him too far. He wanted help. Didn’t get it, though, got the sharp end instead. A hellish snarl battered him. He shrieked. A writhing bunch of darkness flashed out, snatched him by the throat, and shook him like he was stuffed. His scream choked into a snuffle, his pistol took wing and clattered off the plaster wall, h
e collapsed moaning under a body nearly as big as his own. Tearing and snapping. Blood slopping on the walls and floor. Animal musk, fouling the air.

  I crouched, hunching my shoulders, stricken by supernatural horror like a gap-mouthed kid. Had the Doberman come to life? I glanced right and down, and the corpse was still there, its fur corroded by blood. I got a grip on my guts, then my gun, as my brain registered the obvious. Two dogs, one down and one up. Someone had double-gamed Morrison. He’d thought there was no dog, and there were two, one so vicious it had been put down. My heart was hopping about in my chest, but I thumbed off the Colt’s safety and got down to business.

  Again and again, I flung shots into the trembling mess of flesh, hoping to hit dog and not man. The flash-bangs stung my ears, the gunpowder smell bit my nostrils, the fear flooded my veins. Against a Doberman, you have to get lucky, even with a .45. Its slanting bone deflects bullets, its gristle frustrates lead. I sprayed the magazine empty, every shot exploding like gelignite. The dog whipped about as the bullets forced their way in, but it still coughed, teeth clicking, and Morrison was silent. I heard a horrid wet, licking sound. The dog turned toward me. Its eyes were furious, and it clutched a flap of whiteness in its teeth, a skin handkerchief. Morrison’s left cheek.

  The Doberman stepped toward me and rumbled low, like a badly-tuned motorcar. It took another step, slurped and swallowed the rag of flesh. Another step. It was still hungry. That had only been a canapé. It was steadying itself for the leap, heedless of the pitter-patter of its own blood. My leg muscles spasmed, frantic to move. My brain wouldn’t say yes, but I was suddenly falling, my right foot pinned to the floor by the dog corpse. The empty Colt went somewhere, and I splayed my hands as I hit the floor, using them as a pivot to flip my body around.

  I was on my hands and knees, breath blazing in my throat. Face to face with the monster, three feet away. Only the corpse lay between us, and that wasn’t much. The animal seemed to chuckle. I could see its chest muscles gathering and vibrating. I could smell the stink of blood on its breath. Then it sighed and slid downward. Its muzzle bumped and twisted on the polished wood floor. It rolled half left attempting to get up, and then it died.

  From the back of the house, I heard the squeaking of a door, the rattling of a Venetian blind on glass, steps tapping on concrete, then thudding on grass and earth. Shakily, I stumbled in that direction. Light and heat roared through the open door. I got there, looked out, not wanting to see. To see was to have to pursue, and I was done with pursuit. It didn’t matter, I’d lost again.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Now we come to the strangest part of this tale. Did you think the earlier part was strange, what with a desert burial, the appearance of a mourner from afar, a garroting, two mysterious car crashes and an attack by a killer dog? I thought so myself at the time, but strangeness is never in the externals. No, it lies within the motives of man, within my own motives. I have presented myself merely as thuggish writer with none of the finer feelings. Well, that is true. But I certainly have some feelings—inaccurate in purpose, disastrous in consequence, pitiable in nature. I am a good man and a bad man, and the bad part is the best. There’s no challenge in saving a paragon, after all. Pray for me, save my soul.

  * * * *

  My youthful editor, Frye, called me in for a talk, but not at the ten-story pile that made up Scribe headquarters.

  “They don’t want you coming to The Tower,” he told me.

  Imagine that.

  “They don’t quite know what to do with you.”

  Imagine that, too.

  “You aren’t supposed to be carrying a gun on duty, you know. That’s an offense that carries punishment up to and including termination.”

  I snorted, enjoying an iced tea as I surveyed the Valley from the rotating eatery on top of the Hyatt Regency Hotel downtown. In the yellow late-afternoon light Phoenix splashed out to the mountains, palm trees thrusting up from the litter of housing and commercial.

  “Being eaten by a great hulking Doberman is also an offense that carries punishment up to and including termination,” I replied. “Though I suppose it has its consolations. You aren’t forced to go through an exit interview with the Scribe’s Human Resources Department.”

  We rotated, caught a view of the 1920s-era Westward Ho Hotel, the node of Biltmore development near 24th Street and Camelback, the Hayden Flour Mills that tubed up near the beginning of Tempe across the Salt River. The mountains to the south and to the northeast were slumping, low things, salted with gravel and pocked by climbers, or so I imagined. One needs imagination to survive in this part of the world. Frye glanced about as if he feared the other rotating people might be informants.

  “We’re going to say you were taking a personal day,” he said. “Though your private actions reflect on your professional role as a reporter, at least you weren’t acting as an agent of the corporation.”

  Frye had a bad Adam’s apple, always bobbing under stress. His blue eyes bulged when he considered something important. He perspired too much and drank too much and worried too much. He was not really a bad sort, but he was aiming himself right at liver disease and heart disease and depression, not to mention a soul-shattering middle-age crisis and a tendency to fart at awkward moments.

  I sipped iced tea. “How are they going to handle the story?”

  He was drinking Coca-Cola and rum, or some shit like that, while carrying out his duties at five o’clock in the afternoon. That, too, was against regulations, but we all choose our own personal violations. What are the sins of the regulators, I wonder? Ordering Viagra and Vaseline jelly off the Internet in the middle of the workday, when they should be pencilling in the next round of layoffs? The silly bastards.

  “We’ll just play it straight,” he said.

  “That will be a first.”

  “We’ll quote the police but leave a few things out. Good thing you didn’t talk to TV. We’ll say you were at a source’s house when he was attacked by two dogs and you had to take action.”

  “It wasn’t Morrison’s house. He just told me it was his house. It’s his sister’s house and she’s gone, so the cops said. He and his friends were trying to kill me.”

  “Halvorson wants to fire you.”

  The windows had rotated to the west and I fancied I could see all the way to the wave of red-tiled cheese-boxes being built in the foothills of the White Tank Mountains.

  “Well, of course he does, God bless him. How else are you going to stifle the best story this paper has seen in a long time and get back about the business of publishing vital information about buttocks-enhancing surgery and fashions in tongue studs?”

  Frye sucked some ice out of his drink and cracked it between his teeth. I don’t think he even knew he was doing it.

  “He won’t fire you, though,” Frye said. “Not just yet. He doesn’t want to call attention to you. And he doesn’t want you to come into the office and spread your stories around. The corporate big wigs are in town from Minneapolis and he doesn’t want them disturbed. But you’ve got to get down under the radar and stay there.”

  I crunched some ice myself. Pain struck through a molar on the right side down, but I didn’t bother to flinch. I supposed I’d feel worse soon.

  “That’s a damned good idea,” I said. “I’m drifting down to Pinal County, to see if I can find an old friend. What could happen to me there?”

  I’d already gotten that call, you see. Handsome Dan Robles said something was up, and Robles had no imagination at all. That meant I’d better pack my investigative files into the Toyota’s trunk. And clean my Colt.

  * * * *

  By the time you leave the Valley to the east, swing south past the legend-haunted Superstition Mountains, skirt a dead motel and begin to meander south to Florence via Highway 79, you are already in Old Arizona. There are rusty wire fences, yes, and power lines. But the countr
y broadens out and the vegetation is bushy from long years of growth—cholla, saguaro, creosote, paloverde and mesquite. The mountains hang back at the end of the landscape. Ghosts walk the land all the way from here to Tucson. There’s La Llorona, the Weeping Woman, a poor Mexican girl who drowned her two children after being spurned by a rich lover. And Tom Mix, the old-time cowboy star who died when he crashed his 1937 yellow Cord Phaeton in a dry wash. And the sinner Juan Oliveras, known as El Tiradito, “the little castaway.” In the Barrio Viejo of Tucson, a shrine of time-troubled adobe bricks memorializes Oliveras, a sheepherder who fell in love with his mother-in-law in the 1870s and was chopped to death by her husband. Old ghosts. Troubled spirits. And Rhea Montero’s ghost wandering with them.

  The sun was collapsing among the shadows of the arroyos when I slid into Florence, threaded my way through a townscape filled with manufactured homes, ancient Sonoran Style adobe buildings, heavily-porched bungalows and the 1891-vintage American-Victorian courthouse. Downtown I found my destination, a burger joint called Cowboy Meat. Florence is the oldest white settlement in Arizona. Cowboy Meat seemed just as old, but it was charmless. You could see rusty nails loose in their nail-holes in the outside boards, the sidewalk overhang was battered and the inside smelled of new plyboard and excelsior. The few customers looked hungry and wary.

  I found Robles and Daly at a booth near the back. A mixed reaction, here. I got a mumble from Daly and a measured handshake from the deputy. I hadn’t expected Daly to be happy to see me, but I’d hoped for more from Robles. After all, the bastard had called me. But as I settled into my wooden-bench seat, I got the picture. Robles was trying to maintain. He glanced at Daly with obstinacy and hesitation. This was a man stifling his good sense to please a woman. Suddenly I felt a pang of envy.

  “Things are moving, are they?” I said. “We’re about to roll up the murder gang and make a name for ourselves?”

  Robles looked at his food. It wasn’t like him not to meet my eyes.