Twenty to midnight. I took two more hits from the flask and went back into the diner.
Big Belly had finished his meal and left. I waited while she rang up a middle-aged tourist couple with fanny packs, then asked if she got off at midnight.
“Why? You going to buy me a cuppa and tell me you’re an international spy?”
“I started off on the wrong foot. I’ll make it cappuccino if it’ll make up for being a jerk.”
She thought that over. She frowned more attractively than most women smiled. I had an almost overpowering urge to see what her smile looked like. She was as hard to put away as the flask, which I had now in my hip pocket.
“I’m on till four,” she said. “But I’m past due for a break. Coffee’s fine, but I wouldn’t mind a slice of pie.”
She asked the cook to cover the counter and brought the coffees and a wedge of lemon meringue to a booth in the smoking section, away from the others. I produced the flask and when she nodded I trickled some of it into both cups. We tapped them together in an unspoken toast.
She made a face when she tasted it. “I suppose it’s good whiskey, but you don’t drink it in coffee for the taste, do you?”
“My old man only drank it this way when he had a cold.”
“You’re not going to talk about him again, are you?”
“That subject’s closed.”
We shared small talk, or what passed for it between strangers late at night. Her name was Elizabeth; she preferred Beth, but she had Liz scripted on her uniform blouse and said I could call her that as long as she was dressed for this job. She was working two jobs to earn enough to pay a lawyer to get custody of her ten-year-old daughter. She was a recovering meth addict. Her lawyer said if she could stay clean for another six months she had a better chance in court. “So much for budding romance,” she said, forking pie into her mouth.
“If I go on hitting the stuff the way I’ve been lately, we’ll both be in the same boat.” I added more to my cup. She frowned again when I offered to freshen hers, then nodded. The coffee was still hot; the fumes entered my nose and speeded up the process. I had to close one eye to see only one of her.
“Conscience,” she said. “I guess you have to anesthetize yourself to make a clean job of it.”
I couldn’t tell if she was needling me or if she was really interested. I asked her what her other job was.
“Not as glamorous as this. Tell me about some of the people you’ve killed.”
I looked at her, closing one eye. Her mouth twitched at the corners. It was going to be one of those conversations. In the same vein I told her about Omaha and then Sioux Falls, that bitched-up job that had almost got me pinched. I’d spent a nervous day maneuvering myself back into position to make it good. I was careful to speak hypothetically, spinning a story to keep the lady’s interest.
I put away the flask, but by then I wasn’t paying as much attention as I should have. I told her what I was working on, an open contract; a hundred and fifty grand to the man who made an example of a mouthy errand boy who’d blabbed enough in court to take down a chunk of the East Coast and put him in the Witness Protection Program. But Anderson was a grifter who couldn’t resist the temptation to turn a dishonest dollar even if it brought attention and he had to be relocated under yet another identity. At present he was delivering office furniture from Cincinnati to L.A. and back, with a new face courtesy of the taxpayers to keep him from being recognized in case of a chance encounter with a former acquaintance. I’d started out careful, but somewhere along the way I stopped being hypothetical and mentioned the fact that Anderson always put in at that truck stop and was due there in a little while.
“Do you use a gun?”
“I have, but it makes a lot of noise. A knife’s better for close work, and you know right away if you made it good. Also it’s cheaper to replace when you leave it at the scene, with the prints wiped off, and you don’t get jammed up if the cops find one on you. A lot of truckers carry buck knives for quick repairs.”
I heard myself then, and it sobered me up in a hurry. Then she chuckled, shaking her head, and the smile turned out to have been worth waiting for.
“You sure do sling the bull.” She finished her pie and slid away the plate. “I ought to dump my coffee in your lap. So why am I not doing that?”
I took out my pack and lit us both, relieved. “Maybe I’m the first guy you ever met in this place didn’t think pushing a rig was the most romantic job in America. It’s boring as hell is what it is. You make up stories just to keep from aiming straight at a bridge abutment.”
“It’s pretty clever, especially that bit about being able to move around being a big advantage. You ought to write for the movies.”
“You need to know somebody,” I said. “And it helps to know how to spell.”
She laughed. I grinned. It was going to be all right. Then the cook made a racket behind the counter and that meant her break was over. She thanked me for the pie and the entertainment and I got up like a gentleman when she rose. She pressed against me briefly; probably an accident, but try telling that to my physical reaction. I was going to have to stop in on my way back across country.
Back behind the wheel I stuck the flask in the glove compartment and fired up the diesel. The Anderson job was out, at least at that location. If I was to get a jump on all the others looking for a big payday I’d have to follow him when he left, run him off some lonely section of road, and do the job with a jack handle, or anything but a knife. It would help that he wasn’t going by the name Anderson and that the feds would make sure it didn’t get out that a witness in their care came to a bad end. If Liz read about it, she’d think it was an accident and wouldn’t connect it with me.
One thing was sure. I needed to save the whiskey from then on for after the job, as a treat instead of a stimulus to action.
Anderson pulled up half an hour late, his company rig plastered with mud from some detour down a dirt road, probably in search of a craps game. The man had no pride, in his workmanship or anything else. The cargo of Arrow shirts I was carrying may have been just a cover, but I’d deliver them on time. Apart from ridding the world of a rotten snitch, I’d be doing some dispatcher the favor of not having to can him.
He went into the diner, looking as sloppy as the way he approached his duties. I remembered what Liz had said about there being two types of truck, the big-bellied kind and the kind that looked like Randy Travis. I adjusted the rearview for a look at the stalwart chin, the granite squint, the hair cut short at the temples and left long in front to tumble go-to-hell fashion over the forehead. She’d felt firm and warm pressing against me. I wanted another pull at the flask but I tamped down the temptation with a smoke.
I dozed off, I think. I jumped, alert all at once and cursing, but Anderson’s filthy tractor-trailer stood where he’d left it and the clock on the dash told me only five minutes had passed. At least I’d had the presence of mind to ditch the butt in the ashtray, where it had smoked itself out. I didn’t remember doing it. Blackouts are a good sign to cut back.
I turned on a late-night talk show for company: the war, the economy, yet another scandal on Capitol Hill. If I’d ever had reason to regret the path my life had taken, self-esteem was only a dial switch away. I put in Johnny Cash and tried to keep up with him on the Rock Island Line.
Forty minutes passed, an hour. I pictured Anderson lingering over a plate of slop, maybe chatting up Liz. I hoped to hell he wasn’t trying to impress her with his career in crime.
I got restless after ninety minutes. His desks and crap were due in Milwaukee by noon. I didn’t picture him highballing it to make his deadline. He was exceeding even the margin of ineptitude I’d drawn up for him. I ditched the cigarette I’d started and stepped down to investigate. He didn’t know me from Donald Duck. I could sit slurping coffee on the stool next to his and he’d think I was just another gear-cruncher, feeling all superior because he was just slumming from the wise-guy
life.
The place was jumping. Just in the time I’d been out of the loop the lot had filled with Macks and Peterbilts and the odd Winnebago, and Liz was too busy filling mugs and plunking down bowls of chili to notice me. There were more beer guts than Travises crowding the counter, but Anderson wasn’t among them, nor at any of the booths, where the knights of the road sat belching onions and air-shifting down steep mountain grades for their bored audiences. I went down the narrow tiled corridor that led to the showers and toilets.
Anderson wasn’t in any of them, not even the ladies’ room, where a schnook like him might wander into without stopping to read the sign on the door.
The only door left was marked EMPLOYEES ONLY.
He lay there on the floor among the mops and cartons of toilet paper and industrial-sized mustard dispensers, on his face in the middle of a stain that didn’t look like anything but what it was. I bent to feel his neck for a pulse, but didn’t get that far. The knife stuck out hilt-deep from just below his shoulder blade, flat, with a brass heel and a printed woodgrain on the steel handle. I groped for the buck knife in my left pants pocket, purely from reflex. It wasn’t there.
The door flew open and the rest was shouting and shoving and my feet kicked out from under me and two hundred pounds of county law kneeling on my back and the muzzle of a big sidearm tickling the back of my neck. I heard my rights and felt my shoulders pulled almost out of their sockets and the cold hard heavy clamp of the cuffs on my wrists.
I kept my mouth shut, credit me that. I was as sober as a Shaker, and met every pair of eyes that locked with mine during the hustle through the crowded diner and out the door toward the radio car, where some kind of soul who cared whether I suffered a concussion pressed down my head with an iron palm, shoved me into the back seat, and slammed the door.
The lot was desert-bright, sheriff’s spotlights adding candlepower to the pole lamps, the night air throbbing with sirens grinding down and radios muttering and spectators’ chatter and the monotonous drone of official voices ordering the crowd to disperse, go home to your families, nothing to see here. I sat staring at the gridded polyurethane sheet that separated me from the front seat, where a fullback in uniform sat on one haunch with a foot on the pavement, murmuring into a mike, lights twinkling on the Christmas-tree console that divided the bucket seats in front.
When I got tired of looking at that I stared at the carpeted floor at my feet. I hadn’t a chance with a not-guilty plea. The cops would track me through the ICC log and place me at the scene of every hit I’d performed. A good prosecutor would find a way to bring that out in court, even if my knife in Anderson’s back wasn’t enough. (“Someone picked your pocket? That’s your defense?”) You can’t argue with the record. I was pinned as tightly as my old man in his bar, where customers kept going in and never came out.
I raised my eyes to meet those of the curious pressing in for a closer look, before they were manhandled out of the way by the hard men who had taken over the truck stop. One of the pairs of eyes belonged to Liz, looking less tired now, with that smile on her face as she made a gun with her finger and shot me with it.
I didn’t know what it meant at first. Our conversation had taken place on the other side of the flask and came drifting back in pieces. One piece slowed down long enough for me to reel in.
Her other job wasn’t as glamorous as this.
And as she faded back into the crowd, I heard the rest, as clearly as if she were still speaking: “You don’t have to move around. I see just as many opportunities as you do just staying in one place.”
The Pioneer Strain
This was my second published short story. Even when I was young, I felt a closer bond to members of the generation ahead of mine than my own. I know Molly Dodd better than some close friends of my youth. (I came up with the name years before TV introduced The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, a character who bore no resemblance to mine.)
• • •
“A rifle!” Vernon Thickett stared up at his fellow deputy from behind a steaming hot bowl of Maud Baxter’s notorious Red River Chili and cursed.
Earl Briggs nodded. He was a lean country boy, leaner even than Thickett, and with his shock of untrained wheat-colored hair and freckle-spattered face he looked far too young to be wearing a star on his buff shirt. “That’s what I said, Verne. She’s got a rifle and Lord knows how many cartridges up there and she threatened to blow a hole in her nephew’s nice tailor-made suit if he didn’t clear off her land.”
“Did he take her advice?”
A quick grin flashed across the younger deputy’s face. “You know Leroy, Verne. What do you think?”
“I think he took her advice. Where is he now?”
“Out on Route Forty-four. He called the office from one of those free telephones the highway department put in last spring.”
“Madder’n a half-squashed bee, I expect.” Thickett made a face at his untouched meal and pushed himself to his feet. He towered over Earl by a head. “Get in touch with Luke and Dan and tell ’em to get over to Molly’s place on the double and wait for me. No sirens. We don’t want any state troopers in on this one. Then bring my car around in front of the office while I grab a gun. That’s the only thing the old girl understands.” When Earl had left to carry out his orders Thickett snatched a slice of bread from the table, spooned a quantity of chili onto it, slapped another slice on top of that and, nodding to hefty Maud Baxter behind the counter, strode toward the door of the diner with the sandwich in his mouth.
He didn’t say a word to Earl all the way out to Molly’s place. Verne Thickett was not the law in Schuylerville, Oklahoma, but as long as Sheriff Willis was in the hospital recuperating from a gall bladder operation he was the next best thing. Until now his biggest headache had been the kids who kept stealing the outhouse from behind Guy Dawson’s place and hauling it up onto the roof of whatever schoolteacher happened to be the target of their hostilities that week. As for Molly Dodd, she was trouble enough at any time, but the kind of trouble she usually caused seldom involved the law. Molly Dodd armed with a rifle was one problem he wouldn’t wish on his worst enemy.
For the past two years she and her nephew, Leroy Cooper, had been engaged in a bitter legal battle over the ownership of the 160 acres she lived on up in the Osage Hills. The Great Midwestern Bank and Trust Company, of which Leroy was the Schuylerville branch manager, claimed the land in lieu of payment on the loan it had made to Molly’s late husband back in 1969, while she maintained that he had paid it off shortly before his death in 1973. Molly, now in her late seventies, had been part of Schuylerville for so long that most of the town had sided with her throughout the complex legal maneuvering, but that had come to an end three weeks before when the county court of appeals found in favor of the bank and issued an order for Molly Dodd’s eviction.
Thickett berated himself for not anticipating the present situation. The pioneer strain in Molly was too strong to allow her to give in easily. He remembered the story his father had told of the time she’d come home early from a visit to find the house dark and her best friend’s flivver parked in the driveway. Instead of going in and shooting Clyde and his lover—which, according to the moral code of the time, would have seemed the natural thing to do—she had simply climbed into the shiny new car, driven it into the next county, and sold it. The story had it that Clyde ended the affair soon afterward, and there was no record in the sheriff’s office of a car being stolen that year. True or not, the account was worthy of Molly’s reputation for audacity and ingenuity.
It was certainly a funnier story than the one currently unfolding up in the hills.
Leroy Cooper’s sedan was parked at the side of the private road that led to the house at the top of the hill. A pair of scout cars were parked across from it at different angles. Earl ground the car to a dusty halt behind the civilian vehicle and they got out.
Cooper separated himself from the two deputies with whom he’d been conversing and
came forward. “I want the woman arrested, Deputy! Do you know she actually threatened to shoot me? I barely got out of there with my life!”
“Take it easy, Leroy.” Thickett slid his Stetson to the back of his head. “Do you mind telling me what you were doing up here in the first place?”
“I merely reminded her to vacate the premises before midnight tonight. That’s the deadline set by the court. The bulldozers come in tomorrow.”
“That’s our job, Leroy. Why didn’t you call us first?”
The banker looked as if Thickett had just asked him to scrub out a spittoon with his monogrammed shirt. “This is a family matter, Deputy. There seemed no reason to involve the law.”
“It’s a little late, isn’t it?—What’ve we got, Luke?”
Luke Madden, the older of the two deputies already on the scene, was a big man with a bulldog jaw and hair the color of dull steel. He had been a deputy when Wilbur Underhill stormed through the area in 1933, and his prized possession was a framed newspaper clipping that described his inconclusive shoot-out with the outlaw. He spoke with a Blue Diamond matchstick clamped between his teeth. “That cabin’s butted smack up against the side of the hill. There’s only one way in or out by car, and this here’s it. If you and Earl and Dan can keep her busy in front, Verne, I can sneak around the long way and take her from behind.”
“How are you going to get in, through the chimney?” The chief deputy squinted up at the gabled structure atop the hill. “I reckon we’ll just go on up and give her the chance to surrender.”
The four-car caravan took off with Earl and Thickett in the lead and Leroy Cooper timidly bringing up the rear in his gleaming sedan. They were rounding the final turn before the house when a shot rang out and a bullet starred the windshield between the two deputies in front. Earl yanked the wheel hard to the right. The unmarked cruiser jumped the bank and came to a jarring stop in a bed of weeds at the side of the road. They both spilled out Thickett’s side of the car and crouched there, guns drawn.
Desperate Detroit and Stories of Other Dire Places Page 13
