Joe Crewes did not show at the donut shop the following day. Jack, who hated sitting on hot news, drove out to the Motor Court Inn at 6:30 P.M. There were thousands of motels like it springing up across the country, with the manager's office on one end and a pool out front. Jack found the red Fury parked in the space before room 7A.
A knock brought no response. The room curtains were drawn, but a crack of light shone out. He knocked again, louder. The door opened a quarter-way. Joe's unshaven face hovered in the space, bleary-eyed. He was wearing only a pair of boxer shorts.
"Jack? What—what time is it?"
"Time for your surveillance report."
"Ah …"
Jack stepped past him, into the room. The bed was a mass of wrinkled sheets. On the nightstand stood two bottles of bourbon, one empty. "I can see you're taking your pledge to stay drunk seriously."
"It's not so much."
Jack propped himself on the edge of the bed. "Sit down. You need to hear this."
Joe sat, with effort.
"First off," Jack said, taking the report out of his pocket, "Billy DeFour doesn't look bad. He's got no criminal history, and he's owned that dealership for the past three years. By all accounts, it's a money-maker. On top of that, he's a Rotarian and member of the Kiwanis Club."
Joe brightened. "I told you. I told you he was legitimate."
"Let me finish. I wouldn't peg Billy as your typical long con operator; they're usually fly-by-night types, and he's got roots in this community. The problem is the 'Dallas business associates' he mentioned. Have you met any of them?"
"No."
"Well, I think I spotted one the other day. He came to visit with Billy in his office. This isn't solid, mind you, but the man's description matches a gent named Bunny Ziegler. Ever hear of him?"
Joe shook his head.
"He's part of what's known as 'The Dallas Mob.' They're not Sicilian mafia, but a group of crooks protected by white-collar businessmen. Oil money, mostly. Untouchable. They've got their hands in a lot of dirty dealing throughout the state, including running confidence scams."
"But you don't know for a fact this same fella you saw is Ziegler?"
"Not for a fact. There aren't too many five-foot, waggly-eared guys driving around in black Cadillacs, though."
"So you're saying Billy is a criminal."
"I'm saying he's associating with them. He might not realize the full extent of what he's doing. Likely, he's in over his head."
"I don't buy it. This is all speculation."
"I didn't figure you'd like it."
Joe rose from his chair, the zig-zag scar turning chalk-white. "What do you want me to do? Walk away from this whole opportunity because some hobo detective thinks it might be crooked? Is that it?"
"Calm down. You paid me to—"
"I'm sorry I did. I'm sorry I ever brought you into this." Joe's hands were curling into fists, though he didn't seem aware of it.
"Whoa, now. I don't want to make a habit of punching out clients. You can do whatever the hell you want with the information." Jack got off the bed and took the hand-written report from his pocket. He laid it on the sheets. "If and when you're ever sober again, you might want to have a look at that."
The door to the bathroom swung open, so sudden both Jack and Joe startled. Rosie stood in the doorway. She had a towel wrapped around her slender frame, and her wet, black hair fell in slick curves over her shoulders. She stalked into the bedroom. The muscles along her supple legs tensed and rippled.
"I … ah … didn't know you were in the middle of something." Jack eased for the door. The near-naked woman's gravitas felt threatening, and he became acutely aware of the Colt in its shoulder holster. He doubted if this was a Freudian phenomenon. Rosie's eyes leveled with his as she leaned over the bed and snatched up the report. She tore it into long shreds.
"Joe told me what you are, Mr. Laramie."
What you are. Said it like he was a vampire.
"I'm not ashamed of what I do." Not always, anyway. Jack reached a hand toward the doorknob. Joe couldn't seem to look at him, all of a sudden.
"Joe no longer requires your services," she said. "If you have any further contact, he'll file harassment charges."
"Is that his decision, or yours?"
"We discussed it."
"Then he should be able to tell me himself."
Joe mumbled something.
"Tell him," Rosie said.
"I said, get the hell out of here, Jack." The lightning-bolt scar wasn't so livid now. "I don't need you."
"Fair enough." Jack tried to ignore the triumphant look dawning on Rosie's face as he slipped out. He wanted, very badly, to slam the door shut, but years of working with people in tight situations exerted its control. He closed the door with a faint click. Almost immediately, whispers echoed back and forth on the other side.
Jack steadied his hands and fired a Lucky. It was none of his business what Joe ended up doing. If he wanted to be led around by his pecker, so be it. The kid would likely pickle himself before he reached thirty, anyway. Jack wasn't some college-trained analyst, to pull people out of their neuroses, and he sure as hell wasn't Joe's father.
"Adios," he told the big red Fury. Case closed. He climbed into his own humble car and pulled out of the Motor Court's lot.
* * *
The next morning, Jack drove down to Tyler to see Willie Clementine, a bail-bondsman he sometimes partnered with. They spent three unsuccessful days trying to track a fugitive, and Willie, feeling sour, got into a fist-fight with a trucker outside a bar. Jack had to pull him off. That only made Willie madder, and the two decided to part company.
On the midnight drive back from Tyler to Kilgore, Jack caught sight of Joe's Plymouth in the opposite lane. He glimpsed him for only a second as their speeding cars passed. Joe's face showed no recognition; his eyes seemed glazed by the highway, and his head lolled a little. There was no one else in the Fury's cab. Jack wondered what kind of business had him on the road at this hour. Probably drunk and roaming aimlessly, following the white lines for a while. By morning he'd either be in a ditch or back at the Motor Court Inn.
That Rosie's sure taking good care of you, kid.
Though he didn't want to, Jack recalled the early months following his repatriation to the States. He'd experienced them through a thick sheath of alcohol, doted on by his mother in the four-room ranch house where he'd grown up. She'd spent days feeding him whole milk and fried eggs, trying to pack weight back on his skinny frame. At night, he'd sneak into town and use his separation pay to buy bottom-shelf whiskey, which he always drank alone, in his bedroom.
"If your father was still here," his mother would tell him, "he could talk some sense into you."
Veranda Jane Laramie had never married the man she later confessed was Jack's father. "A drifter," she'd sometimes called him, when feeling charitable. He'd apparently died of a heart attack two months before Jack began flight school. As a veteran of the Great War, the old man would've doubtless had wisdom to share; at the least, he could put Jack's suffering into some kind of context. But you couldn't seek counsel from a ghost. Eventually, when Jack had hit one hundred sixty-five pounds, his mother smashed all his whiskey bottles on the front porch, and gave him a train ticket to Lubbock. It was just the medicine he'd needed.
Without his mother … he didn't like to think about what could've happened. Maybe he would've pulled out on his own. Maybe not. There was still plenty of time for him to make a wreck of his life; become a wandering, broken man. But that'd be his own damn fault, not the war's.
Who do you got, Joe? Who's pulling for you?
The question haunted him all the way back to the Starlite.
* * *
By the last week of October, nights in the horse trailer were getting cold enough for Jack to break out his Pendleton blanket. The paper warned of early snow. It also ran a small add in the back about a promotional party for the Bunker Pines Project, sponsored by the V
FW and the Military Order of the Purple Heart. All veterans were welcome.
Maybe not this particular veteran, Jack thought. But I'm going anyway.
Sunday evening he put on his best clothes: a charcoal gray blazer and his black Stetson. The Ruptured Duck pin he'd received for surviving WWII rode on the hat's brim. In his right pocket he slipped a roll of quarters bound by a cardboard tube. The Colt's usual rounds were swapped out for dum-dums, and just because he was feeling nasty, Jack put a straight-razor in his right boot.
Now he was ready.
The ad in the paper included a little map, but he remembered his way clear enough. Speeding down the dark back roads, watching the pine forests grow thicker, Jack had plenty of time to talk himself out of this non-paying gig. There were lots of other ways he could be spending his evening. Playing chess with Ronnie, for example. Or catching up on his laundry. Hell, he could try to make some time with that sloe-eyed waitress who always gave him extra pancakes, at the diner off I-20.
But he kept driving.
He passed the old billboard. Someone had given it a coat of fresh paint. BUNKER PINES PROJECT, NEXT RIGHT. He slowed, caught a flickering in the near-distance. A stooped man, waving a flashlight. Jack rolled down the passenger-side window as he pulled up. An anemic face leaned in. "Are you lookin' for the party, mister?"
"Sure am."
"Just down this road a-spell." The man gestured with his light toward a familiar break in the pines.
"Thanks," Jack said. He got a sharp salute and returned it, before bumping along the dirt path into the clearing.
A second flashlight-waver directed him to park among a ragged line of cars. Too many to count in the dark. Some thirty yards away an orange bonfire blazed, and a pair of floodlights had been set up. Jack got out. He pulled his hat low over his forehead, wondering what would happen if he was recognized. Joe or Billy wouldn't be a problem, but that Rosie …
He drifted into the crowd, thick with married couples and single military-types around his own age. Beer bottles jutted from galvanized tubs; people were helping themselves, liberally. Near the bonfire, a grill had been set up, and a trestle table offered sizzling hot-links and brisket. The smell drew Jack. He was contemplating grabbing a paper plate when he saw Joe Crewes out the corner of his eye.
Reflexively, he stepped behind a fat man shoveling down potato salad. Joe hadn't seen him. He had that same glazed look Jack had glimpsed several days before. Wearing Marine dress blues, a Bronze Star prominent on his lapel, Joe was going through the motions of greeting people, shaking hands, though he looked like he'd rather be somewhere else. Jack wondered how liquored up he must've gotten for this.
He didn't want any confrontations. Not just yet. When Joe started making his way toward him, he turned on his boot heel and headed deeper into the crowd—almost bumping into Billy DeFour. The salesman had his back to him, glad-handing a middle-aged couple and going on about Bunker Pines.
"We've got offers on nearly every lot here," Billy was saying. "Already hit our investment goals and it's not even nine o'clock. With this kind of money we can start the ground-breaking in a couple days, get a few units dug before winter sets in. If you're serious, I'd recommend making a down payment now."
Jack hurried in the opposite direction. The entrance to the bunker lay under a pavilion about ten yards to his right. He made for that. Drawn-out saxophone riffs echoed from the hatch. He climbed down through a haze of cigarette smoke into the living room, packed tight with bodies. A small clearing had formed around the coffee table, and atop it, Eva Brown and Rosie Tokyo danced to a bump-and-grind playing on the Hi Fi. Eva wore ostrich feathers and Rosie a blue-sequined bikini. The blonde gyrated all over the place, waving her arms, undulating, jiggling. Rosie had to move in tight circles to avoid being pushed off the table.
A hand slapped down on Jack's shoulder. He tensed, but the flushed face that thrust close was unfamiliar.
"What a party, huh? Wonder if them fillies come with the bunkers." The man leered for a moment, before returning his attention to Jack. "Let me show you somethin', right over here."
He clutched at Jack's sleeve and led him to a poster board taped to the wall. An aerial photo, blown up, showed the clearing for the subdivision, hemmed on all sides by pines. Someone had used a black marker to draw individually numbered lots, and almost everyone had a colored pin sticking out of it.
"That's mine." The drunk stabbed his finger down on lot 14. "I had the money, I'd buy two side by side and have 'em dig me an underground swimming pool, but I gotta live within my means."
Jack glanced past him, down an adjoining hallway. A tall figure in a sharkskin jacket stood outside the door to the master bedroom. Jack recognized his pug-nose: it was the goon he'd spotted at Billy DeFour's dealership.
"Excuse me." He nudged the drunk aside. His right hand slipped into his coat pocket as he headed down the hall. The heavy saw him coming and squared his considerable shoulders. He had the empty eyes of a sniper to go along with his brawler's face.
"Sorry buddy, but I can't let you back here."
"Well, hell," Jack said in his hick voice, pretending to be tipsy. "I was told I could have a complete tour of the place." He lurched forward as if off-balance. At the same time, his right fist, curled tight around the roll of quarters, shot out of his pocket. The punch landed with extra ballast, square against the big man's solar plexus. Size and conditioning could only protect a fighter so much. He tipped backward and slumped down the metal wall, wheezing.
Jack shouldered the door; it wasn't locked. He half-sprawled into a modest bedroom lit by a pair of floor lamps. On the edge of the bed sat a very short man in a double-breasted panama, cradling an accountant's ledger. He had a pencil tucked behind one of his oversized ears. With his height, his Dumbo silhouette, and a full head of silver-white, curly hair, he might have seemed comical. But there was nothing funny in the utter flatness of his gaze. He showed no surprise at Jack's sudden appearance. His hand snaked inside his jacket.
"Huh-uh." Jack hauled his Colt faster than Tom Mix on a hot day. His thumb worked the hammer with an ominous click. "Keep 'em where I can see 'em, Mr. Ziegler."
The child-sized hand came out of the panama, empty.
Jack waved his gun toward the door. "Any second now, your bodyguard's going to recover and want to come rushing in here. Tell him it's a bad idea."
Without hesitation, Ziegler called out: "Scavo, stay put. Don't do anything stupid." His voice grated like two cinderblocks scraping together.
"Good. Now, I'm not here to hurt you, Mr. Ziegler."
"Bunny, please."
"Bunny. I just want a moment of your valuable time." Despite being on the good side of the gun, Jack found himself talking fast. "Normally, whatever's going on here at Bunker Pines wouldn't be any of my business—"
"And what is your business, Mr …?"
"Not important. What's important is this: you've recruited a young veteran named Joe Crewes. He's a lush, and too impressionable for his own good, but he's a friend of mine."
"And?"
"I don't want him hurt."
Ziegler arched a white eyebrow. "That's it?"
"Pretty much."
"Let me see if I understand correctly. You barge into a legitimate business gathering, assault one of my employees, threaten me with an antique six-shooter, and make vague allegations of a criminal enterprise. You do all that, to tell me not to hurt a man I don't even know."
"Joe Crewes. Yeah, that's about the size of it. Only in Texas," Ziegler said, shaking his head.
"We're an uppity bunch," Jack agreed. He nodded toward the ledger. "I heard some of the suckers talking out there, so I know you've already taken them for a lot of money. When it all folds, I don't want Joe holding the bag."
"Are you threatening me?"
"Let's call it a friendly request." Ziegler closed his hands over the ledger. He looked about as worried as a houseplant. Jack, by contrast, had sweat slicking down the sides of his temples
, stinging his eyes.
"You've made your point," Ziegler said. "Now I'll make mine. I want you off these grounds in five minutes. If I ever see you again, I won't hesitate to have you killed in the most creative manner I can imagine. Poured concrete is a personal favorite, given my contacts in the construction industry. Now go."
Jack went.
He holstered the Colt as he stepped out through the doorway, past Scavo. The heavy was still wheezing, clutching at his stomach.
"He'll beat me for this," he whispered. "You're gonna wish you'd knifed me, instead."
Jack tipped his Stetson. "Partner, I'm wishing that already."
* * *
"Check and mate. You want another game? I've still got twenty minutes before I have to call in."
Ronnie Baum had just beaten him for the third time, even after offering a pawn and move handicap. They were back in Jack's regular booth at the Starlite, surrounded by the comforting smells of grease, dark roast, and swirling nicotine. Cold night air seeped through the window. Jack figured he was playing so poorly because the previous evening still had him rattled.
"Let me get a jacket, first," he said, pausing to glare at Drabek, asleep at his post behind the counter. The old cheapskate had explained he never turned the heater on until November.
"Hurry back. I'm on a streak, here."
Jack went out through the shop's rear door, gritting his teeth at the unseasonal cold-snap. He stopped when he saw a square of white paper taped to the horse trailer's gate. How long had that been there? He didn't remember seeing it when he got back from lunch at noon, and he hadn't heard any cars pulling around to the shop's rear lot.
Ah, you're getting too jumpy. He tore the paper off and read it by the streetlight's faint glow.
Jack, I need to talk to you. Something's going on. Meet me at the motor court, same room as before.
The Girls of Bunker Pines (The Drifter Detective Book 3) Page 4
