File on a Missing Redhead

by Lou Cameron

  “That’s what I’m going to find out,” I said.

  I got back in my cruiser, made a turn onto the highway, and started to cross. Just then I spotted Gurney, the trooper I’d sent to clear the area, trudging back along the shoulder of the road. I tooted the horn and said, “Get in. I’ve got a job for you.”

  “Sir?” He blinked. Then he nodded, walked around the rear of the cruiser, and got in the bucket seat beside me. I told him to fasten his safety belt and stepped on the gas. We shot across the highway through a break in the traffic and bounded off all four wheels as we left the shoulder on the opposite side.

  “What the hell!” gasped Gurney, grabbing for his hat as we bounced through the greasewood at thirty miles an hour.

  “Used to hunt rabbits out on these flats,” I said, swerving to miss a thick clump of yucca. “Unless my memory’s playing tricks, there’s a dry wash just ahead that runs into Las Vegas Creek.”

  “But, Lieutenant,” Gurney protested, “we’re on the wrong side of the road. If the guy’s crawling through the greasewood on his gut, he’s on the other side. Same as the cabin.”

  “Nobody’s going to crawl any farther than he has to in this heat,” I said. “He’ll hit the dry wash, even if he doesn’t already know it’s there. It’s eight to ten feet deep and paved with packed sand. A guy could stand up and run along the bottom without anyone seeing him from the motel. I imagine that’s what he’s doing right now, if he’s not in the cabin.”

  “But,” the trooper said in that patient voice one reserves for drunks and retarded children, “if the wash is on the other side of the road, what the hell are we doing on this side?”

  “I said it runs into Vegas Creek,” I explained, slowing down. “Don’t you guys ever look at a road map while you’re driving from one waitress to another?”

  “Sure I look at maps.” Gurney frowned. “The creek’s a few miles north of here and—Son of a bitch! You mean the wash crosses the road?”

  “Through a culvert,” I said, stopping the cruiser and opening the door on my side. I checked my Cobra and added, “Keep the noise down. The culvert’s directly to your left. The wash is a few yards dead ahead.”

  Gurney looked towards the highway, a city block to our right as we walked east through the greasewood and whispered, “How come so far, Lieutenant? Why don’t we lay for him right where he’ll come popping out from under the road?”

  “And have him pop right back under it?” I asked. “Careful, this is it.”

  I led him between a couple of clumps of chaparral and hunkered down on the rim of the dry wash. From where we were, you could see the round black opening of the culvert staring at us from the sunbaked clay of the highway bank. A ribbon of dead, flat, brown sand wound between the eight-foot walls of the wash like a cinder track. There were no footprints in the sand.

  I said, “He hasn’t passed this point yet, Gurney. I want you to edge along the rim and get closer to the culvert. If he comes out, hold your fire and don’t say anything until he’s passed you. I’ll try and stop him here.”

  “And we’ll have him boxed like a rabbit in a bowling alley.” Gurney grinned, his annoyance at me evaporating now that I was dealing him in on an arrest that would look good on his record.

  He moved away in a low, crouching run. He knew what he was doing. He moved towards the highway until he was just within earshot, and dropped out of sight in the scrub.

  All we had to do now was wait.

  All a cop has to do most of his life is wait. You wait in cars. You wait in squad rooms. You wait and wait and wish to Christ something would happen. And, most times, nothing does.

  If you’re a good cop, you keep at it. You stifle the boredom and manage to stay awake, and sometime, somewhere, the waiting pays off and you’re in line for a promotion, if you’re not dead.

  If you’re a bad cop, you get tired of waiting. You tell yourself you joined up for some action, for Chrissake, and learn to goof off. You take to reading magazines on a stakeout. You find places along your beat where you can stretch out and screw the dog without the sergeant knowing you’re doing it. You learn about an alcove in a second-rate hotel where a guy can join a pinochle game and kill an hour or two on a cold, rainy night. You make a science out of long coffee breaks and get to know a string of waitresses who like to flirt with a cop who’s killing time. And if you’re careful, you’ll never get caught. You’ll put in your time and get your pension and live to tell a lot of lies to your grandchildren.

  But you won’t make many arrests.

  It was hot out there on the edge of the wash. Hot enough when you were up and moving around; murder when you were hunkered down between a couple of chaparral clumps that smelled like cobwebs and baked Vaporub. Hot enough to make a guy wish he’d gone into some other business.

  He was taking a long time, if he was coming at all. That was a thought. Wouldn’t I look like a silly ass if it turned out he was in the cabin all this time?

  Figuring he’d crawled as far as the wash on the other side of the road, how long would it have taken him? He’d had half an hour before I’d gotten to the motel. Maybe twenty minutes since then. A guy could crawl maybe a mile and a half an hour. Maybe slower, if he didn’t know where the hell he was crawling to, or circling.

  I shot a glance up into the cobalt-blue sky. There were two… three… four buzzards in view. There were always buzzards up there this time of the year. But they were scattered, ranging the desert for anything larger than a mouse that might be dead, dying, or in trouble.

  I don’t know how they can tell, but buzzards can. They know right away if a sheep, a cow, or a man below them is in trouble. You can lie still, sunbathing by a pool, or even out on the desert, and they’ll ignore you. Start breathing hard, or feeling sorry for yourself, and the black-winged bastards start circling over you like shadows of doom. Comes in handy when you’re looking for lost kids. Buzzards like kids. Dead kids. But we find a couple alive, every year, by watching the sky while we’re searching the desert.

  Okay. If Webster was wandering around out here in the sun like me and that other idiot, Trooper Gurney, he was in good enough shape for the buzzards to ignore.

  Or he was back in the cabin.

  What if they’d already taken him? I was too far from the cruiser to hear a call on the radio. I’d parked it back there so it couldn’t be seen from either the highway or the culvert. What if they were trying to call me right this minute? I hadn’t told them where I’d be. They might be driving into town with the guy while Gurney and I fried our brains out for nothing.

  I’ll count to a thousand, I thought. If he doesn’t show by the time I count to a thousand, I’ll chance a quick run back to the cruiser. Gurney will spot him if he comes out in the time it takes to radio our position.

  I counted to a thousand. Slow. Then I counted to a thousand again. I looked at my watch. Was it possible? We’d only been out here for half an hour.

  How long should we wait? How long should a cop wait before he gives the whole thing a miss and knocks off for the day?

  If he knows his business, he waits until he’s relieved. Or until something happens. But nobody was coming to relieve us, and it didn’t look like anything was going to happen.

  There was a dry rustle in the brush behind me. It sounded like a lizard. Or a snake.

  Too hot for snakes, I told myself. Too hot for anything but a lizard or a dumb cop.

  I started to look at my watch again. But I didn’t. Clock watching can drive you out of your skull, and the sun was doing enough all by itself. The air was too dry for my sweat to bother me. But it wasn’t cooling me worth a damn as it poured out of every pore and evaporated. I stared at the culvert through the shimmering heat waves and wondered how Gurney was making out. For all I knew, he’d keeled over in this heat, the way I was figuring to do at the rate things were going.

  Maybe, I thought, I ought to slip down to him and see how he was. He hadn’t let out a peep since leaving me, and if h
e’d had a heat stroke he’d need help. That crazy bastard who called himself Joe Webster wasn’t coming this way. Nobody was coming this way. We were baking ourselves to death for nothing.

  There was a flash of movement in the mouth of the culvert. I stared at it, wondering if it was my imagination. I saw it again. A blur of pink that winked on and off like a dim signal light. It was a human face. It had come out into the sunlight a moment and popped back into the culvert like a gopher sticking its head out of its hole.

  He’s spotted us, I thought. Then I realized that was impossible. Impossible unless Gurney had his big fat face hanging out over the rim of the wash. But there was no way for me to check. And the culvert was too far for my pistol.

  If I’d brought the AR-15, I could have nailed him from where I was. I could have put the wicked little bastard on full automatic and blown him out the other end of the hole.

  But one slug from an AR-15 can kill a man if he takes it anywhere in the trunk. The hydrostatic shock can knock him cold if you hit him in the hand. I didn’t like to use anything like that unless I had to. I’d seen what a needle-nosed AR-15 slug could do to human flesh as it ricocheted off a bone and keyholed on through like a baby buzz saw.

  The guy was trigger-happy. Maybe nuts. But so far he hadn’t killed anyone we knew of. Our job was to sit on him and hold him for the head shrinkers in the white coats. A burst of automatic fire was hardly the shock therapy a psychiatrist would prescribe.

  The face came to the culvert mouth again. He was still making like a gopher in the middle of a putting green. He hadn’t spotted either of us or he’d have scooted out the back way. He was just being a very cautious gopher. The kind that sniffs around for the grounds keeper before he comes out to nibble the grass.

  The man in the culvert eased a few steps out into the wash. I could see him clearly now. He was a small, wiry man in a threadbare black suit. His head was sunburned between the roots of his thin, dishwater-gray hair. He was wearing a dirty undershirt beneath the suit jacket. He had something in his hand. It was a gun. I couldn’t tell the make and caliber from where I watched. But it had put three respectable holes in a police car. Assuming he hadn’t reloaded, he still had three to six shots left.

  The man stood for what seemed a long time just outside the culvert. Then he shrugged, fatalistically, and started towards me at a fast walk. He kept throwing glances back over his shoulder. Most people do. They never seem to remember we have radios, and that more than one cop may be looking for them.

  I waited until he was close enough to hit with a rock before I made my play. I stayed under cover as I yelled, “Okay, Webster, drop the gun. You’re covered both ways.”

  He fired from the hip and whirled to run back the way he’d come. It was a wild, unaimed shot in the general direction of my voice. I fired a warning shot into the sand a few yards beyond and to the left of him. He whimpered like a rabbit in a snare and spun on a dime. Shooting. He didn’t know where I was. But he was sending them along the rim of the wash. I dropped lower and waited for him to run out of ammunition.

  He didn’t get the chance. There was the authoritative snap of a Police Positive and the man on the bottom of the wash jerked like a puppet on a string, threw his gun straight up in the air like a kid lobbing a ball over a fence, and fell backwards. He landed spread-eagled in the sand, staring openmouthed at the sun. He was dead. When they drop like that, they’re always dead.

  I sighed and stood up. My legs were stiff, and my gut felt empty. I saw Trooper Gurney standing in the waist-high scrub twenty yards down the rim, beyond the corpse. He was staring down at the man he’d shot. The gun was still in his hand. I wondered why. I’d already tucked my Cobra back in my shoulder holster.

  I dropped down into the wash, sliding and clawing for purchase with my heels and getting a couple of shoefuls of sand in the process. I leaned a hand against the wall I’d just slid down and emptied my shoes. Then I walked over to the corpse.

  “I was aiming for his legs, Lieutenant!” yelled Gurney from above me. “Honest to Christ I was aiming for his legs!”

  “I know,” I shouted back. “Take the cruiser back to the motel and get the others. Oh, and tell them we’ll need the meat wagon and a photographer from the coroner’s office.”

  “I tried to hit him in the leg, dammit!” said Gurney. Then he shrugged and vanished from sight, muttering dark Gypsy curses.

  I knelt beside the corpse. The man Gurney’d killed was staring up accusingly. He seemed thoroughly annoyed to be dead. At least he wasn’t grinning. Some people seem to think it’s funny as hell to die. It kind of gets you to have a stiff smiling at you like your fly’s unzipped, or like he knows something that you don’t know… yet.

  I went through his pockets. There wasn’t much. An expired driver’s license said the man who called himself Joe Webster had told a fib. His name was Lewis Foster. There was a folded paper tucked between a couple of singles in the same wallet. It was a release certificate from Nevada State Prison.

  He’s been out of the can a month.

  I checked my notes. He was one of the ex-cons we’d wanted to question about Stretch Voss and his unusual views on love. Nobody’d been able to locate Foster, until now. I wondered why, if he was in the clear, he’d smoked up the first police car that chanced by his hidey-hole.

  There was a noise behind me. I turned on my knee to see Sergeant Dalton of the Vegas Police sliding down the wall of the wash. He walked over and looked down at the body.

  “Kid forgot to allow for the elevation, shooting downhill, eh?” Dalton asked. “Where’d he take it?”

  “Chest,” I said. “From the way he threw his arms up, I’d say we hit the top half of his heart.”

  “We?” Dalton smiled. “Trooper Gurney said he killed the guy. Seems kind of shaken up, by the way.”

  “I was in charge of the detail,” I said. “If there’s any beef, I’ll take the chewing.”

  Dalton nodded approvingly and observed, “He’s white and over twenty-one. I doubt if anyone’s liable to holler police brutality, Lieutenant. Especially after they see what we found in the guy’s cabin.”

  “He’s an ex-con,” I said. “A suspect in the Romero bomb killing. I hope you found what I hope you found.”

  “We did. Bottom of a cardboard suitcase. Had them hidden under some dirty shirts.”

  He held out his hand. In it there were three shiny lengths of brass tubing that looked, at first glance, like rifle cartridge cases.

  They weren’t cartridges. They were dynamite caps.

  • • • A further check on Lewis Foster revealed that he had a record a mile long. He was a narcotics user, an ex-safecracker, and a congenital loser. He’s spent most of his forty-eight years in prison. During World War Two, the Army had taught him something about demolitions. As far as we could discover, he’d only used the knowledge to kill one man. But the man had been Larry Romero. As soon as I knew who Gurney’d shot, I rephrased my report, giving him full credit for killing the son of a bitch. Gurney was promoted to sergeant. It seemed to dry his tears of remorse remarkably well.

  Of course, the man really responsible for Larry’s death was still alive. But we couldn’t prove it. Stretch Voss had the best kind of alibi. He was still in the can. Everyone in the state of Nevada seemed to know he’d killed a cop. But nobody knew what to do about it.

  But at least we’d cleaned up the bombing, and I could get back to the pursuit of Duncan MacDonald and the rescue, if you wanted to call it that, of Kathy Gorm.

  It took Hazel Collier a week of phone calls before she had anything worth reporting. I was in the office when she called. She said, “Frank, I think I just talked to Kathy.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “In Elko. I checked out the dentists and none of them have had any lead shielding installed by anyone answering MacDonald’s description. But one nurse dropped a remark that got me to thinking. She got annoyed as I was conning her and asked me if I was from the sheet-metal shop
that had been pestering her for work.”

  “You get the name of the place?”

  “Of course. Called them too. They turned out to be an old established firm in Elko. I posed as a sales representative pushing sheet lead. They said they didn’t want any. They said business was lousy and mentioned a competitor. They couldn’t see how he stayed in business. They said he’d opened a shop in the same neighborhood at a time when there were already too many sheet-metal shops for the business in town.”

  “Think it’s another phony business?”

  “Has to be,” Hazel replied. “I checked the Elko Yellow Pages. They weren’t listed. The phone company said they’d just installed a phone and that they’d be in the next edition.”

  “You get the name of the place?”

  “How do you think I conned the phone company?” She laughed. “They’re tight as hell with information about their customers. I got the name of the new sheet-metal shop from the old sheet-metal shop. It was ‘Consolidated Sheet Metal Incorporated.’ I called the phone company, said I was calling from Consolidated, and asked why we weren’t in the Yellow Pages. That’s how I found out it was a new number. A legitimate shop might have just moved to a new location in Elko, you know. But they’d have kept an ad in the Yellow Pages.”

  “Figures,” I said. “What was that you said about talking to Kathy?”

  “I called Consolidated and said I wanted a quotation on some sheet lead. The girl I talked to had a snotty secretary voice. She said there was a lead shortage and quoted me a price fifty percent higher than the going rates. By the way, there’s no lead shortage. I checked that, too. It’s gone up, but not as high as Consolidated is asking for it.”

  “In other words,” I mused, “Consolidated Sheet Metal doesn’t seem too anxious to sell any sheet metal.”

  “Struck me the same way,” said Hazel.

  “I think,” I said, “I’ll just jump a jet to Elko and shop for some sheet metal. I’ll want you to go along, by the way.”

  “I don’t know, Frank,” she protested.