Bad Signs

by R.J. Ellory

  The drive-in was a co-managed enterprise. The brains was the warehouse owner, Barnard Melville, a wool dealer whose family hailed from Tuba City and Cameron back before God was born. The warehouse did its warehousing, but Barnard was as close to an entrepreneur as the Melville family had ever produced, and he had once seen a drive-in theater in Payson, and there they had shown a film against the wall of a factory building and it had lit a spark in his brain. Jack Levine and he had shared the cost of the wall painting, the projector, the lease of the films themselves, and the Lunch Box stayed open until every last car had driven away. Burgers, fries, hot dogs, fried chicken, malted milk, soda, cookies, muffins, coffee, and candy. Two hundred or more cars, four hundred or more occupants, a dollar fifty a head on average, and Jack Levine and Martha Gerrard ran the whole operation fortnightly, paying the going rate to the girls who waitressed, and those girls got to keep the change that was ordinarily left on the side trays that clipped to the doors and upon which the food was set while the passengers made out.

  It was that knowledge that had inspired the idea for Bailey Redman. Distracted teenagers, the noise of the movie, the darkness, the side trays, the change left there for the waitresses. Two hundred cars, even at ten or twenty cents per car, added up to a good deal of money.

  The movies that Jack Levine and Barnard Melville rented and showed were old-time B-stock, never less than five or six years out of circulation, but the clientele—on the whole—didn’t care a great deal. That evening was Edward L. Cahn’s 1955 monster masterpiece The Creature with the Atom Brain. Mad ex-Nazi scientist uses radio-controlled atomic-powered zombies to help an exiled American gangster wreak vengeance on his enemies and return to power. Standard fare for such an evening. Ironically, Cahn—director of such masterworks as The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake and The Curse of the Faceless Man, had also directed a film called Riot in Juvenile Prison back in 1959. Such an irony would have pleased Elliott Danziger, and—had he been alive—perhaps Earl Sheridan too.

  The schedule included a newsreel, a short, and then the main feature at seven forty-five. Running an average of eighty or ninety minutes, the show was done somewhere after nine. Bailey had a plan. They would creep down there around eight fifteen. From where they lay in the long grass looking down into the drive-in they could see the clock next to the water tower in the yard of the fire station. Cars were already beginning to make their way into the enclosure. People were walking across to the Lunch Box to book early orders that would be delivered once the picture show had begun.

  Clay didn’t know what to think of such a thing. It was stealing. He smoked a cigarette. Bailey smoked one too. When they were done smoking he thought about it again, and it was still stealing.

  “I don’t know,” he said, and he let the statement hang there for a while. After the while had elapsed and she had not responded, he repeated that he didn’t know, and then he said, “Whichever way you look at it, it ain’t our money. Either it belongs to the people in the car, or it belongs to the waitresses.”

  Again Bailey Redman didn’t reply.

  Clay, lying on his back, rolled over and propped himself up on his elbows. He made a cup with his hands and rested his chin in it. “Stealing is a sin.”

  “Starving is worse,” she replied.

  “Sure, I get that, but you don’t always have to come by money by doing something wrong.”

  “I agree,” she said. “You got to work.”

  “Right.”

  “Work is done by adults. I’m fifteen, you’re seventeen, neither of us is any use for anything right now, and even if we were we’d have to work a week or two before anyone’d even give us a dime. Hell, I don’t even see how we could get a job unless we lied about our ages, and lying’s a sin too.”

  “So it’s a matter of which sin is worse.”

  “Life is always a matter of which sin is worse.”

  “That’s a slanted viewpoint for someone as young as you.”

  “It’s a slanted life.”

  “So what you’re saying is we don’t have a choice?”

  Bailey rolled over on her stomach too. She leaned up on her elbows the same as Clay. She kicked up her feet at the back and scissored her lower legs back and forth. “Sure we have a choice. Go down there and get some of that money or stay right here and die of starvation in the grass.”

  Clay smiled.

  “What are you smiling for?”

  “Listening to you.”

  “What’s so funny?”

  “How simple and dramatic you make it sound. We don’t have a choice but to steal money. It’s simply a question of which sin is worse. If we don’t commit one sin or other then we’ll starve to death in the long grass.”

  Bailey Redman didn’t reply. She was manipulating him. He knew that. He could see through her like glass.

  “Okay,” he said, “but not all of it.”

  “We won’t have time to take all of it.”

  “So we just crawl around on the ground, reach up, take the change off the trays that are hooked to the sides of the cars, and then we run away.”

  “That’s about the size of it, yes.”

  “And if someone sees us?”

  “You run like a madman.”

  “And if one of us gets caught?”

  “Then whoever it is will get the chair,” she said, and rolled onto her back once more.

  “You’re such a wiseass.”

  “Well, you know what John Wayne once said?”

  “What was that?”

  “He said life is tough, but it’s tougher if you’re stupid.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  There was something about the guy at the counter. Sure, he was seated with his back to Digger, but it was the way he was seated with his back to Digger that was disrespectful. His hunched shoulders, the manner in which he grunted at the waitress, the sound he made when he drank his coffee. All these things.

  It was a small enough place, maybe a little bigger than the Olsons’ place back in Twentynine Palms, but it couldn’t have catered to more than thirty or forty people at full stretch. The chicken-fried steak they served Digger was the best steak he’d ever eaten, no doubt about it. He was all set to tell the waitress as much, maybe even leave her a tip, but then he got this disrespectful shit off the guy at the counter and everything else in his mind went to hell. The guy was in his early forties, jeans, a denim jacket, a red-and-black-checked shirt, a kerchief tied around his neck and knotted in back. He had a hat on the stool beside his own, a beat-to-shit fedora or some such, and the way he took a stool just for his fucking hat made Digger angry.

  Digger had a mind to say something, had a mind to go ask for the stool beside him just to see if he’d move the damned hat, but he steeled himself.

  There were two types of trouble. There was the kind of trouble you got out of when it came a-calling, and there was trouble you got into ’cause you created it yourself. The first was inevitable, whereas the second was just foolish. Digger was not of a mind to go making a nuisance of himself. He had to be mindful of drawing attention to himself.

  But then, as simply nothing more than a provocation, he saw the guy just shift up on one butt cheek and break wind right there where other folks were eating.

  A disgusted shudder went through Digger, and he knew there was no way he could let this kind of disrespect lie.

  Digger got up slowly. He took his check and his cash to the counter, stood behind the stool where the man’s hat was seated, and he nodded to the waitress.

  “You got your check there, honey?” she asked.

  “Think I’ll have just one more cup of coffee,” Digger said. “If that’s no trouble, miss.”

  “Why, hell no, sweetheart. You just set yourself down wherever an’ I’ll bring on over a pot. Just made fresh.” She smiled at Digger, such a warm smile, such a friendly smile, and Digger knew that Earl would have liked her real good too.

  Digger stood there. He waited for the man to move his hat.
The man went on pretending that he hadn’t seen Digger. That was just the first provocation. It was intentional. Digger knew it. Any doubt he might have had was swiftly dispelled when Digger tapped the man on the shoulder and said, “Excuse me, sir … I wonder if you’d mind movin’ your hat there so’s I could take a seat here …”

  The man didn’t move. That was just the second dismissal.

  “Sir …” Digger started.

  The man turned. He turned slowly, as if he was merely trying to locate a fly, a buzzing fly, a dirty buzzing little fly that was now starting to annoy him.

  He looked at Digger.

  He was an ugly man. He had pockmarked skin and heavy-set brows, and he looked like he was the kind of guy who’d kick a dog just for the hell of it.

  “Go sit someplace else, kid,” he said.

  Kid.

  Kid?

  “Ain’t no shortage of seats in this place … you just run along and find someplace else to sit …”

  Run along?

  Digger gritted his teeth. He felt a strange sensation of distance between himself and the man, as if suddenly there was a gulf between them, as if there might be echoes if he spoke again.

  His blood was boiling. He glanced at the fork, right there on the counter. He saw the man’s hand, the way he’d placed it beside that fork as he’d turned. Like an invitation. With one swift motion Digger could have taken that fork and driven it through the man’s hand and stuck that damned stupid hand right there to the counter.

  That’s what Earl would have done.

  But then Digger stopped.

  No, Earl wouldn’t have done that.

  There were two types of trouble. The second type was just plain foolish.

  The waitress appeared. Digger smiled at her. She was a nice lady. She had a fresh pot of coffee and a clean cup, and she just went on and poured him some coffee and passed it over, and Digger took it and gave her the money. He gave her an extra quarter for being so pleasant.

  “Why, thank you, sweetheart,” she said. “You have a safe trip now, wherever you’re headin’ off to.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Digger said, and he turned and walked back to the table.

  He drank his coffee. He watched the man. He nursed his rage.

  However this guy had planned to end his day was not the way it was going to end.

  Digger was the soul of patience.

  It was all of twenty minutes, and then the guy got up, donned his hat, straightened his kerchief, tossed a couple of quarters on the counter, and left the diner. Digger counted to ten and followed on after him.

  Had he left it any longer he wouldn’t have seen the dark blue ’58 Chevy pull out of the lot and turn onto the I-10. He was heading east, same direction as Digger, out toward Las Cruces, perhaps El Paso. The truth was something Digger would never know for sure, and didn’t care to know. The driver of the Chevy, one Marlon Juneau, was a Canadian out of Wynyard near Quill Lakes in Saskatchewan. He was down to see his sister, Helen, and the Chevy he drove was a rental he’d picked up in Albuquerque when he’d come off the train. He’d intended to follow the Rio Grande right down 25, and go straight on through to Las Cruces. Here he would have cut back northeast to her place in Alamogordo. Somewhere around Hatch he’d screwed up, gone southwest on 26 for some damn fool reason, and hit the I-10. He’d seen the diner and pulled over to eat. He wasn’t a driver, hadn’t driven this far in ten years, and it didn’t suit him. The constant jiggering and juddering fouled up his guts something awful, and he’d wished more times than Christmas that he hadn’t had to come. But he did. No question. His sister’s useless piece-of-shit husband, a man by the name of Tate Bradford, had walloped her again. Not the first time by any means, but this time he’d walloped her good. Broken her cheekbone, concussed her, and she’d had the police over to help her evict him. He’d gone, bitter as poison, but was likely to return. She had called Marlon late Sunday afternoon, and Marlon had made arrangements to get there as fast as possible. Took a train from Regina to Rapid City, South Dakota, a second from Rapid City to Denver, a third from Denver to Albuquerque. Over twenty-four hours, sleeping as best he could, but all knees and elbows, impossible to get comfortable, hungry and awkward and ever more riled at the prospect of facing off with Tate Bradford over his damaged-goods sister. It was a ball of bullshit, but then what could he do? Family was family, and family was blood and you were bound to it.

  The run to Alamogordo was all of a hundred and fifty miles, and he figured he would make it by ten. He wasn’t going to get there any quicker, and if Tate was on his way back to break his sister’s spine with a shovel there wasn’t anything he could have done about it. Marlon Juneau wasn’t a fatalist, but a realist. He was getting there as quick as physics and geography would allow, and if geography put Tate and Helen in the same place before he got there then he’d be too late. It was that simple.

  It wasn’t until he was a good thirty miles from the diner that he even noticed the Galaxie behind him. He noticed it but paid it no mind. A Ford Galaxie was a Ford Galaxie, and there was nothing unusual about it. When the Galaxie overtook him he didn’t even look to see the driver. He watched it disappear up ahead in the twilight and flicked on the radio. He didn’t give that vehicle a second thought until he caught the flash of something in his headlight a hundred yards up head. The Galaxie was pulled over at the side of the road, the hood was up, the driver—a young man by all appearances—was waving his arms over his head and flagging him down. Detours and distractions was all he needed now, yet, despite appearances, Marlon was one of the world’s Samaritans, this evidenced by the fact that he’d dropped his life to come to his sister’s aid so many hundreds of miles away, and he felt the least he could do was give the young man a ride to the next garage where he could get the help he needed. The highway was all but empty, and if the number of cars he’d seen thus far were anything to go by then this boy would be stranded a good while yet if he didn’t lend a hand.

  Marlon pulled over, climbed out, and even as he walked toward the Galaxie he was saying that he really couldn’t hang around. Twelve feet from Digger and there was a flicker of recognition in his eyes. The kid from the diner. What the hell was this about?

  “I’m on up to Alamogordo,” Marlon said. “Got some family trouble up there and I need to arrive in a hurry. I can give you a ride to—”

  And his voice fell quiet when he saw the handgun that appeared from behind the young man’s back and was then aimed right at his face.

  “Oh shit,” Marlon Juneau said in a flat, matter-of-fact voice.

  “Oh shit is right,” Digger replied. He came out from behind the open door and took a step toward Marlon.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Seven forty-eight p.m., evening of Tuesday, November 24. Clay Luckman and Bailey Redman lay in the long grass on the sly bluff overlooking the makeshift drive-in movie theater. Every once in a while Clay thought he could smell the hot dogs and fried chicken being cooked up in the diner below, and it made him awful hungry. Digger Danziger stood at the side of the I-10 a handful of miles outside of Las Cruces, and he wondered if he should kill the disrespectful asshole right there and then or goad him somewhat. He was leaning toward the latter. And then there was Tate Bradford, half a skinful of something cheap inside of him, and he had decided to drive down from Tularosa to Alamogordo and resolve this bullshit with Helen once and for all. It was a decisive thought, a thought fueled by bitterness, empowered by the belief that he had lived a life filled with hard-done-bys and disadvantages, and he was too good a person to let it go on any longer. He had hit her, for sure, but she had deserved it, and the bitch had called the cops. Un-fucking-believable. You didn’t call the cops on family. You didn’t call the cops for personal shit. Totally, totally un-fucking-believable.

  John Cassidy was coming home, however. He pulled up outside the house and hesitated for a moment before he got out of the car. The interviews he had conducted that evening had pretty much confirmed for him tha
t he was dealing with someone outside of Deidre Parselle’s circle of family, friends, colleagues, and associates. Everything thus far indicated that her attack had been perpetrated by a random acquaintance. What had been done, more the manner in which it had been done, had led him to the conclusion that he was dealing with a sociopath.

  John came up through the backyard as usual, entered through the kitchen, and was overwhelmed with the smell of pot roast. He called Alice’s name, heard her as she made her way down the stairs and along the hallway. He kissed her, held her hands for a moment, and then took a seat at the table.

  “Have a glass of beer or something,” she said. “Dinner’ll be another fifteen minutes or so.”

  “I’m okay,” he said.

  “Bad?”

  He shook his head. “No, not any worse than it was before. I spoke to a couple more people. She was a good girl. Never in any trouble—”

  “Until now,” Alice commented.

  “Right,” he replied. “Until now.”

  She paused there before the sink. “Seems it’s always the ones who are never in any trouble that wind up in the worst trouble of all.”