Bad Signs

by R.J. Ellory

  The scene itself was a debacle. The remains of the blackened, burned-out car sat at the side of the highway like a stationary nightmare. A couple of pickups were parked on the other side, and the occupants were out on the highway, walking up and down, looking at the vehicle, the dead man inside, like there was something important to be learned from this scene.

  First task Koenig undertook was to ask them to leave.

  “There ain’t nothing to see here,” he told one man.

  “Sure as hell there is, mister,” was the reply he got. “There’s some dead feller with half his head missing sitting in a burned-out car.”

  The onlookers didn’t give a damn who the suits were—federal or otherwise—but when Koenig told Candell that they had to go, Candell took it upon himself to reason with them. They did go—eventually—and Koenig and Nixon surveyed the wreck, the dead man inside, and wondered what the hell would happen next. There was no way to confirm that this was Luckman’s work, but it had to be factored into the equation simply because of the sheer incongruity of it.

  “Last murder around here?” Nixon asked Candell.

  “Two years, a little more perhaps. Woman stabbed her husband in the throat with a kitchen knife when she found him out for cheating on her. Didn’t mean to kill him, just to teach him a lesson, but she hit his juggler and that was the end of that.”

  Koenig looked at Nixon. Nixon looked back. An unspoken appreciation that the more they thought of this the more it could be Luckman.

  They informed Hoyt Candell that it was his task to maintain the confidentiality of the environ, to ensure that the inquisitive county residents and passersby didn’t violate the integrity of the crime scene. People would be down from Mesa—vehicle investigation specialists—and they would examine the car closely, and then tow the car away.

  “And the dead feller?” Candell asked.

  “He goes with the coroner once the car has been examined,” Koenig replied.

  “You know what killed him, ’cause seems to me that he had half his head missing before he went in there, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Appears that way. Perhaps a shotgun. Several handgun rounds—”

  “Have to be an awful big handgun, or right up close and personal to take the top of his face away like that.”

  “Yes, it would.”

  Candell frowned. “Kind of sick son of a bitch does something like that to someone? And what the hell for?”

  Koenig shook his head. He smiled faintly, which was the first sign of personality or humor he had demonstrated since he’d arrived at the side of the I-10. “Sheriff, your guess is as good as mine. This man we’re after, Clarence Luckman … well, let’s just say he’s done some pretty terrible things.”

  “Looks like he’s of a mind to do a whole bunch more,” Candell said.

  “Yes, it does, doesn’t it?” Koenig replied, and was amazed to find that such an admission based on someone else’s statement created quite an effect on him. Had he been any less professional and businesslike in his attitude he might have stopped to consider all the lives he was now responsible for, the people who would step across Clarence Luckman’s path and find that that single step had marked the end of their life. The number of lives he could now save was entirely dependent on how quickly he found the boy. The boy? Yes, he was still a boy. Seventeen years old and capable of atrocities such as this. Atrocities such as this maybe, for there was no way to confirm that this had in fact been Luckman’s work. But Koenig was professional and businesslike in his attitude, and he had worked hard and long to ensure that emotion, sympathy, intuition, and especially assumption played no part in his considerations of a case. But in this instance intuition and assumption had crept in; there was something about the burned and dead body in the car that rang a bell. It made him feel something.

  And as far as this Clarence Luckman was concerned, well, there was little to expect but his timely end. They would find him. It was inevitable. How quickly was the question, but it was when, not if. And when they saw him they would kill him. This was the way it was going to be. Word had gone out. Shoot to kill. No questions, no hesitations. Shoot to kill.

  Koenig and Nixon were at the scene less than an hour. They shared a few words and decided to head on for Las Cruces. There was a small field office there, and from that point they could coordinate their next steps with the agents in Anaheim and Tucson. If Marlon Juneau had been the victim of Clarence Luckman’s unpredictable temper, then Clarence was still heading east along the highway and he would have made it to Las Cruces. If this was Clarence’s handiwork, then it did indeed look like he was heading for Texas.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  They found a map without difficulty. A small gas station somewhere between the outskirts of Tucson and the turnoff for Highway 83. The man inside was helpful enough, let them look at the thing without making them pay for it.

  “Here,” Clay said, and he put his finger right on Eldorado. “This is not a coincidence.”

  Bailey could see what he meant. They were on the I-10, and the I-10 went all the way from Tucson through New Mexico and into Texas, and right there—right in front of their very eyes, about thirty or forty miles the other side of Fort Stockton—the I-10 turned off to Highway 190, and where did Highway 190 take them? Hell, if it didn’t take them right into Eldorado.

  “You can’t tell me that this doesn’t mean something,” he said. “The exact highway we’re on takes us right to Eldorado. You gotta see that that means something. We just have to stay on this road and we’ll be there, though I sure as hell ain’t intending on walking the whole way. That must be—what?—six or seven hundred miles.”

  “We’ll get a ride,” she said. “Bet there’s trucks that come all the way out of Tucson and on down to El Paso every day. That must be near as damn it half the way in one go.”

  Clay folded up the map, put it back in the wire rack. He bought a couple of moon pies and a bottle of Coke. They had eaten eggs in a diner en route, but already Clay was hungry again. With each dime he spent he realized that they were running on prayers and little else.

  They started walking again—that vague middle ground between someplace and someplace else. This was a flat and unrelenting land. The trees were squat and awkward. Anything taller than a shoulder was invariably man-made. There were rusted gas pumps, once bold turquoise and visible for a hundred yards in any direction, now simply part of the landscape, behind them the station, now fallen into disrepair, the wood stolen for fires, for house repairs, for flatbeds. An outhouse, a shed for tools and what-nots, a water tower, a weathervane, a corroded sign that read Don’t Take a Curve at Sixty-Per. We Hate to Lose a Customer—Burma-Shave. Folks ill equipped and unsuited for such terrain had arrived with ideas. The heat, the dust, the sandy-throated dryness, had beaten those ideas into submission. Whatever determination and dollars might have been invested here had been left behind.

  Clay would have called it godforsaken, but he didn’t believe God had anything to do with such a place.

  It was late morning, and somewhere back at the outskirts of Tucson Jack Levine and his sister Martha, the owners of the drive-in movie theater, were sharing words with Barnard Melville. They had already spoken with George Buchanan regarding the absence of tips for the drive-in waitresses the previous night. George had told them of the boy he’d seen, couldn’t have been more than seventeen or eighteen. George had figured him for nothing more than a free seat for the movie, but now it seemed that two and two made four. Maybe the boy had been stealing tips from the window shelves. Jack wanted to call the police. Barnard said it wasn’t worth it. The police had one hell of a lot better things to do than chase some kid around Tucson for the sake of a few bucks. There were five waitresses. They had come up short for the night’s work. Barnard, big-hearted feller that he was, dug a five-buck bill out of his pocketbook and gave it to George.

  “Give ’em a dollar extra each from me,” he said. “And keep a weather-eye open for this kind of thin
g. Next time they can go without.”

  That was the end of it.

  Had they called the police, had a black-and-white come over, the officers might have shown George Buchanan the picture that had come through from the federal office just a little while earlier. Yes, George would have said, that looks like him. But I can’t be sure. Not a hundred percent. It was dark. He surprised me. I only saw him for a split second and then he was gone.

  Had that information reached Koenig and Nixon it would have merely confirmed something that Koenig was now beginning to suspect. Why, with the proceeds of the Wellton bank robbery, would Clarence Luckman have wasted his time stealing pocket change from a drive-in movie theater? Simple. Because he was crazy. Because he was irrational, impulsive, spontaneous, opportunistic, and most of all he was unpredictable. Koenig, faced with George Buchanan, would have told George that last night had possibly been the luckiest night of his life. “That kid,” he would have said, “would have killed you right where you stood and never thought another thing about it.” And it was that sentence, the use of the word kid that said it all. What they had here was a teenager—arrogant, knew everything there was to know, bucking authority, packed full of hormones and energy, and to boot he was as crazy as a shithouse cockroach. The worst kind of nightmare. He caught people unawares and off guard, like Bethany Olson, like Laurette Tannahill and Deidre Parselle. Teenagers don’t do this kind of thing. Teenagers are a little rowdy sometimes, sure, but they aren’t dangerous. Clarence Luckman was out to prove them different, and he was doing a damned fine job of it.

  So Jack and Martha, George Buchanan, and Barnard Melville went back to their business and didn’t consider it again, wouldn’t even think of it until Clarence Luckman’s picture started appearing in the papers. But that wasn’t going to happen for a while. That wasn’t going to happen until Elliott Danziger really started swinging for the fences.

  Clay and Bailey kept on walking. Churches every five hundred yards—Evangelical Covenant, First Baptist, Community Congregational, Church of the Nazarene. And they all had signs—clever words and turns of phrase that seemed incongruous in this setting. Fire protection policy available—talk to Jesus inside. Forbidden fruits make many jams. Seven days without prayer makes one weak. Let Jesus into your heart. If you don’t like it, the devil’ll take you back. They sure liked their religion down here, Clay thought, and wondered why it was always the poorest that seemed to possess the greatest faith. Maybe if you had enough money behind you you didn’t need God taking up space.

  They walked a good three or four miles before lunchtime, and then they sat at the side of the highway and imagined how good it would have been to drink another Coke.

  Bailey made mention of plants and creatures. Guessed what they were. Blacksnakes. Leopard frogs. Fireflies. Goatsuckers. Other things that Clay had never seen the like of before.

  Out of the blue she said something else. “If love is so great, how come it breaks so many hearts?”

  Clay was lost for words, mumbled, “I don’t know, Bailey.” He didn’t know if she was speaking of her mother, her father, or someone else.

  “I miss my dad,” she went on. “I miss my mom, but I knew she was sick, and I knew she was going to die, but my dad …”

  Clay tried not to look at her, but he couldn’t help it.

  “And your brother … do you miss him?”

  Clay nodded. “Sure I do. Miss who I thought he was, not who I think he’s become.”

  “Why do all the bad things happen to just a few people? And why is it never just one bad thing, but one thing after another, and then another thing after that?”

  Clay sighed. “Think you’re gonna have to ask that question of someone a lot smarter than me, Bailey.”

  He looked at her and she was smiling. “What?” he asked.

  “I like the way you say that.”

  “What? What did I say?”

  “My name. It sounds good when you say it.”

  “Bailey.”

  “Right,” she said. “Bailey.”

  He felt his cheeks color up. He dared not look any way but straight ahead.

  “You think we’re going to die, Clay?”

  “Die? Die of what?”

  She shrugged her narrow shoulders. “I don’t know,” she replied. “Bad luck maybe?”

  Clay couldn’t think of anything to say, and so he said nothing.

  There was silence for a good minute, and then she said it once again. “I miss my dad. I really, really do.”

  A little later they got a ride.

  “Can take you as far as the turn-off at Deming,” the driver told them. He had four teeth—two up, two down. The hand he extended to help Bailey on up into the cab of his truck was short the little finger. Maybe he had a habit for losing bits of himself as he traveled. “Have to go on up to Hatch,” he said, “or I’d take you farther.”

  Clay got on up beside Bailey, and they took off.

  “You pair headin’ home?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Bailey said. “Me an’ my brother. We’ve been down in Tucson visiting, and now we’re heading on back to Las Cruces.”

  “Hell of a way to be goin’ by yourselves. You ain’t got no kin to drive you?”

  “No, sir,” she went on. “We’re visitin’ our gramma, and our pa is away working at the moment.”

  “What’s he do then, your pa?”

  “He sells shoes. Drives around the country selling shoes.”

  “Hard job.”

  “No harder than drivin’ a truck I shouldn’t reckon.”

  The man smiled. His teeth showed like broken picket posts. “Well, I guess you’re right there, missy,” he replied. “Name’s Milt. Milt Longfellow. And you might be?”

  “I’m Caroline, and this here is my brother, Jack,” she said.

  “Pleased to make your acquaintance,” Milt said, and there was little else he had to say for himself until they came up on Deming.

  A cordon had been erected with sawhorses and ropes around a burned-out car at the side of the highway. Police were evident, a couple of black-and-whites and a vehicle that looked like a hearse.

  “ ’S up here?” Milt inquired, and they slowed somewhat as the scene unfolded around them.

  A cop stood by the side of the road and waved them on, and as the truck went by Clay looked directly at him, eye to eye, and for a second he imagined that there was the faintest flicker of recognition. It was nothing, merely imagination, and then they were on past the wrecked car and whatever had happened back there, and the road was once again ahead of them—empty and flat like a gray ribbon laid smooth on the landscape.

  It stayed that way—quiet, peaceful almost, and then the signpost for Hatch to the left was coming up and the truck was slowing down.

  “Gotta part ways here,” Milt said. “Pleased to have your company. You take care of yourselves an’ each other now.”

  “Will do, mister,” Bailey said.

  Waving, standing there side by side as the truck pulled away left to Hatch, Clay asked her why she’d lied about their names.

  “I didn’t lie,” she said. “I just told a different kind of truth.”

  He frowned.

  “There’s people that need to know things, and there’s people that don’t. We ever get ourselves in some kinda trouble … well, the less people who know where we’re going the better.”

  He couldn’t disagree with her, and so he didn’t. They started walking, now sixty miles or so from Las Cruces, and he started to wonder whether the trouble she’d spoken of was some kind of omen. She’d had no scarcity of bad luck, that was for sure. Maybe she too had been born under a dark star. Perhaps they were both carrying bad signs, had been drawn in together because of it, and the two of them were destined for heartache whichever way they went.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  If Elliott Danziger gave any later consideration to his actions, those considerations would have centered around pride and a sense of accomplishme
nt. There was a case he’d heard about way back, in Kansas as far as he could recall, where two guys had done a whole family—mom, pop, son, and daughter. It had taken two of them, and they’d done it under cover of darkness. Well, everything Digger had done he’d done alone, and he’d done it in daylight.

  He slept well in the motel cabin. The bed was sufficiently firm, the pillow adequately soft, and he left the window open an inch to get some fresh air into the room. There was little he hated more than a room with no windows. He woke to the sound of the traffic on the highway a quarter mile away. He lay there for a while, aware that it was past nine o’clock, a strange smile on his face when he considered how much money he had, how much freedom, how much anonymity. No one knew where the hell he was, and it felt good. Had he known that his actions were being ascribed to his half brother he would have felt a mixture of emotions—a sense of satisfaction and wonderment that things were working out so well for him, against that an awkward feeling akin to jealousy. No, not jealousy, more a kind of injustice. Someone else was getting the credit for his work. However, he was not aware of this fortuitous misrepresentation of the truth, and thus felt little but the sensation that came with a brand-new day. A brand-new day in a brand-new life. There was no breakfast, but—more important—there was no one telling him what to eat and when to eat it. There were no locked doors aside from those he locked himself. There were no raised voices, no challenges, no provocations, no insults, no threats of violence … save those, of course, that he chose to administer himself. He was afraid, but only a little, and that fear was easily remedied. He only had to think of Earl and he felt strong, almost bulletproof. This was the way things were supposed to be. This was the way they were always meant to have been. He’d just had to be patient. God bless Earl Sheridan for breaking him out. God bless Earl Sheridan for showing him the way, the truth, and the light. In fact, fuck God. What the hell had God ever done for him? Nothing, that’s what. It was him and the memory of Earl Sheridan, and that’s all he’d ever need.