Bad Signs

by R.J. Ellory

  Clay counted the money out. It had a reassuring feel. Felt like full stomachs and maybe a coat for Bailey. Felt like blankets, hamburgers, maybe some hash browns and a chicken-fried steak. He stuffed the dollars in his pocket and went back to tend to Bailey. She was up on her feet, walking back and forth around the rocks against which she’d leaned for support.

  “Sick,” she mumbled. “Really sick.”

  “I got us the better part of fifty dollars,” Clay told her.

  Her eyes widened. “You took their money?”

  “Sure I did. They ain’t gonna have a helluva lot of use for it.”

  “But they’re dead.”

  Clay was puzzled. “And this is worse than taking it off of living people?”

  “It’s different. It’s disrespectful. Ain’t you superstitious?”

  “Superstitious about what?”

  “Stealin’ money off of dead folks … means their ghosts is gonna follow you until you pay it back.”

  “That’s just so much horseshit. Lord Almighty, where did you hear such a thing?”

  Bailey turned her back on him and walked toward the road.

  “Wait up,” he called after her. He let her go twenty feet and then he jogged up behind. “You can have half of it,” he said.

  “Won’t catch me touching dead peoples’ money.”

  “Suit yourself. Won’t stop you eatin’ the stuff it buys though, will it?”

  She stopped suddenly. He near as damn it ran into her. She glowered at him for a while, and then she seemed to lose the will to argue. Her face cleared, she turned back toward the road, and he stayed silent.

  They were a good quarter mile down the highway before she spoke again.

  “You think we should do something about it?”

  “About what?”

  “About those two people. About that accident.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  “I think we should tell someone. The police maybe. We should make an anonymous call as soon as we can and tell someone that there’s dead folks down there.”

  “And if we do then you’ll shut the hell up about superstitions and dead men’s money?”

  She hesitated, and then she nodded in the affirmative. “Deal,” she said.

  “Okay,” Clay replied. “Next place we come to we’ll find a phone and make your call.”

  She seemed satisfied. The hunch came out of her shoulders. She looked up ahead as opposed to down to the road. The mood lightened.

  Clay walked on beside her, and once again she moved into his shadow and kept up with him step for step.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Circumstance, coincidence, the reason didn’t matter. All that mattered was the appearance of Walter Milford’s neighbor in the early afternoon of that Wednesday. Walt Milford and Frederick Ross had been neighbors for fifteen years. They had probably spoken about fifteen times. They were old school—both alone, both generally miserable—but never did it occur to them to pool their loneliness and misery and make the most of it. It was like the old story—two Englishmen stranded on an island in the Pacific, and after many years a rescue boat arrives. They both approach the vessel, at which point the oarsmen greets them both, assuming of course that they know each other all too well. “Oh no,” one Englishman says. “We’ve never been properly introduced.” That pair of schmucks could have been Walt Milford and Fred Ross—strong, silent types, knew best whatever the situation, never humble enough to be corrected, never wrong enough to be right.

  The motivation for Fred Ross’s visit that Wednesday was one of extraordinary unusualness, namely a bloodhound called Wagner, a dumb cooze of a thing as far as Walt Milford was concerned. Ross had owned Wagner for three years, had inherited him as much as anything else. A family of Californians had moved in down the block, had stayed for little more than six months, and then upped and gone without warning. Wagner had been theirs, and they left the poor dumb thing behind. He howled relentlessly for twenty-four hours, and then Fred Ross went in through one of the windows of the rented house and found him. That was a done deal. Fred was Wagner’s savior. Wagner never left his side from that day forward. Fred Ross had never been a dog man. Never been an anything kind of man when it came to domestic pets. But Wagner had a way about him, a kind of understanding nature. He seemed to know when to be quiet, when to be playful, when to leave Fred alone, when to haunt his feet. It was a good arrangement. An arrangement that worked.

  Fred Ross might have owned a dog, but he did not own a car. Walt Milford, now unable to drive a car, owned a Ford Galaxie, and it was that Ford Galaxie that Fred Ross possessed the intent to employ in assisting Wagner’s journey to a veterinarian. The dog hadn’t eaten for twenty-four hours, had barely drunk any water. He was listless and lethargic, and though not an energetic dog at the best of times, such apathy was very much out of character. Had it been six or eight blocks Fred Ross might just have carried Wagner. But it wasn’t six or eight blocks, it was a good six or eight miles. There wasn’t a way in the world they were going to send an ambulance, so Wagner was going to stay home whilst Fred Ross went to Walt’s.

  So Ross appeared at the front door, and the first thing he noticed was the absence of the car. The car was gone only on those rare occasions when Milford’s son showed up. It would be a bitter coincidence if this was one of those times when he had done so. Just when Ross needed him. That would tell him all he ever needed to know about luck, good and bad. The second thing Ross noticed was the fact that not only the screen, but the inner door was unlocked. Opening the screen he leaned forward and pushed the front door. It swung inward. It made no sense. The car gone, the front door left open? Maybe a moment of forgetfulness, but he somehow doubted it. Seemed from what little he knew of Walt Milford the man was fastidious and organized, much the same as himself. It was an age thing, a culture thing, because these days the younger ones didn’t seem to give a damn about much of anything at all. Except maybe girls. Girls and music.

  Fred Ross called out. “Walter? Walter? You in here?”

  There was nothing. Not a sound.

  He called out again. “Walter? It’s Fred … from next door. You in here, Walter?”

  The seemingly inherent and premonitory shift in viewpoint that accompanied aging kicked in. Ten tears, twenty years younger, and there would never have been such a thought. Walt Milford was out. He’d left his door unlocked. These things happen. No big deal. But now? Get past sixty and the first thing you thought of was a fall, an accident, a coronary, a stroke.

  Fred Ross let the front door close behind him and he stood in the dim silence of the hallway for quite some time. He could feel the slightly increased pace of his own heart. His nostrils cleared like ammonia. The hairs on the nape of his neck stood to attention.

  He took a step forward. He swallowed noisily. He cleared his throat.

  “Walter? You okay? Can you hear me?”

  Dead, unconscious, even hit with stroke and lying somewhere mumbling and drooling, such questions were irrelevant and unnecessary, but they were instinctual and automatic.

  Fred made his way slowly along the front hallway to the doorway at the end. The house was of much the same design as his own. Through this doorway was the sitting room, in the right wall of the sitting room the doorway into the kitchen, on the left the doorway into the dining area.

  The door was closed, and before he reached out his hand and pushed it he steeled himself for what he might see. He knew he was being foolish, he knew there was a more than satisfactory explanation for the absent car and the unlocked front door, that Walter had gone with someone to attend to some unexpected matter, had simply forgotten to pull the door firmly closed behind him … or perhaps he hadn’t meant to lock it. Once again a generational thing. It was only in the last five years, ten at most, that you’d had to consider who might be in the neighborhood, who might be keeping an eye on your house, who might be interested in getting inside while you were gone. Walter might have expected to be away for
just a little while, and it hadn’t been worth searching out his keys …

  Fred raised his hand and pushed on the door. It swung inward slowly. The curtains were drawn. Light came in through the windows from the backyard. The room was empty. He took a step forward, immediately alert for Walter’s feet protruding from behind a chair, his body hidden from view.

  There was nothing.

  He breathed his first small sigh of relief.

  It was then that he heard it. A scratching sound. Scratching and tapping.

  Fred angled his head to the right and frowned. Was that a dog? A cat perhaps? It sound like an animal trapped somewhere.

  And then he heard the low moaning, and he started suddenly. He felt a shudder up his back, and the hairs at the nape of his neck rose to attention.

  There it was again.

  He didn’t scare easy, but there was something about the quietly desperate sound that chilled him to the bone.

  Scratch. Tap, tap. Uuuggghhh …

  The door. The basement door.

  He closed his eyes. He kept them closed for a good ten seconds. The very same door in his own house went down into the basement. He stepped closer. He ran a strange and inexplicable gamut of emotions, everything underpinned by a sense of chilling dread. He knew. Somehow he knew something bad had happened to Walt Milford.

  Fred looked around for something, saw Walter’s cane lying right there on the floor.

  It didn’t make sense. Walter, without his cane?

  And then two and two began to approach four, and he started to appreciate what had happened here, and all of a sudden his fear vanished and he rushed for the cellar door and started shouting.

  He called out Walter’s name again, but his voice was weak and it cracked on the second syllable. In his own mind he sounded like a frightened girl.

  “Walter? Walter, you down there?”

  The moaning sound became louder, and Fred knew where Walter was. He unlocked the door, wrenched it open, and found the old man there, lying right there on the steps, his face dirty, his breathing weak …

  He helped him up and out of the cellar doorway, shouldered him to the sofa, laid him down, and then he was on the phone, calling for help, the police, ambulance, everybody he could think of.

  He looked back at Walter as he stood there with the receiver in his hand, and his heart went out to the old guy.

  A half hour later Walter was gone, away in an ambulance to the hospital, and Fred Ross sat in Walt Milford’s kitchen and answered questions for a detective called Cassidy.

  After Cassidy had left Fred Ross went home. He got two or three shots of whiskey inside of him, and went out for a pack of cigarettes. He’d not smoked a cigarette for thirteen years.

  And then a while later the detective named Cassidy came back again. He said he’d been out to see Walter in the hospital, wanted to let him know that Walter would be fine.

  “He’s a tough old guy,” Cassidy said. “Tough as boots.”

  “He tell you what happened?” Fred Ross asked.

  “He did, for sure.”

  “But he can’t tell you who it was, him bein’ mostly blind an’ all, right?”

  “Right,” Cassidy replied.

  Ross sat and listened as Cassidy started talking. He told him that he believed the attack on Walter Milford was connected to another assault in Tucson, a young girl who lived above a hardware store. He was disappointed that Fred Ross didn’t known the license number of Walt Milford’s dark gray Ford Galaxie, but he said that it wouldn’t take too much work to find out. Already he had called the federal office in Anaheim, California, and had given all the information to the agents there. Apparently there were people working on it, people who might want to talk to Ross directly, and if he was to hear from men by the name of Koenig and Nixon then Cassidy would appreciate it if Fred would answer up as best he could on anything they wanted to know.

  Why this Detective Cassidy told him these things he didn’t know. Ross certainly didn’t want to know any more about the attack on Walt Milford, nor what might have happened to anyone else for that matter. He wanted to try and forget the whole thing. He knew he wouldn’t. Not for a long time.

  Fred Ross watched Detective John Cassidy leave by the back door and cross the yard. Cassidy accessed Walt Milford’s property at the rear and went on up into the house once again. Fred knew that the detective stayed there for another hour or so, because the man’s car was parked out front. He wondered what it would be like to have a job like that, to make such things as this your business. He wondered what the hell the world was coming to. He wondered about a lot of things, and not a damned one of them seemed to make a great deal of sense.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Bailey Redman did the talking while Clay Luckman hung back by the potato chips and pork rinds. They’d come by a gas station with an attached store that sold fan belts, spark plugs, cans of oil, shoelaces, an assortment of handmade bird boxes, packets of seeds, all manner of things that seemed incongruous and unrelated.

  “We’ve walked about an hour,” she told the man behind the counter. He had on a red checkered shirt and tatty-looking dungarees. His hands looked like they’d been soaked in crude oil every night for much of his life. A pin badge on his breast pocket read Clark.

  “Maybe four, five miles back that way,” she explained. “A car went off the road. There’s two dead men in there.”

  “And what would you want me to be doin’ about it?” Clark said.

  “Nothin’,” Bailey replied. “Just call someone maybe. The police. Just tell someone so they can go out there and fix it all up. Someone somewhere is gonna wanna know that their kin is dead, wouldn’t you say?”

  Clark nodded slowly. “Guess so,” he said. “Okeydoke, I can do that.” He looked at Clay Luckman suspiciously. Maybe this was a scam. Maybe the girl was here distracting his attention with alarmist fabrications while her accomplice was pilfering pork rinds.

  “Thank you,” the girl said, and she smiled. She didn’t smile like a thief’s accomplice. Clark relaxed a mite.

  The kid came forward then. He had two bags of chips, one of rinds, a packet of Oreos. Didn’t look like he was concealing contraband anyplace about his person. He paid with a five-buck bill. Clark made change, gave him a paper bag to put his provisions in.

  They went on their way, and as soon as they were out on the highway he made the call to the Luna County Sheriff’s Department. Clark Regan was lucky enough to catch the sheriff personally. Hoyt was about to take an early lunch. He knew Hoyt Candell. Had known him for years. Hoyt seemed surprised at first, and then very interested. He said he would drive out himself and check up on it. He wanted to know which way the kids had gone. Two of them you say? A boy and a girl. How old? You remember what they looked like? If you saw them again could you identify them?

  Clark hung up. Sheriff Hoyt Candell would be by to see him later, to let him know whether or not there were really two dead bodies in a car four or five miles down the road.

  Even as Sheriff Candell started out from his office Clay Luckman and Bailey Redman were fortunate enough to get a ride that would take them all the way into Las Cruces. They would be there within the hour, and none the wiser about what was going on just forty or fifty miles behind them.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Digger waited until they were done eating.

  The more he watched them the more he liked them. The girl had stopped looking like anyone else, and she just looked like herself. The mom and dad seemed like nice folks, chatting with each other, the dad asking the waitress for extra stuff for the kids every once in a while, and when they looked like they were set to leave he took out his wallet and left a good tip on the table.

  Nice folks.

  Kind of folks who seemed like they’d help someone out who was in a pickle.

  Digger got up and started over toward them.

  He straightened his jacket as he went. Flattened down his bangs at the front in case they were mussed,
and he tried to smile as best he could.

  He felt nervous, no doubt about it.

  He felt like he was seven, and in trouble for something he didn’t do.

  The man saw him coming, set down his coffee cup, and frowned slightly.

  “Hey there, mister,” Digger said. Even his voice sounded like a child.

  “Hey, son. What’s up?”

  Son.

  Digger bit his bottom lip.

  “Hope you folks is all okay,” Digger said. “Hope you all had a good breakfast and whatever.”

  The girl sniggered.

  The boy nudged her silent.

  The mom just looked puzzled.

  “What’s up there, son? How can we help you?”

  Son.

  Digger closed his eyes for a moment. His palms were pretty much running with sweat. He could feel the drips falling from his fingers. He knew that couldn’t be the case, but still he could feel it.

  “Hey there,” he said to the boy, and this prompted yet another snigger from the girl.

  Digger felt his cheeks color up.

  No, he could do this. He could deal with this. He could get these nice folks to give him a ride out of here. He could use this situation to his advantage. A good few miles in the right direction, someplace where he could find another car maybe. People had to be looking for him, of course, but they weren’t looking for a family. No, they weren’t looking for a family.

  This was thinking smart. This is how Earl would have figured things out.

  “I was just wonderin’ if you folks were heading my way …”

  “You want a ride, son?” the man asked.

  The wife smiled, like she was a little embarrassed, but there was something beneath that, something … Jesus, what was the word? Clay would have known the word. Something that made Digger feel like she was looking down on him. The kind of way Shoeshine would look down on him from up on his high horse. You are not like me. I am superior to you. This kind of thing.