Bad Signs

by R.J. Ellory

  She didn’t reply. She was being right the only way she knew how.

  Seated in a corner booth, stomachs full, they looked at each other awkwardly.

  “You really think this is such a good idea?” she asked him.

  “What?”

  “Going to this Eldorado place.”

  He shrugged. “Hell, I don’t know, Bailey. I don’t know what the hell we’re doin’. My folks are dead, your folks are dead, and each other is pretty much all we got right now.” He paused, and then he smiled a curious smile. “One question I do have is why you go on hangin’ with me?”

  She smiled. “Polite girl always dances with the boy that brung her.”

  He smiled back. He turned and looked out of the window—the cinnamon-colored earth, the upside-down ocean of sky.

  “Best get going,” he said. “Want to see if we can get a ride down to El Paso, stay there the night maybe. Also want to keep ahead of anyone who might be looking for us.”

  She didn’t move.

  “Whassup?”

  She closed her eyes for a second, and she took a breath deep enough to drown in. “I’m tired,” she said.

  “ ’S why I wanna get to El Paso. Maybe we can find somewhere halfway comfortable to sleep.”

  “I don’t mean like that. I don’t mean not-enough-sleep tired. I mean tired in my heart, in my head. Like the spirit of me is tired.”

  “Hell, Bailey, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. You had a bad start, that’s all. We’ve both had a bad start, but things is gonna get better. There’s plenty of folks had it rougher than us, and they come out on top. They end up makin’ a bunch of money and straightenin’ everything out. All of it is about making the future better than what we got now.”

  “Is that all it’s about? You really think that’s why we’re here?”

  Clay turned his mouth down at the corners. “It’s lunchtime, Bailey. That kinda conversation is for when it’s dark and quiet and there ain’t nothing else goin’ on.”

  “My father used to tell me stories, you know?”

  “Stories?”

  “I was thirteen when I met him for the first time. I took a bus to Scottsdale by myself and I found him.”

  “Hell, I bet he was surprised enough to have a heart attack.”

  “No,” she said matter-of-factly. “He wasn’t surprised at all. I think he expected me to show up.”

  Clay didn’t speak.

  “And he was real good. He was a good man in so many ways.” She smiled, almost to herself. Clay had the impression he could have been anyone, that she just needed to say some things. Who might be listening was the least of her concerns. “He tried to make up for things, I think. He used to buy me stuff, and he’d make sure that he always had the things I liked to eat in the icebox when I came over, and when I went to bed he’d sit and tell me stories. Made-up things and real things, you know? He just told me stories about whatever he could think of at the time …” She hesitated. “This is gonna sound foolish,” she said.

  “Can’t be the judge of that until I hear it,” Clay replied.

  “One time, a ways back, he told me a story about Eldorado. The real one, you know? Not the one in Texas.”

  Clay was at first disbelieving, then bemused, then just downright amazed. “That is a sign,” he said eventually. “That has to be a sign.”

  “I don’t know what it is, Clay, but I figured I should tell you. Since you mentioned this place in Texas it’s been on my mind a good deal. Maybe it was nothing more than a coincidence or whatever, but I figured I had to say something.”

  “And what did he tell you about the real Eldorado?”

  “Told me that everyone who gets there winds up rich and happy.” She hesitated.

  “What?” Clay asked her.

  “Also told me that a lot of people died trying to find it.”

  Clay said nothing. She was right. Her father had been right. He understood something about her now. Coincidence, a sign, whatever it was, she was going along because of her father, not because of Clay or anyone else. Her father had spoken of it, and thus it mattered. He could have told her Denmark or England or Ding Dong, Alabama, and if he had said any one of those places then that’s where they’d be headed. And coincidence? Clay didn’t believe in coincidence. What had he heard one time? Coincidence was when God wanted to remain anonymous. Sure as shit with sugar on top was his sarcastic response to that homily. It was nonsense. Same as the bullshit church signs they passed every mile and a half.

  “You believe that you’re going to wind up rich and happy?” he asked her.

  “I believe that if you believe anything hard enough then you can get it.”

  “That’s a very positive outlook you have there.”

  “And you’re very sarcastic.”

  “And you really think you’re heading for greatness?” he went on.

  She didn’t hesitate because she was uncertain. She hesitated because she was thinking how to say what she wanted to say. That was the definite impression Clay got as he watched a faint smile emerge on her lips. “Greatness?” she said. “Hell, Clay, don’t you think I’m just the greatest already?”

  He didn’t say anything. What was there to say? She was contagious, like a disease, but a good disease. A contagious cure. Was there such a thing?

  “Leave a quarter for the waitress,” she said as she got to her feet. “Leave a dollar maybe.”

  “I’m not leaving a dollar. Hell, we’ve got little enough money as it is.”

  “Leave a dollar,” she repeated. “That money from those dead men was no more your money than anyone else’s. Share a little bit of it. It might do us some good.”

  “You’re serious—”

  “Tempt fate if you want, Clay Luckman.”

  “You’re telling me that if I don’t leave a dollar then something bad is gonna happen to me?”

  “I’m not saying anything of the sort.”

  He took the bundle of notes out of his pocket and dropped a dollar on the table.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said quietly.

  She led. He followed. The waitress watched them go. Her name was Betty Calthorpe, and she later considered it strange that a couple of kids would leave a dollar as a tip.

  Thirty minutes or so later Clay and Bailey picked up a ride into El Paso. The driver was a water-pump engineer called Martin Dove, and he asked their names and Bailey said her name was Frances and this here was her brother, and his name was Paul.

  “Like St. Francis and St. Paul,” Martin Dove said, and Bailey said a little like that, save that Frances was spelled with an e.

  “It’s i for ’im, and e for ’er. That’s how you remember.”

  “Clever,” Martin Dove said, and then he told them about the water pump he’d just fixed in Caballo, New Mexico, and now he was driving back to the office in El Paso to file his reports.

  It was four thirty or thereabouts when they arrived, and the driver waved them goodbye and good luck. He thought they were nice kids, and then he never thought another word about them. Not until later.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Garth Nixon and Ron Koenig were appreciative of Sheriff Hoyt Candell’s care and attention to detail.

  The gun and shell box had been left right where he’d seen them, and Nixon brought them out carefully, bagged them, asked if Candell would assign one of his deputies to drive them directly to the federal office in El Paso. There they had sufficiently advanced equipment to take prints from the gun. They could also trace the serial number of the weapon, ascertain whether it had ever been legally registered. Candell couldn’t have been more helpful. The assigned deputy left the scene at 4:35. The items would be signed into the El Paso Bureau of Investigation Offices a little after six thirty, carrying with it Koenig’s written entreaty that the matter be addressed with the utmost urgency. The senior technical officer was called back in from home. He started work immediately. Within an hour he had located the serial number registration of the weapon
as that belonging to Harvey Warren, sole proprietor of the Marana Convenience Store & Gas Station in Marana, Arizona. It wouldn’t be until the following morning that the fingerprints were formally identified, and this solely because Ronald Koenig happened to have a fingerprint record against which the lifted prints could be compared.

  At the scene itself—the overturned car three or four miles from Deming, Luna County—Koenig and Nixon puzzled over the circumstances. At that moment they had no way of determining if the death of the two men had any connection to Clarence Luckman. From all circumstantial evidence it appeared that the two men had been engaged in some sort of sexual activity whilst the vehicle was in motion. The gun and the box of shells might already have been there, the car just happening to stop in the same place. Unlikely, of course, but nothing could be ruled out until certainty ruled it out. The gun may have been placed there later. There was no indication that either man had been shot, and the gun did not appear to have been fired recently. It was a piece of the puzzle that bore no context, or it was unrelated. Nixon suspected the latter, Koenig the former. Had he been asked why, he would not have wanted to cite intuition, but intuition it was. The farther they traveled, the more pieces of this thing appeared, the more he seemed to be able to determine those that belonged and those that did not. At least that’s what he believed, and his belief was based on what he felt. The crime scene—the presence of the discarded gun and shells sufficient to classify it as a crime scene in Koenig’s mind—felt connected. That was all he could say, and he didn’t say it out loud. It felt connected.

  They drove the four miles out to the gas station then, and they showed Clark Regan a photograph of Clarence Luckman, and Clark peered at that picture for a long time before he shook his head.

  “I couldn’t be sure,” he said. “I was more talkin’ to the girl. The kid was just hangin’ back there by the pork rinds, and then he come on up here to pay for them, but I was still sort of talking to the girl and I didn’t really pay him a great deal of mind.”

  “But it could have been him?” Koenig asked.

  “Hell, mister, put it that way it could have been anyone.”

  They returned to the scene with no further certainty than that with which they’d left. Who this girl might have been they had no idea, and if she was in the company of Clarence Luckman and past track record was anything to go by she would more than likely be dead before dusk.

  The Luna County coroner was called. Additionally Hoyt Candell sent for a tow truck. Once the coroner had removed the bodies Candell had the tow truck right-side-up the vehicle and then haul it back onto the road.

  “What is it with vehicular-related homicides this week?” he asked Koenig.

  Koenig shook his head. He didn’t comment because he had no comment to make. Three dead men, fifteen miles apart, same county, same route as had been ascribed to the escapee Clarence Luckman. Koenig, irrespective of whatever intuitive shifts he might periodically experience, was also not a believer in coincidence. He thought of the decision that had been made. Luckman was going to die. That was the simple truth of it. There would be no hesitation, no second thoughts. The moment they saw him would be the moment of his death. Sometimes, for the good of all, it just had to be that way.

  Satisfied that they had done all they could, Garth Nixon and Ronald Koenig left the scene at quarter past seven and drove the fifty miles back to Las Cruces. There the report from the El Paso office awaited them. The gun had belonged to one of the victims at the Marana Gas Station. Koenig had been right once again. Luckman had followed the I-10, had left the gun and shells at the scene with the two dead men, and then more than likely continued on into El Paso. Why the gun had been left behind, he did not know. Whether Luckman was responsible for the deaths of the two men in the car was also unknown. The one thing he did know was that El Paso would be their next destination. Nixon and Koenig checked out of their hotel and left immediately. They would be in El Paso before nine that evening. Photographs of Luckman had already started going out to the gas stations and convenience stores all the way along the interstate. Every uniformed man had seen that picture enough times to recognize Clarence Luckman from fifty yards. Additional FBI agents were being assigned to the surrounding counties and towns.

  Ronald Koenig believed that they were very close to securing Luckman’s arrest. The attacks on Gil Webster, Deidre Parselle, and now this Walter Milford. Beyond that the deaths of Laurette Tannahill and Marlon Juneau. Add in the two men in the car outside of Deming—if indeed Luckman had been responsible for that also—and it made four. Four was more than enough for any man. Four was already well over the line. This thing had to stop, and it had to stop right now.

  The net would tighten up and close in. It was inevitable.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Clay Luckman felt more than out of place in El Paso. It was a big city, seemed bigger even than Tucson. He wanted to carry on, to get out beyond the suburbs and stay the night in a motel somewhere along the highway. They still had the better part of fifty bucks. They could afford at least one really good meal and a good night’s sleep. They deserved it, Clay reckoned, after the distance they’d walked and the things they’d seen. Bailey didn’t argue. She seemed just too damned exhausted to bother.

  Digger, however, was energized beyond all measure.

  The thing with that family had been good. More than good. He’d been back on the road no more than thirty minutes, and he could barely contain his excitement. It had been a shame in a way, because the daughter was good-looking in most every way, and the mother was pretty fresh herself. They would have struggled for sure. But once he’d got inside them and showed them who was boss they’d have quieted down a good deal. Daughter first, then the mother, then the daughter again. After the second or third time he figured that they would have started to like it, started to get into the mood of the thing and all that. At least that’s what he thought.

  He thought about the boy that had hit him with the flask. He had showed a degree of courage, and courage was a quality Digger could admire very easily. The boy had been courageous, trying to protect his little sister like that. Earl Sheridan was courageous. The only person he could think of in that moment who was not courageous was his damn fool dumbass brother, and he didn’t even know why Clay had come to mind. Thinking of Clay made him angry for moment, but then he forgot about him.

  He just went about the business of driving, and he drove as quickly as he could—away from the carnage, the dead bodies, the spent .38 that he’d taken from Wellton’s Sheriff, Jim Wheland. He left Rita McGovern on the roadside, his fingerprints on the Galaxie, his shoe prints, the shell casings, and he left behind Walt Milford’s dark gray Ford Galaxie that Garth Nixon and Ron Koenig were so desperate to find. He also left behind Margot Eckhart, left her with severe cranial trauma and a broken back. She had been thrown clear of the car as it rolled, and though unconscious and seriously wounded, she was still very much alive. She would come round within an hour of Elliott Danziger’s departure. She would crawl from the scene of the burned-out station wagon to the highway and she would be seen by a young couple named Rick Waverley and Samantha Pierce. They were driving from Pine Springs to El Paso in a light blue Chevy that her father had given them for an engagement present. They were going to be married in June of 1965.

  The El Paso County Sheriff’s Department would be there by seven fifteen, and while Rick comforted the distraught Samantha by the side of the road, the emergency medical services rushed Margot Eckhart to Saint Savior’s Hospital. The sheriff himself, a rail-thin sixty-one-year-old widower named Joseph Lakin, permitted no one access to the scene at all. He instructed that a cordon be erected both ways and that all traffic be diverted to another route back down the highway. They had found Rita McGovern’s body not fifty yards away, and an abandoned Ford Galaxie, which—Lakin knew—was not Rita’s car. Hers was a dark blue Ford station wagon, and it was evident in its absence. Lakin knew Rita McGovern due to the fact that they att
ended the same church, and now she was dead on the road with a gunshot wound to the throat. In the burned-out wagon there were another three—an older man in the driver’s seat and two teenagers in the rear, though he could not tell whether they were male or female as yet.

  Standing away from the smoke and the stench he made a call to the county office.

  “Alert the feds,” he said matter-of-factly. “I don’t know what the hell we’ve got out here, but I reckon they need to come look at it.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Alice Cassidy stood beside her husband, felt the warmth of his hands on her stomach. Dinner plates were still on the table. He’d eaten like a ravenous thing, said nothing, and then sat for a while in silence while she watched him. He’d come back to her when she mentioned the doctor’s visit earlier that day.

  “He said it was all good. Everything is normal. Everything is going according to plan.”

  John did not reply, but she knew from the expression on his face that he was pleased and relieved.

  She was waiting for him to tell her about the afternoon’s events. There’d been another incident, something connected to the Parselle girl. She knew that much. He hadn’t told her, not in words, but she knew him well enough to read the body language, the facial expressions, the silence.

  “Same person,” he said eventually. “Same one as killed the girl. I’m sure of it.”

  “And he’s still in Tucson?” she asked.

  John shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. He locked someone in his basement and took his car, and I think he’ll be long gone by now.”

  “And you’ve given all the information to those federal people that were here?”

  “Yes …”

  “Yes, but?” she prompted.

  He looked at Alice, and then he looked away. He smiled at some errant thought, and then he looked back at her and said something that she could have predicted long before he started talking.