“Now where the hell's she got to?” he said in a voice that was probably meant to be a thoughtful whisper but which boomed out across the desolate yard like a thunderclap. He walked down the steps and looked around the house, as if he thought she might be hiding, like a sleepy dog, behind the latticework under the porch. The cold rain was coming down pretty heavily. It had soaked Reaves's sweatshirt as soon as he stepped beyond the overhang, plastering it against his massive chest and torso. I had given up trying to keep dry and started to worry about keeping warm. The wind was so cold it made my teeth chatter and my breath hang in white clouds in the rainy air.
“Maybe she's gone down to the barn to look after the goats,” Reaves said without much conviction. “We can take a look.”
He walked across the yard, taking big, bear-like strides, and down the hard dirt pathway to the barn. I followed him down a hillside that was littered with stones and choked with weeds. A single sunflower fluttered in the wind like a pennant. The ground flattened out in front of the barn; I could hear the goats bleating noisily inside. Reaves pulled one of the big slat doors open and shouted, “My's well come in out of the rain.”
I walked into the barn, which smelled of hay and goat turds and wood dust. There were a couple of horse stalls on my right, just empty bins half-filled with feed, a big hay loft overhead dripping with straw and rain water, and a goat shed on my left where two barrel-chested nanny goats were sitting out the storm. A shovel and a pitchfork were hung neatly on the unopened barn door behind me.
Reaves looked around the empty barn and shrugged. “Hell if I know where she's got to,” he said crankily.
He walked across the packed dirt floor and looked out the open door at the rain. Then he reached to his right and pulled the shovel from its hook. He turned back to me and said, “What do you want to find Hack for, anyway?”
“I told you. I want to ask him some questions. The fact is he could be in some trouble with the law.”
For the second time since I'd met him, Norris Reaves paused to think things out. And for the second time since I'd met him, I wondered why. Wondered and worried a bit, because I wasn't armed and he was as big as they come. You're getting pretty paranoid, Harry, I said to myself. But it didn't feel like paranoia. Men like Reaves shouldn't have to think about questions or answers. Not unless those questions or answers could get them into trouble.
He propped his arm on the shovel handle, like a bizarre version American Gothic, and took a deep breath.
“Maybe he don't want to answer your questions,” he said.
“Why don't we ask him and see?”
“Like I said. I don't know where he is.”
“But your sister does.”
Reaves took another deep breath and his chest heaved. “What you want to go making trouble for, mister?” he said almost sulkily. “What do you want to bring the law down on us for?”
I'd had enough of that barn and of Norris Reaves. I started toward the door.
“No,” he said and held the shovel out to block my way. “I can't take the chance. That fucking speed freak could get the lot of us busted if he starts talking to the law.”
I stared blankly at the shovel and felt the fear start up in the pit of my stomach. “You're kidding, aren't you?” I said to him.
He shook his head very slowly and motioned with the shovel head toward the rear of the barn. It was one of those nightmare moments when you know things are getting out of hand and you don't know why.
“I don't know what you think's going on here, Red,” I said, and the smile I made felt pasty even to me. “But I'm investigating a girl's murder and all I want to do is ask Haskell a few questions.” I pointed at the shovel. “There's no need for that. Why don't we just call this whole thing off before somebody gets hurt.”
“Ain't nobody going to get hurt but you,” he said placidly. He poked the shovel at me and I stepped back toward the goat shed. “I don't like people snooping around. That's one thing I don't like.” He jabbed at me again with the shovel and I almost lost my footing as I backed away from him. “I'm going to fix you first, then I'm going to scare up that no-good son-of-a-bitch Hack and fix him, too. If I fix things right, there won't be nobody else coming around here and messing with my business.”
He'd backed me up a good twenty feet from the door, and the look on his long, country boy's face was absolutely vicious, as if I'd said something against him or his family—pure, feuding mean. I didn't understand the look and I didn't understand the spot I was in, but that didn't make it any less frightening.
“Look,” I said desperately. “I don't care about your business. I told you I'm only interested in Hack.”
He shook his head stubbornly. “I can't be sure you'll kill him if you find him; and once you get that boy talking, there ain't going to be no stopping him. That's just the way it is with speed freaks. Wired the way they are, they got to move their mouths to keep from bugging out.” He sighed almost piteously. “It ain't as if I didn't warn him not to take the stuff. But he's never been right in the head, that one. Not him or his whole damn family. It just ain't good business to eat up your own profits.”
“Speed?” I said hollowly. “You deal speed?”
“Me and Effie and Hack too, when he's sober. Took me a goddamn extension course at O.C.A.S. to figure out how to do the bookkeeping and administration. I got a growing concern, mister, and I ain't about to let nobody fuck it up.”
I suppose his entrepreneur's pride would have been funny if he weren't holding that shovel in his huge hand. At least I'd begun to understand what I'd gotten myself into, and somewhere in the back of my mind I was thinking that, wired on speed, Hack Lord was going to be one dangerous man to track down. But at that moment, Hack Lord wasn't the problem. I thought about all those chrome-plated wrenches and almost laughed. I was about to be “fixed” so that Goodman Reaves could keep on buying dumbbells and power saws.
“I don't care if you deal speed,” I said to him. “Can you understand that?”
“Oh, I understand, all right,” he said. “You're probably telling the truth, too. But the law's not going to see it your way and I got a business to protect. If Hack's killed him a girl—and I sure as hell wouldn't put it past him—then the law's got to be in on this, sooner or later, no matter how you look at it. They find you and Hack dead—under the right circumstances—they might figure you and him killed each other, and then maybe they'll leave us alone. It ain't a sure thing, mind you. But I've been thinking it out, analyzing it, and there just ain't no other solution. You got to go and so does Hack. Nothing personal, mister. I guess it just ain't your day.”
I swallowed hard and couldn't think of one thing to say. It wouldn't do me any good to point out the flaws in his logic. He didn't have a complicated mind, just a deadly one, as lethal and efficient as a twenty-five cent rattrap. And me...well, I'd just happened in at the wrong moment. Like he said, it wasn't my day.
Reaves took the shovel in both hands, sank it into the dirt floor, and kicked the spade with his foot, sending a big chunk of dirt flying past me. I jumped back and he laughed to himself, as if making people jump were his idea of a good joke. He jerked the spade out of the ground and jabbed it back into the hole he was digging.
“What are you doing?” I asked with a shudder.
“What's it look like?” he said without looking up. “I'm digging a grave.”
“Why?” I said.
He didn't answer. Just kept digging. Long, fluid jabs with the space, as if he were working on his pecs again.
Ka-chunk. Ka-chunk.
For a second I couldn't think at all. For a second I was back in ‘Nam, on recon, and my heart was pounding and the adrenaline was flowing and all of my brains were up in my eyes and in my ears. Then I got angry. Not with Reaves. Not at first. With myself, for leaving the .45 in the car under the dash when I'd known full well that something wasn't right about that garage and about the man who'd stopped to think as soon as I'd mentioned Haskell
Lord. Then it all came down to the sound of that spade biting into the ground and look on Norris Reaves's bland, country boy's face. I stopped riding myself and started hating him and the sound he was making. And within a second or two, I had enough anger going to turn that adrenaline to good use. I began to think again, with a stoned-out, crystal clarity. To plan how to get to that gun and to shoot that big bastard with it before he stuck me into that hole he was digging.
I looked quickly around the barn. Reaves was standing about ten feet in front of the open door, right in the center of the doorway. I was about ten feet behind him and another twenty feet from the rear wall. There were a couple of boarded-up windows on that wall. And the rear doors were barred and nailed shut. I couldn't go away from him or around him; so it had to be through him. And that meant moving him out of the doorway, to the right or to the left, then somehow turning him around long enough for me to get past him and get a headstart up the hill. There was just no way I could take him on head-on. His wrists were the size of my forearms.
He could see I was thinking it over and he smiled again, almost angelically, as if he thought the idea that I wanted to save my skin was kind of cute, like baby's first word. I back-stepped to my left, toward the goat shed, and he followed me with his eyes, his hands still pumping with machine-like regularity at the hole in the barn floor.
“I wish you wouldn't do that,” he said in a soft voice. “It makes me kind of edgy. And you wouldn't like me when I'm edgy. Believe me.”
I wanted to make him edgy, all right. That huge, muscle-bound man who thought that killing another human being wasn't “personal.” I wanted to make him so edgy that he'd charge me like a mad bull. Unthinkingly, depending solely on brute strength. He already had strength and position. All I had going for me was speed. And that was no sure thing. I wanted to even up the odds. I wanted to make Norris Reaves at least as mad as I was. Then I might be able to side-step him.
The spade went, “Ka-chunk!”
I looked him over and decided that ruffling him wouldn't be hard. It was just a question of finding his weakest point and then making the taunting as crude and vicious as I could. And with a muscleman, weak points are easy to find. They wear their vanity like armor all over their bodies. I took a deep breath and started up.
“You got a girl, Red?”
He kept digging.
“I've often wondered about that. Whether or not guys like you had girlfriends. I mean, all that work you do in the gyms. All those flye-pulls and bench presses. You've got to be trying to impress somebody. So why do you do it if you don't do it for the girls?”
He didn't look up.
“Or maybe you don't like the girls. Is that it, Red? Is that why you oil down your ‘pecs’ and your ‘lats’? It's not for the girls is it, Red? It's for the boys. The young boys. So they'll start dragging around after you with their hands in their pants. Do you like that, Red? A big, ugly guy like you? When the fags come on to you?”
“Just keep talking, mister,” he said and slammed the spade with his foot. “I like to hear you talk like that.”
“I'll bet you do, Red. An ugly guy like you probably likes to hear about the boys. Do you hang out at the Y, Red? Do you go into the steam rooms and flex your muscles? Or do you go to the parks, Red? Do you go into the johns and pretend to take a pee and wait for the teenage kids to come in so you can show off for them? I guess you must have to wear a bag over that head of yours. But they're not really interested in your face, are they, Red?”
Reaves took a deep breath and the muscles in his huge chest jumped as if they'd been touched with a cattle prod. “You better shut up, now, mister,” he said with an eerie softness. “If you know what's good for you.”
“Why? You got a hot date waiting for you back at some bar? Is that it? Some guy you want to corn-hole, so it'll make you feel like a he-man?” I laughed an ugly laugh. “All the muscles in the world wouldn't make you a man, Red. You got faggot written all over you.”
He stopped shoveling and I tensed to move.
Reaves pulled the spade out of the ground and juggled it in his right fist, as if it were a handful of change. “I warned you,” he said. “But you jus’ wouldn't listen.”
His face had gotten very red, almost as red as his hair. And he was breathing hard, with the dumb fury of a cornered animal. He took the shovel in both hands and snapped the handle in two with a single movement of his arms. It cracked with the sound of a gunshot. Jesus! I said to myself and stepped back quickly to my right. He tossed the shovel head behind him and waved the broken length at me like a club.
“I'm going to make you beg me to stop hurting you,” he said.
He dropped into a crouch and came at me, tossing the handle from hand to hand.
I crouched, too. And when he was about ten feet away, I jumped to my right, toward the door. He adjusted more quickly than I thought he would, given all those muscles. But you have to sacrifice something to develop a physique like his, and I knew from that one movement that I had better than a step in speed on him.
I feinted to my left, and he whipped that shovel handle out and slashed at my right shoulder. The broken end caught my sleeve and ripped it open. I moved back to my right and he crept forward, swinging the club across the front of his body. I backstepped again and knew that I was running out of room. The goat pen was right behind me.
Reaves stood up for a second and smiled, as if he thought he had me trapped. There was about seven feet between us now; but I'd pulled him far enough away from the barn door so that, if I did manage to get around him, I could make it outside without any danger of him cutting me off.
“Well, c'mon, faggot,” I said between my teeth.
He snarled furiously and came at me, the shovel handle raised above his head like a broad sword. I zagged left and he turned left; then I dove to my right, like I was following a sideline pattern, and made it past him just as he was bringing the shovel handle down into the fence around the goat pen.
The goats started bucking and shrieking. And so did Norris Reaves. “I'll kill you!” he screamed. “I'll kill you!”
He whirled around, but I was already three steps ahead of him, making straight for the barnyard. I thought I was out of immediate danger. I thought I had enough distance on him to make it up to the car. Then something struck me hard in the back and knocked me up against the closed side of the barn door. For a second I didn't know what had happened, didn't realize that he'd tossed that shovel handle at me like a brickbat and caught me right in the middle of the back. It was a costly second, because by the time I'd gotten my breath and turned to face him, he was only a few feet away and coming hard—his arms spread apart and his enormous shoulders tensed as if he were doing a crab pose.
I reached to my right and jerked the pitchfork off the wall and, without thinking about my aim, jabbed it forward just as Reaves got to me.
He shrieked with pain, but still managed to club me on the side of the head—hard enough to knock me down and almost out on the dirt floor. I lay there for a second, stunned. Don't pass out! I pleaded with myself. For God's sake, don't pass out! And I didn't, although it cost me energy I didn't know I had to sit upright again. Reaves was lying on his back about five feet behind me, clutching at the pitchfork that was sunk in his right thigh. There was blood all over the floor and on Reaves's hands and up and down his pants leg.
“You son-of-a-bitch!” he screamed at me and pulled the tines of the fork out of his leg. He slipped the sweatshirt off, tied it around his thigh, then very slowly and very purposefully got back to his feet.
Jesus Christ! I said to myself and scrambled to my own feet and out the door into the cold, driving rain. The dirt pathway up the hillside had turned to mud. I slipped a couple of times as I clawed my way up it. Not looking back. Not daring to. Just racing toward the car before Norris Reaves could catch up to me again.
When I made it to the yard, I ran straight for the Pinto, jerked the door open, and dove across the seat for the gu
n rack. The Colt came away cold in my hand. I turned back to the hill just as Reaves was hobbling to the top—his leg all red and his chest and pants covered with mud.
“Don't come any closer, Reaves,” I croaked at him.
He kept on coming, dragging his wounded leg behind him.
What the hell's keeping him up. I said to myself and raised both arms and aimed the pistol. But the gun barrel was wobbling badly and my head was still ringing from the punch I'd taken and, after all the adrenaline I'd been burning, I just didn't have any strength left. I squeezed the trigger and the gun barked, sending me tumbling back onto the car seat.
I'd missed him by a mile and I knew it. But like me, he was going on sheer nerve at that point. And after all the blood he'd lost, he just couldn't go any farther. He hobbled into the yard, then pitched forward into the mud and lay there, panting out gray smoke and holding his bloody thigh with both hands.
That's how things stood for about five minutes. Reaves lying helplessly in the muddy yard and me sitting helplessly on the car seat. Both of us too drained of energy to move or to speak.
“Call an ambulance,” he said after a time. “I’m going to bleed to death.”
“Bleed to death,” I said to myself and worked my way slowly out of the Pinto and up to the farmhouse porch. I sat down on the stairs, under the overhang, and stared at Reeves, who was lying beneath me in the muck.
“Call an ambulance, goddamn it!” he shouted.
“Where's Haskell Lord?” I said dully.
“I told you,” he groaned. “I jus’ don't know. Ain't it bad enough he brought the law down on me?”
“Where's your sister, then?”
He didn't say anything.
So I didn't move. I just sat there, listening to the rain on the roof, feeling my heart beat slow down again below the two hundred or so beats per minute it had been pumping back in the barn, and not thinking about how close I'd just come to death.
Final Notice Page 12
