Wild

by Brewer, Gil

I didn’t say anything.

  Steifer said, “Some kid coming home from school, playing hooky, heard the dog. He came over to investigate. He saw what was going on, ran home, and his mother called the sheriff’s department. Silverman and Haddock are working together on this. Silverman’s coming with a couple deputies, they ought to be here. We’re tired. Can you imagine that?”

  “No kid saw me,” I said. “I just got here.”

  “We didn’t figure you sat up with that,” he said, gesturing toward the body. There was real irritation in his tone now. His voice lowered. “You think we want to believe a guy like you would get himself fouled up in something like this? Give us some credit.”

  They were closing in. How do you get away from two trained cops. Especially when they’re carrying a grudge.

  Steifer’s voice was bitter. “You bastard,” he said. “You know goddamned well we’ve been trying to locate you. You’ve been staying out of our way. It’s been a game of tag to you, you son-of-a-bitch. So now we’ve got you. Using a friend, too. Hoagy Stills came to Haddock with the information on that gun right after he talked with you. That was a great way to act. With us right there, talking to Stills. You sure as hell are a son-of-a-bitch, Baron—believe me. We got no sympathy for a louse like you.” He raised his voice. “Every lawman in the state working day and night. And you playing tiddly-winks with hot information, using it to your own purposes.”

  “And a tiddly-wink to you,” I said.

  Vagas thrust his lower lip out. “Where is that money, Baron? That’s what you’ve been after, isn’t it? Playing your neat lone game.”

  My voice was strained through chips of broken glass. “There’s no use in my trying to tell you anything. You’ve got it all figured out. You know all the answers. The oracles of Central Homicide.” I spoke evenly. “You’re so thick-skulled you wouldn’t recognize the truth if it gnawed holes in your head.” I looked at the hound. He was trotting around in the grass, panting. I said, “I came out here to see what I could find. It was a logical place to pick up threads. Also, I found a key today—a key that fits the padlock on those chains down there in that cement block house, where that corpse,” I turned and pointed, “was when I first found him.” I had half an angle. It was the lousy half, as usual, but I decided to play it out and see what happened. Only the instant I’d finished speaking, I felt as if I’d turned a gun on myself. Naturally, to them, I would have the key.

  “Sure,” Steifer said. “It figures. But why tell us you ‘found’ the key?” He turned to Vagas. “He’s crawling, Rudy. Like the worm he is. Trying to crawl out from under.”

  I spoke to Rudy Vagas. “This body, here, is Barton Yonkers. The same guy who clobbered the Laketown bank. His pal, Horace Ailings, is dead. The body was found over by Lake Wales. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  Vagas snorted mildly. “Let’s see the key, bright boy. Take it easy—toss it to me.”

  I tossed him the damned key.

  “Hold him right here and let him suffer,” Vagas said. “I’ll be back in a minute.” He turned and started off down the slope toward the trailer.

  Steifer and I watched each other.

  “I know what’s in your head,” he said. “I’d kill you.”

  I said, “Your brains wear shoes.”

  He said, “Where’s the money, Baron?”

  I looked at the hound. It was as if he were guarding the dead body, now. I was soaking wet with sweat.

  Steifer said, “Why don’t you level with me? You know you haven’t got a chance.” He glanced down through the woods, where Vagas had walked. “Come on,” he said. “Spill it to me. You’ve got this Hendrix dame someplace, right? Why not tell it? Tell it to me. You got a heat on for her, only she wants money to play the game. You started out on this thing somehow, and you saw a chance to really make a killing. Isn’t that right?”

  I said, “You’re sure new in those clothes you’re wearing. I’ll bet you’re back in uniform by tomorrow.”

  He took a quick step toward me, ready to say something else, troubled.

  I said, “Trying to work it so you’ll get the gold star while your pal Rudy’s not in sight?”

  Steifer moved another quick step. It scared the hound briefly. The hound leaped, snarling at him, like a horse shying. Steifer instinctively looked down and lashed out with his right hand, his gun hand. I moved.

  I chopped and caught him with a judo clip on the side of the neck. He dropped the gun. I’d had to do it. His eyes were astonished in that spare second before I chopped him again, giving it everything. Halfway down, he tried to call out. I went crazy, fingered my fists into a club, and smashed him on the joint of skull and neck, at the back, with all my strength. He huddled in a ball on his knees and flattened out, cold.

  I was already running when I remembered Vagas. The hound stood over Steifer, mouth gaping. I had to get to the Ford. Vagas was in the cement block house now. If I went for the car, I’d be directly in his line of fire.

  I ran as softly as I could down the slope toward the trailer. I started around behind it, then remembered the letters from Asa Crafford to Carl Hendrix, behind the veneer in the closet. There might not be another chance to get them. I slipped along the front of the trailer. The door was open. I went in fast, over to the closet. The closet door was open. The veneer was down among the shoes, with the bottle of gin. The letters were gone.

  I got out of there fast, went behind the trailer. I walked now, on my heels, digging them into the ground, without sound. I weighed a straight two hundred. I had put all I could of that weight onto Steifer’s neck and skull. Again, as with the punk Joe Lager, I hoped to God I hadn’t killed him. I never used that method without worrying. One time I’d killed a man that way. The memory of it was bad. He’d been due to die, but Steifer was just the north end of a horse headed south.

  I came around the side of the cement block house, listening, and reached the door. Vagas was hunkered down trying the key in the padlock. He hadn’t heard me. Then I heard the hound coming, crashing through the grass and brush, like the devil was after him.

  Vagas heard him, too.

  I didn’t wait.

  He turned straight into my fist as I lifted it from the floor. It caught his jaw. His teeth cracked. He arched backward, his eyes gone up into his skull. I stood there with my wrist and elbow a blaze of sharp pain, my knuckles numbed. When the feeling returned to my knuckles, it was like being struck with a hammer. I had smashed a knuckle.

  Vagas’ gun was on the dirt floor. I kicked it into shadows under the army cot. He got to his knees, groaning, then fell back.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But you wouldn’t listen. I’ve got things to do, and you couldn’t let me go.”

  He kept talking Martian, saliva running down his lips, trying to get up. Again he got to his knees and fell back. I grabbed up the length of chain, wrapped it around his leg, and snapped the padlock on it. The key twinkled on the floor. I got that and fired it out the door, then turned, running.

  The hound watched balefully. He didn’t move as I ran past him, heading for the Ford.

  Two long strides past the doorway, slugs ripped into the dirt by my feet, and I heard the shots rattle off across the country. Steifer was up on the knoll. He wasn’t sure whether or not I had Vagas’s gun.

  “Baron!” Steifer shouted. “Don’t be a fool!”

  I ran like hell for a wooded slope to the left. There was no chance to make the Ford now. I had to reach the shelter of woods. He would shoot to kill.

  “Baron—stop!”

  He fired again. I kept going. He was being careful. A careful cop is a deadly cop. The slug ticked a pine, ricocheted skyward in a snarling whine.

  I ran head down, my feet sliding on the ground. I came over the top of the slope, looked back there. Steifer knelt on the opposite knoll, beside Yonkers’ grave. He took aim, holding the gun with both hands.

  I dropped. The slug cracked over my head.

  I rolled across
clean wet grass, glimpsing splashes of misty sky, then smelling the sharp wet odor of the earth. I came up running. I was in pine woods.

  Steifer’s voice echoed.

  “Stop—Baron!”

  I ran with everything I had, tasting gall in my throat, feeling the urgent labor of my lungs. A loud snapping and snarling and crashing was behind me. It was the hound.

  He ran jawing beside me. His eyes were full of laughter. For a brief instant both of us rushed back through the years to the time when I was a boy, running through damp autumnal Montana fields with my own dog leaping at my side. Long ago, before the family migrated to Florida, before James Baron had thought of becoming a private cop.

  I paused, listening. My breath rasped rawly in my throat. Steifer let go another shot. It was wild. He called, out of range now. Then he began running. He crashed toward me, distantly.

  “Home, boy!” I said to the hound.

  The hound lolled his tongue, eyes dancing. He was ready for the race. I ran again. The dog kept pace in a lazy lope.

  Steifer fired. The slug whipped through trees. I spotted a road, a billboard advertising women’s bathing suits. The sound of a siren lifted like an emotional wrench through the quiet day.

  I was back where I’d come from. In my mind’s eye, I saw them—piling out of police cars, shouting orders, starting through the woods in pursuit.

  Lines of blue. Neighbors would be deputized by Sheriff Zack Silverman. All out for the monster.

  I leaped a ditch onto a macadam road. I was dragging lead now. I ran off in the direction of town. As I ran, I tried to beat some of the dirt off my clothes, thinking of trying to hail a ride. In ten minutes, this area would swarm with law like bacteria on an infected wound. Men with shotguns. They would have the ‘copter out. Field glasses and scopes.

  I jogged steadily along.

  You read about them, trying to escape the Law. They must know it’s only a matter of time. You can’t escape the Law. It’s organized. You can’t escape today’s organization. I knew this. There is only the momentary respite. The emotions of this moment, knowing you’re wrong, knowing they will get you; the feeling of overwhelming doom, of being trapped, knowing you can easily be killed even when fundamentally guiltless—this feeling is comparable to nothing. The doom is complete. Convention reads it to you from the crib; the Law is the force of right—right or wrong—and if you err, you pay. There is no escape. In the close chase, you run hand in hand with doom. You don’t dismiss panic. Panic is your heart. Panic is your hide. And panic is selfish.

  The If—always the If.

  If I didn’t reach Ivor Hendrix, get her some place else to safety, and locate a tangible fact that would open this case and clear me, I was done. I would rot behind Raiford’s bars. It would take more than theory. I had to come up with total answers now.

  I couldn’t wait for a cab, and a city bus wouldn’t serve. The only answer was to steal a car and head for the Vista Groves Hotel.

  The hound loped along beside me. I didn’t have the strength to order him away. He looked happy, and as crazy as I felt.

  I ran past houses, set back off the street now. Then I spotted an Amoco service station on the next corner. Nobody was at the gasoline pumps, no sign of action. A yellow and black ‘55 Dodge sedan was parked alongside the station. I cut across a vacant lot, approached the station from the rear. The dog prowled beside me. I patted his head, said, “Hush, boy.” He looked up at me and laughed sadly.

  I reached the car, opened the driver’s door, checked the ignition. Keys hung in the lock. Somebody was talking inside the office. I pushed the shift lever into neutral, released the parking brake, and shouldered the car backward down a gentle cement ramp toward the street. It rolled easily. The hound sat in the middle of the street, head cocked, watching.

  The car rolled faster. I got under the wheel, backed into a drive, closed the door, started the engine, and took off in the opposite direction.

  There was whining, leaping, scrabbling beside the car. The hound was doing a good forty-five miles an hour, right outside, tongue flapping over his shoulder.

  I slammed on the brakes, flung open the door. He leaped in, jumped in back, flinging mud around on the bright parrot-yellow upholstery. He sank down on the seat, meek-eyed, tail flipping. I started off again. Through the rear-view mirror, the gas station back there was quiet.

  It began to mist more thickly. A wind came in from the Gulf of Mexico, full of salt, fanning the land. I had a stitch in my side like a rusty knife scraping the muscles of my heart, and I thought of Ivor Hendrix, and of the long ago when we’d known each other, and of the years between—and now.

  In every way, Ivor was still more than I could ever have imagined she might have been. You weren’t supposed to be able to go back to that first dream—she was only supposed to be a ghost that haunted your lonelier nights.

  Something attained, yet never attainable.

  Held, yet never again beheld.

  Only you had to hope, because without hope, there was nothing.

  I cornered fast at a light and drove across town to the Vista Groves Hotel, hoping.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  As I WALKED down the hall toward Ivor Hendrix’s room, I suddenly didn’t want to look inside the door. It was as if I knew she would be in there, bug-eyed and purple-faced. Or spread across the bed, naked, with a knife sticking in her back.

  I rapped lightly. “Ivor?”

  She didn’t answer.

  The door was locked. I backed off, set my heel and let the door have it brutally, just under the lock. The door snapped with shuddering crack, lashed open, back against the inside wall.

  You know you’re right, you hope you’re not right.

  It’s like getting hit twice as hard the second time, in the same place as the first.

  She was gone. Not just dead. Gone.

  The room looked as if it had been passed through a threshing machine. It was demolished.

  I had done all this by myself.

  I closed the door, looked around. Whoever they were, they had gotten to her at last. The place had been picked apart with destructive meticulousness. They had been after something. What?

  Elk Crafford’s name was a tantalizing whisper. I had told him where she was. If he had harmed her, I would harm him, thoroughly, completely. Ivor Hendrix had gotten to me in her own strangely cool way.

  The room was dim, lighted only by a bed lamp. I checked the bathroom. The top was off the water tank on the toilet. The medicine chest had been excavated, the floor littered with smashed bottles, tubes and boxes, leftovers from former tenants.

  In the other room, the mattress had been knifed and sliced; stuffing oozed out, bulging among twisted steel springs. Bureau and dressing-table drawers were yanked out, smashed, cleaned. The carpet had been torn up. The shades were ripped from the windows. Curtains had been pulled down.

  It had become darker outside. Small rain ticked against the windows. I moved to the wall, switched on the overhead light. It came on brightly. I stared at the big round white globe, stared at a dark elongated shadow.

  The high ceiling was faintly stained. Coolness warped along the nape of my neck.

  It had been in the movie, The Lost Weekend, where Don Birnam hid his whisky up there. Only how would I reach the globe?

  How had she reached it? I could be wrong.

  I stood on the foot of the bed. Flailing the air with my hand, I was still five feet from the light. The long shape of Ivor Hendrix’s cylindrical white purse was quite plain to me now.

  I leaped high off the bed, reaching, and missed, thundering to the floor. A brass candlestick lay on the torn carpet, knocked from a shelf. I reached for it, tossed it straight up at the overhead light and ducked.

  Glass cracked and showered down. It tinkled and crashed on the floor. I watched her purse strike the floor and bounce. Something jumped out of the purse, bounding across the room. Whatever it was nestled up against the baseboard by the door.

&nb
sp; I listened. There was no sound from the hall.

  I went over to the baseboard and picked up the bundle of what looked like small notebooks, held together with a narrow pink garter.

  I frowned, stripped the garter off, and shuffled through flat small tan envelopes. I opened one and looked at it, knowing alread what they were.

  Bank books.

  The one I had opened was issued to a woman. Name of Gertrude Paulding. Fort Myers.

  It was a new account. I checked the deposit. One thousand, eight hundred.

  I looked at another.

  Ivor Heira. Lincoln Trust, Hibiscus City, Florida. One thousand, two hundred.

  Interested, I opened another bank book. They were very neat, clean, brand-new bank books. They seemed to be all savings accounts. Of course, stupid of me. There was no chance overlooking the interest accumulate.

  Henrietta A. Zonders. Key West. Thirty-two thousand.

  Another: Loretta Stitskin. West Palm Beach. Fifteen thousand.

  Getting a bit bold.

  Charlotte Debra Westmark. Miami. Thirty-two thousand.

  Babette Jardin. Gainesville. Seventeen thousand.

  She got around a lot while she was visiting dear Auntie Liz, up in Orlando. I went over and sat on the ragged mattress, on the bed, and continued with my research. As I opened each bank book, crisply untouched, my heart rocked faintly, and I perspired slightly, and I wanted to throw up.

  Mary Fuchs. Jacksonville. Nine thousand.

  I hurled that one savagely across the room.

  Doubtless playing her little games to while away the wearisome days of travel fatigue.

  Alice Botkins Somersall. Tampa. Forty-four thousand.

  Grace Golden. Planter’s Trust, Orange Corners. Four thousand.

  Aileen Fielding Singer. Probably a sewing machine store across the street, there in Bradenton. Twenty-three thousand.

  Helene Demmonds Dartell. Miami. Fifty-six thousand.

  “I’m so sorry I forgot to tell you, Lee. We can phone Aunt Liz right now, while I’m here. She’ll verify that I asked her not to tell anyone I was there.”

  They call it brass.