by George Wier
“So you intercepted one of those installments.” I said.
“Yeah. I did,” she said, waving her hands for emphasis. “Only I didn’t know it was one of the big ones.”
I could tell that she was getting a bit tipsy. It was our third beer each. Regardless, I was enjoying seeing her animated like that.
“It was easy,” she said. “I got hold of Archie’s little black book, the one with all the guys in it from the old days; guys that Carl and Lefty would talk and laugh about. And I found it: Ernest Neil. It had a number next to it. A few days later when I got access to a phone I called the number and got this old guy.”
“Neil?”
“Nah. A jockey. Jolly Mortensson. Worked for Ernie Neil.”
“Yeah?” Hank said, prompting her to continue.
“So Ernie helped me set it up. He handled some of the footwork from his end. But it was up to me to make the switch.”
“Where’s the money?” I asked. It was the first time I’d asked it.
“That’s just a… a little tiny detail… a small part of the problem,” she said.
“Where is it?” Hank and I asked in the same instant.
Afterwards, I wished she hadn’t told us.
CHAPTER FIVE
“Well. I will just be damned,” Hank said.
“Yeah,” I nodded in agreement.
Julie was all done and just sitting there, sipping on her beer.
I could tell by Hank's serious demeanor that he'd arrived at some important thought or decision. A crossroads, as it were.
“You tell her all about me, Bill?”
“Just that you’re handy in a tight spot, that you’re a client of mine, and that you’re alright. That’s about it.”
The toaster oven timer dinged. My stomach was doing little whirly-gigs, and the smell of toast, butter and cheese had become maddening.
We took time out for Hank to fix us up a plate each and a tall glass of iced tea. The tea tasted like it was a couple of days old, but at least it was sweet.
“Okay,” he said when he was back at the table with us. “So who are Jake and Freddie?”
Julie sat back in her chair. She didn’t seem very interested in Hank’s toaster oven cheese sandwiches. Mine, however, didn’t stand a chance.
“They’re Lefty’s and Carl’s sons. They’re about as stupid as a couple of snipe, but they’re like hound dogs. They never give up.”
“When was the last time you saw them?” Hank asked.
Julie turned to look at me. There was a strange look in her eye. Something she didn’t want to say.
“Better tell him,” I said.
She reached out, wrapped her fingers around her bottle of beer on the table and drained the last quarter of it in one long gulp.
“About an hour ago,” she said.
“What?” Hank and I chimed in at the same instant.
“Following us from Hank’s mall.”
Hank and I were on our feet.
My life is not very exciting. I don’t like excitement. I don’t even watch exciting movies. I like things nice and calm. You put in your day of work, you watch the sun fade from the sky and you draw your dollar. But sometimes you just have to move quickly.
Hank and I were moving before we could think.
He jumped up and locked the back door with a flick of his wrist.
I was into the front room and dodging stacks of old, dust-coated thirty-three rpm records and nineteenth-century legal volumes to get to the front door.
“Lock it, Bill,” Hank called out from the kitchen.
“Yeah,” I said.
The living room had two large windows, one of which had the shade pulled four-fifths of the way down. The shade for the other one was missing completely.
I made it to the front door, peeked out of one of the rectangles of glass that was at eye level.
The front yard was empty. Well, not exactly empty. It was Hank’s yard, after all. There was his car in the driveway. Across the street was my Mercedes. There was beat up Ford F-150 parked behind that.
“Bill, what are we doing?” It was Julie. I turned back toward her voice. She stood in the doorway between the kitchen and living room in the center of the house.
“Julie. Get back in the kitchen,” I urged. From the kitchen I heard the sound of a slamming drawer. Hopefully Hank was fishing for a gun somewhere.
I looked back quickly toward the truck. I couldn’t see anyone in the cab for a moment, but then again there was a bit of a blur there.
Something had moved.
Then I saw the barrel of the rifle and recognized it for what it was about an instant before it barked a spark of flame.
Things happened pretty fast.
The glass from the window pane on my right crumpled in on itself in three large shards. I hadn’t fully registered what was occurring yet. My first thought on it was a bit odd: windows aren’t supposed to do that! Then I connected it with the rifle barrel about a hundredth of a second later and turned back toward Julie.
She just stood there, bringing her hands to her face.
A large divot of splintered wood had appeared on the facing of the kitchen entryway about shoulder-high not a foot from her. I could see the splinters on her neck and ear.
In the next instant Hank hit her from behind and took her down to the floor. I heard a loud grunt.
“Bill,” Hank called out. “Head’s up.”
Something sailed through the air toward me from their direction behind the tallest stack of books. I snatched it out of the air and was pulling the slide on the object before I could think much about it. It was a thirty-eight.
I looked again out of the small doorway glass in time to see the passenger door on the other side of the truck fly open.
An engine roared into life.
I don’t know what came over me after that. The moment became somewhat surrealistic, with dark, pulsing, purplish and red tendrils creeping into the corners of my vision. It’s happened to me a few times before, and each time it has, by the time I saw the colors and recognized them for what they meant, it was too late.
The front door was suddenly open and I was across the porch and sailing off into the brilliant green too-tall grass and the too-bright sunlight, and the funny thing about it was I couldn’t even feel my feet touching the ground.
The pickup truck was moving, slamming the corner of the rear fender of my Mercedes in an effort to escape. There was the shatter of glass and the crunch of metal. I didn’t much care, though, at that moment. The red and purple pulses were forming interesting tributaries around the movie theater screen my vision had become. And there was a part of me that was watching the whole thing with a sort of rapt fascination, like a kid at the movies with a box of overly buttered popcorn on his lap and an awed look on his face. But, when you’re watching a movie, you’re safe. The bullets aren’t real bullets and the crunching metal is all staged and all is right with the world. That was how I felt.
It looked as though I was going to beat the truck.
I pointed my right hand at the truck cab and the blurry figures inside it as the whole thing loomed suddenly very large in front of me. My hand bucked once… Twice.
The driver was trying to put his foot through the floorboard of the thing. Tires squealed on the hot pavement and a carburetor whined with a steep over-abundance of horsepower.
The center of the pickup windshield blossomed with a huge, elaborate spider web. Another, duplicate, spider web appeared in front of the driver.
The truck came on.
It had been perhaps thirty feet away a second before, but suddenly it was about half that, or maybe more.
Oh, I thought. Okay. Move!
I did this funny thing with my legs-I did a sideways frog-movement. Sort of a cross between a hop and a dive.
I felt a numbness in my left foot, even as my shoulder slammed into the bottom of the ditch across the road from Hank’s house. Anyone who has ever been bitten by a shark whil
e swimming would know how it felt. First there was a bit of a jolt traveling up my leg, a distant cousin to the electrocution variety, then sudden and intense numbness. Last came pain. But that was okay. What was even more noteworthy was the interesting sensation around the crown of my head, and the darkness that came on. Which in itself was interesting because I had been fairly certain that it was early afternoon.
CHAPTER SIX
I’ve had a few rude awakenings in my life. When I came to in the near dark, that first instant was unsettling. I wanted to swat at the wasps that were stinging my head, only there were no wasps.
“Settle down, Bill.” It was Hank’s voice.
“What happened?” I asked.
We were inside a garage. A bare forty-watt bulb cast the only light into the room. I heard a gentle snore nearby.
“That’s Julie,” Hank said. “She’s asleep. Napping. Don’t worry… She’s fine.”
“The last thing I remember was seeing Julie standing in your kitchen doorway. Somebody shot at her.”
“According to Green-Eyes over there, that would be Jake Jorgenson. He’s the one with the rifle. Also, she says he’s a pretty good shot. But he was looking in through glass at an angle, and I think refraction saved her life.”
“Yeah?”
“Also, you tried to tackle a speeding truck. How’s that foot?”
“What foot?”
I looked to where he pointed. My shoe was off and I had one leg partially elevated. My foot was wrapped up with an Ace bandage.
“What the hell?” I said.
“You must have kicked that truck. Or else somebody ran over your foot. I don’t think anything’s broken, though. It’s not as big as it was a few hours ago.”
“Geez. It hurts,” I said. “But not like my head.”
“Good,” Hank said. “Probably you’ll just limp for a few days. But you’ll need to walk on it soon. You know. To see if anything… gives.”
I looked down past my foot and saw an army cot boxed in by a couple of old steel filing cabinets. It was Julie. She was wrapped up in a sleeping bag.
“Carpin wants her dead,” I said.
“Yeah,” Hank replied. “I don’t know the guy, and he sounds like a real asshole. But,” he chuckled, “if somebody did to me what she did to him… Well.” He was sitting in a folding chair facing me, one of the kind you’d use on a fishing trip that is nothing more than a couple of pieces of bent pipe and two swatches of canvas. He had a three-fifty-seven Smith amp; Wesson Magnum on his lap and a large night watchman’s flashlight in his hand.
“Yeah,” I said.
“I put Dingo in the house,” Hank said, offhand. “Anyone tries to go in there, she’ll have them for dinner. Also, we’ll hear it out here.”
As I recalled, Dingo was a cross between a German Shepherd and an Australian Blue Heeler. One of the smartest dogs I’d ever seen. I’d forgotten all about her.
I moved to get up but felt a wedge of cold pain at my temples.
“Take it easy, Cowboy,” he said. “You’ve got a minor concussion.”
“Feels like… Goddamn wasps nest in my head. Why the garage?”
“No windows.”
“Oh,” I said. “Say… What time of day is it?”
Hank looked down at his watch. “About three in the afternoon. Anyway, I can’t let you go back to sleep. Not for awhile.”
“I thought it was night. It’s sure dark in here.”
“We won’t be leaving until it is dark, or at least we won’t unless we have to. Also, I took the liberty of moving the vehicles. They’re at a friend’s house about a mile from here, out of sight. I wanted it to look like nobody was home.”
“Okay,” I said. “Good enough. So what do you want to do?”
“Well, I was thinking about that.” Hank turned to the side in his chair and reached down toward the floor. I shouldn’t have been surprised to see what he brought back up.
“It’s time for the world-series,” he said. “Best two out of three. Or three out of five. Or whatever.”
He unfolded the cardboard square, put it down flat on a small pedestal beside him, and held out a transparent plastic bag.
“What’ll it be?” he asked. “Red… Or black?”
“Goddammit,” I said. “Not Checkers.”
It was dark-thirty out.
I wouldn’t have minded saying that I felt fine. That simply wasn’t the case. I was nursing a head that felt like the inside of a bell tower that was constantly striking the hour, I was wincing with every step I took, but thankfully, I didn’t think anything was broken, and I had lost all but two games out of the last forty at checkers. The two times I had won, Hank had cursed and blamed it on the ill-lighting. Probably he was right.
We left the garage and Julie and I followed Hank inside the back door of his house under cover of darkness.
I felt safe, though.
I don’t normally carry a gun. There are many reasons for this, the first being the most obvious: they’re illegal in Texas unless you carry a permit, which I don’t. Also I have a bit of a superstition about them. I’ve come to think that guns actually draw trouble. It’s like walking around with the Queen of Spades in your shirt pocket. It’s just asking for it.
Except for one thing: sometimes you really need one. Just in case.
In light of recent events, it felt good having one tucked into my belt. It was the thirty-eight that Hank had lobbed to me earlier in the day.
Dingo was happy to see Hank. The dog put her paws up on his chest and he gave her a good petting. When she was done with Hank, she got one good noseful of me, ignored my attempts to be friendly with her and put all of her attention on Julie. Julie smiled and made friends with the dog.
“So what now?” Julie asked. She looked rested and composed and beautiful there in the silvery moonlight coming in through Hank’s kitchen window. Other than a couple of tiny Band-Aids on her cheek and neck, there was little else to show that she’d lived through a close call.
“What do you think, Hank?” I asked. “Hotel?”
“Hell, no!” he said. “I’ve got better accommodations in mind for us.”
*****
Hank made a phone call there in the dark and ten minutes later there was a black Chevy Suburban idling in his driveway.
Hank and I checked out the lay of the land and then I stepped back inside Hank’s front door and prodded Julie out into the night, hurrying and hustling her into the back seat of our ride while Hank took the front. I would have made a fine Secret Service Agent.
When we got a little way down the road Hank introduced us to our driver.
“Bill, Julie,” he said. “Meet Dock Slocum. That’s ‘Dock’ with a ‘k’, like when you dock your boat.”
“Hello Bill, Julie,” the driver said, taking one hand off the wheel for a second and giving us a cursory wave.
“Hi,” Julie and I said together.
There wasn’t much to be said after that, so we all lapsed into silence. I guess Dock didn’t feel like talking.
He was an elderly fellow with perhaps a good fifteen or twenty years on Hank. So far he was little more than Hank’s mystery friend, someone I’d not heard Hank mention before.
Julie leaned into me and I slid my arm around her. My head still throbbed, but not as bad as before.
I could tell we were on the edge of town. The Suburban threw a wide swath of illumination into the night before us, revealing stunted trees and scrub brush along the side of the road and the sporadic lights of the dwindling city winked behind us as we topped a hill.
After a few minutes we turned off the main highway going out of town and began to ascend one of the many steep and lofty hills surrounding Killeen. Dock shifted down into low and I turned to watch behind us. Overhead the moon was full and bright and I could see no headlights behind us, nor could I see anything else but a broadening vista of city lights shimmering like a galaxy across the dark landscape below.
So much for the hou
nd-dog persistence of Jake and Freddie.
Hank, Dock and I sat up late into the night drinking several bottles of Dock’s home brew, a very sweet Muscadine wine unlike anything I’ve ever bought at a liquor store. I’d say the alcohol percentage was a little higher. At the same time it was dry and smooth and it evened out the ache in my head. If I didn’t slow down soon, though, I’d end up hogging the bottle. Or hugging it. While we drank we played matchstick poker and talked.
“The game, gentlemen,” Dock said, “is Maverick.”
“Just deal, Dock,” Hank said. “Bill knows how to play.”
“Sure he does,” he said and smiled, looking at my dwindling pile of matches.
“How did you run across this girl, anyway?” Dock asked.
Julie was in an upstairs bedroom, fast asleep.
“My partner referred her to me,” I said. “I haven’t talked to him about it yet.”
“Okay,” Dock said. “Interesting girl. Right pretty.”
“You know it,” I said.
“What I’d like to know is to what degree you believe her, and if what she says is true, what you’re planning to do about it.”
“Tomorrow,” Hank began, “first thing we’ll do is go looking for Amos and Andy.”
“You mean Jake and Freddie,” I said.
“Yeah, them.”
We played out the poker hand. I tried to put together an extra queen with the one I had showing and the one down under, but drew a mate to the nine on top. Dock raised the stakes and Hank and I called. Dock beat us both with a flush.
“How do we find them?” I asked.
“Oh,” Hank said. “Julie told me while you were out.”
“Well,” Dock said as he pushed back from the table and squared up the cards. “It’s past my bedtime. What time do we start in the morning?”
“We?” Hank asked.
Dock looked from me to Hank and back again.
“You can’t expect to tell me all this shit and not bring me along. It’s not neighborly. I just assumed…”
“Hold on there, Tiger,” Hank said. “I wouldn’t want you to miss out. What do you say, Bill? Dock’s a fine hand in a tight corner.”
