John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 03 - A Purple Place For Dying

by A Purple Place For Dying(lit)

  I stayed down. The human mind is strange. Scared as I was, I wanted to laugh. A woman, a cave, flight, an arsenal of murderous stones. A hundred thousand years of human progress. I could see a little cartoon of myself dragging Isobel off by her hair. I imagined she would talk about the hostility syndrome.

  I did not risk another look down the slope. A silhouette against a starry sky can catch the eye. I heard a clink of metal against rock. Then low talk. They were closer together than before. I could not hear what they were saying. Their basic plan, as I imagined it, seemed sound. How many times can they make you inhale cyanide? So kill the nosy couple, drag them down and dump them into the back of their car. Pull it off the rocks. Knock the blurred windshield out with a stone. Drive it down to the valley floor and across country. Push it into a narrow arroyo, cover it with rocks and brush. And be in bed before the sun comes up.

  When one spoke again, the voice was alarmingly close.

  "Run right into that cave, Pablo."

  "With a gun, maybe?"

  "Had a gun, he'd wait in those rocks below to bushwhack us."

  "Pretty big mean-lookin' man, boy."

  "I seen him too. Hey! You in there. You and the girl come on out, nobody gets hurt." They waited. The silence was intense. "Then I come in shooting."

  "Charlie, maybe it goes right on through."

  "Give me that light. I'm going on in."

  I had wormed back from the edge slightly. I took the big shard in both hands and came up onto my knees near the edge. I raised the stone high above my head, then hurled it down onto the one who was right beneath me, shining his light into the cave, his body crouched and cautious. The other one was about fifteen feet back, and he was very very good. As I was hurling the rock downward, he took a pot shot from the hip. The rock was about even with my chest when the slug hit it and whined away into darkness. I felt the impact in my hands just as I released the rock. I went rolling backwards without delay, wondering if the shot would send my target hopping back out of range. But as I rolled back, I heard a heavy, moist and somewhat hollow sound, as if a ripe pumpkin had been dropped on a cement floor.

  I kept flat. He had no way of knowing I had not taken the slug in some small degree. Or even seriously. When the angle is correct, they will ricochet nicely off skull bone.

  There was silence. I heard a groan of anguish and heartbreak. Suddenly a wild voice yelled, "You kilt him, you son of a bitch! You smashed my brother's head, goddam you!"

  "Go home, Pablo. This is more than you can handle, boy."

  There was another silence. From further away he yelled, "I'm going to gut-shoot you!" He was moving back to get a better angle at me. I snaked my way to where the stones were plentiful, and with great eagerness and considerable alarm, I kept the air full of stones, arching them high, aiming them where I thought he had to be.

  I scuttled ten feet to the side and risked a look. He was heading up the slope we had climbed, the slope above the sandy area. I had a good rock and I took aim. It bounced off his hip and sent him sprawling, but even as he fell he managed to get a shot off. A shot close to the head neither whines nor whistles. It makes one audible little explosive huff, very brief and very persuasive. I rolled away and threw another stone into his area.

  Scrambling swiftly, I picked a different place to take a look over the edge. He had come back down the slope of loose rock. He was crossing the sand. He went cat-like down the solid pitch of rock below the sand, after stopping for a moment near the body, out of my line of vision. He went quite a way down, then turned and stopped, partially flattened against the slope.

  "You hear me up there?" he called.

  "I hear you just fine."

  Sounding much more calm and under control, he said, "I'm not crazy. You get no more chance to chunk me in the head with a stone."

  "So go away"

  "You'd like that fine. Come dawn I'm coming up after you. You killed my blood brother. I make you a promise, man. You think about it all night. While you're gut-shot and dying in the morning, you can watch me with your woman."

  "Your mouth is big, Pablo. Just like your brother's."

  "You can't make me sore now, so I come up there and you have a chance of busting me with a rock. I got a place where I can watch this hill, this whole side of it, and you can't get down the back side of it. I see good in the nighttime, man."

  We had been raising our voices at first, but now they found a natural level in that desert silence.

  "Which one of you brave boys killed Mona Yeoman? You, or this cat-meat brother up here?"

  "You don't make me sore, man. I killed her. Good shot, huh? Not this rifle gun. What I was going to do, I was going to move it just a hair, and put the next one into you. Save everybody a lot of trouble. But the round I used on her, the casing split and the shell case stuck in the chamber, and it pulled the catch off the ejector."

  "You boys were real bright. You couldn't do anything right, could you?"

  "It's going to be all right from now on, man."

  "Is that what your half-sister says? Is that what Dolores keeps telling you?"

  "Doe figured it out pretty good."

  "She's as stupid as you are, Pablo."

  "You think so? What Doe told us, maybe Mona hired you to kill the old man. That's why Mona had to die first, but he shouldn't know she was dead, or maybe he'd make out a new will before we could get to him. You think that's stupid?"

  "Killing people is always stupid."

  "Doe isn't stupid. Look, she found out from Mona the best way we could grab that professor. It had to look like she went off with him, right? And he told us where Mona was going to take you, to that cabin. That made a good place, right? You should hear him, that man with all the big words, making little smiles at us, saying we shouldn't. But the last three minutes before we blew the rocks down on him, he spent those three minutes screaming."

  "You've got a lot of class, Pablo. A lot of brains. Just like your pal Pompa. Just like that trash you sent on that airplane ride to El Paso. You're as dead as your brother, but you don't know it yet."

  "Don't you worry about me. Everything is fine. I kill you both and hide you and go away a couple years. Doe has one smart lawyer, with all the proof about Yeoman being her daddy. I'll bury you and I'll bury my brother Charlie. She'll be rich, man. I can come back in a couple years and get in touch real careful."

  "She won't be around, Pablo. And she won't be rich. She took the old man some coffee. Buckelberry's checking out where she got the strychnine. Probably from you boys. The ranches use it for vermin, don't they?"

  The stars were bright. A dog-thing hollered a hundred miles away. Somebody walked over my grave. "You so smart, man. Who saw Doe? Nobody!" But there was some defiance there, of the kind that comes from uncertainty, perhaps from fear.

  I did not understand these people. Did they think themselves involved in some sort of crusade? A man, his wife, her lover, one hired assassin and one of the brothers-all dead. What turns on this kind of a bloody engine? This Pablo wanted to boost the score from five to seven. If the state could be depended upon to exact its own variety of jungle justice, seven would become nine. And for what?

  "Pablo?"

  "Too bad it won't be a knife for you."

  "I just wonder about something. Dolores knew he was her father. She worked for them, for Jass and Mona. For years. Then she left and got married. Then all of a sudden... all this starts."

  "You bet your ass, man. It starts good."

  "She got hold of you boys to help her."

  "Help her get rich. Why not?"

  "But wasn't Yeoman good to her?"

  There was a chilling cackle of laughter from him. "So good, man. So real good. That's why, man. How much good can you stand?"

  I knew I couldn't get any further in that direction. He had stopped making sense. "Where's Mona's body?"

  "They'll find it. They can't help finding it."

  "Let me ask you one more thing. It was pretty dark in you
r mother's place. I couldn't get a good look at you and your brother. But I had the feeling I'd seen you before."

  ''We move around pretty good," he said, very casually. "I saw you good through that scope. Six power. I had those hairs crossed on your belly. No wind at all. Five hundred yards."

  "Were you parked a little way down the street that day I visited your sister?"

  "Man, you dream it, don't you?"

  "What difference does it make now, Pablo?" After a long silence he said, "She like to kill us both that day, coming to see her in the daytime. Charlie tells her about how we got Pompa, how good he is with a knife. She cried some. Imagine that? She cried over that old man."

  I had been feeling cautiously around in darkness and found a stone that fit my hand very nicely. It was a little too heavy to throw in normal fashion, but I could heave it stiff-arm like a grenade. It was a very long chance of doing any harm, but any chance was worth taking. The angle was bad. He was perhaps thirty yards away down the slope of rock. I would have to come up a little to do it, risking a momentary silhouette.

  I counted to three and came up and threw. An instant after release, as I was already dropping back into cover, I heard the shot and felt a dirty little tug against the fabric right at the point of my shoulder. A tug and a faint impression of heat. He was dishearteningly good. I heard my stone clack against the solid rock and bound on down to the foot of the pitch.

  He called to me a few times. I kept silent, hoping to con him into thinking he had hit home, hoping he would come up to take a closer look. He stopped calling. I heard a sound further away. I wormed forward and looked and saw him in the starlight, thirty feet from the bottom of the slope, walking directly away from it. He walked to a knoll about a hundred and fifty yards away, and I lost him as he started up it. He had a good place. We would have to come down into the flats if we left the bigger hill. Unless it clouded over, hardly possible, we'd be bugs on a tabletop for that handy-dandy rifle. It was about all the proof I needed that we couldn't get down the other side of our fortress.

  As I rolled up onto hands and knees and turned away from the edge, I turned directly into an impact of animal warmth that nearly jumped my heart right out of my chest. She had moved like a spook. Silvery highlights on the moist of an eye, wet of underlip, glad warm exhalation of her breath.

  "All that shooting and yelling," she whispered.

  "If I can't trust you to do exactly as I tell you... "

  "Please. I thought maybe I... maybe I could help..." She dropped the sharp stone she held. It clattered between us. I led her back away from the edge and we hunkered down. I didn't want to be in the way if he tried a blind one just for luck. I told her where he was, and what had happened to the other one. She had worked her way close enough to hear most of my little chat with brother.

  "What can we do?" she asked.

  "I don't know. We have to think of something. We have to have a surprise for him. When he comes up here at dawn he won't make any stupid mistakes. He'll be cold about it."

  "The other one had a gun too."

  "And he took it along. I heard him set it down on the slope. It slid a little and he grabbed it."

  I sent her off to circle around and wait for me at the top of the incline she had climbed previously, the loose stones above the sand bowl where the man lay dead.

  I looked down at the darkness of him sprawled against the sand. I lowered myself over the edge, kicked myself away from the sheer wall and dropped, rolled quickly close to the wall, just in case. Charlie had not been a fastidious boy. Even in that cleansing desert air, stronger than the effluvium of death was a lion-cage smell about him, bringing an atavistic prickling to the back of my neck. Scent of the enemy slain.

  I was after tools. Close to the cave mouth I saw a small shadow too orderly in outline to be something from nature. I went to it and discovered that it was the flashlight, a cheap one in a black metal case. I backed into the cave mouth and aimed it at Charlie-boy's head and punched the button. As my stomach took a slow backflip, I heard Isobel's shallow gagging cough. I shoved the flashlight into my pocket and waited for the slow return of complete night vision. Then, with all the assurance of a housewife trying to pick up a dead garden snake, I went through his tight pockets. The only things that seemed useful were his pocket knife and the broad leather belt that held up his soiled jeans. When I rolled him over to get at the belt buckle; trapped gases bubbled from his throat.

  I went blundering up the slope in great haste to get away from him. Isobel was waiting at the top. We went back into the giant tumble of rock and went through and around it to a place where there was so much rock between us and the distant brother, I could slowly unpucker. They use slow motion strobe light camera stuff to show what modern slugs do to flesh. They use gelatin of the right consistency. I remember those pictures too clearly, it seems.

  We sat on a rock step leaning back against an armchair back of slanted rock. "How do you feel about... killing him?"

  "That's a goddam fool question."

  "I'm sorry. I just... feel strange with you because you did it."

  "Let's say mixed emotions, honey. There is a very small hot feeling of satisfaction, because he had a gun and I had a stone, and I tricked hell out of them with a very simple device. Then there is a kind of sadness about the waste. And some irony I guess. Also, a little bit of a sick feeling, like the kid after shooting the sparrow."

  She put her hand on my arm. "I'm glad it's all those things. I'm glad you try to be so honest."

  "Stay here. I'm going to take a look at this edge of the drop."

  It was a sorry look. We were on a butte-like formation where one side had spilled away, like a footstool with dirt banked against one side of it. A twelve-story footstool, with about an acre of jumbled rock on top of it. I stood near the edge and, looking down, I could make out quite a bit of the curving road. I saw my beetle car down there, backed off the curve, with the pickup truck parked off the road about twenty feet from it. I had the feeling I could spit that far. I got down on my belly and looked over the edge at several places. Not a chance anywhere.

  I went back to her. She sat hugging herself. The sun heat was beginning to leach out of the rock, and the night was cold.

  I sat close to her and put my arm around her. "We've got to trap him somehow, Iz."

  "If we can find a place, maybe, where he can't use the gun?"

  "And can't smoke us out. And where we can rig a surprise for him."

  We went looking, prowling our huge rocky playpen. She called softly to me. I went over and found her staring dubiously at a triangular opening between two huge stones. It was at ground level, and small. I stretched out and shone the light into it. It looked roomy. I crawled in. After crawling three feet, I found that it opened up nicely. It wasn't a neat cave. It was just an accidental space in tumbled rock, the floor of it at a thirty degree angle, the inside all corners and angles and cantilevered protrusions. It went back about fifteen feet, and at the back of it, around a little corner, was a place big enough for one person to hide out of sight of the entrance. It was refuge, and also a potential trap.

  So we armed it. It took a couple of hours of work. She had some pleasantly bloodthirsty ideas. She held the light while I cut the dead man's belt into long thin strips. If man is the most dangerous hunter, he is also the most dangerous game. I searched our front yard and found a length of dry tough fibrous wood as big around as my wrist. I whittled it clean and worked it firmly into a crack off to the side of the entrance, just where it widened out. It extended across the entrance. I tied our leather line to the end of it, ran the line up to a jutting finger of stone and made it fast with a temporary slip knot. Then I put her up there on the knot, and I braced myself and bent the tough wood up until it was above the entrance. When the line had been refastened to hold it in that position, I slowly released my pressure on the weathered limb. The leather held, so tight it thrummed if you touched it.

  It was a nervous-making thing
to crawl under. I went out and cleared signs away from our entrance, but not too carefully. This was a reverse of the other trick. I tore the sleeve of her suit jacket and plucked a pale thread and caught it into the edge of rock at the entrance. He would see it by dawn-light, if he was a careful tracker. I could assume he was.

  Though I did not expect him to try to sneak up in darkness, I rigged an alarm. I wedged a stick across the entrance, as I came back in, one he would have to remove, and carried a line back and looped it over a lip of rock. To it I tied the metal parts of the dismantled flashlight, like a wind chime. The slightest movement of the stick made an audible jangle.

  After we had assembled some throwing stones of the proper heft and size, there was nothing more we could do. Without the flashlight, the cave was a total blackness. We rehearsed the positions we would take, then we stretched out on the floor on the slope, our feet braced. I held her. The cold was getting to her. The position was awkward and uncomfortable. After a little while I shifted us. I took my jacket off. I lay at the foot of the sloped floor, my back against stone. I pulled her down against me, wrapped my arms around her and worked the jacket over us.