Find a Victim

Chapter 20

I went out after her, down the veranda steps, across the uncut lawn. She looked back and saw me coming and started to run. At the edge of the vacant lot her feet got tangled in the rank crabgrass. She fell on her knees and huddled there, her hair veiling her face, her white nape bare to some unknown fatal ax.

I lifted her to her feet and kept one arm around her to steady her. “Where are you going?”

“I don’t know. I can’t stay here with him. I’m afraid of him.” Her breasts moved against me like wild things caught in a net. “He’s an evil man, and he hates me. He’s hated us both from the time we were born. I remember the day Anne was born. My mother was dying, but he was angry with her. He wanted a son. He’d be glad to see me dead too. I was a fool to come back here.”

“Why did you leave your husband Mrs. Church?”

“He threatened me. He threatened to kill me if I set foot outside his house. But anything would be better than staying here.”

She looked up at the blind house-front and across the vacant lot strewn with its rusty car-frames. Beyond it, in the street, a black sedan turned the corner and stopped at the curb, abruptly. I saw the white Stetson emerge from the driver’s seat.

“Brand.” Her body went soft against my side, as if its bones had dissolved in acid terror.

He came across the vacant lot, walking stiffly on long pistonlike legs. I went to meet him. We faced each other on the narrow path.

“What are you doing with my wife?”

“You’d better ask her.”

“I’m asking you.” His large hands were open at his sides, but they were taut and trembling. “I told you to stay away from her. I also ordered you to drop this case.”

“It didn’t take. I’m on it, and I’m staying.”

“We’ll see about that. If you think you can disregard my orders, push my deputies around, and get away with it–” His teeth bit off the sentence. “I’m giving you a choice right now. Be out of my county in one hour, or stay and face felony charges.”

“The county belongs to you, eh?”

“Stick around and find out.”

“This is where I came in, Church. Every time I run into you, you have a bright new plan for getting me off the case. I’m slow in the mind, but when a thing like this goes on and doesn’t stop, I get a little suspicious. Just a little.”

“I’m not interested in your suspicions.”

“The D. A. ought to be, unless he’s as sour as you are. If your whole county government is sour, I’ll go higher.”

He looked up at the white colloidal sky. “What makes you think you can talk to me like this?”

There was something histrionic in the question. I suspected that his will was bending under pressure, that his integrity was already broken.

“The fact that you’re a phony. You know it. I know it. Your wife knows it.”

A pale line framed his mouth, almost as white and definite as a chalk line. “Are you trying to force me to kill you?”

“You haven’t the stuff.”

His lips stretched, uncovered his teeth, which glinted with gold souvenirs of childhood poverty. His eyes sank and darkened. I watched them for a signal. They shifted. His right shoulder dropped.

I ducked inside of his swing. His fist went by like a blundering bee, stinging my ear in flight. He staggered sideways off balance, open to a left to the jaw or a right to the middle. I let him have the right. His stomach was like a plank under his clothes. He blocked my left with his right forearm and countered with a left of his own. It caught the side of my head and whirled me around.

Hilda Church was crouched at the edge of the lot like a frightened animal. Her eyes were wide and empty, and her mouth was open in a silent scream.

I turned on Church with my face covered. His fists drove in under my elbows and doubled me over. I came up from underneath with an uppercut that turned his face to the sky. His hat fell off. He staggered backwards a few steps and went down. Rolled over and got up and came at me again.

His long left found my stomach, then my nose. Rain-bowed in my streaming vision, he pivoted from the waist and brought his hooked right over. It chopped me down. I got up onto my knees and felt his fist exploded in my face again. It must have opened the gash in my brow. Liquid warmth ran into one of my eyes and turned the daylight red.

I got up and went after him with my head down and bulled inside his left and hammered his body. He dropped his guard. I looped a right at his jaw, felt the pain of the impact electric to my elbow. His dazed profile turned sideways, nimbused with red. I measured him with my left and put my weight behind a short right hook. He went down with his back against the side of a wheelless T-model.

He was slow getting up this time. His feet dragged in the withered grass. Gravity pulled at his arms. I could have gone over his slipping guard and finished him. Instead I tied him up, partly because he was beaten and partly because the woman cried out behind me: “Stop it! You have to stop it!”

I held his arms immobilized. His face was like a skull covered with stretched parchment The scar in his temple was red and beating. He struggled to get loose, closing his eyes in the agony of effort. My blood ran onto him and mixed with his, and I had my first clear thought since the fight began. One of us was going to have to kill the other.

Fury surged through him again. He kneed me and flung himself backwards, out of my hold. He staggered sideways in the weeds, steadied himself on the wheelless car. There was a frozen stillness. I saw Church leaning sleepily on the carframe, the trees steady in the windless heat, the mountains behind the trees ghostly and two-dimensional in the haze. His hand went to his hip in a jerky mechanical motion.

Fear ran through me like a jagged spark. I had a gun in my pocket. I didn’t reach for it. That would be all he needed to make it self-defense. And he was law.

The .45 in his hand dragged him toward me. His slouching silence was worse than any words. If I was going to get it, this was the time and place, under a white valley sky, in the middle of a case I’d never solve. Sweat ran in cold runnels under my clothes, and the drip of blood from my chin counted off the seconds.

The woman stepped around me. “Brand. This man has been kind to me. He doesn’t mean any harm. Don’t hurt him. Please.”

Her hands reached for the gun and pushed it down. She walked close into him and stood with her face against his shoulder. “Say that you won’t hurt him. Please. There mustn’t be any more killing.”

He looked down at the top of her head as if he had never seen her before. Slowly his eyes focused.

“There won’t be any more.” His voice was deep in his throat. “I came to take you home, Hildie. Will you come home with me?”

She nodded, leaning against him like a dutiful doll.

“Go and get into the car, then. I’ll be along in a minute.”

“No more trouble? You promise?”

“No more trouble. I promise.”

He thrust the blue gun back into its holster. Their bodies came apart gradually like a giant cell dividing. She walked with stunned leisureliness along the path to the street. He watched her all the way until she was in the front seat with the door closed. Then he picked up his hat and turned to me, brushing it on his sleeve: “I’m willing to forget about this, if you are.”

“I’m not, though.”

“You’re making a mistake.”

“You make your mistakes and I’ll make mine.”

“Damn it, Archer, can’t we get together?”

“Not on any terms that would suit you. I’m staying in Las Cruces until this thing is finished. Try slapping charges on me and I’ll show you a couple of charges of my own.”

“Such as?”

“Failure to do your duty. Conspiring with hoods.”

“No.” He reached for my arm. “You don’t understand.”

I stepped back out of his reach. “I understand this. I’m trying to solve two homicides, and something is trying to stop me. Something that looks like law and talks like law but doesn’t smell like law. Not in my nostrils. It smells like zombie meat. A zombie that takes the public’s money and sits behind a courthouse desk pretending to be an officer.”

“I’ve always done my duty.” But he said it without conviction. His anger had turned inward, and his corroded snarl was chewing on itself.

“Did you do it last night, when that truck broke out of the county?”

He didn’t answer. He stood and looked at the ground between us, then turned on his heel and walked toward his car, stumbling a little. The back of his coat was split. There was a streak of dirt on the crown of his Stetson. In the diffused light, his body cast a faint and wavering shadow.