Find a Victim

Chapter 25

We came up over the shoulder of the mountain. The high valley below it brimmed with darkness, broken far down somewhere by a splash of light. I switched off the ignition, and drove without lights or power, using the foot-brake to control our speed. The hushed car coasted down a winding grade, which straightened out and became the main street of Traverse.

I stopped at the top of the street, in front of an extinct restaurant whose windows had been smashed and boarded up. Featureless frame structures sprawled on the slopes, some of them trampled flat by the snows of past winters. Above them, piles of slag from the worked-out mines mimicked the mountains that stood all around.

About a quarter of a mile below us, at the far end of the vacant town, a great rectangular doorway belched white light. Two men moved in and out of the light, carrying boxes to the rear of a big van that stood in the street. Back and forth they walked with the weary automatism of lost souls laboring in the mines of hell.

“It’s them,” Jo whispered. “I don’t want to go any closer.”

“I wouldn’t let you. How many guns do they have?”

“I think they all have guns. One of them, the one they call Faustino, has a tommygun.”

“That’s bad. You better go and sit in the alley. Get behind something, just in case. MacGowan, is your gun loaded?”

“Don’t worry.”

“How’s your eye?”

“I shot a buck at four hundred yards a couple of weeks ago. If it was daylight, I think I could pick them off from here.”

“Wait ten minutes, till I get down there. Then open fire. But save a couple of rounds. They’ll probably try to make a break. This road is the only way out, isn’t it?”

“Except for mountain goats.”

“If any of them get away from me, take cover behind the car and see if you can stop them. Fire in ten minutes now.”

“I got no watch.”

“Count to five hundred, slow. All right?”

“Fine.”

He got out of the car and lay down in the road. Jo disappeared into the alley beside the boarded-up restaurant. I walked down the hill with my gun in my hand, keeping close to the buildings. They were the shells of vanished businesses, a barbershop, an ice-cream parlor, a company store. Their only patrons were chipmunks and coyotes, quiet in the broken shadows. Altitude and silence rang in my ears like quinine.

A hundred yards or so from the light, I went down on my knees and elbows. The position brought back the smells of cordite and flamethrowers and scorched flesh, the green and bloody springtime of Okinawa. I crawled along the fragmented pavement from doorway to doorway. My time was nearly up.

The light poured from the open double doors of a frame building on the other side of the street. There was a fire-station sign above the door. Meyer’s truck stood inside with its headlights on and its rear doors open. The big box was nearly empty. The two men were unloading the last of the cases and passing them to a third man in the blue van.

They were stripped to the waist, and sweating. One of them was broad and dark, covered with curly black hair on chest and back and arms. The other was tall, beak-nosed, with vague pale eyes. I could see the blue tattoo on his white forearm. He heaved a case into the van and turned to his companion with a grunt: “She was a sweet little piece. I wonder what happened to her.”

“Don’t you ever get enough of it?”

Their voices were slightly blurred, their movements a little uncertain. The dark man pushed a case into the van and leaned against it. I rested the barrel of my revolver on a piece of broken sidewalk and sighted along it, aiming at the middle of the single black eyebrow that barred his face.

An invisible fist rapped the side of the van. I fired before the sound of MacGowan’s shot came rattling down the hill. One of the dark man’s eyes broke like a brown agate. He looked around at the light-splashed blackness with his remaining eye, ran toward me on buckling legs and went down on his knees and fell on his face, as Tony Aquista had fallen.

The tall man trotted shambling into the building. He came out much more slowly, step by step, with a Thompson submachinegun in his hands. It struck out a saffron tongue at me and giggled. I fired too quickly and missed. The rapid slugs stitched the wall behind me, dropping nearer. Death chattered in my ear.

MacGowan’s second and third shots echoed down the street. The tall man turned his vulture head and swung his tommygun away from me. I aimed slowly at his middle and fired twice. He took two steps backward and coughed. His gun clanked on the road. The van began to move.

He screamed above the clash of gears: “Wait for me, you dirty son–”

He snatched up the gun and ran stooped over, holding his belly together with one spread hand. He flung himself into the rear of the van as it wheeled in front of me. I emptied my gun at it. It passed over the man in the road and altered the shape of his body and fled up the street, the roar of its engine mounting higher and higher.

MacGowan’s rifle spoke again, three times. It didn’t stop the blue van. It passed the top of the street and climbed on toward the ridge, pushing its jumping plow of light.

Bozey came out of the firehouse as I was reloading my revolver. He walked like an old and sightless man, with his legs wide apart and his arms outstretched. His face was puffed and lacerated, his eyes swollen shut.

“Mike – Clincher – what happened?”

He stumbled over the man in the road, got down on his knees, and shook the lifeless body. “Mike? Wake up.”

His fingers sensed the body’s broken strangeness. He let out a single coyote howl and crawled away from it.

I walked toward him. The sound of my footsteps held him cowed and crouching. He lisped through jagged teeth: “Who is it? I’m blind. The bastards blinded me.”

I squatted beside him. “Let me look at those eyes.”

He raised his blind face, whimpering. I pressed his eyelids apart with my fingers. The eyeballs were bloodshot but undamaged. He peered at me through little cracks of sight.

“Who are you?”

“We’ve met before. Twice.”

He grunted in recognition and tried to grapple with me. But his movements were languid and boneless.

“Don’t you know when you’ve had enough, boy?”

I twisted my hand in the scabbed fur collar of his jacket and dragged him up to his feet and went through his clothes. No gun. But my wallet was in his hip pocket and he was wearing my wristwatch. Its face was smashed. I loosened it and slipped it off over his hand. He didn’t resist. The fight had gone out of him.

His long red hair fell over his ruined face like dragging wings. He blinked down at the body at his feet, surrounded by its Rorschach blot of blood. “So you got Faustino.”

“He was careless.”

“What about the others?”

“They got away in the van.”

“You want to know where to find them? Turn me loose and I’ll lead you to them.”

“That won’t be necessary. They’ll never get back to New Mexico.”

“You know who they are, eh?” He sounded disappointed.

“If they’re the mob you drove for in Albuquerque.”

“Yeah.” He spat red toward the body. The sight of it had rekindled his confidence and made him talkative. “My mistake was going back and trying to work with creeps. I’m a heavy thief by profession. I work alone. But Faustino offered me twenty-five G’s for the twelve hundred cases. And I let him suck me in.” His voice trembled with righteous anger. “I ask him for my payoff – the stuff is worth close to a hundred G’s in his territory – so he holds a tommygun on me and tells his cohorts to pay me off the hard way. I should have figured on a double play.”

His fingers moved across the unfamiliar contours of his face. “I kind of wish you didn’t knock off Faustino. I was counting on doing it myself.”

“You won’t be circulating. Any exterminating you do will be bedbugs in a jail cell.”

“Maybe. Where’s your home base, copper, in Las Cruces?

“Los Angeles.”

“State police?”

“Private.”

“No kidding. Who do you work for?”

“Myself.”

“That’s very interesting.” He leered with stupid cunning. “Maybe you and me can make a deal.”

“What have you got to bargain with?”

“If I told you, I wouldn’t have it. I’ll tell you this. It could be a big one, bud, a once-in-a-lifetime setup. You and me could take over Las Cruces and open it up and run it for ourselves.”

“Who’s running it now?”

“Nobody. That’s the crime of it. There’s plenty of money in town, but no action. We could give them action.”

“Wouldn’t the local law object?”

“Leave them to me.” He was carried away by psychopathic ambition. “Only I can’t operate out of a cell. You take me back there and throw me in the clink, you’re tossing away the hottest chance you ever had.”

“A chance for what? To get conned like Kerrigan?”

That silenced him, but not for long. “Okay. So I made a patsy out of Kerrigan. He was taking off with my girl. She wanted something with more class, she said. So I should finance their honeymoon. Not me. But this is different. This is no con.”

“I hear you telling me.”

“Listen.” He pawed at my chest “I know something nobody else knows. We can parlay it into something big, you and me together. I like you, see.”

“Uh-huh. What’s your special information?”

“Are we in business?”

“I have to know what I’m buying first. Why did the sheriff let you break out of the county last night?”

“I didn’t say he let me out of the county.”

“What road did you take?”

“You tell me. You know everything.”

“The pass road, the one that goes up through the foothills.”

His eyes were bright little knife-slits in the blue bulbs of his eyelids. “You’re smart. We could get along. I like smart cookies.”

“Have you got something on the sheriff, Bozey?”

“Maybe I have.”

“Something that Kerrigan told you?”

“He didn’t tell me nothing. I reasoned it out for myself.”

“About Anne Meyer?”

“You catch on fast. They found the body, eh?”

“Not yet. Where is it, Bozey?”

“Wait a minute, not so fast. Are you and me making a deal?”

“If you want one. These are my terms: show me where the body is and I’ll do my best to get you a break. You’re on your way to the pillbox now, whether you know it or not. The D. A.’s got you tabbed for murder–”

“I didn’t kill nobody.”

“That won’t help you. With your record, you’re a natural to take the rap for Aquista and Kerrigan.”

“Christ, I didn’t even know that Kerrigan got it until Jo told me. I never got within half a mile of – what’s his name, Tony Aquista?”

“Tell it to the D. A. He’ll tell you different, and he can make it stick. They’ll gas you for those murders if somebody doesn’t step in and prevent it. Co-operate with me and I’ll do my best to clear you. You’re going to be in for a long stretch, but I won’t let them gas you if I can help it.”

He looked around anxiously at the black spiked horizon. His pipe-dream of power and money had blown away and left him naked, dwarfed by the giant world. Away off on the other side of the ridge a banshee wail of tires ended in a long, reverberating crash and an explosion, muffled by the distance. It was the sound the silence had been waiting for.

“What was that?”

“Your friends from Albuquerque. I hope.”

He looked at me sharply, his broken nostrils snuffling in surprise. “You play kind of rough.”

“When I have to.”

“Why would you give me a break? Nobody ever gave me a break. How do I know you will?”

“You won’t know it until it happens. It’s a chance you have to take. Not much of a chance, after the ones you’ve been taking. It’s in your own interest to help me find the body. I think whoever killed her killed the others, too.”

“You may be right at that.”

“Who was it, Bozey?”

“If I knew I’d tell you, wouldn’t I? I’ll show you where she is, though. Kerrigan left her in her car, down in a little canyon near Double Mountain.”

I marched him up the slanting street. Jo was alone in the front seat of my car.

“What do you know?” Bozey said. “Family reunion.”

The girl didn’t look at him. An aura of sullen anger enveloped her.

“Where’s your grandfather, Jo?”

“Gone up the hill. We heard a crash a while back Grandpa thought maybe the blue truck went off the road.”

“I heard it, too.”

I opened the left-hand door and urged Bozey into the seat between Jo and me. She pulled away from him.

“Do I have to ride with this? After the lousy trick he pulled on me and Don?”

“Don’t be like that,” he said. “He could have passed it south of the border – a guy with Kerrigan’s front.”

“I don’t want to hear it. You’re a rotten swindler. I hope they lock you up and throw away the key.”

I turned up the grade. MacGowan was at the top, leaning on his rifle and breathing hard. Far down on the other side, in the deep trough of the canyon, there was a swirl of red and yellow fire.

He limped toward the car. “Looks like the end of them. They didn’t see the two-seater in time, I guess.”

Jo growled: “Good riddance of bad rubbish.”

“You shouldn’t say things like that, Josie. It don’t show proper respect for human life.”

“I’m human, too, aren’t I? They never showed proper respect for my human life.”

MacGowan climbed into the back, and we rolled down the long, unwinding road. The sports car was lying with its wheels in the air like a smashed mechanical beetle. Black skidmarks led to the deep-gouged edge of the road where the truck had gone over.

A thousand feet below, it was still burning brightly. Among the faint far odors of burning oil and alcohol I could smell Okinawa again.