Five Star Fugitive

Chapter One Bordertown Harpy

The tall girl was restless. She had dark eyes with a hard flickering light in them, like black opals. Her mouth was wide and soft and sullen. It was ten o’clock at night in Baker, Texas. Her third-floor room in the Sage House had the hot breathlessness of the bakery she had once worked in, back when she was fourteen and had looked eighteen.

Five days in this hole. And it could be five more.

A half-block away a barn dance was in progress. She could hear the tiny whine of the music, the resounding stomping of boots. Somebody yelled shrilly, “Eeee-yah-hooo!”

“Damn silly cowhands,” she muttered. She threw the movie magazine away, sat up and tapped a cigarette on a long thumbnail the color of blood. As she lighted it a heavy strand of hair swung forward. The hair was the color of wheat, so expensively and expertly dyed that it looked natural. As she sucked the smoke into her lungs, she threw the strand of hair back with a quick movement of her head.

She looked with distaste at the room. Brown and green grass rug. Wicker furniture. Metal bed painted a liverish green. The mattress sagged toward the middle from all directions. Her two suitcases were on stands by the far wall, the lids open. A stocking dangled out of one, almost to the floor.

“You’re letting it get you, kid,” she said softly.

In her bare feet she padded over to the biggest suitcase, took the last pint out from under the rumpled clothes. She broke her fingernail on the plastic covering and cursed bitterly. She tossed the covering into the tin wastebasket by the bureau, poured three inches of the rye into the heavy tumbler which stood on the bureau.

She stood in front of the bureau staring down into the glass, hating the loneliness, the fear, the tension. The heavy rope of hair swung forward again. She stood in an ugly way, feet spread, shoulders slumped forward.

“How, kid,” she whispered. She tossed off the tepid liquor, gagged slightly on it, poured some more in the glass and left it on the bureau top.

She went into the bathroom. The big old tub stood on feet cast to resemble claws. She put the plug in and started the water running. The pipes were so clogged that the water came out in a thin stream. She went back to get her glass, and went to the front window. Starlight glinted off the Rio Grande. Across the way she could see the lights of small, dirty, turbulent Piedras Chicas.

A faint night breeze swayed the dusty curtains and cooled her. She looked hard at the distant lights as though trying to see down into the streets, to see the man who would bring the package across the river.

While the tub was filling with tepid water, she sprawled on the bed, finished the second drink, yawned and closed her eyes.

A flabby moon-faced middle-aged man came quietly down the hall. He wore a sports shirt loudly decorated with rodeo scenes. He listened outside her door, then slipped a paper-thin strip of tool steel out of his trouser pocket. He slid it along the jam, his small pink mouth pursed in concentration.

When it touched the latch, he pressed down hard, pulling slightly toward himself. There was a thin grating sound. He turned the knob slowly and pulled the door open a crack. He looked in, then looked up and down the hall.

He stepped lightly into the room and shut the door silently behind him. He drifted, soundless as smoke, across the room, stopped, looked at her cautiously.

For a long time he studied her. He wore an expression seen on the face of any person who intends to perform a difficult act with practised confidence. He slipped his shirt off and threw it behind him. Rubbery muscles moved underneath the flaccid white skin. In two quick steps he reached her. She heaved up as his stubby white thumbs dug into the pressure points at the base of her throat. Her eyes rolled back into her head so that only two narrow slits of white showed.

Shaymen watched her for a moment and then began an expert search of the room. He slit the linings of the two suitcases, wrenched the high heels from five pair of shoes, looked under the rugs, in the backs of the two pictures. He found it in a leg of the metal bed. The roller wheel had been pulled out of the leg and what he wanted had been shoved up inside the hollow metal, the roller wheel replaced.

He slipped off the rubber band and the oil cloth. The tightly rolled bills expanded. Shaymen riffled the corners with his thumb. Hundreds, five hundreds and thousands. He frowned. He didn’t like the thousands. They called for a fencing operation and a discount. The recent activities of the Bureau of Internal Revenue had made the discount a big one.

He tucked the roll into his pocket, put the shirt back on, looked at the girl. There was a swift sensation of regret in his mind, gone almost as soon as it arrived. He left the room after making certain that the hallway was empty. On his way down the stairs he nibbled the thin coating of glass cement from his finger tips. It had an acid taste. He spat out the hard flakes with small soft explosive sounds. It was always better than gloves. Didn’t arouse suspicion. Didn’t smother the cleverness of the hands.

In the lobby he bought a pack of cigarettes from the girl who was just closing the counter for the night. He smiled inside himself as he saw her staring at the shirt. It was so flamboyant that no one looked beyond it to the negative face.

Out on the sidewalk which still gave off the remembered heat of the sun, he took a deep drag on his cigarette and walked west. The tourist court was a quarter mile beyond the city limits. Travelers sat out in the lawn chairs escaping the heat. They talked and laughed softly. Shaymen accepted the invitation to sit with them and have a cold beer. He was sleepy. He yawned a great deal.

Lane Sanson supported himself precariously against the bar in one of the cheaper cantinas of Piedras Chicas. A wandering mariachi with guitar was singing in a hard nasal voice. His income depended on his nuisance value. A peso would keep that nerve-twanging voice at a safe distance.

Lane Sanson cupped his big hand around the small glass of mescal on the bar in front of him. The solution of all eternal mysteries was on the tip of his mind, ready to be jolted off with this drink, or the next, or the next.

An absent smile touched his big, hard-lipped mouth and he thought, “You better start finding some answers quick, Sanson. A lot of good answers.”

That was the trouble with the world. No answers. All questions. How did Sandy put it that night she left for good? “Lane, you’ve spent six years feeling sorry for yourself. Frankly, you’ve turned into a bore.” Her bright eyes had crackled with angry flame.

“So?” he had said, as insolently as he could manage.

“Good-by, Lane.” Just like that. Clunk. Gone.

Oh, that Lane Sanson, he’s going places. Yessiree. That’s what they said, isn’t it? A hell of a good reporter, that Sanson. You’ve read his book? Battalion Front, it was called. Remember the reviews. “This one has guts.” “A war book with integrity.” The magazine serial rights brought in forty thousand and the book club edition added fifty to that and the movies had donated a neat sixty-two five.

If the agent hadn’t been on the ball, taxes would have creamed him. But the movie deal spread the take over five years and the book and magazine take were prorated backward over the previous three tax years.

One day you’re a member of the working press. A day later you’re a cocktail party lion.

And Lane Sanson, the man of the hour, spends the next five years breaking Sandy’s heart. This was the last year of income from the book. Where did it go, that integrity they yaked about? Diluted over a thousand bar tops, spread in sweet-talk to half-a-hundred women.

Sooner or later you hit bottom. The inevitable bottom. Three weeks ago he got the papers in Mexico City. He signed them. Good-by, Sandy. There was a party that night. What a party! It lasted four days.

When the hangover was gone he had written the letters. Ten of them. Eight had answered and of the eight, seven had said, “So sorry, pal.” The eighth had said, “Come on up for a try. Leg man. Guild rates.”

He had driven out of Mexico City in the convertible that was beginning to be a shambling relic of the big money year. Six hundred miles of Mexican sun with the top down had put a false look of health on top of the pale dissipation green of the two years in Mexico City — two years with nothing to show for it but fifty pages of manuscript so foul that on that last cool night he’d used it to get the fire burning in the apartment out Chapultepec way.

Yes, he had driven right up to the border full of false courage and when he had seen the bridge across the Rio Grande, the bottom had fallen out. On this side of the bridge a man could drift along. Over on that side he had to produce. And Lane Sanson was grievously afraid that, at thirty-four, his producing days were over for keeps.

One bridge to cross, and he couldn’t make it. He’d parked the car, wolfed enchildas for a base, and embarked on a mescal project.

So far he had arrived at one great truth. Up to the age of twenty-eight everything he had done had turned out right. And then the gods had switched the dice. How long can a man go on alienating his friends, forgetting his skills, fouling up his marriage.

The loss of Sandy was a pain that rattled around in his heart. Sandy of the gamin smile, the eyes that could go solemn on you. Sunday mornings with Sandy, Sandy whom he had struck, hearing her emit a low soft note of pain that stung his drunken heart because it was the same soft sound that she made when ecstasy was too much to bear silently.

He doubled his fist and struck the edge of the bar. Damn a man who rolls endlessly down a bottomless slope and cannot save himself.

An Indio girl moved close beside him. She had a flat broad brown face, obsidianblack expressionless eyes and a wide, mechanical, inviting smile.

“Por favor, buy Felicia a dreenk, señor,” she wheedled.

She wore a cheap cotton dress, pale blue plaid, too small for her, and pulled to a dangerous tightness. Her feet were bare and broad.

“Your ancestors were kings,” he said, his words slurred. “They had a great civilization.”

“Just wan leetle dreenk for Felicia?”

“They sacrificed young girls to the sun god, Felicia. At dawn from the top of mighty pyramids.”

“Here the tequila ees good. I like.”

He pushed two pesos across the bar top. The bartender filled a small glass for Felicia. “Muchas gracias,” she said.

“Salud,” said Sanson. He touched her glass with his glass of mescal and they drank.

“Wan more now?” Felicia said.

“No more now, darling.”

There was a thin flare of contempt far back in the depths of the shining eyes. “You buy Felicia more, Felicia make you happy.”

“That is the terrible goal of mankind. To be happy. I wonder if it is a good thing. This pursuit of happiness. What do you think, Felicia?”

“No unnerstand.” Her shining black hair had been frizzed into a cheap permanent.

“Happiness?” he said, “I no unnerstand either.”

“Wat your name? How called you?”

“Lane.”

She repeated it twice. He bought her another tequila. It disappeared like magic. Her eyes had a brighter glow.

“I luff Lane. Lane luff Felicia. Good?”

“That, my dear, is the ultimate simplification.”

“No big words. Too much big word. No unnerstand. We go now?”

“Where do we go?”

“Other cantina. How you say? Mas barrato.”

“Cheaper.”

“Ah, si! Cheepair!”

He shoved the change from the bar top into his pocket. It no longer mattered what he did or why, where he went or for what. He staggered heavily when he got away from the support of the bar. She grabbed him with a strength quite astonishing and steadied him. A group of Mexicans looked at him and chortled. Sanson was perfectly certain that disaster lay ahead. With luck, all they would do was roll him for what cash he had. Somehow, it didn’t matter.

The cantina lights revolved sickeningly and he struck the side of his face against the door jamb. She pulled him erect and steered him out into the furnace air of the night. She held his arm clasped against her and he felt the roil and writhe of her muscles under the taut brown hide as she struggled with him, trying to steer him down the sidewalk.

“Not far. Not long way,” she panted.

They came to the dark mouth of a narrow fetid alley, full of the stink of decay. She looked behind them and then shoved him hard into the alley. He stumbled and fell heavily on one elbow and his hip. He smiled almost casually. It was coming a lot sooner than he expected. If his luck was good, his throat would be slit. That was something Lane Sanson had thought of doing for himself, standing, looking into his own bathroom mirror.

He was yanked to his feet and slammed against the adobe wall, hard. Felicia stood out on the sidewalk looking in the other direction. He could make out the wavering figures of two men.

“Where is it?” a man demanded in whispering, metallic English.

“Hip pocket,” Lane said.

“Hands high.” He obeyed. His wallet was taken out of his hip pocket. A pencil flashlight flicked on, pointed at the sheaf of bills. Suddenly the wallet was slapped hard against his mouth. He felt the blood run between his teeth.

“This is just money. Where is the package?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sanson said with drunken dignity.

“You are the one. We know you are the one. No one else has come. Please don’t try to play games.”

“You’ve got the wrong guy,” Sanson said querulously.

There was a sudden pin-prick pain against his belly. The light flicked on again, just long enough for him to see the six-inch length of steel gleam.

“Now you stop talking foolish, my friend, or I swear I’ll spill your blood around your shoes.”

“I would consider that a great favor,” Sanson said huskily.

Then the two men talked to each other in rattling Spanish so fast that Sanson could only catch a word here and there.

“You talk,” the man said. The knife pain was stronger, deeper. Sanson involuntarily sucked his stomach away from the point of the blade.

The anger was a long time in coming, but suddenly it throbbed behind his eyes. “I haven’t the faintest damn idea what you want. I’m a newspaperman on my way to Houston. I don’t know anything about any package. Now take that knife out of me or I’ll feed it to you.”

“Big talk. Big talk,” the man muttered, but he seemed a little less positive. Again they talked together. The wallet was shoved back into the side pocket of Sanson’s jacket. His car keys were taken out. He caught the words “auto” and “azul”. So they had watched him long enough to know that his car was the blue one parked in the zocolo.

“And there isn’t any package in,” Sanson started. He heard the faint swish and the adobe wall behind him seemed to explode and drive the side of his head off into the hot night sky. There was no sensation of falling. Just an explosive boiling blackness...