The Instant Enemy

chapter 22

IT WAS AFTER ONE when we got to Rodeo City. It was a seaside motel town strung out between the highway and the shore. We went down a ramp to the main street, which ran parallel to the highway and just below it. Three motorcyclists in bowler hats roared past us down the middle of the street. Girls with blowing hair clung to their backs like succubi.

We found the turning and the sign: CENTERVILLE 20 MIS., and we turned inland. The blacktop road passed rodeo stands which loomed like an ancient amphitheater in the darkness. Gradually it looped up through the foothills, then more abruptly into a mountain pass. Before we reached the summit of the pass we were in a dense cloud. It gathered like rain on the windshield, and slowed us to a crawl.

On the far side of the summit actual rain began to pound on the roof. The windshield and the windows fogged up. I climbed into the front seat and wiped them every few minutes, but it was slow going.

It rained all the way to Centerville. Every now and then a flash of lightning would show the timbered walls of the valley slanting up above us.

Centerville was one of those Western hamlets that hadn’t changed much in two generations. It was a street of poor frame houses, a general store with a gas pump, closed for the night, a schoolhouse with a bell housing on the roof-peak, and a small white steepled church shining wetly in our headlights.

The only lighted building was a lunch counter with a beer sign, beside the general store. The place had its CLOSED sign out, but I could see a white-aproned man swinging a mop inside. I ran through the downpour and knocked on the door.

The aproned man shook his head, and pointed at the CLOSED sign. I knocked some more. After a while he leaned his mop against the bar and came and opened up.

“What is this, anyway?” He was a man past middle age with a foxy weathered face and a talker’s mouth.

I stepped inside. “I’m sorry to bother you. Can you tell me how to get to the Krug ranch?”

“I can tell you, but it doesn’t mean you’ll get there. Buzzard Creek will be running by now.”

“So?”

“The wash crosses the road to the ranch. You can try it if you want to. The other fellow made it, leastwise he hasn’t come back.”

“You mean Jack Fleischer?”

“You know Jack, do you? What’s going on up at the ranch?” He nudged me confidentially. “Has Jack got a woman up there? It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“Could be.”

“It’s a hell of a night for a party, and a hell of a place.”

I called Hank Langston in from the car. The man in the apron introduced himself. His name was Al Simmons, and he made it very clear that he owned the place, as well as the store next door.

Simmons spread out a paper napkin on the bar and drew a crude map for us. The entrance to the ranch was twelve miles north of Centerville. Buzzard Creek ran, when it ran, just this side of the ranch. It rose very quickly in a heavy rain. But we might make it across, since it hadn’t been raining long.

Simmons said as we were leaving: “If you get stuck, I have a tractor that can pull you out. Of course that will cost you money.”

“How much money?” Hank wanted to know.

“Depends on how long it takes. I generally get ten an hour with the tractor. That’s portal to portal. But if your car gets carried away downriver, there’s nothing anybody can do. So don’t let that happen, eh?”

We drove forever up a gravel road that badly needed resurfacing. The rain came hissing down from the sky. The lightning made frightening meaningless signs.

We crossed several small streams which ran through dips in the road. Exactly twelve miles from Centerville by the odometer, we came to the creek. It flowed across the road, sliding brown and steady under the headlights, dappled by falling rain. It looked at least a hundred feet wide.

“Do you think you can make it, Hank?”

“I don’t know how deep it is. I’d hate to lose the car.”

“We might do better wading. I’ll try first.”

I got out my gun and flashlight and put them in the inside breast pockets of my jacket. Then I removed my shoes and socks and trousers and left them in the wagon. When I stepped out in front of the headlights, jacketed but trouser-less, Hank laughed out loud at me.

The water was cold, and the gravel hurt my feet. Still I felt a certain pleasure which went back a long way, to my first infantile wades in Long Beach, holding my father’s hand.

I could have used a hand to hold on to now. Though the water never rose higher than my thighs, it pulled at my legs and made it hard to walk. At the deepest part, in the middle of the stream, I had to brace my legs apart and lean into it. It was like a second force of gravity pulling me at right angles to the first.

When I got beyond the middle I paused for a moment to rest and get my bearings. Peering ahead to the far shore, I could see a grayish bundle lying beside the road. I moved closer. It was a man, or the body of a man, wearing gray clothes. I splashed toward him and got the flashlight out.

It was Hackett, lying face up to the rain. His face was so badly battered that he was hardly recognizable. His clothes were sodden. There was mud in his hair.

He responded to the light, though, by trying to sit up. I got down and helped him, with an arm around his shoulders.

“I’m Archer. Remember me?”

He nodded. His head lolled against me.

“Can you talk?”

“Yes, I can talk.” His voice was thick, as though he had blood in his mouth, and pitched so low I had to lean close to hear it.

“Where’s Davy Spanner?”

“He ran away. Shot the other one and ran away.”

“He shot Jack Fleischer?”

“I don’t know his name. An older man. Spanner blew his head off. It was terrible.”

“Who beat you, Mr. Hackett?”

“Spanner did. He beat me unconscious and left me for dead, I guess. The rain brought me to. I got this far, but then I pooped out.”

Hank shouted at me from the other bank. The headlights of the station wagon blinked. I yelled at him to cool it, and told Hackett to wait where he was.

He said in utter dismay: “You’re not going to leave me here?”

“Just for a few minutes. We’ll try and bring the station wagon across. If Spanner’s gone, there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“He’s gone. Thank God for that.”

Hackett’s bad experience seemed to have humbled him. I felt a sympathy for him which had been lacking before, and I lent him my jacket.

I started back across the river with the flashlight in one hand and the gun in the other. Then I remembered Fleischer’s car. If he was dead, I might as well use it.

I came back to Hackett. “Where’s the dead man’s car?”

“I think I saw a car beside the barn.”

Waveringly, he pointed off to the right.

I walked up the road a hundred yards or so and came to a lane branching off to the right. Rains past and present had worn it down to bare rocks. I went up the lane, dreading what I would find at the end of it.

The barn was the first building I came to. It was sagging and old, with great holes in its walls. I shone my flashlight around. A barn owl flew out of one of the holes: a blank flat oddly human face flying on silent wings through the beam of light. It startled me, as if it had been Jack Fleischer’s ghost.

His car was parked below the barn, unlocked, with no key in the ignition. This probably meant the key was in Fleischer’s pocket. I almost gave up my plan to use his car. But I forced myself to go on up to the house.

Apart from one small flat-roofed section, there was nothing left of the building but its old stone foundations. Even the part still standing had taken a beating from the weather. Torn roofing paper flapped in the wind, and the warped door hung ajar.

When I found Jack Fleischer inside, prone on the wet concrete floor, he had become a part of the general ruin. In the weak flashlight beam, his face and head seemed to have been partly rusted away. Water dripped down on him from the leaking roof.

I found when I went through Fleischer’s pockets that his body was still warm. His car keys were in his trousers, and in the breast pocket of his jacket were the documents he had had copied at the Acme shop in San Francisco. I kept a copy of each of them.

Before leaving the shack, I took a final look around with the flashlight. Built into one corner was a two-level board bed like those you see in old Western bunkhouses. There was a sleeping bag in the lower bunk. The only other furniture was a chair made from a cut-down wooden barrel. Looped and coiled beside this chair was a lot of used adhesive tape. Some cigarette butts lay on the floor by the bunk.

I left Fleischer where he was, for the police, and made my way down the muddy slope to his car. The engine started on the first try. I drove in low gear down the gullied lane to the road, and back to the spot where Hackett was waiting. He sat with his head leaning forward on his knees.

I helped him to his feet and into the front seat. Hank shouted from the other bank:

“Don’t try it, Lew. It’s too deep.”

I had to try it. I couldn’t leave Hackett where he was. I didn’t trust myself to carry him across. One slip and he’d be gone downriver, and all our efforts lost.

I eased the car forward slowly into the water, aiming straight for Hank Langston’s headlights and trusting there were no curves in the road. For one frightening instant in the middle, the car seemed to be floating. It shifted sideways, then jarred to rest on a higher part of the invisible road.

We got across without further incident. Supporting Hackett between us, Langston and I transferred him to the back seat of the wagon. After putting on my trousers I took back my jacket and wrapped Hackett in a car rug. Fortunately the wagon had a good heater.

I locked the doors of Fleischer’s car and left it in the road. Then I went back to it and searched the trunk. No tapes. I slammed the trunk lid down. We made the slow twelve-mile journey back to Centerville.

We must have been gone about two hours, but the lights were still on in Al Simmons’ place. He came to the door yawning. He looked as if he’d been sleeping in his clothes.

“I see you made it back.”

“We did. Jack Fleischer didn’t. He’s been shot.”

“Dead?”

“Half his head was blasted away with a sawed-off shotgun.”

“At the Krug place?”

“That’s correct.”

“What do you know? I always reckoned that place would get him in the end.”

I didn’t take time to ask Simmons what he meant. He showed me his telephone at the back of the counter, and gave me the number of the nearest sheriff’s office, in Rodeo City. The officer on duty was a Deputy Pennell. I told him that Jack Fleischer had been killed by a shotgun blast.

“Jack?” he said in a shocked voice. “But I was just talking to Jack tonight. He dropped by earlier in the evening.”

“What did he say?”

“Said he was on his way to the old Krug ranch. He wouldn’t tell me what was on his mind. But he said if he didn’t come back by morning, I was to come up after him, with a couple of extra men.”

“You better do just that. Don’t wait for morning.”

“I can’t. I got no patrol car available. My car broke down, and the county won’t budget another till January.” Pennell sounded upset and confused. “I’ll have to have a car sent up from Santa Teresa.”

“What about an ambulance?”

“That has to come up from Santa Teresa, too. But if Jack’s dead he don’t need an ambulance.”

“Not everybody’s dead. I have an injured man with me.” I didn’t mention Hackett’s name, since I was hoping somehow to get him home before the news broke. “I’ll bring him into Rodeo City. We’ll meet the ambulance and the patrol car at your office.”

Al Simmons sat at the counter listening openly to my end of the conversation. When I hung up he spoke in a meditative tone:

“It’s funny how things turn out in a man’s life. Jack held that same post in Rodeo for over fifteen years. Rory Pennell was his sidekick.”

“What was Jack’s connection with the Krug ranch?”

“I don’t hardly like to say.” But his eyes were bright with desire to deliver his story. “Jack’s dead and all, and he’s – he was a married man. I wouldn’t want it to get back to Mrs. Fleischer.”

“Another woman?”

“Yeah. Jack had his good qualities, I guess, but he was always a skirt-chaser. Back in the early fifties, he was chasing the woman who lived on the Krug place. I think he caught her, too,” Simmons said with a sideways grin. “He used to stop off here for a case of beer, and then he’d go up and spend the night with her. I can’t hardly blame him. Laurel Blevins was a pretty piece.”

“Didn’t her husband object?”

“I don’t think he knew. Blevins was gone a lot of the time. He killed all his own meat. When he wasn’t hunting, he was tramping around the hills with a painter’s whatever-you-call-it.”

“Easel?”

“Yeah. He pretended to be some kind of an artist. But him and his wife, and the little boy, they lived like Digger Indians in that burned-out old ranchhouse. You can’t hardly blame the woman for going for Jack. He was a good-looking fellow fifteen years ago, and he always had money from the Rodeo houses. After Blevins left her, he kept the woman in Mamie Hagedom’s house. I got that from Mamie Hagedorn herself.”

“What happened to Blevins?”

“He traveled on. He was a born loser.”

“And the little boy?”

“I don’t know. He got lost in the shuffle.”

He should have stayed lost, I was thinking, instead of coming back to revenge himself on a past he couldn’t change even with a shotgun.

I questioned Al Simmons about Davy, and Simmons remembered him. At least he’d seen a man or boy, driving a green compact, take the turn to the ranch early the previous morning. No, he hadn’t seen or heard him come out tonight.

“Is there another way out?”

“There’s the northwest pass. But it takes a four-wheel drive, ‘specially in weather like this.”

Langston was honking outside. I had one more thing to do. I phoned Hackett’s house in Malibu and got Ruth Marburg on the line and told her I was bringing her son home.

She burst into tears. Then she started to ask me questions, which I cut short. I told her we were coming down by ambulance. While Hackett didn’t seem to be seriously hurt, he was exhausted and suffering from exposure. She’d better have a doctor on hand when we got there.

I gave her six a.m. as our E.T.A.