Hot Springs (54 page)

“Suppose something goes wrong? Suppose we have a flat tire or have to evade a roadblock, and we fall behind schedule.”

“If we’re not there, he comes back next day, same time, no problem. It’s flexible. I accounted for that. But we have clear road and we ought to keep going. The sooner we’re out of here, me boy, the sooner you’re enjoying the pleasures of them dusky Mex women.”

“Okay, okay,” said Owney. “I hate being nervous. I want to fucking do something.”

“This is the hard part, old man,” said Johnny.

“Say, Owney,” said Herman Kreutzer from the back seat, “whatever happened to your English accent? It seems to have escaped too.”

The gunman erupted in laughter. This annoyed Owney, but until he had reestablished himself, he was subject to such predations. His misery increased.

“Uh oh,” said Johnny.

“Oh, shit,” said Herman.

Owney felt the sudden infusion of red light as, just behind them, a police or sheriff’s car had just turned on its lights and siren.

“Fuck, he’s got us,” said a gunman.

“We’re going to have to pop this boy,” said Johnny.

“No,” said Owney. “I’ll handle it. You guys, you been laughing at me like I’m nobody. I’ll show you Mr. Fucking New York rackets.”

“Oh, he’s a tough one,” said Vince the Hat.

“Let the boy operate,” said Johnny.

Johnny guided the car to the shoulder and eased to a halt: Owney got out, raised his hands high.

The policeman—no, a sheriff’s deputy, or possibly the sheriff himself, for the black-and-white’s door read SHERIFF and under that MONTGOMERY COUNTY, ARK.—climbed out of the car, but kept his distance. He was not distincdy visible behind the haze of lights.

“I’m unarmed,” called Owney.

He spread his coat open to show that he had no pistol. Then he started to walk forward.

“Y’all just hold it up there,” said the sheriff.

“Ah, of course. Meant no harm, sir,” said Owney in his best stage British.

“Who are you? Mite late to be pleasure-cruising through the mountains in a big oP station wagon.”

“We were enjoying the sporting possibilities of Hot Springs,” said Owney. “Our money having run rather abrupdy dry, we decided to head straight toward Fayetteville. We may have taken a wrong turn. Glad you’re here, Sheriff. If you’d just—”

He took another step forward.

“You hold it,” said the sheriff. “And tell all them boys to stay in that car. I am armed, and I am a good shot, and I’d hate there to be any trouble, because if there is, one or t’other of you and your boys is going to Fayetteville in a pine box.”

“Yes sir. No need for violence. We’ll show proper ID and you may verify our identities via your radio. I appreciate that people are jumpy tonight, what with that fellow escaping prison in Hot Springs. We’ve been stopped twice at roadblocks already.”

He kept advancing.

“You hold it there, pardner,” said the sheriff, putting his hand to a big gun in his holster, and at the same time looking quickly to the car to make certain nobody had stepped out and all the windows had remained rolled up.

“Sheriff, uh—?”

“Turner, sir.”

“Sheriff Turner, I appreciate your nervousness given the drama of the evening. But I wish to assure you I am harmless. Here, go ahead, search me. You’ll see.”

Owney assumed the position against the fender of the police vehicle; the fellow gave him a quick pat-down and came to the conclusion he was unarmed.

But Owney also saw that he was a professional, and shrewd. He hadn’t approached the Ford but stayed back by his own vehicle. No one in the car could get a shot at him, not without opening the doors and leaning out, and he was probably very good with his gun. If they all jumped out of the car, they might get him, but not before he’d gotten two or three of them. And he could then dip back into the woods, pop their tires and make it to a phone to call in reinforcements quick. Sly dog.

“What business are you in, sir?” asked the sheriff, somewhat relaxed that he’d found no gun on Owney.

“Well, I’ve been known to wager a penny on the ponies, the fall of a card or the roll of a die.”

“Gambler, eh? But you didn’t do too well in Hot Springs.”

“Had a run of bad luck, yes. But I’ll be back, you can make book on it.”

“Well, y’all be careful. Ain’t no speed limit here but you were moving mighty fast. Don’t want to scrape you off a tree.”

“No, indeed.”

“Say, what was the name again?”

“Vincent Owen Maddox.”

The sheriff’s face knitted with a little confusion, for the name sounded so familiar.

“And you say you’re headed to Fayetteville.”

“Headed toward Fayetteville, old fellow.”

“Well, Mr. Maddox—”

Then his face lit with amazement as he realized that the Owen became Owney, and his face set hard, for in an instant he knew who he was up against, and his hand flew fast and without doubt toward the big gun at his hip.

But Owney was faster.

In less than half a second he had a small silver revolver in his hand, as if from nowhere, as if from the very air itself, and he fired one bullet with a dry pop into the sheriff’s chest. The big man never reached his Colt and stepped back, for the bullet packed so little impact it felt only like a sting, but in the next second the blood began to gush from his punctured aorta and he sat down with an ashen look, then toppled sideways to the earth.

“All right, you fellows,” called Owney. “Get him in his car and get it off the road, chop chop now.”

Johnny’s gunmen got out of the Ford and dragged the dead police officer to his car. Vince started it, and began to creep along the road until he found enough of a hill to drive it over so that it would tumble off and into the underbrush.

“Say,” said Johnny, “ain’t you a fast piece of work. Where’d you get that little ladies’ gun?”

“When they delivered my suit to the cave, it was tucked in a pocket.”

“I don’t mean that. I mean, where were you packing it? I didn’t realize you were heeled. You sure got it out in a flash.”

“I am a man of some dexterity.”

“Where was it?”

Owney smiled, and pulled up his coat sleeve. His shirtsleeve underneath was unbuttoned and a black piece of elastic circled his wrist. Quickly he slid the gun under it, then drew the suit sleeve back down over it, where it disappeared to all but the most discerning eye. But Johnny could see it was an old nickel-plated revolver of the sort called a bicycle gun, a .32 rimfire from very early in the century, that lacked a trigger guard and had a one-inch barrel.

“It’s a trick another sheriff once taught me,” said Owney.

My father knew the land. That’s what my father knew. But what good is that? What value is that? What does that get you?

Earl walked out onto the porch, where he could see the sim setting to the west. But it was a quiet twilight in Polk County and no cars had headed on down the road in quite some time.

My father knew the land.

What does that tell me?

But the more Earl hammered against it, the harder it became.

He knew this land. What the hell good would that be to train robbers in Hot Springs, fifty odd miles away. He knew Polk County, an out-of-the-way spread of land, mostly mountain wilderness with a few one-horse towns far to the west, hard up against Oklahoma. What was there about Polk County that could be important to these men?

Well, maybe they could hide out in the mountainous trees of the Ouachitas. But there were plenty of trees, mountains and wilderness in Garland County itself or in Montgomery County. What would they need to come an extra county over here for?

He tried to recall what he knew about that robbery, what old D. A. had told him months back. Five armed men, an inside job, four guards killed, a huge payroll in cash taken, and they got away without a trace.

He applied his tactical imagination to it. It was a military problem. You have to leave an area. You are behind enemy lines. You are being hunted in force by all police agencies. How do you do it?

Well, obviously, you drive. But to where? Roadblocks are already out. You can’t get far by road. Do you take a train? No, don’t be ridiculous. Well, maybe you don’t leave. Maybe you go to ground for a month and wait the manhunt out. You have, after all, friends in the area who can hide you. But… the longer you stay there, the more likely that somebody will notice something, somebody will talk, somebody will see something.

That leaves a boat. Could you take a boat? Could you ride up the Ouachita River to— well, to where?

That was interesting. You might go by boat, and possibly the cops wouldn’t be covering the river or the lake because they’d believe you’d be on the road. But… a boat to where? You take the Ouachita to where? It would make most sense to take it south, toward the Mississippi, and he didn’t even know if the Ouachita reached the Mississippi. And that took them into the flat part of the state, where—

This was getting him nowhere. It was poindess speculation. Maybe they did take a boat. Where would it get them, which way would they go, who could know now, six years later? And what difference would it make?

He heard a dry light whine from far off. It was so familiar he almost didn’t notice it. He’d heard it in the Pacific a million times. He looked into the fading light and finally caught it, a plane, a silver speck up high, where the sunlight still commanded, glowing against the darkening sky, entirely too far to be identified.

An airplane, he thought.

They might go someplace where they could be picked up by an airplane. This suddenly seemed reasonable. You get into an airplane and you’re free. It’s 1940, after all. There’s no radar, because it’s still a secret; and the big wartime push hasn’t begun, so the system of commercial aviation is haphazard and roundabout, planes come and go every day.

They go to an airplane.

What kind of airplane?

There are four men. They all have automatic weapons and presumably some supply of ammunition. They have clothes because they’ve been living in the area prior to their raid, and they have the trophy of their efforts, the payroll. Close to half a million, in cash. In small bills, in bags or a strongbox or some such. All that cash, maybe a hundred pounds of it. He had no idea how much a half million in small bills would weigh* but it would be considerable.

So: What kind of airplane?

Not a Piper Cub or any other small puddle-jumper, like the observation jobs he’d seen in the war. Maybe you could land all right, but it would be too dangerous to take off again with all that weight.

Therefore: it would have to be a multiengine plane, a substantial airplane that could carry five men, their equipment, their money. Something like… a DC-3? No, too big. But maybe some kind of Beechcraft, twin-engined, like the staff planes the brass had used in the war. You never saw them in combat zones, but behind the lines they were ubiquitous. Heavy, slow, low, but planes that were dependable and could land anywhere it was fiat.

So where would you land such a plane?

Obviously, the airports were out, because they’d be watched by cops. You couldn’t land that big a plane in a farm meadow, or anywhere near civilization because it would clearly be spotted, and you probably couldn’t do it at night, because it would be too dangerous.

So: you had to find a big, flat field somewhere, but somewhere far from prying eyes, somewhere in the wilderness, in the mountains, somewhere safe and secure, unlikely to be stumbled upon. That would leave out a road, a farm, a park, it would leave out just about anywhere.

Where would you land a plane? And what on earth would his father the hunter have to do with it?

A memory came to Earl. It was indistinct at first, a blurred image from some deep pool where experiences had been recorded. It was from his childhood. He had a vision of a remote field, a valley, yellow and rolling. He was there with his father and a few other men. It was maybe 1927 or ‘28, he was maybe twelve or fourteen years old. He heard his father’s voice, instructing.

“Now you pay attention,” the man was saying, in that low rumble that was his voice, “because I don’t want to have to say this twice, Earl. You want to look to the treeline. The mule deer is a creature of the treeline. He likes the boundary between the open and the closed. He also likes the wind to be blowing across the open, so that he can smell anything tracking him. He won’t go into the full open, particularly during hunting season, because he knows he’s being hunted. Don’t know how, but he does. He’s smart that way. He wants the tender shoots of the margins. This is where you will find him, in the dawn or possibly at twilight. You must be alert, for his moves can sometimes seem magical, and you must be patient, for there is nothing in his mind to distract him, as there will be to distract you, so you must compel yourself to stillness. Do you understand, Earl? Are you listening, boy?”

Of course he was listening. Who could not listen to Daddy? Daddy demanded respect, and Daddy got it. Earl sat with his rifle as his father explained to him, as he was introduced into the rituals of the hunt.

But now he remembered and he saw: a wide field, so remote that to see it was to feel oneself the first white man in the territory in the year 1650-something, and to marvel at it, its length, its yellowness, the low hills that encased it to make it a valley and the far, blue peaks of higher mountains.

A name came out of his memory.

Hard Bargain Valley, a splash of flat yellow in the mountains, called such because some westward pilgrims had thought to winter there and by spring all that remained was food for the crows. Earl remembered the crows wheeling overhead, back and forth, like bad omens. God had made a hard bargain with the pilgrims indeed.

Could you land a plane on Hard Bargain Valley?

Yes, he knew in a second. You could. Easily. A bigger plane too, not a Cub but a substantial twin-engined craft.

Now it came together in a moment, as if all the parts of the puzzle had been sunk in his brain all these years and at some darker deeper level he’d been working on them. Now they fit. They announced themselves with a thunderclap, a vision of purity so intense it almost knocked him back.