The Knights of the Cornerstone (25 page)

“In you go,” he said, backing the wheelbarrow into the room. Together, pulling and pushing, they managed to haul Lymon up between the handles. He slumped backward, sitting down in a heap on the foam pad from the floor and resting with his hands in his lap, his head back and eyes closed.

“It’s been a long time,” he said weakly, “since I’ve been hauled home in a wheelbarrow.” He tried to laugh but couldn’t manage it.

Calvin had the unshakable feeling that he had been
running around in the dark warehouse for half an hour, and that the sun was rising like a helium balloon in the sky outside. He kept the wheelbarrow low, so that it wouldn’t spill, and turned sharply into the hallway, heading down toward the warehouse and to the river. Lymon now appeared to be unconscious, breathing heavily and erratically.

It was lighter in the warehouse—the gray dawn showing through the skylights, and through the open door ahead Calvin could make out the materials piled in the yard. Then they were out among the pallets and machinery, under the windy morning sky, heading for the open gate that led out to the dock. Calvin thought about the racks of costumes in the locked room. What was that all about? Somehow he couldn’t imagine Bob Postum playing the lead in
Scheherazade. …

He stopped abruptly when someone stepped in through the gates and held up a pistol, not pointing it at them, but letting them see it—the same pistol that Calvin had seen earlier that morning. It was Mifflin, his clothes wet with river water, the hair on the sides of his head standing straight out. He held up his free hand, like a traffic cop. “You folks hold it,” he said. “Just stay right there.”

Calvin wondered whether it mattered that the pistol had gotten soaked. What he knew about pistols would fill half a postcard. Shirley and Donna, he noticed, had stopped dead, and both of them knew more than he did.

“At ease with the wheelbarrow, son,” Mifflin said to Calvin. “We aren’t going anywhere till we think this through.” Donna moved across to stand next to Shirley, and Mifflin edged back a step. “You don’t come anywhere near me, Red. I don’t like to be crowded by jujitsu queens, and I don’t intend to shoot anybody if I can help it. We’ll all move back inside now.”

“My uncle’s sick,” Calvin said. “He needs a doctor and a hospital.”

“You’re right about that,” Mifflin told him. “If you had a siren on that wheelbarrow, you could run him right on down the highway into Needles. Move on inside now, like I said.”

Lymon was still unconscious, and had slumped sideways down into the wheelbarrow. Calvin lifted the handles and started to make a wide turn, in order to follow Shirley, when out of the corner of his eye he saw a black dog run in through the gate, a moving shadow against the early morning twilight, leaping silently at Mifflin’s back. Mifflin shouted in surprise, stumbling forward, the dog clamping onto his arm and bearing him over onto the ground.

Mifflin threw himself back and forth, shrieking, “Hey, hey!” in a falsetto voice, audible above the sound of deep muffled growling. He still held the pistol in his right hand, trying to keep from beating it on the concrete floor of the yard. Calvin started forward but stopped dead when Mifflin quit fighting and jammed the gun against the dog’s side and pulled the trigger. There was the sound of the pistol going off, muffled, but loud enough, and the dog lay dead on the ground.

Mifflin pushed himself to his knees, still holding the pistol, his left arm turned outward. He stared at his mangled hand and forearm, blood running down onto his khaki pants, and then he stood up shakily, getting his bearings. Calvin sprinted forward, pushing the wheelbarrow at a dead run toward Mifflin, who looked at him incredulously from fifteen feet away. He felt the wheelbarrow slam solidly into him at mid-thigh, knocking him backward, the wheel bouncing up and over Mifflin’s body and down again onto the concrete. Calvin fought to keep it upright, but tripped
over Mifflin, letting go of the wheelbarrow handles and falling heavily. He caught himself with his hands and got back up fast—fast enough to see the wheelbarrow teeter along for another five feet or so before it hit a head-high pile of sand and went over sideways.

“I got Lymon!” Shirley yelled, and Calvin sprang to his feet and looked for the pistol, which lay on the concrete near a pallet of fence block. Mifflin was already up and lurching toward it. Calvin took three running steps and threw himself forward, hitting him in the back of the knees with his shoulder, the two of them going down in a heap, Mifflin grunting with pain. Calvin scrambled up again, just as Donna was snatching up the fallen pistol.

Mifflin was finished, and evidently he knew it. He didn’t try to get up, but held his bleeding arm to his chest and waved Calvin away.
“Okay,
for Pete’s sake!” he said. “Doggone it! I want to
talk,
is all!”

Calvin felt most of the fight leak out of him, and for some reason he recalled Mifflin’s going on about pickles yesterday at the Gas’n’Go, and the way he had seemed polite and deferential when he’d gone out unhappily to lure Donna inside the store. What door had the man stepped through years ago that had led him, like Paige Whitney, to this strange place on the river?

“Gimme a hand here,” Shirley called, and Calvin hurried across to the sand pile where Lymon had spilled about halfway out of the wheelbarrow. The sand had stopped him, and he was lying on his side, apparently oblivious. Calvin managed to boost him back into the wheelbarrow and to lift it upright by heaving upward on the down side of it while Shirley pulled back on the top side. He beat sand off the edge of the foam pad and dusted it from his uncle’s cheek.

“What now?” he asked Shirley breathlessly.

“Your call,” she said.

Mifflin’s shirt Was torn down the front, and his arm was still oozing blood. He shivered suddenly, and looked at the dead dog.
“God,
I hate to hurt an animal.”

“What goes around comes around,” Shirley said.

“It’s coming around fast, too,” Mifflin said. “First shift’s on at seven. You three are burning daylight.”

“Let’s tie him up and get out of here,” Donna said.

“Can I put in a quick word?” Mifflin asked. “I’d like to negotiate.”

“What do you have?” Calvin asked him.

“I’ve got a place up in Idaho. Up on a lake. Three-bedroom log cabin with a Franklin stove. Big porch close enough to the water to fish off of. My daughter’s up there along with her two kids. Her no-good husband left them a couple of years back. So here’s what I’ve got to offer. I tell you what I know, and you let me walk out of here. I mean to take some tools for my trouble and head on up to Idaho. And I’ll tell you right up front that Bob keeps a couple of bundles of hundreds tied up with rubber bands hidden in his desk. I’m fixing to take the money, too, if you folks don’t. I’ll show you where it is if you want it.”

“We don’t,” Calvin said.

“I understand that. I’m just telling you so that you know I’m on the up-and-up. I don’t have no quarrel with you folks, and I swear to you on the grave of my dead mother that I wouldn’t have let them torch your store yesterday, Grand-maw, but I couldn’t do nothing to stop it. That was pure Bob Postum all the way. He’ll do the mean thing just because it’s mean, and he’ll make a joke about it afterward. He killed Lamar Morris at the bookstore for no reason at all—or at least that’s what Slim told me. I’ve been fed up
with this outfit since he put his big plans into motion six months ago. So if I got nothing to say that interests you, then tie me up, although I’d kind of like to wash out this dog bite with peroxide first.”

Lymon groaned in the wheelbarrow. Calvin realized that it was real daylight now. He could see the tops of the Dead Mountains glowing in the first light The breeze blew across the lot, stirring up dust. It had a barnyard smell to it, as if there were animals stabled nearby.

“Get on with it,” he said to Mifflin.

“All right, son, I will. Truth is, they’re going in through the passage. They traced it out with sonar. They grabbed your uncle as a diversion, and you Knights came right on out here just like Bob figured you would.”

“How many men are there?”

“Fifty. Armed. Desert rats and drifters from Beaumont to Panamint Flats. ‘Extras,’ Bob calls them. Some of them headed up into the hills last night, and some upriver.”

“And they’re loyal to Bob Postum?” Shirley asked. “I can’t make any sense out of that.”

“They’re loyal to a share of those silver ingots that came out of the Essex smelter back in the day.”

“What
silver ingots?” Calvin asked.

Mifflin stared at him. “Well,” he said, “that’s the rumor anyway. But you’ve only been in town for a couple of days, so maybe you haven’t heard it yet. Lamar Morris’s daddy wrote a piece on it, but the Knights paid him off for it and then burned all the copies of his little book, leastways all except one, which Bob’s got. That’s how I know about it. I’ve seen it. Bob uses it as a recruiting tool, you might say. He’s got a box full of those Essex smelter ingots, too, mined in New Cyprus in the thirties. They say Bob took them off of James Morris, Lamar’s father, when he killed the
man. A box full of silver ingots makes for a good-looking rumor.”

“What else?” Calvin said.

“They’ll only use the guns if they
have
to, because it tends to make a lot of noise, and it don’t resemble the Crusades a whole lot. It runs counter to the movie scam. Everyone knows you Knights beat your swords into ploughshares, which puts you one down if push comes to shove. Bob thinks you’ll hesitate, because you’ve got scruples. He doesn’t have any scruples at all.”

“The movie scam …” Calvin said, abruptly remembering the script stuck into the box full of books. Robert P. Wolverhampton, LL.D.—
Bob Postum.
Of course. He thought about the script’s multiple endings and wondered whether Postum had meant them as a
choice.
Sending the script with Morris’s books was like leaving the trunk of the Dodge open after he had stolen the veil. Postum saw all of this as fate playing itself out, the whole thing scripted.
Pride goeth,
Calvin thought, repeating his uncle’s sentiment.

“The kicker,” Mifflin said, “is what Bob likes to call his siege engines—two big catapults. He means to bombard New Cyprus from the heights.”

“And the costumes … ?” Calvin asked. “That’s for what—a film?”

“It’s cover,” Shirley told him. “We’ve got them, too. No one in the world is going to think there’s real trouble with everyone dressed up like the Crusades. They can keep it up all day and night.”

“That’s right,” Mifflin said. “They plan to have some fellows with camera equipment out on a barge, keeping tourists away and passing out flyers saying it’s a film shoot. That corralled-in area you see over there?” He pointed away across the yard. “That’s for the camels—or was.
Bob rented a couple of dozen of them from a big outfit that supplies the Hollywood studios. He’s going to run twenty-five armed men down the trail from the quarry on camels. Then while everything’s breaking loose topside, he means to take the silver and what-all else back up the passage and put the Knights right out of business. Once he gets set up on the heights, there’s not a lot you can do to stop him. And Bob figures that the Knights won’t call in the authorities. There’s a lot of history out here that doesn’t bear scrutiny.”

There was the sound of a semitruck rumbling past out on the highway. Calvin realized that Donna and Shirley were watching him. “Good luck in Idaho,” he said to Mifflin, who nodded his thanks and turned around to walk away, but then stopped abruptly.

“One more thing,” he said. “You-all have some kind of rat among the Knights. Bob’s got ahold of someone. I don’t know who it is, but I heard Bob bracing him in the office late last night. The man was pretty liquored up, it seemed to me, and Bob wasn’t happy about it, and wanted to know how he expected to do any driving. I was on my way out to get a bite to eat down at Norm’s, and when I got back they’d cleared out, although Bob’s truck was still here. It’s out there now. You folks had better watch who you trust.”

He turned around and went on his way again, disappearing into the warehouse.

G
eoffrey de Charney’s houseboat wasn’t moored at the dock any longer. It lay in mid-river, a hundred yards down, swept along by the current, the cabin flaming like a funeral pyre despite the drowning Calvin had given it with the water cannon. Someone—it must have been Paige Whitney—had doused it with gasoline, because it was burning like it was built of pine boards. A chemical reek of black smoke poured into the sky where it was pulled to pieces by the wind and blown put over the desert. The boat swung around sideways, and the bow was close enough to the California shore to ground itself for a moment before the current pulled the bow free again and the boat drifted around a bend in the river and disappeared from sight.

“There goes our ride,” Shirley said.

“No, it doesn’t,” Donna said, turning around and unlatching the gate again. Calvin set the wheelbarrow down and hurried after her, and together they lifted the hitch end of
the
Painted Lady’s
trailer. Calvin was faintly surprised at how easy it was to turn it and roll it out through the gate. They angled it past the edge of the dock and down to the steep beach where it started to pick up momentum. Calvin held on, following it right into the shockingly cold water until the trailer was submerged to the top of the tires. “The key’s here somewhere,” Donna said, climbing on board. “Cast it loose.”

Calvin unhitched the boat, pushed it deeper into the river, and let it go, setting Donna adrift and then slogging back up onto the beach where he stood at the water’s edge.

If she couldn’t get it started, she’d have to swim for it and let the boat go. In that case, he thought, they’d put Lymon in the Harvester and call Taber on the cell phone and arrange for a boat to pick them up down at the bridge. He could see Donna rummaging behind the seats now, lifting cushions and running her hand up under the dash. The
Painted Lady
was thirty feet from shore, the current sweeping it away. The river ran green and flat, with swirls glinting in the early sunlight, and away downriver smoke still rose from the burning houseboat.