Wild (12 page)

I
STOOD
on the loud pedal.

The Olds roared at me from a side street curb where it had been parked. He’d probably been waiting for me to appear at the Crafford house. I couldn’t see the driver’s face behind the wheel. He had the engine wide open.

The Ford began to wind up. I had no gun. I was sure the driver of the other car was the imported heavy who had bolixed up my skull. He had a .45 automatic that I knew of. There was no telling what extra artillery he carried.

A dirt street joined the street I was on. The intersection was a mass of pot-holes. I took the turn in a wallow of mud and bottoming springs. I braked, turned at the next right, opened the engine wide again. It was a hump-backed asphalt road, gleaming like ice in the misting rain. The Ford seemed to hit lightly along the surface, the wheel like a thin piece of wire in my hands. The tires sizzled like bacon frying.

The windshield was fouled with dust and rain. It formed an opaque mass in front of my eyes. The wipers refused to operate, or I didn’t know how to work the switch. I glanced in the rear-view mirror. The Olds was perceptibly gaining. The droning whine of the powerful engine creased the roar of the Ford.

A broad stretch of brick pavement veered diagonally off to the right into what I knew was a sedate residential section, constructed along the old nineteen-twenty boom-period scheme of roads. The landscape was jungle. Trees dropped low over the bricks. The streets in here were a jumble of hairpin turns, small circles—a labyrinthian maze.

I headed in there. The Olds, following, slid viciously across the brick, straightened. I knew I had to get away from that car, that man, or die. There was no other answer.

The guy was out to get me one way or another. There would be no more bargaining now.

I drove through an unhoused area, starting around a broad circle. The circle of ground was covered only with grass and a few large water oaks.

He began firing at me again.

I was a good target. There was nothing I could do. We were at opposite sides of the circle, which composed an area slightly larger than an average city block. There were no streets leading off the circle. I hunched down as far as I could, then realized that if he hit the metal of the door with one of those slugs, it would tear through into me as if it weren’t even there.

I glanced over toward him. Two slugs ripped through the car to the rear of the front seat. At the same instant, he savagely turned the Olds up over the curbing. He came powering directly at me across the stretch of browned grass between the trees.

Another car approached me from the opposite direction. I passed it and met the street where I had turned onto the circle. It was then I realized I was lost in here.

At one time I’d known this crazy-house of streets. No more. If I didn’t get out of here, I might inadvertently trap myself on a dead-end.

To top it off, the windshield was nearly blind. I worked nervously with the wiper switch. Nothing happened. It wasn’t raining hard enough to erase the contamination of slime on the glass. I put my head out the side window, trying to see ahead. It wasn’t much better. I couldn’t control the car well at speed.

I hit a straight flat street and pressed the accelerator down again. He was back there, sliding in a shriek of rubber on a turn. The Olds straightened and flew at me as if shot out of a gun. I was finished unless I pulled a trick out of the hat.

I wondered if any of the old wooded section down by the bay was left.

I swerved right, the left wheels up over the curb, lurching through a long, slow curve. The pavement bricks were so slick I couldn’t get back on the street. The car was on the edge of going completely out of control. I knew if I touched the brakes I was done. I held it, and gradually crept back toward the street, the wheels lurched and sang across bricks. Some of these streets were deadends. If I happened to be on one of them, he would have me.

The road ceased. Curbs beveled into the rutted grass. I drove straight on through the opening where the street had been planned, no chance for hesitation, trusting to the memory of possible lovers’ lanes. This had always been necking country in the old days, and it didn’t look much changed. The wheels struck a battering bump. The windshield wipers began working, smearing at the murky mess on the glass, helping a little bit.

I drove through woods, turning toward the bayside. As a rule, car paths led out from parking areas on the bay in all directions. I kept it wide open. White-blue waters of the bay flashed between trees.

A car parked up ahead suddenly leaped into gear, slid in a tire-biting turn, and shot toward me, rocking. A guy and his gal. As we passed, I saw her face, the gaping red mouth, the wide eyes, as she struggled to pull down her skirt. They’d figured I was copper. The guy hunched low over the wheel, really driving. He didn’t look my way.

I watched the rear-view mirror as much as I dared. I saw the Olds slamming between trees. The two cars approached each other. The guy and his gal were going like hell now. The Olds broke and pulled off the lane among thicker trees, avoiding collision.

I bounced lurching into a beaten clearing beside the bay, saw another cut-off leading through thickly growing vines. I took it, the tires grinding through deep ruts.

In another instant I burst out on brick pavement, sliding sidewards. I straightened out against the far curb, took the next left, and a half minute later came out on smooth asphalt. It was Twenty-Second Avenue, which would lead me straight to Forty-Ninth, and on to Pine Park.

There was no sign of the Olds. I’d lost him.

The Ford made like a baby jet. We went.

I crossed through most of town without trouble. Still on Forty-Ninth. I began to relax, and then I saw the police cruiser. It rolled slowly toward me. They were taking their time, looking. They could have checked the U-Rent-It spots. It could well be that they knew what I was driving because I’d had to give my right name when I rented the Ford.

I turned fast into an alley, cut the engine beside an old red cement house, and lay low on the seat.

Cracking the door, I looked out. They slowly drove past. I waited. They were gone. I stuck my head up and saw the cruiser parked directly across the street opposite the mouth of the alley. White smoke powdered from the exhaust. They had me.

I started out of the car, casing the alley for a run. Then I saw they had stopped for the corner red light.

Two cops sat in the cruiser, batting the breeze. I climbed back under the wheel. If they turned their heads, they would see me. They would be checking every blue Ford sedan in the city.

They drove off.

I sat there. My shirt stuck to my back with perspiration. My palms were slick on the wheel rim. There was a fine trembling all through me. I was getting old and crochety and all used up. I felt lousy.

I drove on toward Pine Park. The overalled, tobacco-spitting fat man with the crowbar was still there beside the road, probing in his drainage ditch. He waved. Maybe he would always be there.

I parked in the same spot as yesterday, overlooking the lake and the trailer, and walked down toward the cement block house.

It was still. Wind breathed in treetops, and the mist had thinned. More and more I sensed the spot I was on. They would be looking for me everywhere. There was no safe place to be.

The door of the cement block house was open.

I jammed my hands in my pockets, scowled at the whole rotten business. I stood there staring at the shackles and chains. My hand touched something in my pocket. I felt as if somebody had stuck a hatpin into the back of my neck. I saw myself going to Elk Crafford, telling him where Ivor Hendrix was.

I was the worst kind of fool. It was a wonder I was able to remember my name.

I took the brass key out of my pocket. I had found it on the deck of Crafford’s schooner, the
Carol
. If it happened to fit the padlock on those chains, I had possibly thrown her to the dogs. I had completely forgotten about the key. Of course, it wouldn’t fit.

I grabbed up the padlock, the chains rattling. The brass key slid into the slot like you’d stick your finger in butter, and it turned those tumblers quicker than Florene could turn a trick at the old Parsienne Sphinx. Florene had been fast. She was a piker compared to this key. I stood up, holding the key, thinking how crazy the comparison was. I felt crazy. You have to be crazy to be as stupid as I’d been.

I turned and ran for the car.

Savage noises reached from up on the knoll beyond the lake. They were animalistic, nightmarish. I ran on past the trailer. The trash pit where they had burned things was cleaned out. There was no sign of the suitcase. I moved fast up past the lake through wet knee-high brown grass. Reaching the slope of the knoll, I entered thick pine woods. The sounds coming from in there would make violent death an anemic dream.

I stopped. My insides lifted sickeningly.

It was the hound. Out of sight, out of mind. Vince Gamba’s dog. Snarling, it gripped a human hand in its teeth. It yanked ferociously at an arm, tearing it from a freshly scarred hole gouged in the soft earth.

The animal’s eyes were a red frenzy. White fangs sank deep into the stiff claw of hand. The dog’s body was braced as it yanked and viciously whipped its head. The arm came free. The beast growled in its throat, lashed its head. The arm flew off into the grass. The hound dove into the pit, its blood singing with ancestral cravings on distant moonlit plains. The teeth ripped into a man’s ankle, bare and paper-white above a dirty tennis shoe.

I yelled at the hound, ran at him, trying to scare him off.

It whirled, stood braced, head down, eyes up, jaws open, and emitted a crazed whine.

I ran at it again. It stood ground.

The hound had dug the earth free revealing the muddy corpse of the man I’d found shackled in the cement block house. The body lay in a crumpled, awkward position, smeared with wet dirt.

We faced each other across the corpse.

“Go home, boy!”

It was then I saw the scar; a raised, bloody, festering welt on the dead man’s abdomen.

This was Barton Yonkers. Somebody had killed him for four hundred thousand grand. That same somebody could put me right beside him. Everything had turned into a crumbling house of paper cards.

The hound did not move. I ran at it again, shouting. It stood ground, the wild light in its eyes unchanged.

I turned, looking around in the grass for a length of limb, something to go after the hound with.

I continued to stand in a twisted position, staring.

Steifer and Vagas walked toward me. They were about fifteen feet away. Steifer held a gun in his hand.

“Stand still,” he said.

I straightened slowly. I felt something go out of me, like life, maybe, or hope. Something else took it place. It was a kind of raw and violent despair.

R
UDY
V
AGAS
wore a yellow oilsilk slicker. His eyes grinned, but the rest of his face was a dead thing to see. Steifer had on a black raincoat. The two of them moved closer. They looked at the body in the muddy grave. They looked at the mute hound. Then they looked at me.

Steifer wagged his gun and wiped his face with his free hand.

“We’ve been trying to locate you,” he said.

“I’ve been kind of busy.”

They stared at the body.

“This dog found it,” I said. “Nasty, isn’t it?”

“I’d say it was crazy,” Vagas said. “Must we stand around here?”

The hound made no sound. It seemed to be waiting now, interest in the corpse gone. I only had half listened to what Vagas said. I knew I had to get back to the Vista Groves Hotel, where Ivor Hendrix waited. I felt the tight drawstrings of desperation. I couldn’t breathe right. I felt blocked.

“Must have been a surprise,” Steifer said. His voice was like the taste of alum. “Having that little old hound-dog dig up the body like this.”

“What are you getting at?”

“We have a warrant for your arrest, Baron,” Vagas said. “Don’t make things worse for yourself, and worse for us.”

“What conditions?”

“Material witness. Witholding evidence. Aiding and abetting. Conspiring with criminals. Breaking and entering. Disturbing the scene of a crime. You name it.” He let his eyes go narrow. “Suspicion of homicide.”

My throat was dry. When I spoke, my voice cracked.

“You know better than that.”

“Do we?”

“I just came out here in line with….”

“So did we. When the medical examiner gets here, along with Sheriff Silverman, and Haddock—and the lab crew, the newspaper crew—we’ll have a real party.”

I didn’t say anything.

Steifer said, “Some kid coming home from school, playing hooky, heard the dog. He came over to investigate. He saw what was going on, ran home, and his mother called the sheriff’s department. Silverman and Haddock are working together on this. Silverman’s coming with a couple deputies, they ought to be here. We’re tired. Can you imagine that?”

“No kid saw me,” I said. “I just got here.”

“We didn’t figure you sat up with that,” he said, gesturing toward the body. There was real irritation in his tone now. His voice lowered. “You think we want to believe a guy like you would get himself fouled up in something like this? Give us some credit.”

They were closing in. How do you get away from two trained cops. Especially when they’re carrying a grudge.

Steifer’s voice was bitter. “You bastard,” he said. “You know goddamned well we’ve been trying to locate you. You’ve been staying out of our way. It’s been a game of tag to you, you son-of-a-bitch. So now we’ve got you. Using a friend, too. Hoagy Stills came to Haddock with the information on that gun right after he talked with you. That was a
great
way to act. With us right there, talking to Stills. You sure as hell are a son-of-a-bitch, Baron—believe me. We got no sympathy for a louse like you.” He raised his voice. “Every lawman in the state working day and night. And you playing tiddly-winks with hot information, using it to your own purposes.”

“And a tiddly-wink to you,” I said.

Vagas thrust his lower lip out. “Where is that money, Baron? That’s what you’ve been after, isn’t it? Playing your neat lone game.”

My voice was strained through chips of broken glass. “There’s no use in my trying to tell you anything. You’ve got it all figured out. You know all the answers. The oracles of Central Homicide.” I spoke evenly. “You’re so thick-skulled you wouldn’t recognize the truth if it gnawed holes in your head.” I looked at the hound. He was trotting around in the grass, panting. I said, “I came out here to see what I could find. It was a logical place to pick up threads. Also, I found a key today—a key that fits the padlock on those chains down there in that cement block house, where that corpse,” I turned and pointed, “was when I first found him.” I had half an angle. It was the lousy half, as usual, but I decided to play it out and see what happened. Only the instant I’d finished speaking, I felt as if I’d turned a gun on myself. Naturally, to them, I
would
have the key.

“Sure,” Steifer said. “It figures. But why tell us you
‘found’
the key?” He turned to Vagas. “He’s crawling, Rudy. Like the worm he is. Trying to crawl out from under.”

I spoke to Rudy Vagas. “This body, here, is Barton Yonkers. The same guy who clobbered the Laketown bank. His pal, Horace Ailings, is dead. The body was found over by Lake Wales. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

Vagas snorted mildly. “Let’s see the key, bright boy. Take it easy—toss it to me.”

I tossed him the damned key.

“Hold him right here and let him suffer,” Vagas said. “I’ll be back in a minute.” He turned and started off down the slope toward the trailer.

Steifer and I watched each other.

“I know what’s in your head,” he said. “I’d kill you.”

I said, “Your brains wear shoes.”

He said, “Where’s the money, Baron?”

I looked at the hound. It was as if he were guarding the dead body, now. I was soaking wet with sweat.

Steifer said, “Why don’t you level with me? You know you haven’t got a chance.” He glanced down through the woods, where Vagas had walked. “Come on,” he said. “Spill it to me. You’ve got this Hendrix dame someplace, right? Why not tell it? Tell it to me. You got a heat on for her, only she wants money to play the game. You started out on this thing somehow, and you saw a chance to really make a killing. Isn’t that right?”

I said, “You’re sure new in those clothes you’re wearing. I’ll bet you’re back in uniform by tomorrow.”

He took a quick step toward me, ready to say something else, troubled.

I said, “Trying to work it so you’ll get the gold star while your pal Rudy’s not in sight?”

Steifer moved another quick step. It scared the hound briefly. The hound leaped, snarling at him, like a horse shying. Steifer instinctively looked down and lashed out with his right hand, his gun hand. I moved.

I chopped and caught him with a judo clip on the side of the neck. He dropped the gun. I’d had to do it. His eyes were astonished in that spare second before I chopped him again, giving it everything. Halfway down, he tried to call out. I went crazy, fingered my fists into a club, and smashed him on the joint of skull and neck, at the back, with all my strength. He huddled in a ball on his knees and flattened out, cold.

I was already running when I remembered Vagas. The hound stood over Steifer, mouth gaping. I had to get to the Ford. Vagas was in the cement block house now. If I went for the car, I’d be directly in his line of fire.

I ran as softly as I could down the slope toward the trailer. I started around behind it, then remembered the letters from Asa Crafford to Carl Hendrix, behind the veneer in the closet. There might not be another chance to get them. I slipped along the front of the trailer. The door was open. I went in fast, over to the closet. The closet door was open. The veneer was down among the shoes, with the bottle of gin. The letters were gone.

I got out of there fast, went behind the trailer. I walked now, on my heels, digging them into the ground, without sound. I weighed a straight two hundred. I had put all I could of that weight onto Steifer’s neck and skull. Again, as with the punk Joe Lager, I hoped to God I hadn’t killed him. I never used that method without worrying. One time I’d killed a man that way. The memory of it was bad. He’d been due to die, but Steifer was just the north end of a horse headed south.

I came around the side of the cement block house, listening, and reached the door. Vagas was hunkered down trying the key in the padlock. He hadn’t heard me. Then I heard the hound coming, crashing through the grass and brush, like the devil was after him.

Vagas heard him, too.

I didn’t wait.

He turned straight into my fist as I lifted it from the floor. It caught his jaw. His teeth cracked. He arched backward, his eyes gone up into his skull. I stood there with my wrist and elbow a blaze of sharp pain, my knuckles numbed. When the feeling returned to my knuckles, it was like being struck with a hammer. I had smashed a knuckle.

Vagas’ gun was on the dirt floor. I kicked it into shadows under the army cot. He got to his knees, groaning, then fell back.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But you wouldn’t listen. I’ve got things to do, and you couldn’t let me go.”

He kept talking Martian, saliva running down his lips, trying to get up. Again he got to his knees and fell back. I grabbed up the length of chain, wrapped it around his leg, and snapped the padlock on it. The key twinkled on the floor. I got that and fired it out the door, then turned, running.

The hound watched balefully. He didn’t move as I ran past him, heading for the Ford.

Two long strides past the doorway, slugs ripped into the dirt by my feet, and I heard the shots rattle off across the country. Steifer was up on the knoll. He wasn’t sure whether or not I had Vagas’s gun.

“Baron!” Steifer shouted. “Don’t be a fool!”

I ran like hell for a wooded slope to the left. There was no chance to make the Ford now. I had to reach the shelter of woods. He would shoot to kill.

“Baron—
stop!”

He fired again. I kept going. He was being careful. A careful cop is a deadly cop. The slug ticked a pine, ricocheted skyward in a snarling whine.

I ran head down, my feet sliding on the ground. I came over the top of the slope, looked back there. Steifer knelt on the opposite knoll, beside Yonkers’ grave. He took aim, holding the gun with both hands.

I dropped. The slug cracked over my head.

I rolled across clean wet grass, glimpsing splashes of misty sky, then smelling the sharp wet odor of the earth. I came up running. I was in pine woods.

Steifer’s voice echoed.

“Stop—
Baron!”

I ran with everything I had, tasting gall in my throat, feeling the urgent labor of my lungs. A loud snapping and snarling and crashing was behind me. It was the hound.

He ran jawing beside me. His eyes were full of laughter. For a brief instant both of us rushed back through the years to the time when I was a boy, running through damp autumnal Montana fields with my own dog leaping at my side. Long ago, before the family migrated to Florida, before James Baron had thought of becoming a private cop.

I paused, listening. My breath rasped rawly in my throat. Steifer let go another shot. It was wild. He called, out of range now. Then he began running. He crashed toward me, distantly.

“Home, boy!” I said to the hound.

The hound lolled his tongue, eyes dancing. He was ready for the race. I ran again. The dog kept pace in a lazy lope.

Steifer fired. The slug whipped through trees. I spotted a road, a billboard advertising women’s bathing suits. The sound of a siren lifted like an emotional wrench through the quiet day.

I was back where I’d come from. In my mind’s eye, I saw them—piling out of police cars, shouting orders, starting through the woods in pursuit.

Lines of blue. Neighbors would be deputized by Sheriff Zack Silverman. All out for the monster.

I leaped a ditch onto a macadam road. I was dragging lead now. I ran off in the direction of town. As I ran, I tried to beat some of the dirt off my clothes, thinking of trying to hail a ride. In ten minutes, this area would swarm with law like bacteria on an infected wound. Men with shotguns. They would have the ‘copter out. Field glasses and scopes.

I jogged steadily along.

You read about them, trying to escape the Law. They must know it’s only a matter of time. You can’t escape the Law. It’s organized. You can’t escape today’s organization. I knew this. There is only the momentary respite. The emotions of this moment, knowing you’re wrong, knowing they
will
get you; the feeling of overwhelming doom, of being trapped, knowing you can easily be killed even when fundamentally guiltless—this feeling is comparable to nothing. The doom is complete. Convention reads it to you from the crib; the Law is the force of right—right
or
wrong—and if you err, you pay. There is no escape. In the close chase, you run hand in hand with doom. You don’t dismiss panic. Panic is your heart. Panic is your hide. And panic is selfish.

The If—always the If.

If I didn’t reach Ivor Hendrix, get her some place else to safety, and locate a tangible fact that would open this case and clear me, I was done. I would rot behind Raiford’s bars. It would take more than theory. I had to come up with total answers now.

I couldn’t wait for a cab, and a city bus wouldn’t serve. The only answer was to steal a car and head for the Vista Groves Hotel.

The hound loped along beside me. I didn’t have the strength to order him away. He looked happy, and as crazy as I felt.

I ran past houses, set back off the street now. Then I spotted an Amoco service station on the next corner. Nobody was at the gasoline pumps, no sign of action. A yellow and black ‘55 Dodge sedan was parked alongside the station. I cut across a vacant lot, approached the station from the rear. The dog prowled beside me. I patted his head, said, “Hush, boy.” He looked up at me and laughed sadly.

I reached the car, opened the driver’s door, checked the ignition. Keys hung in the lock. Somebody was talking inside the office. I pushed the shift lever into neutral, released the parking brake, and shouldered the car backward down a gentle cement ramp toward the street. It rolled easily. The hound sat in the middle of the street, head cocked, watching.

The car rolled faster. I got under the wheel, backed into a drive, closed the door, started the engine, and took off in the opposite direction.

There was whining, leaping, scrabbling beside the car. The hound was doing a good forty-five miles an hour, right outside, tongue flapping over his shoulder.

I slammed on the brakes, flung open the door. He leaped in, jumped in back, flinging mud around on the bright parrot-yellow upholstery. He sank down on the seat, meek-eyed, tail flipping. I started off again. Through the rear-view mirror, the gas station back there was quiet.