Talk of the town

  Which answered everything very neatly, I thought. It was a closed circuit, like two snakes swallowing each other: she was a tramp because she was with Strader, and she was with Strader because she was a tramp. How could you argue with that? I went out and dropped the envelope in a postbox and drove back to the motel. When I walked into the office Josie came out of the curtained doorway and said there had been a call for me some ten minutes ago.

  “A woman?” I asked.

  “Yes, suh. She say she would try again.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “How is Mrs. Langston?”

  “She’s still sleepin’ quiet.”

  “Good,” I said. “You stay right here with her.”

  I went across to the room and sat looking at the telephone, trying to make it ring. It was some twenty minutes before it did. When I picked it up, u feminine voice asked softly, “Mr. Chatham?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “Are you still interested in that deal?”

  “Yes,” I said. “What happened before?” I listened intently, but there was no trace of the noisy fan in the background now.

  “I almost got caught and had to hang up. I’m calling from a different place. Look—it’s going to cost you more. Three hundred; take it or leave it.”

  “So the other call was a build-up? Don’t try to con me.”

  “I’m not,” she replied. “I just told you you could take it or leave it. But if I spill anything I’m going to have to get out of here for good, and I’ll need it. They’ll guess who it was and I don’t want any of that acid in my face.”

  “What do I get for three hundred?”

  ”Names. The man that did the job and the one who hired him.”

  “Names are no good. I need proof.”

  “You’ll get it. Listen—they’re going to do it again. It’ll be a different man, of course, but I’ll give you a description of him and tell you what night. What else could you need?”

  I thought about it. “Sure, I could catch that one. But he might not talk, and I want the guy behind him.”

  “Use your head,” she said impatiently. “You’ll have his name. If the police pick him up at the same time and tell him his boy talked, how’s he gonna to know the difference? He’ll crack.”

  “He might,” I agreed. It was an old trick, but it still worked.

  “Then it’s a deal?”

  “Okay,” I said. “Where and how do I meet you?”

  “You don’t. I told you that before. I’m just as close to you right now as I want to be.”

  “Then how do I get the money to you?”

  “In cash. Put it in a plain Manila envelope and mail it to Gertrude Haines, care of General Delivery, Tampa.”

  “H-a-i-n-e-s or H-a-y-n-e-s?”

  “What difference could it possibly make?” she asked boredly. “Send it in twenties.”

  “How do I know you’ll call after you get there and pick it up?”

  “You don’t. But if you’ve had a better offer, grab it.”

  “I know a little about con games myself,” I said. “And before I fork over that kind of money I want something more specific than cheap wisecracks.”

  “Well, I don’t know how to help you there. You either trust me or I trust you. And I don’t trust anybody. So where are we?”

  “Try selling it to the police. Maybe they’ll make you an offer.”

  “Wise guy. Well, I just thought you might be interested—”

  “I am,” I said. “And I’m not being unreasonable. If I’m willing to send you three hundred dollars, blind, I’m entitled to some assurance you know what you’re talking about.”

  ”We-ell,” she said slowly. “The acid was the kind they use in car batteries. And it came off a hijacked truck. How about that?”

  “Sounds fine,” I said. “Except I still wouldn’t know whether it’s the truth or not. About the truck, I mean.”

  She sighed with exasperation. “God, you’re a hard man to do business with.” She paused, and then went on, “Well, look—I could tell you where the rest of the acid is—”

  “That’s better.”

  “But it won’t do you a bit of good by itself, because there’s no connection where it is and who put it there, if you get me. It’s on an old abandoned farm, and the man the farm belongs to doesn’t even live here any more.”

  “Never mind,” I said. “Just tell me how to get there.”

  “Not so fast. You get this straight. If it looks like somebody’s following you, don’t go out there. They don’t think I know where that stuff is, but it could still get plenty rough when they started trying to find out who tipped you. I don’t care what happens to you, but I bruise like a peach.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll watch it. Go on.”

  “All right. From the motel go on out east till you pass a concrete bridge over a creek. It’s about four miles. Just beyond it, maybe half a mile, there’s a dirt road going off to the left through the trees, and a couple of mailboxes. One of the mailboxes says J. Pryor, I think. Follow that road. You’ll pass two farmhouses, and then you go over a cattle-guard and past a corral and a chute for loading cows into trucks, and then there’s not anything for about three miles except pine trees and palmettos. The farm is on the right. The farmhouse burned down a long time ago and just the chimney is standing, and in back of it is an old barn. The acid is up in the loft, eight glass jugs of it buried under some moldy hay. You won’t have any trouble finding it, because there’s also a few five-gallon cans of paint hidden with it.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “When you get back, mail the money. I’ll call you within a week, as soon as I know for sure who it’s going to be.”

  “That long?”

  ”They’ve got to wait at least till you reopen the place, haven’t they?”

  They apparently watched every move I made. I felt like a man trying to set up housekeeping in a lighted display window. “All right,” I said. “Incidentally, where are you calling from now?”

  “You’re cute.”

  “Where did you call from before?”

  “Why, I thought I told you. From somewhere else.” She hung up.

  * * *

  Traffic was only moderate on the highway. I could see five cars strung out at varying distances behind me as I settled down to about forty-five and started checking them in the mirror. About half a mile ahead, on the right, was the El Rancho motel. I glanced at it as I went past. It was in the same class as the Spanish Main, only perhaps somewhat larger. It looked as if there were twenty-five or thirty units spaced around the semicircular drive, with a pool and a lot of colored umbrellas and lawn furniture out in front. Apart from all the rest of it, she was bucking rough competition in the motel business.

  Three of the cars passed me and went on out of sight at about sixty or sixty-five. Another joined the two still behind me, coming up from far back. It passed the three of us and disappeared. Neither of the other two made any move; forty-five appeared to suit them perfectly. When I came to the concrete bridge we were still strung out in the same order. I saw the mailboxes, marked the location of the dirt road, and began easing in the throttle until I hit sixty. They dropped back, and in a few minutes were out of sight. About ten miles ahead I spotted a road leading off to the right. Wheeling into it, I parked just around the first bend and walked back to where I could watch the highway. In two or three minutes they went past, still traveling at the same moderate rate of speed. I was in the clear. I turned and went back. When I came to the mailboxes and swung off into the dirt road there was no one behind me and nothing coming from the opposite direction except a big tandem rig.

  I passed the two farmhouses in the first mile. Beyond the cattle-guard, the road deteriorated into an unfenced and poorly graded affair running through scrubby pine and palmetto. Dust boiled up to hang in the still hot air behind me. The road tilted up a slight rise after another ten minutes and the cleared fields appeared, sloping away to th
e right. They were abandoned, grown up with weeds and dead, brown grass. A pair of ruts turned off the road into the old farmyard at the top of the slight grade. I swung into them and stopped the station wagon in the shade of a lone tree growing in front of the foundation blocks and the fire-blackened monolith of the chimney where the house had been.

  When I cut the ignition and got out, the drowsy stillness of summer afternoon closed in around me. There was something peaceful and timeless and utterly isolated about the place that made it almost attractive. A painter would love it, I thought. Heat waves shimmered above the brown and empty expanse of the fields stretching away towards the timber beyond. The old barn, gray and weather-beaten and its roof full of holes, leaned in an attitude of precariously arrested collapse some eighty or a hundred yards away. I crushed out my cigarette and walked down to it through the brittle weeds. Some kind of burrs stuck to the legs of my trousers and shoe-laces. The door was at this end. It was closed, but I could see no padlock on it. Above it was a small square opening through which I could see the edge of the pile of hay in the loft.

  The door was secured with only a doubled strand of baling wire pulled through two holes and twisted together on the outside, but when I had unfastened it I had trouble forcing it open far enough to squeeze inside because of the sand that had washed down the slope against the bottom of it in past rains. The interior was gloomy and smelled of old dust and dried manure and straw. Narrow shafts of sunlight slanted in through cracks in the wall, illuminating the dust motes hanging suspended in the lifeless air. My shoes made no sound on the springy footing. There were some empty stalls on the right, and about half-way back, against the left wall, was the ladder going up into the hayloft. There was an opening about three feet square above it, the top rung of the ladder gilded by a shaft of sunlight coming in through one of the holes in the roof. I stepped over in the dead silence and mounted it.

  My head was just coming up into the opening, my eyes level with the last rung of the ladder, when my breath sucked inwards and the skin tightened up, cold and hard, between my shoulderblades. In the thick coating of dust there, where the puddle of sunlight was striking the top of the two-by-four, were the fresh imprints of four fingers and part of the palm of a hand. I threw my feet out into space, pushing against the rung above as if I were trying to shove myself downwards through clinging mud or tar, and for one awful fraction of a second I seemed to be hanging suspended in the air, unable to fall, like a balloon half filled with helium, and then the gun crashed behind me, paralyzing my eardrums. Pain like a hot icepick sliced across the top of my head and the air was filled with dust and flying splinters, and then I was falling at last, turning a little and trying to swim downwards into the gloom below me and away from that deadly shaft of sunlight. I landed on my feet, but off-balance, and fell backwards and rolled, all in one continuing motion, and as my feet went up and over and I was staring in horror at the opening above me, I saw the bent, denim-clad leg and the knee in the shaft of yellow light, and the beefy hand, and the searching twin barrels of the gun, still swinging.

  I was over and down, then, with my knees under me, pushing up, and turning, and the gun crashed again. I felt the knife edge of pain once more, this time along my left arm from shoulder to elbow, as the shot string raked the powdery manure and dust and exploded it into the air about my head and into my eyes. I was blinded. I came on erect and crashed into the wall, and fell again. I pushed up, and staggered, tearing at my face with one hand to get my eyes clear, and felt the stickiness of blood mixed with the dust, but I could see a little, enough to make out the narrow oblong of light that marked the door. But even as I whirled and plunged towards it I heard the sharp metallic click of ejectors above me and then the thump as he closed the breech of the reloaded gun, and at the same time the swift and deadly rustling of dry hay as he ran towards the front of the loft. I was trapped.

  While I was squeezing myself through the half-blocked door he would be right above me, leaning out of that opening with the shotgun barrels less than six feet above my head. He’d cut me in two, like cheese under an axe blade. I veered and slammed against the wall with a hand to stop myself from going on into the opening and being blown to pieces. I whirled. There was no other way out, and all he had to do was jump to the ground and come in after me.

  Then my mind began functioning a little better, and I realized there had to be another way out somewhere because he hadn’t come in at the front. I was running even as I heard the heavy thud of his feet against the ground outside the door, and was already three-quarters of the way to the rear wall when the light cut off behind me and I knew he had made it and was squeezing through the doorway with his gun. But there was no sign of a door or opening of any kind ahead of me. And I was already past the ladder. Before I could turn and make it up into the loft to try to get out the front that way, he would blow my legs from under me and kill me at his leisure. There was nothing to do but keep going. I could hear him struggling with the door. I swept my eyes frantically across the cracks of light ahead of me, and then I saw it, one that was a little wider at the bottom than at the top. It had to be the plank he had pried loose to get in. I hit it head on, without slackening speed at all. It gave and my right shoulder tore loose the one next to it, and then I was out into blinding sunlight, fighting to keep my balance because if I fell now I was dead. I stayed on my feet somehow, and when I was running under control again I leaned and cut sharply to the left, like a half-back turning the corner, to get out of line with the opening behind me.

  All the muscles in my back were drawn up into icy knots as I pounded across the open ground expecting at any second to feel the shot charge come slamming into it, but there was only silence behind me. I turned on one more burst of speed and then risked a glance over my shoulder. There was no sign of him, and I was nearly a hundred yards from the corner of the barn, well beyond the dangerous range of a shotgun. I cut left again and began running towards the car before he could head me off. I made it and looked back, sobbing for breath as I fumbled in my pocket for the keys. He was nowhere in sight. He hadn’t even come out. His gun was useless at this distance and he was standing quietly inside somewhere, just waiting for me to go away. As long as I didn’t know who he was, he could always try again. I shuddered. He was in no danger of my coming back to get a look at him; a shotgun at point-blank range is one of the deadliest and messiest weapons in the world.

  I scrambled into the car and whirled it out onto the road, conscious that I was dripping blood all over the seat. I had to keep wiping my eyes free to drive. When I had put a mile behind me I slid to a stop and got out to see if I could find out how bad they were; I had an idea they were isolated pellets from a blown pattern, but they hurt excruciatingly and were making a mess of the car whether the loss of blood was serious or not. I felt the top of my head. The scalp was split for some three inches where a shot pellet had raked across it, but the pellet itself was gone. I ripped off my shirt, spraying buttons into the road, wiped the blood and dust from my face with it, and looked at my arm. A single pellet had grazed it in a long and deepening gash downwards from the shoulder before it penetrated. I could feel it just under the surface in some muscle near my elbow. It felt large. A No. 2, at least, and possibly even one of the smaller sizes of buckshot.

  I thought about the first shot. He couldn’t have been over six feet behind me, and at that distance, with even a badly blown pattern, the stray pellet wouldn’t have scattered more than a fraction of an inch from the rest of the shot column. Another fraction of a second in getting my head down out of that opening and it would have exploded like a dropped water-melon. The reaction hit me. I was weak and shaky and had to sit down.

  I slumped back against the end of the seat and fumbled with a cigarette, but it was a mess before I could even get it into my mouth. I let it fall into the dust of the road beside the little tapping drops of red, and listened to the peaceful droning of an insect of some kind out in the timber. There was something chi
lling about the way they had outmaneuvered me. They had used the oldest con game formula in the world, and made me go for it like a greenhorn.

  They were good; they were so good they scared me. An anonymous tip that I could find the acid if I’d go out to that isolated place would have put me instantly on guard. I would have been suspicious, at least, and careful. But she hadn’t done it that way at all. The tip was something else, and I had demanded this part of it. I’d talked her into it against her will. And then she’d warned me about being followed. While he was already waiting for me there in that loft with his shotgun.

  These people were yokels?

  7

  Dr. Morley dropped the shot pellet onto the white enamel surface of the table, and grunted. “Humph. Goose load.” He was a large, florid man with either a naturally bluff and hearty attitude or a chameleon-like adaptability in suiting the bedside manner to the patient. I was big, healthy, and relatively unhurt, so I was getting the he-man-to-he-man treatment, with overtones of gallows humor. “Sure wasn’t a quail hunter, was he?”

  “No,” I said. Maybe I would think of some funny stuff myself later on, when I quit hearing that gun go off just back of my head. “It was a double barrel,” I added, and winced a little as he swabbed the incision and started putting a dressing on it.

  “Oh.” He grinned. “Not much he can do with it, then.”

  Except make sure next time, I thought. I didn’t have any idea who he was or what he looked like. He could get behind me any time. The only thing I knew for certain was that I was no longer merely looking for an acid-throwing hoodlum who faced a few months in the County jail if he were caught. You didn’t treat a minor headache with brain surgery.

  “Better give me a tetanus booster,” I said. “I can’t remember when I had the last one, and that place was paved with manure.”

  “Oh, you’ve got to have a tetanus shot, all right,” he agreed with vast humor. “But first I want to do a little hem-stitching on that head. You’re not fussy about your hair-do, I hope?”