I wanted to run, God, I wanted to run away from the blood and the smell of raw gasoline, but I made myself roll him over so I could empty his pockets into mine, then I grabbed the garbage bag out of the back seat, holding his goods tightly with my arms around the shredded plastic. I took a moment to glance in the open trunk, where I found a green duffle bag. I slipped the strap over my shoulder, and ran.
Okay, I panicked. I had stepped in shit and I was scared. If you don’t see that sort of thing regularly, you lose your touch for dealing with it, the cynical layer that lets you see a shattered body, shake your head once, then go about your business. I tampered with evidence, obstructed justice, and ran away, leaving the dead body propped like a side of beef in the front seat. And ran.
When I started the long uphill flight to my rental car, I couldn’t get enough air in my lungs, and when I got to the dead end beyond the switchback, I fell on the ground beside the driver’s door, sobbing, sucking empty air, thinking, trying to remember how to survive a world at war. Think. It hadn’t been a bomb connected to the ignition, or the car would have gone up when he first turned the key. Whatever it was had been under the front seat. Whoever put it there must have known I was around, must have tailed me tailing him. Think. I crawled around to the passenger door, opened it slowly, carefully, searching with bleary eyes for a wire. Nothing. Nothing under the seat on that side. Under the driver’s seat, though, a simple booby trap, something I had seen explained in Time magazine during the Vietnam war. A grenade with the pin pulled and stuffed into a tin can to hold the handle down—a Del Monte crushed-pineapple can, a killer with a sense of humor—and a length of soft soldering wire run underneath the floor mat and tied to the clutch pedal.
My hands were shaking so badly that I thought I would never get the grenade out from under the seat without dropping the can, but I did, eventually, then I held it tightly as I crawled out the driver’s door and looked for a place to put it, a safe place, but what if a kid came along, or a hunter or a bear turning over rocks looking for grubs, no safe place. I set it on the roof of the car, threw the dead man’s goods in the back seat, took the grenade and the can and myself and put us behind the wheel, the grenade lodged snugly in my crotch.
I wanted to weep, and did. My balls wanted to climb back up into my body, and they tried, sweating with the effort. I started the car and tried to ease down the trail, but my foot hammered the accelerator against the floor, and the cold engine flooded and died. “Oh, Jesus God,” I heard myself say, then I started the engine again, let the car coast in neutral down the hill, idling to warm it up. Even before I reached the ruined Toyota, though, I hit it again, fleeing, crazy, trying to brake, to go slow through the motel parking lot, but when I hit the highway the little car was going so fast that it lifted two wheels off the ground, which made the grenade rattle in the can, but still I jammed the throttle down, ran the gutless little bastard as hard as it would. A few seconds down the road, the gas tank of the Toyota went off behind me like a bomb, the fireball rolling through the rear-view mirror.
When I finally stopped running up and down Forest Service roads, I had no idea where I might be, but I knew I had to stop. The panic only stops when you stop running. I longed for the warm weight of my Browning 9mm automatic hanging heavy under my arm. At least I have a live grenade, I thought, laughing hysterically, riding between my legs. I shot off the road onto a logging skid trail and bounced the goddamned little car as far as it would go up it. When I got out, though, with nobody in sight as far as I could see, it still didn’t help. I could feel gunsights crawling like ants across my back whichever way I turned. I reached in the back seat, hefted the duffle bag; it was heavy, it rattled, that was enough, maybe a pistol, maybe a big knife, anything…But I couldn’t make myself wait to look there, standing by the car, so I threw it over my shoulder and ran, the can in my other hand.
When I was about seventy-five yards uphill and across fifty yards of granite scree from the car, I fell into the shadow of an outcrop, lay flat behind the lip of the shattered rocks, and decided I had run as far as I was going to. I lay my head on the duffle bag, propped the can and the grenade securely between two rocks, and waited to catch my breath. Then I unsnapped the duffle bag, dug into it, and felt better almost immediately.
Right on top were three fragmentation grenades still in their cardboard tubes. Below them, two flat packages wrapped in heavy plastic. I opened the first one and nearly shouted with joy. Not that guns kept you from running—I saw men in Korea shot in their foxholes, wrapped around their unfired weapons—but if you’re done with running, a gun feels better than a woman, more comforting than your mother’s breast. Although I had only seen them in movies and in magazines, I recognized the small submachine gun at once. An Ingram M-11. Not much larger than a .45 automatic pistol. Eight hundred and fifty rounds a minute. So simple a child can operate it. I dug deeper, looking for clips and ammo.
I found what I was looking for, and more. Ten loaded clips of .380 rounds, a bat-shaped suppressor. A kilo of marijuana. A bag of white powder, heroin or cocaine, I assumed. Two more grenades. The guy in the yellow Toyota might be a bad guy, but he was Santa Claus to me.
Everything except the grenades had been wrapped in the heavy black plastic, and all the packages were covered with a light pinkish-gray, dusty powder. I brushed it off my hands and the two M-11s, then turned the duffle bag inside out to see if something inside had burst, but the bag was empty. I loaded the kilo of smoking dope, its plastic wrapper still intact except for the tear I had made to look at it, and one of the M-11s back into the bag, then got ready.
I fitted the suppressor to the other Ingram, loaded it, and fired a short burst at ponderosa about thirty yards downhill and to my right. Then two more to get the feel of the kick. On the fourth burst, which emptied the clip, I chipped enough bark off the big yellow pine to convince me that I could hit a man, and the little submachine gun didn’t make enough noise to frighten away the chipmunks that had come out on the scree to watch me. Then I changed clips, moved back deeper into the outcrop’s shadow, stacked the grenades beside me, checked my field of fire, and waited.
After a while, I opened the baggie of white powder, tasted it. Cocaine. Maybe four or five ounces, more than I had ever seen in my life. I snorted a bit off my knife blade, and it nearly took the top of my head off. The coke must have just come off the boat, not even stepped on hard yet, maybe seventy, eighty percent pure. My admiration for the dead guy rose another few notches. He didn’t look like much, he lived like a tramp, and his car was a seven-year-old wreck, but he carried good stuff in his trunk. I had another tiny snort. What the hell, I thought, if the bad guys are behind, they may have a little trouble doing in a drug-crazed, scared-shitless, middle-aged old fart like me. Especially since I had a good position, half a dozen grenades, an automatic weapon, and two hundred and seventy rounds of ammo.
But nobody was behind me—good, bad, or indifferent—and by midmorning, most of the fear washed with occasional nips of coke, I had become bored enough to be half sane again.
What in God’s name had Sarah gotten me into? What had the woman in the blue Subaru said to the man to make him run? They hadn’t been dealing weapons or drugs, not if they had met so often at the same time and same place. Never. The man was dead, the woman gone, and I had no idea who either of them might be. At least I had the license-plate number off the woman’s car, and even if it was rented, I could catch up with her. And the plate number off the man’s car, too, written on a slip of paper somewhere…
I now remembered rolling over his dead body to rifle his pockets. I checked the thinly timbered hillside and what I could see of the road, then emptied my pockets.
The leather of his wallet was wrinkled and stretched, as if it had been emptied of everything nonessential—those slips of paper with telephone numbers and names you don’t remember, out-of-date insurance cards, expired credit cards, pictures that have lost their meaning. In it I found only three twenties, two
tens, a five, four ones, and a two-dollar bill folded in a square with “Shit” written across it in red ink, and a Washington State commercial operator’s license in the name of John P. Rideout at an address in Wilbur, Washington. Stuck to the back of the license, not with glue but from wear, was a small snapshot of a plain chubby woman with three small and indistinct children huddled at her baggy knees. The group stood in front of a small frame house on the edge of a meadow, around which loomed a dark evergreen jungle. Certainly not Wilbur, which sits on the lava-broken high desert plains of eastern Washington, but perhaps somewhere west of the Cascades.
In my other pocket I had found half a pack of Salems, and stuffed behind the cellophane, a matchbook from a bar called Nobby’s in West Seattle. I used the last match out of the book to light one of my own cigarettes.
Okay, I had a place to begin, with Rideout, and a plate number for the woman. But no notions. Why had somebody blown the poor devil to bits? To rip him off? No, they left the goodies in the trunk. Maybe he ripped somebody off. And why me? And did they know who I was? Probably. All they had to do was open the glove box and read the rental agreement. But why me?
And the trembling began all over again. My cigarette slipped out of my fingers and fell inside my down vest. As I slapped at the sparks flying across my chest, I found the small bloody streaks left by his fingers. They knew me, all right. And I had to either find the bad guys to tell them I had a poorly developed sense of law and order and didn’t talk even in my sleep. Or go to the law. I didn’t know what kind of fall it was in Idaho to tamper with evidence and obstruct justice, I didn’t even know where the Idaho State Prison was. Even turning state’s evidence, probation was the best I could hope for. And what evidence? No law, not until I knew what the hell was going on. I couldn’t even hang around the house and wait for the bad guys to come by for a chat, a few last words. I had to go to ground, hide as I tried to find out why Rideout had been killed, why they tried to kill me.
I wondered how many people they had working the tail—at least four, I guessed, and damn professional work at that. I thought about taking Sarah’s money and the colonel’s paycheck and simply running, my sense of justice superseded by my sense of survival, wondered where the bastards had picked up our tail…
Then I had a terrible vision of somebody watching the meeting through binoculars, like me, casing the neighborhood to be safe, seeing the old woman with her gleaming silver hair, seeing the sun low in the southern sky flash off her binoculars. Shit, I had to find a telephone, had to get that beautiful old woman out of her house for a while, someplace safe until I could find out what was going on. And I had to get rid of the goddamn live grenade, too.
Although I didn’t know exactly where I had ended up, I did know that I was north of the South Fork and that if I kept heading north on the Forest Service roads, eventually I would come out on the Clearwater and back on Highway 12, which we had come over the night before. Highway 12 was the only place I could hope to find a telephone without going back to Elk City and whatever law-enforcement attention the explosion of Rideout’s car had drawn. From the paved roads, national forests looked like vast impenetrable barriers, but that was strictly for show, for the tourists. In fact, all those acres of forest land were threaded by an endless maze of roads built by the Forest Service with taxpayers’ money for the logging industry, access for the heavy machinery necessary to clear-cut great swaths of timber. I couldn’t complain too much, though, since roads gave me a chance to get away from Elk City, from the minions of the law and the outlawed gathered there by the charred remains of John P. Rideout.
The mountain air was fresh and cold, but the road was mushy with snow melt along the sunny stretches. At least the rental car was good for something—the front-wheel drive pulled it right through the boggy places. When I finally came down off the side of the mountain to cross a creek, I stopped the car and tossed the grenade into the middle of the culvert in about two feet of running water. It seemed a safe place to dispose of the bomb. Even through the thick metal sides of the culvert and the three feet of roadbed, the explosion shook me. I stumbled about for a moment, slapping at myself, checking for wounds with an old combat habit. When I leaned over the edge of the creek to see if I had damaged the culvert, peering through the smoky mist, a great lunker of a cutthroat came floating out, belly up. I went down the bank and out into the knee-deep water, which was so cold I felt the ache all the way up to my hips, to pick up the trout. Such a fucking waste, I thought, holding the slippery length of the fish, and I felt like weeping again. “My fucking nerves are shot!” I screamed. “Shot to fucking hell!” Then I threw the fish back into the water, threw him as hard as I could. The small burst of adrenaline carried me out of the water, back to the car, down the road. But my hands were shaking on the wheel within minutes, my balls still trying to crawl away from the grenade.
Finally, in the middle of the afternoon, I reached Highway 12 and drove west to the Syringa Café, where I had a huge order of ham and eggs while I waited for a truck driver to get off the telephone. When I called Sarah’s number, though, no one answered. I called the colonel, asked him to put a man on Sarah’s house around the clock. He didn’t ask me why or where to send the bill or what kind of trouble I was in now. He just said, “Certainly.” A good soldier all the way. I headed west toward Lewiston on the Washington border, where I traded my piece of rented Detroit crap for a Datsun station wagon. The girl behind the counter started to ask me why but when she looked at my face again, she just shook her head and filled out the forms. I borrowed the key to the rest room to take a look at myself. I had only been on the job twenty-four hours and already I looked like hell, like death warmed over, like a man on the run from himself.
On the way north I tried to drive close to the speed limit, as one must when carrying the sort of load I had in the back seat, but it was a battle all the way. When I went through Pullman, where my son went to college, I had a terrible urge to give him a call, to drop by his dorm just to give him a bear hug, but it would just have confused him, so I pressed on to Spokane, then west on Highway 2 to Wilbur.
When I drove by the address on Rideout’s license, the house didn’t just look empty, it looked abandoned forever. I had to sleep, I thought, so I checked into a motel and called Sarah’s number one last time, and Gail answered.
“Don’t you people ever pick up the phone?” I asked a bit more curtly than I meant to.
“Sarah doesn’t,” she said, “and I’ve been out.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “How’s your father?”
“They flew him back to the Mayo Clinic this morning,” she said, “for tests, more fucking tests. I wanted to be a doctor once, you know, until I found out that they don’t know shit.”
“Nobody does,” I said. “Listen, I want you to do me a favor.”
“What? I hope it doesn’t take too long, Milo, because I’ve got two quizzes tomorrow, and I haven’t cracked a book for either of them.”
“Just listen a minute,” I said, “please. I am in a world of trouble—”
“I told Sarah not to give you that much money,” she interrupted.
“Just listen—”
“What sort of trouble?”
“Will you please just shut up for a minute!”
“Don’t you be telling me to shut up, asshole,” she said.
“Ah, Christ,” I sighed, “whatever happened to that moment of tenderness between us?”
“You dudes in your needle-nosed boots always think you’re so fucking tough,” she said, “but underneath you’re all just a bunch of sissy cream puffs. It went where it was supposed to, old man, the way of all flesh, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, down the toilet of life…” She sounded as if she was crying.
“I don’t believe this conversation,” I said.
“I don’t either,” she said and hung up.
When I called back, the line sounded permanently busy. I took a shower, tried again without luck, then lay back on the
bed hoping I didn’t have bad dreams…
…and I didn’t. I didn’t sleep enough, but spent most of the night wrapped around the submachine gun, my hands still heavy with the empty weight of the dead fish, the dead man as I rolled him over to rummage through the pockets of his life.
Chapter 6
Even though I suspected it would be wasted time, I spent the next morning working Wilbur without finding a soul who had either seen or heard of John P. Rideout, and even though I knew nobody was behind me, the back of my neck kept twitching. Everything was wrong, nothing fit, and nobody answered the telephone at Sarah’s house. I called a lawyer in Butte to get him to check out the plate number on the woman’s car, but his secretary told me that he was in California on vacation. I thought about the matchbook from Nobby’s in Seattle. Maybe it really was a clue, and Seattle was a lot closer than Butte. I could drive over in a couple of hours, check out the bar, and with a little luck, drop the rented Datsun at the airport, and catch a night flight back to Missoula to get my pickup.
Right. So I cut across the back roads south to the interstate, across the fields of wheat stubble and sagebrush hills sliced by lava dikes. After eighteen months, the volcanic ash from Mount St. Helens still lay along the roadsides. We had even had enough ash fallout in Meriwether to close the bars for four days, which was as near to a natural disaster as I ever wanted to get.
When I picked up the interstate at Moses Lake, I tried Sarah again. Still no answer. So I called the colonel. He told me that none of his men had reported any activity, unusual or otherwise, at the Weddington house. Then he asked where I was.
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