Dancing Bear

by James Crumley

  No matter how tough you are, you don’t rise to the leadership of even a crappy small-town biker gang without a certain amount of ability to be articulate, even if only in the argot of bikers, and this guy looked as if he had never been at a loss for words in his life.

  “You-you-you fucking—you pigs,” he stammered, “you dudes will do anything for a bust, any-anything—”

  “Forgive your enemies,” I said, hoping I was quoting something, “as I forgive you, my son.”

  But he just muttered a string of curses as he hurried back into the bar, pushing the armored-truck driver out of the way as he tried to get into the door.

  “What the hell’s wrong with him?” he asked as he stepped over to me.

  “Salvation just turned to shit in his hands one more time,” I said.

  “Say what?” he asked, but I didn’t answer.

  In fact, I didn’t say anything for a long time. Or so it seemed. The small insane encounter with the biker had shaken me more than I could admit. I was tired of being half drunk, or half sober, tired of measuring out those shots of candied alcohol. The world was simply too crazy for me to handle sober. Maybe not the whole world, but at least the world where I lived—the bars and back streets, the shadows from which I watched, that world was too crazy for me to handle sober. Maybe the whole world was too crazy. Religious wars, political wars, economic wars…Did that world out there reflect us? Or we, that world?

  I didn’t much know, didn’t much care. I knew I had to find out who wanted my ass, and negotiate, accommodate as much as I could and still live with myself. I had to find Sarah, if they had her, and Gail, and when I found the old woman, I had my own peace to make. That old lady and I would get happily stoned and talk about my father. And if I didn’t find her, or if I found her dead, I intended to wreak havoc across the land until the guilty were punished under my hand. Even if it cost my life.

  Then I realized what a coward I had been. It had been coming on me for years, the closer I got to fifty-two and my father’s money. That was over now, here in this dog-shit alley, it ended, all the running, hiding, and I found myself grinning, not like a rabid animal, but like a child.

  “Hey, man,” the armored-truck driver asked, “are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” I said, “absolutely fine. If a guy can’t stand the occasional mid-life crisis, then fuck him, right?”

  “Damn straight,” he said. “But listen, man, I’m really sorry about the other day. I was behind a handful of downers and a pint of vodka, and my liver just won’t handle it anymore, so I tend to get a little crazy—”

  “What did you do in Vietman?” I interrupted.

  “What’d I do?” he said. “Well, shit, man, I did what every grunt worth his C rations did, man—I killed people. What difference does it make to you?”

  “Can you still handle yourself?”

  “If I need to, Jack. Why?”

  “I need somebody to cover my back,” I said. “You want the job?”

  He brushed his hair out of his face, wiped the melted snow off his forehead, then held his hands out toward me, palms down, so I could see the fingers tremble. “I can just barely wipe my ass,” he said sadly.

  Perhaps because we had shared that frozen moment in the gray, gusting rain or perhaps because I had finally lost my mind—whatever, I dumped a patch of cocaine on my fist and said, “Will you at least do what I say?”

  He hesitated for a moment, brushed his sleeve across his wet nose and snorted off my hand. “Why?”

  “Money, fun, fire power, and enough of this to keep us fairly sane,” I said.

  “When?”

  “Now,” I said, laughing, having a touch of nose myself, “right now.”

  “I can’t remember your name, man—I know it’s one of those long Polack numbers…”

  “Russian,” I said.

  “But you just hired a hand.”

  “I can’t remember your name either,” I said, and we both laughed wildly in the dark alley.

  “Simmons,” he said, still laughing, “Bob Simmons.”

  “Milodragovitch,” I said, and we went to work.

  —

  I left Simmons in the car, clutching the .357, while I slipped across the yard to have a look through the windows of the surveillance house on Gold. Just as I thought, it was the other two guys from Washington, the salesman and the VW van driver, sitting on folding chairs in a bare living room. A small black-and-white television screen flickered on top of a stack of radio receivers. The two guys were sitting so closely together in the chairs that it almost looked as if they were holding hands. I went back to the car and we drove down to Abner’s house.

  When I introduced Simmons to him, Abner wrinkled his nose as if he smelled a dead rat.

  “Don’t pay any attention to how he’s dressed,” I told him. “Simmons is undercover, too.”

  “Looks like he’s been hid under a pile of garbage,” the old man muttered.

  I borrowed Abner’s flashlight, his hammer, and a towel—it would be a sloppy job breaking into the Bogardus house, but since my lock picks were in the tool box of my pickup, I didn’t have much choice—and told Simmons to watch the other house.

  “If they come out running,” I said, “you come out behind them, find some cover, and shout ‘Freeze!’ as loud as you can.” He stuffed the .357 in his belt and wiped his hands on his dirty jeans. “Don’t worry,” I added, “they’re probably not going to start a fire fight in the street.”

  “Right,” he said, “right.”

  Abner shuffled over to a closet, drew out a Long Tom 10-gauge single-barrel shotgun. “This’ll blow their shit to kingdom come,” he said.

  “Put that away,” I said. “I didn’t hire you for gunfire, Mr. Haynes.”

  “Make that Corporal Haynes of the AEF,” he said. “And you can have your money back, son.”

  “Okay, but for God’s sake, be careful!” I said. “That goddamned cannon will blow somebody’s house down.” Crazy old bastard. “Please be careful,” I said again, but he just sneered. I gave up and left.

  —

  The house was a cracker box, though, so I slipped the side-door lock with Sarah’s Gold American Express card and left the hammer and the towel on the stack of firewood. At least the Hush Puppies were good for something—they were quiet. I went through the house as quickly as I could and found out a great deal about the Johnsons—bounced checks and past-due credit duns, a collection of S-M magazines, some Polaroid nude studies of a dumpy dark-haired woman who was rather proud of her labia—but almost no evidence that Cassandra Bogardus had ever lived there. Just the tweed suit and the gray wig she had used to fox me at the airport. So I gave that up too.

  When I got back to Abner’s house, the old man asked me if I had had any luck.

  “I got out alive,” I said.

  “Yeah, but you’re a pro,” the old man said proudly, “and that’s not luck.”

  “You watch too much television, old man,” I said thoughtlessly, and Abner pouted and grumbled as he put away his shotgun. He sulked for another fifteen minutes while I waited to call the colonel at the telephone booth, waited in a dead silence because Abner refused to turn on his new Sony.

  When I called the colonel, he picked up the phone on the first ring, and I asked him to meet me at the office. I wanted to see who had hired Haliburton to tag Cassandra Bogardus.

  On our way across town Simmons asked, as politely as a very nervous man could, what was going on.

  “You just cover my back,” I told him, “and don’t worry about anything else.”

  He got a little sullen too, so I left him in the car while I went into the colonel’s office.

  “Milo?” he said from behind his desk. “You look terrible.”

  “I assume you had the building swept,” I said.

  “This morning,” he said. “It’s clean. They just bugged the telephone lines.”

  “Bastards,” I said, and for once the colonel didn’t l
ook away when I cursed.

  “I would certainly feel better if I knew what was going on,” he said.

  “Me too, sir.”

  “I don’t like working in the dark.”

  “Me either, sir,” I said.

  “Well, what did you get me down here for, Milo?” he said tartly. This was my night for pissing people off.

  “I need to borrow a couple of those down vests with the bulletproof lining.”

  “Sure,” he said, tossing me his keys. “They’re in the weapons locker.”

  “Sir, Simmons is out in the car,” I said. “He’s giving me some backup on this. Maybe you can talk him into coming back to work when we’re done.”

  “Simmons?” he said. “Good man. A little confused from the war still, but a good man all the same. And a good idea, Milo. Thanks. I’ll give it a shot.” Then he put on his flat cap and went out.

  When I heard the front door close, I used the colonel’s keys to unlock his file cabinet. The Cassandra Bogardus surveillance had been instigated by a Seattle firm, Multitechtronics, Inc. I jotted down the address and telephone number, locked the files, and hurried down the hallway to pick up the vests. When I carried them out to the car, the colonel was talking very softly while Simmons stared out the windshield.

  “Thank you, sir,” I said as I climbed into the Subaru. “I’ll be in touch.” I stepped on the gas, leaving the short man standing in the snow-covered parking lot.

  “What the hell was that all about?” Simmons asked.

  “The colonel wants to give you another chance,” I said.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said.

  “He’s a good old man,” I said. “A little stuffy, but he’ll go to the wall with you.”

  “Ain’t bad for an officer,” Simmons said, then laughed bitterly.

  “Where do you live?”

  “I’ve got a dump over the Deuce.”

  “Living close to home, huh?” I said. “You want to pick up some clothes and whatnot.”

  “Why?”

  “We’ve got a suite at the Riverfront,” I said.

  “Guess I should.”

  “Got a match?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Then dip it into here,” I said, handing him the vial of coke, “and let’s fix our noses.”

  “You’re the boss,” he answered.

  Although the late-evening traffic on the Franklin Street strip was light enough so that any cop cars would easily be visible, I took two or three close, searching looks to be damn sure before we did any coke. And luck was with me again. I spotted the light-blue van that had carried the two bad guys to my house earlier. They had settled in about forty yards behind us.

  “Shit,” I said and blew the coke off the match stick. “We shouldn’t have used the same telephone booth twice.”

  “What?” Simmons asked.

  “Do me quick,” I said, “then climb over and jerk the back seat out and see if you can reach that orange knapsack in the trunk.”

  “What?”

  “Do it!”

  Simmons seemed to have some experience breaking into auto trunks through the back seat because he did it quietly and smoothly, without much effort.

  “This what you want?” he asked, handing me the knapsack.

  “Right,” I said and slipped the silenced M-11 out of the sack.

  “Jesus,” he sighed. “What the hell is that?”

  “An interesting toy.”

  “You are into some serious shit, huh?”

  “You want out?” I asked as he climbed back into the front seat.

  “No way, man. No way.”

  “Okay. Now the vests,” I said, and we struggled into them. Although I had never personally tested the Kevlar mesh vests, I had seen them stop a .357 magnum round on a dummy. “Let’s go for a ride,” I said.

  I took them out to the interstate, not running, but not poking along either, driving like a man on business. The van stayed with me as I headed west to the Blue Creek Road exit, where I turned south up the creek. The snow seemed to be falling harder on the dark, empty stretch of road, and the wind kicked small ground-blizzard swirls through my headlights. The van had cut its headlights, but I could still catch an occasional glimmer of its parking lights in the rear-view mirror. I punched the Subaru a bit, and it pulled away smoothly across the snow-packed ruts.

  When I got to the long wooden bridge across Blue Creek, which led to Moccasin Flats Road, then back to town on the old highway, I raced across the slippery planks, then another twenty yards just around the belly of a curve, where I stopped the car and told Simmons to get behind the wheel. I ran to the bridgehead and dove behind the biggest rock in the ditch. The van came on faster now, its tires crunching through the frozen snow crust as it followed our tracks onto the bridge. It seemed I could hear the men chuckling while they checked their guns.

  Thinking I didn’t want to just drop them in cold blood, thinking maybe I could work something out, I let the van get to the middle of the bridge before I tried to put a short burst into the left front tire. I had held too low, though, so it took a second burst to hit the rubber. The van veered sharply into the railing, bounced and slithered, but it kept coming on the flat. The guy in the passenger seat leaned out the window; a spurt of flame exploded from the end of his arm, followed by the sharp, ugly splat of a silenced revolver. I rolled to the other side of the rock, put a burst into the grill. Steam and sparks and the hiss of a ruptured gas line filled the darkness. The fan belt began to scream like a hysterical woman, and the van came to an abrupt halt.

  “Listen, you guys!” I shouted. “It doesn’t have to be this way!” When they didn’t answer, I added, “Let me have the old lady and the girl back, I’ll keep my mouth shut about Elk City and we can call it even!”

  Then they answered. Three rounds ricocheted off my small boulder, rock chips and dust mixing with the snowflakes. To hell with it. I sprayed the bridge and the van to get their heads down, saw the first flickers of flame off the engine and then crawled down the ditch around the curve, jumped into the car, and told Simmons to hit it. He did, and it was the most dangerous thing we did all night. Fifty yards down the road he nearly put us into the creek.

  “Jesus!” I said. “Let me drive.”

  “Right,” he said, his voice trembling.

  As we changed seats we heard a muffled roar and watched a fireball rise through the snowy night.

  “Hope those boys were wearing their winter coats,” I said, “because it’s a long walk home.”

  “Shit, was that the van? On the bridge?”

  “People up here have been trying to get the county to build a new one for years,” I said.

  Chapter 8

  After we picked up Simmons’ gear, we packed all the guns into the small trunk, then called a cab, leaving the little blue Subaru abandoned in the alley behind the Deuce with the keys in the ignition. I would report it stolen, eventually. Back at the Riverfront, the bar was closed, so Simmons and I had to make do with the remains of my schnapps.

  “I’m sorry I can’t tell you what’s happening,” I said over the last shots. “Some people are trying to kill me, and I’m trying to work a deal with them without killing any of them. Anything else I tell you would make you an accessory after the fact.”

  “Whatever,” he said. He had been strangely silent since the bridge. “You’re the boss.”

  “Look, if anything happens,” I said, “you’re looking at a piece of a federal firearms rap and a cocaine bust—”

  “Listen,” he interrupted, “I gotta tell you something…”

  “What’s that?”

  “You ever kill anybody up close?” he asked. “I mean face to face?” I nodded, but I didn’t want to talk about it, even if he was going to. “Well, shit, man, I spent my sixteen weeks of the war riding an armored personnel carrier and firing fifty-caliber rounds into the fucking bush. Man, I never even saw Charlie. I was a fuck-up before the war—got into the Army because a judge
in Denver gave a choice of the slammer or Uncle Sam on a little pot bust—and I got my Purple Heart when a gook rocket hit the half-track parked in front while I was sitting on the side of the APC reading a Spiderman comic, took a piece of shrapnel no bigger than a pencil eraser…” He paused, tugged his shirt out of his jeans, and pulled it up. “Look at this shit.” The doctors had opened him up from pelvis to sternum, gutted him like a game animal, but he was pointing to a tiny blue dimple just to the right of his belly button. “So I ain’t no kind of hero, man, and both times tonight, I was scared shitless, so if you want to look for some real backup, man, I’ll understand…”

  “Just shave clean in the morning,” I said, “and we’ll get you a haircut and a new suit. I can’t have my bodyguard looking like a tramp.”

  He grinned and tossed off the last of the schnapps. “How do you drink this shit?”

  “I’m with you there, son,” I said, “and you’ll do to ride the river with.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted, “but I heard it in a Western movie one time. And another line—‘Let’s hit the hay.’ ”

  I heard him laughing all the way into the other bedroom of the suite, heard him, like me, switch on the television set for the all-night company in our sleep, hoping to dream Western movies instead of our lives.

  And woke the next morning to a full-blown blizzard, six inches of fresh and six more coming, hard icy winds off the Pole, and single-digit temperatures. My kind of weather, born and bred to it, and those web-footed sissies from Seattle were in trouble. I needed some clothes and winter gear out of my house, wanted a chat with Carolyn Fitzgerald about her connection with Cassandra Bogardus, but first I needed more wheels.

  After I dressed in my rich man’s clothes, I folded the leisure suit neatly, set it in the trash can with the snow-stained Hush Puppies on top of it, hoping the maid had a husband with no taste, then Simmons and I took a cab down to the car-rental agency, where I picked up two four-wheel-drive rigs, a Blazer for me, an American Eagle for him. I wondered if I was about to set some sort of record for rent cars, wondered if I would ever see my trusty pickup again, wondered, as we drove out to the mall, what Simmons would look like in a suit and a haircut.