Dancing Bear

by James Crumley

  “Give me their names and addresses,” I said.

  After I noted them down, I went back into McMahon’s office, where we wrote a new will that split my father’s estate, half going to my son, half to the Rausche children and Simmons’ little brother and his daughters.

  “How about witnesses?” McMahon said, and I followed him down the hallway, where we found a legal secretary working late and a janitor. “I’ll file it in the morning,” he said as we went back to his office, “first thing. Now what are you planning to do?”

  “You know I can’t tell you.”

  “Right,” he said. “Good luck, Mr. Milodragovitch.”

  “You can read about it in the papers,” I said, “the funny papers.”

  —

  Even though, and melodramatic as it sounded, we seemed to be on a suicide mission, I wanted to do some reconnaissance work on Tewels to see where to hit them. I had some vague notion that I could trade Tewels for Sarah and Gail if they were still alive, or use him to hurt the bad guys if they weren’t. And I had to tell Simmons what was going on. He didn’t say much, just “Sure, boss,” and hit the cocaine a little harder. He wasn’t alone. I tried to interest him in a couple of really high-priced hookers, one last touch of flesh before we went under, but like me, he seemed embarrassed by the idea.

  For the next three days and nights Simmons and I put a twenty-four tag on Tewels, and he kept us busier than a one-legged man at an ass-kicking contest. The second day, I bought a couple of portable CB units and a base station and rented a camper so we would have a place to sleep and shower. I lost count of how many times we changed rental cars, how many hours of sleep we lost. And all for nothing. While we were standing tired in the constant rain or trying to stay awake as it softly drummed on the tops of the cars, Tewels maintained a busy work schedule and an even busier social life—a Broadway roadshow, a dinner party, a cocktail fund raiser for a local film society, which I crashed in my rich man’s suit. I managed to stand three feet away from Tewels, sipping sparkling French water and lime and listening to him discuss the New Wave directors, whatever they might be. He was a tall, lean man, bald except for a silver fringe, and moved like an athlete.

  Even as my vague notion of kidnapping Tewels evolved into a real idea, he had so many people around him that it looked as if we would have to mount a military operation to snatch him. A young man, who looked as if he had a steel lump under his arm, drove Tewels around in his Bentley. The driver lived in an apartment over the garage, but a butler, a cook, and a housekeeper lived in the house. Even the housekeeper looked as if she could climb off her broom and chop down a tree with her hard, angular face.

  But about eight o’clock on the third night as I was sitting down the street from his house in an anonymous dog-turd-brown Champ, the driver came down the stairs in a gray three-quarter-length parka with a fur-trimmed hood. He opened the garage and backed out a Toyota Land Cruiser station wagon. Tewels, wearing a shearling coat, a watch cap, and heavy gloves, and carrying a briefcase, met him in the driveway, and they drove away like men with business in mind.

  As I followed, I stuck the portable CB’s antenna out the window and tried to wake up Simmons. “Break two-seven for Spider Man,” I said several times. “You got a copy on the Russian Bear?”

  “You got the Spider Man,” he answered sleepily. “Over.”

  “Spider Man, Spider Man,” I said into the mike, shaking because this felt like the right time to take them down—they weren’t dressed like that and driving the Land Cruiser to take in a show, “the Garbage Man is on his way to the dump. I want the pickup, winter duds, and all the rest. Over.”

  “The rest? Over.”

  “Pineapples and them little things that play bush-time rock ’n’ roll,” I said, “Over.”

  “That’s a big ten-four,” he answered, laughing, “from the Viet-Vet Spider Man. Over.”

  “Heading east on I-Ninety,” I said, “pedal to the metal, so shake it, bo. Russian Bear eastbound and down.”

  “Spider Man back door and down.”

  Simmons must have flown, because he came up behind me before we made Issaquah, flashed his lights once, then dropped back.

  The traffic wasn’t too heavy, and the Land Cruiser was easy to tag. We went on up Snoqualmie Pass into a light, blowing snow, then past the ski areas, which hadn’t had time to groom the slopes and open the lifts yet; just before we reached Cle Elum they turned north on 903, heading toward Cle Elum Lake. I jammed the Champ into a snowbank at the exit, then dashed over and jumped into the cab of the pickup.

  “Cut your headlights,” I said, “and stay after that rig.”

  “You’re the boss!”

  We could have used a real snowstorm, but the light flurries mixed with the blowing snow were enough to keep the pickup invisible. “Watch his taillights,” I said, “and stay off the brakes.” Then I changed into my snow pacs, checked the loads in the Browning and the M-11, stuffed two grenades into the pockets of the Kevlar-lined vest, and two extra clips for the Ingram in my hip pockets.

  “Jesus, boss, what’s happening?”

  “I don’t know, son,” I admitted, “but they’re going out here where it’s dark and cold.” Already so excited that my breathing had shifted to rapid-fire, I added, “This is it, lad.”

  “It?”

  “Showdown city.”

  “Oh shit,” Simmons sighed as he fumbled for the cocaine vial, which we snorted sloppily off our fists.

  Beyond Roslyn, the Toyota’s brake lights flared, then disappeared as the rig turned left. Simmons down-shifted and slowed, coasted up to the place they had turned. I could see a sign by the road but couldn’t read it. I climbed out, ran over to the sign. VARNER AND ASSOCIATES, it said, REAL ESTATE. A number of four-wheel-drive vehicles had been up the snowy track recently. Through a gap in the storm, the brake lights blazed again about fifty yards up the hillside, and the headlight beams swung around a switchback behind the thick evergreen screen, and another fifty yards above that, I thought I could see the dim glow of house lights.

  While Simmons put on his pacs, I drove the pickup on up the road until I found a place to pull off, then parked, dug through the parkas for woolen ear bands and sliced gaps in the palms of our mittens so we could get our trigger fingers out. Simmons’ fingers were trembling so badly that when he checked the loads in the .357, he nearly dropped it in the snow.

  “Easy,” I said. “Let’s see if we can’t do this without blowing anybody’s shit away, okay?”

  “It’s cold,” he said.

  “You can still back out, son, stay with the pickup.”

  “I’m scared of dying, you’re scared of killing somebody,” he said. “We make a great team—but we’re a team, Milo.”

  “Okay.”

  We blackened our faces with muddy slush from the wheel wells, tried to grin in the freezing wind, then trotted back to the uphill track. Halfway there, we saw headlights and dove into the snowy ditch. A four-wheel-drive camper van turned up the road. We gave it a few minutes, then ran on.

  After a short rest at the track while the storm seemed to intensify, we started up the frozen ruts of the road. At first we rested every twenty-five steps, trying to hold down the clouds of our breath, then every ten as we eased up the road. When the glow of the building showed up the last switchback, we stopped, walked more slowly, pushing our pacs into the snow before we shifted our weight forward. The tree trunks rubbed each other, moaning in the wind, and the branches rattled brittle and icy. When we reached the switchback, we went around it uphill, flat on our bellies, buried in the shadows of the snow-plowed berm. After another twenty-five yards we could see the front of the real estate office at the dead end of the road.

  It was a wide, low log building with a parking lot cut into the slope on the side nearest us. Tewels’ Land Cruiser, the camper, and a jeep station wagon were parked there. A porch with floodlights at either end stretched across the front of the building. In spite of his large, fluffy
down parka, the man on the porch looked very cold as he walked back and forth, stamping his feet and slapping his gloved hands together. When he paused under the far flood, I could see his face. It was the dude in the Porsche who had wanted to get Western when I took his keys on the ferry dock. I was glad to see him again. Now we could have all the horse shit and gun smoke he wanted.

  Simmons followed me as I bellied in a long loop until we were in the shadows of the parked rigs and had a clear shot at the guy’s feet and legs on the porch. I extended the wire stock of the Ingram, switched it to single fire, then handed it to Simmons.

  “Cover me,” I whispered, “but don’t switch this little bastard to rock ’n’ roll.”

  “Gotcha, boss,” he said. Even in the darkness, I could see his lips, blue and trembling.

  I slithered around the side of the parking lot to the building, stood up slowly and peeked through the corner of the window in the narrow gap that wasn’t covered by frost. A long office took up the front half of the building, with three desks that looked little used spaced out along its length. Tewels’ driver and the partner of the guy on the porch sat at the far desk, smoking and flipping the pages of a property album. Three doors were set into the back wall, but only one of them had light underneath it. The guy on the porch came in, complaining about the weather, and the driver cursed, zipped up his parka, flipped up the hood, and went outside.

  I went on around to the back of the building, struggling in the deep, drifted snow, the Browning automatic freezing to my hand. The drapes were shut in the lighted office, but they didn’t quite reach the bottom of the sill. I couldn’t see much—two sets of hands smoothing out a map, another set counting bundles of money—and couldn’t hear anything but the rumble of their voices.

  The odds didn’t look good, but I heaved on through the drift to the far corner and peered around. The driver had stepped off the porch out of the wind to take a leak. From the wavering pattern of his smoking stream, it looked as if he were trying to write his name in the snowbank. That made the odds better. These guys might be tough in town, but this was my frozen turf. He was too busy melting snow and chuckling like a little boy in the wind to hear me as I crept up behind him. I jerked his hood back and laid the barrel of the Browning against the side of his head as hard as I could. His ear burst like a rotten plum and he fell into a snowbank, where I clubbed him again.

  He had an S&W 9mm automatic on him, which I unloaded and pitched into the storm, then I took his parka, ripped out the drawstring, tied his wrists to his ankles, gagged him with his handkerchief, then buried him in the snow. I crawled around the porch and back to Simmons.

  “Okay,” I whispered, putting on the driver’s parka and tucking the fur-lined hood around my face. “Are you ready to hit it?”

  “One more toot, boss, okay?” he said. It was windy and imprecise, but we did the best we could. I couldn’t tell if the tears in his eyes were from the cold or the fear. “I’ll be fine,” he said.

  “It’s not your war,” I whispered as I took the grenades out of my vest pockets.

  “It’s never anybody’s war, boss,” he muttered through chattering teeth.

  “Okay,” I said, trading him the grenades for the submachine gun, “I’m going through the front door. You stand to the side, and if I shout ‘Bob,’ you pitch the grenades in on the right-hand side of the room.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’ll get behind a desk,” I said as he straightened the pins. “Let’s do it.”

  We crawled around the rigs onto the porch and across it under the front window to the door, where we stood up, Simmons with his back to the wall. He lifted one snow-covered eyebrow, and I turned the doorknob, stepped inside.

  They let me get three steps into the office before the big guy raised his head to tell me to shut the door, but three steps was all I needed to get to the center of the narrow room. I thought they might give it up when they saw the ugly shape of the Ingram, but they didn’t. They leapt to their feet, reaching for iron instead of the sky, and I chopped them down with two soft, sputtering bursts.

  I tried to hold low, to wound instead of kill, and it worked for the smaller man—his right leg crumpled under him and he flopped to the floor—but I held the burst too long and the Ingram kicked up and away and stitched the big guy right up the middle, blood and goose feathers exploding up his chest. He would never get Western again. The silenced, subsonic .380 rounds hadn’t made much noise at all, but the big guy crashed into a file cabinet and a large metal ashtray as he fell. I knelt to get the small wounded man’s piece as the door to the rear office opened. I put a short burst under the chin of a man I had never seen before, blew him backward into the room. I was in the office before his body hit the floor, the blood-lust growl tickling my chest.

  Four men sat on the far side of a long table, their faces and clothes splattered with blood and brain tissue, sat very still, their hands poised, their heads cocked, as if listening for something, perhaps the muffled drumming of the dead man’s heels on the carpet. It was all I could do to keep from emptying the clip at them.

  I stepped past the rattling heels—that soft, final sound that had echoed in my head since the night of my father’s suicide—and got my back against the wall. The little guy in the front office still had a piece on him. “Mr. Rodgers,” I shouted out the door. “I want you to count to ten, and if you don’t see two pieces on top of the desk, I want you to pitch the grenade in.”

  “Holy shit,” he grunted, “gimme a minute!”

  “One,” Simmons said loudly, “two…”

  “There,” the wounded man said as he clunked his piece loudly on the desk top.

  “Now the other guy’s,” I said.

  “Right, right!” He groaned with the effort, and I heard another clunk before Simmons got to seven.

  “Mr. Rodgers,” I said, “unload them and pitch them outside. And when you’re done, drag the little guy in here where I can see him.”

  After a moment Simmons backed through the doorway, dragging the man by his collar. He clutched his thigh tightly above his bloody knee, and his right foot dangled off at an impossible angle. Simmons propped him against the wall of bookshelves in the back of the room.

  “Now let’s see what we’ve got,” I said.

  Tewels sat at the far left, a scrap of gore stuck to his forehead, sweat and blood leaking between his eyebrows and down the side of his nose, where it dripped off his neat mustache and splattered on a Forest Service map. The man next to him looked like a Hollywood actor who once had hopes of playing leads but who had drunk himself into character roles that featured closeups of his corrupt, bloated face, his mean, frightened eyes, and his silver thatch of hair. Beside him sat a very scared Oriental man, his slim frame draped in a silk suit, not a Japanese or a Chinese, but perhaps a Malaysian.

  On the far right sat a pale blond man in his thirties with the weak chin and beady eyes of a bureaucrat, but except for a flicker of his pale eyelashes, he didn’t look impressed. “You were supposed to be dead, you fucking clown,” he said calmly, “and now you are.”

  “I’ve got a family,” the character actor said, his oddly high voice full of tremor, the whiskey sweat rolling off him.

  “We can work something out,” Tewels offered quietly.

  I put a short burst into the bookcase over the blond man’s head, said, “Shut up, gentlemen,” then watched the paper fragments drift down in the silence. “Over here, Mr. Rodgers,” I said as I moved to the other side of the doorway, tripping over the feet of the dead man, just a brief stumble, but the blond man looked extremely amused. “Get this piece of shit out of here,” I said to Simmons.

  When Simmons got hold of his feet and tugged, the bloody back of his head popped softly loose from the carpet, like the sound of a top-feeding trout sucking down a May fly. The actor looked as if he was going to faint at the sound, and I had to struggle to hold my dinner down.

  “You stupid drunken jerk,” the blond man sa
id. “Your nerves just aren’t up to it anymore, Milodragovitch.”

  “Would you please shut up,” Tewels said. He looked worried.

  “Cover them,” I said to Simmons as I moved the Ingram to my left hand and drew the automatic with my right and handed it to him. “If anybody moves,” I added, “gut-shoot the albino.”

  “Ain’t got the heart for it, old man,” Blondie said as I put a fresh magazine in the submachine gun.

  “Please,” Tewels pleaded, and the actor mouthed the word silently.

  As I traded guns with Simmons again, Blondie said, “You clowns juggle too?”

  “Us old cowboys just don’t seem to scare anybody anymore,” I said to Simmons, then shot a brass ashtray off the table beside the blond man. After all the stuttering pops of the Ingram, the roar of the 9mm automatic sounded like a major explosion in the office. And it was true—we didn’t—except for the actor, whose eyes rolled back into his head as he buckled out of the chair in a dead faint.

  Everybody wants to be a hero these days. When I glanced at the actor’s fainting fit, the blond man’s hand snaked under his coat while he dove for the corner. It was so easy it wasn’t even funny—I shot him twice in the ribs in mid-dive, then once in the head when he hit the floor. But the little wounded guy, he was a pro; he came up with a hideout gun, a dinky .25 automatic, two tiny pops that bounced Simmons off the wall. God love him, though, he pulled his weight. Like good old Roy, he shot the gun out of the wounded man’s hand, but unlike the movies, the fragments tore his gun hand to shreds and blew his face off. Simmons fell to his knees, lifted the Ingram, and took out the Oriental with a burst as closely spaced as a close-range shotgun blast, throwing him out of his chair and into the wall. Tewels had stood up, his hands raised as high as they would go, but Simmons started to pull down on him, too.

  “Please, Bob, no,” I said as he pitched forward onto his face.

  I did what I had to do, business as usual in my crappy line of work, made Tewels kneel, his fingers laced behind his head, his forehead leaning against the bookcase, then I made sure the dead were really dead. Nobody at home in Blondie’s head, the little guy had swallowed his tongue, choked on his own blood, and the actor’s buttocks jiggled like jelly when I shook them with my foot, unconscious. Then I went to check on Simmons.