WEST ON 66

by James H. Cobb

  If she was Lisette Kingman.

  Her sketch pad had been tucked neatly into an outside pocket of the shoulder bag. The fit was so close I suspected that the bag had been chosen specifically for this feature. I sat down on the edge of the bed and began to flip through it. Now, at long damn last, I could see what she'd been up to.

  Over the first few pages there were a number of what looked like fashion designs. Women's clothing, dresses, sports outfits, lingerie, that kind of thing. Intermixed with them, however, were other random drawings. Faces, buildings, what might have been Rainbow Beach back in Chicago. The girl had the knack of shaping a few quick, dynamic lines into a clean and vividly recognizable image.

  On the last couple of pages I began to spot things that I knew. The dining room at the Dixie Trucker's Home. A sketch of one starkly tiled exterior corner of our unit at the Coral Court Motel A third of Calvin Reece, catching and underlining the ingrained toughness and grim humor of the man.

  And the start of a drawing of another man, tall, blocky, square-featured, unfinished. A jagged line like a lightning bolt slashed through it.

  The shower turned off. Moving fast, I returned the drawing pad to the shoulder bag and repositioned it exactly where I had found it. By the time the bathroom door opened, I was stretched out on my bed in the other room, just staring at the ceiling.

  "Hey, where are we going for dinner?" Lisette asked, peering around the door frame. She was relaxed and happy again. Wrapped in a big white bath towel and with her long dark hair shower-damp and flowing down her back, she did look like somebody's kid sister, eyes wide and unconcerned about any­thing beyond cheeseburgers or Chicken in the Rough.

  "Well there, then, now, Princess, I don't know. We'll just have to get out there and explore the epicurean delights of Springfield, Missouri."

  "I'm impressed. I didn't know you knew words like epicu­rean."

  "Oh, I'm just full of surprises."

  "You certainly are, Sir Galahad. Give me five minutes, or maybe a little more."

  She whisked back out of sight. A moment later, her dis­carded towel sailed across the hall and into the bathroom.

  So okay, so maybe she didn't really look all that much like somebody's kid sister.

  My pack of Luckys lay on the end table, and I lit up, using the motel's book of complimentary matches. Lying back again, I sent a blue plume curling toward the ceiling.

  We knocked off the last hundred miles to the Kansas-Missouri line before eleven the next morning. There's not much of 66 in Kansas, just a short hook through the very southeastern cor­ner of the state. You could drive it in a quarter of an hour if it weren't for the two towns, Galena and Baxter Springs, that you have to pass through.

  This little patch of land was soaked in a lot of history, though, history and blood, the two being frequently synony­mous. The Jayhawkers had ridden here before the Civil War, Quantrill's Raiders during, and the James gang after. And there had been later incarnations as well.

  Galena was the mining town, and at the peak of the lead and zinc boom its main drag had been called the Red Hot Street. It had burned bright on Saturday nights as the miners came roaring in to dump their pay into the pockets of the pimps, tinhorns, and barkeeps.

  Later had come the depression and the strikes. I could re­member Dad talking about the bad times in Galena. In a strug­gle between rival miners' groups, nine CIO organizers had been gunned down in the streets, and the National Guard had been brought in to declare things a draw.

  As for Baxter Springs, it had been the destination of the first herds of Texas longhorns to flow up the Chisholm Trail after the Civil War. Dodge City, Abilene, and all the other hell-raising Kansas cow towns that came later just followed the ex­ample that had been set here.

  Now the cattle drives were gone, replaced by the big mid-western truck fleets that used Baxter as a home terminal. And the mines were playing out, leaving nothing behind in Galena except for grim stories and gritty gray mounds of ore tailing. Chat heaps, the locals called them. Both communities were sinking into a peaceful Middle American sleepiness.

  Barring the odd corpse that still turned up now and again.

  "I tried calling ahead from the motel this morning," Lisette said over the road wind fluttering in through the '57's windows. Route 66 had just crossed a one-lane rainbow arc bridge and now almost tunneled through a thick and humid grove of black­jack and ground cherry. "The number in the guidebook isn't good anymore. They've changed over to a whole new directory system. And directory assistance doesn't list a Claster anywhere in either Baxter Springs or Galena."

  "That doesn't mean all that much, Princess," I replied. "Reece wasn't listed in the phone book, either. Claster might not have a phone, or he might be living in a rooming house or an apartment. Even if this Jubal guy's moved on, there's got to be somebody around here who'll know something."

  Lisette peered at me over the top of my commandeered sun­glasses. "And how do we go about finding this somebody?"

  "We ask. Hell, it's not like this place is Chicago. In a small town, everybody knows everybody. Even in a middlin' big small town like Baxter Springs, enough people are going to know enough people so it shouldn't be that big of a deal. Trust me."

  I took a second to glance across at her. "Haven't you ever spent any time in a small town?"

  "Gary was the smallest. And I didn't know a lot of people."

  She went cold, silently warning me off the subject. Just like every other time I'd tried to probe into her past. The hatches would slam shut, and her wariness would return.

  I let it ride as we blew past the sign welcoming us to Baxter Springs.

  It was a quiet town with a contentedly worn-out and weary kind of peace about it, all crumbling brick and peeling white clapboard beneath the lush sycamores that lined its streets. There was a small business district, a shady little park, and a sign explaining that there weren't any springs anymore, but that before the mines there had been.

  With Lisette tagging along at my heels, I couldn't drop in on the local cops like I had back in Saint Louis, but then I really didn't need to. Like I said, it wasn't that big of a deal. Excuse me, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but anyone, and I mean anyone, can be a halfways decent detective. All it requires is a degree of patience (stubbornness works just about as well) and the common sense God gave a doorknob.

  We hit the local phone company. Sure, the number we'd been given was no good now, but it might have been once. A quick check in some of the old directories and, yeah, in 1947 there had been a Ruben Claster listed. The number matched, too. Reece hadn't been screwing with us.

  Now we had an address. An old one, but an address. We checked it out.

  It was rural, a short drive west out of town. And once we were out there, we found nothing: a tangle of wire in a ditch and what might have been the foundations of a house and barn in what was now a cow pasture.

  But the land was there. A Claster had owned it once, and somebody else had to own it now. We drove a quarter-mile down the road to a prosperous-looking farmhouse and had a talk with a friendly, well-upholstered farmwife. Over a cup of coffee I fed her a line about how my new wife and I were looking for an old army buddy of my father's. In return, we listened to her tell about how her husband had picked up the land about eight years ago at a bank auction.

  Gee, what had happened to the previous owner?

  He wore out and died, leaving nothing but an unpaid mort­gage behind.

  Any of his kin still around?

  There were a couple of sons. They were never much for helping around the place. They might still be around town somewhere.

  Given the expression on the farm woman's face, she wasn't too happy about the idea.

  We headed back to town and the local newspaper office. Reece had told us the Clasters ran on the wrong side of the law. Great! We asked to see the morgue files containing the last few years of the local police column and started cruising for Clasters.

  It didn't take long to s
trike gold. It is written that Ruben begat two sons, and verily, they have sinned.

  Jubal Claster, Illegal Transport and Possession of

  Alcohol, September 1941, Six Months . . . Ira Claster, Theft of Farm Machinery, March 1944,

  State Youth Farm . . . Jubal Claster, Grand Theft Auto, September 1945,

  One Year . . . Ira Claster, Drunk and Disorderly, June 1951, Ninety

  Days . . . Ira Claster, Assault and Battery, Breaking and

  Entering, August 1954, One Year . . .

  Neither of these guys appeared to be members of the Chris­tian Temperance Union, so we hit the bars and roadhouses along the Galina-Baxter Springs corridor next. Leaving Lisette in the car, I went in and bought a few for some of the older regulars.

  The State Line Tavern: "The Claster boys? Jeeezus! Their old man wasn't all that much good, but God, the two boys was hell-raisers. Pretty good with a motor when they felt like it, but that sure didn't make up for 'em the rest of the time ..."

  Andy's SmokeHouse: "Jubal and Ira. Yeah, I remember 'em. Jubal ain't around no more. Lit out back around '47 or '48, likely in some kind of damn trouble or other. Ira still comes in now and again. When he ain't doin' time, anyway."

  The Old Trail Packaged Liquor Store: "Ira? Sure, he's still around. Got a mechanic's job out at that two-pump Texaco on the Melrose Road west of town. You can't miss it. He's likely out there now."

  Piece of cake.

  The service station was set in a patch of weeds and rusty car hulks. An army surplus Quonset hut with a couple of wood frame add-ons, its white paint losing the fight to a growing collection of rust stains. Turning into the shale rock driveway, I stopped the '57 just short of the bell hose. It was getting late in the day, and the sun was edging below a hazy horizon. Back up in the tanglewood, katydids screeched a protest against the heat.

  "This is it, Princess; here's where we find the guy we need to talk to."

  "But this is Ira Claster, not Jubal."

  "Yeah, but who's more likely to know where this Jubal char­acter is hanging out these days than his brother?"

  "True." The girl nodded. "You were right, Kev. This didn't turn out to be that big of a deal." That speculative expression crossed her face again. "Where did you ever learn to be so good at doing this kind of thing?"

  "You ought to see my collection of Hardy Boys novels." I popped the door and got out of the car. "Come on; let's go visiting."

  She didn't move. Lisette just sat in the '57's front seat, arms crossed and with one elegant eyebrow lifted, waiting for satis­faction.

  "Okay. I did a tour as an MP in the army. I watched our CID people do this kind of stuff all the time."

  "I thought you said you were a paratrooper?" she asked sus­piciously.

  "I was. But I managed to get myself shot up in Korea and I lost my jump rating. I finished my hitch with the Military Police. That happens with a lot of ex-Airborne. The logic is that you need someone theoretically tougher than your average GI to keep your average GI slapped into line."

  Lisette nodded and reached for the door handle. "Just cu­rious."

  The only sign, or rather sound, of life seemed to be coming from the station's single inside service bay. It was the slightly unsyncopated rumble of an engine radical enough to be inves tigated by the McCarthy Commission. We circled the building and, while Lisette hesitated at the open bay door, I went on in.

  The hot mill was nestled in the immaculate engine com­partment of a red-primered 1940 Ford pickup nosed inside the garage. A man leaned in beneath the open hood making an adjustment. Even given the loose gray garage coveralls he wore, I could see the classic chain gang build on him, lean but with powerfully muscled arms and shoulders. His hair was black and collar-length long, not out of style but out of don't-give-a-damn. His dark eyes were agate cold and indifferent as he looked up.

  "Yeah?"

  To tell the truth, I wasn't paying too much attention to the guy at the moment. My instincts had taken over, and I was focused on the engine.

  It was one of the last of the flathead V-8s, a '52 or '53 24-stud Mercury, topped by an Edlebrock manifold and a gleaming quadruple-rank of Stromberg 97 carburetors. Aluminum-finned high compression heads had been installed along with custom-tuned headers, and the stock water pumps were gone. Replac­ing them was a single big positive displacement marine pump feeding into the block below the exhaust ports.

  This last was the mark of a very serious engine indeed. Be­fore the coming of the overhead valve, mills like this one had literally been the power and the glory of American hot-rodding. Even now, a full-house "Big Merc" like this wasn't anything to take for granted.

  "You running a three-eight-by-three-eight configuration on her?" I asked.

  Claster's eye became a degree or two less cold. "Yeah," he replied in a dry semisouthern twang. "I thought 'bout taking her out to three seven-sixteen, but I wasn't sure she could hold together."

  "Smart move. She wouldn't be any good on the street. Get those cylinder walls too thin and you get all sorts of overheating problems. You got a real haulin' Henry here as is. Damn! This is nice!"

  I meant it, too. Maybe Ira Claster was an ex-jailbird with a long record, a bad attitude, and green teeth, but he had created at least one little piece of perfection with this engine. He had taken something and had reworked and refined it until it was as good as it could possible get. Not many people in this world ever do that.

  "You ever run flatheads?" he asked, straightening and start­ing to wipe his hands on a piece of already-oily waste.

  "No. No, I can't say that I have. But my first heap was a '29 Ford roadster with a Model B four-banger in it. I ran a Riley head and a pair of Winfields, and that little bitch was hot. The V-8s would kill me once we got into high gear, but man, for the first three hundred yards, there wasn't a car in the world that could touch me."

  We laughed then, just for a second, that odd little chuckle that happens when one person's reminiscence triggers a sym­pathetic memory in another's mind.

  "What you runnin' now?" he asked.

  "One of the new Chevy 283 overheads in a '57 One-Fifty."

  Claster's scowl returned and he took a second to spit elab­orately on the concrete floor.

  Obviously a Ford man.

  "What'd you want?" he demanded, tossing the grease rag behind him onto the tool bench that ran the full length of the service bay.

  "To talk to your brother, Jubal."

  He hesitated for a second before turning back to face me. "Jubal doesn't live around here anymore. He moved on 'bout ten years ago."

  "Well now, we know that. That's why we need you to tell us where we can get ahold of him."

  Claster's dark brows drew together, and his frown deepened. His hand went back to the tool bench, coming to rest within a couple of inches of a heavy-duty socket wrench.

  "No big deal, man," I said levelly. "We're not cops. [At least one of us wasn't, anyway.] And we just need to ask him a couple of questions."

  " 'Bout what?"

  "About my father." Lisette had come up to stand beside me, lifting her voice to be heard over the rumble of the idling engine. "Ten years ago, we think that my father and your brother might have done some business together. I need to find out about that business. My name is Lisette Kingman."

  She'd said the magic word, and the duck dropped. Claster's hand moved the last couple of inches to the wrench. "I don't know you," he growled, "my brother don't know you, and nei­ther of us know what the hell you're talking about."

  Oh, but he did. I could read it in his face. He knew who Lisette's father was. He knew why we wanted to talk to brother Jubal, and he knew just exactly what had happened one night on the Oklahoma prairie ten years ago.

  "I don't want to make trouble for you or your brother," Lisette continued. "I just want to talk to him."

  "Well, he don't want to talk to you, bitch, so you can quit lookin' for him!" The wrench came up in his hand, balanced for striking. "Get outta here!" />
  I shoved Lisette back behind me. I had a suspicion that this guy hadn't been listening when his momma had told him that deal about not hitting girls. "Hey, man! Take it easy! Like the lady said, we just want to talk."

  "And like I said, we don't want to talk to nobody!" There was wild in this guy's eyes as I backed Lisette and myself down the narrow corridor between the idling truck and the tool bench. "Now you get the whole hell out of here, an' if I catch you asking any questions about Jubal around this town, you'll get your head busted open!"

  "Okay, okay! Don't get the reds, man. We're gone." I lifted my hands shoulder-high, both as a diplomatic gesture and to give me an elbow to use for nudging a resisting female back toward the open door.

  "Kevin, we have got to get some answers from this guy!"

  "I don't think he has any he wants to give away," I replied, turning back toward the bright Kansas sunlight. "Be cool, Prin­cess. Whatever he knows somebody else around here has to know, too."

  Thinking about it, I realize now that wasn't the brightest thing I could have said at that moment.

  Lisette, who had been looking back over her shoulder, gasped, and I heard the rasp of a boot sole on gritty concrete over the sound of the pickup's engine.

  I was clear of the truck's tailgate by then, and I tried the spin kick, the one my old tae kwon do instructor said you could generally only land right by luck.

  I was lucky. Claster was rushing up behind me with the wrench held low like a stabbing dagger. He planned on smash­ing the head into the small of my back, a move that could have laid me up for a month with a ruptured kidney or possibly paralyzed me for life.

  Instead, the steel toe cap of my jump boot took the wrench out of his hand with the neatest little metallic ping you ever heard.

  It stopped my attacker cold, and just for a split second it left him goggling at his empty hand. I went in on Claster in that split second, my right hand cocking back and pistoning for­ward, palm open, into his face.

  The blow snapped his head back, the heel of my hand raking back across his features, crushing his lips and nose and throw­ing him backward into a sprawl between the workbench and truck. I'd hurt him, but guys like Claster get used to being hurt early on. He swarmed back to his feet, madder and no doubt meaner than he'd been before.