Good luck with the parole board, guys.
We lay over for the night in Vinita. I conned a price reduction on a couple of side-by-side units out of a grandmotherly motel keeper. (I'm taking my fiancee home to meet my parents.) She did make a point, however, of making sure the connecting door was locked. I humored her.
While Lisette soaked contentedly in the bathtub, I yelled in to her that I was stepping out for a cigarette. And, in fact, I did light up as I waited for the long-distance operator to put me through to California.
Jack wasn't home. However, Sheila, his wife, was. She told me to, for God's sake, call the office on the double. I dropped another dime and went through the routine with long distance one more time.
"Jesus, kid, where are you? You okay?" the Bear's voice roared out of the earpiece.
"Oklahoma, and yeah, I'm fine. What's going on? How come you're still downtown?"
"Captain Faraday ordered me not to leave this desk until I'd gotten a report in from you."
"The captain! Aw, Jesus, Jack! I wasn't ready to go to the captain with this thing! I'm just starting to get it pieced together out here!"
"Hell, kid, I didn't have any choice in the matter. You were about two seconds away from having an all points bulletin put out on your head."
I hurled my half-smoked smoke to the ground with my free hand. "What's the deal, Jack? What's going on?"
"This morning the captain came out of his office breathing fire and asking what in the hell my crazy punk kid partner was doing back in Saint Louis!"
"How'd he find out?"
"A real hot rocket that came in over the wire from the East Saint Louis PD. It seems like yesterday some hotshot who matches your description was going around flashing an LA County star and asking a whole lot of questions about a local citizen named Calvin Reece."
"Yeah, we looked this guy up. So what about it?"
"So, early this morning Calvin Reece was found shot to death in the alley behind his bar."
OKLAHOMA
The road for the next 100 miles is good: with wide shoulders, generally grassy. The hills are low, the countryside almost flat with patches of wood . . .
The connecting door between the rooms swung open, its old Yale lock yielding more quickly and quietly to my knife blade than it would to its own key. I stood stock-still for a full three minutes, giving the occupant of the bed plenty of chance to slip back into a deep sleep.
During that time, I indulged myself, studying Lisette in the faint light that glowed in through the room's curtains. It was a warm night and she lay bare, a single sheet drawn up to the smooth curve of her hips and her arms curled around one of her pillows, cuddling it to her chest. Her tousled pony tail was looped around her throat, and her face held a relaxed innocence I had rarely seen when she was awake and coping with her world.
The empty expanse of bed beside her looked awfully good, too.
When we'd said good night, I'd mentally mapped out the position of all of her possessions within the motel unit, as well as its furnishings. Now it took me only three silent sock-footed steps to reach and retrieve her shoulder bag.
Back in my unit, I sprawled on the bed and went through the Rittenhouse guide, page by page, looking for where Johnny 32 Kingman had written. "Here's where I buried the loot."
Nothing, or at least nothing I could recognize as important yet. As Lisette had pointed out, there were mileages and notations, stars and check marks, all of which must have meant something to a man ten years in his grave but didn't mean anything to me.
There had to be another part to this. And shit, sure there was! She was sleeping next door right now. Lisette had lived inside this thing all her life. She said she'd been asking questions, digging up old stories. She must be able to look into this book and see things that I couldn't.
Then again, maybe not. Maybe Lisette was running blind herself, hoping the pieces would come together as we got farther west along her father's trail.
Granted that the girl next door really was Lisette Kingman in the first place. Jack's trace on Lisette was still dead-ending. Officially, the paper trail on Lisette Marie Kingman began with her birth in a Chicago hospital and ended when her mother had carried her out of the door.
Damn it! What had happened to the other twenty years of her life? What had put the demon I had seen this afternoon inside her and was there any way to get it out again?
Damn it all entirely.
I slid the girl's art pad out of its pocket in the shoulder bag and flipped it open, studying the additions she had made today.
It was turning into a visual log of our journey. There was a simple landscape that contrasted the lifeless elephant backs of the chat heaps with the verdant growth of the scrub woods. There was an outline sketch of the old stone mansion library in Baxter Springs and another of Claster's one-horse service station. There was also a drawing of the '57.
She'd made a couple of false starts on that one. I don't think Lisette had done many car studies before. But in the end, just as she did with people, she'd caught the essence of the machine. The cock of the half-turned front wheels was just right. Also the subtle angle of the upsweep of the tail fins. I wondered how I could con this drawing out of her without giving away the fact that I had been snooping in her stuff.
And on the last page . . . Damn, was that supposed to be me? I never look that good to myself when I stare into the shaving mirror in the morning. Thanks for the compliment, pretty girl, but I think you've got a little too much Prince Valiant in there.
This wasn't getting me anywhere. I returned the guidebook and sketch pad to her shoulder bag and quietly returned it to her room, taking one more moment for myself to look at the slender form curled on the bed.
I left the door between the units unlocked. I had to start covering her better. I couldn't take the chance of Spanno getting her alone, whoever she might be.
Suddenly the motel room seemed unbearably hot and stuffy. I tucked the Commander back into my belt and turned out the reading lamp by the bed. Then I stepped out through the unit's door into the motel's central court.
The '57 dozed in her parking slot in front of our rooms, her paint dulled in the moonlight by an accumulating layer of road dust. I quietly promised her a wash job just as soon as the rush was over, and I leaned back against her fender.
The motel and the town slept. Even 66 was quiet at one in the morning, the traffic stretching out to one or two tire-whispering passages a minute. Across the highway, a cluster of fireflies danced defiantly in the treetops, refusing to believe in the coming first frost. I lit up a Lucky and flashed an acknowledgment to them with its glowing tip.
If there was anything at all good about this thoroughly screwed up situation, it was that I wasn't losing any more vacation time. As of now, I was officially back on the county payroll. The death of John Kingman had ridden on the books for the past ten years as a cold case. But the books never get closed all the way on murder.
By a freak set of circumstances I'd stumbled across a trail that might lead to the resolution of four killings that had taken place a decade ago. And maybe to a fifth barely twenty-four hours old.
Captain Faraday had reluctantly agreed to let Jack and me play this thing out for a while. I was way the hell out of my jurisdiction here and running without any backup. On the other hand, I was the only cop in the right place at the right time to maybe break this case open.
I'd flow with the investigation, seeing where it would lead and collecting the evidence as it came along. I'd report back to Jack, and when the time felt right we'd call in the local law to make the arrests. I'd worked solo undercover operations like this before, and that's how I'd work this one now.
The thing is, most cops who die in the line of duty generally die when they're alone. And brother, I was alone out here, alone except for a girl who carried a big load of secrets around with her.
I took another drag and exhaled. Somewhere out there, a fast black car was running
through the night. In it were three men who had taken the life of Calvin Reece as a testament, a pledge to the will and desires of Mace Spanno. Spanno wanted the money and the girl, and he was willing to pay a blood price for them.
He must be putting the pieces together the same way we were, remembering the past and following the trail of his late partners down Route 66. We knew he was out there, and he knew we were out here. And sooner or later, we'd cross.
I flipped my dying smoke onto the pavement. I didn't pray for Calvin Reece, but if he was out there anywhere in the dark, I wished him well. I also promised that I'd try and make things
even with the guys who had iced him. I figured that was the
kind of religion he'd appreciate.
I hope he got at least one good punch in before they put him down.
We'd knocked off the hundred and fifty miles to Oklahoma City in the cool of the morning, slowed some by our passage through Tulsa and by the Friday traffic flow between Oklahoma's two big towns. The brushy hardwood forest that had cloaked the land ever since Saint Louis was growing ragged, the patches of pasture and cultivation growing larger the farther west we went, heralding the return of the prairie. With the concrete rolling away beneath her willing tires, the '57 pulled Oke City in over the horizon.
"The guidebook have anything to say about Oklahoma City, Princess?" I asked, slaloming us around an elderly and laboring Plymouth.
"Yep," she replied, sliding over closer to me on the car seat. "It does. There are the usual notations about a car agency and a hospital and so forth, and one special one. See?"
I moved the book and her hand down out of my face in time to avoid the looming back end of a Greyhound bus. "I'll take your word for it. What's it say?"
"Just three letters: WRK. In capitals and underlined three times."
"WRK? What the hell does that mean?"
Lisette frowned and shook her head. "I have no idea. There's no other entry like it anywhere else in the book."
"Think we should have a look around?"
She nodded. "Yes, I think this might be something important. Do you still have your friend with the Ouija board?"
"I'll see if he's home."
We passed a sign reading: OKLAHOMA CITY BUSINESS LOOP 2 MILES.
I apologize, Sir Arthur. If Sherlock has a little free time on his hands, we could sure use him in Oklahoma City about now. After a long hot afternoon, we'd hit a blank wall. Hell, we'd damn near beaten ourselves to death against it.
WRK underlined, something that meant something important to John Kingman. No phone number. No attached address. I'd tried all of the standard investigative techniques. We'd hit the city library and gone through the old phone books and city directories, trying to connect the three letters up with some business or company name. We'd found a few matches, too, but why Johnny 32 might have had a sudden overwhelming need for a bakery or a shoe store in the middle of Oklahoma was beyond us.
We'd gone through the newspaper files, trying to match the letters up with some event or noteworthy person within that time frame. That had turned up nothing outstanding. We'd checked out the phone book. There were all sorts of matchups there. A lot of people live in Oklahoma City. Too many. What do you do, dial up Mr. Walter Richard Klausburg and ask him if he'd numbered a well-known Chicago gunman among his acquaintances ten years ago?
I even checked to see if the letters WRK might have been the call sign of a radio station broadcasting out of Oklahoma City in 1947. They weren't. We ended up cruising the city streets to see if anything might leap out at us. Nothing did.
In the end, we parked the '57 beneath the shade trees of a small neighborhood park. Sprawling on the grass, we listened to the sprinklers hiss and considered our options.
"Let's work on the K again," I said, staring up at the sky. "It's the last of the letters; it could be the initial for your last name. Did your dad have any relations who might have lived out this way? Any Kingmans at all."
"Like I said about four hours ago, none that I ever heard of." Lisette lay on her stomach a couple of feet away, her flats kicked off, her sketch pad open in front of her, and a grass stem tucked in the corner of her frowning mouth.
"How about your mother?"
"Mom was from northern Italy. She didn't have any family in this country." Lisette picked up her pad and aimed a sketch in my direction. "What do you think?"
I glanced across at it. "Shorten the skirt."
"This is supposed to be a business suit. No woman is ever going to buy a business suit with a skirt that comes up to midthigh."
"Sounds like a good idea to me."
"Men!" Lisette flipped the pad shut and rolled over on her back, mimicking my position. "This isn't getting us anywhere."
"It doesn't seem to be," I agreed.
"Maybe this WRK thing isn't important after all."
"But maybe it is. You thought so this morning."
"I know I did."
"So what do we do next? You're the boss."
"Damn it, Kevin!" She yanked herself up into a sitting position angrily. "I know I'm the boss . . . and I admit it. I don't know what to do next."
I came up on one arm. "You open for suggestions?"
"Yes."
"Then let's get back on the road. You're right: maybe this WRK notation isn't such a big deal after all. Or maybe we can do without it. Either way, it's not good for us to hang around any one place for too long."
She nodded. "You're right. It's not good a idea at all." She flipped her notepad shut and reached for her shoes. "Mace will be after us, Kev. I know it."
Damn straight. So did I.
I got to my feet and offered her a hand up. She accepted it, offering a thank-you smile in exchange.
Her hand felt good. Why is it that the feminine thermostat is set differently than that of the male? A girl's skin is always about ten pleasant degrees cooler or warmer than her surrounding environment, depending on the season.
It also felt good to fire the '57 up with the intent of moving on. Oklahoma City was starting to feel itchy, kind of like a bad patrol zone along the DMZ or a dark alley in Long Beach. I heard a rattle a:nd a rumble coming up behind me and caught movement in my rearview mirror. I hesitated before pulling out into the traffic stream to let the truck pass.
There wasn't anything much remarkable about the vehicle. A massive and grimy ex-army deuce and a half, loaded down with a tangle of rusty appliances, scrap pipe, and crumpled bicycle frames. Some junk dealer headed out to the local. . .
"WRECKING YARD!"
It was right out beside 66 on the city loop, right where any inbound traveler would see it first thing. We'd driven straight past the place without making the connection. Twenty acres of scrap, the handling cranes lifting above the expanse of rusting and crumpled metal like the necks of a pack of browsing dinosaurs.
The yard crew had knocked off for the day, and the small office parking lot was almost empty as we got out. There was all of the usual stuff beyond the chain-link fences: metallic city junk, girders and plumbing from demolished buildings, old cars. I winced At the sight of what had been the perfectly good body of a '32 Ford five-window, crushed under a stack of lesser automotive corpses.
The yard had a few specialty clients as well. We were in oil country, and apparently this was where old drilling rigs came to die. There Were miles of battered piping and casing, piles of rusty valve and pressure heads, and a row of old stacking towers, lying over on their sides like steel Christmas trees in some giant's off-season lot.
"What in the heck could your dad have wanted here?" I asked.
"I haven't the faintest idea," Lisette replied, coming to lean beside me against the '57's fender. "I don't suppose it would do any good to try and ask around?"
"For what was probably a onetime stop ten years ago? I doubt it." I crossed my arms and shook my head. "We'll have to figure this one out ourselves."
"If this is actually what he meant," Lisette brooded. Hello, wall
. Fancy meeting you again. "Anything I can help you folks with?" A man came out of the small office building behind us. He wasn't the kind of guy you'd generally associate with a junkyard. Lean, neat, and on the short side, in his fifties, his hair and precisely trimmed mustache were gray as were his (my God, were they pressed?) JCPenney's work shirt and pants. Shrewd-looking brown eyes glinted out from under a canvas fishing hat.
" 'Bout to lock up here," he said, "but if there's anything special you need?"
Lisette hesitated and then got her purse out of the front seat. "Maybe. Have you worked here long?"
"Ever since the war. Took the job when Tom Jardine went off with the Air Corps. Tom never come back, so I kept on here at the office. There a problem?"
Lisette held out her father's picture. "This probably sounds awfully funny, but by any chance, do you remember this man? He might have come through here a long time ago.?"
The old-timer glanced down at the picture and studied it for a moment. "He did. Around ten years ago or thereabouts. An easterner. City man. Good-looking fella. What would you like to know about him, young lady?"
"It was the car that made it stick in my mind," Hawk Carby continued. He'd invited us in to the comparative cool of the wrecking yard office. Settling in a well-lived-in chair behind a battered but mathematically neat desk, he went on with his story. "Pretty damn thing. Bran'-new Lincoln couple, cream-colored. One of those twelve-cylinder jobs. The boy here in the yard talked about it for a couple of days after. That was right after the war, and we were just starting to see new cars again. That and the suit."
"The suit?" Lisette prompted.
"Yep. You don't see many men poking around a scrapyard in a new suit. Pants of it, anyway. Left the jacket in the car, as I recall."
It was my turn to prompt. "Can you remember what he was looking for?"
"Sure. Pipe. A chunk of three-inch-diameter oil line, oh, about yay long." Carby held his hands about four feet apart. "Threaded at both ends. I remember that 'cause he picked up a couple of end caps for it too."
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