WEST ON 66

by James H. Cobb

  pages.

  There were a lot fewer now to be concerned with, just Ari­zona and California. Essentially desert, no major cities, few small towns, few people at all until you hit LA. Just lots and lots of empty space to hide $200,000 in. And maybe, some­where in this book, there was one tiny hint about where.

  I didn't find a thing on my first read-through. Doggedly I flipped back to the start of the Arizona section and began again. Lisette had figured out where the money was, but Spanno hadn't. This guidebook was the sole information source that Lisette had that Spanno didn't. Ipso facto, the key clue was here in the book.

  Barring, of course, the very real possibility that somebody, somewhere, wasn't feeding me a line of total bullshit.

  I didn't see anything on my second go-round, either. I con­sidered saying to hell with it and going back to bed. But then I decided to give it one more shot. This time, though, I didn't try to read; I just leafed through the pages and looked.

  That was when I spotted it.

  The paper of the hard-used little guidebook had darkened some over time. But around one entry on page 116 of the Cal­ifornia section the paper was just a shade lighter. Maybe as if something had been erased off of it.

  Carefully holding the book parted at that place, I rapped the bottom of the spine against the edge of the sink. A few crumbs of rubber fell out of the binding. I rolled a finger over them. They were still soft, fresh. Something had been erased on that page and recently.

  The entry concerned a desert stretch of Route 66 out be­tween Needles and Barstow. It had been underlined, but the pencil marks had all been carefully removed. I couldn't help but remember the big art gum eraser Lisette carried in her purse.

  195 mi. (174 mi.). Here you pass close to Mount Pisga Volcanic Crater, whose lava flow comes to the very edge of US 66(L). If you did not visit Amboy Crater, it is worth your while to stop for a few minutes to walk over and examine this lava flow . . .

  Johnny 32 Kingman did not give a howl in hell about vol­canic geology. He'd been using this guidebook as a blueprint for a heist. Every notation he had made had a direct connection with some concrete aspect of his plan. A fast recheck verified that there was only one other notation in the book that didn't involve a location in a city or town.

  And that was the murder site outside of Quapaw. I remembered my own words back in Oklahoma City: "... out-of-doors . . . somewhere near the highway where he could get at it fast." Lisette must have remembered this entry, and my thinking out loud must have made the connection for her. This was it. This had to be it!

  I could visualize Johnny 32 grinning at his own inside joke as he underlined the passage ten years ago. I could also visualize his daughter rubbing those lines out just a couple of days back, sealing the secret away for herself.

  I took a minute to memorize the entry and the mileage no­tations; then I switched out the light and went back to bed. I returned the guidebook to Lisette's bag, and I was just easing down onto the mattress when the even tempo of the girl's breathing broke.

  "Everything all right?" she asked drowsily. "Everything's fine. I'm just a little restless, I guess." "Let me help." She nestled against me, a flow of bare satiny skin molding against my back from shoulder to the knee. Her arm lightly hooked around my chest, and I felt a gentle hug and the brush of her lips against the nape of my neck. "I'll keep you warm."

  "Thanks, Princess. Go back to sleep." She already had. I could feel her slow, even breathing riffle my hair.

  I stared out into the room's darkness again. So there was one of my problems solved. I'd broken the secret of the guidebook, and now I knew where the two hundred grand was hidden. Big friggin' deal.

  ARIZONA

  173 mi. (69 mi.) Stafford's Cafe, including gas, gro­ceries and a curio shop, comprises the town of Allen-town here. Soon the trees grow more sparse and you begin to enter a stretch of over 125 miles of almost barren country . . .

  Back at the dying end of the last century, a wagon track met a mean dry wash out on the Arizona desert. Here a bridge was built, and so was a town. Dreaming boomers' dreams of growth and prosperity, its founders called it Peerless.

  Peerless didn't grow, however; nor did it prosper. It just survived through the searing summers and freezing winters on the flats just east of the San Francisco range, a one-horse supply stop for the local ranchers and miners.

  Years passed and times changed. Mr. Ford's Tin Lizzie gave the locals a new mobility. The ranchers and miners started going up to the bright lights of Flagstaff whenever they needed to restock, and Peerless found itself deprived of its justification for existence. Soon even survival looked questionable.

  But then, in 1927, some crazy government men came through, posting signs along the gravel road that ran across the bridge and through the little town, proclaiming it officially part of something called "US Highway 66." They predicted big changes coming.

  But not right away. The depression came first. Throughout the thirties, Peerless lingered, staying alive on the droplets of blood left behind by the dust bowl refugees fleeing for the the­oretical refuge of California and from the crumbs dropped by the upper crust experimenting with this new amusement called motor touring.

  Things began to turn around after the CCC boys brought the paving through. Diesel fuel and black coffee were added to the town's inventory as America heard war talk and the big rigs started to roll again, riding the wave of rearmament. And after Pearl Harbor the troop convoys trudged past. On their way to combat, a million men caught a fleeting glimpse of a gaunt little desert town and never even knew its name.

  When the war ended, the changes did come. The men came home and started families and bought the bright new cars roll­ing off the assembly lines. They wanted to enjoy the freedom they'd fought for. They wanted to see the country they'd de­fended. And Peerless was part of that country.

  Good times, man. Mary was kept busy in the kitchen of Mary's Cafe. High-octane flowed in a river from the Peerless Flying A. The Tom Tom Trading Post produced an unending stream of postcards and "genuine Indian" beadwork. And the Grand Canyon Auto Court was full almost every night during the season, even when their advertised "air cooling" turned out to only be an electric fan on the dresser.

  Then, about the time the present deponent was arguing with a bunch of moody Marxists over around Pyongyang, the aging two-lane bridge over the wash west of Peerless was taken out by a flash flood. This was bad enough, but then some bright young engineer in the State Highway Department noticed that if a replacement span and a bypass were built just a few miles downstream, a meandering northern loop could be cut out of Route 66. The driving time from Winslow to Flagstaff could be reduced by a good fifteen minutes. No doubt feeling proud of himself, he reached down and drew a little line on the map.

  He couldn't have destroyed Peerless any more thoroughly if he'd called in a bombing mission.

  The traffic on the highway had become the lifeblood of the town. Deprived of that bloodflow, gangrene set in rapidly. No one came to eat Mary's hot beef sandwiches. No one pawed through the beads and trinkets in the Tom Tom Trading Post. No one stayed at the Grand Canyon Auto Court even after they put in real air-conditioning.

  The FOR SALE signs went up, but there were no takers for a dead-end community on a dead-end road. And so, after a while, the people of Peerless just drifted away to places where they could stay alive. They abandoned their town to the desert wind and to the one man who chose to stay behind.

  That was the story of Peerless as we'd picked it up that morning, heading west out of Gallup. Passing under the Route 66 arch at the state line, we'd left the wind-carved ramparts of New Mexico behind and started out across the mirage-haunted wastes of northern Arizona.

  There's a lot of strange stuff out there. The highway led us past the Painted Desert, where the land is made of flame turned to stone, and then on through Petrified Forest National Mon­ument, where the towering trees of an ancient woodland had toppled and become trapped in eternity,
maybe as punishment for some prehistoric sin. Meteor Crater is out there, too, that huge cosmic shell hole that proves we are receiving visitors from outer space, only straight down and at twelve miles per second.

  It's beautiful country, but it's an eerie kind of beauty, un­earthly, almost as if you might look out across it and see some­body with three eyes and a couple of antennae looking back.

  It's lonely country, too. There aren't a lot people living out here, and those who do know each other or at least of each other. Inquiring at some of the isolated gas stations and trading posts along the way, we soon started hearing about "that guy in Peerless." We didn't hit the real jackpot until we talked to the counterman at the Meteor Crater Cafe.

  "Jubal Claster?" he said. "Sure I know him. He comes in here for breakfast pretty regular. I guess even he needs some­body to talk to every now and again."

  "So is he still over in Peerless?" I asked, taking a sip of Coke I didn't particularly want.

  "Mister, he is Peerless. He's the last guy hanging on in that dump, and frankly, I don't know how he keeps from starving to death. Nobody goes out that way anymore."

  "It's funny, a man living alone like that," Lisette said, stir­ring the ice in her drink in a carefully unconcerned fashion. "What kind of person is he?"

  The counterman shrugged. "Quiet, keeps to himself. There's not much to say about him, really. He's been running the gas station in Peerless ever since a couple of years after the war. I just figured him to be a returned vet who wanted to be his own boss. Say, what's up with old Jubal anyway?"

  "What do you mean?" I asked.

  "Well, for years nobody's said a word about him. Now you folks are the second batch of people in less than a day to come through asking about him."

  Lisette and I glanced at each other. "Somebody else has been asking about Jubal Claster?"

  "Yeah. Three guys were in here last night. What's going on?"

  "He's just won the Irish Sweepstakes." I tossed a quarter on the counter, and Lisette and I started for the door.

  The turnoff for Peerless was only a couple of miles farther west, marked by a faded and collapsing cluster of billboards adver­tising tourist services, the town's frantic last-ditch effort to draw in enough road dollars to survive. Leaving the highway, we bumped over the twin sets of Santa Fe tracks that paralleled 66 along this stretch and followed the cracked pavement out into the desert.

  Peerless itself was as dusty and disintegrating a little ghost town as you could have wanted. Only about twenty or so small buildings strung out along either side of the access road, just short of the barricaded approaches and abandoned piers of the demolished bridge. It looked lifeless, but no way was I taking that for granted. I pulled over on a small rise just east of town and dug my binoculars out from under the seat. For the next fifteen minutes I systematically glassed every inch of the place, looking for unpleasant surprises.

  Nothing moved except for the heat shimmer.

  As I ran my recon, Lisette sat cross-legged on the '57's trunk lid, her pencil whispering. When I lowered my binoculars, she held up her drawing pad. "What do you think?"

  It was a sketch of Peerless, silhouetted against the backdrop of the San Francisco range. Simple, stark, and elemental, yet she'd grabbed up a chunk of the loneliness and despair of the place and tacked it down on paper. I nodded. "Yeah, you got it.

  "Are things any better closer up?" she asked.

  "Have a look." I passed the field glasses to her.

  Figuring out the focus, she studied Peerless for herself. "Do you remember me saying how I hid out in a movie theater that first night I was on the run?" she asked after a couple of minutes.

  "Yeah."

  "Well, one of the movies I sat through six times had a town in it just like this one. Giant radioactive grasshoppers had come out of the desert and had eaten everybody."

  "I saw that one, too. The Beginning of the End. Peter Graves and Peggie Castle. Cool flick!"

  Lisette made a sour face and handed the glasses back to me. "I wonder if Claster really is still living down there."

  "Somebody is. The gas station hasn't been abandoned yet."

  I lifted the binoculars to my eyes again. The station in ques­tion was the last building on the north side of the highway. A single-story white clapboard structure, it was an old-fashioned rural live-in station. What they used to call a double-ender. The end that faced the road contained the station office. The other end had a "front" porch in back that opened into the owner's living quarters. On the near side of the building there was what looked like a grease pit under a rickety shed roof, while over on the far side there were two big aboveground gas­oline storage tanks. The setup would have had an LA County fire marshal screaming in anguish, but I guess nobody gave a damn out here.

  A swaybacked wooden pump shelter big enough to accept a Model A extended in front of the station. The pumps them­selves were a pair of genuine old hand-cranked Tokheim gas dispensers with ten-gallon glass reservoirs mounted atop their graceful columns. They must have been installed back in the 1930s. Hell, the whole station must have been, and not updated a day since.

  But someone was keeping the place going. The building wasn't boarded, the glass was intact, and a loaded oil rack and a STATION OPEN sign had been set out. A Dodge power wagon mounting a wrecker's A-frame also sat parked next to the build­ing.

  As I watched, a man stepped out of the station office into the shade of the pump shelter. He was alone, and he sank down into an old kitchen chair parked beside the door. Tilting the chair back, he leaned comfortably against the wall, his arms crossed on his chest.

  I had the strangest feeling that this guy was waiting for us.

  I tossed the field glasses onto the car seat. "Let's go, Prin­cess. He's down there all right."

  Peerless's disintegration was even more apparent as we rolled slowly down the main street. Paint was stripping in the desert wind, stucco crumbled, and bristly masses of tumbleweed built up against the buildings and drifted in the alleys between them.

  I didn't take the '57 into the gas station. Instead, I parked in front of the abandoned cafe across the street, backing us in so we were nose out to the road and set for a fast takeoff. I gave the Commander a hitch into place under my windcheater, and we were ready to go visiting. With Lisette at my side, we crossed the sun-baked concrete to where the sole citizen of Peerless awaited us.

  I knew we'd found Jubal Claster before we'd even spoken a word. Clad in Levi's and a worn checked shirt, he had the same rangy frame, the same dark hair, and the same dark eyes as his brother, Ira. Jubal carried a little more weight, though, as well as a little gray in his hair. His eyes were also milder and shrewder than his younger brother's. He gave us a welcoming nod as we stepped into his patch of shade. "Afternoon. It looks like a hot one out there."

  "It does come with the country," I replied, nodding back.

  He gave a short chuckle. "It surely does. Now, can I help you folks with something?"

  "You can if you're Jubal Claster."

  He nodded again. "I am, and I guess you're the folks who've been out looking for me."

  "I guess we are. Did Ira tell you about us?"

  "He did." Claster lost his grin and let his chair come back on all four legs. "He called me the other night from Amarillo. Look, mister, I can't excuse what my brother did back there, but I sure hope that you can. He was worried some about me, and he was just trying to scare you off. Ira's a hothead some­times, but I swear to God he didn't really mean to hurt you or the little lady here."

  In an extremely large rat's ass he didn't, but diplomacy re­quired I agree. "I guess I can see that," I replied, leaning against one of the pumps.

  "I apologize for him," Jubal went on. "And since no harm was done, I hope you folks can see your way clear not to make too much over this. I'd sure appreciate it."

  "Like you said, no harm done. Forget it."

  It was my turn to smile and lie through my teeth. Little brother Ira wa
s going to spend the next twenty years as some lifer's girlfriend if I had anything to say about it. There are certain things I take personally, and buckshot is one of them.

  Claster seemed to relax at that and tilted back again. "I guess that brings us back around to what I can do for you folks. Mind if I ask how come you came all this way looking for me?"

  "Didn't Ira tell you when you talked with him?" Lisette asked.

  "He wasn't too clear on the subject. I suspect he didn't give you folks much of a chance to lay your cards out. Like I said, Ira's kinda a hothead. Best you explain it to me yourselves."

  "It's because of my father," she went on, taking over the conversation. "Ten years ago, you agreed to help him with a certain job. I need to know about that job."

  "Well, little lady, I'd say that all depends on who your father is and what this job was."

  "My father's name was John Kingman, from Chicago."

  Claster went still for a second; then he smiled again and shook his head. "I'm sorry, but I've got no idea who you're talking about."

  "Your brother seemed to think you do," Lisette responded quietly. "And Calvin Reece said you should. He gave my father your name, just like he gave it to us."

  Claster lost a little of his country bon homme at that. "You talked to Reece?"

  "We did. He told us everything. How my dad needed a good man down in Kansas and about how you were the man he came up with."

  "And what was this good man supposed to do?" Claster asked softly.

  "He was to help my father steal a quarter of a million dollars from my father's gang." Lisette sank down on her heels, bring­ing her eyes level with the garageman's. "Did you, Mr. Claster?"

  Nothing moved except for a sun-parched leaf skittering across the pavement in a puff of wind.

  "If a man did do something like that," Claster said finally, "he'd have to be a fool to own up to it. Especially to someone who just turned in off the road." His voice was neutral now, no friendship, no enmity, just neutral.