by Jim Thompson
Well, anyway, I thought it over for a minute or two. Then, in place of going straight ahead, I angled off, moving south and a little east and slowly coming around in a wide arc. I couldn’t exactly pinpoint the spot where they were, but I knew it was roughly east of camp and a little over a mile from it. So, by using the camp lights as a guide, it was no great problem to keep my bearings.
The problem was moving. Fast enough, I mean.
I was wearing a little tying-twine harness around my chest, up where I could watch it and get at it. There were six sticks of dynamite in it, all capped, of course, and with fuses as short as I could cut.
With a load like that tied onto you, you don’t hurry so good. Not over rough ground in the dark. With a load like that, the first time you stumble will be the last time, and you’ll travel a lot further and faster than you counted on.
So I had to take it very easy, and I had to take a long detour to where I was going. I was short on time—maybe a lot shorter than I thought. But it was that or nothing, and that’s no choice.
I reached the end of the arc, the point where I would cut sharply to the west. I stooped down low behind a thick growth of sage and struck a match to my cigar. Lighting it so fast that there was the merest flicker of light. On and gone before anyone could be sure he had seen it.
I took a deep puff or two, shielding the glow with my hands. I let the ash grow over the coal, protecting and hiding it. Then, I was ready for the backstretch. Or as ready as I’d ever be.
If the gang was only guarding the other side, I had a chance—and Carol and Four Trey had one. But if they had someone on this side, the rear approach…
And they did.
It was lucky that I was forced to move so carefully, kind of making a chore out of it each time I lifted a foot and set it down in front of the other one. Otherwise I might not have heard it. The soft chuff-chuff of a spade.
I crept forward, guided by the sound. Getting in fairly close before I finally saw him. I was moving in still closer when he stabbed the spade into the ground with a sharp chuff, leaving it standing upright as he stooped.
He laughed, a mean, teasing laugh. Then his jeering voice drifted to me, speaking to someone on the ground.
“…sorry, honey, but you just hadn’t ought to’ve knowed…little Mexico job we pulled. Them spics…ever…we done it…wouldn’t like us a-tall…”
There was a frantic, smothered sound. Terrified, choked. Suddenly I knew what it was, what was going on.
Carol. Carol, bound and gagged and about to be buried alive.
He laughed again, spoke to her with mock sympathy. He was goin’ to tuck her in real nice, he said. Real nice an’ cozy. Might be a mite lonesome at first, but pretty soon all sorts of things would be cuddlin’ up to her. Fire ants an’ tumble-bugs, an’ snakes an’—
A real funny guy, you know? He was laughing and having so much fun that I was right on top of him before he knew it. Which was just about the last thing he ever knew.
I swung with my razor-sharp shooter’s knife, just one sweeping slash across his throat. He sagged backwards on his heels, knees buckling, and toppled into the grave he’d dug for her. And that was the end of his laughing and teasing. The end of him.
I spoke to Carol, whispered to her, rather. Letting her know who I was, warning her not to cry out. Then, I got her ungagged and cut her bonds. And then, well, I sort of held her for a minute, and she sort of held me. And she cried a little bit, but just out of happiness and relief. So softly that it couldn’t have been heard.
They had Four Trey, she told me. They’d caught him as he was approaching them. He wasn’t armed—apparently he’d ditched whatever weapons he had when he saw he was going to be caught. But his story (which they didn’t believe, of course) was that he hadn’t been carrying any.
“That’s right, Tommy,” Carol whispered. “He said he’d been meaning to kill them all, but he’d changed his mind. He’d settle for having them give themselves up.”
He’d settle for it? He would? I reckoned they’d got a big laugh out of that.
“Why haven’t they killed him?” I whispered.
“They’re going to, as soon as Longie’s through with him. Longie jokes a lot, and he says there’s plenty of time.”
We whispered together a little longer. Then, I told her to swing wide, like I had, and head for the pipeline camp. She didn’t want to (and, as it turned out, she didn’t). She wanted to stay and try to help. But I got kind of tough about it, so finally she started away in the darkness, and I moved forward again.
I came up on a little rise to see a faint glow ahead of me. The dimmed light of a lantern which seemed to rise up out of the earth. That would be where the car was parked, the low dip in the prairie. Where the gang and Four Trey were. A few yards further along and I could hear them; Longie’s drawled questions and the whoops of laughter as Four Trey answered them.
I paused, running my hands over the dynamite harness, making sure the sticks were all riding good. I cupped my hands around my cigar, and drew the coal alive with a long puff.
The gang’s laughter tapered off into silence. An ominous note came into Longie’s amused drawl.
And then suddenly I was there, as close as I could get to them. Not fifty feet away and looking down on them from above.
Longie was sitting in the tail-end of the housecar, his legs dangling over the side. Four Trey was standing a few feet in front of him, and the others were kind of ringed around him in a half-circle. They were all crowded together, which made my dynamite about as useless as so many sticks of candy. I hesitated, wondering what I’d better do, as Longie spoke again.
“You think I didn’t see through it, Four Trey? You think I didn’t know it was all a setup right from the beginnin’? Why, hell, I almost laughed in their faces! A Square John goin’ crooked just when a smart sheriff turns stupid! A damn fool would’ve knowed it was a trap, an’ I ain’t no fool!”
“You’re not, huh?” Four Trey made a pretense of yawning. “You figure it’s smart to walk into a trap with your eyes open?”
Longie said he sure as hell did, because it wasn’t a trap no more when a man had his eyes open. The law had been tryin’ to trap him and his boys for years, and they’d walked off with the bait every time.
“Only one thing I didn’t know, Four Trey. I wasn’t sure of it, anyways. That was where you fitted into the picture. But when you skipped out, and when I got to thinking back on all those questions you used to ask when we were doin’ time together.…”
“Forget it!” Four Trey cut in on him. “You’re smart and everyone else is stupid. But it still doesn’t change anything. I’ve tipped off the sheriff, and there won’t be any payroll coming through.”
Longie laughed angrily. “Now, I reckon that’s not so, ol’ friend Four Trey. What you told the sheriff was that we wasn’t goin’ to rob the payroll this time. You told him there’d been some kind of hitch, car trouble prob’ly, and we’d have to wait for the next time around. That’s what happened, and don’t tell me it ain’t neither. Because you figured to kill us yourself and you didn’t want no law buttin’ in!”
Four Trey hesitated; nodded. “All right. I changed my mind, but that is what I’d planned. But there still won’t.…”
“Don’t you say it, you lyin’ son-of-a-bitch! They can’t stall the men another payday, an’ the sheriff don’t see no reason to stall. So the money’ll be comin’ through all right. An’ it’ll be on one of the only two things that’s left runnin’. All we got to do is knock out the only truck and the only pickup that comes down the trail, and we’ve got the score made!”
“You’ll never swing it.” Four Trey didn’t sound very convincing. “Pipeline traffic is about all there is out here. What do you think will happen when it’s chopped down to two vehicles?”
“Some tall wonderin’, I reckon. But they’ll be practically here by then. So.…” Longie slid down to the ground. “So that’ll be the end of their wonderin’,
and them, too. An’ speakin’ of ending things.…”
He jerked his head, gesturing. The gang began to close in on Four Trey, and then.…
A fist slammed into the back of my neck. I stumbled and went down, and there was a triumphant yell from Doss.
“Got him, Longie! I got the punk!”
33
The stumble helped; kept me from falling flat on my chest. Instinctively, I thrust out my elbows, catching some of my weight on them, and that helped, too. So I didn’t slam down on the ground like I might have. I went down hard, but with just a little less impact than dyna takes to explode. And that little was as good as plenty. Like I say, Dyna’s a good girl as long as you don’t crowd her. Which, apparently, was just what that damned Doss was determined to do. He was trying to grind me into the ground at any rate, which worked out to the same thing.
He’d come up on me from behind, so he didn’t know I was a walking bomb. He hadn’t seen the dyna, and I couldn’t tell him about it, because he had his knees in my back and my mouth and nose crushed into the earth. I struggled, tried to yell. He bore down all the harder, and I strangled and began to lose consciousness.
And there was a burning in my chest. And the smell of smoke. And, vaguely, I wondered where my cigar was.
The weight suddenly went off of me. Doss yanked me to my feet, gave me a shove down the slope. I was dazed, wobbly. So, after a step or two, he grabbed my arm and started to hustle me along with him.
“Punk son-of-a-bitch! I’ll…I’ll.…”
He saw it then, the charred ring of fire on my shirt. The sputtering fuses of the dynamite. The others had been staring up at us and now they saw it, too. And he and the others, all seemed to yell, to move at the same time.
One moment they stood frozen, speechless. The next, they were yelling, scrambling to get the hell away from me.
“Yeow…!”
“Gangway! How the hell…!”
“Where’s Bobo? Where…?”
“The car, the car, the car…!”
There was the craack-craack of a rifle, and the lantern shattered and went out. Car doors slammed, and the starter whirred. I came alive suddenly, began clawing at the dyna.
I hit the rear of the car with the first stick. A pure lucky hit because I wasn’t taking aim, just trying to get it away from me. The car rocked forward, its windows shattering. The scorched air of the backblast slapped me in the face, and my eyes filled with pale smoke. But I grabbed loose two more sticks and threw them, one with each hand. As they exploded in the air, the car roared and rolled away.
I didn’t have time to throw the last three sticks. The fuses were almost burned into the caps, and I knew I’d never make it. And I didn’t have to, either.
Four Trey grabbed me. He yanked the whole harness loose with a jerk. Threw it with one hand as he bore me down to the ground with the other. I slapped my hands over my ears, just as all three sticks went off together. But I was almost stone deaf for the next couple minutes.
Four Trey and I sat up. We looked at each other, and grinned. His lips moved in speech, but of course I couldn’t hear what he was saying. Then I spoke to him and neither of us could hear what I said.
We laughed; so relieved, you know. Just glad we weren’t dead. He put a finger in his ear and wiggled it, then spoke to me again. His voice seeming to come to me from a thousand miles away.
“…didn’t hear you, Tommy. What did you say?”
“I just said,” I said, carefully mouthing the words, “that it looks like we’re still alive.”
“Well, you’d just better be!” Carol sat down next to me. “I’ve got plans for you, Mr. Tommy Burwell.”
34
The smoke and fumes of the dynamite were gone, and the air was sweet again. It was good to be there, with the peaceful night sounds all around us; the three of us sitting in the night on the Far West Texas prairie. And with all the excitement we’d been through, we needed to rest.
Carol sighed and snuggled close to me. Four Trey yawned and stretched, then crimped up his hat brim front and back. He kept looking away toward the trail to town, as though he were expecting something from that direction. And I finally asked him if he thought the gang would be back.
He drawled that he didn’t think so. In fact, he was pretty sure that they wouldn’t be.
“It’s too bad they got away,” I said. “I guess I didn’t handle things very well.”
“Now, don’t you fault yourself, Tommy,” he said. “You did just fine, and I’m proud of you.”
I thanked him for his opinion, adding that I still hated it that they’d got away. “Maybe we could go over to camp and get one of the trucks or pickups started. If we could make it into town to a phone.…”
“We’d never do it, Tommy.” He shook his head firmly. “Those flatbeds and pickups are knocked out for the next twelve hours, and you can bet money on it.”
“Well.…” I looked at him frowning, thinking he was taking things pretty calmly. “It seems kind of strange that two men will be killed, two drivers, and that a month’s payroll will be stolen without us doing a thing to stop it.”
He shrugged, not saying anything, and continued to stare into the distance toward the trail to town. A moment or two passed, and then he asked me if I thought he’d made a mistake in not killing the Longs and everyone in their gang.
“They were right about that, you know. I had intended to kill ’em all. But when it came time to do it.…” He shook his head. “I just wasn’t up to it, Tommy. I felt that they had to be given a chance to turn themselves in.”
“Well,” I said, “I guess I can understand that, all right. I know I couldn’t just massacre a dozen men, no matter who they were. But.…”
“Exactly,” he cut in. “Murder is murder, and I’d be as bad as they were. But if I gave them a chance and they didn’t take it, then whatever happened to them would be their own doing.”
“Yeah?” I hesitated. “How do you mean, whatever happened to them?”
“Well…” His shoulders moved again in a lazy shrug. “I was thinking that they might have an accident.”
“Accident?”
“Why not? People have ’em on a lot better roads than that trail over there. And they’re not driving with their lights off like Longie does.”
“Well, yeah. But.…”
“Now, suppose something got dropped over there on the trail. Maybe kind of buried so that it was almost impossible to see. Longie would smash right into it, wouldn’t he?”
“I guess so,” I said. “But.…”
That was all I said. Because the whole sky suddenly lit up for miles around. A great blinding flash that turned the prairie night into day. Then came the explosion, the blast, and the ground trembled under us. And I was deafened for the second time that night.
Darkness returned. The echoes of the explosion died away. I rubbed my ears, shooting a glance at Four Trey.
“Well,” I said. “I guess Longie hit something, all right.”
“I guess he did,” Four Trey said.
About the Author
James Meyers Thompson was born in Anadarko, Oklahoma, in 1906. In all, Jim Thompson wrote twenty-nine novels and two screenplays (for the Stanley Kubrick films The Killing and Paths of Glory). Films based on his novels include The Getaway, The Killer Inside Me, The Grifters, and After Dark, My Sweet.
…and The Golden Gizmo
In July 2012, Mulholland Books will publish Jim Thompson’s The Golden Gizmo. Following is an excerpt from the novel’s opening pages.
The Golden Gizmo
It was almost quitting time when Toddy met the man with no chin and the talking dog. Almost three in the afternoon.
House to house gold-buyers cannot work much later than three nor much before nine-thirty in the morning. The old trinkets and jewelry they buy are usually stored away. Few housewives will interrupt their after-breakfast or pre-dinner chores to look them up.
Toddy stopped at the end of the block a
nd gave the house before him a swiftly thorough appraisal. It was the last house in this neighborhood. It stood almost fifty yards back from the street, a shingle and stucco bungalow virtually hidden behind an untended foreground of sedge and cedar trees. Crouched at the end of the weed-impaled driveway was a garage, or, rather, Toddy guessed, one end of a three-car garage. An expensive late-model car was in view, and a highly developed sixth sense told Toddy that the other stalls were similarly occupied.
Hesitating, wanting to quit work for the day, Toddy flipped open the lid of the small wooden box he carried and looked inside.
In the concealed bottom of the box were the indispensables of the gold-buying trade: a set of jeweler’s scales and weights, a jeweler’s loupe—magnifying eyepiece—a small triangular-faced file and a tiny bottle of one hundred percent pure nitric acid. In the tray on top was a considerable quantity of gold-filled and plated slum, mingled with the day’s purchases of actual gold. The latter included almost an ounce of high-karat dental gold—bridges, crowns and fillings—plus an approximate two ounces of jewelry, most of it also of above-average quality.
A man who buys three ounces of gold a day is making very good money…if he buys at the “right” prices. And Toddy had bought right. For an investment of twenty-two dollars, he had acquired roughly eighty dollars’ worth of gold.
It had been a good day, as good as the average, at least. He was under no financial pressure to work longer. If he knocked off now, just a little early, he could miss that clamoring and hopeless chaos which is Los Angeles during rush hours. He could be back in town inside an hour or less.
Elaine always slept late—of necessity. If he got back to the hotel early enough, he might be there before she started stirring around. Before she had a chance to raise any of that peculiarly hideous hell of which only she was capable.