Blood Sport

by Dick Francis

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Another twenty minutes.’

  We stared at each other in dismay.

  ‘Go on then,’ I said in the end. There was nothing else to do.

  I left the cab and walked restlessly a short way back along the road, fearing every second to see Matt’s headlights and wondering how best to deal with him if we had to. I was all for stealing from him what wasn’t his, but not for damaging his skin. He, however, would have no such inhibitions. There would certainly be blood. Not fair to make it Sam’s.

  At two minutes past midnight he called out that he had finished, and I walked quickly back to join him. He was pouring water into the radiator, and screwed on the cap as I came up.

  ‘It should be OK now,’ he said. His hands were covered in grease and his big body hung tiredly from the shoulders. ‘Which way do we go?’

  ‘On.’

  He nodded with a wide slicing grin. ‘I figured you’d say that. Well, I guess that’s OK by me.’

  He swung up into the cab and I climbed in beside him. The engine started sweetly at first try, and switching on his headlights, he released the brake and eased away along the road.

  ‘If anyone catches us here from now on,’ I said, ‘duck.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Tell you something,’ he said comfortably. ‘I swing a mean left hook.’

  ‘The chap we’d be taking on goes for the head. But with a club of some sort in his fist.’

  ‘Nice guys you play with,’ he said. ‘I’ll remember that.’

  We covered the remaining distance at a good speed and in silence. The horsebox crept round the last corner and its headlights flickered over the farm ahead. I put my hand on Sam’s arm, and he braked to a halt a short way from the yard.

  ‘Switch off, would you? Lights too,’ I said, and jumped quickly down from the cab to wait a few precious seconds until my eyes and ears got used to silence and dark.

  No lights in the house. No sound anywhere except the ultra-faint ringing vibrations of limitless air. The calves and hens were asleep. The horses were quiet. I banged on the cab door and Sam switched his headlights on again before climbing down to join me. The bright shafts lit up the back of the house and wouldn’t shine straight into the horses’ eyes when I led them from the barn. Over on the shadowy side of the yard the open doors of the shed where Matt had kept his car yawned in a deep black square. The jumbled rubbish dump just in front of us threw surrealistic shadows across the dusty ground, and its smell of decay brushed by our noses.

  Sam swept it all with a practised glance. ‘Not much of a place.’ His voice was as low as a whisper.

  ‘No … If you’ll unclip the ramp, I’ll go fetch the horses. One at a time, I think.’

  ‘OK.’ He was breathing faster and his big hands were clenched. Not used to it, after all.

  I hurried down towards the barn. It wasn’t far; about forty yards. Now that we were totally committed my mind raced with urgency to be done, to be away, to be safely through Kingman before Matt came back. He could have been on the road behind us, be rushing at this moment across the desert to the farm …

  What happened next happened very fast, in one terrifying cataclysmic blur.

  There was an urgent shout behind me.

  ‘Gene!’

  I turned, whirling. There were two sets of headlights where there should have been one.

  Matt.

  The voice again, yelling. ‘Gene! Look out.’ And a figure running down the yard towards me.

  Then there was a roar behind me and I turned again and was met full in the eyes by the blinding glare of two more headlights, much closer. Much closer.

  Moving.

  I was dazzled and off balance and I’d never have got clear. The running figure threw himself at me in a rugger tackle with outstretched arms and knocked me over out of the way, and the roaring car crashed solidly into the flying body and left it crumpled and smashed and lying on top of my legs.

  The car which had hit him turned in a wide sweep at the end of the yard and started back. The headlights lined themselves up like twin suns on their target and with a fraction of my mind I thought it ironic that now when I’d decided not to, I was going to die.

  Half sitting, half kneeling, I jerked out the Luger and pumped all of its eight bullets towards the windscreen. I couldn’t see to aim straight … my eyes were hurting from the glare … Not that bullets would do any good … the angle was wrong … they’d miss the driver … By the time I fired the last one the left headlight was six feet away. I uselessly set my teeth against the mangling, tearing, pulping collision … and in the last tenth of a second the straight line wavered … the smooth side of the front wing hit the back of my shoulder, the front wheel ran over a fold of my shirt, and the rear wheel gave me a clear inch.

  Almost before I realized it had missed me, the car crashed head on into one of the buildings at my back with a jolting screech of wood and metal. The bodywork crumpled and cracked. The stabbing lights went black. The engine stopped. Air hissed fiercely out of a punctured tyre.

  Gasping, dreading what I would find, I leaned over the heavy figure lying on my legs. There were more running footsteps in the yard, and I looked up hopelessly, unable to do any more. I’d used all the bullets … none left.

  ‘You’re alive!’ The voice came from the level of my ear, the man kneeling. Sam Hengelman. I looked at him in a daze.

  ‘I thought …’ I said, with no breath, ‘… this was you.’

  He shook his head. ‘No …’

  He helped me raise and turn the man who’d saved me; and with sickness and unbearable regret I saw his face.

  It was Walt.

  We laid him on his back, in the dust.

  ‘Look in the car,’ I said.

  Sam lumbered silently to his feet and went away. I heard his footsteps stop and then start back.

  Walt opened his eyes, I leaned over him, lifting his hand, feeling with surging hope for his pulse.

  ‘Gene?’ his voice mumbled.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He didn’t come.’

  ‘Didn’t …?’

  ‘Came to help you …’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Thanks, Walt …’

  His eyes slid aimlessly away from my face.

  ‘Christ,’ he said distinctly. ‘This is it. This is … really … it.’

  ‘Walt …’ His hand was warm in mine, but it didn’t move.

  ‘Sod it,’ he said. ‘I wanted … I wanted …’

  His voice stopped. There was no pulse. No heartbeat. Nothing. Nothing at all.

  I put gently down on the ground the warm hand with the rounded fingertips, and stretched out my own, and shut his eyes. It should have been me lying there, not Walt. I shook with sudden impotent fury that it wasn’t me, that Walt had taken what I’d wanted, stolen my death … It would have mattered so little if it had been me. It wouldn’t have mattered at all.

  Walt … Walt …

  Sam Hengelman said, ‘Is he dead?’

  I nodded without looking up.

  ‘There’s a young guy in the car,’ he said. ‘He’s dead too.’

  I got slowly, achingly, to my feet, and went to look. The car was a blue Ford convertible, and the young guy was Matt.

  Without caring, automatically, I took in that the car had smashed the right-hand door of the garage shed and ploughed into the wall behind it. Most of the windscreen was scattered in splintered fragments all over the inside of the car, but in one corner, where some still clung to the frame, there was a finger-sized hole.

  Matt was lying over the steering wheel, his arms dangling, his eyes open. The skull above the left eyebrow was pierced and crumpled inwards, and there was blood and hair on the chromium upright which had held the windscreen. I didn’t touch him. After a while I went back to Walt.

  ‘What do we do?’ Sam Hengelman said.

  ‘Give me a moment …’

  He waited without s
peaking until eventually I looked up and down the yard. Two sets of headlights still blazed at the way in.

  ‘That’s Walt’s car up there?’

  ‘Yeah. He drove up with the devil on his tail and jumped out and ran down after you …’

  I turned the other way and looked at the dark garage.

  ‘The young guy must have been in there all the time, waiting for us,’ Sam said. ‘He came roaring out and drove straight at you. I couldn’t have stopped him … too far away. Walt was halfway down the yard …’

  I nodded. Matt had been there all the time. Not in Las Vegas. Not on the road. Lying in ambush, waiting.

  He hadn’t passed us on the road, and there was no other way to the farm. He must have gone back ahead of us. Turned round on the road to Las Vegas and driven back through Kingman while I was sitting in the bus station waiting to telephone to Walt.

  But why? Why should he have gone back? He hadn’t seen me following him, I’d been much too far behind, and in any case I’d left him once he was safely on the highway.

  It didn’t matter why. It only mattered that he had. Sam Hengelman looked down at Walt and summed up the mess we were entangled in.

  ‘Well … what the heck do we do now?’

  I took a deep breath.

  ‘Will you fetch that torch of yours?’ I asked, and he nodded and brought it from his van. I went with it over to the Ford, and took a longer, closer look. There wasn’t much to see that I hadn’t seen before, except for a bottle of bourbon that had been smashed in the impact. The neck and jagged top half lay on the floor to Matt’s right, along with several smaller pieces and an uneven damp patch.

  I walked into the garage and looked at the Ford from the front. It wouldn’t be driving anywhere any more.

  The big torch lit up clearly the interior of the deep shadowy garage. Quite empty now, except for a scatter of cigarette stubs against the left-hand wall. Matt had been smoking and drinking while he waited. And he’d waited a very long time.

  The bullet hole faced me in the windscreen and left me with the worst question unanswered.

  I’d have to know.

  I stood beside Matt and went over every inch of his body down to the waist. He’d taken off the cream-coloured jacket and was wearing the checked shirt he’d worked in. There were no holes in it: no punctures underneath. His head was heavy. I laid it gently on the steering wheel and stepped away.

  None of the bullets had hit him. They’d only smashed the windscreen and blinded him, and he’d slewed a foot off course and run into the wall instead of me, and his head had gone forward hard against the slim metal post.

  Slowly I returned to where Sam Hengelman stood beside Walt. He drooped with the utmost dejection and looked at me without hope.

  ‘Did you unclip the ramp?’ I asked abruptly.

  He shook his head. ‘Didn’t have time.’

  ‘Go and do it now. We’re taking the horses.’

  He was aghast. ‘We can’t!’

  ‘We’ve got to. For Walt’s sake, and your sake, and Dave Teller’s sake. And mine. What do you propose? That we call the police and explain what we were all doing here?’

  ‘We’ll have to,’ he said despairingly.

  ‘No. Definitely not. Go and let down the ramp.’

  He hesitated unbelievingly for a few seconds, and then went and did as I asked. The horses stood peacefully in the barn, apparently undisturbed by the racket, the shots, and the crash. I untied the nearest, Showman, and led him quietly up the yard and into the van.

  Sam watched me in silence while I tied him into one of the stalls.

  ‘We’ll never get away with it.’

  ‘Yes we will,’ I said, ‘as long as you take these horses safely back to Lexington and never tell anyone, anyone at all, what happened here tonight. Blot it out of your mind. I’ll let you know, when you get back, that you’ve nothing to worry about. And as long as you tell no one, you won’t have.’

  The broad fleshy face was set in lines of anxiety.

  ‘You’ve collected two horses,’ I said matter-of-factly. ‘An everyday job, collecting two horses. Forget the rest.’

  I returned to the barn, fetched Allyx, and loaded him up. Sam still hadn’t moved.

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘I’ve … arranged … things before. There’s a rule where I come from – you take a risk, you get into a mess, you get out.’ He blinked. ‘Walt threw himself in the way of that car,’ I said. ‘Matt didn’t intend to kill him… You didn’t see a murder. Matt drove straight into the wall himself … and that too was an accident. Only two automobile accidents. You must have seen dozens. Forget it.’ He didn’t answer, and I added brusquely, ‘The water can’s empty. You can fill it over there.’

  With something like a shudder he picked up the container and went where I pointed. Sighing, I checked that he had brought three days’ fodder for the stallions, which he had, and with his help on his return, shut the precious cargo up snugly for their long haul.

  ‘You don’t happen to have any gloves around?’ I asked.

  ‘Only an old cotton pair in the tool kit.’

  He rooted about and finally produced them, two filthy objects covered with oil and grease which would leave marks on everything they touched, as tale-bearing as fingerprints. I turned them inside out and found they were thick enough to be clean on the inside. Sam watched wordlessly while I put them on, clean side out.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Will you turn the van, ready to go?’

  He did it cautiously as far away from Walt as he could, and when he’d finished I stepped with equal care into the car Walt had come in, touching it as little and as lightly as possible, and drove it down into the yard, stopping a little short of the screen door to the house. There I switched off the engine and lights, put on the brake, and walked back to talk to Sam where he sat in his cab.

  ‘I’ve three jobs to do,’ I said. ‘I’ll be back as quick as I can. Why don’t you just shut your eyes for a couple of minutes and catch a nap?’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  I concocted a replica of a smile, and a fraction of the tension in his face unwound.

  ‘I won’t be long,’ I said, and he nodded, swallowing.

  With his torch I surveyed the yard. The Luger was an automatic pistol, which meant it threw out the cartridge after each shot. No one would find the spent bullets, but eight shiny metal shells scattered near Walt’s body were something else. Seven of them winked in the light as I inched the torch carefully round, and I collected them into my pocket. The eighth remained obstinately invisible.

  The ejection slot had been on the side of the gun away from Walt, but the cases sometimes shot out straight upwards instead of sideways, and I began to wonder if the eighth could possibly have travelled far enough over to be underneath him. I didn’t want to disturb him: but I had to find the little brass thimble.

  Then, when I’d decided I had no choice, I saw it. Bent and dusty, partly flattened, no longer shining. I picked it up from the spot where I had been half-lying in the path of Matt’s car. He had run over it.

  After that I attended to the ground itself. Tyre marks didn’t show on the rough dusty surface, but the hoof prints did to some extent. I fetched a broom of twigs from the barn and swept them out.

  The garage was next. I punched through into the car the remaining corner of the windscreen with its significant bullet hole, and I picked up every one of the cigarette stubs which told where and how long Matt had waited. They went into a trash can standing a few yards along from the house door.

  Matt hadn’t locked the house when he went out. I went in to look for one essential piece of information: the address of the place, and the name of its owner. The torchlight swept over the threadbare covers and elderly furniture, and in one drawer of a large dresser I found what the farmer used for an office. The jumble of bills and letters gave me what I wanted. Wilbur Bellman, Far Valley Farm, Kingman. On the scratch pad beside the telephone, Matt had written a bonus. In heavy
black ballpoint were the simple words: ‘Insurance 9 PM.’

  Before leaving I gave the big dilapidated living room a final circuit with the torch and the beam flickered over a photograph in a cardboard folder standing on a shelf. Something about the face in it struck me as familiar, and I swung the torch back for a second and closer look.

  The patient passive face of Kiddo smiled out, as untroubled as it had been when he told Walt and me about Offen’s mares. Loopy unformed writing straggled over the lower half of the picture. ‘To Ma and Pa, from your loving son.’

  If Offen had sent his stud groom to Miami to join his parents, Kiddo’s loyalty to his employer was a certainty. I almost admired Offen’s technique in furnishing himself in one throw with an obscure hideout for the horses and a non-talking employee.

  After the house there remained only Walt. Nothing to do but to say goodbye.

  I went down on my knees beside him in the dust, but the silent form was already subtly not Walt. Death showed. I took off one glove and touched his hand: still warm in the warm air, but without the firmness of life.

  There was no point in saying to him what I felt. If his spirit was still hovering somewhere around, he would know.

  I left him lying there in the dark, and went back to Sam.

  He took one slow look at my face and said in an appalled voice, ‘You’re not leaving him there?’

  I nodded, and climbed up beside him.

  ‘But you can’t…’

  I simply nodded again, and gestured to him to start up and drive away. He did it with a viciousness that must have rocked the stallions on their feet, and we went back to Kingman without speaking. His revulsion at what I had done reached me in almost tangible waves.

  I didn’t care. I felt only one grim engulfing ache for the man I’d left behind.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Lynnie put her brown hand tentatively on mine and said, ‘Gene … what’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said.

  ‘You look worse than you did when you came back with Chrysalis. Much worse.’

  ‘The food doesn’t agree with me.’

  She snorted and took her hand away. We were sitting on the sea terrace, waiting for Eunice to come down for dinner, with the sun galloping the last lap to dusk and the daiquiris tinkling with civilized ice.