“You’re crazy,” MacCready wheezed, holding his knee.
Cowboy laughed. It was a helluva good laugh. It even made me shiver. MacCready took it to heart. There was a sudden sharp urine smell in the air.
“They weren’t supposed to go that far,” he said in a flat, resigned tone. “I heard about two strangers in a beat-up old Mustang watching my office. They said you had bothered them in Dallas, too. But, I swear, they were only supposed to scare you off. All that shooting … and the fire … I didn’t know that was going to happen.”
“Start at the beginning, Greedy. Who is the bald one? The one they call Turk.”
“Dixon,” MacCready said. “Ivan Dixon. He’s crazy, too.” Presumably he meant “too” as in like me.
“He runs the gang, does he?”
MacCready nodded vigorously. “Yes. He’s one of the Dixon boys. From up around Mount Pleasant.”
“How did you get connected with them?”
“I bought the Dixon place after Ivan’s uncle died. Ivan—Turk—inherited it. I bought it from him. He came up here early last year, from someplace down south. Houston or Galveston, I don’t know. He had other gang riders with him. I guess they’re still living on the money from the farm, mostly.”
“Mostly? You use them for odd jobs, don’t you?”
“Nothing like tonight, I swear. I didn’t know what they were going to do. Honest.”
“Sure,” I said. “There were five I know of, Greedy. Couple are dead already. And we killed one tonight. Which two rode away from the motel?”
“Turk,” he said, “and Joe Lockhart. They call him Smokey Joe.”
So it was Stomper who had charged into our shotguns.
“Okay. You’re doing fine.” I reached out to pat him on the shoulder. He jerked back and crawled a few feet away.
Cowboy stood over MacCready. “Where did they go?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Honest.”
“Guess,” I said. “Remember, there’s a nice prize for being right.”
“They stay at a place south of town,” he said. “The old Prescott place.”
“I heard you had a tenant farmer there.”
“Yes,” he said, “but Wiley only farms it. He lives at his own place down the road. Turk Dixon and his friends use the Prescott house. They keep an eye on the place for me.”
“You’re bullshitting us,” I said. “If those animals had been living out there for better than a year, the whole county would know it.”
“No,” MacCready whined. “It’s true! We have a deal. They take it easy around town. Low profile, that’s what I told them.”
“He’s lying,” I said to Cowboy. “Let’s get started.”
MacCready screamed like a hurt woman. “I swear!” he wailed. “They’re gone most of the time, but that’s where they live. Please!”
It was starting to get light by then. The little lake had taken on a pewter shade. Trees on the far side were sharp against the eastern sky.
Cowboy jerked his head at me and we walked away from MacCready to talk.
“I know we’re only funning him about a hit,” he said, “but you ought to consider it.”
“Hell Cowboy, what’s the point? Without the bikers, he’s not a threat.”
“Point is, if he gets to Turk and Smokey Joe before we do we’ll never catch those old boys.”
“I don’t think Greedy will be interested in talking to them. He’ll be too busy remembering how he wet himself hoping he wouldn’t be awake when his throat got cut.”
“Another thing,” Cowboy said. “I know these Greedy MacCready characters. We can scare him off for a while. Won’t be long, though, he’ll be back in business, leaning on honest folks.”
“Maybe. I can’t help that. I’m not going to kill him just because he’s the local General Bullmoose.”
“You’re a pushover sometimes, Rafferty.”
“It’s my genuine love for all mankind.”
“You gotta do something about that,” Cowboy said.
He walked to the car and slid into the passenger seat. I got in, too. After the Mustang groaned into life, I turned it around and started up the gravel road. MacCready struggled to his feet and limped down to the water’s edge.
The last thing I saw in the rearview mirror was MacCready bending over with his hands on his knees, throwing up on his shoes.
Chapter 25
On the way back through Conover, we stopped at the drive-in cafe opposite Dolan Ford. We only intended to ask directions to the Prescott farm, but a booth by the window looked comfortable and the coffee smelled good and it seemed a shame the cook had nothing to do. So we ordered breakfast.
A breezy waitress brought black coffee first. It tasted great, but it felt odd to drink morning coffee without smoking. I’d salvaged my wallet from the motel fire, but lost my pipe and tobacco pouch. Lousy priorities.
“If you smoked,” I said to Cowboy, “I could bum a cigarette.”
“Filthy habit.” He shrugged. “Buy a pack if you’re hurting.”
“Naw. I’ll tough it out.”
By the time our food came, the place had started to fill up. Leathery men hunched over coffee cups and dutifully wise-cracked with the waitress. Outside, a sunburned man in creased jeans stepped out of his pickup. He gave the Mustang an odd look as he ambled past. When he came in, he looked at us, too, then sat at the counter with another local. They had their heads together most of the time.
“We got to get out of this town,” Cowboy said. “Every damn person in the county knows us one way or another.”
“Blend in,” I said. “Chew a stalk of grass. Stub your toe in the dust. Practice saying ‘aw, shucks’ and ‘reckon it might rain?’”
Cowboy shook his head. “City boys,” he said disdainfully. “You’re bigger hicks than us country people.”
“Guilty,” I said.
We finished our food and I sent the waitress away when she offered more coffee. I wanted a smoke too badly and I didn’t want to give in and buy cigarettes.
“Come on,” I said to Cowboy, “let’s get it done.”
The Prescott place was an undersized, single-story, once-white frame house set in a U-shaped windbreak of elm trees. The home site was surrounded by fields that looked pretty good to me, not that I knew what I was looking at. Inside the windbreak, though, the house and grounds had a beaten, weary look.
We drove by the first time without stopping. The only sign of activity was a quarter-mile away, where a green tractor crawled along a fence line doing something agricultural.
On the second pass, I stopped on the road, out of sight of the house. Cowboy got out, went through a barbed wire fence, and ran across a plowed field, angling toward the rear of the house. He had the Ruger tucked into the back of his belt. He carried his shotgun in high port position across his chest.
I turned past the mailbox as fast as I could and urged the Mustang to do its feeble imitation of acceleration up the drive. There were no shots from the house, which was a welcome surprise.
I drove as close to the house as I could, bailed out carrying my Ithaca, and flattened against the front wall. Still no response.
I peeked around the corner. Cowboy came from behind a shed and darted out of view around the back of the house. I began to have a small empty feeling in the pit of my stomach.
We hit the front and back doors together and found ourselves facing each other down a hallway that ran the length of the house. At Cowboy’s end, the hall opened into a room, probably the kitchen. There were two doors on the right side of the hall, one door on left.
The hallway walls were covered with motorcycle posters and graffiti. The floor was littered with cigarette butts and empty beer cans. And dirt. It might have been swept once in the past year, but certainly not twice.
I went through the doorway on the left with the shotgun ready. Living room. Another door connected it to the kitchen. Cowboy poked his head through, then disappeared.
The li
ving room was empty, except for two threadbare couches and a nearly new color television set. There was nice collection of cans and butts on the floor there, too.
When I came out of the living room, one of the other hallway doors opened. I nearly sprained my back bringing the shotgun to bear.
“Oh!” she said. “Shit, you scared me!”
She was a pudgy girl of about eighteen, with tangled brown hair and a heavy jaw. She wore a T-shirt with a screen-print of a starving baby and the words Ethiopian Slimming Salon on it. The T-shirt stopped just below her crotch. Her naked thighs were heavy and lard-white.
Cowboy appeared, jerked her out of the doorway and dove into the room. I went down the hall and kicked open the last door. It was an empty bedroom.
“Empty,” Cowboy called.
“Here, too,” I said.
“What the fuck do you guys want?” asked Thunder Thighs.
“Turk and Smokey,” I said. “Where are they?”
“Fuck should I know?” She yawned into a grubby fist. “What time is it?”
“Early,” I said. “When did they leave?”
She shrugged with an exaggerated gesture that showed she didn’t wear panties and didn’t care who knew it.
“One, two o’clock. So what? You pigs got a warrant?”
“We don’t need a warrant,” I said. “We’re not cops.”
“Oh,” said Thunder Thighs, “That’s different.” She walked into the living room, switched on the TV set, and sprawled on a couch. When the TV screen settled, the Roadrunner did it to the Coyote again.
I felt like the Coyote.
“Come on,” said Cowboy. We went to the kitchen. I closed the door to the living room. Cowboy gently laid his shotgun on a linoleum-covered counter and glared out a window into the empty backyard. “We fucked up,” he said.
“A reasonable summation.”
“Probably shouldn’t have had breakfast.”
“I don’t think it mattered,” I said. “They haven’t been back here since they left for the motel.”
Cowboy snorted. “Does that bitch strike you as reliable, boss-man?”
“Look at it this way. Does she look as if she gives a shit either way?”
Cowboy pointed his finger at me. “You got a good point there.”
Thunder Thighs shoved open the door, shuffled into the kitchen, and rummaged through the noisy old refrigerator. She muttered to herself, found a cold frankfurter, and bit the end off it.
“Gotta have my breakfast,” she said. “Not worth squat without it. Hey, if the guys come back, there’s gonna be shooting and all that, eh?”
“Most likely,” said Cowboy.
“Well, what I mean is, you guys will give me a chance to get out of the way, won’tcha?”
“Yeah,” I said “Don’t worry about it.”
“Okay, thanks. See ya.” She went out again. Her legs didn’t look any better from the back.
“Come here,” Cowboy said. “Want to show you something in that bedroom.”
The room that he had checked was similar to the one I had seen; there were old mattresses and sleeping bags on the floor, piles of clothing, and more motorcycle pinups.
The only difference was cultural and artistic; the room he cleared had a Polaroid pornography display.
The photos were stuck to the wall with a mixture of thumbtacks and tape. Some were obviously older than others. The settings varied, as did the participants, although the theme was consistent. Each photo showed a biker having sex with one or more girls.
The bikers invariably mugged for the camera. The girls’ reactions were more varied. There was a chesty brunette who specialized in poorly faked passion. Thunder Thighs displayed only token politeness. A young girl with scarred cheeks and a punk hairstyle appeared to be sleeping.
There were other photos, with other girls and other expressions. The saddest of them all were the pictures of Vivian Mollison.
“What we have here, Watson,” I said, “is your basic grade A, legal evidence.”
“Thought you might like ’em,” Cowboy said. “This one down here is your client, I guess.”
“Yeah. Poor kid.”
“She don’t look very interested, does she?”
Vivian didn’t look interested at all. She had the same look in all seven photos; a vacuous docility that made her look stupid. She seemed remote from what she was doing. She might have been holding a banana or eating a popsicle or simply daydreaming.
They were the most off-putting pictures of naked people I had ever seen.
“How bout that ex-biker chickie in Dallas? I don’t see her in here.”
“Damned well better not,” I said. I felt slightly ashamed because I, too, had looked for photos of Fran.
Cartoon music came from the television set in the other room while Cowboy and I took down the pictures of Vivian. I put them in my pocket.
“So, what do we do now, boss-man?”
“Rule Four,” I said. “When all else fails, sit on your duff and await good news.”
“One of your better rules,” said Cowboy “And for two-fifty a day, I’m a good sitter.”
So, we sat on our duffs and waited for Turk and Smokey Joe to come home.
Chapter 26
I moved the Mustang behind the house where it could not be seen from the road. Then we mapped out killing zones and paced off distances to the places we thought the bikers might stop when they arrived. We knocked a hole in a bedroom wall for a gunport.
On the television front, Thunder Thighs didn’t give up when the morning cartoons ended; she dove straight into the soap operas.
Cowboy discovered a telephone under a pile of old magazines on the living room floor. I phoned the Dallas cop shop. Ed Durkee was in his office.
“I was beginning to wonder about you,” he said. “Bring in the Rosencrantz broad. I’m catching a lot of flak over that Dew Drop Inn shooting.”
“Okay, Ed, will do. Soon as I get back in town.”
“Where the hell are you?”
“Dalton County,” I said. “And the good part is, I have what you need for an arrest on the Mollison snatch.”
“If you drag in some shit-kicker who claims he saw a motorcycle with a blonde on the back—”
“Better. The guys you want are Ivan Dixon—one of the Mount Pleasant Dixons, I’m told—and Joe, probably Joseph, Lockhart. Fran Rosencrantz can ID Dixon as the leader of the five bikers who bought Vivian Mollison from Guts Holman. And I have snapshots of Dixon, Lockhart, and others, in the sack with Vivian. How ’bout them apples?”
Ed grunted. I could imagine him rubbing his malleable face. “These pictures,” he said. “Are we talking normal sex or rape?”
“Trust me. You’ve seen her since they let her go. Well, she looks even more spaced out in these photos. It might not be ‘choke her down and black her eye’ rape, but it’s close enough for me. For the grand jury, too, I bet. Don’t worry, Ed, you have a case.”
“Well, maybe …”
“Maybe, my ass! You’ll have an eyewit to testify Dixon and his gang arrived without Vivian and left with her. You’ll have photos of what they did with her. Plus medical and psychiatric reports about her condition afterward. What more do you want?”
“Well,” he said, “having the bikers wouldn’t hurt.”
“I'm working on that now.” I told him where I was and that I expected Turk and Smokey Joe to return eventually. “With any luck, I’ll deliver them this afternoon. You lucky devil. What would you do without me?”
“Goddamn it, Rafferty. You can’t … Does the county law out there know what you’re doing?”
“Not exactly.”
“Listen Rafferty, I did not answer this phone. You got that? Just bring in the Rosencrantz broad and don’t tell me things I shouldn’t know. Good-bye.”
“Hey! Did you get those names?”
“I got them. Dixon and Lockhart. I’ll handle it. Go away.”
“Dixon’s from Mount Pleasant.
Try the—”
“Good-bye!” The phone went dead.
The thought of all that paperwork must have made him irritable.
I relieved Cowboy at the front window watch post. He dozed on one of the couches. Thunder Thighs was still encamped on the other couch, outstaring the television set. Her entertainment was briefly threatened when a newscast appeared instead of a soap. She found a game show on another channel. It was a close call.
Nothing happened outside. After two hours, I had enjoyed all the bucolic scenery I could stand and I badly needed a smoke. I shook Cowboy awake. He yawned and raised his eyebrows.
“Nada,” I said. “I’ll see if there’s anything to eat in this dump.”
There was nothing in the refrigerator that looked fresh enough to be consumed without a fight. In a cupboard over the sink, I found two cans of chili and one of beans. So far, so good.
Thunder Thighs trundled into the kitchen. “Oh, great,” she said. “You fixing lunch?”
“If you can find a pan or two. And plates, or bowls.”
She opened drawers and looked under things and finally came up with an aluminum saucepan. It was encrusted with what may have been ancient spaghetti.
“Will this do?” she asked.
“It’ll have to. Scrape out as much of that crap as you can.”
She used a rusty table knife like a dagger and chipped hard pasta into the sink. I peeled the labels off the cans and set them aside. When the pan was down to merely filthy, I put the cans in and covered them with water from the hot water faucet. She showed me which stove burner worked and we waited for the water to boil.
“Don’t you have to punch holes in the cans?” she asked. “Somebody told me you should do that, cause they’ll explode otherwise.”
“They would if you put them in a fire, but not this way. Think about it. Boiling water can’t get hotter than 212 degrees, right?”
“I don’t know.”
“Take my word for it,” I said. “They won’t explode.”
“Hey, that’s really good then, isn’t it? You wouldn’t ever have to wash the pan, would you?”
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