Blue Lonesome

by Bill Pronzini

  How many more snakes hidden in those rocks?

  Get out of here!

  He managed to stand upright. His head ached where he’d been clubbed, but he had his equilibrium again and all his senses seemed to be working more or less normally. Only his breathing was erratic, wheezy. He scanned the ground around him, the rocks, the rest of the enclosure, and the catwalk above. As far as he could tell he was alone except for the diamondback. A closed door—stairway up from the shed, he thought—gave access to the gallery. The only opening in the inner fence, down here, was the now closed door to the passageway, directly across from where he stood.

  He knew what this place was, now. What it was and why he’d been lured out here and then thrust down into the pit. And under the layer of fear a thin, bitter rage began to simmer.

  He looked again at the diamondback. It was still coiled, still hissing faintly and tasting the air with its black-tipped tongue, but it no longer seemed to be rattling. His chest felt hot, constricted; he drew several deep, shallow breaths to stave off hyperventilation. Then he climbed higher on the slope, almost to the wire mesh at the fence’s base, and began to make his way around toward the lower door.

  The rocks littering the slope were smaller than those in the nest below. A few were clustered together; he avoided these. Something else lay on the earth twenty feet from the door, half hidden by dust and dirt—a long, light-metal rod, about the size and length of a fishing pole, with a wire slip noose at one end and a cord running from the wire loop to the butt. Snake catcher. He stepped over it, took two more strides before movement caught and held his eye, at the base of the fence just ahead.

  He froze. Another snake lay in shadow between the mesh and a chunk of limestone that was the same blotched brown as its body—the reason he hadn’t seen it before. Different species: shorter, the body thinner and less clearly patterned, a projection above each eye like a budding horn. Sidewinder? Whatever kind it was, it looked just as deadly as the diamondback.

  It was already moving, swelling and coiling. He heard the dry sound like escaping steam, then the buzz from its tail. His first thought was to detour downslope and then over and back up to the door. But to do that he would have to venture close to the diamondback again. Fear made him indecisive, held him rooted until he remembered the snake catcher.

  He backed up a slow, careful step. The sidewinder was coiled now, its tongue licking out; its eyes had vertical pupils, malevolent black slits. He kept retreating until his heel struck the metal pole, rattled it. The dark jutting head shifted that way. Messenger bent, not taking his eyes off the snake, and caught up the pole and brought it around in front of him as he straightened.

  The cord leading from the loop to the butt was frayed through. Didn’t matter; he had too little knowledge to try snaring a poisonous sidewinder. Fend it off—that was his idea. Try to ease around it, and if it struck make it strike at the wire slip noose instead of him.

  He moved forward again with the pole out at arm’s length, the blood-pound in his ears so loud he could no longer hear the rasp of his breathing. Sidesteps, baby steps. The snake watched him or the loop, he couldn’t tell which. Sweat hazed his eyes; he blinked rapidly, keeping both hands on the rod so it would remain steady. Just a little farther—

  His sliding foot dislodged a rock, sent it clattering downslope. His nerves were as frayed as the cord on the snake catcher; his hands jerked involuntarily, thrusting the wire loop six inches closer to the sidewinder—close enough to provoke it into action.

  The ugly horned head glanced off the loop and off the metal end, almost ripping the rod from Messenger’s grasp. The snake flopped down, squirmed, started to recoil. Frantically he jabbed at it with the pole, missed, jabbed again, and succeeded in snagging the lower section of the body and flipping it a short distance downhill. The sidewinder recovered, hissing, and seemed in Messenger’s overwrought state to turn toward him as if it were about to launch an attack. He threw the rod at it, lurched around and uphill for the door.

  There was no knob or latch on this side. He flung himself against the heavy wood, felt the shock all the way through his upper body when the door failed to yield. He lunged at it again. It wouldn’t give an inch. Bastards had barred it somehow on the inside. …

  He twisted his head. The sidewinder appeared to be closer than it had been, tight-coiled now, head lifted high; in the fading sunlight the knobby horns gave it a Satanic look. He backed away from it in the shadows along the fence.

  The gallery, he thought, the other door up there.

  He pushed away from the fence, back into pale sunlight. The upper door was directly above where the sidewinder waited, but in line with where he stood was one of the vertical supports for the catwalk railing. It and the board floor were no more than a foot above his head. He shifted his gaze to the mesh at the base of the wall, shifted it upward again; then he stepped back into shadow, set himself, and made his jump.

  He managed to lock both hands around the support. It gave a little—old, dry wood, rusty nails—but held his weight as his boots scrabbled against the mesh for a toehold. He found one, started to pull himself up … and his foot slipped and he lost his grip at the same time and dropped, skidding to one knee in the loose earth. He was up instantly, not looking anywhere but at the support, focused only on escape.

  Again he jumped, again he locked hands around the beam. His toehold this time was firmer; he dug his boot hard into the mesh, lifting with arms and shoulders, pain in the straining muscles, pain a roaring stroke in his head. He got one knee over the lip, slipped, held on, and heaved upward—and he was onto the gallery, crawling under the railing and then lying flat on the rough boards.

  He lay there for seconds or minutes, until his pulse rate slowed. The fear-drain left him with leaden limbs and dulled thoughts. He shoved onto all fours, got to his feet with the aid of the railing. Standing, he could see over the top of the outer wall. On the highway a tractor-trailer rig rumbled by, heading toward Beulah. Beyond the highway, dusk crawled in plum-colored shadows across the desert flats, lay ink-black in the creases and notches of the hills. Time distortion: It seemed that he must have been in the pit for an hour or more, when in fact it hadn’t been much more than ten minutes.

  He moved closer to the fence, to look down into Herb Mackey’s yard. His Subaru was parked where he’d left it; from here it appeared untouched. The dirty white pickup was long gone from behind the house trailer.

  Wobbly-legged, using the railing, he made his way to the gallery door. It was neither locked nor barred. A short flight of steps took him down into the shed. When he reached the car he opened the driver’s door and sat on the edge of the seat without getting in. His fingers were clumsy as he unlaced his right boot, took it off. Small spot of sticky venom on his sock; he dragged the sock off. Just below his ankle bone were a pair of faint reddish marks that were tender to the touch. He held his breath while he probed them, then let it out in a thin sigh. The skin was unbroken.

  He leaned in to adjust the mirror so he could examine the right side of his head. The skin had been broken there, but the gash was neither long nor deep. The blood on the wound and on the hair around it was dirt-flecked and coagulating. Not much physical damage, really. Most of his anguish had been mental.

  Another test passed, barely. The edge this time had been needle-sharp, as sharp as the diamondback’s fangs.

  The sun was gone now, darkness closing in. He sat slumped, elbows resting on his thighs—waiting until he felt strong enough to put his sock and boot back on and then to drive.

  15

  SHERIFF ESPINOSA LOOKED at him as if he were either drunk or demented. “That’s the goddamnedest story I’ve heard in years,” he said.

  “Every word is true.”

  “Herb Mackey died four weeks ago. Heart attack. First thing we did was destroy his snakes, and his place has been closed up ever since.”

  “I had no way of knowing that,” Messenger said. “I believed the man on the pho
ne; why wouldn’t I? And I told you, they covered the lower half of the highway sign—the words Rattlesnake Farm and the Closed sticker over them. I tore the burlap off before I left.”

  “Still doesn’t make much sense.”

  “Look at me. You think I hit myself on the head? Scratched my hands and arms, ripped and dirtied my clothes? All just to come in here and file a false report?”

  “For all I know,” Espinosa said, “you were in a brawl. Put your nose in somewhere it wasn’t wanted.”

  His head still ached and the anger in him had risen close to the surface. He bit back a sharp reply and replaced it with, “Go out to Mackey’s then. Look around. Those two snakes are still in the pit, along with God knows how many more.”

  “Proving what? They could’ve crawled in there on their own. Diamondbacks and sidewinders grow like weeds in this country.”

  “So you’re not going to do anything.”

  Espinosa leaned back in his chair, making the swivel mechanism creak. The only other sound in the Sheriff’s Department at City Hall was static from the dispatcher’s radio. Messenger had caught the baked apple just as he was about to leave for the day; now he was beginning to think he shouldn’t have bothered coming here at all.

  “What would you have me do?” Espinosa asked at length. He had his pipe out and was loading it methodically with black shag-cut tobacco. “Two men, you said, but you didn’t get a look at either of them and you didn’t recognize the voice on the phone or the voice of the one who spoke to you at Mackey’s. I don’t suppose you noticed the license plate on the pickup?”

  “No. I didn’t pay much attention to the truck. I thought it was Mackey’s, that it belonged there.”

  “What make and model?”

  “I’m not sure. American-made, I think.”

  “What color? What year?”

  “White. Not old but not new either. It had a broken radio antenna, I remember that much.”

  “American-made, white, not old and not new. You know how many pickups in this county fit that description, even with the busted antenna?”

  “All right,” Messenger said.

  “And there’s still the point of the whole thing. Why would these two men go to all the trouble of trapping or buying two or more rattlers, luring you out there, and then blindsiding you and locking you in with the snakes? There’re easier ways to warn a man to mind his own business.”

  “It was more than a warning. They didn’t care if I was bitten and died in that pit.”

  “You weren’t bitten and the odds were that you wouldn’t be, unless you landed on top of one of the critters.” Espinosa paused to light his pipe. He liked the taste of the smoke; a small smile appeared around the teeth-clamped bit. “Besides, if you had been bitten, you’d likely have survived. Not many people die of rattlesnake bites, Mr. Messenger. It’s a myth that they do.”

  “Maybe so, but some people do die. And the ones that don’t get deathly sick. I tell you, it was more than a warning. It was attempted murder.”

  “Why would anybody around here want you dead?”

  “You know why, Sheriff.”

  “Stirring up a matter better left alone is hardly cause for attempted murder.”

  “It is if I’m right and somebody other than Anna Roebuck is responsible for those two killings. That person is afraid I might get at the truth.”

  “Who? Got any ideas about that?”

  “All I know is, I’ve had warnings from John T. Roebuck and from Joe Hanratty and Tom Spears.”

  Espinosa’s eyes took on a glass-hard shine. “You saying it could be John T. wants you dead?”

  “I’m not saying anything. I’m giving you information so you can do your job.”

  “John T.’s great-grandfather was one of Beulah’s first settlers. Him and his family are the best friends this town has ever had. I know John T.; known him all my life. He’s never harmed a single person, not one.”

  Then why do his sister-in-law and Jaime Orozco dislike him so much? Why is his wife a drunk? Why did he come on to me like Brando playing the Godfather?

  Messenger said, “And I suppose Hanratty and Spears are Godfearing pillars of the community, too.”

  “They’re not killers.”

  “Neither was Anna Roebuck.”

  Espinosa stared at him, hard, for a clutch of seconds. Messenger matched the stare with an unblinking intensity of his own. “You know what I think, Mr. Messenger?”

  “I’ve got a pretty good idea. Quit my crusade and get out of town while I’m still alive.”

  “That isn’t what I was going to say.”

  “Different words, maybe, but the same message. Another warning. Well, I’m sick of warnings and I’m damned if I’ll stand still for an attempt on my life.”

  Espinosa asked tightly, “What’re you planning to do about it?”

  “I don’t know yet. But I’ll tell you what I’m not going to do. I’m not leaving Beulah with my tail tucked between my legs, the way I’m supposed to.”

  “That mean you’re looking to cause more trouble?”

  “What it means, Sheriff, is that I’m staying until one of us finds out who tried to kill me tonight. And who really murdered Dave and Tess Roebuck.”

  IN HIS CAR in the City Hall parking lot he slid a random jazz tape into the cassette player, turned the volume up loud. Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five, a short-lived combo but still among the best ever. Opening press roll by Zutty Singleton on the drums that ended in a series of hard, fast rim shots to set the tempo. Straight, simple pattern woven by Louis’s magical trumpet and Fred Robinson’s trombone, Fatha Hines on the keyboard creating contrapuntal harmonics and then an amazing run of rich chord progressions. Jimmy Strong’s clarinet developing a wail that matched the piano note for note, chord for chord, then fading to let Fatha carry the sweet, hot harmony. New Orleans-style twenties jazz that soothed him, kept his rage from boiling over the edge of control.

  He had never been this angry in his life. And why the hell shouldn’t he be: Nobody had ever tried to kill mild-mannered Jim Messenger before. But it was a blind anger, without direction or focus. The baked apple would do nothing to track down the men who had lured him to Mackey’s; he would have to do it himself if it was to be done at all. But how? Not a detective, not a hero, just an out-of-his-element CPA with a midlife compulsion and a frustrated mad-on. How, for Christ’s sake?

  Louis’s trumpet was dominant now, one of his celebrated solos: hard, powerful, and so dirty-sweet and low-moaning it made you ache to hear it. Brilliant departure on … was that “Wild Man Blues”? No horn man had never blown as hot as Armstrong. No horn man had ever been able to improvise like Armstrong—

  Improvise, he thought. Improvisation.

  The soul of jazz. “One person’s mad concept balanced against the correct counterbalance of restraint and understatement”—he’d read that somewhere once. Three kinds of melodic improvisation: soloist respects the melody, with the only changes the lengthening or shortening of some notes, repetition of others, use of atonal variations and dynamics; the melody is recognizable in the soloist’s rendition but its phrases are subject to slight additions and alterations; soloist departs entirely from the melody, uses the chord pattern of the tune rather than the melody as a point of departure. Broad musical definitions for what was really indefinable. Still, if you were trying to explain the concept to someone who knew nothing about music, you could simplify it into a more or less apt capsule definition: Improvisation is that which is bold and unpredictable.

  Soloist respects the melody; soloist departs from the melody. Bold and unpredictable, either way. But no soloist can work completely alone. He has to have rhythm and harmony and syncopation—backup help, input from sidemen that may also be bold and unpredictable.

  When you looked at it that way—didn’t the same thing apply to him, his life? For all of his adulthood hadn’t he been a frustrated soloist playing the same written chords over and over again without departure
or assistance, straight through toward the end? The only “mad concept” he’d ever had was the one that had led him here to Beulah.

  And didn’t the same apply to the situation he was facing now? Hadn’t he been approaching it in the same linear, uninspired fashion that he’d approached his life? Yes, and it would be useless to go on that way; he’d never get anywhere without help and a change in method.

  He’d given his life edges. Time now, by God, to give it a little bold unpredictability.

  HE PROMISED HIMSELF that if he slept badly, or awakened with a severe headache, he would go to the hospital for X rays first thing in the morning. Head injuries were nothing to fool with; they could be serious, no matter how minor they seemed at first. But he slept all right, and felt reasonably well when he awoke—just a dull throbbing in his temples and some tenderness to the touch. No concussion, then. It had been shock as much as the blow itself that made him fuzzy-headed and cockeyed those first few minutes in the pit.

  He drove rather than walked to the Goldtown Café for breakfast. His appetite was good; another positive sign. He caught Lynette Carey’s eye when he walked in; she acknowledged him with a brief nod, but she didn’t smile and she didn’t look his way again. Nor did she serve him, despite the fact that he made a point of sitting in her section. No help there. Not that he’d expected any, as poorly as he’d handled the meeting with her in the Saddle Bar.

  Two possible allies, then. One was Jaime Orozco. Messenger felt certain Orozco would do whatever he could to help clear Anna’s name, but his resources were limited. The other possible ally and best hope was Dacy Burgess.

  He would go talk to Dacy first, as soon as he finished breakfast. Try to convince her that the plan he’d developed last night was worth risking. She had more to gain than he did if she agreed. The trouble was, she also had more to lose if the scheme backfired.

  16

  WHEN HE DROVE down into the Burgess ranch yard, Lonnie and the yammering and snarling Buster were there to greet him. Dacy was in the stable, the boy told him; he didn’t have much else to say. And if he noticed the bandage above Messenger’s ear, the iodine-stained abrasions on his hands and forearms, he didn’t ask about them.