Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 11

by Majic Man (v5. 0)

  The only windows in the room were just behind my easy chair, double blinds drawn tight. Opposite the bedroom door was what I assumed to be the front door, to my right from where I sat. Low ceiling, creamy pebble-plaster walls; interestingly, no overhead lighting. This seemed to be that guest cottage Deputy Reynolds had referred to, where Mac Brazel and Sheriff Wilcox and God knew how many other witnesses of the saucer incident had been detained for “unofficial questioning.”

  So I sat there in my boxer shorts like Dagwood waiting for Blondie to bring him a sandwich and breathed slow and deep and took stock of my situation and myself; the oddly agreeable dream waved at me amiably from the back of my mind, though another part was already wondering why my subconscious found the notion of a space creature pleasing. I rotated my shoulders, rolled my neck, worked my joints, getting the juices going, the blood flowing, like an athlete prepping for the big game.

  Then I got up and prowled some more. The drawers in the kitchenette were empty; no spoons or forks, certainly not knives. The cupboards had a few glasses and coffee cups but no supplies; the refrigerator was empty but for a few bottles of Coca-Cola and Canada Dry. I plucked one of the cold Cokes from its shelf and, using a drawer handle for a church key, opened it.

  Sipping the soda, I walked to what I took to be double windows, raised the blinds, exposing instead a picture window, unopenable; I touched fingertips to the thing and it was some kind of clear plastic, possibly like what they used in aircraft cockpit windshields—toss a chair at this baby and it would toss the chair back at you. Beyond the plastic picture window were the low-slung barracks-style clapboard buildings of the base, interspersed with trees and bushes; not so much moonlight filtered in as yellow light from a streetlamp on the blacktop artery this cottage was perched along.

  I closed the blinds.

  Chugging my Coke, puzzling out my predicament, I went to the front door; a man’s home was his castle, after all—if he wanted to lower the drawbridge and go out for a midnight pillage, who was to stop him?

  “Who” was standing on my front stoop, his back to me: the brawny white-helmeted Negro MP from the jeep, blocking the way like the sentry he was. He glanced over his shoulder at me, like a bull acknowledging a buzzing fly. His face was a beautifully carved tribal mask, his eyes brown and placid and yet very, very hard.

  “Can I help you?” He had an intimidating, lower-register Paul Robeson resonance.

  “Yeah, how ’bout some clothes and a lawyer … oh, and a car.”

  The helmeted head shook. “I can’t let you pass, mister. You’re a guest of Colonel Blanchard.”

  “Swell. I’d like to talk to Colonel Blanchard.”

  “Colonel’s gone for the day. Please move back inside.”

  And the MP, unblinking eyes fixed upon me, reached out and pulled the door shut.

  I backed up a step, grunted, “Huh,” took another swig of the Coke, considered my lot in life, and tried the door again—which still wasn’t locked.

  The MP’s head turned slowly, almost mechanically, and his gaze over his shoulder at me oozed barely controlled impatience.

  “Mister,” he said with the world-weariness only a guy in his twenties can muster, “you got it easy in there. It could go lots harder for you. You prefer the stockade to the guesthouse, I can make that arrangement.”

  “Can I at least get something to eat?”

  “You’ll get breakfast in the morning.”

  The MP half-turned to reach out for the knob again, to slam the door, but instead I slammed the Coke bottle into the side of his head, just under the helmet, across his ear; it didn’t knock him out, but sure as shit stunned him, and I yanked him by that arm and flung him like a shot put across the room, where he slammed into the davenport, which slammed into the wall, knocking that framed print off its nail, dropping with a clunk behind.

  Now I shut the door.

  The MP, who’d somehow lost his helmet on the trip across the room, was sneering at me as he came up off the davenport, blood running from his ear vivid against his black cheek. He moved slowly, with easy, pantherlike grace, crouching low, though even crouching he was taller than I was, and I was six foot, for Christ’s sake! It looked like he planned to tackle me, but he was smarter than that: he simply unfastened his holster and got out his sidearm and was raising it, probably not to shoot me, just to cover me and make me listen to reason, but I was past reason, and I swung fast and hard with the Coke bottle and knocked the gun out of his hand, but the bottle slipped out, too, smacking against the plaster wall, taking out a chunk, not breaking. You ever try to break a Coke bottle?

  Now he did tackle me, driving me back into my easy chair, but we both went backward, chair and all, ass over teakettle, and he was off-balance enough for me to shove up under him and toss him to one side, where he went crashing into the standing lamp, knocking it down, pulling its plug, sending the room into near darkness.

  The MP was getting back on his feet again, but before he could get all the way up, I snatched his helmet off the floor and swung it around and clanged the damn thing off his skull. That dazed him, dropped him to a knee, but my swing had been awkward, the helmet slipping from my fingers and flying someplace. A massive fist arced around and caught me in the side, staggering but not dropping me, and as he was picking himself up, I was picking up that coffee table, magazines spilling, ashtray tumbling, and whammed it into him. The thing didn’t shatter, like a chair in a John Wayne saloon fight—the damn thing was maple, and it hurt the big man, sent him onto both knees, this time. So I hit him with it again, across his hunched-over shoulders, and he flopped onto his face, not unconscious, just hurting, with things inside him broken, ribs mostly, I’d wager.

  Catching my wind, I found his gun on the floor and, as he was rousing, trained it on him.

  “I don’t want to kill you,” I said, “particularly.”

  “Shooting an MP is a federal offense.” Despite the size of him, despite that commanding Old Man River voice, this fucker was scared.

  “So is kidnapping a citizen. Take your clothes off.”

  His eyes and nostrils flared. “What?”

  “Don’t worry about it. You’re not my type. Take ’em off. Try not to get any blood on ’em.”

  Grumbling, he got out of his MP uniform and soon we were just two guys in their boxer shorts, with a pile of clothes between us. He had the more impressive musculature by far, but I had the gun. Keeping the .38 trained on him, I crouched to sort through his things, fishing out his gunbelt; his handcuffs were looped on them.

  “Turn around,” I said, standing, his gun in my right hand, his handcuffs dangling in the left.

  He spat on the floor. “Fuck you.”

  “I can cuff you or shoot you. Pick one.”

  Doing a commendable job retaining some dignity under humiliating conditions, the MP drew in a deep breath; the blood was glistening on his ear. He was a tough man: most guys wouldn’t have to weigh the choice I’d given him. Slowly, he let out the breath; just as slowly, he turned his back to me, and I cuffed his hands behind him.

  I left him in the bathtub, his ankles and knees bound with electrical cords I’d liberated from lamps, sticking one of his socks in his yap, shutting him in with the vent fan going (in case he managed to spit the sock out and start in yelling), leaving a chair propped under the knob of the closed bathroom door.

  His clothes were too big for me, and I only had one sock, but he was only a half a shoe size or so bigger and the helmet fit fine, not to mention the .38 revolver, which was a perfect fit for my palm, though for decorum’s sake I snapped it in its holster before setting out into the world that was Walker Air Force Base.

  Bathed in more moonlight and streetlamp illumination than I cared to be, in my oversize one-sock uniform, helmet tipped forward like Bogart’s fedora, I walked down the sidewalks with an MP’s crisp confidence; at every intersection of blacktops, signs guided me. Up ahead, two noncoms exited a two-story office building, chatting, smoking
, heading in my direction; they nodded to me, as they passed, and I nodded curtly back. Up ahead, a pair of MPs stepped out of a barracks, and I cut quickly to the right, moving off the sidewalk onto the grass, hugging bushes, hoping they didn’t see me.

  Apparently they didn’t, as I was able to slip through a row of trees and onto another sidewalk, with hangars up ahead, the landing lights of a plane coming in, streaking through a wire fence in long white fingers, tickling me all over, and revealing another MP, patrolling along that perimeter. Heart pounding, I cut between two barracks, slipping within the safe haven of a row of shrubbery-surrounded trees planted between them, keeping low, almost tripping over two people on the ground.

  Backing up, I was unsnapping the holstered sidearm, as somebody was saying, “Shit!”

  Not me.

  Down on the grass, an enlisted man—actually kid—had been embracing another enlisted man, both with their trousers around their ankles and a hand on each other’s, well, gun (as the DI back at boot camp used to say, “This is your rifle, this is your gun, this is for Japs, and this is for fun”). They looked up at me in wide-eyed horror, probably not unlike the expression I was showing them.

  “Oh God, oh God,” one of the kids was saying. “Please don’t turn us in! We weren’t doing anything—honest!”

  The other kid didn’t say a word—he was too busy bawling.

  Resnapping the holster, I raised a finger to my lips in shush fashion, whispered, “As you were,” and moved on.

  Thank God for those signs at intersections, because soon I was headed in the right direction. A black staff car rolled by, slowed momentarily, and I suddenly felt absurd in my baggy uniform, and even as my hand drifted over the holstered revolver, I wondered if I really had it in me to start shooting it out with the Air Force.

  Then the car turned left, onto the adjacent blacktop artery, and slipped away into the night. Three minutes and no further incidents later, faithfully following the intersection signs, I found the building I was looking for: off by itself, with driveways flowing in and around for easy access, the long, low, unpretentious white clapboard structure with USAF HOSPITAL over its folksy screened-in porch.

  I now had a wristwatch—a Bulova, courtesy of that colored sergeant—and it was shortly before ten o’clock p.m., which could be a piece of luck, as ten was when Air Force nurse Maria Selff’s shift ended. I needed one more piece of luck: for Maria’s powder-blue coupe to be unlocked. There were perhaps twenty-five cars parked in the front lot, but the sleek Studebaker, with its short hood and long trunk, was easy to spot.

  The driver’s-side door was locked; but the rider’s-side wasn’t, and with a quick look around the rather brightly lit lot, to make sure I was unseen, I opened the door and slipped into the snug backseat, shut myself in, sitting low, below the wraparound rear windows. My timing was good, because within a minute, cars began rolling in as new personnel arrived for shift change. The lot was alive with slamming car doors and coworker chatter. I kept low and waited.

  Not long: within five minutes, she exited the building with two other nurses, chit-chatting as they each withdrew keys from purses, the other two women separating off to the left and their own cars, while Maria headed right, toward me, as I spied her through the side window, from my backseat slouch. Clip-clopping in her white nurse’s heels, she came across the parking lot, the generous curves on the small frame packed into her khaki dress, overseas cap jauntily cocked, lustrous black hair pinned up.

  I ducked down onto the floor just before she got in, the dome light briefly blinding me before she shut herself in with me. Before she had started the engine, I sat up—not way up—and said softly, “Maria, stay calm, it’s me.”

  Startled, she turned, eyes wide, mouth open, and I said, “Just talk to me in the rearview mirror—I don’t want to attract attention.”

  She turned away and the blue eyes, round with alarm, stared at me from the rearview mirror. “What are you doing?”

  “Waiting for you.”

  “In the backseat?”

  “Well, we did have a date.”

  Her eyes tightened in the mirror. “Nathan, why are you in an MP uniform? You’re scaring me.”

  “Listen, I’ll go if you want me to. I’ll try to find a fence without an armed MP walking it, to climb over, and hoof it back to town. But what I want, if you’re willing, is for you to sneak me off this goddamn place; I’ll just duck down back here, or climb in the trunk—whatever makes you most comfortable.”

  “I … I think the trunk. When I go out through the gate, the guard would see you back there…. What’s going on, Nathan? Are you going to get me court-martialed?”

  “That’s a possibility,” I said, “and I’ll head for that fence if you say so,” and I filled her in on my kidnapping, up to and including my escape from the base “guesthouse.”

  She was shaking her head, and the eyes in the mirror were closed. “I told you … I told you I was putting all of us in danger. They warned me not to talk … I should never …”

  I put a hand on her shoulder. “Now, you gotta get hold of yourself, beautiful. We just don’t have time, either one of us, to have a nervous breakdown right now. Understand?”

  She swallowed, nodded.

  “You okay? Got your composure back? Why don’t you dry your eyes.”

  She got a hanky out of her purse and did.

  “All right,” I said. “Okay. Let’s see if I can fit in that trunk….”

  Some other hospital personnel on Maria’s shift—nurses, orderlies, a doctor or two—were getting their cars; we waited for a clear shot, then we got out, she opened the trunk and I crawled in—just me and a spare Goodyear, in the red blush of her taillights, a big fetus in an MP’s uniform. I heard her get back in the car, shut the door, ignition key bringing the engine to life, and the Studey had a smooth ride, as she guided the buggy down the blacktops and glided up to a stop at the front sentry.

  I heard some muffled conversation, friendly, male laughter, female laughter—some son of a bitch was flirting with my date!—and then we were moving again, more quickly. My muscles and bones ached, as if I had the flu—or maybe it had something to do with my 190 pounds being stuffed in a car’s trunk.

  In under five minutes, the Studebaker rolled to a stop. I heard her get out, and then the lid lifted and there she was, Maria, my personal nurse, framed against a starry sky that was the same color blue as those concern-filled eyes in the heart-shaped face under the cute, cocked hat. With her in my life, what was I doing dreaming about space men?

  She helped me out of the trunk, and I needed the help, my legs still rubbery, joints creaky as a rusty gate, and I found myself in the alley behind the Mission Revival-style bungalow she rented on Pennsylvania Avenue. We went in the back way and she sat me down at a Formica table in a cozy white-trimmed-red kitchen.

  “I’ll put some coffee on,” she said.

  “Please.”

  “You need anything to eat? There’s a couple kinds of sandwiches I can make you …”

  “No. No thanks.”

  Maria got the coffee going, then sat beside me; if she looked any cuter in that khaki nurse’s outfit I would have done hand-springs, or bust out crying. “They’ll be looking for you soon, Nathan.”

  I nodded. “Do you think anyone’s connected the two of us?”

  She took off her hat, tossed it on the table, began unpinning her shining black hair; her mouth glistened with bright red lipstick. “Other than Glenn, no—and he wouldn’t say a word. He’d want to protect me and, anyway, he has to do business at the base, wouldn’t want it known he gave you that information…. Oh my God!”

  She covered her mouth in horror.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Your spiral pad … your notes, my name, everyone you talked to, if they took that from your hotel room—”

  I shook my head, no, my expression reassuring. “It wasn’t in my hotel room; it’s locked in the glove compartment of the rental. I doubt th
ey’ve got it.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “If they did, we’d have company by now.”

  I put the gun on the table, where it served as a strange centerpiece; the pageboy once again brushing her shoulders, she looked at the weapon gravely.

  I said, “I need to get out of this town—this state. Look, I may still have a little time, before they find that MP, or he hobbles out of that bathroom…. I better go get my car….”

  She touched my hand. “What if they’re watching, what if they’re waiting …?”

  “I won’t go to my hotel room—I’ll just fetch my Ford, which is out in the open, in public. They grab me, I’ll make a big loud stink.” I patted the .38. “And loud noises. … I wasn’t arrested, remember—bastards kidnapped me. That’s illegal, even in New Mexico.”

  Her eyes narrowed in thought. “Have you considered going to the sheriff’s office?”

  I smirked, laughed once. “You really think I should go anywhere in Roswell, but here?” I pushed my chair away from the table, stood. “Listen, Maria, you’ve been terrific … but I don’t want to get you in a jam—I’m gonna walk over and get my car, and get outa this tinhorn town. I’m not even waiting for the noon stage….”

  Now she stood, clutched my MP’s shirtsleeve. “In that uniform? You know, they shoot spies for that…. Just wait. Have your coffee, first … I may have a better idea.”

  “Maria, I’m running out of time.”

  The coffee had stopped perking; she went over and poured me a cup. “Cream or sugar?”