Poker is an amusement. A pastime. I play it professionally for the same reason Jackie Robinson played baseball and Bobby Fischer played chess.
No one is forced to sit down at the table, and those who choose to do so risk only money.
But the game played out at the main intersection of this town had involved far more important stakes, and neither the winnings nor the losses could be computed entirely on a spreadsheet.
Farewell had lost something of value. Something indefinable but deeply rooted in those notions of trust and neighborliness that are the whole basis of community in the parts of America that do not echo to the melody of steel canyons and concrete arroyos. A bank is a bank is a bank, and no one sheds a tear for the banker, no matter where he plies his trade. Considered as function, the role of the urban financier and his rural counterpart alike is to provide the pecuniary lubricant that enables the wheels of commerce and industry to roll. Without this contribution they grind to a halt. And mistrust, even in very small doses, has much the same effect on the operation of this financial machine as a handful of Carborundum in the bearings of a dynamo.
Trouble comes when this basic role is either forgotten or removed, even temporarily, from its paramount position among priorities. Bankers get rich enough in the normal course of affairs; impatience leads to error and error to disaster. Reality has no more sympathy for greedy optimism among bankers than it does for the same fault among poker players.
J. J. Barlow’s bank had survived. Indeed, according to Dee Tee Price’s information, it had even managed to make good its early reverses through adroit management of the opposition’s ill fortune. Yet the coup could not have made him happy.
I had met the legless banker only once, but much of that encounter had been spent at a poker table—and there is no better way of forming an accurate assessment of a man’s inner landscape. He was a willing and aggressive competitor. Barlow wanted it all, and he would try to get it all. But the tenor of his play, and of our conversation afterward, had shown me a man of clear perceptions and understandings, one who would value the game for itself even while bending every effort to win.
Such a man would be more likely than most to appreciate the nature of his responsibilities in a town like Farewell.
Which made it all the more difficult for me to understand how he had been able to rationalize some of the things that I knew, or suspected, about him. Especially the sudden rupture of relations with the late Orrin Prescott.
And that made no sense…
But I never got to tell myself why it didn’t make sense, for suddenly I had something else to think about.
The traffic light that had given me the time for reverie changed to green, and the little car was already in motion when a momentary flare of light near the rear of the Citizens National Bank building brought my head swiveling around at full emergency speed. Having one eye can be a literal pain in the neck.
A door had opened and closed back there.
Waiting for the light, I had spotted J. J. Barlow’s state-of-the-art Corniche parked under a streetlight at the curb just outside the ramp-equipped side door of the bank building, and when the door opened I had fully expected to catch a glimpse of the man himself. But no wheelchair emerged from the building, and there was no one visible on the street.
Obviously, then, someone had gone in, not out, and the sight of a sheriff’s patrol car parked unobtrusively just down the block from the bank fostered a sudden urge to make three right turns and park on that same street.
It was ridiculous, of course. Also sneaky and stupid. Besides, I was in a hurry to get back to the phone in my motel room and find out what Mistah Dee Tee Price had discovered.
But I made the three turns and parked my car, switched off its lights, and settled back to get accustomed to the dim light.
That’s always been a weakness of mine.
During the early stages of a game, I can seldom seem to resist the chance to pay for a look at another player’s hole cards.
I waited in the darkness for nearly an hour.
Poker teaches patience.
And when Vollie Manion finally came back out of the bank and got into his car and drove away, I was about a block behind.
Following Vollie Manion was even stupider than waiting around to spy on him.
He had already shown an unhealthy fondness for beating the hell out of me. Taking the chance of giving him another—bigger and better—reason for indulging that taste was about as sensible as feeding caramels to a grizzly bear. But I couldn’t seem to get my foot off the accelerator.
At first, he seemed to be cruising at random, turning corners when he felt like it and occasionally doubling back on his tracks, but it didn’t take me long to see that he had a purpose. The deputy was trying to avoid the very thing that was happening to him. Trying to be sure of shaking off any possible pursuit.
The realization raised a regimen of questions.
The patrol car he was driving had the appearance of a standard black-and-white, with regulation decals on the doors and the usual light bar clamped to the top. But the sound of its engine and the quickness of its response from a standing start told me it was probably the sheriff’s department’s special pursuit vehicle. Most southwestern law enforcement agencies have them. They justify the expense as a necessary measure for control of illegal street racers. But the truth is that lots of people like to drive a really powerful car now and then, and back-road sheriffs are no exception. I wondered if Ybarra knew his deputy was driving the hot wheels tonight, and I wondered if Vollie was on duty or just doing a little street prowling on his own time. I would have paid good money to be able to tune in to the local law enforcement net for just a few minutes.
But I couldn’t spare much time for wishing. As soon as I understood the purpose of his erratic course and speed, I began a series of countermeasures intended to make Vollie think he had succeeded, running through a series of such fun maneuvers as stopping at the curb and turning off my lights to let the patrol car gain a block or so before pulling out into the street again, or turning into a side road to make a quick U-turn that brought me back into his wake at a distance that would not mark me as a constant follower.
The little car that had performed so indifferently when matched against a pickup truck earlier in the day turned out to be well adapted to this kind of work, even to its paint job. Fiery red in daylight, it showed up as black under the amber glow of Farewell’s sodium streetlights, offering me just the extra edge of anonymity I needed.
We kept at it, the patrol car leading and me following at the most erratic pace I could manage while still keeping the other car in sight, for nearly twenty minutes before Vollie finally seemed satisfied that he was alone and unremarked in the night world, and cut left to the highway leading out of town in the general direction of the Prescott Helicopters operation.
This presented another kind of problem: There were no side streets and no places to park. But there was darkness—street lighting stopped short at the city limits—and there was other traffic to mingle with and hide behind. Besides, it turned out that we weren’t going far.
Less than a mile beyond the Now Leaving Farewell, Come Back Soon! sign, Vollie’s high-powered car swerved left through oncoming traffic and bumped to a stop on the sand and gravel apron of what appeared to be a crossroads garage I’d noticed in passing earlier in the day. It was an all-night affair, apparently, and so were several places nearby.
I drove past them without changing speed or turning my head, but cut right a moment later to swing the little skate past a line of cars parked beside a peeling white stucco roadside establishment whose bulb-lighted tin sign proclaimed it Lupe’s Famous / Food * Beer * Music.
The music was easily audible even before I killed my engine.
And I could smell the beer.
Here was Farewell’s answer to Broadway and the Sunset Strip—proof positive that sleaze is where you find it.
Lupe, I was told much later, wa
s not a short form of Guadalupe, but the family surname (originally Lupidischikoff) of the man who had homesteaded a section of thin grassland here nearly a century earlier. Lupe had failed at farming, failed at ranching, failed at oil prospecting, and had been about to burn his sod shanty to the ground and strike out for California when the state decided to put a two-lane highway through the land. That gave him an idea.
He set up an old-fashioned gravity-feed gasoline pump he had found in Amarillo—some said he had stolen it from a man who died there under mysterious circumstances, but nothing was ever proved—and put out the word that he was a European-trained specialist in the repair and maintenance of all manner of motorcars.
Local people knew it was a ghastly lie, of course. Lupe had a hard time just getting his pump to work. But out-of-towners sometimes fell for it, and over the years he actually did acquire a rough working knowledge of the internal combustion engine and its various ailments.
Meanwhile, he married a Farewell girl—her pistol-toting father was determined to attend either a wedding or a funeral that day, and practical-minded Lupe opted for the wedding—and put her to work in a second business, a café that he set up across the road from the garage.
Call it symbiosis: Gas-and-repair customers could always expect their work to take long enough for them to consume a full meal. Plus extras. While hungry motorists who stopped there seemed frequently to need the services of a qualified mechanic to get their cars started again, and better-dressed wayfarers might even find their vehicles in such bad shape as to warrant spending the night in one of the tourist cabins / Clean * Reasonable that sprang up beside the café.
It was a good, full life, and Lupe enjoyed it hugely until his sons were old enough to join their mother in a lawsuit that put the old man in a rest home “for his own protection and conservation.”
He died not long afterward, but the family continued to operate his crossroad enterprises for several decades before dry rot finally set in. Time changes all things, and one of the things it changed about Farewell was the route of the main road. The four-lane state highway that had brought prosperity to Lupe’s garage, café, and cabins was now a minor county thoroughfare, and the various businesses located on it had been obliged to adapt to their altered circumstances.
By the time I saw it, a little gasoline was still being sold at the garage—the old gravity pump stood empty between two slightly newer Wayne electrics—but its main income was from renting space and tools to adolescent do-it-yourself mechanics who met there to tune and rebuild their Saturday-night wheels.
The café still sold a little food, but the kitchen was permanently closed by order of the county health department. Everything now came from a freezer via a microwave located behind the bar. The biggest seller was beer—spiked, for a fee, with white lightning—and a large share of the gross was from those few electronic games that could be kept working.
Doctors did well on the tetanus injections and suturing inevitably associated with such an establishment.
And cabins rented by the hour.
I parked the little red skate out of sight and walked slowly toward the front while looking for a place where I could see the garage without standing in full view.
It was easy to find. One of the few holdovers from the café’s years of prosperity was an outdoor telephone booth bolted to the side of the building next to the pothole-and-gravel parking lot. It was a technological antique, relic of a day when phone companies cared enough about their customers to protect them from the elements. Two panes of glass were missing from the bottom of the old booth, and the door had suffered some mishap that made it hard to close. A chain that had once protected the telephone directory now ended an inch from its mooring, and the light socket at the top of the booth was empty.
But the telephone itself was in working order, and no one would be surprised to see someone making a call, no matter how long it seemed to take.
Wedged inside and resting my weight warily on the rickety seat, I had a near-perfect view of the garage—and immediately found myself looking at familiar objects. And people.
One of the recognizable objects was a motor vehicle. Vollie Manion’s overpowered patrol car was in one of the work stalls. The hood was up and the sound of a power drill at work occasionally managed to muscle its way past the raucous country-and-western beat emanating from the café. A pair of overalled legs protruded from the engine compartment of the cruiser, but the angle was wrong for me to see whom they belonged to.
Also familiar was a pickup truck that sat forlorn and leaning heavily in what I decided was a meditative pose beside two other wrecks in the lot next to the garage. The driver’s door and tailgate seemed to be missing, and the nose was bashed in; only two wheels remained, and one of those seemed to be rather loosely attached, but I had no doubt at all that it was the same unfortunate vehicle that had chased me down a lonely road on the other side of town a few hours earlier. Nobody else appeared to be much interested in it now, but I was at least mildly pleased to note that there seemed to be no major bloodstains around the cab. Always struck me as wasteful to kill someone by chance or error.
And here was Deputy Vollie Manion himself, emerging from the garage. Lounging in front of the office, hands in hip pockets and a beer-heavy sneer on his face, was Harold, the fledgling thug who had turned out to be so talkative after I offered to remove one of his eyes on my first early morning in Farewell.
He offered some brief remark as the tall deputy started across the road, and Vollie didn’t seem to like it.
Or maybe Vollie was just in a bad mood.
Whatever the motive, reaction was swift and effective. Vollie turned with more speed than I would have expected in a man his size and brought his knee up hard into Harold’s crotch, while seizing the front of his shirt in one of those peculiarly undersized hands. The youngster’s feet left the ground and his eyes widened as the deputy brought his face close and said something that couldn’t have been audible five feet away, but appeared to have the desired effect on the listener.
When Vollie let the youngster go, he dropped to the ground in a crouching attitude, nursing his groin.
The overall-clad mechanic who had been at work on the cruiser had emerged from the repair bay to watch the fun, and I was interested to see that this did, indeed, seem to be old home week. Lighting was poor and our last meeting, in the parking lot at the country club, had been a brief one, but the grubby splint of his right wrist identified him positively as the knife-wielding druggie who had initially seemed so insensitive to pain.
I sat still in the phone booth and wondered.
I wondered how well and how long those three had known one another.
I wondered if their conversation had anything to do with their erstwhile compadre, Greenteeth—a.k.a. Boo—and how his pickup truck had managed to get itself into such deplorable condition.
I wondered how competent good ol’ Vollie Manion, the sometime helicopter door gunner, might be with a .30-06 sniper rifle, and if he went in for loading his own ammunition for greater accuracy. The notion didn’t seem to fit, for some reason, but it was certainly worth a question. Or two.
But wondering is dull work when you don’t get any answers.
I watched the three drift back inside the garage, their earlier difficulties apparently forgotten, and I wondered what possible good it could do me to go on sitting in the cold. Nothing more to see, and always the chance of being spotted if I kept hanging around there. I roused myself, keeping a close eye on the garage as I began to move out of my improvised hidey-hole…and got just the right amount of emotional advance warning to brace my right leg against the base of the booth and swing my right hand in a blunted lance to the midsection of the man who was moving in so quietly from the back of the parking lot.
The air went out of his lungs in a great huff of surprise, and his eyes lost focus, but the spring-handled blackjack he had swung at my head continued right on course, knocking a fair splinter of wood out o
f the door.
I hit him two more times—one left-handed hammer blow directly over the heart and a kite to the exposed nerve just below the nose—and he went down without another sound, mouth open and eyes lolling far back into the skull.
It was Greenteeth.
A six-pack of Coors on the ground beside him explained the errand that had kept him apart from his friends across the road, and how he’d been able to get so close without my feeling his wa behind me. A certain level of intoxication, even from a mild but long-standing beer drunk, tends to cloak the emotions.
But there was no time for philosophy.
A quick glance around the area assured me that our little set-to had not been observed. All the same, there was a good chance that someone would be driving by or coming out of the café at any time. And Boo’s buddies would miss him—or the beer they’d sent him for—after a while. The newly vacated telephone booth seemed to be as good a hiding place as any, and I bent over the recumbent form to grasp it under the armpits.
His hat fell off while I was wrestling him into the booth, and I was pleased to see that our little meeting out on the road near Pemberton’s home office hadn’t been entirely without penalty. The coarse wavy hair at the side of his head was matted with long-dried blood, and his ear had been bandaged after some mishap or other. I wondered if there had been any internal damage, and surprised myself by hoping that there had not. Greenteeth’s attempt to muscle me off the road hadn’t been his own idea, any more than had our original encounter at the country club.
A doctor at the hospital where Dee Tee and I spent time after they sent us back to the world told me once that a man can rarely remember events immediately preceding sudden trauma resulting in unconsciousness. No time for the permanent memory to function, he said. I hoped he was right as I stuffed the unconscious form into the booth and made sure he was solidly perched on the seat. I wrapped his hand around the telephone receiver, snatched up the hat and clamped it on his head with the brim over the eyes, and shoved the six-pack out of sight beside his feet.
The Preacher Page 19