AMayhar - The Conjure

  * * * *

  Lena opened her eyes and stared into darkness. She could hear the breathing of her guest in the bedroom, the light thud of Lone's tough old heart, the creaking of aged boards, and the whisper of shrubbery outside her warped windows. Nothing troubled the land around her home.

  Had she reached Choa's sleeping mind? she wondered. But she could only wait and see.

  CHAPTER XV. An Unlikely Persimmon

  Choa woke in the middle of the night with a feeling that there was something he needed to do. He tried to think of what it might be, but nothing came to mind. He'd settled the drug question for good and all, he knew. Nothingever came out of that sinky hole.

  The boy Wim was safely back home—Choa had followed secretly to make certain of it. Wim was tough and smart, but there were things going on in the bottomlands that might be dangerous for a child, so Choa made sure, without giving the boy any sign that he was behind him.

  What else could there be? Still, something brought him up from his pallet of dead leaves and set him moving, well before the star patterns reached their midnight position. He'd learned long ago to follow his hunches, for they were too often important and accurate.

  He even knew which direction to take—he was heading for the creek where he had first hidden the ice chest. His legs, still strong for all his sixty years, covered the ground at a rapid rate, cutting across loops of the meandering streams, using deer trails that went the way he wanted. By midnight he found himself following the narrow branches that were the upper reaches of the stream above the gator hole.

  When he came to the wider part, where the big bend and the eddy had hidden the chest for a while, he realized that only one alligator was resting on the low bank. Two more lurked at the edge of the water. The rest? He looked around very carefully, for his control depended upon subtle signals that were not useful in the dark.

  Slipping along with all the skill he had learned from his father and grandfather, Possum Choa scouted out the area along the creek bank. Crouching low, he checked the treetops; lying flat along the ground, he surveyed the surface of the forest floor for suspicious lumps.

  He spotted the man in the huge persimmon tree mainly because he had found Wim up in a tree, earlier. Once he knew where the man was, he also understood where some of the alligators were likely to be. Easing backward, he came to the higher edge of the creek and checked about for something heavy.

  A pine knot came beneath his groping fingers, and he sighed with satisfaction. Pulling it free of the clinging dirt and threadlike roots of vines, he hefted it, found a clear area through which to fling it, and pitched it into the deeper water. It hit with a solid splash, the sort a leaping fish might make if it rose for a late-night meal. The gators by the pool began to move.

  Choa heard a rustling, grunting, slithering sound as the gators around the persimmon tree roused and turned toward the sound of potential food. He pulled himself up onto a sweetgum trunk that angled outward over the creek and watched as the waiting gators returned to their regular habits.

  When the last had passed, he moved down the tree and sped toward the unlikely persimmon he had discovered. His arrival came as a shock, it was clear, to the man who was just dropping to the ground when he got there.

  Then everything became clear to Choa. In the confetti of moonlight drifting through the overarching branches, he saw and recognized the face of the man in the boat.

  "Well, Mr. Oscar Parmelee,” he said. “I've been waiting to meet you. Seems as if you left something down here in my country that you want mighty bad."

  Parmelee turned toward him, his scratched face pale and filled with hope. “You found it?” He sank to sit on the ground, as if his knees had given way. “You the one who located my stash? What'd you do with it? I'll pay big money to get that back."

  "Oh, I wouldn't take money, even if I still had the stuff,” Choa said. “Would you like to see where it went?"

  Parmelee pulled himself upright, using the tree trunk for help. “How far?” he asked. “I been in that tree half the day and all the night, so far. My hips and butt are about wore out with sitting on that skinny limb."

  Then he looked up, alarmed. “What you mean, if you still had it?” His voice was shaky, on the edge of going shrill.

  "You'll see,” Choa said. “You want to go now, or you want to rest a while? It'll be easier in the daylight."

  Parmelee looked warily toward the creek. “I'd just as soon move away from here, over into the woods. Then I could use some rest, flat on my back with no alligators starin’ up at me."

  Possum Choa grinned until his cheeks felt likely to split. Finding this killer helpless in the woods was better luck than he'd ever dreamed of having.

  CHAPTER XVI Setting Up a Messenger

  Choa roused Parmelee as soon as there was enough light to walk by. Scratched and bruised, hungry and worried, the drug pusher grumbled a bit before he got himself together enough to travel.

  Choa paused, as the sun rose, and tickled a couple of big perch out of their morning doze. Skewered on sweetgum rods and crisped quickly over a small fire, they provided enough breakfast to keep his captive going.

  He intended to show Oscar Parmelee exactly where his precious stuff was hidden. Then he'd let him go out and tell whoever he wanted to. Parmelee would be hard-put to find the sinky-hole again; even if he did there was no way to plumb its depths without draining several thousand square acres of swamp and bottomland.

  If the pusher returned with some of those for whom he worked, that would be all right, too. People sometimes came into the swamp and never went out again.

  The two wandered for miles around the deer paths and the spring branches, the creek meanderings and the loops of the river. By the time they came over the ridge above the sinky-hole, Parmelee was staggering with exhaustion, but he was hanging on, evidently thinking he was about to recover his stash.

  The thought made Choa want to laugh, but he suppressed the urge as he led his flagging companion down the slight slope to the tangle of briers that was the nearer edge of the morass. When Parmelee stumbled to a halt beside him, Choa pointed into the middle of the thick gray-green mess before them.

  "I put it in there, in the hole behind the briers. Nothing has ever come out of that bog in all the years my folks have lived here. Every twenty or thirty years it turns, something about the swamp gas does that, I think, and bones of deer and cows and men and petrified logs and all sorts of things roll up and over and down again.

  "Maybe in a couple of decades you might come back and camp out here to wait. But that ice chest isgone , as far as the here and now goes."

  The man dropped to his knees, staring in despair at the gluey mess. “It wasn't just the drugs,” he whimpered. “That would be bad enough. But they smuggled in somethin’ really valuable—more than the million or so the pure cocaine would bring—that the Big Boss wanted mighty bad. Diamonds, I think it might be. Or maybe parts for a nuclear bomb. And it's all lost!"

  He turned to Choa as he rose, and there was murder in his red-rimmed eyes. But the Indian had slid away silently and swiftly, and now he watched from a clump of sawvines as Parmelee blundered about the edge of the hole, probing with a dead branch he had scavenged.

  Nodding quietly, Choa realized that it might be a good thing to let Parmelee find his own way out. Although he had no intention of doing anything specific or personal to those who might return with Parmelee, he also had a deep sense of the realities of this country.

  The swamp was totally unforgiving. A bunch of townies who couldn't find their way out of their own back yards could easily wander around in circles until they lay down and died of pure discouragement. Which, once he thought about it, was a pretty fair and just way for them to go.

  So when Parmelee began his attempt to get back to roads and people and all the things he understood and could deal with, Choa was there, leaving traces that even such a purblind idiot could follow. Only when he gained the unmistakable paths along the big
creek that ended at the river did Choa give up his surveillance and turn his weary steps toward home and his own familiar pallet bed.

  It would take Parmelee a long time to bumble his way to the nearest pull-out where a dirt road ended at the river, even if he turned right instead of left at the bigger stream. It would take even longer for him to convince those he worked for that he was telling the truth. Once he did that, he might be held responsible and killed for the loss of whatever treasure accompanied the drugs in that ice chest. The thought didn't bother Choa a bit.

  If someone came back to search, Choa would know. It wasn't only old Lena who had watchers in the woods.

  * * * *

  It had tickled the life out of Sheriff Cole when August Rambard and his sidekick came skiting back into Templeton, tight-lipped, unwilling to talk about their visit to Lena McCarver. They assured him that they had all the information they needed and left without even stopping to eat lunch.

  He'd been chuckling over that for a couple of days when the cell-phone rang in his official car. He cursed softly as he turned the thing on. He had intended to disconnect it, because it seemed that only those he didn't want to hear from used it when they wanted to get in touch.

  As he feared, it was Harland Fielding. “We've got a problem,” the man began, without even the pretense of courtesy. “One of our people” ... by that Cole had a shrewd idea he meant Oscar Parmelee ... “has located our property down in the swamps. We need help in getting it out—sounds as if it's sunk in a bog down there."

  Ransome Cole knew that this was make or break time. If he went along with this ridiculous assumption that he was in the pockets of Fielding and his boss, he would never be his own man again. Even if it meant danger for himself or his wife, he had to make a stand now.

  "Harland,” he said in his most peaceable tone, “I don't give a pile of dog shit whether you ever find those drugs or not. And if it's Parmelee who told you about ‘em, you better either turn him in or get him out of my county before my deputy can get over there. You hear me?"

  A second of stunned silence followed his words, and he felt a surge of well being fill his overweight body. Whatever happened, he'd taken his life out of their dirty hands. If it came down to it, he'd shoot Harland Fielding down without a second thought and know he'd done a good thing for everybody he served. There came a click as Fielding hung up.

  Ranse punched in the number of his office. When Myra answered, he said, “You get Philips over to the Holiday Inn where Harland Fielding lives. Tell him to watch his step and take Steve Goddard down with him in another car.

  "Call Wash Shipp and fill him in—he might want to help. I'm going to be out of town tonight—keep that under wraps, unless somebody really needs to know."

  Next he called his sister-in-law down at Noonan, seventy miles south. “Ellen? I need to get Mae out of town for a while,” he said. “You want to come up and get her, or should I bring her down myself?"

  "What're you up to, Ranse?” came the quick reply. Ellen Gooding had known him for a lot of years and knew him better than it was comfortable to think about.

  "I turned over a new leaf, El,” he replied. “I'm goin’ after some of the big baddies here in Templeton, and I don't want Mae in the line of fire. I just told off Harland—you ‘member old bad-ass Harland Fielding?"

  He heard her quick gasp of comprehension. There were no flies on Ellen Gooding, that was certain.

  "I'll come get her. Be there before dark, if you can put me up for the night."

  He thought for a moment. “I'll meet you at Lewton, halfway. I don't really want either one of you to spend tonight in the house. I intend to ... go somewhere else, myself."

  He almost let his plan out, but just in time it occurred to him that if others could tap into his computer system in the jail and courthouse they could tap his telephone, too. He didn't quite know how cell-phones worked, but even the possibility of leaking his plan was something to avoid.

  He heard a quick indrawing of breath at the other end of the line. “That bad?” she asked.

  "I can't say for sure and certain, but I been knowin’ that boy for more than forty years, and I don't intend to take a chance on him. He's mean clear through to the bone; you know it very well. I'll meet you at Cal's Drive-in in Lewton at about five-thirty, if you think you can make it by then."

  "I'll probably be waiting for you, Ranse. You know how much I care about my little sister. If you're that worried about her, I'm worried twice as much. You get there. I'll be sitting in my car drinking coffee."

  With a sigh of relief, Cole turned toward the courthouse and his parking space. He'd get Myra to have somebody put his official car in the county lot. There was no way he wanted to take Mae off in something as easily identified as the marked car.

  His four-year-old blue Ford looked just like about a thousand other cars in town, and for the first time he appreciated that. Sticking up like a sore thumb was, he realized for the first time, a good way to get your head knocked off.

  He got back into Templeton about eight-thirty that night and turned into the next street over from Hawthorn, where his house was. He'd had the folks at Cal's pack him some sandwiches and fill his coffee thermos.

  He kept a blanket and sleeping bag in the Ford, but it was too hot to think about those. If he lay down he'd go to sleep, anyway, and tonight he intended to stay wide awake.

  He crept through shrubbery between property lines, crossing the back yard that abutted his own. Spotty, the huge Dalmatian there, knew him, of course. He only wagged his tail and found a more comfortable position in his dog-house, as Ranse tiptoed to the privet-lined chain-link fence between the properties and peered out through the thick foliage.

  The light he'd left on in Mae's room lit the viburnum bushes outside her window, and its glow, filtering down the hallway, shone softly through the glass of the back door. He'd planned to have as much light as made sense, in order to seem natural and to see anybody who might be lurking around the place. He'd left the front porch light on, too.

  So far, he seemed to be the only one doing any lurking. He drifted around to the Reynoldses’ side yard, where a thick bunch of japonica made good cover. He lay flat and crawled into the bushes, pleased that he could still move so silently.

  From that position, he could see the front door, well lit. The side door was directly opposite him, lit by the street lamp at the end of the Reynolds drive, and he could also see the back door, where the glow of Mae's lamp would make anyone approaching it quite visible.

  He might spend a miserable night watching a house where nothing was going to happen, but he knew he could never have gone blithely in and slept, after hearing the note in Fielding's voice and that ominous silence after he made his stand.

  There were unsolved killings in his county that he was morally certain could be laid at that man's door. Friends or enemies were all one to that redneck! Thank God he'd never taken money from Fielding. The favors he had done had been more like insurance that nothing bad would happen to him or Mae.

  He settled down, chin on fist, waiting with the patience of an old deer hunter, while the night ticked away on his Timex. From time to time a car would pass, and most of those he recognized. First came Sam Dutton, going to his job on the swing shift at the foundry. Much later it was Elizabeth Stafford, coming home from her seven-to-three shift at the hospital.

  It was the car he didn't recognize that roused him to full alertness. That one was a nondescript gray Chevy with patches of rust on its fenders. Its engine, however, was quiet. That in itself was suspicious.

  It paused beside the curb thirty yards up the street. Then it came on, and he could just see someone walking along beside it, stooped so he wouldn't be seen by anyone glancing out of a window. Once level with Cole's front door, the vehicle stopped, and the walker raced up the walk and flung something against the door; it hit with a loud thump.

  He was fast, but Cole had made it a habit to note appearances, and he thought he could i.d.
the man if he saw him again. Tall and skinny, he ran as if he had something wrong with his right leg. His hair flashed pale under the street lamp—blond or maybe going gray. He had the longest arms Ranse had ever seen on anybody.

  Then he was back in the car and it was racing down the street, the men inside now unworried by any noise it might make. Ranse laid his face on his folded arms and waited. In about the time it would have taken him to reach the door from his bedroom, there came a blast of noise. Even with his face covered he could see a blinding flash of light.

  Then he shot out of the japonicas and pounded on Mack Reynolds's back door. “Mack! Call the fire department. Call the police! They just bombed my house!” he shouted, before jumping over the low hedge into his own yard.

  The garden hose was connected, as always in the fall, to keep Mae's chrysanthemums watered. He turned it on full and hauled its length into the window of Mae's sewing room, which was already filling with smoke. He dragged the hose farther, keeping its stream directed at the open door into the living-room.