by Jim Nisbet
“Oh—Steve?”
“Yeah, Marity?”
Windrow lifted the glass. “Thanks for the bump.”
“Anytime, baby.”
The last phone call went to Emmy Cohen, the lawyer. Emmy Cohen and Windrow took turns employing each other. She promised to pull strings in order to discover the terms of Sweet Jesus O’Ryan’s will. Windrow promised to call back, soon.
Then he drank the amphetamine, or methedrine, or dexadrine, or whatever it was the cocaine had been cut with, dissolved in whiskey.
The solution numbed his esophagus, loosened his bowels, and woke him up.
Now the Ford roared beneath him.
Chapter Seventeen
OUTSIDE THE FORD IN THE MOONLIT DARKNESS THE SAN Joaquin Valley flowed north, taking with it mile after mile of aqueducts, Los Banos, the Pacheco Pass, the potential site of Los Vaqueros Reservoir, the San Luis Reservoir and Forebay, sizzling power transit lines, 43% of California agriculture, the intersection where James Dean died, the stench of herbivore dung that envelopes a few cubic miles around the huge Harris Ranch feedlot at the Coalinga turnoff, gas flares, blue mercury lights and the sulphurous reek peculiar to the oil fields that dot the whole valley with increasing density until the traveler arrives in that unique oilrich pocket in the southern San Joaquin, between the westward-curving southern tip of the Sierra Nevada and the slopes of the easternmost Coastal Ranges, in western Kern County, California.
Here the traveler finds oil wells and walking beam pumps everywhere; in backyards, next to restaurants, in supermarket parking lots, in cotton fields and pastures and fruit groves, on desert flats: multiply in fields or preserved as relics, like a valued species of shade tree. In the first third of the twentieth century, California produced more oil than any other state, and a great deal of it came from the south end of the San Joaquin Valley.
It was into the vertiginous financial prospects of oil, the ruthlessness of water politics, and the dizzying manipulation of irrigable land that Edward “Sweet Jesus” O’Ryan had inserted himself by his sentimental purchase of an insignificant plot of desert in the thirties. Deepwell technology turned his innocuous purchase into a small empire. As Windrow negotiated the Buttonwillow turnoff he was mulling over the luck of old man O’Ryan, and the shortsighted willfulness of his proud bride from Philadelphia.
But Windrow had been driving at speed for almost three hours, and found himself underestimating the curve of the off ramp. He passed the 35mph sign doing better than seventy, slid sideways up to and slightly beyond the stop sign at the end of it, before he got the machine halted. Across the road stood an open gas station, empty of traffic, with a young attendant sitting bolt upright in a chair next to a pump staring in unabashed, open-mouthed admiration at Windrow’s smoking Ford. Windrow drove a crescent to the pump island, switched off the motor, and got out and stretched, wide awake.
The kid eagerly washed every window, inside and out, filled the empty tank with hi-octane solvent, and dumped two quarts of black gold into the creaking engine block. He’d checked every fluid reservoir on the car and had three tires properly inflated when Windrow returned from the telephone booth at the other end of the lot. The detective paced around the pump island, lost in thought, while the kid brought the fourth tire up to snuff, readjusted his Crane Racing Cams cap and reported in.
“You need some brake fluid, mister. Water’s ok in the battery and radiator. She took two quarts of oil and seventeen and a half gallons of gas, the right rear—”
“Put it in,” Windrow waved his hand at the car.
The kid pulled a can of brake fluid out from under the rag hanging out of the back pocket of his coveralls and topped off the reservoir, saying the while, “Also, sir, I couldn’t help but notice your fan belt squealing as you pulled across the intersection, I can take care of that for you two ways sir, though you seem to be in a hur—”
“How long’s the quick way?”
“About three seconds, sir, you just—”
“Do it.”
The kid drooled some of the brake fluid out of the can onto his fingers and pinched them around the inside circumference of the tired fan belt, rubbing it in, observing as he did so, “You handle this rig pretty good, sir, if I may say so, though I imagine she oversteers like a motherfucker—”
Windrow handed thirty dollars to the kid. “That cover it?”
Windrow was traveling faster than the kid was, who was falling far enough behind that he took the cash with the same hand that had brake fluid all over it.
“Yessir,” he said, disappointed that Windrow didn’t want to discuss driving techniques. “I’ll get your change.”
“Keep it,” Windrow said, slamming the hood. “Which way is Reward, California?”
The attendant pointed west. “Highway fifty-six to McKittrick, take the right into the hills.”
“The right?”
“There’s only one, sir.”
“Thanks for the service,” Windrow said, getting into the car. The motor started immediately. He levered the selector into low and floored the accelerator. The four-barrel carburetor moaned and the rear tires laid a long pair of loud black marks through a sliding U-turn out of the service station and onto the pavement west. The fan belt didn’t squeak.
The kid stood in the acrid blue smoke under the moths and the lights, thirty dollars and a can of brake fluid in his hand, and grinned appreciatively until the Ford’s ruby tail lights disappeared over a light rise in the night desert, about two miles away. Then he swung his fist and turned all the way around, making a fast car noise with his voice.
On the telephone, Emmy Cohen had told Windrow some very disturbing, though not unexpected news. To wit: she had discovered the terms of O’Ryan’s will.
Leaving monies to his various foundations and charitable enterprises, with generous sums remaindered to Hardpan and Sal, everything else went to Jodie.
Windrow didn’t know what to make of it. He’d thought there’d been a pattern in the slaughter; thought that there might even be reason to believe that someone had killed old man O’Ryan—although it could never be proven: Woodruff might almost wear the shirt of guilt, with a little tailoring, if he lived long enough to try it on.
Again and again his mind swerved from what most of it wanted to think. Again and again, that part of it that had brought him to his senses, sitting on the staircase of his office building, returned him to the one fact he’d withheld from Bdeniowitz, the fact he hadn’t allowed himself to admit to anyone.
After he’d stumbled over the body of Concepción Alvarez, turned on the light, examined her, searched his office and called the police, he’d gone for a drink. The ice had been in the freezer, in the top of the old refrigerator. As it had done several times in the past week, his eye drifted up to linger over the guitar case Jodie had left behind when Sal had come to get her.
This time, going for the ice had been no different. His mind was on the body on the floor behind him when, replacing the tray in the freezer, his eyes checked the top of the refrigerator. It had taken a second, maybe two, for the vacancy to register.
The instrument was gone.
Now, blazing into the tunnel in the desert night burrowed by his headlights, he felt again that tingling in his sternum that had spread to his churning stomach, causing him to harden his jaw as he stood in front of the refrigerator, the light from the icebox on his face, a corpse on the floor behind him, the sensation presaging an inevitable and terrible conclusion.
Staring into the highway illuminated by his high beams he missed the turnoff to Reward. He slammed on his brakes and, in the hundred yards it took him to stop, almost missed McKittrick. The five or six buildings McKittrick contained were completely dark, lit only by the wild swing of his headlights as he turned around and swung onto the dirt road that went toward Reward.
Gas flares threw lurid, erratic shadows into the sky above the hills around him. Clusters of lights and jets of steam appeared here and there in the de
sert, far off the road. A walking beam pump, nodding in and out of its inexorable chore to pull the oil to the surface, appeared in his lights and disappeared as he passed. He passed several others, traveling perhaps three or four miles until he came to a crossroad. He turned right, driving slowly. The road was rough; the tail of the Ford dragged after each bump. Five miles further a jeep track angled off the road to the left, skewed between him and a fenced-in pump, came back to the road again and then veered sharply to the left and disappeared into the night.
Windrow stopped the Ford and killed its lights, ignoring a pair of unblinking yellow eyes that watched him from beneath an atroplex.
Slowly, his own eyes got used to the darkness, and he found he could make out a vast arrangement of stars overhead, stretching from horizon to horizon in the north and south. Toward the west, the Temblor Range pitched a silhouette of darkness against a few degrees of sky and to the east the several oil fields diffused enough light into the dust above them to effectively obscure the starlight beyond.
When his eyes were completely adjusted, Windrow backed the Ford without lights down the jeep track and parked it on the side of the fenced pump opposite the road.
Sitting on the edge of the opened trunk, he put on an old pair of waffle-soled walking shoes, dark denim pants, a couple of heavy cotton shirts, and a canvas hunting vest.
He emptied his pockets into the trunk of the Ford, keeping only the car key, which he put into the watch pocket of the denim pants. A pocket knife, a flashlight and his .38, went into pockets, in the vest, and he closed the trunk lid.
Then he waited for a while.
The air was very cool and very clear. Watching the desert oil complexes around him, he would sometimes see fire leap out of a vertical flare pipe, like dragon breath, as it suddenly received more fuel; a couple of seconds later he would hear it. Behind him, the electric motor running the walking beam whirred quietly.
He walked around the fence until he came to a sign that hung off its gate. The moon was only a week or so past full, and it provided plenty of light for him to read
O’RYAN PETROLEUM
JODIE 9
KEEP OUT
He came back to the side of the fence against which the Ford was parked and scanned the desert to the northwest, the direction in which the jeep track disappeared, until he saw what he was looking for. The rise of the Temblors beyond made the world dark over there, but the waning moon was straight up, and Windrow could make out the silhouette of a shack against the hills.
He’d wanted to avoid using the thin jeep road, but a few minutes of walking beside it convinced him otherwise. The desert floor was continually cut by narrow gullies and washes, gravel deposits, and holes of every size and description. He knew it was too late in the year for most rattlesnakes to be awake, but a twisted knee or ankle at this stage of the game would be decidedly inconvenient. He decided to risk the jeep road and returned to it.
The shack seemed to be a few miles distant, and the jeep road didn’t go straight to it, but rather meandered from well to well in that general direction. An hour later he’d passed three more wells, Jodies 7, 5, and 4, and was squatting on his heels watching a jet, flying high and fast, north to south, when he saw lights swerve across the desert floor.
A car, driving recklessly, was making its way down the first dirt track off the Reward road. As it approached the pump behind which the Ford was hidden, Windrow thought the car was travelling so fast that it couldn’t make the turn, if it was going where he was going.
But it did. The headlights swung an arc far to the left, then too far to the right, left again, then straight, bounding up and down. The driver was definitely driving too fast for the jeep track, constantly in a controlled slide.
Though still at least a couple of miles away, Windrow slunk to a gully about fifty yards off the road and lay down in it. The short trip off the road had covered his boots and socks with foxtails. So he idly picked them out of his clothing, one by one, as he lay watching and listening.
Soon he heard the slough of tires in sand, the chassis of the car banging into its body, its rear bumper and differential bouncing off the center of the road. The bucking vehicle and its wild lights passed Windrow’s hiding place spewing sand, and wound further into the desert. It was the Chevy wagon. The same vehicle in which he had seen the woman wearing the eighth-note haircomb. He cautiously raised his head and followed its progress. Soon he could no longer hear it, only see its lights, and a while later the lights of the car swung to illuminate a fence with a beam lifting above it, a car beside the fence, the side of the building next to that, before they extinguished. A pall of dust raised by the car diffused moonlight for more than a mile back along the road from the house toward Windrow.
That would be O’Ryan’s desert home, and Windrow would want to be talking to the driver of the Chevy.
He made his way back to the road, then jogged fifty paces and walked fifty paces until, fifteen minutes later, he was within a hundred yards of the house. There he squatted behind a tall creosote bush until the pounding in his head and chest had subsided, watching the shack. The wagon sat in front of it, empty. He saw no one.
Crouching from bush to bush, .38 in hand, he made his way to the side of the pump fence. Here he paused again. Through the links in the fence, when the beam raised, he could see a chink of light between the sash of a window and whatever had been used to cover the rest of the glass. He moved to the front corner of the fence and looked at the windows of the house facing the porch. These too, had been masked from within, and only some small bits of light escaped through holes or cracks.
Between the house and the pump stood a venerable Cadillac. All its tires were flat. Windrow made his way to the side of the car away from the house.
In the porch yard, the Chevy Wagonaire waited. Both front doors stood open, and its cooling motor snapped and creaked.
Silently, Windrow made his way to the quarter panel on this car, getting a look at its license plate on his way by. California, GUSH.
Windrow hesitated. Two open doors on the car indicated that there could be at least two people inside the house. Of course, the driver might have been by himself, and merely unloaded something from the right side.
He thought he should wait to see what developed, as he worked his crouch around the outside of the car, around the front end, to the edge of the porch. Yes, that probably was what he should do. Better judgment would indicate that the operative should just wait and see what happened. He took a step onto the porch. He could take one or two people as they came out the door, if he were in the right position, somewhere on the other side of the Chevrolet, for instance. Or he could wait around the side of the building.
He was three steps onto the porch and just two steps from turning the door knob with his free hand when the door opened wide.
Windrow was flooded in light. He squinted and lunged low into the man who had opened the door. The man had been backing out of the house, and he screamed. Windrow grabbed his left arm and twisted it high up between the man’s shoulder-blades and yanked him backwards, through the door onto the porch. As he did this he yelled Freeze! Into the man’s ear, as loudly as he could, ran his gun arm between the man’s right arm and body, and jammed the muzzle of his pistol hard into the hollow between the man’s jaw hinge and his neck. All of this caused the man to involuntarily pull the door, which opened inward, toward him, as Windrow pulled him back. Windrow hadn’t wanted that. Using his leverage on the man’s twisted arm, Windrow pushed him forward, so that the man’s face smashed against the closing door and pushed it open again, the door swung wide to the left, banged against the wall upon which it was hinged.
They stood there, in the doorway. By now Windrow knew that the man shaking in his arms was Woodruff, but he had a little more trouble with the other person in the room. He could tell it was a woman, because her clothes were in shreds, and the straight–backed chair she was tied into was facing him, and the only light in the room was a l
amp on a table in the corner in front of her, but it seemed like a long time before he realized that, properly rearranged, the swollen and suppurating features on her motionless face would spell Jodie Ryan.
He put all his strength into kicking Manny Woodruff toward a stuffed easy chair, and all his artifice into twisting the arm as he released it, so that it dislocated the shoulder. But it was the shotgun blast from the front door, beside Windrow’s ear, the gun behind him, that carried Woodruff over the chair and crashing into the bookcases beyond. Two stout arms expertly landed the barrels of the shotgun on the point of Windrow’s right shoulder, numbing his entire right arm. The blow sent his .38 twirling after Woodruff in the yellow lamplight, and the boot planted in Windrow’s back sprawled him against the same chair over which poor Woodruff had died in midair.
Silence.
“Sit down,” somebody said. Windrow hadn’t fallen over the chair, but used his good arm to stop himself. He caught a glimpse of Woodruff, splayed and dead in the shadows under a heap of paperback books, cinder blocks, and board shelving, and a violent odor assailed his nostrils. The arms and legs jutted from the corpse at angles never seen on a live human, there was blood and exposed meat. Windrow, the small hairs on the back of his neck uncurling, righted the chair. Then he slowly turned around.
It might have been a man, who faced him. It dressed like one. Western leisure suit, light green with bright magenta piping that made double vees over the shoulders and breast pockets, nacre buttons on the jacket and shirt, matching green bootcut pants over the expensive, polished but scuffed boots, an olive short-brim Stetson and a very white silk kerchief around the neck, knotted at the throat, it all gave the general appearance of a particular style of manhood, though the brows and lashes of the grey eyes evidenced extraordinary care; but the silver hair, the subtlest hint of bluish tinge and further extraordinary attention showing as it cascaded from the hatsize to the shoulders, where it curled inward toward the neck and upward again before it stopped, trimmed and coiffed just so, indicated a meticulous femininity to Windrow, in spite of the shotgun.