The Runaway Man: A dying man, a dying world, a child to be saved

by Steven Hardesty

  THE RUNAWAY MAN

  by Steven Hardesty

  A dying man

  A dying world

  A child to be saved

  Historical Thriller

  The Runaway Man

  Copyright © 2015 by Steven Hardesty

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from Steven Hardesty.

  For more thrillers, visit the author’s website at

  http://www.stevenhardesty.com

  Cover by James at GoOnWrite.com

  Cover image by iStock.com

  STEVENS & MARLIN PUBLISHING, LLC

  Sarasota, Florida

  Version 20150220

  An evil man is his own enemy

  and wherever he may go

  he can never escape the grasp

  of his enemy’s vengeance.

  – Sa’adi, Golistan

  Iran – 1978

  Patchway scrambled across the desert sand into the shadow of the wrecked car, cracked open the revolver and counted the remaining cartridges. Three of them. That was all he had. His fingers shook like a drunk’s as he wiped hot sand from the cylinder and closed up the pistol and waited for the killer.

  Saifallah came running up over the hill firing his automatic. Bullets pounded into the car where Patchway huddled. Metal fragments spattering off the car drove into Patchway’s face and chest. He jerked back from the spray and a bullet tore through the fender and into him. Patchway was flung flat in the car’s shadow. Good God, is it over so soon?

  He felt sudden pain in his leg. He wanted to scream. It was not like the ache of the poison in his stomach. It was as though his leg had been ripped off.

  He dropped the pistol and put his hands around the wound to close up the flesh and end the pain but the wound was too big. Gigantic.

  He had been crouching and the bullet had entered beside his knee and driven up his thigh and exited at his hip. Blood! He had never seen so much blood come out of a man who was not going to be dead.

  Patchway tore apart his shirt for a tourniquet. He used more cloth to stuff the long wound. When that hectic activity was done, he lay back in the dirt, sweating and gasping, his hands clutching the other pain in his poisoned stomach.

  Bone? Had the bullet broken any bone? He pulled off his shoe and wiggled his toes. Good. If he could do that, the bone was whole or enough of it was whole for him to hobble. He almost laughed he was so happy to see his toes wiggle.

  But he could not crouch anymore. He could not bend the ruined leg. He could not hide and he could not escape. The runaway man had come to the end of his run. The child was over there hidden in the tower of the crumbling mud brick fortress with the killer Saifallah hunting for him.

  Patchway had to finish this before he bled to death.

  Chapter 1

  Tehran – Two Years Earlier

  Through the alcoholic buzz in his ears Patchway heard the first applause of the morning like the distant popping of balloons or machineguns.

  He tested his belly scar – okay – and sat up in bed, listening to the crinkle and creak of thick scar tissue. The war had done that to him, that old war he wanted not to remember. But he would be all right today. He had to be all right.

  Patchway knocked a cockroach from the plate laid over the top of his glass of last night’s vodka. He drank down the Persian vodka with a sobering seltzer tablet.

  Glynda Heater lay stiffly in bed beside him, her breast barely rising in respiration. The blood had run out of her cheeks until she was nearly the color of the sheets. Paler than the color of her pale blonde hair, the reason she was followed in the avenues by men and boys. Until they saw her blue hex eyes.

  Patchway touched her gently. She moved in her sleep. Her hex eyes opened an instant but she did not wake. He heard another shout of applause. His having a woman like this at the end of the world was a marvel to him. But he had to be all right.

  He reached under the bed for the big revolver and tossed it clattering into a drawer and kicked it shut. There was still anger in him, and too much of the old savage hunger. Still nightmares of balloons and machineguns.

  The stone floor was cold under his feet and reeked of gasoline polish. He swept warm socks from the kerosene heater and put them on. His feet were the only part of him not naked, not cold, not lit with the tang of her bed perfume.

  Patchway stood in the darkened room and listened to the morning clatter of camel hooves on the cobbles outside, the hammer of a car engine starting up, the milkman pushing his cart howling his prices.

  Patchway parted the heavy velvet drapes and looked out into the alley. Morning light was thin and clear. Above buildings with antique French grilles, sandblasted by desert winds, he saw the Alborz Mountains, black then white and red as the sun rose on the volcanos.

  Beyond Tehran and its desert and past the volcanos was the tropical north of silk worms and jungle along the Caspian Sea. Above the sea was the old Russian enemy that was making Patchway rich.

  Countries are like Slinky toys running downstairs – they stretch, rattle, pop! contract. Stretch. Rattle. Pop! Contract. This country, once called Persia and full of striding kings and arrogant mullahs, had stretched and rattled down into a place now called Iran, a glorious gold mine filled with the greediest of the world’s greedy men and women. They were making too much money too fast to think about Slinky toys.

  Patchway thought about toys and watched for the first telltale of the contraction sure to come. Then he would jump to another gold mine, in Indonesia, perhaps, or Chile. There are plenty of gold mines in the world, he knew, and he could make money in any of them, if he could survive their stretch, rattle, pop! contract.

  The Shah of Iran was a weak king in a tough country that had been happily perfecting anarchy and feudalism for twenty five centuries. One or the other of them had to go, the king or his country. That contraction was coming sooner than Patchway wanted. A year, maybe two. Not enough time to make all the money he wanted but enough to get moderately rich. Then Patchway would close up his corner of the Iranian gold mine and go out to find another place to dig a fortune.

  Anyone who watched Slinky toys could measure the days to the world’s end. But was the Shahanshah Arya Mehr, King of Kings and Light of the Aryans, watching for the moment to leap aside and save himself, his dynasty, his palaces and all his delights? Pack up his Shah Bunny and Prince Valiant and haul off to the French Riviera, as had so many other unwanted kings and princes from this part of the world? Or was he going to miss the pop! and lose the gold mine?

  Then let kings be damned, if they no longer had money to pay Patchway.

  Patchway heard the applause again. Better applause than balloons.

  The alcoholic buzz was not fading from his head. He went into the shower room. Opened the toilet lid in order to close the bathroom door. Turned on the shower to partly fill the tub. Pulled the drain plug. The roaches that had gathered under the plug during the night rushed up into the tub and were whirled down the drain. He got into the shower.

  Glynda got under the shower spray. Her white-blond hair and the water and her skin seemed to him all the same tone. Her eyes were closed.

  “Rub me,” she said.

  He put oil on his hands to lather her skin. Now
there was loud applause, bright and anxious in his ears.

  “Rub me hard,” she said again.

  They made love under the shower spray, her eyes still closed.

  Glynda got out a somnambulist and toweled herself and pulled on her woolen tent boots – orange and blue – and her Russian mink coat, shook the hair from her face and said, “Feed me.”

  They went into the kitchen, into the mandible-ticking of the giant roaches cleansing last night’s dishes piled in the sink. She shooed them. They hissed at her and did not shoo.

  Patchway heated flat bread on the open fire. He put on a plate the goat’s cheese and red onions the kohl-eyed servant had cut for them. He made Glynda a picnic on the living room carpet, beneath the warmth of the morning sun.

  He had done all those things but he was nearly as somnambulist as she. The scar on his belly was a slick, cold patch on the outside of him. Its chill seethed into him.

  Glynda opened on him her bright blue hex eyes, cold and startling.

  “Make me pregnant today,” she said.

  They made love again there on the bread and cheese and the old silk carpet.

  When they were done, Glynda said, “It didn’t work.”

  No applause.

  “How could you know?” he said.

  She pulled the mink from her body and dripped on the carpet a smear of his semen. She put her hand into it and tested it for stick and showed him.

  “Not adhesive enough,” she said. “You’ve got to do better. Bring me tea.”

  He began the tea water that, at this 7,000 foot altitude, would be long in boiling. He filled the kitchen sink with water to give the roaches a swim.

  “I’m twenty two,” Glynda called from her mink on the carpet. “I’ve got to get pregnant.”

  The doorbell rang.

  Patchway reached under the rice cooker for the small pistol he kept there. He put the weapon in the pocket of his bathrobe. Glynda waited for him to do it.

  She closed her mink and opened the frosted glass door.

  The man who stood there was startled and pleased to see her disarranged in her mink. He was hawk-nosed with thick white hair over his ears and white brows over black eyes.

  “It’s the Colonel,” she called to Patchway in the kitchen.

  “Ask if he wants tea.”

  “Do you want tea, Colonel?”

  “Only if you won’t offer me anything else.”

  The bodyguard stood stiffly embarrassed behind Colonel Ardjovani, his black hair in a pompadour scented with oil and rose water, his hands behind his back, his brown sloe eyes averted.

  “I’ll dress,” she said to Ardjovani. “Then we can go.”

  “Come like that – in your mink chadur,” he said.

  Ardjovani closed the door with the bodyguard outside.

  She left to dress.

  The Colonel toasted Patchway with his tea glass. “I know why you keep her but why do you keep her?”

  “Love, that’s the rumor,” said Patchway.

  “She loves you a little and this morning despises you more. This city is full of women! It’s delight for a greedy man. You. Me. Why keep this woman who very nearly has contempt for you? Give her to me. The mink coat, too.”

  “What’s the day’s gossip?”

  “Do secret policemen gossip?”

  “You bug and you gossip.”

  “You’re a businessman, Patchway. Even more cold-blooded than most. Be business-like. Sell me Glynda and her mink coat.”

  “She’s not what I sell.”

  “You sell guns. You’re the scum of the Earth, although I like you very much. Sell me this woman. Price her like a gun.”

  “I don’t sell guns. I sell organizational systems. The people who make them work sell the guns. They are the scum of the Earth.”

  Patchway’s was a rich business thanks to a Persian terror of the Russians across the northern frontier and a never-ending war with Iraq. And the Omani war and a feud with Pakistan and guns to be smuggled up into Afghanistan. And the fact that the last time Persia had any organization at all was when it fought and whipped the Roman legions. All of that helped Patchway sell his organizational systems because wars and feuds need systems even more than they need bullets. Or so Patchway had persuaded the generals and khans and overlords of the Iranian gold mine.

  “What would you say to losing her?” said Ardjovani. “You claim to love her. But I wonder – does she make you hear the applause anymore? You’re the kind of man who must hear the applause. A Western man for whom the whole world was invented. You know, don’t you, what’s going to happen next? She’ll go off with someone else. With me, for example. Did you offer me breakfast vodka?”

  Patchway took the bottle from the freezer.

  “Only a small portion,” said Ardjovani.

  Patchway poured water glasses half full. They drank.

  “You’re going south to chase the mad priest,” Patchway said. “What will you do with him?”

  “How do you know about that?”

  “Gossip.”

  “It’s a mistake to know what the secret police are doing. Especially in a flat like this with all its bugs.”

  “Who bugged it?”

  “All of my enemies. Every place I go is bugged.”

  “Not you?”

  “Why would I want to listen to your lovemaking with Glynda? Pathetic stuff. Give me another half of vodka for the cold flight.”

  Patchway poured out the liquor and said, “What will you do with him, the mad mullah down south?”

  “Is there money in it for you? Then don’t ask.”

  Ardjovani gazed out the window into the brightening morning. He was annoyed that Patchway knew too much, annoyed at the early season cold, annoyed at what he had to do.

  He said, “My life is never so grand as to give me the parts I deserve. I’ll catch him but I can do nothing with him except keep him quiet. What do you think of that?” There was sudden fury in Ardjovani’s voice.

  “I think it’s impossible.”

  “It’s the end of my career! It’s exile! Better if they sent me into Iraq to shoot that lunatic over there – Ayatollah Khomeini. But then I would be a hero and no one wants me a hero. It’s the part I deserve but I’ll never have.”

  Glynda came into the room. Ardjovani’s fury evaporated.

  She was dressed in calf-length khaki skirt, cotton blouse buttoned to the throat, long sleeves. Not much different from the uniforms of the pretty but hawk-nosed girl soldiers. Kerchief to hide her pale hair. She had a purse as large as a briefcase – a woman’s defense in a Tehran filled with grabbing males – and her mink in her hands.

  “To Shiraz, Colonel,” she said.

  Ardjovani said to Patchway, “The helicopter will have us there this evening, with the usual tiresome base inspection stops en route. We’ll picnic in the desert. When do you arrive?”

  “Noon tomorrow.”

  “Be on time.” Ardjovani went out to hound his chauffeur in hauling away Glynda’s bags.

  The bodyguard Saifallah, his hands still behind his back, his pompadour glittering with its oil and rose water, bowed to Patchway and Glynda before he followed his Colonel.

  Glynda said to Patchway, “Will you be there tomorrow? Do you love me?”

  “I love you,” he said.

  She kissed him. “Tomorrow,” she said. “Don’t be late or don’t come.”

  Patchway stood at the window and watched Ardjovani’s Mercedes wind around a camel train and a shouting milk vendor and out of the alley into the city.

  He stood there a long while waiting but for what? For the end of yet another life?

  His scar began to ache. He put his hand over it. It was slick and brittle as glass left in a desert after an atomic bomb blast.

  Patchway sat at his desk to continue the making of money. But he sat there a long while unmoving, waiting. What else was he to do?

  The sun crawled toward zenith.

  The pharaoh-eyed serva
nt in her black chadur flung open a door with a bang. “Telephone, Agha, from Isfahan,” she said. “The Mistress.”

  Waiting was over. He took the phone.

  He said to the servant, “Leave me alone with her.”

  “What are you going to say to her?”

  “I don’t even know what she’s going to say to me.”

  “You know what she’s going to say.” The servant left the room.

  Glynda said to him, “It happened.”

  “What happened?”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  “In a helicopter? You got pregnant in a helicopter? Good God, him.”

  “You’ve got to be more discreet, Patchway,” she said. “Or I’ll hang up. These lines are bugged.”

  “How do you know if it just happened?”

  “I know. Like I knew you couldn’t do it for me. Pack my things and send them to Ardjovani’s family in Ahwaz. This is goodbye, Patchway.”

  Patchway put down the telephone. It was over. No woman. No life. Nothing now but the cold pain of the scars in his belly. Nothing but the memory of a red time when men and women and children died in the orange fire that came out of his rifle in another moment of contraction called Vietnam.

  His hands trembled as he pressed them both on the telephone instrument as though he could suppress the news that he had once more killed love.

  The first killing of love had been in a high, sere Western plains land filled with buffalo herds and the smell of saddle leather. He had gone to that place desperate to find a normal life after the war. She was desperate to escape poverty. They had found each other.

  But desperation is not enough for marriage. Not enough to compensate for her bloated belly that he wanted to love but despised because he saw there on her flesh the images of other mothers, pregnant or clutching infants, swirling in the flames that came from his rifle barrel.