Hallie waved to him from the porch, a dim figure in his rearview mirror. He honked the horn twice and headed off down that icy, washboard road, swearing to himself all the while he would find his way back to the farm and Hallie.
36
Hector had to keep turning on a flashlight to check unnamed roads against Hallie’s hastily scrawled map.
About three miles or thereabouts from Hallie’s house, he saw big headlights boring through the sleet and snow. As he came closer, Hector saw the vehicles seemed to be stopped. Three men were silhouetted in the blinding beams of the lead vehicle, waving rifles above their heads and signaling Hector to stop.
He slowed his stolen car, pulling his Colt from under his coat, cocking it and then laying it on his lap under Hallie’s map.
As one of the men approached, Hector pulled the scarf closer around his face, covering a little more of his nose. He turned down the radio and cranked the window down a couple of inches to talk through it. His left arm burned at the exertion required of rolling down the window just a crack. As one man approached the driver’s side door, another man stepped into Hector’s headlights, squinting and checking his license plate against something on a clipboard.
One of the ex-Pinkertons said, “It’s Hawk, right?”
Hector recalled the bounty hunter’s voice from his confrontation with Hallie. The difference between a southern Texas accent and one from southern Arizona was negligible to all but locals, Hector figured, gambling he could get by:
“That’s right,” he said. “Get those vehicles over so I can get by. I’m trying to make up some ground, goddamn it.”
The rogue Pinks didn’t seem to care about his objectives: “We’re heading in to comb these shithole farms,” the man said. “Hell, you got us all dragged out here in the first place, from what I hear. You telling me that now you’re tearing off?”
“That’s right,” Hector said, surly. “They lit out of here too long ago. But I mean to overtake them.”
Hawk had left his knife in its sheath on the passenger sheet. Hector held it up where the bastard could see. “Had me a little talk with some of this Dalton whore’s kin folk. She’s rabbited again. Her and the crime writer have doubled back. They came back this way to try and lay a false trail, to make us think they’re running north with the notion of heading up into Vancouver. Make us think they’re going to lose themselves somewhere in Northern Canada.”
“You saying they ain’t back here?” Some smart boy Hector had drawn in this one.
“Got out just ahead of the freshest snow,” Hector said. “They’re really running back east figuring we’d never figure them to do that. I’m going to try and catch ’em before they reach the coast. I know where they’re stopping along the way. Now make fucking room for me to get by.”
“Ease up, Geronimo,” the Pinkerton said. “We got guys fucking everywhere. We can head ’em off and save you a shitload of driving. Just tell me where these safe harbors are and—”
“I have my own arrangement with Mr. Scartelli, asshole,” Hector said. “Do you want me to tell Mr. Scartelli how you queered my shot at catching this skirt before she could get to the Feds back east?”
The man held up his hands and backed away. Bastard folded far faster than Hector had expected him to.
Hector told himself he deserved that break.
The ex-Pinkerton climbed up on the step to duck his head in the driver’s side window of the big dump truck with the front-mounted snow shovel. The driver steered over closer to the side of the road and the bus behind followed. Hector drove slowly past them and picked up Hallie’s map, using their headlights to check his next crossroads. He didn’t want to foul up and have to double back and maybe run into the would-be Pinks again.
Hector watched the rearview mirror, then sighed in relief.
Thank God—the sons of bitches were turning their vehicles around to follow him out. Looked like Hallie and her children would be spared after all. Hector gave the Woody some more gas then. He figured he’d try and get some distance on the bastards before they could really try to follow him in earnest.
When he finally hit a main, marked and properly paved road, Hector dropped the hammer. He drove for ten miles as fast as he dared go on the slick pavement. He pulled over just long enough to get at Hallie’s coffee to steel himself for the longer drive ahead.
Hector’s country music station had faded somewhere coming down out of the sticks. He turned the radio up on some crime drama, sipping his coffee and burning down the road.
37
The radio was Hector’s sole companion across the state of Missouri—more crime dramas, country music when he could find it, and disquieting news out of Korea when he couldn’t.
Seemed to be lots of night attacks being mounted by the Chinese and North Koreans. Harry S. Truman: seemed to Hector every Democrat administration in his lifetime brought with it a bloody and arguably avoidable war.
The Korean news gave Hector a sour stomach. He’d had several newspaper syndicates and magazines approach him the past months with stringing offers to cover that “conflict,” the so-called “police action.” Whatever they were calling this one to keep from properly calling it a war. But this time, Hector wasn’t biting.
He’d had his fill of those sorts of wars. Europe and the last big show had ground out whatever capacity Hector had for that scale of carnage. Or so he told myself.
In a truck stop outside Wichita, he waited under a canopy, smoking a cigarette and watching the flurries fall. He watched those eighteen-wheelers come and go.
Hector had figured Meg, Shannon and their escort would beat him to their rendezvous site. Their lateness worried him.
But then after loving Hallie, the prospect of reuniting with Meg unsettled Hector, too.
Because of that unease, the awkward mess he’d made for himself falling for Hallie, he’d given Jimmy an aggressive schedule to reunite with him at Hector’s hacienda in La Mesilla.
In effect, Meg and Hector would have to drive twelve hours straight through, switching off driving duties and stopping only for food-to-go and to fill up the Woody’s tank.
Hector was on his third Pall Mall when he saw the old ’41 Touring Sedan lumber into the truck stop. He waved and the headlights flashed once. Hector cast down his cigarette and walked out to meet them.
Jake Carmony, rodeo-clown-turned-stuntman, turned-grizzled and wall-eyed character-actor, thrust out a big hand and pumped Hector’s good arm. “By Christ, Lass, I’m relieved to see ya after the ear fillin’ I’ve been getting. You’re really playing it edgy takin’ on these Dago types.”
Hector smiled and twisted a toe atop a cigarette stub. “You try to choose the fights you can win,” he said. “That said, sometimes the fights choose you. Thanks for takin’ this job on, and on short notice at that. And thanks for doin’ it in this lousy damn weather.”
Hector could see Shannon’s luminous eyes in the backseat so he was curbing his language. The usually salty tongued Jake seemed to be doing the same. Hector said, “I wish to God there was time to catch up, buddy, but we’ve got to fly.”
“Understood, and no sweat, Hec. You give ’em hell, pal.” Hector fished the roll of bills he owed Jake from his pants pocket and passed it to him in the guise of a last handshake.
Hector was positively hemorrhaging cash, this bloody escapade.
Jake said, “Next time you make sometime when you come this way, hear? I’ll stand you to some world-class barbecue.”
Hector walked around the Packard and took Meg’s hand, drawing her up to him. Seemed she was getting around better—Meg was foregoing a cane.
But her breath smelled of gin. She helped Shannon out and Hector ended up carrying the box with Shannon’s dog—little “Hector” the bitch—sleeping inside.
Hector popped the rear hatch on the Woody and slid the box inside. He’d picked up an air mattress during a stop for gas in a small berg halfway between Moberly and Wichita: he just couldn’t bear th
e thought of the girls sacking out on the same surface that luckless Tomás Hawk rested upon during his final, brief ride to that dry well’s frigid bottom.
Shannon squealed when she saw the cushions and cozy pillows and blankets in back. She crawled in, kicking off her shoes and snuggling up with her puppy. Meg leaned in for a hug and gave Hector her cheek.
Given circumstances of which she surely wasn’t aware—namely Hector’s torn carnal allegiances—that was okay by him.
He said to her, “We’re driving straight through, I’m afraid. We’ll switch off driving duties if you think your leg is up to it. If not, I think I can push on. Just twelve hours more, give or take. A little over seven hundred miles. We’ll likely risk bunking one night at my place to freshen up and reconnect with Jimmy, then we’ll make the final border run.”
Meg slid into the front seat of the Woody and Hector closed the door after her.
When he slid behind the wheel, he saw she’d already started the engine and turned up the heater. They started rolling and Hector could feel the road bumping up against those tire chains through the thinner veneer of snow out that way. He figured in another fifty or so miles due south they’d have to stop somewhere and have those snow chains pulled off.
Meg said, “Where’d you ever find that guy Jake? He’s unbelievable. I felt like I spent the last several hours trapped inside a B-movie. Is he for real? I mean, really? I think he thinks he’s George Raft.”
“Jake’s real enough,” he said. “You had to at least like Les.”
“Lester was wonderful,” Meg said. “I love him. And he was terrific with Shannon. She’s never flown, and the flight was pretty terrifying at points because of the weather. Lester is a very brave man. And Lester made up this elaborate story for Shannon as he flew us. A wonderful, weird, funny story that he kept going for hours. I wish I had had a notebook and pen to take dictation for him. I think it was easily publishable.”
“Les is the best of men,” Hector said. “And a damned fine writer.”
“Yeah…” A long pause, then, “Driving straight through is a sign that things are getting even worse, I guess,” Meg said. “And you’ve switched cars. I hope you didn’t find yourself forced to sell your Chevy in exchange for this heap.”
“My car’s still at your mother’s,” Hector said. “I’ll get back there in a few days to pick it up. Once you two are safe, I mean.”
“Then what’s the story on this jalopy?”
Hector told her in as much detail as he could with Shannon maybe eavesdropping behind the seat.
When he finished Meg said, “My God, how horrible.”
“Your mother is fine, by the way, despite all that happened to us after you left.”
Meg nodded. “Thank God for that.” Her gaze drifted to the silver thermos resting on the seat between them. In this strange voice she said, “That was my father’s.”
It sounded like an epiphany.
“Your mother loaned it to me for the road trip,” he said. “I’ll get it back to her when I pick up the car.”
“Sure.” That tone… Just like that, Hector sensed something between them changed.
Something ended.
To his possible discredit, Hector figured, he felt immense relief sweeping over him. Hector thought, Okay, then. So be it.
***
In a town called Liberal, hard along the Oklahoma border, Hector finally had to stop at a service station to scrap those snow chains.
The grease monkey kept giving Meg the eye, not in that lustful way, but more in recognition. Hector had the sense the mechanic would be dropping a dime on them as soon as they pulled out. That meant their car would be made.
Watching the man watching Meg, Hector stepped inside the garage’s office to pour himself a cup of coffee. There on the desk next to the cash register was a copy of the Kansas City Star with a picture of Megan on the cover. The paper was covered with greasy fingerprints obscuring some of the type. Still, Hector tried to scan the story to get its gist. Damn fool reporters had misspelled his last name. Sloppy amateurs.
But either way, that wire-service article had torn it.
Hector pulled out his penknife and cut the station’s phone chord.
The car handled better with those damn chains off and he gave her some gas as they cut across the northwest corner of Texas, jumping jurisdictions lickety-split in case that grease monkey had found some other close-by phone and alerted any Kansas cops.
Hector at last allowed himself a deep breath when they at last crossed over into New Mexico.
Driving through Tucumari, Hector said, “We’re in my country now. We’ll stop for some more grub in Vaughn. Should make it to my house before sunset.”
Meg nodded, looking a little nervous… maybe even a little sad.
38
Everything was quiet around his hacienda. He asked the girls to stay in the car while he walked the grounds, checked around back.
Mostly it was quiet. Just the sound of coyotes baying and the slap of the Rio Grande as it hit the bend and flowed on down south.
Hector took a long, hard look at his house, two stories of stucco with a wrap-around second floor porch, just as he had described it to Meg. He suddenly had trouble really seeing himself letting it go.
Sensing motion, he looked down and saw a scorpion. Those critters Hector wouldn’t miss.
He ground the deadly bug under his boot heel and went to fetch the girls.
***
Hector locked the garage door with the Woody inside, parked alongside the forty-one Chevrolet Cabriolet he’d never quite brought himself to unload. He finally had some plan for that car now.
Hector lugged in the suitcases and locked up the front door behind them.
Meg had turned on some lights in the front of the house. Hector promptly doused those lights and made the place look derelict again.
Dropping the luggage in the foyer, he wandered the hallways of his big, lonely house, looking for the girls. He found them in his book-lined study. Shannon was rolling pool balls across the billiard table.
Meg smiled sadly, “It’s everything I imagined, and yet so different. It’s a wonderful place. I don’t know how you ever leave such a place.”
Hector couldn’t think of anything to say to that, so he just smiled and shrugged.
Shannon quit playing with the billiard balls and picked up her puppy. She pointed at a large oil painting behind the bar. It was a nude woman standing in full view, pretty, but her body was disrupted by little half-open doors and compartments. It was a piece of surrealist art he’d picked up in Paris several years before. Shannon said, “That’s creepy.”
“It is,” Hector agreed.
Meg arched an eyebrow. “Friend of yours?”
“The model and the artist,” Hector said. “Surrealist painter of my acquaintance. Friend doesn’t quite fit, though.”
“Sounds like another novel,” Meg said. “That one at least have a happy ending?”
“Jury’s still out,” Hector said. “You two take my bedroom. It’s the biggest bed in the house, and it’s on the second floor and therefore defensible. I’ll shack out down here. With luck, Jimmy might yet make it here tonight. Help me stand guard.”
“You look exhausted. You need sleep, Hector.”
“I’m going to stay up and make some calls,” Hector said. “I’m owed a few favors it’s time to call in. Maybe I can rustle up some sentries if I work the phones aggressively.”
While Meg and Shannon settled in, Hector poured a single malt and sat at his writing desk with the phone and his drink, staring up at his surrealist painter friend’s sexy, unsettling self-portrait and thinking.
Rachel… Like Meg, Rache was a bird with at least one wing down.
The kind of woman who too often made Hector a goner despite his knowing better.
That was another old, bad habit he surely meant to change.
Hallie wasn’t damaged like that. Hector smiled, thinking about her.
> Then he scooped up the phone receiver and started calling around to local bars and whorehouses, either side of the border.
***
Hector was fresh from a scalding shower, just hitching a towel around his waist when Meg barged in. “I saw a man outside, Hector! He had a rifle.”
Scooping up his Colt Hector said, “Easy now, it may not be what you think.”
He ran downstairs and parted a curtain and searched the night. A man outside the window raised his pistol and waved. Hector waved back and turned to find Meg limping down the stairs after him.
“That fella is Raoul Reyes, a local boy who answered the call,” Hector said. “There should be at least four more just like him out there now. Tough customers, sure, but they’re our thugs.”
Meg sighed and shook her head. “Do all your friends live the same way? I mean toting guns? Running toward trouble instead of away from it?”
“Suppose if they didn’t do all that they simply wouldn’t be my friends,” Hector said.
Meg seemed committed to testing things about then. She stepped up close and put a hand familiarly on his hip. Despite himself, Hector stirred under the towel. She said, “Shannon’s asleep…”
She was pushing up against Hector when the doorbell rang. That tenor voice called out, stopping Meg just as she was leaning in for a kiss. “Hector, open up! The cavalry has arrived!”
Pulling away, Meg said, “Jimmy. His damned timing…”
Yeah. Good old Jimmy.
About that timing: Hector thought it perfect.
***
The three of them sat in Hector’s book-lined den, James and Meg on a leather couch and Hector in his leather armchair. He’d dressed and dragged a comb through his hair. His left arm was finally feeling like it was regaining something like full range of motion, and not a moment too soon, he reckoned.
Jimmy said, “Who are those thugs outside? Jesus, I thought I was a dead man.”
The Running Kind: A Hector Lassiter novel Page 22