I shook my head. “I’m his son.”
Tillie barked with laughter. “Well, I’ll tell you what I told your old man. You go on up Route 4 a little over two miles until you come to a fenced-in cornfield on the south side of the road. They’ll be a sign on the gate saying, ‘Private Property.’ Just go on through that gate up the road ‘bout half a mile and you’ll come to Theo’s farmhouse. But don’t you let on that I sent you, hear?”
“I won’t,” I promised. “When did you say my father stopped in?”
“I didn’t say, honey. But it was around seven o’clock this evening.”
I swallowed the rest of the coffee, dug a couple of dollars out of my pocket, and laid them on the counter. “Thanks, Tillie,” I said.
She shook her head with rueful amusement. “You cops kill me.”
“What makes you think I’m a cop?”
“The size of the tip for one. And for two, who else comes visiting at twelve o’clock at night and don’t have no idea how to get where he wants to go?”
When I thought about it, she had a point.
22
I HAD no trouble finding the farm. It was exactly where Tillie had said it would be, two and a half miles up Route 4 on the south side of the highway—a fenced-in field with a lumpy dirt access road cutting through it like a keloid scar. I pulled the Pinto off the highway and parked in front of the gate. Somewhere, farther down the road, a hound began to bay forlornly. His broken, querulous voice carried across the dark field like the peal of a warning bell. And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the baying stopped, and the roadside was filled with a cottony quiet, like the hush at the heart of a pine forest on a cold January day.
I couldn’t see a farmhouse from where I was sitting. The field appeared to rise steeply for a couple hundred yards before falling away into a glen or valley on its south slope. The farmhouse was probably located in the hollow—invisible from the roadside. I stared at the rusted tin sign posted on the gate—Private Property.
I wondered for a moment whether I could pull the same trick on Clinger that I’d pulled on his disciple, Roger—claim that I was a cop and flash the Special Deputy’s badge at him. That might get me onto the porch. But it sure wouldn’t get me in the front door, not if Clinger was in the kind of trouble I thought he was in. If he was involved in the drug trade, even a cop would need a search warrant to get inside the house—I was sure of that. Moreover, he was bound to be suspicious and edgy, especially if Bannock had paid him a visit earlier that night. The smart thing to do would be to try calling Bannock again, I thought, and to find out exactly what he was onto.
I toyed with the idea of driving back to Tillie’s Diner and phoning the cops, but I was already there, within shouting distance of Robbie Segal. And I didn’t want to leave without making that shout. Oddly enough I felt fairly certain the girl was still alive. Which wasn’t to say that I didn’t feel Robbie wasn’t in danger. Just that I couldn’t see her following Bobby to the grave, like a spring widow. In the light of what I’d learned, the two of them now seemed like protagonists in different stories—the devoted lover of a medieval romance and the impetuous heroine of a gothic adventure story. It was an ill-formed match—but I’d sensed that all along. What I hadn’t realized, until I’d talked to Annie, was just how hopeless Bobby’s love had been from the start. I wondered now if the girl had ever loved the boy or if, like her mother, she never understood what the word meant.
She had maneuvered Bobby into taking her to paradise—to a world that he and a lot of other people had thought of as being constituted solely of love. And she’d grown fast to the place, like one of those fleeing women in mythology turned into a brook. She’d become part of Clinger’s world, so immediately and so completely that she’d astonished Annie and the Caldwell boy with the very fierceness of her attachment. Annie had seen something inexplicable in that attachment. But then she hadn’t been following the girl as I had—hadn’t seen the loveless street she’d come from or been in her antiseptic room and seen the paltry dream she’d concocted there out of a few icons and a few paragraphs in a book, like a bird made of paste and newsprint. And then Robbie was very young, as Annie had said, and very beautiful, which is a cruel combination, as all precocity is cruel.
I sat there trying to excuse the runaway girl of blame, and suddenly realized that I was in the same position that Bobby Caldwell had been in—that instead of explaining the girl, I’d ended up explaining him. Sitting there, in the dead midnight, I felt as if I’d been retracing his steps all along, right up until that very moment, as I prepared to make my own attempt at rescuing a girl who didn’t seem to know how lost she had become. Maybe she could explain herself, I thought, when I finally found her.
I flipped on the inside light, opened the glove compartment, and took out a pair of binoculars, a flashlight, and a flask of Scotch. The special deputy approach was useless, I decided. Any direct approach was useless if the girl didn’t want to cooperate. And if she hadn’t gone away with Bobby, there was no reason to think she’d come out with me. Or that Clinger would even let me try to persuade her to come. Followers must have been getting hard to come by for Theo, and those that were left had to be hard-core fanatics. What I wanted to do was to case the farm from a distance, trying to spot the girl or, if I was really lucky, to catch her there alone. Or virtually alone. Then I’d either take her out by force or I’d sit on the place until the chance to grab her came up.
It was little better than a kidnapping, but I couldn’t see any other way to bring her out.
I flipped off the car light and opened the door. Before stepping outside, I reached under the dash and pulled the Colt Gold Cup from the pistol rack. I checked the magazine, cocked the piece, locked it, and stuck it firmly in my belt. Then I strapped the binoculars around my neck, stuck the flashlight and the flask in my coat pockets, and walked into the night.
******
The open, fallow field provided no brake against the wind, which was running down the hillside like an ice floe. I was cold through and through by the time I reached the crest of the hill. I turned my back to the wind, sat down in one of the furrows, and pulled the flask out of my coat. The liquor brought tears to my eyes, cleared my nose, and unblocked my ears. And suddenly I could smell the damp earth all around me and hear the wind whistling across the barren field.
I took a quick look at the Pinto—parked beside the gate—then turned around and trained the binoculars on the south slope. The field was plowed for sowing for another hundred yards. Then it died away in a muddy swale full of day lilies and tall green rushes. Beyond the marsh, lilacs were planted in a row, their grape-like flowers glowing like blue velvet in the night. And beyond the hedge row, the tall, irregular silhouette of a farm house and a barn and a silo rose out of the earth like a nighttime shadow.
I swept the binoculars across the farm yard, where daffodils clustered in the dirt. There weren’t any signs of life—in the yard or in the house or in the outbuildings. No lamplights. No glowing cigarettes. No parked cars or farm machinery. And no sound, except for the wind. I glanced at my watch, which was showing a quarter of one, and thought that the Clinger family had either gone to sleep or gone out for the night. I looked back at the Pinto, as if it were a warm, inviting bed. But the chance of having that farmhouse to myself was too good to pass by. I got back to my feet and started down the hill.
I skirted the muddy swale at the edge of the yard and came out behind the barn, on the eastern side of the farm. There was a window set in the barn’s rear wall. I shined the flashlight through it and peered in. A tractor was parked in the middle of the floor, between two rows of feed stalls, but there weren’t any cars inside or any fresh tire tracks in the dust. Which made it that much more likely that there was no one at home. I clicked off the light and slid around to the front of the barn. The farmhouse was about twenty yards from the outbuildings, facing northwest toward the access road. When I was satisfied that there really wasn’t anybody else around
, I scampered across the open ground to the rear porch. A compressor was throbbing dully nearby. I hadn’t heard it until I’d gotten to the back of the house. I figured it was located at the base of one of the walls, lying in the grass like an overturned water tank. The fact that it was still running made me feel better, because, from the deserted look of things, I’d been wondering whether Clinger hadn’t flown the coop altogether.
The rear porch was just a concrete abutment, leading to a screened wooden door. I walked up the steps and tried the handle, but it was locked tight. There were two windows on either side of the door, only they were both closed and they were both too far off the ground and too far from the rear stoop to be jimmied. I examined the door again, pulled a credit card from my wallet, and tried to force the lock. I almost broke my Mastercard in two. The latch was a deadbolt—impossible to open without a hacksaw or a set of files or a key. That left the front door and windows.
I climbed back down the steps and walked around the north side of the house to the front yard. The aluminum windows in the north wall were screened and latched. The whole house had been freshly sided in aluminum strips and painted the mealy color of cornbread. The renovations must have cost Clinger a bundle; but then I figured they’d probably been done in the good old days before money problems had forced him into the drug business.
There was an apple tree planted in the front lawn with clumps of sedge scattered like cabbage leaves around its trunk. I stared at the tree for a moment before turning the corner. I knew what I’d find in front—I guess that was why I paused. And it was there, all right, when I finally stepped into the yard—the wooden porch with its six steps and its railed landing. I’d been looking at a photograph of it for four days, and seeing it in reality unnerved me—filled me with an eerie sense of déjà vu, as if I’d actually been there before. I carried that feeling with me up the stairs onto the dark landing. Another half-step led to the front door. There were two storm windows flanking it.
I tried the door handle and was about to try the left window when I heard a footstep on the stairs behind me. The sound sent a chill up my spine.
“Wha’chu doing, fella?” a man’s soft, mocking voice said.
“Trying to get in,” I said meekly. And then I put a little iron in my voice and added: “I’m a cop.”
“Sure you are,” the laughing voice replied.
“I’ve got I.D.,” I said quickly, but when I reached for my coat pocket, I let my right hand drop onto the cold butt of the pistol. My Special Deputy’s badge wasn’t going to fool this one—I could hear that in his voice.
“You best put your hands above your head,” the man said. “I’d hate to shoot an officer of the law.”
“You’ve got a gun?” I said stupidly.
“A Remington pump. And it’s pointed at the back of your head.”
“I don’t suppose we could talk this over?”
He laughed. “You just raise your hands.”
I slipped the gun from my belt and started to raise my arms.
“Higher!” the man said with sudden sharpness.
I had about five seconds to decide what to do. If I dropped the pistol and went along with him, there was a chance I could talk my way out of it. But I figured it would have to be some mighty straight talk—the kind that would blow any chance of getting the girl out quietly, although I knew that chance might already have been blown.
I shifted my eyes to the left and looked at the porch rail. It was about a step and a half from where I was standing, and it was low enough that I could vault it easily. I didn’t want to shoot anyone, but I didn’t want to put myself at the mercy of one of Clinger’s followers, either. Mercy didn’t appear to be their strong suit.
“I’m not fucking with you, mister,” the man said. “Either you raise your arms or you’re going to be tasting your own brains.”
“I’m moving,” I said and jumped for the rail.
The shotgun went off behind me with a terrific bang. The left front window exploded in a hail of glass and splintered aluminum. I could hear the pellets spattering through the house, breaking glass and slamming into furniture with dull, concussive thuds. But I was over the rail by then.
I hadn’t counted on the drop. It was a good six and a half feet from the porch rail to the yard, and I landed badly, twisting my left ankle in a nest of sedge and rock. I was still trying to pick myself up when the man came ambling around the corner. I didn’t even have the pistol unlocked. I heard him pull the pump back and knew that if I pointed the gun at him I’d be dead.
“All right,” I said. “All right.”
I tossed the Colt on the ground. I could see the man smile. His teeth and his eyes and the gun barrel were about the only things I could see in the darkness.
“Kick it on out here,” he said.
I kicked the gun away from me and stared at it for a second, lying in the sedge. Then I got to my feet, leaned back against the wall, and dusted some of the dirt off my pants leg. My ankle was beginning to throb and burn. I wouldn’t be able to run on it—or, at least, not very far. I watched the man as he walked up to me. He was wearing a leather flyer’s jacket and jeans, and he looked more like a bodyguard than one of Clinger’s followers. I figured that was probably what he was—hired muscle, like Jerry Lavelle. Only this one was the local variety. A young, brainless Kentucky thug.
“Hurt yourself, did you?” he said with a generous smile.
“My ankle.”
He nodded and slapped the shotgun barrel across the right side of my head. He hit me so quickly and so hard that my skull bounced against the aluminum siding of the farmhouse. I think the only thing that kept me standing on my feet was sheer surprise. I touched my temple and felt the blood running down my cheek. Then I stared goofily at the man standing in front of me. He was still smiling.
Back to the wall, I slipped to the ground and sat there—legs stretched out in front of me—looking at the pattern my blood had made in the dirt. Someone else came up beside me, but I blacked out before I could lift my head to look at him.
23
WHEN I woke up I didn’t know where I was or what had happened to me. I could hear someone playing a piano—toying with it like a kid practicing the scales. And there was a bright light overhead. It made me wince when I opened my eyes. Then I remembered that I’d been hurt and touched gingerly at the right side of my head. Something inside my skull throbbed like an infected tooth.
I groaned aloud and the sound of the piano stopped.
It took me a few seconds, but I managed to sit up. I was on a couch—an old Victorian number with velvet cushions and a dark, glossy wooden frame. I stared dully at the carpeted floor and waited for my mind to clear. Judging by the pain in my head, the blurred vision, and the faint nausea I was feeling, I figured I’d suffered a concussion.
I rested my head against the cushion and watched the room come into focus: a small parlor, with white plastered walls and second-hand Victorian furnishings. There was an upright piano on the wall across from the couch, and a man was sitting in front of it, with his back to me. He ran his fingers down the keyboard and turned around. I thought I knew his face.
“Clinger?” I said.
The man nodded. “I’m Theo Clinger.”
He stared at me intently, as he’d stared into the camera in the photograph. He had long black hair, streaked with gray, and black, heavy-lidded, vaguely oriental eyes. The rest of his face was thin, fleshless, and as white as bone. Even his lips were whitish. His dark eyes looked like the lumps of coal in a snowman’s head.
“Where am I?” I said to the snowman.
“You’re at my farm. In the house.”
I suddenly remembered the man with the shotgun and how I’d been hurt. I asked Clinger why the man had hit me and he laughed.
“You were trying to break in. And we’ve had some trouble lately. The only reason you’re not lying in a ditch right now is that you have a friend here who told us who you were.”
&nb
sp; Robbie’s name popped into my head and I spoke it.
“She’s not here,” Clinger said. “She left with Bobby on Wednesday.”
“Bobby?” I said stupidly. I wanted to ask him about Bobby, but for a moment I couldn’t think of what to say. “What happened to Bobby?”
Clinger tapped his fingertips together and considered the question. “I’m going to be honest with you. I know who you are and who you’re looking for. And I don’t want any trouble with the law. Bobby took Robbie with him when he left here on Wednesday. That was the last time I saw either one of them.”
“What happened to him?” I said again.
My head was clearing and I was beginning to get a sharper sense of the man in front of me. He had a cool, candid, melancholy voice that didn’t quite match the arrogant, fleshless face. I wondered vaguely if he was putting on the candor for me or if he always spoke in that sad, considered way.
“I believe Bobby was killed by my enemies,” he finally said. “I’ve already told the police this earlier tonight. I see no reason not to tell you. A lot of people don’t understand where we’re coming from here at the farm. They don’t approve of our lifestyle, and they express their disapproval in violent ways—poisoning our wells and our livestock. I believe Bobby was killed by some of them, as a warning to me.”
“You’re telling me he was lynched?” I said incredulously.
“He may have been,” Clinger said. “I’ve had business dealings with some of these people. It’s quite easy to feel cheated by someone you don’t like—someone you’re afraid of, someone whose values you don’t agree with. A few of these men came out to the farm a couple of weeks ago. They threatened my life and the lives of my family. That’s the reason why I hired Logan and his friend.”
I made a confused face and Clinger pointed to my head.
“Logan is the man who found you on the porch.”
“I see.”
Day of Wrath Page 16