The Bookwoman's Last Fling

by John Dunning

  I turned over and lay my head on that soft, airless tire. I was careful; didn’t want to make any noise, didn’t want him to know I was alive let alone awake. I thought I was starting to get my wits back now. I knew enough to know I was in a bad spot. Two or three things could happen, none of them good. I knew he wasn’t going to help me out of the trunk, brush me off, and send me on my way. When he opened it, I had to attack, fast.

  Now I could hear the radio playing: some vintage country music station with a hayseed announcer who droned on and told bad jokes between such ancients as “The Race Is On” and “Please Help Me, I’m Fallin’.” I had a moment of absolute clarity, maybe a full minute when I knew everything, and I saw Sharon’s face so clearly I could almost touch her; I thought of my bookstore on East Colfax and I remembered my old pal Hennessey from Denver homicide; I visited the other booksellers, Seals and Neff, who used to be up the street; and for a long minute I was back in my childhood with my friend Vinnie. Rita McKinley was clutching his arm and Trish Aan-dahl stood apart like a good reporter and took notes. Vinnie and Rita were getting married and Trish was the society page reporter sent to cover the affair for the Seattle Times. Finally I thought of Erin d’Angelo and I wondered if I’d ever see her again. Oh, Erin! This trip did not have a good feeling to it, but here I was and I couldn’t do a damned thing about it. When the moment came I had to attack the bastard hard.

  Again I had forgotten my name. Slowly it all began coming back.

  I stretched out my arm, which had gone numb, and my hand touched the poker. I knew right away what it was; I remembered seeing it by the fireplace in the living room as I looked in from the front porch. A poker is a helluva terrible weapon. And a mind a terrible thing to waste.

  Forget the jack: Give him a taste of his poker. Poke his guts out, then hope I could get up fast enough to take a real swing at his head.

  I closed my eyes and the vertigo returned.

  Incredibly, I must have slept. I opened my eyes to the headache of the world. I still couldn’t see but for the moment I could think and I could hear the steady drone of the car. I was being taken for a ride in all the worst uses of that term; I was going for a ride, as somebody named Nitti or Capone might have put it.

  I thought I still had a good sense of time. I had always been able to wake from a sound sleep and know about what time it was. My gut told me this was mid-afternoon, we had been on the road two hours, and that meant we had traveled a hundred miles or more from the farm. If he had gone northeast he might be close to the racetrack now. Maybe that’s where we were going: he was planning to dump me near Golden Gate Fields in his good deed of the day. But I knew that he might not have gone northeast at all, he might be going south by southwest, in which case we’d be somewhere down the Coast, past Steinbeck country, maybe headed for San Luis Obispo. I had no way of telling, but that country station was still blaring on the radio, I heard the call letters and static, which probably meant he was heading away from the station’s broadcast area, wherever that was.

  I thought about my life. It all passed like they say it does for a dying man, like a fast motion picture. It went much too fast, because suddenly my time ran out.

  The car had stopped. I heard him get out; I felt the car rock but he closed the door softly, with the slightest click. He walked around to the trunk, rapped on it three times, kicked the tire. What’s that prove? Not a damned thing. He’s trying to see if I’m awake, if I’m alive, if he can rattle me. He’s not sure now whether he killed me; he figures if I’m alive I’ll be a basket case by now and I’ll start clamoring to get out. He’s partly right; I am that basket case.

  I couldn’t afford any weakness now; I couldn’t let him see me blink, couldn’t let him hear me breathe. But that goddam radio kept whining, filling the air with its corn-pone disc jockey and its whiny shit-kickers. Country music may have a certain charm, but not when you’re about to die. No one should have to listen to shit-kicking nonsense when someone has come to kill him.

  I could feel his presence, looming over the trunk.

  He’s trying to decide what to do and how to do it.

  Then I heard the sound of liquid being splashed. Johnny Horton was singing “The Battle of New Orleans” and the smell of gasoline was seeping down around the top of the trunk.

  He’s gonna burn it…

  …burn it…

  He’s gonna burn the fucking car.

  I heard it blow, a poof sound as unmistakable as a gun being cocked. Almost at once a crackling noise came down like the forest fire that almost killed Bambi, and in a few seconds the heat was terrible. I turned in the cramped space and all I could think in that desperate moment was gotta get out. I couldn’t go through the trunk door, couldn’t rip up the floor: only one thing I might do, kick out the backseat and go that way.

  I wiggled around and doubled over; got my legs against the partition behind the seat. I pushed with my legs and it gave a little: then I kicked it, kicked it again; I kicked the hell out of it and the seat flew out of there. Smoke and heat poured in and I rolled over and around and crawled into the car. I still couldn’t see: it was night, my timing had been seriously off, it was pitch-black dark except for the fire, which was suddenly everywhere. Crawling through it was like crawling through the end of the world into hell. I gripped the back door handle and wrenched it open and the cold air gushed in. I had the poker in my hand—didn’t remember picking it up again or maybe I had never let it go—and I rolled out of the car and fell on the cold sweet earth. I rolled and I kept rolling until dizziness made me stop.

  I lay flat in the snow and watched the fire burn.

  No idea where I was. No clue where he was. Not a hint whether he had stayed around to see the end of his handiwork or hauled ass out of here as soon as he lit the fire.

  I raised my head. The world spun out of control. I flattened out in the snow as the car exploded and rained fire around me.

  I rolled out of the freezing snow onto a stretch of grass that felt almost dry. Then and for the longest time I didn’t move. When I looked up again the burning car seemed cold and far away, like something in an astronomer’s telescope.

  11

  In the beginning I was alone in the black universe. The fire was the exploding galaxy and it would burn till it stopped, as other stars had done and would do for trillions of years. I knew I was hurt but I felt no pain. I was cold but I felt no chill. I felt no alarm, no heat, or relief. I had no thought but that I had somehow made it through the endless night. I could feel the firmament but I had no sight except for that fire-thing swirling off in the distance. I had a thought, what the first man might have thought coming to life after that long dark night. Where am I? But still the night showed no sign of ending and the universe swirled in its blackness as it had forever.

  I was most aware of the nothing. It was deeper than the black; I could feel some small part of the black, but the nothing went on and on beyond my ability to imagine. If I had been able to stand I might have wandered in the wilderness, gone off a cliff, fallen into the nothing, and blundered into the next vast abyss. This darkness would drive a sane man mad; trying to penetrate it was like pondering the Creation without any compass or moral guide, without even a hint that there was any true way or direction. There was no up, down was only what I lay on, and for now this was all there was.

  In some part of my brain I knew there was another man somewhere. There was a man in the nothing trying to kill me. Gradually over decades and centuries I had retrieved enough sense to remember that. The man walked with a limp and his name was Cameron.

  Years later I opened my eyes and saw a pale outline against a black universe slowly turning blue. A mountain. I still felt pinned against the earth, weighed down by God’s heavy boot on my back, but I had seen the mountain and I knew I would survive. I had rolled over and now I lay on my back. Oh, wow. I clearly remember thinking this thought; I knew I’d had a dream and in it I had been a deity, a ruler over the earth. But tonight I wa
s a wounded one and here I lay. Here I am, limping man: Come and get me, you son of a bitch. But if you do, you come at your peril.

  The sun rose slowly over the mountains, the valley became eerily visible through a thick fog, and now I knew some other things. The sun was like a great red wafer pasted in the sky. This was a line from a book, and it told me I was a reader. I thought it was The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen King, but I still wasn’t sure of anything. I thought the mountains were to the east; there were hills behind me, and that was the west. I turned over on my side, an excruciating effort; but then, having come that far, I knew I could do anything. I made the big effort and pulled myself through my pain, and through the fog I could see the road and across the way the place where the burned hulk of the car still gave off a wisp of black smoke.

  Now it all came back. Sudden clarity returned and I knew I still held the poker in my right hand with a tight grip. I knew I had been sleeping on it. I knew these things before I felt the numbness in my arm and the ache in my ribs. I shifted the poker into my left hand, but this was not easy. The right hand held on and I had to force my will over it.

  I would have a helluva time standing; it would be a challenge figuring out where I was and where I had been going, but at least I was alive. He had left me for dead and that was the worst mistake he would ever make.

  Slowly I got to my feet. I suffered through a new wall of dizziness: then I began to walk down to the road, one step at a time.

  I stood on the road, still unsteady. I was vaguely aware of a car passing as I closed my eyes and held on to a road sign. The next car that came, minutes or hours or days later, stopped.

  I never did get her name. I thought she said Cathy, but that may have been another part of my Heathcliff dream. She remains in my fractured memory as a voice, a strong arm over my back, a wisp of bright red hair, and a Vermont license plate.

  I think I told her I had been in an accident. She drove me to a town and took me to a hospital, handed me over to a man in a doorway, and disappeared.

  Modesto.

  I was in a hospital in Modesto, more than halfway across the state. In addition to the concussion I had second-degree burns on both arms. I spent a good part of the rest of my life filling out insurance forms, signing my shaky name, promising to pay if Blue Cross decided not to for any arbitrary reason they chose to invoke. They were sending an agent out to get a face-to-face statement of what had occurred, and I took this as an omen that my rates would go up whether they paid the bill or not.

  I listed Erin d’Angelo as a responsible party who could be called in an emergency. A cop came to my room and took a statement. I didn’t ask; he just showed up. This was the hospital’s doing and it turned testy when he teetered on the verge of threatening me with trespass. The next day I was told they had found the remains of Cameron’s car. They were trying to find its owner. Lacking any further motive or more physical evidence, this was probably all they could do. Cops are overworked almost everywhere.

  That afternoon I called Sharon at the ranch in Idaho and left a message on her answering machine. I told her I needed written permission to enter the grounds of the farm and the house, and I needed keys to the house and the gate as well. I needed these as fast as she could get them here.

  I told her Cameron was missing and Louie and Billy should be extra vigilant.

  I left a message for Sandy at the racetrack, saying I’d had an accident and would be back in as soon as possible.

  I slept. Watched part of a boring news conference on the TV, then an old movie, a program of Roadrunner cartoons, and some Beverly Hillbillies reruns. At eight o’clock I closed my eyes and slept through the night. When I opened them again, Erin was sitting in the chair beside my bed.

  “Hey. What brings you here?”

  “I’m the gas girl, here to read your meter.”

  This was an old joke between us. I smiled and told her my meter was broken and she leaned over and kissed my weary head. “At least your brains are becoming unscrambled. I expected much worse.”

  The hospital had called her to verify information, “and here I am.”

  Bless the hospital. “How long can you stay?”

  “As long as I need to.”

  She was calling in her Brownie points for all the overtime she’d been working at the law office. I told her everything that had happened and we talked far into the morning. “The best thing you can do is come on home to Denver, send this Sharon her money back, and forget about it. But of course you won’t do that.”

  “No.” Now I needed to find Cameron. Now it was personal.

  Two days later someone in a white coat said I was being released. I was still having occasional episodes, as he put it, but if I took things easy I could go. This would never have happened in the days when doctors, not insurance companies, made these decisions, but I was glad to get out of there.

  12

  We drove across the state and picked up my car. It seemed untouched from when I’d hidden it in the trees outside the farm, and I felt reasonably coherent, well enough to drive cautiously on to Richmond. Erin followed me and we took a room there, not far from the racetrack. I slept through the night and awoke well before dawn with a headache. A few painkillers brought me to life again, and we sat in an all-night cafeteria over breakfast and talked about how to proceed. She was in it now; I knew her well and there was no turning her back unless I went home with her. I was itching to get out to the racetrack—for herself she suggested taking my list and trying a few of the San Francisco bookstores that I had not reached with my phone checks. That part of the hunt had begun to look bleak, like shooting at the moon with a BB gun, but I had learned never to underestimate her energy, ingenuity, or stamina, and I sure welcomed her viewpoint. Maybe she would ride up to Blakely and visit Carroll Shaw at the library there. “He sounds like a fellow who can educate me if nothing else. I’ll see how the day goes.” We would meet that evening at five o’clock in the same café on San Pablo Avenue.

  It was still on the early side of six when I arrived at the stable gate. I showed Alvin my license, he nodded me through, and I walked along a ridge above the mud and turned into the stable area. Already the clatter of feed tubs was a familiar sound as I crossed between the barns, and I blended right in. I passed a few words with Obie; then I started Pompeii Ruler around the barn. Dawn was breaking when I finished his walk: a brilliant sunrise that lit up the world.

  Sandy arrived late. I told him I was fine and he left me alone for the moment. The tow ring was still a river of slop, but the rain had gone and I took that as a good sign. Again the ginneys and I walked the whole stable under the shedrow. As always I seemed to gain strength in work: I walked five miles; then I sat in the chair outside my tack room and let the boys finish up. Everyone was sympathetic: they had heard I had had an accident and were happy to take up my slack. Sandy pulled up a chair and asked me for an account of my trip east, as he put it, and I told it to him straight. Cameron hadn’t shown his ugly face again but his pal Rudy was still working in the opposite barn. No one had approached him; no one as far as Sandy knew had asked him about Cameron. I doubted this. If the cops had not at least sent someone to talk to him, this investigation would set new records for shabby ineptitude. I asked Sandy how his conversation with Sharon had gone, but he said they had been playing telephone tag all week and he had not yet had that pleasure. I was annoyed at this news and we had a short, terse exchange over it. I said, “You know if she asks me what I’m finding out about her mom, I’m gonna have to tell her,” and it went downhill from there. He said, “Look, I’ve got one or two other things on my plate right now. I’ve got a horse running this afternoon, I’m not sitting by the phone all day, and I’m sure she’s not either.” I said, “That may be, but I’d put a priority on this if I were you.” He said, “Dammit, Janeway, I’m not accustomed to taking orders in my own shedrow,” and I said, “Then let it ride and we’ll see what happens.” He got up from his chair. “That sounds almos
t like a threat.” I closed my eyes. “I don’t like threats any more than you do, Sandy, but if you don’t tell her soon, I will, and I’ll bet I can get her on the phone pretty quick. That’s not a threat, she just needs to know.”

  There was a moment when I didn’t know whether he was going to continue with this, break out laughing, or chase me out of there with a buggy whip. I gave him what I hoped was my apologetic look, but I knew he had been dragging his feet and he knew I knew; he had done nothing the whole time I had been in the hospital.

  “I’ll tell her,” he said defensively. “I said I’d tell her and I will.”

  “Please,” I said as he walked away.

  He had left me irritated and headachy. I sat watching the barn across the way. I could see that the trainer had hired another young stud like Rudy to rub Cameron’s horses. Rudy was assuming authority over the new hand and acting bossy. But I still figured Rudy was all strut, no waltz, and I made up my mind to pay him that visit. I was not quite my old self yet, but right now what I felt like doing was goading him into taking a swing at me.

  At eleven-thirty another man arrived across the way. Obie saw me watching and said, “Cameron’s brother, Baxter.” He was a smart guy, Obie, I decided again: he knew when something was up. “Bax has a stable over in Barn 14,” he said without being asked. I could see the Geiger resemblance in Bax even from there. I wondered if the brothers socialized much: I had heard they were not on friendly terms. “Cameron will always take any opportunity to be a pain in the ass,” Obie said, “but you already knew that. I think Bax has got his craw full of it in recent years, but he’s no plaster saint either. And they are still brothers after all.”