Carmody's Run

by Bill Pronzini

  “Yes.”

  “If anybody comes out of here but me, start the car and go away fast. We’re at Farm Xorrigo, near Santa Margarita. There’s a map in the glove box to show you how to get back to Palma Nova. Go to Pepé’s and wait there. Clear?”

  “I... yes. But what about—?”

  “No questions. Move.”

  She nodded, went away unsteadily through the trees. Carmody returned to the Seat, jerked wires loose under the dash. That done, he ran ahead toward the farmhouse.

  He heard the shrill cry of a woman just as he came in sight of it. She was shouting something, the words indistinguishable. Carmody took a moment to study the house, the farmyard, before going to the far end of the clearing. There were more sounds now, something falling, something shattering; seconds later a gun went off, hollowly, a single report. After that, he heard only silence.

  He left the woods, ran through deep shadow until he reached the grape arbor. He hunkered down behind a rusting metal swing, watching the house with his flat gaze. Less than a minute had passed when the glass beads in the doorway tinkled and the man, Miralles’ hired gun, came out into the yard.

  The moonlight was bright enough for Carmody to see the automatic held loosely in the tall Spaniard’s hand. He didn’t hesitate; there was a big score to settle here. He rose up and stepped out from under the arbor and squeezed off twice with the Beretta.

  TUESDAY NIGHT SILVERA

  The impact of the bullets knocked Silvera down. But they didn’t keep him down where he fell, didn’t numb his mind the way they did the right side of his chest. Almost immediately he rolled and scrambled on elbows and knees toward the nearest of the stone fences. Myrtle and evergreen shrubs grew in close to the fence, forming pockets of deep shadow; he dragged himself into one of these just as a spray of dirt washed over his right leg and the gun sounded again behind him.

  The Browning was still in his grasp; he twisted around with it, tried to find Carmody in the moonlit darkness and did not see him anywhere. He was sure it was Carmody, even though he hadn’t gotten a look at the one who’d shot him. It made no sense that he was here; how could he have found Farm Xorrigo so soon after Silvera himself had learned of its existence? And yet it could not be anybody else. Jennifer Evans had been alone, he was certain of that; and the Guardia Civil would have come with a dozen men and lights and they would not have shot him without warning. Carmody, only Carmody...and now he would kill the man, gladly. Now it was not only a necessity, it would be a pleasure to cut his belly open and empty his entrails on the ground and grind them under his foot.

  Something moved near the farmhouse, at the remains of an old wooden cart. Silvera raised the Browning, fired once, and the movement stopped. Without hesitation he scuttled backward several feet because the muzzle flash would have betrayed his position. His body was still in motion when he saw the flash of light from the farmhouse wall, heard the bullet slap the earth where he had been lying and then the rolling echo of the shot. He fired in turn at the place where he had seen the light, drew farther back along the fence. This time there was no answering shot. But he didn’t believe he had hit Carmody; he would not fall for any such ploy as that.

  The activity had caused pain to erupt through the numbness in his chest. Silvera explored the wounds with his fingertips, grimacing. The one below his collarbone was the worst; the bullet must have severed nerves or muscles, for he could barely move his arm. It and the wound lower down, along his rib cage, were bleeding profusely. He did not like the feel of his own blood. It enraged him, made him sick to his stomach. He would have to have a doctor—and soon, very soon. Before the bleeding made him too weak to travel.

  He looked up at the night sky, to where the moon sat fat and white above the hilltops. Its light was both good and bad: he could see Carmody if he left cover, but Carmody could also see him. And he could not afford to play a waiting game because of his wounds.

  He would have to be bold, then, force Carmody into making a mistake that would leave him vulnerable. He would have to find an edge.

  TUESDAY NIGHT–CARMODY

  Carmody lay belly-down along the side of the farmhouse and cursed himself for not making killing shots with his first two rounds. He’d had the element of surprise on his side; he’d been only ten yards from the Spaniard; and he’d had the moonlight to aim by. A kid with a .22 could have put a round through the hired gun’s eye at that range, with that much light—and yet he’d missed the heart not once but twice.

  So far he hadn’t done any of it right. He’d let his emotions get in the way like a frigging amateur. And when he’d seen the hired gun sliding along the ground and pulled up and steadied himself for the third shot, he’d hurried that one and missed again, short. After that he’d had no choice but to go back under the arbor. And now here he was in a standoff with a wounded man—the worst kind of standoff, because wounded men, like wounded animals, were a hell of a lot more dangerous.

  The one advantage he had left was that the Spaniard couldn’t afford to let it go on too long, play cat and mouse games with a couple of bullets in him. He’d have to either force the issue or try running away from it. If he’d already got the diamonds–and chances were he had–that might help tip the scales on the side of running.

  How would he do it? Over that stone wall and through the farmland and orchards beyond? He wouldn’t want to take the chance of revealing himself long enough to climb the fence; and he wouldn’t be that familiar with the area—where there was another farm, where there was transportation.

  His car, the Seat on the track, was the closest and the fastest way out of here to a doctor. He couldn’t know Carmody had disabled the car; he might suspect it but he couldn’t know for sure. He’d risk it because it was the best choice open to him. He’d be lying over there now, thinking about the car, figuring a way to get to it from where he was. And the way he’d figure would be back along the fence until the farmyard ended and the trees began, then into the trees where there was plenty of cover and he could work his way around to the road. There was no other route he could take, except to go over the wall and he wouldn’t go over the wall.

  Carmody lay breathing through his mouth, watching, listening. Moon-washed darkness and bulky shadow-shapes; the fiddling of crickets, the occasional hum of a mosquito. The Spaniard was still thinking about it over there. But he’d make up his mind before long, and when he started to move Carmody would hear him. He couldn’t crawl hurt over rocky ground without making some kind of noise.

  When the first sounds came, four or five minutes later, they were louder than he’d expected. Leaves and branches rustling, a dragging on the ground; silence, more rustling, more dragging. Carmody strained his eyes but the blackness along the fence was impenetrable and he couldn’t pinpoint the Spaniard’s location by the sounds alone.

  He inched backward against the farmhouse wall, until he could no longer see the fence. Then he stood up. The rustling and dragging were still audible as he retreated to the rear corner and turned it, moving on the balls of his feet.

  TUESDAY NIGHT SILVERA

  A few meters from the end of the farmyard, Silvera stopped crawling and sat with his back against the stones, his feet pulled in to one side. Sweat oiled his face, his body...sweat and more of his own blood. The pain in his chest had grown fiery from his exertion. Already he was feeling weakened, dizzy.

  He listened. At first he heard nothing; then there was a low skittering, perhaps of an unseen pebble being kicked at the far side of the clearing, beyond the grape arbor. One corner of Silvera’s mouth lifted in a shark’s smile. Carmody had taken the bait. Now he would go around the farmhouse and the outbuildings, into the trees on the far side of the entry road.

  Silvera had thought it out carefully, putting himself in Carmody’s place, in Carmody’s mind. Carmody would think that escape, the services of a doctor, were his adversary’s primary concern; he would think his adversary would attempt to get to his car, which Carmody had surely seen on the ent
ry road, as quickly as possible; and he would believe that the adversary would take the safest route open to him, along the fence and then into the trees. So Silvera had made plenty of noise crawling here, so Carmody would be sure to hear him and believe that his reasoning was correct. He would not come to the fence and follow; no, that way was uncertain, left too much to chance. Instead he would go the other way, into the trees on the opposite side, and attempt an ambush at the car.

  Silvera sat resting, giving Carmody time to get into the woods. But not too much time, because when no one approached the car from the opposite direction, Carmody would soon become suspicious and think of the possibility of an assault from behind. Silvera must be in position before that happened, he must stalk Carmody with great care and shoot him in the back if possible, taking care only to disable him. He had special plans for Carmody’s death, oh very special plans.

  One more minute passed before he heard another sound. It came from the direction of the pines, a faint crackling as of a footstep on dry pine needles. Carmody was in the woods now, moving among the trees.

  Silvera pushed away from the fence, gathered his feet under him. The pain in his chest made him wince and his stance wobbly at first; then his legs steadied, and he began moving along the wall toward the farmhouse, bent low so he could not be seen above the stones. He was careful to make no sounds that could be heard more than a few feet away. His useless left arm was cradled in against his body. Sweat made the Browning slippery against his right palm.

  When he came abreast of the house he paused to listen again. The crickets, nothing more. Still bent low, he ran to the side wall and laid his back against it, his breathing labored, his mouth open wide so it wouldn’t be audible. The pain was savage now, feeding his hate for Carmody. And the hate gave him new strength.

  He went around behind the house, half running, not worrying about sounds because the ground was thick with clay dust here. At the end of the cactus patch, he moved in along its fencing. Ahead were the outbuildings and the livestock corrals. Nothing stirred in that direction; Carmody was well into the trees by this time. He stepped out, crossed to the first of the corrals, paused a moment beside the feeding shelter there. Then he started over past the well to the second corral.

  Scraping sound on rock, barely audible —and Carmody stood up behind the gallows-shaped windlass.

  Silvera tried to twist and fall away, bringing the Browning up, thinking: No, you could not have known! And Carmody’s first bullet tore the gun out of his hand and the second ripped into his chest, threw him sideways and down hard on his back. He lay there in the red dirt, moving his legs, only his legs, paralyzed from the waist up, looking into the bright sky overhead.

  He was dying, he knew he was dying. There was terror in him as immense as the sky, so immense that he did two things he had not done since he was a boy in Esteban de Bao.

  He began to cry.

  And he began to pray.

  TUESDAY NIGHT–CARMODY

  Carmody came out from behind the well. The Spaniard was twitching on the ground, twitching and making weeping sounds—you don’t twitch or cry when you’re playing possum—and his weapon was lying eight feet away. But Carmody was taking no chances with the Beretta’s clip empty and the nearest new one in the Porsche a long distance away. He didn’t go near the man until another couple of minutes had vanished; and he didn’t holster the Beretta until he got close enough to see how much blood was pumping out of the Spaniard’s chest.

  It had been the rustling and dragging sounds that had given him away. They’d been too loud, much too loud for a man bent on escape. Once Carmody figured them for a trick, it had been easy enough to work out what the Spaniard was really up to. So he’d made a little noise of his own, not too much, to give the impression that he’d fallen for the misdirection and was headed deep into the trees. Instead he’d doubled back here to the well and set up an ambush of his own. And the too-smart hired gun had walked right into it.

  Now it was over—or almost over. Carmody picked up the man’s weapon, saw that it was a Browning .380 automatic, a hell of a piece, and saw too that it was useless; the bullet he’d put into it had damaged the firing mechanism. He threw it down again, scuffed it around in the dirt with his shoe to smudge any prints he might have left. The Spaniard was still twitching, still weeping, muttering something now that was unintelligible. Carmody walked around until he found a large, heavy rock—a chunk of quartz. He took it to where the dying man lay and used it and then hurled it away into the dark.

  It took only a few seconds to search the body and find the chamois pouch containing the diamonds. With the pouch in his own pocket, he crossed the yard to the farmhouse. Inside, he found the dead woman —Fanning’s woman, he supposed— and when he saw her he didn’t feel bad any more about using the quartz rock. He took a sheet from the bedroom, draped it over the woman to keep the flies off her blood until he could make an anonymous phone call to the Guardia Civil. Then he went out and down the lane past the Seat, walking at first and then trotting.

  Gillian was locked in the Porsche, waiting for him.

  WEDNESDAY, EARLY MORNING–CARMODY

  Carmody said into the telephone, “I’m calling about that information you gave me earlier tonight. There was a problem at the Hotel Mallorca Grande. Maybe you heard about it.”

  “I heard about it,” Ibanez said. “I have details. I knew you would want them.”

  “Good. How serious was the attack? Fatal?”

  “No, señor. Death would have been merciful.”

  “I don’t follow that.”

  “The mind as well as the body was affected.”

  “The body in what way?”

  “Paralysis.”

  “Permanent?”

  “It would seem.”

  “And the mind?”

  “Damaged brain cells,” Ibanez said, “caused by lack of oxygen. There is very little chance for recovery, the doctors say.”

  “Thanks. I’ll be in touch.”

  Carmody rang off, lit one of his thin black cigars. If Miralles was a cripple and a vegetable, the diamonds belonged to him now—no contest. Give it a week, maybe two, and if Miralles’ condition hadn’t changed, he’d contact Van Hagen in Amsterdam and have him pick up the gems and sell them, legally or on the black market. Either way, he’d realize upwards of two hundred thousand dollars—more than enough to finance another villa and repay him for the time it would take to get set up in a new location.

  He left the bedroom, saw that Gillian was still sitting huddled in one of the leather armchairs, and asked her, “How do you feel?”

  She took a sip from the glass of Veterano he’d given her. “I’ll be all right.” she answered. Her jaw bore purplish welts and bruises where she’d been hit, and she’d complained of a headache, but it wasn’t her physical state that concerned him. “It’ll just take a while, that’s all.”

  He went to the bar, poured himself a drink. Behind him Gillian said, “Will you tell me about Fernando now? What happened out there at the farm?”

  It was the fourth or fifth time she’d asked him. He said the same things now he had the other times: “No. You don’t want to know. You’re better off forgetting any of it ever happened.”

  “I’ll never forget it. Is he dead?”

  “All right, he’s not going to bother you any more.”

  She held the glass more tightly, looking into it as if it were a deep well and she were trying to see the bottom. She said to the glass, “I loved him once. How could I have been so wrong?”

  She had said that before, too, on the ride back from the interior. Tense and frightened, she’d needed the reassurance of her own voice in the dark car and she’d kept up a running commentary. All about her relationship with Fernando Marl, and how he was the one who’d told Zaanhof about her, and what she’d felt when she recognized him last night, and the terrible way he’d been smiling, and how he had come in off the balcony and hit her with the gun. Carmody had only half-li
stened because none of it mattered any more, it was all past history, and he’d been thinking about Miralles and the diamonds.

  Gillian lifted her head. “I was wrong about you, too, Carmody. In the beginning.”

  He still had nothing to say.

  “You seemed cruel and uncaring about anyone but yourself. But you took my bracelet and the money from Zaanhof’s villa, and you saved my life out at that farm. You do care about people, don’t you? About me, just a little?”

  He had no words to answer questions like that. He shrugged and said, “I took the stuff from Zaanhof’s on a whim. And I had better reasons than you for going to Farm Xorrigo.”

  “Then you don’t care anything at all about me?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I don’t care what you believe.”

  She looked at him steadily. “I’m not going home yet, with my face like it is. I think I’ll stay on Majorca for a few days.”

  “Why tell me that?”

  “Don’t you want me to stay?”

  “No. There’s nothing for you here, on the island or in this house.”

  “I think there is.”

  Carmody was silent for a time. Then he finished his drink, put the glass down hard and went to stand in front of her. “Right now,” he said, “you’ve got a choice. I’ll drive you to a hotel in Palma Nova, or you can spend the rest of the night here. But if you stay here, you don’t sleep on the sofa and you don’t sleep in the spare bedroom.”

  “You’re very blunt”

  “I’m too old to play games,” Carmody said. There was desire in him, deeper and more urgent than any he’d felt in a long time. And it wasn’t just a need for release. There was more to Gillian Waltham than breasts and a vagina, much more—that was what had been bothering him about her all along. She had a face, she had a mind and a persona, she was real in the same way Chana had been real. He didn’t want it that way but there it was; there was no sense in denying it any longer. “Well?”