“Damn you, Eb,” I said aloud. “Why couldn’t you leave well enough alone?”
Chapter Eleven
The blond kid, Johnny, was alone on the premises of Maxe’s Garage, huddled up in the tiny office near the pumps with a space heater between him and the cold rain outside. He had been nervous in my presence on Tuesday; today he was as fidgety as a baby with a loaded diaper.
“Mr. Maxe ain’t here,” he said.
“That’s all right. I’ll talk to you.”
“Me? Nothing I can tell you.”
“Sure about that?”
He wouldn’t make eye contact. “I’m sure.”
“What’re you afraid of, Johnny?”
“Not afraid of anything . . .”
“Your boss?”
“No, I told you, nothing.”
“Where can I find him?”
“I dunno. He left about one o’clock.”
“Went home, did he?”
“I dunno.”
“Where does he live?”
Hesitation. His throat worked as if something were caught down there and he was having difficulty swallowing it.
“I can look it up,” I said. “Save me the trouble.”
“Spring Valley Road. Big white house.”
“Where’s Spring Valley Road?”
“Next block up, turn left, then right.”
“Now,” I said, “tell me about Ollie Ballard.”
“Huh?”
“Ollie Ballard. Good friend of your boss, isn’t he?”
“. . . I couldn’t say.”
“What’s he do for a living?”
“He . . . yard work, hauling . . . you know, that kind of thing.”
“Where can I find him?”
“I dunno. I haven’t seen him—”
“I meant where does he live.”
“Spring Valley Road, only farther out. Little place past the creek. Listen . . .” But he didn’t tell me what I should listen to; the rest of the sentence seemed to snag on the obstruction in his throat. His tongue made skittery movements along his upper lip. Ollie Ballard was one of the things he was afraid of; I could see it in his eyes.
“You get along with Ballard, Johnny?”
“Sure I do. I get along with everybody. Why?”
“Kind of an odd guy.”
“I dunno what . . . odd?”
“Weird. That laugh of his—gives you the willies.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Like he’s a little crazy. You think?”
“I . . . well . . .”
“How does he feel about blacks?”
“Huh?”
“Black people. Doesn’t like them, does he?”
“Jeez, how should I know how he—”
“That’s why he joined the league.”
Blink, blink, blink. “The what?”
“Christian National Emancipation League.”
“What?” he said again.
“Come on, Johnny. You know what I mean.”
“No,” he said. “No, I never heard of any league.”
“Sure you have. Maybe you’re a member too.”
“No! I don’t belong to nothing.”
“But Ballard does. Why lie about it?”
“I’m not lying. I never heard of a Christian League. I . . . you mean the Sentinels—”
The last word came out in a snipped-off whisper, as if he hadn’t meant to say it and was trying to bite it back as it rolled out. He scrubbed a dirty hand over his face, smearing and blackening the sweat that had popped out there. He wasn’t looking anywhere near me now.
I said, “Tell me about the Sentinels, Johnny.”
“No. I dunno anything about them. . . .”
“We’re past that point. And you’re the one who brought up the name.”
Headshake.
“Sentinels. A group like the league, right?”
Headshake.
“Ballard’s a member—how about your boss? He one too?”
Blink, blink.
“Who else in town? How many?”
Blink. Headshake.
“How about a couple of guys who wear camouflage outfits and drive around in a camouflage army Jeep? One young, one about my age with a big hook nose like a hawk’s?”
“Jesus!” he said.
“Who’re they, Johnny? Tell me their—”
He came driving up out of his chair, so suddenly and with such violence that he kicked over the space heater and sent me backward a couple of quick steps to get clear. “Leave me alone! I dunno nothing, I don’t want to talk about those . . . I ain’t gonna talk to you anymore, just leave me alone!” He blundered past me, out into the rain, and was gone around the far corner of the garage.
Sentinels, I thought.
Some sort of affiliate or offshoot of the Christian National Emancipation League? Or another racist group entirely, maybe home grown? Well, whatever the Sentinels were, they were organized enough and bad enough to scare hell out a husky twenty-year-old kid.
Spring Valley Road was a narrow ribbon of asphalt, roughly paved and loaded with chuckholes, that curled out into thick forestland west of town. A dozen or so private homes were spaced along it close in, most of them old and moderately rundown on large parcels, flanked by barns and chicken coops and junk cars and vegetable patches and gnarly little apple orchards that looked as though they wouldn’t produce much edible fruit. The rain gave all the places a dreary, forlorn aspect—not that a bright, sunny day would have done much to improve the shoddy appearance of most of them.
Poverty pocket, this whole area. Jobs at a minimum, and the ones that were available mostly low-pay and menial. Prospects for future betterment dim. A lot of people would feel frustrated, angry, psychologically as well as geographically cut off from the mainstream, and suspicious of federal, state, and local government because of their isolation. There’d be a high incidence of alcoholism; and a frontier attitude toward the right to bear arms and the need to protect families and property against outside forces; and a kind of paranoid bonding among those looking for easy answers and scapegoats for their troubles. Add all of that together, throw in a smattering of low IQs like Ollie Ballard’s and a lack of adequate education, and you had the perfect breeding ground for hate groups and semisecret militia outfits.
The big white house Johnny had mentioned was among the first half-dozen closest to the village, no better and no worse in size or condition than its neighbors. I slowed when I spotted it, would have turned into its gravel drive except that the house showed no lights and I didn’t see any vehicles parked in the yard. Wherever Art Maxe had gone, it wasn’t home.
After half a mile the distance between the houses grew longer, and the ones I passed were smaller and poorer still. Two parcels seemed to have been abandoned, including one whose barn had collapsed in on itself in a sodden tangle of gray boards and rusted strips of sheet metal. Beyond that property’s broken fencing, a narrow bridge spanned the rushing waters of a creek, possibly the same one that flowed through the village; and just beyond the creek was a sixty-foot twist of mud that led in among scrub pine to a clearing. A two- or three-room shack—you couldn’t dignify it with any other name—slouched at the back of the clearing, on the stream’s bank. Off to one side of it stood a tumbledown shed, and around back was what appeared to be a dog run fenced with chicken wire. Parked nose up to the shack’s front porch sat a dented, primer-patched truck so old the Joads might have driven it out from Oklahoma on their quest for the promised land. Smoke, thin and torn away by the wind as soon as it appeared, poured out of a stovepipe chimney.
I stopped at the entrance to the muddy access lane, just long enough to reach under the dash, unclip the .38 Smith & Wesson Bodyguard revolver I keep there, turn the cylinder to put a live round under the hammer, and slip the gun into my topcoat pocket. An unnecessary precaution, maybe, but you don’t take chances when you beard a lion in his own den, even a halfwit lion in a scruffy den like this. Then I dro
ve on toward the shack, at a crawl because the surface was slick and offered about as much traction as a skin of ice.
I heard the dogs barking before I was halfway to where the truck was parked. At least two of them, one inside the shack and the other in the run out back. Big, too, from the racket they made. The furious barking and whining tightened the clutch of tension between my shoulder blades. I like animals and most dogs, but some breeds—the larger and more aggressive kind—make me edgy. I’d had run-ins with a couple of that variety; they were not experiences I cared to have repeated. And Ollie Ballard’s mutts, whatever they were, sounded aggressive as hell.
I eased in alongside the battered truck, shut off the engine. As I set the brake and reached for the door handle, Ballard materialized in the shack’s doorway. He wasn’t alone: the dog that came out under the porch overhang with him was black and brown, weighed sixty or seventy pounds, and had a head like a cannonball studded with teeth. Pit bull. The worst damn kind of attack dog there is. My stomach kicked a little, but I didn’t hesitate in climbing out. Never show fear to an animal or to a man.
The pit bull barked and growled and bared more of its canine dentalry. Ballard said something to it sharply, and it shut up and sat on its haunches and glared at me as I came around the front of the car. I stopped there and said to Ballard, “Okay if I come up out of the rain?”
He made a loose come-ahead gesture. I went up three rickety stairs slowly, my right hand in my coat pocket and my fingers touching the .38. When I moved ahead under the slanted roof I was about five feet from him and the pit bull. Too close, but I stayed put and tried to look more relaxed than I felt.
Both Ballard and the dog peered at me out of red-rimmed eyes. Behind the shack, the other animal kept on barking its fool head off—another pit bull, probably. Ballard hadn’t shaved in two or three days; yellowish stubble spiked his cratered cheeks. Baggy pants and a faded and torn plaid shirt covered his stickman frame. Made for scaring crows and little children, I thought. With him around, every night was Halloween.
“You’re that guy from the city,” he said. “That detective. I thought you went away.”
“I did. Now I’m back.”
“What for? What you want here?”
“Looking for Art Maxe.”
“Art? I ain’t seen him since yesterday.”
“Know where I can find him?”
“Nah. Garage or home, likely.”
“He’s not either place.”
“What you want with Art anyway?”
“Ask him some more questions.”
“About that girl and her nigger? He already told you, he don’t know what happened to ’em.”
“How about you?”
“Huh? Me?”
“You know what happened to them, Ballard?”
“Shit, no. Wouldn’t tell you if I did.”
“Didn’t like it much, did you.”
“Huh?”
“White woman, black man.”
“Goddamn right I didn’t like it. Pretty little piece like her, letting that nigger do her. Made me want to puke.”
“That all it made you do?”
“Huh?”
“Teach them a lesson, maybe? Hurt them?”
He stared at me with his mouth open.
“You and the other Sentinels,” I said.
Five more seconds of stare. Then the high-pitched giggle came out of him, so sudden and shrill that I jerked involuntarily and the pit bull started a low, rumbling growl deep in its massive chest. It sat there growling and quivering, its hot red eyes on my throat. I closed my hand around the .38, slipped my index finger through the guard and against the cold curve of the trigger.
“What the fuck you talkin’ about?” Ballard said.
“The Sentinels. You and the Sentinels.”
He looked confused, but not because he didn’t understand what I was saying; you could almost hear what few gears he had grinding away in his head. “What’re you, a joker?” The giggle again, not as shrill. “Man, I’m the joker around here. Couple of aces missing, but the joker’s still in the deck.”
“Nothing funny about this, Ballard.”
“Funny about what?” he said. Then he shook his head and said, “Three things I like and that’s beer, dogs, and pussy. Sometimes I drink so much of the first, I get the last two mixed up.”
“Sentinels do something to the kids? You do something?”
A little more of the openmouthed stare. His lower lip was wet with spittle. At the same time, he closed his mouth and dropped a hand to catch hold of the pit bull’s collar. The dog tensed and the growling modulated into another teeth-baring snarl; I could see muscles rippling along its back, its jawline, in all four legs.
“Oughta set him on you,” Ballard said. “Yeah. Rip your fuckin’ throat out.”
I took the gun from my pocket, not too fast because the last thing I could afford was to have it snag on the cloth. Ballard’s bloodshot eyes rounded when he saw it; a thin slugline of spit wiggled down from a corner of his mouth.
“Let go of that collar,” I said, “and I’ll shoot him. I mean it. Him, and then you.”
He didn’t say anything. But his hand tightened on the collar.
“All right. I’m leaving now. But I’ll be around. If you did hurt those kids, if anybody else around here did, I’ll find out about it. And don’t get any ideas about coming after me—it won’t do you any good. I don’t push around, and I’m not the only one who knows about the Sentinels. You understand me?”
His answer was another giggle.
I backed over to the steps, watching the dog and Ballard’s hand on its collar. Down the steps at the same slow pace, into the wind-whipped rain. Nothing happened except that I stepped into a puddle with one of my brand-new eighty-dollar shoes. Inside the car, I locked all the doors before I laid the .38 on the seat beside me. The scarecrow and the pit bull stood still, staring like a pair of bogies, as I started the engine and backed up and went away from them.
On the ride into the village I kept thinking that I’d handled things badly with Ballard, pushed him too hard. He didn’t worry me, but whoever else was mixed up in this—the Sentinels as a group or individuals among them—did. You can’t guard against unknowns. I’d probably stirred up a hornet’s nest by coming at Ballard the way I had; so the prudent thing to do, if I wanted to avoid being stung, was to leave Creekside again right now and establish myself at a safer distance.
The problem with that was, you can’t accomplish nearly as much from a distance as you can at close quarters. Besides, nobody had ever accused me of being prudent. I was like that pit bull: give me something worth attacking and I’d keep after it until I tore it apart.
The courtyard at the Northern Comfort Cabins was empty except for thirty or forty glistening rain puddles. I angled in close to the office, with the driver’s side nearest the entrance so I would need to take only a couple of steps to get inside. It was raining as hard now as it had been in Eugene the day before—thick, wind-driven lancets out of gray-black clouds that seemed to hang just a few hundred feet about the village. The low overcast made me think of Joe Btfsplk, the character in “Li’l Abner” who had a cloud of gloom and doom hanging over him everywhere he went. If any single impression of Creekside and its citizens stayed with me, this would be it. A real-life Dogpatch with an entire population of Joe Btfsplks.
At first I thought the office was untenanted, but as I approached the counter a female head covered with stringy, gray-streaked hair came into view behind and below it. The face under the hair was round and puffy and sagging, as if all the flesh were slowly rotting away beneath the skin. One of the reasons, or likely the main reason, was gin: she had a glass of it in one hand and the air in the too-warm room was ripe with the juniper berry smell. She was sitting in an ancient cushioned armchair with her feet up on a stool. Beside her on the chair’s wooden arm lay an old Bible; and in front of her, next to the door into the rear living quarters, was a portable
TV with its screen dark. She might have been anywhere between forty and sixty, round and flabby and fat-ankled, wearing a shapeless Hawaiian muumuu of the sort that had gone out of style twenty-five years ago.
I leaned on the counter. “Mrs. Bartholomew?”
“Ruth Bartholomew, that’s me.” Raspy voice, unfuzzied by the gin. She was the kind of heavy drinker, I thought, who would sound completely lucid right up to the moment she passed out. “Who’re you?”
I told her. There was a change in her eyes—a darkening, a shifting, almost a retreating. Up came the glass; down went the rest of the gin it contained, a good two fingers. She didn’t even blink.
“Well?” she said. “Why’d you come back?”
“Just doing my job. Your husband around?”
“No. Went down to Susanville. You want to stay here again?”
“If you have a vacancy.”
Either the irony escaped her or she chose to ignore it. “Got nothing but vacancies this time of year. You care which one?”
“Same as before. Eleven.”
She didn’t comment on that. Nor did she get up out of her chair. “Seventy-five a night,” she said. “In advance.”
“It was fifty, three days ago.”
“New rates.” Her eyes challenged me to argue.
I didn’t give her the satisfaction. On the counter was a stack of registration cards; I took one and filled it out. Ruth Bartholomew watched me with her gin-bright eyes, but still she made no move to stand up.
I said, “You want me to fill out the credit card slip too?”
“I’ll do it. Reach the key yourself, though.”
I took the key off a rack at one end. She moved then, in a series of slow pushings and liftings that were almost like a parody of the ritual movements of aikido or tai chi. I waited until she was on her feet before I said, “What can you tell me about Allison McDowell and Rob Brompton?”
“Who?”
“You know who I mean. His name is Rob Brompton.”
“That so?” One of her hands gobbled up my MasterCard; it was the fastest I’d seen her do anything except suck down the gin. “Well, I don’t know nothing more’n Ed told you.”
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