John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 16 - The Dreadful Lemon Sky

by The Dreadful Lemon Sky(lit)

  I tossed the other shells away. They weren't going to help me. I could guess what he would do. He would start circling that big grave as fast as he could go. I could stay out in front but not for long, not in such heat. And as soon as I slowed, or headed for the trees or the stables, he'd have me. I didn't have much time to do any thinking.

  In such a situation it is difficult to believe it is completely serious. A yellow jeep is a jolly vehicle. Pastureland is not menacing. The hour before noon is not a likely time for dying. It was some odd game of tag, and when it ended the eventual loser would congratulate the winner. Let's try it again someday, pal.

  But it was real. A jeep with or without a blade la a lethal weapon. I could tell from the way it tracked that he had it in four-wheel drive. He was Rkilled, and the jeep was agile.

  I thought of alternatives and discarded them as fast as they came up. I could head across the field and try to trap him into a circle out in the open. I could turn a smaller circle than he and maybe get near enough to the side of the jeep to Jump him. No chance. He would read it, accelerate out of the circle, and swing around and come back at me. Or I could slow him enough, maybe, to go up over the blade and hood and drop in on him. But how do I slow him down that much?

  Suddenly I thought of one slim chance. If I couldn't make it work, I was going to be no worse off. I was going to be dead. And if I didn't try it, I was going to be dead. A mockingbird flew over, singing on the wing, a melody so painfully sweet it pinched the heart. I do not want to leave the world of mockingbirds, boats, beaches, ladies, love, and peanut butter from Deaf Smith County. Especially do I not want to leave it at the hands of a fool, at the hands of this Van Harn who thought he could wipe out an event by killing anybody who knew anything about it. It has been tried. It never works. Any lawyer should know that.

  I had to get him going counterclockwise around the horse grave. So I moved to my left end he gunned the motor and took the bait. He came on so fast he gave me a very bad moment. The big hole was a sloppy rectangle about ten feet by eight feet. Before I could get my feet untangled and get around the first corner, he nearly clipped me. He had shoved about three blade loads in on top of the dead horse, and so that side was filled to within about two feet of the original ground level, the whole front half of the horse still uncovered.

  He pressed me. I had to lope around pretty good, with a constant fear I might slip and fall on the corners. He held it in an almost continuous controlled skid, the back wheels staying farther away from the hole than the front wheels. His reasoning was obvious. In such heat I could only make so many circuits. I had to make enough circuits to lull him. The sweat was running into my eyes. Each time I passed the decision point, I mentally rehearsed exactly how to do it. And I had to do it soon, before I was exhausted.

  At last I felt ready. I rounded the corner, dropped down two feet onto the loose dirt, spun and leapt up beside the jeep, and dived for the top of the wheel. He tried to accelerate but I was able to stretch the necessary few inches. I snapped my right hand onto the top of the wheel and pulled it hard over, toward me. The jeep swerved into the horse grave, dropped, and piled into the straight side of the hole, over where it was deeper.

  The left rear fender had popped me in the side of the thigh, throwing me into a deep corner of the hole, in considerable torment. I scrabbled and pulled myself up and saw Van Harn fold slowly sideways out of the jeep. The four wheels were still turning, settling it deeper, and then it stalled out.

  His legs were still hung up in the jeep. One eye was half open, the other closed. He had a high white knot in the middle of his forehead, growing visibly. I hobbled to him and bent over him. He hit me in the mouth and knocked me back into the same corner of the hole. Before I could get up, he sprang out of the hole and went racing toward the backhoe. I came lumping along behind him, with no hope of closing the distance.

  He went to the back of it and wrenched a spade out of some spring clips, a spade I wished I had seen earlier.

  He darted to meet me and swung the spade, blade edgeways, at my middle. During my screeching halt I managed to suck my stomach back out of the way. He swung back the other way, from left to right, aiming at my head. I couldn't back away in time. I dropped under it, dropped to my hands and knees, felt it whip the hair at the crown of my head. That made everything real and deadly. A tenth of a second faster and he would have cleaved my skull.

  From knuckles and knees I launched myself forward, getting one foot under me, coming up under him like a submarining guard, getting a shoulder tucked cozily into his gut, clapping an arm around his heels as he tried to bicycle backward. He smacked down hard and lost his spade. I crawled up him; straddled him. He was yipping, bucking, writhing. I didn't want to break my hands on the bones of his skull or face. I came down with a forearm across his throat, my other hand locked on my wrist for leverage. I tucked my face into the curve of my arm as protection from his flailings. After a frantic spasm he fluttered a little and went still. I kept the pressure on to be sure of him. Then I rolled off and got onto my knees and sat back on my heels, blowing hard. His white cap lay nearby. I picked it up and wiped the sweat off my face and out of my eyes.

  His face was puffy and suffused with blood. His chest was moving. It seemed very quiet out there in that pastureland. I listened to the songs of the midday bugs and the liquid call of a distant meadowlark. Time to wrap him up and make delivery.

  Sixteen

  WHEN AT last I felt partially restored and was not gagging with each breath, I got up onto my feet. My right thigh was cramping with the muscle bruise the jeep had given me. I managed a deep knee bend without screaming, and the second one did not hurt quite as much.

  The jeep offered the best chance of something with which I could tie him up. I trudged toward the horse grave. If he could have come the whole distance across grass, he would have had me. He had to cross some of that dirt from the hole. The brittle limestone crackled under his running feet. I jumped sideways, ducked, and spun all in a single terrified bound. I heard the spade hiss past my head. His momentum carried him toward the hole. He tried to turn, tripped, stumbled, fell and rolled down the slope, and ended up beside the Jeep.

  I was after him quickly and got there as he lifted the spade over his head. I reached up and got hold of the handle. As soon as I had the handle he let go of it and hit me three very fast and very good shots. He had screwed his feet into the dirt. He had very good leverage, and he was too able to attempt the roundhouse blows of the beginner. He slammed them home, very close straight shots. They darkened the sky. The spade slid out of my hand. I stepped into him and hugged him like a big sick bear. I bore him down and suddenly he was in back of me instead of in front of me. I was on my hands and knees in the soft dirt and he had a wiry arm locked around my throat.

  My air was shut off. Dazed as I was, I could not get the leverage to get out of that position or to throw him off. I tried to crawl to the jeep. He somehow held me back. I scraped with both hands like a dog digging a hole as I tried to plunge forward. The world swam. My lungs heaved against the obstruction. I began to feel a lazy floating pleasure. Oxygen starvation. Rapture of the deeps. I folded down and with darkening sight stared into the hole I had dug with my hands. I saw a piece of blue pipe, very pretty blue pipe. And just under it, as in some grotesque still life, I saw an unmistakable segment of suntanned wrist, dirt caught in the sun-bleached curling hair.

  The dimming brain works slowly and with difficulty. Clean blue tubing. An azure blue. The size used for a bicycle frame. And why was that fellow under it, under the dry dirt that had come from a hole too deep for all the recent rain to reach?

  There was a stupid rhyme in the fading brain: Jason Breen and his Azure Machine.

  The realization pierced the darkness that was closing in on me. What happened in my mind was not fright, not anger. It was an overwhelming dismay. A veritable crescendo of dismay, enough to galvanize my slackening body into a few moments of a terrible, terminal strength.
I will never know how I was able to come to my feet with Van Harn plastered to my back. I took a single wobbly step and then fell toward the jeep, turning as I fell, so that I smashed him against the metal. I rebounded onto hands and knees, the stricture gone from my throat. I stretched out and breathed until the shadows lightened and the sun came out again. In sudden fright I pushed myself up and spun around. Freddy lay on his side.

  I had the feeling he was going to bound to his feet and we were going to have to do it all over again, as if he were some mythological creature which could not be slain.

  First I got the chain from the jeep. I rolled him onto his face, and chained his wrists together, tyIng a clumsy knot, and used the surplus to chain his ankles.

  Then I knelt by the hole and carefully pulled the dirt away until I could see a hand, and most of a forearm, and more of the tubing of the blue bicycle.

  From the angle, the rest of him was under the Jeep, and under a foot of dirt. Somewhere under there could be found the stillness of the Jesus face, the wire glasses, the crushed guitar, the brown legs sturdy with the bicycle muscles. And somewhere in his head, lost forever in the death of the synapses, were the jellied memories of why he had come out here and what Van Harn had done to him. The idea had been splendid. Dig a big hole and bury the body under a horse. Who would ever look farther than the horse?

  I dragged Van Harn up the slope toward the back of the jeep and left him in the shade of the rear overhang. I felt his throat. The pulse was strong and regular. Except for the knot on his forehead, there wasn't a mark on his face. The left side of my underlip felt like half a hot plum. When I opened my mouth to yawn width, experimentally, the hinges creaked. I had a dull headache behind my eyes. He could blow them in pretty good. His dark glasses were missing. I looked around and found them; stomped flat.

  Just as I climbed out of the hole I heard the oncoming drumbeat of a galloping horse. It was one great big dark brown horse, and she looked good in her cowgirl hat, yellow shirt, and twill britches. But when she pulled it up short and slid off, she turned back into Jane Schermer, with pudding face, minimal neck and neuter body.

  "Smith said Frederick had to shoot..." She saw Freddy in the shade of the jeep. "What are you doing to him?"

  "Nothing, at the moment. But he's kept me pretty busy."

  "Get that chain off him at once!"

  "First come take a look at this."

  She hesitated, then dropped down into the hole. She had let the reins hang free. The big horse made munching and ripping sounds in the stubbly grass. I pointed to the hole, big around as a bushel basket and half as deep, with the arm, the hand and the portion of blue bike in the bottom of it.

  She stared and sprang back and turned quickly, making a shallow, gagging little coughing sound. "Who? What-"

  "I'm pretty sure it's Jason Breen. He worked at Westway Harbor Marina."

  "But did you..."

  "Did I? God's sake! Sure, I came out here and sort of borrowed that backhoe, which I don't know how to operate. Then I dug this big son of a bitch of a hole. Then I put Jason and all his gear at the bottom of said hole and covered him over good. Then I shot this horse and... look. Forget it."

  "But Frederick couldn't have done it."

  "Lady Jane, I don't think there's anything in this world that you or I could think of that Freddy wouldn't do, if he happened to feel like it."

  She hustled over and knelt by Freddy. She felt his forehead with the back of her hand. She put her ear against his bare chest to hear his heart. She stood up and looked at the visible half of the horse. "Poor darling," she said softly. "Poor Sultan. Poor beast. My Graciela foaled him. He grew up on my place. I gave him to Frederick."

  "That's nice."

  She went to the front legs of the horse, lifted, and tested with strong hands. "Must be a hind leg," she said. "Take that stupid chain off of Frederick-right away!"

  "I don't think it's a hind leg either."

  She stared at me. "What do you mean?"

  "I think Freddy needed a dead horse."

  "He has other horses here. Sultan was valuable."

  "He needed a dead horse that was so valuable and he liked so much that it made sense for him to send his ranch hands off on other work while he took care of it himself."

  "What makes you think a hind leg isn't broken?"

  "I watched him slide it up to the edge of the hole and roll it in. By then he didn't care what I saw because he had already decided to put me in the hole next to Jason. Under the horse."

  "You make him sound like a... Could you uncover those back legs? Please?"

  I walked over and got the spade and went to work. Once I got into the rhythm of it, it didn't take long. Before I finished, her fool horse finally caught on to the fact there was a dead horse in the area. He came over and stared into the hole, then screamed and backed away, shaking his head, rolling his eyes, and clacking his teeth. Jane hustled and caught him and led him all the way to the trees and tied him to a branch and left him there, squealing and pawing at the ground.

  She hunkered down and checked each back leg in turn, then stood up and dusted her hands and climbed up out of the hole. I followed her. She looked thoughtfully down at Freddy, and she didn't say anything about the chain.

  "I raised Sultan," she said.

  "I better go to the house and use the phone."

  "Phone?"

  "To report a body."

  "Oh, of course. There's one in the tack room, an extension. Are you going to leave Frederick... like this?"

  "I know. That chain looks as if I'm overacting. But I feel a lot better with it wrapped right where It is."

  She looked at me and through me. Her eyes were small and of no particular color. Dull hazel, perhaps. "The things people said about him. I knew they were all lies. They were jealous." She focused on me. "Is this all some kind of terrible trick? Did you shoot Sultan?"

  "I am not terribly fond of horses, but I've never shot one."

  "I have to believe somebody."

  "It might as well be me. Freddy tried to kill me. He made some good tries. He tried with the jeep. He tried with the spade. He tried manual strangulation. He is a very tough animal. He is about twice as strong as he looks."

  "Jane?" Freddy said weakly. "Jane, dear?"

  "Yes?"

  "Help me, please."

  "You shot Sultan because he broke his leg?"

  "No other choice, dear. Please help me. Unfasten the chain, please."

  She moved closer, looking down at him. "'I don't think I can help you, darling. I don't think anybody can help you. Just be patient. We're going to make a phone call. You won't have to stay there very long."

  I was halfway to the stables and the tack room before I could no longer hear his voice calling her name. She cantered past me when I was almost there. I found the phone while she was shooing her horse into an empty box stall.

  Captain Scorf was not available, so I asked for someone to whom I could report a dead body, a murdered body. Then I gave a very simple report and explicit directions.

  Jane Schermer sat with her back against the box stall door, her knees hiked up. There was a broad overhang shading the walk which led by the stalls. I sat beside her.

  After a long time she said, "They were telling the truth and he was telling the lies."

  "What?"

  "Nothing. I've been going over things that troubled me, that I asked him about. I've been such a fool."

  "That is a very convincing fellow when he wants to sell you."

  "I was too easy to sell. I wanted to get married."

  "So you'll get married. But not to Freddy."

  She turned and looked at me. "Men have never paid much attention to me. I know when it's the money. A person can tell. I wondered about him. I was never sure."

  "Maybe it wasn't."

  "You're trying so hard to be kind, aren't you? Why would he... spoil everything for himself?"

  "In big ways, and little ways too, people do that all the
time to themselves. We can't stand prosperity. We have to tinker with the machinery." She looked out across the track at the distant scene, at the canted top half of the yellow jeep. She touched my arm suddenly. "Look!"

  I looked out there and saw that Freddy had performed a feat I would have called impossible. With wrists chained behind him and ankles chained together, he had managed to worm his way out from under the back end of the jeep and get himself up out of the hole and onto his feet. He was on the far side of the hole, hopping up and down with terrible demonic energy, managing somehow to retain his balance, though without seeming to make any progress. He was springing high into the air. I thought I heard a distant shouting. Then we saw him fall, roll, and disappear back into the hole.

  We both got up. Jane said, "Something's the matter with him."