“What difference would that make?”
“If the harvest really isn’t done, there will be a bunch of bindlestiffs and threshers at that place somewhere, probably hiding right now, and at least one of them knows where Krueger is. When we come back, I don’t want any important people around as witnesses. And Puckett thinks he is just so goddamned important.”
“When will that be, that we go back?”
“Tonight, if the rain lets up. Late. You drag people out of their beds and push them outside with no clothes, it takes the fight right out of them.”
But the rain went back to being a serious downpour. Drood’s deputy had to squint hard to see past the feeble vacuum-powered windshield wiper, and nobody talked for the rest of the trip.
In the back seat, the Windmill Man silently wondered where he could get a cartridge belt. When they came back in the morning, he wanted to be sure he had enough bullets to kill both Krueger and the sheriff. He didn’t trust the sheriff. Maybe he should do the deputy, too. Maybe a lot of people. He hadn’t decided yet. The City of Ithaca did not have a newspaper, but he pictured a headline, all the same: BLOOD BATH AT LOCAL FARM. Wouldn’t that just be something, though? Just what he needed.
Chapter 27
In the Belly of the Rooster
Joe Wick didn’t make it back to the farm until late evening. His Model T was almost completely coated with brown mud, and so was his face. He had obviously given up on trying to keep the windshield clear and had folded it up to full horizontal and looked under it instead.
He went out to the barn first, to talk to the crew of the Ark. Annie Wick came out of the front door of the house and joined them. Some of them were working on sewing up the tops of wheat bags, but most were just sitting around aimlessly. They all looked up eagerly.
“You missed supper,” said Annie.
“I’ll get over it,” said Joe. “I saw the tracks in the yard. Did Puckett come back?”
“We couldn’t tell,” said Jude. “There was a blue Dodge with a white star on the front door. But nobody got out. They just circled around the yard once and then left. We all stayed out of sight.”
“That would be Sheriff Drood’s rig,” said Joe. “But if he had Puckett with him, I can’t figure why they didn’t get out.”
Neither could Charlie. But if some lawmen had come to the farm, and they weren’t there about the banker’s money, he was very much afraid he knew what they were looking for.
“Maybe they got confused when they didn’t see the Peerless,” he said. “If so, they won’t stay that way for long. We should figure on them coming back.” And what the hell would he do then?
“Maybe so,” said Joe, “but not anymore today. The roads are terrible slick. I barely made it back from Ithaca.”
“What were you doing in Ithaca?” said Annie.
“Getting money from the bank, Mama. We sold the crop, but we got to bag it and store it for three months.”
“Well, we know how to do that, all right.”
“A nickel a bag to anybody wants to help with it,” he said to the group.
“Who keeps track of the count?” said one of the crew.
“I trust you.”
“Wow, a fair man!” said another. “That’s good enough for me.”
Some of them drifted away from the group to start work that night. Some just went to bed.
“I don’t suppose you ran into Jim Avery in your travels?” said Charlie.
“No, but I wouldn’t worry much. Nobody’s traveling tonight without a powerful reason.”
Like running from the law, ran through his mind, but he said nothing. It seemed to him that Avery had been gone far too long for him not to worry, but he could see nothing he could do about it.
Then he remembered the Starving Rooster. He had resolved to clean and grease and oil it one last time before it got put away for the winter, and it had completely slipped his mind. He went to the machine shop and collected some tools in a canvas bag, put on his leather jacket, lit a kerosene lantern, and headed out to the corncribs. Emily gave him a kiss on his way out.
Two hours later, he was fast asleep. Inside the concaves of the big machine once again, he had greased, oiled, tuned and adjusted everything in sight. Afterwards, the pace and tension of the past few days and the lack of sleep finally caught up with him. He fell into an exhausted heap on a cushion of straw that was left in the separator. Sometime between then and dawn, Emily found him there, put a blanket over him, and put out his lantern.
***
The lawmen returned to the Wick farm just before dawn. They came in two vehicles this time. Drood led the way in his Dodge, with his two deputies, Otis and the big former farm kid, whose name was Clete. The banker, Puckett was not with them.
The Windmill Man followed in his official Mercer County pickup. He hadn’t bothered to explain his reasons for that to Drood. The truth was that he didn’t trust the three goons not to make a mess of the whole operation, and if that happened, he wanted his own way of getting clear. And of course, he didn’t ever like somebody else having control of his actions, even in a small way. It did not worry him that he did not have a plan yet. He had always been lucky at improvising. Part of his luck came from being opportunistic without being emotional. And part of it, of course, was just pure Providence. He trusted Providence. But even so, there were definitely too many wild cards in this game.
The roads were still treacherously soft and slippery, but the rain had finally stopped, so the drivers could at last see where they were going. That was enough. Both vehicles had high undercarriages and good tires, and their progress was steady, if not fast. Drood pulled into the Wick place and came to a sliding stop in the middle of the main farmyard. He motioned to the Windmill Man to pull up alongside him.
“Put your pickup around on the back side of the barn,” he said. “Keep anybody from running off into that corn field out back, while my deputies and I search the outbuildings. Anybody we find, we’ll herd them toward you. You see the Krueger guy, you sing out.”
“What about the house?”
“Most likely nobody there but the Wicks. I know them. They’re old, and she’s a Jesus freak. We’ll let them sleep for now. They won’t come and interfere. If we need them later, we’ll go back and slap them up.”
That seemed far too careless to the Windmill Man. But he went along with it for the moment, giving Drood no expression that he could decipher. He drove the pickup around behind the barn, near the staged water tanks by the windmill. He put the driver’s side away from the buildings, so he had the bulk of the vehicle between himself and anybody who might come out of the barn, shooting. He shut off the engine but then put the magneto switch back to “on,” so if he had to start it in a hurry, one quick crank would do it. One nice thing about the T, he thought, was that the crank was always right there, in the ready position. It didn’t detach, as on some of the newer models, just to get lost somewhere. He got out of the rig, turned up his collar against the morning chill, laid his hands on the warm hood, and waited.
***
Charlie woke to the sound of voices in the corncrib bay. He was about to stick his head out of the Rooster to see who was there, when he caught a glimpse of khaki trousers, polished boots, and shotgun barrels. He pulled his blanket over his face and waited.
“See anybody?”
“No. The place is empty.”
“Should we look in the corn?”
“The cribs are full. Nobody can get in there.”
“How about inside the threshing machine?”
“Judas Priest, Clete, you are dumber than a sack of hammers. Who the hell would be inside a threshing machine?”
“Hey, come on; it’s possible.”
“It’s also dumb. I looked under it, okay? Let’s get over to the barn. That’s where they’re all going to be. You mark my words.”
“It wasn’t so dumb.”
“Just move it.”
The footsteps receded, and after a minute of silence, Charlie risked a peek out of the Rooster. Then he climbed out as quietly as he could, went to the end of the machine bay, and peered around the corner into the yard behind the barn. Thirty yards away, by the windmill and water tanks, the brown Model T pickup from Mercer County was parked pointed away from him. But the man in the uniform, leaning on the hood, was definitely not the man he had seen in Minot. There was something dimly familiar about him, but he couldn’t place it. He moved back into the shadows and then hunkered down behind one of the wheels of the Rooster and continued to watch.
Soon the blue Dodge with the white star stopped by the far corner of the barn, and another uniformed man got out. Then the crew of the Ark came shambling out into the yard in their nightclothes, followed by the two men who had been in the shed by the Rooster, with their shotguns up. So it had happened. The law had come for him, and somehow or other, they had known where to look.
Jim Avery, of course, would tell him to stay where he was. The people of the Ark had gone to a lot of trouble to hide him, and it would be an insult to them to throw all that away. But Avery wasn’t there, and Charlie had to do something.
He needed a weapon. His bayonet was back in his pack, in the barn loft, and he saw nothing in the machine bay that would be a substitute. There wasn’t even a corn knife or a sickle. He picked up the biggest wrench he could find and moved to the other end of the enclosure, the one facing the farmhouse. Looking out, he saw nobody in that part of the yard, and he ran as fast as he could from the corncrib to the front of the barn. If somebody saw him dash between the two buildings, he was done for. He flattened himself against the barn and held his breath for half a minute. When nobody called out, he continued on his way.
He entered through the small door of the horse stable and quickly climbed the ladder to the hayloft above the main barn. At the place where he and Emily had slept, he found his pack, with the bayonet in it. He put the sheath on his belt, buckled it up, and descended to the old threshing floor. He put the wrench in his boot.
Partway down the ladder, he saw a door open and shut at the front of the barn. He dropped to the floor, drew his blade, and moved that way, ducking behind stacks of grain bags as he went, his heart throbbing in his ears.
Most of the barn was in deep shadows, and he concentrated in vain on trying to see into the corners. The hair on the tops of his hands and arms stood up as if he were in an electrical storm, and he was dimly aware that he was sweating. He tried to breathe quietly. Was he doing that? His heart was beating too loudly for him to tell. Finally, the intruder stepped into a patch of light from an upper window, and he saw her clearly. He put the bayonet back in its sheath and stepped out into the open space.
Annie Wick was carrying the biggest double-barreled shotgun he had ever seen, quite probably an eight gauge. When she saw him, she made a sign to be quiet and moved quickly over to whispering distance.
“You’re a sight for sore eyes, Annie. How did you avoid the party out back?”
“Me and Joe been watching from the upstairs window of the house. They didn’t bother to roust us, and a lucky thing for them, too. Joe’s got his rifle, but he can’t get a clear shot at anybody. I saw you run out of the crib shed and come here, so I came, too. What are you fixing to do, Charlie?”
“I don’t know yet, but I’ve got to do something. This whole mess is my fault.”
“You don’t know yet if it is a mess. Let’s watch some.”
They went over to the big doors in the back of the barn and each picked a knothole to look through. The crew of the Ark was standing around in a loose cluster behind the barn, women in long flannel nightgowns, barefooted in the cold mud, and men in wool long johns, some with work boots hastily pulled on but not laced. Now and then they were pushed or prodded by the two deputies with shotguns, and they folded their arms against the cold and squinted into the light. They looked confused, sleepy, and frightened. A few, including Maggie Mae, looked boiling over with rage. She had her arms folded across her chest in a defiant posture, and her eyes spoke of murder.
The sheriff from the blue Dodge paced arrogantly in front of the group, hands on hips. Soon the sheriff from the Mercer County pickup came over to join him, limping slightly, and suddenly Charlie remembered were he had seen him before.
The two sheriffs spoke to each other, too quietly for Charlie to hear. The one with the limp was shaking his head.
“Who is it that wants you, anyway,” whispered Annie, “that lawman from Mercer?”
“Probably. Only he isn’t a lawman.” Charlie kept his voice to a whisper, as well.
“What? What is he, then?”
“Good question. The night I left home, I saw him dressed like an ordinary stiff. He was in a harvested field, pitching straw in the moonlight.”
“Why on earth?”
“I don’t know, I just—oh my God, yes I do know. He was trying to hide something. Something he couldn’t let anybody see. That son of a bitch!”
“I don’t understand.”
“He was hiding a grave, Annie. The grave of the woman everybody thinks I killed. That bastard killed her. And he doesn’t know if I saw the grave or not.”
“Oh, dear. If that’s true, then he wants to kill you, too.”
“He surely does.”
“I think he’s evil, Charlie. You should get away from here. You can’t kill evil.”
“We’ll see about that. I don’t know anything about the other guys in uniform, though.”
“They’re from Ithaca. We know them. The sheriff’s name is Drood. He’s meaner than a dog that’s been bit by a skunk. He’d as soon shoot you as look at you. His deputies aren’t quite as bad by themselves, but they try to show off for him, act like tough guys. But they won’t chase you past the county line. None of them. That’s about ten miles east. I think you ought to go that way, real quick.”
“I’m not leaving the others to be beat up or killed.”
“What else can you do?”
“I’ll know when I do it, won’t I?”
“Bad plan.”
Out in the yard, the sheriff named Drood raised his voice and addressed the group.
“Well, well, well. What do we have here? Looks like a threshing crew to me.” To one of his deputies, he said, “You sure you got all of them?”
“Unless there’s somebody in the house, boss, that’s it. We looked in every building, even in the lofts.”
“How about the steam engine?”
“Didn’t find one. Threshing machine is in one of the corncrib bays, but no engine, no how.”
“That’s not good. And no Krueger, either? Hollander?”
“He’s not any of these people,” said the Windmill Man.
“Not good at all. All right, people, what’s the story here? Where’s the boy and his little toy steam engine? Where’s Charles Krueger?”
“I’ll tell you what the story is, Sheriff,” said Emily. Charlie held his breath. “The story is, you produce a warrant or get the bloody hell out of here. This is private property, and the owners have rights and so do we.”
He wanted to hug her. That might not have been the smartest thing to say, but damned if she didn’t have guts.
The sheriff walked up to her slowly, fixing her with a hard stare that she returned without flinching. When he got within a foot of her, she uncrossed her arms and put her fists defiantly on her hips. He looked her up and down, then grabbed a handful of gown at the top and ripped down. As she reached down to grab her garment and cover herself again, he backhanded her in the face with his other hand. She staggered to her knees, dripping blood on the wet ground.
Charlie yanked the bayonet out of its sheath and lunged for the door, but Annie Wick managed to grab him before he got to it. “No!” she whispered.
“But I’ve—”
“You can’t!”
“God damn it, Annie!”
“The
y’ll just kill you.”
He knew she was right, and he replaced his weapon in its sheath. It might have been the hardest thing he had ever done.
Outside, the lawman continued to shout at the group.
“Your rights are what I say they are, folks, and not one damn thing more. Now let’s try this again. Charles Krueger is nothing but a common murderer. You don’t owe him a thing, least of all a beating and a trip to jail. Now who wants to tell me where he is?”
“He went to shit, and the hogs ate him,” said Jude the Mystic.
“Who are you talking about?” said one of the others.
“He fell off a cliff and drowned.”
“Fuck you,” said yet another.
“And the bucket of bolts you rode in on.”
Emily was still kneeling in the mud, her head down, crying softly and bleeding from her mouth. Drood looked around at the rest of the group, and his gaze stopped at Maggie Mae. “What do you think?” he said to the other sheriff.
“Perfect. She’s the most defiant-looking one here. Break her down and the others will fold in a hurry.”
“You!” he said, pointing.
“She can’t talk,” said Jude.
“She’ll talk to me, by the twisty. Or somebody will talk for her.” He grabbed her by the hair at the side of her head and pulled. He was obviously unprepared for the knife that she had hidden under her folded arms. She slashed out with it, stabbing him just below the left armpit. The blade didn’t penetrate very far, probably hitting a rib. He screamed in shock and rage and doubled partway over. With his good side, he pulled out his big Colt revolver and jammed it up against the bottom of her jaw.
“Clete!” he screamed, and the deputy came up behind her and grabbed her knife hand, twisting viciously and pulling her arm up behind her back. The knife fell into the mud. Drood holstered his gun, doubled over with pain, and pulled a kerchief out of a back pocket and pressed it against his wound, which was bleeding profusely.
“Son of a bitch, that hurts! You’re going to be very, very sorry you did that, missy. Clete, run her over to one of those stock tanks. Let’s see if she can breathe underwater.”
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