Bad Signs

by R.J. Ellory

  A report had come in from a hysterical Marilyn Webster about the discovery of her husband, locked in his own basement by a gun-wielding teenager, a second unknown woman in the bedroom, badly hurt, still alive but fading fast. But that report had gone to the police at Gila Bend. It would not be until the following morning that Wheland’s car would be found out behind the house and the sheriff’s department would contact the federal authorities. Webster was unable to identify the young man who had locked him in the basement. He’d had a kerchief tied around his face. Laurette Tannahill would not be telling anybody anything at all for quite some time it seemed, and thus the authorities were blindsided.

  At that moment Koenig and Nixon had eight killings to deal with, all the way from Bethany Olson in Twentynine Palms to Danny Leggett from the bank at Wellton. Seemed that the death of Earl Sheridan had not marked the end of the trouble. Laurette Tannahill, if she didn’t pull through, would make it nine. Even at eight it still ranked as the most significant killing spree in Arizona’s history for over forty-five years, and despite the fact that Earl Sheridan had been killed at Wellton, it looked like trouble was still making its way westward. The earlier record holder had been one Window Rock resident called Bernard Fenney. Fenney exemplified all of the craziness it was possible for a man to maintain. One Saturday afternoon he took it upon himself to march into the Hubbell Trading Post and let rip with a couple of shotguns. The shells he used were of his own invention, stuffed with lead shot, fish hooks, bits of glass, saltpeter and ball bearings. Once he’d laid down half a dozen people in the post, he went walkabout. The authorities finally trapped him in a cabin up near Keams Canyon, and they just wound up hurling some dynamite in there to finish the thing. Fenney had killed fourteen, wounded as many again, and by the time the dynamite did its work there was too little of him left to get an explanation.

  But that was history. That was now folklore and ghost stories for kids who didn’t eat their greens. Eat your collards or Fenney will come find you. This was now, right here and now, and eight was enough of an issue to have raised the antennae up in Phoenix. Both Koenig and Nixon were good men, men of stature and reputation, but even heroes have lice and neither of them wanted this to be the swan song of their respective careers. Clarence Luckman might have been lucky this far, but if it had anything at all to do with them then his luck had just about exhausted itself. Koenig and Nixon filed reports and made phone calls. They alerted their superiors all the way to San Francisco and Los Angeles. They were told that more men would be assigned and dispatched, those to assist in the location of Clarence Luckman, others to search for the body of the unfortunate half brother, Elliott Danziger. Radio announcements alerting citizens to keep a lookout for Clarence Luckman had already started through three counties, and more would follow. Luckman’s picture was duplicated time and again, and copies of that picture were driven in every direction on the compass. He swiftly became the most wanted individual for the last twenty-five years of FBI operations. And Clay Luckman—hunkering down in a collapsed barn somewhere in the middle of nowhere—did not have the faintest idea of what was about to befall him.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  She was twenty-three, and she lived alone. Her name was Deidre, but everyone called her Dee. Dee Parselle. Her mother worried far too much about her, but her father was a leatherworker in Apache Junction and he believed that a girl of twenty-three should be independent and focused. He had given her the money to find an apartment, and she’d found one—right there above the hardware store on Peridot Street. Four rooms—a sitting room, a kitchen, a bathroom, a bedroom. She’d been there for seven months, she had friends who visited, and there was a guy she’d met through her work as an orthodontist’s receptionist, a guy with an impacted bicuspid called Ben. She thought he might be the one. Ben, however, didn’t feel the same way about Dee. He wanted to fool around as all boys did, but did he want something beyond that? She hoped so. She really did. Ben—unbeknownst to Dee—had already figured he might move on anyway. After all, they had been going out for three weeks and she still hadn’t let him past second base.

  Monday evening she’d gone to get groceries. Her apartment was above the store and accessed by a wooden stairwell and walkway. It gave her privacy and altitude, and when the summer came she would put a chair out there and smoke cigarettes and listen to the record player from her sitting room, and she would have potted plants and maybe she would paint the railings, and things were going to be good.

  Monday evening she let herself in through the screen, the front door, and she kicked it shut behind her and went on down the hallway to the kitchen on the right to set her bag down. She didn’t go back to close the door for a good two minutes, and when she got there a young man was standing on the walkway looking at her through the screen and she jumped, startled, and wondered if she hadn’t dropped something. He was little more than a silhouette against the light behind him, and she could not see his face.

  “Miss?” he said.

  She took a step closer. “Yes? What can I do for you?” She wanted to sound unconcerned, but there was a querulous edge to her voice.

  “I just wondered if I could get a drink of water,” he said, and there was something innocent in the question, and yet at the same time Dee was thrown into a confusion of feelings as he raised his left hand and placed it against the screen.

  “Please,” she said. “Wait there …”

  But he came on through, and it was only then that she saw he had a gun in his hand and a kerchief tied around the lower half of his face, and at first there was a tightening in the base of her gut, and then her knees started to weaken, and she had to place her hand against the wall to stop herself from fainting.

  “Wha-what do you w-want?” she stammered, and now she did sound afraid, even to herself, and she had never been a tough girl, never been a fighter, never been one to take the offensive, and even though running at him with her fists and nails and screaming at the top of her voice, catching him off guard and unawares, pushing him back into the screen—which would certainly have given way with his weight—and seeing him fall out onto the walkway, perhaps even stagger back and lose his balance against the banister and go appetite-over-tin-cup backward to the yard below … even though this would have been the smartest thing to do there was no way in the world that Dee could have done something like that …

  She was completely unable to do a thing except allow a brief whimper to escape her lips as he advanced on her.

  He was gentle at first, taking her by the arm and guiding her through into the sitting room.

  There was something deeply disturbing in his eyes. They were blue, a good strong blue, and not a shade of gray in them, but the blue was cold and unfeeling, and she knew from the moment he asked her the second question that she was done for.

  “You here alone?”

  She nodded. She started to cry.

  “Stop crying!” he said, and though his voice wasn’t loud it was nevertheless hard and direct and uncompromising.

  She stopped crying.

  He pushed her away from him to the middle of the rug. She stood there, her arms in front of her, her hands out toward him as if pleading. She didn’t speak, couldn’t speak, and she felt like she was going to pass out right there and then.

  “What’s your name?” he said.

  She shook her head.

  “You don’t have a name? Everyone has a name, sweetheart. Now, what is your name?”

  “Dee,” she said, and the sound was involuntary, as if there was now no longer any connection between physiology and thought. She didn’t think to tell him her name, she just told him. He asked and she gave.

  “Dee,” he repeated. “Dee. Dee. Dee.”

  “Ple-please d-don’t hu-hurt me …” she gasped, and her eyes were so filled with tears she could see him as little more than a blur.

  “Now, Dee … sweetheart … what makes you think I want to hurt you? Do I look like the sort of person who goes around hurting p
eople?”

  She didn’t know what to say. Yes, mister, you look like that kind of person … exactly that kind of person. No, mister, you … you what?

  She said nothing.

  “I asked for a drink of water, that was all. If I’d wanted to hurt you I would have hurt you. But if I wanted a drink of water …” He left the statement incomplete. There was something happening. Something unexpected. He felt … felt what? Sorry for her? It upset him that she was so afraid?

  Digger smiled to himself. Jesus, what on earth would Earl say? You fucking pussy! Christ Almighty, are you a man or a fucking mouse? Give it to her, Digger! Just fucking give it to her! Fuck her and shoot her and be done with it!

  But no. There was something about this girl. She was pretty and fragile, and there was something almost trusting in the way she looked at him. Almost as if she believed what he was telling her.

  “Sit down,” he said.

  She did so. Didn’t hesitate, didn’t question the instruction.

  She sat on a plain wooden chair that was there beside the kitchen door.

  Digger stepped back. He lowered the gun fractionally. “You scared of me?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Ye-yes …”

  “Well, okay, I understand that. That makes sense to me. If I was home and someone came to the door with his face all covered up and a gun in his hand … well, I reckon I’d be scared some too, right?” Digger smiled beneath the kerchief. “Well, for sure it would have to depend on how big the guy was and whether or not I figured I could take him, but if he was a good deal bigger than me and he had a gun, or maybe two guns, then sure I’d be a little nervous, just like you.”

  He looked at Dee as if waiting for acknowledgment. She gave none.

  “But that’s not the deal here, sweetheart. I just need a place to lie low for a while, and I see you in the street and you look like the kind of girl who’d take pity on someone less fortunate, and there we are. We can make the best of it, or we can make the worst of it.”

  “Ar-are y-you in tr-trouble?” she asked.

  Digger laughed coarsely. “Hell, sugar, ain’t we all … from the moment we’re born to the moment we die? Ain’t nothing but trouble from one to the end with a few distractions along the way.”

  “I mean … I mean real trouble … like, with the police or something?”

  “No, what do you take me for, a criminal? I ain’t no criminal. I’m just down on my luck and things haven’t gone so good, but there’s always a light somewhere, right? You just need to make your mark someplace, and then people start respectin’ you again and it all straightens out.”

  “You’re gonna hide here or so-something?” she asked.

  “Hide? Who said anything about hiding?”

  “Someone must be af-after y-you … if you’re carrying a gun an’ all …”

  Digger looked at the gun in his hand. He raised his eyebrows, almost as if he were surprised to see it there. “Well …” he started, and then he shook his head. “Well, that’s a long story … ain’t important.”

  “You can st-stay here for a while if you like,” Dee said. She tried to smile. She shook her head. “I ain’t so afraid … I mean … I mean, you don’t look so terrible to me, mister.”

  Digger frowned.

  Dee raised her hand and withdrew it. She raised it again, slowly.

  Digger lifted the gun. “What the—”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I ain’t gonna do nothin’ …”

  He watched her, the way her hand reached out toward him, and then the tips of her fingers were against his face, and for a moment he was intrigued, curious as to what she was doing, and then she tugged down the kerchief slowly, and she smiled when she saw his face.

  “You’re a handsome man,” she said. “You ha-have beautiful eyes as well …”

  Digger felt himself color up. He didn’t know what the damn hell was going on here, but all of a sudden the last thing in the world he wanted to do was hurt her.

  He could hear Earl’s voice—Go on, give it to her! Fuck her and shoot her! Fuck her and shoot her, you pussy!—but the sound of that voice was fading.

  For a moment he closed his eyes, and he felt the sensation of her fingertips on his cheek, and then he knew what she was doing.

  He jerked back, raised the gun, but she was not trying anything. She was just looking at him—slightly surprised at his reaction — but still smiling gently.

  “What are you doing?” he said.

  She frowned, a fleeting shift in her expression, and she shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. “Just looking at you …”

  The fear seemed to have vanished from her voice.

  What was she saying? That she wanted him here? That she thought he was good-looking, a nice guy?

  Suddenly Digger had a vision of Eldorado. He remembered Clay, how they peered at that magazine advertisement and imagined the life they could have in such a place.

  He felt a rush of emotion in his chest.

  Digger and Dee in Eldorado.

  Elliott … he would be Elliott in Eldorado. Dee and Elliott. Elliott and Dee.

  Something hurt in his throat. He closed his eyes. He felt a tear somewhere, almost as if he were going to cry.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “What can I do? I’m just a girl. I’m here on my own. You’re bigger and stronger and faster than me. I’m going to run? How far would I get? And even if I did get there, what would I tell anyone? This nice boy came to my house and we sat and talked for a while, and he seemed like such a nice boy …”

  And the way she said that—nice boy—didn’t seem anything but a compliment. He was a nice boy. To Dee, he was just a nice boy. Someone his mother would be proud of.

  “You look tired and hungry,” she said. “I make great sandwiches. I can make you a turkey and white cheddar with some mayonnaise or something. Maybe you want a pickle and some chips, huh? You look real hungry …”

  Digger smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “I kinda am …”

  “So go wash up. You go shut the front door, and you go wash up and I’ll make us a sandwich, and we could have a root beer too. I got some root beer in the icebox, and we could just talk for a while. You can tell me about yourself and how you wound up in Tucson.” She started to get up from the chair. “We could pretend, you know?”

  Digger raised an eyebrow.

  She smiled. “We could pretend we were … you know? Like we were on a date or somethin’ …”

  Digger didn’t know what to say, didn’t know what to think.

  “Go on,” she said. “Close the front door and you go on back and wash up before we eat …”

  Digger got up from the chair. He stood there for a moment.

  She took a step forward. He didn’t back up. His arm hung by his side, his hand loose on the grip of the gun.

  She tentatively raised her hand and touched his face once more. “I don’t even know your name,” she said.

  “Ell … Elliott,” he replied.

  “Well, go on, Elliott … go on back and wash up.”

  Elliott hesitated, and then he tucked the gun in his jeans pocket, walked to the front door, and pushed it closed, and then he followed her direction as she pointed in back of the apartment to the bathroom.

  Once there he stepped back and looked into the living room. He could hear her in the kitchen. She was making sandwiches.

  Elliott Danziger stood for just a moment in the bathroom. He could see his own face looking back at him, the kerchief still around his neck like some kind of cowboy. He untied it, stuffed it in his pocket. He took out the gun and held it in his hand. It was cold and heavy. He felt ashamed. He felt disgusted with himself for treating such a poor, defenseless girl so badly. That was just damned awful of him. Such a nice girl like that. Such a …

  He shook his head.

  Jesus goddammit, why’d he have to be such an asshole all the time? Clay wouldn’t have spoken to her like that. Clay wouldn’t have thought such things about her …
that he was going to fuck her and shoot, or maybe stab her and whatever. What the hell was wrong with him?

  He had to tell her sorry.

  He put the gun in the waistband of his jeans and walked back to the living room.

  She was silent. No sound from the kitchen.

  Elliott frowned.

  And then there was something. A sound like … like someone dialing a phone?

  Elliott started toward the kitchen, and that’s when he saw it. Saw it because he damned well nearly tripped over it.

  The cable across the carpet.

  He sped up. No! he thought. She didn’t … no way, she didn’t!

  She just dropped the phone when she saw him appear in the doorway.

  Her own sudden intake of breath was the loudest thing she had ever heard.

  Digger reached to his left and ripped the cable from the wall. With his right hand he was already holding the gun.

  Rage filled him to bursting. He boiled over inside. He felt more anger than he had ever experienced, so much so that he believed his body might just explode.

  “I was just—just going to tell my mom I’d—I’d be—be l-late for d-dinner …” but she was already crying, and the terror was in her eyes, and the lies were on her lips, and Digger could see them, could smell the betrayal and deceit in the air around her, and he hated her then, hated her more than was possible …

  Oh, how Earl would have raged now, how Earl would have torn her limb from limb!