Bad Signs

by R.J. Ellory

  Bailey ordered for them both. Hash browns, sausage, gravy, malted milk. Before the food came Clay got up, said he was going out for cigarettes. He returned with a pack of Lucky Strikes, one of them lit already and in the corner of his mouth.

  The food came and they ate in silence. When he paid the check he was reminded of how much money they didn’t have. There was very little like the weight of empty pockets.

  He held out the few dollar bills and the collection of change. “This is something we have to do something about,” he said.

  “We do,” she replied, and yet neither of them offered an idea of what that something might have been.

  They left the diner just as Elliott Danziger decided on a dark gray Ford Galaxie parked behind a house on Montrose. The keys would be in the house or in the car. Either which way he was getting them, and then it was goodbye, Arizona. He instinctively touched the butt of the revolver through his jacket and made his way to the rear yard gate.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  As bad luck would have it, the owner of the Ford Galaxie on Montrose Street lived alone. His name was Walter Milford, and he too had been born under a dark star. He was fifty-eight years of age, had served his country in Salerno, running into battle with his comrades as part of Operation Avalanche, and then amidst the ranks of allies as they fought for Monte Cassino. Invalided at the end of the war as a result of deteriorative blindness and a serious leg wound, Walter Milford walked with some difficulty even now, the better part of twenty years later. He often woke with an ache the size of Tennessee, used a heavy cane when he walked, and the discomfort he suffered set his tone at resentful and varied little across the dial. His eyesight, having grown ever worse year by year, was now at the stage where he saw shapes and shadows, little more, and the car that he’d once driven was little more than an ornament. It was maintained solely for the periodic visits that Walter’s son made—Thanksgiving, Christmas, sometimes Easter—and he would drive Walter out to a restaurant and Walter would listen patiently as his son detailed the trials and tribulations of his advertising firm. Walter’s pension provided him with a quality of life that left a great deal to be desired.

  The young man that knocked on the back door of the house that Tuesday afternoon merely gave him further cause for bitterness.

  “I was wonderin’, sir, if you had a jug of water. My car seems to be overheated—”

  “The hell you think this is, a goddamned garage?” Walter replied.

  Digger smiled apologetically. “Don’t see as there’s any excuse to be discourteous, mister,” he replied.

  “Don’t give a damn what you do or do not think,” Walter said, “and I’d be more than pleased if you’d get off my goddamned property right now.” He got up out of his chair, used the cane to lever himself to a standing position, and he stood there glaring at the teenager.

  Digger withdrew the gun from the waistband of his pants. There was no reaction on Walter’s face. Digger was surprised. He did not appreciate the fact that the lack of reaction was occasioned by Walter’s inability to see the weapon.

  “Got a gun here, you old fucker,” Digger said.

  “Why, you little asshole—”

  “Fuck you, old man.”

  “You two-bit no-good son of a bitch. What the hell do you want? You’ve come here to rob me? Is that it?” Walter took a single step forward.

  Digger came through the screen, through the open inner door, and he stood there in the hallway. They were now little more than twelve feet apart. Digger had the gun down by his side. He possessed the advantage. The old man was scared shitless. He could tell by the flicker in his eyes.

  The feel of the gun in his hand gave Digger such calmness. He felt high. He felt elated. He felt as if his whole being had been touched by the hand of God.

  “To rob you?” Digger said. “Don’t see as how you got anything worth robbin’.”

  “So what you here for? You’ve come to kill me?”

  “Maybe.”

  Walter sneered contemptuously. “You don’t scare me, you little punk. You think I’m frightened by a sawed-off little punk like you—”

  Digger smiled inside. He raised the gun and aimed it squarely at Walter’s chest. “I think you’re gonna pee your pants, old man,” he said. There was a derisive and condescending tone in his voice. He wanted the old man to say he was scared. He wanted the old man to admit that he was terrified.

  And whatever Walter Milford might have felt, he was damned if he was going to show some darn fool teenager with a pistol he was frightened. He’d faced Nazis in Germany, fascists in Italy. He’d been in bar brawls with American sailors. He’d chased down a purse snatcher one time in San Diego and given him the kicking of his life. He wasn’t going to be threatened by this …

  “Where are the keys to the car?” Digger asked. He held the gun steady. Strange, but it didn’t seem to weigh anything at all.

  “You go burn in hell,” Walter said. A red rag to a bull.

  Digger smiled. He took two steps forward. If he fired now the force of the bullet would knock Walter Milford clean on his ass.

  “Give. Me. The. Keys. To. The. Car.”

  Walter smiled back. “Go. Burn. In. Hell.”

  Digger came at him, but Walter was quick. With his heavy cane he swung upward and caught Digger’s forearm from the underside. The gun went flying across the room, hitting the mirror above the mantel and cracking it from corner to corner.

  The pain was considerable, but Digger was so enraged he simply lashed out sideways with his clenched fist. That fist caught the right side of Walter’s face, broke a couple of teeth, and Walter staggered but did not fall. Digger went for the gun, retrieved it, aimed it once more. Walter raised the cane again, and this time he brought it down on Digger’s left shoulder. It was more the weight of the cane than the force with which it was delivered, but the shock and impact was sufficient to catch Digger off guard and bring him to his knees. Digger lost his grip on the gun a second time and it clattered away and hit the baseboard. It was then that the dark star over Walter Milford came into its own. Raising the cane high above his head, a moment away from bringing the full force of it down on Digger’s head, Walter was stopped dead by an excruciating pain in his chest. His heart cramped viciously, and he let out a howl of anguish. His grip on the cane was relinquished involuntarily, and he dropped it. Digger was up on his feet, running across the room to get the gun. He thought to shoot the old man as he knelt there on the ground, both hands on his chest, his face a mask of agony as he gasped for air. He hesitated for a moment, and then made a move for the kitchen.

  Walter Milford lashed out with his left arm and caught Digger sideways. Digger fell awkwardly, jarred his elbow against the arm of a wooden chair. He howled in pain, and even as he struggled to get to his feet Walter was lashing out again.

  “Jesus fucking Christ, old man!” he shouted. “Give it a fucking rest!”

  Digger swung his arm out and his fist connected with Walter’s shoulder, but Walter didn’t go down. He was right there on his feet, cane in his hand.

  Digger held the gun steady, aimed right at Walter’s head. “You back off, old man, or I’m gonna shoot you right where you stand.”

  “Ha!” Walter snorted, and he pulled his arm back as if to bring that cane down on Digger’s head with every ounce of strength remaining.

  Digger was fast. He was younger and stronger and his blood was up. He just lunged forward and punched Walter Milford in the chest. Walter’s breath was knocked right out of him. He dropped the cane and fell backward. The side of his head caught the edge of a low table. He was unconscious before he hit the ground.

  Digger caught his breath. He stood there, gun in his hand. There was a bright and shining light in his eyes, and his heart was racing, and his stomach was churning, and he felt the singular and unmistakable pressure of the moment in every ounce of his being.

  He didn’t take a moment to consider the fact that he’d nearly had his ass kick
ed by a blind man.

  “Fuck you,” he said, and he felt brave and bold and powerful.

  He stood there until his heart slowed down, until the pulse in his temples and his neck returned to normal.

  But he hadn’t gotten his ass kicked. He’d beaten the old bastard into submission, and now he could just shoot him in the head for his trouble. He had the power of life and death. He had total power over the old man. He could kill him, or let him live.

  Digger took a step back and looked at the gun in his hand.

  There was nothing like it in the world. There could never be anything like this in the world. This was God’s work. This was the devil’s work. This was not religion, it was better than that. This was an epiphany, an exorcism, a channeling of such force that his mind and body could barely contain it. Whatever it was that he experienced in such moments was the most important thing in the world. The most important thing a human being could ever experience. Earl had been right all along.

  And now the old man was unconscious, and there was no hurry. He could get himself together. He could wash up, find some new clothes, look for any money the old guy might have.

  A handful of minutes later Digger was upstairs in the bathroom stripped to the waist. His blue shirt was on the floor, his face and neck and hands and arms were scrubbed clean. He had wiped down his leather jacket, found a clean shirt amongst the old man’s things, and he was ready to go.

  Downstairs once more, Digger checked to see if the old man was still breathing, and left him lying right there on the floor while he searched for the keys to the Galaxie. He found them in a dish on the countertop in the kitchen. He went through cupboards and drawers, located Walter’s “emergency fund”—a bundle of ones and fives and tens tied together with a piece of string, tucked right there in the back of the cutlery drawer. He counted out thirty-seven dollars, stuffed the notes in his jeans pocket and went back to the front.

  Before he left Digger looked around the lower floor of the house until he found the basement door. A light cord inside the doorway illuminated a flight of stairs. He descended slowly, felt the chill of the darkness and damp, established that there was little down there but old clay jugs, water pitchers, a trunk full of military clothing with a box of medals on top, work boots with the laces tied together, a couple of old canvas sacks that smelled of mold, a broken ladder, an empty tea crate. Back upstairs he got a good grip on the cuffs of Walter’s pants, and he dragged him to the basement door. He got his arms under Walter’s shoulders and made his way down one riser at a time. The old man wasn’t so heavy, and he laid him down on the basement floor. He was still unconscious, still breathing, but he sure as hell was going to wake up with a sore head. He looked down at Walter Milford on the floor below. He felt nothing at all.

  “Scared now, little man?” he said. His voice was measured and peaceful. “Are you? Just a little bit? Just a little unnerved by today’s experience?”

  He enjoyed the silence that came in return.

  Then he took the gun from the waistband of his jeans, and—holding it steady—he aimed it at Walter’s head. “Bang,” he said, and smiled.

  He put the gun back in his chinos.

  He closed and locked the door soundlessly, and made his way out to the car.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  John Cassidy, en route from one appointment to another, stopped off at home at approximately quarter past four that afternoon. He had spent the afternoon speaking to Deidre Parselle’s parents, her work colleagues, her friends, with an air of sadness about him that reminded him more of the loss of his mother than his father. Alice called it his shadow. She said she could sense it when it was there. She said that it was as obvious as daylight and sunshine, and yet only she could perceive it. The shadow was what made him question all things. The shadow was the thing that made him a cop, made him a detective, made him seemingly more interested in the dead than the living. Aside from her, of course. Her and the baby.

  She saw the shadow around him as he came across the backyard and in through the kitchen door.

  “What happened?” was her first question, and before he had a chance to respond she added, “Who died?”

  John smiled. He held out his hands and she stepped toward him. He held her for a few moments, or rather she held him, because she knew at times like this she was an anchor for him, a reminder that there was light and life in between the darkness and dying.

  “A young woman was attacked,” he said. He did not say her name. Protocol prevented divulgence of specifics. He could tell her that someone died, but not their identity.

  “Murdered?” Alice asked.

  “No, not murdered, but she was attacked very brutally.” John sat down at the kitchen table. “You have some coffee on the go?”

  She shook her head. “You know I don’t drink it anymore. I’ll make some—”

  “It’s okay,” he replied. “I have to go soon anyway.”

  “I’ll make some,” she repeated. “You’ll stay long enough to have a cup of coffee.”

  She busied herself in silence. She asked no more questions. He would speak when he was ready.

  “It was a sex attack, I think,” was his opener. “He didn’t rape her, but he stabbed her in the breasts …”

  Alice didn’t turn. Cassidy felt her close her eyes for a moment and withdraw inside.

  “In her home or elsewhere?”

  “In her home.”

  “So there’s a reasonable chance he knew her.”

  John shook his head. “I don’t think so. I think if he knew her he would have made sure she was dead. I’ve heard of enough killings of enough spurned lovers to know that often there’s just a single wound. The throat is cut. A knife through the heart. A single gunshot to the head. Almost as if they want to make it as swift and definite as possible.”

  “Was the house broken into?”

  “It was an apartment, up a stairwell and along a sort of balcony. It was above a hardware store.” He paused. “And no, I don’t think he broke in. There was a bag of groceries on the kitchen counter. I think he followed her home.”

  Alice Cassidy stopped what she was doing. “Peridot Street?”

  John looked at her. His expression confirmed the question.

  “Was it the orthodontist’s receptionist? That girl?”

  John didn’t say a word.

  “Christ Almighty, John, I’ve spoken to her.” Alice crossed from the stove to the table and sat down facing him. “I was making inquiries about getting a new orthodontist. You know, after you had that trouble with the abscess and everything, and I went there. I had to wait a while to see him, and I just got talking to her. Pretty girl, early twenties, dark hair, and she said she lived above the hardware store on Peridot Street.”

  Again John didn’t speak, which were all the words Alice needed.

  She shook her head slowly, resignedly. “Lord Almighty,” she said as she rose from the chair. “What on earth is this world coming to?”

  A half hour later John Cassidy left with those words echoing in his head. What on earth is this world coming to?

  He did not need to tell Alice to say nothing about the girl who lived above the hardware store on Peridot Street. She took what he did very seriously, and a breach of confidentiality between them would have been a mortal sin in her eyes. She watched him go, and she didn’t want him to, but he’d told her he had to interview more of the girl’s friends. The longer he left it, the less would be remembered. He said he would try and be back by seven. She knew well enough that she couldn’t expect him until she saw him.

  Instinctively she checked the front door and the back. She knew it was foolish, that whoever had done this thing was more than likely three hundred miles away by now, but she felt that crawling sense of unease that always arrived with bad news. She did not understand how fine the thread was that attached her to these things, but she appreciated that the thread was there. The same thread that now drew Ronald Koenig and Garth Nixon in from
Gila Bend to look at Gil Webster’s abandoned pickup, the same thread that was now stretched over two hundred miles southeast as Elliott Danziger started to feel hungry on the I-10 between Lordsburg and Deming. He had left Arizona behind, was now a good sixty miles into New Mexico, and he had decided to stop at the next diner he saw, wherever that might be along this road.

  Clay Luckman and Bailey Redman, however, were ready to be involved in an altogether different kind of trouble, and that trouble had started when Bailey saw an advertisement for an open-air drive-in theater showing a horror picture that very evening.

  She’d looked at that poster for a little while, and then—with a mischievous smile playing around her lips—she had said, “I have an idea.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  There was enough blue left in the sky to make a sailor’s suit. It was close to six, the sun was down all but remnants, and they lay in the long grass on a bluff that overlooked the drive-in. The screen was the end wall of a vast warehouse facility. Brick-built, it had to be sixty feet high and forty feet across. The wall had been painted white, a black border had been applied to all four edges, and from a distance it looked like the frame for a missing photograph. The drive-in was nothing more than a fenced area, an entrance to the right, an exit to the left, and enough open expanse to cater to a good three or four hundred cars. The really important thing was the diner.

  Established in 1936, owned by the same family for twenty-eight years, the Lunch Box was now a thriving little business lorded over by Jack Levine and his sister, Martha. Jack was close on sixty now, his sister five years younger. Jack had never married, considered women more ornament than use, save when he got the urge, and then he found a good deal of use for a couple of forty-something widows he knew, one in Sells, one in Benson. Martha, however, had been married four times, carried eleven children, nine of which survived childhood and went on to cause their own brands of trouble in other folks’ lives. Her last husband, Hobey Gerrard, had died just two years before. Some kind of embolism. He’d left her sufficiently provided for with a comfortable house in the Tucson suburbs, and she helped out her brother because he needed the help, not because he paid her. Without her the Lunch Box would have gone to ground years before, though Jack Levine would never have countenanced such a thought. Its success was all his own. The arrangement worked just fine, rather like a Greek marriage. He was the head, she was the neck. She turned the head any which way she chose, and he remained ignorant of the fact.