Bad Signs

by R.J. Ellory

  Thus Elliott took Candace Munro back to Morton Randall’s house for lunch. No one was any the wiser, and no alarm bells were ringing. Unknown to Elliott, he had almost committed the perfect abduction. Not that that would have pleased or impressed him either which way. In that moment he had far more pressing issues on his mind.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  An hour later—Clay and Bailey still on the road from Sierra Blanca to Van Horn—John Cassidy pulled up to the curb in front of his house and killed the engine. He needed to get to the office, but he wanted to speak to Alice first.

  He needn’t have worried. First thing she said to him as he opened the door was, “I called Mike. Told him you weren’t good. Said I thought you had some fever or something and it’d be best if you stayed away for a day or so in case it was contagious.”

  He hugged her. He started to speak before he’d even let her go.

  “No,” she said. “You’re going to have something to eat and a cup of coffee first. From the look of you—and the smell, I might add—you’ve slept the night in your car and you’ve driven here without any breakfast.”

  Cassidy sat down. He watched her silently as she made an omelet, packing whatever she could into it in the way of protein and nutrition. She made coffee, poured two cups, though hers was merely an inch or so in the bottom.

  Cassidy ate. It was hard work. He wanted to talk to her. He wanted to express in words all the thoughts he’d been having on the drive from El Paso. She made him clear the plate, and then she sat across the table from him and told him to speak slowly.

  When he was done she looked at him and said, “When there’s two people.”

  A vague frown crossed his brow.

  She smiled. “The answer to the only question that really needs an answer. How could someone leave a gun beneath a car in one place, and yet be in a diner a hundred or so miles away about to kidnap and kill a family? When there’s two people … exactly as you have already convinced yourself.”

  “I have convinced myself of this,” Cassidy replied. “I really have. It makes sense, Alice. It is the only thing that make sense. The only report they have of the death of the other boy who was taken hostage by Earl Sheridan is from Sheridan himself. This Danziger boy. Sheridan told the police in Wellton that he and Clarence Luckman had killed Elliott Danziger. There’s no body that’s been found, not as yet anyway. Where did they kill him? And why? These two boys spent their lives together, sent from one juvenile facility to the next, but always together. You don’t have brothers like that going off and killing each other. It does not make sense. Second, there’s this report from the owner of the gas station … something about whoever reported the crashed car on the highway being a girl, and there was a boy with her. Two teenagers, not one. The crashed car was where they found the gun that came from the convenience store in Marana. That’s the thing that bothers me now. There’s some significance to that gun. Some significance to where it came from. This convenience store in Marana.”

  “Marana is thirty miles away,” Alice said. “It’s no distance at all.”

  Cassidy nodded. “I know.”

  “And you think there’s something there that can help?”

  “Who knows? But I can’t just let it rest. The federal authorities are not going to wait to ask questions. If they see this Clarence Luckman they’re going to kill him.”

  Alice reached out and held his hand. “So go. Go on, take a drive up there. Take a look at where it happened. Speak to the police. They’ll talk to you.”

  “Yes,” he said. “That’s what I wanted to do, but I’d planned to go tomorrow or the next day.”

  “Well, I got you the day off so you may as well get on up there now.”

  He squeezed her hand. “Thank you, Alice.”

  “No thanks needed. Go on. Get out of here. Call me if you’re not going to make it back for supper, okay?”

  “I will,” Cassidy replied, and he leaned forward to kiss her.

  “Not good,” she said once he’d pulled back.

  “What?”

  She crinkled her nose. “You smell like a hobo. Go on and take a wash before you leave. I wouldn’t want anyone thinking I let you out of the house looking and smelling the way you do.”

  Cassidy rose from his chair. He touched her face gently. “Too good for me,” he said.

  “Don’t I know it,” she replied.

  An hour later he was on the road again, driving the thirty miles or so to Marana. He found the convenience store without difficulty. Marana was not a big place, and it was the only store appended to a gas station. It was closed. It had been the scene of a brutal double homicide only three days earlier. Cassidy looked about the place, but there wasn’t a great deal to see. He asked for the sheriff’s office and was directed to the small office manned by Officer Nolan Sharpe, representative of the Pima County Sheriff’s Department.

  Sharpe was young, no more than twenty-three or -four, but he was personable, and he had about him an organized manner that demonstrated a desire to be there and to undertake the job properly. He seemed pleased to have Cassidy consult him, as if the attention from a Tucson City detective elevated his position and gave it greater stature and credence.

  “Harvey Warren we all knew,” he told Cassidy. “Harvey was an institution here in Marana. His family has owned a store here for decades, but Harvey was the one who built the gas station alongside it. Good man. Terrible tragedy. Unbelievable.”

  “And the other victim?” Cassidy asked.

  “Frank Jacobs. Franklin to give him his full name. Shoe salesman out of Scottsdale. Passin’ through, as far as we know.”

  “And there was no one else in the store at the time of the shooting? Just Earl Sheridan, Clarence Luckman, Harvey Warren, and Frank Jacobs?”

  “As far as we know. There was no one else dead, and there was no one hangin’ around either. We went in there, found the two dead men, and Jacobs’s Oldsmobile was gone. They also emptied his wallet and took whatever was in the till.”

  “And this Frank Jacobs was down from Scottsdale, you say.”

  “Yes, Scottsdale. He was a traveler. Sold shoes. Wingtips, work boots, whatever.”

  “You have an address for him?”

  “Sure do.” Sharpe found the file, wrote down the address, handed the slip of paper to Cassidy.

  “You gonna go on up there and take a look in his house?”

  Cassidy shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. He wished to appear nonchalant. He didn’t want Sharpe reporting to Koenig and Nixon that he’d been snooping. “We’ll see which way the wind blows my thoughts when I get out of here.”

  “Well, anything I can do you know where I am.”

  “That’s appreciated.”

  “And if they’re looking for any trainee detectives in Tucson …”

  Cassidy smiled. “Then I’ll put your name down.”

  “Obliged, Detective Cassidy.”

  Cassidy and Sharpe parted company. Cassidy looked at his watch. It was a little past four. Scottsdale was at least ninety miles and he wanted to be there before it got dark. He planned to call Alice from the nearest phone. No, he wouldn’t be home for supper, but he wouldn’t be so late that she couldn’t keep it warm for him.

  With the address of this Franklin Jacobs in his pocket he took the I-10 toward Phoenix. There was something he couldn’t shake loose—the idea that there was someone else. Just as Alice had said earlier. How could someone be in two places at once? Well, it was easy, of course. When they were two people.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  They walked and walked, and when Bailey figured they were done walking Clay just wanted to walk some more. By four o’clock they had covered the better part of ten miles. They had spoken little. At first Bailey looked like she didn’t want to speak. Clay tried a few times. Started a few things up but they fell flat and the silence returned. After a while he let his imagination run. He began to think of himself as a cowboy, a ranch hand, a herder separated f
rom his crew and his charges in some terrible storm, and now responsible for the daughter of some murdered landowner. Murdered by redskins. Danger all around them. It kept him amused for half an hour and then he figured it was just dumb. Not one car passed them. They did see one man along the way. Must have been eighty or a hundred years old. Clay asked him the name of the next town on the road.

  “Van Horn,” the man said. He spat the words out like they were something bitter-tasting. Like he couldn’t get them out fast enough. Clay’s attention was drawn to a five-inch scar down the side of his neck. Maybe he’d talked too much one time. Maybe someone figured he’d shut the hell up if his throat was cut, but got talked out of it when he was only halfway done. Now the old man was being careful. Half a dozen syllables at a time, no more, no less. “Thirty miles or so,” the man added.

  Clay thanked him and they went, left the old man behind with his scar and his limited conversation.

  They stopped at a store and bought a few things. Bread, cheese, peanuts, soda. It was a grim store, selling things for a dime that weren’t worth a nickel. Seemed to stock more dust than it did anything else.

  Eldorado was somewhere close to the other end of the world.

  Silence again but for their footfalls. The landscape around them was every different kind of big. In a way he felt both lost and a little overwhelmed. He ate the bread, the cheese. He broke off pieces and gave them to Bailey. She took them, said nothing, but a few minutes later her hand came out for more.

  Finally they stopped. It was growing cooler.

  “We have to make a decision,” Clay said. “Whether we’re gonna keep walking toward Van Horn and hope we pick up a ride, or we try and find somewhere to sleep the night.”

  Bailey turned and looked at him. “You think I’m pretty, Clay Luckman?”

  Clay frowned. That was a low curveball out of somewhere with the sun in your eyes. “Pretty? How d’you mean?”

  “Well, shoot, Clay, if I have to explain what I mean by that question then it seems I got my answer already.”

  “Hell, Bailey, I know what you mean. Jesus, girl, you’re fifteen years old—”

  “And that matters? I knew a girl one time, she was pregnant when she was thirteen.”

  “Just because someone else does it doesn’t make it right. No girl should be pregnant at that kinda age …”

  “Well, that and everything else aside, you still have to answer my question.”

  Clay felt himself blush. He remembered being in the hotel, the way he’d crouched to look through the bathroom keyhole in the hope that he’d see her naked.

  “Well, sure, Bailey, of course I find you pretty. Pretty as a picture, I’d say.”

  “And do you love me, Clay Luckman?”

  “Now, what the hell kinda question is that?” Clay stopped dead. He was getting annoyed now. This really was crazy talk.

  “If I was a little older, would you love me then?”

  Clay looked down at the ground. He shook his head. “Bailey, I’ll tell you something right here and now. You are pretty. Of course you are. Anyone who doesn’t think you’re pretty … well, they ain’t gonna be right in their mind—”

  “Well, how come you ain’t never tried to … you know, tried to get me out of my clothes?”

  Clay’s eyes widened. He knew what was going on. She was clutching at things—anything—that would make her feel less lonely. “Now you’re just being … Christ, Bailey, I don’t even know what to say to that. If this is something that’s come about because of what’s happened, like you’re feeling all lonely and whatever—”

  Bailey Redman stepped forward suddenly. She grabbed Clay Luckman’s face with both her hands, her palms flat to his cheeks until he felt his eyes were going to meet, and then she kissed him dead center on the lips. He was too shocked to move, too shocked to say anything at all when she released him and stepped back.

  She looked at him unerringly. She had a fool grin on her face. “Say after me, ‘I love you, Bailey Redman.’ ” She paused for a moment. “It ain’t hard, Clay Luckman. Just say it so’s I can hear it. I. Love. You. Bailey. Redman.”

  Clay started breathing again. He wasn’t aware he’d stopped. “I … er, I lo-love y-you, B-Bailey Redman.”

  “Good. Now again, but like you mean it.”

  Clay blinked hard. “Er, okay … I love you, Bailey Redman.”

  “Well, all right, then,” she said. “Now that’s done we’re all set. I love you, you love me, we’re on the way to Eldorado, and everything’s gonna be fine an’ dandy.”

  Clay started walking again. She came up alongside him, put her hand around his arm, and squeezed it reassuringly.

  “And when I’m a little older … you know, however old you think I have to be, well then we can do the sex thing as well, okay?”

  Clay didn’t say a word. He was still speechless from the I love you, Bailey Redman thing.

  They walked for thirty minutes more. They’d held hands pretty much the entire way. Clay was convincing himself that this uncharacteristic overture from Bailey was little more than a coping mechanism related to the loss of her father. The man had been dead three days. She’d cried two times, two times only, sobbing and hyperventilating and the whole thing, and then nothing. There was the odd moment she’d disappear completely, her mind elsewhere, her gaze fixed on some indistinct middle ground between one thing and another, but the emotional release at the side of the road had been her only real expression of grief and anguish. Now she was adopting Clay as her mentor, her big brother perhaps, and she wanted his assurance that he loved her. What did it mean? It meant that he promised to look after her, to protect and defend her, to care for her as her father would have done had he still been alive.

  Clay knew how she felt. He’d had a big brother one time. He knew what it was like.

  Clay reckoned he could do those things, and do them to the best of his ability. That—in all honesty—was the very least he could do.

  “Ain’t been no cars, Clay,” she said eventually. “Doesn’t look like we’re gonna get a ride, and I’m tired.”

  “We’ll have to find somewhere to sleep for tonight,” he said.

  “We should have asked Smithy for a blanket.”

  “For sure.”

  A half mile on they saw a barn to the right of the highway. Three or four hundred yards away, a sound roof, the sight of bales in there, and Clay made a straight line for it as if it were an oasis in the desert.

  Adjoining a tract of pastures and fallow ground, the barn provided storage room for the feed and hay for whoever’s herd grazed there in summer.

  Once inside they sat cross-legged. They ate the rest of the bread, some more cheese, some peanuts, and then they drank soda. Dry chaff floated in the last weak sun bars. Bailey moved her hand and motes rushed away and back. After a while Clay lit a cigarette just to see whorls and curlicues of smoke in the sunlight. He felt good, inexplicably so, and he wondered if some small part of the shadow that had been following them had now been left behind.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  Candace Munro was not a virgin. Two years before she’d had sex with a young man called Dan Forrest whose father owned a hardware store in Grandfalls. Candace had met Danny when old Mr. Forrest’s truck broke down outside of Van Horn. Sam Munro was called out. Candace went with him for the ride, and there she met Danny. Danny was a sweet boy. They talked on the telephone. He drove over a couple of times and they had root beer floats and talked about nothing specific or consequential. They held hands. One time they kissed. Next time he came over and he told her that he was joining the army and they were sending him to Fort Benning in Georgia and this was possibly the last time he would see her for a while. She knew it would be the last time she ever saw him. She perceived it. They made love. He’d brought a rubber. He’d never done it before and nor had she, but they managed to figure it out. That was the late summer of 1962. August he went to Fort Benning. December he fell twenty feet from a tree bough a
nd broke his neck. They were doing maneuvers, the red team and the blue team. They weren’t shooting real bullets or nothing. It was just training. The team leader sent him up the tree to see where the blue team had laid low. He got up there, and just as he was about to report the enemy position he slipped and fell and he was dead. Candace’s perception had been right. Since that time a couple of other things had happened. Katie Garrett’s boy had a puppy and the puppy ran away. They looked and looked but couldn’t find it. Candace got the thought into her head that the puppy was in a drain or something, and she told Katie Garrett this. Katie looked surprised, and then she rushed down to the end of the yard and heaved open a metal cover that was once a hatch over the flood outlet for the town’s auxiliary generator. The puppy was in there—wet, cold, starving, but alive. How he’d gotten through the pipe work and down into the outlet no one knew, but it didn’t matter. Dog and boy were reunited and everyone was relieved. Another time Candace knew that someone planned to not pay her father for the work on his truck. He was just passing through, had a flat, asked for a tire change. Sam was almost done with the tire and Candace told him. She said, “Make him pay now,” and Sam said that it wasn’t done that way. You did the work, then you got paid. She insisted, even threatened to ask the man herself. Sam did as his daughter asked. The man looked awkward and sheepish, and then he made like he was going through his pockets, and then he expressed surprise and alarm that he didn’t have his pocketbook or any cash with him. He said he would to call someone, and call someone he did—right from the garage phone—and he told whoever to come down and meet him and bring some money. “How did you know that?” Sam asked his daughter after the one had paid and then both of them had driven away. “I don’t know. Sometimes I just get a really strong feeling about something and I know I’m right.” Sam kissed the top of his daughter’s head. He hugged her and told her he loved her despite the fact that she really should be burned as a witch.