“All right. And they knocked you down?”
“They shore did. The fat one, he gone back outside, see. Ah was out on mah porch, tellin’ him don’t never come back, when the tall one, he just walk out past me like ah was nothin’. Pushin’ past me, like. Ah fall down the steps, hurt mah knee. The fat one laugh. Then they get on their motor-sickles and they go off makin’ that squeally sound like they do.”
I thanked her and we shook hands. It was like holding a warm, angry crab.
“You catch them motor-sickle men, you boys thump ’em for me, promise?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Cowboy said. “We surely will.”
Daniels walked us out. We stood on the sparse lawn.
Cowboy put on his hat and tilted it forward over his eyes.
“Greedy MacCready,” he said. “I suppose everybody calls him that?”
Daniels nodded deliberately. “Not to his face, you understand.”
“No, I reckon not,” Cowboy said. “Man like that, in a town like this, he’s got friends, I’d say. The local banker for sure. Probably most of the city council, too. And the local police.”
“No police here,” Daniels said. “Conover’s not incorporated. All we have is a town constable. He rents his house from MacCready.”
I said, “So Mrs Fullylove didn’t report the incident to the constable.”
Daniels and Cowboy gave me identical looks.
“County sheriff?”
“Sister Arbetha would make a poor witness against MacCready,” Daniels said flatly. “Even if what she says is true, folks know she’s fallen off that porch before. When she was alone.” He looked me in the eye and said. “White folks here don’t mess with MacCready. I don’t want Sister Arbetha to do it, either.”
“Forget her for a minute,” I said. “Does the sound of MacCready hiring bikers as muscle ring true?”
Daniels looked away. “Folks have had problems before,” he said. “Bank trouble, sometimes. And cut fences and fires, things like that. Old Mister Prescott didn’t want to sell. He had problems right up to the day they found his body under his tractor. MacCready has a tenant farmer on that land now, and he doesn’t seem to have any problems at all.”
“Was Prescott black or white?”
Daniels laughed sourly. “He was white, but that doesn’t matter. Conover’s integrated. Black or white, if folks don’t want what MacCready wants, they tend to be unlucky.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I can see how that would be the case.”
Cowboy said, “Yeah,” too, and we shook hands with Reverend Daniels and we got into the car and drove off.
Cowboy looked out at sleepy little Conover. There was a lot of hate in that look.
“It’s a mite early for lunch,” he said, “How ‘bout we go whup the living hell out of MacCready to work up an appetite?”
Chapter 22
Crooks are just like cops: you can never find one when you need him.
MacCready’s office was a small, cream-colored wooden building. It was set on oddly high foundations, so the front door was three steps up from the street. There was a brick building with a lawyer’s sign close by on one side of MacCready’s; a vacant lot, then an old house on the other.
MacCready’s door was locked. I knocked. No answer. We pressed our noses against the glass panes. Inside, there was an old wooden desk, an older wooden office chair, a worn leather couch, and four starkly modern steel file cabinets set against a wall. There was another room in the back. Most of that room was out of sight.
Except for the file cabinets, MacCready’s office looked down-home, old-fashioned, broken-in and comfortable. I liked it a lot better than my own office. Personally, I wouldn’t keep pictures of myself shaking hands with state bigwigs on the wall, but some people like that sort of thing.
Cowboy wandered around the side of MacCready’s building. I sat on the front steps. A pickup truck with brown feed sacks in the back blatted past. The driver worked hard at ignoring me.
Cowboy returned. “Back door’s locked, too,” he said. “Looks like he’s got a storeroom and toilet back there. Little alley runs through there. Two parking spaces. No car now, though.”
“We can’t break in,” I said. “Somebody would spot us in a minute out here.”
“Back’s no good, either. There’s a nosy old broad hanging laundry across the alley. She got real interested when I tried the door.”
“Come on, let’s find a phone book.”
MacCready, T. J., was listed, but the address was simply Route 1, Conover. I started into the drugstore, expecting to find out where MacCready lived in two minutes. Cowboy didn’t like the idea.
“Town’s too small,” he said. “Hell, they already made us, I reckon. Everybody knows there are two strangers in town. By now, the smart ones know we’re huntin’. You let on we want to find MacCready, why, they’ll warn him before you get out of sight.” He shook his head. “I know these little towns. If you want MacCready to run, you go ask where he is.”
“Oh,” I said. “That was probably Lesson Eight in the Private-Investigation-Made-Easy course. The post office lost that one.”
“No need to get upset,” he said. “I’m just telling you about small towns, that’s all.”
“Thank you, Thornton Wilder.”
“Aw, the hell with it. C’mon, boss, it’s time to feed me. Fore I complain to the shop steward.”
We ate breaded cardboard disguised as veal cutlets, gray coleslaw, and runny mashed potatoes. The sign said Home Style Cooking. Apparently it meant the kind of home with bars on the windows.
The afternoon drifted away in a haze of heat and boredom. Twice, people walked up MacCready’s steps and tried his door. MacCready didn’t show.
By 4:30, a freckled ten-year-old had spent an hour watching us watch MacCready’s office. “Let’s go,” I said. “You’re right. This goddamned town’s too small for a stakeout.”
Smiley, the motel manager, gave us Room Twelve for another night. We showered away the sweat and dust and hit the street again.
Cowboy drove for a change. We cruised up and down country roads, read mailboxes, wished for bikers. No MacCready. Nothing.
At dusk, we filled the Mustang with gas again, surrounded another forgettable meal and went back to the motel.
“Want to hit MacCready’s office tonight?” Cowboy asked.
“Naw, but tomorrow we have to make a move. This is taking too long. If MacCready doesn’t show in the morning, we’ll ask around, even if it does spook him. There must be at least one person in the local establishment hates MacCready’s guts.”
Cowboy checked his shotgun, laid it beside his bed, and propped himself against the pillow. “Whatever you say, boss-man.” He opened a copy of Western Horseman.
I tried Hilda’s number. No answer.
Tomorrow, I thought. Tomorrow we’ll blow this stupid town wide open if we have to.
I needn’t have worried about it.
That night, the bikers came to us.
Chapter 23
They didn’t make much noise, but it was enough to bring me out of a deep sleep in the middle of the night. The first sound I recognized was a boot scrape on gravel.
“Cowboy,” I whispered.
“I hear ’em,” he said. There was a sharp click from his side of the room.
I slowly eased my shotgun off the floor and pointed it past my toes, toward the only door to the room. The moon was up and a little light filtered through the curtains. Not much; only a gray wash that softened and changed objects without hiding them.
When I was a young boy, it used to scare the living hell out of me to wake up in that menacing gloom.
There was a hoarse whisper outside, too soft to understand. Then someone kicked the door, hard, beside the lock. It splintered, gave way on the second kick, and flew open against the wall.
One of the fat, hairy ones charged through the open doorway, howling as he came. I shot him in the chest.
The biker stoppe
d short. He swayed backwards, still clutching a rifle or shotgun, and seemed about to catch his balance. Cowboy’s shotgun went off and the biker collapsed with the right side of his head missing.
I rolled onto the floor between the beds; Cowboy arrived at the same time.
There were surprised shouts in the parking lot. A square shape flew in through the gaping doorway, bounced off the dead biker with a muffled sound, and fell onto the thin carpet. Dimly, behind the ringing in my ears, I heard a rhythmic sloshing.
Then I smelled the gas fumes.
“Hey, now,” Cowboy said, “these old boys are serious.” He went up and over his bed in a fluid roll. I heard him scuttle into the bathroom. Glass broke and rattled on the tile floor. There were eight or ten sharp flat cracks, rapid and evenly spaced, then Cowboy’s shotgun boomed twice.
“Back’s covered,” he called from the other side of the bed a minute later. “Automatic weapon.”
The gas fumes were stronger now. “There’ll be a torch coming in here soon,” I said.
“No shit,” Cowboy said laconically. “Throw my stuff over here. Boots first. Let’s see how thin that wall really is.”
I tossed his boots over the bed, heard him grunt when one struck him. His bag was open and I removed his Ruger before I threw it after the boots. A burst of automatic fire exploded the window beside the open door and spat-spatted into the wall above the beds.
When the firing stopped, I followed Cowboy’s boots and bag over the bed. My hands were full of guns and my bare butt felt cold and exposed.
“Keep ’em honest,” Cowboy said, about the same time I thought of it, and I put a round of buckshot through the doorway. Someone screamed an indecipherable taunt.
Cowboy, flat on his back in underwear and boots, held his shotgun as far from the wall as he could and fired twice. Two saucer-sized holes appeared in the wall six inches above the floor. Cowboy scootched forward and kicked at the edges of the holes.
A burly figure darted past the doorway. I snapped a shot at it, missed, and fumbled for shells. “Here,” Cowboy grunted, “do mine, too.”
I topped up both shotguns, stuffed Cowboy’s Ruger into his bag, and made sure the .45 was in my bag.
There was a shifting orange glow outside. “Hurry it up Cowboy,” I said.
“Almost ready.” He stopped kicking, reversed himself, and jammed his head and shoulders into the hole. He stuck, wriggled convulsively, and disappeared into the next room.
I threw things after him. His bag and my bag; for the guns, not the clothes. Then the shotguns and finally—as a fireball arced into the room—me.
The ragged hole in the drywall had sturdy two-by-fours on each side. I think sixteen inches is the standard distance between studs in a wall. At a guess, I would have said I could not fit through a hole sixteen inches wide.
I was wrong. I went through there like a rat up a drain pipe. While I did, I heard a dull crump and felt sudden heat like a bad sunburn on my legs.
The room we entered had not been rented for the night. I stood there, naked, trembling a little from exertion and adrenaline. Cowboy came back from the window. He had to shout to be heard over the blast furnace in our room. “Keep moving,” he said. “I reckon this whole place is gonna go.”
We went through more walls, learning on the way. We found the small table near the beds was exactly the right size to fit between the studs. If you swung the table hard enough, the drywall would break up into dusty plate-sized chunks. It took about six good whacks per wall. After two walls, the table legs came off in your hands.
The second room we broke into had been occupied until the commotion frightened everyone but us outside. We stopped there to get dressed in the clothes we had left. What we didn’t have, we stole. I found a shirt and put it on. Cowboy liberated a pair of socks.
The third room was empty. In the fourth, I took a pair of Puma joggers only one size too big.
When we crawled into the fifth room, there was a roar of motorcycles outside. We got to the door in time to see two brake lights wink and they paused, then turned onto the highway.
“Party's over, I guess,” said Cowboy.
We brushed plaster dust off each other and stepped outside with “who, me?" looks on our faces. As we did, an elderly fire truck wheezed into the motel parking lot. Cowboy and I strolled toward the Mustang.
The Room Twelve end of the motel had crumpled into a bed of fierce coals. The rest of the wing was progressively collapsing as the fire worked its way through the flimsy wooden building.
There was a small crowd of ten or fifteen people gawking at the fire. Cowboy and I eased around behind them. It wasn’t easy to be invisible while lugging shotguns and pistols and wearing other people’s clothes, but we gave it a good shot.
The Mustang was on the far side of the small parking lot; close enough to the fire to be uncomfortably hot. I retrieved my spare key from the magnetic box under the fender and she reluctantly started.
“That’s gonna cost you,” Cowboy said, as I wheeled the car out of our parking spot and bumped over a fire hose. “Nail ripped the hell out of my boot.”
“Put a new pair on the bill,” I said. “Mollison can afford it.”
“Pure elk hide, too,” he grumped. “And just broke in good. Damn!”
A chocolate-brown LTD was parked beside the highway, opposite the motel entrance. The driver was alone in the car. He sat watching the fire. He glanced at us, looked away, then jerked his head back in a silent movie double-take.
The LTD started with a roar and spat gravel as it lurched onto the road. The lights came on and I saw the personalized license plate: MAC 1.
The LTD was probably thirty miles an hour faster than my tired old Mustang. That didn’t do it any good at all.
MacCready drove it off the road half a mile later.
Chapter 24
MacCready’s driving was pathetic. He lost it on a straight stretch of road, for God’s sake. He leaned the LTD up against a telephone pole with the left rear wheel hanging in space above the drainage ditch, then he raced the motor and tried to drive away.
“Simple shit, ain’t he?” Cowboy said.
MacCready saw me walk toward his car and he slapped the door lock button down like a tourist in South Dallas after midnight.
I pointed the shotgun at him and motioned him out of the car. He looked stubborn and didn’t move, so I blew out the back window. He came out of the car in a scrambling rush, fell into the ditch, and clambered onto the road with his hands held high and his pant legs dark and dripping. “What the—,” he said. “You can’t get away with—”
“Oh, shut up, MacCready. Get in the Mustang.”
“MacCready? Who’s MacCready? I’m not—”
“Will you give it a rest, for Christ’s sake?” I said. “Which would you rather be: MacCready or dead?”
“Okay, okay. Take it easy, boys. We can work this out.”
Cowboy drove, MacCready sat in the front passenger seat with his hands flat on the dashboard, and I sat in the back.
“I don’t know what you boys want with me,” MacCready said. His voice quavered a little.
I said, “All you need to know is that if you move your hands off the dashboard, I will hurt you very badly. Do you believe that?”
He nodded slowly.
“Okay.” I said. “Cowboy, find someplace where we can talk to Greedy without being disturbed.”
Cowboy drove through Conover and continued east on Texas 11. He took the side road where the biker had eluded us and tried a gravel road to the north. It was a driveway. He tried again. The second gravel road led us a mile or two into the woods.
The road stopped at a circular lake three hundred yards across. There was a ten-foot-square corrugated metal building at the water’s edge. A pipe came out of the lake, ran through the building, and dove underground.
Cowboy turned off the ignition. The Mustang pinged and tinkled in the stillness. There was a full moon. There were no other buil
dings or lights in sight.
“Out,” I said. MacCready and Cowboy got out. I followed.
MacCready stood quietly by the car. He brushed his hands, straightened his suit, shook his soggy feet. He was a short, sleek man in his late forties with a vulpine face and dark hair that looked oily in the flat moonlight. He wore glasses with thin metal rims.
He had calmed down during the ride. When I waved him away from the car, he came with his hands outspread and a good-ole-boy wheeler-dealer tone in his voice. “Look here, I don’t know what the problem is, but we can sure—”
I ignored him and spoke to Cowboy. “The thing that pisses me off,” I said, “is that now we have to drag the information about these bikers out of him. I hope we get paid for the extra work, after all this.”
“Heyyy,” MacCready said.
“Can’t be helped,” Cowboy said. “You know what the Old Man said.”
“Yeah, but I don’t have to like it.”
MacCready said “Heyyy” again.
“You see, MacCready,” I said, “it’s supposed to look like a thrill killing, right? Like a psycho did it. This kind of contract is always messy, but we don’t mind that. Then this biker business came up. The Man wants to know who they are, so … And wouldn’t you know it, before we could run that down, you sent those freaks after us at the motel. So we have a personal stake in it now.”
MacCready tried to run. He lurched clumsily around the front of the Mustang and lumbered toward the surrounding forest. Cowboy loped after him, kicked him on the side of the knee, and MacCready crumpled to the ground.
I walked over and knelt beside him. “Here’s the very best I can offer you,” I said. “Tell us about the bikers. Before we cut you, I’ll give you a little tap to put you to sleep.”
“You’re crazy,” MacCready wheezed, holding his knee.
Cowboy laughed. It was a helluva good laugh. It even made me shiver. MacCready took it to heart. There was a sudden sharp urine smell in the air.
“They weren’t supposed to go that far,” he said in a flat, resigned tone. “I heard about two strangers in a beat-up old Mustang watching my office. They said you had bothered them in Dallas, too. But, I swear, they were only supposed to scare you off. All that shooting … and the fire … I didn’t know that was going to happen.”
Rafferty's Rules: A Rafferty P.I. Mystery Page 14