He glanced at the bus station clock again while the woman filled out the quadruplicate forms on the Plymouth. There was not time even for a shave. If Perriquey didn’t like his looks it was too bad. He glanced at his reflection in a plate-glass mirror and shook his head. This wasn’t the way they’d planned it.
He signed for the car, took the keys. The girl told him the car was parked at the rear door of the bus station.
“You know where the X-Bar Ranch is?” he asked her.
“About ten miles west on Highway 58. You can’t miss it. There are signs all along the road.”
It was six minutes to twelve when Ric turned the Plymouth into the stone-enclosed ranchyard at the X-Bar Dude Ranch. He slowed the car, letting it roll toward the main ranch house. This place had the look of money lavishly applied. It was all adobe and stone, with a carefully manufactured look of age. The cottages were lined together with slate roofs that almost met so the whole line of them resembled an old fashioned bunkhouse, with bridles tastefully hung along the front walls. Between the ranch house and the guests’ bunkhouse were shuffleboard courts and a swimming pool that was lighted even at this hour. Inside the ranch house Ric saw a few couples dancing and others around card tables.
Ric parked the car in the area of swank cars. He walked up the steps, feeling the wind cold against his sweated face.
A cowhand in chaps and sombrero opened the door for him. The clerk was also in fancy western garb. Ric glanced at the guests, saw they were outfitted in expensive variations of cow-country dress. Even the women wore boots. Three cowpunchers played music softly and slowly from an alcove at the end of the community room. At the left of the desk was a bar made to resemble an early times saloon.
“Mr. Perriquey,” Ric said to the clerk. “What cottage?”
“Mr. Perriquey is in cottage five, sir. He has been expecting a gentleman caller.” The clerk called the cowboy from the door. “Would you show this gentleman to Mr. Perriquey’s bunkhouse, Shorty?”
Shorty’s accent was straight from Brooklyn. He chatted steadily as they crossed the shuffleboard courts, skirted the swimming pool. Ric did not say anything, but this did not discourage Shorty. He rapped on the door at cottage five. After a moment, Ric heard someone move inside. He felt that old tightening, the worry.
He handed Shorty a quarter and the boy went back across the courts, talking to himself.
Ric looked around. The music sifted across the area from the ranch house, tired and uninspired. His hands sweated. He rubbed them along his coat pockets.
The door opened wide, spilling light across Ric and out to the sodded grass. Ric stared, surprised at the looks of the man who stood there. He had not known what he expected, but it was not this type of man.
“You Ric Durazo?” the man said. He stared at Ric coldly.
“Yes.”
Perriquey glanced at his wrist watch.
“You slice it thin, don’t you, Durazo?”
“That’s the way it rolls,” Ric said. “May I come in?”
The man’s sharp featured face pulled into a faint one-dimension grin. “Certainly. Please do.”
Ric stepped into the room and Perriquey closed the door behind him. Again Ric was surprised to find they were alone. The bathroom door stood wide open. Ric looked around. The bed was untouched. Perriquey had been sitting in one of the chairs, waiting.
“Sit down,” Perriquey said.
Ric sat down. Perriquey stood near the door. Looking at him, Ric had the odd sensation that in twenty-five years Martin Kimball might look like Perriquey, except for the look of intelligence about Perriquey. Here was an elderly Martin Kimball, but equipped with brains. Perriquey was tall, slender so that even in his expensive gray tweed suit he looked as though he would snap in two, like a brittle limb. His iron-gray hair was carefully brushed, waved, groomed.
Ric said, “Is the baby all right?”
Perriquey’s chiseled features looked as if they would pull into a laugh, but instead his mouth twisted faintly and he pushed the palm of his hand across his temple, smoothing his already smooth hair.
“Aren’t you rushing things, Durazo? We have a few things to talk about yet. You’ve wasted my time. Quite a lot of it. First, I don’t know who you are—any more than you know who I am.”
“All right. I’m Ric Durazo.” He reached inside his pocket and removed an envelope. “This is from Senator Ironfield. You want to read it?”
“Of course.”
Perriquey took the letter, slit it open with a manicured finger. He moved nearer a floor lamp, pince-nez on the bridge of his thin nose. He held the paper away from his face.
He read the brief note: “This will inform you that the bearer represents me in all matters, with full power of attorney.” It was signed by Senator Gifford Ironfield.
Ric took the note back, placed it in his coat pocket. “All right Perriquey, who are you?”
Perriquey permitted himself a faint smile. “I’m Norton Perriquey. I am the man whom you have come so far to see, Durazo. But I’m also the man who holds all the aces and asks all the questions.”
“Will you answer one?”
“I might. If it pleases me.”
“The same one I asked before. Is the Ironfield child still alive?”
Perriquey lighted a cigarette, held its holder daintily. “You’re a very direct man, Durazo. But I’m in an odd position. I cannot answer that question. Not just at this moment.”
“Why not?”
“It’s very simple. You’re a direct man, as I said. You have a gun in your shoulder holster. You might kill me if I told you the baby was already dead.”
Ric’s fists knotted. “I might.”
“You very well might. And there’s more; if we bargain at all, we must have something to bargain over, mustn’t we?”
“Get it said.”
“I said it. You would not bargain for a dead child. So as long as it pleases me to say so, I’ll tell you the child is alive—and as long as I say so, you’ll have to accept that.”
Ric wiped the back of his hand across his forehead, feeling the sweat. The sense of fatigue moved downward through his body. He wondered if he would ever again escape that pang of emptiness in his solar plexus. It seemed almost to be a part of him by now.
“I’ve got the money, Perriquey. What else is there for us to talk about?”
Perriquey gave Ric a smile that was almost sad. He drew deeply on his cigarette, exhaled in sharp straight plumes of white smoke.
“In many ways it is too bad that Ironfield chose a man like you to represent him, Durazo. You’re a man of action, and I might add, even of primitive impulses. I can see the senator’s reasoning.” He stared at the bright tip of his cigarette. “In his distraught condition, it is quite easy to imagine he feels he is dealing with criminals and a man like you—a man who could beat their heads together seemed an ideal choice. Too bad we don’t operate that way. Too bad Ironfield did not think the thing through more deeply. When I say it is too bad—what I mean is—it’s too bad for Ironfield.”
Ric sat forward on his chair. “When you say that Ironfield is in a distraught condition, Perriquey, you’ve hit it. I don’t think he would have called on me if there had been any other way out that he could see. The man is suffering.”
For the first time Perriquey betrayed some of the primitive emotion he accused Ric of displaying. He stared hard at Ric for a moment, the cigarette forgotten between his manicured fingers. His eyes tightened and a muscle worked along his sharp-hewn jaw line. He looked at the cigarette as if it offended him and ground it out in an ash tray. Ric thought he looked as if it gave him pleasure to smash it—as if he were smashing it in Gifford Ironfield’s eyes.
There was the faintest quiver of exultance in Perriquey’s tone. “Is he suffering, Durazo?”
“I don’t know what kind of thing you are, Perriquey, to doubt it. Ironfield is in his late fifties. This baby was his first child. You wouldn’t have to be with him more than
five minutes to know he worships it. What kind of kick does it give you to know he’s eating his insides out?”
“The kind of kick you wouldn’t even understand, Durazo. Well, it was worth waiting for, worth waiting to meet you. You know, I fully planned to walk out of that door at midnight and let you howl at the moon. You really sliced it slim, considering you had no way of finding me if I didn’t want you to do it.”
“I cut it thin because I couldn’t help it.”
“That’s because the Ironfield child is not your only interest in life, Durazo.”
“If you don’t think he is, you just keep fooling around with me.”
“Violence. Ah, violence. That’s something you understand, isn’t it, Durazo? And now you’re threatening me.”
Ric stood up. “We might as well get one thing straightened out now, Perriquey. I’d snap you in my hands right now. I’d step on you like a cockroach out of that wall. You mean nothing to me. You and your kind are slime to me. I’m playing it your way because I want that kid safe.”
Perriquey smiled. “That’s what you would do. But get this straight, Durazo. You won’t do anything. I’ll walk out of this door and you won’t stop me. You won’t lift your voice to stop me, much less your fist. Get this clear. You try to lump me in with all kidnapers—”
“You’re all alike to me.”
“But we’re not. I don’t have to defend myself to you. But it pleases me to show you how wrong you are—how wrong Ironfield was to send you here.”
“The poor bastard did what he could.”
“Oh, it pleases me to hear you describe him as a bereaved parent. Ironfield. The son of a bitch. He’s been so many other things in his life. He got married and became a human being almost at the last minute. You know? Almost as though he woke up one morning and realized the human race was enjoying itself and he was almost old enough to die and he hadn’t even joined it, yet. So the son of a bitch married a girl thirty years younger than himself, had a brat and thought he was one of God’s favored people. I wonder what he thinks now.”
“I don’t think he thinks anything. He just sits and stares and wonders if he’ll get his kid back.”
“Let him wonder. Let him pay. He never paid in his life for anything.”
“You hate deep, don’t you, Perriquey.”
Perriquey inclined his head in a slight bow.
“And for a long time, Durazo. That’s why I tell you that you don’t have the Ironfield child driving you as I do. Gifford Ironfield gave me the dirty end of the stick—the chewed up part—a long time ago. When I got where I could, I wanted to hit back at him, the cold fish of a son of a bitch. But I never could. You know why? There was no way to touch him. He was just that. A cold fish. What can you do to a fish? There’s no way you can touch him. But then, it was just as though he set it up himself. He got married. For a long time I used to lie awake nights thinking about his wife—thinking about the things that could happen to her, and what it would do to Cold Fish when it happened. But I was afraid it wouldn’t hit deeply enough. I wanted him to hurt—in his guts—the way I had hurt, so he could live with it twenty years—the way I lived with it.”
Ric stepped forward. His voice was hollow. “The baby is dead.”
For a moment he and Perriquey stared at each other in the silent room. Ric’s hand was shaking. He brought it upward toward the shoulder holster.
Perriquey’s voice stopped him. “If the child were already dead it would defeat me, Durazo. You’re thinking with your gun hand. I want Ironfield to suffer just as long as I can stretch it out.”
Ric’s hand dropped to his side. “You’ve run it all the way out, Perriquey. It may excite you to laughter to know that his wife has already tried to commit suicide. She blames herself because she turned her back on the sleeping baby for five minutes—long enough for it to be stolen. You’ve hurt them enough, Perriquey, even for your dirty rotten warped mind. You’ve left them nothing. They’ve sent the quarter of a million dollars—in cash. You deliver the baby to me and you can have it.”
Now Perriquey did laugh in his face. “You make it sound so quaint and simple, Durazo. Pay the money. Get the baby back. It isn’t that simple.”
“That was the deal.”
“That was the deal a week ago. Time changes things. People change them. You have changed it all. I only wish I could be there when you go back to Ironfield and his wife and tell them you have failed.”
The fist tightened in Ric’s stomach. They were tying him in knots so he wanted to double over with the sharp agony. He could see in Perriquey’s face that all the deal was off. Perhaps it had never been on. Perhaps Perriquey only wanted to string out the torment and torture. He wanted to build up their hopes and then knock them dead.
“You never meant to accept the payment.”
“Oh, but I did. I did until day before yesterday.”
“I’ll go along with you for another five minutes, Perriquey.”
“That time is quite adequate for me, too, Durazo. And remember that you set the limit yourself. In five minutes our negotiations end.”
“What happened day before yesterday to change your mind?”
“You happened, Durazo. You threw a kid out of your sports car—the only such vehicle in Los Solanos.”
“A punk trying to pull a gun on me.”
“Sure, and you smashed his gun, and broke his ribs. He had to tell the police he was attacked, and he described you. They are looking for you on that little matter.”
“I have the money. We can close the deal and both of us get out of here.”
“No, Durazo. It’s all off. I told Ironfield I wanted a man who would attract no more attention in nice surroundings than I do. But in the first few hours you were at La Pueblo you made a pass at the owner’s wife—”
“Did she tell you that?”
“I find out what I need to know. And you attracted other attention. Within an hour after you checked in at La Pueblo, an FBI agent checked in.”
“I knew nothing of it. I swear that.”
“Saul Rehan? I think you did know. You carried on a very guarded conversation with him in the La Pueblo Cafe. Oh, it looked so innocent. You thought you were going to pay me off and Saul Rehan would pick me up. Well, I’ve news for you and Rehan.”
“My God, Perriquey, we’ve tried to do exactly as you ordered.”
“Don’t bother to lie about it. I can tell you Rehan will never find a dollar of that money on me, because I refuse to touch it. I wouldn’t spit on it handed to me from you. And there’s more you can tell Rehan. They’ll never find the child or his body, and they’ll never connect me with it because it’s only your word against mine and I’m leaving this part of the country tonight.”
“I know nothing about Rehan. Ironfield is on the spot. FBI was smart enough to keep him tailed even when he got in touch with me that’s a rotten break. But get me the baby, and I’ll see you get out of the country if I have to kill Rehan.”
“You are determined to get that baby, aren’t you. It’s too bad. You should have thought of that when you were laying Kimball’s wife and getting him so stirred up he’s got the State Police looking for you.”
“Perriquey, all that stuff happened to me, just as you tell it. Only not quite the way you tell it. I swear to you I’ll protect you to the Mexican border if you’ll take the money and turn the child over to me.”
Perriquey’s mouth twisted. “You’re too hot, Durazo. I won’t touch you or that money.”
“It’s a quarter of a million dollars, Perriquey.”
Perriquey shrugged. “You know where you can stick that quarter of a million, Durazo. The deal has fallen through. You can go back and tell Ironfield that. The kid is as good as dead. You’re too hot to deal with.”
Durazo stepped forward. Agony worked in his face. He caught Perriquey’s arms. They were like broomsticks in his hands.
Perriquey regarded him with distaste. “Take your hands off me.”
�
��The money, Perriquey. I’ll get you out of the country. If Rehan gets near you, I’ll kill him. All I want is that baby. In the name of God, man, I’m begging you.”
“You can stop.” Perriquey smiled and picked up his hat from the bed table. He set it precisely on his gray curls. “What beats me, Durazo, is that you care at all. What’s in it for you? I happen to know enough about you to know that five years ago when Ironfield was a circuit judge he sent you to prison on what later actually was proved to be a bum rap. You should hate the son of a bitch. I don’t think much of you, Durazo. You forgive mighty easy.”
He turned and walked, a rigid man, grown taut and brittle with middle-age, a man driven by hate under his urbane exterior. He paused at the door.
“Don’t go out that door, Perriquey. If you do, I’ll hunt you down. That’s something I understand.”
“It won’t get you the baby.”
“You won’t live to see Ironfield suffer either, Perriquey.”
“I am seeing that. And I will see it. I’m quite safe. You wouldn’t touch me. You think as long as I’m alive there’s a chance you’ll get that baby back. As long as you think that, nothing’s going to happen to me.”
“You’re wrong, Perriquey. I’m going to hunt you down. You’ll never be able to run far enough, or hide in a rat hole deep enough. I’ll find you and I’ll kill you. It’s going to kill that baby’s mother when I tell her I failed. When that happens, God help you, Perriquey.”
“You underestimate me, Durazo. If I were afraid of you, I’d have been afraid of the police, of the FBI. I would never have started this deal if I were afraid of anybody. But I’m not. Your threats fall somewhere on the floor, between you and me.”
“All right, Perriquey. I came in this room thinking you were smart. I don’t think that any more. I think you’re insane, and that’s all I think. So you walk out that door. Go on. And then you start running, and don’t you ever stop, and don’t forget to keep looking over your shoulder.”
Perriquey laughed at him.
He turned the door knob. Sweat beaded Ric’s forehead, ran along his temples.
A Ticket to Hell Page 11