Hard-core Murder

by Paul Kenyon

  It was murderous country out there, with place names like Furnace Creek and Ground Afire. It was a place where the flies crawled, because the heat burned their wings off. A man could lose a quart of water in thirty minutes and die of dehydration in an hour. Tourists were cautioned to carry water, and not to leave the main roads without notifying the ranger station.

  But that's just what Mitch was doing now. The Baroness almost missed the turn. The glowing arrow swiveled abruptly and she twisted the wheel. The Bugazzi swerved, spraying sand and salt crystals that had drifted over the cracked asphalt.

  She followed the faint track for another half-hour. She was across the Nevada border now, she judged. Mitch was still somewhere ahead of her, fingered by the lumininous arrow.

  Outside the windshield the desert was bleak and silvery in the moonlight. The stark ridges marched past, mile after mile. She turned off her headlights. She didn't need them under those blazing stars, and she didn't know when she might be likely to catch up to Mitch.

  The hoods in the black Lincoln must have done the same. It was right behind her without warning. They pulled alongside of her, evidently intending to force her off the road. She remembered the driver's failure of nerve back there on the freeway, and smiled to herself.

  She flicked the wheel fractionally to the left, scraping the side of the Lincoln. The Bugazzi's sculptured fender crumpled. It made a satisfactory racket. She could almost sense the Lincoln flinching. She caressed the Lincoln again with a shriek of tearing metal, then, while the driver was still rattled, she put her foot down on the floor.

  The Bugazzi shot ahead, goosed by its 460-cubic-inch engine. She pulled in front of the Lincoln and eased up on the gas, just a mathematically precise fraction. The back of the Bugazzi crumpled the Lincoln's grill. She shot forward again, the Bugazzi's spare tire housing smashed beyond repair.

  She'd given them something to worry about. A person who'll unhesitatingly wreck a brand-new $30,000 automobile has to be unpredictable. It wasn't going to be that easy or that safe to take her.

  The man in the right-hand seat had a shotgun sticking out his window. She ducked before it went off. Her rear window turned into a frosty pattern of cracks.

  She jammed on her brakes for a split second and swiveled her rear. The back deck of the Bugazzi took out the headlights on the shotgun man's side. It was instant retribution. The psychologists called it aversion therapy. She was going to train him to get nervous about her every time he tried something.

  He raised the shotgun again, trying to line it up with her weaving car. She reached into the concealed compartment for the Mark Cross umbrella that came with the car. She thrust it out the window, opened it, and let go. It flapped like a big black bat into their windshield. The Lincoln swayed dangerously before the driver recovered.

  She felt around inside of the compartment for the Bernardelli VB. Driving one-handed, she hiked up her skirt and thrust the flat little gun into the waistband of her pantyhose. She was going to need it very shortly.

  The next time they tried to pull up beside her, she turned on her headlights. The hood driving the Lincoln instinctively lifted his foot off the pedal, with the unthinking reflex of a driver who thinks for a microsecond that the taillights ahead of him are brake lights going on.

  During that microsecond, the Baroness surged forward at top acceleration, putting five hundred feet of road between them. The desert road was narrow, but she swung all the way to the right, risking getting her wheels dug into the sand, before spinning the wheel all the way left. The Bugazzi's turning radius was just barely short enough. She came roaring down the highway, headlights ablaze, directly at the Lincoln.

  She could hear the squeal of brakes, see their arms flung up to protect their faces. They thought she was crazy. The head-on crash would have killed her, too.

  At the last possible moment she stood on the brakes and simultaneously locked the transmission, stripping the gears. She tugged at the wheel with all her strength. It was enough, just barely enough, to keep her alive.

  She pushed herself out the door with a powerful kick, and hit a roadside dune, rolling as she struck. There was a great jolt and all the breath was driven out of her. She rolled over on her stomach in time to see the Bugazzi hit.

  The Lincoln struck it at an angle, going seventy. The driver's seat, where she would have been sitting, became a tangle of springs and shredded glove suede and fragments of Italian marble. There was the crash of a thousand cymbals, and the two cars rode one another upward, becoming a crazy arch before they merged into a pastiche of tortured metal.

  The Baroness got to her feet and walked over to the wreck, the Bernardelli VB ready in her hand. One of the Bugazzi's wire wheels was spinning. Oil dripped onto the roadway like blood.

  The two hoods were mashed, raw meat in what was left of the Lincoln's front seat. The driver's guts were strung out along the steering column like a display of sausages in a German butcher shop.

  The Baroness swayed and sat down by the side of the road. Her body ached with the impact. She rested for a few minutes until she recovered.

  To the east, the killer sun was starting to come up, throwing long red fingers over the dunes. She was a hundred miles from nowhere, without a car, without water. In a very short time, the sun would be over the horizon, sucking the juices from her body.

  She'd seen it happen in the Sahara. And the Sahara wasn't as hot as this hellish place. The water was wrung out of the body — at the rate of a half-gallon an hour. The blood thickened. The heart began to race. With a dehydration of fifteen to twenty percent death came before you knew it.

  She sighed and got to her feet. She inspected the wreckage again. The Lincoln's radiator no longer existed. But the Bugazzi's was still intact, though badly dented. The impact had been just behind it.

  She unscrewed the cap and dipped a finger inside. The water was hot but tasted sweet. She almost sobbed with relief. They'd given her a $30,000 car, but they'd saved eighty cents on anti-freeze.

  She looked for something to drain it into. The Bugazzi's leather top sagged into the crushed interior. She cut it free and made a water bag out of it.

  She looked at her watch. The glowing arrow still pointed along the road. There was nothing behind her except a hundred miles of desert. She had no idea what was ahead of her — but Mitch had been headed for somewhere. It could be a mile ahead, or fifty miles, or a hundred.

  But there was no alternative. None at all.

  With a sigh, she slung the leather pouch with its forty pounds of water over her shoulder. She started walking.

  * * *

  It was strange, feeling the snow crunch beneath her feet, when the sun beat like a fist on her bare shoulders, and her knees and hands burned with the contact whenever she stumbled and fell.

  Snow? She wiped at her fiery eyes and scanned the acres of blinding white flats she was trudging across. It wasn't snow. How could it be? It was salt. A vast expanse of crystallized brine.

  It was time for a drink. She'd waited too long. She was becoming dehydrated again — dehydrated to the point of irrationality. The next stage was hallucinations. Then death.

  She sank to her knees and unslung the leather bag from her shoulder. There were only a few quarts, tasting warm and metallic and bitter from the tannin and resins. She'd drunk close to five gallons today, crossing this eerie inferno — replacing the forty pounds of water that the relentless sun had pulled from her tissues. She wasn't even sweaty. The air was too dry for that. The perspiration evaporated almost immediately.

  Gratefully she drank a pint of the bitter water. It tasted delicious. She waited a few minutes, then drank another pint. She felt better.

  She began walking again, the leather pouch frighteningly light now. There might be enough water to last until sunset; the sun was a blood-streaked yolk, low on the ridges behind her. She could get through the night without water, maybe cover another fifteen or twenty miles before she dropped from exhaustion. But she had no illu
sions that she could get through the next morning, even an hour of it.

  The sun was just touching the rim of the desert when she heard the motors. They sounded like supercharged VWs, unmuffled. They weren't coming from the road that dipped beneath the sand and surfaced in front of her like a giant's stitches. They were coming from somewhere off to the side.

  She scrambled, helter-skelter, for the long shadow of a dune. She flattened herself against the hot sand and burrowed in as much as she could.

  They leaped over a low ridge, heading straight for her position — two skeleton-framed dune buggies topped by holiday awnings in stripes of blue and white.

  There were two men abreast in each buggy, sitting as stiff as cardboard cutouts. They wore wide-shouldered dark suits and natty fedoras with the brims pulled low. They looked as if they'd been stamped out of the same mold as Mitch's two dead playmates in the Lincoln.

  The Baroness held her breath. She inched a hand into the scoop neckline of her sleeveless dress and found the flat shape of the Bernardelli VB. It wasn't much at long-range accuracy. But it was better than nothing.

  The dune buggies swept closer, their balloon tires scrabbling in the sand. She could see the shotguns, held like pikestaffs on the passenger sides. Only fifty feet from where she lay, they peeled apart and went off in opposite directions.

  When they were out of sight, the Baroness got to her feet. The sun was an orange sliver, pushing itself into the hills. The two dune buggies were a patrol, dividing up part of a security perimeter. They'd traveled out together. All she had to do was follow the stem of the T they'd made.

  The double track in the sand was already beginning to sift over. But it was plain enough to follow, even in the dusk. She walked across the desert, swinging the water bag, feeling almost jaunty.

  She came to the fence a half-hour later. It was made of strands of wire strung along leaning posts made of old railroad ties. The gate was a primitive affair: a rude rectangle with a diagonal bar, between two tall poles that could be seen at a distance.

  She approached it with caution, primitive as it looked. When she drew closer, she could see the little ceramic insulators. The only reason for an electrified wire in this lonely place was an amp meter somewhere, rigged to set off an alarm at some central security station.

  She tossed the leather bag over the fence. Then she backed up for a running start. The fence was only five feet high, a good fifteen inches below the women's Olympic record. It would have been easy if she hadn't been so dehydrated.

  She took in a great gulp of the harsh desert air. Then she pounded toward the fence, driving her lean, strong muscles to their limit. If anyone had been watching, they wouldn't have seen the effort. They would have seen a slender, graceful figure leave the ground at twenty miles per hour and sail upward, free as a bounding doe. She twisted her hips in midair and flung her legs parallel with the fence. She cleared the top wire with six inches to spare and tumbled down into the sand on the other side.

  It was night now. The stars were out, brilliant as flares. It was cool, almost pleasant. She took a sip of water and began walking again. Now that the murderous heat of the day was past, the desert began to come alive. She risked a single shot from the Bernardelli VB to kill a snake coming out of its burrow in the sand, and ate the flesh raw. It was the first food she'd had for twenty-four hours.

  About midnight, she topped a gentle rise and saw the vision.

  It was Rome. Rome in three-quarter scale.

  There was the Colosseum, a frosty round cake in the starlight. There was the massive Arch of Constantine and the freestanding pillars of the Roman Forum. And the dome of the Pantheon, crowded crazily next to it.

  The mighty stone ruins rose out of a litter of wooden buildings that looked like the set of a western movie.

  The Baroness searched her memory. Wasn't there something about an eccentric millionaire who had built a reconstruction of ancient Rome in the Nevada desert some time in the 1920s? Ruby Bill Jackson, that was his name. It had been in private hands since Ruby Bill's death. It had never become a tourist attraction, like Scotty's Castle in Death Valley.

  Ruby Bill's Roman fantasy had tenants, she saw. A dozen cars and panel trucks were parked in the dusty streets. Among them was one she recognized: Mitch Lloyd's big purple Eldorado.

  There were lights on in the hotel over the western saloon. The Baroness crept forward, her gun in her hand.

  She could hear sounds now, drifting through the night. A honky-tonk piano tinkled from the direction of the saloon, and there were laughing voices. Someone was having a party.

  A man came through the swinging doors. He was dressed like a movie cowboy, in chaps and boots and a leather vest and a ten-gallon hat. He carried a double-barreled shotgun under his arm. He began making the rounds of the wooden storefronts. He was some kind of guard.

  The guard tipped his hat to a girl in a dance-hall costume who was coming out of the livery stable, then continued his rounds. Penelope kept watching. After a while, she detected the glint of metal on a wooden balcony. There was a dark shape there, with a rifle. Another guard.

  She kept looking. There was a third man lounging in front of the sheriff's office. He was dressed in cowboy clothes, too. He wore a pair of six-guns.

  Penelope stayed where she was. She could get as far as the beginning of the street without being seen. There was cover there: a buckboard parked in front of the rooming house. But she couldn't take two steps down the street without one of the guards seeing her.

  She hiked up her skirt and tied it with a knot around her waist. She waited until the patrolling guard had turned and headed back down the street, and made a dash for the buckboard. She crouched behind one of the big wheels and tried to figure out what to do next.

  Footsteps approached. Penelope peered between the spokes and saw the dance-hall girl coming down the street, heading for the rooming house. She tucked the Bernadelli VB into the waistband of her pantyhose and waited.

  A pair of legs came into view. They were clad in flesh-colored tights, the feet in silly-looking high-heeled shoes tied around the ankles with ribbons.

  Penelope's strong hands shot out and grasped the ankles. She pulled the girl under the wagon with her and had a hand over her mouth before the girl could scream.

  She looked into a pair of wide, terrified eyes. "It won't hurt, sweetie," she said. She tapped the girl's skull precisely with the butt of the Bernardelli VB. The girl slumped, her eyes rolling back in her head.

  She stripped the girl and wriggled into the tight bodice of the dance-hall costume, tucking her own bra straps underneath. The shoes were a little tight, but she got them on. She piled her own dark hair high, in an approximation of the girl's upsweep, fastening it with a few stolen pins and decorating it with her victim's bow. The Bernardelli VB was no problem; she tucked it under the spray of ostrich feathers ornamenting her rear.

  The girl moaned. Penelope hit her in the jaw, and tied her hand and foot with the pink tights. There was enough material left over for a gag.

  She sauntered down the wooden sidewalk, imitating the girl's walk. The guard was on the other side of the street. He tipped his hat as he drew level with her, and walked on. She passed under the balcony without incident, feeling the eyes of the hidden guard on her. At the far end of the street, the man in front of the sheriff's office glanced up disinterestedly.

  She risked a look into the saloon as she passed by the swinging doors. Swinging was the right word for them. Inside were a couple of dozen people having an orgy. Some of them were dressed — or half-dressed — in western costume. Some were affecting Roman toggery — togas, tunics and assorted pieces of armor. Some were naked. There was a man in a striped shirt and sleeve garters pounding out a tune on the tinny piano. On the top of the piano, a chubby blonde girl was being screwed by a man dressed as a gladiator.

  She reached the alley beside the hotel and slipped into the darkness. If she kept close to the wall she was shielded from the view of
anybody passing by the projecting wing of the hotel's Dutch front — the false façade added to many western buildings to make them look bigger than they are.

  There was a rickety fire escape. She kicked off the awkward shoes and climbed barefoot. There was a lighted window. She could hear voices coming from inside.

  She crawled out on the wooden platform under the window. It shook alarmingly. She inched forward, trying not to make any noise. The voices continued; nobody seemed to have heard her. Cautiously she raised her head and looked inside.

  It was an old-fashioned bedroom with a brass bed and heavy Victorian furniture. There was a man sitting up in the bed: a pudgy man with a porcine face fringed with a sparse goatee. He was naked, as far as she could tell, except for a blue beret. Beside him, the sheets up to her chin, was a blonde girl with a bored expression.

  Beside the bed, facing the window, was a tall muscular man in a sports shirt and slacks.

  It was Mitch.

  The pudgy man with the beret was saying, "…and it'd be a pretty good deal for you, Mitch baby. I might even be able to talk the Syn into giving you and me a percentage of the gross."

  Mitch was saying: "I have to hand it to you, Sully. You outdid yourself with the picture about you-know-who's wife in Washington. Whatever else you are, you must be a hell of a convincing casting director."

  Penelope's eyes gleamed with excitement. The pudgy man had to be the one she was after. And Mitch had led her to him.

  "Look kid," the pudgy man said, "it's getting late and The Socket here needs her beauty sleep. Why don't you…"

  And at that moment, the balcony gave way.

  Penelope's hands scrabbled for the windowsill. There was a ripping noise as the wooden supports tore loose.

  The pudgy man turned his head toward the window, his face registering alarm. Mitch reached in his pocket and came out with a gun.