Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 08

by Blood (and Thunder) (v5. 0)

  The car, I noted for no good reason, was a black Studebaker two-door coupe. It had pulled up on the grass incline with perhaps a dozen other vehicles, ranging from new sedans to beat-up pickup trucks, in front of a rambling ramshackle oversize shed of a building alive with lights and laughter and honky-tonk piano; a crude wood-burned sign sat on two legs in the unmowed yard: WILLSWOOD TAVERN. Silhouetted behind the gray, unpainted wooden frame structure, with its split-log shingles, loomed the ghostly, foreboding shapes of a swamp.

  They dragged me behind the building; through open windows, I glimpsed a burly bartender with no apron dispensing sweaty bottles of beer, drunken men dancing with loose women, long picnic-type tables where spaghetti and oysters and crawfish were being chowed down by a rowdy clientele, smaller tables where men were playing cards with piles of cash on the table.

  Behind the building, across a short yard with tall unmowed grass, the darkness of the swamp beckoned me to make a break for it. Whatever dangers lurked there, they were surely preferable to the certainty of what faced me with Big George and Carlos.

  But my muscles weren’t working yet; my brain barely was.

  McCracken opened a door, and Carlos pushed me through. I stumbled into a dark room and rolled on a hard dirt floor, bumping up against a wooden chair. A door slammed, and a cone of light clicked on from a hanging lamp, and I was a huddled shape in the spotlight.

  “Put ’im in the chair, Carlos.”

  The big hands were on me again, and I was hoisted off the floor and slammed into the wooden chair. Carlos got around behind me and yanked my arms behind me and rope looped around my wrists and around through the rungs of the chair. I could feel him knotting them, tying me into the chair; at least the hemp wasn’t so tight as to cut off the circulation. Thank God for small favors.

  It was a small supply room—shelves of canned goods, stacked cartons of bottled beer; a big gray metal washer tub was shoved against the slats of one wall.

  “I can handle this by myself,” McCracken said to Carlos.

  “Thanks,” Carlos said. “No good de boss not bein’ ’round on Sat’dy night.”

  The bullnecked hood—and apparent proprietor of the Willswood Tavern—opened a door that must have led into the kitchen, because the pungent aroma of tomato sauce filled the room. Dishes and kettles clattered.

  “You get tired, George my fren’,” Carlos said, “jus’ let me know. I send Bucky Boy back.”

  Then it was just me and McCracken.

  He took off his suitcoat and rested it on the stacked beer cartons. A .38 revolver was shoulder-holstered under his left arm. He unbuttoned his cuffs and rolled up his sleeves. Then he plucked something off a shelf—he was outside the cone of light, and I couldn’t make out what it was—and stepped into the light, right in front of me, the hand with the object, whatever it was, behind his back.

  His battered fighter’s mug worked up a smile. “We already tossed your hotel room, didn’t find ’em. Didn’t find ’em in your car, neither….”

  The noise of drunken merriment, from out in the saloon, leached through the wooden walls.

  “I don’t have the goddamn bullets,” I said.

  “Sure you do. You said you did. I heard ya tell Seymour and Dickie.”

  “I was bluffing.”

  He frowned; thinking was an effort. “Bluffin’?”

  “There are no bullets. I was just tryin’ to extort some dough out of Seymour for Mrs. Long.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “It’s the truth, goddamnit! George, listen to me—I knew those sons of bitches rooked Mrs. Long outa the ‘dee-duct box’ money. Asking around, I figured out Carl Weiss just punched Huey, and set you guys off!”

  “I’ll ask ya again,” he said, and his hand came out from behind his back.

  A rubber hose.

  “Please don’t,” I said. In Chicago, it was called getting fed the goldfish; and it was a meal I’d been served before.

  It hadn’t agreed with me.

  “George, goddamnit, I’m telling you the truth….”

  The hose swished through the air and whacked into my left forearm; the sting was followed by a deep ache.

  “I want those bullets, Heller. Where are they?”

  It swished again, and again, and each time I cried out, but nobody out there having fun could hear me, and the sting would be followed by the ache, and he kept questioning me and I kept telling him I didn’t have the goddamn bullets and he moved on to my right arm and then my thighs and my calves and shins and by that time I had stopped yelling and started whimpering and then I stopped whimpering and started crying my fucking eyes out, and then, thank God, I passed out.

  Somebody threw water in my face and I came out of it, coughing, choking, sputtering, spitting, not knowing whether I’d been out a minute or an hour or a week; but the pain was living agony and I began to scream and McCracken slipped a hand over my mouth and I screamed into it.

  The sound of drunken revelry continued from the next room.

  McCracken took his hand away from my face. “Keep your voice down, Heller, or you get the next one in the jewels.”

  And he whapped me on the thigh, alongside my balls, and the pain shot through me like an arrow, but I clenched my teeth. Didn’t scream. Just moaned.

  A hillbilly scarecrow in coveralls and no shirt on his hairless sunken chest stepped into the shaft of light. He had an awful, crooked, bucktooth smile that was black and yellow and green—everything but white; his eyes were large and yellow and his nose was straight and pointed, like a bee stinger. His sunken cheeks were stubbly, but his chin was nowhere in sight; his Adam’s apple was prominent and bobbed as he laughed, which he was doing right now, watching me suffering in my chair.

  “This is Bucky Boy,” McCracken said. “Bucky Boy’s gonna he’p me out.”

  “I’m the fella ’round here what makes the Yankee gumbo!” Bucky Boy chortled. He kicked the big gray washer tub. “Mix ’er up in there, I do.”

  McCracken folded his arms; the rubber hose hung limply, but threateningly, from his right hand. “Why don’t ya ask Bucky Boy what Yankee gumbo is?”

  But I didn’t have to.

  “I dump me a Yankee in this here tub,” he said, and kicked it again, and laughed idiotically, deep in his throat, making his Adam’s apple bob some more, “and then I pours in lotsa lye! Then I let ’im soak a spell!”

  Leaving a partly decomposed, liquefied corpse….

  McCracken picked up the recipe from there: “Before long, all we got to do is pour that fool Yankee into the swamp.”

  Ingenious way to dispose of a corpse; send it flowing into a waterway.

  “I…I don’t have the damn bullets. I told you. I was bluffing.”

  McCracken beat on me a while. Every blow sent pain shooting through my system until I was drunk with it; I started to laugh, to join in with the good time that was leaking in from the saloon out front.

  “He’s gettin’ slaphappy,” Bucky Boy said, a frown indicating some degree of thinking ability.

  McCracken was rubbing his right arm with his left hand. “I’m gettin’ wore out. You wanna pound on him some, Bucky Boy?”

  “Shore!”

  “Don’t kill him, now.”

  “Try not!”

  Bucky Boy had pipe-cleaner arms, but he found power somewhere; the wiry hillbilly had the sense to get behind me, and find new territory, slamming the rubber hose into my shoulders, even whapping it through the rungs of the chair. I wasn’t laughing anymore, but he was, filling the little storeroom with raucous, down-home glee.

  When my body was one enormous sea of anguish, I did myself a favor and passed out again.

  When I came to, I was alone. I was throbbing with pain, like my body was covered with boils about to burst; though they hadn’t touched my face or hit me on the head, my head was splitting.

  I tried to stand. Maybe I could make it over to that door, if I could get my feet and legs to work. It took all the effort I had, b
ut I stood. My legs were flimsy things under me, like a card table that wasn’t put up right, but I dragged myself over to that door, hunching over, carrying the chair on my back like a slave with a cotton bale, and turned my back to the door, and, with no more effort than it takes to thread a needle with your toes, tried the knob, turned the knob.

  But it was locked.

  Now what?

  I could try to smash the chair against the wall—it was spindly enough that it might come apart—but would the racket attract somebody out there? The sounds of drunken laughter and honky-tonk piano continued; it had covered my screams—would it cover this?

  The walls that weren’t lined with shelves were either blocked by beer cartons or that Yankee-gumbo tub, so the door itself, which was a solid-looking slab of wood, was the best bet. I rammed myself into it, and the chair didn’t give, though every bone and muscle in my body seemed to; but I did it again, and again, and tears were rolling down my face, mingling with sweat, when McCracken came bolting through that kitchen door and dragged me back over toward the middle of the little room and slapped me, twice, hard. My mouth was bleeding, but I was starting to go generally numb.

  When he began waling on me with the rubber hose again, I hardly felt it; I was just a big dead slab of meat, barely holding onto consciousness.

  “I want those fuckin’ bullets! I want those fuckin’ bullets!”

  I could have told him about Vidrine, and if the pain hadn’t turned to numbness, maybe I would have; but I knew, punchy as I was by this point, that telling him about Vidrine would only get the doc killed. It wouldn’t help me. Oh, maybe McCracken would stop beating on me. But he was going to kill me, anyway. I knew that.

  So did he.

  Because you have to kill a man you give a beating like this to.

  Or he’ll kill you.

  My chin was on my chest. McCracken was standing talking with Carlos; beanpole Bucky Boy was looking on.

  The washer tub had been moved out from the wall; it was filled within a few inches of its rim with a cloudy liquid. An acrid aroma flared my nostrils.

  “I don’t care whether you do this thing or not,” Carlos said, “but dawn’s comin’…and Sunday’s my big mornin’, you know, The cops and the crooks and the boodlers be comin’ by, to pay Carlos his cut’a de week’s take. So eider way, I want ’im outa here. ’Live or dead, sho’ ’nuff.”

  McCracken sighed, shook his head and said, “Hell—he ain’t gonna talk.”

  “Do whatever y’think best. I ain’t no part of it, dough.”

  And Carlos went back through the kitchen. No sounds or smells came out. The saloon was quiet out there. After hours.

  The lye smell was starting to crowd out the air in the little space; McCracken started to cough. Then he dug in his pants pocket and came back with a key and unlocked the door that led out back, let that door stand open to air out the room a little.

  Bucky Boy stood in front of me and said, “You bet’ let me kill ’im, boss, ’fore we dump ’im in the tub. He might thrash aroun’ some, and get that mean ol’ stuff on you and me.”

  That’s when I stood, chair and all, and, heaving all my weight into it, butted Bucky Boy in the pit of his stomach, and he went careening backward, head knocking against the conical lamp, sending it swinging, throwing its light wildly around the storeroom, while he went awkwardly back, windmilling his arms like Huey giving a rabble-rousing speech, instinct making him look over his shoulder to see where he was going, and splashing right into the tub of lye, getting it on his bare arms, chest, the side of his face, and more; he had lost balance, he was in the tub, splashing and kicking and screaming like he was being skinned alive, which in a sense he was.

  But he didn’t get much if any of it on me, splashing around, because I was busy ramming backward into McCracken, who was clawing for the gun in his shoulder holster, only he didn’t get to it before my chair splintered against him, sending him into a wall of canned goods. The shelves collapsed and the cans rained on him, and he was on his ass down there, under the wood and the scattering of cans, dazed.

  I moved through the open door and outside, shaking the remnants of the chair from behind me, free, or as free as a man with his hands bound behind him can be, and ran into the early daylight, moving toward the swamp. McCracken would soon be after me, with his gun, and hazardous as the unknown of that marshy wilderness might be, it was a place where I might find cover, where I might have an even chance.

  As soon as I crossed the waist-high grass of the yard and stumbled into the trees, the ground got soft, spongy. Would it go out from under me, and put my chin at ground level? Words like snake and quicksand flashed through my city-boy brain. What was I doing in this grotesque world of sharp, spiky palmettos and canes? This macabre jungle of ferns and vines, some green, others gray, a gloom brightened (I suddenly noticed) by the morning chirping of a thousand birds.

  I knew I shouldn’t go too far, or I’d never come out. My only goal, for the moment, was to hide; stay away from the man with the gun who wanted to kill me. If I could find something sharp, to work the ropes around my wrist against, I could quit thinking defensively, and fight back…but right now: hiding. Survival….

  The land gave way to water suddenly, a forest of cypress trees standing like impossibly tall men, but they were dead men, as gray as the Spanish moss they were so lavishly draped with; the trees of this ghost forest were no less formidable dead than alive: their out-flaring, swollen trunks separating into twin arms reaching into a sky they blotted out, their root systems above the water, gnarled, skeletal, horrible, beautiful.

  One step at a time, I tested the water, to find the land beneath. I saw something sliding along the water’s surface, about ten feet away; I froze. Waited. Then, whether harmless or poisonous, the serpent had passed, and I had this hellish Eden to myself again. Another step, and another, over one ankle, one more, another, to my knees, and then I was up on the roots of the biggest cypress in Louisiana.

  I knew the direction I’d come, so I got behind the tree, figuring I could peek around and watch for McCracken, and in the meantime try to work the rope on the bark of the cypress. I had already twisted my fingers around to check the knot; it was hopelessly tight. It might take a while, but eventually the rope would wear through.

  As I worked the ropes against the rough bark, I heard the rustle of fronds as he moved through. I had hoped that spongy ground would swallow up my footprints, but even so, maybe he could track me by broken branches and tramped-down foliage. I hadn’t been too careful; I’d just been moving.

  I peered around. He was standing at the edge where the marshy land gave way to water and the ghost cypress forest began. He wasn’t twenty feet away.

  “Heller!” he called, voice echoing across the water. “Give it up. You gon’ die out here!”

  A bird called a mocking cry by way of response.

  “Look—I believe ya…you were bluffin’. There ain’t no bullets. Me, I made an honest mistake. I’ll put my gun away, if you call out to me. I swear it on my mama’s grave!”

  Not even a bird answered him this time.

  “Heller! They done rushed Bucky Boy to the hospital! No harm done. He’s gon’ be jus’ fine. No hard feelin’s. We all took a beatin’ on this one. Come on, boy!”

  He wouldn’t step out into that water. He wasn’t sure I was out here. All I had to do was wait him out. I already had a sense, from what Carlos said, and from McCracken himself, that McCracken was acting on his own accord. There’d be no reinforcements. All I had to do was wait him out. Something nudged me, and I turned quickly and the snout of a dull gray alligator, a creature easily eight feet long, was right beside me.

  I lost my balance and fell back splatteringly into the water, arms waving. I was on my ass, knees up, and the view through them was the gator looking at me with its beady eyes, considering whether I was worth the trouble.

  “Heller!” McCracken called, almost cackling. “Got ya now!”

  He ca
me running, and hit a deep spot, which made him lose his footing, sending him splat, face first into the water, and his gun went flying and splashed into the swamp, only a few feet away, gone forever. The fuss was too much for the gator, who slithered away, but I had to make the best of it.

  Maybe my hands were bound behind me, but McCracken was unarmed now, and I kicked up water as I ran toward him and as he was just getting back on his feet, I played bull and rammed my head into his belly, sending him back down, throwing water everywhere. But when I went to kick him in the head, he reached up and grabbed my foot and threw me backward, with considerable force, and I slammed into a cypress and got the wind knocked out of me.

  I slumped there, gasping for breath, beyond pain, as the dripping McCracken, his battered fighter’s face twisted into a smile as grotesque as the most gnarled, twisted branch in this gruesome landscape, staggered toward me, each footstep splashing. He was reaching into his pocket for something.

  His hand came back and he flipped the razor open and its blade caught the sun streaking through the hanging moss.

  “Maybe them bullets are inside’a you,” he said. “We gon’ have a look-see….”

  I tried to stand, but I couldn’t get my footing on the knobby cypress roots, my hands still roped behind me.

  His throat exploded in a blossom of blood as something thunked into the tree trunk, above me. He dropped the razor and it plinked into the water, as he clawed with both hands toward his throat, but blood was billowing out and he staggered a few more steps and fell face down at my feet, turning the swamp water around him a spreading red.

  At the edge of the swamp, where the water began, Murphy Roden was standing, expressionless, a heavy revolver in his fist, trailing smoke.

  “Nate! You alive, kid?”

  “And kicking,” I said, or maybe I just thought it.

  Either way, I passed out.

  The shades were drawn, but morning sun peeked around the edges and threw streaks of sunlight on my face, prying my eyes open.