by Неизвестный
I put money on the bar and looked around, but in the thick smoky gloom, I could make out only two Indian farmhands hunched together and speaking wordlessly as they shared a bottle.
“Is the Doctor in tonight?” I asked.
O’Connell didn’t look up from the glass he was smudging with a greasy cloth. “You see him?” His voice was like two rocks rubbing together.
I couldn’t tell if that was a joke, a rebuke, or a genuine question. I ordered another drink and headed toward a dark corner, taking small steps for fear of tripping on something unseen.
“The Doctor isn’t here.”
I was so surprised by the voice at my elbow, I nearly spilled my drink. I turned, and a tiny red ember of cigarette flared, illuminating a young man’s face. Lope Perez watched me through dark eyes that were unnervingly like his mother’s, but there the similarity ended. He had a compact, boxer’s physique. He wore a dark T-shirt, and on his forearm I could make out the hint of a tattoo that was, I knew from seeing it in daylight, a scorpion stinging a snake. Both creatures were criss-crossed with lines of paler flesh. Knife fighting was what passed for fun in the back alleys of Bellamy. Lope’s cigarette glowed as he drew again, and I saw that beside him sat another young man with a face like a whippet, blue-black hair slicked with Bryl, and lizard eyes. Eustacio.
“Oh,” I said.
Lope gestured for me to sit. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t figure a choice. I sat in front of the young men, as did a nearly empty bottle of El Tesoro and two shot glasses. They didn’t offer me a drink.
“How was your day?” Lope asked.
“Fine.”
“On your way home?”
I nodded.
“And you have some…” he hunted for the word, “merchandise…you want to talk to me about?”
I thought about the last of the contraband cigarettes tucked away in Marseillaise.
“I do,” I said. “I would.”
Lope took a long draw on his cigarette that made it glow bright and crackle. I was used to the gloom now. His face was smooth and scarless, a sign that he knew how to fight. His eyes rarely blinked and never left mine. He nodded.
“Then why you want to see the Doctor?”
My drink hovered halfway between the table and my lips. Lope Perez was smart. He never paid a penny more than he had to, for whatever I had to sell, and he always peddled his black-market gasoline and tires for top dollar. He had an intuition for what a person was willing to pay and a physical presence to ensure they did. Now he’d sensed that I had something to sell. I didn’t know what the gadget in Abraham’s coat was worth, but whatever it was, if Lope got involved in the deal, I knew I’d get next to nothing.
“He has something for me,” I lied.
Lope watched me for a long moment. He knew I was lying. He stubbed out his cigarette and looked at Eustacio. He said something in Spanish, and a crooked grin wormed onto Eustacio’s face.
“That’s rude,” Lope said apologetically. “Speaking when you don’t understand. I said to him, all the Doctor would have for you is a case of the clap.”
Lope smiled. It wasn’t a pleasant expression.
“Well,” I said. “That’s my business, isn’t it.”
Lope’s dark eyes were almost invisible in the gloom, but I could feel his attention on me. It was a predatory examination, like a big cat deciding whether an old antelope was worth the effort.
“You’re right,” he said. He tipped the last of his tequila into a glass and drained it. “Your business is your business. And besides,” he stood and leaned to whisper in my ear, “your date has arrived.”
As the young men walked away, I realized my hands were shaking. I heard Lope say loudly, “Buenas noches, Señor Feidler.” I half-heard a low exchange, and then, the Doctor turned to face me.
His hair was gray, and his eyes were as narrow as a Mongol’s. His shoes and suit had been white once, but that must have been before the war. He wore his blue fedora snapped down at the front and up at the back, and he carried a bamboo cane for the same reason a tightrope walker carries a pole. He was already drunk, but he was good at it.
“Well, well,” he said, and spoke my name. “Aren’t we the lonesome doves?”
His accent was European, and that made his fruity observation sound almost sophisticated. I checked that Lope was gone, then invited him to sit.
“Oh,” the Doctor said regretfully. “But I’m not planning on staying.”
I gestured for O’Connell to bring us two more drinks. The Doctor made a face as if shocked by my generosity, then pulled a rickety wooden chair to sit opposite.
His name was indeed Fiedler, but he was called The Doctor because he had once been one, but of what, no one quite knew. He’d immigrated after the first war and had done little since but drink, suffer internment during the second war, and then drink again. We were birds of a feather. Lonesome doves. But unlike me, the Doctor was a great talker and a great listener.
We exchanged pleasantries for a drink or two, and then I made sure I had his eye.
“Where is The Project?”
“I have no idea,” he said. But a tiny muscle under one eye twitched. “Why would you want to know that, anyway? You think the scientists there are short of tobacco?”
“I can pay.”
The Doctor regarded me and pulled out a yellow ivory cigarette holder. I reached into my pocket and gave him a smoke for it. He lit it and inhaled delicately.
“What business do you have there?”
“My own.”
The Doctor smiled.
“A man with business at the Project would already know where it is,” he said. Like Lope, he had a sense for fresh meat. “I want half.”
I laughed, and the two Indians looked up.
“I’ll give you five bucks.”
He shook his head. “Half.”
“It’s a matter of national importance,” I said.
“Then there’s no time to quibble.”
“Ten bucks,” I countered, disgusted at my own inability to bargain.
The Doctor smiled. “Half.” He stood, steadied himself a moment, then straightened. “The desert calls me to make water. Think about it. I’ll be back shortly.”
He weaved away into the darkness, and I heard the door that led to the back alley squeak open and clunk shut.
A moment later, I stood and followed him.
The single bulb in the toilet block was brighter than any in the bar, and the sight of the Doctor in his white suit standing against the dirty steel urinal made me squint.
“Ah,” he said. “You’ve reconsid––”
I hit him hard in the kidney. There was a sharp, girlish intake of breath, and he fell to one knee. I considered what I was doing, and how this could see me doing sixty days in Sheriff Doyle’s cell. But I had a chance here, a once-in-a-blue-moon chance, and I wasn’t going to let this greedy little mincer cheat me out of it. I kicked him between the shoulder blades, and the metal on my legs rang.
“I asked nicely,” I said. His hand was in a puddle of dark liquid on the edge of the trough. I stood on it, keeping most of my weight on my other foot. “Five bucks was fair. Ten bucks was generous. Now it comes free.”
“I d-don’t know where it is––”
I shifted my weight and heard the tiny snap of a finger breaking. The small man sucked in a breath to shriek, but I grabbed him around the mouth.
“Tell me where the Project is, or every bone gets doubled.”
His narrow eyes had widened with pain and were wet with tears. He nodded, and I let my hand off him. Sobbing, he told me about a Navajo shepherd named Kinlichee who came into Bellamy once a week for salt and flour and a drink or two. The Doctor had seen the guy wore new boots, and smelling a story, he had asked how a poor shepherd family could afford new boots. The Indian had smiled and said his wife had got the job of mending the suits for a Nobel Prize winner. There were lots of those suits to mend these days, just down the road. But
then the Indian had gone mum, perhaps realizing he’d said too much.
“Where did this Kinlichee live?” I demanded.
“I don’t…”
I pressed heavily again on his hand.
“Off Five-Fifty,” The Doctor hissed.
“The bridge road?” I asked.
The Doctor nodded. “Please,” he begged. “Please…”
I took my foot off his hand. He didn’t look up at me. I reached into my pocket, opened my wallet, and took out a carefully folded and hidden ten dollar bill. I dropped it in the puddle.
“You shouldn’t be so greedy,” I said, and left.
I hurried back through the empty streets of Bellamy. I knew the road that the Doctor had described, and I thought I could find it even at night. I wondered now if what I’d told him was true. Maybe this was a matter of national security. Maybe the little metal gadget Abraham carried was a key that could save our country from the Martians. Maybe it could save the world. What kind of a reward would that earn? My tongue grew wet at the prospect, and my squeaking pace picked up. When I reached Juanita’s rooms, my fingers trembled with excitement as I fumbled the key into the door lock.
Even before I stepped inside, I knew the room was empty.
I switched on the light and confirmed it. The single bed was empty. Abraham was gone. So were his shoes, jacket, and coat. I stared at the emptiness for a long, fraught moment, then hurried back outside.
A night breeze had picked up, bringing scents from the town, the sweet smell of jasmine and the alien, peppery smell of the desert. I looked left and right, but nothing moved except the shadows of a spindly pecan tree swaying near a solitary street lamp. I looked down at the ground. In the dust were fresh tire marks. They terminated near me in two smooth patches, where the wheels had spun as the driver accelerated.
Lope.
I swore loudly and did a slow, pathetic circle, looking for something to kick or hit. It’s a terrible feeling, that unscratchable itch that tells you you’ve done something stupid and the chance to fix it has gone. When I was a kid, my old man took me to a horserace track near Sierra Vista. It was little more than a circle in a cornfield. I watched him put a dollar—his last dollar after being laid off from the transport depot—on the final race of the day. His horse won, and I’d never seen the miserable bastard so happy. Until he realized he’d lost the ticket. We searched through a thousand stubs until we were the last ones there, and some guy with a Billy club told us we had to go. I never saw my father cry, but he was damned close that evening.
I was not my father, and felt hot tears on my cheeks. I’d assaulted a man for nothing. I’d go to jail for nothing. I had everything in my hand for that moment I’d held that little metal gadget, and now…
Sniveling like a bullied schoolboy, I wrenched open the Citroën’s driver side door. Ignoring the stabbing pains as the braces bit into my legs, I jumped behind the wheel. I’d made up my mind, then. My life was at a turnpike. I either got on and raced, or slunk back into painful, drunken obscurity that the honest part of me knew would see me ending my days at fifty or fifty-five, my liver shot, hated and pitied, and avoided by everyone who clapped eyes on me. Abraham and his gadget were my ticket out. My salvation. I was owed it. And I would get it.
I turned the ignition key, and slammed the car into gear.
It took only a few brain cells to figure that Lope had lifted Abraham before taking a back street back to Los Clavos to find the Doctor. But I had to be sure. I parked Marseillaise at the back of the alley that led to the restroom block and then to the bar’s rear entrance. I didn’t have to go far before I found the bloodstains. I was light-headed. Lope had me checked in three easy moves, and I felt every inch the fool I was. They were heading for the old bridge road off 550.
I hobbled back to the car, but not to the driver’s door. I opened a rear door, and then one of the hidden compartments under the mat. My fingers found oilcloth, and I pulled out and unwrapped my old service 1911 Colt. I chambered a round, slipped the gun into my jacket pocket, and then got behind the wheel.
I drove too fast, hunched over the wheel and urging the needle on Marseillaise’s dial to edge past sixty-five. Her headlights lit nothing but the road, low rocks, and piñon trees. The stars overhead shone on millions of acres of flat desert.
I felt the hard weight in my jacket pocket. I’d shot at targets with an M1 carbine, and I’d shot at planes with the .50 cals on my Mustang, but I’d never shot at a man with a pistol.
A few miles after Perez’s bar and rooms, the way veered south. The only routes east were service roads that were little more than parallel grooves made by the ancient trucks of poor farmers and the rare visits of repair trucks owned by the utility companies—and they had pretty well stopped since the invasion. I had to slow Marseillaise at the first of these skeletal side roads, or I’d never find the one I needed. My feet itched, and my mouth was dry as a noonday rock. Then I saw it: a withered post as gray as old bone, stuck in the dry earth. Held to it with nails and wire was a warped signboard. I hit the brakes and slowed the car to a crawl. The letters of the sign were so flaked and faded, you would have been hard pressed to read it in daylight, but I’d passed it before and knew what it said: Noab Bridge 5 Miles. The bridge road. Marseillaise’s headlights picked up fresh tire tracks heading up it. Somewhere up there was an old shepherd’s farm, a military base no one was supposed to know about, and Lope’s Chevy. I had to catch that car.
I pushed the gas pedal to the floor and drove like the devil himself, ignoring the wildly shaking wheel and the awful clangs and clatters as Marseillaise bottomed out on the wheel ruts. What would I do when I saw the tail-lights of the Chevy? Lean out the window and blaze away like Lawrence Tierney in some gangster film? I knew that I would. I pulled the gun from my pocket and stuck it flat under a thigh. When I looked up, I saw the demon-eye glow of tail-lights.
They weren’t moving.
Then, a white figure seemed to jump into the headlights. A body lying on the road. My heart did a salmon leap, and I swerved without thinking. The steering wheel juddered hard as something in Marseillaise’s steering box snapped. I was heading toward a barbed-wire fence and bouncing like a bride on her honeymoon, the steering wheel turning without effect. I slammed down on the brake pedal and stopped a foot from the fence.
I got out, dazed, the Colt in my hand. The air was cooler this late, and a sea of stars lit the flatlands silver. A motor idled. I crouched and followed my broken car’s tracks back to the road. The Doctor’s white suit now wore fresh blooms of red. He didn’t move.
A pistol shot rang out in the night air, and the basic training from all those years ago grabbed me and pulled me to the ground.
“––back and I’ll kill you!”
It was Lope’s voice, strangely high-pitched in the night air. “Show your dog face, and let me kill you!!”
As my eyes adjusted to the starlight, I could see that Lope’s Chevy was empty, but its motor was still running. Thirty yards past it was a dark slash in the flat landscape—the steep walls of a dry wash that ran full maybe twice a year. The dry creek was crossed by a bridge constructed of two gray tree trunks set into the banks and covered by tarred railway ties with a series of posts, themselves little more than roughly shaved lengths of tree trunk, to stop vehicles steering off into the gully. By the starlight, I could make out two figures near the bridge. One was slumped in the dust, not moving. Even in death, Eustacio’s hair was still neatly pomaded. The ground near Eustacio’s neck was a dark stain. Not far from him was Abraham. He was crouched with his back to an end post on the bridge, huddled in his greatcoat. There was a smear of fresh dust up one side of the coat. In one hand, he held a small, silver pistol. His eyes were on me.
“Abraham?” I said, walking closer.
He was shaking, and his face was a mask of confusion. When he saw I was carrying my pistol, he awkwardly raised the little silver gun, which I presume he somehow got from Eustacio. I lowered the Colt and
held up my other hand for peace. Abraham motioned for me to stop.
“He’s in the flussbett,” he said tightly, and indicated the gully.
Another shot rang out from the very spot Abraham had indicated, and wood a foot above Abraham’s head splintered.
“You’re still up there, pulpo!” cried Lope. “Eustacio!!”
“He’s dead!” shouted Abraham, and wildly sent a shot down into the darkness of the gully.
“Eustacio..!” Lope shouted again, and something strangled in his voice said he believed Abraham.
I waddled in a crouch over to Abraham.
His eyes were wide and wild, and his face trembled.
“What happened?”
“Is that you?” shouted Lope, and said my name. “Are you up there?”
“Shut up, Lope,” I said. “I got my forty-five.”
“Don’t listen to that––”
“I mean it!” I shouted back, and thumbed back the hammer of the Colt. It made a satisfyingly loud click. I looked at Abraham.
“They came into the room,” he explained. “They put me in a car. The man in white was already dead. I thought they’d kill me, too. When we hit a bump, I snatched the gun off that one,” he indicated Eustacio’s body, “and jumped out.”
“Don’t believe him!” Lope called. “Hey, I got your precious bauble, pulpo! Wha’choo goin’ to do without that!”
“Shut up, ya cheap thief!” I shouted, and poked my head around the corner of the pole. Down in the dry creek bed, pressed up against the gully wall, Lope stood clutching his gun. When he saw me, he swiftly aimed and fired. I ducked back and heard the round sizzle the air where my head had been. I heard Abraham whimper beside me.