“Don’t you like the idea?”
“I like it, baby. I like it fine. I’m just wondering, though. It doesn’t seem likely that you live here alone. Who makes the crowd?”
“Luke.”
“Your husband?”
Her full lips curled. “That’s one thing you could call him.”
“How’s Luke going to feel about me being around?”
“Don’t worry about Luke. He just eats and sleeps here, and not too much of that. Most of the time he’s nursing that damn broken-down still of his.”
“Still? You mean they have those things down here yet? I thought they went out with prohibition.”
“Maybe they did in Kansas City. Not here. Luke makes a pile of money bootlegging. Not that it does me any good. He’s a regular miser. He loves the green stuff too much to part with any of it.”
“You sure he’ll let me stay around?”
“Don’t worry about him, I said. I can handle it.”
He stood up. “Okay, baby, you twisted my arm. I’ll just hike back to Greenview and pick up the bag I left in the station there. Few things I’ll need.”
She didn’t bother to get up. She just kept on lying there on her back on the well-cap, and very slowly she extended her arms above her head, arching her spine and stretching.
“Hurry back, Dickie,” she said. “Hurry right back.”
He returned to Greenview, his feet still burning in his shoes, and by a kind of malicious paradox, the road that had seemed mostly up hill coming out of town seemed just as much so going back. When he reached the farm again, carrying his bag, the last of sunlight was touching only the crests of hills and ridges.
Rose was waiting for him on the back porch. Beyond her, in the lighted kitchen, he could see the figure of a man who was bent over the kitchen table spooning something into his mouth.
“Come on in the house,” Rose said. “Luke’s home.”
He followed her into the house and set his bag on the floor inside the screen door. The man at the table stopped eating to look at him with wary little eyes, holding the spoon suspended empty between plate and mouth. Dickie felt a shock of surprise and grinned pleasantly to hide it. He’d expected a young man, but Luke was long way past young. Fifty at least, Dickie guessed. Maybe onto sixty. He had a long, bleak face, almost rectangular in shape, with a broad, square chin. His hair was coarse and bristly, a dirty grey, and it gave more the effect of quills than hair. His voice detoured through his nose, and the nasal twang gave it a mean sound.
“What you want here?”
“I’m looking for a place to stay a few days. Your wife said maybe I could stay here.”
Rose’s laugh, behind him, had a jeer in it. “Luke’s worried about his still. He thinks maybe you’re a state agent. Maybe even a Fed.” Dickie laughed, too, just to show how funny he thought that idea was, but Luke didn’t seem to think it was funny at all. His little eyes slipped past Dickie in the direction of Rose, and his bleak face was suddenly a real and considerable menace. Dickie felt an uneasy chill wriggle its way along his spine, and he realized that Luke was a dangerous man. Just as dangerous in his own way and place as a man like Buck Finney was in his.
“You shut up,” Luke said. “Just keep your trap shut.”
Rose repeated her laugh, but the jeer was gone, and there was something in its place that might have been the tremor of fear. Luke’s eyes came back as far as Dickie and stopped. They stayed there a long time without moving.
“If you want to sleep in the barn, you can stay,” he said at last. “If you don’t, you can move on.”
Dickie took it gracefully. “The barn’s okay. I’ll carry my bag down now.”
Luke’s spoon resumed it’s shuttling between plate and mouth, and Rose said, “There’s a lantern in the harness room, if you want a light. Be careful of the hay.”
“Sure,” he said. “I’ll watch it.”
He carried his bag to the barn and climbed to the loft on a straight wooden ladder nailed to the inside wall. Opening the loft door, he lay in the hay in front of it and looked out to the ancient hills. He knew nothing of geology, nothing at all of the region’s incredible history, but the dark remnants of earth’s patient violence filled him with an indefinable uncase.
Shrugging it off, he began to think of Rose, and after a while the threat of the hills receded. He found himself listening, expecting the soft sound of her approach up the ladder, but then he remembered the sound in her voice in the kitchen, and he decided that she wouldn’t come. Not tonight. Not any time when Luke was around.
He loves the green stuff too much to part with any of it, Rose had said. The words had lingered verbatim in Dickie’s consciousness. To a guy who needed two grand, they were words of considerable significance. Two grand? Better add a half. It would take a lot of interest to make Buck Finney forget that the principal of the debt was delinquent. Interest on money you owed Finney accumulated fast.
Would a billy like Luke have twenty-five C’s cashed? It wasn’t impossible. Sometimes these hill characters surprised a guy. They were full of surprises. Take the case of a dame like Rose being hitched to a sour, ugly Ozark boot-legger like Luke, for instance. Rose was a doll with possibilities. She even talked as if she’d been to school. Maybe through a consolidated high school somewhere. Knock off the rough edges, polish her up and put her in the right rags, she’d go great along Twelfth.
It just didn’t make any kind of sense, her being married to Luke. Or did it? When you considered the possibility of Luke’s having a nice little green cache, things began to add up. Dickie might not know anything about geology, but he knew his share about dames, and he could recognize the predatory type a mile off. A few grand would go a long way towards getting an ambitious dame out of the hills on the right foot, and he was willing to bet dollars to tax tokens that Rose had been thinking about that when she crawled in with Luke at the start.
Lying there in the hay, looking out to where the moon was beginning to edge a distant ridge, he weighed the pros and cons of collaboration, and pretty soon he went to sleep.
He woke at daylight to sounds below. Without moving, he listened to the opening and closing of the harness room door, the sound of heavy shoes on hard-packed earth, the opening of the barn door on the field side away from the house. Seconds later, Luke came into view, headed for the hills. He was carrying an old bolt-action rifle, and he walked with a long-legged, undulating motion that ate up the ground in a hurry.
Ten minutes passed, no longer, before Rose came up the ladder and over the hay to his side. She leaned back, braced on her elbows, and passed him a slow smile. “Luke’s gone,” she said.
“I know. I watched him leave.”
“You hungry?”
“A little.”
“You come up to the house, I’ll fix you something.”
“Pretty soon. I’m in no hurry.” She looked out the loft window toward the hills into which Luke had gone, but her eyes were blank, as if they were turned inward to focus on her own thoughts. Her full lips pouted softly.
“When you going back to KC?”
He laughed. “How long does it take to get hold of twenty-five hundred bucks around here?”
She turned her head to look at him directly. “That depends on where you look.”
“It would save time to look in the right place.”
“Why you need all that money to get back?”
He lifted his shoulders. “A little debt I owe to a guy who likes to be paid.”
“Oh.” She turned her eyes back to the hills and she was silent for a long time. Finally she whispered, as if to herself, “I know where there’s twenty-five hundred dollars. More than that. A lot more. I know just where it is.”
So there it was on a tentative line. “I’ve been thinking, ba
by,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about a lot of things, but mostly I’ve been trying to think of the reason why a nice item like you would marry Luke. Now I’m beginning to understand.”
She said bitterly, “Fat lot of good it did me. I thought I could work it out of him, but I was all wrong. I sold out for nothing.” She paused, then said in a rush, “Take me back to KC with you, Dickie.”
He’d already anticipated that plea, and he’d decided that it had points. She’d be an interesting attachment for a while, and later on, when the thing went sour, they’d break it up, and thanks for the ride. Meanwhile, however, the whole project depended on Luke’s green cache.
“I told you, baby. I can’t go back without twenty-five C’s.”
“Luke’s got it, Dickie. He must have eight, ten thousand stuck away. He’s been running bootleg for a long time. You can gather a big bundle that way.”
Dickie whistled softly. “Where is it?”
“In the cave. The cave where the still is. These hills are riddled with caves, you know. This one’s about two miles over the way Luke went this morning, and I’m the only one besides Luke who knows about it. I followed him one day and spotted it. When he left, I went in and found the cache. All that beautiful green stuff.” She held her spread fingers in front of her eyes, and her voice dripped with bitterness. “I fingered it a little. Just fingered it a little and put it back.”
“How come? How come you didn’t take off with it.”
She looked at him, and in her eyes was the visual equivalent of the sound he’d heard in her voice in the kitchen last night. A shiver ran through the flesh of her body.
“For the same reason you and I can’t just take off with it now,” she said. “Because Luke’s got to be taken care of first. Don’t underestimate him. He’s mean clear through. He’s killed before, and he’d kill again. With you for company, though, I’d have the nerve to try.”
“How could we get the dough and get away? Have you got an idea?”
“Yes.” She clenched her fingers and sat looking at the fist they made. “Luke sells bootleg to a road joint a couple of miles south of here. They get Luke’s stuff cheap, and it makes for big profits. I’ll bet you’d be surprised how much of the stuff you buy across the bar is bootleg, even in Kansas City. This joint is Luke’s biggest customer. Every Sunday Luke brings a lot of the stuff in from the cave. Sunday night, while the joint’s closed, he delivers it in the truck. The point is, Luke’s a three-time loser. Another rap means life. But instead, for Luke, it’ll mean death. He carries an old .45 Colt revolver with him in his deliveries, and he wouldn’t let himself be taken alive. You can believe that. I know Luke, and he’d never go back to the pen for keeps.”
He looked at her with growing admiration. “I get it. A word to the right party, and it’s good-bye, Luke. Who? The sheriff?”
She shivered again. “Yes, the sheriff. Rube Wells. He hates Luke’s guts. He’d love to nail him. He’d love the excuse to burn him down.”
“This is Sunday, baby. By moving fast, we could do it tonight. I’d sure like to get back to KC.”
“The sooner, the better.”
“You got a phone here?”
“No. You’d have to go to Greenview.”
“What’s the name of this joint Luke delivers to?”
“The Oaks. It’s just a big frame building, like a barn, but it does a lot of business.”
“How does Luke get the stuff in from the still?”
“He keeps a couple of mules pastured out that way. There’s a cart out there, too. He brings it up in the cart.”
“Okay. I better get to Greenview and back before he brings the stuff in.”
“You can use the truck. Come on up to the house, and I’ll fix you something to cat.”
In the kitchen, he ate fat bacon and bread, washing it down with strong black coffee. Then he backed the truck out of its shed and drove to Greenview. The truck was an old 1948 pickup, shaken into a state of innumerable rattles by the rocky hill roads, and the exhaust kept popping like gunfire.
He found a telephone booth in a shabby cafe filled with the rancid odor of grease, and finally got through humming country wires to the county seat. He caught Rube Wells himself in the sheriff’s office and put the finger on Luke succinctly.
The wire hummed for a few seconds after he’d finished, and then the sheriff’s voice sounded harshly, “Who the hell’s talking?”
“Never mind that. You want Luke Flannery or not?”
“I want him, all right.”
“Then you’d better be waiting tonight on the road to the Oaks.” The voice was grim.
“We’ll be waiting. We’ll be right there.” Dickie laughed quietly inside himself, and hung up. He laughed all the way back to the farm, and he was still laughing when he crawled out of the truck and went across the yard to the porch where Rose was waiting.
“Luke back yet?”
“No. He won’t be here for a long time yet.”
“Good. It’s all set, baby. Neat as anything you could want.”
“I hope so.” That long shuddery creeping of flesh was apparent again. “I hope to God nothing goes wrong.”
His eyes narrowed. “You’re sure, aren’t you? About his making that delivery tonight, I mean?”
“Yes, I’m sure. He makes it regular every Sunday night. He leaves here in the truck a little before ten.”
“Okay. Relax, then. We got nothing to worry about. If he doesn’t go crazy, like you think, and get himself killed, he’ll wind up in the county gaol. Either way, it’ll give you and me the chance to get the dough and get out of here.”
“They got to kill him,” she said. “I’ll never be easy if they don’t kill him. Even with life on him, I won’t feel easy.”
It was beginning to get dusk when Luke returned. Dickie sat in the loft and watched him come in from the hills behind a plodding mule. In the primitive two-wheeled cart, the old bolt-action rifle leaning against his knees, Luke was like something from a long way back, crude and somehow savage. In spite of himself, Dickie felt in his own flesh a shudder like the ones that had worked in Rose’s. He crawled back over the hay and down the wooden ladder and stood in the open door of the barn watching Luke as he drove up and stopped.
“Long day,” he said.
Luke didn’t answer. He swung down off the cart and went around to the back. “You can help me unload,” he said. “Put it in the truck.”
There were ten cases of the stuff. A hundred and twenty quarts of raw, unlabelled, untaxed white lightning. Not expecting so large an operation, Dickie was surprised. That eight, ten grand Rose talked about was seeming more credible all the time. He worked hard at helping to transfer the load, not talking, not looking at Luke, feeling within himself a growing tenseness that was part excitement and part something he couldn’t define.
After the load was transferred, Luke said, “Rose’ll have victuals on the table,” and went off across the yard to the house. Accepting the terse statement as an invitation, Dickie followed.
The three of them sat at the table in yellow light and ate in silence. After they were finished, Luke went into the bedroom and lay down in his clothes. Dickie and Rose heard the sharp screech of old springs under his weight, and they sat looking at each other across the kitchen table with the imminent, precarious future a dark bond between them. Then Dickie shrugged and grinned and went out onto the porch, banging the screen. Sitting there on the steps, he listened to the sounds of Rose moving around behind him, scraping up the dishes.
It was funny how things happened, he thought. Couple days ago he’d been a guy with a debt and a deadly creditor. A guy from KC with a poor prognosis. Now, just like nothing, he had a cute country doll and prospects. Now, by all that was cockeyed, he stood to lift a fat bundle from a hillbilly bo
otlegger. He grinned in the darkness and lit a cigarette, drawing the smoke deep into his lungs.
Rose came to the screen door several times, but she didn’t come out or speak. He could feel her there, charged and tense, though she was silent. It was about nine-thirty when he heard Luke’s big clod-hoppers pound slowly across the kitchen floor, heard the screen door bang.
Looking up, he felt something inside him go shriveled and cold in a sudden painful contraction. Luke stood there at the edge of the porch with the yellow light of the kitchen washing his back and edging around onto the long, hard planes of his face. In his hand he held the old .45 Colt revolver. Dickie had seen plenty of guns, but he’d never seen one that looked quite so wicked as this.
“You sleep in my barn and eat my victuals,” Luke said. “I guess it’s only right you do a little work. You better come along and help me unload.”
There was a contingency Dickie hadn’t anticipated. Joke, he thought desperately. Just treat it like a very unfunny joke. He managed a laugh, forcing it through stiff lips.
“I don’t think I’d be much help,” he said. “I’m sleepy as a dog. Just thinking about crawling into the hay in the loft.”
Luke was just holding the .45 casually, but somehow it got twisted around so that the mouth was yawning right in Dickie’s face.
“I reckon you better come,” Luke said.
Under that .45 caliber threat, Dickie stood up with a gaseous sensation of lightness, hysteria clouding his brain, urging him to the insanity of flight. He fought for control, crossing the yard ahead of Luke with reluctant steps, and through the cloud over his brain there penetrated in a thin whisper the words that Rose had spoken in the loft that morning: … he’ll never let himself be taken alive. And he seemed to see with sudden clarity, as if his vision had achieved ascendancy over distance and night, a dark car in ambush en a dark road. Getting into the truck, he looked back toward the house and saw Rose standing frozen and immobile in the yellow rectangle of the kitchen door. Her terror reached out to him across the yard.
The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK Page 7