Wrong Place, Wrong Time

by W. Glenn Duncan

  It was the sun’s daily meridian passage. To capture this celestial quirk, I had to have Thorney’s sextant to my eye almost constantly. While keeping it properly adjusted. But only in the one direction, of course.

  Thorney had done his pan-of-oil artificial horizon thing again. This time he was showing me how to find our latitude by measuring the sun’s height at local noon. He called it a “noon sight” and said it was the easiest thing in celestial navigation.

  “I don’t know about this ‘easy’ business,” I said. My right hand was sweaty on the sextant. My right eye, too, and it was difficult to keep the two heavily filtered suns balanced one atop the other. “I saw that Hornblower movie, dammit. Gregory Peck squinted through one of these gadgets for two seconds and he knew exactly where he was.”

  Thorney snorted. “Movies!”

  “Maybe he had a little-bitty map stuck inside his sextant,” I said. “With a sticker that said YOU ARE HERE.” In the sextant telescope the top sun had climbed a little above the bottom one. I carefully twisted the tangent screw; the two suns came together again.

  “Any more visits from your friends with the spray cans?” I said.

  “Not yet,” Thorney said. “But the little snots will be back, I bet.”

  It was Friday, four long days since Wes Tasot had cut and run. The weather was better; it had stopped raining Wednesday night.

  So much for the good news.

  Ed and Ricco had used a sizable chunk of the Dallas Police Department’s overtime budget on the Tasot hunt. They had come up empty. I wasn’t doing any better. And Cowboy had called in a dozen favors without accomplishing anything. Which was surprising, because Cowboy knew people who knew everything that happened on the street.

  The general consensus was that Tasot had skipped town. I agreed with that. Well, mostly I agreed with that. There was only one niggling doubt.

  Tasot wasn’t a street person. He was a loner and an amateur and a nut and a damned good chameleon. It made perfectly good sense for him to skip town, but …

  Hell! Tasot’s wife didn’t know what was driving him; how could I guess?

  Sure, he was probably gone. Still …

  On the other hand you can’t live your life on “buts” and “stills.” I hadn’t seen Thorney for a week, since our retreat from the motel. Finding Wes Tasot, then chasing him, however futilely, had kept me from visiting the old goat until today.

  I had been wearing my blue windbreaker all week, with the shoulder-holstered .38 underneath it. The thinking thug’s security blanket.

  When I had arrived at Thorney’s house, he had looked at his watch, then dragged me into the backyard for this noon sight lesson. It is true that I did not argue against the project.

  Which is why I was now balancing a sextant and two tiny suns in the middle of a conversation about vandalism.

  “I can’t guarantee it, Thorney, but I think the kids might stop now.” The suns had separated again, but not by far. I gently made them touch. Versatility, thy name is Rafferty. “Jerry Gortner’s gone; he was the ringleader. Okay, there was a carry-over incident, but you’ve had almost a week now with no problems. They’re weaning themselves off bugging you. Betcha.”

  “Hah!” Thorney didn’t seem impressed by my analysis of the situation. “Times about right,” he said. “How you doing?”

  “They’re not coming apart anymore,” I said.

  “Give it another minute,” he said.

  The suns stayed together, delicately balanced like two golden beach balls, then slowly the top disk began to overlap the bottom one. I stopped myself from adjusting the sextant—it was surprising how strong the urge was—and said, “She’s off.”

  According to Thorney, that was the shippy way to announce the sun had started down from its noon peak. “She’s off,” I said again, just because I liked the sound of it.

  “Right,” he said. “What’s the reading?”

  That took a little while to figure out, because Thorney’s sextant had an old-fashioned vernier scale, but I eventually did. “Eighty-four degrees, five point seven minutes.”

  “Uh-huh,” he mumbled, scrawling on the back of an envelope. “Index error was three minutes on … divide by two, plus fifteen-two and …”

  He was right about a noon sight being fast. In less than a minute, he came to “… equals thirty-two fifty point eight. Hey, that's good.”

  “In English, please.”

  “Look here,” he said, holding out the envelope. He walked me through the calculations. “Thirty-two degrees fifty point eight minutes. That’s the latitude from your sight and that’s exactly where we are. As close as I can work it out from the atlas, anyway.”

  “Are you serious?” I asked. I looked at the spidery bundle of brass and glass in my hand. “With this … gizmo, and the sun, I actually … That’s almost frightening, Thorney.”

  He smiled at me. Perhaps because I was grinning so foolishly. He said, “It’s a good feeling, isn’t it?”

  “Good? Hell, yes, it’s a good feeling. ‘Good’ is self-evident, like sex is wonderful and don’t spar with Mike Tyson. This is a lot better than good.”

  I felt strangely young and freshly awakened, like I had been allowed to enter a very special place.

  I said, “It’s only geometry and mathematics, and Hilda says I get carried away with stuff like this, but to think that I could find any spot on earth with this—” I held up the sextant. It looked the same. But I was just a little different now, and I was proud of that.

  Thorney clapped me on the back. “Come on into the house. I’ll buy you a beer to celebrate.”

  I knelt down to put the sextant into its wooden box. “Can we do this again tomorrow? To prove it wasn’t a fluke?”

  When Thorney didn’t answer, I looked up. He was staring toward the house, frowning and sniffing.

  Then I smelled smoke, too, and we both ran for the back door.

  There was no smoke inside, though, and the smell was fainter. We found the fire on the front porch. To judge from the amount of ash scattered around, it had already gone down quite a bit. Actually, it wasn’t much of a fire; just a bundle of newspapers wadded up and lighted by the front door.

  Thorney said, “They probably rang the doorbell, but we didn’t hear it out back.”

  “Well, it beats an attack by massed slingshots,” I said. “See, I told you they were slowing down.” A man who can find his latitude with a sextant always sees the brighter side of life.

  “Snot-nosed little pukes,” Thorney said.

  “Relax, you grouchy old fart,” I said. “I’ll help you repaint this part of the porch.” The fire was well down now, and I raised my foot to stamp out the last of it.

  “Don’t!” Thorney said sharply.

  “Okay, it’s your porch paint,” I said.

  Thorney grinned wolfishly. “You never saw this one before? It’s old as the hills.” He used a hose from the front yard, choked down to a mist. He put out the flames, using as little water as possible.

  “Thorney, what the hell—”

  “You’ll see.” Thorney re-coiled the hose and walked around the house. He came back with a shovel. Working carefully, he scraped up the soggy pile of charred and wrinkled paper. He carried the mess off the porch and down to the curb behind where I’d parked the Mustang.

  He dumped the clump of wet papers into the gutter and poked at the mess with the shovel. And, as they say, all was revealed.

  The papers had been wrapped around the world’s largest collection of dog turds.

  Thorney leaned on the shovel and said conversationally, “In my day, we used cowpats. Or horse manure, if there was a stable nearby. It was a Halloween prank, mostly,” He chuckled. “You could always count on some fool to stamp out the fire.” He looked at the mess in the gutter. “Cowpats were the best,” he said.

  He looked up, grinning, then he stiffened. “Gotcha now,” he shouted, threw down the shovel, and pushed around me.

  There were tw
o small boys hiding in the side hedge. They were coming out now, but they were giggling and pushing at each other, which slowed them down. Thorney was definitely not giggling, but he was seven or eight times their age, so he was slow, too.

  They were all headed for the same corner of Thorney’s lawn and it looked like a dead heat to me.

  “Dammit, Thorney, don’t do anything stupid,” I said and started across the lawn after him.

  Then I noticed the taxi in front of the house. It stopped but did not pull into the curb. The driver peered out at me, then reached for something on the passenger seat.

  Wes Tasot was back.

  Chapter 43

  By the time Tasot lifted his shotgun from the taxi’s passenger seat, I had changed direction, dived behind the Mustang, and clawed the .38 out of its shoulder holster.

  I sat there, pressed hard against the Mustang’s rusty flank, breathing hard, and mad as hell. Every time this Tasot jerk appeared, I ended up behind a car.

  Tires squealed. I peeked over the fender and saw the taxi accelerating away. I almost popped one off at the cab, but those Hollywood going-for-the-gas-tank shots never work. Even if you hit the tank, all it does is cause a leak. More often, they ricochet off the trunk lid and hurt someone who doesn’t deserve it.

  Chasing him, however, seemed to have a lot going for it. The newly repaired Mustang started first try. And it ran well, too. No hissing sound and lots of power. Hot damn!

  I was less than a block behind Tasot’s taxi when he turned the first corner.

  Tasot helped, though. He was a lousy driver. He’d go around corners with his brakes on, then try to accelerate away on the straight bits. In a six-cylinder taxi that probably had 200,000 miles on it, for god’s sake.

  Three minutes later, I’d caught him; the Mustang lurched at the taxi’s rear end like an amorous stallion. But the cab was wide, and Tasot swerved erratically from one side of the street to the other. I couldn’t get around him to force the taxi into the curb.

  In the end I rammed him instead. We were on a residential street with fair-sized trees along the curb. I dropped back some, cranked on another fifteen miles an hour, and crunched the Mustang hard into the left rear corner of the taxi. I wanted to spear him into one of those trees.

  It didn’t work. He went between two trees, up a lawn, bounced onto a low porch, and shoved the taxi’s nose through somebody’s living-room window.

  I wrestled the Mustang to a stop in front of the next house down the street.

  Tasot scrambled out of the crashed taxi and jogged easily toward the front door of the house. He had the shotgun in his left hand and a rifle case in his right. He also carried a soft knapsack with both straps looped over one shoulder. There were hard bulges in the knapsack. Boxes of ammunition? Tasot tried the front door. It was unlocked; he went in. I wondered how many hostages he would find in there.

  This looked like it was going to be a long day.

  I pulled into the driveway of the house next door and drove through to the back. After I’d banged on the door for twenty seconds, a boy about fifteen opened it.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked. He wore a bathrobe and a towel around his neck and he smelled of Vick’s. No prize for guessing who had a chest cold and a traditional mom.

  “There’s a man next door with a gun. Several guns. Call the police. Tell them …”

  He listened carefully while I told him what they would want to know first. He had an intelligent look and he repeated the message accurately.

  “Who lives next door?” I said.

  “Old Mrs Hodstetter. She’s a widow.”

  “Is she home now?”

  He said, “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Call the cops now. I’ll be out front.”

  I backed the Mustang down the driveway into the street and cautiously, leaning way down, nosed up the Hodstetter driveway. Then I got out and went into my familiar snuggle-up-to-the-fender routine. I took the .45 from the glove compartment with me and put the .38 back under my jacket. A hide-out gun is always nice, but mainly I wanted the .45’s firepower. If bad came to worse and I had to shoot Tasot, I wanted to knock him down properly.

  But I don’t want to shoot this guy, I thought. Please? First, he’s a nut, and second, he’s carrying a fake pistol mixed in with all that legitimate artillery.

  So how did that siege turn out?

  Damnedest thing. After I wasted the sucker, we found out his pistol was a fake. Har de har har. Pretty funny, huh?

  That’s it, guys. I don’t want to play anymore. I’ll sit here and watch and tell the cops where he was.

  And where the hell were the cops, anyway?

  As if in answer, the first siren began, faraway and faint in the afternoon calm.

  “Rafferty! Hey, Rafferty,” Tasot called from the house.

  I didn’t answer him. Taunts shouted over car fenders were TV cop show clichés. I didn’t have anything to say. In a few minutes a trained hostage negotiator would come. He’d talk to Tasot until they were both sick of it.

  “Come in here, Rafferty,” he shouted. “Or I’ll shoot the old woman.” There was a feeble wail that cut off abruptly. Old Mrs Hodstetter was home.

  “I’m not kidding, Rafferty. Come in here.”

  No way. If he could get me in there by threatening the old woman, he could make me give up my guns by threatening the old woman. And then where were we? He would have two hostages, not one, and Mrs Hodstetter would be no better off.

  “I’m counting,” Tasot crooned. “Eight … seven …”

  There were three, possibly four sirens now, but they were disturbingly distant.

  “… six … five …” Tasot chanted slowly.

  Why hadn’t he started with ten? Or five? Only a nut would start with eight. And Tasot was a nut and that was the whole goddamn problem. Who knew what the crazy bastard would do? Especially if I didn’t buy a little time for the old woman.

  I stood up and walked around the Mustang, moving toward the corner of the porch, letting the big Colt dangle at arm’s-length.

  The front door slammed open. Tasot brought a thin, elderly woman in a floral dress out onto the porch, holding her backward against his left side with his arm around her throat. His left hand stuck out awkwardly; it was only a lump of gray, fraying bandage. The shotgun was in his right hand, and he held the muzzle snugged firmly into the hollow at the back of her neck.

  Tasot saw me; he seemed startled. I had a sudden flash that he hadn’t expected me to come in, so he had come out instead. Why?

  Tasot smiled. Some of the tension went out of his stance. He wore gray sweats and blue jogging shoes. He needed a shave and his hair was dirty. But otherwise he hadn’t changed much from his Toby Wells guest appearance. He was still a rugged-looking, down-home, big son of a bitch. With a shotgun.

  Thank god he didn’t have one of the pistols. At least I knew that shotgun worked.

  “Hey, Rafferty,” he said. “I was beginning to think we’d never get together.” He moved along the porch toward me. The old woman missed her footing; he dragged her along without seeming to notice. He kept the shotgun pushed carefully against her head.

  I smiled at him. “Hi, Wes. What do you say we let Mrs Hodstetter relax while we talk about this?”

  Damn it, I didn’t know what hostage negotiators were supposed to say. I only knew things like freeze, turkey and grab some wall, sucker. I was out of my element.

  But Tasot wasn’t. He seemed to draw strength from the situation. Perhaps it was the excitement; perhaps it was because he’d finally shed all the pretenses and controls and balances. Whatever the reason was, it gave him an invisible lethal buzz, like the electric feeling around some power lines.

  I didn’t feel that way at all. I felt naked and vulnerable, despite the pleasant weight of the .45 in my right hand.

  Tasot hauled the old woman to the edge of the porch. He stopped twelve feet from me and a foot higher. I could hear Mrs Hodstetter now; she was whimper
ing very, very softly.

  The sirens were closer now. Six blocks? Eight?

  Tasot cocked an ear at the same sirens. “It’s time, I think,” he said calmly. “Good-bye, Rafferty.”

  The .45 was already cocked. I worked the grip safety more tightly into the web of my hand.

  Tasot smiled at me, almost fondly, then he suddenly shoved the old woman away from him, back down the porch. She landed on her hands and knees with a loud sob and folded into a fetal position. She began to cry. She was well clear of our lines of fire.

  For three, perhaps four, seconds after pushing her, Tasot remained half-turned away. The shotgun wasn’t aimed; it pointed at the sky as much as anywhere. Tasot had an arrogant winner’s grin on his face. It grew broader as he gracefully flowed out of his push-pose, supported the shotgun barrel with his left wrist, and turned, swinging the muzzle to bear on me.

  I raised the .45 then and shot him twice in the upper chest. He went down, grunting, but with that sardonic half-grin still in place.

  I went to him. He was already dead.

  Mrs Hodstetter was unhurt, as far as I could see. Then I began to understand what had happened. I checked Tasot’s shotgun. It was empty.

  After that I sat with the weeping old woman, rubbing her back and telling her everything was all right now.

  Neighbors began to appear cautiously, but no one came onto the porch.

  When the cops finally arrived, they handcuffed me and took me downtown.

  Chapter 44

  Ed Durkee said, “He had enough ammo to hold out for a week. Box of .44 mag, box of .270 for the ride, and three boxes of double-ought buck he somehow ‘forgot’ to put in the shotgun.”

  “He committed suicide, Ed,” I said. “He pushed the Hodstetter woman out of the way, then he used that empty shotgun to make me kill him.”

  “Yeah, well, he used you all along, didn’t he?” Lieutenant Durkee sat behind his desk like an ad for wrinkled brown suits. “He conned you into helping him with the Ortega hit, then when he got caught anyway, he used you to check out.”