by David Pierce
'I know that, that's how I knew he was heading up here to pot paradise,' I said mendaciously, not really wanting to advertise to the likes of Dell and Biff let alone anyone else that I had illegally bugged Tommy's home.
'Now,' said Benny, tapping the ruler against the map in a fussy manner. 'May I draw your attention to the northern sector of the Forestry Commission land, roughly, here. You will note that the terrain is irregular but fairly comprehensively criss-crossed by a grid of service and logging roads. I made an approximate calculation and estimated that over three quarters of the area in question is within a mile of a road of some kind, so if we cover them all we stand a good chance of locating the poor man. I'm afraid that our medical examiner told me that after all this time there is very little chance of finding him alive, but stranger things have happened. At least he can be pronounced legally dead and we can take his body back to his family for a decent Christian burial.'
He took off his glasses again to peer fruitlessly through them. 'I personally wouldn't mind if my tired old bones rested here for ever among the green trees and fresh air, but. . .'
I stopped his ad-libbing before it got out of hand by murmuring, 'Quite, quite. And we track him with this?' I patted the top of the receiving set.
'Indeed,' said Benny. 'There is a smaller version but as we'll be in a car we might as well have the more powerful model that doesn't depend on line of sight to pick up a signal.'
'Meaning it works through hills,' I said.
'Obviously,' he said. This was to take away any hope our eavesdropper might have that if the signal was coming from six feet under it would be undetectable.
'Fascinating,' I said. 'I've never seen a model like this before. I've really got to try and keep up with things.'
'There's no sense wandering around those awful roads tonight,' Benny said. 'Especially as, unfortunately, the poor chap is almost certainly dead by now. Why don't you get a good night's sleep and I'll come by tomorrow morning at a reasonable hour, say about six?'
'I don't call that reasonable,' I said, 'but OK, if you say so, sir. I am bushed, I must admit. I think it's all this fresh air.' I even managed to yawn. I snuck a look at my friend Benny who had not only learned his lines but had stayed in character throughout so brilliantly I almost believed what he was saying. All in all, I was proud of my troops and, without being sickening about it, pleased with myself. We had managed to cover all the bases so far. We had maneuvered at least one of the brothers in position and fed him the bait and would soon know if he ran with it. We couldn't let on that we suspected Chico had been murdered, because there wasn't supposed to be any way we could know that. More importantly, there wasn't much point in letting the brothers know ahead of time we suspected them, God knows what they might do, burn down the whole forest, hop a plane to Pago Pago, kill us all. I wanted to leave them an out, an easy out that involved moving Chico's body. As it stood, we'd established, I hoped, that we could find him if he was anywhere within a mile of a road, and the odds were overwhelming that he was, as why would Biff and Dell lug a dead body more than a mile through the woods when they could go a hundred yards off the road in any one of a thousand places, dig a hole, dump him in, and he'd never be seen again.
Now it looked like they would have to lug the body a mile or two, but no real problem, there wasn't much to him, pobre Chico, they could get the whole thing done in a couple of hours and be back at Tim's playing pool and laughing at us and the world by ten o'clock.
So they thought. So I hoped they thought.
We had to wait for the woodpecker to sound the all-clear, so I asked Benny if he would care for a nightcap before he left. He said primly he'd already had his alcoholic consumption for the day, thank you, referring to the one small beer he'd drunk half of at Tim's earlier, but he admitted he wouldn't mind another soda pop if I had a sugar-free one. I said I didn't. Then he asked me if I happened to have any cocoa. I said I didn't have any of that either. Before he asked me for some other foolish beverage I didn't have, like sassafras tea, Ricky the woodpecker crowed, or trilled, which meant it was time to move.
I grabbed my navy-blue windbreaker and Sara's knapsack, which I had earlier requisitioned and prepacked with the .38, loaded, in a shoulder holster, the box of cartridges, flashlight, blunt instrument, handcuffs, the camera and the flares and a few other odds and ends we might never need but just in case.
'You watch the store,' I told Benny as I climbed out.
'Forget it, Uncle,' he said, rummaging in his briefcase. 'Include me in.' He came up with a little ladies' automatic about three inches long and slipped it in a pocket.
'Jesus,' I said, 'where did you get that?'
'Borrowed it.'
'From who, Mata Hari?'
'My sister,' he said. Then he dug out a flashlight, a foot-long sheath knife and a bottle of insect repellent. Brilliant; even I knew you didn't get mosquitoes in January. However, there wasn't any time to argue with him, not that it would have done any good because arguing with Benny was like arguing with General Patton – whatever happened, you lost – so I made him put on a dark sweater of mine, then I locked up and we hurried out to the main road by way of the unlit side of Tim's parking lot.
'Where's the hell's Ricky?' I asked Benny a few minutes later as we were trotting along.
'Not far,' he said, puffing a bit. 'Off the road just around the next bend. I hope it's the next bend. I haven't run this far since summer camp.'
A minute later a car pulled out of a side road right in front of us; it was Ricky in the Jeep. He spotted us, pulled over, and stopped. I hopped in the front with him and Benny fell in the back. Ricky was all in dark clothes too, his all-purpose belt already around his waist. He made a smart U-turn and headed west, on the road we'd originally taken into Carmen Springs but going in the opposite direction.
'This thing working?' I asked Ricky, referring to the receiving set which was on the floor by my feet.
He nodded. 'Maps on the seat beside you,' he said to Benny.
'How do we know which way they went?' I wondered out loud, as the receiver couldn't tell you what direction the signal came from, only its strength.
'I saw them go by,' Ricky said.
'How did you know it was them?'
'Sara told me on the phone they had this half-ton all loaded with extra crap and small-town shit.'
'How did she know?'
'She said she saw you out the window being furtive right beside it.'
'Oh God,' I said. 'I hope no one else saw me.'
'Nope,' said Ricky, shaking his head. 'She said that's what she was doing at the window in the first place, making sure no one else was looking out.'
'Well,' I said, 'score another one for the noodlehead.'
'Maybe you should keep your mind on your work,' Benny put in from the back seat. 'As I understand it if we get too close to those guys and they suddenly pull up and kill their motor, they could hear us coming. And if we get too far behind them we might miss them turning off.'
'Aren't you supposed to be map-reading?' I said. I fiddled with the dials of the receiver a bit and almost immediately had a steady humming signal coming in. I saw from the visual read-out they were getting away from us so I asked Ricky to speed up a little. He put his foot down.
'How many feet in half a mile?' I asked the troops after a while, because I figured that would be a sensible distance to keep between us.
'A lot,' said Benny.
'Two thousand six hundred and forty,' said Ricky. I took his word for it.
'Slow down a bit,' I told him. He obliged.
It is not easy following another vehicle at night, at a distance, on unknown roads. One big advantage we had over the first leg was we knew they were heading back to forestry land and there was only one direct way to get there, which Ricky had thoughtfully penciled in on the map Benny was fumbling with. What would happen after, though, when we turned off on to one of those miserable logging roads, would be in the lap of the gods. When I mentione
d this to my brave boys, Ricky shook his head again and said,
'No hay problema. It rained last night, remember?'
I remembered all right. It was lucky I hadn't caught pneumonia.
'So what?' asked Benny.
'So tracks,' I said. 'Nice new tracks in the mud.'
We drove on steadily through the night, keeping our distance, thinking our thoughts. A half moon appeared to keep us company. We almost lost the boys once when they took a back road we hadn't counted on but we picked them up after a moment of controlled panic and closed in to a half mile again.
It was forty minutes til they turned off into forestry land, right where Ricky had marked it on the map. He switched off our headlights and we began slowly bumping our way through the trees. We didn't seem to be falling any further behind so we figured the boys had slowed down and were driving without lights too. I kept my eyes firmly on the dial but it was another twenty minutes before I noticed that although we were creeping along at the same speed, the distance between us was shortening steadily.
'OK,' I told Ricky. 'I think that's it. Shut off the motor for a minute, will you?'
He switched off the ignition key. Only the wind in the treetops and the occasional ping from the cooling engine broke the silence. 'Let's move it,' I said quietly. 'We want to catch the bastards in the act. We don't want to have to trail them miles through the jungle.' I got my gun out of the knapsack and strapped it on.
'Right on,' said Benny. We got out of the Jeep as quietly as we could, leaving the doors open rather than trying to close them without making any noise.
'When we get there,' I whispered, 'Ricky, you go all the way around them and close in from the far side. Benny, I'll head left, you go right. It'll take you longest to get into position, Ricky, so when you do, make like a bird again. Then we all hit them with the flashlights at the same time from three different directions and for Christ's sake hold the lights away from your body just in case. Ricky, all that hardware on your belt, it's not going to clank together and sound like the cows are coming home, is it?'
Ricky checked and moved a couple of items farther apart, then we took off in single file up the logging road, Ricky leading, then Benny, then me. We tried to make as much time as we could but the going was uneven, muddy, slippery, dark under the trees and downright treacherous. Both Benny and I stumbled into the muck a few times but Ricky seemed to manage somehow.
It was an unpleasant twenty-five minutes later when Ricky whispered back, 'Truck up ahead.'
When we got to it, Benny and I crouched down beside it getting our wind back while Ricky had a quick look around. He was back in a minute and crouched down with us.
'Light,' he whispered, pointing off into the trees. I couldn't see any bloody light from where I was but when we got some ten yards into the woods, stepping as carefully as we could, I did see the occasional flicker through the underbrush and after another twenty or thirty yards heard the unmistakable sounds of someone digging.
Ricky pressed my arm then began moving off to the left in a wide circle to get behind them. Benny and I gave him a few minutes, then we started edging our way closer. Luckily for us tenderfoots, we were walking over a sound-deadening carpet of wet pine needles. We closed in to within twenty feet of the light, always keeping a tree trunk between us and them, then I poked my head extremely cautiously around a deadfall that was propped up at an angle and there they were, the good old boys themselves, Biff digging with a short-handled spade and his brother keeping his light steady on the deepening hole.
I pulled back, tapped Benny on the arm, and gestured off to the right. He nodded, made a thumb's-up gesture, and started edging away. I sneaked over to the left some ten yards then took another peek. The brothers had changed places by then, Dell was up to his knees in the hole digging and Biff was holding the light on him. Biff took a bottle of some kind of booze out of his back pocket and took a long swallow. His brother said something to him I couldn't hear. Then I noticed Dell had a long-barreled revolver tucked in his belt. I got my own gun out, got the flash ready, and crouched there, waiting, trying not too successfully to keep my breathing quiet, deep, and steady. Well, you don't go to war every day.
I waited. Dell cursed once. I waited some more. Then Dell said, 'Got him.'
'Thank fuck,' said his brother.
Then the woodpecker sounded its mating call. Our three flashlights came on all at the same time. I was holding mine on one side of the tree trunk and looking around the other side. I had the .38 resting against the damp bark keeping it steady and had a bead on the center of Dell's chest.
'Freeze!' I shouted. 'Police! You're surrounded by armed troops! Move and you will be shot!'
Dell froze. Biff didn't. We, or more honestly, I, had forgotten one thing – to decide who was supposed to shine his light on who. Of course what happened was all three of us were covering Dell. Biff dropped his light and disappeared into the blackness.
'Ricky, stay with the guy in the hole!' I shouted, getting my brain working a little late. 'You others, find that mother!' But before Benny or I could pick up Biff, he had picked up a pump shotgun from somewhere and he let fly in my direction. The second shot got my right arm, which was still holding the flashlight; thank God most of the load either hit the tree trunk or went wide. I was more surprised than anything, it didn't even hurt for a few moments. Then I saw Benny's light luckily catch one of Biff's legs, which was sticking out from behind a tree. His little pop gun went, pop, pop, twice, I could see the double spurt of material in Biff's trousers, right at the knee, and he went down swearing. Dell still hadn't budged an inch, which was just as well for him, because the state Ricky was in, he only needed the slightest excuse to let him have it.
I shouted to the troops, 'Move in, and keep your lights on the bastards.' I ran to where Biff was groaning and holding his leg, hauled him up, dragged him a few feet to a tree and cuffed his hands behind it. I tossed Benny the other pair of cuffs and he did the same to Dell after easing his gun from his belt, while Ricky kept his machete pressed up against Dell's throat just in case he got any bright ideas. Then Ricky went over to the grave, stepped in, and began throwing out handfuls of dirt. After a minute, Biff ran out of breath and stopped swearing. After another minute, my arm started throbbing, then burning. After another minute, Ricky said softly,
'It's him.' Benny and I went over and looked down. Pobre Chico looked up at us with dirt-filled eyes. Ricky scooped out a few more handfuls of earth until he disclosed a jagged hole in Chico's upper chest.
'Entry wound,' said Ricky.
'Yeah,' I said. 'Be nice if there's no exit wound and the bullet's still in there and even nicer if it comes from that asshole's .38 that Benny's still waving around.'
'Hey, man, my brother,' the asshole in question called over to us. 'He's dying, baby.'
'No such luck,' I said. 'Ricky, come out of there, there's nothing more to do there.' I gave him a hand up.
He noticed my torn sleeve and asked me what happened.
'Lucky bugger got me with some birdshot,' I said.
'It wasn't birdshot, mother-fucker,' said Dell. 'It was double O.'
I went over and kicked him in the head.
'Speak when you're spoken to,' I said. Then I said to my brave boys, 'Follow me, lads.' We withdrew some few yards into the trees where we couldn't be overheard.
'You gonna leave us here, cunt-face?' Dell shouted after us.
'Not a bad idea,' said Benny thoughtfully. 'You all right, Uncle?'
'Yeah, thanks to you and that sissy gun of yours,' I said. 'I never even knew you could shoot.'
'I've only done it twice,' said Benny. 'How about you, Ricky, how you doing?'
'Terrific,' said Ricky with a grin. 'We got the conos, no?'
'We sure did,' said Benny. 'What a night. Let's do it again sometime, like in a hundred years.'
'I hate to break up the party,' I said, 'but we got things to do. Ricky, you got two minutes to find out from the hermanos where the
ir plantation is. I don't care how you do it as long as you don't kill them. Ask them about mines and boobytraps, too.'
'Con mucho gusto,' said Ricky, with a wide smile. He went off and Benny took a closer look at my arm under the light of his flash. Together we counted eight puckers where pellets were embedded but there was just a trickle of blood from a few of them and nothing from the rest.
'Soon have them out,' my friend said.
'Sooner the better,' I said. 'Be just like those fuckers to have rubbed all their shot in garlic or curare.'
Ricky came silently back through the trees.
'That was quick,' I said.
'And quiet, too,' Benny said.
'I found a rock,' Ricky said. 'More like a small boulder. I could just about lift it. I told the big one I'd drop it on his brother's knee. He told me the plantation is only a mile and a half from here and how to get to it.'
'Boobytraps?'
'No mines,' Ricky said. 'A couple of grenades attached to fishing line.'
'Well, get going, but be careful,' I said. 'Then get back to Tim's. Benny, you and Sara take off in the camper. I want you both out of here. Take the receiver from the Jeep, too, and anything else that looks suspicious. Then and only then, Ricky, you call the cops and an ambulance and bring them back here. I'll hang around and keep an eye on the boys until you do. The last thing we need now is for them to spring those cheap cuffs and take off. OK? Vamoose, amigos. See you back in town, Benny. Ta ta to Sara. Oh. Do me a favor, on your way do something nasty and permanent to the boys' fancy wheels.'
They vamoosed. I went back to the brothers, helped myself to Biff's bottle, which was luckily still intact and which turned out to be Wild Turkey, and, as I had a while to wait, made myself more or less comfortable sitting on a bed of needles, resting my back against a handy tree. I kept the flash on all the time, alternating it between the two, sipping the bourbon and thinking clean thoughts.