by Jack Lynch
About two hundred yards out of town I skirted a party of fellows made up to look like Indians. They appeared to be part of the show put on by the Rancho Sanchez. They were squatted down in a little arroyo drinking cans of beer from an ice chest while their horses looked on.
I nodded and wished them a good morning. One of them saluted me with his beer and said, “How.”
I intended to hike up the airstrip until I got near the hangar which was between me and the camper truck with the young loungers. I would then cut over to behind the hangar and see what there was to see. It didn’t work out that way.
I was halfway up one side of the runway when a twin engine Beechcraft glided past me and landed gently on the strip. It taxied down about a hundred yards, then wheeled around and came back in my direction. It wheeled around once again and came alongside me. The side hatch was open and a young Latin-looking fellow wearing a tie-dye tank top was squatting there pointing a shotgun with a short barrel and a large bore at my stomach. He said one word.
“Jog.”
I jogged, and the plane kept abreast of me clear up to the camper truck with the pair of loungers who quit lounging and brought out handguns. I was gasping, but they didn’t pay much attention to that. The one with the ivory tooth around his neck motioned toward the side of the vehicle.
“Assume the position,” he told me.
I spread my legs and leaned easily with my hands apart against the side of the camper.
“That’s not good enough,” he told me.
Maybe he was an ex-cop. At least he followed the procedure. He jerked me back from the vehicle then pushed my shoulders forward, so that leaning with my hands against the camper again I felt very off balance. He handed off his gun to the guy in fatigues and now thrust one leg between my own and patted me down. He was very thorough. He took the .45 out of my shoulder holster and my wallet, then went back until he’d found the .38 revolver in the belt holster near the small of my back. The only purpose in carrying firearms seemed to be to give other people something to take away from me.
“You must be an ex-cop,” I told him.
“You better believe it, sweetheart.” He stepped back. “Okay, you can relax, but don’t plan on going anywhere.”
I turned around. He was going through my wallet. “He’s a PI from Frisco,” he shouted to the others.
“Please,” I told him, “San Francisco.”
“Shut up, sweetheart,” Ivory Tooth told me. Then to the others he said, “He came armed like he knew his business.”
There were three of them who had been in the plane. The Latin youth who’d covered me from the hatch, the pilot, who was a medium-built man approaching thirty and wearing a white Stetson, and a lean girl with dark hair wearing tight Levis down below and only a leather vest hanging loosely open up above. But she also carried a small automatic pistol in a holster at her suntanned waist, so I didn’t do too much staring. Besides, I wanted to keep track of the little wisps of dust being kicked up by the posse or whatever a few hundred yards beyond the runway.
The pilot took charge. “Terry,” he told the girl, “you cover the dude.”
She took out her pistol and pointed it in the direction of my crotch.
“Hicks,” he said to the lounger in army fatigues, “you and Turner unload the plane.” He glanced around at the Latin crew member. “Sam, you help them, then gas the plane.”
The pilot was going through my wallet, studying the license photostat, the gun toting permit, counting the money and inspecting my social security number. The tanned girl held her gun on me steadily, sober-faced and quiet. I smiled at her. With her free hand she gave me the finger.
Turner, the ex-cop, and Sam were inside the plane, tossing out gunnysacks filled with vegetable matter. Hicks was picking them up and throwing them inside the camper. The vegetable matter smelled like a lot of relaxation.
“Is marijuana all you guys deal in?” I asked. “With that much iron everyone’s carrying I figured it must have been heroin or escaped convicts.”
The pilot was still going through my wallet. I think he was reading my discharge papers now. Without looking up he told me, “You’re an interesting dude. If you keep real still, now, you might live one more day.”
“Maybe, maybe not. But either way, it won’t be because of anything you or the tanned kid here do to me.”
He looked up with a little smile. “Why would that be, Mr. Bragg?”
“Because I’m going to give you some information that might save all six of your asses just in the nick of time.”
“I’m curious.”
“You should be. From asking around town I’ve received the impression there’s a link of some sort between you and Ma Leary’s Truck Stop down the road. I of course couldn’t begin to guess what that might be.” He didn’t say anything. I went on. “If that’s true, you’ll be interested to learn the place was busted up last night and some of the girl workers there were mistreated by a raiding party of imported gunmen.”
“How good is your information?”
“Firsthand. Several of the gunsels were hanging around Carl Slide’s casino later on. They banged up my ribs and things some when I went calling.”
“Show me.”
I opened the sports coat and pulled out my shirt, unbuttoned it and showed him the bruises. He nodded and I tucked my shirt back in.
“Your story is barely interesting. I’d rather hear more about you. Who you’re working for. What you’re doing out here.”
“Better let me finish the other story first. The imported guns are still around town. Or just outside it, rather. On my way through frontier land down yonder I saw six or eight of them renting horses at the riding stable. They were outfitted like cowboys, only they carried shoulder holsters and things.”
He finally reacted, along with a couple of the others. They craned their heads toward the fake Western town.
“That was several minutes ago,” I continued, enjoying myself. “Since then they have come riding out and made a big loop around the field. They’re trying to ride their horses on tiptoes up behind the hangars here, but they don’t really ride very well, and right now they’re only approaching the upper end of the runway.”
There was a lot of swiveling around and a couple of swear words. The pilot tossed me my wallet and called to the others.
“Sam, get the Jeep. You other guys go with him. Drive down the front here out of sight from the horsemen until I do my thing. Terry, you just keep the guy right here until I get back.”
He climbed back into the plane and closed the hatch. The engines kicked over. He wheeled the plane around and taxied down the runway, away from the oncoming horsemen. The others got into a Jeep Sam drove out of the hangar and went down around a corner of the next building. The Beechcraft was airborne by the time it got up the runway to where we were.
“Well, there they all go,” I said brightly to the girl, edging a bit closer and trying to gauge how good she was with the gun.
“Don’t try it, asshole,” she told me frankly, now clasping the weapon in a two-handed grip. “Move back.”
She was pretty good with the gun.
“The ex-cop, Turner, must have taught you how to use that,” I told her.
“You better believe it.”
She even used the same words he did. Only she spoke with a flat, plains voice, or one suggesting a border state.
“Are you his girl?”
“No, I’m Joe’s girl. He’s the pilot, Joe Saunders.” She smiled, and a couple of dimples appeared. “We call him the Colonel.”
“I suppose we do at that. Why don’t we walk out on the runway so we can watch the fun?”
“Okay, but don’t try anything smart.”
We went out to where we could see the bobbing horsemen. The sound of the plane taking off had made them anxious. They wanted to arrive before the camper left, and they were trying to ride their horses at something a little more brisk than a walk, but there wasn’t a rider a
mong them. They were doing a lot of banging up and down on their saddles. There was going to be a lot of soreness tonight, where their legs joined together. Saunders was going to make things even sorer for them. He had climbed high beyond them, then circled back and now was looming larger and larger down out of the sky. The horsemen were nearly to the first hangar when Saunders pulled out of his dive, about two feet over everybody’s heads. The horses hadn’t expected that any more than their riders had. They leaped about six feet into the air and came down without their passengers, then broke into a gallop down the strip toward home. One, with wild eyes, seemed hell-bent on trampling the girl and myself. Maybe Terry didn’t feel threatened by private cops, but the badly scared horse pounding in our direction was another matter. She froze.
“Come on!” I yelled. I grabbed her by the wrist and jerked her out of the way. As the horse galloped past she forgot about the gun, until I wrenched it away from her. Even then she was too frightened to do anything about it.
“Buck up, Terry, girl, it’s all over with now. You’re safe.”
I put her pistol into my jacket pocket and led her back to the hangar. The out-of-town cowboys were still rolling around on the concrete, clutching various parts of their hurt bodies. The Jeep was parked nearby and Turner, Hicks and Sam were tossing handguns into it. They finally got the fellows on their feet and had them limping toward us with their hands on their heads. Saunders was landing the plane again. I hooked a finger inside the waist of Terry’s Levis and tugged her inside the hangar.
“Sorry, kid, but I have to use you for a minute to see that I’m treated right.”
She tensed, realizing for the first time that I’d taken away her little automatic. “Goddamn. Joe and Turner aren’t going to like this.”
“Joe and Turner weren’t nearly run over by a wild horse.”
“Maybe you could explain that to them, mister.”
“Depends on how you behave.”
The sore riders and their herders arrived about the same time Saunders shut down the plane again and climbed out. The would-be raiding party was ordered to lean against the front of the hangar.
“All right, tourists,” Saunders called. “Take off your pants.”
“Hey, what kind of crap is this?” one of them asked.
Hicks kicked him where he’d been bouncing in the saddle. The man began groping at his belt buckle.
“Tie them up,” Saunders ordered. He took what appeared to be a five-gallon can of gasoline from the Jeep. As the gunmen stepped out of their pants, Saunders scooped them up and made a pile of them to one side. He doused the clothes with gasoline and threw a lighted match onto them. There was a loud poof.
“But my wallet!” protested one of the bare-legged men.
“One more word,” said Saunders, pointing a finger at him, “and your underpants join the blaze.”
Turner and Hicks finished tying up everybody.
“Okay,” said Saunders, “now line up behind one another real buddy-buddy like. Close.”
They did as they were told, and Saunders took a coil of rope out of the Jeep. He tied one end around the cord binding the hands of the man at the front of the line, passed the rope beneath the crotch of the second man and then around his bound hands, then beneath the crotch of the third man and so on. When he was through they resembled a shaky centipede. He pointed toward the road and told them to take a hike. They did, grumpy but thankful. Turner, Hicks and Sam went back to unloading the marijuana, while Saunders began looking around for Terry and me. I stepped into view with the girl in front of me.
“That was nicely done,” I told him.
“Oh, no,” Saunders moaned. “What the hell is this?” Everybody stopped working and looked over in my direction.
“Where’s your gun?” Saunders asked the girl.
I held her in front of me with my left hand on her bare tummy and rested my right hand holding her little automatic pistol on her shoulder. “I got the gun.”
“You dumb bitch,” Saunders said quietly.
“I have you to thank for it, Joe,” I told him. “When you stampeded the horses, one of them came our way. It damn near killed us. It brushed the girl here, sending both her and the gun flying. I got to it before she did.”
The other three weren’t moving, not knowing what to do.
“So what now?” Saunders asked.
“So how about everybody giving back everybody else’s small arms and you and I having a chat about things in a civil manner? After all, I didn’t have to tell you about the raid on the Truck Stop. I didn’t have to tell you about those guys trying to sneak up on you. So it happens that you import grass. Big deal. I suspected that much when I first heard about the very private airport. It’s not my concern, unless somehow it’s involved with a recent death in San Francisco, and the threat of another. This other being a little girl.”
Saunders looked concerned. “Christ, no. I don’t know anything about that.”
He turned toward his crew with a questioning look.
Hicks, in the fatigues, shrugged. “You know what they say in the Army, Joe. Either trust ’em or snuff ’em.”
“And like I said,” Turner added, “he acts like a pro.”
They were the two who seemed to count. Sam just stood there scratching his stomach.
“Okay,” said Saunders.
Turner brought over my tools. He showed me that the .38 was loaded and slid the magazine into the .45. I released the girl and handed back her automatic.
“Come on into the office,” Saunders told me. He led me into the hangar and over to one corner with a card table and telephone, a couple of chairs, a trash bucket and a refrigerator. “Want a beer?”
“Sure.”
He pointed me into a chair and took a couple of Budweisers from the refrigerator, opened them and passed me one. “What did you want from me?”
“Some help in understanding the town. I think the problems here are the source of my client’s problems in San Francisco.”
“I told you, I don’t know anything about that.”
“Still, you are a part of this amazing town’s operation. I heard different people around bemoaning the fact you bought up their airport.”
Saunders grinned and lifted a pair of scuffed cowboy boots onto the top of the card table. “Yeah, I guess that sort of irritated everybody. But nobody else wanted it. And it’s handy to have your own strip where you can bring in cargo during daylight hours if necessary, like it was this time. Legally it would be very difficult to impede my operation, unless the local law wanted to cooperate with outside authorities, and ol’ Merle just works his ass off to keep outsiders away from his domain.”
“But just now there were some guys trying to impede your operation. They weren’t law, but they were serious.”
He dismissed it with a wave of his hand. “They were just lucky. This isn’t a scheduled cargo line I run. Somebody could have had the field under surveillance, and seen Turner and Hicks waiting. Maybe some truckers talked. It doesn’t matter. It wouldn’t have done anybody any good without the imported gunmen hanging around town to take action on it.”
“You don’t think they’ll stay around?”
“I don’t think I’m going to be staying around. But no, they won’t either, come to think about it.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yup. You said they hit Ma’s place last night. And I know Ma, or at least some of the guys who wheel and deal through there, won’t sit still for it. It must have been Carl Slide’s work.” He shook his head with a snort. “What a loser. But no matter. He’ll learn.”
“Are you partners with Ma?”
“No. Oh, I sort of lay a little money her way—a little, hell, it’s a lot—so I can operate through her concession is all, the same as the others.”
“I’m beginning to understand. The truckers of course. They’re a nationwide distribution network practically at the back door to your own private airfield. You truck the stuff over to Ma’s
and the cargo goes off from there. Do all the guys who stop there carry the stuff?”
“No, only some of them. Some more of them carry other things. A number of them don’t carry anything except legitimate cargo. But everybody who is working a sideline pays Ma Leary a nice concession fee for use of the maintenance sheds out back.”
“It must be an easy living for her.”
“I’d say so. You don’t think she gets rich with the cheap drinks and practically giving away the pussy, do you?”
“I had wondered about that. What’s the other stuff transported out of there?”
He tilted his beer bottle and studied me for a moment, then lowered it with a shrug and a slight belch. “What the hell, it’s not my racket. It’s like a big wholesale interchange of stolen merchandise. Big ticket numbers. Color TVs, microwave ovens, motorcycles. A guy in L.A. can buy a hot TV from Toledo at a reasonable price. Guys in Toledo can buy stolen Hondas from Seattle. A Denver housewife on her birthday gets a new microwave oven from Kansas City that her old man bought in a bar on his way home from work. Stuff coming from areas having antiburglary drives where you have your items branded is still no problem, it being so far away, and the guys buying at those bargain prices know what the score is. They’re not about to check it out at the local police station.”
“A nice setup.”
“Right. I was tumbled to it by an old Air Force buddy now working for a long-haul line. It was the answer to a dope mover’s dream. It takes care of the riskiest part of the operation. Finding the stuff and making buys and picking it up in remote areas down South is no problem. Flying across the border isn’t much of a problem. But touchdown and getting rid of the stuff is chancy. With my own airport and the truckers, it no longer is. I make a lot of money. I’m happy in my work. I have no reason to threaten anybody in San Francisco. I live around there myself. Why make waves?”
“Before Ma Leary took over the Truck Stop it was owned by a man named Armando Barker. Ever hear of him?”