Richard Marsten - Vanishing Ladies

‘Let’s see what’s inside,’ I said. We were talking in whispers. There’s something about the darkness of night and the silence of woods that makes men automatically lower their voices. Together, we lowered the tailgate. I climbed up into the truck.

‘Want to hand me the light, Johnny?’

He passed the flash to me. I ran it over the floorboards. In one corner of the truck was a burlap sack. It was empty, but it was soggy and limp, wadded into the corner, huddled there like a frightened amoeba.

The sack was red with blood.

I got sick inside.

I stood there for several moments, and I couldn’t say anything or think anything. I finally knelt and touched the sack. The blood was cold. I got up and played the flash over the rest of the truck. Something metallic flashed in the beam of light. I stooped again.

It was a shovel with a broken handle.

There was fresh earth on the blade. There was dried blood on the splintered wooden shaft. I went to the back of the truck, doused the light, and jumped to the ground. I handed the dead flash to Simms.

‘Better leave it out,’ I said.

‘Why?’ He studied me in the darkness. ‘What’d you find?’

‘Blood.’

‘What?’

‘And a shovel that was recently used. Somebody’s dead, Johnny, and somebody was buried.’

‘Who?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Buried... where?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Here?’

‘I doubt it. Probably some place away from here.’

‘It couldn’t be Lois,’ he said. ‘She went to Davistown. She...’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It couldn’t be Lois.’

‘Then—’ He cut himself off. He stuck the flashlight into his back pocket. We walked up the road in silence. The voice came as a complete surprise.

‘Don’t use them guns,’ it said.

I stopped dead, automatically bringing up the .38.

‘I said don’t! My finger’s on the trigger. All I got to do is tighten it.’

He stood in the middle of the road, a giant in a red plaid shirt and earth-stained jeans. Hezekiah. He held a shotgun in his hands. As he’d said, one finger was making love to the trigger.

‘Drop it, Colby,’ he said. ‘You, too, Simms.’

I dropped the .38. I heard Simms’ .45 thud to the ground beside me.

‘Kick them over here.’

I kicked my gun towards him, and then the .45. Hezekiah stooped to pick them up, and then tucked both the .38, and the .45 into his belt, on opposite sides of his waist.

‘Get together,’ he said. ‘Both of you. I want to see you both.’

Simms stepped closer to me. His hands were on his hips, the thumbs cradling his hip bones, the fingers spreading around behind his back.

‘You found the truck, huh?’ Hezekiah said.

‘Yes.’

‘You find what was in it?’

‘What’d you have in mind, Hez?’

‘The sack we carried her in. The shovel we used to dig her grave.’ I couldn’t see his face, but it sounded as if he were grinning.

‘We found them,’ I said.

‘They told me to get you. I figured you’d come back here to look for your detective friend. I figured right, huh?’

The news that they’d tipped to Mitchell wasn’t exactly heartening. ‘You figured right,’ I said disconsolately.

‘Sure,’ he agreed. ‘I’m no dope.’

‘Are you smart enough not to get mixed up in murder?’

‘I’m mixed up in it already,’ Hez said.

‘You can still get out.’

‘Can I? With the girl dead and buried?’

‘But you didn’t kill, Hez.’

‘I know I didn’t.’

‘So why be a sucker?’

I honestly wasn’t trying to attract Hez’s attention away from Simms by talking. That was the farthest thing from my mind. I was trying to find out as much as I could from a guy I thought was plain dumb. I forgot all about Johnny Simms and the flashlight in his back pocket, and his fingers spread close to that flash. I forgot all about the fact that he’d once been a Marine, and I forgot what he’d done to Planett and his deputies when he hadn’t even been angry. I forgot, too, how much he loved Lois.

I should have remembered those things.

‘I ain’t no sucker,’ Hez said. The girl’s dead and gone. Ain’t nobody ever gonna know we done it.’

‘Who?’ I said. ‘What girl?’

‘Why, the prosty-tute,’ Hez said. ‘Lois. Who’d you think?’

There was a sudden gasp beside me, and then a deadly cold silence. I remembered Simms then, but I remembered too late.

The flashlight went on suddenly, throwing harsh blinding light onto Hez’s face. And then Simms leaped and the shotgun went off. The flashlight spilled to the ground, rolling in a crazy pattern of uncontrolled light. Hez swore and tried to fire again, but Simms had his hands on his throat. I dropped to the ground, trying to get at Hez, trying to help Simms, and Hez kicked out suddenly, catching me in the groin. I yelled and rolled over, and I heard Simms say, ‘You son of a bitch, you lousy son of a bitch!’ and all the while his hands were tightening on Hez’s throat.

Hez dropped the shotgun, and his right hand went to his belt, and I knew he was reaching for the Smith and Wesson, and then the gun barged into sight and there was an explosion and Johnny Simms bucked with the shocking power of it, but he did not release Hez’s throat.

Hez brought the gun up, trying for a shot at Simms’ head. But Simms clutched his throat and slammed Hez’s head back against the ground and the gun left Hez’s hands, and Simms tightened his fingers on the leathery throat, his thumbs on the big man’s Adam’s apple.

They teach Marines to kill, and Johnny Simms wasn’t playing. Johnny Simms was carrying a .38 caliber slug in his abdomen, but he’d just learned that his girl had been murdered. And maybe he’d attacked enemy soldiers with such ferocity, but I doubted it.

Hez tried to roll over. His eyes were beginning to bulge out of their sockets, and there was a prayer on his mouth, or a gasp, or a curse. He never got it out. His eyes rolled upward, and he tried a last stand effort to free his throat from Simms’ hands, but Simms would not let go. Hez rattled, a deep rattle that started down in his bowels and shuddered up the length of his body and then trembled from between his lips like a cold wind. And then he suddenly relaxed, and he was still, and I said, That’s enough, Johnny.’

Johnny Simms didn’t answer me.

Johnny’s hands were still tight around Hez’s throat, and the blood spilled from Johnny’s belly where the revolver had ripped him open at close range. I felt for his heart. He was dead.

I picked up the .38 from where it had fallen from Hez’s hand. He had said the dead girl was Lois.

Then the girl who’d been put on that train this morning was Ann Grafton, and she’d been taken to Davistown.

Where in Davistown?

There was a man who might know.

I put the .38 into my jacket pocket, and started up for the car. There was a cold wind blowing in off the lake, a wind which would speed the rain’s coming. I slammed into the convertible, started the engine, and backed out of the court. I took the bumping medieval road doing sixty all the way. I turned left into Sullivan’s Corners and then raced through the town, past the traffic circle, past the blinking yellow caution light. The stars had deserted the sky long ago. The clouds were rolling in, in bunches, piling up like hordes of black sheep. In the distance, I heard the solemn roll of thunder, saw the answering feeble spit of lightning.

I pushed the gas pedal down to the floorboards when I hit the highway. The speedometer climbed to eighty. The thunder and lightning were moving closer now, coming in with the sudden fury of a summer storm. You could smell dust in the air, whirling dust, and the heavy pregnancy that comes before water bursts from the womb of the sky. It was going to rain like hell. It was going to wash the town of Sullivan’s Corners clean of blood.