Билл Пронзини - The Cemetery Man and Other Darkside Tales

“You trying to tell us you ain’t had a woman in forty years? You ain’t been laid in all that time?”

“It’s the truth.”

“What kind of man don’t want to get laid for forty years? Huh?”

I said nothing.

“So what you been doing all that time?” Pete said. “Choking your lizard?”

I said nothing.

“He don’t even do that,” Miguel said. “All he does is pick crops and sit here by himself at night, all tired out from the Lord’s work.”

“Toiling in the fields of the Lord. Right, Harry?”

“Yes.”

They laughed and drank. I listened to the crickets and the nightbirds and wished for a small breeze. It was very hot.

“Damn,” Miguel said, “I’m getting a heat on.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Getting a hard-on, too. How about we go over to Salinas, pick up a couple of putas ?”

“We ain’t been paid yet, remember? We ain’t got no money, remember?”

“Hey, Harry, you got any money?”

“No,” I said.

“Twenty bucks, that’s all we’d need. How about it?”

“I don’t have twenty dollars.”

“No, huh? No stash in your trailer?”

“No.”

“Maybe he’s lying,” Miguel said. “Maybe we oughta go in, have a look around.”

“Go ahead,” I said. “You won’t find any money.”

“Oh, shit, forget it,” Pete said. “He ain’t lying to us. All he’s got is this jug of the best damn tequila. And he wouldn’t mind if we was to go ahead and finish it, ain’t that right, old man?”

I said nothing.

“I tell you,” Miguel said, slurring his words now, “this tequila makes me horny as hell. Harry here don’t need pussy but I do. Man, real bad!”

“Forget it. Ain’t nobody in the camp gonna give it to you.”

“Rosa Caldera might.”

Pete laughed so hard he choked. “Rosa Caldera! That bitch! She wouldn’t let you screw her if you was the last dude on the planet.”

“Plenty of guys’ve had her.”

“Sure, but not you. Not either of us, man.”

“She came by here a few minutes ago,” I said.

They squinted at me. “Who did?” Pete said.

“Rosa Caldera. On her way to the river.”

“Yeah? Who was with her?”

“No one. She was alone.”

“So she was going to the river,” Miguel said. “What for?”

“To swim naked under the willows by the sandbar.”

“... Naked? How the hell you know that? She tell you that?”

“I know,” I said.

“She wouldn’t tell him nothing like that,” Pete said. “He must’ve seen her. That right, Harry? You seen Rosa swimming naked in the river?”

“Yes.”

Pete laughed. “Hey, he’s a peeper. A peeping holy roller.”

Miguel didn’t laugh. “She goes there alone? Swims alone?”

“Tonight, yes. But not always.”

“Who else swims with her?”

“Men. Different men.”

“They get naked too?”

“Yes. Sometimes.”

“What else they do besides swim, huh?”

I said nothing.

“Screw? Rosa screw guys down there in the river?”

I said nothing.

“Sure she does,” Pete said. “And Harry watches. You like to watch, huh, old man?”

“No.”

“Yeah, sure you do. You keep going back, right? That’s how you know about the guys Rosa screws down there.”

I said nothing.

Miguel drank again, licked his lips. “She went down there alone tonight, you said.”

“Yes. Alone.”

“Maybe she’s meeting some dude later,” Pete said.

“No. Not tonight.”

“How you know that?”

“She asked me to swim with her.”

“The hell she did!”

“She didn’t mean it. She was teasing me.”

“Yeah, Rosa the cockteaser.”

“How long she stay down there in the river?” Miguel asked.

“A long time on hot nights.”

“Under the willows by the sandbar — that’s where she swims?”

“Yes.”

They looked at each other. Again they drank. Their eyes were very bright in the pale light from my trailer window.

“Harry,” Pete said, “you’re too damn old to be drinking tequila on a hot night like this, so we’re gonna do you a favor — we’re gonna take this bottle away so you won’t be tempted. What you say to that?”

I said nothing.

Pete laughed again, but Miguel did not, and together they staggered away into the darkness.

Noises woke me, loud voices close by. I pulled on my pants and went outside. It was very late but the camp was alive with movement and bobbing lights, men and women running past my trailer in the direction of the river. I followed them.

Eladio Sanchez came hobbling up to me, as excited as I have ever seen him. His sun-weathered face was shiny with sweat.

“Harry,” he said, “it’s terrible, Harry — isn’t it terrible?”

“What is? What’s going on?”

“Haven’t you heard? Don’t you know?”

“No,” I said, “I was asleep. What happened?”

“Rosa Caldera’s been killed. Raped and killed.”

“Raped and killed, you say?”

“Down by the river. Jaime Valdez was out for a walk and heard her scream. She was dead when he found her. Naked, raped, her head crushed with a tequila bottle.”

“Do they know who did it?”

“Miguel Santos and Pete Simms,” Eladio said. “Jaime saw them running away. But they won’t get far, the police will catch them. Isn’t it an awful thing, Harry?”

“Yes,” I said, “it’s an awful thing.”

He hobbled away and I went back to my trailer. But I was not sleepy anymore. I walked down to a different part of the river and found a place under one of the willows.

It was cooler there, close to the moon-silvered water. The camp noise was only a low buzzing murmur, all but lost in the throbbing song of the crickets. Peaceful. A man could settle down in a place like this, if he was a settling-down kind of man.

But I was not, and had not been for forty years.

The harvest here in the Salinas Valley had been a good one, but now it was almost finished and soon I would be moving on. To other places, other crops, other fertile fields.

The Lord’s work is never done.

It was a wide spot on a secondary road in a corner of the Nevada desert.

Line, it was called. Some name for a town, Hood thought as he drove in. Maybe whoever founded it had called it that because the road ran line-straight through it from one long section of sun-blasted wasteland into another. Or maybe it was because of the dozen or so old-fashioned western-style buildings that faced each other across the road like sagging blocks stretched out along a plumb line.

Dry, dusty, deserted except for an old man sitting in the shade in front of one of the storefronts. A dead town. A nowhere place.

Fitting, though, name and town both. Just right. He was in Line to cross a line, to make Line the end of the line for Teresa and the drifter, Kincaid, she’d run off with three months ago.

Hood had done a lot of things in his life. Boosted cars when he was a kid in East L.A. Committed a couple of burglaries, sold some meth, worked as a bagman for a gambling outfit, busted a few heads for money. But he’d never killed anybody.

Until now. That was the line he was here to cross.

He’d tracked Teresa and Kincaid from L.A. to Phoenix to Vegas to Tonopah. Kincaid worked different jobs when he could get them — ranch hand, truck driver, laborer — but jobs were scarce these days and he hadn’t worked much in those three months. Mostly they were living off the two thousand of Hood’s money Teresa had stolen from him the night before they ran off. Traveling here and there in no definite pattern, spending their nights in cheap motels or holed up in Kincaid’s car. Not easy to track, but not too difficult, either — not when you had enough hate driving you.