Fletcher Flora - The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK™ - 26 Stories by Fletcher Flora

“And you look like you might be able to show a girl the way. How come you’re so far from home? Don’t tell me you came just to see the beautiful Ozark scenery, like they talk about for the summer suckers.”

“Okay. I won’t tell you that.”

She shrugged and lay back flat across the well cap. “Don’t tell me anything, if you don’t want to. A fat damn I care.”

He laughed, leaning back against his braced arms. He felt a strange, warm affinity with this big country doll. He decided she’d do to play along with. Up to a point, of course.

“Just say I’m here for my health,” he said.

“You in trouble?”

“You might call it that. Nothing that can’t be worked out eventually. Meanwhile, I need a place to hole up in.”

“You figuring to stay in that flea bag in Greenview?”

“I’m wide open to a better suggestion.”

“Maybe this would be better.” She rolled her head on the well-cap and slanted a look at him from hooded eyes. The pulse in his throat leaped and hammered, and his insides were shaken by silent ribald laughter. Like a school kid, he thought. Like a damn green kid with the first time coming up. “Is that an invitation?”

“Don’t you like the idea?”

“I like it, baby. I like it fine. I’m just wondering, though. It doesn’t seem likely that you live here alone. Who makes the crowd?”

“Luke.”

“Your husband?”

Her full lips curled. “That’s one thing you could call him.”

“How’s Luke going to feel about me being around?”

“Don’t worry about Luke. He just eats and sleeps here, and not too much of that. Most of the time he’s nursing that damn broken-down still of his.”

“Still? You mean they have those things down here yet? I thought they went out with prohibition.”

“Maybe they did in Kansas City. Not here. Luke makes a pile of money bootlegging. Not that it does me any good. He’s a regular miser. He loves the green stuff too much to part with any of it.”

“You sure he’ll let me stay around?”

“Don’t worry about him, I said. I can handle it.”

He stood up. “Okay, baby, you twisted my arm. I’ll just hike back to Greenview and pick up the bag I left in the station there. Few things I’ll need.”

She didn’t bother to get up. She just kept on lying there on her back on the well-cap, and very slowly she extended her arms above her head, arching her spine and stretching.

“Hurry back, Dickie,” she said. “Hurry right back.”

He returned to Greenview, his feet still burning in his shoes, and by a kind of malicious paradox, the road that had seemed mostly up hill coming out of town seemed just as much so going back. When he reached the farm again, carrying his bag, the last of sunlight was touching only the crests of hills and ridges.

Rose was waiting for him on the back porch. Beyond her, in the lighted kitchen, he could see the figure of a man who was bent over the kitchen table spooning something into his mouth.

“Come on in the house,” Rose said. “Luke’s home.”

He followed her into the house and set his bag on the floor inside the screen door. The man at the table stopped eating to look at him with wary little eyes, holding the spoon suspended empty between plate and mouth. Dickie felt a shock of surprise and grinned pleasantly to hide it. He’d expected a young man, but Luke was long way past young. Fifty at least, Dickie guessed. Maybe onto sixty. He had a long, bleak face, almost rectangular in shape, with a broad, square chin. His hair was coarse and bristly, a dirty grey, and it gave more the effect of quills than hair. His voice detoured through his nose, and the nasal twang gave it a mean sound.

“What you want here?”

“I’m looking for a place to stay a few days. Your wife said maybe I could stay here.”

Rose’s laugh, behind him, had a jeer in it. “Luke’s worried about his still. He thinks maybe you’re a state agent. Maybe even a Fed.” Dickie laughed, too, just to show how funny he thought that idea was, but Luke didn’t seem to think it was funny at all. His little eyes slipped past Dickie in the direction of Rose, and his bleak face was suddenly a real and considerable menace. Dickie felt an uneasy chill wriggle its way along his spine, and he realized that Luke was a dangerous man. Just as dangerous in his own way and place as a man like Buck Finney was in his.

“You shut up,” Luke said. “Just keep your trap shut.”

Rose repeated her laugh, but the jeer was gone, and there was something in its place that might have been the tremor of fear. Luke’s eyes came back as far as Dickie and stopped. They stayed there a long time without moving.

“If you want to sleep in the barn, you can stay,” he said at last. “If you don’t, you can move on.”

Dickie took it gracefully. “The barn’s okay. I’ll carry my bag down now.”

Luke’s spoon resumed it’s shuttling between plate and mouth, and Rose said, “There’s a lantern in the harness room, if you want a light. Be careful of the hay.”

“Sure,” he said. “I’ll watch it.”

He carried his bag to the barn and climbed to the loft on a straight wooden ladder nailed to the inside wall. Opening the loft door, he lay in the hay in front of it and looked out to the ancient hills. He knew nothing of geology, nothing at all of the region’s incredible history, but the dark remnants of earth’s patient violence filled him with an indefinable uncase.

Shrugging it off, he began to think of Rose, and after a while the threat of the hills receded. He found himself listening, expecting the soft sound of her approach up the ladder, but then he remembered the sound in her voice in the kitchen, and he decided that she wouldn’t come. Not tonight. Not any time when Luke was around.

He loves the green stuff too much to part with any of it, Rose had said. The words had lingered verbatim in Dickie’s consciousness. To a guy who needed two grand, they were words of considerable significance. Two grand? Better add a half. It would take a lot of interest to make Buck Finney forget that the principal of the debt was delinquent. Interest on money you owed Finney accumulated fast.

Would a billy like Luke have twenty-five C’s cashed? It wasn’t impossible. Sometimes these hill characters surprised a guy. They were full of surprises. Take the case of a dame like Rose being hitched to a sour, ugly Ozark bootlegger like Luke, for instance. Rose was a doll with possibilities. She even talked as if she’d been to school. Maybe through a consolidated high school somewhere. Knock off the rough edges, polish her up and put her in the right rags, she’d go great along Twelfth.

It just didn’t make any kind of sense, her being married to Luke. Or did it? When you considered the possibility of Luke’s having a nice little green cache, things began to add up. Dickie might not know anything about geology, but he knew his share about dames, and he could recognize the predatory type a mile off. A few grand would go a long way towards getting an ambitious dame out of the hills on the right foot, and he was willing to bet dollars to tax tokens that Rose had been thinking about that when she crawled in with Luke at the start.

Lying there in the hay, looking out to where the moon was beginning to edge a distant ridge, he weighed the pros and cons of collaboration, and pretty soon he went to sleep.

He woke at daylight to sounds below. Without moving, he listened to the opening and closing of the harness room door, the sound of heavy shoes on hard-packed earth, the opening of the barn door on the field side away from the house. Seconds later, Luke came into view, headed for the hills. He was carrying an old bolt-action rifle, and he walked with a long-legged, undulating motion that ate up the ground in a hurry.