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

Ten minutes passed, no longer, before Rose came up the ladder and over the hay to his side. She leaned back, braced on her elbows, and passed him a slow smile. “Luke’s gone,” she said.

“I know. I watched him leave.”

“You hungry?”

“A little.”

“You come up to the house, I’ll fix you something.”

“Pretty soon. I’m in no hurry.” She looked out the loft window toward the hills into which Luke had gone, but her eyes were blank, as if they were turned inward to focus on her own thoughts. Her full lips pouted softly.

“When you going back to KC?”

He laughed. “How long does it take to get hold of twenty-five hundred bucks around here?”

She turned her head to look at him directly. “That depends on where you look.”

“It would save time to look in the right place.”

“Why you need all that money to get back?”

He lifted his shoulders. “A little debt I owe to a guy who likes to be paid.”

“Oh.” She turned her eyes back to the hills and she was silent for a long time. Finally she whispered, as if to herself, “I know where there’s twenty-five hundred dollars. More than that. A lot more. I know just where it is.”

So there it was on a tentative line. “I’ve been thinking, baby,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about a lot of things, but mostly I’ve been trying to think of the reason why a nice item like you would marry Luke. Now I’m beginning to understand.”

She said bitterly, “Fat lot of good it did me. I thought I could work it out of him, but I was all wrong. I sold out for nothing.” She paused, then said in a rush, “Take me back to KC with you, Dickie.”

He’d already anticipated that plea, and he’d decided that it had points. She’d be an interesting attachment for a while, and later on, when the thing went sour, they’d break it up, and thanks for the ride. Meanwhile, however, the whole project depended on Luke’s green cache.

“I told you, baby. I can’t go back without twenty-five C’s.”

“Luke’s got it, Dickie. He must have eight, ten thousand stuck away. He’s been running bootleg for a long time. You can gather a big bundle that way.”

Dickie whistled softly. “Where is it?”

“In the cave. The cave where the still is. These hills are riddled with caves, you know. This one’s about two miles over the way Luke went this morning, and I’m the only one besides Luke who knows about it. I followed him one day and spotted it. When he left, I went in and found the cache. All that beautiful green stuff.” She held her spread fingers in front of her eyes, and her voice dripped with bitterness. “I fingered it a little. Just fingered it a little and put it back.”

“How come? How come you didn’t take off with it.”

She looked at him, and in her eyes was the visual equivalent of the sound he’d heard in her voice in the kitchen last night. A shiver ran through the flesh of her body.

“For the same reason you and I can’t just take off with it now,” she said. “Because Luke’s got to be taken care of first. Don’t underestimate him. He’s mean clear through. He’s killed before, and he’d kill again. With you for company, though, I’d have the nerve to try.”

“How could we get the dough and get away? Have you got an idea?”

“Yes.” She clenched her fingers and sat looking at the fist they made. “Luke sells bootleg to a road joint a couple of miles south of here. They get Luke’s stuff cheap, and it makes for big profits. I’ll bet you’d be surprised how much of the stuff you buy across the bar is bootleg, even in Kansas City. This joint is Luke’s biggest customer. Every Sunday Luke brings a lot of the stuff in from the cave. Sunday night, while the joint’s closed, he delivers it in the truck. The point is, Luke’s a three-time loser. Another rap means life. But instead, for Luke, it’ll mean death. He carries an old .45 Colt revolver with him in his deliveries, and he wouldn’t let himself be taken alive. You can believe that. I know Luke, and he’d never go back to the pen for keeps.”

He looked at her with growing admiration. “I get it. A word to the right party, and it’s good-bye, Luke. Who? The sheriff?”

She shivered again. “Yes, the sheriff. Rube Wells. He hates Luke’s guts. He’d love to nail him. He’d love the excuse to burn him down.”

“This is Sunday, baby. By moving fast, we could do it tonight. I’d sure like to get back to KC.”

“The sooner, the better.”

“You got a phone here?”

“No. You’d have to go to Greenview.”

“What’s the name of this joint Luke delivers to?”

“The Oaks. It’s just a big frame building, like a barn, but it does a lot of business.”

“How does Luke get the stuff in from the still?”

“He keeps a couple of mules pastured out that way. There’s a cart out there, too. He brings it up in the cart.”

“Okay. I better get to Greenview and back before he brings the stuff in.”

“You can use the truck. Come on up to the house, and I’ll fix you something to cat.”

In the kitchen, he ate fat bacon and bread, washing it down with strong black coffee. Then he backed the truck out of its shed and drove to Greenview. The truck was an old 1948 pickup, shaken into a state of innumerable rattles by the rocky hill roads, and the exhaust kept popping like gunfire.

He found a telephone booth in a shabby café filled with the rancid odor of grease, and finally got through humming country wires to the county seat. He caught Rube Wells himself in the sheriff’s office and put the finger on Luke succinctly.

The wire hummed for a few seconds after he’d finished, and then the sheriff’s voice sounded harshly, “Who the hell’s talking?”

“Never mind that. You want Luke Flannery or not?”

“I want him, all right.”

“Then you’d better be waiting tonight on the road to the Oaks.” The voice was grim.

“We’ll be waiting. We’ll be right there.” Dickie laughed quietly inside himself, and hung up. He laughed all the way back to the farm, and he was still laughing when he crawled out of the truck and went across the yard to the porch where Rose was waiting.

“Luke back yet?”

“No. He won’t be here for a long time yet.”

“Good. It’s all set, baby. Neat as anything you could want.”

“I hope so.” That long shuddery creeping of flesh was apparent again. “I hope to God nothing goes wrong.”

His eyes narrowed. “You’re sure, aren’t you? About his making that delivery tonight, I mean?”

“Yes, I’m sure. He makes it regular every Sunday night. He leaves here in the truck a little before ten.”

“Okay. Relax, then. We got nothing to worry about. If he doesn’t go crazy, like you think, and get himself killed, he’ll wind up in the county gaol. Either way, it’ll give you and me the chance to get the dough and get out of here.”

“They got to kill him,” she said. “I’ll never be easy if they don’t kill him. Even with life on him, I won’t feel easy.”

It was beginning to get dusk when Luke returned. Dickie sat in the loft and watched him come in from the hills behind a plodding mule. In the primitive two-wheeled cart, the old bolt-action rifle leaning against his knees, Luke was like something from a long way back, crude and somehow savage. In spite of himself, Dickie felt in his own flesh a shudder like the ones that had worked in Rose’s. He crawled back over the hay and down the wooden ladder and stood in the open door of the barn watching Luke as he drove up and stopped.

“Long day,” he said.

Luke didn’t answer. He swung down off the cart and went around to the back. “You can help me unload,” he said. “Put it in the truck.”