Bill Pronzini - Savages

Her sausage fingers stopped him.

“Well, it’s your hide, mister,” she said. “Half a mile west there’s a road cuts off into the wilderness. Peters out into a dirt track after about four miles. Another mile or so, there’s a gate with a No Trespassing sign on it.”

He let her make the five disappear before he said, “Couple more questions before I go. Were you working last Friday?”

“Every damn day except Monday.”

“You happen to see a husky kid in his early twenties, driving a dark blue ‘fifty-seven Impala?”

“I don’t know nothing about cars.”

“You couldn’t miss this one. Might’ve been over at Brody’s part of the day.”

“Didn’t notice if it was.”

“How about yesterday or today? Any young guys come in, strangers?”

“We don’t get too many strangers in here, even in summer. Who’s this kid, anyway?”

Runyon said, “Thanks for your help,” and left her excavating an ear canal with the tip of her little finger.

The Lost Bar Saloon was a squarish log building incongruously topped with a huge satellite dish that loomed up like one of the radar scanners at the SRI complex. The reason for the dish was apparent when Runyon walked in. The bartender and three beer drinkers, two male and one female, were all watching a pro football game on a wide-screen TV, the volume turned up so high you couldn’t hold a conversation without half-shouting. Their interest in him was brief, vanished altogether when he asked his questions. Indifferent responses void of information. None of them had seen a dark blue ’57 Impala in the vicinity recently, or would own up to it if they had.

He closed himself inside the Ford again and rolled out of Lost Bar, following the fat woman’s directions. The wilderness road was a bent and crimped tunnel bored through thick stands of pine, alternately climbing and dropping, bypassing the crumbling hillside remains of a sluice mine. The going got rougher after pitted asphalt gave way to potholed hardpan; he had to drive at a crawl to avoid damage to the tires and undercarriage. The jouncing restarted the ache in his head. He clamped his teeth together and slowed down even more.

After a mile and two-tenths by the odometer, he rounded a curve and there was the gated entrance to Gus Mayerhof’s property. The gate and the barbed-wire fencing strung out on both sides were plastered with No Trespassing signs, all of them handmade. If the gate had been shut and locked, he’d have had to consider whether or not to go in on foot; but it stood open, like an invitation. The access road was a scar on the hillside, heavily furrowed by the erosion of rain and winter snows, climbing up through deep woods. It crested after five hundred yards or so, and the trees thinned; and as he started down on the other side he was looking at a home place like none he’d seen before.

It wasn’t a house or a cabin or a shack; it was a patchwork, spare-parts thing made of wood and brick and tarpaper and sheet metal, sprawling and sagging and jutting at odd angles among tall lodgepole pines. Smoke curled from a stovepipe chimney in one corner of an uneven A-frame roof. A lean-to to one side sheltered a newish Dodge pickup. The front and side yards were littered with the corpses and skeletons of two trucks, a passenger car, a wood stove, an old-fashioned icebox, dozens of less recognizable items.

There was no front porch, just a pair of concrete steps built into a foundation slab below the door. The man standing on the bottom step didn’t move as Runyon drove into the yard. Bearded and shaggy-haired, big-bellied in a khaki shirt and military camouflage pants, he had a shotgun slung over one arm and a chain leash tight-wrapped in the other hand. The pit bull, black and vicious looking, strained at the other end of the chain, barking furiously, foamy drool flying from its jowls. There was no expression on the man’s blocky face. The way he stood, flat-footed, motionless, made him seem even bigger than he was.

He remained motionless until Runyon parked at a slant behind one of the rusted-out wrecks. Then he came forward in a long, stiff-backed stride, like a giant stick man, to within a dozen yards of the Ford. When he stopped again he jerked once on the chain and the pit bull immediately quit barking, sat on its haunches, and stared at Runyon with red-eyed malevolence.

“I don’t know you,” in a big bass rumble. “Stay where you are, you know what’s good for you.”

“Gus Mayerhof?”

“Got eyes, ain’t you? Know how to read signs?”

“Your gate was open.”

“You better have a goddamn good reason for driving through it.”

“I’m looking for a kid named Jerry Belsize. Lives down in the valley-Gray’s Landing. Twenty-two, husky, drives a dark blue ’fifty-seven Impala.”

“What’s that got to do with me?”

“I was told he came up here to see you last Friday.”

“Then you got told wrong.”

“You haven’t seen him recently?”

“Nobody comes to see me without they’re invited. Nobody.”

“That’s not what I asked you, Gus.”

“Mr. Mayerhof. Nobody calls me Gus unless I say so.”

The new headache had put Runyon in a bleak, dark mood. He didn’t like pit bulls; he didn’t like hard-ass pot growers with shotguns; he didn’t like the situation he’d let himself into. And he didn’t like having to put the kind of tight hold on himself that Mayerhof had on the dog, even if it was the only option given the circumstances. He said, slow and reasonable, “I don’t want much from you, Mr. Mayerhof. Why not just give it to me and I’ll be on my way.”

“Yeah? Why should I?”

“Be in your best interest.”

“Who says so?”

“I say so. My name’s Runyon, Jake Runyon.”

“Fuck Jake Runyon,” Mayerhof said. “You’re a trespasser, not a cop.”

“Close enough to a cop.”

“… What’s that mean?”

“Private investigator. Close ties to the law.”

“Bullshit.”

“I can show you my license.”

“Fuck your license.”

The leash on Runyon’s temper was starting to fray. “Look, Mayerhof, I didn’t come here to make trouble for you. It’s none of my business what you do for a living, but I can make it my business if you push me. I can make it the law’s business.”

“Not if you don’t leave here in one piece,” Mayerhof said. His body turned slightly as he spoke; the shotgun barrel came up on a level with Runyon’s face framed in the open window. His glare was as malevolent as the pit bull’s.

“Cold-blooded murder? I don’t think so. People know I’m here. How do you suppose I got your name, found out where you live?”

“You never heard of self-defense? Man’s got a right to defend his property against trespassers.”

“Not when they’re sitting inside a car.”

“Say you threatened me. Nobody here to call me a liar.”

“There’d still be an investigation. How’re you going to hide what you grow and sell up here?”

“So maybe you just disappear, you and your car both. Happens all the time in country like this.”

“All right then, go ahead and shoot me. But do it quick, Mayerhof. I’ve got a. 357 Magnum in here and the longer you wait, the better my chances of using it. Miss me and I’ll blow your head off before you can lever up another shell. The dog’s head, too, if you try to let it do the job for you.”

“Bullshit.”

“I’m a good fast shot, better than you are one-handed with a pump gun, faster than a pit bull can jump through a car window. I was on the Seattle PD for twelve years. Give me the chance and I won’t miss.”

Standoff. But it was the kind that couldn’t last very long. If he’d gauged Mayerhof wrong, he could get himself killed right here and now-put an end to his misery. He cared and he didn’t care at the same time. But he hadn’t misread the man. He’d had confrontations with dozens of Gus Mayerhofs over the years, the petty criminals with hard-as-nails exteriors and guts that melted and ran when push came to shove.