Brian Garfield - Fear in a Handful of Dust

He sagged back against the wall of the cliff and brooded at the dusty drab hood of the truck. Through the windshield he could see a pillow scrunched up in the slot behind the driver’s seat. Duggai probably used it for dozing through the heat of the day, sitting in the cab with the air conditioner running.

Mackenzie worked forward another foot, stepped out in front of the truck, put his palms lightly on the hood and stretched forward on tiptoe trying to see if the rifle was in the cab. The bulk of the truck blocked him from Duggai’s view but if he stepped on either side he’d be seen.

He saw the front sight and the muzzle, tipped up against the inside of the passenger door. So Duggai hadn’t slung it in its rack under the camper roof. He’d kept it in the cab. It stood, no doubt, with its buttplate on the floor, the stock wedged firmly between seat and door so that it wouldn’t carom around inside the cab. If Mackenzie could only get that passenger door open the rifle would fall right out into his hands.

It was that easy. And that impossible. The rifle might as well have been in Texas. The lock buttons on the sills of both doors were punched down in the locked positions; and the windows were shut.

He backed silently away from the truck and leaned against the cliff and tried to think.

Beyond the rock lip he heard Duggai grunt with pleasure and splash gleefully, slapping the surface of the water like a child learning to swim. Mackenzie scowled at the distraction and tried to focus his thinking on the truck, the problem of the truck, the Chinese box puzzle dilemma of the truck. Then something tickled his foot and when he looked down he saw the scorpion.

It was a small one not more than half an inch high with the whiptail stinger curled up over its golden back. It’s the little ones that kill, he thought dispassionately. The little ones had the most virulent poison. He watched it move alongside his foot, coming out away from the base of the cliff where it must have been holed up in a crack between the rocks. He stood absolutely still in his terror and watched it. The scorpion stopped, one tiny leg pressed against the knuckle of his little toe, and he thought perhaps it was licking up the blood by his foot. The curled stinger twitched back and forth.

His mouth twisted with the irony of it. Stretch the scorpion out straight and it might not measure three inches from antennae to stinger but it was deadlier than Duggai’s two hundred-odd pounds or Duggai’s engine-block-busting Magnum.

It was one of Duggai’s demons. Mackenzie knew that without thinking anything through. Nothing mystical about it. Sheer logic. Duggai had posted the scorpion here as a sentry.

He wanted to laugh.

The scorpion leaned momentarily away from his foot, following the trace of the blood Mackenzie had left. Mackenzie whipped his foot away, hopped mightily away along the face of the cliff-more than a yard in the single jump and then he kept retreating until he saw that the scorpion had scuttled back into its hole, startled by his sudden movement. When Mackenzie stopped he felt the pain flood up through his feet but it wasn’t the pain of a poison sting, it was only the same pain as before; anyhow he’d been watching the scorpion when he fled and he was sure it hadn’t had time to whip him.

Frozen against the cliff he waited: had he made noise?

The water rippled once or twice. Then he heard nuzzling snorts: Duggai playing in the water. So he hadn’t heard anything.

Mackenzie watched the scorpion’s hole with abiding suspicion but the creature didn’t reappear for a while and finally he switched his attention to the truck again, the truck and the rifle locked inaccessibly within it.

He stood there for a very long time filled with nagging frustration because his mind had gone blank.

Duggai’s voice startled him: his heart seemed to stop. Then he realized Duggai was only singing. Chanting a Navajo song softly to himself. The voice was too soft for the words to reach Mackenzie but he knew the song. It was a young boys’ campfire song of no particular consequence. White Painted Woman and Coyote and legends from faraway times-a sort of nursery-rhyme song.

Perhaps it was the song that drew the scorpion out of its hole. Mackenzie saw it venture into sight and stand just outside its rock crack, tail up over its back, little claws opening and closing like lobster appendages. When it moved it moved quickly but not very far-across the game trail in front of the truck, claws rattling audibly like a crab’s. After some insect, probably, but Mackenzie couldn’t see the prey. The scorpion disappeared into leaf shadows under a ball of scrub.

Sluggishly Mackenzie’s brain began to work. He had one advantage although it wasn’t much: Duggai wouldn’t be expecting him here. Duggai wouldn’t credit Mackenzie with the strength to get this far and probably he wouldn’t believe Mackenzie still had the presence of mind to think ahead of him. Duggai had it all mapped out and knew his victim’s limitations and knew he was safe here: this was R amp;R, not a combat zone. Therefore Duggai would be just a shade slower to react than he’d have been if Mackenzie had come at him last night in his hilltop lair where Duggai had been expecting it.

But it wasn’t enough of an advantage to be reassuring. It was a factor but there were plenty of factors in this and most of them were set dead against Mackenzie. And above them all loomed the simple fact that Duggai could get his wet hand on that Magnum faster than anything Mackenzie could do by way of getting near the rifle.

He thought, half panicked, of getting back up onto the cliff and somehow dragging a boulder up there with him and dropping the boulder on Duggai’s head in the water but he knew that was no good because it was too chancy-he was so weak he certainly couldn’t trust his aim and anyway Duggai would probably hear him struggling with a rock long before he got into position to launch it.

He thought of trying to disconnect the brakes from underneath the truck, then pushing the truck over the lip so it would roll down and crush Duggai in the water but that was a fevered pipedream: even if he knew some way to disengage the gears and cut the brakes from underneath the truck, Duggai would hear the noise.

He thought of trying to pick the lock but he didn’t know how; anyhow he had no implement.

He kept watching the ball of brush where the scorpion had disappeared because he didn’t want it taking him by surprise. And that gave him an idea.

It was a slim chance, perhaps no better than some that he’d discarded, but he had to do something quickly before Duggai got tired of the pool and decided to come back to the truck for lunch or a towel or a look around.

He backed away painfully toward the half-dead mesquite he’d passed on his way up. Under it lay half a dozen dead branches and he selected one. It was the size of a broom handle, gray and gnarled and brittle; he tested it gently to make sure it wasn’t broken. All the time he kept watching the ball of brush for the scorpion to reappear. He saw a spider run out across the clay. It disappeared under a catclaw. Something had frightened the spider; it meant the scorpion was still under there. Mackenzie hefted the stick and quickly searched the ground nearby until he found a loose rock twice the size of his fist. He picked it up but it was stratum-cracked shale and that was no good; he needed a rock that wouldn’t shatter. He kept half his attention on the ball of brush while he continued to seek a suitable rock and finally he found one that satisfied him: it appeared to be honest hard stone and it would have to do.

Mackenzie padded forward, feet curling in agony; he had the rock in his left hand and the stick in his right, holding it by the butt-end like a saber. He worked his way past the ball of brush until he was crouched in the trail with his back nakedly exposed to the truck and whatever might come up behind the truck; he was facing the ball of brush, as far away from it as he could get and still remain within stick’s-length of it. Then he began to prod silently.