Росс Макдональд - The Instant Enemy

It was Hackett, lying face up to the rain. His face was so badly battered that he was hardly recognizable. His clothes were sodden. There was mud in his hair.

He responded to the light, though, by trying to sit up. I got down and helped him, with an arm around his shoulders.

“I’m Archer. Remember me?”

He nodded. His head lolled against me.

“Can you talk?”

“Yes, I can talk.” His voice was thick, as though he had blood in his mouth, and pitched so low I had to lean close to hear it.

“Where’s Davy Spanner?”

“He ran away. Shot the other one and ran away.”

“He shot Jack Fleischer?”

“I don’t know his name. An older man. Spanner blew his head off. It was terrible.”

“Who beat you, Mr. Hackett?”

“Spanner did. He beat me unconscious and left me for dead, I guess. The rain brought me to. I got this far, but then I pooped out.”

Hank shouted at me from the other bank. The headlights of the station wagon blinked. I yelled at him to cool it, and told Hackett to wait where he was.

He said in utter dismay: “You’re not going to leave me here?”

“Just for a few minutes. We’ll try and bring the station wagon across. If Spanner’s gone, there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“He’s gone. Thank God for that.”

Hackett’s bad experience seemed to have humbled him. I felt a sympathy for him which had been lacking before, and I lent him my jacket.

I started back across the river with the flashlight in one hand and the gun in the other. Then I remembered Fleischer’s car. If he was dead, I might as well use it.

I came back to Hackett. “Where’s the dead man’s car?”

“I think I saw a car beside the barn.”

Waveringly, he pointed off to the right.

I walked up the road a hundred yards or so and came to a lane branching off to the right. Rains past and present had worn it down to bare rocks. I went up the lane, dreading what I would find at the end of it.

The barn was the first building I came to. It was sagging and old, with great holes in its walls. I shone my flashlight around. A barn owl flew out of one of the holes: a blank flat oddly human face flying on silent wings through the beam of light. It startled me, as if it had been Jack Fleischer’s ghost.

His car was parked below the barn, unlocked, with no key in the ignition. This probably meant the key was in Fleischer’s pocket. I almost gave up my plan to use his car. But I forced myself to go on up to the house.

Apart from one small flat-roofed section, there was nothing left of the building but its old stone foundations. Even the part still standing had taken a beating from the weather. Torn roofing paper flapped in the wind, and the warped door hung ajar.

When I found Jack Fleischer inside, prone on the wet concrete floor, he had become a part of the general ruin. In the weak flashlight beam, his face and head seemed to have been partly rusted away. Water dripped down on him from the leaking roof.

I found when I went through Fleischer’s pockets that his body was still warm. His car keys were in his trousers, and in the breast pocket of his jacket were the documents he had had copied at the Acme shop in San Francisco. I kept a copy of each of them.

Before leaving the shack, I took a final look around with the flashlight. Built into one corner was a two-level board bed like those you see in old Western bunkhouses. There was a sleeping bag in the lower bunk. The only other furniture was a chair made from a cut-down wooden barrel. Looped and coiled beside this chair was a lot of used adhesive tape. Some cigarette butts lay on the floor by the bunk.

I left Fleischer where he was, for the police, and made my way down the muddy slope to his car. The engine started on the first try. I drove in low gear down the gullied lane to the road, and back to the spot where Hackett was waiting. He sat with his head leaning forward on his knees.

I helped him to his feet and into the front seat. Hank shouted from the other bank:

“Don’t try it, Lew. It’s too deep.”

I had to try it. I couldn’t leave Hackett where he was. I didn’t trust myself to carry him across. One slip and he’d be gone downriver, and all our efforts lost.

I eased the car forward slowly into the water, aiming straight for Hank Langston’s headlights and trusting there were no curves in the road. For one frightening instant in the middle, the car seemed to be floating. It shifted sideways, then jarred to rest on a higher part of the invisible road.

We got across without further incident. Supporting Hackett between us, Langston and I transferred him to the back seat of the wagon. After putting on my trousers I took back my jacket and wrapped Hackett in a car rug. Fortunately the wagon had a good heater.

I locked the doors of Fleischer’s car and left it in the road. Then I went back to it and searched the trunk. No tapes. I slammed the trunk lid down. We made the slow twelve-mile journey back to Centerville.

We must have been gone about two hours, but the lights were still on in Al Simmons’ place. He came to the door yawning. He looked as if he’d been sleeping in his clothes.

“I see you made it back.”

“We did. Jack Fleischer didn’t. He’s been shot.”

“Dead?”

“Half his head was blasted away with a sawed-off shotgun.”

“At the Krug place?”

“That’s correct.”

“What do you know? I always reckoned that place would get him in the end.”

I didn’t take time to ask Simmons what he meant. He showed me his telephone at the back of the counter, and gave me the number of the nearest sheriff’s office, in Rodeo City. The officer on duty was a Deputy Pennell. I told him that Jack Fleischer had been killed by a shotgun blast.

“Jack?” he said in a shocked voice. “But I was just talking to Jack tonight. He dropped by earlier in the evening.”

“What did he say?”

“Said he was on his way to the old Krug ranch. He wouldn’t tell me what was on his mind. But he said if he didn’t come back by morning, I was to come up after him, with a couple of extra men.”

“You better do just that. Don’t wait for morning.”

“I can’t. I got no patrol car available. My car broke down, and the county won’t budget another till January.” Pennell sounded upset and confused. “I’ll have to have a car sent up from Santa Teresa.”

“What about an ambulance?”

“That has to come up from Santa Teresa, too. But if Jack’s dead he don’t need an ambulance.”

“Not everybody’s dead. I have an injured man with me.” I didn’t mention Hackett’s name, since I was hoping somehow to get him home before the news broke. “I’ll bring him into Rodeo City. We’ll meet the ambulance and the patrol car at your office.”

Al Simmons sat at the counter listening openly to my end of the conversation. When I hung up he spoke in a meditative tone:

“It’s funny how things turn out in a man’s life. Jack held that same post in Rodeo for over fifteen years. Rory Pennell was his sidekick.”

“What was Jack’s connection with the Krug ranch?”

“I don’t hardly like to say.” But his eyes were bright with desire to deliver his story. “Jack’s dead and all, and he’s – he was a married man. I wouldn’t want it to get back to Mrs. Fleischer.”

“Another woman?”

“Yeah. Jack had his good qualities, I guess, but he was always a skirt-chaser. Back in the early fifties, he was chasing the woman who lived on the Krug place. I think he caught her, too,” Simmons said with a sideways grin. “He used to stop off here for a case of beer, and then he’d go up and spend the night with her. I can’t hardly blame him. Laurel Blevins was a pretty piece.”