Росс Макдональд - The Instant Enemy

“Didn’t her husband object?”

“I don’t think he knew. Blevins was gone a lot of the time. He killed all his own meat. When he wasn’t hunting, he was tramping around the hills with a painter’s whatever-you-call-it.”

“Easel?”

“Yeah. He pretended to be some kind of an artist. But him and his wife, and the little boy, they lived like Digger Indians in that burned-out old ranchhouse. You can’t hardly blame the woman for going for Jack. He was a good-looking fellow fifteen years ago, and he always had money from the Rodeo houses. After Blevins left her, he kept the woman in Mamie Hagedom’s house. I got that from Mamie Hagedorn herself.”

“What happened to Blevins?”

“He traveled on. He was a born loser.”

“And the little boy?”

“I don’t know. He got lost in the shuffle.”

He should have stayed lost, I was thinking, instead of coming back to revenge himself on a past he couldn’t change even with a shotgun.

I questioned Al Simmons about Davy, and Simmons remembered him. At least he’d seen a man or boy, driving a green compact, take the turn to the ranch early the previous morning. No, he hadn’t seen or heard him come out tonight.

“Is there another way out?”

“There’s the northwest pass. But it takes a four-wheel drive, ‘specially in weather like this.”

Langston was honking outside. I had one more thing to do. I phoned Hackett’s house in Malibu and got Ruth Marburg on the line and told her I was bringing her son home.

She burst into tears. Then she started to ask me questions, which I cut short. I told her we were coming down by ambulance. While Hackett didn’t seem to be seriously hurt, he was exhausted and suffering from exposure. She’d better have a doctor on hand when we got there.

I gave her six a.m. as our E.T.A.

DEPUTY RORY PENNELL was a rawboned man of forty or so with a heavy chestnut mustache and a bad stammer. The stammer had probably been intensified by Jack Fleischer’s death. Pennell seemed genuinely upset. As we talked, his big right hand kept going back to the butt of the gun he wore on his hip.

I would have liked to spend more time in Rodeo City, talking to Pennell and Mamie Hagedorn and anyone else who might help me to reconstruct the past. It was beginning to look as though Jack Fleischer had been deeply implicated in the death of Jasper Blevins. But the question was fairly academic now, and it would have to wait. The important thing was to get Stephen Hackett home.

The two sheriff’s men from Santa Teresa would have been glad to escort him. It was a relatively safe and easy job, high in publicity value. I reminded them that Jack Fleischer’s body was lying alone on the Krug place. Somewhere in the hills north of there the boy who killed him was probably stuck in the mud.

I said good-bye to Hank and rode the ambulance south, sitting on the floor beside Hackett’s pallet. He was feeling better. He had had some first aid on his face, and sucked a cup of broth through a straw. I asked him a few of the questions that had to be asked.

“Did Sandy Sebastian hit Lupe?”

“Yes. She knocked him out with a tire iron.”

“Did she use violence on you?”

“Not directly. She did tape me while the boy held the shotgun on me. She taped my wrists and ankles and mouth, even my eyes.” He raised his hand from the blanket and touched his eyes. “Then they put me in the trunk of her car. It was hellish being shut up like that.” He lifted his head. “How long ago did it start?”

“About thirty-six hours. Did she have any special grudge against you?”

He answered slowly. “She must have. But I can’t understand what.”

“What about the boy?”

“I never saw him before. He acted crazy.”

“In what way?”

“He didn’t seem to know what he was doing. At one point he laid me out across a railroad track. I know it sounds like Victorian melodrama. But he clearly intended to kill me, by letting a train crush me. The girl ran away, and he changed his mind. He took me up to the – the other place and kept me prisoner there.

“For most of the day – yesterday? – he treated me pretty well. He took the tape off and let me move around some. Gave me water to drink, and some bread and cheese. Of course the shotgun was always in evidence. He lay on the bunk and held the gun on me. I sat in the chair. I’m not a coward, ordinarily, but it got pretty nerve-wracking after a while. I couldn’t understand what he had in mind.”

“Did he mention money, Mr. Hackett?”

“I did. I offered him a good deal of money. He said he didn’t want it.”

“What did he want?”

Hackett took a long time to answer. “He didn’t seem to know. He seemed to be living out some kind of a dream. In the evening he smoked marijuana, and he got dreamier. He seemed to be hoping for some kind of mystic experience. And I was the burnt offering.”

“Did he say so?”

“Not directly. He said it as a joke, that he and I should form a musical group. He suggested several names for it, such as The Human Sacrifice.” His voice faded. “It was no joke. I believe he meant to kill me. But he wanted to see me suffer as long as possible first.”

“Why?”

“I’m not a psychologist, but he seemed to regard me as a substitute father. Toward the end, when he got high on marijuana, he started calling me Dad. I don’t know who his real dad is or was, but he must have hated him.”

“His dad died under a train when he was three. He saw it happen.”

“Good Lord!” Hackett sat up partly. “That explains a lot of things, doesn’t it?”

“Did he talk about his father?”

“No. I didn’t encourage him to talk. Eventually he dozed off. I was planning to jump him when the other chap – Fleischer? – came in. He must have thought there was nobody there. The boy let him have both barrels. He had no chance at all. I ran outside. The boy caught me and beat me unconscious.”

He fell back onto the pallet and raised both elbows defensively, as if Davy’s fists were in his face again. We rode the rest of the way in silence. Hackett’s hoarse breathing quieted down, lengthening out gradually into the rhythms of sleep.

I spread a blanket on the vibrating floor and slept, too, while the world turned toward morning. I woke up feeling good. Stephen Hackett and I had come back together and alive. But he was still full of fear. He moaned in his sleep and covered his head with his arms.

The red sun was coming up behind the Malibu hills. The ambulance stopped in West Malibu near a sign which said “PRIVATE COLONY: NO TRESPASSING.” The driver didn’t know where to make his turn, and he gestured through the window.

I went up front with him. The other attendant got into the back with Hackett. We found our left turn and climbed through the hills to Hackett’s gate.

It was just a few minutes past six. Coming over the pass we were met by the full blaze of the morning sun, like an avalanche of light.

Ruth Marburg and Gerda Hackett came out of the house together. Ruth’s face was lined and bleary-eyed and joyful. She ran heavily toward me and pressed my hands and thanked me. Then she turned to her son, who was being lifted out of the ambulance by the attendants. She bent over him and hugged him, crying and exclaiming over his wounds.

Gerda Hackett stood behind her. She looked a little piqued, as if she felt upstaged by Ruth’s display of emotion. But she got her hug in, too, while Sidney Marburg and Dr. Converse stood and watched.

There was a third man, fortyish and heavy-shouldered, with a square unsmiling face. He acted as if he was in charge. When Hackett stood up shakily and insisted on walking into the house, instead of being carried, the heavy-shouldered man assisted him. Dr. Converse followed them in, looking rather ineffectual.