Росс Макдональд - Find a Victim

About a quarter of a mile below us, at the far end of the vacant town, a great rectangular doorway belched white light. Two men moved in and out of the light, carrying boxes to the rear of a big van that stood in the street. Back and forth they walked with the weary automatism of lost souls laboring in the mines of hell.

“It’s them,” Jo whispered. “I don’t want to go any closer.”

“I wouldn’t let you. How many guns do they have?”

“I think they all have guns. One of them, the one they call Faustino, has a tommygun.”

“That’s bad. You better go and sit in the alley. Get behind something, just in case. MacGowan, is your gun loaded?”

“Don’t worry.”

“How’s your eye?”

“I shot a buck at four hundred yards a couple of weeks ago. If it was daylight, I think I could pick them off from here.”

“Wait ten minutes, till I get down there. Then open fire. But save a couple of rounds. They’ll probably try to make a break. This road is the only way out, isn’t it?”

“Except for mountain goats.”

“If any of them get away from me, take cover behind the car and see if you can stop them. Fire in ten minutes now.”

“I got no watch.”

“Count to five hundred, slow. All right?”

“Fine.”

He got out of the car and lay down in the road. Jo disappeared into the alley beside the boarded-up restaurant. I walked down the hill with my gun in my hand, keeping close to the buildings. They were the shells of vanished businesses, a barbershop, an ice-cream parlor, a company store. Their only patrons were chipmunks and coyotes, quiet in the broken shadows. Altitude and silence rang in my ears like quinine.

A hundred yards or so from the light, I went down on my knees and elbows. The position brought back the smells of cordite and flamethrowers and scorched flesh, the green and bloody springtime of Okinawa. I crawled along the fragmented pavement from doorway to doorway. My time was nearly up.

The light poured from the open double doors of a frame building on the other side of the street. There was a fire-station sign above the door. Meyer’s truck stood inside with its headlights on and its rear doors open. The big box was nearly empty. The two men were unloading the last of the cases and passing them to a third man in the blue van.

They were stripped to the waist, and sweating. One of them was broad and dark, covered with curly black hair on chest and back and arms. The other was tall, beak-nosed, with vague pale eyes. I could see the blue tattoo on his white forearm. He heaved a case into the van and turned to his companion with a grunt: “She was a sweet little piece. I wonder what happened to her.”

“Don’t you ever get enough of it?”

Their voices were slightly blurred, their movements a little uncertain. The dark man pushed a case into the van and leaned against it. I rested the barrel of my revolver on a piece of broken sidewalk and sighted along it, aiming at the middle of the single black eyebrow that barred his face.

An invisible fist rapped the side of the van. I fired before the sound of MacGowan’s shot came rattling down the hill. One of the dark man’s eyes broke like a brown agate. He looked around at the light-splashed blackness with his remaining eye, ran toward me on buckling legs and went down on his knees and fell on his face, as Tony Aquista had fallen.

The tall man trotted shambling into the building. He came out much more slowly, step by step, with a Thompson submachinegun in his hands. It struck out a saffron tongue at me and giggled. I fired too quickly and missed. The rapid slugs stitched the wall behind me, dropping nearer. Death chattered in my ear.

MacGowan’s second and third shots echoed down the street. The tall man turned his vulture head and swung his tommygun away from me. I aimed slowly at his middle and fired twice. He took two steps backward and coughed. His gun clanked on the road. The van began to move.

He screamed above the clash of gears: “Wait for me, you dirty son–”

He snatched up the gun and ran stooped over, holding his belly together with one spread hand. He flung himself into the rear of the van as it wheeled in front of me. I emptied my gun at it. It passed over the man in the road and altered the shape of his body and fled up the street, the roar of its engine mounting higher and higher.

MacGowan’s rifle spoke again, three times. It didn’t stop the blue van. It passed the top of the street and climbed on toward the ridge, pushing its jumping plow of light.

Bozey came out of the firehouse as I was reloading my revolver. He walked like an old and sightless man, with his legs wide apart and his arms outstretched. His face was puffed and lacerated, his eyes swollen shut.

“Mike – Clincher – what happened?”

He stumbled over the man in the road, got down on his knees, and shook the lifeless body. “Mike? Wake up.”

His fingers sensed the body’s broken strangeness. He let out a single coyote howl and crawled away from it.

I walked toward him. The sound of my footsteps held him cowed and crouching. He lisped through jagged teeth: “Who is it? I’m blind. The bastards blinded me.”

I squatted beside him. “Let me look at those eyes.”

He raised his blind face, whimpering. I pressed his eyelids apart with my fingers. The eyeballs were bloodshot but undamaged. He peered at me through little cracks of sight.

“Who are you?”

“We’ve met before. Twice.”

He grunted in recognition and tried to grapple with me. But his movements were languid and boneless.

“Don’t you know when you’ve had enough, boy?”

I twisted my hand in the scabbed fur collar of his jacket and dragged him up to his feet and went through his clothes. No gun. But my wallet was in his hip pocket and he was wearing my wristwatch. Its face was smashed. I loosened it and slipped it off over his hand. He didn’t resist. The fight had gone out of him.

His long red hair fell over his ruined face like dragging wings. He blinked down at the body at his feet, surrounded by its Rorschach blot of blood. “So you got Faustino.”

“He was careless.”

“What about the others?”

“They got away in the van.”

“You want to know where to find them? Turn me loose and I’ll lead you to them.”

“That won’t be necessary. They’ll never get back to New Mexico.”

“You know who they are, eh?” He sounded disappointed.

“If they’re the mob you drove for in Albuquerque.”

“Yeah.” He spat red toward the body. The sight of it had rekindled his confidence and made him talkative. “My mistake was going back and trying to work with creeps. I’m a heavy thief by profession. I work alone. But Faustino offered me twenty-five G’s for the twelve hundred cases. And I let him suck me in.” His voice trembled with righteous anger. “I ask him for my payoff – the stuff is worth close to a hundred G’s in his territory – so he holds a tommygun on me and tells his cohorts to pay me off the hard way. I should have figured on a double play.”

His fingers moved across the unfamiliar contours of his face. “I kind of wish you didn’t knock off Faustino. I was counting on doing it myself.”

“You won’t be circulating. Any exterminating you do will be bedbugs in a jail cell.”

“Maybe. Where’s your home base, copper, in Las Cruces?

“Los Angeles.”

“State police?”

“Private.”

“No kidding. Who do you work for?”

“Myself.”

“That’s very interesting.” He leered with stupid cunning. “Maybe you and me can make a deal.”

“What have you got to bargain with?”

“If I told you, I wouldn’t have it. I’ll tell you this. It could be a big one, bud, a once-in-a-lifetime setup. You and me could take over Las Cruces and open it up and run it for ourselves.”