Джо Горес - Cases

He drove with both hands on the wheel, ten and two o’clock, steering with short quick sawing movements as if he were hitting 150 on an oval track with pursuing race cars tight behind.

“I was drinking beer in a bar on the west side one night and a cop who was usually on the east side came in and put a hand on my shoulder. ‘I see you on the east side now and then,’ he says to me. ‘I never see you,’ says to him.”

Dunc capped the water jug. “They’re bad news, all right.”

In Rochester the cops had been benign, only throwing them out of Emerson’s Pool Hall once in a while because they were too young to hear that sort of language. But on the road he’d found cops to be only grief.

“Get you down to the station house and ask you over and over until you tell two stories, just for meanness, then they stick you in jail. I mind my own business. In Oklahoma City, I was there a year and a half, you always see me alone. No one’s got anything on me, I can look anybody right in the eye.”

Dunc shifted in the seat. His gut was starting to stiffen up for sure. The desert flowed by outside the open windows. He found it hard to keep his eyes open — forty-eight hours without sleep...

He came up out of dark nightmare with a start. Jesus! He stole a look over at his companion, afraid he might have screamed aloud as he woke. But it must have been just long enough to have the dream he already couldn’t remember.

“... drove a load of vegetables up to Fairbanks last year on the Alaskan Highway. The boss, he drove with me on the way up, but I had to drive it alone on the way down. Got seventy a week and board, he couldn’t get no experienced drivers to run that highway for less than a hundred a week.”

Dunc had driven the Alcan himself two years before, when he was nineteen. He’d driven and driven and driven, two thousand miles from Minnesota, had thought he’d be in Alaska and was still in Idaho.

“Gotta be careful with women,” said the driver. “I had a sort of steady girl, God what a beautiful body — she was a beauty queen up there in Oklahoma City. She was only about twenty. I had to pull it out each time with her, but I told her it was better than her having a baby. Maybe your wife’s playing around on you, but I’m never going to tell you. Man gets his name known that way. They’ve never had my name down yet and if I can help it they never will.”

Somehow they’d gotten his name down, and Dunc was alone in a strange city at 6:15 in the morning — St. Louis, Chicago, maybe New York. Then the familiar bells of St. Olaf’s started playing the Stabat Mater, and he realized he was walking down Tenth Street in Minneapolis, with a killer stalking him.

He came up behind a limping man who wore blue denims, an old sport jacket that didn’t fit, a green shirt, a brown cap, and a lumberyard apron. His face was round, red, vacant. His voice was slow, high-pitched, singsongy. For sure not the killer.

“We get a three-day weekend for Decoration Day this year,” the man said. “Three days for the Fourth of July, too, even though it falls on a Saturday — we get the Monday.”

They started across Second Avenue together; dust eddied about them in little swirls.

“A man is trying to kill me,” said Dunc in desperation.

His companion thrust a key into his hand. “Second apartment house, room at the top of the stairs on the left.”

Dunc turned off as the other man limped on down Tenth, looking straight ahead. Neither of them said goodbye. He pounded up the stairs, used the key, ducked into the room.

A girl his own age was sitting on the edge of the bed. She wore a red knit dress that clung beautifully to her curves. Great legs, dimples at the ends of her wide full-lipped mouth, crystal-clear wide-set hazel eyes, and a mass of chestnut hair that framed a round face. Short nose, lovely arched brows.

Dunc looked out between dingy lace curtains. In the ground-floor window across the street was a big Bible, open on a lectern. Bright light shining on it reflected a golden nimbus on the bulky man standing beside the window, so one side of him glowed, the other was in darkness. His felt hat was pulled low over his eyes and his hands were bunched in the pockets of his tan overcoat. Dunc knew each fisted hand held a gun.

The killer started across the street without looking either way. Dunc whirled away from the window, terrified. The chestnut-haired girl on the bed was smiling a Mona Lisa smile.

“Running away won’t do you any good.” She had a musical voice, even though she was speaking gravely. “You’ll have to face this. Here. Now.”

He listened at the door. Heavy footsteps on the stairs. He grabbed a chunky brass lamp from the bureau, stood against the wall beside the door. At least he’d go down swinging.

The door was kicked open to rebound off the wall on the side opposite of Dunc. The killer’s guns came through first, ranging the room. Dunc was already swinging the lamp. The killer made a strangled sound, his round red face was a mask of blood, bone, shattered teeth. He sagged as Dunc jerked him inside. A second blow wasn’t going to be needed.

“Now you can go on,” the girl’s Mona Lisa smile told him.

“You okay? You were sort of yelling out in your sleep.”

Dunc sat up, drenched in sweat, knuckling his eyes. He’d been sprawled over against the door. The Merc was stopped in a narrow rutted one-track dirt road going from the highway into a desert made otherworldly by the rising moon.

“I go north to my folks’ place from here. You’re welcome to come along, but it’s twenty miles off the highway and—”

“No, this’ll be swell.” Dunc’s door creaked in the desert twilight. “I’ll get something here in no time.”

He reached in the back to haul out his duffel bag. His gut, from Arnie’s kick, was stiff and sore.

“Hey, better take the water jug, too. I won’t need it Tore I get home.”

The big jug three-quarters full of brackish water was a real gift. Dunc’s dream was still vivid in his mind. If he saw the girl in real life, would he know her? Though the killer had worn a different face, he had to have been Captain Hent.

Dunc watched the Mercury crunch away up the narrow track, following its twinned headlights bouncing along the uneven road until their glow was gone and the car’s rattling had diminished to silence. Nice guy, but he really covered up in the clinches.

Alone in the moonlight, Dunc spun around in a circle, arms wide, heavy work shoes scuffing the blacktop, then sat down on his duffel bag. It was so bright that he could write up the latest ride in his spiral notebook by moonlight. He was getting it all down, good and bad, the expected and the surprises. From the notebook he would write short stories, maybe someday when he got the guts for it, a novel...

He heard a thin distant whine on the desert air. He stood up, stuffing the notebook into the duffel bag in case it might be a ride, but it was going east. The massive semi truck-trailer festooned with colored lights whooshed by him, the warm wind almost knocking him off his feet.

He’d been east. He wanted to go west.

On the Glee Club’s Easter tour to California three months before, he’d seen his first ocean, his first palm tree, his first desert, and, in San Francisco just across the Embarcadero from the Ferry Building, his first illegal after-hours joint. He and four others from the club had sung all night for beer before running across the street to catch the Southern Pacific train to Los Angeles without even getting back to the St. Francis to pack.

A little buff and gray animal with a bushy black-tipped tail trotted across the road under the paper-cutout moon. Enormous ears, tiny body. Desert fox, kit fox, trotting with that tongue-lolling grin all foxes wear going about their business, it was gone into the mesquite silent as cloud shadow.