Shirley Murphy - The Cat, the Devil, and Lee Fontana

The boy’s shoulders had straightened. “I can do that.”

“Can you drive truck?”

“I can drive that truck.”

Lee had nodded, thinking Tony would do. But it wasn’t long before the kid was strutting like a Spanish rooster, goading the men. “ Estoy el segundo jefe, you guys. Don’t give me any shit,” and the next thing Lee knew a fistfight erupted between Tony and a dark-skinned older man. Lee, jumping over a row of cantaloupes, grabbed the two of them and jerked Tony around to face him, his temper flaring hot.

“What the hell did I hire you for! To stop fights, not start them.”

Tony looked at him innocently. “I was only keeping order, señor . . .”

The men snickered.

Lee shoved Tony toward the rows and whirled around, staring at the idle crew. “The bunch of you get back to work or I’ll run your sorry asses clear to hell off the place.” He’d burned with rage, almost out of control. The other men looked at him, and quieted and turned away.

Lee didn’t think he had the authority to fire anyone, but they seemed to think he did. He looked Tony over, trying to quiet the fire in his belly. “If you can’t straw boss like a man, Valdez, I’ll pick someone who will.”

Tony quieted, too, looking at him first with anger, and then sheepishly. For the next three days Tony behaved himself, he didn’t goad the men, and he stopped two serious arguments capably enough. But then on Friday evening, when Lee moved to the right seat and let Tony drive, heading up the levee, the kid double-clutched it, jammed it into second and floorboarded it, shooting up the slope so fast the front wheels left the ground and the rear end skidded toward the drop-off. Lee grabbed the dashboard, and the pickers laughed and cheered.

“What the hell are you doing, Valdez! Slow down! This ain’t no cayuse you’re breaking!”

“Just getting the truck up the hill, señor.”

“Yeah, and have the damn thing in the canal, on top of the pickers.” He wanted to smash the kid’s face. “If you can’t do better than that, hombre, you’ll ride in the back from now on.” Lee had been mad and rightly so, but in the ranch yard as he swung out of the truck, he wondered if that much anger was called for, wondered at the explosion of blazing rage that had filled him.

Dusk was gathering as Delgado’s Cadillac pulled into the yard. Lee turned over his day’s tally to Jake and moved away to his cabin to sit down on the steps catching his breath. Maybe he’d get used to this gig, and maybe he wouldn’t. On the hot evening breeze, the smell of beans and chili from the cookhouse drew him. Rising, he moved inside the cabin to douse himself with water, to gulp water, then he headed on out and down the steps, anticipating an isolated supper at the long tables, among the Spanish-speaking men.

Jake was just crossing from the house to the big white Cadillac parked beside the mess hall. There was no mistaking Ramon Delgado, as the boss stepped out. Looked like the fancy new car had been clean and shining when he left the home ranch this morning, before it picked up the day’s collection of road dust. Lee could see the gleam of red upholstery inside. Along the back shelf beneath the rear window lay a handsome serape carefully folded, and on the hood, where other cars had radiator ornaments, Delgado had mounted a set of polished, brass-tipped longhorns that reached out just to the edge of the fenders.

Ramon Delgado was a big man, half a head taller than Jake and maybe twenty pounds heavier. He looked to be all muscle under his Levi’s jacket and pearl-buttoned shirt. His boots were three colors of fine soft leather, heavily stitched in flower patterns. His black Stetson sported a silver hatband. Lee imagined a nice home place up in Hemet, maybe an adobe house low and rambling, green lawns irrigated by the Colorado and shaded by rows of date palms. Everything about Delgado looked rich and successful; and beneath the wide black brim, his face, hard-angled and square, had the look of a man to be wary of.

Beside him, Jake looked thin and dry, the leathery look of a cowman, faded frontier shirt, faded jeans and cracked boots. Lee watched the two men head inside the mess hall, eyeing the four bulging money bags they carried, bags marked with a bank logo that Lee couldn’t read, and each sealed at the top with a green drawstring and a metal clasp. Watching Delgado with speculation, he headed on in, to collect his pay.

The pickers, the minute they saw Delgado’s car, had piled out of the trucks laughing and talking and crowding fast into the mess hall for their wages. They were lined up inside, shoving and jostling, eager to pocket the week’s take, twenty to twenty-five dollars apiece, depending on how fast a fellow worked, more money than they’d ever see in Mexico. And the bags held, as well, the wages for Lee himself and for Jake and the other five foremen.

He knew from Jake that Delgado made the rounds to all four ranches every Friday, heading out from Hemet, knew that Blythe was his last stop, that he’d stay with Jake overnight, head back home in the morning. The same drill, week after week. Leave Hemet at dawn carrying all four payrolls, carrying enough cash to set a fellow up real nice.

Maybe not as much as Lee would like to have on him before heading for Mexico, but a nice start. And how could Delgado miss a week’s wages? The thought quickened Lee’s pulse, wondering where Delgado kept the money until he headed out. In the local Hemet bank, maybe picked it up the night before? Or in a home safe?

If the safe was one of those big walk-in jobs, that would be a poser. He wished he’d paid closer attention to the half-dozen master safe crackers he’d known over the years in one prison or another. Though he had learned some, all right.

But if there was a safe, what other kind of security did Delgado have? Dogs? Guards? Some kind of electronic device?

No, it would be better to hit him just as he started out in the morning from Hemet, wait until he was on the road alone, then force him over. He’d need firearms; and he needed to know what weapons Delgado carried, and where, what weapons he had stashed in that big Cadillac, and what weapons he carried on him.

But, picturing himself forcing Delgado’s car off the road, a tremor of fear touched Lee. Was he up to this? Up to handling Delgado alone, as he had always handled his victims in the past, except for those years he ran with Jake? After parting from Jake, he’d blown a couple of jobs, and when he took a good look at what he was now, an honest look at how he’d aged, at how weak he’d grown compared to the man he had been, he didn’t much like what he saw.

But then a dark sense of power kicked in, a sudden surge of certainty. He could do this. What was the matter with him? A dark vitality stirred his blood, strength burned in him, and a hard envy of Ramon Delgado, jealousy for all Delgado had that Lee had never had. A heady resentment boiled in him making him scoff at the idea he was too old to take down Delgado, that he was biting off more than he could handle.

He’d bring this off, he thought, smiling, he could take what he wanted and maybe—maybe he could set Jake up for the fall.

He thought about that, about laying the groundwork for Jake’s arrest, setting up the clues, maybe lift one of Jake’s guns from the house, with Jake’s fingerprints on it, maybe something else of Jake’s left “forgotten” under the seat of the Cadillac. He’d stash the money where no one would find it, return to the ranch innocent as a babe. And when the cops came nosing around he’d be there to sympathize with Lucita, to comfort her, to be enraged at Jake’s betrayal of all they’d had together.

If Lee could hear the cat’s whisper that Lucita would never believe such a story, that thought didn’t last long. The dark presence told him more forcefully that he could do this, he could lay out a foolproof scenario that left Jake guilty beyond doubt, a plan that even Lucita would have to believe.