14••••

THE NEXT MORNING, THE CONDEMNED MAN, WHO HAD slept like a child and showered like a teenager preparing for a date, ate as hearty a breakfast as the Holiday Inn could provide, then stepped outside to contemplate the delicate air and the clear blue sunshine of the high plains. Interstate 25 was two hundred feet to the east, though, and the diesel stench took the edge off my enjoyment. Sixty-five miles south, the gray cloud of Denver’s smog humped over the horizon like a whale’s back. But the morning was finally ruined when I saw Trahearne sitting in his Cadillac barge, an obscene grin on his round face. He looked like a fat, mean child.

“What’s happening?” I said, trying to stay calm.

“Hell, boy, I checked every motel in town before this one,” he said. “I thought you had more taste than to stay at a Holiday Inn.”

“Some of my best friends are Holiday Inns,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

“Looking for you, what else?” he ..said. “After we talked, I decided to drive down to Meriwether, and when I got there, your secretary told me that you had driven down here, so I picked up a couple of hitchhikers, and they helped with the driving, and we drove all night and here I am …” His voice ran slowly down, like one of those talking dolls whose string had been pulled too many times.

“Let’s not have any more lying, okay?” I said as I opened the door of the Caddy and got in. “No more lying.”

“I couldn’t find her without you, son,” he sighed. “I didn’t know where to look.”

“You were already here when you called me, weren’t you?” I asked, and he nodded. “And you sent her daddy a postcard, didn’t you?” His head rose and sank once, then lay heavily on his chest. “Why?”

“I’ve got to know who she’s seeing,” he muttered.

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll show you.”

“Would you drive?” he asked.

There seemed no need to hurry, so I eased the convertible through town. Traheame didn’t say anything until we were four or five miles on the other side of town on the Laramie highway. As we topped the first hill and dropped into a little valley beyond a hogback ridge, he said something, but the wind through the convertible covered his words.

“What?” I asked.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Not sorry enough to suit me, old man,” I said, and he started to weep. “Stop your goddamned whimpering,” I said. “Just stop it. You know what she said when I told her that you’d seen that movie?” He shook his head. “She said, ‘That poor, poor man.’ She’s too good for you, you know that?”

“God do I ever know it,” he said.

As we turned off 287 onto the Poudre Canyon road, I asked him, “Why? What the hell did you have in mind? How did you know where to go?”

“I didn’t have anything in mind,” he said, “except finding her. I was out there, driving around in circles

and drinking, you know, hoping to find her but not looking for her, you know, and when I stopped at the Cottontail, I couldn’t … Well, the little whore must have told you.” “Told me what?”

“I couldn’t get it up,” he said blankly. “She didn’t even remember you,” I said. “That’s even worse.”

“If you want them to remember you, old man, stay out of whorehouses,” I said. “How did you know to go to Sonoma?”

“Once she was gone, off on a trip, and I went through her things and found a clipping from the San Francisco paper, a review of a Little Theatre group production of Anouilh’s Antigone. When I read the description of the girl who played the lead, I knew it had to be her.” Then he paused. “I’ve always known she wasn’t who she said she was,” he admitted, “knew right from the beginning. She had never been to t!:te south of France, never been to Sun Valley before that summer. At first it seemed exciting, you know, not knowing who she really was. But it was like the promise she made me give her before she would marry me—the novelty wore off quickly and began to drive me mad.”

“What promise?” I said as I parked the Caddy behind Melinda’s VW. A battered gray GMC pickup was parked in front. It looked like it had been wrecked once, then towed out of the river. “What promise?” I repeated.

“That she could come and go as she pleased,” Trahearne muttered. “That I wouldn’t ask any questions.”

“She promised you the same thing, didn’t she?” He nodded, and glanced around. “Does he live here?” he asked.

“He?”

“You know, the man … the man she sees.” 194

“She’s supposed to meet me down here around ten,” I said. “I’ll let her tell you about it.”

“It’s you now, isn’t it,” he said sadly, a statement not a question. “It’s you.”

“Just shut the fuck up, all right?” I said, then got out and walked across the road to watch the river.

What a case. Private detectives are supposed to find missing persons and solve crimes. So far in this one I had committed all the crimes—everything from grand theft auto to criminal stupidity—and everybody but poor old Rosie and I had known where Betty Sue Flowers was from the beginning. I had the odd feeling that if I didn’t go home soon, instead of ending up with a bank account fat with Catherine Trahearne’s money I would end up with holes in my boots and moths in my pocket. The more- I thought about it, the angrier I became. I stood up and charged back across the highway, shouting at Trahearne.

“I’m sending you a bill, old man, and I don’t care if it breaks your ass, you better come up with the scratch!”

“All right,” he answered meekly.

“Oh, stop being such a damned dope,” I said. “She’s up on that mountain staying with a woman who saved her life once and she’s not doing a number with me—she’s never done a number with anybody since she made the colossal mistake of falling in love with your sorry ass.”

“All right,” he said, not believing a word of it.

As I thought about it, I wasn’t too sure that I believed it either. Like too many men, Trahearne and I didn’t know how to deal with a woman like Melinda, caught as we were between our own random lusts and a desire for faithful women so primitive and fierce that it must have been innate, atavistic, as uncontrollable as a bodily function. That was when I stopped being angry at the old man.

“What time is it?” I asked him. “Ten-thirty,” he said.

“She should be here soon,” I said. “Let’s have a midmorning nip.”

He looked startled, then reached under the seat for the bottle. As we shared the whiskey, I wondered how long men had been forgiving each other over strong drink for being fools.

At eleven, when Melinda still hadn’t shown up, I hiked up the trail toward Selma’s place, Trahearne following at his own pace, ten steps and a halt for some heavy breathing.

“I’ll go ahead,” I told him, “and warn them of your arrival so it won’t be so much of a surprise.”

“It’ll be a hell of a surprise if I get there,” he joked as I went on ahead. Two switchbacks up the hill, I could still hear his tortured breaths.

By the time I reached the clearing, my lungs were working overtime too. As I paused to rest a bit, I noticed a black splotch in the dust of the trail and splatters of dried blood on the rocks beside it, then I wondered where the dogs were. Across the clearing, the kennel gate stood open, as did the bank of small animal cages.

I ran to the large cabin, but it was empty, so I ran outside and around it. A young boy was digging a large hole with a pick and a young girl knelt beside a pile of dead dogs and birds and small furry animals. Selma sat on the far side of the clearing, her back against a pine, a shotgun cradled on her knees.

“What the hell happened?” I said to the boy.

He started, then climbed out of the hole quickly, the pick raised like a club. An ugly mouse closed his left eye, and he spit blood between broken teeth.

“You’ll have to kill me this time, you son of a bitch,” he said as he came at me with the pick.

“Hey,” I said, holding up my arms and backing away. He didn’t stop. The girl beside the grave moaned and covered her face with her hands. “Hey, wait a minute,” I said, but he kept coming. “Calm down, son,” I said, still walking backward, “I didn’t do anything.”

“You led them here!” Selma screamed as she stood up and pointed the double-barreled shotgun in my general direction.

The boy with the pick glanced over my shoulder, and I heard the scuffle of feet on the rocky dirt. I didn’t wait to find out what the sudden inhalation of breath behind me meant; I ducked and rolled away, catching a glimpse of the other young girl as she swung the ax she carried. When it hit the ground where I had been standing, the blade glanced off a rock and the ax bounced out of her hands. She didn’t take her eyes off me, though, she just locked her fiercely calm gaze on my face as she picked up the ax again. There’s nothing like a woman with an ax to get you moving. I chunked a handful of dirt and stones at the boy with the pick, scrambled to my feet, and ran back to the trail, stepping high and moving out. The ax looped and whistled over my head, and I picked up the pace. Just as I hit the tree line, Selma touched off the first barrel, and shot dusted a small pine to my left. I dodged, and she got a piece of me with the second barrel. The edge of the pattern stung me high on the right side but it didn’t knock me down. It helped my progress, though. I abandoned the trail to leap straight downhill through the small trees.

Combat at close range is the sort of thing you have to train for until you operate by reflex. Once the ball is rolling, there usually isn’t much time to think and just barely enough time to react. It had been nine years since I led a squad with the 1st Air Cav in the central highlands of Vietnam, and Trahearne’s Pacific war was twenty years beyond that. When I found him on the trail midway down the hill, we were two civilians scared out of our wits, as effective a combat unit as a couple of headless chickens.

“Jesus Christ, what happened?” he asked me in a breathless whisper.

“I don’t know,” I said, trying to think. “Go back down the hill,” I told him. “Take your car a mile up the highway and if I’m not back in an hour, go get the sheriff.”

“I’ve got a shotgun in my trunk,” he said.

“There’s already too many shotguns up here,” I said. “Just do what I say.”

“What are you going to do?” he asked with a hurt look. When he remembered his war, he remembered being in command.

“Going back up the hill,” I said, “and you get your ass down it.”

“Lemme go with you,” he whined.

“Move,” I said, then hit him on the shoulders with the heels of my hands.

The big man went ass over teakettle, and I dodged into the trees, circling right over the lower end of the ridge and into the next drainage, then I dropped down the far side of the ridge about a hundred yards, and worked my way back up toward the clearing. If I had been in better shape, I would have gone the other way, uphill, and dropped down on the clearing. If I had had any sense, I would have gone home.

Fifteen minutes later, I bellied up to the clearing behind the large cabin. Three of them were on the far side, peering into the trees beside the trail—Selma with the shotgun, the boy with his pick, and the crazy girl with her ax—but the other young girl sat on the edge of the unfinished grave, still weeping into her hands.

Sweat poured off me so furiously that I couldn’t tell if my back was still bleeding, and I was too tired to crawl on my belly anymore. I stood and walked up behind the girl as quietly as I could, with all the cunning and grace and animal stealth of an old milk cow, but she didn’t hear me until I sat down beside her.

“Don’t be afraid,” I said to her. “I won’t hurt you.”

She fainted right into my arms. I lifted her in front of me like a shield, then shouted at the others. They turned and walked back toward me.

“One more step and I break her neck!” I shouted melodramatically. She was so limp her neck might as well have been broken. The three of them stopped, then took a hesitant step. “Throw all that crap away!” The boy flung his pick to the ground in disgust and Selma sat the shotgun at her feet but the girl with the ax kept it on her shoulder. “You gotta throw it away, honey,” I said.

“Don’t honey me, motherfucker,” she answered calmly, clutching the ax handle tightly.

“Please, young lady,” Trahearne growled from the trail as he lumbered into view, “please put it down.” His face was fiery red and his shirt completely soaked with sweat, but he walked straight up, carrying the ugliest shotgun I had ever seen-^a riot gun, a 12-gauge Remington pump with an 8-shot magazine, a 20-inch barrel, a pistol grip, and a metal stock that folded over the receiver and barrel. I knew what it was because I had one just like it. “Please,” he said again.

She let the ax head fall to the ground beside her tennis shoe but she kept her hand on the handle. I was willing to settle for that. Without their weapons, Selma and the boy lost their angry spirit, and their shoulders sagged like empty sacks, but the girl stood defiant and erect. She even managed to spit on the ground toward me. I couldn’t have spit if my life depended on it. I lifted the unconscious girl and walked toward the cabin.

“Where the hell did you come from?” I asked Trahearne.

“I don’t know,” he said, “but wherever it was, it was a hell of a walk.” A grin brightened his tired face.

“Let’s go in the house and sit down,” I told everybody as I carried the girl toward the doorway. They all followed like ducks in a row.