A Purple Place for Dying (18 page)

I looked back and saw the wink and swing of a flashlight along the path we had taken. It would end at the rock slope. They would come up. And this was their country, not mine. They had the guns. I had a woman, and she was gasping for breath. Rough slopes of stone rimmed two sides of the basin. They could be climbed. They went up about thirty feet. The third side was a sheer cliff, just as high. There was a cave mouth in the cliff, narrow and tall.

I said to her in a low tone, "Now do exactly as I tell you."

I had her walk beside me, taking long strides, right to the mouth of the cave. It looked deep. I found a dead branch on the sand and picked it up. We walked backward, in our own footprints in the loose sand, back to the edge of the pitch we had climbed. I looked over the edge and saw that we weren't going to make it. They were dark shapes coming up the slant too swiftly. I saw a tiny fleck of light on metal. But I had to give it a try. I sent her running to where the loose rocks looked easiest to climb and told her to head on up. I backed along after her, wiping out our tracks with broad strokes of the branch. But at any moment a head would come over the edge and we would be in plain view.

"Hold up!" one of them said sharply. I heard it a little after they did, a distant clatter of a noisy engine.

The voices of the Sosegado boys carried well in the stillness. "Be old Tom coming back from Quintana," one said. "Goddam pickup right in his way."

"You stay put. Don't climb up there. I'll go move it."

I blessed old Tom and brushed my way back to the rocky slope. I discarded the branch and climbed up. She was at the top. The stone formation there was as if some giant had picked up a loose double handful of hundred ton dominoes and stacked them there in a jumbled pile. There were a thousand hiding places. I hurried her along to one and told her to stay put.

"What are you going to do?"

"If it doesn't work out, worm yourself back into the smallest deepest place you can find, and don't make a sound. Sooner or later Buckelberry will come looking. Stay alive."

I circled and came back to the top of the cliff overlooking the cave. Using great caution I got a look at the man on the slope. He was crouched there, a red cigarette end against a burly shadow. I moved back until I was directly over the cave. I could see our footprints. They looked convincing. I felt around and located three rocks. A fifteen pound shard about eighteen inches long, and two rough chunks the size of softballs. I had heard the pickup start. He kept it in a low gear. In a little while the sound stopped as he got it off the road. The noisy engine came closer. It stopped straining and went into a rackety idling sound, and I heard voices over the sound of that engine. It started up again and chugged off through the night toward Burned Wells.

I stayed down. The human mind is strange. Scared as I was, I wanted to laugh. A woman, a cave, flight, an arsenal of murderous stones. A hundred thousand years of human progress. I could see a little cartoon of myself dragging Isobel off by her hair. I imagined she would talk about the hostility syndrome.

I did not risk another look down the slope. A silhouette against a starry sky can catch the eye. I heard a clink of metal against rock. Then low talk. They were closer together than before. I could not hear what they were saying. Their basic plan, as I imagined it, seemed sound. How many times can they make you inhale cyanide? So kill the nosy couple, drag them down and dump them into the back of their car. Pull it off the rocks. Knock the blurred windshield out with a stone. Drive it down to the valley floor and across country. Push it into a narrow arroyo, cover it with rocks and brush. And be in bed before the sun comes up.

When one spoke again, the voice was alarmingly close.

"Run right into that cave, Pablo."

"With a gun, maybe?"

"Had a gun, he'd wait in those rocks below to bushwhack us."

"Pretty big mean-lookin' man, boy."

"I seen him too. Hey! You in there. You and the girl come on out, nobody gets hurt." They waited. The silence was intense. "Then I come in shooting."

"Charlie, maybe it goes right on through."

"Give me that light. I'm going on in."

I had wormed back from the edge slightly. I took the big shard in both hands and came up onto my knees near the edge. I raised the stone high above my head, then hurled it down onto the one who was right beneath me, shining his light into the cave, his body crouched and cautious. The other one was about fifteen feet back, and he was very very good. As I was hurling the rock downward, he took a pot shot from the hip. The rock was about even with my chest when the slug hit it and whined away into darkness. I felt the impact in my hands just as I released the rock. I went rolling backwards without delay, wondering if the shot would send my target hopping back out of range. But as I rolled back, I heard a heavy, moist and somewhat hollow sound, as if a ripe pumpkin had been dropped on a cement floor.

I kept flat. He had no way of knowing I had not taken the slug in some small degree. Or even seriously. When the angle is correct, they will ricochet nicely off skull bone.

There was silence. I heard a groan of anguish and heartbreak. Suddenly a wild voice yelled, "You kilt him, you son of a bitch! You smashed my brother's head, goddam you!"

"Go home, Pablo. This is more than you can handle, boy."

There was another silence. From further away he yelled, "I'm going to gut-shoot you!" He was moving back to get a better angle at me. I snaked my way to where the stones were plentiful, and with great eagerness and considerable alarm, I kept the air full of stones, arching them high, aiming them where I thought he had to be.

I scuttled ten feet to the side and risked a look. He was heading up the slope we had climbed, the slope above the sandy area. I had a good rock and I took aim. It bounced off his hip and sent him sprawling, but even as he fell he managed to get a shot off. A shot close to the head neither whines nor whistles. It makes one audible little explosive huff, very brief and very persuasive. I rolled away and threw another stone into his area.

Scrambling swiftly, I picked a different place to take a look over the edge. He had come back down the slope of loose rock. He was crossing the sand. He went cat-like down the solid pitch of rock below the sand, after stopping for a moment near the body, out of my line of vision. He went quite a way down, then turned and stopped, partially flattened against the slope.

"You hear me up there?" he called.

"I hear you just fine."

Sounding much more calm and under control, he said, "I'm not crazy. You get no more chance to chunk me in the head with a stone."

"So go away"

"You'd like that fine. Come dawn I'm coming up after you. You killed my blood brother. I make you a promise, man. You think about it all night. While you're gut-shot and dying in the morning, you can watch me with your woman."

"Your mouth is big, Pablo. Just like your brother's."

"You can't make me sore now, so I come up there and you have a chance of busting me with a rock. I got a place where I can watch this hill, this whole side of it, and you can't get down the back side of it. I see good in the nighttime, man."

We had been raising our voices at first, but now they found a natural level in that desert silence.

"Which one of you brave boys killed Mona Yeoman? You, or this cat-meat brother up here?"

"You don't make me sore, man. I killed her. Good shot, huh? Not this rifle gun. What I was going to do, I was going to move it just a hair, and put the next one into you. Save everybody a lot of trouble. But the round I used on her, the casing split and the shell case stuck in the chamber, and it pulled the catch off the ejector."

"You boys were real bright. You couldn't do anything right, could you?"

"It's going to be all right from now on, man."

"Is that what your half-sister says? Is that what Dolores keeps telling you?"

"Doe figured it out pretty good."

"She's as stupid as you are, Pablo."

"You think so? What Doe told us, maybe Mona hired you to kill the old man. That's why Mona had to die first, but he shouldn't know she was dead, or maybe he'd make out a new will before we could get to him. You think that's stupid?"

"Killing people is always stupid."

"Doe isn't stupid. Look, she found out from Mona the best way we could grab that professor. It had to look like she went off with him, right? And he told us where Mona was going to take you, to that cabin. That made a good place, right? You should hear him, that man with all the big words, making little smiles at us, saying we shouldn't. But the last three minutes before we blew the rocks down on him, he spent those three minutes screaming."

"You've got a lot of class, Pablo. A lot of brains. Just like your pal Pompa. Just like that trash you sent on that airplane ride to El Paso. You're as dead as your brother, but you don't know it yet."

"Don't you worry about me. Everything is fine. I kill you both and hide you and go away a couple years. Doe has one smart lawyer, with all the proof about Yeoman being her daddy. I'll bury you and I'll bury my brother Charlie. She'll be rich, man. I can come back in a couple years and get in touch real careful."

"She won't be around, Pablo. And she won't be rich. She took the old man some coffee. Buckelberry's checking out where she got the strychnine. Probably from you boys. The ranches use it for vermin, don't they?"

The stars were bright. A dog-thing hollered a hundred miles away. Somebody walked over my grave. "You so smart, man. Who saw Doe? Nobody!" But there was some defiance there, of the kind that comes from uncertainty, perhaps from fear.

I did not understand these people. Did they think themselves involved in some sort of crusade? A man, his wife, her lover, one hired assassin and one of the brothers-all dead. What turns on this kind of a bloody engine? This Pablo wanted to boost the score from five to seven. If the state could be depended upon to exact its own variety of jungle justice, seven would become nine. And for what?

"Pablo?"

"Too bad it won't be a knife for you."

"I just wonder about something. Dolores knew he was her father. She worked for them, for Jass and Mona. For years. Then she left and got married. Then all of a sudden… all this starts."

"You bet your ass, man. It starts good."

"She got hold of you boys to help her."

"Help her get rich. Why not?"

"But wasn't Yeoman good to her?"

There was a chilling cackle of laughter from him. "So good, man. So real good. That's why, man. How much good can you stand?"

I knew I couldn't get any further in that direction. He had stopped making sense. "Where's Mona's body?"

"They'll find it. They can't help finding it."

"Let me ask you one more thing. It was pretty dark in your mother's place. I couldn't get a good look at you and your brother. But I had the feeling I'd seen you before."

''We move around pretty good," he said, very casually. "I saw you good through that scope. Six power. I had those hairs crossed on your belly. No wind at all. Five hundred yards."

"Were you parked a little way down the street that day I visited your sister?"

"Man, you dream it, don't you?"

"What difference does it make now, Pablo?" After a long silence he said, "She like to kill us both that day, coming to see her in the daytime. Charlie tells her about how we got Pompa, how good he is with a knife. She cried some. Imagine that? She cried over that old man."

I had been feeling cautiously around in darkness and found a stone that fit my hand very nicely. It was a little too heavy to throw in normal fashion, but I could heave it stiff-arm like a grenade. It was a very long chance of doing any harm, but any chance was worth taking. The angle was bad. He was perhaps thirty yards away down the slope of rock. I would have to come up a little to do it, risking a momentary silhouette.

I counted to three and came up and threw. An instant after release, as I was already dropping back into cover, I heard the shot and felt a dirty little tug against the fabric right at the point of my shoulder. A tug and a faint impression of heat. He was dishearteningly good. I heard my stone clack against the solid rock and bound on down to the foot of the pitch.

He called to me a few times. I kept silent, hoping to con him into thinking he had hit home, hoping he would come up to take a closer look. He stopped calling. I heard a sound further away. I wormed forward and looked and saw him in the starlight, thirty feet from the bottom of the slope, walking directly away from it. He walked to a knoll about a hundred and fifty yards away, and I lost him as he started up it. He had a good place. We would have to come down into the flats if we left the bigger hill. Unless it clouded over, hardly possible, we'd be bugs on a tabletop for that handy-dandy rifle. It was about all the proof I needed that we couldn't get down the other side of our fortress.

As I rolled up onto hands and knees and turned away from the edge, I turned directly into an impact of animal warmth that nearly jumped my heart right out of my chest. She had moved like a spook. Silvery highlights on the moist of an eye, wet of underlip, glad warm exhalation of her breath.

"All that shooting and yelling," she whispered.