Going Nowhere Fast (15 page)

So here we were, poor Dog and me: hidden from everyone's view, alone and unarmed, facing the least friendly end of a maniac's gun on the one hand, and a three-thousand-foot drop on the other.

Does that sound like a bad hair day to you, or what?

"Step farther back, if you would," Ray said, directing us to back up until the jagged edge of the Canyon was less than a yard behind us. "There. That's fine. Just fine."

"If it's the money you want, take it," Bad Dog said, holding his roll of bills forward for Ray to accept.

"Thanks, no. But that was a nice thought." He and Phil turned to each other and had a good laugh.

"Well, if you don't want money, what do you want?" I asked, starting to feel more angry than afraid. "You certainly aren't doing all this just to get a newspaper story."

"That, dear lady, is quite true," Ray said. "We're not after a story. And as you might guess, we never were. What we're after is information. Some simple answers to a few simple questions."

"Like what?"

"Like where is Filly Gee?" Phil jumped in.

"Who?"

"Filly Gee, Mrs. Loudermilk," Ray said, his voice getting a sharp, unexpected edge to it. "The man Mr. Bettis told you about before he died. Remember?"

"I don't know what you're talking about. Mr. Bettis never told any of us anything. He was dead when we found him, we've told you that a thousand times."

"He never mentioned the name Filly Gee to you? Or told you where he might be hiding?"

"No. We don't know any Philly Gees. Who or what is Philly Gee?"

"Just a man worth a lot of money to whoever helps us find him. Does that refresh your memory at all?"

"How much money are you talkin' about?" Bad Dog asked.

I would have stuffed a bar of soap down his throat if I had had one.

"Oh, I don't know," Ray said, pretending to be mulling it over. "Say, fifteen grand?"

"You could offer us fifteen million, and it wouldn't make any difference," I said. "We don't know this Philly Gee of yours. We'd never even heard of him until this very minute."

"He's got three toes, right?" Bad Dog asked.

Ray gave Phil a brief glance, then turned back to Dog and nodded. "That's right."

I suddenly wished my husband were here; nothing would have suited the moment better than a good "Jeez Looweez."

"Then you do know him," Ray said.

"No. We don't," I cut in, slapping a hand over my son's open mouth.

"Mrs. Loudermilk, if the young man wants to talk, I think you should let him talk."

"He doesn't know what he's saying! You dangled fifteen thousand dollars in front of him, so he said the first thing that came into his head. He was
guessing
."

"Guessing? He was guessing that the man we're looking for just happens to have three toes? Please, Mrs. Loudermilk. You're insulting my intelligence."

"Mine too," Phil said.

"Look. We saw a picture, that's all," I told them. "Of a foot with three toes. But we know absolutely nothing about who it belongs to."

"What kind of picture?" Ray asked, sounding very skeptical.

"It was a drawing. A sketch."

"Whose sketch? Who drew it?"

"We don't know, but… we suspect Mr. Bettis drew it."

"You suspect?"

It was a risky thing to do, but I told them everything. It seemed pretty clear to me that they were going to hear it all anyway, one way or another, so rather than oblige them one answer to one question at a time, I just filled them in all at once, barely pausing to take a breath. I figured that once they were made to understand how little we knew about Bettis and "Philly Gee," they'd let us go, and take their inquisitive little minds elsewhere.

But I figured wrong.

"What do you think, Phil?" Ray asked his partner when I'd told them all there was to tell.

"I think she's telling it straight. They can't help us."

"Yeah. That's what I think too."

"What about the pictures she talked about? Shouldn't we go get them?"

"Naw." Ray shook his head. "She says the house isn't there anymore, and I believe her. What are we going to do, drive down there to stare at an empty lot?" He turned to me. "I'm very sorry for all the trouble, Mrs. Loudermilk. But Phil and me, we had to be certain you weren't holding out on us. I hope you understand."

"Frankly, I don't," I said. "But then, I don't really want to. I just want to go back to my husband and forget this whole thing ever happened. Now, if you gentlemen will excuse us…"

I took Bad Dog's hand and started to walk away, but Phil stepped smoothly to one side to bar our way.

"I was afraid he was gonna do that," Bad Dog said.

"I wish I could trust you and your son to keep quiet about all this, Mrs. Loudermilk, because if I could, it would not be necessary to kill you," Ray said. "But I can't. I don't know either of you that well."

"Now wait a minute, man," Bad Dog said, his voice shaking.

"Again, my apologies. You're both victims of circumstance more than any anything else, but I feel responsible for you all the same. Rest assured I'll try to be a better judge of character in the future." He turned to Phil and said, "Make it quick."

Then he walked away.

Left alone to do the dirty work, Phil smiled at Dog and me and said, "Don't worry, folks. This isn't going to hurt a bit. I'm a professional."

With that, I closed my eyes and waited to die.

And waited.

And waited.

But nothing happened. The gun didn't go
pop
, the pain didn't come, my heart didn't slam to a stop. Time merely stood still, marred only by sound. The sound of some kind of struggle.

I opened my eyes again.

And there stood Dozer Meadows, pinning Phil to the trunk of a tree with one hand clamped tight over the smaller man's throat. Even in the dim moonlight, I could see Phil's eyes getting bigger and his face turning an unsettling shade of some undetermined color. The gun was still in his right hand, however, and he appeared to be fighting with everything he had to raise it from his side up to where Meadows's menacing face loomed.

"Put the gun down, man," Meadows advised him.

But Phil wouldn't listen.

"I'm warnin' you, man. Put the gun
down
, all right? Right now!"

Again Phil chose to ignore the order. The gun rose another fraction of an inch in his hand, and Meadows saw it.

Without another word, the big man lifted Phil over his head and tossed him into the Canyon. I felt something fly over my shoulder, and then I heard the screams.

I thought the echoes would never die.

10

"Mrs. Loudermilk, my name is Alex Medavoy."

He was a handsome young man in a very bland way, tall but not thin, dark-haired and clean-shaven. Clean-shaven to the point of being glossy-cheeked, in fact. His dark blue suit fit, but did not excite; ditto for his crisp white shirt and burgundy tie. His cologne was wholly unmemorable.

He was an FBI man, he said. I would have never guessed.

We were sitting in Ranger Cooper's office, a by now all too familiar setting for me, but Cooper was not in the room with us. I'd been sitting here now for almost an hour, alone, expecting the ranger to come in and ask me all the questions that needed to be asked about the circumstances of Phil the cameraman's death, but in had walked Mr. Medavoy instead. He sat down in the chair beside me not the one behind Cooper's desk, mind you, but the one right at my left elbow—showed me his ID, and then watched as I nearly lost my lunch all over his lap.

The Feds!

"You look pale. Should I get you some water?"

"No, no, no." I shook my head and took a deep breath. ''I'm okay. It's just that… all this excitement…"

"Of course. You've been through quite a bit tonight. I understand. We'll try to make this as brief as possible, all right?"

I nodded and said, "Please."

He smiled. "Wonderful. We'll start with something simple. Mrs. Loudermilk, do you have any idea who the two men were who accosted you and your son this evening?"

"They said their names were Ray and Phil. They told us they were newspaper reporters."

"And you believed that?"

"No. I didn't."

"And why was that?"

"Because they didn't act like reporters. They didn't look like reporters. And they had guns and Instamatic cameras. "

Medavoy raised an eyebrow. "Instamatic cameras? I don't understand."

I told him about the toy camera Phil had been carrying around when we first met him.

"Oh. I see," Medavoy said, grinning. "Then they never told you who they really were."

"No. Who were they?"

"Just a pair of hoods from back east. Musclemen out of St. Louis. Their real names aren't important. What is important is that you managed to make their acquaintance without getting badly hurt. "lost of the people those two have bumped into over the years weren't that lucky, I'm afraid. "

"You mean they were hired killers? For the mob?"

"It'd be more accurate to say they were couriers, Mrs. Loudermilk. Capable of killing, yes, but that ,vas not their area of expertise. I venture to say, you and your son Theodore would be dead by now if it had been. In all probability, Mr. Meadows as well."

That water he had tried to offer me a moment earlier was starting to sound pretty good; my tongue was beginning to feel like that of a camel, an hour removed from safari.

"Where is Ray now?" I asked, curious. The last time I'd seen him, he'd been sprawled out facedown on the walk path where Dozer Meadows had dropped him, looking a good deal like a fresh corpse waiting for the coroner's wagon to stop by.

"He's at the medical station here, getting patched up," Medavoy said. "Meadows broke his jaw in three places and moved his nose to a different spot on his face. He looks like hell, but I'm told he'll survive."

"Thank God." I was, again, hearing Phil's terrified voice diminish into the Canyon. I wondered if I always would.

"You're pretty lucky the big man came along when he did," Medavoy said. "Yes. We are."

"I would have preferred to have Colletta—excuse me, Phil—alive too, but it sounds like he gave Meadows no choice but to do what he did to him."

I recognized this as a question, not a comment, so I said, "That's true. Phil wouldn't put down the gun, so…" I was unable to finish the sentence.

"I understand. It was self-defense."

"Yes."

Medavoy nodded his head, satisfied. "Well. Enough of that. Let's push on, shall we?"

I waited for him to do so.

"Good. Let's talk about the kind of questions Ray and Phil asked you. All right? Tell me what they said they wanted to know, exactly."

"They wanted to know if Mr. Bettis had told us anything about somebody named Philly Gee before he died. They seemed to be interested in finding out where this Philly Gee person, whoever he is, was hiding. That's what they said, 'hiding.'"

"And did you tell them?"

"What?"

"Did you tell them where this Filly Gee was hiding?"

"No." I was confused by the question. "We don't
know
any Philly Gee. Who in the world is Philly Gee?"

"Then Mr. Bettis really was dead when you found him. He never actually spoke to you, about Filly Gee, about anything."

"No. He was dead. Conversation between the living and the dead is very minimal, Mr. Medavoy. That's because dead people don't do much talking, and they don't listen very well either. They're a lot like policemen, in that respect."

"I'm sorry if this is overly familiar territory for you, Mrs. Loudermilk, but these questions have to be asked."

I just answered his apology with silence.

"Did either Ray or Phil admit to killing Mr. Bettis in your trailer?"

"No."

"Did they ever ask you if you knew who might have killed him?"

"Not that I recall. Didn't the man they have in jail down in Flagstaff kill Mr. Bettis?"

"If you don't mind, Mrs. Loudermilk, we'll leave all the questions for me to ask, okay?"

''I'm sorry. I just wondered—"

"While we're on the subject of Flagstaff—why did you and your family drive down there this morning?"

"To pick up our trailer from the sheriff's station. They had taken her down there to run some lab tests on her, and when they said we could have her back, we decided to go down and get her ourselves. Why?"

"And that's all you did while you were down there? Pick up your trailer from the sheriff's station?"

"Well…"

I could tell from the look on his face that he already knew the answer to his question. And as if to prove it, he opened the manila envelope he'd been holding in his lap and handed me a set of eight-by-ten black-and-white photographs.

"These were taken in Flagstaff this afternoon, Mrs. Loudermilk. Maybe you can tell me what they mean."

They were all candid shots of Joe, Dog, and me, first at Geoffry Bettis's home, then up at the vacant lot that had been 505 West Fir, where we were joined in a couple of shots by Dozer Meadows. In other words, it was a virtual expose of three amateur detectives caught in the act of butting in where they don't belong. It was embarrassing, to say the least. So this, I thought to myself, was what Bad Dog always meant when his father and I would get the goods on him and he'd mumble two words dejectedly under his breath:

Stone busted
.

Needless to say, I came clean again. What else could I do? Dog wasn't here to show me how to lie effectively, and I was getting a little too good at that for my tastes, anyway, so I went with the honest approach. They always say on TV that if you cooperate with the authorities, they'll go easy on you. Of course, they also say Listerine kills the germs that cause bad breath.

Medavoy remained unnervingly quiet after I had stopped talking. I tried to read his eyes for some clue to my fate, but he kept them turned away from me. Deliberately, I thought.

"Am I in trouble?" I asked him when I couldn't take his silence any longer.

"That all depends," he said, sounding grim.

"On what?"

"On whether or not you've told me everything. If you've been holding anything back, if you've neglected to tell me anything at all—"