Scenarios - A Collection of Nameless Detective Stories (13 page)

"Now? What for?"

"There's something I want to check on."

"I don't feel like going all the way back there."

"That's good, because I'm going alone."

"Are you serious?"

"I'm serious," I said, and to prove it I got out of the booth. "I'll be back in a couple of hours—three at the outside. Then we can have dinner."

"I don't think so," she said, miffed again. She leaned across the table. "Mr. Treacle, do you have any plans for the next few hours?"

"Why no, I don't."

"Fine. How would you like to have dinner with me?"

I blinked at her. A minute ago she'd been haranguing him for being unfeeling and greedy; now she was asking him to have dinner with her. Treacle was just as surprised as I was. He looked at her, looked at me, looked at her again, and said, "Well, I don't know. . ."

"Go ahead," I told him. "Ms. Wade can be pleasant company. Sometimes."

"Well, if you're sure you don't mind. .

"I don't mind. I'll call you later with another report." I glanced at Kerry before I started away. "Enjoy your dinner." She stuck her tongue out at me.

6.

I
t was nearly six-thirty when I came down between the cliffs and back into
Cooperville
. The sun was dropping behind the wooded slopes to the west; evening shadows had begun to gather among the ghost buildings along the creek. The meadow grass had a warm golden sheen.
Cooperville
was a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't have wanted to live there—not now and especially not after the Munroe Corporation finished with it.

There was a dark green pickup parked alongside the
Cooperville
Mercantile, which probably meant that Jack
Coleclaw
and his wife were back from Weaverville. I wasn't interested in talking to
Coleclaw
, at least not yet, but when I saw the other cars parked over near the cottage I turned in there on impulse. There were five cars altogether, among them Paul Thatcher's jeep and Hugh Penrose's Land Rover. The way it looked, the residents were having some kind of town meeting.

I stopped where I had that afternoon, alongside the gas pump. When I got out of the car, the door to the mercantile
opened and Gary
Coleclaw
came out with a can of Coke in one hand and a half-eaten sandwich in the other. As soon as he saw me he did an about-face and went right back in again. There was no sign of the fat brown-and-white dog. And nobody else came out of the store.

I was not about to go over to the cottage; facing the entire population of
Cooperville
was something I had no desire to do. I started to get back inside the car—and a man came hurrying around the far corner of the mercantile, from the direction of the cottage. He was alone, and he was somebody I had never seen before.

He stopped two feet away, put his hands on his hips, and stared at me with eyes as cold as winter frost. He was about my age, mid-fifties; dark-
complected
, powerfully built, with not much neck and not much chin. Running to fat, though. You couldn't see the belt buckle of his Levi's because of the paunch that hung over it.

"You're the insurance detective," he said.

"More or less. And you?"

"Jack
Coleclaw
. If you're here to talk to me, you wasted the trip. I've got nothing to say to you."

"Nobody seems to have anything to say to me. Why is that, Mr.
Coleclaw
?"

"You're trying to make out one of us killed that Munroe man in Redding, that's why. No one here had anything to do with Randall's death, mister; no one here started any fires. Now suppose you just get back in your car and get the hell out of
Cooperville
. And don't come back, if you know what's good for you."

"Is that a threat, Mr.
Coleclaw
?"

"Nobody's threatening you."

"Two people this afternoon made a pretty good imitation of it."

"Feelings run high around here where Munroe is concerned," he said. "All we want is to be left alone. If we're not…"He didn't finish the sentence.

"Suppose I go to the county law and tell them I'm being harassed? Do you want that kind of trouble?"

"You can't prove it. Besides, we cooperated with the county cops when they made their investigation. They didn't find anything; there wasn't anything they could find. The sheriff's department doesn't worry us, mister."

"Then why should I?"

"You don't."

"No? How come the summit meeting, then?"

He scowled. "What?"

"It looks like you're entertaining everybody in town tonight," I said. "I figure that's because of me. Or do you all get together regularly for coffee and cake?"

"What we do of an evening is none of your business,"
Coleclaw
said. "You keep coming around here, you'll get the same you got today—and more of it. Now that's all I got to say. You've been warned."

I watched him stalk off the way he'd come and disappear around the far corner of the store. I did not like the feeling I had now: bad vibes, a sense that there was more to this business than the idea I had developed back in the motel bar in Weaverville. There was too much hostility here, that was the thing. And it was too intense. But I couldn't seem to get a handle on what lay at the root of it.

I drove away from the pump, out onto the road again. If anybody was watching me from inside
Coleclaw's
house, the curtained front windows hid them. I couldn't see anybody anywhere now. The whole damned town might have been a ghost, lying still and crumbling in the golden light of an approaching sunset.

When I got to the fork I took the branch that led between the abandoned mining-camp buildings. I parked in front of the hotel, got my flashlight from its clip under the dash, and locked the car. Then I went around to the rear, to where the back door still stood hanging open on one hinge. I stepped inside.

Not much light penetrated now, at this time of day, through the chinks in the outer walls. The place had a murky, eerie look to it, as if there might actually be spooks and specters lying in wait on the shadowed balconies and among the decaying rubble. I switched on the flashlight, crossed the rough whipsawed floor.

The light picked up the collapsed pigeonhole shelf, the door in the wall behind it. I swung the door open. Mica particles and iron pyrites gleamed in the flash beam when I played it across the tier of shelves and their collection of arrowheads and chunks of rock. I moved over there. Some of the rocks had fossils embedded in them, all right. Bryophyte fossils, just like the ones in the stone cup in the trunk of my car.

I picked up one that looked to be the same sort of mineral—travertine, Treacle had called it—as the stone cup, and put it into my pocket. Then I swept the rest of the room with the light, looking for something that might confirm my suspicion as to who it was who spent time here. The Coleman lantern, the stacks
of National Geographic,
the cot with its straw-tick mattress told me nothing. But under the cot I found a small spiral notebook, and the notebook had a name on it, and that was all I needed.

I put the notebook into the same pocket with the fossil rock. As I started out the light, probing ahead, showed me nothing but the edge of the desk and the pigeonhole shelf and dim shadow shapes beyond. I took one step through the doorway

Something moved to my right, behind the desk.

That was the only warning I had, and it wasn't enough. He came rushing toward me out of the gloom with something upraised in his hand, something that registered on my mind as a length of board. He swung it at me in a flat horizontal arc like a baseball bat. I dropped the flashlight, threw my arm up too late.

The board whacked across the left side of my face and head, and there was a flash of bright pain, and I went down and out.

7.

I
awoke to pain. And to heat and a whooshing, crackling noise that seemed to come from somewhere close by. And to the acrid smell of smoke.

Fire!

The word surged through my mind even before I was fully conscious. It drove me up onto one knee, a movement that sent shooting pain through my head and neck; I was aware that the whole left side of my face was half numb and felt swollen. I had my eyes open, but I couldn't see anything. It was dark wherever I was—dark and hot and filling up with thin clouds of smoke.

Panic cut away at me; I fought it instinctively, shoved onto my feet, and managed to stay upright even though my knees felt as though they were made of rubber. I still could not see anything except vague outlines in the blackness. But I could hear the thrumming beat of the fire, a frightening sound that seemed to be growing louder, coming closer.

The smoke started me coughing. That led to several seconds of dry-retching before I could get my breathing under control. I took a couple of sliding steps with my hands out in front of me like a blind man; my knee hit something, there was a faint scraping sound as the something yielded, and I almost fell. I bent at the waist, groping with my hands. The cot, the straw-tick mattress: I was still in the room behind the hotel desk.

Coughing again, fighting the panic, I slid my feet around the cot and kept moving until my fingers brushed against wood, touched rock. The shelving, the collection of junk. I went sideways along it to my left, toward where I remembered the door to be. Found it, found the latch.

Locked.

I threw my weight against the door, a little wildly. The wood was old and dry; it gave some, groaning in its frame. I got a grip on myself again and lunged at the door a second time, a third. The wood began to splinter in the middle and around the jamb. The fourth time I slammed into it, the latch gave and so did one of the hinges; the door flew outward and I stumbled through, caught myself against the edge of the hotel desk.

The whole rear wall and part of the side walls and balcony were sheeted with flame.

The smoke was so thick in there that each breath I took seared my lungs, made me dizzy and nauseous. I pushed away from the desk, staggered toward the front entrance; tripped over something and fell skidding on hands and knees, scraping skin off my palms. Flames licked along the front wall, raced over the floor. As old and decayed as it was, the place was a tinderbox. It would be only a matter of minutes before the entire building went up.

In the hellish, pulsing glow I could see the boarded-up door and windows in the front wall. I scrambled to my feet again and ran to the window on the left; a gap was visible between two of the boards nailed across it. I got my fingers in the gap and wrenched one of the boards loose, flung it down, and went after another one. The fire was so close that I could feel the hair on my head starting to singe.

Sparks were falling around me; two of them landed on my shirt, on the back and on one shoulder, but I was only half-conscious of the burns as I tore the second board loose, hammered at a third with my fist where it was already splintered in the middle.

When I broke the two pieces outward, the opening was almost wide enough for me to get through. But not quite—Christ, not quite. I clawed frantically at another board, twisting my head and shoulders through the window and out of the choking billows of smoke. More sparks fell on the legs of my trousers, brought stinging pain in four or five places as if someone was jabbing me with needles. I sucked in heaving
lungsful
of the night air; I could hear myself making noises that were half gasps and half broken sobs.

The oxygen gave me the strength I needed to yank one end of the board loose, and when I wrenched it out of the way I was able to wiggle my hips up onto the sill and through the opening. In the next second I was toppling over backwards, then jarring into hard earth on my shoulders and upper back—outside, free.

I rolled over twice in the grass, away from the burning building; got up somehow and staggered ten or twelve steps into the middle of the road before I fell down again. Now that I was clear of the fire, I could smell my singed hair, the smoldering cloth of my pants and shirt. The smells made me gag, vomit up the beer I'd drunk earlier in Weaverville.

But I was all right then. My head had cleared, the fear and the wildness were gone; inside me was a thin, sharp rage. I got
to my feet again, shakily. Pawed at my smoke-stung eyes and squinted over at the hotel.

My car was gone.

The rage got thinner and sharper. He took it away somewhere, I thought. Took my keys after he slugged me and drove it away and hid it somewhere.

But there was no time now to think about either him or the car. The hotel was coated with flame, like a massive torch, and the fire had spread to the adjacent buildings, was beginning to race across their roofs to the ones beyond. Part of the starlit sky was obscured by dense coagulations of smoke. Soon enough, that whole
creekside
row would be ablaze.