The Murder Book (54 page)

I edged the chair another foot forward. Got stuck again. Freed the wheels.

Bill said, “Nacho was intelligent-o, selling but never using. I could’ve learned from you, Nacho.”

“You couldn’ta learned nothing. You were stupid.”

I closed the space between us and Vargas to ten yards.

“I don’t see any truck,” I said.

“There’s a fucking
truck
,” said Small.

Vargas shot a disgusted look intended for his partner, but kept his eyes on me. He began tapping his boot impatiently. Shiny, needle-toed black boots that had never known stirrups; the jeans looked fresh, too. Big shopping spree.

A one-day costume, because you could never really wash out the blood.

Bill said, “Nacho, my man, be smart: I got nothing to look forward to, put me out of my misery, but leave the old guy and Aimee and everyone else alone. Take me off in that truck of yours and do what you want with—”

“Like I need your fucking permission,” said Vargas.

Bill’s head rolled. “No you don’t, no one’s saying you do, it’s just why not be smart, like I said he’s got a heart condition—”

“Maybe I should have him run around in circles till he drops dead. Save on bullets.” Vargas laughed, kept his gun hand behind Bert, lifted the other arm and jacked Bert up effortlessly. The old man’s toes barely grazed the gravel. He’d gone deathly pale. A rag doll.

Vargas said, “Hey, this is like playing puppet.” His gun hand shifted upward, too. Just an inch or so.

“Nacho, man—”

“Yeah, sure, we’ll let everyone go. Maybe we’ll let you go, too. Hey, that’s a good idea — let’s all go out and have a beer.” He snorted. “She ain’t the only retard.” The boot tapped faster. “C’mon, c’mon, move it.”

I closed the gap to twenty feet, fifteen, exerted downward pressure that tipped the chair slightly, got stuck again.

“What the fu — you playing with me, Whitebread?”

“Sorry,” I said, in tremulous voice. “You told me to keep my hands — just a sec.”

Before Vargas could reply, Bert sagged in his grip, cried out in pain, clutched his chest. Vargas laughed, too clever to be taken in by an obvious ruse, but Bert kept thrashing, gave his head a hard shake, and the sudden movement tugged Vargas’s arm down and Bert struggled to twist away. As Vargas tried to contain him, his gun hand rose and the weapon was visible. Sleek, black automatic. Aimed at the sky. Behind him, Small was cursing, his attention directed at the struggle. Aimee stared, too, not resisting.

The moment Bert had shown distress, I’d pushed the chair faster, got within five feet of Vargas. Stopped. Vargas continued to grope for Bert. I gave a low grunt.

Bill groped under the folds of the top blanket and pulled out the shotgun.

Old but clean Mossberg Mariner Eight-Shot Mini Combo with pistol grip and speed-feed. Extreme saw-off, barely any barrel left. I’d found it under the bed, where he’d said it would be, stored in a black canvas case coated with dust bunnies. Lying next to two rifles in similar housing and half a dozen boxes of ammo.

“Use the big shells,” he said. I’d loaded the weapon.

Then handed it over to a stiff-fingered blind man.

Vargas got a firm grip on Bert, but Bert saw the shotgun, turned, and bit down on Vargas’s arm, and when Vargas bellowed and let go of him, he dropped to the ground and rolled away.

I muttered, “Now,” and Bill yanked the trigger.

The explosion boxed my ears, and the recoil shoved the wheelchair into my groin as Bill’s head snapped backward and connected with my midriff.

Nacho Vargas was blown away as if caught in a personalized tornado. The bottom half of his face turned to smoky, bloody dust, and a giant, ruby pink orchid blossomed where his gullet and chest had once been. As he fell, white-flecked, red broth shot out through his back, spattering Aimee and the small cowboy, who looked stunned. I threw myself at him, swung one fist upward, connected under his nose, got hold of his groin with my other hand and twisted hard.

The whole thing had taken five seconds.

The small man went down, landed on his back, cried out in pain. His black T-shirt was grimed with what looked like steak tartare and bone bits and gobbets of something gray-pink and spongy I knew to be lung tissue. His gun — shiny and silver — remained entwined in his fingers, and I stomped his hand and kicked the weapon loose. The gun rolled away and I dived for it, slid into gore and skidded and went facedown into the gravel, feeling the buzz of impact, then searing pain along one half of my face, both elbows and knees.

I’d fallen atop the weapon, felt it biting into my chest. Now the damned thing would go off and blow a hole through me, what a dignified demise.

I rolled away, grabbed the gun, sprang to my feet, hurried back to the small man. He lay there, immobile, and I felt under his filth-encrusted jaw, got a slow steady pulse. The hand I’d stomped looked like a dead crab, and when I lifted his eyelids all I saw was white.

A few feet away, what had once been Nacho Vargas was an exhibit for the forensic pathology texts.

Aimee said, “Careful.” Talking to Bill, not me. She was behind the chair, now, had removed his watch cap, was stroking his head.

Bert was on his feet, tottering, holding Vargas’s weapon with two hands. Staring at it with revulsion. His color made me unsure if the chest pains had been a total ruse.

I kept the silver gun trained on the unconscious man, heartbeat racing way beyond optimal, muscles pumped, head boiling.

Up close, he looked barely twenty.

Give it to that kid of yours to play with.

A young man with one kid, maybe a new father. Would he have helped Vargas dispatch all of us, then gone home and played with Junior?

He moaned, and my fingers tightened around the trigger. Another moan, but he didn’t move. I trained the gun on him, had to work at releasing the pressure in my fingers. Slowing my breathing, struggling to think clearly, sort things out.

The clearing around the house deepened to a sickening, syrupy gray. Bill sat there in the chair, the shotgun across his lap. Aimee and Bert stood by, silently. The small man didn’t move. Silence settled around us. From somewhere off in the forest, a bird peeped.

A plan: I’d tie up the unconscious man, put him and the wheelchair in the trunk of the Seville, drive us all to some safe place — I’d figure out where along the way — no, first I’d call Milo from the house — I had to get them all in the house — the bloody gravel, the corpse with its yield of shredded body parts, would be dealt with later.

“Do you have any rope?” I asked Bill.

His mirrored glasses were off, and Aimee was dabbing at the gray hollows with a corner of the top blanket. Unmindful of the porridge that splotched her clothing and her face.

He said, “No. Sorry.”

“Nothing to tie him with?”

“Sorry… the other one’s alive?”

“Out cold but alive. I thought with that arsenal—”

“The arsenal was my… baggage… never really thought I’d use it…”

The shotgun had been clean, freshly oiled.

He must’ve read my mind, said, “I taught my Aimee how to take care of it.”

Aimee recited: “Ream the barrel, wipe it down, oil it up.”

“But no rope,” said Bill. “Ain’t that a hoot. Maybe we can shred some clothing.” Tired. One hand caressed the truncated shotgun.

Aimee mumbled.

“What’s that, sugar?”

“There is rope. Kind of.”

“There is?” he said.

“Twine. I use it for my rolled roast.”

“Not strong enough, baby.”

“Oh,” she said. “It holds in the roast.”

“Bert, come here and keep a close aim on him,” I said, pocketing the silver gun and pulling the small man to his feet. He was 130 pounds tops, but deadweight and the noradrenaline cool-down made dragging him to the house an ordeal.

I got him to the door, looked back. No one had followed. Nighttime turned the others to statuary.

“Inside,” I said. “Let’s take a look at that twine.”

B
ill was right about the cooking twine. Too flimsy. I used it anyway, sitting the small man in a chair in the front room and using both rolls to create a macramé mummy. He looked out of it, hopefully for a while. My heart started racing again.

I searched the small kitchen, found a crushed, nearly empty roll of duct tape beneath the sink, unspooled enough to run two tight bands around his body and the chair, at nipple and waist levels. What was left, I used to bind his ankles together. He offered no resistance… how old was his kid?

I said, “Where’s the phone?”

Bert shuffled over to a corner, bent behind another chair, retrieved an old, black dial phone, and handed it to me. He hadn’t said a word since the shooting.

I lifted the receiver. No dial tone. “Dead.”

Bert took the phone, jabbed the receiver button, dialed O. Shook his head.

“Do you generally have phone problems?”

“No, sir,” said Bill. “Not that we use it much, maybe—” He frowned. “I know that smell.”

“What smell?” I said.

The concussion came from behind, from the rear of the house. The impact of something striking wood, followed by a loud sucking
swoosh!
Then the xylophone glissando of broken glass.

Bill turned toward the sound. Bert and I stared. Only Aimee seemed unconcerned.

Suddenly daylight — a false, orange daylight — brightened the bedroom, followed by a rush of heat and the cellophane-snap of flames.

Fire licked the curtains, a zipper of it, running up to the ceiling and down to the floor.

I ran for the bedroom door, slammed it shut over the spreading inferno. Smoke seeped from under the panel. The odor hit: metallic, acrid, the chemical bitterness of a flash storm ripping open a polluted sky.

The smoke from beneath the door fattened from wisp to wormy coil to clouds, relentless and oily, white to gray to black. Within seconds, I could barely make out the forms of the other people.

The room grew furnace-hot.

The second firebomb hit. Again, from behind. Someone was stationed out back, in the forest, where the phone wires ran.

I grabbed hold of Bill’s chair, waved frantically to Bert and Aimee’s smoke-obscured silhouettes.

“Get out!” Knowing that what I was sending them to was unlikely to be safety. But the alternative was roasting alive.

No answer, and now I couldn’t see them at all. I rolled Bill toward the front door. From behind came roaring protest. The door collapsed and flames shot forward as I shoved the wheelchair. Groping the air for Aimee and Bill. Screaming with clogged lungs: “Someone’s out there! Stay low—”

My words were choked off by convulsive coughing. I made it to the door, reached for the knob, and the hot metal broiled my hand.

Handicapped push door, idiot. I shouldered it hard, shoved Bill’s chair, lurched outside, eyes burning, retching, coughing.

Running into the darkness and aiming the chair to the left as a bullet impacted against a front window.

Smoke billowed out of the house, a smothering curtain of it. Good cover, but poisonous. I ran as far from the gravel drive as possible, into the underbrush that formed at the house’s eastern border. Racing with the chair, struggling to manipulate the contraption over rocks and vines, getting caught in the underbrush. Unable to free the chair.

Jammed. I lifted Bill out of the chair, slung him over my shoulder, and ran, adrenaline-stoked again, but his weight bore down and I could barely breathe and after ten steps I was on the verge of collapse.

My legs buckled. I visualized them as iron rods, forced them straight, lost my breath completely, stopped, shifted the load, panted and coughed. Feeling the dangle of Bill’s ruined legs knocking against my thighs, the dry skin of one palm against the back of my neck as he held on tight.

He said something — I felt it rather than heard it — and I resumed carrying him into the forest. Pulled off ten more steps, counted each one, twenty, thirty, stopped again to force air into my lungs.

I looked back at the house. None of the Halloween glare of fire, just smoke, funnels of it, so dark it bled easily into the night sky.

Then, the spot where the little green house had stood was suddenly engulfed by a crimson ball haloed in lime green.

The kerosene stink of a stale campground. Something igniting — the kitchen stove. The explosion threw me to the earth. Bill landed on top of me.

No sign of Aimee or Bert.

I stared back at the house, wondering if the fire would spread to the forest. Not good for the forest, but maybe good for us if it attracted attention.

Nothing but silence. No spread; the firebreak serving its purpose.

I rolled Bill off me and propped myself up on my elbows. His glasses had come loose. His mouth moved soundlessly.

I said, “You okay?”

“I — yeah. Where’s…”

“Let’s keep moving.”

“Where is she?”

“She’s fine, Bill, come on.”

“I need to—”

I got hold of his shoulder.

“Leave me here,” he said. “Let me go, I’ve had enough.”

I began lifting him.

“Please,” he said.

My burned hand began to throb. Everything throbbed.

A raspy voice behind me said, “Dead end, Mr. Cadillac.”

V
ance Coury’s silver hair caught moonlight. A black leather headband held it in place. The musk of his aftershave managed to seep through the scorched air.

He shined the flashlight in my face, shifted the beam to Bill, lowered it and held it at an angle that brightened the forest floor. As the white spots cleared from my eyes, I made out the rectangle in his right hand. Columnar snout. Machine pistol.

He said, “Up.” Businesslike. Tying up loose ends.

He wore light-colored, grease-stained mechanics overalls — outfitted for messy work. Something flashed around his neck — probably the same gold chain I’d seen at the garage.

I got to my feet. My head still rang from the explosion.

“Walk.” He motioned to his right, back to the clearing.

“What about him?” I said.