The PMS Outlaws: An Elizabeth MacPherson Novel (29 page)

“We go back a long way,” said the scarred man. “The outbuilding, you said? Don’t trouble yourself. I can find them. Place hasn’t changed much.” He turned away before Bill could ask him anything else.

Bill would have caught up with the man, to help him search
for the elusive Mr. Jack, but before he could make up his mind to do so, another car swung into the circular drive, and Bill recognized the driver. At least, the long blonde hair and the lovely youthful face certainly matched his impression of the telephone voice of his prospective client. He hurried over to the car.

“Hello!” he said with a much more genuine smile. “I’m Bill MacPherson. Did you call just a little while ago?”

As she slid out of the car, the young woman returned his smile. She was wearing a short skirt with a twinset and a string of pearls, and she might have been anyone from a swimsuit model to a brain surgeon. Bill hardly cared. His instincts for gallantry were roused. She was so lovely that he decided to take her case no matter what. “I did call you,” she said. “You just have to do something about my car.”

“Umm … I’m an attorney,” said Bill. He sounded regretful, as if he considered his years in law school a complete waste of time if what this enchanting creature actually needed was an auto mechanic.

“Well, of course you are!” she said, laughing up at him as if that were the wittiest thing anyone had ever said. “And I want you to go after the mechanic that charged me a fortune and then ruined my engine. Did you hear that noise it was making as I drove in?”

Bill shook his head. His senses at the time had been focused on vision rather than sound. “I’m not sure I could tell anything if I did,” he admitted. “But that’s okay. We can get expert witnesses. Why don’t you come inside where I can take notes, and tell me what the problem is?”

She shook her head. “I’d be just hopeless at trying to explain mechanical problems. Let me take you for a spin, and you
listen to the engine, and then I’ll answer all your questions—if I can, that is.” She unsheathed another dazzling smile. “You’re not afraid of being kidnapped, are you?”

“Of course not!” said Bill, without putting his brain in gear. As he got into the passenger seat of the woman’s car, he found himself thinking about his old roommate Milo Gordon for the first time in months.

T
here was only one chair in the outbuilding that served as a storage shed for the big house. It was a battered aluminum lawn chair, whose webbing had begun to fray, so that sitting down in it was a form of gambling. When none of his guests expressed an interest in pushing their luck, Jack Dolan himself sat down in it, with his back to the one bare lightbulb dangling from an insulated wire in the rafters. Three men squatted in the dirt in front of him, getting up occasionally to stretch their legs—they weren’t what you’d call young, either, but compared to Old Man Dolan, they were teenagers. One of them wore jeans and a plaid shirt, but the other two were in shirts and ties. They looked as if they knew how out of place they were in a storage shed, but nobody spoke. They waited politely while the ancient man in the lawn chair picked up a mason jar full of colorless liquid, unscrewed the lid, and passed it to one of his guests.

Dutifully, the man took a swig, wheezed, and handed it off to the man on his left, who sipped warily and pushed the jar toward his companion. “Well,” said the first man, a bit hoarsely. “That’ll take the paint off the wall, Mr. Dolan. I can see you haven’t lost the touch.”

The old man beamed in the half darkness. “Give me a little
backing and a lot of help with the lifting, and there’s still a fortune to be made with that stuff. It’s the best.”

“I’m sure it is, sir.”

“Takes a lot of sugar, though,” Mr. Jack confided. “More than I can carry.”

The three men looked at one another. At last, the man in the plaid shirt said, “I’m sure it’s an art form, Mr. Jack, but the fact is, you know, bootlegging just isn’t the moneymaker that it was in your day. I mean, even a huge operation—not your little bitty still in the basement there—even a professional concern is just not going to be cost-effective these days. The money, I’m sorry to say, is in drugs, and I know that being a gentleman of the old school, you don’t hold with that any more than we do.”

“Never could make plants grow,” said Mr. Jack. “Especially indoors.”

“I expect it’s complicated,” the spokesman agreed, glancing nervously at his companions. “But what we’re trying to explain to you, sir, is that we’re not really interested in starting you up in business again. It’s still illegal, you know.” He softened his words with a chuckle. “If a man can’t retire at ninety-two, it’s a sad old world, and that’s a fact.”

The man in the red tie spoke up. “I think my father may have given you the wrong idea about that when he spoke to you in Hardee’s the other day.”

“What we do want,” said his companion, “is to interview you and to see—possibly even to buy—any photographs you may have of your operation in the late nineteen-forties.”

Jack Dolan stared at the trio, mistrusting his hearing. “Pho-tee-graphs?”

“And interviews. Tape-recorded interviews. We’re doing a project.” Having said that, the man felt even more like a teenager, but he hurried on into an explanation. “We have a couple of projects, actually. Jim here—” He indicated the short man in the red tie. “It was his dad who spoke to you at Hardee’s—Jim is starting up an exhibit for the history museum: Moonshining in Southside Virginia. He wants to do an oral history project, interviewing some of the old-timers, and he needs to borrow photos of stills that he can enlarge to illustrate the exhibit.”

“Museum?” Mr. Jack blinked at them.

After an awkward pause, the spokesman said, “We’re history professors, Mr. Jack. I thought you knew that. No? Jim’s father didn’t mention it? Well, he has a strange sense of humor sometimes. Anyhow, as I said, Jim is doing a moonshining exhibit, and Fred and I are working on a screenplay. It’s sort of a Butch Cassidy yarn, set in Virginia in the Forties. We’d like to base the main character on you. Sort of a last-outlaw-stranded-in-the-brave-new-world story. We’d have to make changes, of course, but basically we want to tell your story.”

“Hadn’t you better wait and see how it ends?” said a voice from the darkness.

N
ot even on his most competent days would Bill MacPherson ever be mistaken for someone knowledgeable about mechanical devices. Therefore, he was reluctant to tell his beautiful new client that she was wasting her time driving him around and expecting him to detect any engine problems in her car. To Bill, the motor sounded perfectly fine. It usually took
smoke pouring out from under the hood to alert him to any difficulties in his own car, but he decided not to mention that, either.

Throughout the drive of five minutes or so down the tree-lined country road leading away from Danville, the two occupants of the vehicle had maintained an expectant silence, waiting for the sound of mechanical disaster, but so far the car had purred along, defying all expectations. Bill glanced at his watch. It was nearly four o’clock, and if he wanted to take down the pertinent information about the case from his new client before quitting time, they ought to get back to the office and get started on the paperwork. He was fairly sure that a longer drive would not enlighten him in the least, although the scenery—by which he meant the driver—was not unpleasant.

“We ought to head back,” he said. “I’ll be happy to take your word for the car problem until we can get an independent mechanic.…”

Thunk!

Suddenly he did hear it: a dull thunk of metal striking metal. He started to speak, but the young woman motioned for him to keep quiet. Scarcely daring to breathe, they listened.

Another thunk.

But it wasn’t coming from the engine. It sounded … it was impossible, of course, Bill told himself … but it sounded as if it were coming from behind them. From the trunk.

“Stop the car,” said Bill softly.

There was no other traffic on the road, and they were now on a level straightaway of two-lane blacktop bordered on either side with fenced-in cow pastures. Moments after Bill had spoken, his companion slowed the car and eased off the road. Just
before she cut the engine, another thunk echoed through the car. Bill sprang out and went around to the back of the car. His mind had just enough time to register “Tennessee license plates. Odd.” when the young woman bent forward and put the key in the lock of the trunk. An instant later the lid sprang open, and Bill found himself face-to-face with another blonde, this one pointing a can of Mace directly at his face.

Bill slammed the trunk and spun around just as the driver made a grab for his arm. Part of his brain registered the fact that she was not armed, except with a pair of handcuffs, which she was trying to use like brass knuckles. No problem, thought Bill. He had a sister nearly his own age: He’d had half a lifetime of experience fighting girls, and no compunction about it. He had to admit to himself, though, that perhaps his most useful combat training had been playing the dummy for A. P. Hill’s martial arts practice. From time to time Powell Hill would come back from class with a new self-defense move she wanted to demonstrate to Edith, and, in the absence of anyone actually dangerous, Bill would be drafted to play the attacker. These sessions always ended with him dutifully crashing to the floor, but, bruises aside, the experience had been an educational one. His instincts of self-preservation impelled him to learn the moves, and eventually he became so hard to defeat that A. P. Hill had abandoned the demonstrations and enrolled Edith in the class with her instead.

After months of being on the receiving end of A. P. Hill’s best moves, and learning to counteract them, the beautiful stranger with the handcuffs posed no problem at all. After a minor gash and one resounding blow to his shoulder that would probably turn purple in a couple of hours, Bill managed
to subdue his assailant and pin her to the ground. Very considerate of her to provide handcuffs, he thought, fishing them out of the mud. He snapped the handcuffs on one wrist, and dragged her to the back door of the passenger side of the car. She wasn’t fighting any longer. Her face was smeared with dirt, and her breath was coming in quick gasps. She had hit the ground with more force than was strictly necessary, but Bill, who had no idea what was going on, was taking no chances.

By the time he had slid the chain of the handcuffs through the door’s armrest and handcuffed her other wrist, she was crying softly.

A phrase that A. P. Hill occasionally used rose unbidden to his mind. Testosterone poisoning. An apt diagnosis, he thought ruefully. He had been on the verge of making a possibly fatal mistake just because he had been bewitched by a pretty face. Powell would never let him live it down.

“Don’t bother to cry,” he told the woman. “I know that trick. I have a kid sister. Now, are you going to tell me what the hell is going on?”

Through a curtain of tangled blonde hair, the young woman looked up at him with a misty, pleading smile. “I just found you so-oo attractive,” she murmured. “And I got this crazy idea that we could have some really kinky sex if—”

“Oh, save it,” said Bill. “The porn film as documentary? I don’t think so. Do you mean to tell me that men actually fall for that line?”

She shrugged philosophically. “In my experience: invariably.”

He checked to make sure that the handcuffs were locked,
and that she could not slip the chain out from beneath the armrest. Then he slammed the door and retrieved the car keys from the ground behind the car.

Another thunk came from the depths of the trunk.

“You’re staying in there!” Bill yelled, tapping on the lid. “Until I get some answers, whoever you are.”

That face looked familiar somehow. On a glimpse of less than five seconds, he couldn’t place it, though. With a shrug, Bill climbed into the driver’s seat and turned the car back toward the direction of his office. Let the police sort it out, he thought. So much for his beautiful new client, he thought ruefully. On the other hand, he might have grounds for a lawsuit of his own. He brightened considerably at the prospect, and drove back to the house, keeping one eye on the prisoner in the backseat and weighing legal strategies, while the thumping from the trunk grew louder and more insistent.

T
he three history professors had gone. Mr. Jack, still sitting in his battered aluminum lawn chair, looked up at the shadowy figure silhouetted by the dangling lightbulb. He did not seem particularly upset by the intruder. In ninety-two years, he’d had a lot of time to get used to the idea of death, and he found that it didn’t impress him as much as it used to. He had even outlived the threat of jail, because no jury in Virginia was going to send a frail old man of ninety-something to prison, no matter what his crimes. Being ninety was a prison.

“W
ell?” he said to the man in the shadows. “Were you looking for me?”

“I thought you were dead, Jack.”

“Not quite!” snapped the old man. “And I’m not ready to be installed in any damn museum, neither!”

The man knelt down so that the light shone on his face. “Do you know who I am?” he said softly.

Jack Dolan peered into the scarred face of an old man—not as old as he was, but still well past the plump vigor of middle age. “I’ve no idea,” he said flatly.

“I forget myself sometimes,” said the man. “It’s been decades since I even said the name. I go by Hillman Randolph these days. Most of the time I forget it isn’t who I am.”

Jack Dolan strained to recognize the voice, but age had changed it beyond anything he would find familiar. The name, though. Hillman Randolph. Just a minute …

“The lawman?” he said. “The one in the accident?”

The man nodded.

“Is that how you got those burns?”

“It is.”

The old man shook his head. “It’s a pity,” he said at last. “But you’re a tad late to be coming after me, whether it’s revenge you want or money. Same thing, I reckon.”

Hillman Randolph looked at the shrunken old man in the lawn chair. He’d heard the three professors offer to make a screenplay of the old man’s life, as if it were already over. The man was a museum piece. Just because he was alive didn’t mean the past wasn’t dead.