“So he says that’s too bad and one thing and another. I have another shillelagh and give out a little guff about money being no object if I could only get them parts for the new Caddy. I’m on the third shillelagh when he finally makes the suggestion why don’t I go see Jack-the-Wrecker. Sometimes this Jack gets hold of a new bus, been in a wreck or something, no good for anything except to get parts from. I tell him much oblige and maybe I’ll give it the try. So I taxi out to this junk yard — you know where it is, Boss?”
“Out on North Buckeye.” Tony nodded.
“Yea. It’s big’s a circus lot. High board fence all around it. Door’s shut when I get there, but while I’m scheming how to scale that barb-wire on top of the fence, somebody inside opens the doors and this pickup rolls out.
“Before the yuk who’s driving spots me, I’m inside the yard behind a broken-down school bus. He stops his pickup, locks the doors from the outside and drives off. I take a peek around.
“There must be two, three hundred heaps in that boneyard. Jallopies, jeeps, busses, trailers, hot rods, tractor combos, rotary concrete mixers, even one of them sixteen-wheeler Diesel jobs. New, old, rusty, busted glass, some with no tires, no wheels, some ain’t even got motors. Across the back of the lot is a shed about the size of a freight station, and they’s a dazzling white light in there, so I figure somebody’s using an acetylene torch. I go over and there’s two Joes in there with glass masks and gloves on. They’re cutting up a snooty new Cadillac. Torching it to pieces, body, frame, the works.
Butch hesitated for a moment, then went on, a little apologetically. “Maybe I shoulda beat it then, but the way it looks to me, we want some identification of this bus, so I walk right up and make my pitch about wantin’ to buy transmission parts. They want to know how I get in. I tell ’em, but they don’t buy it. They put out the torch and look me over good.
“One of ’em says, ‘How’d you happen to come way out here in the first place, Buster?’ I mention the Melody and the skinny bartender, but still they’re suspicious. They got the body of this Caddy all dismantled. The hood is off but the motor’s still on the chassis and I’m edgin’ closer to see if I can read the numbers stamped on the frame or maybe on the motor block, when they really catch wise what I’m after.
“One of ’em breaks out a gun from somewhere in his coveralls. I go for mine, too, natch — but the other ginzo pulls the trigger on his torch and that flame blinds me. Besides which I’m tripping over my own feet getting back outa the way of that white-hot jet. When I get so I can see a little better, the first thing I make out is the hot end of a thirty-eight hooked right into my belt buckle.
“I give out with the old bluff, but it’s no sale. They skin my pockets, read the identification in my wallet. One of ’em wants to push the button on me right then and there. But the other one disagrees, an’ he’s the one at th’ controls of th’ thirty-eight.
“They have a son of a bitch of an argument, th’ one with the gun hollering, ‘He won’t stand for no rodding and you know it!’ and the other — the one who wants to blast my nuts with that jet flame — shouting, ‘Hell with what he’ll stand for and won’t stand for! You know well’s I do he’s a lost ball in high weeds and nobody’s ever gonna see him no more!’
“It’s not hard to dope out they’re bellering about Jack-the-Wrecker, and that they think he’s either flew the coop or is hiding under a headstone. But it don’t help me much, because they finally get together on one point. Which is, I’m to be tied up and put in cold storage until such time as the Wrecker does come back. If he don’t, they pop my balloon anyhow.
“I’m getting fed up with that muzzle itch anyhow, so the next time the one with the grip on that gas-jet squirts a flash of lightning in my direction, I take a chance and belly my weight on the spitting end. It rocks the reasonable bugger right back on his heels. His tail gets a touch of that flame. He lets out a screech that would drown out a fire siren. Drops the gun. I get it.
“The one who got his ass fried is down on the cement doing spasms. I poke the gun at the other one. March him out. Into the first car he claims’ll run. A jeep. I prod him in, get in after him. I can’t horse around with him getting out and unlocking those doors, all that waste motion. I want out. I tell him so. ‘Get up speed,’ I tell him. ‘Sock into those doors. Bang ’em open. Or I’ll bang you open.’
“He has trouble getting the motor going, and I’m stupid enough not to guess why. Then he has to back up to get headway so we’ll have enough oomph to bust through. But I feel pretty jake, while I’m ramming that thirty-eight in his navel. Finally we get zooming. We make so much noise I never do hear the other sucker get the wrecking truck roaring. But he does, while my joker’s covering the noise with the revving up of the jeep. Make it short, both cars get to the door simultaneous.
“Boss, you never hear anything like that crashup! Like in the song, the two locomotives were a-going to bump. We hit the door in the jeep. The wrecker hits the jeep on my side. We go through — and over. The wrecker rolls right onto us. I get glass splinters is my hair, my mouth, my eyes.
“My driver’s screeching like a wounded weasel. I must let go with the gun when we rolled over. The jeep’s gas tank comes apart. We catch fire.
“Don’t ask me how I got out. I don’t know. I remember crawling out through what was left of the windshield. Next thing I remember, a couple boys in white coats are sliding me onto a stretcher.”
Tony said, “I wonder what you’d have done with a fourth shillelagh underneath your belt.”
They drove home and, once in the library, Tony Quinn left Butch for a few moments. He returned with a silver tray which he placed on the Circassion walnut coffee-table.
“There’s your medicine, Butch. One bottle every twenty-four hours.”
Butch Leary made a guffawing sound through his bandages at sight of the quart of Irish whisky and the flanking array of beer cans.
“You’re making a great mistake, Boss. You keep on treating me like this, you’re liable to have a permanent guest on your hands.”
Tony bent down, touched a match to the paper crumpled beneath the birch logs in the wide brick fireplace. “At least I can see to it you don’t get into any more rough-and-tumbles, then.”
Butch sampled the whisky, sighed with satisfaction. “You ain’t kidding me. You brought me here because you figure those ginzos might come after me again, if I holed up in my room.”
“I want you to be in shape to go before the Grand Jury in the morning. You’d more likely be ready for the undertaker, if they thought it would be necessary to stop you from testifying about Prosser’s Cadillac.”
“Only thing I can say, honestly, is that it was a black Caddy with whitewalls.”
“This year’s model. Right. There aren’t too many of those expensive boats in Vulcan City, so if we send the hot car squad around there to check and there isn’t any black Caddy in Jack-the-Wrecker’s, it would leave it up to them to explain what had happened to it since your little ‘accident’.”
“Aw, by now they probably carted it out in the woods somewhere, dumped it.”
“Expect they have, Butch. Wouldn’t surprise me if we failed to locate that lad with the bullet in his digestion, too. Chances are they carted him to Columbus or Portsmouth, with some hooked-up yarn about a gun-cleaning accident. Otherwise one of our hospitals would have reported a gunshot patient before this.”
“Didn’t the guy who picked me up and run me in to the hospital see either of them boys in the bust-up cars?”