At the top, I had a good view of the surrounding area. Shacks were nestled in little green pockets bordered by fenced-off crop acreage, with dirt access roads connecting them to each other and the town. No one seemed to be working in the fields, but there were a few people taking the breeze in front of their cribs, which struck me as eerie.
I descended the ladder, and when I was halfway down, saw an old man on one of the roads staring at me. I pretended not to notice, and he turned his back and ran — flat out — to the biggest shack in the community, a corrugated metal job with a white wood barn attached.
I hopped off the ladder and pursued, taking foot roads out of town and over an eighth of a mile or so to a stand of sycamore trees that formed a perimeter a few yards from the barn. The man was nowhere in sight, but the sliding barn door was open just a crack. I drew my .38 and sprinted over and in.
Sunlight through a side window illuminated a big empty space, and the smell of hay plus something medicinal hit my nostrils. In the center of the barn, the acid stench got stronger, and somehow familiar. I noticed a table covered with a tarpaulin wedged into a corner near the connecting door to the shack and saw dry ice hissing out of rips in the canvas. The shape underneath took form, and I pulled the tarp off.
A buck-naked dead man was lying on top of dry ice blocks, sachets oozing formaldehyde placed strategically on his body. He was a stone ringer for Harwell Treadwell, and you didn’t have to be a medical examiner to figure the cause of death — his crotch was blown to bits, torn, blooded flesh laced with buckshot all that remained.
I redraped the stiff, then eased the connecting door into a test jiggle. It gave, and I very slowly pulled it open, just a tiny fraction of an inch, in order to look in. Then it flew open all the way, and a big double-barreled shotgun was sighting down, and I shoved both my hands at midpoint on the stock and pushed up.
A huge “Ka-boom!” went off; the tin roof lurched under the force of the blast; pellets ricocheted. I threw myself at the shotgun wielder just as he tried to slam me with the butt of his weapon, wrestled it away from him, then chopped down at his head with the flat side of my .38 — one blow, two blows, three. Finally the man went limp. I kicked the shotgun out of harm’s way, then weaved on shaky, shaky legs.
It was the old man who’d rabbited when he saw me on the ladder. I looked around the room, saw a pail of water on the cracked wood floor by the front door, picked it up, and dumped it on my assailant. He stirred, then started sputtering, and I knelt down and placed my gun on his nose so he could get the picture up close. “You admit you killed that man back there or you convince me somebody else did, and you live. You tell me where the other Treadwell brother is and I don’t arrest you for assault on a police officer. You dick me around, you die.”
The geezer took it all in, his eyes getting clearer by the second, exhibiting the remarkable recuperative powers of the seasoned shat-upon. When he curled his lips to spit invective, I said, “No banter, no wisecracks, no shit,” and cocked the hammer.
Now pops got the whole picture, in Technicolor. “I ain’t no killer,” he said with a midwestern twang. “I’m a truck farmer likes to dabble in the medical arts, but I sure ain’t no killer.”
“I am. So you keep going and keep my interest, because I get bored easy, and when I get bored I get mad.”
Pops gulped, then spoke rapid-fire. “People here put up Miller and Leroy, ’long with the girl, when they had that trouble up in Ventura. They—”
I interrupted. “Did they pay you for it?”
Pops cackled. “Where you think everbody is? Miller and Leroy got cousins up the wazoo here, they spread the money around, everbody went up to Oxnard and Big V to spend it. Like to put Miller and Leroy broke they spent so—”
“What?”
“ ’Fore he died, Leroy told me they spent eight, nine thousand dollars, said this town of ours had hospitality like Hot Springs in the old days.”
I said, “Mister, the ransom money came to a hundred thousand.”
Pops snorted. “Big commotion back where it went bad. Police got most of it, Miller and Leroy got the dregs.”
My first thought was of the Ventura sheriffs holding back big. “Keep going.”
“Well, everbody got happy here, and Miller and Leroy and the cooze holed up, and Miller and Leroy started schemin’ another trade, and they started arguin’ and feudin’ over the girl, and she took to Miller ’cause Leroy was so nasty to her. Then Leroy tried to do her what you might call against her will, and she talked Miller into payin’ back her virtue.”
“Miller killed his own brother?”
“That’s right. And he felt so bad about it he paid me just about his last two hundred dollars to fix that boy up for burial, then put him in the ground when all the cousins got back after spendin’ their money.”
“Then Miller and the girl took off?”
“That’s right. Headed south, brand new black paint on that pretty car of Harwell’s.”
“When?”
“Yesterday. ’Bout noon.”
“Did they cut the phone lines before they went?”
Pops shrugged. “Don’t think so. Seems to me they was up this mornin’.”
I got the pins and needles tingling up the spine I always got when something was real wrong. Stensland the fed had said that there was “twenty-one hundred something” locked up as evidence, and Miller and Leroy dished out “eight or nine” grand for shelter. That left almost ninety thousand missing. Figure a few thousand blown away during the Mexican standoff — and the rest sucked up — probably by the feds and/or the Ventura sheriffs. And the scary part: if Miller Treadwell took off with Jane Viertel yesterday, it was the law that ambushed us — to make sure Harwell Treadwell didn’t squawk about his brother’s whereabouts — so they couldn’t tell us about their paltry take of the ransom pie.
I put my gun away, said “Bury the degenerate bastard,” and walked out the front door mad — like I’d been sucker punched.
When I got back to the dump where I’d left Davis and our prisoner, they were gone. A fresh wave of panic hit me; then I heard grunts and metal on metal noises coming from the other side of the building. I walked around, and there was Harwell Treadwell chained to a fence and my forty-six-year-old partner embarking on a new career as a hot-rod engineer.
He was working on the jerry-built heap I’d noticed earlier, which now resembled a cross between Buck Rogers’s spaceship and a collection of spare parts some trashcan dog dragged in. It was a Model T chassis with two motorcycle tires on the front, two tractor tires on the back, what looked like a half-dozen hooked-together lawnmower engines, and an undercarriage made up of chicken wire and friction tape. The man himself was on the ground toiling on the drive shaft, and when I reached into the driver’s seat and beeped the horn, he came up gun first, laughing when he saw who it was.
“Woooo, boy! You almost died!”
I walked over and whispered in Davis’s ear. “Miller killed Leroy and took off with the girl in the Auburn yesterday. The Ventura bulls are holding back on the ransom money, and I think it was them shooting at us. Let’s roll now. On foot if this thing won’t go.”
Davis smiled. “She’s got a name, boy. ‘Li’l Assdragger.’ And she’ll fly.”