Phantom Nights (31 page)

Giles yawned. The boy had picked up his bike, thumbed on the streaky beam of the fender-mounted light. Giles felt a keenness rising in his blood.

Okay.

"F
rancie, this is Bobby Gambier. Sorry to be calling so late."

"That's all right, Sheriff. Mama and Daddy came back from Kentucky with just the prettiest two-year-old bay filly. Everybody else's out in the barn with a case of new-horse fever; I came in a minute ago to put coffee on. If you're wanting Alex, I don't know. He left here hours ago. Wanted to borrow my scooter, but I had to say no; Daddy would bust a blood vessel and I'd be grounded 'til school starts. He didn't make it home?"

"Not yet."

"Ohh, that worries me too."

"Give you some idea of what he wanted the borrow of your scooter for?"

"I think he was going someplace it's a chore to get to from here on his bike." She paused in thought. "Someplace he had to be at a special time, because he kept looking at the clock. Had him excited, because he didn't finish half his supper."

"Such as the movies? No, I didn't see his bike in the rack out front of the Gem. He's not shooting pool either."

"I wish I could help."

"You've been a good friend to both of us, Francie. He's just got this wandering streak in him, Lord knows. Has to be running off somewhere all the time."

Bobby put the receiver of his phone on the hook and looked at Ramses, who had been at his stash of morphine in the bathroom and was sitting now, slack and exhausted, in the only other chair in the office. Eyes closing, opening to focus woozily on a yellow chamber-pot light, one of a pair overhead with dark residues of insects inside them.

"This dear friend of mine I was telling you about. Dr. Charles Martorell? He was also a medical officer during the Great War. Which is how we met, at the base hospital outside of Amiens in 1917. For more than thirty years he has specialized in repairing acute trauma done to the throats of soldiers damaged by gunshot or war gasses; also
pompieres
or workers in hazardous places who breathe invisible flame from explosions or flash fires. In the past few years he has performed successful surgeries on children muted by diseases such as pneumonia and diphtheria. Charles has established an international reputation."

"That so? All the specialists who looked at Alex when he was younger said that his larynx was just shot to hell." Bobby was looking at a six-foot-square map of Evening Shade on the wall behind his desk, the yellowed celluloid sheet covering the map pinholed and marked up with a grease pencil. "My mother and my daddy had Alex up to St. Loo and down to New Orleans, trying to find him help. All Alex got out of it was the train rides, but at least he always enjoyed those. His Lionel electric train set was destroyed in the house fire and I never did replace it, but most weekends after I came home from Germany we'd drive out to Cole's Crossing, sit for hours watching the freights and the big streamliners
 
go by. The
Dixie Traveler
, there's a humdinger, every night at"—Bobby looked at the clock over the door to his office—"nine oh four sharp it would hit the Crossing, ten coaches long plus the dining and club cars. We talked, I mean I talked, about getting on sometime for the trip to Washington, D.C. but I've always been so busy—"

Something clicked behind Bobby's eyes.

"Think I'll drive down to the Crossing before I call it a night. Want to go along or lie down on the couch in Luther's office?"

"Some fresh air would be a good idea," Ramses said, sweating and looking as if his latest injection of morphine was not getting the job done fast enough.

T
here is something lonely about peddling a bicycle hard, getting up to twenty miles an hour on the good stretches on a little-used country road in the dark of a sultry summer's night with only a D-cell battery light and the yellow moon sometimes visible through high-banked trees to the left of the road for illumination, the asphalt lumpy or even gummy except where there are potholes or large washouts along the crumbling right shoulder (northbound) that Alex has nearly memorized in all of his excursions up and down that road; hit one at speed and take a nasty tumble. His light ignites the eyes of animals (possum, coon, armadillo, a skunk), and the moon puts a high shine on portions of the mucky slough downhill to his right that are not covered by a froglike skin. There are insects, of course; mosquitoes can't keep up with him, but hardshell fliers aiming at the bouncy light sometimes veer off course to smack him in the face or tangle spikily in his coarse mop of hair. If he forgets and breathes momentarily through his mouth during a particularly tough stretch of road, he can catch an insect spang in his teeth. They all taste the same, bitter, takes a lot of spitting to get one off his tongue and his spit is scarce; he's always near to dehydration by the time he winds up back in town. Not uncommon for his calves to cramp and his quads burn unmercifully but he doesn't like to slow down and hates to stop. Expanding his endurance is one of his summer's goals. He expects a lot out of his growing body, lifts weights in the garage, does pull-ups on an iron pipe nailed between a couple of elm trees in the backyard of the house he is not sure he can call a home anymore.

The headlights of the car or small truck that has been about a hundred yards behind him almost since he left Cole's Crossing appear like smeared apparitions in the mirror on his left handlebar. He's stopped paying it any mind. Trying to decide now, with four miles to go until he hits the town square, where he'll spend the rest of the night. Francie's house is out; her folks are back from Bowling Green, and they think he's dirt. Maybe he ought just to go home, hose off in the driveway, curl up in Bobby's station wagon to sleep. Not bother
anybody
, he thinks grimly, a burning dismal anger in his breast. They didn't want him in the house anymore. So what? He'd get some breakfast out the back door, like a tramp passing through, from sympathetic Rhoda. Cut the grass for his grits and gravy. Owe them nothing. Then take off. He is almost fourteen. He can bum his way around the country. Robert Mitchum did it, and now he's a big movie star (Alex has learned this reading one of Francie's fan magazines). Robert Mitchum has done jail time as well and doesn't take shit from anybody. Just hop a freight, never look back . . .

That will have to come later. First he and Mally need to take care of Leland Howard. But Alex doesn't have a clue where to find that mangy owlhoot, and if he does find him, how to get his attention.

Coming now to the sixty-foot bridge spanning a ravine with a mostly dry creek at the bottom of it. Stagnant pools of water amid some big flat rocks. The bridge isn't paved. There are two lanes of planks laid over four-by-fours with space between them. Six-inch-high wooden curbs but no railing on either side. Strict load limit. Most drivers obey the yellow warning signs posted well in advance and go across the bridge in low gear.

So Alex wonders why the driver who has been lagging behind him for miles is now speeding up.

J
im Giles in his assassin's mind gave the accelerator of his rackety pickup a goosing, and large reflectors nailed to posts on either side of the dangerous bridge strafed his own headlights back at him. The boy darted a look around at momentum sprung on him like a lion charging in a 3-D picture show and lost his cycling rhythm halfway across. The front tire of the bike slipped off the worn plank on the right side of the bridge and hit a space between four-by-fours. The boy lost his grip and left his seat in a soaring sprawl. As the upended bike jumped and pivoted in the air the truck ran into it and crunched it whole beneath the front wheels. Twisted metal dragged the undercarriage and loosened the oil pan. Giles blinked at the impact as he braked, too hard, and the pickup's back end swerved off the planks. He was busy trying to avoid dumping his truck into the ravine and lost sight of the boy.

When Giles had control again, he didn't see the boy anywhere.

He shifted to neutral, grabbed a flashlight, and got out. While he was dragging the wrecked bike out from under his pickup, he heard the pierced radiator hissing and smelled hot oil dripping.
Well Goddamn
. But he had to make sure this sorry business was over with and
right now
.

Giles walked slowly along the left side of the bridge where there was a wooden curb six inches high. He flashed his light down through some dead trees and saw the boy beside the rocky creek bed. Sitting up, not lying there unconscious. Holding the back of his neck. He didn't look up when Giles flashed the light on him. There was blood on his face.

"Hey, kid!"

He looked up slowly, dazed and maybe with a cracked skull, but obviously he had a lot of luck going for him. Giles reckoned his brains ought to be coming out of his ears. A litter of dry branches sticking to his clothing suggested his fall had been broken somewhat. So that's how it was, still alive; but Giles wasn't going to wait around town for a third crack at him. It was going to be Murder One after all and the hell with it.

Giles returned to his pickup and reached inside to take his Remington shotgun down from the rack. Eighteen-inch barrels, customized by a gunsmith, but enough range to do the job from, say, a distance of thirty feet. Deer slugs. Giles cocked his shotgun and was on his way back to a good vantage point, flashlight beam lancing into the ravine, when somebody else showed up.

Headlights a quarter of a mile up the road toward town. A lone car, but still it was turning into a party. He was lit up by the truck's headlights behind him. Truck blocking the bridge, blowing steam from the radiator and leaking oil.
Well Goddamn
.

Giles ran back to the pickup, laid the shotgun on the seat beside him. He needed valuable seconds to ease the truck back onto the planks. By then the other car had reached the place where the road narrowed to one lane for the bridge crossing. He shifted into reverse and began backing up. Let them go on by, keep his face hidden. Then, when he had the bridge to himself again, drive back and finish the boy.

But he had momentarily forgotten about the tell-tale bike lying wrecked on the bridge. And his engine was overheating.

T
orn up it was, Bobby Gambier recognized Alex's Schwinn bicycle even as Ramses said, "Looks like there's been an accident."

"God, it's Alex," Bobby said with a thickening of fear in his throat. He stopped a few feet short of the bridge, staring at the pickup truck that was backing away from the scene. He heard gears grinding; the driver was having transmission problems. Apparently he couldn't move his smoking truck any direction but reverse.

"Flashlight's clamped under the dash," Bobby said to Ramses. "See if you can find Alex. He must have gone off the bridge. I need to find out what that son of a bitch in the pickup had to do with this!"

Ramses got out of the Packard, moving fast for a man of his age and in a terminal condition. Bobby gunned the Packard across the rumbling bridge straight at the retreating truck. Now the other driver was pouring it on, zigzagging backward at nearly forty miles an hour on narrow blacktop. Bobby flashed the Packard's high beams to try to get him to stop and increased his own speed.
Flash, flash
. He could make out the driver, head turned halfway around as he steered erratically. The smoke around his beat-up truck was blue-black. Burning oil; Bobby could smell it as he put his Packard almost nose to nose with the runaway Chevy truck.

The driver looked around at Bobby, his face grim in the headlights. Then he picked up what looked like a sawed-off shotgun from the seat beside him. Bobby panic-stopped. The pickup slewed around on the road in its own spilling oil and ran out of control up the embankment to one side of the road, stopping when it hung up on the half-rotted stump of an osage orange tree that had fallen years ago. The truck was tilted to one side at an angle of about fifteen degrees, left front wheel spinning aimlessly off the ground.

Bobby and the Chevy driver sat still for several seconds, eyeing each other through the dust and smoke settling out of the air. Bobby reached for the short-nosed .44 Bulldog he always had in the Packard and slipped out the door, crouching.

"Deputy sheriff! Climb out of there; you're under arrest! I want to see hands, see your hands!"

What he saw was the downhill slant of the shotgun barrels as the door on the driver's side creaked open. Half of a hatted man in silhouette. Bobby ducked lower as a slug from the shotgun blew out part of the Packard's windshield and ripped open the seat on the driver's side. Bobby darted out past the front fender and shot twice from his crouch, dumped the shotgun man on his back, sending him in a slide past his smoking truck on thick leaf mold and other woodsy detritus.

Bobby straightened slowly, revolver in a two-handed grip, ears ringing. Adrenaline was giving him a kick. The sky was flecked with birds chased from their high roosts by the gunplay.

"Christ, I'm shot!" the man hollered. "Don't shoot again, I'm done!"

"Get your hands in the air where I can see them."

"Christ no, I can't do it. Shoulder's smashed all to hell. Got me down low too. I can't move at all."

"You got one good hand on that shotgun. Slide it on down the slope away from you!"

Bobby heard him groan; then the shotgun slithered a couple of yards as the man weakly pushed it away from him. "Is that it?"