Easy Death (5 page)

“Not them,” I said. “Him.”

“Just one man?”

“Just one man now. A couple of guys, they held up an armored car on the state road south of Willisburg. On the cut-off there. I got one, and I think those tracks out there are from the other.”

“Don’t you know for certain?”

“Pretty certain. Not a lot of tracks to follow out there today.”

“Does that make it easier?”

“Not really. Can I trouble you for that Jeep outside?”

December 20, 1951

9:00 AM

Logan and Chuck

“Stop there and hold real still, friends.” The voice of the man in front of them, the one in the police uniform pointing his gun their way, was still calm and commanding, but somehow much different.

Logan stopped.

Chuck stopped.

Both their hands went for the guns at their sides.

And froze motionless as they heard the unmistakable sound behind them of a round being jacked into a shotgun.

“Like he said, friends,” the voice at their backs a little bit deeper and a lot more scary, “hold real still.”

They held real still.

The man in the police uniform with the gun in his hand walked a few steps closer, his long blue coat almost touching the snow, heavy boots moving carefully. Logan studied the gun, noting it looked like a .38 Police Special revolver with a four-inch barrel. Standard issue in just about every police department he knew of. The man himself looked lanky and a little pale, and Logan wondered for a second if he might slip and fall, then wondered what the one behind them with the shotgun would do if that happened. He hoped the man didn’t slip and fall. Tried to swallow and found his throat suddenly dry.

And he needed to blow his nose. He sniffed noisily.

“Wipe it on your sleeve.” The pale man seemed calm and understanding, almost like Logan and Chuck’s stern father, if their stern father had packed a gun. “Just do it slow.”

Slowly, Logan wiped his nose on his sleeve. From the corner of his eye he saw Chuck doing likewise.

“Pay attention now.” As the man in police clothes spoke, Logan heard the edgy patience in his voice; like he’d heard before, in the Navy, from twenty-year veterans so used to giving orders that the thought of disobedience never entered your mind. “I say pay attention here friends, ’cause your life hangs on it.”

Logan paid attention.

“In an hour or so,” the man said, “when you don’t show up in Willisburg, do they come looking for you two, they’ll find you locked up in the back of that tin-can truck there. Now they can find you alive or they can find you dead, and that’s all up to you and how much trouble you give us.”

Logan looked into the man’s eyes. They looked hard, professional, and surprisingly honest. “You do just like we say and you come out of this alive,” he was saying. “Either one of you make us any trouble and they’ll find your brains spread out here, if they look real hard for them once the snow melts. And I’ll give you something else: I never killed a man in my life and left any witnesses around to remember it.”

Logan sniffed again and wiped his nose on his sleeve. Very slowly.

“Big fella,” the man said, leveling his pistol at Logan, “take the sidearm out of his holster—” the gun waved a fraction of an inch toward Chuck “—and throw it over there in the snow. Use your left hand. Do it slow. Not fast.”

Chuck sniffed, trying to keep his nose from running in the cold, and wondered if the man would think he was crying as Logan reached slowly over and took the gun from Chuck’s holster. He hoped the man wouldn’t think he was crying.

Chuck lowered his right arm a fraction of an inch. “Slip it to me!” He hissed the words to Logan without moving his lips. “Then jump right. I’ll jump left and go for the guy behind us.”

Logan hesitated, calculating his chances of handing Chuck the gun, jumping right, pulling his own gun and shooting the man in front of him.

He tossed Chuck’s sidearm in the deep snow.

“Now you there,” the man in the police uniform said. He nodded at Chuck. “What’s your name?”

“I forget just now.” Chuck tried to return the man’s level gaze and found it difficult; he thought maybe the gun had something to do with it.

“Well Mister I-forget-just-now, there’s something on your face, and I don’t much like the look of it.” The man was almost smiling, but not quite, and it made Chuck feel frustrated, like when he was little and told all the grown-ups how he was going to be a policeman someday and arrest all the bad guys, but no one took him seriously, and
why am I remembering all that right now?
He sniffed in the cold and wiped his nose on his sleeve again.

“…so when you take your partner’s gun,” the man in the uniform was saying, “I want you should use your left hand, just the fingers, and move it real slow when you toss it away. You understand that, Mister I-forget-just-now?”

Chuck didn’t say anything. And he didn’t move. Behind him, the other robber said softly, “You want me to just go ahead and kill him?”

The man in the uniform didn’t seem too concerned. He didn’t act like they were in a hurry or anything like it. He just stood there in the blowing snow without seeming to notice the cold, and then he grinned outright.

“You know, I’m not for killing the both of you today,” he said easily. “Not for it much at all.” He raised his voice a notch, “But Pinky there behind you with the shotgun, he wouldn’t mind killing you boys too much. Would you Pinky?”

“Don’t mind it at all.” The voice from behind them didn’t sound amused or friendly. “You just give the word.”

“Well I guess he don’t mind it at all,” the man in the uniform said. “But me, I just hate to kill even one man. You know, I killed a man one time and then I didn’t get to sleep almost all night, it bothered me so much. I like to been up almost half the night before I got to sleep, and all over killing just one man.”

His voice dropped and all the humor went out of it.

“So I’m going to say it once more. This ain’t your party, bud. It’s my party, and I’m playing the tune: take your partner’s gun and throw it away. Slow.”

Chuck wanted to say, “Go to hell,” but he couldn’t think of it. So he just stood there, defiantly still.

A second passed as the snow fell around the men standing knee-deep in the empty white road. Then the man in the uniform cocked his service revolver.

Logan felt his stomach lurch. He tried to make his voice work. “Hold on, mister,” he managed, “just hold on, I’ll do it myself.” He crossed his left arm across his body and reached the holster on his right hip. “See, I’m doing it slow,” he said, “you don’t have to shoot anybody, I swear we won’t make trouble.”

The man in the uniform seemed to like that better, but he kept his eyes on Chuck as Logan awkwardly took the gun in his left hand, holding it by the barrel, and brought it back across, to throw it away.

It passed close to Chuck’s raised right hand, the butt just within easy reach. The man in the uniform seemed to read the future in Chuck’s eyes, and it didn’t bother him. He was ready for it.

Logan wasn’t. A shock like an electric jolt went through him as Chuck snatched the gun out of his hand and swung it around toward the man in the uniform. Moving in slow motion, Logan turned his head to stare at his brother in disbelief.

He was just in time to see the right side of Chuck’s head explode in a red burst.

December 20, 1951

11:20 AM

Officer Drapp

Getting hold of that Jeep was more work than I figured on.

“You may not need it.” The ranger got a thoughtful look on that big hard-featured face of hers. “Captain Scranton is on the tower and of course he might have seen whoever made those tracks, and he can tell us what they look like; and then you can call in the description from here, and they’ll be waiting to pick them up as they come out the other side of the park. That should work just as nicely, shouldn’t it?”

“No, I’m afraid not.” Not for me, anyhow.

And anyway it sounded kind of funny from where I was standing. I didn’t know much about how these park rangers work, but I couldn’t see any boss of the outfit sitting up in a lookout tower and letting the wonder-horse run things down at headquarters here. And come to that—

“What’s anybody doing in the lookout tower on a day like this?” I asked. “You can’t see anything more than a half-mile off, can you?”

She looked awkward at that. And I mean it was like she’d sat on something sharp and couldn’t move her butt off it.

“Oh, he’s out there, I’m sure.” She turned away from me, more to hide her face than anything else, it seemed like. Then she walked, kind of like the way a cowboy walks in the western movies, over to an old-style crank phone in a wooden box on the wall, pulled the earpiece up to her ear and turned the handle like that should change the subject. I heard the phone jangle through the earpiece.

“Captain?” she pitched her voice into the mouthpiece and cradled the ear-part tight against her head—it was either to hear better or to shut me off from asking any more questions. “Captain Scranton?”

And then she just stood there, listening at the phone while nobody answered.

“Captain Scranton?” She turned the crank that was supposed to sound a bell on the other end and tried a different tune: “Emergency here. Captain Scranton, this is Ranger Nixon and we have an emergency here, I’m afraid. Could I speak to you, Captain?”

I guess not.

She didn’t even try the phone again, just hung it up and turned to me and said, “Well I suppose we must take the Jeep out after all.”

“You’re half right,” I said. “I’ll take the Jeep out and look for my man out there, and do I find your Captain, I’ll have him phone in.”

“Well that won’t do.” She said it like she was looking at a smudge on her coffee table. “No, I shall have to go with you.”

“Can’t have that,” I said, trying to sound patient. “I’m after an armed robber and—”

“And that’s all well and fine for you I’m sure, but Officer Drapp I just this minute lost my Captain and I’ve got to find him. Now if you’re worried about me, I’ll put on my sidearm, but—”

“But I don’t take any civilian on a job like this, especially not—so don’t even talk it over with me. This is a police matter and—”

“And you almost said ‘
especially not a woman
,’ didn’t you?” She shot a look at me that stepped all over my face for what she thought I was going to say—and all over every man who ever said that to her. Or anything like it.

It was some look, that look.

“Well, I have responsibilities of my own,” she went on when she could do it without spitting at me, “and at this time that’s to find out what’s become of Captain Scranton, and I really don’t care how many bank robbers you need to chase after.”

“He’s not a bank robber; they hit an armored car.”

“Car or bank or gumball machine is neither here nor there as far as this conversation goes.” She squared her shoulders, stuck out her lantern jaw and lowered heavy eyebrows at me like she was swinging a club or something, “I must go after my captain.”

And I saw we were all done talking about it. My chances of getting that Jeep without her in it was cut way down to nothing, unless I knocked her down and tied her up, and was I to try something like that the smart money would all be on her side.

“Better get that sidearm,” I said.

* * *

Even that wasn’t quick and it wasn’t easy. She had to mess through a drawer to turn up a key that went to a cabinet with a lockbox inside that had the key to a gun locker. It was a pretty impressive gun locker, too, steel-reinforced, with a high-powered hunting rifle inside keeping company with a shortened-up shotgun and an army surplus Colt .45 automatic. All this time I tried to look patient and listen to the music from that big old radio,

…the cattle are lowwwwing
,

The poor baby wakes,

But little lord Jesus
,

No crying he makes…

Well good for Him. I made myself say something nice. “Looks like you take good care of the weaponry here in the woods.”

“We never lock the building itself.” She released the clip from one of the .45s, checked it, shoved it back in and hunted up a holster and belt. And she did it like someone who’s done it enough to make a fast, professional job of it. Made me wonder how well she could handle the business end.

“We have tourists and campers coming in here for all sorts of things,” she went on while she worked that gun, “and sometimes even an animal wanders in, and of course we don’t want the animals hurting themselves. So we keep the guns locked up as best we may.”

She went through the Chinese-puzzle-box of locking everything back up again, then put on a giant fur-lined Eskimo coat. The coat made it so she couldn’t have got that .45 off her hip in less than a quarter-hour, but it looked thick enough it likely could stop a bullet.

“There.” She pulled a parka hood over her head that just about covered her face, and lumbered around a little. “I feel just like Nanook of the North.”

She looked more like one of his sled dogs, and not the lead dog neither, but I just said, “Better let me drive; I’m not sure you could move your arms in that thing.”

“Good idea,” she said. “Do you want to call police headquarters for help before we start out? Or perhaps just let them know where you are?”

Not much I didn’t. And I’d wasted about as much time here as I could.

“Wouldn’t work,” I said. “Let’s go.”

She gave me a funny look. “You’re going after these armed robbers all alone?”

“Just one armed robber is what I think.”

“And you’re going after him by yourself,” she pressed, “without calling for more men?”

“Wouldn’t work.” I said it again so she’d know I meant it.

“Well, I guess being a police officer, you’re no doubt used to walking into danger.”

“You reckon?” We started to the door.

“I just happened to think,” she said all at once, “was anyone killed in this robbery affair?”