Authors: Bill Pronzini
They were nearing the intersection with the rutted track that led to Anna’s property. Above both the track and the valley road ahead, clear in the light from moon and stars, was a hanging residue of fine, talcum-pale dust. One or more cars had come down the track not long ago, going fast enough to raise dust clouds as high and thick as the ones in the Jeep’s wake, and then headed off toward town. Or to John T.’s ranch? Across the desert flats he could see the Roebuck property’s night-lights—half a dozen spread out on tall poles. But just those lights, no others. Everybody there must still be asleep and unaware of the fire. Or pretending to be unaware of it.
Dacy braked to make the turn in front of the storage shed. The Jeep skidded, yawed, and for a sickening instant Messenger thought they would slide over into a roll. But she knew what she was doing; she spun the wheel to control the skid, and the tires caught, churning, and the Jeep’s nose wobbled and then straightened out. The engine whined as she geared down for the climb to higher ground. The track’s stone-studded and cratered surface forced her to hold their speed down; even so, she drove fast enough for juts of rock to scrape the undercarriage, dislodged fragments to explode against metal with pops like gunshots. Fast enough, too, to lift him up off the seat and whiplash his neck, even braced as he was, when a front tire slammed through a deep pothole.
The fireglow and the roiling smoke grew and spread in front of them. The wind carried the faint crackle of flames to his ears; and when the Jeep surged bouncing through the shallow canyon, started up the curving rise beyond, the wind laid the fire’s heat across his skin. They were sixty or seventy yards from the closed gate before the high-licking flames appeared. In their reflection he saw the vehicle drawn off onto the hard-pan to one side.
Station wagon. Newish and light-colored.
John T.’s wagon?
Dacy brought them to a slewing stop. Messenger stumbled getting out; Lonnie caught his arm, kept him from falling, but the look the boy threw his way was unreadable. He leaned both hands against the gate, staring down into the hollow below.
Everything made of wood was sheeted with fire—ranch house, barn, chicken coop, pump shed, remains of corral and windmill. Burning tumbleweeds rolled crazily across the yard, as if the wind were playing some kind of fiery game of bowls. Clumps of sage and greasewood burned here and there on the flats, ignited by sparks and cinders. The heat beat against Messenger’s face in pulsing waves.
He said to Darcy, “Nothing we can do.”
“Didn’t figure there would be.”
“Okay by me,” Lonnie said. It was the first he’d spoken and his voice held an odd, flat inflection. “Let it all burn to the ground.”
“Why?” Messenger asked him. “It won’t make the past any easier to forget.”
“Might. What my uncle did—”
“Your uncle? What did he do?”
Lonnie shook his head.
Dacy said, “Never mind that,” and Messenger saw that her gaze had shifted to the station wagon. “By God, if
he’s
the firebug he’ll pay for it one way or another.”
“John T.?”
“That’s his wagon.”
“Why would he want to do this? And in the middle of the night?”
“Who the hell knows? He doesn’t need a good reason for half of what he does.”
She stalked angrily to the station wagon, Messenger and Lonnie following. She yanked the driver’s door open, bent to look inside—and then jerked as if she’d been struck and froze in place. In the firelight the sudden play of emotions across her face was plainly visible. The one that alarmed him was a wincing revulsion.
“Sweet Jesus,” she said softly. Then, louder, “Lonnie, you stay where you are. Stay there—I mean it!”
Tensely Messenger moved up beside her. One clear look into the wagon and his stomach kicked, his gorge rose; he gagged, locked throat and jaw muscles as he backed away. His eyes were on Dacy, but the image of the wagon’s interior remained in sharper focus, as if it had been burned against the backs of his retinas.
Dead man lying in a twisted sprawl across the front seat. Black blood glistening where his face had been. Spatters of blood and brain matter and bone fragments gleaming on cushions, dashboard, window glass …
“What’s the matter?” Lonnie’s voice, raised above the roar of the fire. But he’d obeyed Dacy; he was poised ten paces shy of the station wagon. “He in there?”
“Dead. Shot.”
“Shot? Somebody shot John T.?”
Blew his face away, the same as his brother. I wanted to make something happen but not this. Christ, not this!
“Get the flashlight out of the Jeep. Hurry.”
Again Lonnie did as he was told. When he came back she went to meet him, and said something Messenger couldn’t make out, then returned to the wagon and shone the light inside. Not long, just a few seconds. Then she switched it off and retreated to where Messenger stood and said in a thin, strained voice, “Well, he didn’t shoot himself. No sign of the gun.”
“Shotgun?”
“No. Large-caliber handgun, close range. One round, I think, but I couldn’t tell for sure.”
“Whoever did it was up here in another car. We didn’t miss it by more than a few minutes.”
“I know, I saw the dust, too.”
Lonnie said sharply, “Somebody’s coming.”
Messenger hadn’t heard anything, and still didn’t for another few seconds. Then he picked up the faint race-and-whine of a car or truck engine laboring along the track.
Dacy was already moving at a half-run to the Jeep. By the time he joined her she had her rifle—a .25 bold-action Weatherby magnum, he’d been told—free of the clamps that held it behind the front seats. She jacked a cartridge into the chamber and stood with the weapon at port arms, watching downhill. None of them said anything as they waited. The silence had a charged quality made more acute by the thrumming crackle of the fire at their backs.
It was three or four minutes before headlights flicked erratically over the bare canyon walls below. The beams steadied; the vehicle took shape behind them. Pickup. It rattled uphill, and when it slid to a stop behind the Jeep, Messenger recognized it: Tom Spears’s dirty green Ford. Spears was driving, and Joe Hanratty was with him.
The two men came out running, but they pulled up short when Dacy lifted the Weatherby. Their attention swung confusedly from her to the burning ranch buildings to John T.’s station wagon. Both had the look of men dragged out of sleep: uncombed hair, pouched eyes, wearing nightshirts tucked haphazardly into their jeans.
Hanratty said, “What’s going on here, Dacy?”
“What does it look like?”
“You set that fire?”
“No. You?”
“Hell no. What’s the idea throwing down on us?”
“Somebody set it. That’s the idea.”
“If we’d wanted to burn this fucking place, we’d’ve done it long ago. We don’t know any more’n you do. I got up to take a leak, spotted the fireglow, and rousted Tom.”
“Just Tom?”
“Wasn’t any sense trying to wake up Mrs. Roebuck.”
Spears said, “How long’s John T. been here?”
“Long before we came.”
“Chrissake,
he
didn’t torch the place, did he?”
“We don’t know who did it.”
“Well, where’s he at? John T.?”
From down in the hollow there was a thunderous rumble that turned their heads: The barn’s roof had collapsed in a fountain of sparks and embers. Waves of heat rolled over them, driven by wind gusts. Sweat prickled Messenger’s neck, flowed down from his armpits. The smoke-heavy air was raw in his lungs.
He said, “John T.’s in his car. He came up here to meet somebody, the way it looks.”
“Meet who, this time of night?”
Hanratty said, “Why don’t somebody ask him? Why ain’t he over here by now?”
“Go take a look.”
The cowhands exchanged a glance. Messenger watched them approach the station wagon; Hanratty opened the door. Their shocked reactions seemed genuine; Spears’s “Shit!” was explosive. When they came back to the Jeep Hanratty looked shaken and angry, Spears stunned.
“We found him like that,” Dacy told them, “five minutes before you got here.”
Spears said, “Who’d do that to John T.?” in a sick voice.
“This bugger, for one.” Hanratty had stepped close to Messenger, “By Christ, if you had anything to do with it—!”
“He didn’t,” Dacy said. “Jim was at my place all day and all evening.”
“You with him the whole time?”
“Most of it.”
“He could’ve snuck out after you went to bed—”
“No. We were together until after midnight.”
“Yeah? Doing what, so late?”
“Talking, not that it’s any of your business.”
“Talking. Bet you were.”
Messenger glanced at Lonnie. The boy didn’t seem to be listening; he stood jut-necked again, either lost inside himself or fixated on the blazing skeletons below.
“You go to sleep easy every night, Joe?” Dacy asked coldly. “Sleep like a baby every night?”
Spears said, “What’s the matter with you two? Jesus Christ, John T.’s lying over there dead with his face blowed off. Ain’t anybody gonna
do
something?”
“He’s right,” Messenger said, “the sheriff has to be notified. Mrs. Roebuck, too.”
“I don’t want no part of that job.”
“We’ll go down and do it,” Dacy said. “You and Joe stay here and keep watch until Ben Espinosa comes. All right?”
“No, it ain’t all right,” Hanratty said. “But I guess we got no choice.” He moved even closer to Messenger and did his chest-poking number again. “John T. was a good man, twice the man you are, city boy. Maybe you didn’t shoot him, but I’ll tell you one thing, sure. He’s dead on account of you. One way or another, no matter who done it, he’s dead because you brought your sorry ass to Beulah.”
Messenger kept silent. There was no point in arguing: Hanratty was right.
THE ROEBUCK RANCH
seemed smaller up close than it did from a distance. Even so, there were twice as many buildings as Dacy managed—two barns, two trailers, a long structure that was probably a bunkhouse, several sheds, an old soddy that might have been the original home of John T.’s father and preserved for that reason. Plus a number of tumbledown ricks and a maze of corrals and cattle-loading chutes. The main ranch house was of native stone and shaded by geometric rows of cottonwoods, but it wasn’t much larger than Dacy’s.
The house remained dark as she piloted the Jeep across the floodlit yard. In front she switched off engine and lights, told Lonnie to stay put, and she and Messenger went to the door. He banged an old-fashioned horseshoe knocker; the thudding noise it made echoed like a thunderclap. But it produced no response. He had to use the knocker half a dozen times, with increasing force, before a light finally went on inside.
When Lizbeth Roebuck opened the door, Messenger thought immediately that she’d been hard to wake because she was passed out drunk. Bleary-eyed, puffy-cheeked, the smell of stale bourbon on her breath and leaking from her pores; sexless and sagging inside a blue chenille bathrobe. Steady enough on her feet, though—the carefully cultivated balance of the habitual alcoholic.
She focused on Dacy and said, “So it’s you. What’s the idea making so much noise?” Her husky voice was almost a growl, but you had to listen close to hear the slur in it.
“Something’s happened, Liz. We need to come in.”
“You know what time it is?”
“It’s important. Talk to you and use your phone.”
“Phone? What for?”
“Call the sheriff.”
“Sheriff,” she said. She backed up, slowly, to let them enter. “What happened?”
“It’s bad, Liz. You’d better sit down.”
“Hell with that. Tell me.”
“No way to say it except straight out. John T.’s dead.”
No reaction, not even the flicker of an eyelid.
“Lizbeth? I said John T.’s dead.”
“I heard you. How?”
“Somebody set fire to Anna’s ranch. Burned everything that was left. Maybe John T., maybe not—but he was there. Still is. Whoever else was there shot him inside his station wagon.”
Still no reaction. Messenger remembered Dacy telling him Lizbeth Roebuck was a cold fish. Could be that was the reason, or it could be shock. The other possibility was that the news of her husband’s death
wasn’t
news to her.
A stretch of silence; then she said, “Phone’s in the kitchen,” and went slowly to a red leather wet bar that dominated one wall. Neither Dacy nor Messenger moved. Lizbeth poured a tumbler three-quarters full of sour-mash bourbon and drank it slowly, steadily, pausing for air only once, until the glass was empty. She set it down and then stood as she had before, rigid, expressionless. “Well?” she said to Dacy. “I told you where the phone is. Go make your call.”
“I will.”
“But first, get him out of here.” She wasn’t looking at Messenger; she hadn’t looked at him the entire time. “I don’t want that bastard in my house.”
“Jim didn’t have anything to do with—”
“Get him out. Tell him get the fuck out right now.”
Dacy said, “Jim …”
He nodded. “I’ll be with Lonnie.”
Lizbeth Roebuck was still talking to Dacy, saying, “Out, out, get him the fuck out of my house,” when he opened the door and went outside.
The wind had died again; the hush over the ranch yard and buildings had a layered quality, like the hushes he was used to on foggy nights in San Francisco. The sky above the hills to the north was still flushed and smoke-stained, but the red glow was fading and the smoke columns had thinned and shortened. By the time Ben Espinosa arrived, the fire would be mostly spent and there’d be nothing left of Anna’s ranch except charred wooden bones.
Lonnie was sitting quietly in the Jeep, head tipped back, a lighted cigarette in one corner of his mouth. It was the first time Messenger had seen him using tobacco of any kind.
“She didn’t want me in her house,” he said as he climbed in on the passenger side. “Mrs. Roebuck.”
“That surprise you?”
“No.”
“What’d she say about John T.?”
“Nothing. Whatever she feels, she didn’t say or show it.”
“Yeah, well, that’s the way she is. Nobody knows what goes on inside her head.”