Murder in Vegas Page 19

  A big rusty spot in the dirt marked the ex. From that point the track of a single wheel bit its way out of town. Chuck seized my left arm and swung me around. “This way, Al.”

  From the sheriff’s office, we clomped along the wooden sidewalk formed by the joined porches of Goforit’s establishments. Past the hardware store, the barber shop, the feed store, then down steps to the ground and past the smithy, to the building that marked Goforit’s end or beginning: Scanlon’s Livery Stable.

  Chuck let go to swing the high doors wide. I moved on my own into blessed dimness.

  No neighs, no restless hooves, no swishing tails, no horsy smells. And hitching racks along the way had been unused. Goforit was a no-horse town. That didn’t surprise me. What surprised me: no horseless carriage, no Hummer.

  Chuck had knocked out the stalls to make the stable a hangar. A Sikorsky helicopter and drums of aviation fuel took most of the space.

  I cleared my throat. “You flew Page and me here?”

  “That I did, Al.”

  An oversized mattress filled one corner. A trapeze-like contraption hovered two feet above the mattress.

  I pointed. “That where you bed down?”

  He laughed. “Hell, no. I rough it at the hotel. That comes next.”

  A faint clatter grew louder.

  Chuck grinned. “C’mon.” He stepped back outside and megaphoned through cupped hands to someone up the street. “I’m here with Milledge.”

  By the time I joined him, my fingertips had picked up oily grit from the drums and smeared it over my cheekbones, under my sunglasses. We passed the smithy and stepped onto the wooden sidewalk.

  Down the middle of the street came a beachball of a boy in undershirt and shorts. He pushed a toy wheelbarrow. A toy shovel and a toy cooler rattled in the barrow. He packed a toy gun. But as he came closer, the toy objects grew mansize and the boy became the most man I’ve seen in the flesh. He’d’ve busted a carnival weight-guesser’s scale. I’d say between seven hundred and eleven hundred pounds. (Some spread, I know, but I’m no weight-guesser.) That explained the oversize mattress in the livery stable. The high and wide doors would be his only fit.

  Chuck turned to me. “That’s Bud Kesten, Goforit’s caretaker. Goes with a ghost town: he’s not all here.”

  Bud had sharp ears and a high, wheezy voice. “Yeah, I ain’t all here.”

  He giggled. “Sometimes I goes up the trail a piece, and sometimes I goes down the trail a piece, to freshen them ‘Keep out’ signs.” He pulled at his undershirt to unforeshorten his tin star. “I’m deppity sheriff.”

  Chuck stopped us at the hotel. I made out the faded fancy letters of “Posada” over the door. We waited for Bud to come abreast.

  “Hose everything down, Bud.”

  Bud stopped, sweating profusely. He was probably older than the thirty he looked. Fullblown flesh nullified facial wrinkles, but clearly he pondered. He brightened. “Gotcha, sheriff. Don’t want flies.”

  “Good man.”

  Bud eyed his vast shadow wistfully, as though wishing he could benefit from casting it, then trundled manfully by dry cracked watering troughs and rickety hitching racks on his way to the stable.

  Chuck ushered me into the Posada, past the untended reception counter, waved me upstairs ahead of him, and unlocked the first door we came to.

  At the sudden chill an ah! escaped me.

  He grinned and pointed ceilingward. “If you had come to in the Sikorsky, you’d’ve seen the solar panels on the roof. Power for air-conditioning, electric lights, refrigerator-freezer in the shed out back that Bud can walk into.” He gestured to a desktop computer. “And you’d’ve seen the satellite dish that links me to DBA and the Web.”

  On the screen a gopher popped up from a hole here, surveyed the emptiness, disappeared, popped up from a hole elsewhere.

  I looked around at the furnishings. Chuck had skimped on nothing but good taste.

  When I turned back, the screen saver had given way to the DBA logo. Chuck typed in “Fourtwoone.”

  “Pretty careless of you, Chuck. I see your password.”

  “What does that tell you about the odds, Al? It oughta shake you that I don’t care.”

  But he blocked the screen with his body as some numbers scrolled.

  They put him in a bad mood, confirming Vandemark’s assessment. I winced. Chuck would take it out on me. And did.

  “Let’s get on with the damn tour.” He hustled me out and down.

  The Last Chance Saloon. Pushing through the batwings triggered the player piano. Ghostly fingers tickled the ivories.

  Chuck saw I didn’t recognize the tune. “Stephen Foster’s ‘Voices That Are Gone.’”

  “The words are gone too.”

  “Good point. I’ll commission Marlene Dietrich to sing the lyrics.”

  “She’s long gone.”

  “Don’t play smart, Al, and don’t play dumb. Money can do anything. I’ll have a computer whiz program Dietrich’s voice.”

  “Good for you.” I spoke absently, taking in the long bar. The brass spittoon at the foot of it and the bung-starter on the shelf behind it looked good to bean Chuck with but were out of reach. Chairs and tables were at hand. I heaved a heavy sigh and rested my palms on a chair.

  Chuck saw but said nothing, even looked away.

  I nerved myself to put everything I had behind the swing and found myself hefting hardly anything.

  He whirled with a ready fist, then smiled as I gently set the chair down.

  “A breakaway.” He waved his hand around. “Goes for most furniture in here. Made of yucca wood. Caravan Pictures used them in barroom brawls to clobber stunt men harmlessly.”

  We cast long shadows as we jaywalked across to the Nye County Trust building.

  Inside, behind the high carved-oak railings, a huge iron safe stood against the wall. Chuck put a hand on the dial, then faced me and raised an eyebrow.

  I remembered his password. “I’ll stick with a winning combination: DBA. Four, two, one.”

  “I’m gonna miss you, Al.”

  “In more ways than one, I trust.”

  He twirled the dial, pulled the safe door wide. “Here’s your trust.”

  I cleared my throat. “Some tourist attraction. An empty safe.”

  He reached in. I heard the click of a hidden catch. He began to swing the safe away from the wall. He stopped himself, raised a listening hand.

  Creaking neared.

  He strode to the bank entrance, leaned out. “Bud!”

  A wheezy sigh. “Yeah, sheriff?”

  “Fetch two cans of Sprite.”

  Another wheezy sigh. “Yeah, sheriff.” Creaking faded. Bud Kesten, deppity sheriff, spectator, gravedigger, and gofer.

  Chuck shut the front door and came back. He swung the safe all the way and we passed through the opening into the hidden vault.

  My skin crawled. Mounted trophy heads. Many more than three. Chuck had a long, hidden history. But my gaze fixed on the missing bookies. Rinker, with his heavy-lidded eyes; O’Dea, with his bandido mustache; Todman, with his frozen grin. Peering out of portholes in a Stygian vessel. I pulled my gaze from the heads and took in the rest of the room.

  I played the friendly butcher. I pointed to a strongbox resting on a shelf. “What’s in the box?” His cue to shift his look to the box.

  “Diamonds for a rainy day.” He smiled big at the box.

  I edged back, set myself to whirl and leap for the opening.

  Without turning his head, he reached out and held me from darting out and sealing him in with his diamonds and his trophies.

  “Not so fast, Al. I wanna show you where you go. Right next to Todman. That’s your rightful spot, not Page’s.” He squeezed the nape of my neck. “Now we can head back.” Sly stress on “head.”

  The walk shook to Bud’s tread as we left the bank. He’d made good time.

  Bud handed us cold cans of Sprite and we cut across toward jail. I fumbled with the
tab, nearly let the slick can slip through sweaty palms, nursed the drink super-carefully, all to fall behind and put a giggling Bud between myself and Chuck.

  I spoke casually, but tried to get it all in before Chuck could shut me up. “Bud, do you know there’s a vault behind the old iron safe? Dial four-two-one, reach in for the catch, and you’ll find a box full of diamonds.” I speeded up both my words and my feet as Chuck started rounding Bud. “I bet he’ll add your head to those in the vault if he catches you even peeking into the bank, so get him fir—”

  I barely had time to tighten myself against what I felt coming. It was worth the knockdown blow. Chuck, with his no-loose-ends philosophy, now had to kill Bud as soon as he found a replacement. And Bud, no matter how sluggish his body, now had the frantic thought planted in his mind. I had changed the dynamics of their relationship. I hoped it would change the odds in my favor in my very near future. I looked up from the ground at Chuck and felt like smiling, but my face told me I must look like Doug.

  Chuck hauled me up by my bracelets. “Brought it on yourself, Al. You had to try and wake up sleeping dogs.”

  “See what he thinks of you, Bud? A sleeping dog.”

  Bud wheezed a halfhearted chuckle and pushed me along.

  “Wait.” Chuck planted one hand on my chest and slapped me with the other.

  My sunglasses flew off. He stared at my smudges.

  “How the hell—” He grabbed my joined hands, pried open a fist. My fingertips told him. “The drums in the stable. Gotta hand it to you, Al. You put one over on me.”

  I couldn’t see how it happened; he moved and my sunglasses cracked and ground under his feet.

  “Sorry, Al. An accident.”

  As he locked me back in my cell, Chuck bowed like room service. “Your last-meal request, sir?”

  I squinted at him, unable to tell if his face matched his words. His concern for form, sane or insane? I answered, sanely or insanely, “A candlelight supper with a lovely woman.”

  A specific woman. Betty. I could hear her voice: Al, I need commitment. And I could see her face when my words would not come.

  Chuck brought me back. “Be serious.”

  “I am serious.” I was seeing the light—and the light hurt.

  At seven p.m. Chuck slid the last meal into my cell. The room had a ceiling bulb, so the memorial candle burned palely in its glass on the tray. I failed to appreciate the steak dinner and the vintage claret.

  Full in body, empty in spirit, I waited till Chuck had gone. Then I used the bolo slide to slice a pair of one-eighth-inch slits in the brim of my Stetson, and frayed the edges. With the brim pulled low over my eyes, and the cheekbone smears reducing glare, I would not be shooting blindly … if I had time to draw and shoot at all. I hit the hay with that happy thought.

  Riding to the rescue, the cavalry raised a drumming thunder and a storm cloud of dust. The commander held up his gloved hand, reined in, and the troop stopped. The thundering ended, the cloud rolled over men and horses. They grew as grainy as the dust, and all vanished.

  I sat up, made out nine-thirty, and tried to piece it together. An outside cue had entered my dream and awakened me to the all-too-real Goforit nightmare.

  Bootsteps and the outer door creaking open and Chuck’s voice ushering people in. “Inside, friend. Step right in, honey. Fear not, your motorcycle’s perfectly safe.”

  The rattle of keys.

  The inner door opened. A biker couple. Male: mid-thirties, bandanna’d head, nose ring, shaved hash marks in his eyebrows, steel-studded belt. Female: teenage, cropped hair, bellybutton ring, shrinkwrap Levi’s. Both dusty and weary and didn’t have to be stoned to look spaced-out.

  They stopped dead and stared at me while Chuck opened the other cell.

  “Enter, folks.”

  The guy found his voice first. “You’re arresting us? What for?”

  “Trespassing on private property. Ignoring the warning signs.”

  “Hold on, Sheriff. I told you we lost our way to Death Valley. We followed a desert track, it got dark, we saw your few lights.”

  “Step in, make yourselves comfortable. We’ll straighten it out tomorrow.”

  “No room at the Posada?”

  “Want another charge? Resisting arrest.”

  The girl tugged the guy’s arm. “Let’s get some sleep. I’m dead.”

  They went in. Chuck locked the cell and left.

  The guy looked at me. “What you in for? Spitting on the sidewalk?”

  “You won’t believe me.”

  “Sure I will. That hick sheriff is running a tourist trap, collecting phony fines.”

  “That hick sheriff is Chuck Owens, head of DBA. Goforit is his private game preserve. He stages gun duels and collects human heads.”

  The bikers locked gazes and busted out laughing.

  Chuck came back with two pairs of handcuffs. He beckoned me close, rolled his eyes toward the bikers. “Want your dessert now?”

  I glanced at the girl. She grinned at me. I answered Chuck’s arched eyebrow. “Thanks, but no thanks.”

  He shrugged and moved to the other cell.

  The guy smiled. “Sheriff, are you really Chuck Owens?”

  Chuck smiled back. “That what this touched-in-the-head feller’s been telling you?”

  “Yeah.”

  Chuck tossed the handcuffs into the cell. “Pick ’em up and cuff each other.”

  They stared at him.

  He put his hand to his holster.

  Now they began to believe me.

  A restless night. Lots of tinkling in the chemical toilets.

  Ten to noon. Chuck passed the spare gunbelt through the bars. The bikers huddled and watched. I tuned them out.

  A quick learner, I stretched the gunbelt across my bunk, lay down, and buckled up.

  I rose. Chuck was leaning beside the clock. I reached two-handedly for my weapon. He didn’t stir. I pulled the gun. A double-action Smith & Wesson .38 revolver. Unloaded but cleaned and oiled. I pulled the trigger. The action was smooth, the hammer had its pin, each trigger-pull cocked the hammer, positioned the empty cylinder.

  “When do I get the bullets?”

  “Where. Outside. Just before the draw. Any more questions?”

  I raised linked hands. “How fair is this? Kinda hard to make a fast draw tethered to myself.”

  Chuck snorted. “Carpe diem: die carping. That’s gonna be your epitaph. Listen up, Al. I make the rules. Remember, it’s the only game in town.”

  I nodded. “The odds are with the house—even one built on sand.”

  “Yeah, yeah. To answer your question, I’ll give you the key, then back up twenty paces while you unlock. Now stop stalling.”

  Chuck arranged us in the middle of the street.

  The wooden sidewalk shook and creaked as Bud neared the bench in front of Jeff’s Hardware. A final ominous creak as he settled himself to watch. The hot desert breath wafted the strong scent of an after-shave lotion our way.

  Chuck took a big sniff. “Hey, Bud, wearing that stink for the girl? You’ll gas her to death before you crush her.”

  Bud giggled.

  Chuck rattled six bullets in his fist under my nose. “Hand me your gun.”

  I wrestled the revolver from its holster. “How do I know they’re not blanks?”

  He uncoiled his fist. “Carping to the end. Pick one.”

  I had kept my head bowed for brim shade. I stabbed blindly.

  He inserted the bullet, aimed at my head, hooked the trigger, grinned, swung the gun a touch, held steady, squeezed off the shot. It burned past my ear.

  His voice cut through the ringing. “One shot wasted. Price you pay for carping.”

  He finished loading the gun, shoved it hard in my holster. My fingers itched to touch the gun butt lightly to feel if Chuck’s thrust had made the front sight catch in the leather. But better not hand him an excuse to fire before I was ready.

  He handed me the key. “Now I back
away twenty paces while you free your hands. Then I say, ‘Go for it.’ And we draw and fire.”

  Now seemed Bud’s moment, unless he was just as much of a nutcase as Chuck, or unless his gun was just for show, to ease his gun out while Chuck focused on me.

  Bud giggled expectantly.

  I ducked my head lower, squinted through the fuzzy slits.

  Chuck backed away. “One … two … three … .”

  The key felt hot from his hand and sweaty from me. I made it skitter in search of the hole.

  Bud giggled.

  The key slipped my fingers. I went down on one knee, groped to miss it.

  Bud continued to giggle. Chuck reached “Twenty” and waited. I counted on Chuck’s patience—or enjoyment—and he didn’t let me down.

  I swiped wider and wider for the elusive key, till my twists brought my locked hands to the gun butt. Then I drew and fired without getting up, taking aim through the slits.

  Chuck had his gun out, too late. His figure jerked and I placed two more shots and he fell.

  That left two for Bud. Odds were Chuck wouldn’t trust Bud with live ammo, especially after the seed I’d planted. But I couldn’t take chances. Still on one knee, I twisted to face Bud.

  He sat frozen, his jowls hanging, too stunned to go for the equalizer at his equator if he could. He made a sitting target, and I took my time to kneecap him twice. He toppled off the bench with a thunderous thud. It would take his trapeze to pull himself up.

  I shoved myself upright and moved with shaky knees. I made sure Chuck was dead, went through his pockets for the key to his Posada suite. Then I checked Bud’s gun. Found it empty. He groaned and looked pitiful. I felt no pity. For a beached whale, yes; not for Bud.

  After locating and using the key to my handcuffs, I would have fitted them on Bud. No chance, and really no need. He would keep.

  I passed through the Posada to the refrigerator-freezer shed out back, found Doug Page’s head in the cooler I’d seen in the wheelbarrow, retraced my steps, climbed the stairs, let myself into Chuck’s suite, sat down at his computer and instant-messaged Nevada and Federal authorities.