Chapter 16
When she was gone, I told Reavis to turn his back. Terror yanked at his mouth and pulled it open. “You ain’t going to shoot me?”
“Not if you stand still.”
He turned slowly, reluctantly, trying to watch me over his shoulder. He carried no gun. A rectangular package bulged in his right hip pocket. He started when I unbuttoned the pocket, then held himself tense and still as I drew out the package. It was wrapped in brown paper. A melancholy sigh of pain and loss came out of him, as if I had removed a vital organ. I tore one end of the paper with my teeth, and saw the corner of a thousand-dollar bill.
“You don’t have to bother to count it,” Reavis said thickly. “It’s ten grand. Can I turn around now?”
I stepped back, slipping the torn package into the inside breast pocket of my jacket. “Turn around slowly, hands on the head. And tell me who’d pay you ten thousand dollars for bumping off an old lady with a weak heart.”
He turned, his blank face twisting, trying to get the feel of a story to tell. His fingers scratched unconsciously in his hair. “You got me wrong, I wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“If it was big enough to bite back, you wouldn’t.”
“I never had nothing to do with that death. It must of been an accident.”
“And it was pure coincidence you were on the spot when it happened.”
“Yeah, pure coincidence.” He seemed grateful for the phrase. “I just went out to say goodbye to Cathy, I thought she might come along with me, even.”
“Be glad she didn’t. You’d be facing a Mann Act charge as well as a murder rap.”
“Murder rap, hell. They can’t pin murder on an innocent man. She’ll give me an alibi. I was with her before you picked me up.”
“Where were you with her?”
“Out in front of the house, in one of the cars.” It sounded to me as if he was telling the truth: Cathy had been sitting in my car when I went out. “We used to sit out there and talk,” he added.
“About your adventures on Guadalcanal?”
“Go to hell.”
“All right, so that’s your story. She wouldn’t go along with you, but she gave you ten grand as a souvenir of your friendship.”
“I didn’t say she gave it to me. It’s my own money.”
“Chauffeurs make big money nowadays. Or is Gretchen just one of a string that pays you a percentage?”
He studied me with narrowed eyes, obviously shaken by my knowledge of him. “It’s my own money,” he repeated stubbornly. “It’s clean money, nothing illegal about it.”
“Maybe it was clean before you touched it. It’s dirty money now.”
“Money is money, isn’t it? I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll give you two grand. Twenty per cent, that’s a good percentage.”
“You’re very generous. But I happen to have it all, a hundred per cent.”
“All right, five grand then. It’s my money, don’t forget, I promoted it myself.”
“You tell me how you did it, then maybe I’ll cut you in. But the story has to be a good one.”
He thought that over for a while, and finally made up his mind. “I’m not talking.”
“We’re wasting time, then. Let’s get moving.”
“Where you think you’re taking me?”
“Back to Nopal Valley. The Chief of Police wants some of your conversation.”
“We’re in Nevada,” he said. “You got to extradite me and you got no evidence.”
“You’re coming to California for your health. Voluntarily.” I raised the barrel of my gun and let him look into the muzzle.
It frightened him, but he wasn’t too frightened to talk. “You think you’re riding high, and you think you’re going to keep my money. All you’re gonna do is get caught in a big machine, man.”
His face was moist and pallid with malevolence. For less than a day he had been rich and free. I’d tumbled him back into the small time, perhaps into the shadow of the gas chamber.
“You’re going to take a ride in a little one. And don’t try for a break, Reavis, or you’ll limp the rest of your life.”
He told me to do an impossible thing, but he came along quietly to my car. “You drive,” I said. “I haven’t had a chance to look at the scenery.”
He drove angrily but well. We passed his sister just out of Boulder City. Nobody waved at anybody. We lost her in no time at all.
Back in Las Vegas, I directed him to the Green Dragon. He looked at me questioningly as he pulled up to the curb.
“We’re picking up a friend of mine. You come in, too.”
I slid out under the wheel, on his side, and crowded him with the gun in my pocket as we crossed the sidewalk to the screen door. I couldn’t trust Reavis to drive across the desert without an accident. I couldn’t risk driving myself.
The place looked more cheerful with the lights on, more people at the bar. The redheaded boy was sitting on the same stool, probably with the same empty beer glass in front of him, as desolate as ever.
I called him to the door. He said hello with a surprised inflection, and heaved up a feeble smile from the bottom of his stomach.
“Can you drive fast?”
“The fastest crate I ever drove would only go ninety, downhill.”
“That’s fast enough. I’ll give you ten dollars to drive me back to the coast. Me and my friend. I’m Archer.”
“To L.A.?” He said it as if there were really angels there.
“Nopal Valley. We go back over the mountains. From there you can take a bus.”
“Swell. My name is Bug Musselman, by the way.” He turned to Reavis with his hand outstretched. Reavis suggested what he should do with it.
“Pay no attention to him,” I told the boy. “He suffered a very heavy financial loss.”
Musselman took the wheel, with Reavis beside him. I sat in the back of the convertible, my gun on my knees. The downtown streets were brightening into tunnels of colored light under the darkening sky. Its quick nightly tumescence was turning Las Vegas into a city again. Far behind to the east a slice of moon floated low in the twilit sky.
I caught glimpses of it over my shoulder, over the shoulders of mountains, as it slowly rose in the sky, dissolving smaller. The boy drove fast and hard, and no car passed us. I stopped him at a gas station in the middle of the desert. A battered sign advertised Free Zoo: Real live rattlesnakes.
“You still got a third of a tank,” he told me eagerly. “We’re making good mileage, considering the speed.”
“I have a phone call to make.”
Reavis had wedged himself in the corner by the door and gone to sleep. One arm was over his face, the fist clenched tight. I reached across him and pushed the hand away from his wet forehead. He sobbed in his sleep, then opened his eyes, blinking in the light of the dash.
“We there already?” he asked me sullenly.
“Not yet. I’m going to phone Knudson. Come along.”
Getting out of the car, he walked on loose knees around the gas pumps toward the open glaring door of the office. He looked round at the desert, chiaroscuroed with moon shadows; stole a glance at me, and tensed for movement halfway between the gas pumps and the door. A hunted man in a bad movie, about to risk his two- dimensional life.
