own peculiar way. 'Hazel, honey,' he'd say to me, 'you got a croup jus' like a thoroughbred mare. I never hope to
She shook her head reminiscently. 'He married it to get it, finally. He was a lot of all right, that Blueshirt man. Although it sure was chicken today and feathers tomorrow living with him. That character would bet on anything.'
Some people came in the back door, and she stood up lo go back to the bar to wait on them. 'Don't go away, Horseman,' she said over her shoulder.. 'I don't get a chance to talk the language much these days.'
I knew what she meant. It's a special language. When Jed Raymond walked into the Dixie Pig at eleven o'clock, Hazel and I were still rerunning races we'd both seen.
'You must have had the password, Chet,' Jed said to me. 'Our hostess doesn't usually unbend like this with the hoi polloi.'
Hazel reached up from the booth and nearly collapsed him with a casual backhander in the chest. 'This guy is with it, Jed,'' she said, leveling a thumb at me. 'Where'd you find him?'
'He found me,' Jed said when he could get his breath, 'Lay off the strongarm stuff, woman, or I'll call out the militia on you.' He sat down in the booth beside me. 'One for the road?'
'One,' I agreed. 'Then I've got to get out of here. I'm meeting Roger Craig in the morning.'
I drove back to the Lazy Susan twenty minutes later. Hazel's handsome face and attractive smile danced in the windshield before me. With her hearty laugh and superlative figure she was the most woman I'd seen in a hell of a while.
For a time I'd nearly forgotten the shape of things. It wouldn't do.
I pulled into Roger Craig's elliptically shaped graveled driveway at five minutes to eight. I was wearing my poor-but-honest khakis. Craig was already out in the side yard superintending a young black boy who was setting up an eight-foot section of slash pine about a foot-and-a-half in diameter. If this was the test, it was going to be a breeze. Slash pine is so soft I could have handled it with my teeth. Still, Craig was a native, and this was native wood that he knew.
I opened the back deck of the Ford and slid out my big toolchest along with a couple of coils of rope. Craig nodded pleasantly. I could see he knew about the deposit. His manner was easier. I had the job unless I cut a leg off. He needed the work done, and I was a customer of the bank.
I strapped on safety belt and climbers, giving it a touch of atmosphere, took out a pair of goggles, and unslung the lighter of the axes. 'AH set, Mr. Craig?'
'Whenever you're ready, Arnold.'
I walked to the pine log and tested it for balance. It was wedged firmly. I settled myself in front of it, digging in with my heels in the soft turf. With wood like this I had no need for a long, over-the-head ax stroke. Just as well for a man who still had a stiff arm.
I went at it from shoulder height, placing the cuts more with an eye to accuracy than speed. Still, a deep V narrowed rapidly as the ax rang with the mellow sound of good steel. The fat white chunk chips flew in a steady stream. Chips were still in the air when I stepped back with the pine log in two sections. The black boy stood to one side with wide, rounded eyes.
'I wish I could have tried you a few years back,' Roger Craig said, a wistful note in his voice.
I almost made the mistake of handing him the ax. That would have been a hell of a thing to do to a recent heart-attack victim. I pushed back the goggles after I caught myself in time. 'I'd have asked for a handicap,' I told him. 'You've got a press agent in town. Jed Raymond says you could really go.'
He smiled with pleasure. 'Jed's a good boy,' he said in unconscious imitation of Hazel the previous night. Craig's smile faded. 'I get damn tired of being half a man these days.' Then he turned businesslike. 'You were trying out for two jobs just now. I ran into Judge Carberry at the club last night. Drop around and see him when you finish up here.' He held up a restraining hand when I would have thanked him. 'What do you propose to do for me here?'
'I'll do it all.' I waved at the driveway. 'I'll shape up that low bush Ficus and wax myrtle when I finish with the trees.' I turned to the side of the house. 'Just about all of it needs thinning and trimming, especially the live oaks and that shagbark hickory. See the dead limbs on the sycamore? And you've got two bad palmettos on the other side of the house. The one closest definitely ought to come down, but maybe the other one can be saved.' I ran over it in my mind. 'All told, two-and-a-half or three days' work.'
I le nodded. 'I'll let the judge know he can expect to see you when you finish here.'
'I appreciate it, Mr. Craig.'
'Stop in and see me at the bank whenever you're ready.' I le went into the house, and five minutes later his cat eased down the opposite loop of the driveway.
I smoked my before-climbing cigarette while I walked around the grounds planning my day. One of Roger Craig's forbears had had an eye for trees. There was the biggest magnolia I'd ever seen. It must have gone seventy feet. Craig had chinquapin, sassafras, sweet gum, red birch, and mimosa. On the other side of the house I'd seen cottonwoods and aspens. There was even a chinaberry tree.
It was a bright, sunny morning, and the air felt crisp. I was not only established in Hudson, Florida, but my sponsorship was the best. If I couldn't ease up on the blind side of whoever had sandbagged Bunny with a start like this, then there was something the matter with me.
I climbed upstairs and went to work. Most of the morning I thinned tops, occasionally marking a larger limb that had to go. I never stop for lunch when I'm in the trees. Food is just so much extra weight. I go straight through from eight to four.
In the afternoon I looped three different weight saws onto my belt and shouldered up a coil of rope. I went to work on the larger stuff. I undercut it first, then roped it to the trunk and lowered it after the overcut snapped it off. I wanted no heavy drops tearing up the side of the house or scarring the lawn.
The final half-hour I trimmed up stubs and daubed them with paste. I knocked off at four sharp. I felt tired, but pleasantly so. The arm had. held up well. It was the first real day's work I'd done since I'd cased a bank in Okmulgee, Oklahoma I'd finally decided against trying. But I'm never too much out of shape.
I packed the gear into the Ford and headed for the Lazy Susan and a shower. The traffic light caught me in the square, and I sat there waiting for it to change so I could swing south on 19. I had to hold up for a second after the light changed as a slim, redheaded man limped hurriedly across the street in front of the Ford, against the light.
I turned the corner with a teasing tickle in the back of my mind: had I seen the man before, or just someone who looked like him? When you move around the way I do, it's sometimes hard to hit faces to locations.
Then it hit me.
The last time I'd seen that limping redhead he'd been in Manny Sebastian's parking lot in Mobile with the hood up on my car.
I turned into the first vacant parking space, got out of the Ford, and walked back up the street.
I sat at the wobbly desk in my motel room and spread out under the gooseneck light the real estate map of the area I'd obtained from Jed Raymond. On the floor at my feet the German shepherd lay with his muzzle on his paws, his brown eyes watching me steadily. I'd stopped at the vet's and picked him up after I'd spent a fruitless thirty minutes quartering downtown Hudson in my search for the redhead I'd last seen three-hundred-fifty miles away. I hadn't found a trace of him.
Just seeing him, though, meant the honeymoon was over for me. There was only one reason the redhead could be in Hudson. Manny Sebastian had decided to cut himself in on the Phoenix $178,000. It really wasn't very bright of Manny. I had to give thought to how I was going to change his mind, because I was definitely going to change it. First, though, there was the matter of locating the money myself.
The shepherd's shoulder was stiff, but he could walk. The scrape on his head was nothing serious. 'How you doin', Kaiser?' I asked him. His big tail thumped the rug. His head came up, and his new tags glistened on his new spiked collar. A twenty-dollar bill had straightened me out with the motel proprietor about the added starter in the unit.
I turned to the map. Finding the sack with the money in it had suddenly taken on urgency. I couldn't take the affair in second gear since seeing the limping redhead. I had to get moving. I knew Bunny wouldn't have dug himself in too far out of town, but he wouldn't have set up in a tent in front of city hall, either. He liked to batch it alone where he wouldn't attract attention. It was one of the things I'd liked about him.
