see the cracked concrete steps as he left the porch – no more broken now than they had been when he was eleven and had sat on them those nights when Buddy Shaw and his mother were drunk, had sat waiting for Shaw to go to sleep so that he could slip in.
Colton had stood beside his pickup, looking back at the house. The sparse grass he remembered was no longer there, the glass in one window was replaced by plywood. But otherwise it looked much the same. The last time he had seen it was the day after his twelfth birthday – the last time he had come home. The boy he knew at school had said he couldn’t stay at his house any longer and he had walked home to see if Buddy Shaw had sobered up, and if Buddy Shaw would let him return. He had found the house empty. He had peered through the windows and seen the kitchen stripped of his mother’s pans, and the bathroom stripped of her toiletries. But in the room where he slept, his things were still scattered. The bedclothing was gone from the cot, but the blue jacket his mother had got for him somewhere was still hanging on its peg. And his books were there. And his cap. He had broken a window and gone inside, cutting his hand in his panic. There had been nothing except the old furniture that had been there when they moved in and his own spare clothing.
Colton Wolf stirred uneasily in the recliner. All the desolation of that discovery came back to him again – the sense of loss and confusion and rejection, and with it the bleak, hopeless loneliness. Where could she be? How could he find her? Why had she gone? On the burner, the percolator gave a final cough and fell silent, its duty done. Colton Wolf ignored the sound, if he heard it. He was considering the same questions he’d considered for nineteen years.
A few minutes after one-thirty, he pushed himself out of the recliner and poured a cup of coffee. He took it to the truck, to sip as he drove. At a pay booth beside Central Avenue he made the call. He dialed the El Paso, Texas, area code, and the prefix number, and then waited while the second hand of his watch swept toward 2:10. Then he completed the dialing. He dropped in the coins and heard the number ring just a moment before the second hand swept past his deadline.
It was answered instantly. “This is Boxholder,” the voice said. That address had become something of a joke between them. A joke and a code.
“Okay,” Colton said. “Boxholder here, too.”
“We have another opportunity in New Mexico,” the voice said. “One thing led to another, I guess.”
“Same client?” Colton asked.
Silence. “We never talk about clients,” Box-holder said. “Remember?”
“Sorry,” Colton said.
“Conditions are a lot the same, though. The subject won’t be on guard. And there’s a hurry.”
“How much hurry?” Colton asked. Hurry bothered him. And his voice showed it.
“Nothing specific,” Boxholder said. “Just the quicker the better. Every day increases the risk. So forth.”
“I don’t like to rush things,” Colton said. “Things go wrong.”
“You don’t have to handle it,” Boxholder said. “Maybe you’d better not. But I know you wanted to clean up that original business, and that kept you in Albuquerque anyway, and…”
“I think I’ll have the other business finished in twenty-four hours or so,” Colton said. “Maybe tonight.”
“Well, that’s all we’re committed to. After that’s done we’ve kept the original contract.” Boxholder chuckled. “Took a little longer than anybody figured, but what the hell?” Silence. “I thought maybe you’d like to show these folks how good you usually are.”
Colton grimaced. Boxholder assumed the thought of a dissatisfied customer would bother him. That was correct. Boxholder assumed he took intense pride in his work. That was also correct. “Okay,” he said. “Tell me about it.”
Boxholder told him. Then, as they always did, they arranged the time and telephone number for Colton’s report.
Colton used up three hours. He walked. He dropped the letter he had written to Webster Investigations into a mailbox. It contained his check for $1,087.50 and a note suggesting that Webster run personal ads in West Coast newspapers asking Linda Betty Shaw/Fry/Maddox to contact him. He walked some more. He sat on the bench at a bus stop. The bus stop was near a school crossing and he studied the homeward-bound students. They seemed to be junior-high age and younger, and most of them walked in little clusters and bunches, talking. Once a single kid came along, all by herself. Colton guessed the single was somebody who had just moved to the neighborhood. If you did that, you couldn’t make friends, because everybody already had them. When he was eight they had lived in San Diego in this one apartment almost a year and he had made a friend there. And then when he was fourteen and had been in Taylorville long enough, he had made a friend on two. But that was different. In reform school nobody knew anybody at first and everybody was looking for connections. Taylorville had been a pretty good place, all in all, and he’d been glad enough to go back for his second stretch. They kept the gays off of you in Taylorville. Not like in Folsom, where he’d done his armed robbery time.
Finally it was late enough. He called the University of New Mexico Hospital and asked for Mrs. Myers on the terminal ward. As always, her voice was placid. “I’m afraid it’s all over,” she said. “He’s been in a coma all day and his heart finally quit.”
“Well, you just have to be philosophical about it.”
“That’s right,” Mrs. Myers said. “But it’s always a blow.”
“Well,” Colton said. He found himself searching for something else to say – a way to extend the conversation. But there was no reason for that. He was finished with Mrs. Myers. This would be the last of more than two months of intermittent conversations, all carefully planned, all carefully executed. First he had learned the name of the nurse who ran the middle shift on the cancer wand. He had got that from hospital information by pretending he wanted to send her a thank-you card. And then, on his first call to learn the patient’s condition, he had said, “By the way, are you Mrs. Myers? He’s told me how kind you’ve been to him. I want to thank you for that.” That had set the tone. Colton rarely talked to anyone, but he knew how to do it well. He watched television, and he listened carefully to conversations in airports and restaurants and the waiting lines for movies-the places where people talked to each other. Once in a while he practiced, with cabdrivers or the call girls he took to motels twice a month. But he rarely talked to the same person more than once or twice, except for Boxholder. After all this time, he found himself imagining how Mrs. Myers looked and what she was like – just as he wondered about Boxholder. He had been tempted to go to the ward some evening and take a look at her. But that involved a risk. Colton did not take risks. “Well,” he said again. “Thank you very much,” and he hung up.
9
COLTON LEFT THE TRAILER just as the ten o’clock news was beginning on Channel 7. He was wearing charcoal slacks, a black pullover, and his crepe-soled shoes. He preferred going bareheaded, but tonight he pulled a navy-blue stocking cap over his straw-colored hair. He took with him a canvas flight bag in which he had put a folding shovel, a green blanket, a white cotton coat with the legend STRONG-THORNE MORTUARY printed on the back, and a New Mexico automobile license plate. He had driven past the Albuquerque airport after telephoning and had collected the plate from a car left in the low-rate parking lot where long-term travelers parked their cars. Then he’d replaced the plate he would use with one switched from another car. If the theft was reported, the police would have the wrong number.
He drove back to the airport now, left his pickup in the upper lot, and rented a Chevrolet station wagon from Hertz, using a driver’s license and credit card that identified him as Charles Minton, with a Dallas post office box address. Then he took Interstate 25 south and turned the wagon westward at the Rio Bravo exit. He drove slowly, counting the tenths of miles on the odometer. Near the river, he turned off the pavement onto a narrow dirt road. He got out of the wagon there, taped down the switch to keep the courtesy light off when the door was opened, and replaced the Hertz license with the stolen plates. It was after 11:00 P.M. now, a cloudless night lit by a partial moon. The dirt road crossed a cattle guard, curved across a culvert, and branched. Colton angled left. The road became two tire tracks winding through the cottonwood of the Rio Grande’s silted flood plain. The tracks crossed an irrigation drain on a rattling plank bridge and dropped abruptly downward. A hundred jolting yards beyond the drain levee, Colton stopped. His headlights illuminated the stripped body of an old Ford sedan, rusty and riddled with bullet holes. Beyond it was the ruins of another car, also the target of years of hunters. Trash was
