opening the door itself.
“Get the hell in here,” he said, motioning the trio that stood on his front porch inside, not wanting the neighbors to notice them. “Sit in the living room until I get changed.”
He dressed rapidly, mentally cussing out Bo Jergenson all the while.
Bo Jergenson couldn’t figure out why Gus Ronden was pissed off all the time. He decided it wasn’t worth worrying about. The news he had should cheer up Ronden and the boss. Ronden had just stomped into the room he used as an office and called to Bo to get his ass in there. Bo decided not to take offense. After tonight, he’d have nothing to do with Gus.
“Everything just the way you asked,” Bo said, tossing a small, round metal object down on the big desk and taking a seat.
“What the hell is that?” Ronden asked, looking across the desk at him.
“One of them Catholic medals.”
“What the hell do I want with some mick’s voodoo crap? Those mackerel-eaters are worse than the damned shines with their superstitions. Didn’t help him any, did it?”
“Just took it as a little trophy, that’s all. Don’t mean nothing to me.”
“You got back here pretty fast,” Gus said, scratching at his black curly hair. Bo, absorbed in watching white flakes of dandruff cascade onto Gus’s shoulders, was startled when Gus suddenly asked, “Where did you leave him? It can’t be anywhere near here.”
“I know. You said so before. So I took him out to the farm.”
Gus’s face went white, then red. “The farm? You idiot! You damned idiot! Do you know what the boss is going to do to you? Get back out there now!”
Bo was startled at this reaction. “Why should the boss be mad? It will take that gimpy guy forever to walk back here with that bum leg of his.”
“Because, you moron, that gimpy guy is a newspaper reporter.”
“Reporter!” Bo said, coming to his feet. “Damn it, you didn’t tell me anything about that!”
“Well, he is. This could ruin everything. My God.” He thought for a moment, then said, “You gotta go back there and take him somewhere else. Then kill him.”
Bo shifted his weight. “Kill him? No, no. I didn’t sign on for anything like that. You know that’s not in my line. Besides, he’s out cold.”
“You don’t know Jack Corrigan. Get him.”
“I thought the boss wanted him alive.”
“He won’t want him alive now-not after this.”
“I’m not going to murder nobody, especially not a reporter. They’re like the cops-you knock one off, the others come swarming after you. And they don’t give up so easy. Just ’cause he’s out at the farm don’t mean nothing. He don’t know what’s going on there. He’s a city boy.”
There was a long silence.
“I’m not going to murder nobody,” Bo said again. “Betty or Lew or anybody else squeals on me, I could get the chair. Forget it. And all them people at that party-they seen me have a fight with him.” Bo suddenly thought of the butler who had challenged them at the door. He felt relief that he had given the man a phony name.
“All right,” Gus said, after a moment. “Since you don’t have the guts for it, I’ll handle this myself. You’ll have to show me exactly where you left him. With luck, he’s still there. You come with me-just you and me. The other two will go on to the cabin. We’ll collect our pay and we’ll be all square.”
Bo didn’t like it. Even after Gus walked out of the office, Bo stood thinking, trying to figure out how things could go wrong. If Gus did the killing, he should be all right. Bo’s vague sense of foreboding didn’t lead him to any specific misgivings.
He could hear Gus in the other room, giving directions to Betty and Lew. Lew went right along with Gus’s plans, as always, and said, “Tell Bo we’ll see him later, then.” Betty-what a dame she was!-who had played her part so well at the party, didn’t say anything. If she had any questions, she kept them to herself. Bo decided he wouldn’t ask any questions, either. Mostly because he wasn’t sure what he would ask, anyway.
He started to leave the office, then saw the medal. He picked it up and pocketed it.
Maybe he wasn’t as smart as Gus, but he wasn’t dumb enough to leave a trophy from a dead man sitting on a desk.
Ezra Mayhope pulled his pickup truck to the side of the dirt road. He opened the thermos and poured a cup of coffee into the cap, then took a long sip.
He didn’t need the coffee to stay awake. Dawn was still more than an hour away, but Ezra’s day had started two hours ago, when he began loading the pickup truck with the eggs he’d be taking to downtown Las Piernas, to the big hotels there.
The coffee took the chill off the cold, foggy night.
Until a few miles back, his thoughts had been occupied with the subject other local farmers and dairymen were talking about lately-the sprawl of the suburbs over farmland. There were already little enclaves here and there. This housing tract or that one. On the edges of the cities now, but everyone knew what would happen. These new residents would cause taxes to go up, insist on paved roads, drive up the price of water, and bitch about flies and the smell of coops and dairy yards and beets and what have you.
Was a time, Ezra thought now, when no one honked a horn at a tractor. Tractor was the only thing on the road. And nobody was in a big damned rush. Ezra had been forced to go slowly as the road left dairy farms and fields behind and began to skirt the edge of the marshes, where the fog usually hung so thick, you couldn’t see much of anything for more than a few yards in any direction. A drive he could have done on any other night, fog or no fog, with hardly a care in the world-but a few miles back, some idiot had driven past him in a hell of hurry, and taking up just about the whole of the road with a fancy city car-a big old Cadillac or Lincoln, maybe. Flew by. Bastard was like to have forced Ezra and his eggs into the soft, salty mire, but somehow they managed to pass each other without a scrape-or anyone landing in the marsh.
In ten years of driving this route, coming from his chicken farm to this intersection, he rarely encountered another vehicle going in the other direction at this time of night. Always scared the bejesus out of him whenever he did, because it was almost always someone from town, not knowing how to drive these narrow roads. He drank his coffee and told himself that was all that unsettled him.
He glanced around and shivered. The marsh was always a creepy place. His kids had begged him to take them to see that monster movie a few years back, The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Saw it in 3-D, which gave him a headache, but it was pretty real, all right. It was a bad movie for a man to see if he was someone who had to drive past a marsh in the dark.
The coffee made him feel a little steadier. He’d finish his coffee, then pull out from the intersection onto a slightly wider dirt road, one that would eventually connect him to a paved street that led to Pacific Coast Highway. He’d take Coast Highway to downtown and head over to the Angelus and the other hotels that would be waiting for their deliveries.
He heard a splashing sound and looked to his right. He thought it must have been one of the big seabirds moving through the water, a heron, perhaps. But the sound came again. Then, unmistakably, coughing. Next a sound like retching, then moaning.
“Sweet Lord,” Ezra said, watching as a shadowy creature crawled from the marsh. He put the truck in gear and pulled out onto the road, spilling coffee all over the floorboards as he tossed the lid of the thermos down in his haste.
He reached the paved road before his conscience overrode his panic. He was a God-fearing man who read his Bible and he knew the story of the Good Samaritan as well as anybody. The Las Piernas marshes were not the Black Lagoon. That had been a man. A man most likely in trouble. He turned the truck around.
He carefully maneuvered the truck so that the headlights were shining toward the place where he had heard the sound. He immediately saw the form he had seen before. Lying facedown, now, not even all the way out of the water. Soaked in mire.
Ezra got out of the cab of the truck, carrying a flashlight clenched in his fist. He was generally a peaceable man, but stories of the Good Samaritan or no, a fellow had to be careful. What business did anyone have out here
