(33)

Driving to Ronnie’s that night, as soon as I was away from the downtown lights, I could see ragged clouds blowing over the fragment of moon and the scattering of stars like wraiths.

In my eagerness to see Ronnie, I had left the house almost an hour early. I was adrenaline-fueled on what Mrs. Chandler had told me, the revelation that she was Natural Wilson, the information that she was dying of cancer. The stacks of papers, the reel-to-reel tapes sequestered behind that big block of a door and down under the floor in the Moonshine Castle had added to my nervousness.

Before I left to see Ronnie, I made sure the most important of the files were safe. I went to the Moonshine Castle and packed them and the reels into a couple of large plastic containers from downstairs. Then I went outside into the shadowed alley between the Chandler house and the Judson house. I peeked through a window into the Judson home. I couldn’t see much. I tried the window. It was locked.

I went out to my car and got a flashlight out of the glove box and pushed it into my back pants pocket, grabbed the tire tool out of the trunk, went back and stuck the end of the tire tool under the window, and popped it up, breaking the latch. I pushed the window up, then put the tire tool back in the trunk.

In the Moonshine Castle, I grabbed one of the file boxes and toted it out. It was pretty heavy. I pushed it through the open window, and then, trying to look casual, I headed back to the house and grabbed the other container and did the same. After peeking in both directions, I determined no one was looking and climbed through the window.

I coughed some dust, pulled the flashlight from my back pocket, and used it to look around. I found a hall closet and opened it up. I wondered if this was the closet where Judson had shot himself. It just looked like a closet. No blood. No brains on the wall. The paint seemed old. I put the two boxes inside the closet, then slipped out the window and pulled it down.

I felt pretty clever. I hadn’t taken all the files, but I had plenty, the best stuff. That was insurance, just in case someone did figure out the Moonshine Castle.

I was thinking about all of that when I arrived in the well-lit section of houses where Ronnie lived and parked at the curb. I thought I might sit there until it was time but then felt like an idiot. I decided to drive back into town and buy myself a soft drink, then motor on back. By that time, she would be expecting me.

Before I drove away, I noticed, due to her porch light, that a note was pinned to her door. I got out and went up the walk on cat feet and, in the light, read what the note said.

Danny. I called Mrs. Chandler, but she said you had left. There was a big accident out on Highway 59. I have been called out. I’m so sorry. I must cancel tonight. Such is the life of a policewoman. I know you said it was important. Forgive me. Call me tomorrow at the station. Ronnie

I won’t lie and say I wasn’t disappointed, but there was another part of me that felt okay with it. I was perhaps too wound up to be good company anyway, and it was possible I was worked up because Mrs. Chandler had worked me up. But the more I thought about what I had found, what Shirley discovered, what we knew about the bones, the more I believed I had in fact taken a can opener to a nest of vipers.

I took the note with me, and before long I was on my way to the lake. I wasn’t sure why I was going there, but sometimes a drive could clear my head or line up an article in my subconscious so that it would come out of me with a near explosion of beating typewriter keys. I passed shapes of country houses with yellow glows in their windows that didn’t make them seem warm and illuminated but made them appear more isolated, like luminescent fish in a great, deep ocean.

Finally, there were trees and no houses, just a clay road that became a two-tire rut, and that came to an end at the massive dead hole in the ground that was Moon Lake. Out there, there were no lights except my head beams. I cut those and sat with the motor on, the air-conditioning humming, my foot on the brake, the darkness gathering around me as clouds smothered the moon and the stars. It was like being in the belly of an anaconda.

My mind had so much debris floating around, I had forgotten to worry about that copper-colored car that I had seen before, but now there were headlights behind me. They lit up the inside of my car like a spotlight performance in a cheap bar.

I still had my foot on the brake, and in its red glow, by view of the mirror, I saw the car’s lights go out and I could then identify that copper-colored car for sure, gently coated in brake-light red.

I didn’t have room to turn around without going off the road into precarious areas of mud and brush, so I killed the engine, picked my ax handle out of the back seat, and climbed out of the car.

Me and my ax handle decided the best course of action might be to walk away swiftly, so I did, along a straight stretch toward the lake, then down a hill, then I turned along the shoreline, stepping swiftly and not very safely on the dark, brush-cluttered trail.

I heard car doors slam, and then I could hear the soft slide of shoes on clay behind me. At first the sound was slow and then it sped up, and so did I, struggling to identify the trail in front of me. I started to trot. I could hear them behind me, breathing loudly, nothing soft about their shoes now.

There was a crack in the sky, a rolling away of clouds, and in that temporary piece of dull light, I saw the trail had a split-off that went to the right and up a brushy hill, so I went that way. I made it just as the clouds regrouped and smothered the light. The air was as thick as wool socks.

I was making damn good time up that hill and thought I had outpaced them when I heard their breathing practically on me. Turning, I swung my ax handle, catching only the empty dark, and then the dark wasn’t empty.

I could see two shapes clambering up toward me, one short and stocky, the other tall and lean. The short one had that white crap on his face again, and it glimmered greasy-wet even without much light. The other seemed a golem of tar and orange clown hair that had shifted to one side of his head. They had left their hats at home, though they were still wearing dark suits.

I took a backswing and the ax handle whistled through the air and caught the short one on the jaw as he was working his way up. I hit him so hard, I heard the change in his pants pocket rattle. He did a kind of backward frog leap and went tumbling down the hill in a cluster of clay dust.

That’s when the tall one made his lunge. I swung again. I connected alongside his neck with a meaty sound that jarred the ax handle and sent vibrations all the way up my arms and into my shoulders. He fell over on his side like a plank someone had dropped.

The stout white-faced one was up again, using his hands to help him scramble up the hill. I broke and ran, but they had both recovered enough to chase me, and it didn’t take long before they were on me.

I went facedown under a tackle from behind. The ax handle flew from my hand, and fists began to clobber me in the kidneys. I managed to roll out from under my main attacker a little, enough to see it was white-face. I swung a fist and it caught him under the ear.

He grunted. I could feel him grow weak on top of me. I bucked up my body, and off he toppled, went rolling down the hill like a log. The tall one was still in play, and he was kicking my head football-style. I tried covering up with my arms. Then the tall one appeared to jump backward into the air, and I heard him scream. A shadowy shape only a little smaller than a rhinoceros in platform shoes stood over me. I couldn’t tell much about him besides his size, but it was obvious he had nabbed my attacker by the back of the neck and thrown him backward into the night like he’d been made of pipe cleaners. The wig the goon had been wearing spun off his head and fled into the night like an alien spider.

The thing that walked like a man grabbed me and swung me over his head and settled me on his back, where I clung like a baby monkey, my arms around his pillar of a neck, my legs around the barrel of his body. Then, with me riding piggyback-style, away we went, faster than seemed possible. My rhinoceros continued up the hill, smashing us through brush that scraped me and him, but if he was bothered, he didn’t let on. By the time we reached the top of the hill, I was feeling sick from having been knocked about and also due to the fact that my rescuer smelled like donkey shit under a heat lamp.

Just to maintain the tone of the night, it started to rain with vicious intensity.

The rhino wore a too-small suit coat, and he pulled a flashlight from one of its pockets and turned it on. It was a heavy, rubber-coated thing and the light showed lines of rain in its beam. What it was pointing at was a split between two large trees. In that split was a vine-covered red-clay hill with a patch of lichen-coated concrete in the side of it. To know it was there, you would have really had to be looking for it.

Big man grabbed one of my arms, swung me off his back as if I were a swizzle stick, and pushed me through the split in the trees against the concrete slab. The great slab moved, and when it did, it revealed a slice of deeper darkness than the night.

He poked the flashlight in there. I could see a bit of dust moving around. A foul odor climbed out of the gap. A lot of uncomfortable ideas crossed my mind. Big man grabbed me by the shirt and yanked me inside. He heaved the slab of door to, and with the flashlight in one hand, he threw a big metal bolt lock with the other. It made a heavy clacking sound, securing the door in place.

The rhino grunted, pointed the light into the darkness. There was a short flight of slime-covered concrete stairs that led down into a run of scummy water that looked no less inviting than the river Styx. The smell had grown so bad by now, it made his personal aroma seem like French perfume.

He poked the light at the stairs a couple of times, made a noise in his throat like gargling glass.

Taking the hint, I started down them, careful as I went.