Blowback(53)

Harry looked up at me with dull eyes, and I said, “I'm not up to a drive into The Pines right now. You want to take care of calling Cloudman?”

“All right,” he said.

He stood up, got Mrs. Jerrold on her feet, and then did not seem to know what to do with her. I motioned to the cabin door, put the. 22 down-the feel of it in my hands was like something unclean-and took one of her arms even though I did not want to touch her. Together we guided her inside and down onto Cody's rumpled bed. I pulled a sheet over her, watched her curl herself up and lie there making those sobbing sounds. Then I got out of there, Harry right behind me.

Neither of us had anything to say to each other; he moved away to the path. Cody had come down from the glade. I saw him walk shakily to the rear of the cabin, heard the clink of glass on glass a moment later. Knox and Talesco had come down too, and they were standing around as if they had momentarily lost all purpose and direction, like people in a daze.

I walked past them and straight to my cabin. Even with the fatigue, the loss of tension, I still seemed to be in no immediate danger of a collapse; I was coughing again, though only in a thinly sporadic way. Inside the cabin, I stripped off my filthy clothing, took a long shower alternately hot and cold, brushed my teeth and ran a comb through my hair without looking at myself in the mirror, and put on the stuff I had worn yesterday because I did not have any more clean clothes. I did it all mechanically, mindlessly.

Then I went out and down to Harry's cabin, but not to the front of it-around to the rear and inside the shed there. I stood for a moment next to the skiff that was up on davits, letting my eyes adjust, scanning the interior. And finally I crossed to the rolls of heavy canvas at the rear and knelt in front of them and began to tug at each one in turn.

The Daghestan carpet, bound with cord in a long tight cylinder, was hidden inside a fold of the third roll.

I did not untie it, or even touch it; it was Cloudman's baby-and Kayabalian's. I thought briefly of the twenty-five-hundred-dollar reward that was probably going to be mine. A lot of money, more money than I had seen in one chunk in a long time. And yet it did not mean anything to me at that moment; it was an abstract, and it was tainted with the blood of three men.

I used the canvas to re-cover the Daghestan, straightened up, and went outside again and got a beer from the cooler and sat on Harry's front steps to drink it and wait for Cloudman.





Nineteen




While I waited, the sky got darker overhead and the wind picked up and eventually a few drops of rain started to fall. I watched them make tiny ripples on the steel-colored surface of the lake, darken the reddish hue of the earth. It did not get any cooler, though; if anything, the air took on a damp sultriness that was even more oppressive than the dry heat of the past few days. Here and there I could see patches of blue between rifts in the lowering clouds, and I knew that the rain would not last long, that the sky would probably be clear again by nightfall.

After thirty minutes Sam Knox came around the corner and stopped when he saw me sitting there. Then, slowly, he stepped over and leaned a hip against the railing post, and his eyes were shocked and grave. “Hell of a thing that happened up there,” he said. “Awful thing.”

“Yeah.” I did not want to talk to anyone but Cloudman.

“Always the wrong one that gets it,” Knox said. “It should have been her.”

“It shouldn't have been anybody,” I said.

“No, but if it had to be someone, it should've been her. Talesco was goddamn lucky she held him off. It could have been him Jerrold was shooting at.”

“I thought Talesco scored with her. I thought you were trying to score with her.”

“No, Christ no.”

“Then what was your fight with him about?”

“Him making a play for her,” Knox said. “He's getting married next month, he's marrying this girl in Fresno, and I won't see her hurt…” He broke off. “Look, I don't want to get into that, okay?”

I shrugged. But he had gotten into it enough to tell me I had misinterpreted his drunken mutterings in the hotel bar, and that was why Talesco's comments to me later had not seemed to make any sense. Just a simple case of one man being in love with a girl, and stepping aside for his best friend, and then finding out the best friend was trying to make it with another woman as a kind of last fling. Talesco was lucky Mrs. Jerrold had backed him off, all right. In more ways than one.

Knox said, “What happened to you have anything to do with Jerrold? I mean, the way you looked, all banged up and covered with dirt, and you and Burroughs with those rifles…”

“It doesn't matter now, does it?”