Bindlestiff (The Nameless Detective) (12 page)

He would be coming back to the roundhouse sooner or later, though; otherwise he wouldn’t have left the engine doors open or the lights on. I would have to hurry. And I would have to be damned careful while I was poking around inside there. I didn’t have a gun and it seemed likely that he did. I did not want to end up where I was afraid Charles Bradford had.

Quickly, I went back along the fence to a point where the high bulk of the roundhouse loomed between me and the cottage. A long time ago, a tree had fallen against the fence here; the wire mesh was bent inward slightly and flattened down and rusted at the top. Somebody had come out with a power saw and cut the tree into six-foot segments, also a long time ago, because the segments were still scattered over the ground and starting to rot. One of them lay close to the fence; when I got up on the decaying log I could reach the tubular top bar and get enough of a grip on it to haul myself up.

The problem was, I couldn’t maintain much of a hold with the crabbed fingers on my left hand and I had to do most of the work with my right, clenching my teeth against the pain. It took me a good three minutes of grunting and heaving to hoist my fat backside over the bar and drop down on the other side. The noise I made doing it seemed loud enough to alert half the town, but that was a product of tension and my heightened senses. The cottage was two hundred yards away, and the sounds wouldn’t have carried that far.

Still, I ran ahead to where one of the old passenger coaches was set roughly parallel to the back wall of the roundhouse. I knelt along the coach’s front end, massaging my cramped hand, flexing it. I listened and watched the cottage for more than a minute before I was satisfied Raymond wasn’t coming back to investigate.

All right. I moved back to the other end of the car, crossed to the roundhouse’s side wall, then went forward again to the rear corner. Still no movement over at the cottage. I slipped around the corner, ducked inside through the open door.

And stopped in front of the turntable and tried to keep from gagging. There was a burnt-meat smell in the air, faint but nauseatingly pungent. That told me all I needed to know; I was too late, all right, but not by much more than an hour.

I went ahead anyway, around on the right side of the Baldwin and then up through the gangway and inside the cab. The smell, as I had known it would be, was coming from inside the firebox. I did not want to pedal open the butterfly doors and look inside, but I steeled myself, breathing through my mouth, and did it just the same.

There wasn’t anything left to see—just the glowing embers of the coal fire spread out over the grate. The body of Charles Bradford had long since been reduced to ashes.

If you kept stoking the fire in one of these steam boilers, you could get it as hot as an old-fashioned crematorium.

That was what Raymond had been doing when I interrupted him earlier. And that was what had happened to me back at the library, the thing in retrospect that hadn’t been quite right. It had been late afternoon, Raymond had closed the museum for the day, but there he was, feeding coal into the box as if he’d been preparing to take this old hog for a run. But there wasn’t anywhere to take it; and you don’t stoke the boiler full up on a relic like this just to check the steam pressure or how the valves are working. Christ knew where he’d had the body stashed then—not up in the cab, or he’d have been more nervous than he was, but probably somewhere close by.

I took my foot off the floor pedal, and the doors snapped shut, and I started to turn away. Something that gleamed dully on the deck caught my eye; it was under the fireman’s seat, up against the footboard. I squatted on my heels and scraped it out and held it up in my palm.

It was a piece of copper, elliptical in shape, about three inches long, with some sort of design etched into the metal; through an eye at the top was a broken length of thin chain.

Bradford’s pendant, the one Arleen had made for him back in high school.

That put the clincher on things. The chain must have caught on something and broken when Raymond stuffed Bradford’s body inside the firebox; he hadn’t noticed the pendant there on the deck afterward. I straightened, still trying not to gag, and put it into my pocket. The charred-flesh smell was making me nauseous. Raymond must be a cold-blooded bastard to have hung around in here after the cremation.

Well, he wasn’t going to get away with murder this time. I had plenty enough evidence now to bring the local cops out here and have him arrested. And plenty enough to convict him of a third count of willful homicide.

I turned into the gangway. Outside, a long way off, a locomotive’s air horn cut into the early-evening stillness—probably a freight coming into Oroville from the north. I dropped off the running board and swung toward the open doors.

And Raymond was there, just walking into view on the gravel outside.

He saw me at the same time and came to a sudden halt. There was a frozen moment during which we both stared at each other. He didn’t have a weapon of any kind, at least not in either of his hands. The air horn wailed again, and I thought: Goddamn it! and Raymond made a noise like an animal and turned and ran.

I pounded after him, cursing myself for not having got out of here sooner. The side gate stood open now and he was heading straight for it. Heading for the cottage, I thought, going after a gun. I wasn’t in very good physical shape, but neither was he—a couple of overweight middle-aged guys unused to this kind of exertion. He stumbled just after he got through the gate, and I caught him ten steps beyond.

I hit him from behind with my right shoulder and forearm, sent him sprawling. But the impact and my own momentum threw me off stride, too, and I went down on top of him just as he started to roll away. We flipped over together, clawing at each other, grunting like two pigs in a wallow. Pain erupted the length of my bad arm; gravel gouged into my body and the side of my face, stinging. When we came up we were both on our knees. He broke loose of me and swung at my head, and even though I saw it coming and tried to duck away, the blow caught me over the left ear and knocked me flat again.

He scrambled to his feet, staggering, turning. But I was already heaving up onto all fours, with my head full of buzzing noises and my left arm half numb, and I was between him and the cottage. He might have charged me, tried to take me in a hand-to-hand fight, but he didn’t do it. He had no way of knowing about my bad arm, and maybe he sensed that I might be the stronger; or maybe panic had hold of him and he was not thinking at all. Whatever the reason, he turned his back to me and ran again—away from the cottage, back along the fence toward the woods at the rear of the museum grounds.

I tried to get up too fast, lost my footing and toppled forward like an old tree, scraping skin off my right palm. By the time I made it to my feet again, he was thirty yards away and crashing through the underbrush that grew in close to the fence. I lumbered after him, panting and wheezing, with a chest pain starting that put a peripheral fear of a heart attack into my head.

Tree shadows swallowed him, but I could still hear him thrashing around in the underbrush. Just before I reached the woods I became aware of a rumbling, rattling noise and the ground seemed to vibrate a little. Then the air horn bellowed again, and through the trees I could see the Cyclopean glare of a locomotive’s headlight as the southbound freight clattered into view on the right-of-way. The sweep of light also let me see Raymond: he was running straight toward the tracks and the oncoming freight.

The train was not going very fast, throttled way down and crawling along the tangent, and when he scrambled up the incline I knew what he was going to do. The locomotive and its light swept on past; a short string of flats followed it. I came out of the trees just as the first of a line of boxcars drew abreast of him. He tried to catch hold of the iron ladder on the side of one, missed it, almost fell, and then straightened in time to lunge at the next in line. He caught hold of the ladder on that one, but by that time I was a couple of strides behind him, running sideways on the packed earth of the incline.

It was a foolish thing to do, but I grabbed onto the ladder, too, with my good right hand. Even as slow as the freight was traveling, its momentum almost jerked my arm out of its socket, almost tore my fingers loose from the rung; if that had happened I might have fallen under the wheels. But I managed to hang on, to get one foot anchored on the bottom rung an instant after Raymond hoisted himself up and through the open door of the car. And I swung in right on his heels, barreled into him as soon as he let go of the ladder and his feet hit the swaying floorboards.

The boxcar was empty; the odor of dust and apples assaulted my nostrils as we smacked together, tumbled to the floor. The collision broke us apart, and for two or three seconds I couldn’t find him in the darkness. Then I heard him scrabbling around on my left, and lunged in that direction, and my good hand scraped across his shirtfront. The material ripped, but I got hold of him anyway and hauled him in against me. We rolled over a couple of times, his breath exploding sourly into my face, his fingers clawing at my cheek. I came up on top and swung down at him, a blind, wild swing, then flailed at him again.

That second blow took him somewhere on the head; he grunted in pain. I hit him a second time, more solidly than the first. He stiffened under me and I knew he was hurt and I thought I had him. But one of his hands clutched at my groin, found enough purchase to make me cry out and try to twist aside. I pawed at his hand to keep him from rupturing me, and he swatted me in the ribs with his other arm, and the next thing I knew I was over on my back and he was pinning me with the bulk of his upper body, fumbling at my neck with both hands. I kicked at him, didn’t connect; missed with an awkward punch. And by then it was too late: he had his fingers wrapped around my neck in a stranglehold.

He slammed my head against the floorboards, did it again, did it a third time . . .

Pain. Disorientation. A sudden feeling of distance and time-stoppage, as if part of my mind had been jarred out of whack. I couldn’t move; I couldn’t seem to breathe either. A thought came out of the swirling black inside my head:
He paralyzed me!
I screamed in rage and terror, but the scream was inside my head too, and it had no voice.

Raymond let go of my neck; I felt his weight lift off me, heard him panting, dimly saw him get to his feet and brace himself against the sway of the car. He was giant then, looming, swaying—a massive silhouette outlined against blobs and flickers of light, against a blur of confused shapes sliding past the open door. He kept staring down at me, and I thought through sweeps of pain: Move! He’ll kill you if you don’t move. But except for helpless little twitches, I could not make my body respond.

He turned away abruptly, lurched over to the door and leaned out. The blobs and flickers of light, the blur of shapes, were slowing down. He glanced back at me again, hesitated—and disappeared. Now you see him, now you don’t. Gone. Poof, like magic stuff.

Jumped off, I thought. For God’s sake,
move!

But all I could do was lie there, jouncing and swaying and twitching. Slowing down like the train. Going away like Raymond. Going, going . . .

Gone.

T
here was light shining in my eyes. I reached up and swiped at it, the way you’d try to brush away an insect. But the light would not go away; it just kept shining, hot and bright, burning into my skull like some kind of powerful laser beam.

Somebody said, “Come on, ’bo, wake up. You can’t sleep here. This ain’t a frigging hotel.”

I turned my head to one side, to avoid the light, and realized I was lying still: no more jouncing and swaying. I opened my eyes. Dusty floorboards came into focus in a wide splash of light. Boxcar. Raymond. Christ, Raymond!

I rolled over and tried to lift up; my left arm was numb and wouldn’t support me and I sprawled face down. When I tried it again I used my right hand, and this time I made it up onto my knees. The back of my head throbbed as if somebody was beating on it with a stick. A wave of nausea washed through me; bile pumped into the back of my throat, clogged for an instant, then rose again. I knelt there with my head hanging down, vomiting.

“Drunk,” a different voice said disgustedly. “You’d think these tramps would learn—”

“Wait, Frank,” the first voice said. “He’s not drunk—he’s hurt. Look at the back of his head.”

Part of the light moved at the same time I finished emptying my stomach. “You’re right. Shit, it looks stove in.”

“No, it’s not that bad.”

“Bloody as hell. Hey, ’bo, what happened? You been in a fight?”

I pawed at my mouth, got one foot down under me, and managed to heave myself upright. The boxcar’s side wall, the one with the door in it, was only a couple of steps away, and that was a good thing; I would not have stayed on my feet if it had been any farther away. As it was, I hit the wall sideways and slid along it to the edge of the door, knees buckling, before I caught myself and hung on.

One of the voices said, “Hey, take it easy,” and a hand grabbed hold of my shoulder to steady me. But it was the left shoulder, the bad one, and I made a noise in my throat and shook the hand off. I could see the two men now, even though both of them were still shining big electric torches at me. A different kind of light, artificial-looking and faintly greenish, spilled into the car from outside.