Doom Weapon (6 page)

I was almost afraid to hear the answer: “How old’s your daughter?”

“Twenty-one.”

It was almost like a joke.

“Well, that’s of legal age.”

“It ain’t when she lives under my roof. Boyfriend of hers, no good little bastard, he run off with somebody else and left Lulu Jane with nobody to marry. So she’s still at home and by God she’ll live by my rules.”

“Did she tell you anything about Grieves?”

“Just that he was real drunk and got in a pretty bad fistfight with some real small man who came in late. She’s seen plenty of fights growing up with her brothers but she said this fight was really something.”

“She know the man’s name?”

“Didn’t say. Just said they acted like they really hated each other.”

“Any chance I could talk to your daughter?”

He nodded. “She’s right down the street at the Thrift Shop. She’s got a good job there, especially since she started running the mail-order-bride service.”

I thanked him and walked down the street. The day was still warm and comfortable. Just about everybody around looked to be in a pretty good mood. Spring has got a power no other season can claim.

Lulu Jane turned out to be a rangy young woman with dark hair and a pretty if somewhat pinched face. All I could see of her clothing was a white blouse and a red vest. She stood behind a tall counter surrounded by
a store where secondhand clothes of every description packed the place. Unfortunately, they had the smell of secondhand clothes. But that wouldn’t keep poor families from buying everything they could there.

“You here about a bride?” she said. “I just got a new catalog in and I’ll tell you these are some of the prettiest gals you’ll see outside of Paris, France.”

She reached down. I was about to see this fabled catalog.

“Well, actually, I was here to see you, Lulu Jane. Your dad said it’d be all right if I came over here and talked to you.” I showed her my badge.

Her cheeks blazed instantly. “He said it’d be ‘all right’ if you talked to me? Shouldn’t I be the one to make that decision?”

She didn’t wait for an answer.

“I’m twenty-one years old. I don’t need his permission for anything. I’m saving up money for a room here in town and then it’s goodbye to him.”

Is there anything more pleasant to get dragged into than a family squabble? There’s something about arguing with blood kin that makes people insane.

“Well, I guess I’ll leave all that up to you, Lulu Jane. What I wanted to ask you about was a man named Grieves.”

She smiled, looking even prettier. “He makes it mighty tempting to move to a big city. Not with him, I mean. But just to a big city in general. All the new fashions and the parties and the interesting people. If my mail-order-bride business wasn’t doing so good here, I’d give it some serious consideration.” Then she looked at me as if really seeing me for the first time: “How come you’re asking about Mr. Grieves?”

“Your dad said he got into a fight with somebody one night when you were there.”

“Oh, he sure did. He always keeps saying he just wants to have a party that lasts forever and that’s what it was sort of like. There wasn’t anything shameful going on. Everybody was a little tipsy was all. But then this little fella comes in and they go into this other room and right away you can hear them yellin’ at each other. And then all of a sudden they start into this fistfight. The little fella wasn’t any match for Mr. Grieves, that’s for sure.”

“Did you ever find out what they were arguing about?”

She thought a moment, biting her lower lip as she considered my question. “Well, it was something to do with business because Mr. Grieves said, ‘We’re partners and you’re not gonna back out now.’”

“Did you happen to catch the man’s name?”

She laughed. She had a sweet girly laugh. “Well, as I told you, everybody was a little tipsy and that was me included. About all I remember was that it started with a ‘D’, I think. And maybe that’s not right. But it could be.”

“So you didn’t hear any more than that?”

She blushed. “Not that I can remember.” Then: “I know Mr. Grieves has disappeared somewhere. I just hope he’s all right.” Then: “I’m sure my dad told you how I was left behind by Vern Tiller, who ran off with somebody else. Well, I don’t mind telling you that I’ve been pining over him for more than a year. And Mr. Grieves’s party was the first time I just let go and had fun and didn’t think of Vern, not even once. Well, maybe once. But no more than that. I sure hope Mr. Grieves comes back.”

She smiled. “And invites me to another one of his parties.”

The gravestones weren’t enough. Not for a man of Grieves’s destructive appetites. As day was pushing on dusk, that sad shadowy twilight time that always reminded Dobbs of the family he’d left behind, Grieves suddenly pulled his horse up short and said, “Give me one of those grenades.”

“What for?”

Grieves looked genuinely shocked. “What for? You’re askin’ me what for, you little bastard? Because they’re mine, that’s what for.”

“Haven’t you destroyed enough things for the day?”

“You still sulkin’ about those headstones? You’re worse than a woman, Dobbs. I’m goin’ to take you to a party tonight that’s gonna make a man of you for sure. You wait and see. Now you drop down and get one of those grenades and you bring it over here, you understand?”

No use arguing. For all his fancy ways, Grieves was not of the human species. Dobbs had met a few military men like Grieves. No conscience, no restraint. Evil, selfish, self-absorbed little children. Why in God’s name had Dobbs ever thrown in with him?

Dobbs carefully carried the grenade to Grieves. So far not one of them had misfired, something he’d not yet had to mention to the federal man. Though Dobbs had told him that these grenades never exploded in the hand of the man throwing one of them, this grenade, for all its power, was just as risky as all the grenades that had come before it. Three soldiers had been killed in the trials leading up to Dobbs pronouncing his invention completed. The Army hadn’t cared. If it had one entirely expendable asset, it was the foot soldier.

Dobbs stood in the chilly half-light, squinting a bit now, trying to figure out where Grieves was going. All he could see was Grieves walking slowly across a wide
patch of buffalo grass. The patch was empty except for an unsaddled horse that was enjoying the taste of the grass.

There was nothing for Grieves to blow up there.

And then, thank God for the half-light so he couldn’t see it clearly, Dobbs watched in disbelief as Grieves readied the grenade and then lobbed it right at the horse.

Dobbs had never seen such carnage before. And he would never forget it. No amount of willpower, no amount of whiskey, no amount of saloon whores could ever put the sight out of his mind. The horse’s head was ripped from the body and flew several bloody, brain-spilling feet into the air. And from the hole where head was separated from body gushed an unthinkable rain of blood as the horse collapsed to the grass.

“Did you see that, Dobbs? Did you see that?”

The evil child, delighted.

Dobbs swung around backward and vomited as he had never vomited before.

L
iz Thayer, who I’d been told ran the newspaper, was about five two and ninety pounds at the most. Blond hair pulled back and tied into a bouncy tail. Big brown eyes that would have been sweet if they didn’t look anxious. Faint wrinkles at her mouth and eyes. They looked good and true on her. White blouse, a man’s ancient brown cardigan sweater, and a pair of brown butternuts that showed off her very elegant little behind.

When I walked in she was standing on a stool and thumbtacking flyers to a cork board. The flyers appeared to be samples of the quality of printing you could get there. Few newspapers survived without being a job printer as well.

She looked down at me.

“Be right with you.”

“No hurry.”

“You’re the federal man?” She said this while stretching and talking around a mouthful of thumbtacks.

“Aren’t you afraid you’ll swallow those?”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Well, you didn’t answer mine.”

“Well, as all the six-year-olds say, I asked you first.”

“Yes, I’m the federal man. How many tacks do you have in your teeth?”

“They’re not tacks, they’re long nails about three times as long as tacks.”

“They look like tacks.”

“That’s because they have bigger heads. And I only have two of them between my teeth.” At which point she held up a new poster, picked a nail from between her teeth without relinquishing the hammer, and nailed the poster into place. She did the final one in half the time. Then she turned and jumped down from the stool.

She walked over to the counter, set the hammer down, dug in the left pocket of her butternuts, pulled out a small handful of nails, and laid them down next to the hammerhead.

“Coffee?”

“You people drink a lot of coffee.”

“You may not have noticed but it’s pretty cold here sometimes. But I should warn you, my granddad says, and I quote, ‘Liz makes coffee that tastes like goat piss.’”

I laughed. “You two like each other?”

She went behind the counter and poured herself some coffee. “Depends on the month, day, hour, and minute. It’s a constantly shifting relationship.”

“I’ve had a couple of those.”

“I have, too. Unfortunately, I was married in one of them. He was wise enough to walk away from it. I mooned for a long time. Are you familiar with mooning, Mr. Ford?”

“Much more than I care to be.”

“Good. At least we understand each other about the important things.”

She came over and leaned on her side of the counter. The longer you looked, the more you liked. Behind her I
could see the Standard Washington Hand Press and the type forms, the key elements in the laborious business of printing. In the East I’d seen a linotype machine, the wave of the future they’d said, where setting the type was done in hot metal and set in long strings of words. This cut the biggest chore of printing—setting type by hand—in half. Out here, with few able to afford it, the linotype was the stuff of legend.

“So go ahead and ask me another question so I can get back to work. And quit staring at me because it makes me nervous. For one thing, you’re too old for me.”

I blushed. That’s the true sign of manliness—to blush when an attractive lady digs at you a little.

Then she said: “Damn. I’m sorry. It’s just I hate men so much—”

“You’re right. I am too old for you.”

“Yeah, but you’re sayin’ it nice and I meant it mean.”

“I’ll probably survive.”

She touched my hand, which I had resting on the counter. I liked the feel of her much more than I cared to at the moment.

“Maybe we’d better just stick to business.”

“Good idea. I want to know about a federal agent named Grieves.”

“You mean the ‘heartbreaker’?”

“As in ladies’ man?”

She shrugged. “I suppose to some women he was. Not to me.”

“You ever talk to him?”

She thought a moment. “Just that one time, I guess. He wanted to borrow a couple of back issues.”

“Do you happen to remember what they were?”

“No. But I can find out. We charge a penny to take
out a back issue and you have to sign for it the way you do at the library. The issues he took’ll be listed on the checkout card. I can’t do it right now, though.”

“Durn right, she can’t,” said the stubby little man with the oily apron. He worked the press with a certain passion that bordered on violence. “Right now I need her to set some lines of type for me.”

“You going to let me say goodbye at least to the gentleman, Tom?”

He grinned. “Depends on how long it takes.”

“Tom,” she said in a perfectly droll voice, “is under the impression that he’s boss of this newspaper. And you know something? He may just be right.”

He’d probably been the joke of his schoolhouse. Skinny, sort of bug-eyed, and already balding, even though he couldn’t have been much more than twenty-two or -three. He wore a cheap brown suit that looked too big for him and carried a briefcase that was so swollen it looked to be half his weight.

He came right at me. He put his hand out to shake when he was still five feet away.

Before he reached me, a woman in a bonnet and shawl hurried up to him. They had a conference right then and there. Five, six, seven minutes or so. Very intense. I couldn’t hear the words. The wind whipped them away. Finally, she waggled a finger at him and said, “And I don’t expect to get no bill from you till you get this settled in my favor. Some lawyer you are.”

She stalked off.

“Friend of yours?” I said.

He smiled. “Just one of the local lunatics. If we had a day or two, I could explain what she wants me to
do. Since I don’t have any important connections here, they think they can walk right up to me and I’ll help them. The ones who really need help, I don’t mind. But a lot of them are like jailhouse lawyers. They get in an argument with somebody about property rights or something like that and want me to sue them for a lot of money.” Then: “You’re the federal man and I’m David Longsworth. I heard about Molly Kincaid. She needs legal advice.”

We stood about ten yards from the sheriff’s office. The late afternoon traffic was getting heavy. People heading home, some probably with mighty long journeys.

“I met that agent of yours one day. Didn’t like him.”

“Why’s that?”

“Way he treated me. I know I sort of look like a short version of Ichabod Crane but he kept rubbing it in. Calling me ‘sonny.’”

“What’d you talk about?”

He snorted. “Wanted to know how much money the widow Coltrane was worth.”

“Ella Coltrane?”

“One and the same. I told him I didn’t have any idea. Everything she and Swarthout have is in the mine.”

“Wonder why he wanted to know.”

“Same thing I wondered.” He lifted his briefcase. A faint expression of strain played across his face. “Well, wish me luck with Molly Kincaid. I don’t see how Terhurne can hold her much longer.”

“I hope not. She’s had a rough time of it.”

He smiled. “You’ve restored my faith in federal men. Sure glad they’re not all like Grieves.”