Kaleidoscope (20 page)

“Becker? Here? How’d he find me?”

“Let’s just say Arno has a way of ferreting out information. He knows about Kaleidoscope. He’s almost certainly arrived by now, and I suspect will have fewer scruples in his efforts to recover my property than do you, Jack. In fact, if you can’t find my property yourself, it might pay to simply follow our blonde friend.”

“Following Becker’s not a life-improving proposition, Mr. Bladehorn.”

“Neither is disappointing me,” Bladehorn replied shortly.

“Look, I’m busting my hump down here, awright? I’m not on vacation!”

“Mr. Romaine, if you want to see your family again—in Cleveland or whatever other hole you try to hide them in—you will do what it takes to satisfy my interests. Do you understand? You will follow, flog, mutilate—whatever it takes.”

The line clicked dead and Jack had to remind himself not to slam the receiver onto its hook.

He took a moment to digest the new intelligence. Bladehorn had found his family. That was bad news. Nearly as bad as Arno Becker finding Kaleidoscope. But surely if Becker were anywhere near the premises one of the freaks would have noticed.

Jack recalled his last soiree with Becker. Bastard must still have stitches. Surely he was not recovered enough for a trip to Florida?! But then came the voice that Jack could not ignore, the deeply frightened, pessimistic voice which went something like—

Who’re you kidding, Jack?

The only way to keep Arno Becker away from a quarter of a million dollars was to drive a stake through the bastard’s vampire heart.

No chance of a night’s sleep, now. Jack paused before slipping out the café’s back door. It was dark. There were no kerosene lanterns on the street, only a cloud-filtered moon to light the way. But Jack could see Peewee’s tent through the pines, those twin poles raising her canvas like a pair of breasts in lunar composition. There was no light coming from inside, though. No magic lantern. No moving pictures on the sheets.

He pictured Peewee slumbering alongside Ambassador in her canvas mansion and smiled. Was reassuring, somehow, to envision the elephant standing sentry, cooling his mistress with the fan of those enormous ears. With that imagined comfort Jack left the shelter of the café’s darkened door and stepped out onto the street.

“Hullo, Jack.”

The voice came with the swift snap of a sap. A couple ounces of lead on a leather strap right behind the ear, a brief burst of stars, and Jack dropped like a sack.

Right into Arno Becker’s waiting arms.

Tommy Speck was not able to sleep, which was unusual. Tommy had left the dice to nurse a beer on the wagon outside the tigers’ cage. They weren’t running a menagerie for the show; even Ambassador was off for the year. But Tommy liked the animals, the bigger the better, and Sinbad and Sheila were a never-ending source of mystery, cats caught wild who would, for the right trainer, jump through hoops of fire. Was easy to imagine the pair of carnivores as sentries, ever vigilant, ever ready to defend Tommy’s sandy community, but what he needed now was a guard for his heart.

Tommy was not a man comfortable with divided loyalties. He did not enjoy spying on Jack, not even at Luna’s direction. No matter what anybody thought of the brodie, he had to be better than the Aryan wolf who’d shown up at the beddy’s Western Union door.

“I shoulda told Jack about the telegram,” Tommy confided to the caged cats. “No matter what Luna says, I shoulda told him.”

Tommy left the tigers unsoothed, taking a bead past the chowhouse on the way back to his own downsized trailer. He was abreast of the Sugar Shack when for the second time he saw a Packard rumbling down the sandy center of Main Street. Tommy recognized the albino bastard at the wheel, his golfing cap jauntily cocked. But there was another man slumped on the bench seat alongside, a more familiar figure propped against the passenger-side door.

Was it—?

What seemed like a gallon of iced water flooded his guts.

“LUNAAAAAA!!” the sentry sounded his alarm. “LUUUNAAA!!”

Stripping—
dismantling decorative members used on the various fronts, rides and equipment.

A
burst of stars. Then a jolt up his nostrils and into his brain. Like when you ate ice cream too fast on a summer day.

“Wake up, Pretty Boy.”

Arno Becker’s face floating in and out of focus. A sharp lance, then, like a cattle prod across his nose. Jack came awake, tears stinging his eyes.

“Ah. Better. Here.”

Something cold and wet was forced to his lips. He sucked hard. It was good. Bracing. Arno took the jug away and turned to put it away. Turning his back—

Jack lunged, but something jerked him short in his traces.

He was bound to a tree. Jack felt the burn of the rope on his wrists, coils of hemp pulled so tightly around his chest he could hardly breathe. It was from a tent, Jack realized. Son of bitch, he’d pinched a rope from a tent.

“Too cheap to bring your own, Arno?”

Becker faced him again and shrugged.

“When in Rome—”

A pair of headlights kept Jack turned to face his kidnapper. He wanted to vomit, but that would be difficult strapped with his butt on the ground, a collar around his neck and a pine log draped like a two-ton breakfast tray over his outstretched and numbed legs.

His forearms and hands were tied to the tray. His shoes had been taken off, and his socks. He wriggled his toes.

“Still there,” Arno assured him merrily.

“Wa…water.”

No jug this time. Becker lifted a thermos of coffee from the Packard’s radiator and splashed a sample onto Jack’s face.

“FUCKER!” Jack writhed in his collar.

Arno pulled a deer-skinner’s knife from its sheath.

“We ready to talk, now? Because we need to talk, Jack, and we may not have as much time as I’d like. Certainly not as much as you deserve, Jack-O.”

“Look…” Jack gasped. “Cards up, right? If I knew where Bladehorn’s money was, or his certificates, or anything else I’d tell ya, awright? I’m not stupid.”

Arno sliced his knife a knuckle deep across Jack’s abdomen. It felt like a hot wire passing just beneath the surface of his shirt, but Jack could feel a spreading seam of blood.

“That’s in memory of our last conversation,” Becker smiled. “Just a nick to get us started. Now. Where’s the loot?”

“I dunno where it is, Arno. Jesus, if I did, you think I’d still be
here
?”

“I think as long as Bladehorn’s got your whelp on hooks, not to mention Grandma, you’d do pretty much anything he tells you. Which is why we are having this reunion, Jack. So I can persuade you differently.”

“You’re gonna kill me anyway. Even if I knew. Which I don’t.”

“I am going to kill you, Jack, no doubt. But you can make it easy. Relatively easy. Or you can make it very, very hard.”

Jack felt like he was strangling. He tried to move his arms, his legs.

“You don’t really think those freaks give a shit about you, do you, Jack?”

“Bladehorn gives a shit,” Jack hung in the ropes. “Not about me. About his goddamn property, though. And he won’t let you keep it, Arno. You can find it, more power to you, but you’ll never live to spend it. Bladehorn’ll see to that.”

“That weasel,” Arno spit. “He’s a dead man.”

Arno leaning then to stuff a fist inside Jack’s collar, twisting it. Jack feeling as though a stake was driving into his lungs, trying to breathe—trying!

“Y’see, Jack, you aren’t the only man likes to gamble. It’s just that Mr. Bladehorn’s on a bigger table. The Market, Jack-O. Wall Street. Know what it means to speculate, Jack? Heh? It means you borrow against money you don’t have at margins of twenty to one, thirty to one. Invest in some copper mine in Bolivia or Paraguay, right? And if it hits it’s just like blackjack, and if it doesn’t—?

“Why, you just borrow more. You borrow against the next big hit, but you can’t lose them all, Jack, nobody can. And Bladehorn, just like you, never knows when to cut his losses.”

Arno jerked his hand out of the collar and Jack heaved air like a newborn.

“The only thing between Bladehorn and the wolves right now is a man with a busted arm and no fists.”

“Jesus!” Jack gasped and Becker squatted in the beam of the headlights.

“So tell me what you know, Jack. Any little scrap, ya never know.”

“All right, then, all right,” Jack felt he would rather be blind in the lights than acknowledge the pale amusement in Becker’s eyes. “Alex Goodman—is an alias. The brains who set up the robbery, I think, was a fella named Terrence Dobbs. Used to be a lawyer, maybe some other things. Tampa.”

“Very good,” Arno seemed more angry than pleased. “And where is Mr. Dobbs?”

“Got himself stomped to death by an elephant.”

The knife pulled slowly and deep over Jack’s knee.

A scream gargled in Jack’s throat.

“I don’t have time for jokes, Jack.”

“IT’S TRUE! ASK BLADE! CHARLIE BLADE!!”

“Another name? Very good, Jack. I must say for a man knows nothing you are positively brimming with information.”

A wail broke, strangled and ashamed. It was like a bird that Jack could not keep caged. He felt himself pissing in his pants.

“Go on,” Arno sneered. “It won’t make you feel better, but it’ll be a treat for me.”

Jack bawled openly. Desperate sobs of terror and shame.

Arno enjoyed himself a moment.

“All right, then,” he said finally. “For the doggy in the window: Where is the cash? Where are the stock notes? They must be in the camp somewhere.”

“…I don’t know!”

Arno inspected the toes of Jack’s feet.

“This little piggie went to market—”

“Look, I followed Luna to the Mirasol, all right? She meets somebody, I don’t know who, but you can bet it’s got something to do with Bladehorn’s loot. She gave him an envelope; he took it. That’s all I saw. That’s all I know!”

“—this little piggy went home.”

“NO!” Jack jerked like a puppet against the log, legs twitching impotently, trying to pull away, trying to wrench that massive pine from its roots!

“One joint at a time.” Arno seemed happier. “Just to make sure you’re not holding out on me.”

Jack’s scream began even before Arno leaned on his knife. An awful lamentation rose higher and higher again before it fell to a chorus of pleas for mercy or for death.

Would be easy in that racket to miss the far-off call of a calliope.

Luna gathered her posse in minutes and in minutes more was hurtling over the Tamiami Road, stripping gears as her truck careened around sharp curves and narrow shoulders. There was not a lot of moon to help the truck’s dimwatted lamps. Adding to that was a hazard of gnats and night-time feeders splatting their innards on the windshield.

Luna knew better than to use the wipers.

Tommy was riding shotgun.

“Look sharp,” she commanded.

“I’m looking!”

“He won’t be on the highway.”

“Must be a dozen feeders off this blacktop!” Tommy yelled. “A hundred!”

“Not hard roads,” Luna rejoined. “Was a Packard, right? How far can you go in this sand in a Packard coupe?”

The hound howled from the bed of the truck. The Giant perched at the sideboards with the others. Boomer bayed again and Luna fishtailed the truck to a stop.

“Tryin’ to wreck us?” Tommy gasped.

“Listen!”

Luna killed the engine. The radiator creaked. Insects buzzing. A gator coughed from some slough of water. And then a scream rose distantly, like a panther mating in the pines.

Boomer lunging against his leash.

“THERE’S A ROAD!” The Giant pointed from his vantage.

It was a county road, a feeder. Crushed rock.

“LET’S GO.”

Luna fired the truck to life, spinning tires from the asphalt in a bolt for the limestone spur.

Jack got water, finally, real water splashing over his bloody head. He came to whimpering like a puppy. Shivering.

“Look at your foot, Pretty Boy,” Arno commanded.

Bloody nubs of bone tapping the pine like a blind man’s stick.

“And we got another foot to go.”

Jack slobbering shamelessly.

Arno grunted.

“You really don’t know where it is, do you, Jack? All this time and you still don’t know.”

“Ah…ah tried!” Jack wailed like a boy trying to please an angry father.

“‘Tried’ is a word for losers, Jack.”

Arno jammed his knife into the sand. Worked it a moment.

“Hate those excuses, ‘Tried and failed’, ‘Try and try again’. Y’see, I don’t
try
anything, Jack. I either do something or I don’t. Right now, for instance, I’m going to kill you.”

Jack’s trembling head might have been taken for a gesture of assent.

“You’re going into shock, Jack,” Arno frowned. “‘Man doesn’t handle stress well when he’s in shock. Pity. ‘Cuts’ my pleasure short, if y’know what I mean. And who better?”

Jack heard the gurgle of a jug into a cup.

“Here y’are. Last drink.”

Becker shoved the cup past his lips before Jack realized it was gasoline.

Arno laughing, now, winding a handkerchief onto a palmetto frond as Jack spewed fuel from his mouth.

“Heard you were a performer. Swallowing fire, is it? Flambé took a real interest, what I hear. Who says you can’t teach an old queer new tricks?

“So how about you perform for me, Jack? Hah? Final act of the show, I promise.”

“Nnnno! PLEASE!”

Arno scratched a match under the fuming rags.

“You were in the war, weren’t you, Jack? Saw lots of lungs burned out, I ’magine. Not exactly the same, in fairness.”

“Arno! No!”

Becker kneaded his torchless hand deeply into Jack’s well-tended hair.

“I’m gonna make you real pretty, Jack. Talk about a freak? You’ll fit right in.”

Becker shoving the torch into Jack’s face.

“Open up.”

“Mmmmp!” Jack turned away.

“Blow me, Jack.”

Here came the torch. Jack could see it coming, could feel the fumes of gasoline raw in his mouth, his throat!

Constant pressure, that’s what Flambé had told him. Always exhaling—always! But Jack was spent, lapsing into shock. How much reserve could there be in his overtaxed lungs?

There was no moisture to protect his nose, his lips. But he couldn’t keep his mouth closed forever! Jack could feel the fumes working down the canal to his lungs. An irresistible urge, then, to cough, to sneeze!

Becker jammed the torch into his face—

“BLOW, JACK.”

And Jack blew. He blew his lungs. He blew his guts. He blew out his socks and in the end he lunged a torch of fire a yard long into the evening air and just when he was about to fall into the dark forever….

Arno Becker jerked the torch away.

Jack heaving air into his lungs like gravel through a sieve. His face blistered, burned.

“Not bad, Pretty Boy,” Becker sneered as he poured another tin of fuel into the cup.

“Now let’s see you do her again.”

Jack knew he couldn’t do it again. There was nothing left to offer. Nothing to give.

“Sucking wind pretty bad, Jack.”

Becker was pouring gasoline onto a fresh set of rags, but a rough-running engine interrupted.

“The fuck,” Arno turned, irritated.

You could hear the lumber of the Big Truck barreling down the lane. Headlamps cutting like a scythe across the tops of the pines.

“I may just have to cut this short,” Becker sighed and dropped the rags and gas for his knife.

Becker kneeled smiling beside Jack.

“Maybe I’ll just take the whole head.”

Jack thrashed wildly as Becker pried to open a seam in the rope that collared his neck. A sliver of moonlight running down the blade of Becker’s knife like a falling tear.

“You…stupid…fucking…Kraut.”

“What?” Becker hesitated, the foreign headlights sweeping closer. “What was that?”

“I…know…where it is.”

Jack slurring his words through the seared flesh hanging from his face like jowls.

“The money…the stocks…I know.”

“You’re lying.”

The blade cold now on the skin of Jack’s neck.

“You’re lying,” Becker repeated coldly. “You’re just trying to stay alive.”

“Kill me, then,” Jack wiggled what was left of his toes, “and you’ll never know.”

The truck burst around the corner leading to their clearing, the headlamps framing Jack and his butcher in a grisly tableau.

A shotgun boomed. A small delay and pellets sprinkled through the pines like the first timid messengers of rain.

Arno smiling with his knife.

“Know what this means, dontcha, Jack? Means we get another dance. Once more around the floor, except next time there won’t be an orchestra to bother us, I guarantee. Next time it’ll just be you and me.”

He slashed the blade down savagely. Something like a brand seared Jack’s face.

“See if she’ll have you now, Jack,” Arno hissed.

Another blast from the shotgun shattered the Packard’s rear window, but Becker seemed in no hurry on his way to the car. No rush apparent as he nursed the choke and ignition. Took a couple of tries but then the coupe’s heavy cylinders roared to life, the tires spinning cochina and sand into Jack’s mutilated face. Becker roaring onto the narrow feeder and head-on at Luna’s big Ford.