Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (3 page)

‘I thought maybe you had fell in,’ Byers said.

You’re a bowel-watcher, I thought. You’re reviving a lost art. ‘It was that supper last night,’ I said. ‘I have a very delicate stomach.’

‘Everything about you is delicate, ain’t it?’ he said.

Including my trigger finger, you peasant bastard, I thought. ‘I’m sorry, me-lord,’ I said.

‘For God’s sake, stop whining!’ he said. ‘Move along.’

‘I’m sorry, sire,’ I said, moving along.…

When I got back to Toko he was stooped over, digging into a cluster of vines. He paused, not moving his body, looking up at me past his elbow. With my thumb I indicated that I had the pistols inside my jumper. He straightened up, holding in both hands a cantaloupe almost as big as a watermelon.

‘Ain’t that a beauty?’ he said.

He moved over and stacked it with the others, and then came back to me and started digging in the same cluster.

‘How many was there?’ he asked.

‘Two,’ I said. I did not say anything about the boxes of ammunition. If anything went wrong, if he happened to get hit, it would be bad enough for them to find the pistol on him without also finding a box of ammunition. A box of ammunition is a hell of a lot easier to back-track than a pistol.

I leaned over and started digging in the cluster with him. I switched my eyes around and made certain nobody was watching us and then slipped him one of the pistols. He stuck it inside his jumper.

‘Is it loaded?’ he asked.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Now, take it easy. This is in the bag.’

From the north from the mountains, the strong vibrant music of a diesel motor reached our ears. We looked at each other. ‘You see how these things get done when they get done by an expert?’ I said. ‘It’s just like pushing a button. Now, start inching down towards the eucalypti thicket. Less distance we have to cover, less dangerous it’ll be.’

‘You think there’ll be any shooting?’

Did I think there’d be any shooting? … ‘It won’t matter if you zig-zag,’ I said. ‘Remember that. Zig-zag.’

His face was paling again.

‘It won’t be long now,’ I said. ‘Go on, start inching down. And follow my lead.’

I followed him as he moved along the vines, stooped over, pretending that we were looking for melons. In a minute or two we had come close to the group that contained Budlong. He looked up grinning.

‘Hello, sugar,’ he said to me. ‘Now, Toko, you treat this pretty thing nice,’ he said to Toko. ‘Like to get myself a little of that,’ he said to the others.

The others laughed.

‘Dear old Budlong,’ I said. ‘Dear, dear Budlong. The Satyr of the Stable. Is it really true that you dream about me of a lonely night? You’re not just saying that, are you?’

He smirked but said nothing, and Byers came up, stopping a few feet away.

‘Looks like a goddamn Easter egg hunt,’ he said. ‘You guys stop jawing and scatter out.…’

We started scattering out, and then the two blasts of the bus horn came, so close together they almost overlapped. This was only the signal to get ready, not the signal to act, but with Byers so near and Toko shaking with nerves, I knew this had to be the moment, ready or not. Byers had suddenly sensed something, too. He took a step backward, uncradling his Winchester in a vague, instinctive sort of way, and I shot him in the stomach. He had the Winchester and I wasn’t taking any chances with him. You can shoot a man in the head or in the heart and he may live long enough to kill you, it is possible; but if you hit him in the stomach, just above the belt buckle you paralyse him instantaneously. He may be conscious of what is happening, but there is not a goddamn thing he can do about it. I saw the bullet go into the little island of white shirt that showed between his vest and his trousers. The Winchester spilled out of his arms and he went down to the ground, sprawled in a heavy heap like a melted snow-man.

‘Run!’ I shouted to Toko.

Budlong was utterly dumbfounded. He didn’t move a muscle.

‘Here’s a little dream I’ve been dreaming about you, sugar…’ I said.

He still didn’t move. When I extended my arm he just looked at the gun. It was no more than eighteen inches from his face. I squeezed the trigger and the bullet hit him in the left eye and a drop of fluid squirted and the eyelid fell over the hole as a window shade falls over a pane of darkness. There was no blood at all.

I turned and started running hard over the furrows, over the uneven ground, following Toko, zig-zagging, doubled over as far as I could lean and still get the maximum speed from my legs. All the guards were shooting now and the mountains were throwing back the thin quivering echoes of the Winchesters, but I was not worried even for the length of a half-formed thought. They hadn’t done any shooting since God knew when.…

Toko’s legs pumping up and down soon came into my line of vision and as I pulled beside him he stopped abruptly and straightened up and the look in his face was a distillation of all the nightmares that have been dreamed by everybody since time began.

‘I’m scared.…’ he said.

I kept on running for a few feet and then I turned, slowing up, looking back. Harris was on his horse, coming across the patch towards me, but the ground was uneven for the horse too, and his gait was jerky and cautious Toko was standing ten feet away, between me and Harris. I aimed at Harris but when I shot I shot at Toko. The bullet hit him in the temple and a big saliva bubble formed on his lips and he fell forward in the dirt.

I started running again. The Winchesters were still shooting but I never heard the sound of a single bullet, only the crack of rifle fire and the thin echoes from the mountains. As long as these bastards could reach you with a club or a knotted rawhide strap their marksmanship was magnificent, but when it came to shooting…

I reached the edge of the patch and hurdled a small irrigation ditch, another irrigation ditch, a small one, a secondary one, diving into the eucalypti thicket. In here, in this thicket, I now actually heard the bullets for the first time. They were striking the leaves and limbs with whispering laps and then, lightningly, there were new sounds close by, loud and harsh, and I looked up, startled and a little shaken, and saw that it was a machine gun. It was spitting jagged streaks of flame a foot long, and it was being held in the hands of a man I had never seen before.

The shock of seeing a man there instead of Holiday froze me. I felt as if someone had hit me in the navel with a blizzard. He wore a cap and a bow tie and a blue suit, and he was left standing at the edge of the thicket, full in the open, his left forearm against a sapling so young and slender that it trembled with the recoils, moving the machine gun from side to side in a short, straight line, like a man patiently watering a strip of lawn. I just lay there.…

‘Go around to the other side!’ he shouted at me, and then I realized that it wasn’t a man at all, it was Holiday.

I got up, moving around to the other side, and looked out at the cantaloupe patch. Neither Harris nor his horse was to be seen. Some of the prisoners were stretched out flat beside the irrigation ditch, and to one side a group of guards were firing from kneeling positions, but not hitting anything. They were a good two hundred yards away. Holiday gave them another burst from the machine gun and then lowered it.

‘This way,’ she said, running off through the thicket. The bullets from the guards’ Winchester were still slapping around among the trees, but no more harmful than spring rain on a slate roof. A new sedan was parked on the dirt road ahead, a good-looking one. The motor was running and Jinx was at the wheel. He had the rear door open as Holiday and I got there, and we dived in. The door slammed and the sedan lurched. Holiday pulled herself up on the seat and started putting a new drum of ammunition on the gun.

‘That’s a hell of a thing there,’ I said. ‘Jesus Christ, that’s a
hell
of a thing!’

‘I borrowed it from a friend of mine,’ she said. She looked at me. ‘That’s the second brother I’ve had killed by the cops,’ she said slowly,

‘Poor old Toko,’ I said. ‘He straightened up at the wrong time. I tried to get him to keep going…’

She nodded to two cardboard suit boxes that were standing on end on the floor. ‘Better put those on. I’m sorry about the shoes.’

‘Didn’t you get ’em?’

‘Nine-C. I couldn’t get eight and a half-D.’

That’s all right,’ I said. I picked up one of the boxes opening it. Inside there was a complete outfit, shirt, socks, shoes and suit. They were cheap and shoddy, but what the hell…

That’s Toko’s,’ she said. ‘The other one’s yours.’

‘He had the gun on him when he fell,’ I said. ‘I didn’t have time to get it.’

‘They can’t trace it,’ she said, laying the machine gun on the floor, propping it against the door, muzzle down.

‘I’m glad of that,’ I said.

I had my denim jumper half off when Jinx made the turn from the dirt road on to the highway. The sharp swerve threw me off balance on to the floor, across her feet. As I got back into the seat I felt the car flatten out and pick up speed.

‘I’m sure glad Cobbett came through,’ I said. ‘That was the only thing that worried me.’

‘I knew he’d work his end all right,’ she said.

‘We ought to give him a bonus,’ I said.

‘He’s had his bonus,’ she said, ‘and I got plenty left.…’

You certainly have, I thought. You got more of that left than any dame in the world.

She reached over the front seat and got another suit box from beside Jinx. She lifted the top and took out a neatly folded dress. She took off the cap she was wearing and dropped it to the floor, and then fluffed her hair with her hands.

‘That was pretty good,’ I said. ‘Wearing a man’s suit…’ She smiled at me, unbuckling her trousers but not unbuttoning the fly, slipping them off, arching her shoulders against the back seat to raise her buttocks out of the way. Her legs were slim and white. I could see the skin in minutest detail, the pigments and pores and numberless valley-cracks that crisscrossed above her knees, forming patterns that were as lovely and intricate as snow crystals. And there was something else I saw too out of the corner of my left eye, and I tried not to look, not because I didn’t want to, not because of modesty, but only because when you had waited as long as I had to see one of these you want it to reveal itself at full length,
sostenuto.
I tried not to look, but I did look and there it was, the Atlantis, the Route to Cathay, the Seven Cities of Cibola…

W
E ROLLED RIGHT THROUGH
the heart of town to a garage in the wholesale district,
MASON’S GARAGE
, a sign over the door said. It was a small place, one-story, a little on the shabby side with the entrance in the middle of the building across the sidewalk. Jinx drove the car almost to the rear near the alley exit and then swung into a stall between two cars and stopped. As we got out I saw two men coming towards us. One was trotting. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-three years old, bareheaded and big-boned and wearing clean white coveralls. Above the upper left pocket was the name
NELSE
in red stitching. In one hand he held a pair of license brackets with the numbers already in them, and in the other he held two small wrenches, and without a word to us he started taking the brackets off the sedan. The second man was still coming towards us, bouncing up and down, and in a moment I could see that this bounce was caused by a club foot. He was about forty years old and wore greasy coveralls on which no name was stitched, and a black canvas beanie that advertised a lubricating oil. He had blue eyes and a ruddy face and a worried look.

‘So they got Toko,’ he said.

Holiday and I looked at each other in surprise. It had only happened two hours ago. Before she could say anything he spun on his club foot and moved around the car, inspecting it carefully. He opened each door as he came to it, poking his head in, inspecting the inside too.

‘They must’ve had the news on the radio,’ Jinx said.

‘I didn’t hear it,’ Holiday said.

‘You were too busy,’ Jinx said, looking at me.

‘Who’s this bird?’ I asked Holiday, nodding at the clubfooted man who was still looking at the inside of the sedan.

‘Mason. I got all the stuff from him,’ she said.

Mason came back to where we were standing and he was a different man. The worried look was gone from his face and he was almost pleasant.

‘From what they said on the radio I expected to find the Zephyr full of holes,’ he said.

‘Once we got started we were all right,’ Holiday said.

‘What did it say on the radio?’ I asked.

He began looking me up and down.

‘This is Ralph Cotter,’ she said. ‘Vic Mason’

I nodded to him and he said: ‘You shot up everything in sight, didn’t you?’

‘Is that what they said on the radio?’ I asked.

‘Yeah.’ He turned to Holiday. ‘You should’ve ditched them suit boxes and that prison uniform. You took a hell of a chance. Cops stop you …’

‘I had to bring back the machine gun. Get stopped with that in the car we’d still been in a hell of a fix.’

‘They think you had six or seven men in your mob,’ Mason said, the suggestion of a smile on his face.

‘They put out any descriptions?’ I asked.

‘The usual crap. Only you’re better-looking than they said.’

‘You ought to see me in clothes that fit,’ I said.

‘I’ll see you. I got an interest in you,’ Mason said.

‘What does he mean by that?’ I asked Holiday.

Jinx spread his hands in a small gesture of impatience. All this time he had been standing there looking at me, just standing there looking at me. Once or twice I had the feeling that he was curious about me in a clinical sort of way and didn’t quite know how to ease the itch. That is a very aggravating situation.

‘Look,’ he said finally, ‘I got to get back to the shop. I’ll see you later, huh?’

‘You better call first,’ Holiday said.

‘Sure. Okay,’ he said, moving away towards the alley exit.

‘Shop?’ I said to Holiday and Mason. ‘What shop?’

‘He works in a radio shop,’ Holiday said. ‘He’s a radio man.’