After Hank, Dingo and I bolted down our food we got back on the road.
“Turn left off the town square, Bill,” he said.
It was getting late in the day. All of three o’clock.
“Where’re we going?” I asked.
“Radio Shack,” he said.
“Sorry I asked.”
Surprisingly the town had one.
By four-thirty we were sitting under a shade tree down by a slow-moving creek on the outskirts of town.
I patted Dingo and watched Hank. He was ladling some very foul-smelling raw nitrates from a large-sized trash bag into a series of small metal cylinders. I started to ask where he had gotten the cylinders, then decided against it. I didn’t need to know.
A sheriff’s deputy car passed. I waved and the two patrolmen waved back.
“Think they know us?” Hank asked me.
“If they don’t then I’m willing to bet that they know of us.”
“Remember when she told us about Carl, the jockey?” I asked Hank.
“Yeah. And Lefty. Jake and Freddie’s fathers.”
“Right. Well, remember when Julie said that Lefty liked to tell stories, only he-”
“He did a bad job of it,” Hank said.
“Uh huh. So Carl had to finish most of them. The story she told me in my office the first morning I met her was about a manure pile.”
“What? You’re kidding.”
“Nope. A story about a manure pile and some horse stables. At first I thought it was… Uh… Horseshit.”
“The story,” Hank said, “not the manure. Got it.”
“Right,” I told him. “So there was this bit of concrete poking up at the edge of the manure pile. It had a rusted out lid on it and an old padlock on top of that. All Lefty could say was that the manure pile had a ghost, and that it was the ghost of an old lawman. Carl corrected him and pointed out the concrete tube, about a foot and a half in diameter, and said it was the chimney for an old tornado shelter.”
“Makes sense,” Hank said. “Most of these old homesteads up here on the plains have them. Go on with the story.”
“Okay. Carl told her that a house had once stood right beside the tornado shelter, which was concrete with a steel door. In the ground on top of that was a vegetable garden. They used to fertilize the garden with horse manure. Later, after the house had been torn down and rebuilt higher up on the hill they stopped raising vegetables there. Later they built some new horse stables there-about the time that Archie Carpin was a kid-and because it was tradition, kept on dumping their manure on top of the old tornado shelter.”
“Okay,” Hank said.
“So, that night when Julie was on the run and Archie was coming back home, she had to ditch the money. She had Jessica-the kid-with her and all she could think of doing was getting rid of the money and getting the hell out of there. If those men had caught her with the money, she-they-would both have been dead.”
“She got the lid open,” Hank said. “Didn’t she? The lid to the tornado shelter.”
“Uh huh. She did. It was mostly a blob of rust. She said she got crudded-up on all the wet manure from the downpour, but she got the damn thing open-“
”And dropped the doctor’s bag with the money down the hole.” Hank said, pleased with himself.
“Yeah,” I said. “Only she didn’t know about Blackjack. After all, it was just an old jockey’s tale.”
“Blackjack?”
“You’ll find out,” I said. I glanced at my watch. “We’re running low on time.”
Off to the east the line of dark clouds was much closer.
“I know,” he replied. “It’s time to get Julie and the little girl.”
“And the money,” I said.
Carpin’s ranch was fifteen miles outside of town and three miles from the state highway.
I got Dock’s Suburban up to eighty-five miles per hour and didn’t get any complaints from Hank.
About mid-way we passed a Dodge Ram pickup that had a headache rack on top. A county vehicle. Probably Sheriff’s Office.
I glanced in the rearview mirror, watched it slow down, turn off and whip around. It followed us for a mile or more, then slowed and pulled off to the side of the road.
I wondered, but then decided to forget about it.
The leaden gray leading edge of the storm front rolled and tumbled over us. Beneath it, in front of us and along the black eastern horizon, lightning forked down in brilliant trunks, searching, finding. Thunder pealed. From behind us the sun lit the land away north and east in an ethereal, orange-ish glow.
“Gonna be one helluva storm,” Hank said.
“Yeah. I think we should pull over and re-check our armaments,” I said.
We were loaded for bear. I had a.38 and Hank had his.25 caliber Walther and Dingo. Also he had a backpack stuffed with little metal cylinders with walkie-talkies taped to them.
“How’re you holding up?” Hank asked.
“Bout as well as can be expected,” I told him, but in truth, I was more than a little nervous.
When it comes to mortality, whether it’s your own or somebody else’s, that’s just the way it is. You feel it in your stomach, in the little nerve-endings in your hands and feet, over the sensitive skin along the spine. If I had to name the feeling, I’d call it fear.
I wondered if Hank felt the same.
“Let’s do this,” he said.
I started up the car and pulled out onto the road and headed straight into the coming blackness.
A few miles down the road from Carpin’s ranch the windshield started picking up little spatters of rain. As we advanced the drops become larger, the roadway underneath became slick. By the time we reached a large billboard that read “QUARTER HORSE RANCH” on the roadside, it was coming down in sheets, almost horizontal, right at us. I turned the windshield wipers on full. In our headlights the rain appeared to have a nexus, a central emanation point about eight feet in front of the car and about four feet above the level of the hood.
Night had descended, and it was a night right out of some story by Sterling Hayden, or perhaps Dean Koontz. The kind of night where the weather takes on a personality all its own.
I slowed us to a crawl. The last mile took all of five minutes, though it seemed a lot longer.
The rain came down so fast and thick and hard all at once as we pulled off the road near the main gate that visibility was down to twenty yards, even with the wipers flogging the windshield full tilt.
I looked at Hank.
“Are we doing this right?” I asked him.
“I’ve never done this before, Bill,” he said. “We’ll know soon enough. If we live through this, remind me to tell you that you did fine.”
I put the car in park.
“Leave the keys under the seat,” Hank said. “We may have to scoot pretty quick.”
“How are we going in?” I asked. Really, I was asking myself.
“Gun in hand. We go in together. You too, Dingo,” Hank said. Dingo stuck her head up front and licked Hank’s cheek.
It was my turn to say it: “Let’s do this.”