And only a few hours later John Bones hears Faulk’s name, the sixth one of the thirteen names on the list of that day’s jail releases. But he says nothing until the man on the telephone has read them all. Then says, Thank you, detective, and hangs up.
The Closed sign faces out through the glass but the door is unlocked. He steps from the outer dark into the weak yellow light of the station’s office and a small bell jingles over the door. He slides the bolt lock home. The door to the garage is to his left and stands open. He goes to it and sees them within, staring at him, each man with a quart bottle of beer in hand, standing next to a new DeSoto with its engine exposed under the open hood. The garage bay doors are shut.
Sorry, mister, the bigger one says, his eyes narrowing. We already closed. There’s a filling station a few blocks down still open at this hour.
No, man, the Weldon one says, that’s the fella I was telling you wants to buy the place. Howdy, Mr. Cheval.
He nods at Weldon, sees that Faulk is not so obtuse as the mechanic, that the man has jailbird eyes and knows a policeman on sight.
That right, Mr. Cheval? Faulk says. You looking to buy this gold mine from me? He sets down his beer bottle and picks up a heavy crescent wrench.
He steps into the garage and shuts the office door behind him, draws a short-barreled .44 revolver from under his coat, withdraws the pincer contraption from his coat pocket to reveal the two sets of handcuffs dangling from it.
It requires artistry to mete pain in sufficient degree to make its recipient desire nothing on earth so much as its cessation, yet not to such extent as to grant him even the briefest respite of swoon. In this regard John Bones is an artist. He has known a few true hardcases in his time and Miller Faulk proves one of the most admirable of his experience—outdone only by a grizzled Cajun of years ago who withstood John Bones’ interrogation for more than two heroic hours before his heart abruptly failed, thus distinguishing himself as the only one ever to deny him the information he desired. Faulk lasts roughly half that long, yet is only the second to endure beyond an hour before finally—when John Bones again loosens his gag to permit him to speak—whispering in a nasal rasp: Bubber Vicente. Bigsby…Hotel…Odessa. That’s where…I swear.
That’s where, you swear, John Bones echoes with a smile. You’re a poet, sir.
Crouching beside Faulk, he studies the man’s remaining eye and reads the verity therein, knows that unlike previous names and places Faulk has cried out in the course of their fragmented colloquy, these are the truth. Knows too that Faulk’s surrender is to the only hope left to him—a sooner rather than later demise. Supine on a concrete floor amid smears of grease and oil and blood, hands over his head and cuffed to the DeSoto bumper, legs at awkward attitude for their hammer-shattered knees effected to keep him from kicking, pants down to his thighs and his manly parts in ruin, a few toes rawly absent from the bared feet…what can he hope for except a quick end to it all?
And Weldon? Lying close by. Facedown, hands cuffed behind him. Intact but for his pincered Adam’s apple and his drained blood gelling in a dark mat under his head. He would have done better to keep other company this evening.
John Bones takes up the ball peen hammer once again.
You did good, he tells Faulk. Nothing to be ashamed of.
The hammer describes a blurred arc and in the instant of bonecrack Faulk is forevermore delivered from pain.
He stands and unrolls his sleeves, so deft with the pincers he can rebutton a cuff as facilely as he undid it. Puts on his jacket, his hat. Sets the brim at his preferred angle. Goes out of the garage and out of the office and over to the Model T sedan parked in the shadows. He sets the throttle and ignition and goes to the front of the car and positions the handcrank and whirls it hard and the well-tuned motor rumbles into throaty combustion. He gets into the driver’s seat and readjusts the fuel flow and spark settings and his feet adeptly operate the planetary transmission pedals and he sets out for the westward highway. Bearing into the darker remnant of the night.
It was close to midnight when we pulled into a little filling station a mile south of Pecos. I chose it because the traffic at this hour wasn’t very heavy and there were no other cars at the pumps and only one parked alongside the building. A lamp on a high post glowed over the two pumps but we had the car top up and she had her hair bunched under her hat and wore a baggy windbreaker zipped up to her neck. A big bulge of chewing gum in her cheek the better to distort her face. It wasn’t likely anyone would take her for a woman even if they passed close to the car. She had the four-inch .38 beside her on the seat and covered with a fold of her skirt. I was wearing a hat too, and a paste-on mustache.
“Set?” I said.
She nodded, and revved the motor with a little goose of the gas pedal.
“Remember, if somebody pulls in—”
“I’ll tell them the guy’ll be right out and I’ll honk the klaxon. I’m okay, Sonny.”
I got out of the car as the attendant swung open the screen door and said, “Gas, mister?”
“A road map’s all,” I said, and followed him back inside.
There was another guy in there, sitting at a small table with a checkerboard on it and a game in progress. I drew the .380 from under my belt and let them see it, then held it in the side pocket of my coat and told the attendant to sit in the other chair at the table and for both of them to put their hands under their ass. I went around behind the counter and yanked out the telephone cord. I found a Colt six-inch in the shelf under the counter. I looked at the attendant and he said, “The owner’s.” I put it in my other coat pocket, then opened the register and took out all the bills and stuffed them in the same pocket with the Colt. I told them I’d shoot the first man to stick his head out the door. Then I slipped the .380 back in my pants and walked out to the roadster and got in and Belle drove us off, smoothly shifting through the gears and accelerating steadily. I watched out the back window but didn’t see either guy come to the door before we were out of sight. The whole thing didn’t take three minutes.
After we swung east at the highway intersection at Pecos, I quickly counted the take by the light of the lampposts—$375. More than it had looked like in the till, but awful puny compared to the hauls I was used to with Buck and Russell.
Belle was singing, “Ain’t We Got Fun?”
We checked into a motor camp more than twenty miles away, outside of a place called Pyote. The camp was well off the main highway, set back in a grove of scraggly mesquites and flanked by a high sand hill. I parked the car behind the cabin and we went inside and locked the door and laughed at each other in our comic rush to get our clothes off. I started to take off the mustache too but she stopped me and kissed me and said she’d never kissed anybody with a mustache before. It made me look like Douglas Fairbanks, she said. She stared down between us and said, “You even got a pirate sword and everything.”