‘What do we do?’ Sam Hengelman said.
‘Give me a moment...’
He waited without speaking until eventually I looked up and down the yard. Two sets of headlights still blazed at the way in.
‘That’s Walt’s car up there?’
‘Yeah. He drove up with the devil on his tail and jumped out and ran down after you...’
I turned the other way and looked at the dark garage.
‘The young guy must have been in there all the time, waiting for us,’ Sam said. ‘He came roaring out and drove straight at you. I couldn’t have stopped him... too far away. Walt was halfway down the yard...’
I nodded. Matt had been there all the time. Not in Las Vegas. Not on the road. Lying in ambush, waiting.
He hadn’t passed us on the road, and there was no other way to the farm. He must have gone back ahead of us. Turned round on the road to Las Vegas and driven back through Kingman while I was sitting in the bus station waiting to telephone to Walt.
But why? Why should he have gone back? He hadn’t seen me following him, I’d been much too far behind, and in any case I’d left him once he was safely on the highway.
It didn’t matter why. It only mattered that he had. Sam Hengelman looked down at Walt and summed up the mess we were entangled in.
‘Well... what the heck do we do now?’
I took a deep breath.
‘Will you fetch that torch of yours?’ I asked, and he nodded and brought it from his van. I went with it over to the Ford, and took a longer, closer look. There wasn’t much to see that I hadn’t seen before, except for a bottle of bourbon that had been smashed in the impact. The neck and jagged top half lay on the floor to Matt’s right, along with several smaller pieces and an uneven damp patch.
I walked into the garage and looked at the Ford from the front. It wouldn’t be driving anywhere any more.
The big torch lit up clearly the interior of the deep shadowy garage. Quite empty now, except for a scatter of cigarette stubs against the left-hand wall. Matt had been smoking and drinking while he waited. And he’d waited a very long time.
The bullet hole faced me in the windscreen and left me with the worst question unanswered.
I’d have to know.
I stood beside Matt and went over every inch of his body down to the waist. He’d taken off the cream-coloured jacket and was wearing the checked shirt he’d worked in. There were no holes in it: no punctures underneath. His head was heavy. I laid it gently on the steering wheel and stepped away.
None of the bullets had hit him. They’d only smashed the windscreen and blinded him, and he’d slewed a foot off course and run into the wall instead of me, and his head had gone forward hard against the slim metal post.
Slowly I returned to where Sam Hengelman stood beside Walt. He drooped with the utmost dejection and looked at me without hope.
‘Did you unclip the ramp?’ I asked abruptly.
He shook his head. ‘Didn’t have time.’
‘Go and do it now. We’re taking the horses.’
He was aghast. ‘We can’t!’
‘We’ve got to. For Walt’s sake, and your sake, and Dave Teller’s sake. And mine. What do you propose? That we call the police and explain what we were all doing here?’
‘We’ll have to,’ he said despairingly.
‘No. Definitely not. Go and let down the ramp.’
He hesitated unbelievingly for a few seconds, and then went and did as I asked. The horses stood peacefully in the barn, apparently undisturbed by the racket, the shots, and the crash. I untied the nearest, Showman, and led him quietly up the yard and into the van.
Sam watched me in silence while I tied him into one of the stalls.
‘We’ll never get away with it.’
‘Yes we will,’ I said, ‘as long as you take these horses safely back to Lexington and never tell anyone, anyone at all, what happened here tonight. Blot it out of your mind. I’ll let you know, when you get back, that you’ve nothing to worry about. And as long as you tell no one, you won’t have.’
The broad fleshy face was set in lines of anxiety.
‘You’ve collected two horses,’ I said matter-of-factly. ‘An everyday job, collecting two horses. Forget the rest.’
I returned to the barn, fetched Allyx, and loaded him up. Sam still hadn’t moved.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘I’ve... arranged... things before. There’s a rule where I come from — you take a risk, you get into a mess, you get out.’ He blinked. ‘Walt threw himself in the way of that car,’ I said. ‘Matt didn’t intend to kill him... You didn’t see a murder. Matt drove straight into the wall himself... and that too was an accident. Only two automobile accidents. You must have seen dozens. Forget it.’ He didn’t answer, and I added brusquely, ‘The water can’s empty. You can fill it over there.’
With something like a shudder he picked up the container and went where I pointed. Sighing, I checked that he had brought three days’ fodder for the stallions, which he had, and with his help on his return, shut the precious cargo up snugly for their long haul.
‘You don’t happen to have any gloves around?’ I asked.
‘Only an old cotton pair in the tool kit.’
He rooted about and finally produced them, two filthy objects covered with oil and grease which would leave marks on everything they touched, as tale-bearing as fingerprints. I turned them inside out and found they were thick enough to be clean on the inside. Sam watched wordlessly while I put them on, clean side out.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Will you turn the van, ready to go?’
He did it cautiously as far away from Walt as he could, and when he’d finished I stepped with equal care into the car Walt had come in, touching it as little and as lightly as possible, and drove it down into the yard, stopping a little short of the screen door to the house. There I switched off the engine and lights, put on the brake, and walked back to talk to Sam where he sat in his cab.
‘I’ve three jobs to do,’ I said. ‘I’ll be back as quick as I can. Why don’t you just shut your eyes for a couple of minutes and catch a nap?’
‘You’re kidding.’
I concocted a replica of a smile, and a fraction of the tension in his face unwound.
‘I won’t be long,’ I said, and he nodded, swallowing.
With his torch I surveyed the yard. The Luger was an automatic pistol, which meant it threw out the cartridge after each shot. No one would find the spent bullets, but eight shiny metal shells scattered near Walt’s body were something else. Seven of them winked in the light as I inched the torch carefully round, and I collected them into my pocket. The eighth remained obstinately invisible.
The ejection slot had been on the side of the gun away from Walt, but the cases sometimes shot out straight upwards instead of sideways, and I began to wonder if the eighth could possibly have travelled far enough over to be underneath him. I didn’t want to disturb him: but I had to find the little brass thimble.
Then, when I’d decided I had no choice, I saw it. Bent and dusty, partly flattened, no longer shining. I picked it up from the spot where I had been half-lying in the path of Matt’s car. He had run over it.
After that I attended to the ground itself. Tyre marks didn’t show on the rough dusty surface, but the hoof prints did to some extent. I fetched a broom of twigs from the barn and swept them out.
The garage was next. I punched through into the car the remaining corner of the windscreen with its significant bullet hole, and I picked up every one of the cigarette stubs which told where and how long Matt had waited. They went into a trash can standing a few yards along from the house door.