At the end of half an hour I got up and dug a hole in the soft ground with my heel and knocked my pipe out and stamped down the dirt over the ashes. For no reason at all, I walked a few steps toward the lake, and that brought me to the end of the tree. So I saw the foot.
It was in a white duck shoe, about size nine. I walked around the roots of the tree.
There was another foot in another white duck shoe. There were pin-stripped white pants with legs in them, and there was a torso in a pale-green sport shirt of the kind that hangs outside and has pockets like a sweater. It had a buttonless V neck and chest hair showed through the V. The man was middle-aged, half bald, had a good coat of tan and a line mustache shaved up from the lip. His lips were thick, and his mouth, a little open as they usually are, showed big strong teeth. He had the kind of face that goes with plenty of food and not too much worry. His eyes were looking at the sky. I couldn’t seem to meet them.
The left side of the green sport shirt was sodden with blood in a patch as big as a dinner plate. In the middle of the patch there might have been a scorched hole. I couldn’t be sure. The light was getting a little tricky.
I bent down and felt matches and cigarettes in the pockets of the shirt, a couple of rough lumps like keys and silver in his pants pockets at the sides. I rolled him a little to get at his hip. He was still limp and only a little cooled off. A wallet of rough leather made a tight fit in his right hip pocket. I dragged it out, bracing my knee against his back.
There was twelve dollars in the wallet and some cards, but what interested me was the name on his photostat driver’s license. I lit a match to make sure I read it right in the fading daylight.
The name on the license was Frederick Shield Lacey.
I put the wallet back and stood up and made a full circle, staring hard. Nobody was in sight, on land or on the water. In that light, nobody could have seen what I was doing unless he was close.
I walked a few steps and looked down to see if I was making tracks. No. The ground was half pine needles of many years past, and the other half pulverized rotten wood.
The gun was about four feet away, almost under the fallen tree. I didn’t touch it. I bent down and looked at it. It was a .22 automatic, a Colt with a bone grip. It was half buried in a small pile of the powdery, brown, rotted wood. There were large black ants on the pile, and one of them was crawling along the barrel of the gun.
I straightened up and took another quick look around. A boat idled off shore out of sight around the point. I could hear an uneven stutter from the throttled-down motor, but I couldn’t see it. I started back toward the car. I was almost up to it. A small figure rose silently behind a heavy manzanita bush. The light winked on glasses and on something else, lower down in a hand.
A voice said hissingly: “Placing the hands up, please.”
It was a nice spot for a very fast draw. I didn’t think mine would be fast enough. I placed the hands up.
The small figure came around the manzanita bush. The shining thing below the glasses was a gun. The gun was large enough. It came toward me.
A gold tooth winked out of a small mouth below a black mustache.
“Turning around, please,” the nice little voice said soothingly. “You seeing man lie on ground?”
“Look,” I said, “I’m a stranger here. I—”
“Turning around very soon,” the man said coldly.
I turned around.
The end of the gun made a nest against my spine. A light, deft hand prodded me here and there, rested on the gun under my arm. The voice cooed. The hand went to my hip. The pressure of my wallet went away. A very neat pickpocket. I could hardly feel him touch me.
“I look at wallet now. You very still,” the voice said. The gun went away.
A good man had a chance now. He would fall quickly to the ground, do a back flip from a kneeling position, and come up with his gun blazing in his hand. It would happen very fast. The good man would take the little man with glasses the way a dowager takes her teeth out, in one smooth motion. I somehow didn’t think I was that good.
The wallet went back on my hip, the gun barrel back into my back.
“So,” the voice said softly. “You coming here you making mistake.”
“Brother, you said it,” I told him.
“Not matter,” the voice said. “Go away now, go home. Five hundred dollars. Nothing being said five hundred dollars arriving one week from today.”
“Fine,” I said. “You having my address?”
“Very funny,” the voice cooed. “Ha, ha.”
Something hit the back of my right knee, and the leg folded suddenly the way it will when hit at that point. My head began to ache from where it was going to get a crack from the gun, but he fooled me. It was the old rabbit punch, and it was a honey of its type. Done with the heel of a very hard little hand. My head came off and went halfway across the lake and did a boomerang turn and came back and slammed on top of my spine with a sickening jar. Somehow on the way it got a mouthful of pine needles.
There was an interval of midnight in a small room with the windows shut and no air. My chest labored against the ground. They put a ton of coal on my back. One of the hard lumps pressed into the middle of my back. I made some noises, but they must have been unimportant. Nobody bothered about them. I heard the sound of a boat motor get louder, and a soft thud of feet walking on the pine needles, making a dry, slithering sound. Then a couple of heavy grunts and steps going away. Then steps coming back and a burry voice, with a sort of accent.
“What did you get there, Charlie?”
“Oh, nothing,” Charlie said cooingly. “Smoking pipe, not doing anything. Summer visitor, ha, ha.”
“Did he see the stiff?”
“Not seeing,” Charlie said. I wondered why.
“O.K., let’s go.”
“Ah, too bad,” Charlie said. “Too bad.” The weight got off my back and the lumps of hard coal went away from my spine. “Too bad,” Charlie said again. “But must do.”
He didn’t fool this time. He hit me with the gun. Come around and I’ll let you feel the lump under my scalp. I’ve got several of them.
Time passed and I was up on my knees, whining. I put a foot on the ground and hoisted myself on it and wiped my face off with the back of my hand and put the other foot on the ground and climbed out of the hole it felt like I was in.
The shine of water, dark now from the sun but silvered by the moon, was directly in front of me. To the right was the big fallen tree. That brought it back. I moved cautiously toward it, rubbing my head with careful fingertips. It was swollen and soft, but not bleeding. I stopped and looked back for my hat, and then remembered I had left it in the car.
I went around the tree. The moon was bright as it can only be in the mountains or on the desert. You could almost have read the paper by its light. It was very easy to see that there was no body on the ground now and no gun lying against the tree with ants crawling on it. The ground had a sort of moothed-out, raked look.
I stood there and listened, and all I heard was the blood pounding in my head, and all I felt was my head aching. Then my hand jumped for the gun and the gun was there. And the hand jumped again for my wallet and the wallet was there. I hauled it out and looked at my money. That seemed to be there, too.