The big man leaped out, almost before the car had come to a full stop, and lunged toward the wall of the house, flattening himself against it between the windows, and Romstead could see he had the flat slab of an automatic in his hand. He hadn’t known the other car was there until he’d made the turn into the yard, Romstead thought. He was being blinded with sweat and had to lower the glasses to wipe it away. When he replaced them, Bonner had eased along the wall until he could peer into the kitchen window.
He went around the corner then, up onto the porch, and pushed the door open and went inside. That took guts, Romstead thought, not knowing who might be in there waiting to blow your head off—guts or wild, bullheaded rage. He’d already seen the other was incongruously dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and a tie; he’d just come from his sister’s funeral.
Bonner emerged from the house, strode to the rented car, and opened the door to lean in. Looking for the registration, Romstead thought. The big man straightened up then with the Steadman County map in his hand. He studied it for a moment, threw it back on the seat, and dropped the automatic in the pocket of his jacket. He strode over to the barn, emerged from that after a brief moment, and went to the chicken house to peer inside. He looked once around the flat and then began to stride furiously straight back toward the hillside and the ravines where Romstead was.
He’s not after me, Romstead thought, unless he’s gone completely berserk and stopped thinking altogether, but I’d better find out for sure before he gets right on top of me with that gun. Better to have him open up at fifty yards so I can haul ass than to let him stumble over me. He stood up as though he’d just climbed out of the ravine and started to walk toward the other. Bonner saw him but made no move toward the gun in his pocket; he merely quickened his pace. He began to run up the slope toward the bench where Romstead was. When he reached the top he slowed to a furious walk beside the ravine and shouted.
“Romstead! What the hell are you doing here?”
“The same thing you are,” Romstead called back.
They were less than twenty yards apart when it happened. Romstead heard the whuck of the bullet’s slapping into flesh and bone a fraction of a second before he heard the crack of the rifle up on the ridge to his right. Bonner’s body jerked with the impact, he spun around, thrown off-balance, and started to fall. There was another whuck, and his body jerked again even as it was going down. Romstead was already diving for the ravine. He landed on the sloping side of it and rolled and skidded to the bottom, and as he was spitting out dirt and trying to get the dust and sweat out of his eyes, he heard the rifle fire again.
The ravine was a good seven feet deep, so he was safe here as long as the rifleman stayed where he was, but he had to try to get Bonner down from there if he could locate him. He ran bent over, hugging the wall, and tried to remember just where the big man had fallen. Then he saw the dark coat-sleeved arm. The ravine wall was steeper here. He grasped the hand to pull, and at the same time there was another whuck above him, followed by the crack of the rifle. He hauled. Bonner’s head and shoulders dangled over the lip of the ravine, and a stream of foamy, bright arterial blood gushed downward through the dust from the throat that was almost completely shot away.
Romstead gagged and retched and pushed himself to one side to get out of the way of it, and then the sickness was gone, and he was conscious only of a cold, consuming rage. He clawed his way up the wall, grasped a protruding root to hold himself there behind the body while he groped in the right-hand pocket of the jacket. He had the automatic then, but it was slick with blood from one of the other wounds, and as he slid back to the bottom of the ravine and started to pull back the slide to arm it, it slipped from his hands. He scooped it up, now pasty with dust, operated the slide, numbly watched the cartridge fly out of the already-loaded chamber, and pounded back up the ravine.
Twenty yards away he threw himself against the sloping wall and inched upward until he could see past a clump of sage at the top. The crest of the ridge ahead of him was at least two hundred and fifty yards away. The handgun, of course, was as useless at that distance as a slingshot, but if the son of a bitch came down to appraise his work and finish off the hiding and unarmed witness, he was going to get the greatest, and last, surprise of his life.
He waited. Minutes crept by. There was no movement anywhere along the ridge. He wiped sweat from his face and left it smeared with blood and dust from his hand. Raising the binoculars, he carefully swept the full crest of the ridge for several hundred yards in both directions and saw nothing but sage and sun-blasted rock. Then he heard a car start up, or a truck, somewhere beyond it. It began to draw away and faded into silence. He turned so he could look out over the flat beyond the ranch house, and in a few minutes he saw the lengthening plume of dust rising from the road as the unseen vehicle sped along it, headed south.
It might be a decoy, he knew; there could have been two of them, one remaining to cut him down when he ventured out into the open, but he didn’t think so. A feeling was growing in him now, a totally inexplicable conviction that the rifleman had been up there the whole time he was walking around this hillside and that the man could have killed him fifty times over. Then why Bonner?
In a few minutes he eased back down the ravine to where it shallowed and finally debouched upon the flat. On shaky knees and with his back muscles. drawn up into knots, he stepped out into the open and started toward the house. After a hundred yards he began to breathe easily again.
When he got out to the gate, the fence was gone on one side of it. Bonner had apparently just chopped his way through the wire without even looking at the chain. The dust of the other vehicle’s passage had long since settled, and there were no others in sight. The wheels spun as he straightened out and gunned it, headed for town.
8
“If you two goddamned bullheaded—” Brubaker searched for a word, gave up in bitter futility, and took a cigar from his desk. He began to strip off the cellophane. “He’d be alive now, but no, he had to go charging out there like a gut-shot rhinoceros instead of telling us about it, whatever it was. And if you can give me one single damned reason on God’s green earth why you shouldn’t be dead too, I’ll kiss your ass at half time in the Rose Bowl. Any one of those four slugs he put in Bonner would have killed him, and he could just as easily put the second one in you instead of wasting it on a man who was already as good as dead while he was still falling. Or maybe you’re so small he wasn’t sure he could hit you at two hundred and fifty yards with probably a twelve power scope, a bench rest, and hand-loaded ammunition that would put all five shots in your eye at that range—”
“I don’t know what he was shooting,” Romstead said wearily. “All I know is it was plenty hot, and he was an artist with it. And I’ve already told you, anyway, he could have shot me any time in that half hour I was wandering around there. He must have been up there all the time, and he knew I’d found their garbage dump and those cigar tubes—” He gestured toward the confused litter on Brubaker’s desk, the still bloody and dust-smeared automatic, his own statement, now typed out and signed, and half a dozen of the scorched aluminum tubes, a handwritten letter and some more papers, and a flat plastic bag of heroin. “I don’t know why he didn’t, except it was Bonner he wanted.”