Di Parma drove out from behind the café and along the access road to the now-deserted highway. Vollyer told him to turn north, and then leaned back and closed his eyes. There were faint liquid sun patterns behind the lids, pulsating, and the balls themselves felt too large for their sockets. Damned bright glare.
He hoped his aim wouldn’t be affected if he had the opportunity to use the Remington a little later on.
Nine
Brackeen was half-dozing in his partitioned office when Forester radioed in shortly before noon.
He was in good spirits. The hangover of the day before had all but disappeared by five o’clock, when he’d gone off duty, and four beers before supper had chased the last remnants of it. Later, he’d made up with Marge — damn, but she was still fine in bed, she was a hell of a lot better and hotter at forty than any of those young whores he’d had in Kehoe City — and he’d gotten a good night’s sleep for a change. This morning had been quiet; he’d done half an hour’s paperwork, looked into a minor vandalism complaint, and spent most of the rest of the time leafing through circulars from the FBI and State Police. When Bradshaw, the clerk and radio man, came in to tell him Forester was calling, he had been working up a mild thirst sleepily thinking of Sullivan’s and the upcoming lunch hour.
He got ponderously out of his chair, his soft belly swaying, and followed Bradshaw out to the PBX unit in the main room of the substation. He scratched himself sourly. Forester was due in pretty soon, and him calling now meant he’d gotten onto something — Christ only knew what piddly-ass thing it was — and that in turn meant that Brackeen was probably going to get a late lunch.
He sighed and took the hand mike Bradshaw proffered. He said, “Brackeen.”
Forester’s voice said excitedly, amid gentle static, “Listen, we’ve got a murder.”
A half-formed yawn died on Brackeen’s mouth. “A what?”
“A murder, a murder!”
“The hell you say. Where?”
“Del’s Oasis, out on the Intrastate.”
“Who’s dead?”
“Al Perrins, the guy bought Del out about six months back.”
“How do you know it’s murder?”
“Well, Jesus Christ, he’s got six bullet holes in his chest,” Forester snapped. “What else would you call it?”
Oh, these goddamn snotty bright-faces. “Any sign of who did it?”
“No. But I haven’t had the chance to go over the place yet.”
“You find Perrins yourself?”
“Yeah. I was cruising the area, and I thought I’d stop in for a quick Coke to take the edge off the heat, like I sometimes do.”
A Coke, Brackeen thought. You silly bastard, you.
Forester went on, “But the place was dark, all shut up, and the Closed sign was in the window. It didn’t figure for Perrins to be closed up on a weekday like this, and I thought maybe he was sick or something. I went around back, to that cabin he lives in, and the door glass had been broken in. The place was empty, but the phone wires had been cut and it had been gone through a little; hard to tell if anything was taken. I found the rear window to the café storeroom open, and crawled in to have a look around. Perrins was lying in a pool of blood behind the lunch counter.”
They’re always lying in a pool of blood, Brackeen thought. If you looked at ten thousand violent-homicide reports made by bright-faces like Forester, you’d find that in nine thousand of them the victims were found quote lying in a pool of blood unquote. He said, “All right, hang loose. I’ll be out there in about twenty minutes.”
Forester didn’t respond immediately, and Brackeen took satisfaction in the knowledge that the idea didn’t appeal to him. Finally Forester said, “Maybe you’d better get the county people and State Police out here.”
“Sure,” Brackeen said. “Twenty minutes, Forester.”
He gave the mike back to Bradshaw and told him to put the news of the homicide on the air to the county sheriff’s office — and to the Highway Patrol office — in Kehoe City. Then he located his Stetson and went out to where his cruiser was parked in front. He drove very fast, the way he liked to drive, windows down and the hot, thick air blowing against the textured leather of his face; the siren, shrill and undulatory, turned heads and cleared away the few cars which dotted the streets of Cuenca Seco and the county road beyond.
Brackeen felt a faint, half-forgotten stir of excitement as he sent the cruiser hurtling along the heat-spotted road. There had been a time when the commission of a crime such as murder set the juices flowing warm and deep within him, a time when his position as a representative of the law — of Justice — had inspired grim determination, a need to protect the citizenry from the lawless and the desperate. That time was long dead now — let the bright-faces inflate themselves with righteous vigor — but still, he could not help being interested in what Forester had had to report. A murder, any violent death, was an unheard-of occurrence in Cuenca Seco and environs, the last one having taken place in 1962 and that a husband-wife thing resulting from a protracted drought and flaring tempers, and a revolver kept too handy and too well supplied with bullets; in fact, any kind of overt crime was so rare as to be virtually nonexistent. There was no challenge to the job of law enforcement in Cuenca Seco, and that was the way Brackeen wanted it; but the fact remained that he had been a trained city cop once, dedicated in his own way, and a murder was something he couldn’t take with his usual indifference. That was why he was going to the scene personally, instead of letting Forester and Lydell and the State Highway Patrol have it all to themselves...
Forester was waiting for him under the wooden awning in front when Brackeen arrived at Del’s Oasis. He had a slender, athletic build and ash-blond hair and intense eyes the color of forged steel; in spite of the heat, his khaki uniform was fresh and crisp except for patches of dust on the trousers that he had apparently gotten from climbing through the storeroom window. He stood officiously, unmoving, watching the approach of his immediate superior without expression.
Brackeen parked his cruiser behind Forester’s, stepped out into the wash of heat from the perpendicular desert sun. He pushed his hat back and crossed under the awning. Forester nodded curtly, his sharp eyes now registering disapproval at what they beheld; he said, “The county and state people coming?”
“They’ll be along,” Brackeen answered. He moved past Forester and entered the oppressive warmth of the café. The shades had been pulled up and the lights were on; the air was thick with flies, buzzing angrily, circling. Brackeen went to the lunch counter and around behind it. Forester had apparently found a blanket somewhere and had used it to cover Perrins; the dead man lay sprawled on his back, one leg twisted under him, arms outflung. Wedging his big buttocks against the shelving beneath the counter, Brackeen knelt and drew the blanket back. Pool of blood, hell; there wasn’t much blood at all. Well, that figured. But the guy had been shot six times, all right, you could count each one of the scorched holes in the dark-spotted front of Perrins’ shirt.
Brackeen frowned slightly. Each of the holes was on the upper chest, left side and middle, over and around the heart, with maybe five inches between the two outside wounds. Some nice shooting — or some careful shooting. He replaced the blanket, stood up, and came out from behind the counter.
Forester was watching him from just inside the screen door. Brackeen looked at him and asked, “You go over the premises?”
“Naturally.”
“Find anything?”
Forester hesitated, and then shrugged, and then said, tight-lipped, “I think so.”