“Didn’t expect to find you open on a Sunday,” Runyon said.
“We’re always open. Got to be, up here.”
“Are you Mr. Brody?”
“Sam Brody, that’s right. What’ll it be? Gas, oil?”
“Information.”
“About what?”
“My son. Jerry. He was up this way last Friday, had some trouble with his car, and got it fixed here. Called his mother about it, said he’d be home yesterday. But he didn’t show up.”
The jumpy eyes paused and held for three or four beats. “Is that right?”
“He’s a flaky kid. Disappears every now and then, doing Christ knows what twenty-two-year-old kids do these days. But his mother worries. She sent me out to hunt for him.”
“Last Friday?” Brody said. “What kind of car he drive?”
“ ’Fifty-seven Chevy Impala. Dark blue. Hot stuff.”
“Nope.”
“Nope?”
“I’d remember a car like that. Never saw it, last Friday or any other time.”
“Were you here all day Friday?”
“All day.”
“That’s funny,” Runyon said. “Jerry told his mother he was having the car fixed at the garage in Lost Bar. There another garage around here?”
“Nope. Next closest is in Hayfork. Maybe he meant Hayfork.”
“He usually says what he means.”
“Can’t help you then.”
Runyon said, “I wonder if he saw Gus.”
The eyes stopped darting again. Brody’s face flattened out and went blank, like a shutter snapping into place across a murky window. “Gus who?”
“Local guy Jerry came here to see.”
“Don’t know him.”
“You sure? German, owns property nearby?”
“Sorry,” Brody said. “I got to finish my work.” He started away, paused long enough to glance back and say, “Kids, like you said. Your boy’ll turn up okay,” and then let the garage swallow him again.
Runyon U-turned the Ford across the highway to park in front of the Lost Bar General Store. The interior was gloomy, faintly dank, dominated by the smells of deli meats and the creosote they used on the buckled wooden floor. Close-packed shelves, one checkout stand with a fat woman in her forties behind it, one customer buying a loaf of bread and a six-pack of Coors. Runyon wandered to the cold cases in back, picked out a bottle of Lipton iced tea, brought it back up front. The other customer was gone by then. He paid for the tea before he asked his questions. Different approach this time, a reverse of the one he’d taken with Brody.
“I’m looking for a German fellow named Gus,” he said, “owns property in the area. Can you tell me how to get to his place?”
“How come?”
“How come what?”
“How come you want Gus Mayerhof?”
“Private business matter.”
“On a Sunday?”
“Good as any other day.”
“Not if you’re not expected.”
“I’m not, but I think he’ll want to see me. In fact, I’m sure he will.”
“He’s got a dog, Gus has. Mean bugger of a pit bull, tear your throat out if he gives it the right command. Keeps it because he don’t like strangers coming around unannounced.”
“Let me have his phone number and I’ll call him first.”
“He don’t have a phone.”
“Just directions, then. I’ll take my chances with the pit bull.”
The fat woman eyed his bandage. “What happened to your head?”
“A little accident. Nothing serious.”
“Be real serious if you tangle with that dog.”
He said nothing, watching her, waiting.
“You want a lot for a bottle of iced tea,” she said.
He found a five-dollar bill and laid it on the counter. She looked it for maybe five seconds, looked up at him again with expectant, greedy eyes.
He said, “Five’s all it’s worth,” and started to pick up the bill.
Her sausage fingers stopped him.
“Well, it’s your hide, mister,” she said. “Half a mile west there’s a road cuts off into the wilderness. Peters out into a dirt track after about four miles. Another mile or so, there’s a gate with a No Trespassing sign on it.”
He let her make the five disappear before he said, “Couple more questions before I go. Were you working last Friday?”
“Every damn day except Monday.”
“You happen to see a husky kid in his early twenties, driving a dark blue ‘fifty-seven Impala?”
“I don’t know nothing about cars.”
“You couldn’t miss this one. Might’ve been over at Brody’s part of the day.”
“Didn’t notice if it was.”
“How about yesterday or today? Any young guys come in, strangers?”
“We don’t get too many strangers in here, even in summer. Who’s this kid, anyway?”
Runyon said, “Thanks for your help,” and left her excavating an ear canal with the tip of her little finger.
The Lost Bar Saloon was a squarish log building incongruously topped with a huge satellite dish that loomed up like one of the radar scanners at the SRI complex. The reason for the dish was apparent when Runyon walked in. The bartender and three beer drinkers, two male and one female, were all watching a pro football game on a wide-screen TV, the volume turned up so high you couldn’t hold a conversation without half-shouting. Their interest in him was brief, vanished altogether when he asked his questions. Indifferent responses void of information. None of them had seen a dark blue ’57 Impala in the vicinity recently, or would own up to it if they had.
He closed himself inside the Ford again and rolled out of Lost Bar, following the fat woman’s directions. The wilderness road was a bent and crimped tunnel bored through thick stands of pine, alternately climbing and dropping, bypassing the crumbling hillside remains of a sluice mine. The going got rougher after pitted asphalt gave way to potholed hardpan; he had to drive at a crawl to avoid damage to the tires and undercarriage. The jouncing restarted the ache in his head. He clamped his teeth together and slowed down even more.
After a mile and two-tenths by the odometer, he rounded a curve and there was the gated entrance to Gus Mayerhof’s property. The gate and the barbed-wire fencing strung out on both sides were plastered with No Trespassing signs, all of them handmade. If the gate had been shut and locked, he’d have had to consider whether or not to go in on foot; but it stood open, like an invitation. The access road was a scar on the hillside, heavily furrowed by the erosion of rain and winter snows, climbing up through deep woods. It crested after five hundred yards or so, and the trees thinned; and as he started down on the other side he was looking at a home place like none he’d seen before.
It wasn’t a house or a cabin or a shack; it was a patchwork, spare-parts thing made of wood and brick and tarpaper and sheet metal, sprawling and sagging and jutting at odd angles among tall lodgepole pines. Smoke curled from a stovepipe chimney in one corner of an uneven A-frame roof. A lean-to to one side sheltered a newish Dodge pickup. The front and side yards were littered with the corpses and skeletons of two trucks, a passenger car, a wood stove, an old-fashioned icebox, dozens of less recognizable items.
There was no front porch, just a pair of concrete steps built into a foundation slab below the door. The man standing on the bottom step didn’t move as Runyon drove into the yard. Bearded and shaggy-haired, big-bellied in a khaki shirt and military camouflage pants, he had a shotgun slung over one arm and a chain leash tight-wrapped in the other hand. The pit bull, black and vicious looking, strained at the other end of the chain, barking furiously, foamy drool flying from its jowls. There was no expression on the man’s blocky face. The way he stood, flat-footed, motionless, made him seem even bigger than he was.
He remained motionless until Runyon parked at a slant behind one of the rusted-out wrecks. Then he came forward in a long, stiff-backed stride, like a giant stick man, to within a dozen yards of the Ford. When he stopped again he jerked once on the chain and the pit bull immediately quit barking, sat on its haunches, and stared at Runyon with red-eyed malevolence.