Jed broke off his highly-flavored account of his real estate triumph to lean toward the window which overlooked the back parking lot. "Well, well, well," he said softly. "Here's company." He stood up, a bright smile pasted on his face as a tall blonde walked in the back door. "Here's Lucille now," he said loudly enough to be heard by her. "Maybe she'll have a drink with us." He moved out of the booth.
I could hear his laughing cajolery as he intercepted the blonde. In seconds he was leading her toward our booth. "OP Chet here's been admirin' your post office, especially the fixtures that aren't government issue," Jed was saying. He winked at me as I stood. "Lucille Grimes, Chet Arnold. Chet's a tree surgeon, Lucille." He grinned at her. "I don't need to tell him who you are. Chet had the word on our beautiful postmistress twenty minutes after he'd hit town."
"Won't you sit down, Mrs. Grimes?" I said to cut off the flow of words. She murmured something I didn't get and slid into the booth opposite me. Her face was cool and composed-looking under her blonde hair. Her features were a bit too long and pointed from brow to chin for beauty, but her skin had a delicate pallor that was attractive. Her eyes were surprisingly dark for the rest of her
coloring. Despite the lack of high points, there was nothing
low-keyed in her appearance.
Jed crowded into the booth beside her and called for drinks. Lucille folded slim, capable-looking hands together on the booth table and looked directly at me. "I hear you're a very capable workman, Mr. Arnold," she said. Her voice was low-keyed, too. No stress or strain and no artificiality.
"Thank you, Mrs. Gr—"
"Hear, hear," Jed interrupted. "Lucille, meet Chet. Chet, meet Lucille. What's all this Mr. and Mrs. business?" He got up and advanced upon the jukebox in the corner. He fed it coins and punched buttons indiscriminately. "Dance?" he offered Lucille when he returned to the booth. "Illegal, but the custom of the country," he grinned down at me while Lucille Grimes rose to her feet. "Join us for dinner?" Jed asked her. "Private little celebration of mine."
"Another time, thanks." She sounded genuinely regretful. She danced with Jed. She danced with me. I'm not much of a dancer, but she followed me easily. She wasn't nearly as willowy as she appeared. She filled a man's arms. I tried to guess her age. Thirty, maybe.
1 was on the floor with her again when the back door opened to admit a stocky man in gray uniform trousers with red piping down the sides and a khaki shirt open at the throat. I recognized the blunt red face. It was my opponent from the side-road encounter of the other day. He sat down at the bar and ordered a beer.
Lucille excused herself to us after another dance with Jed. "It's been pleasant," she said, gathering up her gloves and bag. She smiled at us impartially and exited through the rear door. Three minutes later the uniformed man left his half-finished beer and followed.
Jed was watching, too. "They're not usually that obvious," he said softly. "That's Bart Franklin, one of our risin' young deputies. Popularly known as Blaze due to a high-voltage temper. I'm a jackleg deputy around here
myself in emergencies. Blaze isn't one of our better-loved
members."
"He's married?"
"His wife is," Jed returned. "Blaze has a lech for the blonde widow."
"It always helps to know if another dog's after the same bone," I remarked.
"You go for her?" Jed asked in a half-protesting tone. "I brought her over because I remembered you asked about her the other night, but—" He shook his head. "It's ail yours, man. Yours and Blaze's. That gal spooks me. Somethin' about her just don't entrance my entrancer."
The conversation died when Hazel brought our meal. Jed left at eight-thirty to keep a date, and I said good night to Hazel shortly afterward.
I drove back to town, parked in the square, and went into my act. A week ago I'd marked off four taverns as the type most likely to have attracted Bunny's trade. Each night I stopped off in two of them for a glass of beer. I'd sit for half an hour, exchanging an occasional word with the bartender. They all knew me now when I came in, and had my beer drawn before I said a word.
In another few days I'd throw each of them the same bait, starting with the friendliest. "What's become of that big, dark, quiet fella used to be in here this time of night?" I'd ask each of them. "I haven't seen him lately."
A bartender's customers come and go, but they'd try to remember. "Oh, yeah, that big guy," I hoped one or more of them might say. "That's right, he hasn't been around lately, has he?"
If they remembered Bunny, I might get a lead. I needed a lead badly. I was on my second stretch of mapped-out side roads, and I'd found nothing. If a bartender even remembered the direction Bunny drove in when he left a tavern, it would be more than I had now.
I couldn't racket around this area asking for Dick Pierce. A small town is wired together so tightly it would be almost sure to get back to the interested party. Of
course if I crapped out all around the green-covered table in my efforts to find Bunny, a direct query was my ace in the hole.
Or deuce.
The day I asked I had to be ready for anything.
I wasn't planning on it.
Not yet.
VII
The next night I was making the second of my tavern stops when the limping redhead made a mistake. He didn't know it was a mistake, because he didn't know I'd seen him in Mobile. I'd just climbed out of the Ford, ready to go inside for a beer I didn't want, when he cruised by in a black sedan at eight miles an hour. I got a good look at him.
The redhead didn't turn to look at me. He just drove past. The sedan turned the next corner, pulled into the curb, and stopped. I could tell by the quick glow and then the extinguishing of the taillights. I knew the redhead was tailing me as plainly as if he'd written me a letter.
I went inside and had the beer. I talked a little baseball to the bartender and gave some thought to the redhead. He was a luxury I couldn't afford. That decision left only two things to be settled: finding out if he'd already reported back to Manny Sebastian where he'd followed me, and how I was going to get rid of him.
I said goodnight to the bartender and went outside to the Ford. I pulled away from the tavern and turned the same corner the black sedan had turned. There wasn't a car in sight, parked or moving. I circled the block twice, cursing myself for losing him, and then a pair of headlights settled in behind me. I don't know where the bastard came from, but he was good. It takes ingenuity to tail a man in a car without the victim's knowing it. This boy had it.
I took him back uptown, then cast on Main from the
traffic fight. A little privacy was necessary now. From the edge of town I settled down to a steady fifty miles an hour. I was in no hurry. Somewhere out in the boondocks I'd find a place to leave the redhead, permanently.
I found out in the first five miles how he'd followed me from Mobile without my getting wise. He was an artist with an automobile. He didn't just lock himself onto my taillight and leave me to wonder eventually about the lights that remained the same distance behind in my rear-view mirror. There was only a sliver of moon, but he rode some stretches with his lights out. He'd be almost bumper-to-bumper with me for short distances, and then I wouldn't see him for miles. Twice he passed me, once doing about eighty, only to pick me up again from behind. The first time he went past I wasted a look at his license plate. It was carefully, unreadably mud-spattered.
Twenty-five miles up the road I emerged from the woodsy darkness enveloping the highway into a sleepy-looking, wide-place-in-the-road intersection with a blinking yellow light. There were darkened storefronts and a lighted telephone booth just before the blinker. I turned right at the intersection, right at the next corner, and right at the next. I was out of the car and sprinting between two buildings before the redhead's lights turned the last corner and cruised past the Ford. v