“Wait up,” Harmon protested. He’d seen the workman first.
Cranshaw was walking briskly toward an intersection in the rows of twisted hulks. “Hey, you!” Harmon heard him call above the din of the crusher. “Hey, Milton!”
Cranshaw turned the corner and disappeared from view for a moment. Harmon made his legs plod faster, and he almost collided with Cranshaw when he came around the corner of stacked cars.
Cranshaw was standing in the middle of the rutted pathway, staring at the mangled remains of a Pinto station wagon. His face looked unhealthy beneath its tan.
“Shit, Morris! That’s the car that I…”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Arnie. All burned-out wrecks look alike.”
“No. It’s the same one. See that porthole window in back? They didn’t make very many of that model. Shit!”
Harmon had studied photos of the wreck in preparing his defense. “Well, so what if it is the car. It had to end up in a junkyard somewhere. Anyway, I don’t think this is the same car.”
“Shit!” Cranshaw repeated, starting to back away.
“Hey, wait!” Harmon insisted.
A workman had materialized from the rusting labyrinth. His greasy common-placeness was initially reassuring — faded work clothes, filthy with unguessable stains, and a billed cap too dirty for its insignia patch to be deciphered. He was tall and thin, and his face and hands were so smeared and stained that Harmon wasn’t at first certain as to his race. The workman carried a battered tool box in one hand, while in the other he dragged a shapeless bag of filthy canvas. The eyes that stared back at Harmon were curiously intent above an expressionless face.
“Are you Dillon?” Harmon hoped they weren’t trespassing. He could hear a dog barking furiously not far away.
The workman looked past Harmon and fixed his eyes on Cranshaw. His examination of the other man seemed frankly rude.
“Are you Milton?” Cranshaw demanded. The workman’s name across his breast pocket was obscured by grease and dirt. “Where do you keep your late-model imports?”
The workman set down his tool box and dug a limp notebook from a greasy shirt pocket. Licking his fingers, he paged through it in silence. After a moment, he found the desired entry. His eyes flicked from the page to Cranshaw and back again.
“Yep,” he concluded, speaking for the first time, and he made a checkmark with a well-chewed pencil stub. Returning notebook and pencil to shirt pocket, the workman knelt down and began to unlatch his tool box.
Harmon wanted to say something, but his mouth was too dry to speak, and he knew he was very much afraid, and he wished with all his heart that his legs were not rooted to the ground.
Ahead of him, Cranshaw appeared to be similarly incapable of movement, although from the expression on his face he clearly seemed to wish he were anyplace else but here.
The tool chest was open now, and the workman expertly made his selection from within. The tool chest appeared to contain mainly an assortment of knives and scalpels, all very dirty and showing evidence of considerable use. If the large knife that the workman had selected was a fair sample, their blades were all very sharp and serviceable.
The canvas bag had fallen open, enough so that Harmon could get a glimpse of its contents. A glimpse was enough. The arm seemed to be a woman’s, but there was no way of telling if the heart with its dangling assortment of vessels had come from the same body.
Curiously, once Harmon recognized that many of the stains were blood, it seemed quite evident that much of the dirt was not grease, but soot.
The sound of an approaching motor was only a moment’s cause for hope. A decrepit Cadillac hearse wallowed down the rutted trail toward them, as the workman tested the edge of his knife. The hearse, converted into a work truck, was rusted out and so battered that only its vintage tailfins gave it identity. Red dust would have completely masked the chipped black paint, if there hadn’t been an overlay of soot as well. The loud exhaust belched blue smoke that smelled less of oil than of sulfur.
Another grimy workman was at the wheel. Except for the greasy straw cowboy hat, he might have been a double for the other workman. The doors were off the hearse, so it was easy to see what was piled inside.
The hearse rolled to a stop, and the driver stuck out his head. “Another pick-up?”
“Yeah. Better get out and give me a hand here. They want both right and left leg assemblies, and then we need to strip the face. You got a three-inch flaying knife in there? I left mine somewhere.” Then they lifted Cranshaw, grunting a little at the effort, and laid him out across the hood.
“Anything we need off the other?” the driver wondered.
“I don’t know. I’ll check my list.”
It was very, very hot, and Harmon heard nothing Someone was tugging at his head, and Harmon started to scream. He choked on a mouthful of cold R.C. and sputtered foam on the chest of the man who was holding the can to his lips. Harmon’s eyes popped open, and he started to scream again when he saw the greasy workclothes. But this black face was naturally so, the workman’s eyes showed kindly concern, and the name on his pocket plainly read Dillon.
“Just sip on this and take it easy, mister,” Dillon said reassuringly. “You had a touch of the sun, but you’re going to be just fine now.” Harmon stared about him. He was back in the office, and Shiloh was speaking with considerable agitation into the phone. Several other people stood about, offering conflicting suggestions for treating heat stroke or sun stroke or both.
“Found you passed out on the road out there in the yard,” Dillon told him. “Carried you back inside here where we got the air conditioner running.”
Harmon became aware of the stuttering howl of an approaching siren. “I won’t need an ambulance,” he protested. “I just had a dizzy spell is all.”
“That ambulance ain’t coming for you,” Dillon explained. “We had a bad accident at the crusher. Some customer got himself caught.”
Shiloh slammed down the phone. “There’ll be hell to pay!” she snapped.
“There always is,” Harmon agreed.
THE LAST WOLF
The last writer sat alone in his study.
There was a knock at his door.
But it was only his agent. A tired, weathered old man like himself. It seemed not long ago that he had thought the man quite young.
“I phoned you I was coming,” explained his agent, as if to apologize for the writer’s surprised greeting.
Of course… he had forgotten. He concealed the vague annoyance he felt at being interrupted in his work.
Nervously the agent entered his study. He gripped his attache case firmly before him, thrusting it into the room as if it were a shield against the perilously stacked shelves and shelves of musty books. Clearing a drift of worn volumes from the cracked leather couch, he seated himself amidst a puff of dust from the ancient cushions.
The writer returned to the chair at his desk, swivelling to face his guest. His gnarled fingers gripped the chair arms; his black eyes, bright beneath a craggy brow, bored searchingly into the agent’s face. He was proud and wary as an aging wolf. Time had weathered his body and frosted his hair. No one had drawn his fangs.
The agent shifted against the deep cushions and erased the dusty film on his attache case. His palm left sweat smears on the vinyl. He cleared his throat, subconsciously striving to clear his thoughts from the writer’s spell. It would be easier if he could see him just as another client, as nothing more than a worn out old man. Just another tired old man, as he himself had become.