Hot Spot Read online

  “Look out!” I yelled. “Let me at the damned thing!”

  I collided with one of the men, knocked him off his feet, and then fell over him on to the hose. I was soaked, drowned, covered with churned-up mud. It was perfect. It was just what I wanted. I got both hands on the nozzle, dug my feet in, and got up. I held it, and started going forward. I could hear the crowd yell.

  We had two streams on the fire now, but we might as well have been squirting a burning oil well with water pistols. The whole thing was going up like a Roman candle. A big section of the roof caved in and sparks and embers went exploding upwards in the smoke. The crowd was pushing in across the vacant lot all around us. I swung my head and through all the confusion I could see the deputy sheriff and two more men running along the line trying to force them back. I jerked my head at the two men behind me.

  “Slide up here and take this!” I yelled. They clamped their hands on it and I let go, ducked back, and made for the deputy. I got him by the arm and yelled in his ear.

  “That wall’s coming down any minute! We got to get ’em out of here.”

  “What you think I’m trying to do?” he roared back.

  “Look! Go tell ’em to cut the water on this hose. Then get as many men on it as you can. Pick it up. We’ll shove ’em back.”

  He got what I meant, and ran towards the fire engine. I turned and ploughed my way back to the nozzle. Just as I got my hands on it the hose went limp. I started running, dragging it, down alongside the wall and out into the vacant lot at the rear, as far as it would reach. Men were falling in behind me now, picking it up. I started swinging it out and away, like hauling a fish seine. The deputy was yelling and motioning backwards with his arms. They began to back up, and every time they gave a step we dragged the hose against them. In a couple of minutes we had the whole crowd shoved back across the street.

  The wall didn’t fall outwards after all. It sagged a little and went on burning. But I had accomplished the thing I wanted. That deputy, and at least a half dozen others, would remember me all right. My clothes were a mess; I looked as if I’d been fighting fire for a week. There wasn’t much to do now except to keep it from spreading to the houses along the street. We put out fires in the weeds and sprayed water on some of the nearer shacks. And all the time I was waiting. It would break any minute now.

  Then I heard a siren, pitched low and merely growling. Another highway patrol car was inching its way through the crowd jammed in the street. The driver got out and waved his arm towards the deputy sheriff. The deputy went over, while people pressed around them. Then I saw some of them break away and start running towards Main.

  I shoved into the knot of men. The word was travelling faster than another fire. “What’s up?” I yelled at a man squeezing his way out.

  “Bunch of men held up the bank! While everybody was over here at the fire they stuck it up and got away with ten thousand dollars!”

  “Did they catch ’em?” I tried to grab his arm.

  “Not yet. They got away in a car.” He was gone past me.

  By the time I got back to the lot it had grown to four men with sub-machine guns and thirty thousand dollars, and the car was a black sedan. I didn’t pay much attention to it. This was the kind of rumour you’d expect; the men who were working from facts, over there at the bank, wouldn’t be saying what they’d found out. It was just a matter of time till they got the hunch the fire was rigged and start at it from that angle. As far as I could see it had come off without a hitch; I hadn’t left a track.

  The letdown began to catch up with me. I told them I was going over to the room to change clothes. What I really needed was a drink. As soon as I got out of the shower I dug the bottle out of the suitcase, poured a stiff slug in a glass, and collapsed on the side of the bed. It had been rough. I had lost all track of time. I took a jolt of the whisky, felt it explode inside me, and wondered how much money there was out there in the trunk of the car. I couldn’t even guess.

  I went back to the lot. The whole town was in an uproar. It was the biggest thing since V-J Day. The Sheriff and two more deputies had just arrived from the county seat twenty miles away. Highways were being blockaded in all adjoining counties. The story was already spreading across town that the fire had been a decoy. The next rumour was that two experts from the insurance company were already on their way up from Houston. Well, they’d have a hard time proving it, and if they did they wouldn’t be much better off except that it’d point a little more to somebody here in town.

  It was hard on the nerves, thinking of that money still in the trunk of the car, but the only thing I could do was ride it out until after dark. I went up and mixed with the crowd gawking round the bank. Julian was all right, they said. He hadn’t been hurt, just a little shaken up and scared. He was inside there now, with the police. But he couldn’t give any description of the man, or men; all he’d seen was a blanket flopping down over his head. He hadn’t heard any voices, though; which might mean there’d been only one man. Old Mort, the Negro, was a sensation. He’d been so close to one of the robbers he could hear him breathing. He was that close, he said, measuring with his hands. He could of reached out and touched him.

  I sweated out the afternoon some way, and after it was dark I eased out of town, driving south on the highway. Nobody stopped me, or even seemed to notice. Before I turned off on to the dirt road I looked back for lights. There was nobody behind me. The moon wasn’t up yet, and it was partly overcast and very dark. Just before I got to the abandoned farm up on the sandhill among the pines, I pulled off and cut my lights. I wasn’t being followed. When my eyes were accustomed to the darkness I pulled back into the road and went on. At the gate I turned sharply left and went on around behind the old sagging barn and stopped the car where it would be out of sight of anyone going past out in front.

  Fighting the impatience, I waited a few minutes to be sure. Nuts, I thought; there’s nobody within miles. I got out, opened the trunk, and carried the bag inside the barn before I switched on the flashlight. My hands were beginning to tremble a little and I was conscious of a wild excitement. I went inside the corn crib and closed the door. I didn’t notice the heat now, or the sweat on my face. I upended the bag and let the bundles and loose bills cascade on to the floor. It was wonderful.

  I didn’t try to count all of it. Most of the bundles were fifties, twenties, and tens. Without any of the loose bills or the ones it came to $12,300. I whistled softly. A wild impatience began to get hold of me. I wanted to get going, to put it back in the car and run.

  Run where? I thought.

  The world wouldn’t hold me, and I knew it. It wouldn’t take them an hour to figure it out if I disappeared now. They could add too. I couldn’t leave. The only way I could beat them was the one I’d known from the first, and that was to keep my head down and wait it out. After a month or so, when the heat began to die down … I gathered the bag up and went out the door of the crib.

  Picking a spot near the rear wall of the crib, inside one of the stalls, I scraped the old manure out of the way with a piece of shingle, and started to dig. The ground was sand, and easy to gouge up with the shingle. I was careful to place all the loose dirt in one pile. When I was down about eighteen inches, I rolled the bag of money into as tight a ball as I could make it, and shoved it into the hole. Then, just before I started scooping the dirt back in, I thought of something. I lifted it out and began looking over the undershirt. There was a laundry mark on it, all right. Taking out my knife, I sawed out the piece of cloth and stuck a match to it, then ground the ashes into the bottom of the hole. If anybody did happen to stumble on to it I’d lose the money, but they’d never tie it to me.

  I put it back in the hole and began filling it, tamping the dirt down with my fist until it was as firm as the rest of the ground. The little which was left over I spread evenly around, then raked the dried manure and old straw back over the whole area.

  Snapping off the light, I went back to the do
or. The old house was just a faintly darker shadow in the night, off there to the left, and as I looked towards it I thought for the hundredth time of that other day and what Sutton had said to her and the way she detested and feared him. There was something insane about it. You could keep trying for years to add it up and you’d never come out with an answer that made sense. She wouldn’t even know Sutton. The hell she didn’t—!

  I shook them off angrily. What business was it of mine? But, as always, when I gathered her up and threw her out of my mind there was a little of her left over, the way there is in a room a girl has just walked through.

  I went out and got in the car, but instead of heading right back to town I drove on down to the river and went swimming by the bridge. When I did go back I stopped in at the restaurant to get a cup of coffee. The waitress looked at my head and smiled.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked. “Did I forget to put on my hair?”

  She grinned. “No. But it looks like you left it out in the rain.”

  “I been swimming,” I said. “They caught the bank robbers yet?”

  “No. But they got enough cops around here to catch Dillinger.”

  “You don’t even remember Dillinger,” I said. “You were just a kid in a three-cornered Bikini.”

  She laughed, tickled about it. I went back to the rooming house, took another drink, and lay down on the bed, feeling the tension go out of me. I was in. The money was buried, and I hadn’t left a track behind me.

  The next day was Saturday, but there wasn’t much business transacted. They might as well have closed the whole town except that there wouldn’t have been any places for people to congregate and rehash the robbery. The place was full of cops. The white-haired Sheriff from the county seat was in town with two of his deputies besides the one who lived here, and there were some more with plainclothes cop written all over them, probably from the detective agency or insurance company. Everybody was wild to get at the remains of the fire and start pawing through it for evidence, but a lot of it was still smouldering and too hot. Special deputies had been sworn in to keep people away from the place. I had a hunch the Sheriff and the detectives had already junked the out-of-town gang idea and were playing it cagey, going through the motions of looking for the getaway car while they waited for somebody to stick his head up or make a slip. That much money would be burning somebody’s pockets and he’d have to start throwing it around. All right, I thought; go ahead. I know about that one too.

  All I had to do was keep playing it down the middle. I stuck around the lot and talked robbery with anybody who drifted in. And then Harshaw pulled a funny one on me. Around noon he called me into the office. He was chewing a cold cigar and oiling a big salt-water reel on his desk.

  “Sit down,” he said. “I want to talk to you.”

  I perched on the side of a desk, wondering what was coming. “What’s up?” I asked, as casually as I could.

  “I want you to take charge here for a while. My wife and I are going to Galveston for a week.”

  “What’s the matter with Gulick?” I asked.

  “There’s nothing the matter with Gulick,” he said impatiently. “Except that he’s a little slow and he won’t take responsibility. You can use your own judgment about trades. Do you want it, or don’t you?”

  “O.K. with me,” I said. For once I couldn’t start an argument.

  “You can run an ad if you want to,” he said. “The paper comes out early in the week.”

  “What’ll I use for money? My own?”

  He sighed and shook his head. “You’re a tough nut to get along with, Madox. Why in hell would I ask you to pay for the ad out of your pocket? They can send the bill to Miss Harper. Or tell her to give it to you out of petty cash.”

  “O.K.,” I said. At least he was taking that over-ripe bundle of sex with him this time.

  He finished cleaning the reel and put it in a flannel bag with a drawstring. “Well, if you can’t think of anything else to bitch about, I’ll leave it with you,” he said, starting out the door.

  “What are you going after?” I asked. “Tarpon?”

  “No. Hammerhead sharks. They got some big ones around the jetties down there.”

  After I came back from lunch I went out on the lot and picked out about a half-dozen cars that would make good leaders in an ad, made some notes, and started writing it up. At first I was just doing it to kill time, but the thing began to grow on me as I went along and after the second or third draft I had some pretty good stuff whipped into shape, slicing the down payments as low as they would go and playing up all the accessories. I took it up the street to the newspaper office, paid for it and got a receipt, intending to go by the loan office and collect from Gloria Harper.

  I had started back to the office before I remembered it was Saturday and they closed at noon. Well, I could collect on Monday; it didn’t matter. But I was conscious of a vague disappointment, and knew the money was only part of it; what I’d really wanted was an excuse to go in and talk to her.

  I was angling across the street towards the lot when I happened to glance around towards the loan office and saw her through the window. She was sitting at a desk behind a pile of paper work. I turned abruptly and started back, and just as I did I noticed that Gulick had company on the lot. Two of the deputy sheriffs were talking to him.

  Well, it wasn’t anything. They were talking to everybody in town. There was nothing unusual about it. But still I wished I hadn’t turned right there in the middle of the street; it might look as if I had turned back to avoid them. But there wasn’t anything I could do about it now. If I kept switching back and forth in the middle of the street I would attract attention.

  The door was open and there was a big electric fan blowing across the office. She nodded as I came in, but the smile itself was a little forced and there was something very tired about her face. I wondered why she was working overtime. She got up and came over to the counter with tall unhurried grace.

  “It was terrible about the bank, wasn’t it?” she said. “And the fire.”

  “Yes,” I said. I wasn’t even thinking about the bank. And then I remembered what I had come in for. “Harshaw said to take it out of petty cash,” I said, shoving the receipt across the counter and explaining what it was for.

  She wrote out a slip and got the money out of the safe. “Thanks,” I said, putting it into my wallet. “Why don’t you knock off? You look tired.”

  “I will pretty soon.”

  I didn’t want to go. We stood there facing each other across the counter. “What are you going to do tomorrow?” I asked.

  “Nothing special. Go to church in the morning, I expect. And in the afternoon I thought I might go out and try to sketch the Buchanan bridge.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “It’s in the river bottom, below the one where—” She paused, confused, and I knew what she was thinking. “Below the one we crossed going out to the oil well.”

  “Could I go, too?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Why, yes. We could make it a picnic.”

  “That’s fine. I’ll get the restaurant to make us a lunch to take along.”

  “No. Let me do that,” she said. “It’s no trouble.”

  “What time can I pick you up?”

  “About twelve would be all right.”

  “Great,” I said. “I’ll be looking forward to it.”

  I started out and then paused, when I reached the doorway, to look back at her. She was still watching me, and had just started to turn back to the desk.

  It was awkward, somehow. Both of us were a little confused. “Was—I mean, is there anything else?” she asked.

  “Oh,” I said. “No. I guess not.” I turned and went on out into the street.

  When I got over to the lot the two deputies were gone and Gulick didn’t say anything about them.

  9

  I DROVE OVER AROUND NOON. It was a blazing, still day of white sunlight, and the sh
adows under the trees were like pools of ink. She was sitting on the front porch waiting for me, dressed in white shorts and a blue T-shirt, and surrounded by painting equipment and the box of lunch. I got out and loaded it all into the back seat. The cocker spaniel was running eagerly up and down the walk.

  “Can we take Spunky?” she asked. “He likes to run rabbits.”

  I looked at Spunky’s short legs and big paddle feet. “Did he ever catch one?”

  She smiled. “No. But he’s still hopeful.”

  “Sure,” I said. I lifted him in through the rear window and held the door open for her. As we went down Main Street a few people were clustered in front of the drugstore and the restaurant.

  “They’re still talking about the bank robbery,” she said. “Do you think it was somebody around here?”

  I didn’t want to talk about it. “I don’t know,” I said. “It could have been.”

  When we were on the highway going south I cranked the wing windows open and swung them around front to scoop in a little breeze. She sat back in the corner of the seat, facing towards me with one leg doubled under her, and the big violet eyes were happier than I had ever seen them before.

  The road was a mile or so beyond the one which went over to Sutton’s oil well. It wasn’t much more than a pair of ruts struggling through the sand and stunted postoak in a generally westerly direction towards the river bottom, and looked as if it hadn’t been used in months.

  “Where’s it go?” I asked.

  “Nowhere, any more. The bridge isn’t safe and it’s all washed out beyond, on the other side of the bottom. We can get as far as the bridge, though.”

  When we got down among the big oaks in the bottom there was more shade and it was a little cooler. The road wound erratically, skirting the dried-up sloughs. Once we almost ran over an old boar which came charging out of some bushes into the road ahead of us.