Man on a leash Page 9

  In a few minutes the peaks of the Sierra, far off to his right, began to be tipped with yellow sunlight. The two-lane blacktop, which in reality was a good three lanes wide, ran straight down a wide valley floored with sage and rimmed with buttes and ridges on both sides. Ahead and behind there was nobody else in sight. He bore down on the accelerator until he was cruising at seventy.

  He began to watch the odometer, but he saw the gravel road a good mile before he reached it. He turned right into it, stopped, and read the mileage: 6341.1. He subtracted and wrote 13.7 on the map at the juncture of the two roads. Eight miles each direction would cover it. He looked behind and then ahead. You could see almost the full eight miles both ways, he thought. He cranked the windows up, opened the wings a crack, and went on. It wasn’t hot enough yet to need the air conditioning.

  The road was badly washboarded and chuckholed, and he had to keep his speed down. A boiling cloud of dust rolled up behind, and he was thankful there was nobody ahead of him. Gravel roared against the underside of the car. A sage hen ran across the road, and several times he saw jackrabbits bounding out through the sage, raising and lowering their great ears like semaphores; but there was no sign of human habitation anywhere. After five miles he topped a low ridge and saw another immense flat spread out ahead of him. He stopped and got out to study it with the glasses. The road ran straight on, diminishing in the distance. There was no house, no shed, windmill, or structure of any kind. There was no use going any farther in this direction. Wherever his father had gone or had been taken, there had to be a habitation of some kind.

  He turned around and drove back to the highway. Checking the mileage there, he continued on east on the gravel for eight miles. Nothing. He returned to the highway again and drove back to town. As he went past the motel, he wanted to stop and call Mayo but knew it was too early. It wasn’t even eight o’clock yet; she wouldn’t be up.

  Traffic was still light in the streets, but the signals were in operation now. Stopped at Third Street, he checked the odometer and wrote the new reading on the map: 6380.8. He went on through town and out the highway, north this time. A few cars were abroad now, and he passed a couple of big diesel rigs. In about ten minutes he came to the first of the dirt roads leading off to the west. He had to wait for an oncoming car to turn left into it. He stopped, checked his mileage again, and entered it on the map; 6391.1.

  The road curved down a slight grade and across a flat, rough and corrugated and full of axle-breaking chuckholes for the unwary, maintained for pickup trucks. Dust boiled up behind him. He checked the rearview mirror and could see nothing at all through the swirling white cloud. An old pickup came clattering toward him and passed, and he had to slow to a crawl until the dust of its passage began to settle. There was no wind at all, and it was growing hot now. He switched on the air conditioner. After eight miles on the odometer he topped another ridge and stopped. He got out with the glasses.

  The road swung down from the ridge and turned north up another sagebrush flat. In the distance he could see a clump of cottonwoods, a corral, and tiny ranch buildings. At least four more miles, he thought. Too far, even allowing for slight differences in the odometers of the two cars. He turned and went back to the highway, picked up his new mileage reading, and continued north to the second road. It was only a dusty and monotonous repetition of the first. When his odometer reading added up first to twenty-one, and then twenty-two from town, he stopped and turned around.

  He drove back to town and parked in front of his unit at the motel. When he got out, he saw the car was as dusty now as the Mercedes had been. He went inside and put through a call to Mayo. There was no answer. He let the phone go on ringing for a full minute before he gave up and broke the connection, uneasy in spite of himself. Hell, there was nothing to worry about. Wherever she’d gone, Murdock’s man was right with her.

  He called Murdock’s office. Mr. Murdock was out, the receptionist said. So was Mr. Snyder. He identified himself and asked if there were any word from the man assigned to Miss Foley.

  “No,” the girl said, “he hasn’t called in since he took over at eight. But he wouldn’t, anyway, unless he’d lost her.”

  He was forced to admit this was right. Reassured, he thanked her and hung up. He dialed for a local line and called Paulette Carmody. She answered herself.

  “Oh, Eric? You caught me just as I was going out the door.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll call back later.”

  “Oh, that’s all right. It’s the church service for Jeri, but I’ve got a few minutes. What is it?”

  “Nothing important. It was just about that crew member you said the old man locked up for having heroin on the ship—”

  “Oh, that kooky radio officer. Was he ever out there in space? Look—where are you now?”‘

  “Here in Coleville. At the Conestoga.”

  “Fine. Honey, I’ll be home all afternoon; why don’t you come out for a drink and I’ll tell you about the dingaling? It’s quite a story.”

  “I’ll be there,” he said.

  “Bye now.”

  He hung up. Radio officer? Then he shook his head angrily and went out to the car; there was no use indulging in any wild speculation until he had more than that to go on. Finish the job first, he told himself; find the place or admit you were wrong. He wrote the odometer reading on the map, drove up Aspen, turned right on Third Street, and was on the blacktop road headed east out of town.

  The country was rougher in this direction, flinty hills and ridges and twisting ravines. The sun was high overhead now, and heat waves shimmered off the pavement. He came to the dirt road leading north and pulled off into it. A weathered signpost bore arrow markers saying KENDALL MTN 19 and LADYSMITH SPRGS 22. He checked the odometer and wrote 9.2 on the map. The road went up over a ridge and along a high flat with ravines on both sides. It was as rough as the others, the dust a grayish white and as fine as talcum. It was impossible to see anything behind him.

  He came to the fork and stopped to read the mileage again: 13.4. He entered it on the map. The old signs, gouged and riddled with gunshots, indicated the road bearing off to the right led to Ladysmith Springs. He shrugged. It didn’t matter which he took first. A pickup truck came into view down the other, leaving a swirling plume of dust behind it. The driver lifted a hand, and it went on past toward the highway. Romstead took the Ladysmith road and went on. After about a mile there was a small fenced enclosure on his left and a shed that had probably been used for the storage of winter hay in the past but was now empty and falling in ruin. After that there was nothing but sage and rock and powdery dust and the endless succession of low hills. When the odometer indicated he’d come twenty-three miles and there was still nothing in sight, he stopped, poured a drink of the water, waited a minute for his own dust to settle, and turned back.

  He checked his mileage again at the fork and turned up the Kendall Mountain road, discouraged now and facing defeat. This was his next to last chance. The road ran for two or three miles up a shallow canyon, and when it climbed out, there was a fence on his right. The fence continued as the road went up over another ridge and out across several miles of rough mesa, still running north. As his mileage was beginning to run out on him, he passed a gate through the fence, a wooden gate on high posts, with a single-lane road leading through it and disappearing over a slight rise about two hundred yards away. The fence turned at right angles shortly after the gate and ran off to the east across a continuation of the low ridge.

  He was twenty-two miles from town when the road began to drop down from the mesa and he could see out across another wide flat ahead. There was no habitation visible anywhere. He noted the odometer reading and turned and went back. It was three miles to the gate. Nineteen miles from town, he thought. He stopped and got out.

  The sun was straight overhead now, incandescent and searing in the cloudless sky, and its weight was like a blow after the cool interior of the car. There was still no wind,
and in the boundless hush his shoes made little plopping sounds in the dust as he walked over to the gate. It was secured with a length of heavy chain and a rusty padlock that looked as though it hadn’t been opened in years. He could see traces of tire treads in the dust on the other side, however, indistinct and half-obliterated by the desert’s afternoon winds. They might have been made months ago. There was no way he could get through with the car, but he could walk out to where the road disappeared over the little rise and see what was in view from there. He lifted the binoculars off the seat, crawled through the three-strand fence, and walked up beside the road. As the country beyond began to come into view, he felt a little surge of excitement.

  It was a wide bowl-shaped valley or flat, and on the far side of it, among a half dozen aspens or cottonwoods, was a ranch house. He lifted the binoculars and studied it. Besides the house itself, there was a barn, a smaller shed of some kind, a corral, and off a short distance to one side a windmill and a large water tank. He breathed softly. It was a good two miles, he estimated, feeling conviction take hold of him, plus the nineteen to the gate would make it exactly right. But was there anybody there now?

  No vehicle of any kind was visible, and he could see no one anywhere. Of course, there might be a car or a truck in the shed or around behind the house, but he didn’t think so. Those tire marks in the road were too old. He swung the glasses onto the windmill again. Several of its blades appeared to be missing, but he couldn’t be sure at this distance. He couldn’t tell whether there was any water in the tank or not. But there were no animals in sight, no dog, chickens, horses, or anything, not even range cattle.

  His eye was caught then by movement in the sage a quarter mile in front of the house, and he brought the glasses around. It was vultures, five or six of them clustered around something on the ground. As he watched, one of them took off, flapping, and began to soar. Two or three more were circling high overhead. He returned to his scrutiny of the ranch buildings. The place, he decided, was almost surely abandoned. There was no mailbox out here at the road, no telephone or power lines leading in.

  It would be a long walk in the scorching heat of midday, and he’d better have a drink of the water before he started. He went back and was about to crawl between the strands of barbed wire beside the gate when his attention was suddenly caught by the chain encircling the post. It had been cut.

  Somebody had used bolt cutters to remove a quarter-inch section of one side of one of the links, and not too long ago. The clean metallic gray of the ends contrasted sharply with the rusty condition of the rest of it. It had been carefully arranged in back of the post where it would remain unnoticed by anyone going past in front. This had to be the place, he thought, and his eyes were cold as he slipped the adjoining link through the gap and opened the gate.

  He could have been the only person in this end of Nevada as he drove through, closed the gate, and rehooked the chain again. There was no dust in sight along the road as far as he could see, no sound of car or truck. As soon as he had dropped down the short grade into the flat, he was out of sight of the road except for the rising dust cloud of his passage. He drove slowly, keeping his eyes on the building for any sign of life. Nothing moved anywhere except the vultures, taking off in alarm as he went past. Whatever carrion they were tearing at was hidden by the sage some hundred yards off to his right.

  He was near enough now to see that most of the panes were broken in the old-fashioned sashes of the two windows in front. It was a small house, of board-and-batten construction, long unpainted, with a porch across the front and a roof of weathered shingles. There was a fieldstone chimney at the right end of it. He stopped in the shade of one of the trees in front and got out in the silence and the incandescent glare of noon.

  The windmill and the big galvanized water tank were straight ahead, some fifty yards off to the right of the house. Nearly half the mill’s blades were missing, and its framework and ladder were discolored with rust. The corral fence and barn were behind the windmill, both silvery with age and fallen into disrepair. It was years, he thought, since anybody had lived here, but the place had definitely had visitors. The baked earth of the yard bore the tracks of at least two vehicles, one of which he thought must have been a truck of some kind because the tires were bigger and the treads more deeply impressed. This one had apparently been back and forth several times.

  He walked around to the rear. There was a small back porch. The windows here had broken panes in them, too. The tire tracks of the heavy vehicle came on into the backyard, and the truck or whatever it was had apparently stood for some length of time in two places under the big cottonwood some distance behind the porch, judging from the accumulated drops of leaking crankcase oil. There were a great many heel marks and scuffs of shoe soles as though a number of people had been walking around, but the ground was too hard-baked and they were too indistinct for him to gather any information from them. The other building, off to one side of the barn, was apparently a chicken house, and there was an old privy farther back.

  He walked out to the barn, continuing to study the ground. The wide double doors were open and sagging on their hinges, and the ground was softer inside, a mixture of dust and sand and ancient manure unbaked by the sun. There were some stalls at the far end, an enclosed feed bin, and an opening above leading into a hayloft, but the ladder beneath it was gone except for two rungs near the top. One of the vehicles—the lighter one, he thought—had been driven in here just once and then backed out. A few drops of oil discolored the ground between the tracks where it had stopped, but as a measure of the time it had stood here they were meaningless. One car would drip that much in a few hours, another in a month.

  He went back to the rear of the house and stepped up on the porch. The door was closed, but when he tried it, it swung open freely, and he saw it had been forced with a jimmy or pinch bar. It had been a long time ago, however, for there was no raw, fresh look to the splintered wood where the lock had been torn out of the jamb. There was a stovepipe hole and sleeve through the ceiling, so the room had apparently been the kitchen, but nothing remained now except an old table presumably not worth loading when the last occupants moved away. But something was definitely wrong with the picture, and in a moment he realized what it was.

  He went on into the room in front, with its fireplace, and then into the remaining two, presumably bedrooms, all empty of any furniture, all with broken windowpanes, and they were the same. There was only the thinnest film of dust, with no footprints visible anywhere. The house had been swept. The floors should have been heavily covered with dust, drifted sand from the broken windows, and probably old rodent droppings and dead insects, but somebody had cleaned it. Why? To remove footprints? And people had been here, presumably for hours or maybe even days, and nowhere had he seen a cigarette butt, an empty cigarette pack, nonreturnable bottle, or tin can. Trespassers with a conscience? Ecology freaks?

  He stood in the kitchen again, still puzzled by this, when something shiny caught his eyes in one of the cracks of the floor. When he looked more closely, at different angles, he saw there were several of them. He pulled a thin splinter of wood from the wreckage of the doorjamb and knelt to poke one out. It was smooth, bright, metallic, shaped like a teardrop but flattened on one side. Solder? he thought. Here? He lifted out another. There was no doubt of it. They’d fallen into the cracks when the floor was being swept. While there was no electricity for a soldering iron, he knew they were also heated by torches, but what in God’s name would somebody have been soldering in this place? He shrugged helplessly and went outside.

  There was no litter can or garbage dump anywhere. He went back to the old chicken house and looked inside and behind it. Nothing. He came back and stood under the trees in front, feeling as baffled and frustrated as he had after his interview with Richter. Several people had been here, in two vehicles, they’d cut their way through that chain out there, he was certain this was the place his father had come or been broug
ht at gunpoint; but there wasn’t a shred of proof of it or the slightest clue to their identities. Even reporting it to Brubaker was pointless; he wouldn’t find anything here either. Of course, he’d probably know who owned the place, but that was of little value. The owners would have entered with a key, not a pair of bolt cutters.

  He sighed and got in the car and started back out to the gate. From the sagebrush off to his left, the vultures took off again, flapping clumsily to get themselves aloft. Purely on impulse, he stopped the car and got out. It was probably the carcass of a jack-rabbit or a calf, but at least he’d know for sure. As he started out through the brush, he saw a lengthening plume of dust rising from the road. It was coming up from the south, the vehicle itself out of sight beyond the low ridge this side of the gate. He stopped to watch it. It came up to where the gate would be and went past. He went on, beginning to be conscious of the odor of putrefaction. The carcass came into view then. It was a burro, or what was left of one.

  It lay in a small open space surrounded by a scattering of greenish-black feathers and the white lime of bird droppings where the vultures had been tearing at it for days or perhaps weeks. All the soft tissues were gone now, consumed by the big birds and the other, smaller scavengers of nature’s clean-up crew, so that little remained except the skeleton, some of the tougher connective tissues, and enough of the leathery hide to identify it. He was about to turn back to the car when he noticed a puzzling thing about the skeleton. Nearly all the ribs were broken.

  That really was odd, when you thought about it. The scavengers could separate the individual bones as the connective tissues deteriorated, but their breaking anything as strong as the ribs of one of these small desert mules was out of the question. He wondered what could have killed it. The only North American predator with the power to smash in the chest that way would be a grizzly, and there were no grizzlies in the desert or probably anywhere nearer than Yellowstone.