THE CROOKED WAY
by Loren D. Estleman
<an Amos Walker story>

You couldn't miss the Indian if you'd wanted to. He was sitting all alone in a coiner booth, which was probably his idea, but he hadn't much choice because there was barely enough room in it for him. He had shoulders going into the next county and a head the size of a basketball, and he was holding a beer mug that looked like a shot glass between his callused palms. As I approached the booth he looked up at me—not very far up—through slits in a face made up of bunched ovals with a nose like the corner of a building. His skin was the color of old brick.
"Mr. Frechette?" I asked.
"Amos Walker?"
I said I was. Coming from him my name sounded like two stones dropping into deep water. He made no move to shake hands, but he inclined his head a fraction of an inch and I borrowed a chair from a nearby table and joined him. He had on a blue shirt buttoned to the neck, and his hair, parted on one side and plastered down, was blue-black without a trace of gray. Nevertheless he was about fifty.
"Charlie Stoat says you track like an Osage," he said. "I hope you're better than that. I couldn't track a train."
"How is Charlie? I haven't seen him since that insurance thing."
"Going under. The construction boom went bust in Houston just when he was expanding his operation."
"What's that do to yours?" He'd told me over the telephone he was in construction.
"Nothing worth mentioning. I've been running on a shoestring for years. You can't break a poor man."
I signaled the bartender for a beer and he brought one over. It was a workingman's hangout across the street from the Ford plant in Highland Park. The shift wasn't due to change for an hour and we had the place to ourselves. "You said your daughter ran away," I said, when the bartender had left. "What makes you think she's in Detroit?"
He drank off half his beer and belched dramatically. "When does client privilege start?"
"It never stops."
I watched him make up his mind. Indians aren't nearly as hard to read as they appear in books. He picked up a folded newspaper from the seat beside him and spread it out on the table facing me. It was yesterday's Houston Chronicle, with a banner:
BOYD MANHUNT MOVES NORTHEAST
Bandit's Van Found Abandoned in Detroit

I had read a related wire story in that morning's Detroit Free Press. Following the unassisted shotgun robberies of two savings and loan offices near Houston, concerned citizens had reported seeing twenty-two-year-old Virgil Boyd in Mexico and Oklahoma, but his green van with Texas plates had turned up in a city lot five minutes from where we were sitting. As of that morning, Detroit police headquarters was paved with feds and sun-crinkled out-of-state cops chewing toothpicks.
I refolded the paper and gave it back. "Your daughter's taken up with Boyd?"
"They were high school sweethearts," Frechette said. "That was before Texas Federal foreclosed on his family's ranch and his father shot himself. She disappeared from home after the first robbery. I guess that makes her an accomplice to the second."
"Legally speaking," I agreed, "if she's with him and it's her idea. A smart DA would knock it down to harboring if she turned herself in. She'd probably get probation."
"She wouldn't do that. She's got some crazy idea she's in love with Boyd."
"I'm surprised I haven't heard about her."
"No one knows. I didn't report her missing. If I had, the police would have put two and two together and there'd be a warrant out for her as well."
I swallowed some beer. "I don't know what you think I can do that the cops and the FBI can't."
"I know where she is."
I waited. He rotated his mug. "My sister lives in Southgate. We don't speak. She has a white mother, not like me, and she takes after her in looks. She's ashamed of being half Osage. First chance she had, she married a white man and got out of Oklahoma. That was before I left for Texas, where nobody knows about her. Anyway she got a big settlement in her divorce."
"You think Boyd and your daughter will go to her for a get-away stake?"
"They won't get it from me, and he didn't take enough out of Texas Federal to keep a dog alive. Why else would they come here?"
"So if you know where they're headed, what do you need me for?"
"Because I'm being followed and you're not."
The bartender came around to offer Frechette a refill. The big Indian shook his head and he went away.
"Cops?" I said.
"One cop. J. P. Ahearn."
He spaced out the name as if spelling a blasphemy. I said I'd never heard of him.
"He'd be surprised. He's a commander with the Texas state police, but he thinks he's the last of the Texas Rangers. He wants Boyd bad. The man's a bloodhound. He doesn't know about my sister, but he did his homework and found out about Suzie and that she's gone, not that he could get me to admit she isn't away visiting friends. I didn't see him on the plane from Houston. I spotted him in the airport here when I was getting my luggage."
"Is he alone?"
"He wouldn't share credit with Jesus for saving a sinner." He drained his mug. "When you find Suzie I want you to set up a meeting. Maybe I can talk sense into her."
"How old is she?"
"Nineteen."
"Good luck."
"Tell me about it. My old man fell off a girder in Tulsa when I was sixteen. Then I was fifty. Well, maybe one meeting can't make up for all the years of not talking after my wife died, but I can't let her throw her life away for not trying."
"I can't promise Boyd won't sit in on it."
"I like Virgil. Some of us cheered when he took on those bloodsuckers. He'd have gotten away with a lot more from that second job if he'd shot this stubborn cashier they had, but he didn't. He wouldn't hurt a horse or a man."
"That's not the way the cops are playing it. If I find him and don't report it I'll go down as an accomplice. At the very least I'll lose my license."
"All I ask is that you call me before you call the police." He gave me a high school graduation picture of a pretty brunet he said was Suzie. She looked more Asian than American Indian. Then he pulled a checkbook out of his hip pocket and made out a check to me for fifteen hundred dollars.
"Too much," I said.
"You haven't met J. P. Ahearn yet. My sister's name is Harriett Lord." He gave me an address on Eureka. "I'm at the Holiday Inn down the street, room seven-sixteen."
He called for another beer then and I left. Again he didn't offer his hand. I'd driven three blocks from the place when I spotted the tail.

The guy knew what he was doing. In a late-model tan Buick he gave me a full block and didn't try to close up until we hit Woodward, where traffic was heavier. I finally lost him in the grand circle downtown, which confused him just as it does most people from the greater planet earth. The Indians who settled Detroit were being farsighted when they named it the Crooked Way. From there I took Lafayette to 1-75 and headed downriver.
Harriett Lord lived in a tall white frame house with blue shutters and a large lawn fenced by cedars that someone had bullied into cone shape. I parked in the driveway, but before leaving the car I got out the unlicensed Luger I keep in a pocket under the dash and stuck it in my pants, buttoning my coat over it. When you're meeting someone they tell you wouldn't hurt a horse or a man, arm yourself.
The bell was answered by a tall woman around forty, dressed in a khaki shirt and corduroy slacks and sandals. She had high cheekbones and slightly olive coloring that looked more like sun than heritage and her short hair was frosted, further reducing the Indian effect. When she confirmed that she was Harriett Lord I gave her a card and said I was working for her brother.
Her face shut down. "I don't have a brother. I have a half brother, Howard Frechette. If that's who you're working for, tell him I'm unavailable." She started to close the door.
"It's about your niece Suzie. And Virgil Boyd.
"I thought it would be."
I looked at the door and got out a cigarette and lit it. I was about to knock again when the door opened six inches and she stuck her face through the gap. "You're not with the police?"
"We tolerate each other on the good days, but that's it."
She glanced down. Her blue mascara gave her eyelids a translucent look. Then she opened the door the rest of the way and stepped aside. I entered a living room done all in beige and white and sat in a chair upholstered in eggshell chintz. I was glad I'd had my suit cleaned.
"How'd you know about Suzie and Boyd?" I used a big glass ashtray on the Lucite coffee table.
"They were here last night." I said nothing. She sat on the beige sofa with her knees together. "I recognized him before I did her. I haven't seen her since she was four, but I take a Texas paper and I've seen his picture. They wanted money. I thought at first I was being robbed."
"Did you give it to them?"
"Aid a fugitive? Family responsibility doesn't cover that even if I felt any. I left home because I got sick of hearing about our proud heritage. Howard wore his Indianness like a suit of armor, and all the time he resented me because I could pass for white. He accused me of being ashamed of my ancestry because I didn't wear my hair in braids and hang turquoise all over me."
"He isn't like that now."
"Maybe he's mellowed. Not toward me, though, I bet. Now his daughter comes here asking for money so she and her desperado boyfriend can go on running. I showed them the door."
"I'm surprised Boyd went."
"He tried to get tough, but he's not very big and he wasn't armed. He took a step toward me and I took two steps toward him and he grabbed Suzie and left. Some Jesse James."
"I heard his shotgun was found in the van. I thought he'd have something else."
"If he did, he didn't have it last night. I'd have noticed, just as I notice you have one."
I unbuttoned my coat and resettled the Luger. I was getting a different picture of "Mad Dog" Boyd from the one the press was painting. "The cops would call not reporting an incident like that being an accessory," I said, squashing out my butt.
"Just because I don't want anything to do with Howard doesn't mean I want to see my niece shot up by a SWAT team."
"I don't suppose they said where they were going."
"You're a good supposer."
I got up. "How did Suzie look?"
"Like an Indian."
I thanked her and went out.

I had a customer in my waiting room. A small angular party crowding sixty wearing a tight gray three-button suit, steel-rimmed glasses, and a tan snap-brim hat squared over the frames. His crisp gray hair was cut close around large ears that stuck out, and he had a long sharp jaw with a sour mouth slashing straight across. He stood up when I entered. "Walker?" It was one of those bitter pioneer voices.
"Depends on who you are," I said.
"I'm the man who ought to arrest you for obstructing justice."
"I'll guess. J. P. Ahearn."
"Commander Ahearn."
"You're about four feet short of what I had pictured."
"You've heard of me." His chest came out a little.
"Who hasn't?" I unlocked the inner office door. He marched in, slung a look around, and took possession of the customer's chair. I sat down behind the desk and reached for a cigarette without asking permission. He glared at me through his spectacles.
What you did downtown today constitutes fleeing and eluding."
"In Texas, maybe. In Michigan there has to be a warrant out first. What you did constitutes harassment in this state."
"I don't have official status here. I can follow anybody for any reason or none at all."
"Is this what you folks call a Mexican standoff?"
"I don't approve of smoking," he snapped.
"Neither do I, but some of it always leaks out of my lungs." I blew some at the ceiling and got rid of the match. "Why don't let's stop circling each other and get down to why you're here?"
"I want to know what you and the Indian talked about."
"I'd show you, but we don't need the rain."
He bared a perfect set of dentures, turning his face into a skull. "I ran your plate with the Detroit police. I have their complete cooperation in this investigation. The Indian hired you to take money to Boyd to get him and his little Osage slut to Canada. You delivered it after you left the bar and lost me. That's aiding and abetting and accessory after the fact of armed robbery. Maybe I can't prove it, but I can make a call and tank you for forty-eight hours on suspicion."
"Eleven."
He covered up his store-boughts. "What?"
"That's eleven times I've been threatened with jail," I said. "Three of those times I wound up there. My license has been swiped at fourteen times, actually taken away once. Bodily harm—you don't count bodily harm. I'm still here, six feet something and one hundred eighty pounds of incorruptible PI with a will of iron and a skull to match. You hard guys come and go like phases of the moon."
"Don't twist my tail, son. I don't always rattle before I bite."
"What's got you so hot on Boyd?"
You could have cut yourself on his jaw. "My daddy helped run Parker and Barrow to ground in '34. His daddy fought Geronimo and chased John Wesley Hardin out of Texas. My son s a Dallas city patrolman, and so far I don't have a story to hand him that's a blister on any of those. I'm retiring next year."
"Last I heard Austin was offering twenty thousand for Boyd's arrest and conviction."
"Texas Federal has matched it. Alive or dead. Naturally, as a duly sworn officer of the law I can't collect. But you being a private citizen—"
"What's the split?"
"Fifty-fifty."
"No good."
"Do you know what the pension is for a retired state police commander in Texas? A man needs a nest egg."
"I meant it's too generous. You know as well as I do those rewards are never paid. You just didn't know I knew."
He sprang out of his chair. There was no special animosity in his move; that would be the way he always got up.
"Boyd won't get out of this country even if you did give him money," he snapped. "He'll never get past the border guards."
"So go back home."
"Boyd's mine."
The last word ricocheted. I said, "Talk is he felt he had a good reason to stick up those savings and loans. The company was responsible for his father's suicide."
"If he's got the brains God gave a mad dog he'll turn himself in to me before he gets shot down in the street or kills someone and winds up getting the needle in Huntsville. And his squaw right along with him." He took a shabby wallet out of his coat and gave me a card. "That's my number at the Houston post. They'll route your call here. If you're so concerned for Boyd you'll tell me where he is before the locals gun him down."
"Better you than some stranger, that it?"
"Just keep on twisting, son. I ain't in the pasture yet."
After he left, making as much noise in his two-inch cowboy heels as a cruiserweight, I called Barry Stackpole at the Detroit News.
"Guy I'm after is wanted for robbery, armed," I said, once the small talk was put away. "He ditched his gun and then his stake didn't come through and now he'll have to cowboy a job for case dough. Where would he deal a weapon if he didn't know anybody in town?"
"Emma Chaney."
"Ma? I thought she'd be dead by now."
"She can't die. The Detroit cops are third in line behind Interpol and customs for her scalp and they won't let her until they've had their crack." He sounded pleased, which he probably was. Barry made his living writing about crime and when it prospered he did, too.
"How can I reach her?"
"Are you suggesting I'd know where she is and not tell the authorities? Got a pencil?"
I tried the number as soon as he was off the line. On the ninth ring I got someone with a smoker's wheeze. "Uh-huh."
"The name's Walker," I said. "Barry Stackpole gave me this number."
The voice told me not to go away and hung up. Five minutes later the telephone rang.
"Barry says you're okay. What do you want?"
"Just talk. It isn't cheap like they say."
After a moment the voice gave me directions. I hung up not knowing if it was male or female.

It belonged to Ma Chaney, who greeted me at the door of her house in rural Macomb County wearing a red Japanese kimono with green parrots all over it. The kimono could have covered a Toyota. She was a five-by-five chunk with marcelled orange hair and round black eyes embedded in her face like nail heads in soft wax. A cigarette teetered on her lower lip. I followed her into a parlor full of flowered chairs and sofas and pregnant lamps with fringed shades. A long strip of pimply blond youth in overalls and no shirt took his brogans off the coffee table and stood up when she barked at him. He gaped at me, chewing gum with his mouth open.
"Mr. Walker, Leo," Ma wheezed. "Leo knew my Wilbur in Ypsi. He's like another son to me."
Ma Chancy had one son in the criminal ward at the Forensic Psychiatry Center in Ypsilanti and another on Florida's death row. The FBI was looking for the youngest in connection with an armored car robbery in Kansas City. The whole brood had come up from Kentucky when Old Man Chaney got a job on the line at River Rouge and stayed on after he was killed in a propane tank explosion. Now Ma, the daughter of a Hawkins County gunsmith, made her living off the domestic weapons market.
"You said talk ain't cheap," she said, when she was sitting in a big overstuffed rocker. "How cheap ain't it?"
I perched on the edge of a hard upright with doilies on the arms. Leo remained standing, scratching himself. "Depends on whether we talk about Virgil Boyd," I said.
"What if we don't?"
"Then I won't take up any more of your time."
"What if we do?"
"I'll double what he's paying."
She coughed. The cigarette bobbed. "I got a business to run. I go around scratching at rewards I won't have no customers."
"Does that mean Boyd's a customer?"
"Now, why'd that Texas boy want to come to Ma? He can deal hisself a shotgun at any Kmart."
"He can't show his face in the legal places and being new in town he doesn't know the illegal ones. But he wouldn't have to ask around too much to come up with your name. You're less selective than most."
"You don't have to pussyfoot around old Ma. I don't get a lot of second-timers on account of I talk for money. My boy Earl in Florida needs a new lawyer. But I only talk after, not before. I start setting up customers I won't get no first-timers."
"I'm not even interested in Boyd. It's his girlfriend I want to talk to. Suzie Frechette."
"Don't know her." She rocked back and forth. "What color's your money?"
Before leaving Detroit I'd cashed Howard Frechette's check. I laid fifteen hundred dollars on the coffee table in twenties and fifties. Leo straightened up a little to look at the bills. Ma resumed rocking. "It ain't enough."
"How much is enough?"
"If I was to talk to a fella named Boyd, and if I was to agree to sell him a brand new Ithaca pump shotgun and a P-thirty-eight still in the box, I wouldn't sell them for less than twenny-five hunnert. Double twenny-five hunnert is five thousand."
"Fifteen hundred now. Thirty-five hundred when I see the girl."
"I don't guarantee no girl."
"Boyd then. If he's come this far with her he won't leave her behind."
She went on rocking. "They's a white barn a mile north on this road. If I was to meet a fella named Boyd, there's where I might do it. I might pick eleven o'clock."
"Tonight?"
"I might pick tonight. If it don't rain."
I got up. She stopped rocking.
"Come alone," she said. "Ma won't."
On the way back to town I filled up at a corner station and used the pay telephone to call Howard Frechette's room at the Holiday Inn. When he started asking questions I gave him the number and told him to call back from a booth outside the motel.
"Ahearn's an anachronism," he said ten minutes later. "I doubt he taps phones."
"Maybe not, but motel operators have big ears."
"Did you talk to Suzie?"
"Minor setback," I said. "Your sister gave her and Boyd the boot and no money."
"Tight bitch."
"I know where they'll be tonight, though. There's an old auto court on Van Dyke between Twenty-one and Twenty-two Mile in Macomb County, the Log Cabin Inn. Looks like it sounds." I was staring at it across the road. "Midnight. Better give yourself an hour."
He repeated the information.
"I'm going to have to tap you for thirty-five hundred dollars," I said. "The education cost."
"I can manage it. Is that where they're headed?"
"I hope so. I haven't asked them yet."
I got to my bank just before closing and cleaned out my savings and all but eight dollars in my checking account. I hoped Frechette was good for it. After that I ate dinner in a restaurant and went to see a movie about a one-man army. I wondered if he was available.

The barn was just visible from the road, a moonlit square at the end of a pair of ruts cut through weeds two feet high. It was a chill night in early spring and I had on a light coat and the heater running. I entered a dip that cut off my view of the barn, then bucked up over a ridge and had to stand the Chevy on its nose when the lamps fell on a telephone pole lying across the path. A second later the passenger's door opened and Leo got in.
He had on a mackinaw over his overalls and a plaid cap. His right hand was wrapped around a large-bore revolver and he kept it on me, held tight to his stomach, while he felt under my coat and came up with the Luger. "Drive." He pocketed it.
I swung around the end of the pole and braked in front of the barn, where Ma was standing with a Coleman lantern. She was wearing a man's felt hat and a corduroy coat with sleeves that came down to her fingers. She signaled a cranking motion and I rolled down the window.
"Well, park it around back," she said. "I got to think for you, too?"
I did that and Leo and I walked back. He handed Ma the Luger and she looked at it and put it in her pocket. She raised the lantern then and swung it from side to side twice.
We waited a few minutes, then were joined by six feet and two hundred and fifty pounds of red-bearded young man in faded denim jacket and jeans carrying a rifle with an infrared scope. He had come from the direction of the road.
"Anybody following, Mason?" asked Ma.
He shook his head and I stared at him in the lantern light. He had small black eyes like Ma's with no shine in them. This would be Mace Chaney, for whom the FBI was combing the western states for the Kansas armored car robbery.
"Go on in and warm yourself," Ma said. "We got some time."
He opened the barn door and went inside. It had just closed when two headlamps appeared down the road. We watched them approach and slow for the turn onto the path. Ma, lighting a cigarette off the lantern, grunted.
"Early. Young folks all got watches and they can't tell time."
Leo trotted out to intercept the car. A door slammed. After a pause the lamps swung around the fallen telephone pole and came up to the barn, washing us all in white. The driver killed the lamps and engine and got out. He was a small man in his early twenties with short brown hair and stubble on his face. His flannel shirt and khaki pants were both in need of cleaning. He had scant eyebrows that were almost invisible in that light, giving him a perennially surprised look. I'd seen that look in Frechette's Houston Chronicle and in both Detroit papers.
"Who's he?" He was looking at me.
I had a story for that, but Ma piped up. "You ain't paying to ask no questions. Got the money?"
"Not all of it. A thousand's all Suzie could get from the sharks."
"The deal's two thousand."
"Keep the P-thirty-eight. The shotgun's all I need."
Ma had told me twenty-five hundred; but I was barely listening to the conversation. Leo had gotten out on the passenger's side, pulling with him the girl in the photograph in my pocket. Suzie Frechette had done up her black hair in braids and she'd lost weight, but her dark eyes and coloring were unmistakable. With that hairstyle and in a man's work shirt and jeans and boots with western heels she looked more like an Indian than she did in her picture.
Leo opened the door and we went inside. The barn hadn't been used for its original purpose for some time, but the smell of moldy hay would remain as long as it stood. It was lit by a bare bulb swinging from a frayed cord and heated by a barrel stove in a corner. Stacks of cardboard cartons reached almost to the rafters, below which Mace Chaney sat with his legs dangling over the edge of the empty loft, the rifle across his knees.
Ma reached into an open carton and lifted out a pump shotgun with the barrel cut back to the slide. Boyd stepped forward to take it. She swung the muzzle on him. "Show me some paper."
He hesitated, then drew a thick fold of bills from his shirt pocket and laid it on a stack of cartons. Then she moved to cover me. Boyd watched me add thirty-five hundred to the pile.
"What's he buying?"
Ma said, "You."
"Cop!" He lunged for the shotgun. Leo's revolver came out. Mace drew a bead on Boyd from the loft. He relaxed.
I was looking at Suzie. "I'm a private detective hired by your father. He wants to talk to you."
"He's here?" She touched Boyd's arm.
He tensed. "It's a damn cop trick!"
"You're smarter than that," I said. "You had to be, to pull those two jobs and make your way here with every cop between here and Texas looking for you. If I were one, would I be alone?"
"Do your jabbering outside." Ma reversed ends on the shotgun for Boyd to take. He did so and worked the slide.
"Where's the shells?"
"That's your headache. I don't keep ammo in this firetrap."
That was a lie, or some of those cartons wouldn't be labeled C-4 Explosives. But you don't sell loaded guns to strangers.
Suzie said, "Virgil, you never load them anyway."
"Shut up."
"Your father's on his way," I said. "Ten minutes, that's all he wants."
"Come on." Boyd took her wrist.
"Stay put."
This was a new voice. Everyone looked at Leo, standing in front of the door with his gun still out.
"Leo, what in the hell—"
"Ma, the Luger."
She shut her mouth and took my gun out of her right coat pocket and put it on the carton with the money. Then she backed away.
"Throw 'er down, Mace." He covered the man in the loft, who froze in the act of raising the rifle. They were like that for a moment.
"Mason," Ma said.
His shoulders slumped. He snapped on the safety and dropped the rifle eight feet to the earthen floor.
"You, too, Mr. Forty Thousand Dollar Reward," Leo said. "Even empty guns give me the jumps."
Boyd cast the shotgun onto the stack of cartons with a violent gesture.
"That's nice. I cut that money in half if I got to put a hole in you."
"That reward talk's just PR," I said. "Even if you get Boyd to the cops they'll probably arrest you, too, for dealing in unlicensed firearms."
"Like hell. I'm through getting bossed around by fat old ladies. Let's go, Mr. Reward."
"No!" screamed Suzie.
An explosion slapped the walls. Leo's brows went up, his jaw dropping to expose the wad of pink gum in his mouth. He looked down at the spreading stain on the bib of his overalls and fell down on top of his gun. He kicked once.
Ma was standing with a hand in her left coat pocket. A finger of smoking metal poked out of a charred hole. "Dadgum it, Leo," she said, "this coat belonged to my Calvin, rest his soul."

I was standing in front of the Log Cabin Inn's deserted office when Frechette swung a rented Ford into the broken paved driveway. He unfolded himself from the seat and loomed over me.
"I don't think anyone followed me," he said. "I took a couple of wrong turns to make sure."
"There won't be any interruptions, then. The place has been closed a long time."
I led him to one of the log bungalows in back. Boyd's Plymouth, stolen from the same lot where he'd left the van, was parked alongside it facing out. We knocked before entering.
All of the furniture had been removed except a metal bedstead with sagging springs. The lantern we had borrowed from Ma Chaney hung hissing from one post. Suzie was standing next to it. "Papa." She didn't move. Boyd came out of the bathroom with the shotgun. The Indian took root.
"Man said you had money for us," Boyd said.
"It was the only way I could get him to bring Suzie here," I told Frechette.
"I won't pay to have my daughter killed in a shoot-out."
"Lying bastard!" Boyd swung the shotgun my way. Frechette backhanded him, knocking him back into the bathroom. I stepped forward and tore the shotgun from Boyd's weakened grip.
"Empty," I said. "But it makes a good club."
Suzie had come forward when Boyd fell. Frechette stopped her with an arm like a railroad gate. "Take Dillinger for a walk while I talk to my daughter," he said to me.
I stuck out a hand, but Boyd slapped it aside and got up. His right eye was swelling shut. He looked at the Indian towering a foot over him, then at Suzie, who said, "It's all right. I'll talk to him."
We went out. A porch ran the length of the bungalow. I leaned the shotgun against the wall and trusted my weight to the railing. "I hear you got a raw deal from Texas Federal."
"My old man did." He stood with his hands rammed deep in his pockets, watching the pair through the window. "He asked for a two-month extension on his mortgage payment, just till he brought in his crop. Everyone gets extensions. Except when Texas Federal wants to sell the ranch to a developer. He met the dozers with a shotgun. Then he used it on himself."
"That why you use one?"
"I can't kill a jackrabbit. It used to burn up my old man.
"You'd be out in three years if you turned yourself in."
"To you, right? Let you collect that reward." He was still looking through the window. Inside, father and daughter were gesturing at each other frantically.
"I didn't say to me. You're big enough to walk into a police station by yourself."
"You don't know Texas Federal. They'd hire their own prosecutor, see I got life, make an example. I'll die first."
"Probably, the rate you're going."
He whirled on me. The parked Plymouth caught his eye. "Just who the hell are you? And why'd you—" He jerked his chin toward the car.
I got out J. P. Ahearn's card and gave it to him. His face lost color.
"You work for that headhunter?"
"Not in this life. But in a little while I'm going to call that number from the telephone in that gas station across the road."
He lunged for the door. I was closer and got in his way. "I don't know how you got this far with a head that hot," I said. "For once in your young life listen. You might get to like it." He listened.

"This is Commander Ahearn! I know you're in there, Boyd. I got a dozen men here and if you don't come out we'll shoot up the place!"
Neither of us had heard them coming, and with the moon behind a cloud the thin, bitter voice might have come from anywhere. This time Boyd won the race to the door. He had the reflexes of a deer.
"Kill the light!" I barked to Frechette. "Ahearn beat me to it. He must have followed you after all."
We were in darkness suddenly. Boyd and Suzie had their arms around each other. "We're cornered," he said. "Why didn't that old lady have shells for that gun?"
"We just have to move faster, that's all. Keep him talking. Give me a hand with this window." The last was for Frechette, who came over and worked his big fingers under the swollen frame.
"There's a woman in here!" Boyd shouted.
"Come on out and no one gets hurt!" Ahearn sounded wired.
The window gave with a squawking wrench.
"One minute, Boyd. Then we start blasting!"
I hoped it was enough. I slipped out over the sill.
"The car! Get it!"
The Plymouth's engine turned over twice in the cold before starting. The car rolled forward and began picking up speed down the incline toward the road. Just then the moon came out, illuminating the man behind the wheel, and the night came apart like mountain ice breaking up, cracking and splitting with the staccato rap of handgun fire and the deeper boom of riot guns. Orange flame scorched the darkness. Slugs whacked the car's sheet metal and shattered the windshield. Then a red glow started to spread inside the vehicle and fists of yellow flame battered out the rest of the windows with a whump that shook the ground. The car rolled for a few more yards while the shooters, standing now and visible in the light of the blaze, went on pouring lead into it until it came to a stop against a road sign. The flame towered twenty feet above the crackling wreckage.
I approached Ahearn, standing in the overgrown grass with his shotgun dangling, watching the car burn. He jumped a little when I spoke. His glasses glowed orange.
"He made a dash, just like you wanted."
"If you think I wanted this you don't know me," he said.
"Save it for the six o'clock news."
"What the hell are you doing here, anyway?"
"Friend of the family. Can I take the Frechettes home or do you want to eat them here?"
He cradled the shotgun. "We'll just go inside together."
We found Suzie sobbing in her father's arms. The Indian glared at Ahearn. "Get the hell out of here."
"He was a desperate man," Ahearn said. "You're lucky the girl's alive."
"I said get out or I'll ram that shotgun down your throat."
He got out. Through the window I watched him rejoin his men. There were five, not a dozen as he'd claimed. Later I learned that three of them were off-duty Detroit cops and he'd hired the other two from a private security firm.
I waited until the fire engines came and Ahearn was busy talking to the firefighters, then went out the window again and crossed to the next bungalow, set farther back where the light of the flames didn't reach. I knocked twice and paused and knocked again. Boyd opened the door a crack.
"I'm taking Suzie and her father back to Frechette's motel for looks. Think you can lie low here until we come back in the morning for the rent car?" 
"What if they search the cabins?"
"For what? You're dead. By the time they find out that's Leo in the car, if they ever do, you and Suzie will be in Canada. Customs won't be looking for a dead bandit. Give everyone a year or so to forget what you look like and then you can come back. Not to Texas, though, and not under the name Virgil Boyd."
"Lucky the gas tank blew."
"I've never had enough luck to trust to it. That's why I put a box of C-four in Leo's lap. Ma figured it was a small enough donation to keep her clear of a charge of felony murder."
"I thought you were some kind of corpse freak." He still had the surprised look. "You could've been killed starting that car. Why'd you do it?"
"The world's not as complicated as it looks," I said. "There's always a good and a bad side. I saw Ahearn's."
"You ever need anything," he said.
"If you do things right I won't be able to find you when I do." I shook his hand and returned to the other bungalow.

A week later, after J. P. Ahearn's narrow, jug-eared features had made the cover of People, I received an envelope from Houston containing a bonus check for a thousand dollars signed by Howard Frechette. He'd repaid the thirty-five hundred I'd given Ma before going home. That was the last I heard from any of them. I used the money to settle some old bills and had some work done on my car so I could continue to ply my trade along the Crooked Way.