Sentinels Read online

  Chapter Six

  The Eagle’s Roost was like every back-country tavern I’d ever set foot in, down to the heads and horns of dead animals displayed on the walls and the jukebox packed with sob-and-throb country tunes. At one end was a tiny dance floor and bandstand, and beyond that, through an archway, was the card room. Both the bar and the card room were moderately crowded, to the point where nobody paid much attention to me. Walk into an unfamiliar watering hole like this when only a few regulars were present and they’d all stop what they were doing to give you the once-over, wonder who you were and why you’d wandered onto their turf. Walk into a place like this when it was crowded and the opposite happened: you weren’t an individual, just another cell in the crowd body. That was the way it was with lynch mobs too. And one of the reasons strangers can incite men who would not even speak to them under other circumstances.

  I made my way to the only empty stool at the bar, at the far end. There were two bartenders and the one working this end was rail-thin, about as jolly as a slug on a dry rock and just as slow; it took him nearly five minutes to get around to where I was sitting. I used the time to flash Allison’s photo at the rough-dressed men on either side of me. None of them wanted anything to do with it or with a reasonably well-attired stranger; I was interrupting their happy hour and their penetrating discussions about deer hunting, baseball, and whether or not dynamite was the best method of uprooting a stubborn tree stump. One, a fat, balding guy wearing suspenders went so far as to give me a dirty look, climb off his stool, and clump away into the men’s room.

  When the meatless bartender finally acknowledged my presence, I tried the photo on him. His interest was likewise nil. He said with annoyance, “Can’t you see I’m busy?”

  “Just take a look,” I said. “It’s the girl who disappeared last week—”

  “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “I didn’t say you did. I’m only trying—”

  “You drinking or what?”

  “Not right now.”

  “Then don’t take up that stool, huh?”

  He moved away, and I thought: Bad idea, trying to work cooperation out of a bunch of backwoods Bud-suckers. Let it go for now. Come back later, maybe, when it’s not so crowded. Or, hell, why bother? Even if any of the Eagle’s Roost patrons knew anything, they weren’t likely to tell me about it, drunk or sober.

  I slid off the stool, got one foot down on the floor—and somebody bumped me from behind, hard enough to put me into a lurch and stagger. I caught myself in time to avoid slamming into a woman heading for the bar. When I straightened and came around, I was looking at the fat, balding guy who’d given me the dirty look.

  “Whyn’t you watch where you’re going?” he said with his lips peeled back. Dog-snarl look, dog-snarl voice.

  Looking for trouble, I thought. I could see it in his jowly face, his little pig eyes. Why? One of those belligerent types who turn mean when they drink, maybe. Or maybe he just didn’t like strangers asking questions and showing photographs of missing kids.

  Trouble was something I didn’t need, not in a place like this. I said, keeping my voice even, “Sorry. Guess I didn’t see you.”

  “Yeah? Next time pay attention. Otherwise you’ll wind up bouncing on your ass.”

  Anything I said would only provoke him; I stayed silent. Some of the drinkers at the bar were swung around on their stools, watching us.

  The fat guy came ahead and poked my chest with a hard, blunt forefinger. “Whyn’t you go back where you come from?”

  I kept my hands down at my sides and my mouth shut. But my eyes held his in a flat, unblinking stare. I wanted him to know that I wasn’t afraid of him, that I felt the same dislike for him he felt for me.

  He moved even closer, tried to prod me with his bulging paunch. I wouldn’t prod; my feet were set apart and all my weight was bunched forward. Big as he was, he would’ve had better luck trying to move a wall.

  “Leave him alone, Frank,” somebody at the bar said. “What the hell?”

  The fat guy ignored that. He said to me, right up in my face, “You ain’t wanted in Creekside. Get me?”

  “I get you.” I smelled him too; his breath stank of beer and cigarettes and a bad case of pyorrhea. Enough of this crap, I thought. I said, “Okay, Frank. Back off now.”

  “Suppose I don’t, asshole?”

  “Then one of two things will happen. Either we’ll stand here like this all night, nose to nose, or you’ll have to try prodding me some more. If you prod me, one of two things will happen.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I’ll resist enough to make you take a swing at me and then I’ll go file an assault charge with the county law. Or I’ll just plain resist and then we’ll get into it good and you’ll be the one who winds up bouncing on his ass.”

  One of the stool-sitters snickered. I wasn’t the only one in there who didn’t like fatso’s mean-dog act.

  “What’s it going to be?” I said. “Your choice.”

  “Tough one, eh, Frank?” somebody else said, and there were more snickers.

  The fat guy was used to being the aggressor; I’d put him on the defensive and that was a role he didn’t know how to handle. Being laughed at by his friends—if he had any—and his neighbors unsettled him too. For about thirty seconds nothing happened and it could have gone either way. Then, jerkily, he glanced around, didn’t find much support in the watching faces, and I saw his shoulders sag a little and I knew I’d backed him down.

  He knew it too. He said lamely, “Screw this, you ain’t worth the hassle,” and backed up a pace, glaring. After a few seconds he turned and hoisted his lard onto his stool.

  It had gotten quiet in there, but now that the floor show was over, the noise started again: loud voices and plenty of laughter. I made my way toward the door, not hurrying. I was two-thirds of the way there when somebody at one of the tables reached up to flick at my coat sleeve. My first thought was that it was more trouble, and I came around fast and tense; I was in no mood for a repeat performance.

  But it wasn’t more trouble. The sleeve-plucker was Art Maxe, slouched in a chair with a bottle of Bud (what else?) in one hand and a cancer stick in the other, grinning up at me. Across from him sat a tall scarecrow of a man with dirty-blond hair, bright eyes, cratered cheeks. The scarecrow seemed to think I was worth gawking at. He wasn’t quite smiling, but I had the impression there was laughter lurking somewhere inside him.

  Maxe said, “Handled yourself pretty good over there. Think you could’ve taken him in a fight?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I bet Ollie here ten that you could. Frank’s a tub of hot air.” He sucked in smoke, let it dribble out slowly before he spoke again. “Dunno why you’re bothering to show that girl’s picture around. Kids got lost somewhere, like I told you.”

  “I get paid to bother.”

  “Tell me something? I always wondered.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Your business—you make good bread?”

  “I make a living.”

  “Just a living? Must not be very good at it.”

  “I usually get results.”

  “In the city. Not up here.”

  “No?”

  “These mountains, they got secrets no outsider can find out. Some we can’t even find out ourselves.”

  The laughter quit lurking inside the skinny guy and came out in a thin, high-pitched giggle. I didn’t like hearing it; it made me think of Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death, just before he shoved the old lady in the wheelchair down the stairs.

  “What’s funny?” I asked him.

  “Nothin’,” he said. “Nothin’s funny.”

  “You wouldn’t have anything to tell about the missing kids, would you?”

  “Who, me? Not me, man. I don’t know nothing about nothing—do I, Art?”

  “Not unless it has to do with beer, dogs, or pussy,” Maxe said.

  “Yeah, and I dr
ink so much of the first, sometimes I get the last two mixed up.”

  Bad old joke between them; they whooped it up together, the scarecrow slapping the table hard enough to make the bottles and glasses on it dance a little jig. Maxe rescued his Bud before it tipped over and then winked at me. “Don’t mind Ollie,” he said. He tapped his temple. “Everybody around here says old Ollie Ballard ain’t all there and I guess they’re right. How about it, Ollie? You playing with a full deck or not?”

  “Couple of aces missing,” Ballard said, “but the joker’s still there. Yessir, the joker’s still there.”

  His shrill giggle followed me out, lingered in my ears like a slow-dying echo even after I shut the door. Couple of aces missing, all right. His laughter was the kind you’d hear in an asylum around three A.M.

  As early as it was—not even seven o’clock—Main Street and the side streets were empty of cars and pedestrians. No night life here; just the tavern and the cafe and the comforts of home and hearth, such as they might be. I buttoned my topcoat and turned north along the cracked sidewalk. The Northern Comfort Cabins were only a little more than a block away, close enough so that I’d walked down earlier rather than bother with the car.

  The noise from the Eagle’s Roost faded as I moved away from the entrance; silence settled in around me. Darkness too: there was no moon, Creekside was too small to have streetlamps, and the wide-spaced house and building lights shone hard, brittle, without much warmth and without penetrating the night’s hard black shell. The air was sharp-cold, stirred by a high wind running clouds down the sky; it felt thin in my lungs, heavy in my nostrils with the rich scent of pine and fir. Crisp, early-spring mountain night—the kind made for a brisk walk, the kind that ought to lift your spirits. Not mine, though. Not in Creekside, California, population 112.

  I didn’t much care for this little pimple on the backside of nowhere. In fact, I was beginning to detest it. Maybe it was because I was an intruder and had been made to feel like one at every turn. Maybe it was the people I’d encountered during the brief time I’d been there—Bartholomew, Maxe, the aging hippie and the woman in the general store, Ollie Ballard, the thin, snotty bartender, and the fat blowhard named Frank. Maybe it was the lousy chicken-fried steak. Or maybe there wasn’t any specific reason, just the fact that some places, regardless of size or location, generate negative energy that affects certain people. Different places for different individuals. Anyone who is at all sensitive to his surroundings has experienced this at least once, a distaste and an unease that you can’t seem to shake while you’re there.

  I crossed an unpaved side street, stubbing my toe halfway along on a dark-hidden jut of rock. Yeah, right: even the inanimate parts of Creekside didn’t want me around. I laughed a little to myself, or at myself, and went on toward the pale, cold spotlight that illuminated the Northern Comfort sign. There was no sidewalk on this block of Main, and the downsloping verge was muddy and held the faint black shine of water; I had to walk out on the road. Not far onto the asphalt—I was no more than two paces from its edge.

  The first awareness I had of the car coming behind me was the growl of its engine as the driver downshifted to a lower gear. It sounded close, but not close enough to alarm me or make me turn my head. For a few more seconds I walked in darkness; then light from a pair of headlamps splashed around and ahead of me, creating a goblinlike elongation of my shadow. There was another growling downshift, gears grinding this time, and in the next second a sudden blare of sound—an air horn as loud as a truck’s—that caused me to jerk and pivot at the same time.

  The headlights seemed to be rushing straight at me, huge and blinding in the darkness. They slewed away to the left just as I flung myself opposite to the right. Brakes and tires squealed. Somebody yelled something profane. I landed on my right foot, my body twisted sideways, and the foot slipped and slid in the mud; I lost my balance and went down hard on my tailbone, slid some more on one hip before I could get my hands down to act as brakes. But it wasn’t until my feet sliced ankle-deep through chill water, then jarred against the bottom of the ditch, that the slide finally ended.

  I was shaken but not really hurt. And mad as hell. I hauled around, wincing at the shoots of pain in my butt, and scrambled out of the ditch on hands and knees. The car wasn’t a car, I saw then, but an open, military-style Jeep; it was stopped at an angle in the middle of the road, its engine muttering and rumbling, the high-beam lights turning a tree-ringed abandoned building on the far side into a yellow-white diorama. Two man-shapes sat in the Jeep, swung around my way but not moving, not making any effort to come to my aid.

  That made me even madder. I got my legs under me, walked in a hard, soggy stride to the Jeep. “What the hell’s the idea?” I said in the same kind of dog-snarl Frank had used in the tavern. “You almost ran me down!”

  Neither of the men said anything in response. Just kept on staring at me. In the faint glow from the dash lights I could tell that the driver was young, early twenties, and that the passenger was at least twice and maybe three times his age. Both wore what looked to be camouflage fatigue outfits, the kind that soldiers and some woodsmen wear; the driver also had a fatigue cap on, turned around so that its bill poked out behind his head. Father and son? I’d never seen either of them before. Nor the Jeep, which had a camouflage paint job to match their outfits.

  “You were walking on the road.” That came from the older man in a flat, raspy voice that sounded as though it was used to giving orders. His short-bristled head turned slightly into profile as he spoke; he was bull-necked, craggy-jawed, with a nose as long and hooked as a hawk’s beak.

  “On the side of the road,” I said. “I couldn’t walk in the ditch, could I?”

  The driver said without a hint of apology, “I didn’t see you right away. Pretty dark along here. And you’re wearing dark clothes.”

  “All right. But you were going too goddamn fast.”

  “Are you hurt?” the older one asked. Not as if he cared much.

  “No, but I could’ve been.”

  “We didn’t come that close to hitting you.”

  “That’s what you say. I say you were—”

  Abruptly he swiveled away from me, facing front. “We’re late enough as it is, Ramsey,” he said to the driver.

  The young one put the transmission in gear. I said, “Hey, wait a minute—” but that was as far as I got before he popped the clutch. The Jeep bucked away, yawing for twenty yards or so until he got it straightened out again, leaving a trail of burned rubber. By the time they passed the Northern Comfort, he was doing at least fifty.

  I stood there, still hot, and watched the Jeep’s taillights grow smaller and then disappear around a turn, out toward the highway. Crazy bastards, driving like that through town. No matter what the older one had said, they’d come pretty damn close to running me down—

  A thought crawled into my head: Yeah, they had. And what if they’d done it on purpose? Some kind of warning to quit snooping around on their turf?

  No, that was paranoid thinking. Nobody I’d talked to had seemed particularly worried about my presence, or about my finding out anything incriminating; everyone’s main interest seemed to be in my going away and leaving them alone. So why should a couple of strangers want to stir me up when it was obvious to anyone with half a brain that I’d be leaving soon anyway? The incident was just what it seemed: a near accident, brought about by carelessness and compounded by disregard for the rights and feelings of anybody but the two rednecks in the Jeep.

  I’ll be glad to leave in the morning, all right, I thought as I trudged wet and cold and frustrated to the motel. The earlier the better.

  Chapter Seven

  Wednesday was a bust.

  I checked out of the Northern Comfort at eight A.M. There were streaks of dried mud on my topcoat that I hadn’t been able to clean off; and my shoes, the only pair I had with me, were badly scuffed and still damp, even though I’d laid them out in front of the cabin�
�s space heater overnight. I’d be lucky if I didn’t develop a head cold as another memento of my visit to Creekside.

  From the motel I drove down to the Modoc Cafe. Not for breakfast—the eggs would probably contain salmonella and Christ knew what the coffee would do to my digestive tract—but to find out if Lorraine, the early-shift waitress, had anything to tell me about Allison and her friend, Rob. She hadn’t. She possessed the same inner core of cynicism and quiet desperation as Lena, but none of the pleasant veneer; she answered my questions with scowls and monosyllables, the gist of her responses being that the missing kids hadn’t stopped for food or coffee or anything else on their way out of town. I’d expected as much. They had no doubt wanted shut of Creekside as badly as I did.

  I felt better when I was out on Highway 395, heading south. The weather, at least, was cooperating. Mist lay among the trees at the higher elevations, and there was a sheen of wetness on the road, but the sun was out and the clouds of the night before had all blown inland. The sky had that bright, ceramic-blue quality you usually see on clear mornings after a heavy rain.

  There was a string of hamlets between Creekside and Susanville; I stopped in each of them, showed Allison’s photo and asked my questions in cafes and grocery stores, at service stations. Covering the same ground as Captain Fassbinder, no doubt, and getting the same head shakes and blank stares. I was treated to more of the same at three gas stations, a Denny’s, and a Lyon’s on the outskirts of the Lassen county seat.

  My first stop in the town itself was at a shopping center, where I spent eighty bucks in a shoe store to put some dry leather on my feet. Eighty bucks that I couldn’t in all good conscience charge to Helen McDowell on the expense account. Then I found my way to the Sheriffs Department, where I spent an unproductive fifteen minutes with Ralph Fassbinder. He was a lean, energetic type in his late forties, with no apparent bias against private detectives; he treated me cordially enough, but he also wasn’t very forthcoming or encouraging.