Deadman (8 page)

Yes, this was a sacred pool, a place sacred to women, probably sacred to countless tribal women who had come here. She wished she had been here then, that they were here now to talk to her, in soft, musical voices. They would talk about what was proper to women, about children. This was a place where even the mention of men was banished. She was so relaxed, so calm, she almost forgot about Joe.

Despite the mood of softness, of weakness even, she paradoxically felt strong lying in this pool. This is why she had come to prefer being here without Joe. All the foolish craziness of wanting to be a son to her father, to avenge him, was erased here. The strength and vitality she felt in this blessed pool seemed to her a kind of energy that emanated from all the tribal women who had doubtless soaked here in days gone by.

And while she lay in this pool, her eyes nearly closed in ecstasy and release, she did not see Mario Soper, who came along the path and stood on the little cliff above her. The jay flew. The raven whacked his wings to rise upward and bend away. A squirrel chattered
with alarm, but she had never paid any attention to the squirrels and birds and did not now heed this alarm.

Mario gazed down at the woman below him. She waved her arms and her legs indolently to keep herself afloat. Her black hair spread out around her head. He was aroused by her lack of pubic hair. He laid down the two pistols that he carried and stripped off all his clothes. Then with a joyous roar he leapt out over the rocks to fall nearly on top of her.

The shock of his entry into the water stunned them both. But before she could recover he was upon her.

Mario seized her by the shoulders, shouting crazily, “Oh yeah, you fucking pussy!”

He forced her back against the rocks, their sharp edges biting into her shoulders and buttocks. He thrust his knees between hers and levered her legs apart. His cock was large and stiff. He immediately, though fruitlessly, began to thrust his pelvis against hers, his stiff cock blindly stabbing at her stomach and thighs.

Helen gasped and gawped. She struck at the man with her small fists. He grabbed her head with both hands, his fingers locked in her hair and forced it under the hot water. With one hand he pressed her head down against the sandy bottom, then he seized his cock with his right hand and tried to direct it between her spread thighs, into her.

She wrenched her head free of his single hand and threw a wild punch that struck the man in the chest, her little fist as hard as a rock and momentarily stunning him. She twisted and escaped, her face surfacing. She gasped for breath. But he yanked her back again by her hair. He laughed wildly.

Helen could feel his nasty cock poking at her flesh, and revulsion and fear surged in her. So this was rape. This is what rape was, this smashing and forcing and heedless wrenching at her bones and ligaments and flesh. He would rape her and kill her, she knew. She threw her knotted fist against his face and was pleased when it struck
his throat and made him gag violently. Then she thrust her knee upward but the water slowed the movement and her knee slid harmlessly along his inner thigh, not reaching its target.

She felt strong, however, a surge of determination. This was
her
pool. She sensed that he was enervated by the heat, whereas she was invigorated. She clasped her legs about his hips, ignoring the already wilting cock thrusting impotently at her, and flung herself over so that she rose astride him, his arms flailing out to the sides, thrashing to prevent himself from sinking under.

With both hands she grasped his head and smashed it against the rocks, digging her thumbs into his eyes, trying to gouge his eyeballs out of their sockets. She rode him down, under the surface. His hands quit searching her body and scrabbled furiously at her thumbs. She smashed his head against the rocks again, and sensed a kind of relaxation in his body. In a panic she pressed down against his chest, literally mounting it on her knees. She reared her streaming head into the delicious air, gasping but still bouncing on the man's chest on her knees and shoving his head against the rocks as hard as she could. She pushed. She thrust. She bounced. His arms lay out on either side.

And then she leapt off his body and scrambled through the splashing water, which slowed her. Glancing back over her shoulder, flinging her wet hair out of her eyes, she saw him rise slowly to a sitting position. He lurched to his knees and then stood. The water was only to his knees in this spot, whereas it still came to her pelvis. She waded frantically, conscious that he could simply step after her, not having to drag his legs through the water. He reached out and grasped her shoulder just as she attained the rocky edge. His hand slid off her slippery skin and he tumbled sideways, flopping on his butt on the gravelly bottom. Incredibly, he laughed.

The laugh infuriated Helen. She seized a large rock and spun about, bringing it down heavily on the man's head. It made a horrible, soft cracking noise. The man groaned and fell backward, his head not quite submerged in the shallow water here. Helen danced out of the
water, frantically hopping about and uttering little noises. Then she turned and started to run toward the cabin.

She saw the two guns lying on his clothes, by the path. A handy little .32 automatic and a familiar looking .38 revolver. She stooped to pick up the automatic and racked the slide back as Joe had showed her. It was loaded, cocked and ready to fire. She picked up the revolver in her left hand and walked purposefully back toward the pool.

She stood on the little rocky cliff above the pool, from which the man had leaped upon her, and aimed the .32 automatic at arm's length. The first shot smacked into the water to the right of the man. She adjusted and fired again. The bullet hit the water first, but then his left thigh. The man yelled and sat bolt upright. She fired again and again, not counting the shots, aiming at his chest. She must have hit him, for he groaned and fell back into the water. Then the gun was empty. She threw it at him and it splashed into the water near him.

To her horror, he rose from the shallows, sitting up with his hands on the bottom. He brought his left hand to his face to sweep his dripping hair from his vision, then heaved himself to his feet and clambered out of the water. He stumbled up the path toward her. Helen stared in horror. She started to run, then realized that she still had the revolver. She switched it to her right hand and took aim.

The first shot hit him in the chest and he staggered sideways, teetering on the edge of the rocks. She fired again. She didn't see where it hit, but he toppled backward and fell with a great splash onto his head and shoulders in the pond. Standing above him, she carefully aimed and fired the remaining three shots into his body. When the hammer clicked on an empty chamber she heaved the gun at the man's sprawling body.

The noise in the little enclosed space was too loud to really be heard, just a great roaring noise, then ringing. Finally, it faded to silence and then, after a long, still moment, one could hear the tiny
yank-yank
of a nuthatch.

“Oh yeah,” Helen gasped. She stood on the ledge, bent at the waist, hands on her thighs, breathing heavily. “Oh yeah.” Oh, what a fine thing. Yes, yes—yes indeed. She made no connection between this miraculous victory and what she had done before, against Carmine. Oh, it was fine, now. She had won.

The man floated in the pool in a cloudy corona of pink water, his arms outstretched. When she regained her composure, she stood erect, and with a grim face she turned and walked rapidly back up the trail toward the house.

Fifteen minutes later she reappeared, dressed in jeans and a sweater and boots, pushing a red wheelbarrow. She sat down by the pool and took off her boots and socks, then waded in and grabbed the naked man by his hair, towing him to the edge of the rocks. He trailed a pinkish slick that drifted slowly toward the bottom end of the pool.

Helen strained to pull the man onto the rocks that lined the pool, and with a great effort she got his upper torso onto the wheel-barrow. Then she sat down and tugged on her boots. The barrow tilted and balked as she struggled to push it up the hill toward the house. Twice the body slipped out of the barrow and sprawled against the rocks. Needles and dirt became plastered on it. She hauled it back onto the barrow each time, but finally she gave it up and turned about. With much less difficulty she was able to guide it down the path toward the meadow below, toward Tinstar Creek.

She had thought of carrying the body off and dumping it a long ways from home, perhaps in another state, but now she reckoned that she herself was long gone for another state and the body could stay in this one. She was not, however, inclined to let it rest in the sacred pool. Indeed, the pool had been violated, not only with the would-be rapist's blood, but with the violence that had been expended there. From the creek it would wash down into the irrigation ditch, she supposed. She hoped that the flow of the springs and the rains would purify the sacred pool.

On her way back to the house, trundling the empty wheelbarrow,
she picked up the man's clothes and tossed them into it. At the house again, she recognized that Joe's vaunted security had been breached. She had noticed the new yellow pickup truck standing before the house when she'd run back for her clothes. Now she searched the cab. The paperwork for this vehicle was lying on the front seat. It declared that it had been bought the day before, in Mis-soula, in her name. So this was what Joe had been up to, she thought. The yellow pickup, a fancy four-wheel-drive affair, was supposed to be a present for her. She had seen one like it in Butte a few days earlier and had told Joe that she had to have it. No doubt the killer had used the address on the forms to find where they lived.

No tears came to her eyes with the realization that Joe was dead. That was clear. This man with two guns, one of which was Joe's—she had recognized the special small grips (Joe had small hands, like hers)—obviously had killed Joe and had come here. This was the way Joe did life, she knew; now it had done for him. So be it.

There was a fancy black tonneau cover on the box of the new pickup truck. Helen undid several of the snaps that held it down and peeled it back to discover a pile of strange gear in the back of the truck. She started to empty it out before she realized that the biggest bundle was a dead man in an old army coat.

Helen was stunned. To be sure, she had just survived a shocking attack and had mustered the strength and will to dispose of a man's naked corpse, but this . . . What could this be all about? Perhaps Joe had killed this man, but had been overcome by the other. It was a mystery that she couldn't begin to fathom. She sat down on the narrow rear bumper of the truck, groaning softly. It was too much, too much. She felt close to tears, but suppressed them with anger. If she had refused to mourn Joe a moment earlier, now she cursed him.

But after a minute to regain her strength, she sighed and stood up. Now the problem was to get rid of this body. She wasn't going to drive with this grisly load in the back. She let down the tailgate and dragged the dead man out on it until he sprawled in the sunlight. A
stained cowboy hat lay among the gear. She looked down on a bearded face that was dirty with many broken vesicles in the cheeks and nose, the hair filthy and long. The flesh was weathered but pallid and old, dried blood was caked around the throat. Now she realized that the throat had been cut. Surprisingly, there wasn't a lot of blood on the layers of flannel shirts the body wore. Apparently, he had lain for some time on his face, which had dirt embedded in it, and most of the body's blood had drained away. He was about average height and heavy, perhaps as young as twenty-five or as old as forty, she couldn't tell. He looked like a derelict, an alcoholic. She had no idea how long he had been dead. He didn't smell so good, but then he must never have smelled very fresh. At any rate, he wasn't obviously rotting.

It was too mysterious for her. She dragged the body off the extended tailgate and let it fall to the pine-needled floor of the drive. Then she jumped up into the box, unsnapping the cover and rolling it back. She tossed all the alien gear out onto the hard-packed yard. There was no blood in the truck box, she was glad to see.

She packed all her gear and carried it out to the truck. Then she took the wheelbarrow and walked up above the house to a path that led around the side of the mountain to Joe's cache. This was an old abandoned mine adit, once framed by timbers, which Joe had removed when he discovered this entrance hidden behind brush. To one side was a large ponderosa. But the pine had been struck by lightning a few years earlier and had finally died, along with the parasitical mistletoe that had helped to obscure the opening. Joe had explored and developed this disused mine long before Helen had come to join him here. She thought it was crazy and spooky, poking around in an old and surely dangerous mine, but it was part of Joe's obsession with security.

He had cleared away the debris for some fifteen feet inside the opening and provided a slatted floor of rough planks on logs. On this platform he had constructed a studded and raftered frame and sheathed it with rough cedar. The cavity was dry and cool, and if
someone should stumble on the well-concealed opening, guarded by brush and seemingly fallen branches, they would encounter a solid metal door mounted in the recessed frame. One would have to be looking for this opening to detect it. Here Joe kept the boxes of cash he had taken from Eugene Lande, a thief who had stolen the money from a mob money-laundering operation in Detroit. There were also various other valuable papers and some guns stored here.

This door was kept securely locked, but Helen knew where the key was kept under a nearby rock. She pried up the rock and found the key, then opened the tomblike cavity. Carrying two boxes at a time on the wheelbarrow, she transported the money down the path to the truck. She didn't bother the boxes of Joe's private papers and records, nor his guns—a carefully oiled and wrapped Stoner rifle, a Browning automatic shotgun, a Cobray automatic, and a couple of revolvers.