The Name of the Game is Death (10 page)

"What'll it be, pardner?" she asked. Her voice was a ripened contralto, deep and rich-sounding.

"You're Hazel?" She nodded. "I'm Chet Arnold. Jed Raymond sent me along. Make it bourbon and branch. Jim Beam."

She smiled, a quick, attractive smile. "Jed's a good boy." She turned to the bottled array behind her, and I watched the smooth ripple of muscle in her forearm as she poured my drink. I couldn't see an ounce of fat on the woman except where female displacement required it. She was the best-looking big woman I'd ever seen.

She examined me frankly as she set my drink down. "Staying with us awhile?"

"Depends," I answered. "I'm prospecting the area. I make like Tarzan for a living, only with more equipment." She looked her inquiry. "I swing through the trees with an ax and a saw on my belt," I amplified my first statement.

Her red head was cocked slightly to one side as she took me in feature by feature, her powerful-looking arms folded over her superb big breasts. "I'm not so damn sure you've got the face for that kind of work," she said finally. I've been in front of X-ray machines that didn't get as close to the bone as that woman's eyes.

I moved onto the offensive. "Are you from a ranch around Kingman, Hazel?"

Her deep voice warmed. "Not bad for a guess, pardner. Nevada, not Arizona, though. I was raised in McGill, north of Ely. And I get so homesick for the rim rock country sometimes I could bawl like a week-old calf."

"The planes are still flying," I suggested.

She shook her good-looking head. "I guess I'm married to this goddamn place. I just drink another fifth of my live-star shellac and forget about it. Did you want to eat?"

"Jed said you featured steak."

"Jed said right. Take your drink over to the booth there." She pointed to a corner. "I'll put your steak on the fire."

"Medium well," I said.

When she brought it to the booth twenty minutes later with a mound of french fries and a pound of sliced tomatoes, I ate for a quarter-hour without coming up for air. I mean it was really a slab of beef.

I was divot-digging with a toothpick when Hazel returned to the booth. "Apple pie? Coffee?" she wanted to know.

I tested my straining belt. "Better rain check me."

She glanced at the bar. Everything was quiet. I had my first look at her feet as she stood beside the booth. She had on worked-leather cowboy boots studded with silver conches. They're not given away. Evidently the Dixie Pig wasn't about to declare bankruptcy.

Hazel slid into the booth opposite me and sat with her chin propped in her hands. Her steady gaze seeped through to my backbone again. "Maybe it's not the face," she decided. "Maybe it's the eyes. What do you really do for a living, Chet?"

I reached for my cigarettes, offered her one, and lit two when she accepted. "Your pa should have hairbrushed you out of asking questions like that, Hazel."

"My pa never hairbrushed me out of anything I wanted to do," she answered. "Well?"

"I've been known to make a bet." I humored her.

"That's more like it," she said briskly. "A workingman you're not, pardner. What's your action? Horses?"

"Horses," I agreed.

"Is that right?" She straightened up as though someone had turned on an electric current in the booth seat. "D'you remember old Morning Star? I saw him run five-and-a-half furlongs at Delaware Park in a tick less than—"

So we sat and played Remember When.

It's a damn small world sometimes. Hazel's first husband had been Blueshirt Charlie Andrews, the man who bet 'em higher than a duck could fly. I'd never met him, but he'd been a pal of a friend of mine who unfortunately attracted a small piece of lead. I didn't tell Hazel this.

In five minutes we found out we'd both been in Louisville for the same Derby and in Baltimore for the same Futurity not too many years ago. We argued about which

year it was. "I
know
which year it was," Hazel insisted. "It

was my first year at the tracks. I was seventeen."

"Which makes you—"

"Never mind the arithmetic, Horseman."

"—younger than I am," I finished.

Her inward look turned back down the years. "I guess Charlie Andrews was about the ugliest man I ever knew. He was about five-five and weighed two-forty, and even his ears had muscles. He stopped off for a cup of coffee in a diner in Ely where I was a waitress. He was on his way to Santa Anita, but three weeks later he was still sitting in the diner trying to talk me into sharing the wealth. He was about as subtle as a blowtorch, and I was green as grass. He'd sit across the counter from me, taking up most of two stools, and he'd spread the grease in his own peculiar way. 'Hazel, honey,' he'd say to me, 'you got a croup jus' like a thoroughbred mare. I never hope to
see
a bigger piece of ass.'"

She shook her head reminiscently. "He married it to get it, finally. He was a lot of all right, that Blueshirt man. Although it sure was chicken today and feathers tomorrow living with him. That character would bet on anything."

Some people came in the back door, and she stood up lo go back to the bar to wait on them. "Don't go away, Horseman," she said over her shoulder.. "I
don't get
a chance to talk the language much these days."

I knew what she meant. It's a special language. When Jed Raymond walked into the Dixie Pig at eleven o'clock, Hazel and I were still rerunning races we'd both seen.

"You must have had the password, Chet," Jed said to me. "Our hostess doesn't usually unbend like this with the hoi polloi."

Hazel reached up from the booth and nearly collapsed him with a casual backhander in the chest. "This guy is with it, Jed,'' she said, leveling a thumb at me. "Where'd you find him?"

"He found me," Jed said when he could get his breath, "Lay off the strongarm stuff, woman, or I'll call out the militia on you." He sat down in the booth beside me. "One for the road?"

"One," I agreed. "Then I've got to get out of here. I'm meeting Roger Craig in the morning."

I drove back to the Lazy Susan twenty minutes later. Hazel's handsome face and attractive smile danced in the windshield before me. With her hearty laugh and superlative figure she was the most woman I'd seen in a hell of a while.

For a time I'd nearly forgotten the shape of things. It wouldn't do.

I pulled into Roger Craig's elliptically shaped graveled driveway at five minutes to eight. I was wearing my poor-but-honest khakis. Craig was already out in the side yard superintending a young black boy who was setting up an eight-foot section of slash pine about a foot-and-a-half in diameter. If this was the test, it was going to be a breeze. Slash pine is so soft I could have handled it with my teeth. Still, Craig was a native, and this was native wood that he knew.

I opened the back deck of the Ford and slid out my big toolchest along with a couple of coils of rope. Craig nodded pleasantly. I could see he knew about the deposit. His manner was easier. I had the job unless I cut a leg off. He needed the work done, and I was a customer of the bank.

I strapped on safety belt and climbers, giving it a touch of atmosphere, took out a pair of goggles, and unslung the lighter of the axes. "AH set, Mr. Craig?"

"Whenever you're ready, Arnold."

I walked to the pine log and tested it for balance. It was wedged firmly. I settled myself in front of it, digging in with my heels in the soft turf. With wood like this I had no need for a long, over-the-head ax stroke. Just as well for a man who still had a stiff arm.

I went at it from shoulder height, placing the cuts more with an eye to accuracy than speed. Still, a deep V narrowed rapidly as the ax rang with the mellow sound of good steel. The fat white chunk chips flew in a steady stream. Chips were still in the air when I stepped back with the pine log in two sections. The black boy stood to one side with wide, rounded eyes.

"I wish I could have tried you a few years back," Roger Craig said, a wistful note in his voice.

I almost made the mistake of handing him the ax. That would have been a hell of a thing to do to a recent heart-attack victim. I pushed back the goggles after I caught myself in time. "I'd have asked for a handicap," I told him. "You've got a press agent in town. Jed Raymond says you could really go."

He smiled with pleasure. "Jed's a good boy," he said in unconscious imitation of Hazel the previous night. Craig's smile faded. "I get damn tired of being half a man these days." Then he turned businesslike. "You were trying out for two jobs just now. I ran into Judge Carberry at the club last night. Drop around and see him when you finish up here." He held up a restraining hand when I would have thanked him. "What do you propose to do for me here?"

"I'll do it all." I waved at the driveway. "I'll shape up that low bush Ficus and wax myrtle when I finish with the trees." I turned to the side of the house. "Just about all of it needs thinning and trimming, especially the live oaks and that shagbark hickory. See the dead limbs on the sycamore? And you've got two bad palmettos on the other side of the house. The one closest definitely ought to come down, but maybe the other one can be saved." I ran over it in my mind. "All told, two-and-a-half or three days' work."

I le nodded. "I'll let the judge know he can expect to see you when you finish here."

"I appreciate it, Mr. Craig."

"Stop in and see me at the bank whenever you're ready." I le went into the house, and five minutes later his cat eased down the opposite loop of the driveway.

I smoked my before-climbing cigarette while I walked around the grounds planning my day. One of Roger Craig's forbears had had an eye for trees. There was the biggest magnolia I'd ever seen. It must have gone seventy feet. Craig had chinquapin, sassafras, sweet gum, red birch, and mimosa. On the other side of the house I'd seen cottonwoods and aspens. There was even a chinaberry tree.

It was a bright, sunny morning, and the air felt crisp. I was not only established in Hudson, Florida, but my sponsorship was the best. If I couldn't ease up on the blind side of whoever had sandbagged Bunny with a start like this, then there was something the matter with me.

I climbed upstairs and went to work. Most of the morning I thinned tops, occasionally marking a larger limb that had to go. I never stop for lunch when I'm in the trees. Food is just so much extra weight. I go straight through from eight to four.

In the afternoon I looped three different weight saws onto my belt and shouldered up a coil of rope. I went to work on the larger stuff. I undercut it first, then roped it to the trunk and lowered it after the overcut snapped it off. I wanted no heavy drops tearing up the side of the house or scarring the lawn.

The final half-hour I trimmed up stubs and daubed them with paste. I knocked off at four sharp. I felt tired, but pleasantly so. The arm had. held up well. It was the first real day's work I'd done since I'd cased a bank in Okmulgee, Oklahoma I'd finally decided against trying. But I'm never too much out of shape.

I packed the gear into the Ford and headed for the Lazy Susan and a shower. The traffic light caught me in the square, and I sat there waiting for it to change so I could swing south on 19. I had to hold up for a second after the light changed as a slim, redheaded man limped hurriedly across the street in front of the Ford, against the light.

I turned the corner with a teasing tickle in the back of my mind: had I seen the man before, or just someone who looked like him? When you move around the way I do, it's sometimes hard to hit faces to locations.

Then it hit me.

The last time I'd seen that limping redhead he'd been in Manny Sebastian's parking lot in Mobile with the hood up on my car.

I turned into the first vacant parking space, got out of the Ford, and walked back up the street.

I sat at the wobbly desk in my motel room and spread out under the gooseneck light the real estate map of the area I'd obtained from Jed Raymond. On the floor at my feet the German shepherd lay with his muzzle on his paws, his brown eyes watching me steadily. I'd stopped at the vet's and picked him up after I'd spent a fruitless thirty minutes quartering downtown Hudson in my search for the redhead I'd last seen three-hundred-fifty miles away. I hadn't found a trace of him.

Just seeing him, though, meant the honeymoon was over for me. There was only one reason the redhead could be in Hudson. Manny Sebastian had decided to cut himself in on the Phoenix $178,000. It really wasn't very bright of Manny. I had to give thought to how I was going to change his mind, because I was definitely going to change it. First, though, there was the matter of locating the money myself.

The shepherd's shoulder was stiff, but he could walk. The scrape on his head was nothing serious. "How you doin', Kaiser?" I asked him. His big tail thumped the rug. His head came up, and his new tags glistened on his new spiked collar. A twenty-dollar bill had straightened me out with the motel proprietor about the added starter in the unit.

I turned to the map. Finding the sack with the money in it had suddenly taken on urgency. I couldn't take the affair in second gear since seeing the limping redhead. I had to get moving. I knew Bunny wouldn't have dug himself in too far out of town, but he wouldn't have set up in a tent in front of city hall, either. He liked to batch it alone where he wouldn't attract attention. It was one of the things I'd liked about him.

After looking at the map, I tentatively ruled out the north-south stretch of US 19 as the most likely section to look for Bunny. Too much traffic and too many people for a man trying to attract no attention to himself. That left Main Street east of the traffic light in Hudson. And because of Thirty Mile Swamp south of Main Street, it left Main Street to the north.

I took a pencil and lightly marked two points five miles apart, beginning at the edge of town. If I drove up every road leading north from Main in that five-mile stretch, I might not find Bunny but I might find a blue Dodge with Arizona plates. An automobile is hard to dismantle completely. Even the burned-out skeleton of a car could be a starting place.