The Last Domino Contract, page 1
THE LAST DOMINO CONTRACT
A Joe Gall Mystery
Philip Atlee
Chapter 1
A chill wind blew across the Indian Nations of eastern Oklahoma. Now, at twilight, frost rimed stunted pine mantling low hills. The Weak countryside seemed to be brooding over an ancient injustice; it had watched the degradation of proud tribes. It was also a tornado alley; black funnels born on the naked plains of Texas ripped across it into Arkansas and Missouri.
The man I knew only as Prescott stood beside me on a high overlook. We were surveying the narrow state highway which came switchbacking up toward our aerie from the northwest. Mr. Prescott, whom I had met the day before in Fort Smith, was staring through a sniperscope.
“Could be the girl,” he announced, and handed me the scope. I trained it down the road and picked up a little white car, nosing around mounting turns. The image jumped into my right eye. We were waiting for a white Honda hatchback, and I was about to hand him back the scope when my eye picked up something else, moving rapidly.
The overhauling vehicle was a pickup. Behind the shadowed driver, I could make out two racked rifles barring the back window. Nothing unusual in that; farmers and ranchers nearly all carried them. The driver must have had his vehicle floorboarded; when I gave the scope back to Prescott the pickup was only a switchback behind the little Honda, and gaining.
“A drunk brave,” speculated Prescott, scope trained down. “She’d better give him running room.”
As the pickup slammed through the turn, we could hear its tires wail. The Honda did not slacken speed, but its driver cut sharply to the right edge of the ascending road. The dark pickup wailed again, swerving behind her.
The crash was not loud, a metallic clang, but the back end of the Honda was lifted by the impact. The girl swerved it again, desperately, toward the center and then the left side of the narrow highway. That was a mistake; when she tried to recover, wrenching back toward the center, the pickup roared as if its driver was trying to throw the pistons.
One partially hoisted Honda rear wheel bumped, shredding and smoking on the asphalt, and the little car catapulted off the highway. Smashed into some scrub growth, swapped ends sliding sideways, and began to flip. Hurtling downward through failing light, it struck a rocky ledge and plummeted end over end… settling, shattered, in a dry creek bed.
Drunk Indians don’t drive that well.… After the little hatchback had been shoved over the steep incline, the pickup swerved back to its side of the highway, still at high speed, and came roaring toward our windy overlook. I had two shots at it with the pistol, going for the tires, but both shots chunked into the body. Grabbing the scope from Prescott, I tried to make out the rear plate, but it was muddied over. The pickup whined on south, toward Interstate 30.
Prescott and I drove down around the turn and parked on the grassy shoulder, and it took us half an hour to work our way down to the smashed Honda. The driver’s-side door had been wrenched off in the plunge, but that hadn’t helped the driver. She had been compacted in the wreckage of the light frame; the steering wheel had broken off. One of its spokes pierced the right side of her face; the column had impaled her slender body.
I was leaning past her, searching for the envelope which was supposed to hold classified documents from the plutonium plant where she had worked, when Prescott grunted. He had gotten the back hatch open and was also rummaging.
“Here,” he announced, dragging out a bulky manila envelope and a fake-alligator purse. I trained my flashlight; the top papers from the envelope were production records at the plant. As I leaned toward him over the dead girl, who smelled bad from her puncture wounds, he emptied the purse.
A Mickey Mouse watch, nearly nine dollars in bills and change, a small, well-handled notebook, a Kotex pad, two bulky marijuana joints, an electronic security key to the plutonium plant, and an ID badge. The small photograph on it was more flattering than most; she had been a dark, intense girl.… Twenty-four years old, divorced, one child in custody of her husband, who lived in the Houston area…
Dying sunlight paled above us as we considered these meager artifacts briefly.
“All right?” asked Prescott. When I nodded, he replaced the papers in the manila envelope and started stuffing the personal belongings back into the shoulder purse. I watched the Kotex pad being stowed and remembered that the girl had been afraid the things might be contaminating, after use. From plutonium. Plant authorities had discovered that the food in her refrigerator was contaminated. Together with her apartment toilet seat, and her urine samples.
That was why she had been flown to the AEC laboratory in New Mexico, for comprehensive tests. The contents of her refrigerator, her kitchen utensils, curtains, linens, bed, stove, and all personal effects had been trucked to the plant in her absence, to be buried in a site approved by the Atomic Energy Commission.
Plutonium is the most toxic substance known to man. If inhaled as dust, it is a carcinogen. A mass of it as large as a grapefruit is enough to destroy all life on the earth, if distributed properly. It has a half-life of 24,000 years.…
Prescott handed me the bulky envelope of restricted documents and closed the flap on the purse. It was full dark. I eased out of the twisted steel coffin and was flashing the beam of light around, trying to pick the best path up and out of the creek bed, when something heavy-caliber boomed behind me. I wheeled and flashed the light back in time to see Prescott’s face blown apart.
His body slumped behind the little wrecked car. The big handgun boomed again and turned me around. Dark figures rushed me, and one of them knocked the flashlight from my hand as I fell. “Get it!” shouted a voice, and the envelope was ripped from my hand. “Kill the mother!” instructed another voice as I went rolling away.
Flashlight beams crisscrossed, and another shot cracked, ricocheting off a rock outcropping. I plunged on, into a dark stand of stunted trees, and went scrambling through them on all fours. Far above me, spotlights from three cars drawn up along the highway’s edge angled along the dark ravine.
Lacerated and winded, I went to ground in another dark clump. Found a sizable stone by groping with my hands. Something dripped on it; I was bleeding like a stuck pig. A right-shoulder wound, above the clavicle. I unbuttoned my shirt and tried to stuff its folds into the wound. Then launched the stone with my left hand, like a grenade. When it fell, the search parties moving down toward me shouted, the triple-spots converged, and a machine gun began to stutter.
Lying hidden, I tried to stanch the wound again. I have some experience of hunting, and being hunted. The people pursuing me had no interest in capturing me; they wanted to kill me as quickly as possible.
I scrambled on down, toward the east. When the rocky draw intersected a shallow stream, I moved across it and over another hill, still in cover. Followed the next draw down until I came to a small concrete bridge over a dirt road. The sounds of pursuit had dwindled, probably because a light sleet had begun to fall. Climbing up to the dirt road, I walked along it for nearly a mile.
To the right, across a stubbled, white-powdered pasture, I saw a big barn with about a dozen cars and pickups around it. Laboriously, I eased through the strands of a barbed-wire fence and started across the frozen stubble. There was a guard before the barn. I did not see him until he detached himself from the shadow of its eaves and put a rifle on me.
He wore a battered straw hat and lank hair slanted over his eyes, but nothing clouded the eye of the deftly handled rifle. He stood watching as I stumbled toward him.
“Now halt!” he ordered, when I was ten feet away.
“Hunting accident,” I explained, pointing to the stained shoulder. “Need a doctor.”
He nodded. “Walk into the barn. Walk right careful.”
I did just that. As he closed the door behind me, twenty-odd men crouching around a fourteen-foot circle, enclosed by a low plywood barrier, turned to stare at me. Their dark faces were illuminated by light from a naked overhead bulb. Inside the enclosure, two kneeling men had been ready to release aroused fighting cocks. Their ruffs were fanned and the feathers of their lowered wings spread. The blazing overhead light winked off curved-steel spurs.
“What’s the commotion, Denver?” inquired a voice with the habit of command. It came from an old man with a hawklike face, sitting hunched in the only chair in the barn. He had shoulder-length white hair, shining like silk under the light as he stared across the cockpit.
“Stranger, Uncle Lewtie,” announced my escort, moving me into the circle of light by shoving his rifle muzzle into my back. “Seems to be gun-shot. Claims it was a hunting accident. Far as I can tell, nobody with him.”
The old man regarded me with obsidian eyes. Told the handlers to put their birds down. They did, squatting obediently and waiting. The circle of dark Indian faces surveyed me, slightly curious but otherwise without real interest. Several of them shifted on their haunches and drank from whiskey bottles. They were dressed like dirt farmers, and many of them had currency twined between and around their dark fingers. Indians look as silly in long sideburns and hair that has been layered by a blower as white men.
I had interrupted a main, and they were anxious to get it going again. The center of the cockpit was stained by the blood of losers.
“I am Lucas Benbow,” said the old man with the lustrous white hair. “What do you need?”
“A ride to Fort Smith, across the river.”
The old man considered me. “We don’t run a bus service, mister. If you are shot, you need a doctor. I will have Denver drive you to Sallisaw.”
“That won’t do.” The shoulder was still draining blood; it throbbed badly now that the scrambling was over. “I need to get to Fort Smith.”
The old man lowered his head and murmured something I couldn’t hear, but the circle of men around the cockpit laughed. “You need to get across the river and the state line? Is that it?”
I nodded.
“Can you pay for this service?” he asked. I fumbled with my left hand, brought out my wallet, and tossed it into the cockpit. They regarded its worn plumpness. Began to joke among themselves, but Lucas Benbow’s face tightened in annoyance. He said something, sharply, and the kneeling referee picked the wallet up and stepped out of the lighted square, to tuck it back into my jacket pocket.
“Take him to Sallisaw, in my car, Denver,” instructed the old man. “Charge him ten dollars, but get him to the doctor.”
The rifle muzzle probed my back again.
“My thanks, Mr. Benbow,” I said. “I had heard that a stranger in trouble could find help in the Kiowa lodges.”
The old man lifted his head, angered. An aged but still feral hawk. “We have no lodges any more. Only laundromats, quick-car washes, and liquor stores. What do you know about the Kiowa, mister?”
“Enough, old man. I have studied their campaigns. I know about Lone Wolf, Santanta, Satank, and Big Tree. About the ceremonial lances and the bois d’arc arrow, fletched with copper. The war chiefs of the Kaitsenko. How the copper-fletched arrow was planted at the edge of a battlefield, and none of them ever retreated behind it.”
Lucas Benbow stared over the pit of light where a few shiftless remnants of the Kiowas had come to watch chickens fight. The crouched spectators, clad in dirty dungarees and scuffed boots, rolled betting money between dark fingers and had another belt from their bottles. They sensed the queer emotional electricity between the old man and me. But it wasn’t strong, with them; the young ones had already forgotten their tribal heritage.
“Take him to Fort Smith, Denver,” said Lucas Benbow harshly. “No charge.”
I thanked him and turned away from the crowded cockpit. Outside, Denver led me to a pickup and racked his rifle as he climbed into the driver’s side. We went rolling with clattering thunder across the barred cattleguard which led out of the big pasture, and turned onto the dirt farm-to-market road going south.
As the pickup hummed along, I felt light-headed from loss of blood. Perhaps because of that, the countryside flowed by with astonishing clarity. I had stopped trying to close the wound with the sport shirt; it had clotted from my previous efforts, but would not halt the blood loss. The sleet was no longer falling, and pale moonlight was breaking through ragged cloud banks overhead.
“Why did the old man change his mind?” I asked.
Denver’s dark face was impassive. “He’s Satank’s only living son. You conned him pretty good with that Kiowa hero talk.”
We turned left onto Interstate 30 and rolled past scattered grocery stores and cheap-john liquor drive-ins which were the last places to buy Coors Beer. It was not sold in Arkansas.
The bleeding shoulder throbbed and I considered fainting. Fought off that luxury by reflecting that Satank had been an astonishing warrior. Legend said that he could spit up daggers when he was in danger. On his final trip, to be imprisoned in Texas, he was handcuffed and under military guard. After crooning the Kaitsenko death song, he had ripped out of his cuffs and atacked the armed guards with a dagger before they killed him.…
The pickup rolled swiftly through heavily cultivated bottom lands fringing the Arkansas River. On its eastern side, in Fort Smith, Denver drove me through the half-abandoned city center. Most of the commercial action had moved out to the suburban malls. He turned right onto Towson Avenue, and rolled past Los Angeles-type litter which pocked that main thoroughfare.
When he dropped me off in the emergency entrance of Sparks Hospital, I thanked him, but he turned back toward Oklahoma without comment. And while I was in the emergency room, being treated for a gunshot wound, the Fort Smith police showed up and wanted to know why.
Chapter 2
That question put me between the rock and the hard place. I could truthfully say that I did not know who had shot me, yet if I continued to call it a hunting accident these local cops might come up with Prescott’s corpse. Another hunting accident, next to a smashed car which had held another corpse. And since the agency was still twitching from the Nam collapse and media hotfoot over its illegal domestic surveillance operations, I could easily become a highly visible factor in the brouhaha.
All the papers and television were sniffing for new leads. My involvement, deep in Oklahoma, would seem to prove we were still engaging in domestic surveillance. I suggested to the two patrolmen that we go down to the station and let me talk to the chief. The intern had finished bandaging my shoulder, and when one of the cops looked at him, he nodded.
The chief wasn’t in, but a leathery chief of detectives shook me down expertly and invited me to talk to him. I declined the honor, saying that my business was better done with the chief. He called the gentleman on the phone, and in half an hour the chief and I were in the nearby Federal Building, talking to Washington on a secure line.
My valuables and credentials were given back to me by the lean chief of detectives. As I restored them to my pockets he asked if I wasn’t the peckerwood with the hilltop castle up near the Missouri line—the fellow with the high-fenced hundred acres and the white tigers.
I nodded to the first question, and added that the blue-eyed tigers had been dead for several years.
“Oh, yeah. I remember now… some militant niggers busted into your place and killed them.”
“Yes.” I asked if I could get a cab to the downtown Holiday Inn, where my car was, and he said he’d drive me over. Only a few blocks. On the way, in his unmarked sedan, he asked me how I had gotten the rare tigers. I told him about the purchase from the Maharaja of Rewa, who had bred the strain pure, and how I had bought state and national import and private zoo licenses to get them into the country. After building up the flora and fauna inside my hundred acres, to provide proper ecology.
“Damned shame,” he commented, letting me out at the cookie-cutter sameness of the chain motel.
“Thirty-thousand-dollar shame,” I agreed. “Thanks.”
After checking out and throwing the suitbag into the boot of the Rover, I drove out of Fort Smith north. Over the muddy Arkansas River, navigable westward almost to Tulsa. At the top of Boston Mountain, I parked and found a phone booth. Direct-dialed the same Washington, D.C., number I had used in the Fort Smith Federal Building, and the same duty officer answered.
I said that I was loose and Mr. Prescott had bought the farm. The detached voice said that he had never been our responsibility, which meant he had been tied in from another agency. Staring through the dirty booth glass at the impressive view of steep green canyons and a silver lake beyond the tourist litter, I capsuled the death of the thin brunette girl and told him how we had lost the bulky envelope of classified papers.
“Right. P’s office has advised that you are to skip Hanford and proceed to Seoul. A briefing officer and a trip companion left Dulles about two hours ago; they should be at your place within four hours, by sky. After briefing, you and your companion will be airlifted to St. Louis. Military flight to San Francisco; from there commercial to Seoul, Korean Airlines.” The line clicked dead.
I went into the rock-walled restaurant next door and bought a thirty-five-cent Coke so I could take a five-dollar piss. In another three hours I was nosing into the hillside garage hacked out of red clay, below my clapboard castle. When I used the electronic key on the high, electrified front gate, shaded lights flashed on the terraces of the cupolated house. Hidden spots illuminated the path winding up through the stand of ninety-foot pines.
“Halt!” A treble voice challenged, and a flashlight beam probed from a dark nest high in one of the pines. I stopped and held up both hands. Paddy, my seven-year-old adopted boy from Belfast, was on duty in his tree-house. “Password?” he shouted down, fixing the light beam on me.
