The Naked Face
by Jeffrey Greene
|
Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3, 4, |
part 4
A warm wind blew strong and steady out of the west as Rickard walked toward a small city park about a block off the main drag. A few couples lingered among the cottonwoods, as if watching their ghost children playing on the idle, rusted swing sets, merry-go-rounds, and see-saws.
In the center of the park was a massive boxelder tree, the biggest tree of any kind he’d seen for days. It had an oddly flattened look at the top, but it was only after he walked to the base and looked up that he saw a piano, rain-warped and with most of its paint gone, lodged securely in the heavy branches.
“We call it the Piano Tree,” said a deep, muffled voice behind him. He turned to face the bull-masked man in the wheelchair, the one who’d picked his hat off the floor at the Green Light Café. Some of the newer masks inhibited the growth of facial hair, but not the bull man’s. The scraggly ends of a graying beard emerged like rank weeds from the underside of the mask.
“Category 5 tornado did that twenty years ago. Took the roof off the biggest house in town, picked up the piano, carried it half a mile and dropped it on the oldest tree in the county. Didn’t kill anybody, didn’t kill the tree, which is a good thing, because we didn’t have the budget to get the damn thing down. Still don’t.” He lighted a cigarette and held out the pack.
“No, thanks.”
“Horse get shot out from under you?” he asked.
“Why else would I be here?”
“Why, indeed. When I saw you at the Green Light, I said to myself, ‘That’s not your usual road trash looking for a score. That’s a man on a mission.’ Question is, what kind of mission?”
“Plenty of time on your hands, I’m guessing.”
“Nothing but. I’m the mayor of Last Water and Gas for a Hundred and Fifty Miles. Name’s John Dimes.”
“Mr. Mayor.”
“And your name is?”
“The mask is Lonesome Cowboy.”
“Okay, Lonesome. I meant the name on your birth certificate.”
“Is this an official request?”
“It’s trying to be a polite one.”
“Evan James Rickard.”
“Mucho gusto. Now in my experience, lean and hungry types like you, who travel light and only give their names under official pressure, are usually after something. Or someone. Or running. Which is it, Mr. Rickard?”
“Simpler than that, Mr. Mayor. It’s to vacate your fair hole in the road as soon as my car is fixed. How fast that’ll happen hangs on a water pump from Hanksville. But I’m betting the sheriff already told you that.”
“Old Dave knows to keep me in the loop, and the mechanic’s his brother-in-law. Any visitor to Clifford, even a reluctant one like yourself, is kind of an event around here, sad as that sounds.”
“I’d say so. Especially since my deep purpose in coming here was to fill my gas tank. And if your mechanic’s any good, I’ll be out of your hair by noon tomorrow. Will that be soon enough for you?”
“It will be when you answer my question: some thing, someone, or running?”
“I don’t get why you care. My business is elsewhere.”
“You sure about that?”
“Just a hope, really.”
“Well, I wish you luck finding parts for that antique you drive, but it doesn’t look good, not the way those half-wits in Hanksville operate. You might be staying with us a while.” He threw away his cigarette, and reaching for the controls of his wheel chair, sharply turned his back on him.
“Someone.”
He turned back around. “Who?”
“I still don’t see—”
“Answering the question could help both of us. Believe me.”
“A woman.”
“Tall, lean, long black hair, armed for bear?”
He nodded, surprised. “She might be wearing any of three masks: a Black Jaguar, a Golden Eagle or a Chameleon.”
Mayor Dimes shook his head. “She was bare-faced naked when she robbed our one bank.”
A shudder went through him. “When?”
“Two weeks ago. Got away with twenty-five thousand.”
“Anybody hurt?”
“She pistol-whipped the guard, Bob Simmons. Broken nose, jaw, a couple of teeth. Sixty-six years old, a week away from retirement. You don’t expect a woman to pull a bank job alone, or have that kind of mean in her. But this bitch knew what she was doing. Going in without a mask: that was smart. How do you identify a naked face? Even if you could, nobody wants to look. Be like watching your grandmother do a striptease. Not to mention the fear of infection.
“She put a temp mask on as soon as she left the bank, tucked her hair under a hat, and got away clean. Nobody even saw the car she was driving. Sheriff Dave managed to be somewhere else at the time. Probably under a bed.”
“I can tell you where she was twelve days ago,” Rickard said. “Buying those three masks in a crossroads a hundred miles east of here called Pegleg. Scared the hell out of the owner.”
“And you believe she came back this way?”
“I think she’s headed west.”
“You need to tell me what your business is with this woman.”
He still had a hard time saying it out loud. “She murdered my wife.”
John Dimes took out of his mouth the cigarette he was about to light. “Jesus. Sorry.”
“But first she took her away from me. I knew she was trouble, first time we both saw her in a bar in Oklahoma City. Julie fell for her on sight, left me a few days later, then called me after a month, told me she’d made a mistake, that she feared for her life, asked if she could come back. I told her to pack up and wait for me. I got there an hour later. The front door was unlocked, the woman gone. Julie was laid out in the bedroom as if for burial, her eyes still open, her suitcase on the floor beside the bed. Shot once through the heart.”
“What’s this woman’s name?”
“Magda Sterns. Three months I’ve been looking for her. Quit my job, sold my house, cashed in everything. And then got nowhere. She disappeared. Not even a rumor. I’ve just been wandering around burning gas. This is the first lead I’ve had.”
“First one I’ve had, too. Know what car she drives?”
“A 1972 Olds Cutlass Supreme. Black. She’s probably changed cars by now, unless she’s too crazy to give a damn.”
“You plan on bringing her in yourself?”
“I had another idea.”
“Can’t say I blame you.”
“She has a way of snake-charming young women. Probably has another one on the string by now. If so, that woman’s in danger. You see why I’d like my car in running condition as soon as possible.”
“Yes I do. Think you might need some help?”
“In locating her, yeah. The rest I’ll handle on my own.”
“Hope you’re well-armed. We hired a bounty hunter to bring her back, a good one, supposedly. A week later they found his body — what was left of it after the coyotes and vultures had gotten to it — in a dry wash two hundred miles northwest of here, shot once through the heart. This woman doesn’t waste ammo. The city commission balked at spending any more money on bounty hunters. And here we are.”
“Any idea which direction she might have taken from Pegleg?” he asked.
“I were her, I might head north toward the canyon lands. Long as she’s carrying plenty of water and food, she could disappear in there. Big country, very rugged. She could also get lost and die of thirst. Or she might have gone to Nevada. Pretty much empty, once you get wide of Vegas. Or she might take her chances there, try to lose herself in the crowd. Don’t suppose that helps much.”
“Everything helps. All I know is, she’s running. From me, from you, probably others. She might be looking for a place with no organized legal authority and no extradition treaty. I’ve heard about all kinds of cults, communes, and principalities out here, run by self-anointed prophets. You’d know more about that than I would.”
“Well, now that you mention it, there’s a bunch running some kind of religious cult up in Duchesne County, about a hundred miles north of here. Yet another post-Mormon splinter group waiting for Judgment Day. Their leader’s a lunatic who calls himself Rockwald Fisher Man. The Church of God Unveiled.
“They equate mask-wearing with idolatry, and believe that to conceal the face God gave us is blasphemy. So nobody’s allowed to wear one, not even nano-mesh. Kind of a nudist colony for End-Timers. It’s an armed camp, so the Health Enforcement people stay outside. I think the unofficial policy is to keep the place under surveillance, let them infect each other and die out on their own.”
“So if she took off her mask and just presented herself at the gate, they’d take her in? No questions asked?”
“They might. But I hear getting in is hard and getting out, even harder.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Doesn’t sound like her scene. Men are on her permanent shit-list, and that would go double for some asshole with a concubine. But I guess it wouldn’t hurt to take a run up there.”
“I’ll see that your car’s ready by tomorrow.”
“Thanks.”
“And if you happen to get lucky, and she has any of our money on her, I’d appreciate it if you could get it back to us. There’s a five thousand dollar reward for bringing her in.”
“In what condition?”
“Identifiable.”
“Do I need to be deputized? Carry a warrant?”
“Consider yourself hired by the town of Clifford. I’ll back you.”
“Okay.”
They nodded on it, and the mayor handed him a card. “Just check in with me from time to time. It’d help to know if you’re still with us.”
“I’ll call once a week. Longer than that, you can guess what probably happened.”
“Yeah. Well, enjoy the evening. It’s turning into a nice one.” With a whirr and a jerky bump, he was on his way.
To be continued...
Copyright © 2024 by Jeffrey Greene
