A Night for Screaming Read online

  He was the reason I’d run. I was innocent of any crime, but I couldn’t prove it, and I knew what Fred Palmer could do to a man. I’d seen them beg to be allowed to confess after a session with him.

  He re-entered the waiting room. I stared after him, thinking. I was out of the department and now Fred Palmer was going to brighten his record with me. Pursuit and arrest. Interrogation and conviction. The whole thing was inevitable. It was in the way he walked. His whole manner said, “You’re around here somewhere, Mitch, breathing scared like a rabbit. Why not make it easy on yourself? Why don’t you come in and surrender to me?”

  I heard men yelling in the alley west of me. Someone had seen me running away from that shack.

  Their shoes were loud, pounding toward me along the narrow alley. I glanced once toward the depot to be sure Palmer had gone inside the waiting room and then I pressed deeper into the narrow crevice between wall and building.

  “He got on that bus,” one of the men was yelling as they ran past me. “I know that’s what he done. He made a run for it and got on that bus.”

  They went along the alley toward the street. Somebody was yelling that they had to get word to the sheriff, maybe they could stop the bus on the highway.

  I crept back slowly toward the opening, glanced cautiously up and down the alley.

  I couldn’t stay here, and I couldn’t walk abroad in the daylight, either. I pressed against the wall, feeling the pound of my heart, looking around, trying to think, searching for one break.

  My gaze raked across the phone booth, moved past it and darted back.

  I stayed there for a long time, or what seemed a long time. Maybe it was less than a minute, but I solved this immediate problem for myself. I found an answer. I figured it was the smartest decision I’d ever made in my life.

  I felt myself grinning, felt the muscles ache around my mouth with the angry pull of that grin. I glanced toward that waiting room, thinking, “Think fast, Palmer.”

  I thrust my hand into my jacket pocket, sorted out a dime from the pile of change the waitress had given me in the café

  I stepped boldly out from the wall and walked across to the phone booth. What I loved about this particular phone booth was that it had been placed on the ramp for the last second convenience of bus patrons; that hurried final moment call. It was around a corner from the waiting room, and a building wall shut it off from the alley.

  I entered the phone booth, closed the door behind me. A small fan dried the sweat on my forehead.

  I punched the dime into the slot and didn’t even hesitate as I dialed. Phone 404 - Blue.

  The phone rang a long time. Finally a man answered, his voice sounding almost reluctant. “Hello,” he said. “Great Plains Empire Farms.”

  “Is this Mr. Barton M. Cassel?” I said.

  “No. Mr. Cassel isn’t here right now I’m his foreman. Any message? Anything I can do?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” I said. “I was in the Fort MacKeeney Café and they said you were looking for farm help.”

  “Oh, yes. We’re always looking for help out here.”

  “My name is Mitch Walker,” I said, not bothering to lie about my name. It was a thousand to one chance anybody out there had ever heard of me. A ranch as big as that had its own woes.

  “Yes, Mr. Walker. What can we do for you?”

  “Well, it’s like this. I’m on my way west. But I’m not in any hurry. I’ve heard a lot about your place. I thought I’d like to work out there a while.”

  “We’re in tomatoes and watermelons right now, unless you know something about dairy cows.”

  “I better stick to watermelons,” I said. “I don’t promise to make a career out of it, but if you’d hire me, I’d stick it out for a while and give you a day’s work every day.”

  “Sounds fair enough. We pay a dollar an hour, and we pay by the day, so you can stay as long as you like, cut out when the notion hits you. We find migrant workers like this plan best. We feed you, and you can stay on the place in the men’s barracks if you want to. So your eight bucks a day is clear.”

  “That’s all right with me. How do I get out to your place?”

  “Drive east on Highway 40 until you see the sign over our gate. There’s a man on duty there. Tell him your name and he’ll let you in.”

  “I don’t have a car.”

  “We could send for you if you’re in Fort MacKeeney.”

  “You do need help.”

  He laughed. “Oh, yes. We can always use all the help we can find.”

  I glanced around me. “If you could pick me up at the rear of the bus station,” I said.

  “You got yourself a deal, Mr. Walker. We got a man in town now. In a jeep. I’ll call in and tell him to pick you up. Ten minutes all right?”

  “Boy, you do need help,” I said.

  He laughed and hung up.

  I stayed right there in the phone booth with the receiver against my ear, my face turned toward the wall, and the breeze from the fan riffling my hair.

  The minutes dragged. I saw three men move west along the alley, growling at each other. I kept waiting for a bus to come in. If Palmer stepped out on this loading platform, I wouldn’t be able to get to that jeep.

  Eight minutes. A jeep skidded to a stop at the end of the wall on the alley, and the driver slapped his horn.

  I replaced the receiver. I stepped out of the booth, went over to the jeep. The driver was a thin, sun-darkened man in khaki shirt and trousers, boots and a battered five-gallon Stetson back on his sweated hair.

  “Your name Mitch Walker?” His voice was high, almost a whine.

  I slid into the seat beside him. “Right.”

  “You got no suitcase or nothing?”

  I glanced around, taut. “I’m ready to go if you are,” I said.

  He studied me a moment “You look kind of messed up.”

  “Been traveling on the bus,” I said.

  “Inside it or out?” he said.

  “Like amusing,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  He slapped the little car in gear and laughed. “The way you look is like a joke on Evans, all right.”

  “Evans?”

  “The foreman. Don’t you know him? He said he hired you.”

  “Oh, Evans. Sure. Yeah. Mr. Evans hired me.”

  We had swung around a corner and were streaking east on the highway.

  “Not Mr. Evans. Mr. Howell. Evans Howell. If he hadn’t been in such a rush to hire you, you’d of been picked up by the cops and he could of got you for half price and the county would have had to feed you.” He laughed. “That’s a real good one on Howell. Only I hope the old man is feeling good when he hears it.”

  “The old man?”

  “Cassel. He owns the place. But don’t think he misses a trick. He knows everything that goes on out there ... well, almost everything.” He shook his head and laughed again as we drove out of the town limits. “What you want to do this kind of work for?”

  “Getting low on money.”

  He laughed again. “Either you don’t know where we’re going, mister, or else you’re real desperate for money.”

  I inhaled deeply. I couldn’t tell him it didn’t matter where we were going. I was breathing again, that was all that really mattered. A few minutes ago I had been dangling on a string, and now I was off that string.

  There didn’t seem a place on earth I’d be as safe as I’d be out at the Great Plains Empire. Was the sheriff going to look for me on a farm where he supplied prison labor? When you wanted to hide, you went to the one place nobody would think to look for you, didn’t you? Not even that little waitress would ever think I’d go willingly to work at the Great Plains Empire. She’d warned me against it, and I was most grateful to her for that above everything else she’d done for me.

  In that moment back there at the bus station when there was no place to hide, I’d thought of Barton M. Cassel. Great Plains Empire. Phone 404-Blue.

  I couldn’
t think of a better place to hide than in the middle of prison labor.

  He held the car on sixty. “You got any money?” he yelled at me.

  “A few dollars. Why?”

  He shrugged. “Poker game tonight. You might want to get in it.”

  “Sounds real merry,” I said. I glanced at him, the sharp features, the thin hands gripping the steering wheel. “What’s your name? Or don’t you give out that information?”

  He gave me a quick glance. He shrugged. “You won’t be seeing much of me. I’m off the place most of the time—”

  “Picking up labor?” I said.

  “Yeah. Either the free man, like you, or them that Sheriff Mason sends out in cuffs. But my name’s Buster Kane.”

  The little car raced along the highway. We didn’t speak for some minutes. There was nothing to see in any direction except the flat unbroken plains. Jackrabbits and ground squirrels raced across the highway. Infrequently we would pass the small white triangles of the oil pumps.

  “You got a lot of those things on the farm?” I said, nodding toward the small pumps.

  “We got a lot of everything out there,” Buster said.

  A car was racing toward us, and I saw it was a police cruiser with red roof light blinking. My hand gripped the seat rail. Buster slowed and I held my breath, waiting for him to stop, but the cruiser sped past, and the two cops in it waved back at Buster.

  I sagged in the seat, recognizing those two cops.

  Buster said, “Couple real swell guys. Lots of fun. Always anything for a laugh with them two. Arnie Vallon and Cotton Powell. They been hunting some bum that gave them the slip. And—” Then he stopped talking, letting the car slow as he turned, staring at me. He let his gaze rake over me, and he got it He knew now who I was, who those cops were looking for.

  I set myself, ready to take him apart if he made a move to turn this jeep around.

  After a moment, he burst out laughing. “Well, I’m damned,” he said. “So you think you’re like real clever, huh? You knowed if them two guys arrested you, you’d work out your sentence for us anyway—”

  “Only I wouldn’t get paid for it.”

  He slapped his leg laughing. “Oh, man. This gets better all the time. You figured you had to work out here one way or the other, it might as well be for pay. Huh?”

  “Something like that.”

  He shook his head, laughed again. He stepped hard on the gas. He glanced at me. “At first, you didn’t look like too much to me, Walker. But you pulled a good one. Only one thing wrong with it. You’ll wish you’d picked a better place to hide.”

  “I didn’t have much choice.”

  He laughed again. “There’s always the French Foreign Legion,” he said.

  I watched the dust cloud boiling toward us, thinking we were in the path of a small but violent cyclone. It came on so swiftly I didn’t even have time to yell.

  I didn’t need to. Buster saw it, and he began to curse. He jerked his foot from the accelerator, clung to the wheel with both hands.

  A white Cadillac convertible materialized abruptly from the dust cloud. It was coming down the wrong side of the highway doing better than a hundred miles an hour.

  “That bitch!” Buster yelled.

  I hung on waiting for the driver to see us and jerk the car to the other side of the highway.

  It didn’t happen. Whoever it was at the wheel was going so fast that he had the instinctive knowledge that turning that wheel at all would send the big car wildly out of control.

  But it didn’t slow down. It came directly toward us, wavering slightly as if caught on the wind and barely touching the ground.

  Buster didn’t hesitate. He jerked the jeep hard to the right and we bounced off the highway, across the hard-packed orange shoulder to the stubbled field.

  The car whipped past and the back wash from it shook the jeep.

  Buster had stepped on the brake and for some moments he sat there clinging to the steering wheel, saying one thing over and over. “That bitch. Oh, that bitch.”

  My voice shook slightly. “You know her?”

  Buster swallowed and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “Know her? Everybody knows that bitch.” He laughed. “You work for her now, friend.”

  “Mrs. Barton M. Cassel?” I said.

  He shrugged. “Who else?”

  5

  The man at the gate had a rifle across his arm.

  My sense of shock must have showed in my face. Buster glanced at me and laughed. “The boss had to give him a gun,” he said. “We’re bothered all the time out here. You know? Tourists wanting to take pictures. Kids throwing things out of cars. Don’t worry about that rifle.” He laughed again. “It don’t mean a thing.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ll bet it isn’t even loaded.”

  He had pulled the jeep to the gate and he stopped there waiting while the man, dressed as he was, in khaki, boots and Stetson, came out of the small house inside the fence and walked out to the gate with that rifle across his arm.

  I looked around. Only the fence and its posts broke the landscape along the highway as far as I could see in either direction. I began to see how smart I hadn’t been. And I knew something else. This was the moment of decision. There was one thing to do: step out of this jeep and keep walking east. But it was already too late for that. Inside that sentry box beyond the fence I could see the telephone on the shelf. There wasn’t much else. Comic books scattered on the floor, an old wicker rocking chair, pegs for the rifle, that was all. But the telephone was all that mattered. If I tried to walk away, they could get in touch with the sheriff’s office almost instantly. Alexander Graham Bell’s little miracle.

  I stared east along that sun-blasted highway. This wheat and farm country was flat and dry and barren under the pitiless glare of the sun. Stubbled grass covered the land like thick hair on the back of a man’s fist. A hawk sailed against the faded, cloudless sky. I had no idea how far east of me was the county line, and without that knowledge I was helpless in a land where one farm was larger than the state of Rhode Island. This farm.

  I exhaled heavily, and Buster laughed in a dry way as if he had been following my thoughts.

  I pulled my gaze back. The gate was swinging open, whining dryly on its hinges.

  The hard-packed orange road stretched like a line into infinity across the bare unbroken fields. Distantly, I could see the sprawling massive buildings of the farm.

  There was nothing elegant about the gate, or the simple wooden sign hung above it on two skinned willow poles.

  Inside the gate, Buster stopped the jeep again, waited until the keeper had closed and locked it behind us.

  He walked toward us, squinting. He bent his knees, sighting in at me.

  “Got a new one,” he said. “He a free man?”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Buster said. “He can leave any time he wants to.”

  They both laughed.

  About a quarter of a mile from the farmhouse we entered a long avenue of cottonwood trees. In the distance I could see the tan hides of grazing cattle; there were thousands of them but they seemed only peppered against the sprawling graze land.

  I counted six windmills strung across the farm. This man was pumping enough water to supply a small city.

  The farmhouse was completely isolated from the rest of the buildings by a squared setting of tall cottonwoods backed by a cyclone fence topped with three strands of barbed wire.

  Beyond the fence the milking barns were as large as plane hangars and built with the same rolled roofing. They were all freshly painted with gleaming cement ramps at each end. There were corral areas of carefully heaped manure; there were feed barns, and stables, fertilizer barns, one long red building which housed the farm machinery, huge reapers, plows, harrows, tractors. Everything was brightly polished, painted and washed down.

  A man came running when Buster slapped the jeep horn. He opened a gate, touched his cap in a gesture right out of Sir Wa
lter Scott as we rolled past.

  Buster drove slowly between the barns and stables, speaking casually to the men who paused, looking up from their work.

  We passed the last of the barns, struck another cyclone fence. Buster punched the horn and a man came running from the unpainted barracks beyond the fence. He pulled open the gate, running with it, and we rolled through. Out here, completely hidden from the farmhouse by the smartly painted barns and hangars, were two barracks. Except that they were separated by more cyclone and barbed wire fence, they were identical in shape, lack of paint and general disrepair.

  At the end of the two barracks was another building with two sets of double doors on either side of the dividing fence. This was the kitchen and the messhall.

  “How you like it?” Buster said, watching me.

  I had a knowledge that this boy didn’t. He knew what life was like at Great Plains Empire Farms, but he didn’t know what awaited me a thousand miles back east.

  “Looks charming,” I said. “Too bad they ran out of paint before they got back this far.”

  “Yeah. You’re right. It’s a shame.”

  “Which one of these barracks belongs to the free men and which to the jail labor?” I said.

  He laughed, “Why man, look around you. Can’t you tell?”

  “No. There doesn’t seem much to choose from between them. That barbed wire fence works both ways.”

  “Oh, man, you’re wrong. That barbed wire fence is just for them on the other side of it. Out here, you’re as free as any bird. You don’t see nobody with guns on this side of the fence do you?”

  Evans Howell was maybe two years older than I was. He was tall, well over six feet in his spit-polished boots, but he was slender, angular and knobby in his freshly pressed khaki. His hair was dry, blonde and wavy over a narrow, thin face. He was the kind of man women thought handsome, and it was obvious they never got any argument from him on this subject. He seemed to have a horror of dirt and wiped his hands four or five times on his handkerchief in the first ten minutes he talked to me.