It's Up to Charlie Hardin Page 20

  Aaron: “No, I mean I have to—you know—go.” A lightning flash lit the heavens near enough that the boys heard its artillery shell imitation.

  A numbing thunderclap, and a pause from Charlie. Then, “Well, if that didn’t do it, I reckon you can hold it awhile.”

  “Nope, but I can reach my buttons right here. But if you ever tell anybody, guy—”

  Thunder rumbled a reply. Charlie snickered. “You’re gonna let ’er rip up here? Okay, so will I; shoot, nobody can see us anyhow.” And the boys tended to their trouser buttons, and other needs, with sighs of relief as they made their contributions to the rain.

  Charlie was buttoning up when he saw headlights go on near the Ice House, and spotted his dad hurrying back into the Plymouth. The two cars swung parallel, motionless, long enough for a brief exchange before the police car parked at the corner with a red spotlight shining upward. The Plymouth moved away into the neighborhood scarcely faster than a walking pace, its big spotlight spearing into front yards as it went.

  The city had not installed a police radio in the Hardin Plymouth, and it had never occurred to Charlie why his father had made such a point of having the handle of that clear-lensed spotlight set into the Plymouth’s door. Now, for the first time, he realized that though Coleman Hardin did not own a handgun, the handcuffs in his coat pocket suggested that his job sometimes became actual real-life police work. Charlie imagined his dad searching front yards for the missing boy; knew that a spotlight from the street was not a tool likely to be of much use; and came to the conclusion a wiser Charlie would have reached long before this.

  The downpour was stronger now, which made everything slicker and gave fair warning that one clumsy move could bring a person hurtling down out of that tree a whole lot faster than he had shinnied up it. But in a flash of clarity to match the lightning, he saw that he needed to be involved in some useful way, not hiding out in a crow’s nest built long ago by seven-year-olds.

  Once again, it was up to Charlie Hardin. “I’m no sissy,” he shouted back at the thunder, and eased off the shared perch, and lost his balance. And fell.

  And was snagged by the fork of a branch just below, painfully enough to make him gasp, but with both arms flailing he found a useful grip that led him to the tree trunk and then downward at a reckless pace.

  Aaron’s descent was only a little slower and on his way down he called,

  “Where are we going?”

  “You don’t have to. He needs me,” Charlie called back.

  Aaron: “Which he?”

  Charlie thought of his dad, peering into rainy darkness, and of Jackie Rhett, probably shouting dirty words at a crazy man in an outlaw’s den. “Both hes,” he called. “You better go back inside.” And then he was pelting away through the downpour.

  Only minutes passed before the Plymouth’s spotlight reflected from a rental sign, and Hardin made a cautious decision as he parked two houses away in a driveway masked by a hedge. If that darkened bungalow was really the lair of counterfeiters, a man whose badge was his only weapon would be foolish to inspect the house alone when armed officers were already on the way. He had left Charlie in his room not long before, and he had no reason to suspect his son had stirred from there. The police dispatcher might force a radio message through the storm giving this location to Redmon and others, but that message would have to begin with an ordinary telephone call. Unarmed, Hardin knew he would be cautioned to remain at that telephone and await further instructions. A knock at the nearest residence and a show of his badge would be his best move toward a telephone, and he made that move without hesitation.

  No sensible dog would brave a rainy winter night when he had his own snug one-room apartment, but this was warm summer rain, worrisome only to fleas. Lint waited until no one could claim he was dogging Charlie’s footsteps, though he intended to do that very thing. Then he let boredom propel him away from home for a stroll while he cussed the booms of distant thunder. He knew his boy well, and sensed that any time Charlie set off at a run in such conditions as these, something very interesting must be afoot. The tangy odor of Charlie’s shoes was fresh in Lint’s nose but fading fast in the wash of raindrops. No matter; if Lint lost that familiar beloved scent, well, this was a route he knew by heart. At its other end lay Charlie’s second-best friend, Lint himself claiming the top position. And there was no hurry; it was not as if Lint had pressing business elsewhere.

  Several blocks further as he trotted along a sidewalk, he was drawn to a familiar bulky shape half-hidden by a hedge and gave it a good sniffing-over. Between those irksome outbursts from the sky he could hear Charlie’s dad in that house talking with someone, but that someone was not Charlie so Lint filed it all under “boring” and resumed his stroll for a half-block. By this time the storm center had crept directly above the neighborhood. In spite of the rain’s warmth, increasing crashes of thunder had begun to set Lint’s teeth on edge. He was considering a return to his bed as he crossed the street and hopped a gutter stream that was fast becoming a creek now, and heard the rush of water as it dropped through an iron grating. The rushing water, and—something more.

  Lint remembered that grating. He had watched Charlie shove broken bottles into it one Saturday morning, after Lint and Charlie’s wagon collided. He was not so much intrigued by the grating as with the hole under it, which he decided must be the mouth of a den hiding the biggest woodchuck in all creation. At the moment, if Lint was any judge, that critter down there would be doing the backstroke. At any rate, it was doing something, because the sounds issuing from the hole were sounds of something in trouble. Maybe something human.

  Abruptly, standing atop the curb with thunder’s insults still ringing in his ears, Lint forgot the storm’s hissyfit. He flopped down on the sewer’s big circular iron manhole cover, stuck his nose out over the grating to read any bulletins coming from below, and gave a gruff little half-bark to whoever might be within earshot.

  CHAPTER 20:

  THE HERO BUSINESS

  The person nearest to Lint was Jackie Rhett, petrified and whining almost noiselessly with fear, only a few feet away. Jackie hid motionless in the big pipe as rising water surged around his ankles, but he was separated from the terrier by solid concrete. In Jackie’s view, no help could have come from anything less than his own personal Bengal tiger. The longer Jackie hid in that flooded concrete tube, the more abuse Bridger took from the Latino outlaw. And the more of it that Jackie heard, the more he became convinced that this was a man who would wring a boy’s neck while whistling “La Cucaracha.”

  When he started up that storm drain, Jackie had held his usual opinion that he understood his world and the kinds of people in it. But a few minutes spent listening to Pinero had taught the boy about a type of man rarely found behind a truant officer’s desk. Jackie’s fear grew so great he was not aware of the silent tears that poured down his cheeks. The splash of water, Lint’s excited comments, and the clatter made by a second man stupidly trying to build a barrier in a growing torrent were loud enough to mask Jackie’s scuffings and whimpers. Without knowing he did it, Jackie Rhett gradually crowded himself further into the molded concrete that guided water down from the street. Water fell mere inches from his body, and he pressed the top of his head against the underside of the manhole cover. Now, every bolt of lightning brought him a one-second view of the world above. For some moments Jackie’s view was full of anxious terrier, and then it suddenly changed.

  The storm’s tantrum raged so high that when the patrolman had summoned Coleman Hardin out to his police car, their conversation was chiefly by pantomime. They sped off in the squad car needing only fitful lightnings to show the way and skidded around a corner, then quickly turned down an alleyway. Pinero’s panel van was one of two vehicles that already stood dark and motionless in the backyard behind the gray bungalow.

  In the other squad car sat Cotton Redmon. The three men conferred inside Redmon’s car before the patrolman shook Redmon’s hand, se
cured the top button of his raincoat, and transferred crucial hardware to a pocket he could reach instantly. That hardware included his wallet with its bronzed badge and a Police Special revolver. One corner of the bungalow’s front porch was supported by a pillar the width of a man, and under Redmon’s orders his man would stand immobile against that pillar. Anyone in the house who thought the front door was a means to escape would discover his mistake in a hurry.

  The uniformed officer was very young, and impulsive, and he pounded through shrubs to the bungalow’s front porch without bothering to step lightly. And then, without the least awareness that he had made a commotion like a wild-horse stampede, the officer tried to make himself a wee bit smaller and leaned against the pillar as he stared toward the door. Somewhere near in all this chaos a small dog was barking a call to arms, but it was not the kind of thing to interest a young officer who was intent on more important things, or imagined that he was.

  In a time when many lawmen cared little about thoughtful behavior in their work, Cotton Redmon was the kind of police lieutenant who struck a balance between common decency and his passion for duty. He did not forget for a moment that Coleman Hardin’s work was almost entirely with juveniles, nor that Hardin sometimes dealt with dangerous youths and yet always went unarmed. This is why, when preparing to invade a house that might contain armed counterfeiters and a troubled boy, he gave Hardin the role least likely to involve gunplay. Redmon chose a riot gun for Hardin because it was a shotgun, meant to be used only at short range and relatively harmless at any distance beyond half a city block. But up close and very personal, a shotgun’s muzzle looks like the business end of a cannon and sounds like one, too. If a juvenile officer needed a deadly weapon, the choice of a riot gun would be hard to beat. Leaving Hardin inside the squad car with his scary blunderbuss, Redmon knocked hard on the bungalow’s porch-screen door with his heavy flashlight, keeping his police revolver holstered. It was not strictly according to the rules for him to tear at the screen, but someone had damaged it previously and when his knock went unanswered he reached through to fumble for the lever with his free hand.

  In the storm’s tumult no one could have heard the roar of lions outside, much less the alarms of one small dog. And when Coleman Hardin had hurried out to the police car in darkness, no one had seen the terrier’s small form almost a block away. In his quest for more information, Lint left the curb to stick his nose almost into the flood that gushed along the gutter and down through the iron grating.

  It is well established that Lint’s ears deserved Olympic medals. Between peals of thunder, he detected tiny moans of human fear and then identified which human was making them. A dog that harbored grudges might have trotted off then, having recognized the moaner’s voice, but Lint’s moral code was extensive. It even extended to the obnoxious Jackie Rhett.

  Charlie’s favorite radio programs included Gang Busters and Mr. District Attorney, and no one had ever suggested to him that the superhuman wisdom of police in those dramas might be stretching the truth. So, thanks to those muddle-headed radio plays, Charlie assumed that when the good guys left the Ice House, they knew everything they needed to know. Justice would triumph; crime must pay. If Jackie was somewhere near and fooling around a haunted bank seeking loot, well, Charlie figured his dad would have it all straightened out in a moment. But meanwhile, Charlie was plunging up the street in a thunderstorm remembering he had seen the family Plymouth only minutes before, and asking himself where the H-Word was it now?

  By this time, Charlie could not have gotten any wetter by swimming up Shoal Creek, and the pounding of a jillion raindrops did their part to add more clatter to the brawling of the storm. Charlie did not recognize the new chorus of barks—which had a deeper sound when echoing from a storm grating—for whose they were until he was sprinting up the sidewalk within fifty feet of Lint. Then, interrupting the barks, a high penetrating whine escaped the dog, and it speared into Charlie’s very soul like a dagger. No other creature could manufacture a sound that spoke to Charlie with quite such a cargo of need, of loss, of pure yearning. Charlie dropped to his knees beside the grating to hug his dog.

  “Lint! You stuck? What is it?” As he spoke, Charlie peered into the grating. Lightning flashes showed little more than terrier paws flicking against iron as if to dig through the metal. A darted glance around him was fruitless; the young policeman standing in wait and unseen fifty yards away might as well have been on another planet, hidden on a porch, staring in the opposite direction with his collar turned up.

  As Charlie crowded nearer to the grating Lint backed away, relieved that he could turn this spectacular problem over to his young godlet. Some ancestor of Lint’s had probably herded sheep in Greece because it had endowed the terrier with the ancient Greek view of all gods, who must be allowed to run things even if the product of their ideas is mostly mischief.

  The uppermost thought in Charlie’s mind was to locate his dad, mingled with a new impression that Lint had lost his doggy mind. But in the bursts of light while peering at a common sewer opening, Charlie saw two impossible things. The first was a tiny shudder of motion from the iron manhole cover. And the second was a pair of boy-sized eyes from the gloom of the sewer, staring back up at him.

  For the scrawniest fraction of a moment, Aaron was comforted by the idea of retiring from this water-soaked fracas that his pal had drawn him into. But he had caught the tone in Charlie’s dismissal, and its central message had been “no sissies need apply for this job.” Aaron hoped his father would someday understand why Charlie must not be left to finish his mission alone. Splashing almost in Charlie’s tracks, Aaron began to chase after him only seconds behind.

  Charlie had just commenced ruining his fingernails on that cast iron manhole cover when Aaron spotted him with both knees in the gutter, huddled over the sewer opening. Since he had already committed himself to whatever craziness his pal was into, all Aaron could think to splutter into the pounding rain was, “What are we doing?”

  “Crowbar. Screwdriver. Knife,” Charlie gritted, redoubling his efforts to get his fingers under that lid.

  The only metal thing in Aaron’s pockets that was remotely similar to the needed items was a nickel that he thrust into Charlie’s empty hand. He still had no idea why Charlie attacked the lid’s edge with a coin, and peered at their surroundings wondering if he should run home for a kitchen knife. Then in a long blink of lightning he saw the FOR SALE sign glistening wetly a few yards away, and in a few precious seconds he had pulled its wooden stake from the ground.

  Now Aaron jammed the pointy end of his stake at the crevice between iron and concrete near Charlie’s fingers, prying back and forth, the cardboard sign missing Lint by inches as it waved about. Charlie only grunted, but kept up his attack and was rewarded with a faint metallic scrape. It seemed to Aaron that his makeshift tool had inserted itself slightly deeper into that crevice, and he thrust harder.

  “Ow, ow, ow,” Charlie advised, and shifted his body. “Come help,” he added, which carried a hint that if the stick was help, it was harm too. Something in the brevity of that message told Aaron that his own fingers were wanted in that cruel slot as well.

  Those extra fingers were the difference. With a louder scrape, the heavy lid grated up and across concrete until, with both boys holding it vertical, it rolled away to fall onto the nearby sidewalk with a mighty clang. Charlie flopped onto his stomach and reached both arms down into the blackness of that hole, and Aaron, now on his knees, was astonished as the next flash revealed a pair of hands that reached up toward them, seemingly from the bowels of the earth.

  Pinero tried to keep track of all the noises around him, including the slosh of water that now began to pour steadily into the basement from the broken pipe and, worse, sounds that might be footsteps above him and knocks at the screen door inside the house. Pinero thought fast. “Cade, the wind’s blown that back door open,” he called. “Go fix it right now!”

  Bridger slid down to t
he floor from the broken pipe and rushed to obey without a word, leaving muddy tracks up the stairs. He was almost sober by now but beyond caring whether Pinero’s orders made any sense. In Bridger’s tiny mind, anything that kept him safe from more of Pinero’s threats had to be a fine thing. It did not occur to him that Pinero might send him upstairs to check on the likelihood of something more troublesome than a screen door banging in the wind.

  And a few words carried from the pipe and deepened by its echoes were the last straw, all that Pinero needed to cancel his entire operation. A pair of valuable Nazi engravings in heavy metal plates were the only things a printer absolutely must save to try the scheme again someday, and it was the work of moments to wrap them in pockets of their special leather purse. If cops were really at the door, Pinero figured, he could count on Bridger’s stupidity to create a noisy three-ring circus upstairs. Meanwhile, a smarter outlaw like himself could sneak away through the storm drain and emerge at creekside in welcoming darkness. He might lose his car, but not his freedom; Dom Pinero had tasted the joys of Texas jails and intended to avoid refreshing his memory no matter what the cost.

  With these thoughts, Pinero struggled up to the pipe and paused long enough to draw his revolver. He resolved to shoot any lawmen—or blundering kids, for that matter—who dared come up that pipe. Standing ankle-deep in water now, he released a brief grin imagining Bridger’s sacrifice as the drunken fool met his fate upstairs. Seconds later he heard things too loud to suit him, and too near also, from up the pipe. Silence was no longer his friend. Still unable to see beyond a few feet into the pipe in either direction, he fired one shot up the slope of the pipe to halt any pursuit from that direction and was rewarded by a screech louder, if possible, than the revolver. Then he bent double and began to stumble blindly down the pipe toward the creek, one hand feeling along the pipe, the other holding his weapon.