Herbie's Diner Page 5

  He slid out of his booth and came to sit with me. I found this strangely similar to what I had experienced the day before with Mort Peters. He bummed my last cigarette off me, and I lit it with my Zippo. “You waiting on someone right now?” he asked me.

  “Yes.”

  “Who?”

  “Who else? A woman.”

  He winked at me again. Arlene brought him his food. She gave me a look. The guy started pouring ketchup over everything on his plate. I nodded at her that the kid was okay, and she took off back to the counter, where she went down the line, refilling coffee cups. I’d put the dime store novel in my coat pocket when I’d gone to the john, and I pulled it out now and set it down on the table.

  “Am I interrupting your reading?” he asked.

  “No, it’s starting to chafe. Thought I’d set it down here.”

  “Any good?”

  “It’s not bad. I’m almost done with it, in fact. I’ll let you have it when I’m done.”

  “Nah, that’s all right. I’m not much of a reader.”

  “I wasn’t either, until I got drafted.”

  His eyebrows went up. “Where’d you serve?”

  “I Company, 354th Infantry. I was in a mortar squad.”

  He nodded, but said nothing. A semi pulling a load of logs headed south parked across the way, and a grizzly bear of a man stomped up. Arlene looked happy to see him, and he made a loud production of entering and giving her a hug. He grabbed a booth, and Arlene followed him over with a menu. They spent more time jawing than him ordering, so I imagined he was one of those kinds who was a regular in every place he stopped.

  I took that opportunity to knock my coffee cup onto the floor. It hit and shattered louder than anyone could have imagined, myself included, and everyone in the room jumped. Faces turned to me, and I smiled and held up my hands to say sorry. Arlene made to come and see, but I waved her off.

  “My mistake. I’ll clean it up.”

  Arlene looked like she didn’t want me anywhere near the counter, but before she could say anything the truck driver started in again, saying a few uncharitable things about his employer, and the likelihood of whether he was going to even bother making this particular run on schedule or not. With her back turned, I slipped behind the counter.

  “Hey, while you’re back there, how’s about a refill?” the salesman asked, grinning.

  “Sorry, buddy, I’m off the clock.”

  I knelt behind the counter and found a neatly folded and stacked pile of rags beneath the countertop that Arlene no doubt used to wipe everything down. I grabbed one and gave it all a once-over. A baseball bat was on the bottom shelf. This looked like a Muncey-style peacekeeper to me, something used only if a guy got out of line. Next to it was a Swiss Army knife and a carton of Lucky Strikes. I copped a pack of those and was about to go back to the table when something else caught my eye. I peered in, realizing that I was now taking too long and would soon start to arouse suspicion. Back behind the pile of rags was a familiar sight. The shoulder holster with my service .45 had been tucked behind the pile of rags. Being to the side of the pile I could now see it. I wanted to check on Arlene’s progress, but I couldn’t chance it. Even if she didn’t notice me, if I went poking my head up to look around, someone at the counter would see me acting suspiciously and might tell her. After all, they didn’t know me from Adam. I could be some schmuck trying to rip off an honest, hard-working gal like Arlene, and they’d never be the wiser. I left the .45 but nicked the knife and got back to my booth as quickly as possible, grabbing a broom and dust pan as I went. I swept up the remains of the cup and wiped the floor down with the clean rag. Arlene came by, glaring at me as she went.

  “I suppose you’ll want a new cup o’ Joe, huh?”

  “Thought I might drink some floor polish instead,” I said. “It would probably taste better.” The salesman and the gentleman talking to him overheard us and chuckled.

  “I can arrange that,” Arlene said, and snatched the broom and dust pan out of my hands.

  I sat down again. My new friend had already inhaled his breakfast. The remains of it were pushed to the side. The paperback was gone. He was drinking his coffee and smiling.

  “That gal is a class act,” he said.

  “Of that, I’m sure,” I replied. “You must be hungry.”

  His eyes never left mine. “Yeah. Famished.”

  “Watch out for the cook. He’s a big guy, strong as a bull and mean as a snake. And he likes to overseason his chicken. There’s no talking to him about it.”

  “Good to know. If that’s the case, maybe I’ll mosey on down the trail some. Sacramento’s not far away, right?”

  “You’ll get there before lunch.”

  “Good to know. Hey, Mister Hardwood, thanks. It’s been swell.”

  “Good to meet you, kid,” I said. I stuck out a hand, and he shook it. “Think I’ll hit the trail soon as well. I’ll wait for this coffee to run through me and visit the john before going. Half an hour, I should be back on the road.”

  “Where you headed?”

  “Same place you are, as soon as I’m done here.”

  The smile got bigger. “That’s just fine. Maybe I’ll see you around.”

  “Anything’s possible.”

  The kid left. He hopped on his chopper and started it up with a considerable sound and fury. The windows rattled, and soon he was speeding off into the distance. Arlene brought me a new cup of coffee, and I drank it. I smoked one more cigarette for good measure and considered what I had to do next. It was just past noon by then. No one was expecting anything until the afternoon. Mrs. Peters wasn’t supposed to arrive until then. I could see by Arlene’s manner she was tense. By the way she’d handled Mort and me the day before, it was clear she was no apprentice in the art of shanghaiing travelers. Only, there had never been a payoff like this before. Try as she might to keep her pragmatic head about her, bags of loot were starting to trickle into her peripheral vision. Pretty soon her hands would start to shake. By dinner rush she would screw up an order or two, this from a woman who probably did this job in her sleep.

  Muncey I wasn’t so sure about. A different set of things got his kettle whistling. By the way he’d jumped the gun with Mort, he apparently had a short fuse, though the guy I’d seen thus far was pretty level-headed. What I knew about real psychopaths was that they were nice guys until they weren’t. That sounded about right. Anybody loved money, but I think for Muncey it was the infliction of pain. Maybe he was starting to get antsy, too, thinking about lying in wait for Arthur Hands to show his cards. I couldn’t say what went on in a mind like that, if he anticipated the kill or not, or if he just did it. Any way you sliced it, I had them out of their normal routine. I also had them where I wanted them, at least for the time being. Now I had to make things worse for them, really throw a monkey wrench into their plans.

  I waited a while and then went back to the john. I’d made sure to make frequent trips throughout the morning, so that if I went more than once in an hour Arlene would not suspect it. I was banking on her putting together my intestinal discomfort from yesterday and my trips today as part of the same problem, and that was Muncey’s cooking. Let her think I couldn’t handle it. Arrogance can mimic feelings of trust if you think someone is weak or too afraid to cross you.

  I took care of business and slipped the Swiss Army knife from my pocket. There was a machine bolted to the wall near the sink with a roll of linen cloth hanging from it that could rotate occasionally so a guy could dry his hands. I slit the cloth and pulled it free and tossed it and all the spare toilet paper I could find into a pile by the door. After making certain I’d left nothing in any of the pockets I took off my suit coat and tossed it into the pile for good measure. I pulled my Zippo, flicked it twice, lit the pile in several places to get it going, and I ducked out.

  Arlene was so busy then that she apparently failed to notice I was now in shirtsleeves. I sat down at my table, but this time I didn’
t sip my coffee or light another cigarette. I tried not to think about what was coming next, or if I was walking out of this joint on my own power or being dragged out by the coroner. I’d had enough of that kind of thinking already.

  A dish fell and broke in the kitchen. Arlene’s head snapped up. Mine did the same. She looked at me then, and I stared back. We were both thinking the same thing. She put down her dish rag and started toward the kitchen when the truck driver friend of Arlene’s yelled over the crowd:

  “Hey, Arlene, you got smoke coming from underneath this door!”

  All heads turned to look. Arlene stopped in her tracks to crane her head above the boys at the counter.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Smoke. Something’s wrong in your restroom.”

  “Well, I don’t—”

  She never finished the sentence. What sounded like a whole rack of dishes crashed in the kitchen, but then the mother of the destitute family shrieked “Fire!” and that started an exodus into the parking lot. Arlene and I exchanged glances, and she started toward the swinging door at the back of the building. I could see gray smoke starting to peek from beneath the doorjamb.

  “Muncey, come running!” she howled and plunged through the bathroom door. A second later she stuck her head back out again, let loose a cough, and said to me, “Hardwood, you stay out here and keep your eyes peeled. You hear?”

  I climbed to my feet. “Will do, Arlene.”

  She disappeared. I looked toward the kitchen, but there was no sign of Muncey anywhere. I had an idea of what was transpiring, but I couldn’t worry about that just then. The others had run to the side of the building near the john to get a glimpse of the small window in the restroom that was no doubt now pouring smoke. Everyone loves a fire, after all. I used that as a cover to get behind the counter and grab the baseball bat and .45. Arlene was a fool not to take something with her. My intention was to make her pay for that oversight.

  When I found her in the john, she was spewing a string of obscenities I would have thought only a sailor could manage, and the pipes groaned as she had the tap wide open to throw water on the flames. I eased inside and let the door fall closed behind me. She didn’t hear me coming, but she nevertheless happened to turn at the moment I made my entrance. Her face was streaked with tears from the smoke, and there were black runners of mascara coursing down her cheeks.

  She showed me a mouth full of teeth. “What’s the big idea, Hardwood?” she asked.

  The time for talk was over. I let her have it upside the head. Her jaw raced ahead of the rest of her face as it snapped to the side. She fell backward onto the smoking remains of the fire I’d set, and a handful of teeth skittered across the floor toward the toilet, leaving bloody, little trails behind them. I felt bad about that. The rational part of me knew I could have taken her without violence. By then even a hard case like Arlene had to know the play was in motion, and she’d been caught unawares. But instead I gave her another one across the back of the head when she tried to rise up off the floor. The savage somewhere inside me said she had it coming for making me afraid for my life.

  I exited the john and made for the kitchen. The sounds of things breaking, punctuated by the occasional grunt and curse, were still evident. I was about to push my way in and pay the same respects to Muncey that I had with Arlene when I got another idea. I went out the front and ducked around the opposite side of the building from where everyone had gathered to watch the fire. Somebody was pulling away just as I was coming out. I could only presume they were going to rouse whatever passed for a fire department this far out in the sticks.

  I found them squaring off with one another. Muncey was breathing hard, his big, bald head bathed in sweat. His left bicep was bleeding from a stab wound that had gone clean through the muscle. He held a meat cleaver in one hand, and a switch knife in the other. It didn’t look like mine, which meant he’d taken it in the struggle. The kid looked a lot worse for wear. One eye was closing up on him, and he had blood trickling out of his mouth. He, too, looked like he’d just run a marathon. Muncey turned an eye on me and grinned.

  “You showed up just in time to see me filet this greasy, little shrimp,” he said. He smile was missing a tooth. “Came for us just like you said, Hardwood. I gotta hand it to you. Just wish you’d been right about the hour, though.”

  “He’s maybe a little too ambitious,” I replied. “I hope you don’t mind, but I helped myself to the bat when I heard the stuff breaking.”

  “We got the girl?”

  “Yeah, Arlene’s on her.”

  “What’s she like?”

  “How do you think? She’s hysterical. Thinks we’re going to ice her, too.”

  “Maybe we will.”

  The kid threw a punch so fast it looked like it had wings on it. He dotted Muncey in his left eye, and he followed it up with two jabs to the solar plexus. A guy like Muncey, though, it’s like punching a mountain. The eye watered up on him, sure, but the subsequent blows did nothing but make him angrier. He slashed with the meat cleaver, but the kid ducked under it, which made the switch knife useless as well. Muncey tried to bum rush him, then, but the kid was too quick and kept pace with him. Muncey didn’t push him all the way across the room and against the sink where he couldn’t backpedal anymore, and that was a mistake. The kid was going to duck under the next attack, and then Muncey’s back would be to me. I decided to move before I lost my position.

  I came up behind Muncey and drove the bat into his kidney. He bellowed like I’d tricked him into a slaughterhouse. The kid caught him with a couple of good shots to the face. Muncey threw an elbow back at me, but I’d danced out as soon as I’d connected with the first shot. Once the arm dropped I was back in again, and this time I caught him with a blow to the ribs. My footing was bad, though, and I slipped on the broken dishes. His wind left him a little, but he recovered enough to spin around and nearly cut me in two with the meat cleaver. Luckily, I was falling out of the way when he did it and only got a scratch on the side. The kid jumped on Muncey’s back and tried to wrestle the switch knife out of his hand. That gave me the time I needed to find my footing and move back to attack. Muncey’s eyes were wild now. He knew the game was up, but he wasn’t going to be beaten so easily as Arlene. He slashed twice at me with the cleaver, growled when the kid bit him on the forearm, and told me in no uncertain terms what he was going to do to me when he got me.

  That’s when he got smart. He dropped the switch knife, and the kid, focused more on that than his own safety, went for it. When he did Muncey snatched him up like a sack of potatoes and tossed him across the room. The kid crashed into the trash can, and garbage went everywhere.

  “Just you and me now,” Muncey said to me.

  “Were you ever going to let me go?” I asked him.

  Muncey said nothing. Instead he gave me a gap-toothed smile and showed me the cleaver. I supposed that was my answer.

  It was his game, then. I waited for him to attack, and he didn’t waste much time in doing so. He came at me fast, faster than you’d think a guy that big could move. I could tell he was confident of his chances of getting me in the bum rush. I was nearly in a corner, but I still had the bat, too. I waited for the attack, and rather than counterattack I swung the bat at the meat cleaver, not trying to block the attack, but to strike the hand that was holding it. It was a risky move, but it paid off. The inside swing wasn’t my hardest, but Muncey’s attack was clumsy, probably from his punctured bicep. The bat cracked his fingers, and he yelled, dropped the cleaver, and went wholeheartedly in rushing me. I got a whiff of bad cologne as he put a shoulder into my gut and drove me back against the wall. A crock of flour fell off a shelf overhead and covered us. I got in two decent shots, but Muncey had me. He lifted me by my neck. At first he didn’t squeeze. He seemed to like the idea of having me at his mercy, squirming, trying to break free, but knowing I couldn’t get out of that iron death trap he called a hand.

  “I’m gonna rip you o
pen and read my future,” Muncey said. “You understand me, Hardwood? They’re never gonna find you because there won’t be anything left to find.”

  “They’ll find what’s left of Arlene, sure enough.”

  I don’t know why I had that moment of bravado. The words just seemed to slip out before my mouth could police them. If Muncey had me, I wanted him to know that I’d been the one to ship his girlfriend. It certainly had an effect. Muncey’s eyes reduced to slits on his face. A vein stood out on his forehead, and that’s about the last I remembered for a little while, as he clamped down on my throat and began crushing the life out of me.

  A death struggle is a curious thing. For the two locked in it, the time stretches out towards infinity. I’d heard stories of a guy bleeding out from a sliced artery in his leg still having the time and wherewithal to kill three guys before he dropped. Three people in thirty seconds. They never feel like seconds. Muncey had me in a grip, and it was taking forever to kill me, or so it seemed to me. I couldn’t draw breath, and my body, free of rational control, was flailing about in an effort to get free. If I’d had control of myself a well-placed kick might have done the trick, but a lack of oxygen had put me in a different place mentally. Black spots were creeping into my vision. Soon I would black out, and I imagined then what it would be like to never wake again. Such speculation isn’t good for a guy like me, but I supposed I wasn’t like many other guys in my profession. That was why I had gotten locked into a death struggle in the first place, and it was why I was going to die in the middle of nowhere with very little to show for it. Other guys in my place, they would have played it a lot smarter, but then again, was I really a detective, or just playing one until another gig came along?

  Muncey grunted suddenly, and his grip on me loosened. I dropped to the floor in time to see the kid behind him, switch knife in his hand, and he was stabbing Muncey in the kidney over and over, as fast as he could. The fist holding the knife was bloody. Muncey turned on him and caught him with two good shots to the face, but you could tell the lacerated kidney was already starting to affect him. He drove the kid back against the wall and worked his ribs over, but the punches were getting sluggish and weaker. The kid didn’t have much left, either. He was beaten and bruised, and I could see a red stain spreading across his shirt and down the side of his denims that I hadn’t noticed before. I lay there and waited to catch my breath while the two of them hashed it out.