From the Listening Hills by Louis L’Amour
Contents:
Praise for Louis L’Amour
Sand Trap
Waltz Him Around Again, Shadow
Down Paagumene Way
Backfield Battering Ram
Anything for a Pal
From the Listening Hills
The Moon of the Trees Broken by Snow
Moran of the Tigers
A Night at Wagon Camp
Flight to the North
Too Tough To Kill
Murphy Plays His Hand
Afterword by Beau L’Amour
FROM THE LISTENING HILLS
* * *
BEFORE HE BECAME fully conscious he heard the woman’s voice and some sixth sense of warning held him motionless. Her voice was sharp, impatient. “Just start the fire and let’s get out of here!”
“Why leave that money on him? It will just burn up.”
“Don’t be such an idiot!” her voice shrilled. “The police test ashes and they could tell whether there was money or not…don’t look at me like that! It has to look like a robbery.”
“I don’t like this, Paula.”
“Oh, don’t be a fool! Now start the fire and come on!”
“All right.”
Monte Jackson held himself perfectly still. Despite the pounding in his skull he knew what was happening now. They believed him dead or unconscious and, for some reason, planned to burn the house and him with it.
From some distance away he heard footsteps and then a door closed. All was quiet except for the ticking of a clock. Returning consciousness brought with it pain, a heavy, swollen pain in the back of his head. He opened his eyes and saw linoleum, turquoise and black squares, an edge of enameled metal and beyond it, lying against the wall in what he now realized was the dark corner behind a washing machine, a man’s dress sock, lightly covered with dust. His head hurt, it hurt badly and he wasn’t sure he could move.
His fingers twitched…okay, movement was possible. He didn’t get up, but he thought about it…were they gone? Who were they? A woman. He could almost remember her, something…
He smelled smoke. Smoke! And not wood smoke either, burning plastic, amongst other things. He was definitely going to have to get up.
He lurched to his knees, sending a flurry of twenty- and one-hundred-dollar bills to the floor; his head swam and black spots passed before his eyes. He was in the utility room of a house somewhere, flames crackled, there was money everywhere. He grabbed the side of the washing machine and stood up, a haze of smoke hung in the doorway before him, he stumbled forward into a kitchen. Behind him there was a good two thousand dollars in currency scattered on the floor…but other things had his attention.
The pain and the increase in light blurred his vision. A roll of paper towels, conveniently placed near a burner on the gas range, was spreading fire to items left on the counter, brown paper bags from the market, a wooden box built to hold milk bottles, and from there to the gaily colored drapes over the sink…one whole side of the room was in flames. On the floor lay a man in his shirtsleeves and wearing an apron, a caked reddish-brown stain on his side. Beside him lay two items. A small pistol and a heavy, cast-iron pan.
Monte Jackson suddenly had a vision of that pan coming down on the side of his head. It was only then that he noticed the food that was splattered all over his right shoulder and sleeve. He touched his scalp and nearly lost his balance. It was split, split to the bone.
He turned, and as the lightbulb over the sink burst from the heat of the fire, staggered to a door that looked like it opened onto a side yard; he yanked at the knob. It turned but the door wouldn’t open, it just rattled in the jamb. A lock? The heat was like the broiling desert sun and growing even more intense. The lock needed a key…and the key was not in it.
As the paint began to blister on the wall next to him, Monte Jackson dropped to all-fours and crawled into the burning kitchen, desperately headed for the door that he assumed led to the dining room. He slipped in the sauce that covered the floor near the body, his hand hit the pistol and it went skittering into a corner. He pushed through the swinging door and he was suddenly in the comparative calm of a butler’s pantry.
Shadows thrown by the flames fled ahead of Jackson as he scrambled to his feet and ran down the hallway. Past the dining room, the living room, then the front door was before him. He slid to a stop; a faint whistling sound came from under the door…air rushing into the house, feeding the fire that was spreading in the kitchen and licking its way down the ceiling of the hallway. He could feel its heat at his back. Jackson turned the knob and pulled the door open. It came easily, like one of those automatic doors in a supermarket, the pressure of the outside air pushing it inward. The fire roared to greater life behind him, flames pouring up the stairwell and into the second floor.
Jackson stumbled across a wide front porch and down a short set of concrete steps, the free warm air of the summer night enfolding him. He swayed on his feet. What was going on? He remembered a building with arches along the sidewalk, sitting in a bar, a girl…
Riverside. He was in Riverside. He had been in the bar at the Mission Inn!
Fire lit the second-floor windows of the house. He had to call the fire department…but, what of the man on the floor? The man was dead. The man was dead and he probably owned the house that was burning. Monte Jackson wanted to be far away. Far away in a place where none of this could have happened.
Headlights swung into the front yard and Jackson turned. But the car was not coming in from the road, it had been parked behind the house, near the detached garage.
“It’s him! You idiot, get him!” He heard the woman’s harsh voice again, and suddenly the car accelerated. Jackson backed up, turned, then ran. The dark sedan sprayed gravel as a heavy foot was applied to the gas. He dodged, jumped a hedge and went to his knees, but was up with a lunge and into the shrubbery, slamming blindly into a woven wire fence, hitting it hard enough to throw him back, he ploughed on. The car ground to a stop, caught in the hedge, and he heard the doors pop open. There was a shot. He felt the hot breath of the bullet pass his cheek. He crouched and ran, sighted a gate…how he got through it and into the orchard beyond he never knew.
Twice he stumbled and fell headlong, but forced himself to keep running until he was completely out of breath.
As his head cleared he caught the sound of tires as a car drove by on gravel. Following the sound, he emerged from the brush on the lip of a ravine dividing the wood from a county road.
It was not a main road but, by the look of it, plenty of cars were passing. If he could get a lift, get out of here, well, maybe he could figure out what happened.
He thought of his appearance and lifting a fumbling hand, felt gingerly of the wound along his scalp. There was dried blood in his hair and on his cheek and ear.
The sound of water led him to an irrigation ditch where he dropped to his knees and bathed the blood away, then dried himself with his shirt and handkerchief. Carefully, he combed hair over the wound to try to conceal it. Behind him, the orchard was silhouetted against the glowing cloud of smoke that rose from the fire.
* * *
SO WHAT HAD happened? Well, there was the lounge at the Mission Inn. A girl, pretty enough…pretty enough for a man who had spent the last three months in the desert. He had caught her eye momentarily, but what would a girl like that want with him?
Unfortunately, it was all coming back to him.
The girl, woman, (he had other names for her now)…had been well dressed but was obviously nervous. A man, a big young man, was hanging around the bar, watching her. The two never spoke but Monte Jackson hadn’t been in the desert so long that he was blind; the man didn’t want to be noticed, but he was watching the woman whose name, Jackson now knew, was Paula.
He had finished his drink and left the bar, there was no time in his life right now for women; few women would tolerate the way he was living. There was also no time in his life for whatever kind of drama was brewing between her and the man at the bar. He had no time for it, but when the dark sedan had pulled up beside him as he walked down the street, he had found himself involved, regardless.