5 Detective Novels Magazine — page 112: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

112 I found myself a stick to poke with, turned up my trouser cuffs and waded into the ashes. Janson watched me cu- riously for a moment or two, then went back to fixing the truck tire. The ashes were pretty deep and it was a tougher job than I had figured it to be. It took me half an hour. I scraped the ashes away carefully, then called Janson over. I pointed down without saying anything. “If you’ve got a phone,” I said, when he’d stood there looking for a while, “vou’d better call the sheriff.” — “Sure,” he said. “Well, that tears it. Now I do get a dog, a real dog.” I didn’t follow it. I said, “Huh?” “A watchdog. Then no tramp’d sleep in my barn without my knowing it, and set the place on fire smoking. Drunk, too, likely.” “A man named Dave Otis disappeared last night,” I said. “What’d Dave be doing in my barn? He doesn’t even live on this road.” “Did Dave Otis ever have a brain operation? Was his skull trepanned? And did he wear a wrist-watch with a metal-mesh band?” He looked down at the blackened thing around the left carpal bones of the charred skeleton. “If you stand over there,” I said, “you ‘can see the trepanning of the skull with- out moving it.” “Then it’s Dave all right. But by neorges how Dave ever happened to e— After a moment’s silence, he turned and walked into the house. | WENT over and sat on the grass. I cleaned the ashes off my shoes and knocked them out. I was retying the laces of the second one when Ed Mag- nus drove into the barnyard. Overholt was with him again. Janson came out of the house. I waved toward the ashes. “You wanted a corpse, Magnus,” I said. “Help yourself.” He glared at me, and waded into the ashes. Aftera minute or so, he came out. “It’s Otis, all right. Tip, you go in and phone Doc Reynard. Dunno what kind of an autopsy he can do on that, but he always wants to see a body ’fore FIVE DETECTIVE NOVELS MAGAZINE we move it.” Ed Magnus walked over to me, and I stood up. “Did you know Dave Otis?” he asked. “No,” I told him. “I killed him just for the fun of it.” “You weren’t at Lakota’ s, maybe, any time yesterday ?” “No,” I said. “Were you?” | Tip Overholt came back out of the house. “Doc be here pretty soon,” he said. Magnus said, “You weren’t convinced, last night?” “You crowded me'in a corner, and you used a blackjack. With your hands empty, I’d like to see you do it again.” Slowly he started to take off his coat. I peeled mine and laid it on the grass, then stepped back into the road and waited. He wouldn’t use anything but his fists here, I knew. Not with witnesses. But I had to keep clear of those fists. He was big, but he was slow and ponderous. He didn’t know that I had a cracked rib—but then he didn’t know that I was something of a boxer, almost a welter champ. Given plenty of room for foot- work, I could slice him for bologna and take my time doing it—unless that rib and the adhesive tape were too much for me. That, I figured, evened up things between us. He came walking in confidently, his left arm raised in what he thought was a guard, and his right cocked for a hay- maker. I danced around to his left and put in one over the guard and one under. His swing missed by a yard. The rib, I found, didn’t slow me up any. It hurt, but I could take it. It hurt worse when [ hit with the right, so I settled on a campaign of left jabs with only an occasional light right. That was okay; a boxer can put more smoke in a left jab that travels six inches than an ordinary man can put into a full right swing. | He kept coming in, and I let him. I rode the bicycle in a backward circle, and alternated between his face and his spare tire. In three minutes, or maybe four, Ke was breathing like a locomotive, his face was getting puffy, and a trickle of blood MICLOOKS (CO)