He called thickly, “Hey, Mac.”
The mechanic didn’t hear him. Didn’t move, either. Mechanics probably caught up on their sleep when they rolled under cars but this guy didn’t even bother to get under the car first. He didn’t even mind lying right in a little pool of oil.
If anybody was going to move it looked as if Bill Wayne was elected. It would be nice if that tow truck in the corner would back up to him and drop its hook and crank him up to his feet, but in this joint they only worried about auto bodies, not human ones. He got up slowly. While he was doing it the knocking in his head quickened until he thought a bearing was going to burn out, but once he was up it quit chattering so loudly. His right arm wasn’t really crumpled, either. Just numb and asleep.
What a sloppy joint this was. A mechanic sleeping on the floor in a pool of oil, nobody working, tools scattered around. Right at his feet somebody had left a small power tool that looked as if it might be used to drill holes in metal. He stooped, picked it up. That was odd. You didn’t use this to drill holes in metal. You used it to drill holes in people. It was a .45 Government Model Colt Automatic Pistol. He sniffed at the muzzle and got an acrid smell that knifed into his head like ammonia and started it clearing.
The pistol had recently been used to drill a hole in somebody. It had done an efficient job. The mechanic lying on the floor was Russ, and that wasn’t oil leaking out of his coveralls. That is, not unless they were making oil in dull red shades this season. Russ wasn’t getting ready to slide under the car, either; he had no further use for cars, except maybe a hearse.
He looked at his wrist watch and saw that it was a little after ten. He must have been unconscious for almost twenty minutes. Probably Russ had banged his head against the floor or kicked him just as the .45 let go. He tried to picture the way it had happened. There was Russ leaning down to bang his head on the floor. Or there was Russ getting in the kick, poised right over him. And yet Russ had ended on his back eight feet away. A slug from a .45 packed an awful wallop but you wouldn’t think it would throw a man around like that. Of course Russ might have staggered backward— not that guys did much staggering when a .45 nailed them in the heart.
That had been quite a shot. It must have been left-handed, too, because his right hand hadn’t been in working order. He couldn’t have done as well right-handed if he had emptied the whole clip into Russ. He took out the clip and counted the bullets. Five. He worked the slide and ejected the sixth cartridge from the chamber. He picked it up from the floor and, while he was at it, hunted around for the cartridge case of the bullet that had been fired. It had rolled somewhere out of sight and he couldn’t find it. He replaced the sixth bullet and shoved the clip back into place. Just out of curiosity he held the automatic in his left hand and practiced aiming it. The thing wobbled as if he were using a popcorn shaker. That left-handed shot of his certainly rated as beginner’s luck.
For a moment he was almost tempted to believe he couldn’t have done the shooting. But that was just kidding himself, of course. Nobody else had been around who might have done the job. He’d better get out of here fast, if he didn’t want to find himself on a witness stand pulling that old gag about everything going black.
The thing to do was not leave many clues. Clue number one was the bullet. They could have it. Clue number two was the cartridge case. Ditto. Clue number three was the switch controlling the garage doors, which he had touched when he arrived. They couldn’t have that one; anybody who had been in the Armed Forces had a full set of fingerprints on file in Washington. He went to the switch and wiped it with a handkerchief. Clue number four, footprints. Just to be a good guy he would leave the footprints, seeing that he couldn’t mop up the whole floor.
Clue number five was his appearance. He was taking that with him, although not many people would think it was worth the trouble. His clothes were dusty and rumpled, and his body felt as if people had been holding a rodeo on it. He stumbled across the shop and found a washroom. He yanked out a paper towel and cleaned smears of blood and dirt from his face. That uncovered bruises; his face looked like an apple left too long at the bottom of a barrel. He brushed dirt from his clothes and noted that fortunately he hadn’t picked up any oil or grease stains. He combed his hair, wiped possible fingerprints from the faucets, switched out the light.
The idea of rolling up the noisy overhead doors didn’t appeal to him, and he headed out through the small office beside the shop. He paused a moment to open desk drawers, using a handkerchief, in the hope of finding a map showing the lake where the C-47 had ditched. No maps. He opened the office door, saw the street was empty and walked out.
Sometime in the near future people were going to look at his bruised face and say, “Why, Mr. Wayne, whatever happened to you!” And if, when people asked that question, they had been reading in the paper about a terrific fight in which a man was finally shot and killed, they might connect the two things. He couldn’t afford to be connected in any way with Russ because it would be too easy to dig up a motive.
He walked back to U. S. 30. Halfway between the tourist court and town was a scrubby little park. He hid the .45 at the base of a tree and started into town to shop for an alibi. There was a nip in the air and he began buttoning his sports jacket. He fumbled with the second buttonhole and couldn’t find the button. He stopped, examined it. The second button was gone. He remembered buttoning the jacket in the evening to hide the .45 tucked under his belt. Quite likely the button had ripped off during the fight, and was lying on the floor of the garage where a cop would find it. He took out a penknife and cut off the other two buttons and threw them away.
He walked into downtown Cheyenne. It was Saturday night and the place was getting ready to kick up its heels. Ranch hands and guys from a nearby military post were prospecting around for excitement. A couple of police cars were riding herd on things, and pairs of MPs moved along the sidewalks peering into bars and taprooms. It looked as if Cheyenne could be a tough town on Saturday night. That was fine; he wanted to pick a fight and collect a few honest lumps and coax the cops to rescue him.
On a side street he found just the kind of taproom he needed: dim lighting that wouldn’t call attention to his bruised face, and a rugged-looking crowd at the bar. He marched in, wedged his shoulder between a couple of big cowboys, rammed through to the bar. “Give a guy room, will you?” he snarled. The two ranch hands turned toward him. They were tall rangy guys, and once they started working on him they would probably be about as easy to stop as a stampede. He forced himself to say in a nasty tone, “Who do you think you’re staring at?”
The big guy on his right studied him for a moment, then smiled and said, “I’m lookin’ at a man that seems to want a drink bad. Don’t mind me. Step right in and get one.” He called to his friend on the other side, “Ain’t that right, Joe?”
“It sure is,” the other said. “I’ll even buy the man a drink. What’ll it be, pardner?”
He looked up at the two big friendly faces and knew he couldn’t pick a fight with guys as nice as these. “A shot of rye,” he said weakly.
They draped arms as heavy as fence posts over his shoulders and ordered the drink and tossed theirs down and then shook hands and said they had a poker game coming up and had to get back to it. They sauntered out. Great. Everybody loved him. What did you have to do in this town to start a fight? He ordered another drink and lifted it and felt somebody jostle his arm. He swung around fiercely and saw an Army sergeant, the kind of guy who picks his teeth with a bayonet.
“You shoved me, you big ape,” he snapped.
The sergeant swung his head around slowly, like a tank turret. After a long moment he said, “Sorry, mister.”
What was the Army coming to? “You spilled my drink too.”
“All right, mister. I’ll buy you another.”
“You act tough until somebody gets tough with you, huh?”
The sergeant pulled out a dollar bill and threw it