Chapter 9: Runaway

The following tale comes to you as a result of the discovery of a malfunction in my filing system – the notes were lost for a while, having fallen through a slit in one of those brown-paper concertina things I removed from a drawer and bundled up with an eye to posterity. If for no better reason than that the case came early in my PI career, I think it’s worth recording. Here we go.

The parking area was a battleground where grass and weeds were trying to wrest control from a miserly scattering of gravel over hard-packed earth. Nature was having a tough time, but it never gives up, does it? I’d heard that trees were poking through the roof of the old Amazonian opera house in Manaus.

After entering and stopping my car nose-in to the perimeter fence – chicken wire, three feet high, strung between rickety wooden posts – I thought better of it and reversed forty yards to the opposite boundary, so that I could get out head first if need be. In this part of the country, one just didn’t know.

It wasn’t immediately clear to me why there was a fence at all. Nobody else for miles around had bothered with such demarcation and there was room enough in all directions, especially as most of the nearby lots were obviously vacant. Then I thought of my own background and felt that I understood.

Having been west of the Pond for only a short time, I was still part-conditioned to the British environment, where people are very conscious of their own space. Well, since most of them have such a limited amount of it, they have to be. Try parking as a visitor in the UK suburbs. If you are observant enough, you will see the odd curtain twitching. Maybe the owner here had that same territorial mindset.

On the whole, I’d have preferred to be elsewhere. In fact, I hadn’t really wanted to get out of bed that morning. I’d woken from an entertaining dream, the end of which I would have liked to see. Somehow, I never get to the concluding bit.

I have a lot of these nocturnal excursions, which I’d heard is typical of those who don’t usually travel much. I’m no expert in such matters, but was told that people who get around tend to have dreamless sleep, whereas the stay-at-home types don’t. Perhaps it’s some kind of compensation. On this occasion, my night-time adventure had me bounding across a vast flat expanse of asphalt, one hand holding a bunch of daffodils, the other a briefcase. I was leaping oddly, as though negotiating a series of hurdles of varying heights, spaced a yard apart, though I could see that there were no obstacles of any kind. It was strange. Behind me, in hot pursuit, was an elderly man in vice-admiral’s full-dress uniform, plus two loops of gold braid dangling from his right shoulder. He displayed enough scrambled egg to cover a pound of toast and an array of jingling medals that threatened to capsize him. I’ve seen Christmas trees with less decoration. He was brandishing a cucumber in his right hand. Sigmund, if you’re out there, tell me what this means.

I once kept a record of my dreams over a four-month period, in an effort to find a pattern. In case you don’t already know, this is called oneiromancy. That information isn’t a tribute to my erudition. It came from a friend. Having failed to detect any symbolism, I concluded that dreaming is the mind’s way of shedding unwanted baggage while in free-wheel. I don’t insist on this and if it’s an illusion, I hope that nobody will destroy it, as I like to live in comfort with my interpretations of life’s meaning.

I’d taken a late breakfast – no scrambled egg, in case you’re wondering – then bumbled around for a while in the way one does at times, especially when facing a distasteful task. Finally, I’d got moving. After all, I was a private investigator, following a lead which had steered me to a local eating house of, I’d been told, some notoriety. My activities were normally limited to my adopted city and its environs, but I was champing on the bit in this case and had tracked the fellow concerned for hundreds of miles. Maybe that doesn’t quite fit my dream theory, but I’m prepared to view it as the exception that proves the rule. Also, the man was one of my few genuine fugitives – some absconders want to be found – so I was particularly keen to nab him.

The chase had been tortuous, but I was sustained all along by thinking that he could run but couldn’t hide. I realised later how fatuous that was. In a country of three million-odd square miles, of course he could hide. My respects to the great Joe Louis – I usually associate him with the famous comment – but he was thinking of a boxing ring, not half a continent.

I’d been this far south twice before, on both occasions getting an uneasy, apprehensive feeling. It was the same this time. How can I put it? Call me irrational if you will, but I had a sense that not many local eyebrows would be raised if a busload of vacationers were to vanish, permanently. Well, there would be sporting encounters and other weighty matters to be considered. The thought was disquieting. Yet, I was on a case and was supposed to be intrepid.

It was midday and stove-hot. I got out of the car, which like my present one was elderly and not worth describing. There were eight other vehicles in the lot, the only saloon, or sedan if you will, being a mid-blue Oldsmobile. The remaining seven were pickup trucks in various stages of dilapidation, all dusty and mud-caked. Apart from their less than pristine condition, they had one thing in common – each had a gun-rack in the cab and every rack held a rifle. No shotguns here – this was marksman country.

After a brief glance at the two ramshackle wooden outbuildings, I concentrated on the main structure, which matched its surroundings. Maybe it had been purpose-built, but to me it looked like an oversized converted railroad car. At that stage of my induction to American ways I didn’t appreciate that some of these places had – and for all I know still have – something of a cult status in parts of the US.

The thing was about forty-five by twelve feet, rather over seven feet high and, it seemed to me, made of the same stuff as a standard mobile home. To my mind it should have been called ‘Joe’s Diner’, or possibly ‘Floe’s’. The owner had settled for just ‘Diner’, in foot-high neon – switched off at the time – fastened midway along the roof. There was a door in the end wall – are they called walls? – nearest to me and another in the middle of the frontage. Several dents in the metalwork indicated proceedings of which I was surely better off remaining ignorant. Perhaps it was just my state of mind, or maybe it was because I’d been told to be wary of the spot. Whatever the reason, I didn’t like what I saw. I tried to work out whether it should be classified as mean or dingy. Why not both?

I entered by the door at the end. Directly ahead of me was a narrow aisle. To my left was the stool-lined counter, running along three-quarters of the interior. To the right, there was a row of eight tables with tubular steel legs and red Formica tops. At each table were four matching chairs, most of the vinyl seats and backrests scuffed and knife-sliced – easy to note because there were no customers on that side. At the far end of the unit there was a door to the toilet facilities. The smell of hot food – chilli con carne, I thought – just managed to overwhelm those of coffee and tobacco smoke. It came from one of the four large containers atop gas burners behind the counter.

Of the ten seats at the counter, numbers one to seven were occupied by what seemed to be the pickup brigade, all drinking beer. Three were smoking cigarettes, two chewed toothpicks, one was tucking in to peanuts from a small glass bowl, of which several were lined up. The other fellow had no immediately obvious addictions other than alcohol. I’d never before seen such an assemblage of red meat, bib overalls and wide-brimmed hats – oh, and one baseball cap. Did these fellows ever doff their headgear?

As I walked in, there was some low muttering going on. It sounded like a meeting of primitive tribesmen. My appearance induced silence.

Stools eight and ten were vacant. Number nine supported a man wearing a charcoal suit, white shirt, black narrow-brimmed felt hat and dark glasses. With chin cupped in hands, he was hunched over the counter in an odd way, staring down at an empty bowl. Mr Blue Car was the obvious inference.

Behind the counter was a big man, around six-three, and if there was any change out of two hundred and forty pounds, it would have fitted in a matchbox. A lot of that bulk was close to the equator, under a short white apron. I revised my thinking about the ownership. This man had to be a Jake.

Messrs Pickup turned their heads to me in unison. It was weird, as though some puppeteer had pulled a string connecting them at the neck. ‘All together now boys, ninety degrees left.’ There wasn’t a flicker of emotion in any of the faces. Six round red ones – the seventh was thinner and made of old tan leather – stared at me. Nobody spoke or nodded. The string was pulled again and the heads turned back.