Joker Moon Read online

  Eva-Lynne is not part of the story. So far.

  We were across the Big Sandy and into West Virginia within an hour, too fast for local law enforcement to really act on Neal’s complaint, assuming they did. There is deuce-on-deuce violence that, in my vast experience, your basic cop or sheriff tends to discount.

  If they wanted to run me down for assault, there was a chance they’d call ahead to law near the border with West Virginia, but they would probably look west first—or into Ohio, where Ridley and I had just been.

  Years of travel on a budget had given Ridley and me a good idea of where to lay low, that being our usual mode of travel. There was a north-south road just past the Big Sandy, and I took that rather than continue on to the metropolis of Huntington a few miles farther down the highway. We turned south and found a trailer park just outside of Neal.

  Parking my RV was no big deal, but stashing the big rig with Quicksilver was a greater challenge. Leaving it at a truck stop was stupid; even just leaving it on some little-traveled roadside would guarantee questions, eventually.

  Thanks to a conversation with Mrs. Bonnie Keithley of the Neal RV park, we found a hiding place in a barn owned by her cousin, or so the tale went. In memory of my working methods from the Skalko days, I offered Mrs. Keithley a bit of cash; it worked the way it always does.

  We had Quicksilver hidden before ten that night and had grabbed some takeout from the one crossroads diner.

  Feeling relatively safe, if a bit unsure about how to continue the tour, we bunked down for the night.

  From the beginnings of my tenure with Mr. Skalko in 1966 as a lad of twenty-four, I have had trouble sleeping. Wise moralists will nod and say, of course, you were a petty criminal. In fact, I had already done a bit of not-so-petty criminalizing since dropping out of college, and slept just fine then. I blame age.

  So it was no surprise that I awoke well before dawn and smelled bacon frying—Ridley making his amazingly hearty (given his thinness) breakfast.

  And a voice on the radio, some local news guy talking about a “police manhunt in four states.”

  I could see the look on Ridley’s face—never especially happy, this morning it was unusually grim. “That can’t be about us,” I said.

  Ridley was always reluctant to contradict anyone directly. Except now. “They mentioned you by name. Said you were probably driving an RV.”

  “Nothing about you?”

  He sighed. “Oh, I was mentioned. Ridley Hough, last known residence Palmdale, California.” He actually seemed flattered. “And our other truck.”

  “God, they make us sound like felons or fugitives.”

  “And because you stood up for decency and fairness.” Ridley was not, as a rule, sarcastic, so I took this as offered. I was aware that if one investigated, one might find a record of my California offenses—no convictions, I am proud to note, but a number of charges under the general heading of theft. And a couple of assaults.

  “I didn’t kill the guy. He had to have survived in order to identify me.”

  “Well, another station says this guy’s father is lieutenant governor.”

  That clarified matters. Here was the joker prince phenomenon, where a nat parent goes overboard to protect and coddle a joker son.

  At that moment I heard a siren and even saw flashing lights—a law enforcement vehicle racing down the highway toward “downtown” Neal.

  It passed by, and as soon as it vanished, Ridley said, unnecessarily, “They’ll be back.”

  “And we ought to be gone. West Virginia’s full of hills and hollows and people who don’t like law enforcement.” I was also thinking the smart play might be to double back into Kentucky. You will note that turning myself in was not a consideration.

  Before either of us could take the next step, there was a knock on the trailer door.

  At that moment my eagerness for fight or flight disappeared. Ridley and I were unarmed in an RV; we weren’t going to get into a shoot-out. “Well,” I said, “so much for that scheme.”

  I opened the door expecting to see two state troopers in Smokey hats. What I saw instead was a fat, hunchbacked joker in a suit that probably cost more than I make in six months. His skin was gray, his eyes, lips, and nasal slits black. He had no nose. “Mr. Cash Mitchell?” he said. “My name is Malachi Schwartz. I believe I can offer some help with your current situation, if we can get out of here with some dispatch.”

  Then he spotted my uneaten breakfast: “May I?”

  Even though he ate like a man discovering cooked food, Schwartz managed to share a considerable amount of information. “Your Mr. Neal is in a coma.”

  “That’s impossible,” I said. “I launched him into a tree. He was hanging there in the branches and moving.”

  “Apparently he hit his head when he fell.” He was examining Quicksilver, the flatbed truck, and the RV, and shaking his head at the hobo nature of things.

  “And no one blamed the people trying to get him out of the tree.”

  “That would surely be explored in a trial, but that’s a long way off. And one would hope … never to happen.”

  “Why are you here?”

  He dabbed at his mouth with a napkin. “I am offering you a, well, a private engagement. To display your vehicle and demonstrate its abilities, as you have been doing for years. And possibly to perform some … related educational duties.”

  “Educational for whom and how long?”

  “The whom we can discuss, but I assure you there is nothing illegal or especially challenging about the engagement.”

  “Fine, how much?”

  “An amount equal to three weeks of your current rate … shall we say $1,500?”

  Fruits of my association with Mr. Skalko: Never take the first offer, even if they have a gun to your head. “Three,” I said. “And ten percent up front, as in now.”

  Schwartz actually looked a bit nervous. “I believe time is of the essence here, Mr. Mitchell.”

  “There’s always time for a back-and-forth between gentlemen.”

  Schwartz reached for his wallet and opened it, allowing me to see an impressive number of bills. He removed half a dozen fifties. Which left twice that many. He handed the money to me, and I handed four of the bills to Ridley. “Is Mr. Hough your treasurer?”

  “I don’t like to carry money, since I can’t seem to hold on to it.” Hence the ironic origin of my name. (I am not going to reveal my birth name, since I loathe it.)

  “Are we done?” he said. I nodded. Schwartz rubbed his hands together. “Now to create some magic.”

  Within minutes we had the tarp off Quicksilver. Even though we were largely in shadows inside the barn, the big old teardrop definitely showed its age … rough patches on its formerly shiny skin like liver spots on an eighty-year-old.

  But it was still unique—one of three originally built, the other two long gone—and impressive. Its successors, Space Command Hornets, were zipping to and from Earth orbit every week, but Quicksilver reeked of real accomplishment, history, and human history, too. (It also reeked of oil, mildew, and rust.)

  Or so it seemed to me whenever I saw her. Of course, this might have been the result of proclaiming that story for the better part of a decade. I have reached the age where the legend has been repeated so often that it has become my history.

  And that would include my time with Eva-Lynne.

  “What sort of information do you need in order to lift this vehicle to a location near Charleston, South Carolina?”

  “Well, I managed to find the Moon—”

  “Be serious, Mitchell.” He was losing patience. So I told him that most of my lifts were short distances—literally from one point to another I could see. “Cross-country is trickier, but I can take us to a thousand feet and use visual flight rules to avoid planes.”

  Schwartz closed his eyes for a moment and actually appeared to be talking to himself. Then he said, “I can guide you.”

  “You’re coming along?�
�

  “Yes, and Mr. Hough, too.”

  “What about our vehicles?”

  “They can be retrieved later, and so can my auto. If confiscated, you will be compensated. How much time do you need before takeoff?” He seemed agitated.

  “Ten minutes,” I said.

  “Eight of them trying to remember what button to push,” Ridley said, one of his automatic and blessedly rare jokes. Inaccurate, too: the only buttons deal with interior lights. I, Cash Mitchell, am the power.

  “You’d better get aboard then,” Schwartz said.

  Ever practical, Ridley said, “I’ll grab our gear.” And ran into the RV.

  It was a quick climb up the ladder to the truck bed. The Quicksilver hatch had not been designed to lock—you wouldn’t expect car thieves in Earth orbit or on the Moon. However, this fine nation of ours is rife with such persons, so Ridley had welded a padlock to the hatch. Unlocking it was the operation that consumed several minutes. Then I was inside, finding the light switch and working my way forward to the cockpit and its three cramped seats.

  To my momentary consternation, Schwartz took the copilot seat, leaving Ridley to crowd into the jump seat, two small duffels in his arms.

  I grabbed the lift tiller—specially installed for me back in December 1968, to improve my vital contact with the object to be lifted.

  And out and up we went, the pocket of farmland, the local roads, and soon the whole collection of wooded hollows dropping away.

  Only then did it strike me that this launch might be observed.

  Just as there were finite limits on how much I could lift, I could not go supersonic with Quicksilver, or anything close to that, and had to poke along at something between a hundred and two hundred miles an hour.

  The trip required almost constant lifting, too. I could release my grip and let the vehicle drop a bit, but by and large I was in for a workout. It was especially tricky going over the Appalachians … in a rainstorm.

  I had no memory of the highest peak in that range, nor its location, but realized that I had to be much higher than 1,000 feet to avoid danger. With a considerable amount of sweating and cursing I nudged Quicksilver up to 7,500 feet and above the clouds, even as Schwartz peered out the forward window in something close to terror. And Ridley dozed.

  Eventually, after what seemed like several hours though likely was not more than twenty minutes, the skies cleared and I judged that I was now over northern North Carolina, which Schwartz confirmed.

  He wisely realized that I had no mental space or energy for chat, so left me to my own musings on missteps I had made in my life and career. Those that took place prior to the age of thirty would consume a notable amount of brain time, but I chose to concentrate on the last dozen years—the sad end of my marriage to Eva-Lynne, the multiple business failures, and have I mentioned the drinking?

  I haven’t had a drink since I started on the road with Ridley. (We met in A.A. He’s my sponsor.)

  I also spent a few moments fretting about Ridley and Schwartz. My partner was uncomfortable around jokers, and Malachi Schwartz, with his gray skin and hunched back, would be a test of his tolerance just on appearance alone. The fact that he was an arrogant bean counter would only make things worse.

  An hour in I realized that this was now the second-longest Quicksilver flight in its history—since returning from the Moon in December 1968. I had moved the vehicle frequently, off and back onto the truck at every stop, but none of those hops lasted longer than ten minutes.

  “We are on approach, Mr. Mitchell. Well done. In a few moments I will ask you to turn to the west.”

  The terrain had changed from fields and woods to tidal plains. It was getting on toward late afternoon, and the clouds had rolled in as I flew over old plantations and new suburbs. The city center was spread before me, a twisty collection of peninsulas and docksides. I could even see the old Fort Sumter out in the harbor.

  “Anytime,” I said to Schwartz. I was feeling seriously weak, too, and not sure I could hold Quicksilver aloft for much longer. And that was if my bladder held.

  “Now. You will be crossing the Ashley River there.”

  We bore west, crossing said river into genuine plantation land. We were still well off the ground, so I wasn’t able to appreciate the ancient magnolias, fine old gates, mansions, and whatnot. Not that my mood allowed for that.

  Schwartz guided me to a lower route that took us up a private lane, right through an impressive open gate that featured a wrought iron W.

  “What’s the W for?”

  “Witherspoon. The family that will be hosting you.”

  “Does this place have a name?”

  “It was known for a century as Dayton Place, Dayton being Mrs. Witherspoon’s maiden name.”

  “So she had a bit of family money.”

  From the look on Schwartz’s face, you’d think I commented on the Witherspoons’ sex life. “To descend into the vulgar, and frankly none of your business, zone, both of the Witherspoons come from families with long, fruitful histories here in Charleston.”

  “My apologies.”

  We flew over a flagstone parkway of sorts in front of an honest-to-god three-story mansion straight out of Gone with the Wind.

  Beyond that, surrounding another parkway, were several outlying buildings—a garage on one side and a two-story guesthouse on the other. At Schwartz’s direction, I landed Quicksilver in front of the garage, next to a huge flower bed.

  We popped the hatch and, with considerable grunting and groaning, exited into a flood of fragrance. Whatever might be said of the Witherspoon estate— and I would have issues with it—it smelled pleasant.

  Schwartz gestured. “You will sleep in the guest quarters. You can take your meals in the kitchen there.” He pointed to an entrance at the rear of the main house. “Tomorrow we will begin at eight.”

  “Do that,” I said, reaching for the door to the RV. “I’ll be there at nine.”

  My dramatic exit was spoiled by Ridley. “Hey, what’s that up there?”

  He pointed to the roof, where a strange silhouette stood out against the setting sun. The being was reaching for some kind of cylinder mounted on a tripod, itself on some strange-looking platform.

  “That,” Schwartz announced, “is Master Theodorus.”

  The guesthouse was large, but most rooms seemed to be occupied. An African American man of about fifty, James by name and clearly one of the senior Witherspoon staff, directed Ridley and me to a small upstairs room.

  The first thing I noticed was a shelf of books, someone’s cherished Civil War collection—Catton, Freeman, Foote. And even what appeared to be a first edition, in two volumes, of the Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant. I’ve done a lot of reading during my road years, and the Civil War is a frequent subject, often because Ridley and I found ourselves near battlefields and monuments. At that moment, however, the collection only reminded me that this guesthouse had probably housed slaves. And that the Witherspoon fortune had almost certainly depended on slave labor.

  There were also bunk beds. Ridley threw his duffel on the top, but I grabbed it. “My turn,” I said. Bad enough that he had been caught up in my current mess. “You heard what Schwartz said about that Neal guy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re involved, too.”

  He shrugged, as if this happened every week. I said, “I have to lie low, but you could get Schwartz or someone to drop you in town. I’ll give you the rest of my money and you could vanish.”

  “Nah,” he said. “I’m still working for you.”

  “Even though this isn’t our usual job, and you might wind up in jail.”

  He grinned, this time in resignation mode. “Still better than what I’ve got back home.”

  I can’t speak for Ridley, who in sleep could be taken for dead, but I had a good night for a fugitive from justice in a top bunk. The Witherspoon estate was blessedly quiet, a nice change from the freeway noise or trash pickups that normally
cursed my evenings.

  As Ridley and I staggered out of our quarters the next day, it was clear that my threat to appear late wasn’t something I could hold to: I was hungry.

  We emerged into a cloudy, muggy morning. Daylight allowed us to appreciate the extensive renovations performed on the Witherspoon mansion: the roof had been modified to create an actual platform—the one that the so-far-mysterious Theodorus had used last night—and there was a two-story addition ten feet across that I quickly judged to be an elevator shaft.

  “Lotta work here,” Ridley said. He seemed to approve.

  An open garage revealed an old car in the middle of a remodeling. “What is that, Ridley?” If he didn’t know a car, it wasn’t worth asking about.

  “Used to be a Duesenberg, I think, 1937–38. Not sure what it is now.”

  We presented ourselves at the kitchen door, knocking.

  No answer. Repeated the knocking. Nothing.

  So I opened the door, into a pantry. Ridley followed me through to the biggest kitchen I’ve ever seen, dominated by a huge central workspace or island.

  And occupied by a short, somewhat stout African American woman in her fifties, I judged. She was scrambling eggs, though she turned enough to look us over as if we were selections in the meat section of a grocery. “You must be Mitchell and Hough,” she said. “I’m Dorothy and I am the cook. We make breakfast, lunch, and dinner here. I will assume you are here for all three, unless you tell me otherwise. I do appreciate at least an hour’s notice of any absence. I hate to waste food.”

  She stirred the eggs into a bowl. “Toast? Bacon? Coffee is over there, and we operate on the help-yourself system.”

  Ridley and I both nodded eagerly and accepted full plates. We were headed to the dining room when she said, “Hold on.”

  We froze. “You’re the help, like me. You eat in there.” She nodded to a small dining area, table for four. Nice windows.

  “Really?”

  “Count your blessings, young man.”

  I didn’t really resent being shunted to the servants’ area, since I had a good sense of my place in the Witherspoon ménage.