The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 25 Classic Mysteries

Zangara took our money and never returned change, though I suspected he was buying in the village at current prices. He was a tall, thin man of indeterminate age. His skin was like dark brown leather stretched over his bones. He had a great hawk-beak nose and pointed chin and crags of bone over his glistening black eyes. His coarse black hair grew low on his round, sloping forehead.

“Mucho dinero, señor,” he would say when I tried to find out how much an item had cost. Much money. All the money he had carried into the village.

Trantham would curse him until the curses ended in a choked gasp. And Zangara would look at him with his face a blank, brown skull. Trantham would wheel and stalk off, aching to break Zangara’s chicken-thin neck in his two heavy hands. But he never laid a finger on Zangara. We needed the man. Without him, we might buy nothing from the village. He was our final contact with the world. With something beyond this sun-baked adobe house and a pair of money belts holding thirty thousand dollars apiece.

As if our isolation were not bad enough, Trantham and I began to keep separated from each other. I was ready to gag on his raving. The mere sound of his voice became even more hateful than the endless heat and humidity. And my efforts to accept things calmly infuriated him.

We never permitted the tension to reach the breaking point. Each realized how dependent he was on the other. Each heard in the silence of the nights the throb, throb of hatred from the village and the rustling shadow of Ingram across the river.

By unspoken agreement Trantham and I avoided each other. If he were in the patio, I remained on the front porch reading or playing solitaire — and I even invented two new solitaire games of my own — or looking through the rusty screening at the river or mesquite.

And all the while this house stood across the river.

It was set apart from the small town over there as our house was set apart. It was frame, and looked very small from this distance. Brown, as if it needed paint and repairs. A house that had stood empty for some time, sleeping in the shadow of the cottonwood tree growing at the corner of the yard.

Then one day Trantham was very quiet. He was on the front porch and I was inside, reading. The very lack of activity on his part finally penetrated my consciousness. He never sat still or was silent for very long. Yet it seemed now a long time since I had heard any sign of him.

I threw aside the six-months-old, dog-eared magazine and walked to the front door.

The heat was a crawling, sticky thing, clouding the mind and souring the body. Yet Trantham was standing in the full glare of the sun, in the front yard.

He was looking at the house across the river.

There was movement at the house, the remote figure of a girl going inside. She was back out in a few seconds, lifting something to her eyes. A brief flash of light caught on the binoculars. She had them trained on Trantham.

I looked at him. His shirt was black with sweat, his hair around his balding crown stuck to his skull with more sweat. He was a big, tall bruiser with powerful rounded shoulders, a heavy chest and corded neck.

He stood unmindful of the sun that he had been cursing this morning. He waved.

I looked across the river.

The girl waved back.

Now it was Trantham who moved. He brushed past me like a bull elephant, giving no indication he knew I was there.

I heard him rummaging violently in his room. Then he came out carrying a pair of binoculars.

I watched him as he raised the glasses and looked at the girl. I saw him suck in his breath, and I saw a tremor cross his shoulders.

I looked toward the girl myself. But without glasses she was too distant from me for her beauty to do to me what it had done to Trantham.

I watched them a few moments longer as they waved and gestured toward each other; and then I went in my room and slammed the door.

Trantham was in much better spirits at supper. Several times he chuckled to himself as we munched on frijoles and tortillas.

For him, the boredom had been shattered today.

They played the game three days. Lurking in the house, the heat crawling through all my cells and veins, I hated Trantham for the first time. I’d never liked him, but this was something different.

I wondered how I could get the binoculars from him. I knew he wouldn’t give them up, and if I challenged him for them there’d be only one result. We were that much on edge.

At lunch the fourth day, Zangara had disappeared. I stood in the kitchen and shouted his name three or four times.

From the doorway, Trantham said quietly, “He’s gone over the river.”

I spun around. “What for?”

Trantham grinned. His face was big and heavy and oily. “He went across the river with a few bucks. That town over there is more Mex than American. He can find out.”

“You damned fool!”

His grin turned to a chuckle. “She’s a real looker, a real doll. Lonely and bored over there, I’m betting.”