A Purple Place for Dying Read Free

believe. I'm pretty sure people have been following me. I think I do worry him a little. I suppose it would look bad if the newspapers picked it up-Jass Yeoman's wife demanding an accounting of what happened to her father's money. I guess he must have been worried that maybe I had squirreled away some of my allowance."
    "What makes you think that?"
    "I had a nice little Mexican maid for five years. She quit six months ago and got married. Two men went to her and questioned her for hours, mostly about my personal finances, how much I spent and on what and so on. They claimed to be some sort of accountants. Afterwards she worried about it for a few days, and then came and told me. That happened just two months ago. I had… an unusual relationship with Dolores. We confided in each other. She was very dear to me."
    "And you think that because your husband might be worried, he might be susceptible to some kind of pressure."
    "If I knew what to do, Mr. McGee, I would have tried to do it myself. I even thought I might blackmail my own husband. I hired a man to find out about other women. I guess he was clumsy. The police threw him in jail for three nights running, for little things like spitting on the sidewalk. He gave up."
    "I just don't know," I said.
    She asked me to follow her. We went out to the barren edge of the dropoff. The crumpled hills around us were red-brown, with little patches of stubborn green. There was a clump of wind-twisted pines nearby. She pointed west. The range we were on cascaded down and flattened out, and across the semi-desert plain, distorted by heat shimmer, misty in the distance, we could see the city of Esmerelda, pale cubes rising out of a cluttered smear. She pointed out U.S. 87 angling toward the city from the northeast, about four miles away and three or four thousand feet lower than we were. I could make out two big silver transport trucks crawling along amid the swifter beetles of private cars.
    She stood bare headed, half facing me. "I'm thirty-two years old, Mr. McGee. There's been a lot of wasted time and wasted years. I'm grateful to him, in a way. But I want out. I'm the captive princess, and that's the castle down there. Jass is the king. I can have a little freedom of motion, as long as I ride back to the castle walls at nightfall. Corny I guess. But when you are in love you get some romantic images. And I'm not too ancient to cry myself to sleep. I must have help."
    She stood at my right, half turned to face me, the sun heat of the still day misting her forehead and her upper lip. She wanted the answer. And I frowned in silence, searching for the words to tell her that this was not my sort of thing.
    Suddenly she plunged forward, her shoulder brushing me and knocking me back. She went with her head tilted back, and she landed face down on the baked dirt and the edges of stone, and slid at least six inches after she struck, without having lifted her hands to try to break her fall. The noise that started the fall was a curiously ugly noise. It was a dull sound of impact, like the sound of burying a hatchet into a soft and rotten stump. She lay without twitch, without sound, totally soft and flattened. I heard then the distant ringing bark of a heavy rifle, a ka-rang, echoing in the still rock hills of the windless day. There was too much open space between me and the cabin. I ran in a very fast and very random pattern toward the pines fifty feet away, skidded around them and fell, clutching a twisted root, my legs hanging half over the edge of the drop. A dislodged stone clattered and bounced once, then hit long seconds later and far away. I swallowed the gagging lump that was the clear visual memory of the wet hole punched high in her spine, through the silk blouse, dead center, about two inches below where her neck joined her good shoulders. A big caliber. Plenty of impact. Foot pounds of energy is a product of mass and velocity. Good velocity, for the sound to come that much later. A