Man on a leash - By Charles Williams Page 0,38
One car would drip that much in a few hours, another in a month.
He went back to the rear of the house and stepped up on the porch. The door was closed, but when he tried it, it swung open freely, and he saw it had been forced with a jimmy or pinch bar. It had been a long time ago, however, for there was no raw, fresh look to the splintered wood where the lock had been torn out of the jamb. There was a stovepipe hole and sleeve through the ceiling, so the room had apparently been the kitchen, but nothing remained now except an old table presumably not worth loading when the last occupants moved away. But something was definitely wrong with the picture, and in a moment he realized what it was.
He went on into the room in front, with its fireplace, and then into the remaining two, presumably bedrooms, all empty of any furniture, all with broken windowpanes, and they were the same. There was only the thinnest film of dust, with no footprints visible anywhere. The house had been swept. The floors should have been heavily covered with dust, drifted sand from the broken windows, and probably old rodent droppings and dead insects, but somebody had cleaned it. Why? To remove footprints? And people had been here, presumably for hours or maybe even days, and nowhere had he seen a cigarette butt, an empty cigarette pack, nonreturnable bottle, or tin can. Trespassers with a conscience? Ecology freaks?
He stood in the kitchen again, still puzzled by this, when something shiny caught his eyes in one of the cracks of the floor. When he looked more closely, at different angles, he saw there were several of them. He pulled a thin splinter of wood from the wreckage of the doorjamb and knelt to poke one out. It was smooth, bright, metallic, shaped like a teardrop but flattened on one side. Solder? he thought. Here? He lifted out another. There was no doubt of it. They’d fallen into the cracks when the floor was being swept. While there was no electricity for a soldering iron, he knew they were also heated by torches, but what in God’s name would somebody have been soldering in this place? He shrugged helplessly and went outside.
There was no litter can or garbage dump anywhere. He went back to the old chicken house and looked inside and behind it. Nothing. He came back and stood under the trees in front, feeling as baffled and frustrated as he had after his interview with Richter. Several people had been here, in two vehicles, they’d cut their way through that chain out there, he was certain this was the place his father had come or been brought at gunpoint; but there wasn’t a shred of proof of it or the slightest clue to their identities. Even reporting it to Brubaker was pointless; he wouldn’t find anything here either. Of course, he’d probably know who owned the place, but that was of little value. The owners would have entered with a key, not a pair of bolt cutters.
He sighed and got in the car and started back out to the gate. From the sagebrush off to his left, the vultures took off again, flapping clumsily to get themselves aloft. Purely on impulse, he stopped the car and got out. It was probably the carcass of a jack-rabbit or a calf, but at least he’d know for sure. As he started out through the brush, he saw a lengthening plume of dust rising from the road. It was coming up from the south, the vehicle itself out of sight beyond the low ridge this side of the gate. He stopped to watch it. It came up to where the gate would be and went past. He went on, beginning to be conscious of the odor of putrefaction. The carcass came into view then. It was a burro, or what was left of one.
It lay in a small open space surrounded by a scattering of greenish-black feathers and the white lime of bird droppings where the vultures had been tearing at it for days or perhaps weeks. All the soft tissues were gone now, consumed by the big birds and the other, smaller scavengers of nature’s clean-up crew, so that little remained except the skeleton, some of the tougher connective tissues, and enough of the leathery hide to identify it. He was about to turn back to the