jpt is delighted to present this excerpt from Mr. Naismith's forthcoming novel, Murder for a Distant Stranger.
An ancient International Harvester pickup breasted the hill behind them, fishtailed and slid to an uncertain stop with a howl of worn brakes. Once blue, it was now so spattered with patches, multi-coated primer and desert grime as to seem camouflaged. Half the windshield was missing, replaced by a scrap of weathered plywood. Both headlights were broken. The driver’s door flopped open, and a tall man with a prominent pot belly stepped out. He wore a yellow-and-black giant’s-checkerboard shirt and jeans bleached nearly white. He walked with the rolling gait of an old horseman. As he approached, he settled a worn, sweated Stetson on his head. Under it, his broad, freckled face cracked in a pumpkin grin.
“Welcome to the stampin grounds, Sweetie,” he bawled and enfolded Felicia van Kamp in a grizzly’s embrace.
Felicia laughed and wriggled free. “Richard Poole, this is Jackson Frask. Known to friends—everyone this side of the Divide—as Jumpin Jack Frask.”
The lanky man lunged and grabbed
“Jack’s still king of the cowboys hereabouts,” she continued. “He’s probably the only real cowboy who ever made it in the movies.”
“Aw,” he said, “don’t brag on me before company, Leesie.”
She shoved him playfully. “He’s also the biggest all-round phoney in six states. That saddlebum sh*tkicker talk is to get your guard down so he can—what, Jack?—hornswoggle you? buffalo you? bamboozle you? He’s got a golden phrase for it.”
He shook his head. “Still the feistiest brat around, huh? I thought you’d a found some man to take some of the salt out of you, honey.” He glanced at
“Don’t get me started, Jack. I know you touched John Wayne once, but I also know it’s all a character part from The Man from Horseshoe Bend or some other six-reel oater from your youth.”
Frask drawled, “She’s really something, ain’t she? Answers for everything, and a hair trigger on her mouth and her temper.”
“Jack—Richard Poole is here as an investigator for the company. But I think he’s okay.”
Frask surveyed
“You know what I mean. Drop the yokel routine. You’ve done as much to fight
“Not hardly a fight. More a little intense discussion.”
“You heard about the. . . murder, Jack? Christ, I can hardly say the word!”
He patted her arm. “I come over quick as I could. It was on the CB. Thought we could at least talk. I didn’t know you was here till a couple of days ago.”
“It’s dreadful,” she said. ‘I just don’t understand what’s happening. I thought it would all be simple, and I remembered working here with Father, and I guess it got all hazy with nostalgia. I didn’t keep my focus.”
“You ain’t to blame,” Frask said fiercely. “Don’t you think you’re in the same league of twisted thinking as them boys—and I mean Naismith and Carter as much as Henley and his hired suits. This may get real nasty real quick, and I think you oughta pack your knapsack and move over to the ranch with me for awhile. Where you stayin now?”
“A rented trailer out at Red Rock. A tin box, but it has a swamp cooler.”
“Let’s shift you to the house, Sweetie. You know I got all the room in the world since Francine left.”
“I couldn’t do that. It would be running away. The crew would—”
“Forget that!’ Frask growled. “You think I got the market cornered on dumb macho bullsh*t? Listen to yourself! I’ve known you since you couldn’t get up on a horse, and you don’t change a lot. Still think you need to show your old man you’re as tough as the son he never had.”
Frask nodded approval. “A sensible Easterner! It happened when the planets are all lined up right. You come along, Mr. Poole—I’ll show you Aces and Eights and cook you a big supper.”
“Aces and eights?”
“My little place,” Frask said. “Bought it after my biggest movie part, back in nineteen and fifty. I was the guy who shot Wild Bill in the thing, so I thought it was a good name for the spread. ’Bout the only decent paycheck I got from working in the oaters. Then I got into them cowboys-and-aliens fiascos with Naismith, and it drove me clean out of the business.”
“Cowboys and aliens?”
“Come on—I’ll show you my souvenirs. Shoot, I don’t get a chance to dust off that old horsesh*t. We’ll drink cold beer, chew hot steaks and be lords of creation! Put this little woman to work in the kitchen, where she oughta be . . .” He chuckled, ducking a sharp swat from Felicia, caught her around the waist, dragging her to his truck. “Don’t you struggle, little lady. I done this a hunert times alongside everybody from Johnny Mack Brown to Lash LaRue. I got a Ph.D. in maiden-abductin!” With a whoop, he thrust Felicia into the cab, and
Frask’s ranch house was an old building, brick and weathered wood, in a grove of gnarled cottonwoods. A rustic gatepost arched over the drive was marked ACES AND 8s in writhen pokerwork. Frask led them through the cool, dim interior—polished slate floors, pine paneling, Mexican rugs and hangings, chairs of bent wood and steer horns, an elk head staring over a massive creekstone hearth, a brace of Henry lever-action rifles over a school-of-Remington oil of two cowboys dashing quarter horses over a rolling prairie.
Frask gestured carelessly and said, “It’s a bit heavy-handed, but my ex—Francine—had a one-track mind as a decorator. I think she truly believed I liked all that cowboy crap!”
He led Rick Poole to a long room off the living room and said, “You browse through this old junk while me and Felicia get a jump on a supper fit to eat.”
The walls were mostly tall cabinets and shelves crammed with exotica—pearl-handled revolvers in worn holsters, a rust-pitted bowie knife, flint arrowheads and implements, silverplate trophy cups, bits of harness. One row of shelves held 35 mm. movie film cans. Another was heaped with manuscript binders sporting typed labels: DEATH CANYON STANDOFF, RAGING ARROWS, REDHAWK’S REVENGE, STAGECOACH TO BALD BUTTE, dozens of others. A bison head moldered in melancholy splendor at one end of the room, over a glass case enclosing a Plains Indian war bonnet, moccasins, a stone ax, belts of bright beadwork and oddments of turquoise jewelry.
Another tall bookcase was filled with books and magazines carefully ordered—science fiction and fantasy,
In smaller type below, a lead-in blurb: “Readers have deluged us with commendatory letters on Elron Naismith’s stories. This epic adventure continues his unique vision of the new forces now transforming our world and the destiny of the human race. The processes he describes are within grasp of our present science and technology, reminding us that Today’s Science Fiction is Tomorrow’s Science Fact!” —Jon Carter, ed.
As he shelved the magazine, Frask returned with a tall pilsner glass. “Grab a cold one,
Frask glanced at the magazine and said, “Ah, you found the trash collection, huh? Not that the rest of this isn’t pretty much 24-carat rubbish, too. I guess I hang onto that old space-opera stuff because of sentimental memories. I phased my worn ass out of the movie business on those goddam goofy Cosmos Productions catastrophes. I keep that sh*t to remind how awful it really was when I start feelin pangs of remorse.”
“Cosmos Productions?”
Frask lowered himself into a big leather chair and sighed. “Yeh. A cockamamie idea launched by Naismith and Carter back in 19 and 51, I think. I got sucked into it because I had a lousy thief for an agent. He said the cowboy business was as dead as General Custer, and he thought sci-fi was gonna be It for the next hunert years. He talked about Captain Video and Buck Rogers and that stuff and TV—he thought he would make me a goddam superhero runnin around in funny-lookin underwear sellin breakfast food to dumbass kids. So this schmuck sells me to Cosmos Productions, a new outfit in
“Anyhow, they started this string of cheapo movies for drive-ins—gonna put together cowboys and space stuff, best of both worlds—hell, all worlds out in space! Biggest dumb-bell idea anybody ever tried to put on film. We come out here to the studio on the ranch—I’d shot a couple standard oaters with Jimmy Bascomb and the Range Hounds here, so I knew it. We was gonna put together a serial and a couple features—really low Z-grade stuff. But serials was as dead as dish nights, and the features went from bad to unbelievable. They’d signed up some burn-outs—Lottie LaMaze, between spells of shock therapy, and old Chester Frankel. God, I’d seen his movies when I was a kid, before sound!
“They said we had financing from some mystery millionaire, friend of Naismith and Carter, who believed all that bullsh*t in Carter’s magazines about hidden mind powers and revive your sexual magic. We had a pretty good crew—a lot of talent on the streets then, between the TV scare and the goddam politicians tryin to rid our nation’s movie screens of the great big red menace. But Naismith was writin the scripts, and he didn’t know horseapples from applebutter about movies. He wrote this sh*t that would cost a billion to film, even if you could figure out how to do it, and that would take a f*ckin genius.
“We got here in late fall—comin on to be pretty goddam cold. The old ranch was nothin much to live in, and people were feelin pinched and cranky when we got bogged down in shootin. The thing we started on was called Terrors of Chthonos. Yeh, that’s cuth-oh-nus, even if it sounds like somebody pukin. I called it Terrible Gonads to piss Naismith off. I was scripted in as an intergalactic warlord named Marmoth or maybe Marmalade or something—number-one heavy, see? Up to this time I was usually the guy headin up the rustlers or the number-two bank robber or like that. I got shot about halfway through reel two in most scripts. This time, I thought I had paycheck right through this whole piss-epic.
“We had the usual troubles with a skinflint production—equipment jammed up, no props to speak of, lousy food. But it got itself goin till about Thanksgiving. Then the weather acted up—big-ass northers howlin in, colder than Naismith’s heart. Lottie LaMaze fell off the wagon with moonshine she got over the mountains, and Chester Frankel was as queer as a fourteen-dollar bill and wouldn’t leave the crew alone. Sh*t, if we’d filmed all the stuff goin on off the set, we’d had a hell of a movie!”
Frask paused to drain his beer. He rubbed the tall glass along his temple. His fine hair had been strawberry blond. Now it was cottony fuzz. He massaged his leathery face and smiled dully. “I’m borin your butt off,
“Oh no—I love it,”
“Just about right. This weirdness ain’t stuff people pound out on their trusty Smith-Coronas. We got a couple of films in the can. One was Androids at Apache Pass, I think the goddam title was, and another was . . .yeh, Range-Riders from Atlantis. Jesus! Enough to shrivel your balls—excuse my French.
“So, Naismith was doin his little pirouettes and tutus around the place—he made poor old Chet Frankel look like a he-man—and Jon Carter was testing everybody with his Elronics Y-Meter. Half the crew was stoned on marijuana, hot stuff for the desert in 1950 or so, and I was just keepin my head down and hopin the paychecks would show up. Then this guy appears, see, bugger in a big black Mercedes. The mystery backer, and Naismith and Carter keep him under wraps. He’s this college kid, right outta
“Turns out he’s Alexander Mason Fairley the Third, and he’s totally sold on that sh*t Naismith grinds out—hidden powers of Mu, increase longevity with electric treatments, learn to levitate in the privacy of your home—you know. He’s also in with Felicia’s daddy, been a student on digs, all that. Now Naismith don’t brook no rivals as the man says, and he had no time for van Kamp or archeology, unless it was gonna dig up the Seven Cities of Cibola or Angel Moroni’s golden books, whatever.
“So Naismith gets the kid ensconced in the only decent room in the ranch house, and we go on tryin to film dreck in the teeth of howlin gales and blue northers like I never seen in all the years I was out there actually punchin sons of bitches. Naismith decides he’ll make this one, Ice Monsters of Gila Mountain, to use footage we could shoot in the drifts. Bill Hamilton, our camera operator, though, come down with gallopin frostbite, and Lottie LaMaze wandered outside one night and caught the whoopin pneumonia. The rich kid decides he wants to ski at
“We give it up about New Year’s, when Carter and Naismith skedaddled. The state plow got through, and the rest of us went out in the old crew trucks. I don’t guess I’d of ever come back, but I’d bought this place in the fall, when I was flush and had foolish hopes. A few years later I got sick of fallin off horses and burnin buildings for a couple bucks. I’d busted every spare part I had,
Frask sighed heavily and levered himself up from the chair. “I still feel every one of them falls when I get halfway settled,
The massive meal filled
Which then woke him with frantic beeping early, as violet light suffused the room. He cursed, remembering he had yet to change to Mountain Time. Awake, he slipped from bed and walked to the window. The flat scrubland around the ranch glowed like a promise, and the air was cool and dry as it wafted into the room. Then he saw a figure moving in the nearest stand of cottonwoods.
It moved in a quick, crouching lope from the trees to a half-decayed shed a hundred yards back of the house. Then it slipped to the cover of an old water tank over which stood a small windmill tower. The mill’s tin blades were warped and frozen, and the tank was nearly engulfed by sere weeds.
He dressed quickly, wincing as his head throbbed to him an echo of bourbon, and shuffled to Frask’s room. He tapped on the door, paused and tapped harder. He opened the door. A king-sized bed empty but for a tangle of bright quilts. He padded through the house. The gaudy rooms were empty excepting their taxidermical furnishings. He called Frask’s name then stepped out the back door into a blaze of light leveling across the valley.
Then his mind registered “Gunshot!” when a gruff voice yelled, “I see you, asshole! Show yourself!” He peeped around the tank, rubbing at bruises acquired in his reflexive dive to the ground. Felicia van Kamp stood in the dooryard of the house, with a lever-action rifle pointed at him.
“Jesus, don’t shoot, Felicia,” he called. The rifle barrel dipped as he sat up.
“Oh, for God’s sake,
Brushing at his jeans, he rose, muttering, “I don’t skulk. Prowl, maybe . . .”
“I might have shot you,” she said. “Where’s Jack? I heard something and got up, and he was gone.”
“You didn’t check to see if I was gone?”
“I didn’t want to bother you.”
“I expect what you heard was me.”
“Well, what in God’s name are you doing? Or do I have to guess?”
“Somebody definitely was skulking—around that shed and out here. I think he ran up the creek bed.”
Felicia turned and
She went up the side in an agile bound, while
“Jesus! It’s Jack—he’s down!” she called back to
It took some minutes to bring Frask around. He had an ugly gash over his right ear, which left a sheet of blood down his neck. His pale eyes were unfocused as he shook his head and groaned.
“God damn sidewinder son of a bitch blind-sided me,” he said. “Snucker suck up on me. Getting too damn old, Leesie,” he said as she dabbed at the cut.
“You’re surely too old to be getting bashed on the head,” she said. “You’re pushing seventy-five, Jack.”
“It’s pushing me,” he said. “That codwalloper must of brained me with a big old rock . . .”
The mate to Felicia’s Henry rifle lay in a heap of small rocks a dozen feet away, its butt badly fractured. Someone had pounded it thoroughly after downing Frask.
The old man leaned on
“Who was it? Did you get a good look?”
“Ah, sh*t—I don’t know. I think I’m hallucinatin. I swear it looked like somebody wearin a goddam wet suit. You believe that? In the friggin desert in a wet suit? I just half-turned when the bastard brained me. I must of heard something, but my ears are about shot—all those goddam movie explosions. They blew me up real good in about twenty-five movies, you know?”
In the long country kitchen, they sat at a trestle table, Frask sucking scalding and opaque black campfire coffee while Felicia wound his head in a gauze turban. He shook his head gingerly, as if to test for rattles.
“You got any idea what’s happenin here, friend?” Frask asked
Felicia said, “Arnold Otobi’s dead, and my crew is scared out of their minds, Jack. Now you bring me here and this happens. It’s starting to scare me, too.”
Frask patted her hand. “I can still take care of you, honey. I promised your dad I’d keep an eye on you twenty years ago, you know. It don’t look too good getting bopped on the head in my own back yard, but by God, I got my guard up now!”
She stroked the liver-spotted hand. “That’s so sweet, Jack. But you do sound a lot like one of your old movies when you get wound up.”
“Don’t you patronize me, sonny boy,” Frask snapped. “I recall when you was just second-string halfback on the high school team. Most folks thought you’d end up in reform school.”
Houseman grimaced and said, “So they were wrong. Felicia got me out here—now let’s have a statement.”
Without comment, Houseman recorded the sketchy details. He looked at the broken rifle and shook his head at Frask’s turban.
“You still disputing with Naismith on the boundaries?” he asked.
“No dispute there. I got them cold, and them egg-suckin bastards know it. My line goes right over the hills—the old fences marked it.”
“You think this may be part of your little range war, Jack? You been out messing with their fences? Or committing any other harassment?”
Frask mumbled peevishly, gnawing at his handlebar mustache. “I’ll give them harassment. Harass their effete, citified asses right back East!”
Houseman sighed, pocketing his notebook. “They got a restraining order, Jack. You keep messing with them, and I’ll cart you to the lock-up. Won’t like it, but I’ll do it.”
Frask grunted. “They come around here bashin me on the head, next time I’ll shoot first.”
“Nah. It was like something out of one of them goddam kung-fu movies. Whaddya call em, ninjas. All black suit, just eyes showin. It was downright creepy. Could have been man, woman or child, but the asshole packed a mean wallop.” He touched the bandage carefully.
Felicia walked Houseman back to his unit, and
By late afternoon, Felicia had fretted herself out over Frask, who insisted he was hale and hearty again. She decided to revisit the site and collect her clothes from the trailer.
Felicia put a casserole in the oven, set the timer and nagged Frask to rest. He sat before his 32-inch TV screen and looked surly.
“Gonna rerun Retreat from Skull Canyon,” he said. “Got most of them on tape now. See how old Sam Wild got outta his fix. You just go on about your business and let me be. You’re a lot worse than Francine when it comes to high-caliber natterin.”
The sun rested atop the smallest western hill, a casual balancing act. Shadows were long and purple, heat draining from the air. A pinion jay screeched at
“Let me wrestle this thing,”
Felicia flared up then shrugged and handed
She wrenched the door open and ran to the house.
By midnight the state police team had dismantled most of the old I-H truck and carefully removed a device from under the hood.
Two men in grotesque armored suits carried an urnlike container on a sling out into the flats, trailed by a helicopter spotlighting their way. In minutes, the bomb was detonated, a low, anticlimactic thump in the desert night.
One of the explosives men trudged to the van and talked with Houseman.
“Basically your regular homemade bomb,” he said wearily. “Four sticks of really ancient farmyard dynamite. Probably twenty years old and sweating like a hog. We got pictures to analyze, but nobody wanted to handle that sumbitch—excuse me, ma’am—more than they had to. A regular cap, wired straight to the starter motor. Whoever planted it didn’t have to be no genius, but they had to be brave or stupid to use that sh*t—excuse me, ma’am—or even carry it around in this heat. It was in a box, shoebox kind of thing. Don’t know if forensics will find anything interesting in the pictures or in the bits of wiring.” ###
Copyright 2007 All Rights Reserved
Luminance 
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