What of Terry Conniston? (23 page)

She had a lot of fingerprints on her. But she was a girl who wanted sensation and did as she pleased: a woman in heat.

Charley Bass bought another beer and carried it over to her table. “May I join you? I'm unarmed.”

She looked up; her cranky, pouty expression changed. Charley Bass adjusted his smile, ready for her rebuff. The girl picked up her margarita and drank fast; some of it ran down her chin. He realized, what he hadn't seen before, that she had had quite a few. Her eyes were slightly vague and she almost upset the glass when she set it down. She stared moodily at him and stuck out a pudgy index finger to swirl the ice cube in the squat glass; she still hadn't said a word. The air around her was thick with the heavy scent of cheap perfume.

Finally she spoke but her voice was pitched low and he couldn't make out what she said against the heavy background of talk and laughter. He bent down, staring at the heavy lard-white mass of bunched cleavage visible in the scoop-neck of her dress. “Beg pardon?”

“I said siddown.”

“Thanks.” He settled into a fragile-looking chair across from her. When he put his elbow on the table it rocked toward him. It was a tiny table, hardly large enough for two drinks and four elbows. Noise and crowd swirled close-packed around them. He said, “I'm Charley Bass.”

“Good for you.”

He put on his hearty red-cheeked smile. “Hell of a town to get stuck in, isn't it?”

“You can say that again.”

He wondered how old she was. Twenty-five, maybe; getting a little too soft and suety. A few years more and she'd start getting passed down the line until some smart guy came along and took her on a little vacation to Hong Kong or South America, and then they'd cop her passport and unload her into a crib where she'd get beat all the way down until she didn't even
want
to go home. He knew: he'd plied that trade himself.

She was watching him sleepily. He said, “Here I had a great weekend all set up, meet some friends down at Rocky Point and go out on their boat for marlin in the Gulf. But what happens? My damn Buick blows a wheel-bearing five miles up the road and I spend the whole damn day getting a tow back to this lousy town. Stuck here till morning now. How do you like that?”

“Yeah,” she said. “We had a breakdown too, back up the road. Seven stinking hours in this heat before the good-for-nothin' grease monkey got the water pump fixed.”

He said quickly, “We?”

“Yeah, some—some people I hitched a ride with.” Her restless eyes shifted away, combing the crowd.

His hands felt sticky. “You don't mean to tell me you're alone here? What a godawful place.”

“You can say that again.”

“How about another drink, hey?”

“You paying?”

“Of course, honey.”

“Okay, then. I'm kind of short, you know? The guy with the bugle over there bought me these, but then some fat Mexican woman came in and dragged him away by the ear.” She didn't laugh. “His wife, I guess. Seven or eight months pregnant from what I could see. Poor son of a bitch must be pretty uptight if she keeps after him like that all the time. Why didn't she just let him enjoy himself? Who'd be hurt by it?”

“It wouldn't have bothered you?”

“Me? I like it, they like it. What's wrong with that?”

“Well,” Charley Bass said, “you know these Catholics.”

“I was raised Catholic. I know all about it.”

“Say, what'd you say your name was?”

“Billie Jean. I forgot your name.”

“Charley Bass. Like Sam Bass, the Texas outlaw, ever heard of him?”

“I don't know. You related to him or something?”

“Who knows?” He turned and signaled the barmaid. She came over with a cork-lined metal tray and a bored face and Charley Bass made a circular gesture to order another round; the barmaid turned away, expressionless, giving no indication whether she had understood the order.

He shifted his chair forward when he turned back to face the table. His knee touched against Billie Jean's and she did not withdraw; he gave her a lidded smile and said, “I'm in the oil business. Buy and sell leases. From Pasadena, believe it or not. How about you?”

“Oh, I'm from—just around, you know.”

His hand, under the table, explored her thigh. Under the thin fabric of her dress he saw her nipples grow, harden and swell. Her eyelids drooped and she squirmed on the chair. He said, “I got a room in the old hotel a couple of blocks up the street. How about it, Billie Jean? Nice way to pass the time.”

“Maybe,” she said. A crafty light came into her eyes. “Look, Mister Charley Bass, maybe you'd like to do a girl a favor.”

“Just name it.”

“Well, it's like this, see—these people I, uh, hitched a ride with, they're still here in town, but when I came along with them I didn't know what they were like. I found out they're, you know,
involved
in something kind of shady-like. I ain't sure what it is,” she added hastily, “maybe dope smuggling or something, but I'm pretty sure they think I'm onto them on account of something one of them let slip in the car. Soon as we got here I split, you know? They ain't come looking for me but just the same I'd just as soon not see them again, you know what I mean? They're pretty tough, you know?”

He reached out and patted her hand. “I'll be glad to give you a ride, honey.”

“Well, it—”

She broke off because the barmaid had returned. The barmaid set down drinks on the table and waited indifferently until Charley Bass paid her, whereupon she counted the money laboriously and turned away without a word or a nod.

Billie Jean said, “It ain't just a ride I need.”

“What, then?”

“Well, these people I was with, they've still got my papers. You know, my tourist permit. Mister, I don't want to go back there and face them just to get that piece of paper. I tell them I want my permit back and they'll sure as hell think there's something fishy going on, you know? Maybe think I'm gonna turn them over to the cops or something. They're a pretty mean bunch, you know?”

Charley Bass said, “Well, I don't know, honey. It's pretty tough getting back through the border without papers.”

“I thought maybe you'd know a way.”

“I might,” he said, and pretended to think on it. Billie Jean leaned toward him with a moist hot smile; the dress slipped off her shoulder and one huge breast almost slipped its moorings—a deliberate movement and one which she undoubtedly had practiced to an art. He thought about it. She had a vapid conventional mind, desolate and predictable; she wouldn't be any trouble. A few nights of hot sex with her and then maybe he could look up Sweeney in Hermosillo—Sweeney was in the skin trade, or had been, and a lush-bodied girl stranded in Mexico without papers was just Sweeney's meat. Sweeney would give Charley Bass a cut of the profits. If Sweeney was still there. It had been some time since Charley Bass had conned his way up out of that league but he was a little strapped right now and a few hundred extra wouldn't hurt any.
Why not?

Billie Jean said throatily, “Be a buddy, mister. You know what'll happen if I get caught without that damned permit. I get a couple years of laundry-hands and starchy prison food to spread out on and ain't nobody ever gonna look twice at me again. Listen, they put you in jail down here, you know what happens to you. The American consul never heard of you. Piss and dirt in some old cell they used to use back when they fought Indians. Big stinky Indian butches crawling all over you and you rot on pinto-bean dysentery. They won't even let a white woman work, like a Mexican citizen prisoner, make a few pesos on the side.”

“You seem to know a lot about it.”

“I heard once from a girl I knew. It sent shivers crawlin' up my back just
hearing
about it.”

“Sounds pretty grim.”

“You can say that again. So how about it, lover?”

He covered her hand with his palm and gave it a warm avuncular squeeze. “You just leave it to me, honey. Everything's going to be just fine and dandy.”

Billie Jean's plump face lit up. She leaned forward and pulled his head toward her and kissed him with moist warmth and suction.

C H A P T E R
Seventeen

The big Cadillac drummed eastward away from the seacoast, its quadruple headlights stabbing the darkness. Twisting through the coastal hills, Carl Oakley had both hands on the wheel at the ten-minutes-to-two position; his head was thrust forward slightly, tense, the eyes concentrated on the pitted road ahead as it sped into the light.

Diego Orozco said, “You want me to drive a while? You're pretty tired.”

“I'm all right. I'm fine.” He felt alert but jumpy; he had taken two Dexedrines. “Where did we miss them, Diego?”

“Beats shit out of me.”

“Your boys seemed too positive they couldn't have got through Rocky Point.”

“If they had we'd have picked up a smell of them. They didn't take no boat out, there weren't any airplanes and copters in or out, and the road south along the coast is blocked off for construction. How many times you want to go over all this, Carl? It adds up the same every time.”

Oakley stuck a cigar in his mouth and punched the dashboard lighter. “You keep trying to use your head. You figure the thing to do is rule out all the impossibilities and look at whatever you've got left. But what happens when you rule out all the impossibilities and there isn't anything left?”

“Then,” said Orozco, “you've overlooked something.”

“All right. What?”

“Lots of things, Carl. They didn't do what we expected them to do, that's all. Plenty other things they could've done just as easy. For instance maybe they're holed up making arrangements to get phony papers. False passport, forged seaman's card and papers, you can get a berth on some Liberian freighter bound for Macao and nobody'll ever find you again. All it takes is a little time and the right contacts. Or maybe they figured to draw us off down here on a cold trail and then disappear, filter back into Nogales over the weekend and get back into the States by joining the mob of tourists returning Sunday night from the bullfights.”

The lighter had snapped; Oakley pressed it to his cigar and heard it sizzle. He sucked the powerful smoke deep into his lungs and coughed. “But you're sure the bleeper's still working. The batteries haven't had time to die out?”

“I ain't sure of nothing—but theoretically the thing's still alive and well and livin' in that suitcase. We got to get within twenty-five or thirty miles of it before we can pick it up, though.”

“It doesn't add up. If they didn't get as far as Rocky Point they've got to be somewhere along this road. Why didn't we pick up the signal if we passed right by them?”

“Maybe they're holed up in a lead mine. Maybe they were too close to a short-wave broadcast station that jammed the signal. Maybe there was a mountain between us and an ionized cloud layer above it. Maybe they discovered the bug and smashed it. Maybe they emptied the suitcase and buried it in a slag heap full of metal ore. Maybe the bleeper was faulty in the first place and ain't working at all. You want ironclad guarantees, Carl? You won't get them from me.”

“Maybe if my mother had a beard she'd be my father. I've had maybes up to here.”

Orozco sat back, adjusting his bulk, tugging at his amply fleshed throat. He subsided into tight-lipped reserve; when Oakley glanced at him his eyes, reflecting the dim dashboard glow, had an ominous murky color.

The lights of a car rushed forward and passed them; Oakley glimpsed a family of adults and kids in the long chrome-glinting station wagon, towing a boat on a trailer.

Orozco sat motionless, the smoke of Oakley's cigar making a vague cloud between them. Oakley felt rumpled and haggard. He glanced at the gun glinting dully in Orozco's waistband and said, “Could you kill a man?”

“I have.”

“You have? Where?”

“Where you get a medal for it. Korea.”

“Not the same thing as I meant. What if we do catch up and they want to make a fight of it?”

Orozco's head turned slowly. “
I'm
not worried about me, Carl.”

“All right—all right.” Orozco was right, Oakley thought irritably. It was himself he was worried about. Orozco, giving him a gun yesterday, had asked, “How good are you with one of these things?” and he had had to answer, “Not very.” It wasn't a question of marksmanship; it was a question of character. He had never been under fire, never aimed a gun at another human being.

The sky ahead was graying up. They covered the next forty miles without talking while dawn came indigo and violet and red and pink and orange. Oakley lowered the visor against the horizon-balanced sun. He felt the glazed, slightly out-of-contact unreality of sleeplessness. His eyes began to stray out of focus and he had to blink frequently and harshly; the eye-sockets felt dry and raw from cigar smoke. There thrummed in his ears a steady soporific beating of engine, tires, wind.. The road followed the gentle undulations of arid swells across the uneven desert, mountains heaving their dry-sided bulk against the sky at random intervals in various directions; the road swung along parallel to a dry riverbed, keeping to the low ground. A roadsign loomed and flashed by:
Caborca 20 km
. Shortly thereafter, something began to tweet and twitter in his ears—at first he thought it was an atmospheric change that had set up a ringing; then the sound became so tangible he began to look around the interior of the car to see if a small bird had flown in through the window by mistake.

Orozco said very gently, “Slow it down, Carl.” He was bent forward over the portable radio receiver that bulked on the floor between his legs. Half-blinded by sun glare, Oakley could barely make out the rhythmic flash of a dull red lamp on top of the set. Orozco was turning dials in his big fists; the beeping sound grew louder and softer as he adjusted the coordinates. He brought it back up to its loudest pitch and made a mark on the map in his lap. “Somewhere south of us,” he muttered. “South-east. Keep going a couple miles and we'll take another fix, try and triangulate him down.”