Find a Victim (11 page)

As the truck bore down on me, I took careful aim at the lower left-hand corner of the windshield and fired twice. Cracks spiderwebbed the glass, but it didn’t shatter. Without swerving or slackening, the truck roared directly at me.

When it was almost on top of me, I stepped to one side and ran away from it. Its multiple tires growled in my ear. Something tugged at my trouser leg and spun me. I got a tight grip on air and hit the concrete like a sack of sand. Slid down its deadend street to the rough edge of unconsciousness and went over.

It was a long fall straight down through the darkness of my head. I was a middle-aging space cadet lost between galaxies and out of gas. With infinite skill and cunning I put a grain of salt on the tail of a comet and rode it back to the solar system. My back and shoulder were burned raw from the sliding fall. But it was nice to be home.

I sat up and looked around. There was nothing to see
except the bare concrete, the open hangar, the abandoned coupe beside it. From somewhere and everywhere the cicadas chided me: you should have waited and followed, hated and swallowed, waited and followed. I got to my feet and searched for my gun and found it. It was a long walk back to my car.

I backed in through the open gate and drove to the front of the hangar. My headlights stabbed the darkness of its interior, shining on a pool of oil where the truck had stood. There was nothing else in the place but an empty Coke-bottle, years’ accumulation of dust drifted along the walls, some spatters of aluminum paint on the concrete-slab floor. I touched one metallic droplet with my finger. It wasn’t quite dry.

I went outside to the Buick. It was a fairly new car, but driven to pieces. California plates. No registration card. Several brown cigarette butts squashed on the rubber floor-mat. I sniffed them. Marijuana. A road map of the Southwestern states was jammed behind the front-seat cushion. I took it along and drove back to the highway.

The blacktop crossed it and plunged into the foothills in the distance. I sat at the intersection, my motor idling, and looked at the black mountainous horizon. It was a jagged graph of high hopes, repeated disasters.

There was a black and white sign on the far side of the highway:
LAS CRUCES PASS
. I tried to put myself in Bozey’s place. If he had turned right and south, he’d be sure to hit a roadblock on the borders of the county. Northward, the highway would lead him back into town. The pass road seemed most likely, and I took it.

Four or five miles from the intersection, where the road twisted high and narrow among the foothills, I came around a hairpin curve and saw a pulsating red light. A black car was parked diagonally across the road. I braked to a stop in time. It was the sheriff’s Mercury.

He came forward, carrying a red flashlight in his left hand, a carbine in the crook of his other arm.

“Pull off the road and get out. Keep your hands in sight.” Then the flashlight beam found my face. “So it’s you again.”

I sat perfectly still under the eye of the carbine, the flashlight’s red stare. “It’s also you again. Have you seen the truck?”

“What truck?”

“Meyer’s semi-trailer.”

“Would I be sitting up here if I had seen it?” His voice was impatient, but the anger that had shaken him earlier had passed through him and left no other trace.

“How long have you been here, sheriff?”

“Over an hour.”

“What time is it now?”

“One o’clock, a few minutes after. Is there anything else you’d like to know? What I had for supper, for intance?”

“That sounds interesting.”

“I didn’t get to eat any supper.” He leaned in at the window to look at me. The reflection of the flashlight lent his face an unnatural rosiness. “Who’s been clobbering your?”

“You’re very solicitous all of a sudden. It moves me deeply.”

“Cut the vaudeville. And answer my question.”

“Since you put it so charmingly. I took a fall.” I told him where and how. “This redhead had the truck stashed in an empty hangar at the airbase. He blanked out Meyer’s signs with aluminum paint and waited for the heat to die down. Less than an hour ago, Kerrigan met him at the Steakburger drive-in and gave him the go-ahead.”

“You know this?”

“I saw them together. The redhead—his name is Bozey— handed Kerrigan a paper package of something, probably
something long and green. Kerrigan’s payoff.”

“Payoff for what?”

“For setting up the truck, and arranging the getaway.”

“How would Kerrigan do that?”

I didn’t answer. We looked at each other in silence. The mountains rose behind him in the distance like a surf of stone beating soundlessly on an iron sky. Shadowed by his hatbrim, his face was as inscrutable as the sky.

“Aren’t you a little hipped on this Kerrigan business?” he said. “I don’t like the bastard, either. But that doesn’t mean he’s involved with a gang of highjackers.”

“The facts all point in his direction. I’ve given you some of them. There are others. He ordered a load of whisky that he had no use for.”

“How do you know that?”

“He sold the Slipper this morning. He’s leaving his wife for another woman, and he needs ready cash, a lot of it.”

“Who’s the other woman?”

“Not your sister-in-law, if that’s what’s worrying you. She seems to be out of it. The girl’s name is Jo Summer, and she had a singing engagement at the Slipper. The last couple of weeks she’s been playing up to Aquista, apparently getting set to finger him. You’ve got enough evidence there to book them—”

“Evidence? I’ve got your story.”

“Check it. Go over the ground yourself. Round up the suspects before they leave the county.”

“You seem to be instructing me in my duties.”

“It seems to be necessary.”

“Don’t let that paranoid streak run away with you. I can sympathize with your feelings, after the beating you took. But there are worse things than a beating. So I wouldn’t press too hard, Archer.”

“That could be a threat.”

“It could be, but it isn’t. It wouldn’t be good for me if
you got hurt in my territory—badly hurt. And it wouldn’t be good for you. You can’t see much and you can’t do much on the bottom of an irrigation ditch with a bullet in your head.”

I had my hand on the revolver in my pocket. “Is a carbine bullet what you had in mind?”

Church fingered the stock of his carbine. His face was impassive, almost dreamy. A light wind from the mountains probed my clothes and chilled me. The moral chill went deeper. He said:

“You didn’t catch my meaning, I’m afraid. I don’t want anything to happen to you. If you’ll take my advice, you’ll check in at the hospital and get yourself patched up and treat yourself to a rest. That ought to be clear enough.”

“Crystal clear. I lay off Kerrigan and his gentle friends.”

“You lay off, period. I can’t assume responsibility for you if you keep on throwing your weight around. Good night.”

He stepped back to let me turn. The last I saw of him, he was standing in the road beside his car, a lonely silhouette.

CHAPTER
13
:
I drove back down the pass road
and turned toward the city. The glow of its lights was paler, as if the fires that consumed it were burning out. A few late trucks went by toward the south, their headlights long white fingers reaching for morning. None of them was a rig I had seen before. Bozey would be out of the county by this time, headed east or south. Kerrigan would be on his way to Mexico.

I was wrong about Kerrigan. His red convertible was standing on the gravel apron in front of his motor court. The engine was idling, and its blue-gray exhaust puffed and plumed on the air.

I parked on the shoulder of the highway and walked back to the convertible. It was empty. Switching off the ignition, I dropped the keys in my pocket and took my gun out. All but one of the cottages in the court were dark, but there was light in the main building. It leaked through a side window and glazed the green surface of the small oval swimming-pool. I walked around the pool to the rear of the building. The water looked deep and cold.

The light was in the office. Its back door was partly open, and I looked in. The room was newly furnished with a couple of chromium chairs, a metal desk with a black composition top, fluorescent fixtures in the ceiling. Kerrigan was prone between the desk and a small safe, which was open. The back of Kerrigan’s head was open too. In the blank efficient light, I could see the color of his brains.

The cork floor around his head was soaked with blood. I lifted his head by the short hair and saw where the bullet had entered, between the eyes. It looked like a medium-caliber hole, probably .38. The gray triangular eyes were fixed in eternal surprise. I turned them back to the floor and went through his pockets, quickly. A siren in the distance was whirling a thin loop of sound over the rooftops.

Kerrigan had no wallet, no money in any form. There was no trace of the package Bozey had handed him, either in his clothes or in the safe. I pulled out the contents of the safe: bills and canceled checks, the current ledger for the motor court. It had been losing money.

Somewhere on the other side of the court an engine turned over, coughed, and died. The starter whined again, insistently. I left the dead man and followed the broken thread of sound outside. It came from one of the doorless carports fronting on the alley behind the cottages.

The whining motor caught and turned over, roaring. I started to run toward the mouth of the alley, my leather soles clattering and sliding on the tiles around the pool.
A small sports car with the top down backed out of the carport behind the lighted cottage, paused with a squeak of rubber, and shot toward the highway. Jo Summer’s face was darkly intent behind the windshield.

I raised my gun. “Stop. I’ll fire.”

Then something heavy and hard and grunting struck my legs from behind. I went down at the side of the alley. The little car swerved around me, flicking gravel into my face. A pair of knees hit the small of my back like piledrivers. An arm circled my neck in a stranglehold, and another arm reached for my gun.

I held onto the gun, and used it to hammer the elbow bent around my throat. The man on my back growled with pain. His grip relaxed. Using his arm as a lever, I got my shoulder under his weight. He must have weighed two hundred. My muscles creaked as I rose to my knees. I flipped him forward over my head and pinned him on his back, one arm under his neck, the other between his writhing legs.

The man’s legs were encased in black leather, and I didn’t like the color of his breeches. They seemed to be olive-drab in the chancy light. They looked like part of the uniform of the sheriff’s department. A choked voice said something about arrest into my armpit.

I let him go, but I picked up my gun and held it on him as he got to his feet. It was Deputy Braga, Tony Aquista’s cousin. His teeth were a bright gash in his Indian face, and his breath hissed out between them like escaping steam.

“Give me that gun.”

“I think it’s safer with me, Braga.”

His quick obsidian eyes went from the gun to my face and back again. “Hand it over. I saw you pull it on the girl.”

“I was trying to stop her. She’s one of the highjacking
mob. That was a brilliant tactic of yours, letting her get away.”

“Listen, you smart-cracking L.A. bastard—”

He took a step toward me. I moved the gun, and it inhibited him.

“Listen to me. She’s Kerrigan’s girl, and Kerrigan is on the floor of his office with his brains blown out.”

“Is that the shot that was heard? Are you the one that reported it?”

“No.”

His brown face was wooden with thought. “There’s too damn many coincidences here. You make a habit of finding murder victims in pairs?”

“I was tailing Kerrigan. If you want to know why, ask the sheriff. I laid it out for him a few minutes ago.”

“The hell you did. He’s way up in the pass, manning a roadblock.”

“That’s where I talked to him. Speaking of coincidences, does Church make a habit of doing his own detail work?”

“I’ll ask the questions.” He took another step toward my gun, leaning on its menace like a man walking into a strong wind. “I’m telling you for the last time. Drop the gun.”

“Sorry, Braga. I need it. I’m going after the girl.”

“You’re staying here.”

He crouched and went for his hip. I had the choice of shooting him or letting him shoot me. Or swinging on him with everything I had left, on the chance of finding the point of his outthrust chin. I found it. He lay down on his side, very still, in fetal position.

I heard a click behind me. The door of the lighted cottage opened. A wispy-haired youth in red pajamas came toward me, walking like a sleepwalker. I stepped in front of Braga and went to meet him.

“Who are you?”

“Allister Gunnison. Junior.” He sounded like a butler
announcing his own arrival at a funeral. “Are you the officer I called? I’m sure I heard a shot.”

“What time?”

“I believe it was about a quarter after one. I happened to look at my traveling clock when the noise awakened me. Then I heard running footsteps.”

“Coming in this direction, toward the alley?”

“No, I believe they went toward the highway, over on the other side of the court.”

“Man’s or woman’s?”

“I really couldn’t say. There was no one in sight by the time I got outside. After I called you on the public telephone, I came back to my cottage and took a luminol. I’m afraid I must have gone into shock or something—I just came out of it now. You see, I’m terribly high-strung, my nerves can’t endure excitement.”

“You’re not the only one. Does the sports car belong to you?”

“The MG? Yes, it does.”

“You shouldn’t leave the keys in it. It’s been stolen.”

“Oh, my,” he said, “how dreadful. Mother will be fearfully upset. And I have to face her in Pasadena tomorrow. You simply must get it back for me, officer.”

His myopic eyes focused on me for the first time, took in my face, the wreckage of my clothes. “You’re not—are you a policeman?” His hand went to his mouth.