Interface (Crime Masterworks) (20 page)

‘He’s … he said he was …’ Hariss was striving for an offhand delivery, but his voice slid into a higher register in midsentence, like a teen-ager’s. ‘Said he’s coming to kill me. Do you think Roberta Stayton hired him to—’

‘What difference does it make if he’s on his way?’ His voice had tightened and thinned. ‘Stay away from windows. Keep the blinds drawn. How long ago did he call?’

‘Nearly …’ Hariss checked the Seth Thomas again. ‘Nearly half an hour ago. But he was calling long distance. The operator said his three minutes were up.’

Neil Fargo growled, ‘That doesn’t mean a fucking thing, long distance starts at the San Mateo County line.’

Hariss was reacting to Neil Fargo’s reaction; the sweat was standing on his face again, and his fingers were slippery around the receiver.

‘I’ve got Blaney and Daggert on their way out. Armed.’

‘He’ll go through them like a maggot through shit.’ Neil Fargo’s voice was almost bitter. Then his tone changed, lightened. ‘Still, maybe not. He’s got a bum leg now he didn’t have when I knew him in Nam, it’s got to have slowed him down some. At least it’ll limit the ways he can come at you. All right. Put Blaney on the front gate, Daggert on that point of rock out by your observatory …’

‘Shouldn’t somebody be inside?’

‘You’ve got guns there, haven’t you? Point one at the front door and pull the trigger if anything you don’t recognize comes through it. Tell your strongarms to stop anything that moves. If it doesn’t stop, shoot it. Tell them not to let Docker anywhere near them. I mean anywhere – not within three or four yards. I remember that son of a bitch once …’

He stopped. Hariss said, ‘What about you?’

‘I’ll be there as soon as I can. But the fucking fog has started to come in, that’s going to slow traffic on the Bayshore. It’ll probably take me an hour or better.’

As he was talking, the sound of a doorbell came faintly through the closed study door. Panic surged into Hariss’ voice. ‘There’s … somebody at the front door, Fargo! Some …’

‘That’ll be your troops.’

‘What if it isn’t?’

‘I doubt if even Docker’s got that much nerve. If you’re worried, have your daughter answer it. He doesn’t have a hard-on against her, does he?’

‘I don’t even know why he has one against me,’ said Hariss lamely.

‘Go let in your troops.’ The detective laughed. ‘Let’s
hope
it’s your troops. Tell that fucking Blaney not to put a bullet in me when
I
show up. I’m on my way.’

The fog Neil Fargo had mentioned had thickened, was rolling in from the sea through the Golden Gate, pouring white and silent up the natural passage of the bay and reaching thin greedy fingers out at the city. Alcatraz was blotted out, gone, as were the lights of Sausalito north in Marin County and the garlanded string of lights which marked Oakland, Berkeley and Richmond in the Eastbay.

In the city, especially in the Marina District which lay close to the water, it was wetting down the streets, haloing the headlights and streetlamps, muffling the sound of traffic and city night noises.

Neil Fargo was driving west on Lombard toward the Golden Gate Bridge approach through the mist-pastelled neons of US 101’s motel row.

He turned on his wipers and the defroster to keep the windshield clear, maneuvered his car into the left lane. This would allow him to stay on Lombard when the bridge traffic took an angle right into Richardson Avenue and then Doyle Drive and the bridge approaches. Lombard, suddenly narrow and tree-arched once it lost the bridge traffic, would take him to the Presidio Main Gate.

Through the Presidio was the shortest, most direct access to Twenty-Fifth Avenue, where the winding, rich, very private streets of Sea Cliff began.

Neil Fargo waited through the traffic to the green arrow, went across the in-bound lanes past the traffic islands. He had gone less than a block on this narrow, uncrowded Lombard before stopping the car. Across the street was a small bar splashing yellow light out into the fog. Directly ahead were the Presidio Main Gates, open and unguarded. Beyond them, Lombard became curving Lincoln Boulevard.

The detective had to wait for two cars to pass before he could trot across the narrow blacktop to the phone booth outside the bar. In the open air the mist was palpable, able to be felt on the face, between the fingers, in the nostrils. It was chill and fresh.

He shut the door so he could see to dial; the fog-dimmed corner street lamp was not enough. His fingers ticked off a familiar set of digits, five-five-three-oh-one-two-three. His face was absolutely icy.

‘Police.’

‘Give me the radio room.’

There was a series of clicks, a pause, then another voice – this one hard and male – came on with ‘Central Dispatch.’

‘Yeah, I want to report a stolen vehicle.’

‘You want the Auto Detail.’

‘This is hot,’ said Neil Fargo. ‘It’d better go out on the air right away. I’ll shove the details to Auto later.’

‘Shoot.’

‘Nineteen-seventy-four Mercury Montego sedan license six-three-three, Zebra, Frank, Frank, color yellow. My name is Neil Fargo, that’s F-a-r-g-o.’

‘You the registered on the vehicle?’

‘Ah …’ He had to consider his reply. ‘I’m the … ah … one who rented it. It was stolen by a man named Docker, that’s D-o-c-k-’

‘Docker, did you say?’ The voice had been startled out of its habitual and professional phlegm.

‘That’s right, Docker. And you’re right. You have him on an APB, material witness on a homicide down on Bryant Street this
A
.
M
. You might not have it yet, but San Mateo’s going to be putting him on the air in connection with the killing at the airport of—’

‘Jesus! He in on that one too? The car’s already going out on the air, Mr Fargo. You got a vicinity where it was stolen?’

‘Sixteen hundred block of Pine, that’s Pine and Franklin, about ten minutes ago. I think he took off out Frank … Jesus Christ!’

From the phone booth window, Neil Fargo had been casually scanning traffic, the cars in and out of the Presidio, as he had been talking. Even in the couple of minutes he had been there, the fog had gotten thicker, heavier, an opaque blanket instead of rolling patches with clear spaces between. Visibility was down further yet, but the detective’s face was suddenly crammed against the glass.

‘The son of a bitch just drove by me!’ he yelped into the phone. ‘Right by me in the goddam car!’

‘What is your 10–20 … er … your location?’

‘Oh! Lombard. Lombard and, ah, what the shit’s the street at the Presidio ga— Lyon. That’s it. He went through the Presidio gates!’

‘We’ll alert the Military Police as well as SFPD units,’ said the dispatcher. ‘And thanks, Mr Fargo.’

Neil Fargo hung up, stood in the booth for long moments, his head down as if in contemplation of unwelcome thoughts. Finally he opened the door. Through the fog, he could hear a police siren somewhere far off. Or, considering the fog, perhaps not so far off.

As if released from his regrets by the sound, he sprinted across the street toward his car, which he had left with the motor running and the wipers still snickering at the fog.

T
he yellow Montego was blocked by three cars waiting at the stop sign where Lincoln and Presidio Boulevards rub noses. Docker, big hands steady on the wheel, face set in concentration, didn’t even shift his foot off the accelerator. Instead, he goosed it.

And whipped into the left-hand lane on the wrong side of the miniscule triangular concrete traffic island, horn blaring to freeze traffic. He slewed across Presidio untouched because a sports car driver had damned good reflexes, fishtailed the rear end on fog-wet blacktop and was heading down Lincoln toward the old wooden building that had been Letterman Army Hospital until the new plant had been completed.

Behind him, the air was full of sirens. Directly ahead, an olive green Military Police jeep went into a skid of its own, broadside across the street to block his way, shedding MPs expecting the crash.

Docker jumped the left-hand curb, skun the left side of the Montego on the ancient stone retaining wall in front of some officer’s white frame house, hit the blacktop still accelerating, fighting it under control with big, competent hands.

Ahead on his right behind masking palm trees, the greyish stucco cube which housed the MP Headquarters spilled men in Army greens and wearing white plastic helmet liners. They ran at the road drawing cumbersome Army-issue .45s. Docker aimed the Montego at the closest one, slewed away as the man dove back.

Men were on their bellies, squeezing off shots. One slug smashed against the post between the windshield and the frame on the far side of the car, but then the fog had closed in behind Docker again. His last mirrored view was of men sprinting toward a whippet-aerialled jeep.

The Presidio of San Francisco is an Army post, and has been in the hands of somebody’s military since the Spaniard José Moraga erected an adobe stockade there in 1776. Since it has always been a defensive, not a training camp, relatively little of its total acreage has ever been in actual use. Most of its thousands of eucalyptus, monterey pine and cypress trees were planted by school children on Arbor Days in the early 1900s. Miles of earth and blacktop roads wander through these miniature forests.

But once pursuit had begun, the Presidio was not a particularly good place for Docker to be. It was a closed system; though the gates were always open, access could be controlled by sealing them up. Once inside, Docker had very limited options.

But he did have the fog. That was on his side.

On their side were their radios. Though Docker could not hear them, the air around him crackled with messages as he knifed the big car down the Lincoln Boulevard straight-away past the Parade Ground.

‘Unit Three, do you read me?’

‘10–4, Control.’

‘Subject vehicle outbound on Lincoln. Vehicle is 10–99. Repeat, 10–99. Stolen vehicle.’

‘10–4, Control.’

‘Unit Seven, is the Broadway gate closed and locked?’

‘Affirmative, Control. Am now sealing Presidio Boulevard gate at Pacific Street.’

‘10–4. Is any unit in the vicinity of MacDowell and Lincoln?’

‘Affirmative. Unit Five en route that intersection on MacDowell. ETA, sixty seconds.’

Ahead of Docker, Lincoln divided for an old red brick building which had been there much longer than the automobile and currently housed Army CID. He slammed the brakes to set up a skid, goosed it as he came out of the slide, nose to the right, braked, jammed the wheel left. The rear end caromed off the springy steel guard-rail which divided Lincoln from a steep embankment below the Doyle Drive skyway to the Golden Gate Bridge.

He was still moving, but a tire was scraping something now.

The fog shifted momentarily; thirty yards off to Docker’s right, serenely unconscious of it all, the freeway traffic whipped along, its many eyes fog-misted. The Mercury’s headlights took ineffectual bites at the swirling mist as he roared along Lincoln. To his left, the National Cemetery’s rows of honored dead under their simple markers marching up the hillside were invisible.

‘Unit Five approaching MacDowell and Lincoln.’

‘10–4. Stop vehicle. Repeat, stop the vehicle. Subject is considered armed and dangerous. Subject may be heading for Crissi Airfield, over.’

More sirens, they seemed to be coming from every compass point now, rising and falling as they cried to one another through the night. Docker’s window was down so their voices poured in at him with the fog and the wet. He was hunched over the wheel like a race driver, his face, by the upthrust glow of the dash lights, was rendered less than human from intense concentration.

Ahead, intersection. MacDowell, leading down to Crissi Field. His hands did not twitch the wheel that way. Headlights on MacDowell in the fog.

‘Subject vehicle approaching at high speed …’

The jeep leaped from the fog, trying to cut Docker off. But he was by MacDowell ahead of them with inches to spare. The jeep shot right across Lincoln, rammed headfirst into a tree.

‘Unit Five, come in.’

Docker heard only motor roar, saw only grey wetness, arc of his own lights.

‘Unit Five, this is Control. What is your 10–20?’

‘Bastard beat us to MacDowell. 10–51. Repeat, 10–51. Need a tow truck. No injuries.’

‘We do not read you, Unit Five. Did you make connection with subject vehicle, over?’

‘We made connection with a tree, over.’

‘Unit Two, what is your 10–20?’

‘Ruckman Avenue, heading for the underpass below US. One, over.’

‘Intercept—’

‘Subject vehicle just passed intersection with Ruckman.’

‘Believe subject headed for Golden Gate Bridge access from view area. Can any unit block that intersection?’

Behind the wheel, Docker was laughing with apparent exhilaration. He shouted a snatch of song. He screamed through the stop sign where Crissi Avenue came up from the airfield below, shot a look down Crissi over his shoulder. Just fog.

‘This is Unit Four. We are en route Golden Gate Bridge access from Lincoln Boulevard view area over Baker Beach. Will intercept subject vehicle.’

‘10–4. If subject attempts to run roadblock, initiate fire. Subject armed and dangerous.’

Docker avoided the tempting trap of Marine Drive, which dead ended at old Fort Point under the soaring red steel parapets of the bridge. Instead, he drifted the yellow car around the curved approach toward the intersection with the bridge view area. He had a momentary glimpse of yellow pinpricks on the Marin headlands hiding Sausalito, then the fog slammed the door shut, closing him back into its narrow dripping grey room.

‘Control, this is Unit Four. Turn-off to View Area is a hundred yards ahead. No sight of subject veh … Headlights!’

‘Detain vehicle, Unit Four.’

The open window gave Docker the screaming sirens. Dim in the fog, a splash of light to mark the intersection. A hard right, a hard left, and he would have been aimed into the northbound lanes of the bridge. Northbound to Marin where a thousand suburban roads waited.

Headlights, glaring in his eyes. White flashes behind them whining bullets at him; none hitting.