Slide (17 page)

Marsha was delighted. She sat up, faced Dan, her dress carelessly high. Whenever she wore silk jersey, to avoid lines, she never wore anything underneath.

In the extremely low light Dan couldn't really see anything down there between her legs except a dark area, but because it was hers it had an intense effect on him. He stopped staring, forced his attention to opening one of the caviar jars by prying its lid with a coin.

Marsha accepted the jar. She made her left hand flat, emptied the caviar onto it. A mound of caviar on her palm that she brought to her mouth for a nibble.

Dan was about to open the other jar when Marsha offered her handful to him.

Dan glanced uncertainly at Elliot.

No sign from him.

Dan ate out of her hand.

She extended her hand to Elliot, intending to withdraw it quickly if he went for it.

He didn't.

Angrier, she brought it back to Dan. He tried to be delicate but she pressed her hand to his mouth and he lost control. He devoured the little gray-black eggs, lapped them up. She spread her hand for him to tongue her finger crotches. One, two of her fingers entered his mouth.

She glanced at Elliot. He was like stone. She got up abruptly, led Dan across to Island One. He was beyond discretion. Besides, they were obscure enough to anyone more than an island away.

She lay open. Dan went down, tried to get his head between. Did for a moment, but she outmaneuvered, got him on his back, made sure they were in Elliot's direct view from just across the way when she took Dan into her mouth.

Her eyes remained on Elliot, and his on her. It was something he had made her do for others several times over the years, once to a room-service waiter at the Carlton in Cannes. However, doing it on her own would surely be a violation. She expected Elliot would come over and slap the hell out of her.

Dan's entire body clutched, and constricted sound came from him, as though he were in pain, when he finished.

She left him there, went to face Elliot, waited for him to strike her.

After a long moment, he told her: “One, three, nine, eight, zero, nine.”

“What?”

He repeated the numbers and added: “The identification code word is zephyr.”

She understood then that he had just revealed all that anyone would need in order to withdraw his money in Switzerland.

“You're one cruel son of a bitch, you son of a bitch,” she said, and started to cry.

“You were right,” he said. “If anyone's going to get out of here, it'll be you. You've always been up to your ass in mud.”

19

Captain Dodd awoke suddenly. He was at once so alert he thought he must have slept several hours. But daylight bordered the edges of the drapes that were drawn. He snapped on the bedside lamp. The clock said ten to two in the afternoon of the same day. All he'd gotten were two hours.

He closed his eyes, hoping to sink back to unconsciousness.

Helen entered as noiselessly as possible. She observed him for a moment, like a tending nurse, and was reaching for the lamp's switch when he told her, “Never mind.”

“Did I wake you?”

“No.”

“I was feeding my plants and I dropped the watering can.”

“I didn't hear it.” Even if he had he wouldn't have said so. He stretched.

“Go back to sleep.”

He liked her suggestion but he got up for the bathroom to splash double handfuls of cold water on his face. From in there he asked how her indoor plants were doing.

“You won't believe it.”

“Might.”

“They're doing better on Berlioz than they did on Schubert. For some reason they're greener and they've grown more.”

“How long now have they been on Berlioz?”

“Nearly a month.”

He held back saying probably the reason the plants were flourishing was the increased moisture in the air over the past three weeks. The plants didn't miss sunshine because she had them under a special compensating light.

While he dressed she got him a coffee. He turned on the television to the channel that featured hourly news. He eliminated the sound and only every so often glanced at the picture:

Houses high on Mulholland that had slid down.

Others that were about to.

A Bel Air home worth over a million with mud oozing from its second-floor windows because a rear retaining wall had not lived up to its high cost.

Areas being evacuated.

Faces being interviewed.

Truck gardens swamped.

Farmers in financial pain.

The Los Angeles River flowing fast and high in its cement bed like a real river.

A flight of pelicans at Dodger Stadium, which they must have mistaken for a lake.

A strange kind of mold that was rapidly multiplying in the continual dampness, its spores causing an allergic reaction — human eyes swollen shut, tongues swollen and bulging.

An elderly woman in a wheelchair being rescued, chair and all hoisted up from a collapsed house.

Dodd appreciated that.

Helen buttoned his shirt cuffs for him. Fresh shirt. Somehow she managed to keep at least two complete changes ahead of him, even in this weather. “Can't you stay home?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“Be back for supper?”

“No.”

“I meant a late one.”

“Don't wait.”

She turned away on the excuse of straightening the bed, and so he caught only a glimpse of her resentment. She had difficulty making the bed one-handed. Dodd took time, went around to the opposite side to help, and by then she was showing nothing but her love for him.

A thermos of the soup was on the kitchen table ready for him to take along, and some of the French bread. Evidently she hadn't really counted on supper with him at home.

As he backed the car out, he thought about her resentment, didn't blame her for it. Just that he hadn't seen it in her for many years. Maybe he hadn't noticed. No, he would have. Anyway, she didn't resent him but the job. Her antenna must have picked up how close to him death had come the night before. He wondered if she'd felt the same all the other times.

An image, like a photograph projected at nearly subliminal speed, wedged itself repeatedly amidst his thoughts of Helen. Not until he was parking the car in his space at headquarters did it definitely come to him.

The elderly woman being hoisted in the wheelchair he'd seen on television.…

Wishful thinking, Dodd thought, dismissing it.

He went in to his office. On top of all the papers on his desk was the daily summary, a neatly typed compilation of arrests in the area. Every major category was up, from forcible rape to speeding. He noticed a big jump in auto thefts. A month ago such figures would have been incredible. It was like an epidemic. It wouldn't subside until the rain stopped. The best they could do was try to keep up with it.

Dodd glanced at the floor where ordinarily at this time of day there would be an irregular rectangle of sunlight from the side window. Rain was hitting on the window glass. He had become so accustomed to the rain he would have been surprised not to hear its tattoo.

Again he pictured the elderly woman in the wheelchair.

He picked up the phone.

“Get me Zone.”

A few moments later he was talking to Zone Commander Everett in San Diego. Everett sounded rushed but he heard Dodd out.

“Of course I've considered the possibility,” Everett said.

“We might get General Schyler to change his mind.”

“I doubt that. Especially not when he's right.”

“I think he's wrong.”

“Look, Roy, what you ought to do is back off, give yourself time to get some perspective on this thing.”

“I'm not the problem.”

“Seems you are, in a way.”

“If there's even one person alive in there I want to get him out.”

“No way anybody could live through a slide like that.”

“I did.”

Those two words hung in a pause.

“If conditions were normal I'd tell you to take a few days off.”

“I don't need any time off.”

“They're buried,” Everett said emphatically. “All of them, dead and buried and —”

“I have to be sure.”

“Back off, Dodd.” An order. “I don't want any more losses in that goddamn slide.”

Dodd let silence speak for him. Commander Everett accepted it as compliance. The two men exchanged quick but less official good-byes.

Dodd tried to give attention to some paperwork. Couldn't keep his mind on it. Rather than initial pages without reading them, he put the stack aside. He had a coffee brought in, took three tasteless gulps and let it get cold. There were still four to five hours of light left in the day. He called the Newport Beach Police. Chief Keeler was glad to do the favor and be owed one.

By three-thirty Dodd was in a Bell 47G1 helicopter that was painted black and white with “N
EWPORT
B
EACH
P
OLICE
D
EPARTMENT
” lettered large in green. The helicopter pilot was Stan Hackley, one of the younger officers on the Newport Beach force.

Hackley handled the helicopter skillfully but with such nonchalance that, at first, Dodd was apprehensive. The chopper, given full throttle, practically sprang off the ground, climbed sharply and swooped out over the ocean. The exterior of its plastic-nosed cabin was splattered by rain, further limiting visibility. Below, the coastline was consistently trimmed by the reaches of the surf. The beach was deserted, not even a mark on it. Hackley put the chopper on a southward course just off the coast at an altitude of five hundred feet.

In seven minutes, there on the left, was the city of Laguna Beach. In less than another minute, there was the slide.

It appeared even more extensive, steeper from this vantage. A wide chute of raw, mucky-looking earth. Slick in the rain. Rivulets of rain running down it like a system of veins. All the way down to the water, where it caused a large, umber-colored semicircle.

Hackley made six slow passes, while Dodd studied the face of the slide, both with and without binoculars. On the fourth pass Dodd noticed what he thought might be an irregularity about a hundred and thirty feet up. He lost sight of it, tried to pick it up again on the fifth pass and did so on the sixth.

A horizontal projection like a mud-covered corner.

Dodd asked for a closer look.

Hackley answered by heading the chopper right at the slide, so fast that Dodd flinched, didn't see how they could possibly miss crashing into it. Hackley, unruffled, nosed the chopper up just in time and leveled it off in a hover, mere feet from the face of the slide.

Any other time Dodd would have chewed out the young man, but today such daring seemed appropriate. He directed Hackley to that cornerlike spot.

Dodd pulled the hatch open for a better view. No way of telling exactly what it was, that protrusion. From the angles of it, it had to be some sort of structure. Possibly it was only a section that had broken away. Dodd had brought along a ten-foot pole with a brass hook on its end. He held it out and down, wanting to probe the mud. The pole wasn't long enough. Dodd climbed out onto one of the chopper's landing skids. Hackley obliged by maneuvering the chopper closer to the slide, so close now that its main rotor blade was nearly biting the slope.

Dodd jabbed at the mud. The pole struck something solid, about two feet below the surface. Exploring with the pole from there didn't satisfy Dodd. He signaled Hackley what he intended to do. Hackley's expression questioned Dodd's sanity. He held the chopper as steady as possible. Dodd threw the pole down and lowered himself via the landing skid. He let go of the skid, dropped to the mud, sank in. For a moment there was fear that he would continue to sink, but he went in only to just above his knees.

He retrieved the pole and began poking around. He found solid footing off to his right. The mud, though, made it almost impossible for him to move about. His feet felt as though they had powerful suction caps on them. He managed a couple of steps. Probing farther and farther until the pole was in up to its hilt, he determined more of the underlying solid surface. Encouraging, but it didn't prove anything. What he was on could still be merely a part of any building, perhaps one of those houses that had been carried down from Sheep Hills.

Where the mud was shallowest, Dodd jabbed sharply with the pole, several times. Signaling. He waited for a reply, signaled again, listened again. All he heard was the rain beating on his head and the roar of the chopper, whose blades were causing a turbulence that splashed about unpredictably.

Dodd gazed up the slope.

It was overwhelming, immense, so steep it appeared to be about to descend upon him. His automatic reaction was to take a step back. His legs, held by the mud, couldn't move that quickly, and he was suddenly off balance.

He fell backward.

Over the edge.

He grasped for something as he went over. Got nothing but mud. He saw the helicopter, way out of reach, and Hackley's face, Hackley alarmed for the first time.

Over and down at the mercy of the mud that absorbed his fall. He was sprawled in the slime. It threatened to engulf him, but its slickness and steep pitch actually helped. He was out of control now, in a writhing, flailing plunge — head first, then feet first. He saw sea, sky, mud, quickly over and over but not in order and he couldn't tell which way was up all the way down to the beach and into the slush of the surf.

He ended in a painful, contorted position, his right leg and arm twisted beneath him. He recovered, kneeled, stood up, stunned by what he'd just been through, amazed that he wasn't injured.

Twice in the last twenty-four hours he had been in the hand of death and escaped before it could make its fist.

Hackley was coming for him, setting the chopper down practically on top of him.

Dodd looked a mess head to toe, like a monster made of mud. He glanced up at the slide, to that spot where he'd just been. Something, probably his fall, had disturbed the mud there, caused it to give way. Now, partially exposed, was a huge, three-dimensional letter E.