What of Terry Conniston? (21 page)

Oakley switched it off, satisfied. Orozco came waddling back toward the car, got in and closed the door with a grunt. “Stay put a minute—I got to make one more call.”

“
Qué pasó?
”

“We're gettin' there—we're gettin' there. The Baird kid bought a ten-year-old Ford from a used-car lot in Nogales yesterday afternoon, not too far from where we found Terry's car. The bleeper we planted in that suitcase showed up headed west on Highway Two across Sonora, toward Altar and Rocky Point. And here's the funny thing. Terry Conniston went through the Mexican checkpoint five miles south of Nogales last night. Driving a ten-year-old Ford. Alone.”

“Alone?”

“By herself.”

Oakley closed his eyes momentarily. “I don't get that.”

“Well, look here, maybe they planted the fear of God in her. They could have walked around the station while she went through it. Picked her up on the far side.”

“How in hell could they persuade her to keep her mouth shut?”

“I got no idea. Thing is, she did it. She can get anyplace in Mexico on that road, just about. It's the main highway down through Hermosillo and Guaymas. Or she could turn right on Highway Two—the same road the suitcase took.”

Oakley tried to picture the map in his mind. “Where would that get them?”

“Eventually to Rocky Point. On the Golf of California. They could maybe hire a fishing boat there and head for just about anyplace. I sent a couple operatives down there in a seaplane. Meanwhile we've got two boys in a car at this end of Highway Two. That should bottle them up between the two ends of the road, unless they got through Rocky Point already and put out to sea—but there's no sign they did. The bleeper ain't showed up at Rocky Point. I'd hazard a wild guess they all rendezvoused together at some town along the road, Altar or Caborca, stopped overnight. They could still show up any time this afternoon at Rocky Point. Now I got to get back on the wire and give orders. You're payin' the bills, you're the boss. How you want us to handle it?”

Oakley was still absorbing it.
She's alive
. His contradictory feelings made him react sluggishly but finally he said, “We'll handle it ourselves. The less your men know, the better. We'll drive down there and follow their route—if we catch up we'll deal with them and if they go on to Rocky Point then your men can keep tabs on them until you and I get there. I don't want outsiders or police involved.”

“It's your party,” Orozco said, and unlatched the door.

Oakley said, “Tell your people in Nogales to have things ready for us in an hour. We'll need guns and a radio direction-finder to zero in on the suitcase.”

“Okay,” Orozco said. If he was displeased he didn't give much indication, but he didn't look overjoyed. He got out of the car and tramped to the phone booth. Oakley settled back in the seat. Whatever the outcome now, there was at least a measure of relief in the prospect of action.

C H A P T E R
Fifteen

In the heat Billie Jean sat with her legs wide apart, fanning herself with a folded roadmap. Mitch formed a loose fist, shifting his glance from her to Terry, who stood near the gasoline pumps under the concrete station awning.

Sleeplessness laid a semitransparent glaze over Mitch's eyes; he had to keep blinking. Wracked by bruises and sore muscles, he contained his irritability badly. They had been stuck in this woebegone gas station seven hours.

The grease monkey came up out of the pit under the car wiping his hands on a filthy rag. He was a diminutive old man with the high-cheeked face of a pureblood Indian, the jet-black hair and old-copper skin. A broad grin showed the gaps in his teeth. “Oll ehfeexed,” he said happily. “Jew gonna pagar een dolors o een pesos?”

“Dollars.” Mitch's hand plunged into his trouser side-pocket and crumpled a bill. “How much?”

“Eh?”

“
Cuanto?
”

“Oh.
Sí. Cómo, cómo
—” The mechanic counted on his grease-black fingers, his lips moving. “
Cuarenta … dos … catorce
…
por ocho
.” He frowned and shook his head, and suddenly threw his head back, beaming. “
Doce dolares, por favor
. Ees twelve dollars.” He added with an apologetic shrug, “Would be maybe not so mahch, bot hod to ehfeex the
calceta
and the
pompa
too, jew know? The, ah, the—
chingadera
, I donno the name een Eenglish, jew know?”

“I don't want to hear about it,” Mitch muttered, and fumbled twelve dollars into the blackened palm. He wheeled past the girls and said crankily, “Come on—come on.”

He rolled the car on west through the rocky desert hills, wondering how long the old grease-monkey's patchwork job would hold the water pump together before it burst again. He kept it down to forty-five most of the time, except on the downhill slopes, hoping the water temperature wouldn't rise high enough to blow another hole by steam pressure. In the back seat. Billie Jean said crankily, “Jesus H. Christ. I never been so sticky damn hot in my life.”

“Shut up.”

Terry touched his arm but he gave her a stony look and she withdrew her hand. They limped west in silence after that.

According to the map they had picked up at the gas station, Caborca was a smallish town (
población
5,000-7,500) on the Rio Asunción. There was, however, no sign of a river anywhere in sight when they reached the sign which said HEROICA CABORCA. The appelation, Terry explained, commemorated the occasion in the 1850s when a hundred Yankee filibusters had invaded Sonora, planning to capture it and annex it to the United States; they had been besieged here by the local populace, abetted by several companies of militia, and finally forced to surrender, whereupon the Mexicans had lined them up against the wall and slaughtered them with rifle fire, after which the corpses were stripped of gold teeth and rings and left naked to the village pigs and goats. According to legend it had taken more than a year for the stench to dissipate. It had been the high point, if not the only memorable moment, in the town's four-hundred-year history. The severed head of the filibuster leader had been pickled and placed on display in a jar. It was probably around somewhere, still. The walls of the old Franciscan church were still pocked with bullet holes.

The town clustered against the shoulders of several steep round hills, surrounded by scratch-poor country, all weathered clay and dry brittle clumps of brush. Here and there were painfully irrigated vegetable patches. Flocks of gaunt sheep drifted listlessly across the open desert. Dogs lay in the shade watching through bloodshot eyes when Mitch reached the outskirts of town and slowed to a crawl to make way, horn blasting, through a thickness of chickens clucking in the road.

Ahead on the right stood an apparition: a brand-new motel, complete with plastic, chrome, neon, and swimming pool. Mitch stopped in front of it and eyed the cars parked in the lot. None was Floyd's Oldsmobile. Anyhow, he thought, Floyd wouldn't be likely to stop at a conspicuous place like this.

He drove on into town. The streets were narrow, once paved but now holed and dusted. There were occasional cobbled sidewalks. The adobe structures, rammed together like city slum buildings, were painted ludicrous colors—pinks, yellows, greens. Poverty didn't have to be soot-gray. Slow-moving women with black hair tied back in buns and dusty dresses with flowing long skirts stared at Mitch as if he were a movie director looking for extras to cast in a Pancho Villa film. Men in cowboy hats sat somnolent in shady doorways like characters in cartoons of Old Mexico. It was the siesta hour.

There were a few cars parked with two wheels on the sidewalk—mainly pickups and station wagons, the old ones with real wooden bodies. Mitch didn't see the Olds anywhere; he hardly expected to. Floyd wouldn't make it that easy.

He pulled up next to a young man in pachuco-tight Levi's and stuck his head out the window; he spoke with care, drawing his lips back over his teeth in exaggerated enunciation:

“
Por favor, amigo, dónde está la farmacia?
”

The youth grinned and rattled off something, adding wild arm-and-hand signals like a ship's semaphore signalman. Mitch flushed and heard Terry laugh at him: “He says it's two blocks down and turn right and go across the plaza.”

“Okay,” Mitch said, “
Gracias
.”

“
De nada
,” the youth said, and stood grinning until they drove out of his sight.

Mitch said, “What's so funny about us?”

“Maybe he just likes to smile,” Billie Jean said. “Man, those tight pants, you could sure see how he was hung.”

Mitch didn't glance at Terry; he felt redness creep up his neck. Terry said, “You've got a way with words, Billie Jean.”

“Shit—you making fun of me? Maybe I don't like your high-and-mighty, either, you ever think of that?”

The plaza enclosed a park with a dead lawn and two or three palm trees. Mitch drove around it and found a parking space in front of the pharmacy. A pulse began to thud in his throat. He got the .38 out of the glove compartment and shoved it in his pocket—it was empty but the whole world didn't have to know that.
I should've remembered to buy cartridges in Nogales. Maybe they've got some here
.

It was just like the photograph, von Roon's name painted on the sign. The door was closed and when he banged on it he got no response. He tried the knob but it was locked.

Terry said from the car window, “That's why the kid was grinning. It's siesta time—everything's closed.”

Mitch backed down the three steps and came around the car and got in. “Great.”

Billie Jean said, “What now, smart guy?”

“We wait for them to open up.”

“Not here,” Billie Jean said immediately. “Not here. Too hot in this car. Man, what's wrong with that place back there we passed with the swimming pool? I could use a jump in that pool right now.”

He glanced at Terry. “That place might not be too bad an idea at that. If we can afford it.”

Billie Jean said, “I got some money of my own. I'll pay my own way. Just you drive me back to that pool.”

Drunk in his legs, Mitch opened the door and went in and looked around. His eyeballs seemed to scrape the sockets. The motel room was new, impersonal, sparsely filled with cheap blond furniture. It smelled stale. The drowsy desk clerk had explained with huge amusement how the motel, with its enormous carpeted lobby, had been built by gringo speculators who had assurances from the Mafia that Sonora was about to legalize gambling. The motel was to have been a gambling casino—only Sonora hadn't passed the gambling law. That had been eight or nine years ago. The gringo speculators were still scheming and the Mafia were still making promises and the motel was still losing much money. The clerk had laughed uproariously. He had cast his wizened eye at Billie Jean (Terry had remained outside in the car) and at Mitch, and he had winked and handed over the keys to two rooms. They didn't have enough money to take three rooms. Besides, it would have attracted attention.

He sat down on the bed and began to unlace his shoes. A shadow filled the door and he looked up to see Terry looking at him with an inquiring glance. He said, “You two take the other room.”

“If you think I'm going to stay in a room with that female Genghis Khan you're mistaken.”

“Stay here, then. God knows I'm too fagged out to be dangerous.” He smiled weakly. “I feel like a two-dollar clock that somebody forgot to wind up. I don't know about you but I'm going to wash off some of this dirt before I have to start paying real estate taxes on it.”

He shut himself in the bathroom, turned on the shower and let the water run until the rust cleared out of it, and scrubbed himself almost viciously.
Blood on my hands
, he thought sardonically, remembering the high-school production of
Macbeth
. “Is this a Floyd I see before me,” he muttered. He washed out his drip-dry shirt and underwear in the sink and hung them, wrung out and wrinkled, across the shower bar; and went back into the main room with a bath towel wrapped around his midriff. “I feel twenty pounds lighter.”

Terry sat in a rickety chair with loosely crossed legs, her hair standing out in wild disorder, looking rumpled and untidy and too tired to care. For the first time he realized she was as worn and ragged as he was; he had begun to think she was indestructible.

“Go on in and take a shower. Make you feel better.”

“As soon as I get the strength,” she mumbled. She glanced at him; her eyes seemed slightly glazed. “What in the hell are we doing here?”

“Sometimes I forget, myself.”

“We're bananas,” she said vaguely. “Stark, raving bananas.” She got up and took a moment to steady her balance, and went weaving into the bathroom.

He lay back on the bed and listened to the beat of the shower.
Ought to keep an eye on Billie Jean
, he thought distantly; and then,
To hell with her, let her look out for herself
. Everything was so muddled it didn't really matter any more. The pipedream was just that; ashes, now. Maybe Floyd was around here someplace and maybe he wasn't—what difference did it make? It would be just as easy to rob Fort Knox. In a dark fugue, a dirge, Mitch closed his eyes. He felt instantly as if he were falling down on layers of misty cushions; he heard himself whimper softly in his half-sleep and then a kind of peace settled on him.

A soft touch on his cheek brought him sharply awake. His eyes flashed open.

Terry, leaning over him, kissed him.

He got up on his elbows. She pushed him back with a slim pink arm coated with a fine gauze of soft pale hairs. She was sitting on the edge of the bed; she drew the towel tighter around her; the tip of her tongue quested her mouth corner. She looked pink and scrubbed. Inside, Mitch felt a visceral quiver, the slow coil and press of wanting her—
stupid
, he said to himself; but out of his urgency of danger, his sense of hopeless failing, came a blood need that sent spasms into him, beyond reason or sensibility.