Metzger's Dog

30 Jorge Grijalvas sat in the back seat of the Lincoln Continental, watching the last of the great patches of green irrigated land sweep past the window and disappear. It was all desert now, the earth a dusty brown with slabs and outcroppings of gray rock visible in places where it broke through the thin, powdery covering of soil. The sky behind his head was a glowing pink already, but the high rocks ahead were still in the strong, direct rays of the late-afternoon sun.

He turned to Juan and started to explain again. He spoke patiently and precisely so that the others, who were older, could listen without appearing to. “This man is rich, so there’s no question he’ll bring a number of armed men with him. Just to carry so much money he’d need help.”

“I understand,” said Juan. He adjusted his dark glasses again, a gesture that had already become unconscious. He had been proud of the tear tattooed on his cheekbone until Mr. Grijalvas had taught him that it was a mistake, the mark of a loser. There was no honor in the mere fact of having been in prison.

Grijalvas said, “This man will be a coward. He’s ready to pay the money because he’s afraid not to. He’s also afraid to pay it, and if he sees a chance to avoid it, he won’t have any pity. The men he’s hired will be the ones to watch. They’ll be feeling foolish because they didn’t kill him and take the money themselves. The only way they can give themselves ease now will be to try to kill us. If he shows the slightest sign of wavering, they’ll try it.”

Juan said, “And what if he doesn’t give them the chance, and we get the money?”

“Then there will be a number of men walking away from this who are accustomed to being paid for carrying guns and who know that we have five million in cash.”

“I understand.”

The car crossed a bridge over a dry streambed that was choked with rocks and small, spiky plants. In a half hour they would cross another, and then the patches of green would begin again. This time they wouldn’t be irrigated fields of alfalfa and hay, but the first of the carefully tended golf courses of Palm Springs. Grijalvas looked out the window. From the quiet, air-conditioned interior of the car it all looked still and inviting, like a painting. The bright sunlight made the jagged rocks stand out in relief, throwing long, dark shadows on the empty flats. Outside the car the air was beginning to lose some of its ferocious dry heat. By the time they reached the first of the stoplights on Palm Canyon Boulevard it would be down to a hundred degrees. By the time John Knox Morrison ventured out of his refrigerated hotel room it would be in the seventies, a calm, clear, pleasant night.

CHINESE GORDON SAID, “Well, Palm Springs it is. That’s the last turnoff.”

Margaret sighed. “Do you have any idea how hot it is? Why in the world would people come all the way out here when they could climb into an oven just as well at home?”

“We know why old Jorge is here. It’s not a bad choice, either, considering what he knows. It wouldn’t be hard for him to outnumber the police.”

“And you still expect to be able to take the money away from him afterward?”

Chinese Gordon shrugged. “No matter how many people he has there, he has to split them up when he leaves. If he gets the money and we see a chance, we may do it tonight. If not, tomorrow is another day, and it’s always a long, lonely drive to Los Angeles.”

Chinese Gordon let the big Continental drift off into the distance, dropping the van back to the speed limit. It was several minutes before Margaret realized that what he was humming was “Tenting Tonight.”

JUAN SAT ERECT AND PROUD, as the companion of a powerful man should. He tried not to look directly at Mr. Grijalvas but to keep his eyes forward, staring at the hundred feet of rock and gravel in front of the car’s headlights. Beside the road a gnarled joshua tree appeared, like something crouching to gather energy to stretch itself, then floated back into the darkness. The headlights caught a patch of yuccas clustered in the rocks ahead, and he could see a haze of dust drift across them. A few seconds ahead another car must have passed by here, disturbing the still night air. He could see Mr. Grijalvas’s silhouette in the periphery of his vision, and he unconsciously shifted his posture to imitate it.

Mr. Grijalvas said, “It is now exactly twelve-fifteen.” Juan knew what that meant. Morrison and his men would already be at the valley station of the aerial tramway. In a moment they would leave their car and climb into the gondola, then ride it up the long cable to the mountain station at the top. It was easy to see why Mr. Grijalvas was who he was. Morrison’s ride to the top would take fifteen minutes. His ride back would take another fifteen minutes. During that time he couldn’t change his mind or come back or do anything but dangle a thousand feet above the desert floor in the little glass box. In that half hour Mr. Grijalvas could take the money from Morrison’s car and disappear. That, at least, would be what Morrison thought, but that was only part of it. Juan thought about the new car he was going to buy. After that, there would be other things, but they would occur to him while he was driving the new car.

JOHN KNOX MORRISON STOOD IN THE PARKING LOT and stared at the little blue-and-yellow corrugated steel building on its concrete platform. It looked tiny and insubstantial at the foot of the mountain. The small pool of yellowish light from the flood lamps made the garish building and the pitiful red flowers look unreal. Around the globes of the streetlights in the parking lot huge moths and bugs fluttered and buzzed, their bodies making tapping sounds as they battered against the hot glass. He waited while his companion, Morton, joined him. He glanced back once at the car to see that Morton had left the newspaper on the hood, then walked toward the little metal building.

At the stairway he could see the end of the tramway cable. He sighted along the thin wire, following its sagging length to where it turned up again and became invisible against the dark mountainside. Far above him at the top of the mountain he could see another little pool of bilious yellow light. From here the dim incandescence brought back some long-forgotten memory of a carnival, with the smell of stale popcorn and cotton candy and crowds and the strong sweat that came with the fear of falling from some whirling metal machine that jerked the body upward and pressed it against worn metal safety bars with the centrifugal force of its demonic spinning. He wished he felt more comfortable and could say something to Morton, but Morton was as alien to him as this place. Morton had the calm, efficient, unimaginative look that some of the operational people had, not feeling anything, not really seeing anything. There was also the nagging suspicion that somehow Morton had been chosen by some awful mechanical system in Langley that was based on the similarity of their names.

He followed Morton to the ticket booth and then to the wooden deck, where they waited while one of the tiny lights moved down the mountain toward them, then grew into a set of lighted windows, then resolved itself into a little rectangular box floating down the cable. Morrison listened to the heavy machines behind the wall of the building, a cyclical sound like wheels turning and an armature thumping. He listened for a flaw, an uneven sound that he could invest with his uneasiness, but it only sounded heavy and powerful. Then he remembered that in a few minutes this place would be dangerous, and this machinery was going to take him up and out of it. He felt a terrible eagerness as he rushed into the tram gondola. As it jerked forward and swept away from the deck, it swung gently on the cable. He clung to the hand grip in front of his seat and stared down at the little blue-and-yellow building. It was beginning to look small already. As he watched he saw the tiny headlights of a car come up the road and enter the parking lot. He resisted an urge to drop to the floor of the gondola and kneel out of sight.

A recorded voice came over a speaker in the ceiling. “Welcome to the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway. We’ll be going from the Valley Station, elevation 2,643 feet, to the Mountain Station, elevation 8,516 feet, a trip approximately two and a half miles long and over a mile straight up. The car is suspended on a cable about three inches thick and is driven by the turning of a large wheel…”

THE CONTINENTAL COASTED INTO THE PARKING LOT and moved up the line of cars near the little tram station and stopped behind a tan Chevrolet with a rental agency sticker on the bumper and a newspaper on the hood.

“All right,” said Grijalvas. “Very quickly now.”

Juan walked to the Chevrolet and looked into the back seat, then opened the door and pulled out two suitcases. He walked purposefully up the steps to the tram station, onto the wooden deck, and into the waiting gondola.

“Fine,” Grijalvas said, and Miguel drove the car to the edge of the lot near the entrance to the road.

ON THE HILLSIDE ABOVE THE PARKING LOT an agent spoke softly into his radio. “There’s something wrong. One of them took the suitcases into the tram station, and the others didn’t leave.”

A bored voice answered, “Then wait. We’ve got the road blocked, so they can’t go anywhere. He’s probably going to count it or something.”

“But there’s nothing to count.”

“You don’t say. Won’t he be surprised. Look, we have to wait until Morton has Morrison safely into the chalet up on top before we do anything. Nothing changes that.”

JUAN STEPPED OFF THE GONDOLA and walked along the sidewalk outside the restaurant, where Morales and Figueroa were waiting to take the suitcases. He watched while they carried them a few yards down the hillside, then reappeared in the light.

The three walked beyond the glass doors to the foyer of the chalet, but as they did, Las Crusas was already on his way out of the gift shop and moving toward the telephone booth. The four men converged on the spot. Juan could see Morrison and another man standing outside the booth waiting for an elderly woman with bluish-white hair who was on the telephone.

The four men pulled out their pistols when they were within ten feet of Morrison, and fired. Morrison jerked backward against the wall, his body jumping as the bullets tore into him. Morton crouched and reached inside his coat, but the first shots punched his head back, and he toppled against the telephone booth and sprawled on the floor.

As Juan and his three companions ran toward the door, the old lady said into the telephone, “If you didn’t hear that, it was everything going wrong. They’re both dead.”

The four men burst through the doorway and scrambled down the hillside toward the suitcases. Morales and Figueroa snatched them up and ran as Juan turned to see if anyone was watching from the windows. It was done—no head was visible. Making it at night on the trail down the side of the mountain would be difficult, but the four-wheel-drive truck was waiting for them on the flats. They’d drive along Andreas Canyon to Indian Road, then eastward toward Indio.

Juan ran and caught up with the others, who were trotting now. In the darkness he could hear the rhythmic sound of their deep breathing as they moved down the trail in single file. The trail wound around a large slab of rock, and Juan wondered when they would slow down. In this darkness, after a few twists and turns they were already invisible. The sounds they made seemed loud, but there was no ear that could hear them.

Juan heard a sharp metallic click in front of him that must have been one of the suitcases hitting something, but it sounded like the pump slide on a shotgun. Then there was a clatter of metal sounds that seemed to come from beside the trail and behind him at once. Suddenly glaring lights went on and he saw Figueroa caught in the center of a glowing circle. Figueroa froze, his hands before him as though he were riding a bicycle. Then there were bright flashes of fire that seemed to come from everywhere at once, and Juan saw Figueroa’s body swatted away into the darkness as though a wind had carried him. He didn’t see anything else happen. He felt a terrible, wrenching pain and he was on the ground and his breath was gone, but when he tried to gasp for another it didn’t come.