A Time of Predators

Chapter 23

Rick drew on his cigarette, and the glowing tip cast a faintly theatrical glow over the angles of his face. He and Julio wore swim trunks hut neither had been in the water; it was just that nothing said out here by the pool could be heard except from the kitchen windows, and they were closed.

“Not Debbie,” he repeated doggedly. “I know her, Julio.”

“Yes, man, Debbie.” Julio’s voice was low and intense. “I followed her out there, and waited down the road until she came out again.”

“What the hell are you doing following her anyway?”

Julio’s face was just a blur in the gathering darkness. “Remember the Fourth of July? She said something about you and older women? That showed that she knew about Paula Halstead, so I have followed her ever since, waiting for her to show that she is dangerous.” Then as if sensing Rick’s unasked question, he laughed harshly. The laughter seemed to congeal in his throat. “Yes, last weekend, too. To the cabin. Did you think Julio so dumb as to believe you were not making her? Will the others be so dumb as to believe you when you say she is not a danger?”

The redwood fence blocked off the evening breeze, but Rick still seemed to find the evening getting chilly. He shivered. He’d told Debbie that Paula Halstead had been in love with him, and here was Debbie going to Halstead’s house. Could she be wiggy enough to tell Halstead that story Rick had made up? For the first time he felt things closing in about him. Debbie. Halstead. The rest of the guys. Julio.

If. He looked over at Julio, just a pale blob on the cement beside him now, as the darkness thickened.

If Julio wasn’t making it all up because he was paranoid or something about getting his hands on Debbie. Now that he thought of it, what the hell was Julio following Debbie around for when she was with Rick? Was Julio maybe thinking that Rick should no longer be the moving force of the group? This was Rick’s problem, Rick Dean would handle it. It was time for him to regain the offensive.

“Well, what do you think?” demanded Julio impatiently. “Do you not think the others will agree with my idea that we should—”

“I think you’re full of shit,” said Rick viciously.

Julio’s mouth sagged in surprise. It was always that way: Rick would switch moods, change gears, and neatly be in command again. Rick was going on, his facile imagination working smoothly.

“I told Debbie to talk with Halstead — pretend to be interviewing him for the first fall-term edition of the student newspaper — about his wife’s death.” His lips curved in self-satisfaction as he put it into Julio, watched the bastard squirm. “You know the way Deb is with me, Julio, I didn’t give her any reason why I wanted her to ask. I never have to give Deb reasons. She does anything I say. Anything. But, since you’re so damned chicken—”

“I am not chicken,” denied Julio thickly.

“I said, since you are so chicken,” Rick went on, “I’ll ask her what she found out. Just for you, so you can sleep at night. I have a date with her tomorrow night, in San Leandro. I’ll ask her then.”

Once Julio was gone, however, Rick sat down in one of the canvas deck chairs and thoughtfully lighted another cigarette. It was all very well to say to Julio that he was on top of things, but he knew he hadn’t told Debbie to go see Halstead. It was that Julio didn’t know how to handle chicks. He came on too hard with them. Chicks took everything personal, you had to make them think that they somehow had injured you.

He drew on the cigarette, watched the tip glow. Tomorrow was Wednesday, the twenty-seventh. He really had to find out what was going on, before things went sour. The real danger was that fruiter, Rockwell. So he’d screwed Halstead’s wife, hell, she’d begged for it; and now she was dead, they couldn’t prove a thing there. But Rockwell still was around. Christ, Rick’s old man would freak if he was arrested for that. He still could feel that queer’s face grinding into the gravel, almost.

Caliban jumped up on the couch beside Rick, regarded him warily from quarter-sized eyes. Caliban’s throat was achingly white and the tip of his nose was pink; he weighed thirteen pounds. Rick ran a hand down his back and then, because Debbie was still out in the kitchen telling her ma about the movie, shoved Caliban on the shoulder, hard, trying to knock him on the floor. The cat merely yielded with the push, like a boxer slipping a punch, gave a single indignant rowhr! and jumped off the sofa with wounded dignity. Dogs were okay, wagging their tails and everything, but a cat wouldn’t even purr unless he wanted to.

Debbie came in, looking really sexy in a turquoise thing with a short swirly skirt and a tight top that really showed her jugs. Man, he had to get her down to the cabin for a repeat real soon.

“Mom went up to bed,” Debbie said.

Rick grunted. “My old lady, she’d stay up and keep thinking of reasons why she had to walk through the room or something, where we were.”

Debbie sat down beside him, up close beside him, but all he did was take her hand. It was time to find out. He cleared his throat. “Listen, Deb, Julio was driving out Linda Vista Road on Monday and he... ah... thought he saw you going into that Professor Halstead’s house.”

Debbie pulled the hand away. “He just happened to be driving by? In that green Rambler he borrows from Heavy all the time? Rick, he gives me the creeps, he really does. I keep seeing him on the campus at the U. Whenever he looks at me, I feel like I don’t have any clothes on.” Then she shook her head. “The only one I like is Champ.”

Rick remembered Champ on the phone with that snoopy little bastard’s mother; if Debbie only knew! He said, “Did you go see Halstead?”

“He called me up on Friday, and I went to see him Monday.” She met his eyes steadily. “Have you heard of a man named Harold Rockwell?”

Rick felt as if he had been hit in the stomach; but somehow he kept his face and his voice even. “Rockwell? Isn’t he some real square old cat who paints these real square pictures or something?”

“That’s Norman Rockwell, silly.” But Rick could hear the faint thread of relief in her voice. How the hell much had Halstead told her, for God’s sake? How the hell much did Halstead know? Debbie went on, “He was beaten up, this Rockwell, one night way last spring in Los Feliz, and Mrs. Halstead was the only witness...”

Goddamn it, what were they going to do? How much had he told her, for Christ sake? “You mean, Deb, that you thought I had some—”

“No, silly,” said Debbie almost gaily, fears allayed, “but the station wagon they used to attack Rockwell was... well, sort of like that one of Heavy’s, and I thought... I mean, maybe you weren’t with them... it was the week before Paula Halstead died... And then Professor Halstead said that the same station wagon was parked by the golf course that night, and that his wife was... was raped and every thing before she killed herself, and...”

“Aw c’mon, Deb, I was with Julio that night, remember? And I think we were all to a drive-in movie the Friday before.” He was squirming inwardly, but made himself seem nonchalant. “That professor must really be wiggy. What else did he tell you?”

Listening to her, he felt a ball of lead growing in his belly. Jesus, Jesus, worse than he’d thought. The worst it could be. All summer they’re sitting around on their butts, and that bastard is tracking them down. But who would have thought... I mean, a goddamn teacher... And he had all of it: the station wagon, the kid on the bike, even using the phone booth light as a signal.

“...and so I had to tell him about you and his wife, Ricky, even though I promised you...”

Even that, Halstead had. Oh, that bastard was smart. He cleared his throat. “Ah... what did he want to do about all this?”

“He wanted your name, wanted to meet you. He said...” She thought carefully, trying to remember things heard through the haze of her shock. “He said that even if you were one of them, you didn’t have to be afraid, because the police couldn’t touch any of them anyway...”

Oh yeah, smart, that bastard. Tricky. Just what Rick would have said in his place. Rick stood, began pacing theatrically. With chicks, you had to get their sympathy.

“This is bad, Debbie. I mean, really terrible! We’re just kids, except Champ — and he’s hardly bright enough to do that gardening work of his. So us being kids, who would the cops believe if this Halstead creep went to ’em and claimed we’d attacked his wife or some stupid thing?”

“But, Ricky — you haven’t done anything!” she cried.

“So what? I mean, Deb, now he knows his wife picked me up in a motel and went to bed with me. What do you think he’ll try and do to me if he ever finds out who I am? How do you even know his wife was raped and all that stuff he told you? Was it ever in the papers?”

“No.” Then Debbie’s face crumpled, and she started to cry as the enormity of what she had done struck her. “Oh, Ricky, honey. I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to... I... I didn’t think...”

So that was all right. He’d shut her up for the time being, so she wouldn’t go to Halstead again until Rick was ready for her to go. And that would take some planning, because Halstead was a tricky cat.

As quickly as he could, Rick disentangled himself from Debbie’s tearful remorse, and headed back across the bridge toward Los Feliz. God, everything was a real mess: it was all crumbling in on top of him. Him, not anyone else. He had blinded that goddamn queer, had gone after Paula Halstead, had gotten her so hot to put out for them; his was the great danger, and there was chicken Julio yelling about his danger!

From Debbie, yet. The real danger was Halstead. They’d cooled everything else, and meanwhile there was Halstead, spending the whole damned summer fitting everything together like a damned puzzle or something, until he’d gotten to Debbie. And if Halstead could get to Debbie, the cops could. Halstead. Asking for his name, wanting to see him.

See him, huh? Rick paid the toll on the San Mateo side of the bridge, drove on, hunched over the wheel in concentration. Well, if that smooth snoopy bastard wanted to see him, maybe Rick would let him. On Rick’s terms. At a place he chose.

The cabin. It was perfect. Isolated. No interruptions.

Rick turned over in his mind what he knew was necessary, curiously, like a chimpanzee turning over a mirror found in its cage. Funny, the idea didn’t scare him as it would have a few months ago. Halstead was the one who was pushing. They hadn’t killed his goddamn wife, had they? All they’d done was give it to her, just the way she’d wanted. So why didn’t he just let it drop? Oh no. Not him. Not Halstead. So they had to do it to him.

He got on Bayshore south, toward Los Feliz. There still was a lot of traffic, even though it was midnight.

And that left Debbie.

No problem, actually, until Halstead... disappeared. But then... Hell, they would have to use Debbie to get Halstead down to the cabin, alone, the way they wanted him. And, he thought with a touch of odd pride in her, once Debbie realized what had happened to Paula, and then to Halstead, she’d go to the cops. Or she would unless...

Unless he used Julio’s idea.

Julio was right, there. It would work. It had worked before. But... Debbie? Well, hell, still, if he had to choose between Debbie getting hurt some, and him going to prison for a long time, with his folks and everybody he knew finding out about Rockwell and all...

It wasn’t like she was some untouchable virgin or something. Now that he thought of it, how could he be sure she had been a virgin before last weekend, down at the cabin? She’d sure let him, easy enough, after a little bit of playing the game there until he’d given her a couple of chinks. Hell, chicks always played the game, the young ones like her. And look how far she’d let him go last year, out by Sears Lake.

He swung into the street his house was on, from the freeway access road, and then braked in the closed and darkened gas station on the corner. Getting out of the Triumph, he felt saddened. It was like in the war movies that he dug so: those in command were the ones who had to make sacrifices. And, after all, he was the leader. The other guys depended on him to get them out of this.

He dialed Julio’s number, late as it was.

Chapter 24

Curt’s watch read 7:39 when he pushed the buzzer on Barbara Anderson’s door. It hadn’t started out to be a date; he merely had called to report his progress in searching for the predators. She had, after all, urged him to keep in touch. But she had been so interested in getting the details in person that they had ended up with a mutual decision to go out for a drink together.

The door opened and Barbara smiled up almost shyly at him. Seeing her, the clean-lined beauty of her face, the now strangely tranquil jade eyes, Curt felt a stab of almost adolescent excitement. Which was silly and, he felt, somehow disloyal to Paula’s memory; but the feeling persisted.

“You look lovely, Barbara.”

She made a small mock bow, standing aside to let him by. She wore a navy-blue dress with a short flaring skirt to emphasize the excellence of her legs. “Thanks for them few kind words, sir. I only spent four hours getting ready. How about a drink before we go? I have Scotch, or Scotch.”

“Scotch is fine.” Curt grinned. They were both a little keyed-up and tense, and a drink would help with that.

They stood on the narrow balcony, looking out over the swimming pool, softly lit and empty and very blue and lonely-looking.

Curt tinkled the ice cubes in his glass. “What happens to Jimmy while we’re out?”

“He’s used to it; I sometimes have to work an extra shift at the hospital. We take the TV into his room, and he watches until eight-thirty — that’s what he’s doing now. Then, lights out. He has the manager’s phone number, the police number, and the fire department number. Plus, once we get wherever we’re going I’ll call and give him the number there.” She wrinkled her nose at him. “Enough?”

Curt held up his hands defensively. “Sorry I asked.”

Yes, vaguely sparring, like teen-agers on a first date. They drove slowly south on El Camino, finally choosing an anonymous cocktail lounge with big vinyl booths which successfully isolated them from the other patrons. A bar waitress in black mesh stockings took their orders, rather wearily, as if her feet hurt.

Barbara made her phone call, then returned, lit a cigarette, and looked at Curt through the wisping smoke. “Filthy habit, wish I could break it. And now I want to hear all the details about what you’ve found out.”

“Well, I still haven’t found my predators,” Curt said a bit ruefully, “but I think I’m darned close. You remember Jimmy told me that the girl’s folks were named Marsden and lived in a big white house with a stone front on Glenn Way. That turned out to be a four-block street in the Hillcrest Development, and there were only two houses that fit.”

In one house he had found a childless couple named Moyes who had been living there for eight years. That left the other, in which lived a family named Tucker, and they had been there just about a year. They didn’t know who had lived in the house before they got it.

“But, then, it seems you were no better off than before,” said Barbara. “If you wanted the Marsdens...”

Looking across the table at her, Curt felt that vaguely disquieting touch of excitement again. She was more animated than she had been before, her eyes alight, her face rapt. He had a rather absurd urge to reach across the table and take her hand, but he didn’t. It was too much like someone in a darkened unfamiliar room, holding out a tentative hand because he was afraid of running into something sharp or unpleasant.

“It’s amazing how much neighbors know about other people,” Curt said. “I just went to those on either side of the Tucker house.”

The Marsdens were well remembered; they had lived in the subdivision for years, until moving to San Leandro the previous year. The Marsdens had a nineteen-year-old daughter named Deborah. Curt had called San Leandro Information, gotten their new address, and had driven across the Bay to talk with the girl’s parents.

“Did you tell them why you wanted to talk with her?” Barbara’s lips were half parted; Curt could see a pulse beating in the hollow of her throat above the scoop neck of her dress as she leaned forward.

“No. Her folks are very fine people, and I didn’t want to... well, until I was sure I had the right girl. And what they told me made it seem even less likely that she would be a lookout for a... a gang of rapists. Debbie, they said, was an honors student but was currently attending summer classes at a certain Los Feliz University — which also boasts on the faculty a certain professor named Curtis Halstead—”

“Oh, Curt!” Barbara exclaimed. “Right in your own back yard! If you only had known. All those weeks of looking...”

“Until I talked with Jimmy, remember, I had no idea that a girl might be involved.”

“Is she involved?”

Curt grimaced, and signaled the waitress for refills. “That’s where it starts to get sticky,” he said.

He told of checking the school records, finding which class the girl was in, what dorm she lived in, what classes she was attending, and of leaving his number for her to call. The setting up of the meeting for the following Monday, because the girl was busy on the weekend.

Barbara sampled her drink. “If you ever want to quit teaching, Curt, you could get a job as a private investigator.”

“Maybe I ought to. This past summer I’ve learned more about people, and human nature, than I learned in twenty years of university life. But” — he shook his head — “I still don’t have the predators.”

“Debbie didn’t show up on Monday?”

“Oh, she showed up, all right.” He described the encounter with the girl, ending up with his impulsive handing to her of Paula’s suicide note as Debbie went out the door. “I was hoping it would break her down. You see, I believe her, Barbara. She knew nothing of what went on that night, and just thought she was there to help the one — I call him X — who’s supposed to have had an affair with Paula.”

“Do you think he did?” Seeing Curt’s blank look, Barbara added, “Have an affair with Paula, I mean.”

Curt felt his face coloring up.

Barbara laid a hand on his arm. “I’m sorry, Curt,” she said simply. “That was really a sort of rotten question to ask.”

“It doesn’t bother me, Barbara — really.” As he said it, Curt was surprised to realize that it didn’t. Paula was gone: how could it affect, one way or the other, what their relationship had been? He went on, rather pleased with the discovery, “The hell of it is that Paula could have, I suppose. We each lived our own lives, after all. I don’t believe it for a minute, but... this Debbie was very persuasive in her belief in her boyfriend’s innocence of any violence.”

“But she won’t give you his name. You know, Curt, kids — even kids who are nearly adults — can delude themselves so completely when they think they’re in love. If... if it’s so important to you to... go on with this, give Debbie my phone number. Tell her to call me, I’ll tell her just what was threatened on that phone call to me.”

The same thought had occurred to Curt: using Jimmy and Barbara as a lever to pry information from Debbie. But now he realized that he didn’t want to do that. Barbara seemed somehow to identify his problem as her own, but he found it distasteful to think of putting her or her son into possible further jeopardy from the predators.

“I couldn’t let you do that, Barbara,” he said flatly.

“But, Curt, my number is unlisted; even if they got it from her, they couldn’t get my address. And I want to help you if—”

“I said no, Barbara.” He looked at his watch. “It’s almost ten o’clock. We’d better be going.”

She looked at the stubborn set of his face. “All right, Curt.”

He drove north toward the Arroyo Towers. When he parked the VW in an empty slot just two stalls from the apartment building’s front door, Barbara turned toward him on the seat. “What will you do now, Curt?”

“I suppose I’ll have to start asking questions again — of her folks, her teachers, her house mother, her friends. Find out some way who her boyfriend is — or boyfriends are. Then, check them out.”

“No police, anywhere along the line?”

Curt’s lip curled. “So they can tell me to be a good boy and go home and do nothing? No police.”

“What if classes start before you find your... predators, Curt?”

“Then they start without me. I’m committed to this, Barbara.”

Her eyes were troubled in the dimness of the car. “Have you ever thought what’s going to happen if you find them, Curt? You’re a college professor, not a... a professional fighter or anything. They’re a vicious gang, probably sick or disturbed. They—”

“I wasn’t always a teacher,” Curt began tightly, then was disgusted by the cheap dramatic overtones of his own remark. He turned to face her, talking intently. “All right, sure, Barbara, the world is full of people today who maim and destroy, who get their locks doing it. Old traditions are breaking down, and the new ones haven’t filled the gaps. In some ways our society seems to be falling to pieces — there seem to be predators all over, striking indiscriminately. I’ve heard all the arguments, that we have police to cope with them, that it is an inescapable product of swiftly changing mores. But these predators struck at me. My home, my wife. Maybe I’m weaker than other people, maybe I feel frightened or... or threatened because this could happen to me without some punishment coming to those who did it. I don’t know. But I do know that I have to try and find this particular gang. Find them, and break them, so they don’t ever do it to anyone else.”

In the darkness, Barbara gave a little shiver. “So... now I know.” She tried for lightness, but wasn’t successful. “A dedicated man, no less. But... take care of yourself, Curt. Don’t... let yourself do things with consequences you can’t foresee. Don’t change — you.”

She came forward into his arms, pressed her mouth against his for a long moment. Her lips were almost feverish. Then she was out of the car, looking in at him through the window.

“If it’s any help, Curt, I... feel threatened, too...”

Chapter 25

Rick swung into the gas station he had selected for the call. It had a broad blacktopped lot beside it, with four phone booths along one edge. When he stopped the Triumph, Debbie turned to face him on the seat, not even aware of her short beige skirt riding halfway up her thighs as she did.

“Ricky, I still don’t see why we have to be so sneaky about it.”

“I told you, Deb. If he thinks the cabin is a place that a bunch of chicks have rented for a week, he won’t check up who owns it.”

“But if I just tell him you’ll be there to talk to him, he—”

“—he’d probably have half the sheriff’s deputies in the county down there with him. And then what good would my word be, against a college prof’s? I gotta have it so that if he won’t believe me, I’ve got time to get away without him stopping me or finding out who I am.”

He got out, went around to open her door, the tension whining inside him like a wire drawn too tight. Debbie went down to the end booth and went in and closed the door. Rick stood directly outside but with his back to the booth, so he wasn’t watching her. He went over it all in his mind: if the professor was home, everything went into motion, set for the next night. Well, the next day, really.

Inside the booth, Debbie thought, I’m glad he’s not watching. She knew it would make her even more nervous if he were watching. She made herself drop her dime resolutely, but hoped down inside that the professor wouldn’t be home. It was all happening so fast. The trouble was that by being stupid she had put Ricky into terrible danger; somehow she had to make up to him for that, make sure of his safety.

On the fourth ring, the professor picked up the phone.

“Professor Halstead? This is—”

Curt’s voice was pleasant and relaxed. “I’m glad you called, Debbie. Have you something to tell me?”

“I... yes, sir. Well, that is, I want you to meet me somewhere. D’you have a pencil and paper there?” Curt said he did. “All right, then, do you know where San Conrado is?”

“A little town south of Half Moon Bay, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.” She had begun breathing easier; it wasn’t so bad after all. And her charade really was helping Professor Halstead in his search, because it would get him off the false trail of Ricky and the others. “Just about ten miles south of San Conrado, on the Coast Highway, is a small gravel drive leading off to the right-down a ravine. It’s got a big heavy wooden gate across it, and a big padlock on the gate. Down the gravel road, about a quarter of a mile, is—”

“Will the gate be locked or open?”

She shut her eyes, trying to visualize the gate. “Locked. I guess you can just park in front of it and walk down. Can you meet me there at eight o’clock tomorrow night?”

“Yes, surely. But why tomorrow? Why there? And why at night?”

Rick had rehearsed her on this. “Because I don’t want my folks to know that I’m still going out with... with my friend. They don’t like him. A bunch of us girls have rented the cabin for a week before school starts — we’re going down tomorrow, and tomorrow night the rest of them are going to a movie in Santa Cruz. I’ll say I’ve got a headache, so I can be there alone at eight o’clock.”

“I see,” said Curt. “Will your friend be there with you?”

“I don’t know. I’m going to try and get him there...” She almost giggled on that one; Ricky was so smart to have foreseen the professor’s asking about him! “He’d like to come, but he’s scared you won’t believe him, no matter what he says, and that you’ll try to get his name and get the police after him because of... of what your wife did with him. He says — Oh!” she exclaimed suddenly, the way Rick had told her to. “My mom just came in the front door. Tomorrow night, eight. ’Bye.”

She hung up quickly, pushed open the door of the stuffy booth. Her green sleeveless blouse was sticking to her back, not entirely from the heat in the airless booth. She felt pride in having done it right, and a great sense of relief that it was over. She hated lying.

“It worked, honey! He’ll be there tomorrow night at eight.”

“That’s groovy, Deb.” So, the plan was on. That meant that from now on, Debbie had to be kept away from phones, away from her family, away from everyone until after tomorrow night. Rick had come up with the greatest idea for that, one that took care of everything at once. “So we’ve gotta wait until tomorrow night, so what are you doing tonight?”

She smiled raptly up into his face. “Going out with you, I hope?”

“Let’s make it the whole day, Deb. And night. Go back down to the cabin, right now — just the two of us, just like last weekend. We’ve got our swim suits in the car, and—”

“Oh, Ricky, do you think we dare?” But her eyes already were alight with the idea. “I could... I could call the folks and tell them that I’m getting a bus down to Cynthia’s place and...”

“...and that you’ll be back tomorrow afternoon, or — wait a minute — tell them it’s for the weekend.” Debbie wouldn’t be at the cabin tomorrow night, Rick knew, but she couldn’t know that now. He’d come up with an excuse to bring her back up to Los Feliz in the morning; that would be easy. He had to remember to check up that his old man’s pistol and shells were still in back of the bottom bureau drawer. “We’ll have a ball today, honey...”

Getting into the car, Rick felt a twinge of guilt about the velvet night ahead, when tomorrow... But there just wasn’t any other way. He looked over at her, excited and happy beside him. Sacrifice: the leader always had to sacrifice. It was her or them, once Halstead...

Of course, Halstead, tomorrow night, would be easy. Tricky he might be, but he was just a college prof and real old besides. Deb had said he was over forty. It would be easy to take care of an old cat like that.

Chapter 26

After he had hung up, Curt stood with his hand on the receiver for a good thirty seconds. It didn’t make sense. A cabin, down by the ocean, thirty miles away — so she wanted to shield her boyfriend in case Curt tried to put the police on him, still...

On his large-scale county map, Curt checked the area south of San Conrado. Just at the place she had indicated was a small cove, with a narrow entrance between headlands which were probably spines of rock reaching down from the precipitous, irregular bluffs.

It looked isolated. It looked, in fact, like a trap.

So? So Curt had better go down there right now, today, to make a recon of the area, because he was operating on a set of assumptions.

One. Debbie was not trying to trap him, she was sincere.

Two. She was being manipulated, however, by the unknown X, if he indeed was one of the predators who had attacked Rockwell and Paula.

Three. If X and his cronies were the guilty ones, they now would be seeing Curt as a mortal peril to their liberty.

Four. A cabin clinging to the bottom of a remote ravine by the Pacific was much more reasonable for an assault than a consultation.

Five. The assault might well be fatal.

But then, he thought, what about Debbie? What did they plan to do about her once Curt disappeared? That was the hell of it, of course. He was dealing with teen-agers: explosively immature human beings in grown-up bodies who were probably unstable teen-agers to begin with. Who the devil ever knew what kids were going to do? Half the time they seemed not to know themselves from one minute to the next. Dealing with this gang, if they were the predators, would be like handling plastic explosives. Which didn’t alter the fact that he had to reconnoiter.

Curt looked at his watch. So what was he waiting for? This was the confrontation he had striven for weeks and months to bring about, wasn’t it? Then into his memory came Barbara’s strained, frightened face the night before. You’re a college professor, not a professional fighter or anything. They’re a vicious gang, probably sick or disturbed...

Curt snorted at himself, and went out to the car.

He drove via La Honda Road to California 84, which he then took through the thick stands of redwood and conifers to San Conrado. En route, he realized that in all of his planning he had forgotten to allow for his own emotions. He was scared. Whoever they were, the predators had acted viciously, without hesitation or compunction, each time they had felt themselves threatened. If Debbie’s boyfriend was one of them, probably their leader, then tomorrow evening...

Who would be broken in body and spirit? Who would do the maiming? Even big, rugged Monty Worden professed fear at the idea of being dragged down by a pack of frenzied punks.

From San Conrado he went south along the twisting blacktop of the Coast Highway. In places it ran along the very edge of the bluffs; elsewhere it clung to the face of the cliffs themselves. After nine miles by the speedometer, Curt began watching for the gravel driveway. Another problem: Debbie’s absolute certainty that he was wrong about her boyfriend. But as Barbara had said, the young in love could delude themselves to a terrifying degree; and to accept Debbie’s beliefs meant to accept a dizzying series of coincidences, concluded by a fortuitous blowout on that Friday night of Paula’s suicide.

Curt braked suddenly, seeing the padlocked wooden gate on the right-hand side, but then went on by. Two hundred yards beyond, the road swung right to the edge of the fall and a dusty view-area, well out of sight of the gate. Curt got out, went back afoot along the inside edge of the highway, where it was flanked by an immediate rise of bluff. On the ocean, the gate side of the road, was a steep fall covered with evergreens which effectively screened any glimpse of the ravine, cabin, or cove below. In the fog, this stretch of highway would be dangerous.

The gate bore a sign Private Road — No Trespassing. Curt went over quickly, ducked into the heavy cover beyond it. Deep ditches beside the steeply slanting drive would carry off water during the rains; on either side rose the wooded, brush-tangled sides of the ravine. A good place for a sniper with a rifle.

Curt descended in short rushes, even though he doubted if anyone would be at the cabin today. At the bottom, under cover of a large spruce tree, he waited for his heart to quit pounding. It didn’t. He grinned to himself; he had the wind up for sure. Well, he always had gone into combat scared green; it gave an edge to the reactions. He hoped.

He studied the cup which held the apparently deserted cabin. On Curt’s left, the Douglas fir and tideland spruce of the ravine thinned into a strip of heavy tangled shrubs and small trees, mainly wax myrtles, judging by their smooth gray bark and dark green glossy leaves. They fringed the base of the cliff nearly to the edge of the dunes, where they phased into coarse reeds. To his right, the conifer forest extended around beside the cabin.

Under cover of the myrtles, Curt worked his way left along the cliff base to the plant-topped dunes which shielded the narrow V of beach. Deserted. Beyond the mouth of the cove, Curt could see the foaming swells of the Pacific and the jumbled smoothness which marked the presence of a large kelp bed.

As a trap, the cup was a damned good one. The cliffs probably could be scaled — it even looked like a ledge about forty feet up which might allow one to get back to the ravine — and a good swimmer might be able to enter the cove from the next beach south, depending on the width of the headland. But the normal, unsuspecting man’s approach would be down the ravine, where a man in good cover with a rifle...

Curt dropped down on the beach, under cover of the dimes’ three-foot lip, worked his way up to the cabin. Yes, deserted. He prowled about for another ten minutes, looking in uncurtained windows, checking the position of the electric fuse box. Then he went back up the drive, over the gate, and walked to his car. Leaning against the fender of the VW, he checked the width of the spine of rock which formed the left-hand side of the cove he just had left, and the right-hand side of the beach below the view-area. A man could probably scramble down to the water here; equipped with wet suit, snorkle, fins and face mask, he then could swim around to the cove. Curt, after all, had done some amphib operational training in S.A.S., rubber rafts and all that lot.

But it would be down the gravel for him tomorrow night, he supposed. Risky, but...

Unless he had a second man to cover him.

Curt suddenly felt better. He probably could hire Archie Matthews to — but wait a minute. Matthews, with a license to protect and knowing Curt planned a direct assault on the gang if the predators were there, probably would refuse. But what about Floyd Preston? Preston, as an old clandestine operation teacher, would do it for a lark.

Driving back past the gate, he didn’t see the fresh tire tracks of Rick’s Triumph, overlaid on his own footprints in the dust beside the road. Rick and Debbie had missed him by a bare five minutes.

“I think it’s a setup,” said Preston.

Curt had just spent half an hour detailing the physical layout by the cabin. “I can’t be sure, Floyd, that’s the hell of it. If I go down there tomorrow night, I might find Debbie waiting there alone—”

“—or you might find a bullet in your spine when you get halfway down the road. A guy in the woods, with a good rifle—”

“Not if I’m covered by a second man,” said Curt.

Preston ignored the suggestion. In tightly pegged gray slacks and form-fitting T-shirt clinging to his lithe, tremendously muscular torso, he looked like every boy’s dream of Tarzan.

“Don’t go, Curt,” he said. “Or if you do, take that Sergeant Worden with you.”

“Hell, Floyd,” Curt burst out, “he’s already told me where the law stands on this: since there’s nothing they can do, I’d better not do anything on my own or I’ll be in trouble. No, all we need is you and me. You can act as my cover, to see I’m not shot in the back, and—” He faltered, for Preston’s Indian-featured face wore an oddly startled expression, as if realizing what he was about to say was a shock to himself.

“Well, you see, Curt, I couldn’t go down there with you.”

“But... I thought...” Curt felt the blood rising in his face. “I mean, I thought... you used to...”

“You see, Curt,” said Preston equably, “it just isn’t worth it to me. If this is the gang, they’ll by playing for keeps. Someone’s liable to be hurt, or even killed. You’ve got a hard-on against them, but I don’t. I’ve got a business to run, and getting mixed up in something like this...” He slowly shook his head. “I’ve got a wet suit and mask and flippers you am use, if you decide to go in from the ocean side, but as far as my coming along...”

Swallowing all the angry phrases trembling on his tongue, Curt turned and walked from the office. He tried to hang on to the anger on the drive home, but by the time he was parking the VW beside the porch he had realized how naive his expectations had been. Why the hell should Preston help him in a private vendetta? The trouble was that as the anger dissolved, it left only his knot of fear behind.

It was the old problem of the Hand-to-Hand Manual all over again. In the Manual you threw people around, stabbed them to death, and it all was clean and tidy as a sheet of print in a book. Reality was the gasping, clawing sentry, the stink of fear and sweat and loosened bladder. Finding and disabling and breaking the predators in theory had a clear and terrible clarity about it; but reality was a frightened man, forty-three years old, facing alone a moment of truth for which he was not prepared. Alone. That too had a clear and terrible clarity about it.

Curt went out into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of red wine. It was the first since the weekend of Paula’s death. He returned with it to the living room, sipped at it, stared out the window at the slanting golden late afternoon sunlight on the golf course.

What was his alternative? Give up, as Preston had suggested. Was there any real reason he had to go the next day? No. Nobody except himself wanted or expected him to go on with the search. He could call Debbie Marsden next week, say — oh, say he had found evidence pointing elsewhere than her boyfriend. That would end it, that easily. No one further would be involved, no one else hurt; if a trap was planned at the cabin tomorrow, it would just be forgotten by all concerned.

And tonight? Call Barbara, let her tell him he was making the right decision. Well, no, he wouldn’t do that; but Curt knew he would not be going the next evening. Feeling better, he carried the nearly untouched wine to the kitchen and poured it down the sink.

Chapter 27

Julio pulled shut the double doors of the garage and dropped the old-fashioned wooden bar into place. To eyes still dazzled by the outside brilliance, the artificial light seemed flat and weak.

Heavy looked up from the mechanical depths of the stripped-down Ford that was hoodless in the center of the garage over a great black puddle of oil. As he wiped his hands on a greasy rag, his skull-and-cross-bones ring glinted dully. Champ straightened up from his stool in front of the workbench, his pectoral muscles jumping like a frog activated by electric shock.

“They are coming,” said Julio.

Then they listened. The crunch of gravel as Rick’s Triumph turned into the drive, growl of motor as it drew up outside the double doors, a single tiny squeak of brake drum as it stopped. A door slammed with a heavy mechanical sound, then another. Debbie’s voice spoke indistinguishable words as it approached the side door. The knob rattled.

Light burst upon them. Debbie exclaimed, “Oh, it’s dark in here!”

She wore her clothes of the previous day: beige miniskirt, green sleeveless blouse, sandals on bare feet. Rick still was dressed in his chinos, short-sleeved sport shirt, and desert boots. His voice was alive with excitement or nerves. “Gentlemen: I give you Miss Deborah Marsden!”

“Silly,” chided Debbie, giggling, “I know them all.”

Rick insisted. “On my right, by the tool bench, Mr. Ernest “Champ” Mather, who features the biggest arms and smallest brain in Northern California. Champ, make a muscle for the lady.”

Julio had explained it all to him, but Champ still couldn’t get over the feeling that Debbie was Rick’s girl. Still... He grinned hungrily at her, his flawed, deep-set eyes moving over her; then his biceps jumped out under his short sleeves like grapefruits.

“That is not a can of Crisco by the Ford, but Delmer “Heavy” Gander. His father owns this fine establishment, but he’s fishing this weekend on the Delta. Heavy, take a bow.”

Instead Heavy, smelling strongly of sweat, emitted a terrific belch. Julio went off into a paroxysm of high, almost hysterical laughter. Rick pointed at him like a ref calling a foul on a basketball court.

“Finally is Julio Escobar, who claims to be the only boy in Los Feliz High who didn’t get to make out with you under the bleachers while you were a cheerleader. He says—”

“Why, Rick, that’s not true! I—” Debbie stopped, her face scarlet. It was a put-on, she realized, Ricky’s idea of a joke. But then she saw that a fine sheen of sweat covered his face, and she was uneasy, almost frightened, so she said, “Hadn’t you better get the tool you needed from here and we’d better... I mean, if you and I are going back down to the cabin this... afternoon...”

Her voice trailed into puzzled silence, and Rick put an oddly gentle hand on her arm, detaining her as she turned toward the door. His voice sounded funny, as if he were sick or something.

“You’d better wait a minute, Deb,” he said.

“But... why?” She looked from face to face, uneomprehendingly.

“Because of your friend, Professor Halstead!” exclaimed Julio, darting forward. “Because you have betrayed us into very great danger!”

“I... betrayed into great... but...” She was truly frightened: maybe they were all high on speed or hair spray or something, like some of the girls in the dorm bragged about sometimes. Then it struck her, full force, and she cried at Julio, “You! You mean that you three, you and Heavy and Champ, you... you raped her? Like the professor—”

“We had to do it, Debbie.” But the voice which spoke was Rick’s, not Julio’s; and for an instant the two of them were frozen, face to face, outside time together, isolated from the others. Seeing the expression in Debbie’s eyes, Rick cried, “She saw me, when I was stomping that queer. And that other night, she... she begged for it...”

Debbie ran for the door, catching them enough by surprise so that she had thrust an arm and shoulder out, her mouth opened to scream, before hands dragged her back and smothered her cries.

The hands which had snatched her from safety were Rick’s.

“See?” hissed Julio. “You see what she would do? Now you know why it is necessary to teach her to keep her mouth shut.”

Debbie stared into Rick’s face; his eyes were bloodshot but a stony finality dwelt there also. The whole fabric of her existence dissolved like cloth in acid. Then Rick, with a convulsive, almost blind movement, thrust her at Champ. His hands circled her arms like articulated steel straps.

“Ricky...” she pleaded. “Oh, God, please, Ricky, don’t—”

“You’d better... gag her first.” His face was stark white; he had aged a dozen years in as many seconds. “And make sure you tie her up when you’re... through. I’ll... meet you down at the cabin.”

Heavy’s hand closed hotly over Debbie’s mouth, mashing her lips against her teeth. Her eyes rolled wildly, like a fire-trapped mare’s, as Julio dragged an old mattress out from behind the workbench. He dropped it by the Ford, and began fumbling at his pants.

“I got seconds,” Champ said hoarsely from somewhere above her.

She heard the door shut quietly behind Rick.

Hands jerked her roughly forward, flipped her over on the grease-stained mattress so a wad of oily rag could be thrust into her mouth. Other, eager hands plucked at the waistband of her trim beige skirt, then jerked at her panties. Then, for a long time, there was only the continuing nightmare of sweat and thrusting pain and the lesser abrasions of the mattress cover against her back. Finally there was nothing.

Curt awoke feeling hollow, drained, without purpose. He tried to tell himself that this evening he would be going down to the cabin to meet Debbie and possibly her boyfriend, or else to face the predators; but he knew it was a fraud. He knew he wouldn’t be going. Perhaps, he told himself, he lacked the necessary edge of hatred or of anger. Or perhaps it was just that the years had taken too much out of him. But if even Preston was afraid to go...

Classes would start, Curt would return to teaching, and would, in time, recapture his enthusiasm for it. Perhaps he would start once again on his book. Perhaps...

The phone rang. It was 1:47 P.M.

“Curt Halstead here.”

“Don’t go! Don’t... they’ll be waiting for you, all of them!”

Curt recognized the weak and anguished voice immediately; he leaned forward tensely. “Debbie, what have they done to you? Where...”

“They wouldn’t... stop...” The hysteria in her voice brought sweat to his face. It ran down his chin and stung where he had shaved his neck too close. “There was a mattress... they took turns...”

He tried to make his voice even, conversational. “Debbie, everything is going to be all right, you’re doing fine, just tell me where—”

“Ricky just... left me alone with them. He just...” She suddenly whimpered, “Please, please... help me...”

Curt dashed the sweat from his eyes, reached for the phone book to balance it on his knee. “Debbie, where are you?”

“I... Heavy’s place. They... they wouldn’t stop.”

“You’re doing fine, Debbie. Heavy what? What’s his last name?”

“Heavy.” Her voice seemed farther away, abstracted. She gave a long sigh, then said very distinctly, “Heavy Gander. Please help me.”

“Gander.” Curt leafed through the G’s, ran his finger down a column. Only one. Gander, Charles. “Debbie, is the address three-eight-seven Cuesta Avenue?”

There was no response.

“Debbie, honey, is it on Cuesta Avenue?”

No answer.

He made a decision. He set the receiver down beside the phone, so the connection still was open, tossed aside the phone book, and ran for the car. Check the map. Cuesta. North. He raced the VW up to Entrada, over to El Camino, north again. Only one Gander in the book, had to be the right one. Had to... But if it wasn’t, the phone connection still was open — unless Debbie would come out of it and hang up. God. They just had repeated — he even could understand their thinking. The last time, the woman had killed herself. It sure as hell would work to make Debbie keep her mouth shut.

And have a little fun in the bargain. A little innocent fun.

God. Curt had triggered this; now he couldn’t let things drop. Was it just last night he had been so naive as to think he could just walk away from it, and no one hurt? And no Debbie...

He was nearly to the Fifth Avenue turn-off that would take him to Cuesta before he even thought of stopping to call an ambulance, or the police. Hadn’t he done enough already? It was time for the professionals now, he had the predators where he wanted them: a chargeable offense, with an assault victim who could and probably would identify.

Curt didn’t even slow down. What had Worden said? The D.A.’d be damned lucky to get ’em on probation and remanded to the custody of their parents for a year. Harold Rockwell. Blind. Paula. Dead. Barbara. Terrorized. Debbie. Raped. Whoever they were, whatever they were, Curt wanted vengeance. Personal vengeance. On their bodies.

It was an indifferently kept-up bungalow on a weed-choked half-acre. Curt left the VW in the driveway with the door hanging open, ran across the untended yard to the front door. Locked.

He ran down beside the house, poked an arm through the kitchen screen door, flipped up the hook. Inside he saw a broom; he picked it up and with a wrench of powerful forearms broke the handle in half. A compelling weapon, a jagged-tipped broom handle, when jabbed at eyes or throat. He crossed a kitchen where green-bellied flies buzzed around a sinkful of unwashed dishes. Wife either dead or divorced, man and his son batching it. Charles Gander and his son Heavy. The father off for the weekend, maybe...

But the house was empty. Plenty of disorder, except that it was the continuing disorder of careless living, not of violence.

He went back outside. The wrong Gander? But...

Garage. Double doors closed. He was running again, carrying his broomstick. The doors were barred, so he went around to the side. Would they have a phone extension in the garage? Well... He laid an ear to the side door and called her name.

No answer. And the windows were painted black inside, so he could not see in. He rammed the broomstick through a pane. Still too dark to see anything; so he stepped back and smashed out the whole window. He could see a stripped-down Ford in the middle of the garage, and beside it, flopped carelessly beside the puddle of oil under the car, a greasy old mattress. There was a mattress... they took turns...

Debbie was crouched in the angle of the farthest corner of the garage, half hidden by a workbench. She still held the receiver of Heavy’s bootlegged phone in her hand, but her eyes were merely dark, empty pools in the shadowy garage.

“Debbie?” She didn’t even turn her head to Curt’s call.

He unlocked the window, pushed up the glassless frame, wriggled through. Debbie’s naked breasts were rising and falling shallowly and rapidly, her only sign of life; her ankles were tied. At some time, perhaps before she had called him, she had pulled her stained and bloodied miniskirt up into her lap in a terribly forlorn attempt at modesty. She seemed beyond any of that now. There were a few smears of blood on the mattress, not very many, and dark stains on the cement floor where she had dragged herself to the telephone on the edge of the workbench. There were also heavy dark stains on her forearms and wrists.

Curt uttered a short exclamation, starting forward with the terrible fear constricting his chest that she was bleeding to death, as Paula had. Then he checked himself.

The dark stains were oil. Oil to make her wrists slippery, let her slip off the ropes tying her arms, pull free from her mouth the filthy rag that probably had been used to gag her. A lot of guts, a lot of determination for a girl on the edge of hysteria. How long had it taken her to figure a way to get loose? How long to get to the phone and dial Curt’s number?

Curt was damned glad he hadn’t stopped to call the police. If she had wanted the cops, she would have called them, not Curt.

“Debbie,” he said gently, “I’m going to take the phone. I’ll just touch that, I won’t touch you. Okay?”

Her eyes, those dark shadowed wells without any sign of recognition or comprehension, didn’t react; but when Curt gently took hold of the receiver her fingers released it immediately. Her hand dropped laxly to the twist of ruined cloth which covered her womanhood.

Moving slowly, like a man trying not to startle a wild animal, Curt carried the phone to the far end of the workbench. He got the number from the operator, and dialed, watching Debbie the whole time.

“County General Hospital.”

“Barbara Anderson, please. She’s an R.N. on duty until three o’clock, I don’t know the floor or section. It is an extreme emergency involving Mrs. Anderson personally.”

The switchboard girl was either very bright or very efficient; in less than thirty seconds he heard Barbara’s voice, tight and high with tension, demanding to know what had happened to Jimmy.

“Nothing. This is Curt. I can only tell you this once, Barbara, so take down what you need. They’ve raped another girl, the one I told you about. Debbie Marsden. In the garage behind three-eight-seven Cuesta Avenue, C-u-e-s-t-a. She’s alive and conscious, but she’s catatonic, very pale, her respiration light and fast. I didn’t want to touch her to check the pulse. There’s been some bleeding, I’d guess internally, but I’d guess not very much unless they used something on her besides themselves. She’ll need—”

“The ambulance will be on its way directly.” Her voice was crisp.

“Right.” Curt was still looking at Debbie, his mouth a tight thin line. “Can you keep the police away from her until tomorrow?”

There was a pause. “If she’s in the state you describe, the doctor probably will put her under anyway. But...”

“I need tonight. I know where they are; they’re going to be waiting for me. I don’t want to disappoint them.”

“Oh.” She was silent for what seemed a long time. “You feel you—”

“That’s right.”

Curt could picture her, seemed to look into those remarkably clear green eyes.

She said, “I’ll manage. Come back to me, Curt.”

“Right,” he said again. Then he hung up.

He opened the double doors, waited until he heard the first far whisper of siren, and walked down to his VW. As the ambulance wheeled into Cuesta, he pulled sedately away from the curb. He drove north to Preston’s house in Redwood City, stuck an elbow through the glass of the kitchen door, and spent eight minutes finding Preston’s skin-diving gear.

Back home, he waterproofed a flashlight with electrician’s tape, rummaged through his old foot locker in the study until he found the black commando knife he had carried all through the war, and spent fifteen minutes on it with an oil stone. It had a needle point, double-edged blade. He needed it to butcher them, one by one, as befit the unspeakable pigs they were. Tonight they would die, or he would.

Finally he studied moon, tide, and sunset tables for that night, Friday, August 29th. Planning strategy, all fear burned away.

It was eighteen weeks to the day since Paula’s suicide.

Chapter 28

Champ Mather stood up and stretched his massive body in the deep shadows under the trees just beside the cabin, delighting in the tight powerful play of muscle. By the luminous hands of his watch, 8:45. That guy, that Halstead, he was almost an hour late. Pretty soon it’d be too dark to see him if he did come down the drive. That was too bad, because old Rick had fixed it up real smart. Champ here; Julio up beside the gate; and Heavy inside to answer Halstead’s knock.

But he sure was late, that guy.

A faint scuff of shoe on gravel dropped Champ back into his crouch. Through the gloom he could just make out, beyond the muted gleam of the Triumph, the lighter strip of gravel which marked the drive. That sure was smart of Rick, too, leaving the Triumph right out in plain sight while the wagon was hidden behind the cabin.

That Halstead would think Debbie and Rick were alone in there, would walk right up to the cabin. Once he was inside, they’d do him.

Champ licked his lips in delighted memory. Debbie’d been better than that old woman last spring, because she’d had that look in her eyes. Like a rabbit’s eyes when the back legs are busted with a bad shot, so you can take hold of its head and twist, slow-like, and feel the fibers letting go one at a time while it kicked and thrashed.

That Debbie, she wouldn’t walk with her legs together for a week, he bet. Champ snorted aloud with delight. He’d gone four times, himself. Julio only went the once on her. Heavy, he went twice, like to flattened her just getting on top of her.

“Some lookout you are,” said Julio, from right on top of him.

Wow! Remembering, he’d forgot about watching. He said, “Hey, Julio, how come that professor ain’t showed yet?”

“I don’t think he’s coming. What were you laughing at, Champ?”

“I was remembering how we done Debbie today.”

“Oh.” Julio’s voice was subdued. “Let’s go inside. It’s so dark he’d have to use a flashlight now if he came.”

“Gonna be some moon pretty soon, Julio.”

Julio led the way around the cabin to the kitchen door. Remembering how they done Debbie. He shuddered in the dark, felt an urge to cross himself. He would never forget that. That terrible mistake. He envied Champ, in a way. Champ would probably get as much fun out of using a knothole, except that a knothole couldn’t feel pain.

He knocked at the door; after a moment Heavy’s fat, frightened face looked out. Grease gleamed in the corners of his mouth; bread, mayonnaise, processed cheese, and canned corned beef were laid out for sandwiches. “Oh, it’s you guys.” His voice was relieved. “Guess he ain’t coming, huh?”

“That ought to make you happy,” said Julio wearily.

He went through the doorway into the living room, sickened by the remembered image of Heavy’s white balloon buttocks flexing sluggishly between Debbie’s knees. Rick was standing up against the wall beside the door, the automatic clubbed in his hand. Smash the butt down on Halstead’s head, then carry him unconscious down to the cove and drown him. Better than shooting. Rick and Heavy, the good swimmers, would then carry the body out to the mouth of the cove and let it go. If he was ever found, he’d be accepted as someone who’d fallen off the bluffs, or something, like you read about all the time in the newspapers. So simple. Except Halstead hadn’t come, and it all had been wasted.

“Why did you both come in?” demanded Rick in a thin sharp voice.

Maybe, Julio thought, giving him Paula Halstead’s suicide note after finding it in Debbie’s handbag had been a mistake. “Hell, Rick, he isn’t coming. Not now. And if he does, we—”

“He’s got to come!” cried Rick almost petulantly. “It’s all set up for him to come.”

Julio shrugged wearily. “So he’s chicken. We can get him some other way, Rick.”

“He’s got to come tonight!” Rick raised his voice. “Champ! Go back outside where you were.”

Champ stuck a head and massive shoulder around the doorjamb. “Okay, Rick. I’ll just get me a sammidge, and then—”

“Right now! Heavy can bring you out a sandwich later.”

“Okay.” Champ didn’t mind being ordered around by Rick; he knew that Rick was a lot smarter than he was.

Julio, in the doorway, watched Rick sit down on the couch and put the .32 Colt automatic on the cushion beside him. Rick brought out the suicide note Paula had written, unfolded it, and began reading it again. An intense worm of fear wriggled in Julio’s stomach: why hadn’t he just left it alone with Debbie? Or why had the others listened to him? What if she went nuts or something, all tied up and gagged and everything, her eyes like in one of those horror movies where they wall somebody up alive in a chimney or something?

He cleared his throat. “Ah, Rick, ah, if this Halstead doesn’t show up pretty soon, hadn’t one of us maybe drive back up to Los Feliz and let Debbie loose? I mean, she won’t tell anybody, and—”

“Debbie?” Rick seemed to have walled his knowledge of Debbie away, not in a chimney, but in a corner of his mind which he did not intend to enter again. “We made a mistake about Debbie.”

“That’s what I was saying, Rick, we ought to—”

One of Rick’s legs had begun jiggling nervously. He said, “It was a mistake to leave her in the garage. We should have brought her down here and drowned her, along with Halstead.”

“Drow...” Julio realized he was shaking his head dazedly. “Wow, man, what... what are we turning into? I mean, everything we do seems to shove us along further, instead of—”

The lights went out.

The sudden blackness behind him jerked Champ’s head around, brought him erect in the screening bushes. What the hell? How come they had killed the lights all of a sudden? Should he wait here? But if Halstead somehow had gotten by him, was at the house, Champ didn’t want to miss all the fun. Maybe...

A dark shape flitted past the corner of the cabin and ran swiftly and silently out across the open area toward the Triumph, quite visible under the wan light of the rising half-moon. Just short of the car he seemed to tumble over, sort of, and disappeared into the black shadow.

“Rick?” Champ called softly. No response. “Julio? Hey...”

Still no response. He flexed his powerful hands with indecision, like a cat yawning when it doesn’t know what to do. It sure as hell hadn’t been Heavy; Heavy couldn’t run that fast. Not Rick, or Julio.

That left Halstead. He flexed his hands again, then walked out into the vague moonlight toward the car, not rushing, not trying to be quiet, moving stolidly forward like a tank across open terrain. If it was Halstead, Champ would do him. Do him good.

But when he got to the car, nobody was there. Couldn’t nobody have got inside with him watching, anyway, but he checked to be sure. Then he bent to look underneath, and his mouth dropped open in surprise. All four tires were flat. What the hell... And where the hell...

A rustle of foliage over across the clearing jerked his head around toward the cliff. Into that foliage a dark shape was just disappearing. Champ ran a few steps in that direction, then stopped. How the hell had Halstead gotten over there? Champ hadda keep him from working his way back to the gravel drive, and getting away; but he hadda warn Rick, too. Standing in the moonlight, he bawled Rick’s name.

“Hey, Rick! Hey! Outside here! I seen him! C’mon!”

Then he turned and ran heavily across the clearing toward the bluffs. He crashed into the foliage, then stopped to listen.

Inside the cabin, Heavy, who had been telling Rick and Julio that it was just a blown fuse, stopped in mid-word. He already had lit the old-fashioned kerosene lamp, so they could see one another. At Champ’s shout, Rick’s face went white, and he whirled on Heavy.

“You goddamn fool!” he cried in a high voice. “You and your goddamn fuse box! It was him! Halstead!”

“Let’s go!” shouted Julio. “We have to help Champ!”

But when they got outside, into the open beside the Triumph, they could see no Champ. They could see quite well by the gibbous moon now hanging above the banked clouds; they could hear the incessant surf baying angrily at the fence of rocks that protected the cove; but they could neither see nor hear anything human.

Rick, flashlight in one hand and .32 in the other, made a short crablike rush to get under the cover of the car. “Get into the shadows!” he yelped. “Don’t give him a clear target to shoot at.”

Crouched beside him, Julio said, “How do you know he’s armed?”

“If you were him, would you come down here without a gun?”

Heavy grunted. “There he is! I see him! On the cliff!”

A dark shape indeed was swarming nimbly up the rough stone face of the bluff, already a good twenty feet above the bushes. Rick ran into the open, raised the .32 to jerk off a shot. Nothing happened. He brought the gun down, looked at it blankly, then thumbed off the safety and raised the gun to try again. He jerked the trigger as fast as he could, so the light gun bucked and spat in his hand, eight times. Then Julio caught his arm.

“For Chris’ sake, man, cool it! Champ is going up after him!”

The clip was empty anyway. Rick realized that the smaller shape had disappeared into an irregular strip of shadow, about forty feet up the cliff, which seemed to be cast by an overhang of some sort. Below he could see Champ’s heavier, slower shape moving cautiously upward.

“C’mon! We can go up and help—”

“No!” Rick’s voice rapped out to still Julio’s. He hefted the .32 in his hand. “The clip’s empty. We’ll load up first, and then—”

“But we can’t let Champ go up against him alone—”

“—and we can’t afford to get picked off one by one, either.”

“We oughta check the cars,” Heavy cut in. Sweat stippled his moon face. “I mean, if he did something to the cars...”

“First we reload,” Rick said with finality.

“But what about Champ!” Julio almost yelled. “He’s up there...”

Fifty feet above, Champ’s iron fingers had found a ledge. With a leg-up and a lithe twist, he was lying on a narrow path. End of the line for Halstead: but was he to the right or to the left?

Champ held his breath, listening. Nothing. Far below, in the moon-touched clearing, he could see the others arguing about something, because he could hear their raised voices if not the words. As he watched, they turned toward the auto. Pride welled up in Champ.

They were going to let him take Halstead alone! They trusted him not to foul it up! Rick sure knew how to make a guy feel good.

From his left came a very cautious scraping sound, and a single pebble was flicked off into space by an incautious foot beyond a concealing outjut of rock. It was not repeated, but it was enough. Halstead! His head drawn down between his shoulders like that of a wild animal on the stalk, Champ began inching silently forward, toward the bulge of rock which concealed his unsuspecting prey from view.

Chapter 29

Curt had come in through the narrow neck of the cove at dusk, so the last rays of the sun, glinting yellow-white off the water, would dazzle any observer on the beach. The swim from the adjoining beach to the south had been hampered by the kelp beds, for these huge leathery sea plants formed a thick layer of stems and foliage at the surface which reeked of iodine and often forced Curt to swim underwater. Without Preston’s mask and snorkel and flippers, it would have been impossible. The rubber suit had insulated him against the mid-fifties water.

As it developed, there were no observers on the beach. Curt covered the thirty yards to the dimes by wriggling on his belly, even though no heads appeared at the lighted cabin windows. Once in the reeds, he stripped off the wet-suit, put on the clothing he had carried in a small waterproof bag he also had taken at Preston’s: black turtleneck sweater, black Frisko jeans, steel-toed climbing boots, his commando knife stuck through his belt in the small of his back.

He worked his way silently through the myrtle trees toward the chive, one foot at a time, all senses alive in the near-darkness. By the chive he squatted down. One: locate the enemy snipers, which already worried him. Why hadn’t they been watching the beach? It suggested either that they’d already spotted him, or that they had an incredible lack of respect for the terrain. That worry aside, once the sentries were located, he had to disable the Triumph parked so invitingly out in the open and then find and disable the second car that would be parked somewhere behind the house.

An incautious scuff of city-bred shoe on gravel froze him into immobility while Julio’s dark shape passed close enough for Curt to reach out a hand and trip him up. He didn’t. Instead he listened to Julio and Champ talking, gritting his teeth over Champ’s delight at “doing” Debbie. Now he knew not only who they all were — Rick and Heavy and Julio and Champ — he also knew where they were. And then Julio and Champ disappeared around the corner of the cabin, giving him the Triumph.

He raced silently across the open to the car; as the kitchen door closed behind them, he already was sawing through the tough black rubber of one tire. He slashed all four, was into the clump of bushes the two sentries had quit within two minutes of their departure. He kept right on, around the corner of the house opposite the one they had used, and into the evergreens shrouding the bedroom windows. Here he found the station wagon, which he cautiously hooded to slash and jerk every wire he could reach. He also smeared grease on his face to darken it.

Unless Rick, the apparent leader, was totally ignorant, a sentry would be back out directly. Curt was right. He heard the kitchen door open just as he lowered the Chevy’s hood. From the rear corner of the cabin, he watched Champ’s dark form return to its vigil in the bushes. Curt could have slit his throat right there, but the plan called for the lights next.

He moved back past the bedroom windows, around the front of the cabin under the living-room windows, up tight against the siding so he could not be seen from above. At the fuse box he inched the small metal door open, then paused for a full sixty seconds while he mentally rehearsed his sequence of moves. The moon, rimming the cloud banks with silver, soon would burst from behind them; he wanted to be in cover then.

Knife gripped gingerly between his teeth, he pocketed the two spare fuses from the box. He set one hand on each of the connected fuses, then quickly twisted them out. Darkness inside, voices inside raised in question. Curt jammed the fuses into his pockets, and with the knife slashed out a two-foot section of now-dead wire above the box.

A fast sprint, right down the side of the cabin past the kitchen door, right out across the open to the Triumph. Two yards from the car he dove in a front-shoulder roll which brought him up in a crouch in front of the car, out of sight of Champ. Without a pause he ran right on, silently, in a crouch, with the car between him and Champ. He darted into the myrtle bushes, threw away the fuses, squatted to watch.

It took Champ a full sixty seconds to make his decision, to loom up very big in the moonlight beside the car and begin snuffling around it like a dog by a hydrant. It appeared that the predators were not at their best in open terrain. Curt had to actually shake the bushes to attract Champ’s attention. Once he had it, he went to the base of the cliffs. Yes. It looked like an easy ascent. He heard Champ’s yelling for Rick, and started up. A little dicey, maybe, if they had a gun, but he knew how tricky shooting in the moonlight was. And he had to entice them after him, had to make them come to him.

Curt was nearly to the ledge when Rick started firing. Eight shots, 32-caliber by the sound of them, none even close. On the ledge, he looked down: the one with the pistol had been firing from the far side of the clearing, wildly, at a range of better than fifty yards. No wonder the slugs all had been impossibly wide!

Curt looked down. Only one coming now. The big one called Champ. Four minutes, about. The others, in a dark group, started back toward the cabin, incredibly enough — unless they were going to reload the pistol — then detoured to the Triumph. Actually flashed their light at the flattened tires, thus destroying their night vision.

Curt shifted a little uncomfortably on the ledge. Predators? He had come after leopards, had found hyenas. Of course, dangerous in the aggregate or when trapped, but... predators? Scavengers, rather. Not that it made any difference, he told himself uneasily. He would take them one by one, so they would know it was coming and would have to wait for it, tasting their fear like the taste of a brass bullet casing.

Two thirds of the way along the ledge was a jutting shoulder of rock which narrowed the path to just a bit wider than a foot. To get beyond it, Curt had to edge around with his back to the rock. Perfect.

He followed Champ’s progress by purportedly cautious sounds: the scrape of a shoe on rock, panting, a muttered curse. Did Champ really think he was making a silent approach, so he could take Curt by surprise? Or was he so confident he didn’t give a damn if Curt heard him? Finally the noises showed that Champ was on the ledge, was waiting for Curt to betray himself. So Champ thought he was undetected! Curt let him wait for two minutes, then scuffed his boot, once, to knock a single pebble off the path.

Then he waited.

Two minutes later Champ’s left hand and arm came gradually into view around the knob of rock, as he edged along with his back to the cliff face just as Curt had done.

Now.

Curt kicked with his right leg, jackknifing in the middle for added balance and power, shattering Champ’s elbow with the steel-shod tip of his boot. It was a beautifully delivered kick, which would have sent any normal opponent hurtling into space by mere reflex action.

But Champ’s reflexes were those of an animal, for he sprang not out, but sideways, yelling with shock and pain but still sideways right past Curt, so they were facing one another on the ledge a mere yard wide.

“You... you busted my arm!” exclaimed Champ in amazement.

Then he sprang. Curt, still unnerved by his opponent’s agility and strength, was driven back into the rock before he could set for a defense. His head slammed into the stone; he went woozy for a moment. Champ’s head came up under his chin, forcing his head back, arching his back, at the same time that Champ’s right arm circled Curt’s waist and his clenched right fist dug into the small of Curt’s back.

Legs wide-spread, Champ turned their locked bodies, inexorably, so Curt’s back was to the drop. Still dizzy from his head striking the rock, Curt found his left arm pinned in the terrible strength of Champ’s bear hug; his right hand was free but had no ready place to strike, since Champ’s head was drawn down between his giant trapezius muscles like that of a turtle into its shell. Curt groaned. He was strained so far back that his face was pointed skyward, his shoulders actually were over the chasm. There was a muted double pop, and pain tore through his chest as two ribs cracked.

The pain snapped him back. All finished, was he? Not quite yet.

Curt drove his left knee up between Champ’s legs. The big man shuddered, squirmed, tried to shield his testicles from the second blow he knew would come — but he didn’t slacken his grip.

Again. Champ moaned. He turned his head to the left, grinding his skull harder against Curt’s jaw. But he also exposed his face. Curt locked his right hand into a judo fist, second knuckle of the middle finger protruding, and drove it with all his strength into the place that he hoped Champ’s left eye would he.

It was.

Champ screamed, twisting away and back, clawing his right hand at the injured eye. Curt teetered for a second on the edge, almost gone, then got his balance just as Champ lurched toward him, yelling, all fighting sense gone in rage and pain. With almost surgical precision. Curt used his steel-shod right foot again, but driving it this time into Champ’s crotch. The big man collapsed, going down onto his knees like a heart-shot buffalo, and Curt smashed the knife edge of his right hand in a backhand blow at the exposed neck vertebrae to crush them. He struck three inches too low, across the back of the shoulders, but the force of the blow’ knocked Champ forward, right over the edge.

Curt was dragged to his knees by the ragged knife-blade of pain between his ribs. He dragged in shallow half-breaths, choking still from that awesome bear hug. He looked over the edge.

Champ had slid head-first for the first few feet, had clutched a protrusion of rock with his right hand, had clung desperately as his body slid by into space. His fingers had held on even under the shock of the full weight of his body; now he swung over emptiness by just that one hand, his broken left arm dangling uselessly at his side.

When Curt looked over, he stared right into the fear-stricken face.

“I...” Terror thickened Champ’s voice. “Mister... please...”

Debbie moaning on the phone — please. Curt watched, unblinking, as the clawed fingers began to very gradually straighten.

“Please...”

He couldn’t do it. Curt went down gingerly on his belly, stretched an arm down, was able to close his fingers around Champ’s wrist. “Try to chin yourself,” Curt began. “Try to pull up where I can get—”

Champ’s fingers straightened, his full weight, held only by Curt’s grip, fell free and slammed Curt clown against the rough stone ledge.

Curt yelled and realized that the weight was gone. His own hand had popped open under that scourge of pain.

Champ fell backward, shoulders hunched, legs windmilling above his head, right hand clawing empty air. He made no outcry. His heavy body plummeted through the undergrowth and smashed on the jagged unseen rocks at the base of the cliff with a sickening thud.

Silence. Mutter of distant surf.

Curt struggled to his feet, leaned against the rock, face ashen. Predators? Well, he had learned something about himself then. Not in cold blood could he do it. His victory was bitter in his thoughts. As for the others...

There were no preliminary whimperings — just sudden open-throated shrieks of pain, like the ululating wails of mating panthers. Curt jerked his head around, stared horror-stricken into the shadows below. After a fall like that, the man couldn’t live, couldn’t...

Once in the desert they had been pinned down for two days by enemy air and a man in a perimeter position had been hit and had yelled for nine hours without pause, so that three men were killed trying to get to him and they finally just had left him there, screaming until he died...

Curt had to find a way down. Had to do something. But... no way down. Not for a man with broken ribs. Up, then? Impossible. One way: work obliquely along the face of the cliff toward the edge of the ravine, try to find a way off the cliff face and into the trees. Then down the gravel drive to the man dying below him.

Curt started to move, then paused. His eyes swept the clearing below, and a chill of realization ran through him. The others had not appeared! The pale glow of a kerosene lamp shone against the curtained windows he could see from there. They must have heard the body falling; they must be hearing the screams. But none of them had emerged. Even if they thought it was Curt, not their buddy Champ...

Curt shuddered again; that callous disregard was the worst thing they had done. Then he started edging his way painfully along.

Chapter 30

They were in the living room when the heavy body smashed down through the foliage to stop with an abrupt thud on the rocks. Rick came to his feet with the darkly blued .32 Colt automatic clutched in his right hand, his face very pale.

“What was that?” he demanded in a hoarse whisper.

Heavy also was on his feet, rosy-cheeked face beaming. “Champ got him!” he exclaimed happily. “Champ knocked him off the cliff!”

Julio was halfway to the kitchen door when Rick called him back in a flat, almost deadly voice. “If that was Halstead falling, we’ll know when Champ comes back.”

“But what if it was Champ? What if—”

“Then we can do nothing for him anyway.”

To hell with that, thought Julio. Ever since the rape of Debbie, he seemed to have been waking by painful degrees from some sort of bad dream which had begun last April with the attack on Rockwell. A dream in which he did not what he wished, but what seemed dictated by something outside himself. Well, he was through following Rick’s lead.

He started again for the door, but behind him the safety clicked off. He looked back: the pistol was trained on him, and the look in Rick’s eyes, almost a madness, brought him back to his chair.

Then the screams started.

Julio’s lips drew back and his eyes started from his face as if he were being throttled. “That’s Champ’s voice! He is hurt, he—”

“It might be a trick.”

The gun didn’t waver. Julio sat still. Fifteen minutes passed, while the cries continued. Heavy sat on the couch like a fat white grub, eating a corned beef sandwich; Rick sat in the easy chair beside the cold potbellied stove, with his right leg over the arm of the chair so he could rest the butt of the .32 on his knee.

“Rick, please, listen to that... that noise. Champ—”

“Shut up.”

The cries continued for the next hour intermittently, as if the injured man were undergoing surgery without anesthesia. Heavy, who had made a whole loaf of bread into cheese and corned beef sandwiches before the lights had gone out, was very steadily and surely eating his way to the bottom of the stack.

Julio spoke to him suddenly. “Will you come with me? I can’t stand that sound any more.”

Heavy stared at him with piggish eyes, and then gave a great raucous belch. His cheeks were pouched with half-chewed bread; the white melting fat of the corned beef ran down his chins. Around his mouthful he managed, “Ca... do it, Jul... Ri... gotta wait...”

“Empty your mouth, for Chris’ sake, you pig!” stormed Julio.

Heavy chewed, swallowed, belched. “Rick says we gotta wait.” He shot a look over at Rick, who had Paula’s suicide note open in his lap again. “I ain’t chicken, no matter what anybody says, but I ain’t dumb, either. The Triumph’s screwed up, an’ I bet the Chevy is, too, and I ain’t about to try an’ fix ’em in the dark. So we can’t get outta here: so what’s the use of goin’ outside?”

Julio began pacing, roaming the room like a caged animal, quivering each time that another of Champ’s screams tore at his nerves. A flash of hatred almost palpable in intensity shot through him. Halstead had done that to Champ; had done something to Rick, changed him some way so they were stuck in here, while outside, Champ...

What had happened to Rick? To all of them? Rick wasn’t yellow like Heavy, but tonight he had just sort of flipped. Sat there staring at the dead woman’s note to her husband. Julio checked in his pacing. Rick’s face that morning when he had turned Debbie over to them — maybe that had started it. Or maybe it had started months ago, with Rockwell. Then they had been a group, a unit, a whole bigger and stronger than all its parts. But Rockwell, and then Paula Halstead, and Debbie, and...

It was like being on one of those fun-house things that go around and around, faster and faster, and no matter how you try to hang on to one another in the middle of it, you are finally flung off, sliding and clutching impotently, to the periphery.

He had to get out of here. He stopped in front of Rick.

“You sit there and swing your leg and pretend to yourself that you are not afraid. But you are. You are even afraid to shoot.” He turned and walked unsteadily to the kitchen door, where he paused and looked back. “Even me. Even in the back.”

He turned deliberately, and went across the kitchen toward the back door. Face white, lips bloodless, Rick slowly lowered the gun butt back to his knee again. His left leg began a slight uncontrollable twitching.

Heavy reached for another sandwich.

The moon was lower and the fog banks were building up to engulf it; in the air was a bone-deep chill which helped steady Julio. He had expected a slug in the back, he really had, but he hadn’t been able to stop himself. Funny, he felt almost sad about Rick. For this, they were all destroyed. Now that it was too late, he knew that if they had stopped, before any particular piece of violence, they could have ended it. But they had gone on, and now it was too late. For them. For Debbie. For Paula Halstead and Harold Rockwell. For Champ.

Champ cried again, with a broken gagging note like the sound of some animal or something in those doggy jungle movies on TV. Julio left the shadows of the house, walked out across the open toward the base of the bluffs where he knew he would find poor, dumb, busted-up Champ. But not Halstead. That bastard would be long gone.

But as he came under the bushes he heard a voice speaking a bare five yards away. Halstead! Trapped here, under the cliffs! Julio went into a tense crouch, switchblade suddenly open in his hand, and went on.

“Easy, son,” Curt was saying in the voice of a man gentling a horse. “I had a tough time getting down from that cliff. Now I—”

Julio went in like a ferret from behind, his knife sweeping up in a short vicious loop at Curt’s kidneys. But he was too eager, or he uttered a sound of anticipation, or the failing moonlight was deceptive. Curt rolled forward and up and around, facing him, and Julio’s blade stabbed only air.

But Halstead still was trapped in this small clearing, and Julio’s teeth showed in a grin by the dim, filtered moonlight. He began sliding forward.

Curt spoke in a voice oddly steady. “Your friend is very badly hurt. I think his back is broken. But he may survive if I can get help here in time. Let’s—”

Julio laughed outright. Afraid of the steel, Halstead was; truly, the knife made a giant of him who had it. Champ, on the ground two yards away, moaned fitfully. A ragged wasp of cloud deadened the moonlight even more. Julio heard Champ, had heard Curt’s words, but none of it was even registering. All that registered was that Curt was still backing away from him, and to Julio, that meant fear.

“I am going to kill you,” Julio hissed.

A change took place in the grease-smeared face facing him, but it was not the change he had expected. Tenor did not enter it, but instead a... well, almost a sort of pleasure. Halstead’s right hand went behind him, reappeared with a deadly-looking twin-edged blade, dull black so it caught no moonlight.

“Don’t try it, son. I forgot about it with your friend here, up on the cliff, but I was fighting with this knife before you were born.”

A tiny finger, almost of fear, touched the back of Julio’s neck; but then he leaped forward, slashing up and across and back with the half-clumsy technique of the street fighter who has seldom faced another man’s knife, and who has fought only with others as unskilled as he. Curt whipped his blade at the boy’s knuckles, to cut the tendons and disarm him. But the moonlight was almost extinguished by the fog, and he wasn’t sure where he had connected. Probably just a superficial cut.

Julio fetched up beside Champ, turning back toward Curt with an almost wooden expression on his face. “Hey, what...” he began.

“Look,” said Curt, “I can take you, kid, and I will. Stop...”

Julio took one step toward him and tell face-forward to the ground. Curt waited, milking sure it wasn’t a trick. Actually, it had to be a trick; the most he had done was slash, not stick. But Julio gave no hint of movement. Then the fitful moon emerged for a second, and Curt saw that Julio’s switchblade lay a yard from his curled fingers.

With a muttered exclamation. Curt went in, dropped to a knee, turned the boy over. Dark sightless eyes stared far beyond his — as Paula’s had at the dressing table, as the sentry’s had in his nightmares, as many men’s had during the war. He sighed wearily, and stood up. He wiped his blade on his sweater, and put it away.

He had missed the knuckles but bad gotten the wrist, where the radial artery is a bare quarter-inch below the skin. Julio had been unconscious in thirty seconds, dead in two minutes. But even as Curt felt the shock and revulsion at this senseless death, the thought came through his mind, unbidden: For an old sod, Halstead, you haven’t lost too much of the old speed, have you?

It was gone as soon as it had come, but it left behind it a taste in the mouth like vomit. He looked down at the two victims: the dead and the maimed. Madness. And two more to go? he thought furiously to himself. No. This was the end, the finish. Predators? If only he had arrived a few seconds earlier the night of Rockwell’s blinding, or had been there when they had come for Paula, none of this...

But perhaps, he realized, only on the long tortuous road he had traveled since her death had he learned that threat and force and fear could only be met by similar threat and force and fear. As Curtis Halstead, professor, he would have temporized, appeased, reasoned — and would have been destroyed. Perhaps only as Curtis Halstead whose roots reached back to the violence of the desert campaign was he able to...

He shook off the thoughts. It was over now, finished; leave the other two to Monty Worden’s ministrations, or to whatever private demons they might carry within them. If any. He removed his heavy sweater, laid it over Champ, and felt his pulse. Light and fast from shock, but steady. He might make it, if Curt could get help in time.

Only when he stood beside the VW in the fog, which now swirled thickly and made everything ghostly and dark and wet, did he realize he had lost his car keys. Now what? He didn’t know how to cross ignition wires to start a car, had no way of knowing where or when the keys had gone. Only one thing for it.

He started trudging slowly through the fog toward San Conrado, ten miles distant, his cracked ribs stabbing at every breath, shivering with the cold now that his sweater was gone. And with the fog, there was a good chance, he knew, that he would have to walk the entire distance.

Chapter 31

Sagging the ancient couch beneath his bulk, Heavy wondered how long Julio had been gone. Sure, the screams had stopped, but the silence was even more scary in its way. As long as there were screams, that meant somebody was alive out there. Alive. His moon face puckered; a great racking belch snored up from his belly. “Ah, Rick, how long you figure before Julio comes back?”

Rick slowly turned to look at the fat boy. His eyes were hooded, and his left leg, still outthrust in its pathetic pose of nonchalance, jerked as steadily as a heartbeat. His laugh was a caricature. “You know as well as I do that he’s dead, Heavy.”

Heavy shifted uneasily, belched again. He reached for a sandwich but the platter was empty. Julio dead? Or up on the Coast Highway right now, thumbing a ride? “All... I’m gonna make some sandwiches, Rick. You want one?”

Rick watched Heavy lever his bulk up off the couch; his lip curled. “Go ahead, stuff your belly. He ain’t get at us in here.”

Heavy waddled into the kitchen, by the Light of two candles busied himself over the bread board. What the hell gave with Rick? He’d thought Rick was going to shoot Julio, he really had. He mayonnaised bread thickly, opened a can of Spam, salivating slightly at the spiced aroma of the meat. If only it were light out, he could cannibalize the Triumph to get the wagon started. Or if he were up on the highway, even afoot, or swimming out of the cove to the next beach to the south...

He stopped for a moment, meat knife in hand; then he went back to the front room. “Hey, Rick, I bet I know how that Halstead got by Julio and Champ. I bet he just swam out around the rocks from the next beach south and in through the cove — it’d only be about half a mile...”

“Shut up!” Rick snarled. “He came by them, down the driveway. The stupid, yellow bastards...”

Under Rick’s fury, Heavy retreated to the kitchen. Man, drat Rick sure was getting strange. He went back to his sandwiches. He wished that he had a gun like Rick did, to go up to the highway... Then he thought of that long steep narrow driveway, flanked by concealing black trees. Well, maybe he wouldn’t. But he bet that if he were down on the beach right now, he’d swim for it. Only, the door was locked and the key was in Rick’s pocket. Of course, a window could be pulled open, but...

He stopped again, considering. The fog would hide him from Rick once he was on the beach, or even from Halstead if he was there. Roll out the window quick, down to the water, swim out of the cove. Go down to Mexico somewhere, nobody could find him... His old man wouldn’t miss him anyway, and...

Heavy clambered laboriously up on the sink, with a quick frightened look over his shoulder toward the living room where Rick sat, out of sight, and jerked up the window. A blast of cold air swept through, snuffing one of the candles.

“Heavy! What the hell are you — Heavy!”

Grunting, he dove in head-first panic, hit in a totally graceless front roll, so his pants ripped all the way up the seat with a great snoring sound. Then he was running. The .32 splatted, three times, but he was already down behind the lip of the dunes in the thick ropy fog. Crouching, he ran about thirty feet, then thrust his head up cautiously. Yeah. Rick already was pulling the window back down. Safe.

The fog goosebumped his flesh, and the ripped trousers admitted a shocking amount of cold air to play across his backside. He trotted straight down to the water, ponderously hippo-like, shoes full of sand and nostrils full of the wet iodine odor of beached kelp. His belly swayed almost sedately as he moved.

At the water, Heavy paused. It seemed so damned lonely out there in the darkness where unseen breakers smashed themselves to foam on black rocks; he would rather be up on the highway, where the fog would stop traffic so he could maybe get a ride. But death — his death, the finish of the entity called Heavy — might lie that way.

He kicked off his shoes and socks, shuddering when his feet touched the icy sand. God, it was cold. He dropped his pants, removed his shirt, stood elephantine in skivvies and T-shirt. He made a bundle of the clothes, with the shoes inside, set the bundle on top of his head, and fastened it there with his belt buckled under his chin. He would want those dry clothes when he reached the next beach.

Wading in was like being progessively paralyzed from the feet up. His teeth started chattering and he went numb. When he was in up to his neck, he began stroking out into the fog. Instantly he was isolated in a world of gray-black icyness which muted even his own splashings. He swam awkwardly, holding his head up to keep the clothing dry. At first only the growing roar of the waves guided him toward the entrance, but then he could see the occasional gray turn of a breaker on black rock. Helped by the ebbing tide, he entered the turbulence near the entrance within a few minutes.

Careful now. Don’t get swept up on the rocks...

A heavy wave hammered him against black granite rendered invisible by darkness. His face went under; he was dragged bumping and scraping along the rock face for a few agonizing seconds, his flesh shredded by sharp-edged barnacles. Kick free! Kick free!

He was off the rocks, but somewhere in that struggle his clothing had gone; only the belt hanging around his neck remained. He pulled it off, finally glad of the numbness from the icy water which kept him from feeling the pain of the dozens of superficial gashes he had suffered.

Don’t panic, he told himself. Go back. You can’t make it.

A breaker smashed over him, filling his unprepared and gaping mouth with salt-bitter water. He gulped, belched, momentarily panicked, got control. Back. He had to go back, he...

The backwash of waves off the narrow neck of the cove struck him, spun him, and suddenly he was out beyond the cove and into the open ocean. All right. Don’t panic. Go on then, you’re through now, go...

He churned wildly, fighting for his life, for his legs had been gripped by the slimy tentacles of... of...

Kelp.

Wow. Just kelp. He rode with the lift of the next wave, was free. But panic still nibbled at him as he thought of the huge leathery sea plants rising up from the ocean floor below him. Underneath him lay perhaps half a hundred feet of icy night ocean, filled with kelp like dead fingers, clutching like unknown sea beasts...

Thrashing, he was in it again, enwrapping foliage gripping him, dragging him down. He fought in blind terror against it, and then the first cramp hit him.

It was a giant fist that struck his churning stomach an unbelievable blow and jerked every muscle of his flaccid body with agony. He went down, was suddenly clear of the kelp except for the nude brushing of smooth stems; he caught one, hung on, dragged himself upward. But as he pushed his head free, to gulp air, another wave washed over, filling his mouth with water.

Another cramp struck him. He sank again, gasping, choking, getting more water into his lungs, flailing with arms and legs that sent out erratic shock waves. Heavy was drowning.

Blood from his abraded hide filled the water, attracting a lean torpedo shape from the open sea. It arced in toward the kelp, drawn by blood and those erratic movements which, to a shark, always mean that something is in trouble and hence is potentially food. It would not attack yet, of course, despite that deliciously maddening scent of blood. Despite the viciousness of its attacks, the shark is a cautious predator. It is thus that it has survived, unchanged, for 350 million years.

Eventually, of course, it would move in to feed.

In the cabin, Rick thought: Who needs them? Of course, he had to get up from his chair every few minutes to check each window, carefully, automatic in hand. But it v/as worth it to have no more worries about which one would betray him next. No loyalty, no guts, that had been the trouble with them all along. If he’d had the proper backing from that first night with Rockwell, none of this would have happened. Not that he was to blame for what had happened to Rockwell.

No, the real trouble all went back to Paula Halstead.

His dark, troubled eyes went over her note again. Goddamn that Julio! If he hadn’t given Rick the suicide note from Debbie’s purse — hell, if he hadn’t insisted on getting his hands on Debbie... Not Rick’s fault, what had happened to Debbie. None of it his fault.

please understand that I am doing this because of something intolerable in myself

See? In herself. Nothing about it being because of what had happened with Rick. No, she’d fallen for Rick the second she had seen him. That had happened, she had come, only because of Rick. Nothing else. That look of self-loathing he’d remembered from her face, that hadn’t really been there. She’d wanted it, man. From Rick. He’d turned heron, like he did Debbie and Mary and... and all the chicks.

But still, somehow, it seemed all to go back to Paula Halstead, to the note in his lap addressed to her husband. Back to Paula, and forward to him. For it all ended with Curt Halstead.

Rick made his round of the windows again. He was glad Halstead had gotten the others. Oh, Rick had the gun, once it was light he would make out okay, but he was glad about the others. Champ, last one you’d think was yellow, was the first one to break. Pretending to be chasing Halstead when really he’d been trying to get away.

Then Julio, yellow spic bastard. Going to run away, up the ravine, knowing that Rick wouldn’t shoot him. Only, Halstead had been waiting for him, in the darkness and the swirling fog.

And finally Heavy. Going to swim for it, he bet, after trying to foul Rick up with all that crazy talk about Halstead swimming in. Who the hell had he been trying to kid? That would have meant that a lookout posted along the beach would have warned them of Halstead’s arrival; it meant that Halstead had outmaneuvered Rick at tactics. That was wiggy, man. No damn teacher was better at tactics than Rick Dean. Sure, better at sneaking around in the woods, maybe, but...

But anyway, Heavy was gone. Halstead would have him by now.

That made it neat, tidy for Rick. Everybody gone except Debbie. Well, he hadn’t had anything to do with what happened to Debbie. No matter what she might claim, all he had done was walk out and leave her with the fellows. How could he have known what they would do to her? Besides, she’d put out for anyone; he bet she hadn’t even fought it.

Alter four. Dawn soon. Time to make his move. He stood up, shivered — it had gotten cold in the cabin, that was it — and went to the back door. Very silently he turned the key in the lock, eased the door ajar a hairline. Speed. Surprise. Catch Halstead unawares.

Rick found he was trembling again: the damned cold fog! He put the automatic under his left arm, wiped his sweaty palms down trouser legs that were crumpled from his all-night vigil, took the gun again. He patted his hip pocket. Yes. The loaded spare clip was there.

He kicked open the door, skidded through, fell on the wet cement, screaming in terror and firing at Halstead’s shadowy lurking form behind the Triumph.

No return fire. Just the gently whisping fog, moisture dripping from the cabin eaves. The air smelled of the dawn and of the sea.

He scrambled to his feet, raced, dodging and weaving, to the Triumph where he could crouch behind the bullet-starred hood. He panted raggedly. Okay, okay, so you made me waste two. You don’t know I’ve got the spare clip. He licked his lips: the bad one now, across the open to the foot of the drive. Halstead might be ambushed there...

Now...

Racing across slippery grass in the misty dawn, then his soles spuming gravel. Sharp air knifing lungs as he slid to his knees against the rough bark of a fir tree. Chest full of razor blades, head full of wraiths, but safe here. Apart from the distant mutter of surf, silence utter and complete. Swirling fog. Shadowy trees...

He flipped himself sideways, rolling, into the gravel roadway, pumping bullets up into the fir tree where Halstead had shaken a branch above his head, showering him with dew.

A mountain jay arrowed away raucously into the fog. Nerves, Rick baby. Four used, five left in the clip. He’s working on your nerves, baby, doesn’t know about that spare clip. Once you make the blacktop with that spare clip of bullets, you’re safe. Got to make the blacktop.

Go, man!

Legs pumping, he ran head down, arms working, toes digging into the sharply rising gravel. He was the hero of every war movie he had ever seen, running through enemy sniper fire unscathed; during that short burst of speed he felt no wounds, received medals, was present at his own hero’s funeral to receive the plaudits of the mourners.

Rick was up and over the gate, whirling in the safety of the highway, free from the masking bushes. His mouth was full of cotton, his chest was heaving, his knees were wobbly; but his gun muzzle pointed unwaveringly at the gate. Halstead would have to come over that to get him. He had made it, won free!

“I’m ready for you!” he cried menacingly into the fog.

He hoped now that the bastard would try it. He’d shoot him where he wouldn’t die right away, in the crotch, say; he’d grind the bastard’s face into the blacktop, he’d gouge out his eyes...

The gray fog swirled about him, wetly caressing him, hampering his vision, so when it swirled away... Was that a shadow straddling the gate? Rick stood with a foot on either side of the white center line of the highway, making his stand. If that was...

Halstead!

He went into a half-crouch and fired again and again, flashes of muzzle gas lighting the grayness. The gun clicked, he jerked the trigger again, nothing, not even a click, empty, clip used up.

Rick made a sick whining sound in his throat and broke his fingernails scrabbling at the empty clip, hunched over it furiously like a mad alchemist, unable to get the catch to release the spent clip into his hand. All! He hurled away the dead clip, dug in his pocket for the second, eyes on the gate.

A muffled growl, behind him, made him whirl. A monstrous shape loomed up from around the bend of the highway, yellow eyes fog-dimmed, Christmas-festooned with the red and yellow lights worn by the big semi-truck-trailer rigs which roamed the Coast Highway like unleashed animals. Air brakes hissed; wheels shrieked away rubber lives on the macadam.

Rick dug out like a sprinter, but his shoe struck the discarded clip, he did a comic TV split, windmilling his arms, yelling like Milton Berle milking mi audience for laughs.

Smoking screaming desperately locked rubber hurled uncounted tons of metal onto him. The bumper smashed his teeth, dissolved his skull like flung egg, smeared him grublike down fifty yards of white center line in the serene lifting fog of the dawning day.

The driver made it out of his cab before he got sick.