Contract Null & Void

Walpurgisnacht IV

The rattling, battered, dark green pickup wheezed to a stop on Calle del Arroyo in Stinson Beach just beyond where it angled off the Shoreline Highway. The truck stood there panting like a spent horse while Danny Marenne opened the rider’s door and started to maneuver his battered body off the front seat.

“You sure you can make it okay, son?”

The driver was a craggy man in his early 70s wearing old-fashioned spectacles over faded blue eyes tucked deep under wild white eyebrows. Because he chewed tobacco, his scraggly salt-and-pepper beard was brown-stained under his shrunken lips.

“Oh, sure,” panted Danny, standing storklike on one leg beside the open door as he got his makeshift driftwood crutch out from behind the seat. He made a deliberately vague gesture that could have indicated any of the eight Calles del that cut off Calle del Arroyo at right angles toward the sea. “It’s just down the road a little ways.”

“I could drive you.”

“I’ll be okay.”

The best lie was the simplest one. Quite a lot of Danny’s memory had returned in his days below the bluffs, gaining enough strength to crawl back up again, but he’d told the old man he was staying with friends at Stinson and last night, hiking, alone, had stepped on a soft spot, the ground gave way...

Nothing about the fact that he had a concussion and cracked ribs to go with the badly twisted ankle the old man could see. Or about losing his $2,000 bike and the plans and contracts he’d been carrying with him when he’d gone over. Proof of the scam they had tried to kill him to cover up.

He turned away with a careful wave of the hand not holding the crutch, limped slowly along Calle del Arroyo until he heard the old truck U-turn behind him back toward Shoreline. Then he turned down one of the narrow shrubbery-lined blacktop streets toward the beach house.

Fifteen minutes later, Danny gimped his way into the sandy drive toward the gray-weathered clapboard cabin set in the trees. Living room, two bedrooms, kitchen with a propane gas tank behind it on a two-by-four sawhorse, narrow front porch turned to the ocean twenty yards away with a couple of broken-down rockers on it for lazy weekends away from the city.

No signs that anyone had been here looking for him. Not that they reasonably would have. No way anyone could think he had survived the plunge over the cliff. Nearly hadn’t. The bike, spinning like a boomerang with the torque of the car’s blow, had thrown him just far enough out from the cliff face so he had landed in deep water instead of on black rocks.

So he would be safe until he could call the other two and let them know he was here.

He got the key off the top of one of the telephone-pole segments that served as support pillars under the cabin, twisted it in the lock. The place smelled musty as seldom-used beach cabins usually do, but it enfolded Danny like the arms of a lover. He clumped his way into the linoleum-floored bathroom, pulled the chain of the dim overhead bulb to get his first look at himself in the mirror over the sink.

Mère de Dieu! Amazing that the old man had even stopped for him. He looked like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre after the massacre. Several days growth of beard, dirt and sand and abrasions and swellings and his whole face black-and-blue.

But the pupils of his eyes were the same size.

He took four aspirin with four glasses of water for his head, ribs, and ankle, in the kitchen raided shelves, cans, boxes, eating everything cold, couldn’t wait to heat anything up. Afterward, he couldn’t have said what he had eaten. Just food.

Then a shower to wash the stinging salt residue off his scrapes and lesions. First aid for scrapes, tears, cuts, bruises. Taped the ankle — the ribs would have to heal themselves. A shave, brush the teeth. What bliss.

Naked from the shower, Danny carefully collapsed crosswise on the bed and pulled the bedspread down over him. Just a few minutes rest before he started making his calls...

Slanting late afternoon sunlight woke him.

Bedside clock said three minutes to four. Just time to make his call. He no longer had the proof — on paper. But he had it in his head. And his cohorts had the clout. The men who had sent him off the cliff were about to take a fall themselves.

He dialed.

“Hotel and Restaurant Employees Local Three.”

Danny spoke in a high mincing voice not his own. “Georgi Petlaroc, please.”

“The rosary’s seven o’clock tonight at Cowley’s Funeral Home out in the Sunset on—”

“Rosary? I want to talk to Georgi.” Belatedly, it started to sink in. Inside his head, everything turned very dark indeed.

“Mr. Petlaroc was murdered on Monday, God rest his soul.”

“Murdered.”

“Gunned down in Post Street at one A.M. Assassinated.”

Danny hung up without saying anything further. Petrock dead the same night he had been sent off the cliff. By the same people. He grabbed up the phone again, tried the third man’s office, his home. Not at either place. No information forthcoming and he couldn’t ask. No way to reach him.

“No message,” said Danny numbly.

He sat on the edge of the bed, suddenly, totally exhausted, still wrapped in the bedspread he’d dozed under. He couldn’t leave a message, had to talk to the man himself. If his identity was known, this was no place to meet. It was his cabin.

Danny couldn’t call Beverly, couldn’t call Larry. He was alive only because right now no one knew where he was, and he couldn’t let anyone know until they had regrouped to move against the conspirators. Conspirators who were now also murderers. Murderers who would not hesitate to murder again.

He’d keep trying all through the night.

But even as he had the thought, Danny fell asleep just like that, sitting straight up on the side of the bed, nude except for the bedspread wrapped around his lithe, muscular, dehydrated body. After a while he slumped over sideways, snoring gently.