Dead Skip

Nineteen

“You going to start the car?” asked Kearny mildly. He checked his watch. “Your seventy-two hours are almost up.”

That was it. That was just it. Kearny bringing up the goddamn deadline now. The perfect psychological moment. Waste an hour on stakeout while Kearny is wasting an hour at the Beaghler house, then he comes back and gets into your car and calmly tells you to get going. Get going where?

With a muttered curse, Ballard started to open his door.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” demanded Kearny.

“I’m going back inside and turn sweet little Mary upside down and shake her until an address falls out. That bitch knows where Odum is, Dan, and I’m—”

“So do we.”

“I’m going to— Huh?” Ballard froze, stupidly, half in and half out of the car.

“1902 Gavallo Road, Antioch. We don’t know the name of the girl Odum’s shacking with, and we don’t know the apartment number, but there’s only twelve units in the building...”

Ballard had a sinking feeling. “How in hell did you get all that?”

“I turned a bitch upside down and shook her until an address fell out.” Kearny added nothing about Parker. The big, hard criminal had played straight with him.

“Sharon?” Dammit, would he ever get so he didn’t blindly believe whatever they wanted to tell him?

Kearny gave him a version of the interview with Sharon Beaghler sanitized of Parker as they headed east on California 4, out across the valley floor toward the Sacramento River delta and Antioch. Right out of reach of KDM 366 Control, on which Giselle would shortly be trying to call them.

Bart Heslip opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling. What in the hell went on? Where... He licked his lips. He turned his head from side to side. How...

“Christ,” he said, “I’m thirsty. What time...”

His voice trailed off. Before anyone could tell him that it was a handful of seconds past 8:47 on the evening of Friday, May 12, and that he had been in coma for three days, he started snoring again.

Dr. Arnold Whitaker looked around at the exhausted Corinne Jones, the slat-thin red-headed nurse whose behind he had a passion for patting, the little Filipino aide who had just brought Corinne a glass of orange juice and who had recently been catching Whitaker’s magnificently roaming eye. Whitaker beamed.

Corinne, laughing and crying at the same time, headed for a phone.

Their headlights splayed a little white world out in front of them which fled down the highway at their approach. It was still warm enough, in the cup protected by the dim round-topped hills, for them to have their windows open. The wind raked their hair like blowing leaves. Tension was building inside Ballard.

“Do you really think this is it, Dan?” he asked tightly.

“If it isn’t, we’ve wasted the day.”

Kearny drew on his cigarette, stubbed it in the ashtray. Ballard found his lips were dry. Howard Odum, murderer. He couldn’t leave it alone.

“Ah... how do you plan to play it if he is there, Dan?”

“By ear,” said Kearny.

A car on the other side of the highway divider poured a long stream of horn-noise against their windshield as it whipped by. Probably teen-agers, juiced up on the warmth of the night and the fact of their youth.

“Do we... ah, try to take him ourselves?”

Kearny’s square face was without expression; the glare of another passing car momentarily touched his massive jaw. “We aren’t cops, Larry; and we don’t have enough evidence to give the cops. We don’t have any evidence. Not about Griffin, not about Odum, not even about Bart being attacked.”

“Then what—”

“We’re private investigators on a routine repossession assignment, remember? Running down a 1972 Thunderbird two-door hardtop for our clients, California Citizens Bank. When we find the car we will take possession of it on their behalf.” He paused to light another cigarette, and shook one from the pack for Ballard. “But I’m betting that Odum will have to do something about us when we take the car away from him. Whatever he was willing to kill for last February, or last Tuesday, sure as hell hasn’t gone away.”

Meaning they were deliberately trying to provoke some sort of action by Odum. Action, for instance, like the attack on Bart. Well, Ballard thought, fair enough. There were two of them. Then another, oddly disturbing thought struck him. “What if he doesn’t try to stop us, Dan?”

“Then we wait. We wait for Bart to wake up and point the finger at him. And while we’re waiting, he won’t unzip his pants in a men’s room without somebody putting it in a DKA report. Twenty-four hours around-the-clock overt surveillance if necessary.”

His voice was surprisingly rough, full of a suppressed fury that Ballard found totally unexpected. Dan Kearny involved in a case? Kearny? For the very first time Ballard realized that he had been given a deadline so he would think only about investigating instead of about why he was investigating.

“Not that I think it’s going to be necessary,” Kearny went on thoughtfully. “Odum will have to make his move tonight. And then we’ll have him.”

“If he doesn’t have us first.”

“I met a man today who would use Odum for a toothpick.”

But it wasn’t really needed. Ballard had just been talking; he wasn’t really nervous any more, or scared, or whatever the hell it had been.

Bart Heslip came out of it, suddenly, all at once, at 9:40 P.M. One minute he was lying there corpselike on the bed, as he had been lying for three days; in the next, his eyes were open, with intelligence struggling for comprehension behind them.

“Hi, Corry,” he said vaguely to Corinne Jones. “Jesus, I’m thirsty.” And then, to Whitaker’s delight, he added so terribly tritely — all the cornball TV doctors had it right — “Where am I? What happened?”

“It’s Friday,” said Corinne. “Friday night. Oh, Bart—”

“And your name, sir?” asked Whitaker.

“Barton Heslip,” he said. “I’m thirsty.” His voice sharpened. “What cathouse they let you out of, man?”

Whitaker, in his colorful ensemble that Kearny had noted that morning, looked pained. His hands fluttered. “I am Dr. Arnold Whitaker. This is Trinity Hospital in San Francisco. There is no need to be alarmed. There has been an accident—”

“I’m not alarmed,” snapped Heslip in an alarmed voice. “What kind of accident?” Then in awed tones he added, belatedly, “Did you say Friday?”

“Oh, Bart!” Corinne exclaimed again instead of answering. She was clasping one of his hands between her full breasts. More love than she had thought possible possessed her when she looked into his eyes. “Oh, Bart...”

The hand tightened within hers. “I’ve been here since... Tuesday?” he asked cautiously.

Giselle, in the background, looked at Whitaker, who nodded. She stepped forward with a wide grin on her face. She’d caught a taxi from the DKA offices as soon as Corinne had called her. “Hi, hotshot,” she said.

“Giselle!” Heslip said weakly. “What the hell happened to me?”

“We hoped you could tell us.”

He looked at her blankly. “I remember repo’ing the Willets Merc out there on Seventh Avenue... telling Larry about it...” He looked almost pleadingly at the red-headed nurse. “I’m thirsty...”

They parked in a closed gas station a block away from 1902 Gavallo Road in Antioch. It was a small, unenthusiastic delta town, shut up tight here in the residential area although it was not even ten o’clock. Ballard had driven the Ford once past the apartment house, the top story of which was visible over the roofs of the intervening houses.

“We’ll walk in,” said Kearny. “If the T-Bird’s there, we grab it. If not, we check all of the apartments, starting with single women or two girls living together, until somebody pops. Any questions?”

“I need my repo tools?”

“Bring them, but I’ve got an ignition key dupe. Made it up this morning from the dealer’s code numbers.”

Although most cars could be hot-wired, keys helped where quick action was necessary. And keys got you around the sticky problem of locking steering wheels activated only by the ignition.

Between the gas station and 1902 Gavallo Road, they met only one other person, a handsome brunette in tight slacks walking a Great Dane that came level with her armpits. Ballard realized he had started to tense up again when Kearny turned to look appreciatively at the girl’s taut rump under the clinging trousers: Ballard hadn’t even thought of it.

“What happens if he hears us starting the car and starts shooting?”

“Giselle will pay for the flowers out of petty cash.”

The bastard, loving it, loving every second of it. No wonder he was so testy around the office. He belonged out here, on the street.

The three-story apartment building was set at right angles to Gavallo Road, a box with six apartments on each of the upper floors, with laundry rooms, storage lockers, and a dozen numbered parking stalls on the first. These could be reached only from a blacktop driveway which entered the property through the redwood fence and ran the length of the building and around it to the rear. To get to the street from the parking stalls, you had to drive all the way back out around the building.

Which meant there was a chance of being trapped back there if things got hairy.

“Right around in back,” said Kearny as they turned in at the gate through the fence, their shoes scuffing the blacktop.

Looking as if you belonged there was the single most important factor in chattel recoveries. Ballard had seen cars repossessed with the registered owner standing in the crowd of gawkers without objecting, merely because of the confidence of the repo men. Kearny went the length of the building as if he were the owner on a tour of inspection. When they had turned down the end of the box, and turned again so they could look down the line of twelve parking stalls, he stopped.

“A car in every one of them.”

“And none of them the T-Bird,” said Ballard.

A tremendous frustrated anger flushed through him. Goddammit, wouldn’t it ever end? Wouldn’t they ever catch up with Odum, ever find out where Griffin was, even pin down Bart’s attacker?

“There’s a gap between the front of the building and the fence,” said Kearny.

They walked past the stalls. Above their heads, Channel 2’s 10:00 P.M. newscast began blaring from an open window. Which car — if any — belonged to Odum’s girl friend? Or had Sharon Beaghler conned the great Dan Kearny, too, just as she had conned Larry Ballard earlier?

She hadn’t. When they came to the end of the stalls and could look beyond, down the gap between the building and the fence where the garbage pails were, it was there. Gorgeous, the son of a bitch. White over red, hardtop two-door, license 666 KAH.

Ballard’s nervousness was gone; he was cold, quick, precise, this was what it was all about. Neither man even slowed down. Kearny had given Ballard the keys; he went for the driver’s side. Kearny went down the other side, felt the hood. Knowing whether the motor was cold or warm was often the difference between a flooded engine and a clean grab.

“Hot,” said Kearny.

He kept going right around the car as Ballard pulled the door almost shut and twisted the ignition key after turning off the radio. Ballard backed smoothly out, at the same time reaching across to unlock the rider’s door. Kearny got in as he put it into drive and pulled away.

“She sounds good,” Ballard said to Kearny. He was grinning.

They went down the length of the building, around in front. A man and a woman, silhouetted by the vestibule light, were just coming from the front door as they went by. The man yelled, pointed, then was gone behind them.

“Just in time,” said Kearny.

He added nothing to Ballard about a good job, nor did Ballard expect him to. The good job had been in getting there in the first place. Once you spotted the car, it should be yours, short of physical attack by the subject or his friends. Even then, it usually should be yours. You weren’t hired to lose them.

“You phone it in to the cops while I make the condition report,” said Kearny as they pulled up in the darkened gas station next to the Ford.

Ballard found a dime in his pocket. “Antioch city police or Contra Costa county sheriff’s department?”

“Try the sheriff. He’ll know who has jurisdiction from the address.”

As Ballard stepped into the booth, they heard the sound of a car coming up Gavallo Road, fast. Its lights were on high and the tires shrieked as the people inside it saw the T-Bird in the gas station and stood it on its nose. It was a new yellow Toronado.

“The Lone Ranger and Tonto,” said Kearny in a totally unexcited voice.

The driver was a woman, with the street light back-lighting her blond hair and casting her features into darkness. The door on the rider’s side flew open as the car skidded to a stop. A dark figure hit the concrete running, charging them. Ballard’s heart seemed to stop.

“He’s got a gun,” he heard himself say in a tight, desperately calm voice. “Dan, he’s got a gun...”