Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 123, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 751 & 752, March/April 2004

Road Bomb by James H. Cobb

James H. Cobb is the author of the Amanda Garrett techno-thriller series published by G.P. Putnam, which includes the novels Choosers of the Slain, Sea Strike, Sea Fighter, and Target Lock. The series to which this story belongs stars Kevin Pulaski, anything but a classic noir detective. “Instead,” his creator explains, “he’s a member of the 1950s California car culture whose day job happens to be with the L.A. sheriff’s department.”

We buried Joe Summervale on a warm fall day in 1957, and man, it was something to see.

Joe was a hot rodder and a damn nice guy and the brotherhood gathered to wish him farewell. Three blocks’ worth of rods and street customs followed the hearse and the family limousines down Pasadena’s Colorado Boulevard. Black streamers trailed from radio antennas and spotlight brackets, contrasting with painted flames and glittering chrome, and fifty souped-up V-8’s sounded a rumbling dirge through gutted mufflers.

I drive a Q-ship, myself. Unless you know exactly what to look and listen for, Car seems to be a buttstock 1957 Chevy, a stark black-and-white two-door sedan without even a set of fancy wheel covers to jazz her up. Yet they put us right up front, behind the limos. Joe’s family insisted. I guess it was because I’d been there through those wild first hours after Joe and his fiancee, Linda Bell, had been killed, and that I’d been the cop who’d finally sorted it all out.

There were other reasons, too, I guess.

It started the same way it ended, with a line of sharp street iron rolling beneath a bright California sun. The reason had been far different, though, an open Rod Run organized by Joe’s car club, the Pasadena Royals, a Saturday opportunity for a bunch of L.A. basin rodneys to gather, socialize, and show off their wheels.

We’d rallied at Larry’s Drive-in on Foothills Boulevard and had moved out before noon, rolling east in a pipe-rapping convoy for El Cajon Pass. A cold drink and a cool-off stop had followed at the Summit Inn up on Route 66, and then we started the long climb up the rear slope of the San Gabriel range, following the winding concrete thread of the Angeles Crest Highway. With the passage of summer, the mountains were greening up once more, and the air had a touch of autumn’s bite to it. It was a good day for enjoying the road.

Our eventual target was a Forest Service picnic ground below Josephine Peak. A spot that provided both a good place for an open-air supper and an overview of the distant city and sunset. Parking spaces were found, blankets were spread under the pine trees, and wives and girlfriends unloaded baskets and coolers. Church keys popped, car radios dialed in to rock-’n’-roll, and the bench-racing began.

There was talk about new speed techniques and old races. Times from the last El Mirage speed meet were compared, and threats issued as to what records were going to fall on the next go-round. The National Hot Rod Association’s ban on nitromethane fuels for the 1957-58 drag season was hashed over... again. (The ice-cream rodders protested that Wally Parks really hadn’t sold his soul to the devil and the insurance companies while we greasy ol’ outlaws bitched that if you don’t intend to go as fast as you can, why the hell bother to race in the first place?) As usual, no agreement was reached.

I was running stag that day, so I marauded, making the rounds, shooting the breeze, and treating the various picnic spreads like a smorgasbord. On towards dessert time, I found myself thinking about Linda Bell’s vanilla fudge brownies.

Joe and Linda had picked a shady spot well back from the parking area and most of the crowd. Probably it wasn’t the quintessence of couth to go crashing the engaged couple’s private party, but the lure of those brownies was strong.

I didn’t have to worry. Joe and Linda were the sociable type and I readily received an invite to both a corner of their blanket and their brownie plate.

“So, when do we get to meet this new mystery girl of yours, Kevin?” Linda asked as I enjoyed the bounty.

“Lisette? Oh, pretty quick, I guess,” I replied. “She’s found an art school she likes and we’ve got her an apartment lined up. She’d be here now except for some legal business she had to wrap up back in Gary.”

“What’s this living doll of yours like, Kev?” Joe asked, propping himself up on one elbow.

I didn’t mind him asking. I like talking about Lisette. Since we’ve connected, she’s become a favorite topic of mine. “Well, let me put it this way, man. Once the princess is out here to stay, you’re going to be marrying the second prettiest girl in Los Angeles. No offense, Linda.”

“None taken.” Linda chuckled. Linda was one of those fiery red-gold redheads, her big blue eyes backed up by a scattering of freckles over her snub Irish nose.

Joe laughed, resting a hand on Linda’s knee. “That I gotta see to believe.” Blunt-featured, solid, and stocky, Joe always seemed a little amazed that a totally gone dish like Linda had fallen for him. The truth was, Joe was a pretty worthwhile character. Hard-working, good-natured, and as dependable as a Stovebolt 6, he was the kind of guy the smart ladies go for in the long run. And Linda was a very smart lady.

Joe was also a boss car man. A mainstay of the Royals, he’d built himself one perilously mean ’55 Corvette roadster. In drag racing he didn’t quite have the reflexes to be a real killer coming off the line, but get up there in the high end and brother, you had to beat him off with a club.

“I don’t know, Joe.” Linda giggled. “Kev sounds like he might be developing a pretty bad case over his princess. Maybe we should start planning a double wedding?”

I just grinned and shrugged. There are still a whole lot of “we’ll see’s” tied up with the lady Lisette. She’s a different breed of kitten. But one of these days we’ll see.

Just then, a pretty credible panther scream sounded behind us and a wiry figure hurtled out of the underbrush. Crashing down at the edge of the blanket, he deftly scored the last brownie right out from under my fingers.

If you hung around with Joe enough you got used to this kind of thing. “Hiya, runt,” I grunted. “Where were they carrying you? In the trunk?”

Joe’s sixteen-year-old younger brother, Danny, rolled onto his back and grinned at my hassling. Tow-headed and as skinny as his bro was stocky, he was clad in the classic uniform of the California hot rodder: jeans, engineer’s boots, and a T-shirt. “No way, man. I got my own wheels now.”

I quaked in horror. “Godfry Daniels! Tell me it isn’t true!”

“It is.” Joe nodded proudly. “As of the last meeting, Dan-O here is the newest official member of the Royals.”

“Jeez! You guys are letting anybody in these days! Whatcha runnin’, kid?”

“A ’thirty-seven Ford coupe.” Danny let the year and make roll off his tongue with as much pride as if he’d been saying “Bentley Continental” or “Mercedes 300.” “She’s still got the original flathead but she’s been lowered and I’ve got dual pipes and Smitties on her. Oh, and hey, Joe, I was over talking to Lenny Smith and he’ll make me a real deal on a dual Almquist manifold and a set of Strombergs...”

The smile on the kid’s face could have lit up half of the L.A. basin. At long damn last he was one of the big guys, an equal.

For just about forever, Danny had been Joe’s shadow at the dry lakes and the drag strips, a skinny, pain-in-the-butt kid, prone to playing pranks and hunting for attention. We’d all put up with him, though. I guess because we could read the wheels hunger in his eyes. That dream of the day when he’d have a hot car of his own. Hell, we’d all been there once.

“Listen, Danny,” Joe said firmly, “I already told you that the next ‘real deal’ you’re going to make is for a set of hydraulic brakes. I’ve done everything I can with those damn cablematics on your Ford and it’s not near enough. Once we get some decent binders bolted onto your heap, then we can start talking about speed parts.”

“Oh, jeez, Joe! Come on...”

I swapped headshakes with Linda as the fraternal wrangling raged. These were good people, real good people. When you make your living in law enforcement like I do, it’s important to hang around with folks like this. They remind you that there’s more to the world than the dark and dirty side of things. They also remind you about why you became a cop in the first place.

Evening drifted on, the last coke bottles and beer cans were emptied, and the sun settled into the distant Pacific with a contented sigh. A cool breeze rippled down from the crests of the San Gabes and people started packing their picnic stuff away. Engines started to kick over.

Joe stood and stretched. “Let’s get goin’.”

Danny looked up at his brother and frowned. “Ah, come on, Joe. It’s early still. Let’s hang around awhile longer. It’s just getting nice up here.”

“No chance, runt. Get it in gear.” Joe gave his lady a meaningful glance. “Linda and I have plans for this evening. We’ll see you around, Kevin.”

“Later, man,” I replied, getting to my feet and brushing off my Levis. “You too, pretty girl. And, Danny, when you’re ready to start talking serious gow for that beast of yours, you come and see me. Forget that Almquist manifold. What you want is an Edelbrock and I know where we can go handshaking for one.”

The column of hot rods swung onto the highway for the final 4000-foot dive to the city and the end of the run. Dusk was settling fast as we slalomed down Angeles Canyon, the two-lane stretching out evening-empty. The line of cars began to string out as guys tacked on speed. Nobody was racing, or even exceeded the speed limit worth mentioning, but we savored this last chance to dance with the road. The growing chill of the slipstream felt good as it roared in through the windows and rubber chirped softly as we hung deep into the curves.

As fate decreed, Car and I had pulled out directly behind Joe’s sapphire-blue Corvette. I was tempted to push him a little (he’d referred to my ’57 as “that battleship” on more than one occasion), but I was feeling too mellow that night. Instead, I hung back, content to watch the low-slung car snake down the mountain ahead of me. I couldn’t help but note Linda’s red head resting on Joe’s shoulder and I found myself wishing for the warm presence of a certain little Siamese-eyed brunette of my acquaintance.

The shadows were filling the canyon and I reached down to flick on the ’57’s headlights. I looked up just in time to see Joe’s Corvette explode.

There was a burst of blue-orange flame and the roadster’s front fenders disintegrated in a spray of shattered Fiberglas, the hood peeling back to smash into the windshield. Trailing smoke, the ’vette veered wildly, angling toward the outside edge of the road. Maybe the blast had trashed the steering or maybe Joe and Linda had already been knocked unconscious. I hope so, anyway.

We’d been coming into another curve, but the guardrail was just ten feet too far away to save them. Instead, the Corvette plowed headlong into the first mounting post. Whipping sideways in a flat spin, it went off the highway and into the canyon. I caught the green flash of Linda’s skirt as she was thrown out of the car by the lateral G load and then they were gone.

I stood on the binders and Car shuddered to a halt in a cloud of brake lining and burning rubber. The rods behind me pulled over as well and we were all bailing out and running for the crash site.

The shattered Corvette lay on its back on the bottom of the gorge about a hundred feet below the highway, a wadded-up lump of color off to one side possibly being Linda’s body. There was no sign of Joe at all.

“Joe!” It was a bawling scream of raw anguish. Danny Summervale ran down the shoulder of the roadway, shoving the other stunned onlookers out of his way. I grabbed him a split second before he could dive over the edge.

“Danny! Hold it! It’s no good!”

The kid wasn’t listening. He wasn’t all the way sane just then. He fought me wildly, all the time screaming that one name. “Joe!”

I shoved him back into the arms of a couple of the Royals. It was time to start being a cop. “Hold him, dammit! Everyone, stay up here on the road!”

A couple of guys in a scarlet A-V8 roadster pulled up beside us to gawk. I took two fast strides to the side of their car. “Listen! You guys haul down to the nearest phone. Call the sheriff’s department and tell them you’re calling for Deputy Kevin Pulaski, Metro Division, badge number seven forty-eight. Pulaski... Metro Division... seven... four... eight! Tell them we need the fire department and an ambulance! And tell them to roll the bomb squad and the homicide detail!”

“Homicide?” one of the guys gulped. “Like in murder?”

“Like in don’t ask questions, man! Just do it! Go!”

The A-V8 peeled out, heading down canyon. I did the same, sliding down to the wreck from the road edge, my old jump boots digging into the parched and crumbly soil of the slope.

The wreck hadn’t torched, thank God. The canyon floor was half filled with a tangle of chaparral and California holly and the demolished roadster lay on a bed of crushed underbrush. The only sounds were the creak and click of cooling metal and the distant sobbing of Danny Summervale up on the pavement.

I reached Linda first. She wasn’t a pretty girl anymore, just a torn and broken bit of debris in the dry streambed. Yet she wasn’t all the way gone. Not yet. A flutter of a heartbeat remained and a faint, rasping wheeze of lung action. She must have been busted all to hell and gone inside, but there was no major external bleeding and I didn’t dare move her for fear of snapping that last tenuous thread that linked her to life. We could only wait for the medicos. More as a gesture than anything else I peeled off my windcheater and covered her.

“She’s alive,” I yelled up to the road. Then I turned to the ’vette. As I worked my way slowly around the wreck, I found Joe. Or rather, I found an arm and a clutching hand extending out from under the shattered hulk of the car. When I felt for a pulse, there was only a stillness. This time, I could only look up at the row of faces staring at me from along the road edge and shake my head.

The L.A. County sheriff’s department got it in gear in a hurry. It only seemed to take forever. Patrol cruisers arrived and secured the area, taking names and statements. Search and Rescue tenderly eased Linda up the hillside to a waiting ambulance. The traffic detail showed up, both enforcement and investigation, reopening the highway and starting their assessment of the wreck. As did Homicide, the bomb squad, and the lab crew from forensics.

As the only lawman witness, I repeated the story a dozen times over to a dozen different bosses, what there was of it and for what good it did. And I repeated a lot more than a dozen times over that, no, it wasn’t just a wreck and, yeah, the damn car blew up, and, yeah again, it was a bomb!

I’d developed a very intimate acquaintance with high explosives during my year on the line in Korea. Likewise in all of my racing on circle tracks, drag strips, and dry lakes; I’ve seen just about every kind of fuel fire, crackup, and catastrophic engine failure you can imagine. This just didn’t match. There’d been a bomb in Joe’s car. But as for who could have put it there, or why, man, I didn’t have a clue.

I was going to find out, though. You could abso-goddamn-lutely count on that.

I arranged for a friend to drive Danny’s car to his folks’ place, while I took the kid down with me. That meant I also got to break the news to Joe’s parents, a job I was not particularly looking forward to.

Joe had still been living at home, saving on rent money for a down payment on a place for himself and Linda. His parents lived in a pre-War tract development on the north side of Pasadena, a house-shaped house on a street-shaped street. Joe’s dad, a stocky, stooping man with a welder’s squint, worked on the assembly line at Douglas Aviation. His mom was a gray-haired housewife running thirty pounds overweight. Nothing special, nothing special at all. Just a couple of good people who had raised a couple of good sons, one of whom had just died senselessly.

There was no screaming, no hysterics, at least not at first. Just that blank, shattered stare. Danny was still crying a little and his dad sat beside him on the couch, patting the boy on the back with clumsy gentleness.

I hated doing it, but I socked the spurs to myself and got to work. “Mr. Summervale, I know it’s tough just now, but I have to ask you some questions. Did Joe mention any kind of problems he might have been having lately? Any kind of trouble that he might have been in?”

“Trouble?” Mr. Summervale replied hazily. “No, nothing. Joe never went looking for trouble.”

“How about fights? Arguments? Was he having a beef with anyone at work or in the car club?”

Again the protesting shake of the head. “No! You know Joe. He worked things out or laughed them off. Ever since he was a little boy... never any trouble.”

“How about with Linda? Were there any problems there?” I insisted. “Any fights? Any indication that Joe was jealous or angry about anything with her? Any mention of another guy she might have been seeing?”

“No. They were starting to plan the wedding. Joe said he needed just a little more in the bank. They were in love...”

“Had Joe mentioned any new friends or acquaintances lately? Anyone new he’d been hanging around with?”

“No. Nobody. Nobody...”

Joe’s mom was crying now, too, deep, shuddering sobs, and tears began to glint in Mr. Summervale’s eyes. The merciful anesthesia of shock was starting to fade. God, I wanted to back off so bad. Every instinct was to let these wounded people have their chance to grieve. But I couldn’t. I had to keep pushing. A man had been killed and a girl was dying and somebody, somewhere, was responsible. The more time the perp had to run, the harder it would be to nail him.

To quote my partner and mentor, street cop par excellence Jack Le Baer, “Carrying a badge means that some days you just gotta plan on being a son of a bitch.”

I suppressed the churning nausea in my gut. “Okay, did Joe mention any money problems that might be cropping up? Has he done any gambling lately...?”

After I left the Summervale place, I headed downtown to the L.A. County Hall of Justice to file my report and to swap notes with the homicide and traffic division investigators assigned to the case.

So far, what we had didn’t amount to much. Traffic agreed that this had not been any kind of conventional wreck.

“The breakup of the automobile started well before its impact against the guardrail post. There was no other vehicle or foreign-object involvement that could be recognized and the instigating event has yet to be identified.”

Unquote.

The wreck was being brought in from the crash site. The lab crew would be working on it all night. Maybe they could give us something.

Homicide had also completed the initial questioning of the other witnesses and of Linda Bell’s parents. They’d uncovered essentially the same story I’d heard at Joe’s place.

Joe Summervale and Linda Bell literally didn’t have an enemy in the world. Or at least any known enemy who had an adequate motive for murder. Also no one had been seen messing around with Joe’s car up at the park and no one recalled any suspicious characters hanging around the picnic grounds.

What with one thing or another, it was near midnight by the time I got back to Santa Monica. Turning off Euclid Street and into my alley, I parked the ’57 under the pepper tree that grew beside the weird little former two-car garage/now backyard apartment I call home. A middle-of-the-night silence had settled over the neighborhood and there was a deadness inside my pad that I didn’t have the energy to overcome. I didn’t even bother with turning on the lights.

My stomach was empty, but the thought of my last meal and who I’d shared it with killed any thought of food. I dealt with the problem with a long pull from the milk bottle in the refrigerator. Going on into the minute living room, I dumped myself into the beat-up easy chair I use for television watching. My genuine made-in-Hawaii Polynesian Tiki god stood at my left elbow, half a pack of Luckys and a book of matches sitting in the abalone-shell ashtray built into his head. I lit up and stared at the unlit screen of my 12-inch Zenith.

It didn’t add up. Bombs aren’t a common murder weapon. There’s a cold-blooded ruthlessness and deliberation to them that runs counter to the passion and anger that fuels most killings. You’ll see them used by the mob sometimes, but usually they’re assembled and planted by a highly paid specialist brought in to make a specific hit.

There was nothing about Joe or Linda that would make them a bombing target. He worked in the shop of a Goodyear tire dealership. She was a receptionist in an optometrist’s office. Neither of them had any known criminal ties. Neither ran with a wild or dangerous crowd. Neither had more than middle-class money.

The only two possibilities that made any sense at all were that, A: the hit stemmed from a case of mistaken identity, i.e. the package that nailed Joe and Linda was actually addressed to somebody else. Or, B: some psycho with a sackful of high explosives had suddenly been stricken with an overwhelming urge to blow up a Corvette.

Neither concept was satisfying. Neither was the smoke I puffed down to ashes and a short butt. That didn’t stop me from lighting up a second one, though, or a third. After a while I must have dozed off.

When I woke up, the steely light of dawn was leaking through the blinds. I grabbed a fast shower, a shave, and a clean T-shirt. After slugging down a cold bottle of RC Cola to wash the stale nicotine taste out of my mouth, I headed back downtown. Specifically, to the old Central Jail building that now housed the police crime labs.

Joe’s demolished Corvette lay in the center of the dank jail garage. Around the main hulk, spaced out on tarpaulins spread on the concrete, were all of the other little bits and pieces of shattered car. Field teams, working by flashlight, had painstakingly collected them from the roadway and the canyon floor.

It made for one crazy jigsaw puzzle, but then, that’s the deal with forensics. Any one of these fragments might be the key element in breaking this thing. Question was, which one?

Lieutenant Lee Jones was there, looking about as red-eyed and half-shot as me. Jones is one of the miracle workers of the LAPD Scientific Investigation Division. He literally helped write the book that everybody else uses. It’s a sad surprise when the lieutenant and his lab guys can’t pull a rabbit out of the hat for a stumped investigator.

I got to be sadly surprised.

“I’m sorry, Deputy, but we can’t find any trace of an explosive device.”

It was my turn to explode. “Jesus, Lieutenant! This car was less than fifty yards in front of me! I saw the damn thing blow!”

“I didn’t say that you didn’t,” the lab man replied patiently. “Nor did I say that there wasn’t a bomb. On the contrary, there is clear evidence of an explosive force released within the frontal structure of this automobile. Our problem is that we can’t figure out what caused it. We haven’t located any components from a timer or detonator. We can’t identify any residual traces of an explosive agent, and the crash damage to the car is so extensive we’re having a hard time placing a point of origin for the blast.”

“No explosives trace at all?”

He shook his head. “We’ve run for all of the standards. Dynamite, gelignite, TNT, black and smokeless powder, even military plastique and straight nitro. No reaction. If this was a bomb, it must have been an exotic. If that’s the case, we could be testing for days before we can isolate the compound used.”

I looked around the display of trashed car, my sense of helplessness growing. “You said if this was a bomb. What else could it have been?”

“An accidental explosion of some kind. Had your friend made any kind of unusual modifications to his car lately?”

I considered for a second. “No, Joe’s ’vette was a stormer, but he was running with over-the-counter speed parts and conventional hop-up techniques. Joe wasn’t crazy enough to tinker with radical fuel additives like nitromethane for street use. And if he’d installed an oxygen or nitrous oxide booster tank, you’d have found it in the wreck. How about the battery? That’s the only thing I can think of that might have blown like that.”

Again Jones shook his head. “No. The battery was still strapped in the battery box. The casing was cracked from the crash, but there was no indication it exploded.”

Slowly we paced around the hulk, studying it in mutual frustration. “There is one idea we had,” the lieutenant continued. “What about some kind of a fuel leak and a buildup of gasoline vapor in the engine compartment? That could explain why we’ve got no explosive traces.”

It was my turn to shake my head. “Nah, that wouldn’t work, either. Joe didn’t have a belly pan on his ’vette. In fact, he even had a set of cooling louvers cut into his hood. The front end of this car was wide open with a fifty-mile-per-hour slipstream blowing through it. A gas leak might have caused a fire, but there wouldn’t be any place for a vapor pocket to build up.”

The forensics man sighed. “What about an outside factor? Could he have run over something in the road?”

“A dozen other rods went down that same stretch of road immediately ahead of Joe. Nobody hit anything. Nobody saw anything.”

“What about something being thrown at the car? Like a hand grenade.”

“By who, and from where? We were coming down a steep-sided canyon, Lieutenant. It was almost straight up on one side and straight down on the other with no cover. There was no way anyone could have chucked anything at Joe without me seeing it.”

Lee scowled. “Is there anything at all that might have happened just before the explosion? Anything out of the ordinary that you can remember?”

For about the thousandth time I reran the mental film of those last few seconds up on the highway. “It was just starting to get dark,” I said finally. “I remember reaching down and turning on my lights. Then, boom, the ’vette blew. Hey! Maybe Joe saw my lights come on and that prompted him to hit his. Maybe something was wired into his headlight circuit.”

“Possibly. The Corvette’s headlight switch was turned to the ‘on’ setting. But we’ve examined every inch of the wiring harness and we can’t find any point where anything has been spliced or patched into the electrical system. There’s nothing there that shouldn’t be there.”

“Fan-damn-tastic.”

Jones ran a hand through his thinning hair. “For the moment we’re stumped. We’ll be getting more chemical trace tests back later this morning and we’ll be talking with the FBI’s bomb specialists. If we come up with anything, we’ll let you know. For now, I’ve got to get some sleep. I’m getting too old for this kind of thing.”

“Yeah, understood. Do you mind if I poke around the wreck a little?”

“Go ahead. We’ve got everything catalogued and dusted for prints. If you can spot something we’ve missed, we’ll be grateful. Just wear a pair of lab gloves if you’re going to touch anything.”

I intended to touch a lot of stuff. I don’t pretend to be a scientific genius like Lee Jones and his crew, but I do know cars, inside, outside, and sideways. And for the next couple of hours, that’s exactly how I went over the trashed hulk of Joe’s roadster.

I checked out the Corvette’s 265-cubic-inch small-block engine, and its fuel lines, fuel pump, and carburetion system. I examined the brakes, the clutch, and the transmission linkages. I eyeballed the wiring from the battery terminals to the charred headlight plugs. I had a look at the horn, the heater blower, and the radio, going over anything Joe or Linda could have touched that might have triggered a detonator.

Nowheresville.

Eventually I found myself standing in the center of the garage floor, just staring at the crumpled nose of Joe’s car and at the hundreds of bits of chrome and metal and Fiberglas surrounding it. The lieutenant was right. There was nothing there that shouldn’t be.

Chrome and metal and Fiberglas... and then it hit me. What wasn’t there that should have been?

Where was the glass?

I don’t mean like from the windshield. There were plenty of faceted chunks of broken safety glass lying around on the tarps. I mean the shards of plain old everyday glass glass.

I had to study on that one for a while. Then I started for the Central Jail parking lot.

On the way out, I stopped to put in a call to Georgia Street Receiving Hospital. The antiseptic voice of the charge nurse delivered the words I didn’t want to hear.

“I’m sorry, Deputy, but Miss Bell’s condition continued to deteriorate overnight. She was returned to surgery at six o’clock this morning. She died on the operating table about half an hour ago.”

“Has the family of her fiance, Joe Summervale, been notified?”

“I believe so. The Summervales asked to be kept abreast of her condition and Miss Bell’s family authorized it.”

I tried to phone the Summervale house next. There was no answer.

I had to flash my star twice at pursuing motor officers as the ’57 and I roared up the Arroyo Seco Parkway to Pasadena.

As I skidded to a halt in front of the house, I noted that Mr. Summervale’s Plymouth sedan was the only car in the driveway. It took a couple of minutes of hard pounding on the front door to lift a response. Joe’s father eventually appeared in his bathrobe, looking wrung out and bleary eyed.

“Where’s Danny?” I demanded as the door swung open.

“Uh... Danny?” It took a second for the older man to get his tongue working right. “What’s wrong, Deputy? Isn’t he here?”

“His car’s gone. When did he leave?”

“I don’t know,” the man replied thickly. “Last night I called our doctor to get something for my wife. He gave us both a couple of sleeping pills. Danny didn’t say anything to us about going anywhere... What’s the matter?”

“I don’t have time to explain just now. Did you get a phone call from the hospital awhile ago?”

“The phone? No... yes. I remember the phone ringing. Danny must have answered it. I must have gone back to sleep.”

“Oh great! Look, Mr. Summervale, I need permission to search your garage.”

“Search the garage?”

I took that for a yes and bolted around the side of the house.

Joe had the garage set up as a pretty fair automotive workshop, well equipped and with everything in its place the way a good mechanic likes it. Thanks to that, it took me only about two minutes to find all of what I was looking for. The tools were still set out on the workbench, the power drill, the fine diamond bit, the needle inflater for a basketball pump, and the tube of epoxy sealant. And there were the tanks of a welding rig right over in the corner. The two empty sealed beam boxes from an automotive supply house were buried in the bottom of the trash can.

And then I saw the length of cut-up garden hose heaped in the corner and that killed the last of my doubts. I ran back to the house and grabbed the phone, dialing up L.A. County Dispatch.

“This is Deputy Kevin Pulaski, Metro Division, badge number seven forty-eight! I want an all-points bulletin put out on a black-primered nineteen thirty-seven Ford coupe, plate number... Summervale, what in the hell is Danny’s license number?... Lincoln Ocean Ida four niner six!”

Car seemed to know that this race wasn’t just for fun. My steel lady soared above the L.A. smog layer, treating the San Gabes like they were Pike’s Peak with Duntov himself at the wheel. Her twin Carter four-barrels shrieked as they sucked air, a tremolo counter tone to the thunder of her dual exhausts. Belly to the ground, we clawed our way back up the Angeles Crest Highway, our tires smoking on the curves.

For hundreds of square miles around the L.A. basin, the word was flashing from police agency to police agency: the license plate, the description of the car, the description of the driver. A thousand cops were being called into the search for Danny Summervale. Strictly by the odds, any one of them had as much chance as I did of nailing the kid, but I wasn’t going by the odds just then. I was riding on a gut instinct. One that was telling me to go back to the last place a sixteen-year-old boy had been happy.

The picnic ground was empty at this hour of the morning. There were no obvious signs of Danny or his coupe. I didn’t expect there to be. He’d be looking for someplace quiet and out of sight for what he had to do.

I circled the ’57 slowly around the drive-through loop of the picnic ground, telling myself to stay cool and look for tracks. I knew he had to be with the car. That was the one ace I held.

And then, there they were, fresh tread marks in the dust of a two-rut service road that lead off into the brush. The ’57 and I followed, and man, I’ll tell the world I was prayin’.

A second later and we were pulling in behind the primer-black Ford in its hiding place.

The coupe’s engine was idling and the other half of that cut garden hose led from one of the exhaust pipes to the driver’s-side window.

I bailed out of Car and raced to the coupe, tearing the hose out of the shop-rag gasket packed around it in the open wind wing. Danny lay sprawled across the front seat, unmoving, his lips already taking on that vivid scarlet hue of carbon-monoxide poisoning. The penciled note I didn’t need to read rested on the dashboard.

The coupe’s doors were locked and I thrust my arm in through the wind wing to flip the door handle. A choking petroleum haze billowed around me as I hauled Danny out of the car and carried him to clean air. Dumping the boy on the grass, I rolled him facedown and started artificial respiration, lifting his arms and shoving on his back to squeeze the poison out of his lungs.

As I labored, I found myself swearing at the kid as if he were a cranky engine.

“Breathe, dammit!... Joe wouldn’t want this!... Breathe!... Your folks just lost one son, they’re not going to lose two!... Come on! Light off, you stupid little son of a bitch! Breathe!”

The dual exhausts on Danny’s rod saved his life. He’d only been catching the output from one bank of cylinders. I felt his ribs heave as he sucked in that first load of real oxygen and then the coughing spasm started, clearing his pipes. He was going to make it. Physically, anyway. For the rest, we weren’t going to know for a while.

I sat him up and gradually the coughing segued into a series of shuddering sobs and broken words. He could say it now. There wasn’t anything left to hide anymore.

“It was... supposed to be a joke! God, Kevin... it was just supposed... to be a joke!”

“It’s okay. I know it was, man.” I rested my hand on his shoulder, helping him to stay upright. “Somebody told you about the acetylene gimmick and you rigged Joe’s headlights on the morning of the rod run.”

“Yeah... yeah. This guy told me that if you tapped and drilled a set of sealed beams... and filled them... with acetylene and oxygen, the lights would pop when you turned them on... like firecrackers... Oh Jesus God, Kevin! I swear it was just supposed to be a joke! I didn’t know! I... didn’t... know!”

“I know you didn’t, Danny. The jerk that told you about that gag didn’t mention that if you got the gas mixture wrong, a sealed beam could blow more like a stick of dynamite than a firecracker. It wasn’t your fault. You’ve got to remember that, Danny. This wasn’t your fault.”

The kid looked up at me with wet and swollen eyes. “How did you find out?”

I shrugged. “From looking over what was left of Joe’s car. Our lab guys were real good about picking up all of the pieces at the crash site. Every last little bit. But they didn’t recover any glass fragments from the headlights. Not one. Both of the ’vette’s sealed beams must have been blown completely to powder. There was nothing left to recover. The headlights themselves must have been the explosion point. I worked it out from there.

“When I found out that you weren’t at your folks’ place, and that you’d found out about Linda dying, well, I had a hunch that you might come back up here to do something really dumb.”

Danny started to break up again, crumpling under a load that could destroy a grown man much less a kid just getting a hand on adulthood. “I killed them, Kevin. I killed Linda... and I killed my brother...”

The boy collapsed against me. “I need to die, too,” he bawled, his face buried against my chest. “I shouldn’t live! I don’t want to...”

I locked my arms around him, holding him up, trying to give him something to hang on to. “Bullshit, Danny! You think Joe would want that? Hell no! He loved you and he was proud of you. He wouldn’t want you to quit on him. He’d want you to keep going and get past this.”

I felt the wetness of the boy’s tears soaking into my T-shirt. “How?” Danny asked brokenly. “How do you get past something this bad, Kevin? How can I?”

I felt a few tears coming myself about then. Jesus! I didn’t have anything going for this kind of action. This was a job for the big brothers of the world, for the Joe Summervales. But then Joe wasn’t going to be around anymore.

“Well, you start by living, man,” I found myself saying. “You start by living.”