Find a Victim

Chapter 12

His double red taillight diminished down the slope, flashed at a boulevard stop, and disappeared. When I reached the boulevard, his car was a long block away, headed south toward the suburbs. I kept the block’s distance between us as far as the wye at the city limits. Then I closed in on him, cutting in and out through the highway traffic, past all-night businesses whose signs were like a neon postscript scribbled in the dirty margin of the city.

We were only a couple of miles from his motor court, and I thought that he was on his way there. Instead, he pulled out of the southward stream of traffic and turned in on the asphalt apron of a drive-in restaurant. Its parking space held two cut-down jalopies occupied by mugging couples, and a blue Buick coupe with battered fenders. As I went by, I saw Kerrigan draw up beside the Buick.

Next door to the drive-in stood a dark and unattended service station. I stopped beside its gas pumps. From where I sat, I could see the entrance to the drive-in and one glass wall of the building. A couple of car-hops, wan-looking under blue light, were talking behind the glass to a white-hatted short-order cook. Through the glass of the far wall, Kerrigan’s red Ford and the Buick coupe were dimly visible.

Kerrigan was standing between the two cars, talking to someone in the Buick. Its occupant, whose face was hidden from me, held out a package wrapped in dirty paper or newsprint. Kerrigan stuffed the package under his coat and returned to his car. The Buick’s headlights went on. It backed and turned toward the entrance. I caught a glimpse of a fur-collared leather jacket, a pale hard face framed in lank red hair. Bozey. A jet of adrenaline went through me. I followed him south out of town.

As the Buick fled into the dark perspective of the country, my excitement rose with my speed. I passed Kerrigan’s motor court at seventy. The speedometer climbed to seventy-five and held there. The Buick stayed in sight.

A few miles farther on, it slowed and seemed to hesitate, turned off the highway to the right. Its headlights swept a side road lined with cyclone fence. Then they were cut. I passed the intersection, slowing gradually, and saw its lightless shape crawling blind along the blacktop.

I braked hard, hit the dirt, cut my own lights and U-turned. When I rolled slowly back to the intersection, the Buick was out of sight and out of hearing. I turned down the blacktop after it and drove for nearly half a mile without lights.

The night was starless and moonless. A diffused radiance in the sky was enough to give me my bearings. The road ran straight as a yardstick between the high wire fences on either side. The sloping field to my left was gashed and plowed by erosion like a landscape on the dark side of the moon. The hangars of the disused air-base loomed on the other side. Around them concrete runways lay like fallen tombstones in the wild grass.

There was a break in the fence. I stopped in the ditch beyond it, and twirled the chamber of my .38 special to make sure that it was fully loaded. It was. I got out of the car. Except for the rusty sighing of cicadas, the night was very still. My footsteps made distinct sounds in the grass.

A double wire gate about thirty feet wide stood open in the fence. Its padlock bar had been filed through. I felt the sharp edges with my fingers. A concrete road ran through the gate and merged with one of the runways. The door of the nearest hangar yawned open. The Buick was standing beside it.

I started toward it, across two hundred yards of open concrete. There was no other movement anywhere under the heavy sky. I felt small and expendable. The revolver in my hand was cold comfort. The high whistling whine of a starting Diesel penetrated the silence. Headlights flared inside the cavelike hangar. I broke into a run, hoping to get there before the motor warmed. But it must have been primed with gasoline. The truck rolled out of the building, pulling its huge aluminum semitrailer. Its headlights swung toward me. A white face gleamed in the darkness of the cab.

As the truck bore down on me, I took careful aim at the lower left-hand corner of the windshield and fired twice. Cracks spiderwebbed the glass, but it didn’t shatter. Without swerving or slackening, the truck roared directly at me.

When it was almost on top of me, I stepped to one side and ran away from it. Its multiple tires growled in my ear. Something tugged at my trouser leg and spun me. I got a tight grip on air and hit the concrete like a sack of sand. Slid down its deadend street to the rough edge of unconsciousness and went over.

It was a long fall straight down through the darkness of my head. I was a middle-aging space cadet lost between galaxies and out of gas. With infinite skill and cunning I put a grain of salt on the tail of a comet and rode it back to the solar system. My back and shoulder were burned raw from the sliding fall. But it was nice to be home.

I sat up and looked around. There was nothing to see except the bare concrete, the open hangar, the abandoned coupe beside it. From somewhere and everywhere the cicadas chided me: you should have waited and followed, hated and swallowed, waited and followed. I got to my feet and searched for my gun and found it. It was a long walk back to my car.

I backed in through the open gate and drove to the front of the hangar. My headlights stabbed the darkness of its interior, shining on a pool of oil where the truck had stood. There was nothing else in the place but an empty Coke-bottle, years’ accumulation of dust drifted along the walls, some spatters of aluminum paint on the concrete-slab floor. I touched one metallic droplet with my finger. It wasn’t quite dry.

I went outside to the Buick. It was a fairly new car, but driven to pieces. California plates. No registration card. Several brown cigarette butts squashed on the rubber floormat. I sniffed them. Marijuana. A road map of the Southwestern states was jammed behind the front-seat cushion. I took it along and drove back to the highway.

The blacktop crossed it and plunged into the foothills in the distance. I sat at the intersection, my motor idling, and looked at the black mountainous horizon. It was a jagged graph of high hopes, repeated disasters.

There was a black and white sign on the far side of the highway: Las Cruces Pass. I tried to put myself in Bozey’s place. If he had turned right and south, he’d be sure to hit a roadblock on the borders of the county. Northward, the highway would lead him back into town. The pass road seemed most likely, and I took it.

Four or five miles from the intersection, where the road twisted high and narrow among the foothills, I came around a hairpin curve and saw a pulsating red light. A black car was parked diagonally across the road. I braked to a stop in time. It was the sheriffs Mercury.

He came forward, carrying a red flashlight in his left hand, a carbine in the crook of his other arm.

“Pull off the road and get out. Keep your hands in sight.” Then the flashlight beam found my face. “So it’s you again.”

I sat perfectly still under the eye of the carbine, the flashlight’s red stare.

“It’s also you again. Have you seen the truck?”

“What truck?”

“Meyer’s semi-trailer.”

“Would I be sitting up here if I had seen it?” His voice was impatient, but the anger that had shaken him earlier had passed through him and left no other trace.

“How long have you been here, Sheriff?”

“Over an hour.”

“What time is it now?”

“One o’clock, a few minutes after. Is there anything else you’d like to know? What I had for supper, for instance?”

“That sounds interesting.”

“I didn’t get to eat any supper.” He leaned in at the window to look at me. The reflection of the flashlight lent his face an unnatural rosiness. “Who’s been clobbering you?”

“You’re very solicitous all of a sudden. It moves me deeply.”

“Cut the vaudeville. And answer my question.”

“Since you put it so charmingly. I took a fall.” I told him where and how. “This redhead had the truck stashed in an empty hangar at the airbase. He blanked out Meyer’s signs with aluminum paint and waited for the heat to die down. Less than an hour ago, Kerrigan met him at the Steakburger drive-in and gave him the go-ahead.”

“You know this?”

“I saw them together. The redhead – his name is Bozey – handed Kerrigan a paper package of something, probably something long and green. Kerrigan’s payoff.”

“Payoff for what?”

“For setting up the truck, and arranging the getaway.”

“How would Kerrigan do that?”

I didn’t answer. We looked at each other in silence. The mountains rose behind him in the distance like a surf of stone beating soundlessly on an iron sky. Shadowed by his hatbrim, his face was as inscrutable as the sky.

“Aren’t you a little hipped on this Kerrigan business?” he said. “I don’t like the bastard, either. But that doesn’t mean he’s involved with a gang of highjackers.”

“The facts all point in his direction. I’ve given you some of them. There are others. He ordered a load of whisky that he had no use for.”

“How do you know that?”

“He sold the Slipper this morning. He’s leaving his wife for another woman, and he needs ready cash, a lot of it.”

“Who’s the other woman?”

“Not your sister-in-law, if that’s what’s worrying you. She seems to be out of it. The girl’s name is Jo Summer, and she had a singing engagement at the Slipper. The last couple of weeks she’s been playing up to Aquista, apparently getting set to finger him. You’ve got enough evidence there to book them–”

“Evidence? I’ve got your story.”

“Check it. Go over the ground yourself. Round up the suspects before they leave the county.”

“You seem to be instructing me in my duties.”

“It seems to be necessary.”

“Don’t let that paranoid streak run away with you. I can sympathize with your feelings, after the beating you took. But there are worse things than a beating. So I wouldn’t press too hard, Archer.”

“That could be a threat.”

“It could be, but it isn’t. It wouldn’t be good for me if you got hurt in my territory – badly hurt. And it wouldn’t be good for you. You can’t see much and you can’t do much on the bottom of an irrigation ditch with a bullet in your head.”

I had my hand on the revolver in my pocket. “Is a carbine bullet what you had in mind?”

Church fingered the stock of his carbine. His face was impassive, almost dreamy. A light wind from the mountains probed my clothes and chilled me. The moral chill went deeper. He said: “You didn’t catch my meaning, I’m afraid. I don’t want anything to happen to you. If you’ll take my advice, you’ll check in at the hospital and get yourself patched up and treat yourself to a rest. That ought to be clear enough.”

“Crystal clear. I lay off Kerrigan and his gentle friends.”

“You lay off, period. I can’t assume responsibility for you if you keep on throwing your weight around. Good night.”

He stepped back to let me turn. The last I saw of him, he was standing in the road beside his car, a lonely silhouette.