Interface

Twenty

Walter Hariss hung up the phone with a shaking hand. Sweat was running down his face. He looked around the ornate study with eyes whose whites showed all the way around the pupil, giving his heavy features a slightly owl-like look. The eyes did not seem to register what they were seeing. The shaking hand found a cut-glass whisky decanter, splashed generously into imported glass. Italian glass, hand-blown, $86.76 a dozen wholesale...

The phone was ringing. Walter Hariss raised his head. He looked stupidly at the glass in his hand. It was empty. The level in the decanter on the sideboard was three inches lower.

Panic flooded across his features. His eyes sought the Seth Thomas clock, a thing of chrome and plastic and gleaming brass on the antiqued oak sideboard.

Twelve minutes since Docker’s call. Twelve precious minutes gone.

The phone was still ringing. Walter Hariss ran his hand over his eyes, across his fleshy face, as if attempting to dismiss the nightmare.

The phone had stopped ringing.

His daughter’s footsteps came to the study door. She called through the thick hardwood. “I said you were on the other line. He said he’d call back in five minutes.”

“Who...” His voice had an odd tone. He stopped, adjusted it, as if to isolate his family from a viral contagion. He’d had an argument with Dawn on the way home, their relationship was still tender. “Who was it?”

“A man named Neil Fargo. He said—”

“Good! Thank you, Dawn.” The name seemed to act as adrenalin on him. Intelligence and cunning were once more moving behind his eyes. “If I’m on the other line when he calls, tell him to hang on. I want to speak with him. Don’t let him hang up.”

“I’ll rape him,” she said through the door in her sexiest tones.

He got out “Dawn!” sharply before recognizing the mockery in her voice. He finished lamely, “Whatever you think best, Dawn.”

She went away. He dialled on the other line. After several rings, the voice of Blaney, the overweight Rock Hudson, answered, “Bush Street.”

“Where’s Daggert?”

“Out for hamburgers, Mr Hariss.”

“Want to start earning that percentage, Blaney? And there’s fifty cash each in it for you and Daggert besides.”

“You’re on, Mr Hariss.”

“Good. Call in a couple of the temporaries, and then as soon as Daggert gets back, you and he come directly to my house, understand? Four-eighty-eight Sea Cliff Avenue, in the traffic circle right beyond Phalen State Beach parking lot.”

Dimly, he heard the other phone ringing, heard his daughter’s voice in the hallway, heard her step outside his door.

“Daddy...”

He turned from the phone. He called, “Right. Thanks, Dawn. I’ll take it in a second.” Back to the phone. Speaking with the strongarm, his voice had none of the fear it had carried in speaking with Docker. “Right away, Blaney, understand?”

“Got you, Mr Hariss.”

“I want both of you armed.”

He hung up, picked up the other phone, hesitated momentarily as if he feared it might be another call from Docker; but when he spoke his voice was an executive snap. “Is that you, Fargo?”

“Me. Listen, I’m in a pay phone at the airport. All hell broke loose out here while I was sitting in the middle of a fucking traffic jam at South City. Docker’s gone again. Still by car, not by plane. One of your inside men, some hippie kid, is in custody for trying to steal an attaché case—”

“Docker’s?”

“You hired the kid, you know what you told him to do.” Neil Fargo laughed without any particular mirth. “Your other man, that fat little guy dressed up like Robin Hood, was found in the elevator over in the parking garage, out cold. People found him thought he’d had a heart attack. but I saw him and there were some mighty big red marks on his neck. And some lady lost her lunch when she found Peeler stuffed under her car down in the lower level of the garage. So Docker’s been around.”

Hariss was having trouble with his voice again. “Gus... ah, had Gus been struck in the face?”

There was surprise in Neil Fargo’s voice. “Yeah. Hit under the nose with a hard narrow object. The cops think it was the leaf out of an auto spring, but I know damned well Docker karate-chopped him — I’ve seen that fucker in action before. Peeler would have died of encephalitis from having bone driven up into his brain anyway, but he was DOA when the cops got there. Which means he didn’t make any dying statements, and you’re still in the clear.”

Hariss fought to keep the terror out of his voice. “In the clear? I’m not... not in the... Fargo, you’ve got to get up here! Docker called me. Here at home! He said—”

“I thought your lines were unlisted.”

“I...” It was Hariss’ turn for surprise. “They are! How...”

“Did Roberta Stayton know them?”

“Not from me,” said Hariss.

“Kolinski?”

“Certainly.”

“There’s your answer. If she was planning on setting up you and Kolinski for some kind of fall, she’d have asked. What did Docker say?”

“He’s... he said he was...” Hariss was striving for an offhand delivery, but his voice slid into a higher register in midsentence, like a teen-ager’s. “Said he’s coming to kill me. Do you think Roberta Stayton hired him to—”

“What difference does it make if he’s on his way?” His voice had tightened and thinned. “Stay away from windows. Keep the blinds drawn. How long ago did he call?”

“Nearly...” Hariss checked the Seth Thomas again. “Nearly half an hour ago. But he was calling long distance. The operator said his three minutes were up.”

Neil Fargo growled, “That doesn’t mean a fucking thing, long distance starts at the San Mateo County line.”

Hariss was reacting to Neil Fargo’s reaction; the sweat was standing on his face again, and his fingers were slippery around the receiver.

“I’ve got Blaney and Daggert on their way out. Armed.”

“He’ll go through them like a maggot through shit.” Neil Fargo’s voice was almost bitter. Then his tone changed, lightened. “Still, maybe not. He’s got a bum leg now he didn’t have when I knew him in Nam, it’s got to have slowed him down some. At least it’ll limit the ways he can come at you. All right. Put Blaney on the front gate, Daggert on that point of rock out by your observatory...”

“Shouldn’t somebody be inside?”

“You’ve got guns there, haven’t you? Point one at the front door and pull the trigger if anything you don’t recognize comes through it. Tell your strongarms to stop anything that moves. If it doesn’t stop, shoot it. Tell them not to let Docker anywhere near them. I mean anywhere — not within three or four yards. I remember that son of a bitch once...”

He stopped. Hariss said, “What about you?”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can. But the fucking fog has started to come in, that’s going to slow traffic on the Bayshore. It’ll probably take me an hour or better.”

As he was talking, the sound of a doorbell came faintly through the closed study door. Panic surged into Hariss’ voice. “There’s... somebody at the front door, Fargo! Some...”

“That’ll be your troops.”

“What if it isn’t?”

“I doubt if even Docker’s got that much nerve. If you’re worried, have your daughter answer it. He doesn’t have a hard-on against her, does he?”

“I don’t even know why he has one against me,” said Hariss lamely.

“Go let in your troops.” The detective laughed. “Let’s hope it’s your troops. Tell that fucking Blaney not to put a bullet in me when I show up. I’m on my way.”

The fog Neil Fargo had mentioned had thickened, was rolling in from the sea through the Golden Gate, pouring white and silent up the natural passage of the bay and reaching thin greedy fingers out at the city. Alcatraz was blotted out, gone, as were the lights of Sausalito north in Marin County and the garlanded string of lights which marked Oakland, Berkeley and Richmond in the Eastbay.

In the city, especially in the Marina District which lay close to the water, it was wetting down the streets, haloing the headlights and streetlamps, muffling the sound of traffic and city night noises.

Neil Fargo was driving west on Lombard toward the Golden Gate Bridge approach through the mist-pastelled neons of US 101’s motel row.

He turned on his wipers and the defroster to keep the windshield clear, maneuvered his car into the left lane. This would allow him to stay on Lombard when the bridge traffic took an angle right into Richardson Avenue and then Doyle Drive and the bridge approaches. Lombard, suddenly narrow and tree-arched once it lost the bridge traffic, would take him to the Presidio Main Gate.

Through the Presidio was the shortest, most direct access to Twenty-Fifth Avenue, where the winding, rich, very private streets of Sea Cliff began.

Neil Fargo waited through the traffic to the green arrow, went across the in-bound lanes past the traffic islands. He had gone less than a block on this narrow, uncrowded Lombard before stopping the car. Across the street was a small bar splashing yellow light out into the fog. Directly ahead were the Presidio Main Gates, open and unguarded. Beyond them, Lombard became curving Lincoln Boulevard.

The detective had to wait for two cars to pass before he could trot across the narrow blacktop to the phone booth outside the bar. In the open air the mist was palpable, able to be felt on the face, between the fingers, in the nostrils. It was chill and fresh.

He shut the door so he could see to dial; the fog-dimmed corner street lamp was not enough. His fingers ticked off a familiar set of digits, five-five-three-oh-one-two-three. His face was absolutely icy.

“Police.”

“Give me the radio room.”

There was a series of clicks, a pause, then another voice — this one hard and male — came on with “Central Dispatch.”

“Yeah, I want to report a stolen vehicle.”

“You want the Auto Detail.”

“This is hot,” said Neil Fargo. “It’d better go out on the air right away. I’ll shove the details to Auto later.”

“Shoot.”

“Nineteen-seventy-four Mercury Montego sedan license six-three-three, Zebra, Frank, Frank, color yellow. My name is Neil Fargo, that’s F-a-r-g-o.”

“You the registered on the vehicle?”

“Ah...” He had to consider his reply. “I’m the... ah... one who rented it. It was stolen by a man named Docker, that’s D-o-c-k-”

“Docker, did you say?” The voice had been startled out of its habitual and professional phlegm.

“That’s right, Docker. And you’re right. You have him on an APB, material witness on a homicide down on Bryant Street this A.M. You might not have it yet, but San Mateo’s going to be putting him on the air in connection with the killing at the airport of—”

“Jesus! He in on that one too? The car’s already going out on the air, Mr Fargo. You got a vicinity where it was stolen?”

“Sixteen hundred block of Pine, that’s Pine and Franklin, about ten minutes ago. I think he took off out Frank... Jesus Christ!”

From the phone booth window, Neil Fargo had been casually scanning traffic, the cars in and out of the Presidio, as he had been talking. Even in the couple of minutes he had been there, the fog had gotten thicker, heavier, an opaque blanket instead of rolling patches with clear spaces between. Visibility was down further yet, but the detective’s face was suddenly crammed against the glass.

“The son of a bitch just drove by me!” he yelped into the phone. “Right by me in the goddam car!”

“What is your 10–20... er... your location?”

“Oh! Lombard. Lombard and, ah, what the shit’s the street at the Presidio ga— Lyon. That’s it. He went through the Presidio gates!”

“We’ll alert the Military Police as well as SFPD units,” said the dispatcher. “And thanks, Mr Fargo.”

Neil Fargo hung up, stood in the booth for long moments, his head down as if in contemplation of unwelcome thoughts. Finally he opened the door. Through the fog, he could hear a police siren somewhere far off. Or, considering the fog, perhaps not so far off.

As if released from his regrets by the sound, he sprinted across the street toward his car, which he had left with the motor running and the wipers still snickering at the fog.