The Case of the Courteous Killer

Chapter XII

The water was ice cold, but it took a few moments for me to feel its full effect through my clothing. I stayed underwater as long as I could hold my breath. The drag of my clothing hampered my swimming, but this was counteracted by the swift current. When I finally came up, I was thirty yards from the bridge.

I floundered erect in waist-deep water and peered back toward the bridge. Apparently the truck had passed while I was submerged, for there were no longer oncoming headlights. Although it was still quite dark, I could clearly see the outline of the concrete bridge-railing against the night sky beyond it. I could have seen the silhouette of the Courteous Killer, too, if he had still been on the bridge. He wasn’t.

I listened, but could hear nothing except the steady murmur of the current. I moved toward the north bank into the cover of some bushes overhanging the water. It was only about two feet deep near shore. I sat on the bottom with just my head above water, my face screened from the opposite bank by the overhanging bushes. I waited, shivering with cold.

It was too dark to see more than a few feet. A full minute passed with nothing happening. Then a flashlight beam stabbed the darkness from the opposite bank, not ten feet upstream. It swept the stream in both directions, passing right over the loose foliage hanging before my face. The beam probed between gaps in the foliage, momentarily lighting my face as it passed.

He hadn’t seen me, however, for he swept the beam up- and down-stream several times, and each time it passed over the spot where I sat in the water. Then the flashlight moved downstream, passing the spot where I was concealed and continuing on to a bend in the stream fifty yards beyond. Apparently my kidnaper satisfied himself that there were no feasible hiding places beyond where I was, and that if I’d managed to get as far as the bend, it would be impossible to track me down. The light moved upstream again. It stopped directly opposite the overhanging bushes.

Too late I realized I’d picked the only possible hiding place along that stretch of stream. And he intended to look it over thoroughly.

The bushes overhung the water for a distance of only about ten feet. He started at the upstream end, probing the beam through the gaps between the dangling fronds in an attempt to see what was behind them. After a moment of study, he moved it downstream a bare foot.

I knew that when the beam hit my face, he would be able to spot its whiteness against the dark background of the mud-and-gravel bank. On top of that my teeth suddenly began to chatter with cold. I clenched my jaws in an attempt to stop them, but it was an uncontrollable spasm. To my own ears the sound seemed loud enough to be heard clearly over the murmur of the current.

When the beam centered a foot from my face, I ducked my head underwater and crawled upstream a yard, passing right under the light ray. Then I sat again, my head just above water, and waited for the light to reach the end of the line of bushes.

When it finally did, the light clicked off. There was no sound but the rush of water and the chattering of my teeth. Again I tried to stop the chattering by clenching my jaws. I couldn’t.

Then he heard it. He must not have been able to place the direction of the sound, for if he had, he would have started pumping bullets that way. But I knew he had heard it and recognized what it was, for his voice called softly, “I know you’re in there someplace, Friday. I’m going to count to ten. Then if you don’t come out, I’m going to put bullets at twelve-inch intervals all along the way.”

I don’t know why he thought this threat would induce me to come out, since it would only be to get shot, anyway. I felt beneath me, found a smooth, round rock about the size of a baseball, and raised one arm out of the water.

Tonelessly he counted, “One — two — three — four — five — six — seven — eight — nine — ten!”

The light flicked on again, focused on the upstream edge of the line of bushes, and an orange tongue of flame licked out from his other hand. I heard the bullet smash into the water about where my head would have been if I had been seated five feet upstream.

The light moved a foot nearer, and the pistol cracked again. I rose to one knee and hurled the stone like a softball, in a looping sidearm throw.

I heard him let out a grunt as it caught him square in the chest. The light beam shot upward, then described a flickering arc as the flashlight jolted from his hand and fell into the water. Two shots sounded in rapid succession.

Both went unerringly to where I had been when I threw the rock. But the instant it left my hand, I had launched myself downstream in an underwater dive. The flashlight, still burning on the bottom of the stream, was pointed downstream, and lighted the stream, like an incandescent tube, from bank to bank for a distance of perhaps ten yards. He must have been able to see my swimming figure, for he threw the last two bullets in the gun at the water.

Water deflects bullets, however. Neither hit me, even though the range wasn’t over five yards. Before he could either reload or jerk my .38 from his side pocket, I was beyond the glare of the submerged light and in darkness again.

When I came up, I swam another few yards on the surface, then headed for the bank opposite the one my assailant was on and pulled myself out of the water. Upstream, I could still see the glow of the underwater light.

Scrambling to the top of the gorge would have been suicide while he still had the light, but was perfectly safe in the darkness. I made it to the top and moved back into the cover of some underbrush. There I rested for a moment, panting and shivering.

I peered back toward the glow on the water, and even as I watched, it abruptly went out. Apparently water had finally seeped into the case. When I had my breath back, I angled in the direction of the car. En route, I stopped long enough to search for and find another rock to use as a weapon.

The delay cost me my quarry. My intention had been to conceal myself near the car, alongside the road, and brain him from behind with the rock when he passed me returning to it. But I hadn’t counted on his giving up his search for me as soon as he did. He must have started back for the car as soon as he fired the final shot. As I drifted behind a shrub twenty feet this side of the car, the engine suddenly came to life. Before I could make a move, the Ford roared away toward the north.

After two attempts to flag down trucks, I gave that idea up. I couldn’t blame the drivers for not stopping to pick up a stranger on that lonely stretch of road. Particularly one as bedraggled-looking as I was. My suit was shapeless from being doused in water, and when I climbed up the bank, a good deal of dirt had stuck to the wet cloth. My hat was gone, and my hair stuck up wetly in all directions.

I remembered driving past a roadside cafe about five miles back toward Big Pine. There may have been some place closer in the opposite direction, but I didn’t know, and decided not to chance it. I started to walk back toward the cafe.

On the chance that the Courteous Killer might come back to make another try at the job he had bungled, I got off the road and out of sight every time car headlights appeared from the north. It was now just before dawn, and a few more cars were appearing on the road. About twice every mile I had to duck out of sight.

I reached the roadside cafe just as it began to get light. My outer clothing had dried during the five-mile walk, and the exercise had restored my circulation, but my shirt and underclothes were still soggy. My teeth had stopped chattering, but I was still cold and wet. It didn’t improve my mood to find the cafe closed.

There was a cottage behind the cafe. Its windows were dark, but it looked as though it was lived in. I pounded at the door until a sleepy-eyed man of about sixty came to answer it in pajamas and a robe. When he saw me, the sleepiness left him and he stared at me goggle-eyed.

“Los Angeles police officer,” I said, fishing out my soggy wallet and showing my ID. “I’ve had a little trouble. Like to use your phone.”

He examined my identification carefully before saying in a slow drawl, “Well, I reckon it’s all right, young fellow. Little trouble, you say? Looks like you had big trouble. Been in a mudball fight?”

I said patiently, “Where’s the phone?”

It developed that the cottage, didn’t have one, and that he’d have to open the cafe. I waited while he changed to a shirt and trousers, then followed him to the cafe’s back door.

“You’re not really putting me out none,” he said, as he keyed open a padlock. “Get up at five forty-five, anyway, and it’s nearly five thirty now. Truckers start stopping for breakfast around six.”

Inside, I exchanged a couple of wet bills for coins and made a long-distance call to the Los Angeles Detective Bureau. A half minute later I was setting the machinery in motion to set up roadblocks all along Route 6 and the side roads leading off it.