The Doomsters

22

I DROVE back toward Purissima, keeping a not very hopeful lookout for Carl Hallman. Just outside the city limits, where the highway dipped down from the bluffs toward the sea, I saw a huddle of cars on the shoulder. Two of the cars had red pulsating lights. Other lights were moving on the beach.

I parked across the highway and got the flashlight out of my dash compartment. Before I closed it, I relieved my pockets of the gun and the blackjack and locked them up. I descended a flight of concrete steps which slanted down to the beach. Near their foot, the vestiges of a small fire glowed. Beside it, a blanket was spread on the sand, weighted down by a picnic basket.

Most of the lights were far up the beach by now, bobbing and swerving like big slow fireflies. Between me and the dim thumping line of the surf, a dozen or so people were milling aimlessly. A man detached himself from the shadowy group and trotted toward me, soft-footed in the sand.

“Hey! That’s my stuff. It belongs to me.”

I flashed my light across him. He was a very young man in a gray sweatshirt with a college letter on the front of it. He moved as though he had won the letter playing football.

“What’s the excitement about?” I said.

“I’m not excited. I just don’t like people messing around with my stuff.”

“Nobody’s messing around with your stuff. I mean the excitement up the beach.”

“The cops are after a guy.”

“What guy is that?”

“The maniac – the one that shot his brother.”

“Did you see him?”

“I hope to tell you. I was the one that raised the alarm. He walked right up to Marie when she was sitting here. Lord knows what would have happened if I hadn’t been within reach.” The boy arched his shoulders and stuck out his chest.

“What did happen?”

“Well, I went up to the car to get some cigarettes, and this guy came out of the dark and asked Marie for a sandwich. It wasn’t just a sandwich that he wanted, she could tell. A sandwich was just the thin edge of the wedge. Marie let out a yell, and I came down the bank and threw a tackle at him. I could have held him, too, except that it was dark and I couldn’t see what I was doing. He caught me a lucky blow in the face, and got away.”

I turned my light on his face. His lower lip was swollen.

“Which way did he go?”

He pointed along the shore to the multicolored lights of the Purissima waterfront. “I would have run him down, only maybe he had confederates, so I couldn’t leave Marie here by herself. We drove to the nearest gas station and I phoned in the alarm.”

The onlookers on the beach had begun to straggle up the concrete steps. A highway patrolman approached us, the light from his flash stabbing at the pockmarked sand. The boy in the sweatshirt called out heartily: “Anything else I can do?”

“Not right now there isn’t. He got clean away, it looks like.”

“Maybe he swam out to sea and went aboard a yacht and they’ll put him ashore in Mexico. I heard the family is loaded.”

“Maybe,” the patrolman said drily. “You’re sure you saw the man? Or have you been seeing too many movies?”

The boy retorted hotly: “You think I smacked myself in the mouth?”

“Sure it was the man we’re looking for?”

“Of course. Big guy with light-colored hair in dungarees. Ask Marie. She had a real good look at him.”

“Where is your girlfriend now?”

“Somebody took her home, she was pretty upset.”

“I guess we better have her story. Show me where she lives, eh?”

“I’ll be glad to.”

While the young man was dousing the fire with sand and collecting his belongings, another car stopped on the roadside above us. It was an old black convertible which looked familiar. Mildred got out and started down the steps. She came so blindly and precipitously that I was afraid she’d fall and plunge headlong. I caught her at the foot of the steps with one arm around her waist.

“Let me go!”

I let her go. She recognized me then, and returned to her mind’s single track: “Is Carl here? Have you seen him?”

“No–”

She turned to the patrolman: “Has my husband been here?”

“You Mrs. Hallman?”

“Yes. The radio said my husband was seen on Pelican Beach.”

“He’s been and gone, ma’am.”

“Gone where?”

“That’s what we’d like to know. Do you have any ideas on the subject?”

“No. I haven’t.”

“Has he got any close friends in Purissima – somebody he might go to?”

Mildred hesitated. The faces of curious onlookers strained out of the darkness toward her. The boy in the sweatshirt was breathing on the back of her neck. He spoke as if she were deaf or dead: “This is the guy’s wife.”

The patrolman looked disgusted. “Break it up, eh? Move along there now.” He turned back to Mildred: “Any ideas, ma’am?”

“I’m sorry – it’s hard for me to think. Carl had lots of friends in high school. They all dropped away. He didn’t see anyone the last year or so.” Her voice trailed off. She seemed confused by the lights and the people.

I said, as stuffily as possible: “Mrs. Hallman came here to look for her husband. She doesn’t have to answer questions.”

The patrolman’s light came up to my face. “Who are you?”

“A friend of the family. I’m going to take her home.”

“All right. Take her home. She shouldn’t be running around by herself, anyway.”

With a hand under her elbow, I propelled Mildred up the steps and across the highway. Her face was an oval blur in the dark interior of my car, so pale that it seemed luminous.

“Where are you taking me?”

“Home, as I said. Is it far from here?”

“A couple of miles. I have my own car, thank you, and I’m perfectly fit to drive it. After all, I drove it here.”

“Don’t you think it’s time you relaxed?”

“With Carl still being hunted? How can I? Anyway, I’ve been home all day. You said he might come to the house, but he never did.”

Exhaustion or disappointment overcame her. She sat inertly, propped doll-like in the seat. Headlights went by in the road like brilliant forlorn hopes rushing out of darkness into darkness.

“He may be on his way there now,” I said. “He’s hungry, and he must be bone-tired. He’s been on the run for a night and a day.” And another night was beginning.

Her hand moved from her mouth to my arm. “How do you know he’s hungry?”

“He asked a girl on the beach for a sandwich. Before that he went to a friend, looking for shelter. Friend may be the wrong word. Did Carl ever mention Tom Rica to you?”

“Rica? Isn’t that the fellow who escaped with him? His name was in the paper.”

“That’s right. Do you know anything else about him?”

“Just from what Carl said.”

“When was that?”

“The last time I saw him, in the hospital. He told me how this Rica man had suffered in the ward. Carl was trying to make it easier for him. He said that Rica was a heroin addict.”

“Did he tell you anything more about him?”

“Not that I remember. Why?”

“Rica saw Carl, not more than a couple of hours ago. If Rica can be believed. He’s staying with a woman named Maude, at a place called the Buenavista Inn, just a few miles down the highway. Carl went there looking for a place to hole up.”

“I don’t understand,” Mildred said. “Why would Carl go to a woman like that for help?”

“You know Maude, do you?”

“Certainly not. But everybody in town knows what goes on at that so-called Inn.” Mildred looked at me with a kind of terror. “Is Carl mixed up with those people?”

“It doesn’t follow. A man on the run will take any out he can think of.”

The words didn’t sound the way I’d meant them to. Her head went down under the weight of the heavy image they made. She sighed again.

It was hard to listen to. I put my arm around her. She held herself stiff and silent against my shoulder.

“Relax. This isn’t a pass.”

I didn’t think it was. Possibly Mildred knew better. She pulled herself away from me and got out of my car in a single flurry of movement.

Most of the cars across the highway had left as we sat talking. The road was empty except for a heavy truck highballing down the hill from the south. Mildred stood at the edge of the pavement, silhouetted by its approaching lights.

The situation went to pieces, and came together in the rigid formal clarity of a photographed explosion. Mildred was on the pavement, walking head down in the truck’s bright path. It bore down on her as tall as a house, braying and squealing. I saw its driver’s lantern-slide face high above the road, and Mildred in the road in front of the giant tires.

The truck stopped a few feet short of her. In the sudden vacuum of sound, I could hear the sea mumbling and spitting like a beast under the bank. The truck-driver leaned from his cab and yelled at Mildred in relief and indignation: “Damn fool woman! Watch where you’re going. You damn near got yourself killed.”

Mildred paid no attention to him. She climbed into the Buick, waited until the truck was out of the way, and made a sweeping turn in front of me. I was bothered by the way she handled herself and the car. She moved and drove obliviously, like someone alone in black space.