The Instant Enemy

chapter 14

I DROVE THE CAR, and told Langston he could sleep. He claimed that he wasn’t sleepy, but soon after we got onto the highway he butted his cigarette and dozed off.

The highway left the sea for a while, looping inland through a mountain pass, and then returned to the sea. The railroad ran between the sea and the mountains, and I caught the gleam of the tracks from time to time.

There was very little traffic. This northern part of the county was mostly open country. On the ocean side a few oil stations and gas flares broke up the darkness. Inland, the fields sloped up to the rocky flanks of the headless mountains. There were cattle in the fields, as still as stones.

“No!” Langston said in his sleep.

“Wake up, Hank.”

He seemed dazed. “Terrible dream. The three of us were in bed to–” He stopped in mid-sentence, and watched the night rush by.

“Which three of you?”

“My wife and I, and Davy. It was a rotten dream.”

I said after some hesitation: “Are you afraid that Davy might go to your house?”

“The thought did occur to me,” he admitted. “But he wouldn’t do anything to anyone I love.”

He was talking against the darkness. Perhaps I should have left him at home, I thought, but it was too late now. Since leaving his house I’d added over fifty miles to the odometer.

“How much further, Hank?”

“I can’t say exactly. I’ll know the place when I see it. You have to make a left turn onto a gravel road. It crosses the tracks.” He peered ahead through the windshield.

“How long is it since you’ve visited the place?”

“About three years. Deputy Fleischer drove me up.”

“Why did you go to all the trouble?”

“I wanted to know exactly what had happened. The people at the Shelter told me Davy was practically autistic when he was admitted – mute and almost unreachable. I wanted to know why. Fleischer hadn’t told them much, if anything.”

“Did he talk freely to you?”

“Policemen never do, do they? And I can understand an officer getting quite possessive about a case. At the time he brought me up here, he’d been working on this one for twelve years.”

“Did he say so?”

“Yes.”

“Then he couldn’t have thought it was an accident.”

“I don’t know what he thought, really.” Langston thrust his head forward. “Slow down. We’re coming to the place.”

Several hundred yards ahead in the lights of an approaching truck I could make out a gravel road sloping away to the left. A lonely hitchhiker was at the corner. It was a girl, standing with her back to us and frantically signaling to the truck driver. The truck passed her, and then us, without slackening speed.

I made a left turn onto the side road and got out. The girl was wearing sunglasses, as if the natural darkness wasn’t deep enough for her. Her body made a jerky movement. I thought she was going to run. But her feet seemed to be stuck fast in the gravel.

“Sandy?”

She didn’t answer me, except with a little moan of recognition. I had a vision of myself seen from above, a kind of owl’s-eye view of a man moving in on a frightened girl at a deserted crossroads. Somehow my motives didn’t enter the picture.

“What happened to the others, Sandy?”

“I don’t know. I ran away and hid in the trees.” She pointed toward a grove of Monterey pines on the far side of the railroad tracks. I could smell their odor on her. “He laid Mr. Hackett across the railroad tracks, and I got really scared. I thought he was pretending, until then. I didn’t think he really meant to kill him.”

“Is Hackett unconscious?”

“No, but he’s all taped up – his hands and feet and mouth. He looked so helpless lying across the rail. He knew where he was, too, I could tell by the noises he made. I couldn’t stand it, so I ran away. When I came back they were gone.”

Langston moved up beside me. His feet crackled in the gravel. The girl shied away.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said.

“Who are you? Do I know you?”

“I’m Henry Langston. Davy wanted me to take care of you. It seems to be working out that way after all.”

“I don’t want to be taken care of. I’m all right. I can get a ride.” She spoke with a kind of mechanical assurance which seemed to be unconnected with her real feelings.

“Come on,” he said. “Don’t be so stand-offish.”

“Have you got a cigarette?”

“I have a whole pack.”

“I’ll come with you if you give me a cigarette.”

He brought out his cigarettes and solemnly handed them over. She got a cigarette out of the pack. Her hands were shaking.

“Give me a light?”

Langston handed her a book of matches. She lit one and dragged deep. The end of her cigarette was reflected double like little hot red eyes in the lenses of her dark glasses.

“All right, I’ll get into your car.”

She sat in the front seat, with Langston and me on either side of her. She gulped her cigarette until it burned her fingers, then dropped it in the ashtray.

“You didn’t have very good plans,” I said. “Who made your plans?”

“Davy did, mostly.”

“What did he have in mind?”

“He was going to kill Mr. Hackett, like I said. Leave him across the track and let the train cut him up.”

“And you went along with this?”

“I didn’t really believe he was going to do it. He didn’t do it, either.”

“We’d better check on that.”

I released the emergency brake. The car rolled down the grade toward the crossing, which was marked by an old wooden sign with drooping crosspieces.

“Where did he put Mr. Hackett?”

“Right here beside the road.” Sandy indicated the north side of the crossing.

I got out with my flashlight and looked over the railbed. There were fresh marks in the gravel which could have been gouged by heels. Still it was hard to imagine the scene that the girl had described.

I went back to the car. “Did Davy tell you why he picked this place?”

“He thought it would be a good place to kill him, I guess. Then he probably changed his mind when I ran away.”

“Why did he choose Mr. Hackett as a victim?”

“I don’t know.”

I leaned in at the open door. “You must have some idea, Sandy. Mr. Hackett is or was a friend of your family.”

“He’s not my friend,” she said guardedly.

“You’ve made that fairly clear. What did Hackett do, if anything?”

She turned to Langston. “I don’t have to answer that, do I? I’m only a juvenile but I’ve got a right to a lawyer.”

“You’ve not only got a right,” I said. “You’ve got a need for one. But you’re not going to help yourself by keeping quiet. If we don’t head your boyfriend off, you’ll end up going to trial with him for everything he pulls.”

She appealed again to Langston, the cigarette king. “That isn’t true, is it?”

“It could happen,” he said.

“But I’m just a juvenile.”

I said: “That’s no protection against a capital charge. You already own a piece of a kidnapping. If Hackett gets killed, you’ll be an accomplice in murder.”

“But I ran away.”

“That won’t be much help, Sandy.”

She was shocked. I think she was realizing that the place and the time were real, that this was her life and she was living it, badly.

I felt a certain empathy with her. The scene was becoming a part of my life, too: the grove of trees standing dark against the darkness, the rails reaching like iron strands of necessity from north to south. A late moon like an afterthought hung in the lower quarter of the sky.

Away off to the north the beam of a train’s headlight was flung around a curve. It came toward us swinging, cutting the darkness into illegible patterns, pulling a freight train behind it. My own headlights were shining on the rails, and I could see them dip under the weight of the diesels. The overwhelming noise of the train completed the drastic reality of the scene.

Sandy let out a strangled cry and tried to fight her way past me. I forced her back into the car. She scratched at my face. I slapped her. We were both acting as if the noise had shut us off from the human race.

Langston said when the train had gone south: “Take it easy, now. There’s no need for violence.”

“Tell that to Davy Spanner.”

“I have, many times. Let’s hope it took.” He said to the girl: “Mr. Archer is perfectly right, Sandy. If you can help us, you’ll be helping yourself. You must have some idea where Davy went from here.”

“He didn’t know himself.” She was breathing hard. “He did a lot of talking, about this place in the hills where he used to live. He didn’t know where it was, though.”

“Are you sure it existed?”

“He thought so. I don’t know.”

I got in behind the wheel. Our brief struggle had warmed her, and I could feel her body glowing beside me. It was too bad, I thought, that her parents hadn’t been able to keep her on the back burner for another year or two. Too bad for her, and too bad for them.

I asked Sandy some further questions as we drove south. She was reticent about herself, and about her relations with Davy. But her answers established one thing to my own satisfaction: if Davy Spanner was the one who had beaten Laurel Smith, Sandy didn’t know about it. And she had been with Davy right through the day, she said.