The Moving Target

30

When I slowed down for Buenavista, twilight was softening the ugliness of the buildings and the lights were going on along the main street. I noticed the neon greyhound at the bus station but didn’t stop. A few miles beyond the town the highway converged with the shoreline again, winding along the bluffs above the uninhabited beaches. The last gray shreds of daylight clung to the surface of the sea and were slowly absorbed.

“This is it,” Betty Fraley said. She had been so still I’d almost forgotten she was in the seat beside me.

I stopped on the asphalt shoulder of the highway, just short of a crossroads. On the ocean side the road slanted down to the beach. A weather-faded sign at the corner advertised a desirable beach development, but there were no houses in sight. I could see the old beach club, though, a mass of buildings two hundred yards below the highway, long and low and neutral-colored against the glimmering whiteness of the surf.

“You can’t drive down,” she said. “The road’s washed out at the bottom.”

“I thought you hadn’t been down there.”

“Not since last week. I looked it over with Eddie when he found it. Sampson’s in one of the little rooms on the men’s side of the dressing-rooms.”

“He better be.”

I took the ignition key and left her in the car. As I went down, the road narrowed to a humped clay pathway with deeply eroded ditches on both sides. The wooden platform in front of the first building was warped, and I could feel the clumps of grass growing up through the cracks under my feet. The windows were high under the eaves, and dark.

I turned my flashlight on the twin doors in the middle, and saw the stencilled signs: “Gentlemen” on one, “Ladies” on the other. The one on the right, for “Gentlemen,” was hanging partly open. I pulled it wide, but not very hopefully. The place seemed empty and dead. Except for the restless water, there was no sign of life in it or around it.

No sign of Sampson, and no sign of Graves. I looked at my watch, which said a quarter to seven. It was well over an hour since I’d called Graves. He’d had plenty of time to drive the forty-five miles from Cabrillo Canyon. I wondered what had happened to him and the sheriff.

I shot my flashlight beam across the floor, which was covered with blown sand and the detritus of years. Opposite me was a row of closed doors in a plywood partition. I took a step toward the row of doors. The movement behind me was so lizard-quick I had no time to turn. “Ambush” was the last word that flashed across my consciousness before it faded out.

“Sucker” was the first word when consciousness returned. The cyclops eye of an electric lantern stared down at me like the ghastly eye of conscience. My impulse was to get up and fight. The deep voice of Albert Graves inhibited the impulse: “What happened to you?”

“Turn the lantern away.” Its light went through my eye sockets like swords and out at the back of my skull.

He set the lantern down and kneeled beside me. “Can you get up, Lew?”

“I can get up.” But I stayed where I was on the floor. “You’re late.”

“I had some trouble finding the place in the dark.”

“Where’s the sheriff? Couldn’t you find him either?”

“He was out on a case, committing a paranoiac to the county hospital. I left word for him to follow me down and bring a doctor. I didn’t want to waste time.”

“It looks to me as if you’ve wasted a lot of time.”

“I thought I knew the place, but I must have missed it. I drove on nearly to Buenavista before I realized it. Then when I came back I couldn’t find it.”

“Didn’t you see my car?”

“Where?”

I sat up. A swaying sickness moved back and forth like a pendulum in my head. “At the corner just above here.”

“That’s where I parked. I didn’t see your car.”

I felt for my car keys. They were in my pocket. “You’re sure? They didn’t take my car keys.”

“Your car isn’t there, Lew. Who are they?”

“Betty Fraley and whoever sapped me. There must have been a fourth member of the gang guarding Sampson.” I told him how I had come there.

“It wasn’t smart to leave her in the car,” he said.

“Three sappings in two days are making Jack a dull boy.”

I got to my feet and found that my legs were weak. He offered his shoulder for me to lean on. I leaned against the wall.

He raised the lantern. “Let me look at your head.” The broad planes of his face in the moving light were furrowed by anxiety. He looked heavy and old. “Later,” I said.

I picked up my flashlight and crossed to the row of doors. Sampson was waiting behind the second one, a fat old man slumped on a bench against the rear wall of the cubicle. His head was wedged upright in the corner. His open eyes were suffused with blood.

Graves crowded in behind me and said: “God!” I handed him the flashlight and bent over Sampson. His hands and ankles were bound together with quarter-inch rope, one end of which was strung through a staple in the wall. The other end of the rope was sunk in Sampson’s neck and tied under his left ear in a hard knot. I reached behind the body for one of the bound wrists. It wasn’t cold, but the pulse was gone. The pupils of the red eyeballs were asymmetric. There was something pathetic about the bright plaid socks, yellow and red and green, on the thick dead ankles.

Graves’s breath came out. “Is he dead?”

“Yes.” I felt a terrific letdown, which was followed by inertia. “He must have been alive when I got here. How long was I out?”

“It’s a quarter after seven now.”

“I got here about a quarter to. They’ve had a half-hour’s start. We’ve got to move.”

“And leave Sampson here?”

“Yes. The police will want him this way.”

We left him in the dark. I drew on my last reserve to get up the hill. My car was gone. Graves’s Studebaker was parked at the other side of the intersection.

“Which way?” he said, as he climbed behind the wheel.

“Buenavista. Well go to the highway patrol.”

I looked in my wallet, expecting the locker key to be gone. But it was there, tucked in the card compartment. Whoever sapped me hadn’t had a chance to compare notes with Betty Fraley. Or they decided to make their getaway and let the money go. Somehow that didn’t seem likely.

I said to Graves, as we passed the town limits: “Drop me at the bus station.”

“Why?”

I told him why, and added: “If the money’s there, they may be back for it. If it isn’t, it probably means they came this way and broke open the locker. You go to the highway patrol and pick me up later.”

He let me out at the red curb in front of the bus station. I stood outside the glass door and looked into the big square waiting-room. Three or four men in overalls were slouched on the scarred benches reading newspapers. A few old men, ancient-looking in the fluorescent lights, were leaning against the poster-papered walls and talking among themselves. A Mexican family in one corner, father and mother and several children, formed a solid unit like a six-man football team. The ticket booth under the clock at the back of the room was occupied by a pimply youth in a flowered Hawaiian shirt. There was a doughnut counter to the left, a fat blond woman in uniform behind it. The bank of green metal lockers was against the wall to the right.

None of the people in the room showed the tension I was looking for. They were waiting for ordinary things: supper, a bus, Saturday night, a pension check, or a natural death in bed.

I pushed the glass door open and crossed the butt-strewn floor to the lockers. The number I wanted was stamped on the key: twenty-eight. As I pushed the key into the lock I glanced around the room. The doughnut woman’s boiled blue eyes were watching me incuriously. Nobody else seemed interested.

There was a red canvas beach bag in the locker. When I pulled it out I could hear the rattling paper inside. I sat down on the nearest empty bench and opened the bag. The brown paper package it contained was torn open at one end. I felt the edges of the stiff new bills with my fingers.

I tucked the bag under my arm, went to the doughnut counter, and ordered coffee.

“Did you know you got blood on your shirt?” the blond woman said.

“I know it. I wear it that way.”

She looked me over as if she doubted my ability to pay. I restrained the impulse I had to give her a hundred-dollar bill, and slapped a dime on the counter. She gave me coffee in a thick white cup.

I watched the door as I drank it, holding the cup in my left hand, with my right hand ready to take out my gun. The electric clock above the ticket booth took little bites of time. A bus arrived and departed, shuffling the occupants of the room. The clock chewed very slowly, masticating each minute sixty times. By ten to eight it was too late to hope for them. They had by-passed the money or gone the other way.

Graves appeared in the doorway gesticulating violently. I set down my cup and followed him out. His car was double-parked across the street.

“They just wrecked your car,” he told me, on the sidewalk. “About fifteen miles north of here.”

“Did they get away?”

“Apparently one of them did. The Fraley woman’s dead.”

“What happened to the other?”

“The H. P. don’t know yet. All they had was the first radio report.”

We covered the fifteen miles in less than fifteen minutes. The place was marked by a line of standing cars, a crowd of human figures like animated black cut-outs in the headlights. Graves pulled up short of a policeman who was trying to wave us on with a red-beamed flashlight.

Jumping out of the Studebaker, I could see beyond the line of cars to the edge of the swath of light. My car was there, its nose crumpled into the bank. I took off at a run and elbowed my way through the crowd around the wreck.

A highway patrolman with a seamed brown face put his hand on my arm. I shook it off. “This is my car.”

His eyes narrowed, and the sun wrinkles fanned back to his ears. “You sure? What’s your name?”

“Archer.”

“It’s yours all right. That’s who she’s registered to.” He called out to a young patrolman who was standing uneasily by his motorcycle: “Come here, Ollie! It’s this guy’s car.”

The crowd began to re-form, focusing on me. When they broke their tight circle around the smashed car, I could see the blanket-covered figure on the ground beside it. I pushed between a pair of women whose eyes were drinking it in, and lifted one end of the blanket. The object underneath wasn’t recognizably human, but I knew it by its clothes.

Two of them in an hour were too much for me, and my stomach revolted. Empty of everything but the coffee I had drunk, it brought up bitterness. The two patrolmen waited until I was able to talk.

“This woman steal your car?” the older one said.

“Yes. Her name is Betty Fraley.”

“The office said they had a bulletin on her–”

“That’s right. But what happened to the other one?”

“What other one?”

“There was a man with her.”

“Not when she wrecked the car,” the young patrolman said.

“You can’t be sure.”

“I am sure, though. I saw it happen. I was responsible in a way.”

“Naw, naw, Ollie.” The older man put his hand on Ollie’s shoulder. “You did exactly the right thing. Nobody’s going to blame you.”

“Anyway,” Ollie blurted, “I’m glad the car was hot.”

That irritated me. The convertible was insured, but it would be hard to replace. Besides, I had a feeling for it, the kind of feeling a rider has for his horse.

“What did happen?” I asked him sharply.

“I was tooling along about fifty a few miles south of here, heading north. This dame in the convertible passed me as if I was standing still, and I gave chase. I was traveling around ninety before I started to pull up on her. Even when I was abreast of her, she went right on gunning down the road. She didn’t pay any attention when I signaled to pull over, so I cut in ahead. She swerved and tried to pass me on the right and lost control of the car. It skidded a couple of hundred feet and piled up in the bank. When I pulled her out of it she was dead.”

His face was wet when he finished. The older man shook him gently by the shoulder. “Don’t let it worry you, kid. You got to enforce the law.”

“You’re absolutely sure,” I asked, “there was nobody else in the car?”

“Unless they went up in smoke– It’s a funny thing,” he added in a high, nervous voice, “there was no fire, but the soles of her feet were blistered. And I couldn’t find her shoes. She was in her bare feet.”

“That is funny,” I said. “Extremely funny.”

Albert Graves had forced his way through the crowd. “They must have had another car.”

“Then why would she bother with mine?” I reached inside the wreck, under the warped and bloody dashboard, and felt the ignition wires. The terminals had been reconnected with the copper wire I had left there in the morning. “She had to rewire my ignition to start the engine.”

“That’s more like a man’s work, isn’t it?”

“Not necessarily. She could have picked it up from her brother. Every car thief knows the trick.”

“Maybe they decided to split up for the getaway.”

“Maybe, but I don’t see it. She was smart enough to know my car would identify her.”

“I got to fill out a report,” the older patrolman said. “Can you spare a few minutes?”

While I was answering the last of the questions, Sheriff Spanner arrived in a radio car driven by a deputy. The two of them got out and trotted toward us. Spanner’s heavy chest bounced almost like a woman’s as he ran.

“What’s been happening?” He looked from me to Graves with moist, suspicious eyes.

I let Graves tell him. When he had heard what had happened to Sampson and Betty Fraley, Spanner turned back to me.

“You see what’s come of your meddling, Archer. I warned you to work under my supervision.”

I wasn’t in the mood to take it quietly. “Supervision, hell! If you’d got to Sampson soon enough, he might be alive now.”

“You knew where he was, and you didn’t tell me about it,” he yammered. “You’re going to suffer for that, Archer.”

“Yeah, I know. When my license comes up for renewal. You said that before. But what are you going to tell Sacramento about your own incompetence? You’re out at the county hospital committing a loony when the case is breaking wide open.”

“I haven’t been out at the hospital since yesterday,” he said. “What are you talking about?”

“Didn’t you get my message about Sampson? A couple of hours ago?”

“There was no message. You can’t cover yourself that way.”

I looked at Graves. His eyes avoided mine. I held my tongue.

An ambulance with its siren whooping came down the highway from the direction of Santa Teresa.

“They take their time,” I said to the patrolman.

“They knew she was dead. No hurry.”

“Where will they take her?”

“The morgue in Santa Teresa, unless she’s claimed.”

“She won’t be. It’s a good place for her.” Alan Taggert and Eddie, her lover and her brother, were there already.