Hush Money (9 page)

Never once but twice, didn't I say so?

And there they came, a pair of shining headlights following me out of the lot even before I'd made the quarter mile of eucalyptus-lined road back to the freeway. Except that it was no van this time, instead a black Pontiac Firebird with some three hundred or so horses galloping along under the hood.

I've boasted enough about what the Mustang could do. It's kind of embarrassing even now to admit that by the time I hit the freeway on-ramp, I knew she didn't have it. Maybe our little trip into the ditch had shaken up the jet propulsion, but I couldn't lose our friend in the Firebird. Which was precisely what I needed to do, because where I was going next I didn't want company.

Finally I gave it up, and settled her down in the third lane, making like I was headed back for the motel, a logical enough idea. He stayed on our ass all the way, a comfortable dozen or so car lengths back but closing the gap whenever it looked like somebody else might cut between. I waited till I saw the sign for the exit before the motel, then held my breath and gunned her all she had.

We shot across two lanes. We just missed the ass end of a Greyhound bus in the second and beat a two-sectioned Arco Supreme gas truck in the first. We rocked onto the shoulder, and off, and made the exit by a short hair.

It was a good idea and so was the execution. In the movies he and the gas truck would have lit up the skies for miles around with living-color flames. But the only break in the black night sky as I turned off the bottom of the ramp was a pair of headlights up at the top.

Lucky son of a bitch.

I found myself on a strange road in tractland, still on the Diehl Ranch, with the Firebird for company. It was unnerving as hell. I did the best thing I could under the circumstances. I took my first right, whatever it was, my first left, another right and a left, a zig and a zag for good measure, around a curve onto still another street of houses, and squealed the Mustang into the first open space I saw on the lefthand side. I jammed the brakes, cut the ignition, the lights, and hunkered down out of sight in the front seat.

I heard a motor go by once, then back the other way. Somebody's brights played across the windshield above my head. It had to be his. I figured once he'd lost sight of me in a place like that, he was screwed. A Mustang's no Ferrari after all, and he couldn't exactly stop and check out every one he passed to see who had the lucky dented fender tucked into the curb. Because by that time yours truly could have been halfway to Tijuana and laughing like a love-starved hyena.

The laugh turned out to be his, though.

I waited in the quiet and the dark, ten, fifteen minutes. I sat up and stared out at the lights of the good life, California style. A half-dozen houses, a half-dozen flickering TV screens. Then I eased the Mustang out of her slot, headlights off, and cruised around looking for another exit.

Only there wasn't any. I always thought they built those tract walls to keep people out, but it must be the other way round. I drove down one deadend after another and always there was that outer wall staring me down, a gray mass silhouetted against the sky. A hell of a place for the guilty and claustrophobic.

Finally I eased past the one entrance. I spotted the Firebird parked on the other side of the road, lights off, nose pointed back toward the freeway. He must have known, like I did, that in the other direction there was nothing between us and Palm Springs.

I went back into the tract, like I'd forgotten my rubbers or something, and parked in the same open slot past the curve. This time, if he'd spotted me, he didn't even bother to follow.

The TV sets were still on, winking at me out of the night like square blue eyes.

If Mustangs were tanks, I could have blasted down a piece of wall and made a run for it in the open country. I could have tried it on foot too, but it was a hell of a long walk to nowhere.

I could only come up with one other solution, so I took it.

8

According to the pink card, it belonged to one John R. Roland of 22 Acacia Drive. It was a nice inconspicuous Dodge Polara, the latest vintage, and when I drove it past my friend out by the entrance, brights on and the radio crooning a sweet tune, he didn't so much as pop an eyeball. I had no idea who he was, but I supposed there were worse places to spend a night, and there was a Jack-in-the-Box between him and the freeway where he could have a hamburger before closing.

I drove back onto the freeway, got off a few exits later, stopped for a pair of poached eggs and home fries with some corned beef hash tucked underneath, and drove off again. It couldn't have been much later than ten. I counted on my host not being home, but if he was, well maybe I could help him out with his long division.

When you think of where college kids live these days, you imagine some old condemned house with the paint peeling off the walls, leaking faucets and stopped-up heads, ten to a room and the pot smoke so thick you've got to wear a gas mask, right? Right. Well maybe up at Berkeley, but down my way there's just a bunch of commuter campuses where a few of the kids live in the dorms and the rest are left to fend for themselves. So where do they fend? So anywhere and everywhere. Your next-door neighbors could be college kids, depending on your salary and their old man's bank accounts. Particularly if you live in a place like Blue Pacific Villas.

Blue Pacific Villas was more like permanent mobile homes, with a touch of motel thrown in. The units were built out of wood so green you could almost smell the sap. There must have been a hundred of them, one-storied, in concentric circles with narrow patches in between where the iceplant ran wild, and two inner circles of garages grouped around a swimming pool the size of your dining-room table, and a clubhouse where the old folks could play cribbage and shuffleboard while they waited to die. A transient kind of place, in sum, for people who couldn't make the Diehl Ranch grade, oldies mostly, also servicemen and their wives and brats, a stray student, maybe the local mailman. The backmost units looked out on an Alpha Beta shopping center, the front ones on the Market Basket, take your choice and mighty convenient.

At that it wasn't a bad cover for a kid who had enough going on the side to make him in no hurry for his degree.

A few pairs of eyes stared yellowly at me as I drove in, but they were too close together to be human. The units were mostly dark except for the TVs, and the only other light besides the California moon was the pale green glow of the pool. All the spaces near it were empty. I parked in one and got out, taking along the trusty flashlight I found in Jack Roland's glove compartment.

When I'd been there looking for him the day before, the garage for Number 63 had been open and empty. Now it was closed with a padlock, and by shining the light through the crack at the side of the door I could make out a shape big enough to be a van.

A bad break, I figured. But I decided to save the van for later.

I tiptoed off the blacktop and down the path which led to Ford's, keeping in the shadow of the units. I didn't hear a sound except some distant motors which might have been the freeway, and an orchestra of all-girl cicadas, much closer.

Van or no, Number 63 was dark. The front door was locked and so were the glass doors which gave onto the little patio. Behind the doors, the drapes had been pulled shut, ditto around in the back where some other doors opened directly onto the iceplant. I listened, but the snatches of Hawaii Five-O I caught came from the neighbors behind me.

Either he was asleep, or gone, or a mighty quiet fucker.

It wasn't hard to get in. The kitchen had one of those garbage recesses in the counter next to the sink, with a little gate-door which opened directly onto the path at ground level. Only a hook kept it shut. I jimmied the gate open far enough to get at the hook, pulled out the garbage pail and went up the well quiet as a mouse, then pulled the pail back in behind me and rehooked the gate.

I listened a minute, nothing, then played Jack Roland's flashlight slowly around the living room. It was furnished, I guess you'd say, in Blue Pacific modern: a comfortable chair, a comfortable couch, a Formica table and chairs, four plastic-covered stools by the kitchen counter, drapes and a matching beige carpet, none of it old and none of it new. The only thing which suggested the current tenant was a black-and-white poster on one wall of some number I didn't recognize except that she wasn't Angela Davis, Che Guevara's sister Jean or Mary Magdalene, take your choice.

The door to the little back hall was open and so were the three doors leading off it. One was the bathroom, the second the bedroom: a dresser, a red plastic chair, a double bed. Empty. The third was a smaller room: another dresser, a faint peculiar smell, a couch which looked like it converted into a bed … But when I went in I tripped over something soft and long and damn near fell on my face.

I flicked off the flashlight.

For a minute I made no sound. On the other hand, neither did the something. Then I felt around the wall for a switch, turned it on, and found myself standing almost on top of one of the Lopez brothers.

I thought it was Garcia, but it might have been Gomez. He was lying flat on his back, as still as a statue on an aztec tomb. A thin streak of hardened black blood ran out of his left eye and ended in the carpet around his ear. I bent down and, avoiding the hole in between, opened what was left of his other eye. I picked up his right hand. His arm bent at the elbow, and I let the hand go. It flopped back on the floor.

I got up again, flicked off the light switch and stood there in the dark, wishing like hell I had the boys from Five-O to give me some advice. I didn't know my way around much when it came to bodies, dead ones that is. Garcia's wasn't warm but it wasn't exactly deep-freeze either, and if his hand didn't feel like a live one, when did the rigor mortis set in? He must've been fairly fresh, no more than an hour I guessed, and maybe less.

I'd liked to have kept him company for a while. I could have tried out a few of my ideas on him—like did our mutual boss know where he was?—and maybe he'd have answered, maybe not. But if I'm not particularly squeamish about the dead, sometimes the living are another story. Whoever had done him in, I figured, had been cool enough to walk out and just leave him there for somebody else to trip over like a pair of roller skates. Whoever had been cool enough to do that might be cool enough to come back, or send someone else in his place. Like a man with a badge.

Ford?

It could have been, but why would he have left his transportation behind?

Or it could have been someone setting up Ford.

Or me in Ford's place.

“So long, Garcia,” I whispered to him. “See you around the
fronton
.”

Before I left, I checked the place out, not enough to satisfy Sherlock Holmes but sufficient given the circumstances. Maybe what everyone was looking for was hidden under the floorboards, but all I found worth mentioning was a plastic Alpha Beta produce bag stuffed with a pound or so of grass back behind a stack of T-shirts in the dresser.

I went out in style—by the front door—and up the path to Jack Roland's Polara, his trusty flashlight in hand. I had every good intention of getting the hell out of there, but it seemed so quiet outside, peaceful, the moon a reassuring white way up in the sky, and nobody around but the cicadas who were laughing their clackers off at the way I was jumping at my own shadow, and then a small cicada voice inside told me I might never have another chance to satisfy my curiosity about those black curtains or the van.

I got the padlock off without a sledgehammer, an old talent of mine I hadn't had much use for lately. I rolled up the garage door and there she was, old ZNV 218 all right, with the black curtains and the bashed-in right rear.

The back panel doors were locked, but I managed them too, and in I went.

It was like every redblooded American kid's dream come true. He had just about everything in there, and then some: up behind the driver's seat a refrigerator and a two-burner cooker, a bottled gas setup to run them off and a mini-generator for electricity; a portable sink set into the wall with a water tank up above, complete with spigot; down the length of the lefthand wall a leather-covered bunk which looked like it might open out into two, and drawers underneath and dark-stained wood cabinets up above; more shallow cabinets on the other wall and under them a collapsible table; a tape and stereo hookup; even a carpet, wall-to-wall.

Hell, didn't I say he and Karen had traveled in
style
?

To top it off, the place was an unholy mess.

It looked like someone had ransacked it. Maybe someone had, else Andy Ford's mother had done all the picking up after him when he was in short pants. Clothes were flung all over the place: on the bunk, on the floor, leaking out of the drawers, a man's clothes mostly but also the kind of undies you don't find on a man south of the La Cienega art galleries. There was sand on the carpet, or what looked like sand, and papers, books, and dirty plastic dishes in the sink along with cigarette butts, remnants of food and an almost empty half-gallon jug of Gallo red. Every other inch of wall space had crap Scotch-taped to it, not just posters and empty record albums but photos, postcards, newspaper clippings, a lot of them torn and a lot hanging by one corner.

But the cabinets were another story.

The ones over the bunk contained a few dishes, plastic cups and tinware, all wedged into slots to keep them from rattling around, and a shelfful of groceries, mostly health nut stuff. Like a bottle of wheat germ and a half-full cellophane package of Crunchy Granola. Then I slid open the doors on the collapsible table side, and even the unimpressionable Cage got a shock that jumped his mouth off its hinges.

Out in the Great American countryside where the population is too scattered for stores, they used to have traveling merchants—butchers, bakers etcetera—who went from homestead to homestead peddling their wares out of the backs of trucks. For all I know they still do in places the supermarkets haven't gotten around to. Anyway, that's what this reminded me of. Not a butcher, though, or a baker. But a traveling pharmacy. A pharmacy on wheels, nothing less.