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Hackley had also supplied a robe and a drink.

Now Dodd appraised the robe. It was silk. He'd noticed an I. Magnin label.

“From a lady,” Hackley said. “She ran a stop sign. Instead of her getting a ticket I got that.”

Dodd didn't say anything, but his disapproval was obvious.

Hackley smiled. “My mother gave it to me.”

That was better.

“What size shoe you take?” Hackley asked.

“Ten and a half.”

Hackley brought out a pair of sneakers, a pair of jeans and a shirt.

Dodd's feet were slightly large for the sneakers and his middle was a couple of inches too middle-aged for the jeans. The shirt fit and he squeezed into the sneaks. Hackley solved the pants problem with a pair of blue denim overalls, the regular work kind with adjustable shoulder straps, which Dodd lengthened. Still, the overalls were short in the legs. Dodd would have to go with his bare ankles exposed. He glanced down at them. Pale and veiny, he thought.

Hackley made two phone calls. Tucked the phone between his shoulder and cheek and talked while dressing. His first call was to break a date. He didn't lie, although it would have been easier to use the excuse that he was on duty. He just told the girl he couldn't see her that night and sounded sorry enough.

Dodd felt he was intruding, offered Hackley an out.

Hackley wouldn't take it, made his other call, started it with, “Hey, old buddy.…”

Dodd didn't hear the rest of that phone conversation because of the stereo and because Hackley took the phone by its long cord into the bedroom, not to get out of range, only to find a pair of old white moccasins among the disorder on the floor of the closet. He put them on. He was hanging up the phone when he came out. “All set,” he said.

He provided Dodd with a lightweight hooded slicker, a sort of ski jacket. For himself, a trench coat and a regular white sailor's hat with the brim turned down all around.

They used Dodd's car, gassed it full at the first Union station.

“Can the two of us handle it?”

Dodd thought so.

“I mean, you don't have a bad back or a hernia or something?”

Dodd didn't bother to answer, young smartass.

“How much does one of those things weigh?”

“Don't know exactly.”

“What's your guess?”

“Three, maybe four hundred.”

“Maybe more,” Hackley said. “We ought to find some help just in case.”

Dodd agreed.

First, on Harbor Boulevard they rented an open trailer from a U-Haul place that lived up to its advertised pledge: OPEN 24 HOURS RAIN OR SHINE. The man in charge didn't help hitch up the trailer, just took the hundred deposit and watched from inside, keeping dry.

From there Dodd and Hackley cruised some of the side streets off Grand Avenue. They pulled over at a small stucco house that had been converted into a neighborhood grocery store. Four men stood hunched with their backs close to the store front. It wasn't really a good place to stand because the rain poured off the overhang of the roof, hit the pavement and splattered the men. They didn't seem to mind getting soaked from the crotch down. Maybe because they were passing a paper bag with a bottle in it. They were Mexicans, migrant farm laborers, who usually lived from one day's pay to the next. The weather was particularly rough on them.

Hackley rolled down his window to call out,
“Hey, sēnors, vengan aqui, por favor.”

The men exchanged quizzical glances, shrugged and resumed their previous detachment.

“¿Hablan inglés?”
Hackley asked.

No response.

Dodd leaned across and asked them: “Want to make twenty dollars?”

The four men rushed to the car, shoved one another roughly to be at the window. One said, “What I must do for twenty dollars? I don't steal.”

Another said, “I steal.”

Dodd liked that man's honesty, chose him. His name, he said, was Gilberto Fuentes. He got into the rear seat. One of the other men also climbed in.

“We only need one man,” Dodd told him.

“Two for thirty,” Gilberto said, “Good deal, señor, only fifteen each.”

Dodd hesitated. They took that to mean he was considering.

“Him my brother,” Giberto said. “We work together. Good stealers.”

Dodd didn't believe the brother routine. Evidently they didn't expect him to, because when the car was under way the second man introduced himself as Paco Ramos. Dodd figured Gilberto's comradely generosity wasn't true either. The split would be twenty for Gilberto, ten for Paco, better than nothing in the rain.

Night traffic on the Newport Freeway was moderately heavy. Everything looked slick, hazardous. Dodd thought maybe his tiredness was adding to the impression that any moment he would slip out of control. He kept to the right lane, under sixty.

The Mexicans hadn't asked where they were being taken or what exactly was expected of them. All they knew and cared about was a job for the money. Typically, they were saving their energy, slouched heads down, riding on the comfortable surface of sleep.

Making conversation, Hackley asked if Dodd knew anything about bio-rhythms.

“What's that?”

“We're all supposed to have three different cycles — physical, emotional and intellectual. The way they go up and down can be plotted on a graph for every day of your life — so you know in advance what you're in for.”

Dodd grunted, thought how it would be knowing for sure tomorrow would be a bad day.

“When all three cycles are way down you should feel lousy and dumb.”

“You believe that?”

“A girl I know does bio-rhythm charts. Did mine. Right now, I'm scheduled for a physical and emotional high and medium-low intelligence. Maybe there's something to it, because I'm sort of horny and in a good mood and, instead, look where I am.”

Hackley was glad Dodd laughed. He'd nearly given up on the captain's sense of humor.

No talk for a while. One of Dodd's thoughts was about that silk robe he'd had on. He doubted I. Magnin had a branch store in or anyplace around Livermore.

They were approaching the Garden Grove interchange when the red and amber flashed through the rear window.

Dodd pulled the car over.

A highway patrol car parked behind. Two officers in it. One got out and came to the window on Dodd's side. He kept a cautious distance, one hand on his revolver while the window was being lowered.

Dodd recognized the man, asked him, “What is it, the trailer?”

In the back seat Gilberto and Paco were up on edge, wary, taking it all in.

Dodd disliked the delay but it was his fault. He'd known, of course, trailers weren't allowed on the freeway, had wanted to save time. He flashed his identification and badge at the patrolman who didn't look at it until after he thought he recognized Dodd. He shined his flashlight head on to make sure.

“I didn't know it was you, Captain,” he said.

“That's all right.”

“I should have known the car. Anything I can do for you?”

Dodd told him he could get in out of the rain. When they were under way again, Dodd thought he should have told the man not to mention seeing him. What the hell, he probably wouldn't anyway, Dodd decided.

A quarter mile past the interchange was the Chapman Street turnoff. Dodd took it and headed east for two miles through El Modeno, where he picked up Route S25. After two and a half miles, that minor winding road ended, ran into another that wasn't paved. Dodd swung north for a short way, came to a flat, open area, pulled to the side and stopped.

Since the encounter with the patrolman on the freeway, Gilberto and Paco had been either apprehensively silent or whispering in Spanish. They had seen Dodd's badge, knew now they had admitted to stealing to a policeman of some sort. They kept excitedly advising one another to remain calm.

Hackley thought they might jump out and run for it, so he told them they had been recruited for an official job. Then the only thing that worried Gilberto and Paco was whether or not they would be paid in cash as soon as whatever had to be done was done. Hackley showed them some money to keep them in line.

The range of the car's headlights was cut down by the rain. Out there beyond the reach of the lights was the Lower Peters Canyon Reservoir, a triangular-shaped body of water with only about a mile of shore line.

Dodd had been at that spot a month before, before the rain, when he and Helen had taken an out-of-the-way pleasure drive. He had noticed then that the State Water Resources Department was putting in a new pipeline to serve the recent housing developments north of Tustin Boulevard. However, not a sign now of any such work. That was strange. If anything, all the days of rain should have halted the project.

Dodd clicked the headlights to bright. He steered the car around slowly. Through the silvery diffusion of falling drops the lights hit on something. Yellow. A heavy-duty ditch digger, what was called a payloader because of its combination digging-conveying system. Off to the left of that, a short distance beyond, was something blue, a shade between turquoise and robin's egg. It was a section of polyethylene pipe — plastic. Thirty-six inches in diameter, three-quarters of an inch thick. A number of ten-foot sections of it were strung out in a line ready to be put underground.

Hackley, Gilberto and Paco got out of the car. Dodd turned it around, backed the trailer near as possible to the pipe. He could feel the tires spinning some. Soaked, raw earth, it would be easy to get stuck.

Dodd cut the motor and got out.

Gilberto and Paco were standing there trying to get used to the idea that what they were to help steal officially way out there on this awful night was a worthless piece of pipe.

Dodd tried to heft it. It wouldn't budge.

Hackley told him, “Here comes your hernia.”

The section of pipe weighed nearly eight hundred pounds. Good thing they'd hired both Gilberto and Paco.

Still, it was no easy task, wouldn't have been even on dry ground with solid footing. The mud was like grease. Twice they slipped completely, causing them to drop the section of pipe. They barely got out from under it in time. Finally, they had it up on the bed of the trailer. Dodd and Hackley tied it in place.

Dodd started the car, put it in gear and very gradually increased his foot pressure on the gas pedal. The car's rear wheels spun, whined and threw mud up. Hackley, Gilberto and Paco couldn't get footing enought to push. The wheels were digging their own hole. The car would soon be sunk to its chassis, useless.

“Hold it!” Hackley shouted.

He went over to the state-owned ditch digger, ripped off the tarpaulin used to cover its cabin. He spread the tarpaulin on the ground under the car, gathered and shoved the edge of it down between the rear tires and the mud.

They'd have only one try.

Dodd put the car in neutral, stomped the gas pedal all the way and threw the shift into low.

The wheels spun, grabbed the canvas, snapped the canvas, shot it and mud up behind. Just enough traction. The car and trailer lurched forward, fishtailed and continued on to the slick but better packed road.

23

Island Twelve.

Warren Stevens held up the front of his poncho with his chin. While he urinated. He had the Colt .45 automatic in his other hand. The stream of his urine hit upon the surface of the mud with a steady splat. He played with it, squeezed off the flow to cause a somewhat pleasant ache throughout his lower system. He released but allowed only a short spurt. Stopped and went again and again like that until he ran out.

It was something he often did — ever since he'd read about it in a pamphlet put out by the Army Medical Corps. Telling enlisted men what to do after sexual exposure.

ASSUME EVERY WOMAN IS CONTAMINATED

was a warning in bold type that Warren had no trouble remembering. The pamphlet also said that if a man who had been exposed did not have a prophylaxis kit or couldn't get to an army pro station, his best emergency measure was to urinate immediately and squeeze it off, backing up the flow for a possible inner cleansing. Warren related the idea of squeezing off to squeezing off a shot, not that it was in any way the same, he told himself.

A bit sorry it was over, he closed his fly. He gazed across the islands, saw Brydon and Gloria. And Kemp. They were nearest. Where was Spider? Probably with Lois, wherever she was. Several times over the hours he had caught sight of Spider, had missed two or three good opportunities. Once he'd had the flat of Spider's back in the aim of the Colt and he was taking up the slack of the trigger when Spider moved aside. Warren didn't want to chance a shot at a moving target.

Like the bear.

The bear he had shot that had given his father something special about him to brag about.
Ursus horribilis
, nearly half a ton of killer animal coming head on a mile a minute.

Only Warren knew the truth.

The truth had been covered by layers of lies but it was still sharp in him — what had really happened.

That day of the bear, Warren had just come through thick brush where he'd picked up some burrs on the tops of his woolen stockings. At the edge of a small clearing he paused to remove the burrs. Not that they were bothering him. He was bored. The biggest game he'd seen all day were chipmunks.

At that moment a small, plump cloud passed before the sun causing an abrupt change in the daylight, causing Warren to glance up and see the animal at the opposite edge of the clearing no more than a hundred feet away. It took a while for it to register, for Warren to believe it was a bear, actually a wild, killable bear.

Warren was downwind.

The bear never saw him.

Typical of bears, it had poor eyesight, and besides, just then it was trying to reach some high-growing berries. Up on its hind legs trying to get to the berries.

With a telescopic sight on the rifle, shooting the bear in the neck was like shooting point blank at a thick log. Even then Warren didn't have complete faith in the force of a 458 Magnum. He was afraid the bullet might pass clean through or perhaps penetrate no deeper than the bear's tough hide, only making the animal angry at him. Warren's stomach went hollow when the bear reared and appeared to be in a rage the moment before it fell over dead.