The Surfside Caper (7 page)

“Turn on your lights!”

I turned on the lights. I thought bitterly that I should write a book on how to move corpses without attracting attention.

It was the only car I saw until I dropped down a grade into Rio Pollo.

Rio Pollo is a beautiful name. It means Chicken River. It was quite a place considering the time of night. Or maybe the time of night made it quite a place. I passed rows of shacky beach houses, their cheapness stark and clear under the moonlight. I could see a dark hillside splotched with more substantial looking houses. There were no street lights except those on the main street. The town had only one.

And that was enough. Five blocks of neon. A million dollars worth of advertising. Here the clam was king. Neon clams squirting and opening and steaming. Neon mugs of clam juice being drunk by neon men. One joint was called the Dancing Clam. Another the Singing Clam.

The sidewalks were edged by cars of all kinds. Rio Pollo was apparently a hangout for everyone from the Cadillac type to the jalopy owner. The streets were fairly busy too, for midnight. Business suits, evening clothes, shorts and halters on determined, shivering purple-blotched fleshy females. Bermuda shorts on self-conscious males.

I wondered how many citizens were getting a look at the sign on the stationwagon. I had gone one block on the main drag. I had four to go. That was too many. I made a right turn, toward the beach. I went past another neon-lighted building. The sign said, “Police Station.” A prowl car with parking lights on and motor idling sat at the curb outside. I had one choice. I took it. I kept on going.

I thought of Lieutenant Colton as I drove past. It wasn’t a happy thought.

I made a left turn at the first corner. I drove five blocks and turned left again. I reached the main street. It was quieter here, the clam district all behind me. I went right.

I came to a junction. A road going left was marked, “To U.S. Highway.” Another sign pointed straight ahead. It read, “Beach Drive.”

I suddenly realized I had no notion of where Craybaugh hung out. His place could be miles from Rio Pollo and still be in the oversized city limits. It could be somewhere along Beach Drive or over the hill, toward the highway.

I kept going on Beach Drive. I went past a good mile of more shacky beach houses. The road curved over a low hill and dropped toward a small cove. The beach houses were no longer shacky. They were big, with a lot of glass and landscaping. Some of them had their own boat moorages with boats bobbing gently on the swell of the water.

The road curved around the cove, well back from the rear of fancy houses. My headlights tunneled forward into nothing. I decided I’d made another bum guess. I started looking for a turn-around.

I found it, an oiled road leading left. A big sign arrowed down the road. It read:
Milo Craybaugh. Wholesale Florist. Two Miles.

I almost yelled with the relief of nervous tension.

I made the turn. The road was narrow but smooth enough. It cut over a hill, through a grove, and into a valley. I could feel warmer air enclosing me. I began to smell flowers. The edge of my headlights picked up fields of them on the right. The land to the left was hilly and chopped up, covered here and there with bands of timber.

The fields stopped abruptly. An old-fashioned, freshly painted two-story white house sat surrounded by lawn. Beyond it were rows of sheds. Across from it was a string of greenhouses.

I had come too far. I couldn’t dump Milo in a field now. I had no place to turn around. I would have to carry him into his own back yard and leave him.

The blacktop road continued past the house. It began to curve toward the largest shed. It was a blank-walled warehouse with truck entry doors near one end. The car’s headlights struck the door. They bounced off fresh white paint, blinding me. I cut the lights. The big doors began to roll silently upward.

I hit the brake. A great gob of blackness lay behind the doors. I began to make out the shapes of trucks. I had obviously activated an electric door opener. I was being invited into the shed.

I took too long to accept the invitation. A man appeared from inside. He was carrying a flashlight. The backwash of the light showed me a gaunt face and a workman’s jacket over coveralls. And it showed me the rifle he was carrying under one arm. His feet slapped the blacktop with deliberate, heavy sounds.

The slapping stopped. “Something wrong, Mr. Craybaugh?”

Something was wrong, all right. But Mr. Craybaugh wasn’t interested. I was. Only I didn’t know what to do about it.

Probably out of deference to his boss, the man hadn’t yet flashed his light into the car. But he would if I didn’t answer, didn’t make some kind of move. He wouldn’t see Milo Craybaugh, but he’d find Milo soon enough.

I slid down in the seat. My head was still showing over the edge of the door. I twisted around and lay on the seat. I reached up and flipped the selector lever into reverse. I put my hand on the throttle and pushed. I started moving backward.

“Hey, Mr. Craybaugh!”

I gave the wheel a twist. My idea was to back around so that I was heading out the way I had come in. Then I could get up and drive.

I twisted too far and too fast. I forgot that damned power steering. Wood crunched. The wagon stopped, jolting. My forehead lifted up and slammed against the wheel. I swore. I found that lever and moved it into drive. I could hear the man coming my way, his feet slapping on the oiled road surface. He wasn’t saying anything now. He was just coming for me.

I put the heel of my hand on the throttle and pushed hard. I gave the wheel a light twist. The wagon started forward, too fast. The man yelled again. His voice was almost in my ear. I must have come close to running him down.

The flashlight beam hit the rear view mirror and bounced down into my eyes. The guy was still yelling, a kind of gibberish. I didn’t know what he was yelling about until the right front fender of the wagon hit something that wasn’t about to give. The tail end slewed. The right rear side smacked into something solid. I flipped off the key. There was no point in burning gas. I wasn’t driving this crate any farther.

I could hear the guard running again. I opened the far side door and slid into darkness, feet first. I landed in a tangle of vines and soft dirt. It was very black with only a scrap of moonlight here and there above me.

I had headed down the road, but not quite straight enough.

Somehow I had managed to go all the way beyond the greenhouses before the wagon turned. I had run it into the forest across the fields.

I said, “Sorry for the rough ride, Milo.” I climbed a low bank and started running. I ran fast. I had to. The guard had quit chasing me. He was using the rifle instead.

An alarm bell began ringing frantically. Two bullets ticked through branches and leaves over my head. Then I heard no more shots. I was making too much noise bulling through the underbrush.

I stumbled over a deadfall and skidded through the brush on my chest and arms. I felt a vine loop my ankle. Panic caught me. I started to thresh around like a hooked salmon. My head cracked against a punky log.

I stopped threshing. I lay quietly, letting the panic drain away. I began to feel like a fool. I wasn’t used to being shot at. I wasn’t used to running through dark woods. But neither one was a good excuse to go off the way I had. I sat up and thought about what had happened to my nerves.

The pressure from Samuels trying to run me over the cliff had started it, I realized. And then the reverse English Annette had put on her greeting had keyed me up just that much more. Milo hadn’t helped, either dead or alive. And Annette’s drunken ravings had about finished the job.

Only they weren’t drunken ravings. What Tibbetts had said, and what he had left unsaid, told me that. Somewhere in Annette’s odd actions was the bolt that would let me lock all the bits and pieces together.

I stopped thinking about Annette. I started thinking about myself. I could hear voices of men shouting. A car started up. Another. The shooting and the alarm bell had attracted an army from the volume of noise. They would be beating the bushes in another few minutes.

Headlights probed the timber. They fell far short of where I sat. But they showed too clearly the swath my panicky run had chewed in the underbrush. I crawled on my hands and knees, putting distance between myself and the spot where I had fallen.

The lights went out. I stopped crawling. I crouched behind a thick, fallen tree trunk and did some more listening. I heard four cars on the move. I heard the crackle of dry brush under heavy feet as men moved through the woods. Flashlights blinked like fireflies dancing on a hot Pennsylvania night.

I saw the pattern. The cars were carrying men to the other side of the woods. They would come south and meet the men already moving toward me. I would be flushed out like big game is flushed by beaters.

I worked over my next move. Trying to make the highway through these woods was out. To break through that cordon of men would be like trying to cross the deadly barrier strip which Iron Curtain countries throw up to keep their contented citizens from hurrying off to one of the unhappy, decadent democracies.

I watched the flashlights coming slowly in my direction. They formed a ragged line. I figured the speed of the lights. I gave myself another three minutes. I crouched down behind the fallen tree and waited for the inevitable.

I was wrong. I waited four minutes. Then one eager torch-bearer’s light curved over the treetrunk and spattered on the ground beyond me. It was the only light I could see. The others were still a dozen steps behind. I pulled my head down, turtle fashion. I waited some more.

He reached the tree trunk. I heard a foot scrape. A leg slid over to my side, outlined by the backwash of the flashlight. I let him plant his foot solidly. I gave him time to bring the other leg up, but not time enough to get it to the ground.

I reached up and got a hand on cloth. I pulled, hard. He came down on top of me, straining to turn his grunt of surprise into a shout of warning. I swung for his throat with the side of my hand. I caught him just a hair high.

He made a gagging sound. I pushed him back and hit him again as he opened his mouth a second time. The flashlight was rolling on the ground. I grabbed it and rapped him behind the ear. He stopped fighting me.

Someone close by began to yell, “Joe. Hey, Joe?” A light bobbed in my direction.

I made my mouth full of mush. “Took a header. I’m okay.”

The man laughed. His light moved back into a straight line. I snapped out the flashlight I held and crouched beside Joe. I went through his pockets. He wasn’t armed with anything deadlier than a pair of pruning shears. I let him keep them.

I stood up. I flashed the light ahead and walked after the beam. The other lights were all around me now. I located a patch of bushes. I laid the light in the crotch of the biggest bush. The beam spattered against a tree ahead and disintegrated. It looked just the way I wanted it to.

I dropped to my knees and crawled back to Joe. He was still quiet. I left him and oozed over the downed tree. I stood up and walked, not too fast, not too slow, until I was back to the edge of the woods. I followed along them back toward the big house and the sheds. I passed Milo’s wrecked car. The rear gate was open. Milo was still inside but the tarp had been pulled off him.

I decided I had to move fast if I was going to move at all ever again. The cops would have been notified by now. They wouldn’t take long getting here.

I kept to darkness until I reached the big shed. I ducked into it and took a look around. I made out a big truck and a small one. The small one was a panel job. I opened the door. The key was in the ignition where it logically should be in a truck driven by a half-dozen different workers and carefully locked away at night.

The motor started quickly and noisily. I took off the brake and located first gear. I rolled toward the lighter patch that marked the doorway.

No one bothered me. Everyone was still hunting in the woods. I could see the bobbing lights all the way to Beach Drive.

I turned north on the Drive and headed for Rio Pollo.

I came to the junction of the road leading off to the highway. Only a few lights spattered the heart of town now. Most of the clam signs had been put to bed. Then light blossomed ahead of me. Bright, hard headlights. Whirling red blinkers. And with them came the keening of a siren.

Lieutenant Colton was on his way.

I turned left and bumped down a gravel road toward a line of shacks near the beach. I cut my headlights and made a right turn. I twisted along a half dozen short graveled pieces before I reached pavement. I was directly below the street with the police station sign glowing in front of it.

I went a block farther and turned toward town. I drove almost to the main street. I saw a telephone kiosk. I parked and cut the motor. I left the keys. I climbed to the deserted street and brushed myself off.

I went into the phone booth. I fed a dime into the slot and reached for the dial. I hesitated, forcing myself to take time to do a little thinking.

Who was I going to call? My first instinct had been to call Ingrid and get her here to pull me out of the fire I’d built around myself. But it was possible Colton would come at the wrong time and catch us together. That would mean involving her in my mess.

I could call Annette, I thought, or even Tibbetts. But I didn’t think Annette would be in any shape to help, and I didn’t care to put myself under obligation to Tibbetts.

That left me with Jacob Dolphin. The more I thought of him, the better I liked the idea. I wanted words with Dolphin, and this seemed as good a time as any to have them.

I dialed the Surfside’s number. I said to the switchboard girl, “Get me Mr. Jonathan Dorffmann. He’s expecting the call.”

He might have been at that. He was close enough to his phone to answer on the second ring.

I said, “This is the man from Australia. I’m in Rio Pollo and I can’t find a taxi.”

“What kind of a gag is this?” Dolphin demanded.