Hit and The Marksman (19 page)

“Naturally,” he said. In the back of his tone there was the hint of a Texas drawl, but it wasn't pronounced. He had a voice like a bassoon. He said, “Madonna and I are on different sides of the fence. It's no secret. He wants to bring the gamblers into our state, legally, and I want to keep them out. I've met Madonna a few times, tried to negotiate the question, but he doesn't believe in negotiating. That's all right—I can be pretty stubborn myself. I don't like those bastards but I respect them. Do you want to know anything about my pink Cadillac?”

“Sure.”

“I sold it a month ago.” He gave me a look that might have passed for a fleeting smile; he said, “I can prove it if necessary.”

“Who'd you sell it to?”

“The Cadillac agency. I swapped it for a new car.” His chuckle was a thunderous rumble. “Naturally the word went around that I traded it in because the ash trays had filled up. That's the curse of wealth in this country. The fact was, the car was several years old and I don't treat cars gently. It needed replacement. Well, never mind. The rich are always hated, you know, and I've learned there's no way to prevent it. You can donate a lot of money to good causes but you're accused of dodging taxes. You can drive around in a cheap used car and wear old clothes and act like one of the boys and they say you're cheap or phony or trying to suck up to somebody or crazy or insecure. If you've got good manners you're a snob and if you've got bad manners you're nouveau riche and that makes you a slob. If you live according to your income you're conspicuous and vulgar, and if you don't you're a tightwad. There's only one answer to it and that's to quit giving a good goddamn what anybody thinks and just do the hell what you feel like doing, because that's the only thing money can do for you anyway—buy you freedom.”

He stopped suddenly and gave me a sharp glance. “Hell, you didn't come here to listen to a sick old man bleat about the poverty of riches. Is there anything I can do for you besides tell you about pink Cadillacs? Another beer? A bite of lunch?”

“No. No, thanks.” I got up, feeling like an intruder. “I'm sorry I bothered you. I had a feeling before you walked in the room that I'd been given a bum steer.”

“It happens,” he said, “all the time. I'm sorry I couldn't help more. You're sure you won't stay and put on the feedbag with me?”

“No, I've got to—”

“Nobody around here eats with me any more,” he said, overriding me with the parade-ground strength of his big voice. “The hired help think it ain't proper and I've got no family left. My wife died two years ago and my only son was an Air Force colonel, shot down in Vietnam. How about a bite of lunch? You look like a man who can make good conversation.”

The poor, sick, lonely old fossil. I shook my head and declared, “I'll take a rain check. If we're both still alive next week I'll take you up on it.”

“By God, I'll hold you to that.” He smiled for the first time.

Heat clung to the ground like melted tar. It was past one o'clock; I felt the crowding press of time as I drove out the front gate and turned left on the highway, pushing the Jeep up to speed. One or two thoughts had begun to jell in my mind and I knew where I wanted to look next.

Ten miles west of Baragray's gate the plateau ended abruptly at the Mogul Rim. The desert lay beyond, below the three-thousand-foot scarp. The highway made several sharp turns and went down the face of the rim with long slopes and hairpin switchbacks, hugging the cliffs. I'd started down the steep narrow pitch, with the sheer drop at my left, and a green car ahead of me pulled out onto the road, going in my direction. I braked and mouthed an oath. The car ahead built up a little speed but after that I knew I was stuck. He wasn't much of a mountain driver. I had to keep it down to twenty-five to accommodate him, and I couldn't see any place to pass. I chafed. This was no time to get stuck behind a schoolteacher. I could see vaguely past the sun glare on his back window the faint shape of his head and shoulders hunched nervously over the wheel.

The road bent around a promontory and kept going down; we crawled around two tight hairpins and then I spotted a straight stretch approaching, where I might be able to get by. Impatient, I moved up close behind him, downshifted, hit the horn button and pulled into the left lane, gunning it.

It was downhill; the Jeep shot forward. But as I pulled parallel, the green car accelerated.

I turned my head to yell at him—and saw his wide, florid face.

It was Ed Behrenman—the tail I'd shaken off last night. The crimson face broke into a taut grin. I saw a gun in his right hand, coming out across the sill, a big Army .45 automatic. He tugged the wheel over, bringing his car across the white stripe, crowding me onto the edge.

Chapter Ten

A few times in my life I have done things for which I would like to have taken credit, as if I had reasoned them out beforehand, prepared for them and accomplished them with cool deliberation, unruffled and supreme. The truth was, in each case I acted with unthinking reflex, and it happened to work. Call it luck; call it fate. Call it a natural endowment of good reflexes.

Behrenman swung his car against me. We were both streaking toward a sharp right-hand bend, with the 2,500-foot drop at my left. I hit the brakes hard and it was those unthinking reflexes that made me crab the wheel—not away from him, but toward him.

He was expecting it but he was a shade slow reacting. My bumper banged along the side of his car with a garbage can racket. He slammed his brakes and slewed across the road at an angle, trying to shove me off the cliff with the superior weight of his big car. He might have done it, if the Jeep had had a longer wheelbase. I heard the crack and roar of his pistol. A glazed star appeared in the windshield before me. I was crabbing the wheels over hard, fighting the weight of his car, and as he slid forward the protruding edge of the Jeep bumper swung into the scalloped fender opening over his left rear wheel. There was the sudden sharp stink of burning rubber as the bumper shredded his back tire; then the hooked edge of the bumper caught the inside of his fender. I held the brakes down hard. The green car skidded, swiveling on the pivot. He spun left. His front wheels went over the edge—I saw terror on his suddenly white face. The .45 boomed and roared. In that broken instant of time my reflexes sent messages to feet and arms: I gunned the Jeep forward, got free of his fender, spun around with my rear wheels skidding to the right.

The gun was still thundering. A ricochet screamed off the Jeep's hood. Freed of bumper-hook restraint, the green car pitched forward over the rim and turned a slow somersault.

The Jeep shuddered and stopped, skewed across the road at an acute angle. My front wheels were inches from the edge. I jammed the shift into reverse, backed onto the pavement and set the hand-brake. I got out on wildly trembling legs and made my way to the edge. I could still hear the bang and crash of the tumbling car.

It was still falling. The cliff was not quite perpendicular; the car went down end-over-end, each somersault slow and ponderous. It was hardly recognizable as an automobile—squashed, foreshortened, both ends pleated like an accordion's bellows.

Four hundred feet below, it pitched out over a rock outcrop, hung suspended in the air, and crashed down like a pancake on a reverse-turn of the highway. From where I stood it didn't seem to bounce at all. It hit the pavement flat, on all four wheels, with a sound I never forgot—deafening, but more crunch than crash. Like the amplified crump of a distant field mortar.

Pieces of sharded glass winked in the sunlight down the length of the car's vertical path. One door lay intact, hardly dented, forty feet below me. One wheel, with part of an axle, teetered on the lip of a rock a few yards below that.

I retreated from the edge and braced both hands on a flat fender of the Jeep, taking deep breaths. After a while I opened my eyes and climbed numbly into the seat, got the Jeep moving and crawled downhill at a feeble pace. My arms shook violently. My mouth was sticky with dry fright.

The unrecognizable remains of the green car were splashed across the width of the road, more or less in one piece fused together by impact. The thing was upright but the final blow had driven the remaining wheels and underparts up into the body; it was squashed almost flat, not more than three feet high at any point.

It was a useless gesture, but I tried to pry into the wreckage to find him. All I could find was a hand, severed, the fingers locked around a mangled pistol. I went to the side of the road and vomited.

The wreck blocked the road. I would have to move it. I unwound a length of cable from the winch-drum on the front bumper of the Jeep, found a corner of the wreckage on which to set the hook, went back to the Jeep, set the brakes and worked winch levers.

It was no good. The wreck had smashed completely into the pavement. The only way to move it would be to get above it with a wrecker and lift it out.

I caught myself uttering a blank monotone of curses. I clamped my mouth shut, rewound the winch cable, and turned around to drive back up to the top. There was another highway that would take me around, past Baragray's ranch and down another cliff road thirty miles to the north. It would cost me three hours.

I phoned the Highway Patrol from a lonely filling station to report the wreck, giving them a fake name, and went on. Driving through the mountains, threading menacing dark stands of pine, I put my mind on Ed Behrenman, who had not tailed me up to Baragray's from the city but who had known where to ambush me, and by the time I started down the steep canyon highway I knew where to look for Aiello's killer and where to start looking for the $3 million.

Only it wasn't my day for speed. Halfway down the canyon a tire went flat.

I turned the lurching Jeep into a graveled cliffside overlook and got out, cursing loudly now, to change the tire. It was easy to see what had caused the flat—somewhere in the tangle with Behrenman's car the tire had been raked by steel, the sidewall cut almost through.

Changing the tire was a half hour's work. I went around the Jeep to inspect the other tires but found nothing to alarm me; and went on my way, uneasiness turning to a sour belly-taste of fear as the sun moved steadily toward the mountains across the desert. There were a lot of places to search. I knew who had the money, but not where.

It was well after five when I left the freeway and crossed town on the Strip. I had seen the address some time ago and hadn't forgotten it. Blue, lime, red and pink neon winked and flashed along the Strip. Girls and uniformed men in cars went recklessly fast, squealing into broad parking lots in front of the places where they could spend or otherwise separate themselves from their money. I went by the Moulin Rouge without slacking, thinking momentarily of Mike Farrell—I thought I had that figured out, too, but it would take checking and I didn't have time for that.

Near six o'clock, after fighting the outbound traffic rush and two miles of unsynchronized traffic lights, I turned up a quiet street and drove slowly, seeking house numbers. Going past one house I saw a television screen, blue through the window, flickering as an airplane went overhead, an old woman sitting there, bending toward the set, trying to hear. The house I wanted was next door. I stopped the Jeep and put my hand in my hip pocket, on the Beretta.

There was wrought-iron furniture on the front lawn. I went up a curved pavement to the door and tried the knob without knocking. It was locked. I pushed the doorbell and heard chimes inside. After a minute without response I backed up and walked around the side of the house into the gravel driveway. There was a two-car garage. I looked into it through a side window. There was one car inside, a Jaguar coupe with a slinky look of speed. I went back to the side of the house and looked in. The view through the kitchen showed me part of the living room beyond, and I saw a woman walking toward the front door, not steadily, belting a bathrobe around herself and brushing back uncombed hair.

I went back around to the front and was there when she finally opened the door; evidently she had stopped to put away her hairbrush before answering the chimes. Her mouth was sucked in with a tight look of disapproval. She barred the door with her body, a feline redhead with an amoral half-drunk look. What had been a pretty face ten years ago had hardened.

She swept me up and down with a practiced look, and stepped back. “Come in.” She hadn't asked me who I was or what I wanted—just, “Come in.”

I came in and pushed the door shut, looking around past her. The place was decorated in Miami Modern, expensive but hideous. Had I been in any condition to do so, I might have reflected at some length on the fact that the sole original meaning of the word “luxury,” in Elizabethan times, was “lust.” The house, with its careless, tasteless opulence, and the woman before me would have told me all I ever needed to know about the master of the place, even if I had never met him.

I said, “I'm looking for your husband. I assume he's your husband.”

“Won't I do?” She ran her tongue along her lips. “I'm Sylvia.” Heavy-breasted, she twisted her ungirdled hips, wanting sensation. She sat on a Naugahyde couch and plucked a cigarette from a case on the coffee table. She eyed me as if I were a side of beef and said, “Mix me a drink and we'll talk about my husband. Mix yourself one while you're at it.”

“Where is he?”

Her shoulders stirred. Her breasts handled the bathrobe seductively. “You're a lovely man.”

“Where is he?”

“Who knows? There was a phone call. An emergency case, he said. He's got my car, his is broken down. He'll probably be gone most of the night, as usual. I don't think I even want to be bothered to know what her name is. You don't know, do you? Her name?”

“No,” I said, biting it off. As I looked around the room it occurred to me he might have the loot hidden right here in the house. A good place to start looking—but she, Sylvia, could make it difficult. I said, “I'll mix drinks, but let me use your bathroom first.”