Hour of the Hunter (21 page)

The wig served a dual purpose. It concealed his newly achieved baldness, and it also protected the tender, underexposed skin from the glaring June sun. The few minutes he'd spent outside at Picacho Peak had given him a good start on a painful sunburn.

He used a discreet stop at a gas station to change clothes.

He went into the men's room as a man and came out as a woman.

Fortunately, no one was watching, but when he arrived at U-Stor-It-Here off Fort Lowell and Alvernon, Andrew Carlisle almost laughed aloud at his having taken such elaborate precautions. The woman in the RV-turned office waved him through the open gate without a second glance, no questions asked.

Carlisle enjoyed the anonymity of being a nameless, faceless woman as he sorted through the locker and inventoried his own equipment. It was almost as if he were someone else checking through a stranger's possessions.

The survival gear was all there. He opened the hasp held lid on the metal fifty-five-gallon drum and looked through the freeze-dried food he kept there as well as the water-purification equipment and tablets.

He had no intention of allowing the adventure of a lifetime to be short-circuited by a raging case of diarrhea brought on by drinking giardia-contaminated water.

Other than noticing his survival equipment and commenting on it, his mother hadn't messed with any of it. Carlisle was grateful for that.

Good for My ma Louise. Maybe she was actually getting a little smarter with age, although he 'doubted it.

Andrew had always been a bright boy-he took after his father, Howard, in the brains department. He aced his way through every private school in which his ambitious grandmother had enrolled him. He knew he was smart, and he knew equally well that his mother wasn't. Her overwhelming stupidity was always both a shameful burden and a mystery to him.

While still a child, he wondered how his father had ever become involved with fifteen-year-old Myrna Louise in the first place. Only in adulthood did he finally conclude that basic good looks and raw sex appeal were his mother's main assets. Were in the past and remained so in certain geriatric quarters. After all, she had reeled Jake Spaulding in without the least difficulty. Myrna Louise's big problem was always keeping a man once she got him.

In addition to stupidity, that was Myrna Louise's major flaw--she had never learned the meaning of power or how to use it. Her son had, certainly not in his undergraduate days at Southern Cal and not in the rarefied and surprisingly easy Ph.D. program at Harvard, either, a school where he once again took top honors. No, Andrew Carlisle learned the basics of power, about the granting and withholding of favors, about exploiting both the weak and the powerful, during his years in prison at Florence, during his post-Ph.D. program, as he called it.

Nobody really expected that he'd be sent to prison. That didn't usually happen to educated white men no matter what their crime, but go to prison he did. He left the courthouse with the searing image of an awkwardly pregnant but triumphant Diana Ladd burned into his memory.

If she had dropped it, if she hadn't kept pressing the cops and the prosecutors, no one would have given a damn about Gina Antone. Diana Ladd was the one person who had cost him those precious years out of his life. He would see that she paid dearly for it.

At first he merely wanted her dead, her and the child she carried as well. He employed vivid fantasies of what he'd do to her in order to dull the pain of what was happening to him during his own brutal initiation to prison life.

Over the years, he'd refined his thinking about exactly what he wanted from Diana Ladd. The Margaret Danielsons of the world were useful in the short term, good for immediate gratification, but they afforded little genuine satisfaction. Real vengeance, authentic eye-for-an-eye-type vengeance, demanded more than that. Whatever price he exacted from Diana Ladd would have to be equal to that required of him by those thugs in the prison-absolute submission and unquestioning obedience, no more, no less. The key to that would be her child....

With some difficulty, Carlisle roused himself from contemplation. He wondered uneasily how long he'd been standing, lost in thought, in that overheated storeroom.

Slipping in and out of his imagination like that was dangerous. He would have to pay more attention, keep a better grip on what he was doing. The ability to deliberately disassociate himself from reality was a necessary survival skill in prison, but letting it sneak up on him unawares on the outside could cause trouble.

Even so, thinking about Diana Ladd was sensuously seductive, irresistible. Knowingly now, he let himself slip back into the dream.

Where would he take her? he wondered idly. Where would he have the time-it would take some time, of course-4o do all he wanted, to bring the bitch to her knees?

The answer came in such a brilliant flash of inspiration that it seemed he must have known it all along. Thinking about it made him giddy. It was so right, so perfectly appropriate to go back to the place Garrison Ladd had shown him, to use the man's own pitiful excuse at research to destroy his entire family, both widow and child. How wonderfully appropriate.

Carlisle took one last careful look around the storeroom.

He had moved all the necessary equipment into one corner so it would be easily accessible and could be gathered at a moment's notice, but except for a hunting knife, he didn't take any of it along with him in Jake Spaulding's Valiant.

Not right then. It wasn't time yet.

He went out and closed the door behind him, locking it with a real sense of purpose and anticipation. All he had to do now was find Diana Ladd and that lump of a baby of hers. The child must be six years old by now. Once he did that, the rest would take care of itself All things come to them who wait.

Dr. Rosemead said you had to be sixteen years old to visit with the patients in their rooms. While his mother was down the hall in Rita's room, Davy waited in the busy lobby. He watched with interest as a very sunburned white man came in through the doors and hurried to the desk. A thick curtain of silence fell over the room.

"I'm looking for a patient named Rita Antone," the man said loudly, glancing down at a small notebook he carried.

"Who?" the Indian clerk asked.

"Rita Antone," he repeated. "An old lady who was hurt in a car wreck yesterday."

"I don't know her," the clerk said.

Davy couldn't believe his ears. This was the very same clerk who had, only minutes before, given his mother the number to Rita's room.

"They told me she came here by ambulance. Did she die?"

"I don't know," the clerk repeated blankly.

With an impatient sigh, the man gave up, stuffed the notebook back in his pocket, and retreated the way he had come. Almost without realizing what he was doing, Davy followed the man outside and caught up with him as he climbed into his car.

"I know Rita," Davy said.

Surprised, the man swung around and looked down at him. "You do?

Really?"

Davy nodded. "That woman in there told a lie. Rita is too in there.

My mom's with her."

The hot sun shone on Davy's stitches, making them itch.

Unconsciously, he scratched them.

"Wait a minute," the man said suspiciously, kneeling and staring at the sutured wound. "Wait just one minute.

What happened to your head?"

"I cut it. Yesterday."

"How?"

"When the truck turned over, I guess."

"Rita Antone's truck?" the man asked.

Davy nodded, wondering how the man knew about that.

"So you must be the boy who told my friend about the ambulance on the mountain?"

"You know the man in the red car?" Davy returned.

"As a matter of fact, I do," the man said with a smile.

"You're actually the person I wanted to see. Let's go over there in the shade and talk." They left the man's car and headed toward a mesquite-shaded concrete bench just outside the hospital door. "What's your name?"

Davy.

"Davy what?"

"Davy Ladd."

"And where do you live, Davy?"

"In Tucson."

"What's your mother's name?"

"Diana."

The man had taken the notebook back out of his pocket and was scribbling furiously in it. Now, he paused and frowned, cocking his head to one side. "What's your daddy's name?"

"I don't have a daddy," Davy told him. "My daddy's dead."

"I'll be damned!" the man exclaimed. "You're Garrison Ladd's son, aren't you!"

Davy could hardly believe his ears. He knew from his grandmother's Christmas letters that Garrison was his father's name, but he had never heard it spoken by anyone other than his mother when she was reading those letters aloud. His blue eyes grew large.

"You mean you knew my daddy?"

"I sure did," the man answered. "We had a class together at the U back when I still thought I was going to be a novelist when I grew up. I guess Gary did, too. We were both wrong."

"You mean my daddy wanted to write books?"

The man looked startled. "Sure. Didn't you know that?"

"I don't know anything about my daddy. He died before I was born."

For a moment, the man's eyes grew serious, and then he nodded. "I'll tell you what, Davy, you tell me what you know about Rita Antone, and I'll tell you what I know about your father. Deal?"

He held out his hand, and the boy placed his own small one in it.

"Deal," Davy said gravely, and they shook on it.

Louella Walker sat up straight and chatted almost hopefully as they returned from their brief trip to the bank. The lady there had been most helpful.

"The same thing happened to my grandmother," Anna Bush had said sympathetically, when they explained the situation. She graciously made arrangements to drop service charges on the bounced Steinway check.

"The only sensible thing to do is to start a new account with just your signature and your son's on it, if that's all right."

In the end, that's what they did.

"She was very nice," Louella was saying to her son as they drove home, "although I still feel a little underhanded.

It's like I'm robbing your father of his dignity."

She said that as they turned off Swan onto Fifth and came within sight of their own driveway three blocks away.

Brandon saw the problem long before Louella did.

"Oh, my God!" he muttered grimly.

"What's the matter?"

"My car," he said. "The department's car. It's gone."

As a homicide detective, he took his county-owned vehicle home in case he was called to a crime scene over the weekend when the department was seriously understaffed For years, everyone in the family had hung car keys on a kitchen pegboard upon entering the house. Pure reflex, it was a habit no one thought to change in he face of Toby Walker's failing mental capacity.

"Your car?" Louella asked, puzzled, not yet grasping the seriousness of the situation. "Wherever would it be?"

When Diana came down the hall from Rita's room, Davy wasn't waiting in the lobby. She found him outside, drinking a forbidden Coke. He seemed distant, uncommunicative.

:'What's the matter?" she asked.

'Nothing," he said.

:'Are you worried about Rita?"

'I guess," he told her.

"Well, don't be. Dr. Rosemead says she's going to be fine."

Diana was tired when she and Davy got back home.

She put the boy down for a nap and decided to take one herself.

Locking the door to her room, she stripped off her clothes and lay naked under the vent from the cooler, letting the refreshing, slightly PineSol-scented air blow across her body.

She was tired, but she couldn't sleep. Instead, she lay there and castigated herself for her unreasonable outburst at Brandon Walker.

After all, she was the one who had started bawling on his shoulder.

What red-blooded American male wouldn't have got the wrong idea? It was just that she didn't want this particular male anywhere in her vicinity.

His presence brought up too many unpleasant memories, reminded her of a time in her life that she wanted to keep buried far beneath the surface of conscious thought.

So, of all possible people in the world, why had she chosen Brandon Walker's shoulder to cry on? She realized now that she was lonely for male companionship, but was she so desperate that she would throw herself at the first available man who chanced across her path?

But then, what was so new and different about that? she said to herself grimly. Nothing at all. The loneliness had always been there, for as long as she could remember, and it had always made her do stupid things--Garrison Ladd being a prime case in point.

They'd been inseparable that first weekend, and he had insisted on helping her with her Sunday papers. Then, after the paper route, they'd eaten bacon-and-egg breakfasts at the Holiday Inn before going back to his apartment, where, he told her with a guilty grin, he happened to have a real, full-sized double bed.

"I'll only be a minute," he said, leaving her in the doorway of his book-lined living room. "Wait right here."

She was sure he wanted to straighten the room and make the bed before he invited her into it, which she was equally certain he was going to do.

Diana Lee Cooper didn't object. Going to bed with him was a foregone conclusion, the reason she'd agreed to come to his apartment in the first place.

She knew he wanted her again, that he couldn't get enough of her, and Diana Lee Cooper was willing. In fact, she was more than willing.

As she meandered around the room, looking through the collection of books-volumes of poetry and philosophy, a Middle English version of The Canterbury Tales complete with margins full of carefully handwritten notes-she realized that she'd do whatever it took to capture and keep this Garrison Ladd.

Here was someone she wanted-a man of intellect, a man of some refinement and grace, a man she could respect, who was, as far as she could tell, as different from her own backwoods father as he could possibly be. That difference was exactly what she'd been searching for-someone not the least bit like Max Cooper.