Undercurrent (The Nameless Detective) (14 page)

When we got to Inspiration Way, I asked, "Now where?"

"Russell Dancer."

"And then?"

"That depends on what Dancer has to say."

We drove down to Highway 1 and turned south. The sea was black and restless under a thin breeze, and the proud old cypress trees silhouetted against the night sky were like manifestations of the essence of loneliness. On the horizon, a mist had begun to form; it drifted slowly landward, vaguely luminous, a little eerie: a nameless something, an other-worldly substance reaching out to embrace the primordial landscape . . .

The urgent crackling of the transceiver set under the dash snapped me out of that sort of melodramatic reflecting. Quartermain caught up the handset immediately, and it was Lieutenant Favor to tell us Brad Winestock had just left his house and gotten into his car and Was proceeding north on Bonificacio Drive. Favor was maintaining surveillance. Quartermain told him to keep reporting every thirty seconds until Winestock reached an ultimate destination; then he pulled the car into a turnout that came up on our right. He said to me, "Things are beginning to break."

"I thought they might."

"But I don't like it much. I've got a feeling."

I looked at him. "What kind of feeling?"

"Bad vibrations. Does that sound asinine?"

"No," I told him. "I've got them too."

He ran one of his big hands over his face. "We'll stay here until we find out where Winestock goes. If it looks like anything, we'll want to get there in a hurry."

Favor's voice said from the transceiver, "Subject proceeding east on Pescadero, toward Highway One."

Quartermain and I sat there listening to static and silence for another half-minute; then: "Subject turning north on Highway One. I'm approaching the intersection now . . . Oh Christ!"

Quartermain jabbed at the mike's
Send
button. "What's the matter?"

"There's a string of cars heading south," Favor said. "Winestock just beat them and I'm bottled up here . . ."

"Wedge out there, for God's sake!"

"I'm trying, Ned . . . Okay, here's a break . . . I'm turning now and I've got my foot into it; I can't see his taillights, but he can't have gotten far . . ."

Static. More static. Quartermain said urgently, "Jim? Do you see him?"

"No. Ned, there's no sign of him. The Carmel Highway turnoff is coming up, and he might have taken that. I've got to make a choice . . ." Static. "All right, I'm taking Carmel Highway. One looks clear . . ." Static. "Nothing, no sign of him . . ." Static. "Ned, I'm sorry as hell but I can't locate him along here, maybe he's still on One or maybe he turned off Carmel somewhere. I've lost  him . . ."

Quartermain said "Goddamn it!" very softly. Then he depressed the
Send
button on the handset again. "Keep looking, Jim. Go back to One and cruise it. Cruise the side streets off Carmel. I'll put out a surveillance request to the Monterey police and to the State people. Give me a report in five minutes."

Favor acknowledged and signed out, and Quartermain called through to Donovan at the Cypress Bay station and issued his surveillance request. The remainder of the five minutes went by silent and tense, and then Favor came on: negative. Quartermain instructed him to maintain his search until no longer feasible, then he slammed the handset back on the transceiver unit and took us out onto the highway again.

I said, "Winestock won't go far, if running is what he's got in mind."

"I know that, but I'm thinking about the bald man. Winestock might have led us right to him."

"There's still time. It'll work out."

"Sure," he said. "Sure it will."

Beach Road came up on the right, and Quartermain slowed and made the turn. We went down the road past the trailer encampment and out onto the bluff face. The wood-sided station wagon of the morning was no longer parked there, and it was otherwise vacant. Quartermain edged up to the guardrail on the left and darkened the car.

I said, "Dancer's car—what I think is Dancer's car— is gone. Maybe he's out somewhere, too, for one reason or another."

"That's all we need."

The wind blowing in from the sea was chill and damp, and the mist out of the horizon shifted and undulated low over the black carpet of the sea. I pulled up the collar on my suit jacket as we crossed to the set of stairs that led downward to the beach shack.

We paused on the landing, looking down. The house was shrouded in darkness. You could see the breakers spitting foam and spray as they soared up and over the series of bird-limed boulders on either side of the structure, further down; and you could hear the dull throb of the sea's heart, and the sandy whisper of the wind, and the faint sighing of the old, sea-wormed boarding.

"It looks deserted, all right," Quartermain said.

"Do we go through the motions here, too?"

"We might as well. You never know."

We started down the sand-coated steps, moving carefully; the stairs were too narrow for more than one person at a time, and I led the way. We were a third of the way down, and I had my head up looking at the shack, when a flash of flickering red-orange illuminated the night sky immediately to the rear of it.

I stopped, thinking: What the hell was that? The flaring reddish brightness diminished into a dull glow, and all at once I thought: Fire, oh Jesus,
fire!

I lunged forward, yelling it over my shoulder to Quartermain, running now and hanging onto the railing to keep from losing my balance on the sand-slick boards. I could hear Quartermain cursing steadily behind me. I jumped the last five steps, stumbling, bringing myself upright—and the running figure materialized to the left rear of the shack, racing diagonally toward the rock jetty on that side.

Quartermain saw him at the same time, and he shouted "Stop! Halt there! Police officer!" as we pounded around the side of the shack and down the incline toward the ocean. The running figure slowed momentarily, looking back over his shoulder, and for that instant he was clearly outlined against the pale, starlit black of the sky. Short, wedge-shaped, thick-chested. And even at that distance, because he wore no head covering of any kind, I could see the faint gleam of his bare crown.

The balding guy—the goddamn balding guy.

He swung his head frontally again and kept on running, almost to the rocks down there. Quartermain began to shout again, more in rage than with any thought of the words having an effect. I stayed abreast of him several more steps, and then I thought about the shack and looked back and the glow had brightened somewhat, wavering and flickering. I made one of those instantaneous decisions you have to make in moments of crisis, and shouted to Quartermain, "I'm going to the house!"

He ran on in his loose, shambling way—and the guy was at the rock jetty now, clambering up over the eroded boulders. I took myself out of it, turning, and ran to the sun porch at the rear of the shack, caught the log railing and lifted myself up and over. The drapes were still open across the plate-glass rear wall, and I could see the smoke billowing in there and the flames in a shimmering cherry-yellow pyre; Dancer's bookshelves, the entire left-hand wall, were ablaze.

I went to the porch door, caught the knob and hit the wood paneling with my shoulder at the same time. It banged inward and I was inside, with my right arm up to protect my face. The searing heat of the flames washed over me, and the smoke burned like acid in my lungs, gagging me, taking away my breath. My eyes began to sting and water, and I slitted them, blinking rapidly, looking around the room. Nobody on the floor, nobody on the smoldering furniture—no sign of Dancer. A gasoline can lying to one side, flaming, told me all I needed to know about the origin of the fire.

I ran across to the center hall, coughing violently now, and looked into the kitchen. Empty. I threw open the doors to the bedroom and bathroom, and there was no one in either of them; the place was unoccupied—and that told me something, too. I looked back into the front room, but the fire had begun to spread rapidly and the smoke and flames formed an impenetrable barrier; the roar of the inferno was deafening.

Turning, I stumbled to the front door. It was key-locked, and the key was gone. I hit the panel a couple of times with my shoulder, but it failed to give. Panic formed in the pit of my stomach, clawing. I kicked it down and plunged through the bedroom door, with the smoke and the heat coming hungrily in after me, and got to the window and tugged at the sash and felt it yield and threw it all the way up. My fingers fumbled at the catch-lock on the shutters, snapped it free, and I shoved them apart and dragged myself over the sill and fell onto the sandy ground outside. Half crawling, half running, I got away from there and around onto the slope that fell away to the murmuring surf.

I knelt with my head hanging down, coughing and retching and sucking cold salt air fishlike through my open mouth. When I could breathe again, when some of the burning pain subsided in my lungs, I got my head up and saw Quartermain running toward me from the direction of the near rocky jetty. He was alone, and I did not need to ask to know that he'd come up empty; but at least he appeared to be unhurt.

He got to me and took my arm and helped me up. "Are you all right? Christ!"

"I think . . . so."

"Dancer?"

"Not in there. It's empty."

"Bastard got away. He went over the boulders and up a steep bluff down the way. I heard a car engine, and by the time I got up there he was gone. If I'd worn my goddamn gun, I might have had him—son of a bitch, anyway!"

Panting, I pivoted and looked at the shack. Smoke rolled up into the misty sky in thick clouds, and you could see flames licking with curled orange tongues through the shingled roof. As I watched, the rear glass wall shattered from the intense heat, bursting smoke and glistening shards and more tongues of fire outward. There was nothing we could do; the place was a damned tinderbox.

Quartermain's face looked hellish in the dancing light. "We'd better get up to the car before a spark catches the stairs," he said savagely, and we ran in a wide sweep toward the bluff and along it to the stairs. I could feel the heat again and taste the smoke as we scrambled up. I stopped on the landing, hanging onto the railing and looking down at the flaming shack; Quartermain continued on to the car, and a moment later I could hear him shouting into the transceiver's handset.

I stayed where I was, letting the cool sea wind act as a balm on the heat-reddened surface of my face. Breathing was still a problem, but I thought that it would be all right after a while. A minute or two slid away, and I began to think about the blazing bookshelves and the can of gasoline and the emptiness of the shack, and what meaning those facts had. I turned and went over to the car.

Quartermain was leaning wearily against the roof, the handset still in his fingers and the door open; his iron- colored hair was disarrayed, jutting up and out at angles from his scalp. I said, "I think I know why the fire was set, Ned."

He moved his head in a quadrant and put his eyes on mine; they contained a thinly controlled fury. "Say it."

"There was a can of gasoline in there; the bald guy doused it over Dancer's bookshelves and touched them off. Dancer wasn't home, but the guy still set the fire—and because there were better places to soak up the gasoline, he had to have picked the bookshelves for a specific reason."

Quartermain saw it immediately. "To destroy any copies of
The Dead and the Dying
Dancer might have had."

"Yeah."

"But why?"

"He doesn't want us to read that book," I said. "There's something in it, something in the writing itself. It has to be that way. What the something is we'll know when we read the book—or he figures we will."

"How does he know we haven't already read it?"

"Maybe by my actions, and yours—the police. Maybe we'd be doing things differently if we knew why the book was important."

Quartermain straightened, and his canted eyelids came down. "All right, then," he said. "We've got to read the book."

"The sooner the better."

"Where did you say Paige's copy was—the one I gave you?"

"My unit at the Beachwood, on the nightstand."

"Then we'd better get it."

"Fast." I said. "Before something happens to that one, too."

He called through to Donovan again; Favor had returned to the Cypress Bay station—there was still no report on Winestock—and Quartermain told him to get over to the Beachwood and into my cottage for the book. Favor said he was on his way.

Leaning inside, Quartermain replaced the handset. Then we went over to the stairs again, and the shack was nothing more than a black-and-orange shell now; the roof had collapsed, and sparks drifted and flared in a brilliantine, joyless fireworks display. By the time the county fire equipment got there, not much would be left, not much at all.

Quartermain said tightly, "If that bastard came here to get rid of copies of
The Dead and the Dying
, why wouldn't he be thinking about Dancer too? Dancer wrote the damned book."

"He might have been. Maybe, if Dancer had been here, he was supposed to go up along with the shack." I paused grimly. "Or it could be he already got to Dancer, somewhere else."

"I don't want to think about that possibility," Quartermain said. And then, with sharp frustration: "Goddamn it, I don't understand what's going on. I don't understand any of this. Who in God's name is that guy?"

"Yeah," I said, "who?"

I could hear ululating sirens in the distance, coming down from the north and then coming west from Highway 1 along Beach Road, very loud now. Pretty soon a couple of bright-red county pump engines and a fire marshal's car and a State Highway Patrol unit came out to fill the bluff face with darting light and screaming noise. I retreated to Quartermain's car, and he went over to talk to the marshal. Black-uniformed, white-helmeted men came off the trucks and went to work with hoses and pumping units, and after a time they began playing streams of pressurized water down onto the burning shack.