No, the real trouble all went back to Paula Halstead.
His dark, troubled eyes went over her note again. Goddamn that Julio! If he hadn’t given Rick the suicide note from Debbie’s purse — hell, if he hadn’t insisted on getting his hands on Debbie... Not Rick’s fault, what had happened to Debbie. None of it his fault.
please understand that I am doing this because of something intolerable in myself
See? In herself. Nothing about it being because of what had happened with Rick. No, she’d fallen for Rick the second she had seen him. That had happened, she had come, only because of Rick. Nothing else. That look of self-loathing he’d remembered from her face, that hadn’t really been there. She’d wanted it, man. From Rick. He’d turned heron, like he did Debbie and Mary and... and all the chicks.
But still, somehow, it seemed all to go back to Paula Halstead, to the note in his lap addressed to her husband. Back to Paula, and forward to him. For it all ended with Curt Halstead.
Rick made his round of the windows again. He was glad Halstead had gotten the others. Oh, Rick had the gun, once it was light he would make out okay, but he was glad about the others. Champ, last one you’d think was yellow, was the first one to break. Pretending to be chasing Halstead when really he’d been trying to get away.
Then Julio, yellow spic bastard. Going to run away, up the ravine, knowing that Rick wouldn’t shoot him. Only, Halstead had been waiting for him, in the darkness and the swirling fog.
And finally Heavy. Going to swim for it, he bet, after trying to foul Rick up with all that crazy talk about Halstead swimming in. Who the hell had he been trying to kid? That would have meant that a lookout posted along the beach would have warned them of Halstead’s arrival; it meant that Halstead had outmaneuvered Rick at tactics. That was wiggy, man. No damn teacher was better at tactics than Rick Dean. Sure, better at sneaking around in the woods, maybe, but...
But anyway, Heavy was gone. Halstead would have him by now.
That made it neat, tidy for Rick. Everybody gone except Debbie. Well, he hadn’t had anything to do with what happened to Debbie. No matter what she might claim, all he had done was walk out and leave her with the fellows. How could he have known what they would do to her? Besides, she’d put out for anyone; he bet she hadn’t even fought it.
Alter four. Dawn soon. Time to make his move. He stood up, shivered — it had gotten cold in the cabin, that was it — and went to the back door. Very silently he turned the key in the lock, eased the door ajar a hairline. Speed. Surprise. Catch Halstead unawares.
Rick found he was trembling again: the damned cold fog! He put the automatic under his left arm, wiped his sweaty palms down trouser legs that were crumpled from his all-night vigil, took the gun again. He patted his hip pocket. Yes. The loaded spare clip was there.
He kicked open the door, skidded through, fell on the wet cement, screaming in terror and firing at Halstead’s shadowy lurking form behind the Triumph.
No return fire. Just the gently whisping fog, moisture dripping from the cabin eaves. The air smelled of the dawn and of the sea.
He scrambled to his feet, raced, dodging and weaving, to the Triumph where he could crouch behind the bullet-starred hood. He panted raggedly. Okay, okay, so you made me waste two. You don’t know I’ve got the spare clip. He licked his lips: the bad one now, across the open to the foot of the drive. Halstead might be ambushed there...
Now...
Racing across slippery grass in the misty dawn, then his soles spuming gravel. Sharp air knifing lungs as he slid to his knees against the rough bark of a fir tree. Chest full of razor blades, head full of wraiths, but safe here. Apart from the distant mutter of surf, silence utter and complete. Swirling fog. Shadowy trees...
He flipped himself sideways, rolling, into the gravel roadway, pumping bullets up into the fir tree where Halstead had shaken a branch above his head, showering him with dew.
A mountain jay arrowed away raucously into the fog. Nerves, Rick baby. Four used, five left in the clip. He’s working on your nerves, baby, doesn’t know about that spare clip. Once you make the blacktop with that spare clip of bullets, you’re safe. Got to make the blacktop.
Go, man!
Legs pumping, he ran head down, arms working, toes digging into the sharply rising gravel. He was the hero of every war movie he had ever seen, running through enemy sniper fire unscathed; during that short burst of speed he felt no wounds, received medals, was present at his own hero’s funeral to receive the plaudits of the mourners.
Rick was up and over the gate, whirling in the safety of the highway, free from the masking bushes. His mouth was full of cotton, his chest was heaving, his knees were wobbly; but his gun muzzle pointed unwaveringly at the gate. Halstead would have to come over that to get him. He had made it, won free!
“I’m ready for you!” he cried menacingly into the fog.
He hoped now that the bastard would try it. He’d shoot him where he wouldn’t die right away, in the crotch, say; he’d grind the bastard’s face into the blacktop, he’d gouge out his eyes...
The gray fog swirled about him, wetly caressing him, hampering his vision, so when it swirled away... Was that a shadow straddling the gate? Rick stood with a foot on either side of the white center line of the highway, making his stand. If that was...
Halstead!
He went into a half-crouch and fired again and again, flashes of muzzle gas lighting the grayness. The gun clicked, he jerked the trigger again, nothing, not even a click, empty, clip used up.
Rick made a sick whining sound in his throat and broke his fingernails scrabbling at the empty clip, hunched over it furiously like a mad alchemist, unable to get the catch to release the spent clip into his hand. All! He hurled away the dead clip, dug in his pocket for the second, eyes on the gate.
A muffled growl, behind him, made him whirl. A monstrous shape loomed up from around the bend of the highway, yellow eyes fog-dimmed, Christmas-festooned with the red and yellow lights worn by the big semi-truck-trailer rigs which roamed the Coast Highway like unleashed animals. Air brakes hissed; wheels shrieked away rubber lives on the macadam.
Rick dug out like a sprinter, but his shoe struck the discarded clip, he did a comic TV split, windmilling his arms, yelling like Milton Berle milking mi audience for laughs.
Smoking screaming desperately locked rubber hurled uncounted tons of metal onto him. The bumper smashed his teeth, dissolved his skull like flung egg, smeared him grublike down fifty yards of white center line in the serene lifting fog of the dawning day.
The driver made it out of his cab before he got sick.
After...
Tuesday, September 2nd
After...
Curt locked his car and started up the echoing stairs to the gym. In another week the streets of Los Feliz would be jammed with students returning to the university, but now it all seemed damned remote. Even the gym, the chromed bars and black orderly ranks of weights, seemed remote, as if his last visit had been years rather than days before.
The top half of the office Dutch door was open. Preston, at the desk, looked up and his cold blue eyes met Curt’s — again, like a stranger’s. But then he was on his feet, grinning his wide infectious grin, sticking out his hand. “Well, well, the prodigal returns.”