They’d just started their salad when a bellhop came to their table and said Drinker had a phone call.
“Must be Sherry, calling me from the office.”
“Very funny,” said Sherry.
They were on dessert and coffee when he finally came back with a troubled face. “That was Wee Jimmy Haggerty,” he said.
“He’s a cop, Drinker’s ex-partner,” Dunc told Penny.
“There’s been a break-in at the office, I have to go back.”
“We’ll go with you,” said Dunc, half rising.
Drinker shoved him back down again. “It’s your goddamn honeymoon,” he growled. “Sherry and I can handle it.”
Dunc had his hands resting lightly on Penny’s shoulders from behind as she played blackjack, aware of her body heat the way you were aware of the heat from the fire on a cold night out in the woods. The same kind of comfort, the same kind of warmth. But his thoughts followed Drinker back to San Francisco. Had the files been rifled? Was it something to do with one of Drinker’s private clients whose names were never spoken? Had he left some loose end in one of his own files?
Penny looked back to turn that brilliant smile on him.
“I’m going to pay for our honeymoon, sweetheart.”
She was his lucky Penny. When her luck turned at midnight, she cashed in and gaily stuffed the neat fold of her winnings into Dunc’s inner jacket pocket. Up in their room, neither of them seemed able to stop making love. Finally they fell asleep from sheer exhaustion, tumbled together on the bed like puppies.
The front desk woke them at 9:00 A.M.: Dunc was needed in San Francisco. He didn’t really mind. They were now man and wife, they could do their loving wherever fate might take them.
When he went down to settle their account, he was told their bill had been paid. “Compliments of Mr. Cope,” said the clerk. His face was wreathed in smiles. “A wedding gift.”
That Drinker, he could always surprise you. What did they call it? A real beau geste.
It took him twenty minutes to find the Grey Ghost — he hadn’t been drinking when he parked it originally, so why... Then he saw it about ten spaces up on the other side of the garage. Well, he’d had other things on his mind. A wedding, for instance.
It was a sparkling day, bright blue sky and temperatures up into the forties. He got the car warmed up and the heater working, he didn’t want his pregnant Penny facing the cold.
They gassed up, then went south out of Reno on Nevada 395 to Carson City, then took Highway 50 southwest toward California. They would go up and over Echo Summit, over seven thousand feet high, then eventually down to Sacramento, where the palm trees started.
When they went back to the car after stopping for lunch at sleepy little South Lake Tahoe, Penny wanted to drive.
“I have to learn how to handle the Grey Ghost now that he’s part mine, too.” Dunc started to object because the road up over the summit might be icy, but she laughed him to silence. “Hey, big boy! I’m from the snow country, too, remember?”
He surrendered, closed her door, slid into the passenger’s side, and quickly relaxed against the seat. They sang songs together and miles flew. First camp songs like “Comin Round the Mountain” and “Little Brown Jug,” then on into “Down Among the Sheltering Palms” and “Sentimental Journey.” Dunc did a sonorous “Old Man River” with lyrics changes he’d learned in the Glee Club:
Penny, both hands on the wheel, shot a quick look over at him and said, “Seems to me that on our wedding night, big boy, you got a lot drunk and you got a lot of tail.”
“And I’m gonna get even more tonight.”
“You promise?”
At Echo Summit they pulled off into the vista point. Below them were sparkling, snowcapped peaks with dark armies of pine forests marching up their flanks. Penny plunged them down into the sunlight and shadow on the winding, narrow, two-lane blacktop. Snow was piled two feet deep on the verge of the road, but lay only in patches under the shelter of the trees.
Penny said, “Dunc honey, this is hard to say after Drinker and Sherry have been so nice, but don’t you think maybe you should start looking for a new job?”
“A new... but I love detective work! It’s fun and exciting and I’m getting a lot of material for my writing.”
“But you’re not writing, and it’s changing you, Dunc. When we’re together you’re sweet and loving, but when you’re talking about work you... you’re harder, colder, it’s like you’re losing all your finer perceptions. You just see the bold strokes—”
“Jesus!” he burst out. “First I lose my chance to be a writer, now you want me to quit detective work. Why?”
“So you can get back to your writing.”
“You’re saying it’s detective work that keeps me from writing? Here I thought having a wife and baby to support might have a little something to do with it.”
She looked over at him angrily. “You haven’t had a wife and you don’t have a baby yet, but I don’t think you’ve written a single story since you came to San Francisco. Why are you trying to blame me for that, Dunc? Are you sorry we got married?”
“Quit trying to twist around what I’m saying. Of course I’m not sorry, but the baby’s timing could have been better.”
She wailed in utter misery.
He said, “Oh Christ, honey, I didn’t mean — Penny!”
Ahead the road had narrowed and steepened, made a sharp left-hand turn. Penny rammed the brake pedal right to the floor and kept twisting and twisting the wheel, the car wasn’t turning, wasn’t slowing, she screamed, Dunc saw the trunk of the tree coming at him with appalling speed...
He was standing on the edge of a curving blacktop road with the reek of raw gasoline all around him. Three or four cars were parked at goofy angles off the road. A half dozen people he’d never seen before were milling around aimlessly. Almost all the way off the road was a gray Ford with the open hood crumpled against the scarred trunk of a pine tree and its ass end up in the air with both back wheels three feet off the ground.
Some asshole was holding his arm. Dunc said, “There’s been an accident here, I don’t want anything to do with it”
Lying on the ground was a log or anyway something long and cylindrical with a couple of blankets laid over it. Just looking at it somehow made him queasy and reminded him of how much his head ached. He reached up with his left hand; his forehead over his eye felt slippery to the touch, as if he’d been rained on.
That irritating guy was still gently tugging at his sleeve.
“Why don’t you come over here and sit down for a minute?”
“Hell with you,” said Dunc, feebly pushing him. “There’s been an accident and there’s plenty of people to help out. I gotta find Penny, we’re on our way to Reno to get married.”
“But if you’d just sit down and rest for a few minutes...”
Dunc shook off the persistent Samaritan, started to stride away up the hill. He heard the far-approaching keen of sirens. He’d known it! An accident for sure. They’d wanta ask a lot of questions without answers, he had to go find Penny...
On the other hand it was a long way up that hill. Maybe...
He sat down suddenly in the road, then tipped over sideways and lay still.