He tried and failed to answer. He shook his head, his chest heaving.
At the highway they stopped while the driver opened a locked gate, drove over a cattle grid and locked the gate behind them. Peering through the rear window, Walker saw no pursuing lights.
“Where are you going, Lu Anne?” he asked her as the car sped south along the highway. “I mean, where are we going?”
Lu Anne smiled wearily.
“They’ll think you made off with me,” she said.
“Yes,” Walker said, “they will.”
“What pictures were they talking about, Gordon? Some pictures that … some picture he had?”
“Yeah.”
“Was it of me? It was, wasn’t it? It was of us.”
“Maybe he had a picture. Maybe not. It doesn’t matter now. He’s fucked.”
Walker watched the dry brush race past in the car’s headlights. After a while he patted his pocket to be sure his drug was there. There was a box of Dr. Siriwai’s pills in the same pocket. He sighed.
“Are you going to tell me where we’re going?”
“Morning,” she said soberly. “We’re going to where it’s morning.”
“Will there be something to drink?”
She had taken Lowndes’s bottle of scotch and she handed it to him. He drank it gratefully.
“Bats or Birdies?” Lu Anne asked.
“It’s your party, kid. You tell me.”
“We’ll know when we get there,” she told him.
Ten miles to the south, the road on which they drove turned inland, crossed the mountains on the spine of Baja, and ran for thirty miles within sight of the Sea of Cortez. At the final curve of its eastward loop, a dirt track led from the highway toward the shore, ending at a well-appointed fishing resort called Benson’s Marina. At Benson’s there was a large comfortable ranch house in the Sonoran style, a few fast powerboats rigged for big-game fishing and a small airstrip. Benson ran a pair of light aircraft for long-distance transportation and fish spotting.
Early on during production, Lu Anne had been told about Benson’s by Frank Carnahan; she and Lionel had hired Benson’s son to fly them to San Lucas for a long weekend. The flight had produced much corporate anxiety after the fact because the film’s insurance coverage did not apply to impromptu charter flights in unauthorized carriers. Charlie Freitag had been cross and Axelrod had been upbraided.
In the early hours of the morning, their car turned into Benson’s and pulled up beside his dock. Walker had slept; a light cokey sleep, full of theatrical nightmares that had his sons in them.
Lu Anne walked straight to the lighted pier and stood next to the fuel pumps, looking out across the gulf. Walker climbed from the car and asked the driver to park it out of the way. In the shadow of the boathouse, he had some more cocaine. The drug made him feel jittery and cold in the stiff ocean wind.
After a few minutes, Benson’s son Enrique came out looking sleepy and suspicious. He was a Eurasian, the son of a Texas promoter who had realized his dreams and a Mexican-born Chinese woman. When he recognized Lu Anne he smiled.
“You two want to go to Cabo again?” he asked. He shook hands with both of them and Walker watched him realize that it was not the same man who had been with her on the last flight.
“No,” Lu Anne said. “We want to go to Villa Carmel.”
He was looking down at the ground in embarrassment, an unworldly young man.
“I don’t know, ma’am. There’s a chubasco over the mountains. I have to get the weather.”
“Of course,” Lu Anne said.
The youth stood with them for a minute or so and then went back inside the main house.
“We should go back,” Walker said.
She shook her head.
“You’re screwing them up,” Walker told her, taking a slug from the bottle of scotch. “You should be back at work tomorrow. I should be gone.”
Lu Anne kept looking out to sea.
“I don’t think I want to go back to work tomorrow. And I don’t want you to go.”
“It’s senseless,” Walker said.
“Then why did you come?”
He thought of the bird trilling in the Hollywood hills.
“Where’s he gone?” Lu Anne asked. She meant young Benson.
“I guess he’s gone to find out the weather.”
“Pig’ll come after us,” she said. “He’ll figure out where we’ve gone to.”
“Who will?”
“Billy,” she said. “Bly.”
“I don’t know why you want to go to Villa Carmel. What’s there?”
She smiled at him quickly, surprised him.
“Wait until you see.”
“Weren’t we near there once?” Walker asked. “You were shooting somewhere in the Sierra. A long time ago.”
“We were miles away. We were shooting a Mexican setting of Death Harvest in Constancia.”
“Was it Constancia?” Walker asked. “Or was it Benjamin Hill?”
“It was way the other side of Monte Carmel. Villa Carmel is on this side. The Pacific side.”
“Why do you want to go there?”
“The reason …” she began, and paused. “The reason is a pretty reason. You’ll have to trust me.” She took hold of his hand. “Do you?”
“Well,” Walker said, “we’re out here together in this storm of stuff. What have I got to lose?”
“We’ll see,” Lu Anne said.
Young Benson came back with his map case and climbed to the small room above the boathouse that was his operations shack. He was sporting the leather jacket and white silk scarf it pleased him to wear aloft. When he turned on the lights, an English-language weather report crackled over the transmitter. Walker and Lu Anne on the pier below could not make it out.
She looked through her tote bag and came up with a white bank envelope filled with bills and handed it to Walker.
“What’s this?”
“To pay him.”
He started to protest. She turned away. “My party,” she said.
Climbing the wooden stairs to Benson’s office, he put the envelope beside his wallet, still stuffed with his winnings from Santa Anita. Both of them had so much money, he thought. It was so convenient.
“How’s the weather?” he asked young Benson when he was in the office.
“Garay!” young Benson said, looking wide-eyed at him. “Man, what a shiner you got!”
Walker put a hand to his swollen face.
“Is it real?” the young pilot asked. Walker looked at him in blank incomprehension.
“I thought it might not be real,” the youth explained. “I thought maybe it was fake.”
“Ah,” Walker said. “It’s real. An accident. A misstep.”
“Yeah,” Benson said. “Well, let’s see. Reckon I can get you all over there. We might have a problem coming back. When you need to be back?”
“I don’t know. Can you wait for us?”
“That’s expensive,” the young man said uncertainly. “If the chubasco settles in we might get stuck.”
“When can we leave?”
“When it’s light,” Benson said.
Walker took five hundred-dollar bills out of the envelope.
“Take us over for the day. If we’re not back by sunset tomorrow we’ll throw in a few hundred more.”
“Three hundred for the day, if I wait. Five hundred if I have to wait overnight.”
“Good,” Walker said. He gave the youth five hundred. “Hold it on deposit.”
She was waiting for him at the foot of the steps.
“Will he take us?”
“He’ll take us at first light. He says the weather might keep us over there. Is there a hotel in Villa Carmel?”
She did not answer him. He looked at the sky; it was clear and lightening faintly. The moon was down. The autumn constellations showed. Venus was in Taurus, the morning star.