He picked himself up just in time to see the Winnebago go over the edge of the canyon. It kept to its wheels for almost ten seconds and then started rolling, sideways at first, then end over end. It came to rest in the bottom of the canyon, almost a thousand feet down. It rested there for a moment and then burst into flames.
McBride looked at it. Then he looked at the.45 he still held in his right hand. He wiped it off with his shirt and then threw it by the trigger guard as far as he could. McBride watched the gun fall, and for a moment longer he stared down at the burning motor home.
“Burn, you fuckers,” Eddie McBride said.
Chapter 13
The coyotes followed McBride for nearly an hour. There were five of them, and they never came closer than twenty yards, although the biggest one sometimes loped in just a little closer than that — showing off, McBride thought.
The coyotes had picked McBride up fifteen minutes after he left Latigo Canyon Road. He was now trying to work his way along the bottom of the canyon back to the ocean. It was hard going, and McBride had stumbled and fallen several times, and once he had fallen so hard on his left hand that he thought he had broken his thumb again. When he fell that time, he got mad and yelled and picked up a rock and threw it at the coyotes. He missed, and they had laughed at him. Or at least it looked as though they were laughing at him.
After that it got dark and McBride could no longer see the coyotes, but he knew they were there. It was just like in one of those crummy Westerns that he sometimes read, McBride thought. The cowboy’s stumbling around in the desert or somewhere after dark, and although he can’t see it, he knows that the mountain lion’s out there. Or the Indians or whatever. McBride had a sudden, new respect for Westerns.
The coyotes escorting McBride were just five of the hundreds who ranged over the Santa Monica mountains living mostly off snakes, rodents, and rabbits and whatever else they could catch. But sometimes they would raid a sparsely settled residential section and dine on fat tabby and pampered poodle. There was many a three-legged dog and tail-less cat in Malibu who had been patched up by the local veterinarians after a brief and painful counter with a couple of coyotes.
The five that had picked up McBride followed him until he could see the lights of some houses high up. After that, the coyotes turned and trotted off back into the hills. Again, McBride could only sense that they were gone.
The going got easier after that, and McBride didn’t stumble nearly s often and fell only once more. An hour later he was standing on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Coast Highway about a mile north of where Icky Norris had turned into Latigo Canyon Road.
McBride found a defile and followed it down until he reached the highway. He waited until he could see no cars in either direction and then raced across. On the other side of the highway was a high chain fence. He moved along it until he found a place that had been pried open. He slipped through and carefully felt his way down to the beach. Then he stopped and rested, sprawled on the sand. He estimated that he had walked for a little more than two hours and that he had covered at least six miles. Maybe seven.
Feeling the need for a cigarette, McBride fished a box of Marlboros out of his left pants pocket, wincing at the pain that it caused his thumb. He put the cigarette in his mouth and then swore softly, remembering what he had done with his lighter. Shit, he thought, they’ll find it, and with that emblem on it they’ll figure out that it belonged to some Marine or ex-Marine, and it won’t take Solly long to tell ’em which one, either. He wondered if the burned Winnebago had been discovered yet. If it had, he speculated about how long it would take the police to trace the license and get to Solly’s brother-in-law and then to Solly. An hour, probably. Maybe two.
McBride tried to think what he should do. There was no sense in going back to his room in Venice. By the time he got there they would probably be waiting for him — either the cops or some of Solly’s boys, some he hadn’t even met yet. He tried to look down at his clothes to see how presentable he was, but it was far too dark. He knew, however, that the white duck pants were soiled and stained and that the blue T-shirt wasn’t in much better shape. Then too, he was probably scratched and bruised all over from where he had fallen. If he walked into a motel with no car, they would take just one look and call the cops.
McBride tried to think his way out of his predicament — logically at first, but he was really no problem solver, and dimly he realized this. So he rose and dusted the sand off the seat of his pants and headed north almost intuitively toward someone another mile or so up the beach who was smarter than he and who might have some ideas. He headed toward Quincy Durant.
Durant was seated on the couch in the living room, a secretary’s spiral notebook in his lap, and on the record player the Cleveland Quartet was doing extremely well with Mozart’s Adagio and Fugue in C Minor (K. 546). Durant started when over the Mozart he heard the clump of McBride’s leather-heeled loafers on the flight of wooden steps that led up from the beach. But because there was so much noise Durant relaxed as he realized that someone was trying to announce himself.
He glanced at what he had written in the notebook. There was a heading in printed, almost architectural lettering that read, SILK ARMITAGE. After that there were four paragraphs of no more than three lines each, all of them numbered. When he heard the steps on the stairs, Durant had just written number five. He closed the notebook, tucked it away out of sight under the cushion on the couch, rose, and went over to the sliding glass door. He switched on the outdoor light and slid the door open just as McBride reached the top of the stairs.
McBride stopped and grinned weakly. “How’re ya?” he said.
Durant examined him. “Well, I’d say I’m just one hell of a lot better off than you are.”
McBride nodded wearily, suddenly realizing how tired he was. “Yeah,” he said. “Can I come in?”
“Sure.”
Durant stepped back to let McBride in. Once inside the living room McBride stood for a moment, quite still. He closed his eyes, swayed a little, and then opened them. “That music,” he said. “That’s nice. Classical, isn’t it?”
“Uh-huh,” Durant said. “Classical. Try that one over there,” he said, indicting the Eames chair. “If you bleed on it, the blood’ll come off the leather.”
“Am I bleeding?”
“Not much.”
“I didn’t know I was bleeding.”
“You’ve got a couple of deep scratches up here,” Durant said, touching his own left temple.
McBride, accustomed, as is everyone, to a mirror image, touched his own temple, but the right one. Then he remembered and touched the blood that was trickling down from the two inch-long scratches that were almost gashes along the side of his left temple. He looked at the blood his fingertips and said, “Huh.” Then he sat down on the chair.
“What do you want,” Durant said, “Scotch or bourbon?”
“Gin,” McBride said. “You got gin?”
“I’ve got gin,” Durant said. He turned and went into the kitchen, reached up and opened the cabinet above the refrigerator, and took down the still unopened bottle of Tanqueray gin. He also took down the bottle of Scotch.
“Straight?” he called to McBride.
“Yeah. Straight.”
Durant found a couple of tumblers, put some ice into one of them, and poured a measure of Scotch into it, adding some water from the tap. Then he opened the bottle of gin and poured almost three ounces by guess into the other tumbler. He put the bottles back, picked up the glasses, and went back into the living room.