Runyan, standing in the shrubbery at the edge of the Jungle, tended her safety line without thought, kept the tension on automatically; his hands were busy but his mind was free.
He had told her he loved her. Unexpectedly: It had just popped out. He did love her. But did he trust her? What would he do tonight when they got back down? Everything that had happened to him in the past eight years — intensified since his release from San Quentin — passed one ineluctable message to his brain: Don’t trust anyone. Especially someone who has already betrayed you once.
But last night...
Hell, last night she could have heard a crackle in the brush, could have guessed you were there, and said what she knew you wanted to hear.
So what? You didn’t want the fucking diamonds, even when you thought they still existed. You don’t want the money from the robbery you’re planning with Taps. You don’t want anything in this world except your freedom. And Louise.
Would there ever be any freedom with a woman you weren’t sure you could trust? Would there ever be any freedom without her?
“I love you,” he said aloud. Through his mind passed a line from an old Tin Pan Alley tune: There, I said it again.
Just then he heard the labored sounds of her approach. The slack of the safety line was neatly coiled beside him; he didn’t remember doing it. She appeared on the bald forehead of rock, walking herself up with the aid of the safety line. She had a big smile on her face. Jesus, what a woman he had found! He reached out and gave her a hand up.
How could he have had any doubts?
“Congratulations,” he said. “Half the experienced people I used to climb with couldn’t have made Royal Arches in one day.”
Louise was too exhausted to give him more than a bushed smile. They sat down side-by-side on a windfall tree at the edge of the jungle, swinging their legs and staring out over the view. Louise took the canteen and drank greedily.
She finally lowered it to say, “God was feeling good when he made these mountains.”
“And when he made you.”
She looked quickly over at him, caught by an intensity of emotion in his voice she had never heard before; but he was looking out over the incredible twilight vistas of the valley.
“This is what I missed in prison. Really missed.”
“Then why become a thief?”
“Adventure,” he said. “Excitement. Beating the system. But then it changes. All of a sudden, money isn’t what you get any more. It’s what you have.” He looked at her, something close to pain in his eyes. “And you want it, because you’ve started living in a way you can support only by stealing.”
“Or by compromising,” said Louise, her thoughts turning inward. “Compromising until there’s nothing of you left except the marrow in your bones.”
Runyan nodded. “I was a thief for six years before they caught me. Always worked alone, cased my own jobs... Then...”
“Then you got greedy?”
“Then I became a humanist. Mr. Nice Guy.” He coughed bitter laughter out of his throat like phlegm. “Jamie Cardwell, an old Army buddy from Nam, came to me because he was into a Shylock for a lot of dough. Degenerate gambler, on partial disability from Nam, married, kid coming...”
“And he had this perfect setup?” she prompted.
“You’ve heard my stories before, too,” he said. “Jamie could get the combination to a wholesale jeweler’s safe, he could get me into the building and back out again—”
“Moyers told me a guard saw you getting away and shot you.”
“Did he tell you the guard was named Jamie Cardwell?”
Betrayal opened before her like curtains on a play. “My God!” she breathed, stunned.
“It seems Jamie’d taken in a couple of partners he forgot to mention — the Shylock and the jeweler’s son. But the double-cross was all his. He was afraid there wasn’t going to be enough money to get him out of the hole.” He snorted in bitter amusement. “All he had to do was ask — I’d have given him my share. I was in it for him in the first place.”
Louise said hesitantly, “The man who was killed in the penthouse. Tenconi. Was he the Shylock who—”
“Yeah. Shot to death four hours after I kicked him in the balls and met the maid as I walked out. I don’t know who killed him, but his partner stepped into his percentage.”
“That’s who you came down here to avoid,” she said.
“And that’s why I need Moyers on my tail — as a witness to the fact that I’m not involved if there’s any more killing.”
“Hey, big fella,” she said, “you’ve got a witness right here, you know.”
“The cops’ll believe it better coming from him.”
They were silent for long moments, staring out over the darkening valley. Louise realized his expression had become difficult to read in the gathering dusk. When she finally spoke it was almost reluctantly, as if she were afraid of shattering the mood.
“Why don’t you just... give them the diamonds? I know they cost you eight years, but you said yourself you’d have given your share to Cardwell if he’d asked. You could walk away clean...”
Runyan stood up. “We’d better get started. It’s just a walk down the backside of the mountain, but guys keep getting killed. They miss their step in the dark and fall a thousand feet into the river. They never even get a chance to drown.”
Louise stood also. Sitting even that short length of time had started to stiffen up her muscles.
“I was going to give them the diamonds,” Runyan said abruptly. “But there aren’t any diamonds any more. Where I hid them is a subdivision now. Cardwell’s big moment eight years ago was all for nothing.”
Chapter 24
Cardwell, hunched over his glass of draft beer in a window booth of Killeen’s Blarney, cast sidelong glances out into the dripping night. The hard, clear, sharply etched days of March were gone; the lousy fog seemed to start earlier each spring.
A shadow fell across his face. He looked up, apprehensive yet wanting it over. Delarty, broad and tough-looking, mist standing on the shoulders of his topcoat, slid into the booth across from him. Cardwell tried to drink his beer, coolly, but his hand shook so badly that some of the foam slopped out across the table, wetting his knuckles.
“You think I blew Tenconi away?” he demanded in a sudden shrill voice. “You think I got the seeds for a killing?”
“You thought so — once,” said Delarty contemptuously. He took the glass of beer from Cardwell’s wet fingers and drained it in one long gulp, belched, and set the empty glass back on the table. “You might as well of killed him, telling fucking Runyan about him.”
Bleary outrage welled up like trapped stomach gas. Cardwell slid over to the edge of the booth to stand up, ruining the moment by getting poked in the groin by the corner of the table. He looked down at Delarty’s indifferent face.
“Leave me out of it,” he said. “Just leave me out of it.”
“You were never fucking in it, Cardwell,” said Delarty.
A pair of dimes plonged in the slot of the outdoor pay phone across Judah from Killeen’s. As Cardwell came out of the bar hunched down in his belligerently working-class windbreaker, a seven-digit number was tapped out.
“Police emergency, operator six,” said the flat depersonalized voice of the police dispatcher. Every few seconds the call was beeped to show it was being recorded.
“Cardwell is the name,” said the caller in a near-whisper. “Cardwell. C-a-r-d-w-e-l-l. You got that?”