Cardwell was walking out Judah toward his house several blocks away on the parallel street, Kirkham.
“Cardwell,” repeated the dispatcher’s phone-filtered voice. “Yes, I have that. What’s the...”
“Ask Runyan about it,” the man whispered. “R-u-n-y-a-n. Just out of the joint for a week or so. Ask him about Tenconi, too. T-e-n-c-o-n-i. The maid saw him leaving.”
He hung up before the dispatcher could ask any more questions. The door squealed when he left the booth.
Runyan and Louise walked side by side through the almost warm valley evening, past other strollers. Though it was only a little after seven, she could barely keep her eyes open.
“More lies,” she said abruptly.
“Yours or mine?”
She kept her eyes straight ahead and said in a rush of words, “I didn’t come back on my own. He asked me to and I said I would and then I—”
“I know. I heard your phone calls. In Tiburon. Here, last night—”
Louise felt a bursting rush of emotion as the long-suppressed lump of guilt was hurled through the last barrier in her mind like a stone through a window pane. She wanted to laugh, cry, sing, dance, get drunk, kick a slipper full of champagne off an archbishop’s head.
“I’m glad Cardwell didn’t kill you either time,” she said. “I’m getting rather fond of you.”
“It’s a strange feeling to realize that the guy whose guts you’ve hated for eight years is just a shell — scared, shaky, a real boozer, a real loser... If there’s anything worse than being a con, I guess it’s being Jamie Cardwell.”
Cardwell trudged stolidly up the terrazzo front steps to his inset front door and started to find the lock with his key, his hand not as rock-steady as it might have been. Betty’d have plenty to say about that, but what was a guy supposed to do? At least he’d told off that bastard Delarty. Delarty, Runyan, all of them — they’d learn that if you tried to play pussy with Jamie Cardwell, you were gonna get...
The silenced muzzle of a .38 revolver was pressed against his left temple. He could smell the Hoppe’s No. 9 that had been used to clean it. He didn’t even raise his hands, just rolled doleful eyes toward the dull glint of streetlight off the unseen killer’s weapon. His whole life didn’t pass before his eyes; he felt only an overwhelming sadness.
“Aw hell,” he said in a tired voice, “I just knew I was never going to get out of this al—”
The gun jerked and puffed as it had through the peephole in Tenconi’s penthouse door, driving Cardwell’s head sideways against the door frame like a grotesque fist. He slid down the painted wood, leaving a wet wavering snail-track of blood and brain behind.
Runyan had taken a small plastic pill bottle from his pocket; he kept tossing it into the air and catching it again as they strolled. They were almost back to Camp Four. Louise gave an involuntary jaw-creaking yawn.
“What are you going to do about them, Runyan? They expect their cut and you don’t have anything to give them.”
“I’m going to duck out on Moyers and steal some stolen bearer bonds off another thief down in Los Angeles.”
“So all this rock climbing wasn’t just fun and games,” she said almost accusingly. “It was brushing up on old skills.”
He nuzzled her neck. “I like you ’cause you’re smart and you smell good.”
Louise drew away from him, a frosty glint in her eye.
“And when did you plan to pull this little caper?”
“Tonight.”
“Tonight?” She said in ominous tones, “What was supposed to happen to me while you were off having all your fun?”
Runyan flipped the plastic pill bottle in her direction. She caught it adroitly, then stopped in the middle of the road to read the label aloud in the dim light.
“Restoril, fifteen milligrams. Take two caps before bedtime.” She looked at him and exclaimed, “Sleeping pills!”
She hurled the bottle at him. He caught it and, with the same movement, tossed it into the roadside ditch.
He started walking again. Louise ran after him. She bumped him hard with her hip, then put an arm around his waist and rested her head on his shoulder.
“Kid,” she said, “I like your moves.”
Runyan started to laugh.
Louise was at the top of a mountain in a medieval walled city. The sun was very bright; in every direction there were jagged mountains to and from which people were flying with the aid of equipment on their backs that looked like scuba gear. The people had come, she knew, for that gear which let them fly.
She had also come for power, but not to fly. She had to speak to the General in charge — she needed his help in a decision which she had to stick to, she knew, or die.
The General was standing in the middle of the main square, very tall, unmilitary even though wearing a dark uniform. She pushed through the crowd of petitioners and asked him to help her. He shook his head.
“Not now. There’s a plague in the city, and I have too much to do. Not now.”
To detain him, Louise reached over and seized the General’s penis with her hand. It did not seem a strange thing to do, nor did it seem odd that his member was bare despite the uniform he wore. She came awake in a panic, working her hand up and down the quickly stiffening cock, sure Runyan had given her the sleeping pills and was about to sneak away without her.
Instead, he was rolling over on top of her, still half-asleep himself. She quickly opened her legs, with a gasp of mingled pleasure and relief felt his thick shaft pushing into her. His strokes were long and slow, steady as a heartbeat; when they rose to orgasm she arched her head against the ground so hard that her neck creaked, and raked his back with clawed fingers. He licked her eyelids, licked the corners of her mouth, kissed her on the chin before regretfully withdrawing his still half-rigid member.
Louise sat up, yawning, sated, fumbling in the dim light of the torch for the bra and panties abandoned for her quick dive into the sleeping bag three hours before. Only then did she remember the question which had been bothering her when she had gone to sleep.
“If using our car would alert Moyers to the fact that we’re leaving, how are we going to get to the airfield in time?”
“We’re going to steal one of the Park Service jeeps. Hell, what are thieves for?”
It was just 10:30 when Runyan turned off California 140 in the rolling grassy hills a few miles southwest of the park entrance at El Portal. He followed a narrow rutted dirt track that bounced and tossed the stolen jeep about like an Australian surfboat coming in through the breakers. One instant their headlights were glinting off the scrub oaks, the next casting long shadows behind a lichen-covered boulder, then making twin glowing rubies of the eyes of a startled mule deer.
Going across the flat grassy surface of the airfield, their lights picked out the night-deserted quonset-hut hangar and office with the airsock hanging limp from the mast on the roof.
“I always wondered what it was like to be a rodeo rider,” Louise yelled above the noise of the jeep.
She heard a plane’s engines turn over, cough, catch. It smoothed out and a trim white plane with a blue decorative stripe running along the side began trundling slowly forward from among a half-dozen others tied down. Runyan stopped the jeep.
“Taps Turner knows how to do things in style,” he said. “Twin-motor Aztec-C. We’ll be to Burbank in two hours.”
The black woman pilot in a red jumpsuit, huge black radio earphones making her head resemble that of a gigantic fly, didn’t even unstrap while they boarded. Instead, she demanded, “Who the fuck is this?”