I couldn’t see the house or the water tower. I couldn’t see the road to Les Club, or Split Mountain Road, or the utility lines that stretched along it. If those lines had been visible, I could have got to the ranger station and help. But they were nowhere in sight.
I stared bleakly into the distance, realizing I was lost.
I’d lost all sense of direction while following the curving, branching wash. The hills ranged around me, but I couldn’t tell if the ones I was looking at were the same I’d seen earlier as I’d lain on top of the sandstone outcropping within sight of the old water tower. I stood up and searched for a landmark, but saw nothing.
How far had I come from the house? I wondered. How long had I been out here? Hours, it must be. My tongue clogged my mouth, my eyes were dry and sandpapery. How much longer could I last? I didn’t even know which direction to take to get to civilization.
Direction. I could figure direction from the sun — the damned sun. It beat down on me in pulsing waves. I glanced up, shading my eyes, and noted its position.
The unpaved road to Les Club — whatever its name was — ran southwest. Southwest. But that didn’t matter now. I needed shelter. And water.
Once again I scanned the horizon, my eyes burning. There had to be something...
And then I saw a gray-green haze. Clouds of smoke some distance away. Smoke? I strained my eyes. The clouds swam into focus.
Trees. Smoke trees, named for the illusion I’d just witnessed. And other trees — tamarisks, and what could be desert willows. Trees that grew near water holes...
They seemed an infinity away, across an endless stretch of rocky sand. How far? I wondered. Half a mile? More? It didn’t matter. Those trees meant shade — water.
I began moving again.
I went more slowly this time, to conserve my flagging strength. My breath wheezed in my throat, and wherever there was a little shade, I stopped and rested. Still my heart felt as if it would explode. My skin felt as if it might begin to bubble. I stumbled a number of times, fell twice. But I kept going, gasping and clutching my side, and thinking of water. The trees loomed larger, and then I reached them and plunged into them, down a rocky incline, to the bottom where the water would be.
I fell flat, the shade of the trees coming between me and the wicked sun rays. I lay there for a moment, then pulled myself up and crawled on all fours to the water hole. Leaned forward, toward the precious water.
Only it wasn’t there.
At another time of the year it would be. But not in August. Not in the hottest month of the year.
My throat constricted and a whine came from my lips. I crouched there, staring into the sun-cracked bottom of the water hole. My sight blurred and visions started to dance before me.
Sugarman hanging on the cross... Elaine’s broken body... Others, out of the past: bodies with strangled faces... bloodied heads... stab wounds... bullet holes...
I would join them — all of them, this legion of the dead.
Then the visions were gone. I lowered my head to the ground. And lost consciousness.
40: “Wolf”
It was bloody damned hot in the desert. It hadn’t been so bad in the San Diego area, after that liquid humidity of the Mexican coast, but out here the temperature must have been up over a hundred. Heat shimmered off the highway, glared off the metal surfaces of other cars, made the stark countryside look sere and fiery, and blew inside the rental heap like the breath of Old Nick himself. The car had air conditioning but it had conked out coming down the steep Banner Grade. Which figured. If I hadn’t insisted on the cheapest rental the National agency had, this sort of thing wouldn’t have happened. And I wouldn’t be roasting and dripping like a chicken under a broiler.
The turn for Borrego Springs, off Highway 78, was called Yaqui Pass Road. It climbed, steep and winding, up a sagebrush-strewn hill, and from where it crested you had a pretty awesome view of empty desert spread out to the southwest. A short while later, I had my first look at Borrego Springs. The town was scattered over the floor of a brown, beige, and dull green valley, with massive, barren mountains ringing it in the distance. This entire area was part of the Anza — Borrego Desert Region — several hundred miles of state park that stretched almost to the Salton Sea on the east, almost to the Mexican border on the south.
I was here because I didn’t want to believe McCone had gone to see Woodall yesterday, that he’d done something to her. And because I had nowhere else to look for her. Nowhere else to go period, except back to San Diego to see Tom Knowles. Which was what Knowles wanted me to do. I’d finally got in touch with him, by phone from the service station near Woodall’s house, and told him what I suspected. But I was in no mood for sitting around doing nothing while he made up his mind whether or not to put out an APB on Woodall and on McCone. When he’d told me to come in and talk to him in person I had pretended that there was something wrong with the line and hung up on him.
Down in the valley I passed La Casa del Zorro, the resort hotel where June Paxton had seen Elaine Picard and Rich Woodall having dinner, but I couldn’t see much of it because it was hidden inside a grove of densely grown palms and tamarisk trees. The town, some distance beyond, wasn’t much to look at: plain desert-style buildings, most of them designed to cater to tourists and to the horde of motorcycle riders and dune-buggy drivers who clogged a central green called Christmas Circle. I looped around the circle, drove past the Road Runner Realty Company, and stopped at a Union 76 station.
Arthur Darrow was listed in the local telephone directory — a number on Pointing Rock Road. Darrow was the only lead I had out here; if McCone had come to Borrego Springs yesterday, she’d probably have looked him up. The station attendant told me how to get to Pointing Rock Road. He also told me that as far as he knew, there was no House of Slenderizing and Massage or any other health club in town. No clubs of any kind, he said, except for the De Anza Country Club and the new Ram’s Hill Country Club.
The Darrow house turned out to be nestled up against the De Anza Country Club’s golf course, with its backside abutting one of the greens. It wasn’t quite what I’d expected, somehow: a smallish hacienda-style place, with a low brick wall in front that sported a couple of old wagon wheels for decoration. The yard behind the wall had a patch of lawn, some dwarf palms and yucca trees, a lot of prickly-pear cactus, and two orange trees heavy with fruit. Still, the place had the look of money. Whoever Arthur Darrow was, he didn’t have to worry about where his next meal was coming from.
I parked the rental car in front. In the adjacent driveway was a newish Chevy pickup with the words MILNE GARDENING SERVICE painted on its door; a big man wearing a blue shirt with the same words on its back was kneeling in front of one of the orange trees, trimming the grass around it with a pair of hand clippers. I went up the path past him to the narrow front porch and rang the bell. Nobody answered. I rang it again, waited a while longer, and then turned and went down the path and over to the gardener. He hadn’t paid any attention to me up to then, and he didn’t pay much to me now.
“Afternoon,” I said. “I’m looking for Arthur Darrow. Or his wife. Would you know where I could find either of them?”
He stood up, dragged a handkerchief out of his back pocket, and mopped his sweaty face. He was in his sixties, sun-creased and in better physical condition than I was. A pair of mild gray eyes gave me a brief appraising look. “You don’t look like one of their friends,” he said. He didn’t seem to mean it as an insult.