I sat on my heels in front of him. “Where’s Emerson?”
Tedescu’s lips twisted; he pawed at them with a shaky hand. Anguish, and maybe fear, glistened in his eyes. “Carl,” he said in a thick slurred voice. “Jesus...”
“Where is he?”
“Gone,” he said.
“Gone where?”
“Gone to hell, all gone to hell.” He struggled forward, reaching for the bottle on the table, and managed to knock over an ashtray full of the stubs of his little cigars. I moved the bottle away from him, put it on the floor. “No,” he said, “gimme that...”
“Listen to me, Tedescu. Where did Emerson go?”
He threw his arm up in a vague gesture. “Out there. Ran out... crazy... went berserk...”
“Then what? Did he drive off?”
“No. Crazy...”
“You mean he’s still around here somewhere?”
“Had that gun,” Tedescu said. “Said he was gonna kill me, tried to... oh God!”
Whatever had happened, it was too much for him to cope with; it had driven him into alcoholic oblivion in the first place, and that was where he wanted to stay. After a couple of seconds his eyes rolled up in their sockets, the lids came down, and he flopped over on the couch, pulled his legs up, and sprawled onto his stomach. His breathing, harsh at first, settled into the faint snore. He was gone again.
I let him lie there. It would take time to bring him around enough so he could talk sense, and if Emerson was still here somewhere, maybe crazed and toting a gun, I had no time to waste. I hauled the .38 out and hurried back into the rain.
The yard area, as much of it as I could see, was stark and empty in the failing light. A worn path led away through the grass to the left, probably out to the end of the headland; but the shoreline and the sea beyond were invisible from here, lost in the drizzly mist. The ocean could not have been far away, though: I could hear the angry crash of waves breaking against rock.
I moved past the parked compact, across to where the barn loomed gray and spectral like something out of a Gothic movie. The ground in front was muddy, and there were rain-filled ruts in it leading up to the closed double doors. I slogged through the mud, pulled one of the door halves open. Inside, parked on the dusty wooden floor, was a new Lincoln Continental. Emerson’s car, I thought; he must have driven it in here to get it out of the rain. And it had to mean he was still in the vicinity. It didn’t make sense that he would have left the ranch on foot, in weather like this, when he could have driven instead.
Warily, I stepped inside. The barn smelled of dust and dampness and dry rot; no animals had been housed in it for a long time. Shadows clung to the rafters, to a barren hayloft at the far end, to a workbench tacked onto the side wall. There was not much else in there except for cobwebs and some discarded pieces of furniture stacked near the bench. There wasn’t anything to hear, either.
I opened the driver’s door on the Continental. The dome light went on, letting me see that both the front and back seats were empty. I left the door open, because the light cut away some of the gloom, and moved toward the rear. But he wasn’t back there, and he wasn’t up in the loft; I climbed partway up the ladder to make sure.
Outside again, I crossed to the nearest of the outbuildings. Woodshed, filled with firewood and nothing else. The second structure, larger, more ramshackle, was a storage shed: wheelbarrow, a few rusting tools, a big steamer trunk. On impulse I opened the trunk. It was as empty as the rest of the shed.
Where is he? I thought.
Where the hell did he go?
I backed out of the shed, scanned the terrain again. No other buildings were visible; there wasn’t anything except rock and grass and the few trees. Unless the path led to some sort of structure out at the edge of the headland... a boat house? That didn’t seem likely. The coastline was rugged along here, and the winter storms that assaulted it were sometimes violent; a boat house that was not built out of concrete and anchored to the rock wouldn’t last long against the onslaught of those hammering waves. But I was running out of places to look. And the path had to lead somewhere or it wouldn’t be there.
The wind, gusting now, lashed me with icy rain that stung my eyes and blurred my vision; I had to keep wiping it away in order to see where I was going. My face was beginning to numb, and I had no feeling at all in the fingers of my left hand. I put my right hand into my coat pocket to keep it warm and the gun from getting too wet.
The ground began to slope downward, gradually, and the path angled between boulder-sized rocks and clumps of sawgrass. The thunder of the surf grew louder, until it seemed to be right in front of me. Then, through parting ribbons of fog, I could see the edge of the cliff ahead. The path went right up to it, over it, and out of sight.
When I got to where I could see beyond the edge I was looking down a steep incline to a jagged mass of rocks a good seventy feet below. The surf boiled over them, faintly luminescent — a wild, eerie sight that seemed to appear and disappear, phantomlike, in the mist. The path led all the way to the bottom, with rough steps cut into it at intervals. But not to any boat house. At low tide, there would probably be a slice of beach down there; now, the waves covered it, foaming partway up the cliffside. I could taste the salt spray they hurled up into the air when they broke.
I moved to my left, keeping well back from the edge. The rim of the headland bellied outward a few yards away; the incline straightened into a vertical rock wall. I retraced my steps, went across the path in the opposite direction. The terrain made a sharp inward turn over there. It extended back thirty or forty yards, then hooked outward again the same distance so that it formed a U-shaped cut maybe twenty yards wide. Below, the sea had fashioned a tiny cove halfway into the cut; the inner half was a sloping pile of eroded rock.
I started around the inner lip of the U. And then stopped abruptly, because the mist parted again and I could see something down on those rocks, something blue billowing in the wind. I moved closer to the edge, pawing wetness out of my eyes, and knelt there on the muddy turf, hunched forward, peering down.
The blue thing was a jacket. And there was a man inside it, a man lying bent and twisted, caught between two of the rocks. The wind billowed his hair too, made it look like blond tendrils reaching up into the mist from the top of his shattered skull.
Jesus, I thought. Sweet Jesus.
I had finally found Carl Emerson.
Twenty
I knelt there, staring down at him, for more than a minute. The tension leaked out of me, until there was nothing left but a kind of inner numbness. I could not seem to feel much. A small sense of relief, but that was all.
It was not supposed to end this way. It was supposed to end in confrontation, maybe a fight, maybe death — but not this kind of death. Ten days of hate, three days of finding out who he was, tracking him down, building toward a final showdown, and it had all come down to this: accident, suicide, whatever. It had all come down to nothing.
I had never seen his face; I couldn’t see it now in the rain and fog. All he’d done to me and to Eberhardt, and I had never laid eyes on him in person, or even spoken to him. Never spoken to Jimmy Quon either, never saw his face until he was just a broken lump of clay. So personal, and yet not really personal at all.
Emerson, dead of a crushed skull. The same way he’d ended Quon’s life. The same way he’d ended Polly Soon’s. Irony in that. And more than irony, maybe — a kind of cosmic justice. Vengeance wasn’t mine; Kerry had been right about that. So had the Bible. Vengeance wasn’t anybody’s on this earth.