“I just don’t know. He seems docile. I might take the risk if I had to take the blame, too. But if I make a bad guess, then Enelio is in trouble. It’s just a hunch, my friend. I sense a kind of animal wildness, a potential for unpredictability. Talking to him, even when he wept, was like sitting in a zoo. I didn’t want to make any sudden motions. I would have felt better with bars between us.”
“So, I go with your instinct, Meyer. Your average is too good. We can get in touch with Enelio and find out if he wants us to take the package back to the store.”
We got up. Meyer went through the door first. The blanket was thrown back. The bathroom door was closed. I could hear water running. No reason at all why I shouldn’t accept that obvious conclusion, that Nesta had gotten up, and gone into the bathroom. I did accept it, and in a sudden surge of adrenaline, rejected it a microsecond later, rejected it as I was in motion, going through the doorway. To reverse motion meant vulnerable stasis for too long an instant, so I dived forward, and just as my palms hit Meyer in the middle of the back, knocking him onto and over the nearest double bed, something chunked very solidly and painfully into the meat of my back, just under the right shoulder blade. I used the leverage of Meyer’s solidity to thrust myself to the right, and the momentum took me across the tile floor, scrabbling on all fours for balance, and simultaneously trying to turn so I would be facing the doorway when I came back up. I made it and saw Nesta going by the windows. He was out on the porch and moving fast.
I caught him on the road, about seventy yards up the hill. He was in no shape for uphill running. He turned, gasping and gagging, and swung some kind of dark club at my head so off balance I had time to step back and let it go by. It carried him halfway around. So, in that tiny interval of time when he was almost motionless, trying to reverse direction, I hit him a very nice right hand shot right on the point of the shoulder. It is that ancient and effective torture of schoolyards and playgrounds. The nerves run over the bone of the arm socket right at that point. He dropped the weapon. Something inside a sock. It made a metallic thud. His arm hung slack, dead and useless and he cupped his shoulder in his big left hand and looked at me with the twisted face of a child fighting tears, chest heaving from the effort of running.
“Naughty, naughty!” I said and reached out quickly, caught the end of his nose between thumb and the bent knuckle of the forefinger, and gave a long hard pull downhill, stepping aside and releasing him. He ran a half dozen jolting steps and stopped, his back toward me. I picked up the improvised weapon and gave him a gentle push. It got him in motion and he walked the rest of the way to the cottage, up onto the porch, and into the room, not looking at Meyer as he passed him. Meyer stood outside the door, fingers laced across the nape of his neck, grimacing as he turned his big head from side to side.
“Whiplash, maybe,” he said.
“Officer, he stopped dead right in front. of me.” I spread the opening of the dark sock which belonged to Meyer and peered down into it and said, “Tsk tsk tsk! Little present for you.”
He took it, reached down into it, and pulled out his sturdy little travel alarm. Sturdy no longer. The case had burst open and there were a lot of little loose parts down in the toe of the sock.
He dumped them out on the metal top of the porch table, quite sadly. “McGee, I have to assume you reacted first. It will never cease to make me feel insecure, the way you do that. What alerted you, damn-it?”
“I haven’t any idea. Something subliminal. Something smelled or heard or seen, on an unconscious level.”
“And if I were a more primitive organism, I could perform such feats also?”
“Flattery won’t help.”
We went in. Nesta sat on the foot of Meyer’s bed. His right arm was cradled in his lap and he was looking down at it, slowly flexing the fingers.
“They’ll be interested in knowing you like to pop people on the skull,” I said to him.
He did not raise his eyes. “The law likes to get cases off the books. It takes the heat off them. I thought I better get going before I got elected,” he said.
“You’re going back inside.”
“So?” he said in a toneless voice.
“I can tell them about your little try here, or I can keep it between us.”
It brought a quick and wary glance before the eyes dropped again. “What’ll it take?” he asked.
“Something important that you maybe left out of your confession hour with Meyer. We think there’s a good chance Rockland could have set Bix up to kill herself trying to drive down the mountain alone at dusk.”
“I didn’t even know about that until just the other day, when Mike and Della told me about it. I didn’t even know she was dead.”
“How did you feel when you heard it?”
“I didn’t feel much of anything. A long time ago she was something else. That was one pretty girl and that was one hell of a body. I was willing to trade off Minda for the chance to start balling her. But it was like nothing. Like one of those plastic things in a store window. All you had to do was lead her into the bushes or take her into the camper and she’d lay down on her back. Then a long time later when she’d lost a lot of her looks, and nobody was hacking her any more, I sort of got to like taking care of her. I don’t know why. Making her look a little better, making her eat, making her walk around. But she was gone anyway. She was dead before she was dead. Even pot took her too far out of her tree. When Carl turned her on with horse it was too late to make any difference one way or another. What did I feel? Nothing, I guess. Nothing at all.”
“Would Rockland want her dead?”
“Why would he? She didn’t know who the hell she was or where she was or who we were. Her memory was shot. The way she was just… around, like a lump, used to get on Rocko’s nerves. He used to try to get some kind of rise out of her. One time… I don’t know where it was, I think maybe someplace south of Puebla, outside one of those little towns, some Mexicans came around in the evening, mean-looking bastards in those white pajama suits and straw hats, one with a shiny new rifle, and the others with machetes, a dozen I guess. They had eyes for Bix. So Rocko started laughing and grabbed her by the wrist and grabbed a blanket and took her over into the cornfield and peddled her ass for two pesos a trick, and came back with her and told me the banker’s daughter had earned herself thirty-two pesos. He gave me the money and told me to buy her some penicillin in the next town. Why would he kill her? She was less than nothing. Good Christ, by then she looked forty years old.”
“When you left you were giving up your share of the Los Angeles loot?”
“I didn’t even think about it, man. I was hallucinating bad. I could shut my eyes and feel my hands melting and dripping off my wrists. Rats were running around under my clothes, eating me. Hairy red spiders as big as airdales kept jumping out and jumping back in any direction I tried to walk. And Rocko had sicked them on me and he was making my hands melt, and I just had to get the hell out of there. And I did. I wish I could help you with something. But I don’t know anything I didn’t already tell.”
“What would you have done if you’d nailed me with that clock when I came in the door?”
“Hit him next. Take your money and your car keys and get onto one ninety and head southwest, because they’d expect me to head for Mexico City. My best bet would be to try to get to Vera Cruz and stow away aboard some crock heading across the Gulf.”
“And if you hit us hard enough to kill?”
“I start running. It looks like I killed the others, so what difference would it make?”
“It might make a little difference to you,” Meyer said softly.
“To me? Well… yes. A little difference, I guess. But not a hell of a lot.”
I sat on the bed and phoned Enelio. I said, “We don’t want to take any chances with this one. He got cute, and he’ll get cute again.”