Now, the two-lane and the dammed-up backlog of cars it carried writhed like a snake in the road shimmer. Chunks of the rusty lava ridges flanking the highway broke off and hovered in the sun-bleached sky like a fleet of flying saucers. The auxiliary cooling fans moaned under Car’s hood and she grumbled through her dual exhausts in radical-cammed aggravation, incensed at our snail crawl.
The air stream through the wind-wings might have been blasting out of an open furnace door. I tried to be philosophical about the whole thing, but Miss Lisette Kingman had never studied philosophy.
“Kevin, you’re supposed to be the absolute automotive living end. Why can’t you install some air conditioning in this thing?”
The Princess sprawled on the front seat beside me, her model’s pretty face flushed, her dark ponytail limp, and her short shorts and Kerrybrooke blouse soggy. Only part of it was perspiration, the rest came from the thermos of water she’d emptied over herself. Lisette had been a hot-rodder’s girl for a comparatively short time so she didn’t realize she was speaking heresy.
Car and I forgave her.
“The compressor would bleed ten or fifteen horsepower out of the mill,” I replied patiently, “not to mention the weight of the unit. On a drag strip, that’d tack a good half-second onto your Estimated Time, easy.”
“Which would you prefer,” she arched back, “that half-second or a girlfriend?... Wait a minute. What am I saying? Forget it.”
I chuckled, and slouched lower behind the wheel, my sweat-soaked T-shirt bunching across my back. The Princess was learning.
“What about one of those deals,” she pointed at the vehicle running ahead of us. “That’s an air conditioner, isn’t it? You see a lot of people using them.”
The vehicle in question was a red-and-black ’48 Dodge pickup, ten years old but in good shape. Its cab windows were closed, and something that looked sort of like a sawed-off bazooka was fixed between the top of the passenger-side window and the doorframe.
“Kinda,” I replied. “That’s a swamp cooler, the automotive version of the window coolers a lot of the desert stations use. It’s packed full of ice and the air scoop catches your slipstream and forces it over the ice and through a straw filter that wicks up the melt water. It’s supposed to cool the air down before feeding it into the passenger compartment. They sort of work, but not all that well and they make your wheels look lopsided.”
“Which would you prefer, a car that looks lopsided or a... Never mind! Never mind!” The Princess unbuttoned her blouse, then knotted it closed under her breasts, baring a little more satiny skin.
There can be good in every situation if you look for it.
I edged Car closer to the center line. Squinting through my sunglasses, I watched for the long straightaway and the break in the oncoming traffic I’d need to blast around the road block of lumbering big rigs.
But then the Dodge pickup ahead of me also began a slow, erratic drift to the left. Weaving into the eastbound lane, it drew an angry blast of horn from an oncoming Imperial. The pickup’s driver jerkily swerved back, overcorrecting and kicking up dust from the right shoulder of the road.
“What’s his problem?” Lisette inquired, sitting up straighter.
“I dunno.” I backed off another precautionary car-length from the slaloming truck. “But something’s gone gestanko with this guy.” Through the rear window of the cab I could see the driver’s big-eared head bobbing unsteadily on a skinny neck.
“Do you think he’s drunk?”
“I dunno,” I repeated. “He seemed straight when he pulled onto the highway back at Devlin station. Could be the heat’s getting to him.”
Again the Dodge wobbled off track, almost head-oning a Greyhound.
“That guy’s going to kill somebody, Kevin!”
“That looks like a safe-money bet; himself, if nobody else.”
The question was, what could I do about it? I had the ’57 tricked out with just about every street-worthy speed part you could name, along with a few gimmicks that had to do with my day job as an L.A. County deputy sheriff. Unfortunately that gow-gear didn’t run to roof flashers and a siren.
Then, abruptly, the problem was taken out of my hands. The Dodge’s driver slumped behind the wheel and the pickup started its final fatal drift to the right. I was flashing my brake lights at the traffic behind us even before he tipped off the edge of the road.
It wasn’t too bad of a wreck as wrecks go. At that point, it was only about a three-foot drop from the shoulder of 66 to the desert floor and, thanks to that earth-mover convoy, we’d only been doing about thirty.
I reached the overturned pickup while it was still engulfed in the dust cloud of its roll-over. I kicked in the driver’s-side window and hunkered down beside the cab. Reaching inside, I yanked the keys out of the ignition. Gas was cascading out of the truck’s filler pipe and a spark just then would have been raunchy.
“He’s still alive, Kevin.” Ignoring the dirt, the gasoline, and the broken glass, Lisette was stretched out on her stomach on the far side of the truck, checking on the driver through the busted passenger window.
The Princess only looks decorative. When things go off the high side, my girl is good people to have around.
The driver lay crumpled on the cab roof, a thin, elderly man in a rusty black going-to-town suit. He had the leathery tan of a life-long desert dweller and, under other circumstances, he looked like he might have been a tough old bird. Now, though, he was blue-lipped and limp and when I touched the side of his neck for his carotid pulse, his skin was chill and clammy. I couldn’t smell alcohol on him and there didn’t seem to be a bottle loose in the truck.
“Is he hurt bad?” A tentative voice asked from the outside world.
“You ever hear of anyone hurt good?” I backed out of the crumpled cab and stood up.
Traffic had come to a stop on the highway with long rows of cars pulled over on the shoulders and the usual crowd of gawkers standing around waiting for somebody else to do something constructive.
And the only somebody available was Kevin Pulaski of L.A. County’s finest.
I pointed at a big, late-model Buick Roadmaster station wagon. “Who owns that car?”
“Uh, I do,” a man in a garish Hawaiian shirt and straw golf hat looked startled.
“Okay. Get your tailgate open and your backseat folded down. We’re going to need you to get this guy out of here.”
That’s how you work it in an emergency. Don’t ask ’em. Tell ’em!
Lisette bobbed up on the far side of the truck, smeared with mud and gas. “Is it a good idea to try and move him?”
“We don’t have a choice, Princess.” I looked around at the cholla-studded wastes surrounding us. “It’ll hit a hundred and twenty degrees on these flats and it’ll take at least an hour for a doc and an ambulance to get out from Barstow. This old guy’ll fry if we leave him like this. I figure our best bet is to get him back to Devlin station.”
It seemed to make sense, to me anyway. I only hoped I was calling it right. I lifted my voice again. “We’re going to need a plank or something to use as a stretcher and some blankets...”
Back when the Southern Pacific first ran its rails across the Mojave, they built a string of jerkwaters along the right-of-way to service the old steam locomotives. Named alphabetically from west to east, there was never much to these stations, just a siding and a water tower with all the water coming in by tank car and a few sun-strange section men.