Joe stood and stretched. “Let’s get goin’.”
Danny looked up at his brother and frowned. “Ah, come on, Joe. It’s early still. Let’s hang around awhile longer. It’s just getting nice up here.”
“No chance, runt. Get it in gear.” Joe gave his lady a meaningful glance. “Linda and I have plans for this evening. We’ll see you around, Kevin.”
“Later, man,” I replied, getting to my feet and brushing off my Levis. “You too, pretty girl. And, Danny, when you’re ready to start talking serious gow for that beast of yours, you come and see me. Forget that Almquist manifold. What you want is an Edelbrock and I know where we can go handshaking for one.”
The column of hot rods swung onto the highway for the final 4000-foot dive to the city and the end of the run. Dusk was settling fast as we slalomed down Angeles Canyon, the two-lane stretching out evening-empty. The line of cars began to string out as guys tacked on speed. Nobody was racing, or even exceeded the speed limit worth mentioning, but we savored this last chance to dance with the road. The growing chill of the slipstream felt good as it roared in through the windows and rubber chirped softly as we hung deep into the curves.
As fate decreed, Car and I had pulled out directly behind Joe’s sapphire-blue Corvette. I was tempted to push him a little (he’d referred to my ’57 as “that battleship” on more than one occasion), but I was feeling too mellow that night. Instead, I hung back, content to watch the low-slung car snake down the mountain ahead of me. I couldn’t help but note Linda’s red head resting on Joe’s shoulder and I found myself wishing for the warm presence of a certain little Siamese-eyed brunette of my acquaintance.
The shadows were filling the canyon and I reached down to flick on the ’57’s headlights. I looked up just in time to see Joe’s Corvette explode.
There was a burst of blue-orange flame and the roadster’s front fenders disintegrated in a spray of shattered Fiberglas, the hood peeling back to smash into the windshield. Trailing smoke, the ’vette veered wildly, angling toward the outside edge of the road. Maybe the blast had trashed the steering or maybe Joe and Linda had already been knocked unconscious. I hope so, anyway.
We’d been coming into another curve, but the guardrail was just ten feet too far away to save them. Instead, the Corvette plowed headlong into the first mounting post. Whipping sideways in a flat spin, it went off the highway and into the canyon. I caught the green flash of Linda’s skirt as she was thrown out of the car by the lateral G load and then they were gone.
I stood on the binders and Car shuddered to a halt in a cloud of brake lining and burning rubber. The rods behind me pulled over as well and we were all bailing out and running for the crash site.
The shattered Corvette lay on its back on the bottom of the gorge about a hundred feet below the highway, a wadded-up lump of color off to one side possibly being Linda’s body. There was no sign of Joe at all.
“Joe!” It was a bawling scream of raw anguish. Danny Summervale ran down the shoulder of the roadway, shoving the other stunned onlookers out of his way. I grabbed him a split second before he could dive over the edge.
“Danny! Hold it! It’s no good!”
The kid wasn’t listening. He wasn’t all the way sane just then. He fought me wildly, all the time screaming that one name. “Joe!”
I shoved him back into the arms of a couple of the Royals. It was time to start being a cop. “Hold him, dammit! Everyone, stay up here on the road!”
A couple of guys in a scarlet A-V8 roadster pulled up beside us to gawk. I took two fast strides to the side of their car. “Listen! You guys haul down to the nearest phone. Call the sheriff’s department and tell them you’re calling for Deputy Kevin Pulaski, Metro Division, badge number seven forty-eight. Pulaski... Metro Division... seven... four... eight! Tell them we need the fire department and an ambulance! And tell them to roll the bomb squad and the homicide detail!”
“Homicide?” one of the guys gulped. “Like in murder?”
“Like in don’t ask questions, man! Just do it! Go!”
The A-V8 peeled out, heading down canyon. I did the same, sliding down to the wreck from the road edge, my old jump boots digging into the parched and crumbly soil of the slope.
The wreck hadn’t torched, thank God. The canyon floor was half filled with a tangle of chaparral and California holly and the demolished roadster lay on a bed of crushed underbrush. The only sounds were the creak and click of cooling metal and the distant sobbing of Danny Summervale up on the pavement.
I reached Linda first. She wasn’t a pretty girl anymore, just a torn and broken bit of debris in the dry streambed. Yet she wasn’t all the way gone. Not yet. A flutter of a heartbeat remained and a faint, rasping wheeze of lung action. She must have been busted all to hell and gone inside, but there was no major external bleeding and I didn’t dare move her for fear of snapping that last tenuous thread that linked her to life. We could only wait for the medicos. More as a gesture than anything else I peeled off my windcheater and covered her.
“She’s alive,” I yelled up to the road. Then I turned to the ’vette. As I worked my way slowly around the wreck, I found Joe. Or rather, I found an arm and a clutching hand extending out from under the shattered hulk of the car. When I felt for a pulse, there was only a stillness. This time, I could only look up at the row of faces staring at me from along the road edge and shake my head.
The L.A. County sheriff’s department got it in gear in a hurry. It only seemed to take forever. Patrol cruisers arrived and secured the area, taking names and statements. Search and Rescue tenderly eased Linda up the hillside to a waiting ambulance. The traffic detail showed up, both enforcement and investigation, reopening the highway and starting their assessment of the wreck. As did Homicide, the bomb squad, and the lab crew from forensics.
As the only lawman witness, I repeated the story a dozen times over to a dozen different bosses, what there was of it and for what good it did. And I repeated a lot more than a dozen times over that, no, it wasn’t just a wreck and, yeah, the damn car blew up, and, yeah again, it was a bomb!
I’d developed a very intimate acquaintance with high explosives during my year on the line in Korea. Likewise in all of my racing on circle tracks, drag strips, and dry lakes; I’ve seen just about every kind of fuel fire, crackup, and catastrophic engine failure you can imagine. This just didn’t match. There’d been a bomb in Joe’s car. But as for who could have put it there, or why, man, I didn’t have a clue.
I was going to find out, though. You could abso-goddamn-lutely count on that.
I arranged for a friend to drive Danny’s car to his folks’ place, while I took the kid down with me. That meant I also got to break the news to Joe’s parents, a job I was not particularly looking forward to.
Joe had still been living at home, saving on rent money for a down payment on a place for himself and Linda. His parents lived in a pre-War tract development on the north side of Pasadena, a house-shaped house on a street-shaped street. Joe’s dad, a stocky, stooping man with a welder’s squint, worked on the assembly line at Douglas Aviation. His mom was a gray-haired housewife running thirty pounds overweight. Nothing special, nothing special at all. Just a couple of good people who had raised a couple of good sons, one of whom had just died senselessly.
There was no screaming, no hysterics, at least not at first. Just that blank, shattered stare. Danny was still crying a little and his dad sat beside him on the couch, patting the boy on the back with clumsy gentleness.