“Are the roads passable?”
“That’s what Bozey wanted to know. He said he would like to try it some time for a camping trip. The road’s passable all right – least it was the last time I was there. Most of it is blasted from solid rock.”
“Could he take a big truck up?”
“I don’t see why not. The road was built to carry heavy equipment.”
“And Jo’s on her way there now?”
“She must be. She got me to draw her a little map of how to get to the place.”
“Will you draw one for me?”
“Nope.” He showed his yellow teeth in a grim smile. “I’m going along with you, son. I’m not as fast on my feet as I once was, but I can still fire a gun if it comes to that.”
I didn’t try to talk him out of it.
When I went down to the street after saying good-by to Kate, he had brought a rifle out of the back of his A-model Ford. It was a medium-caliber sporting rifle with a telescope sight. He laid it carefully on the back seat of my car and climbed into the front.
I pressed the starter. “What decided you to come to me?”
“I believe you’re a fair-minded man. You talk like one. I’m taking a chance that you’ll act like one.”
“I’ll do my best.”
I turned south at the boulevard, toward the city limits. It was twilight, and lights were coming on in the houses. The mountains lay like great veiled women against the green east. Some random stars began to nail up the edges of the evening.
MacGowan’s voice came out of the thickening darkness: “Josephine’s fallen among thieves. I couldn’t sit by and see it happen and do nothin’ about it. You should have seen her today, all sweaty and mussed, with a dirty face and that scared look in her eyes. I hardly knew her.”
We stopped in Barstow for sandwiches and coffee, in Baker to check my tires. The air turned colder as night deepened. An hour or so on the far side of Baker, different mountains rose on the horizon. Above them the stars were massed now in white clusters. A few lights gleamed at their feet like bright droppings from the sky.
They slid along the flat terrain toward us. Suddenly the mountains were almost on top of us, blotting out one side of the sky.
MacGowan broke a long silence: “That’s Yellow Ford now.”
It was a general store, a filling station, a few frame houses and tarpaper shacks, a boarded-up real-estate booth surrounded by miles of vacant real estate. A canvas banner on the filling station announced Genuine Rattlesnakes and Other Reptiles on Display: Stop and See the Monsters of the Desert.
A man in a red plaid shirt came out of the station when I pulled up by the pumps. “Ethyl.”
He started the pump. His face was like a worn saddle ridden by circumstance. “You want to see my snakes while you’re waiting? I got a diamondback close to five feet long.”
“I’m looking for a different kind of animal.”
“A Gila? My Gila died.”
“A man.” I described Bozey.
There was an extended desert pause. “I haven’t seen him this week,” he said finally.
“But you have seen him?”
“If it’s the same young redhead. He came in here for gas a couple of times in the last month, and hung around for a while shooting the breeze.”
“What was he driving?”
“Buick coupe.”
MacGowan nudged me. “It’s him.”
“Where was he staying?”
“He didn’t say. Somewhere in the hills.” He waved his arm toward the mountains. “When he first turned up he bought a sleeping-bag and a camp-stove at the store across the way. Claimed he was prospecting for uranium, but he was no prospector. He couldn’t tell iron ore from copper.”
He shut off the pump and leaned on the open window. His sun-faded eyes squinted through crinkled holes in his leather face. “He got me a little nervous after a time. I had a funny feeling, last time he was in, that maybe he was fixing to hold me up. He didn’t, though.”
“When was that?”
“Along about the middle of last week. Right after that he vamoosed. What was he doing out here, anyway?”
“Hiding out.”
“From the draft?”
“Could be. I heard he went through here early this morning, driving a big semi with an aluminum box. Did you happen to see him?”
“No. I don’t open till eight.”
“Maybe you saw a girl this evening. A pretty little brunette in an MG sports car?”
“Yeah, she went through a couple of hours ago. Didn’t stop.”
MacGowan leaned across me. “Is the road to Traverse open?”
“Far as I know. It hasn’t snowed up there yet. Come to think of it, it must be open. A truck went up there today.”
“An aluminum-painted truck?” I said.
“A blue truck, big blue van, looked like a furniture van. It went up about four o’clock this afternoon. In daylight you can see part of the road from here.” He added as I paid him for the gas: “If you’re thinking of driving up to Traverse tonight, you better watch the slides. It hasn’t been cleared for a couple of years.”
I thanked him and drove on.
MacGowan leaned forward in the seat as if he could will the car to go faster. “Josephine’s there all right.”
“She’s not the only one.”
Chapter 24
For the first few miles after we left the highway, the road was fairly straight and smooth. Then it began to twist and turn on itself. Its surface was pitted with chuck-holes, and I had to take it slow.
About halfway up the mountain, the wheels of my car plowed through a sand slide below a collapsing cutbank. On the outer side of the road the ground fell away steeply into a canyon. Another slide ahead lay brown and furrowed in the headlights. I stopped the car and got out. MacGowan stayed in the front seat.
The slope of sand covered more than half the road. There were wide tread-prints in the edge of the sand: the spoor of a big truck. Examining them more closely with my flashlight, I found two sets of tire marks, one partly superimposed on the other. Both were fresh.
I stood up with my heart knocking on my ribs. Somewhere on the black heights above me a little whining sound fretted the silence. I didn’t move. The sound grew in my ears. It was a car engine coming down the mountain.
Light flashed against the sky, defining a rocky buttress up ahead. I went back to my car and switched off the lights. There was no time to move it. I took out my gun and crouched behind the open front door. MacGowan reached for his rifle.
Headlights swung their long beams out over the canyon, swung back onto the road, and blazed in my eyes. The little sports car leaped around the curve. Its horn hooted. Then its brakes took hold. It swerved and skidded broadside into the sand and almost turned over. Flung out sideways over the low door, its driver fell face down in the road and lay still.
“It’s Josephine,” MacGowan said.
I ran to her and flashed my light on her face. Twin worms of blood crawled down her upper lip. Her eyes were fixed with shock, but she was conscious.
She tried to sit up and failed. I supported her with one arm. Her flesh was very soft, hung on an armature so frail that she seemed boneless.
“I’m hurt,” she snuffled. “They hurt me way inside.”
I wiped her bloody lip and saw then that her dress was ripped to the waist. Her body was marked with bruises that weren’t accounted for by the fall she had taken.
MacGowan climbed out of my car and toiled up the road toward us.
I said to the girl, with a hardness I didn’t feeclass="underline" “All you hustlers get hurt sooner or later. It’s fair enough when you make a living hurting other people.”