Half a mile through the air to the north is a tough-looking gang of scrub-covered granitic mounds, not quite mountains, that shoulder their way roughly northwest, toward the Pacific. They have not yet been developed, which makes them an endangered species. A raw interlocking system of dusty red firebreaks runs up and down them. To the south, three quarters of a mile away, is a long, high landslide-prone ridge, sharper than fur bristling on a mad dog’s spine, which some optimistic realtor had named Happiness Hills Homes. The mountains in front and west of the house are almost five miles away, and beyond them the ocean wrinkles and smooths itself in the sun.
Seen through the binoculars, between four inches of open curtain, the firebreaks in the granite mounds to the north looked suicidally precipitous. Up the gentlest-sloping of them, though, ran an unsurfaced dirt road for heavy equipment that would easily accommodate traffic in two directions: a possible. The mountains in front of the house were just too damn far away for him to have seen anything, unless he had the Hubble Space Telescope and he’d managed to fix the mirrors.
Happiness Hills Homes looked pretty good. There was plenty of access, and five building lots had been gouged into the face of the rock. Some of them had even withstood the record rains of February and March. On three of them the unfinished Homes of Happiness Hills baked in the sun, all open beams and broken rectangles of sheetrock. The developer had been working on spec, and not a nail had been driven into the houses since two of the pads spilled down the hillside on a fifth consecutive day of rain. Another profitable tax write-off, another hillside ruined.
I hadn’t bothered to look for Hoxley’s spy-hole for two reasons. First, he was supposed to be looking at me so he could see there weren’t any cops hanging around on the edges of things, and second, he could have been practically anywhere while he was driving the little Mazda. But now, if he was literally on the move, roaming the streets in a big, fat RV, he had a new set of requirements. And anyway, I thought, why not let him see me looking for him?
The problem, of course, was that I might find him.
Still, it felt good to be going on the offensive. I jumped lightly over the cartons in the living room, grabbed an apple from the refrigerator, and hiked down the driveway to Alice.
The southbound motorist on Old Topanga Canyon Boulevard, if he or she was stricken with an inexplicable compulsion to visit Happiness Hill Homes, would yield to the compulsion by turning left over an ugly raw concrete bridge that had been poured across Topanga Creek. He or she would then proceed almost vertically upward via a wide road, unpaved but liberally and repeatedly sprayed with oil. He or she would strike a substantial number of the large rocks that litter the road’s surface, and he or she would watch his or her temperature gauge rise airily toward the red sector. By the time he or she reached the circle at the top, he or she would probably be swearing liberally. I stopped swearing when I got out of Alice, who was steaming like the teakettle in a British farce, and saw tire tracks in the dust around the periphery of the oiled circle.
A wind tugged at my shirt and threw dust in my face as it blew over the ridge, drawn out of the baking San Fernando Valley by the low atmospheric pressure over the ocean. A fire wind, a steady flow of dry air that can push flames in front of it for days. It dried the sweat on my forehead as I knelt and looked at the tracks. They were very wide, wider than any I’d ever seen on an RV. They could even have been from the wheel of a tractor. Maybe they were going to begin building again. Maybe I was wrong about Happiness Hills Homes.
The pads radiated off the circle like the petals of a daisy. Each of them was reached by a short path, probably an embryonic driveway, that cut through the waist-high brush. Lizards scuttled away from me as I took the path leading to the highest pad.
Pad number one was a fragment. Most of it had rumbled down into the canyon during the rainstorm, leaving a gaping red scar that stretched for a hundred feet or so below it. Granite boulders had rolled down onto what remained, probably during the same storm, creating a moonscape of jumble and clutter. I climbed out onto it nevertheless and found cigarette butts, tinsel from a fresh pack, and two used condoms.
Pad number two held one of the partially built houses, just a skeleton of timber with a few empty windows framed in place and some finished stonework around what was ultimately to have been the fireplace. A small rattler sunning on the warm stone of the hearth politely announced itself in plenty of time for me to stop and back away. Other than that, there was nothing at all of interest, unless you counted the splendid view of my house and mailbox, below and almost a mile away.
The rattler was the hero of the day. It was small, which meant that its brothers and sisters were likely to be frolicking in the neighborhood, the healthy rural children of Happiness Hills Homes. The small ones can be as venomous as the whoppers. Bearing that in mind, I negotiated the path to pad three much more slowly than I had to the other two, walking heavily and deliberately with my eyes on the ground. If I hadn’t been looking at the ground, I wouldn’t have seen the fishing line.
It ran, stretched taut, between the upright timbers of the frame, passing through screw-in eyelets about four inches above the ground. The line was transparent, but the sun was almost directly overhead, and a gleam scooted along it as I approached. The gleam was tiny, but, thanks to the rattler, it was enough.
He’d been thorough, just as he’d been at the Doopermart. The fishing line traversed the entire perimeter of the house, four inches above the concrete pad. After I’d stood there for about ten minutes, just looking, I stepped over the tripline and onto the pad. Moving very slowly, I traversed the pad. It was as clean as if it had been swept. I was pretty sure that it had been swept.
This house was Plan B. Unlike the one on lot two, a stairway ran down from the pad to reach a lower level. A tripwire, stretched across the stairway four inches above the fourth step down, was virtually invisible. A foot coming down on it would have done the job, whatever the job was. It took me quite a long time, standing absolutely still and cupping my hands around my eyes against the sun’s glare, to determine that it was the only one. I stepped over it, going down, as though it were a foot thick.
When I reached the lower level, I stopped dead and took a long look around. I smelled oranges. What the architect evidently had in mind was a single, awkwardly long room with a glass wall looking out over the canyon, opening onto an outer deck from which one could enjoy the view. My house was in the center of the view.
There were no tripwires stretched over the skeleton of the deck. Dry weeds, thick and coated with dust, pressed up against the sides of the house. I took a loose two-by-four, lay down on my stomach on the deck, parted the weeds, and looked at dirt. Not until I’d checked all three open sides of the deck did I climb down into the brush. The first thing I did when I got there was stamp my feet eight or ten times to let the snakes know I was around. That finished, I jumped up and down twice and waited. Nobody rattled at me.
Getting no closer to the edge of the house than a foot or two, I worked my way around to the west-facing side and started up the hill, moving sideways. I’d gone six feet when I spotted a line of filament running down from the tripwire surrounding the pad, and used the two-by-four to part the brush in front of it. The line ran into a little square silver device, bolted to the wooden frame of the house. Emerging from the center of the little silver device was a long fuse. The fuse traveled three or four inches before it entered the business end of yet another Fourth of July fire cone. The fire cone was pointed out, away from the house. Into the brush.