Something moved behind me.
I froze, trying to will myself into silent invisibility. Whoever it was waited, too.
All I could think of was to get under the house, get between the open timbers that led down into the foundation, get away from the brush. The brush would explode. I didn’t want to burn, but I certainly didn’t want to explode.
I sank slowly to a squatting position. The person behind me moved closer, accompanied by the sound of breaking brush. I had so much sweat in my eyes that the foundation timbers blurred and wavered.
Then he came fast, and I leaned forward and pushed off with all my strength, a human frog trying to get under the lily pad before the hawk hits. I landed on one shoulder and tumbled away, rolling uphill, toward the juncture of the concrete pad and the hillside.
Rolling, in other words, into a corner.
Transformed in seconds from a frog to a crab, I scuttled backward into my corner and watched the brush. I heard something rasping and realized it was my breath.
Then I saw his feet.
They were brown. They were covered with fur. He lowered his head, gazed lovingly at me, and drooled.
“Bravo,” I said thickly. “God damn you, Bravo.” He started to back away. “Good dog,” I said very quickly. “Good Bravo. Stay, Bravo. Stay.” I was working my way toward him on my hands and knees. “Stay, boy. If you don’t stay, you’ll be Barbecue Corrigan. You wouldn’t like that, would you?” I emerged from my lair and twisted my fingers through the kerchief tied around his neck. He made a sound low in his throat, not really a growl, more like a canine “What’s up?” but he didn’t resist. United by a bond of love and cheap cotton, man and dog completed their surveillance.
I found three cones on that side of the house alone. When I got to the top, I brushed myself off, put Bravo into Alice and rolled up the windows for insurance, stepped over the tripwires again, and went downstairs. Anyone hitting one of those tripwires would have started a conflagration that could have burned half of Topanga Canyon. Wilton Hoxley was going in for mass immolation.
The smell of oranges came from one of the corners of the lower room overlooking the canyon. In it I found a tidy litter of orange peels, melon rinds, peach pits, and seeds. The Incinerator, apparently, lived on fruit. When I finally turned to climb the stairs, something gleamed at me from the vertical portion of the fourth step from the top, the one with the fishing line over it. On a small square of brown paper, in gold ink, I read the words: Hi!
How do you like it!
“I’m going to tell Finch to put a man up there,” Schultz said.
“The hell you are. Why? I cut the lines and yanked the fireworks. He’s not coming back. He booby-trapped it and went away.” The phone was slick and wet in my hand.
“He reads the papers,” Schultz said. “That thing doesn’t go off, he’s going to go up and check. He won’t be able to keep himself from checking. Maybe you found it, maybe you disarmed it. There’s nothing in the papers, he’s going to be beside himself.”
“Oh, for the love of God, Norbert. For this kind of thinking, they pay you eighty dollars an hour? He’s not coming back. If it doesn’t go off, then either it’s intact or it’s been discovered. If he thinks it’s intact, he’ll wait until someone trips over it and it makes the front page. If he thinks it’s been discovered, he’ll figure every cop in California is sitting in the sagebrush wearing asbestos and waiting for him.”
“You’re thinking sane” Schultz protested.
“I’m thinking, period.”
“You can’t think sane with this guy. Trust me on this.”
“I’ve been trusting you. Have we caught him so far?”
“What’s the note say? ‘How do you like it?’ Suppose you’re keeping us from preventing his new mission?”
“This isn’t his new mission. This is a prank.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Because he isn’t around for the fun.”
Schultz lit up and breathed smoke. “A lot of people could get killed if you’re wrong,” he said. “I can’t keep this from Finch.”
“Then I stop talking to you.”
“Wait, wait. How you going to feel if you’re wrong?”
“I’m not wrong.”
“If you can say that right now, you’re dumber than I thought you were. Let’s say there’s one chance in five thousand that you’re wrong. Let’s say that’s the chance that comes up and he rerigs it and some kid sets it off and fifty people die in their houses. Remember how I felt when he burned the first woman?”
I used the time I needed for reflection to transfer the receiver to my other ear.
“You could be right about his mission,” Schultz conceded. “That sounds good to me. He’s going to want to be there. But if you’re wrong about this, this prank or whatever it is, you’re going to carry it with you until the day you die. There are little kids living up there.”
Five thousand to one didn’t sound good enough. “Only two cops,” I said. “And they can’t be uniforms.”
“Fine,” Schultz said. “I’ll tell Finch.”
“They have to go in on foot, over the fire roads. They can get dropped off about two miles away, at the top of Old Topanga Canyon, and pick up the fire road directly across the road from Deer Creek Ranch. You can get a map from the fire department. They should dress like hikers. I don’t care if they’re packing atomic cannons, they keep them in their backpacks until they’re in position and they know no one is peeking. And they take every foot of the way like they’re in enemy territory.”
“Green Beret time.”
“Eight- to ten-hour shifts,” I said. “No endless line of oversized Boy Scouts trekking heartily back and forth to Happiness Hills Homes.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Schultz said impatiently.
Since I had a lot to do, everybody called. I was threading the pipe gizmos into the faucets in the kitchen and bathroom when the phone rang the first time. It was my friend Annie Wilmington, the mother of my goddaughter, inviting me to an eighth birthday party for her son, Luke, on Sunday. I declined. I was screwing the garden hoses onto the pipe gizmos in the faucets when a lady from the Los Angeles Times called to suggest that what was missing from my life was a six-month trial subscription. I told her I wasn’t sure I had six months to live. I was using the hoses to fill five of the six buckets with water when Stillman called to ask how the case was coming along. I told him it was coming along like a house afire and hung up on him. I was putting eighteen of the twenty-four towels into the buckets full of water when Annabelle Winston called.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Well,” I said, “I’ve lost a little weight, but I’ve acquired a guard dog.”
“I haven’t wanted to bother you. I just wondered if you have anything to tell me. I want to go to Chicago for the weekend, but not if you think anything is likely to happen.”
“I think that exactly anything is likely to happen.”
“Should I stay?”
“Look, Miss Winston, I appreciate how patient you’ve-”
“I saw how stressed you were last time,” she said, pouring it on just a bit. “I wouldn’t add to the strain for the world, it’s just that I’m not sure whether to leave or not. When you say you think anything might happen-”
“I mean that he might burn me, he might burn you, or he might burn half of southern California. I think he’s on the move and that he’s got something very big in mind. And I think it’s going to happen soon.”
“I’ll stay,” she said.
“Suit yourself,” I said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to finish filling my moat.”
I put each of the buckets, full of water and towels, dead center in a room. I fastened the garden nozzles onto the hoses and hauled them through the house to make sure there was no spot I couldn’t hit. I filled the sixth bucket with water, dropped the remaining six towels into it, and toted it down to Alice. Bravo roused himself loyally and trotted down after me. When I got back to the top of the hill, I gave him a bowl of water and a full box of low-salt Triscuits, over which I poured bacon grease from some forgotten breakfast. He knocked it back as though it had been Chateaubriand.