“What time did the workmen leave?”
“Two.”
“All of them alone?”
“Like I said, they parked on the street.”
“Swell,” I said. “Obviously, somebody missed something. You’ve converted me. I now share my client’s opinion of the LAPD.”
Schultz ignored the rudeness. “What did he say?”
“He said three. He said three is where it would happen, and three hours from now is when it would happen.”
“Three hours from now?” Schultz sounded panicked.
“Worse than that,” I said. “Three hours from four o’clock.”
“One-twenty-seven-C-three,” Schultz said. “I thought you said it would be clear.”
“You chew on it for a while,” I said. “My jaws are sore.”
After I’d gnawed my cheeks for twenty minutes, I dialed Schultz again.
“No other ways to get into that street,” I said.
“You were there,” he said, sounding frustrated. “It’s a cul-de-sac.”
“Maybe something runs real close behind it.”
“It doesn’t.”
“God damn it, Schultz, check. They didn’t go up the chimney.”
“All right,” he said a trifle sulkily. “Let me get a Thomas.” The phone clattered to the table.
“Holy Mary, Mother of God,” I said. That’s all it took, a two-by-four between the eyes. I fidgeted from one foot to another, not knowing who could get to it more quickly, Schultz or I. Mine was just down at the foot of the driveway, in Alice’s glove compartment.
Then I came to my senses, hung up the phone, jogged down to Alice, and opened the Thomas Brothers map book. The hell with Schultz; what I absolutely didn’t need was thirty-seven squad cars, three or four swat teams, and a battery of heavy artillery. ‘Bye-bye Wilton, at the first siren’s squeal. Anyway, they hadn’t been invited.
Page 127, Row C, Square 3, was a blank brown stretch surrounded by urban clutter. I finally located the legend. In print small enough to prove that I was getting farsighted, it said, San Bernardino County Fairground.
I left the Uzi up in the house; it didn’t seem like the kind of hardware I’d be able to get into the fairgrounds.
Ten minutes later, I climbed out of Alice, leaving my suit of armor rolled up on the seat next to me, ran into the Fernwood Market, and tore open an L.A. Times. There it was on page 5 of the Calendar section, right out in the open for any fool to see, filling the San Bernardino County Fairgrounds with adventure and merriment for all.
The Chivalry Faire.
20
At quarter to seven, daylight saving time, the sun was still floating comfortably above the horizon, roasting everything within reach. I was rolling along unfamiliar surface streets in the tinder-dry hills of San Bernardino, trying to figure out where the hell I was.
The freeway had slowed and then stopped, jammed full of patient, happy weekenders on their way to a bracing dip into the fifteenth century, ready to encounter jugglers, jesters, troubadours, knights in armor, castles, and fair maidens. Maybe even a dragon.
When I hit the clog of traffic, I skated Alice along the freeway’s shoulder to the first offramp, inviting and receiving stares of indignation from drivers who still believed in fair play. Once I coasted down the ramp and off the freeway grid, I was in terra incognita. I don’t know much about San Bernardino, and I’ve tried for years to keep it that way.
The Thomas Brothers were no help. I knew I was somewhere in the two-dimensional cartographic fiction called C2, and I was pretty sure that I was heading toward C3, but that was only because C3 was east of C2, and the setting sun was grilling the back of my neck. Even stripped for preaction, in nothing but a T-shirt and swimming trunks, I felt like a four-minute egg.
The road, a two-lane unmarked tarmac, wound between sere, rolling hills that were stiff with weeds and thick with dust. A series of steps, a giant’s stairway, had been cut into the skin of the hills to my right, the prelude to a bunch of new dream homes. There was so little anyone could want on the hillside that there was no fence: just the road’s oily, uneven edge, a yard or so of tangled puncherweeds posing as shoulder, and then the spiky, overgrown weed garden of the hills.
Six forty-seven, and I needed altitude.
Alice grumbled to a stop at the foot of the new building development, and I sprinted up the dirt track that had been gouged for the earthmoving equipment. As I clambered past the pads onto which the houses would be dropped, I seemed to move in the center of a bubble. Outside the bubble were the heat, the dust, the larger sounds and smells of the day; inside were the rattle of wind in brush beside me, the scuff of my running shoes, and the rasp of my breathing. For a moment, I floated above myself and looked down, seeing my laboring body as a machine that existed simply to get my head to the top of that hill.
My knees began to buckle long before I made it. I was even more fatigued than I’d realized, worn down to nub ends and scraped nerves by Wilton Hoxley. I did the last third of the incline at a sorry trot, which was just as well because I ran right into a chest wound.
At the moment of impact, I thought I’d been shot. I bounced back, flung like a slingshot, and a bright spot of pain in my chest announced itself in crimson through my T-shirt. Both the red and the pain spread as I stood there stupidly, staring down and waiting for my lungs to collapse. When they didn’t, when the sound of the shot didn’t follow, when a second bullet failed to tear into me, I looked up and saw a barbed-wire fence.
A fence, by implication, has something on the other side of it. The thought formed altogether too slowly in my brain as I pressed at the torn skin on my chest and tried to stanch the bleeding. The hill crested some twenty feet beyond the fence. I left a piece of my shirt waving gaily on one of the barbs, but except for that and a scratched knee, I got through intact. I was almost to the top of the hill when I heard the music.
Polyphonal, rhythmic, anachronistic, something with drums and tambours and sackbuts, it floated on the breeze that blew hot on my face as I topped the hill and looked down on a miniature out of an illuminated manuscript brought to life, a fifteenth-century fairyland set down mistakenly in some obscure corner of the Gobi Desert.
Turrets rose gracefully against the nicotine-colored sky. Pennons snapped in the wind, arches arched, flying buttresses flew. I counted three crenellated pasteboard castles, stone-solid from here, several smaller structures, and a warlord’s moated fortress. On a patch of green sward too healthy-looking at this time of year to be anything but Astroturf, mounted knights with lances gave each other the evil eye through upraised visors when their horses pawed the plastic. This had to be the place.
Revelers in costume pushed and shoved their way festively through the streets of a medieval town that huddled at the knees of the taller structures. People crowded against stages where jugglers made patterns of oranges in the air and mountebanks performed tumbling tricks and magicians did complicated things with geese and conical Merlin’s hats. A sudden burst of flame, seen out of the corner of my eye, popped my goose bumps to attention in defiance of the heat. I focused to see a burly man on one of the stages, stripped to a pair of uncomfortable-looking leather bloomers, lift a torch to his mouth and spew an arc of fire five feet long.
The fire reminded me that I was underdressed. I clambered back through the fence and scuffed my way back down the hill to fetch my suit of armor.