Bud Stancell's time away from home had been accumulated in Korea, at the Chosin killing grounds, and he was grateful to return and find Santa Rosa more or less unaltered in his absence. All the changes had come later, after he had married, sunk his final dollars into the construction of a service station and garage. In those days, "service" meant precisely that; a patron didn't have to kiss your ass to get the windshield cleaned, and gasoline was nowhere near the price of liquid gold. Sometimes Bud wondered what had happened to America, allowing little piss-ant countries where they couldn't even grow a decent weed to treat the richest nation in the world like she was second-class.
Perhaps Korea was the straw that broke the camel's back. He heard a lot of people bitch and moan about the beating taken in Vietnam, but the States had settled for a draw at Panmunjom some twenty years before the Nixon pullout from Saigon. Sometimes, especially when he'd had a beer or three too many, Stancell thought the creeping weakness might have started in Korea, taking years before it surfaced, like some kind of virus that lies dormant in your system, waiting for your natural resistance to break down. When the virus hit full-strength, it surely knocked the bottom out of StancelPs business, out of Santa Rosa as a whole.
He ambled toward the service island, hoping that it wasn't Charlie Maddox, not at this time of the morning. That old boy could talk your leg off, and he had a damned opinion about everything. You couldn't wish him Merry Christmas that he wouldn't let you have both barrels, running down commercialism or the heathen nature of the holiday. Bud wasn't up to Charlie's shit this morning, and if it was Maddox, if he started in on some wild hare or other, Bud would have to tell him so.
Except it wasn't Charlie. Hell, it wasn't even close.
Four Mexicans, all piling out of a late-model Chevrolet with plates that put them on the wrong side of the border. Stancell didn't mind, if they were paying cash, but there was something in their eyes that made him just the slightest bit uneasy. Something hard and hungry, like a pit bull's eyes before he took a piece out of your leg.
"G'mornin'. Need ta fill 'er up?"
The tallest of the men shook his head. "We're looking for a friend of ours. We were supposed to meet him, but his car broke down back there." A lazy thumb was cocked across one shoulder, indicating some point farther south. "Maybe you've seen him, eh?"
"Can't help you," Stancell said. "Nobody's been in here today, besides you-all."
"This hombre would be gringo," the interrogator said, as if Bud had not answered him already. "Tall. He might be looking for another car. You seen a man like that?"
"I told you, you're the first ones in today."
The tall man rattled something off in Spanish, shook his head again as if in weary disappointment. "It's important that we find this hombre," he explained. "We got some business with him."
Stancell didn't want to know about their business. He was smelling trouble now, the short hairs rising on his neck. He wished that he was in the station's office, where he kept the Smith & Wesson .38 tucked in a drawer underneath the cash register.
"I wish that I could help you," he responded, hoping that he sounded earnest. "If I see your friend, I'll tell him you were lookin' for him."
"Maybe you won't mind if we should take a look inside?"
"What for? I told you that there's no one here."
"A little peek, okay?"
They were advancing on him, slowly, closing in a pincer movement. Stancell dared not turn his back to run. Instead he started walking backward, toward the open door of the garage. If he could make it that far, he could duck into the office, get his gun and hold them off until he raised Grant Vickers on the phone. And if he couldn't make it to the office, there were wrenches, other tools, with which he could defend himself.
One of the Mexicans was about to cut him off, when Stancell bolted. Never mind the office, he was making for the tool rack, fingers outstretched for the pry bar when a flying tackle brought him down. He hit the concrete deck with someone riding his back, the impact emptying his lungs.
Before he could recover, they had jerked him to his feet. Two of the goons immobilized his arms and held him upright, almost at attention. While a third began to poke around his shop, the leader took a stance in front of Bud and kicked him squarely in the groin.
He would have fallen if the goons hadn't been supporting him. They couldn't stop his throwing up, a hearty breakfast splattering the leader's shoes before he stepped back out of range. Bud Stancell's lower body felt like broken glass.
"We need to find this hombre," he repeated patiently.
Bud gasped for breath. "The bugger hasn't been here!"
"Ah."
The man stepped closer and swung from the cellar with a fist encased in brass. One punch broke Stancell's cheekbone, and he felt his mouth fill with blood.
From that point on, Bud Stancell couldn't have responded to their questions even if he knew the answers, and they seemed to know it. Three of them were on him all at once, with fists and feet, and then the fourth was wading in from somewhere, getting in his licks while there was something left to kick around. They worked in silence, angry, driven by frustration, as they played a brutal game of soccer with his body.
Somewhere in the middle of it, after something like a minute, Bud got lucky and lost consciousness. Another seven minutes passed before his visitors got tired and ambled back in the direction of their Chevrolet.
7
After an hour or two, the Southern California desert begins to look the same. So many yucca palms and Joshua trees, so many tumbleweeds and cacti that they start to run together, merging in the driver's eye and mind. The land is not precisely flat, but there is none of the relief from boredom that is found in trying to negotiate the mountains farther north. In air-conditioned cars, the drivers set their minds on automatic pilot, try to find a station on the radio, and concentrate on staying off the shoulder of the road. In cars that have to use the four-and-sixty system — all four windows down while driving sixty miles an hour — the drivers bake and curse themselves for being stupid enough to make their crossing in the daylight hours.
Johnny Bolan knew the desert, understood it, but it held no abstract fascination for him at the moment. He was focused on his mission, on his brother's need, already calculating odds and angles from the meager information he possessed.
Somehow the move against Rivera had gone sour. That was bad enough, considering the days of planning Mack had put into the raid, but these things happened from time to time. A rotten break, a sentry with the flu backed up by more alert replacements... anything at all. His brother had been stuck in tighter spots, and he was still alive.
It was the wound that worried Johnny. Mack would not have referred to it if it was just a scratch. He knew that much and nothing more, the lack of information taunting him with mental pictures of his brother bleeding in an alley, running from the hunters while his life ran out through ragged wounds. No matter how he held the pedal down, he couldn't get there soon enough, and he could only offer first-aid treatment when he did arrive.
There ought to be a doctor in the town where Mack was hiding, but you never knew for sure. His atlas told him Santa Rosa had 157 residents in 1980, but surrounding towns were larger, and they might be forced to drive the twenty, thirty miles each time they broke a bone or came down with a virus. Many larger towns got by without a full-time doctor of their own, but John would keep his fingers crossed for Santa Rosa, hoping that it might be the exception to the rule.