But Danny was already up. The phone from his bedroom rang peremptorily, and kept on ringing until Joel got to it. It was very unlike Danny to get up before seven- thirty; what was stranger, he was apparently dressed and ready to go. "Note, Joel, you know what I mean 'now'? So get your clothes on—"
"Oh, I'm ready, Danny. But have you been listening to the radio? A lot of roads are closed. " "So we'll take the ones that're open!" What Joel had not been able to appreciate from the window was the wind. It was blowing hard; between his door and the garage he was soaked, in spite of poncho and boots. The driving was going to be even worse than he had thought. So, no matter how much of a hurry Danny was in, Joel took time to make sure he was ready for it. The tires were all at pressure. The gas gauge said three- quarters full. When he opened the trunk the jack, the emergency flashlight, the flares, and the spare tire were all in good shape. He thought for a moment, and then shuffled around in the back of the garage where he kept things that he could see no immediate use for, but were too good to throw out. One of Danny's brief loves had briefly persuaded him to keep a kitten. The animal had lasted less than a week, but there was a sack of Kitty Litter, nearly full, on top of a stack of For Sale signs. Joel lugged it to the trunk. Sometimes you could put that stuff under a wheel when there was thin, slippery mud and it would get you out.
All this delayed him, and by the time Joel got to the front of the house Danny Deere was hopping from one foot to the other in anger. "What the fuck's keeping you, goddam it?" he yelled through the rain. He was wearing the poncho and rain hat again, but not the boots; and he was carrying his big dispatch case with the combination lock. Joel did not know what had happened between Danny and Buster Boyma; Danny hadn't said, and Joel hadn't asked. It wasn't good, that was obvious. Danny had been explosively silent all the way home. This, was not a good morning to cross him.
"You never go downtown this early," Joel apologized, starting the car down the driveway.
"Today I do! Move it!"
Joel nodded without speaking, keeping his attention on the washboarded road. The driving was as bad as he had thought it would be, but Danny didn't comment. Didn't say anything when they passed the Mexicans, all staring out at them from the shelter of their gatehouse porch; didn't even speak when they came to the condominium. Danny's attention was all inside the car. He seemed to have trouble knowing what to do with the dispatch case. First he kept it on his lap. Then he put it behind him. Then he put it on the seat and put his poncho over it, and finally he put it on the floor and leaned forward so that he was half sheltering it with his body. Joel recognized the pattern. It was the money syndrome. Every time Danny carried large amounts of cash with him he was antsy . . . but never, in all the years, as antsy as this.
According to the radio there had been seven inches of rain in the past four days, and the stagnating storm that was drenching the freeway now might dump another six inches. Might dump more. Along the sides of the freeways there were now little streams.
Since there was no more room for water between the particles of sand and grit and clay, every drop that fell from the sky rolled down the slopes. There was a trickle down every bank along the freeways, a stream flowing down each canyon. On the steep declines the rushing water picked at the dirt and carried it along. Because the gravel multiplied the force of the running water, the Los Angeles Flood Control authorities had stretched chain- wire catchment fences along every likely spillway. They stopped the solids and let the water harmlessly through.
But seven inches of rain was close to their design limits. Every catch-fence was now full. Rubble brought the levels behind the fences up to the fence tops. If new floods came, the water would spill over. Each catchment fence would become a six-foot cascade, and as the water struck the base of the fence it would erode the supports, and the fence would go down, and all the tons of uncompacted aggregate, mud and wood, rocks and gravel, would batter down toward the next.
It hadn't happened yet, but Joel de Lawrence's face was pinched as he watched the banks and roadways. There weren't many cars yet; that was good. There might not be very many at all this Monday morning, even after a holiday weekend, because anyone with any sense would stay home if he could. Some slopes looked safe enough—the old cemetery near the on-ramp of the freeway was heavily grassed, because no one had mowed it in years; that was good. Some were already a jelly of mud, like the landscaping around the condo construction. And there were worrisome features he had never paid attention to before, the great rock that as long as he could remember had been embedded in a hillside a mile from Danny's home. Only now it was no longer exactly embedded, because the water had carved much of the dirt away from its base. As they inched past, Joel de Lawrence could see an emergency crew toiling up the hillside toward it.
Even worse, the whole Southland was beginning to stink. Joel could smell someone's ruptured drains even with the windows closed, and according to the radio there was worse. Down in Orange County nine million gallons of raw sewage were pouring out of San Juan Creek every day. Another quarter of a million gallons sluiced through Loma Alta Creek to the sea, after a mud slide had ripped a hundred-foot gap in a main. When Joel tried to talk to his boss about all of this the little man ripped his head off, so he concentrated on his driving and his thoughts.
In a way, it was very exciting—almost even pleasurable.
It gave a special focus to Joel's thinking. The inside thinking. The part that was as private as his dreams. He had trained himself to drive and respond to Danny with the outer layers of his mind, while inside he was busy with the skills he had tried to keep alive within himself for twenty years. Camera angles, special effects, casting, lights: not of films that he was going to produce, because he did not really believe he was ever going to produce any. But the films that he might produce, if the impossible occurred; even the films that he might have produced a quarter of a century past, back in the days before the studios had all gone into the hotel business and Joel de Lawrence had had a steady job. He could have done more! He could have gone just a little farther! He could have been the one to innovate that special saturating Francis Ford Coppola sound, or that Kubrick wash of color; he could have— He could have done many things, but he did not. He had shot pages of script and gone home at five o'clock, and it was no wonder he had wound up no better than this.
Yet—one picture could put it all back for him. And pictures were everywhere. What a film this storm would make! Not expensive, either; a simple story, with all this for background. Maybe a cop story? Maybe a bank robbery? The crooks getting away with the money, but somehow trapped in the mud—that could be a great car chase, the fleeing felons and the L.A.P.D. black and whites struggling after each other at fifteen miles an hour, because the roads were so bad? He didn't need much. A script. A couple of bankable actors. A camera crew; not much else, because if he had a crew right now he could get all the background footage he could use, and there was the 61m! It was all so simple.
It was also fantasy. Twenty years of fantasies had taught Joel de Lawrence to know them. It could happen; but it wouldn't, and the reality of his life was this limousine, and this little man yammering at him from the back seat, and this miserable, blowing, soaking rain. When they finally got onto Sunset Boulevard it had taken them an hour to go a twenty-five-minute drive, and it took them another half hour on the Strip itself. Traffic barely crawled along, as half the motorists paused at every southbound intersection, peered worriedly at the steep inclines leading down toward Santa Monica and Wilshire, and then drove along to seek a gentler slope. In spite of the early start, it was past nine when Joel finally let Danny Deere out at the back entrance of his building, and went to park the car.