I drove under the freeway and got back on, going in the opposite direction from my previous heading. We went east three quarters of a mile and got off to head north. I kept an eye on the mirror but we had no company. I turned into Las Palmas at nine forty-five and found the boarded-up hideout without too much trouble—a feat accomplished only because I’d spent most of my thirty years in this town and knew the back streets by heart.
We were going slowly enough so that Joanne could speak without fighting the wind. She said, “That was very neat.”
“Thank you, ma’am. For my next number I whistle and the Jeep gets up on its hind legs and dances in time to the music.”
“Are you as collected as you’re trying to make me think you are, Simon?”
“No,” I said shortly, and turned into the gap in the high oleander hedge.
The place was dark and silent, which meant nothing. When I turned the engine and lights off, I sat motionless long enough for him to get a good look at us from whatever crack he was using in the boarded-up windows. Then I got down and walked to the door, avoiding the broken glass easily by moonlight. The door was open, sagging. I waited outside and said, “Mike? It’s Simon. Joanne’s with me. Okay to come in?”
No answer; no sound at all. I went inside. It was black in there, I stayed near the door and lifted my voice—possibly he was asleep. “Mike!”
Finally I went back to the Jeep and got the flashlight from its clamp under the seat, told Joanne to wait, and went inside with the light. He wasn’t in the front room. I made my way through the rest of the place, picking a path carefully over piles of fallen ceiling plaster. After fifteen minutes I was satisfied he wasn’t there. It left me in a sour mood; I didn’t want to waste half the night tracking him down. I went back into the main room and flashed the light around once more, ready to leave; the flashlight beam picked up something out of place on the seat of the old couch and I went to have a look.
It was a piece of paper torn off the corner of a newspaper. On the white margin was written in pencil, in a crabbed hand, C—I’m going to your place. Meet you there. Mike.
I took the note outside, got into the Jeep and showed it to Joanne. She said, “I suppose ‘C’ is you?”
“I can’t think of anybody else it’s likely to be. But it raises a question or two. Why my place? And where could he have got transportation from here to there? He left his car up in the foothills.”
She said, “Something may have frightened him. That’s his handwriting, I guess, but it’s much shakier than I remember it.” She stirred, hugging herself; nights cool down fast in the desert. “Do you suppose he’s remembered something important?”
“We’ll find out,” I replied, and pushed the starter. Might as well head home, anyway, I thought; I needed a quiet place to think and if Madonna thought we were on the run after ditching Behrenman, my house was the last place he’d look for us.
I kept a careful eye out for surveillance on the way but spotted none. We took back streets and roads across town—the Jeep was too conspicuous. It took forty minutes to get to my dirt road, and when we passed Nancy Lansford’s lonely outpost I turned off the headlights and drove the rest of the way by moon and stars. It was no great feat, with the silver desert glowing with pale reflection.
From a mile away I could see there were no lights on at my place, and I applauded Mike for having that much sense. In some ways it doesn’t pay to have a home which is also a goddamn beacon. The view of the city from the house is marvelous; the view of the house from the city, of course, is equally distinct.
There was no car in the yard. “He must have hitched a ride. Who with, I wonder?”
We dismounted from the Jeep and I called out, “Mike?”
There was no reply. Joanne looked at me. I said in a murmur, “Stay put,” and went forward, pulling the Beretta out of my hip pocket, not liking the distant sensation that had begun to crawl through me—a feeling like ice across the back of my neck. I headed for the nearest corner of the house, got into the shadows where moonlight didn’t reach and sidled along the wall toward the door.
The screen was shut but I heard the buzz of flies heavy in a swarm, and as I got closer I saw them, hanging angrily in a knot above a thick mound on the doorstep. I took in my breath sharply and bent down to look.
The body lay drawn up, fetal. The side of his head, above the ear and just behind the temple, was a sickening, jellied crater, faintly glistening in the starlight. Death had sucked all expression off his boyish face. The sour odor was subtle but impossible to disregard, any more than the lurching of sick spasms in my belly could be ignored. One sock, bunched, had fallen down around his ankle; the trouser leg was crushed up to the knee and the hairy leg was a spiderweb of half-scabbed blood. His left hand, visible, was twisted awkwardly, with the thumb, and index finger bent back beyond the natural possibilities.
I rolled back his eyelid but there was no need. There wasn’t any question of his death. He had been tortured, systematically bludgeoned and lacerated. Automatically my stricken mind catalogued the evidence and calculated the method: brass knuckles, a knife and something heavy enough to cave in his head. The blood on the rest of him was ample indication that the other injuries had been sustained before the final massive blow which had, mercifully by then, killed him.
The first I was aware of Joanne’s nearness was when I heard her begin to choke. I straightened, wheeled and got an arm around her, pushing her back away from it.
She forced enough control of her voice to say, “It’s Mike, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“He’s dead.”
“Yes.”
“Oh, my God, Simon.” I heard a faint jangling and after a moment recognized it—the ring of the telephone in the house. It rang a second time, and stopped. My head snapped up; I stepped out into the yard and threw my glance downhill, and spotted it—the hill-crest overglow of headlights, coming up, and mingled in the glow the rhythmic flash of red and blue. Police car, with the rooftop dome light flashing.
Joanne had one arm outstretched against the wall of the house, bracing herself, looking faint. I put sympathy aside and snapped at her: “We’ve got five minutes, maybe less. You’re going to have to act a part. Come on, snap out of it—we’ve got a lot to do and no time.”
She stirred and blinked. “Yes. All right. What do you want me to do?”
I told her, in a rush of words; and we did it.
Chapter Eight
The city patrol car, air-conditioned and overstuffed, slewed into the yard. The cop drove with more ferocity than skill; he sent a spout of dust forward when he stopped. I waited till then before I turned on lights and stepped out, holding the screen open for Joanne.
The cop sat in the car, switched on the spotlight and swung its lancing blade of light across the hilltop until it zeroed in on the two of us, blinding us. I shaded my eyes with one hand. After a moment I heard the car door open. The spotlight switched off and the man got out: Sergeant Joe Cutter. I had scars to remember him by.
Cutter was a wide brute, shaped like a fire plug. Hairy and heavy—maybe 225 swarthy pounds on a five-foot-ten frame, fierce and thickly muscular. His jaw was blunt, flesh thick around the lips and nose, eyes set back deep in crude massive bones. Cutter, musky and ugly as a rhino, radiated a constant force of danger like heat.
Speaking, he revealed a chrome-hued tooth. “All right, Sy. Where is it?”