It was still falling. The cliff was not quite perpendicular; the car went down end-over-end, each somersault slow and ponderous. It was hardly recognizable as an automobile—squashed, foreshortened, both ends pleated like an accordion’s bellows.
Four hundred feet below, it pitched out over a rock outcrop, hung suspended in the air, and crashed down like a pancake on a reverse-turn of the highway. From where I stood it didn’t seem to bounce at all. It hit the pavement flat, on all four wheels, with a sound I never forgot—deafening, but more crunch than crash. Like the amplified crump of a distant field mortar.
Pieces of sharded glass winked in the sunlight down the length of the car’s vertical path. One door lay intact, hardly dented, forty feet below me. One wheel, with part of an axle, teetered on the lip of a rock a few yards below that.
I retreated from the edge and braced both hands on a flat fender of the Jeep, taking deep breaths. After a while I opened my eyes and climbed numbly into the seat, got the Jeep moving and crawled downhill at a feeble pace. My arms shook violently. My mouth was sticky with dry fright.
The unrecognizable remains of the green car were splashed across the width of the road, more or less in one piece fused together by impact. The thing was upright but the final blow had driven the remaining wheels and underparts up into the body; it was squashed almost flat, not more than three feet high at any point.
It was a useless gesture, but I tried to pry into the wreckage to find him. All I could find was a hand, severed, the fingers locked around a mangled pistol. I went to the side of the road and vomited.
The wreck blocked the road. I would have to move it. I unwound a length of cable from the winch-drum on the front bumper of the Jeep, found a corner of the wreckage on which to set the hook, went back to the Jeep, set the brakes and worked winch levers.
It was no good. The wreck had smashed completely into the pavement. The only way to move it would be to get above it with a wrecker and lift it out.
I caught myself uttering a blank monotone of curses. I clamped my mouth shut, rewound the winch cable, and turned around to drive back up to the top. There was another highway that would take me around, past Baragray’s ranch and down another cliff road thirty miles to the north. It would cost me three hours.
I phoned the Highway Patrol from a lonely filling station to report the wreck, giving them a fake name, and went on. Driving through the mountains, threading menacing dark stands of pine, I put my mind on Ed Behrenman, who had not tailed me up to Baragray’s from the city but who had known where to ambush me, and by the time I started down the steep canyon highway I knew where to look for Aiello’s killer and where to start looking for the $3 million.
Only it wasn’t my day for speed. Halfway down the canyon a tire went flat.
I turned the lurching Jeep into a graveled cliffside overlook and got out, cursing loudly now, to change the tire. It was easy to see what had caused the flat—somewhere in the tangle with Behrenman’s car the tire had been raked by steel, the sidewall cut almost through.
Changing the tire was a half hour’s work. I went around the Jeep to inspect the other tires but found nothing to alarm me; and went on my way, uneasiness turning to a sour belly-taste of fear as the sun moved steadily toward the mountains across the desert. There were a lot of places to search. I knew who had the money, but not where.
It was well after five when I left the freeway and crossed town on the Strip. I had seen the address some time ago and hadn’t forgotten it. Blue, lime, red and pink neon winked and flashed along the Strip. Girls and uniformed men in cars went recklessly fast, squealing into broad parking lots in front of the places where they could spend or otherwise separate themselves from their money. I went by the Moulin Rouge without slacking, thinking momentarily of Mike Farrell—I thought I had that figured out, too, but it would take checking and I didn’t have time for that.
Near six o’clock, after fighting the outbound traffic rush and two miles of unsynchronized traffic lights, I turned up a quiet street and drove slowly, seeking house numbers. Going past one house I saw a television screen, blue through the window, flickering as an airplane went overhead, an old woman sitting there, bending toward the set, trying to hear. The house I wanted was next door. I stopped the Jeep and put my hand in my hip pocket, on the Beretta.
There was wrought-iron furniture on the front lawn. I went up a curved pavement to the door and tried the knob without knocking. It was locked. I pushed the doorbell and heard chimes inside. After a minute without response I backed up and walked around the side of the house into the gravel driveway. There was a two-car garage. I looked into it through a side window. There was one car inside, a Jaguar coupe with a slinky look of speed. I went back to the side of the house and looked in. The view through the kitchen showed me part of the living room beyond, and I saw a woman walking toward the front door, not steadily, belting a bathrobe around herself and brushing back uncombed hair.
I went back around to the front and was there when she finally opened the door; evidently she had stopped to put away her hairbrush before answering the chimes. Her mouth was sucked in with a tight look of disapproval. She barred the door with her body, a feline redhead with an amoral half-drunk look. What had been a pretty face ten years ago had hardened.
She swept me up and down with a practiced look, and stepped back. “Come in.” She hadn’t asked me who I was or what I wanted—just, “Come in.”
I came in and pushed the door shut, looking around past her. The place was decorated in Miami Modern, expensive but hideous. Had I been in any condition to do so, I might have reflected at some length on the fact that the sole original meaning of the word “luxury,” in Elizabethan times, was “lust.” The house, with its careless, tasteless opulence, and the woman before me would have told me all I ever needed to know about the master of the place, even if I had never met him.
I said, “I’m looking for your husband. I assume he’s your husband.”
“Won’t I do?” She ran her tongue along her lips. “I’m Sylvia.” Heavy-breasted, she twisted her ungirdled hips, wanting sensation. She sat on a Naugahyde couch and plucked a cigarette from a case on the coffee table. She eyed me as if I were a side of beef and said, “Mix me a drink and we’ll talk about my husband. Mix yourself one while you’re at it.”
“Where is he?”
Her shoulders stirred. Her breasts handled the bathrobe seductively. “You’re a lovely man.”
“Where is he?”
“Who knows? There was a phone call. An emergency case, he said. He’s got my car, his is broken down. He’ll probably be gone most of the night, as usual. I don’t think I even want to be bothered to know what her name is. You don’t know, do you? Her name?”
“No,” I said, biting it off. As I looked around the room it occurred to me he might have the loot hidden right here in the house. A good place to start looking—but she, Sylvia, could make it difficult. I said, “I’ll mix drinks, but let me use your bathroom first.”
“Sure.” She smiled and pointed vaguely.
In the bathroom medicine cabinet, as I’d suspected, there was an assortment of medicines. I found the one I sought, dumped six capsules into my palm, flushed the toilet and went back to the living room with the capsules in my closed hand. “Where’s the bar?”
“I’ve got an open bottle in the kitchen. Scotch—I hope it suits you because my husband keeps the bar locked when he’s not home.” She tittered. “Make mine straight, one ice cube.”
As I crossed to the kitchen I saw she had sat back on the couch and adjusted the bathrobe. She had nothing underneath but skin. The lapels were parted, displaying a wealth of pale, soft breast. A lot of men I knew chose their wives with less care than their barbers. In the kitchen I made drinks and emptied the contents of the capsules into hers. I stirred it up and took the drinks into the living room, gave hers to her and was about to retreat to a chair when she patted the couch beside her. “Sit here by me. What’s your name?”