I'd gassed up the car while Bobbie was changing into a more durable costume; and now I had this lanky, longhaired, female-hippie-type beside me, complete with sarape, floppy hat, and a hate for the pigs. You had to hand it to her. Any part she played, she threw herself into heart and soul; but it would be nice if I could ask the real Roberta to stand up and take a bow. I remembered Charlie's warning. Well, I hadn't really planned to turn my back on anybody tonight, anyway…
"You'd better stop, darling." Bobbie sat up and pushed back her hat. Her voice was calm. "It's the Mexican immigration guy. Let me handle him."
I'd already seen a man in a khaki uniform emerging from a roadside shack to flag us down. "What's he doing down here?" I asked, bringing the station wagon to a halt.
"Oh, Ensenada's treated as a border town, no red tape, but if you want to continue down Baja you're supposed to have a tourist permit and stuff." She patted her pockets. "Hell, I left my room key at the desk. Have you got yours?"
"Well, yes," I said, "but-"
"Never mind. Give it to me."
She took the key and cranked down the window. The immigration inspector, or whatever he was, came up to greet us politely. Bobbie broke into fluent, atrocious Spanish, waving the key and explaining, as far as I could follow her, that we were American tourists staying in Ensenada and just wanted to take a little moonlight drive down the beautiful peninsula since it was such a lovely night. The seсor could understand how it was. Si, we'd be coming back shortly. An hour? Well, that was hard to say. It was such a lovely night. It might be just a little longer than an hour…
"You've got to appeal to their romantic natures," she said as we drove away with official permission. She tossed the key into my lap. "Well, actually they're not very strict. As long as they know you've got a room in Ensenada and are planning to come back soon, they'll generally let you through. Obviously Tillery and his bunch got through-at least I assume they're ahead of us, don't you? Of course, they may have thought to get themselves fixed up with the right papers, like you should have."
I said, "Hell, my dope-chasing associate could have got me honorary Mexican citizenship, judging by the way she talked, but nobody told me I was going to have to pass any check points. Thanks. Are there any other surprises lurking along this highway?"
"Not that I know of," she said. "Of course, I've been down only a little beyond the end of the pavement, some ninety miles south, but this bay we're going to isn't nearly that far. As a matter of fact, I think you'd better plan on slowing down as soon as we get through that black-looking range of hills ahead. There seem to be all kinds of lousy little goat-paths leading off into the boondocks, and we don't want to miss ours, do we?"
Actually, we had no trouble finding it. There was even a weathered sign, at just about the right mileage from Ensenada, reading Bahia San Agustin 11 km. As I'd expected, it wasn't much of a road, just a pair of ruts across the desert that was now vaguely illuminated by half a moon. I turned off the highway, stopped the big Ford, and got out to check the ruts by the glare of the headlights. After studying the tracks in the dust for several minutes, I got into the car once more, frowning thoughtfully.
"Well, can you track the varmints, Davy Crockett?" Bobbie asked. "Did the critters take this road, Dan'! Boone?"
"I think so," I said. "At least, a big car with new tires came through not very long ago. But there's been some other traffic before it. A truck of some kind-a husky, six-wheeled job, if I read the sign correctly-and a jeep."
"A jeep? That man called Willy was driving a jeep last night, wasn't he? Frank Warfel's driver and general handyman? I never met him while I was with Frankie, but I heard Jake telling Tillery about him."
I said, "Well, I don't know exactly whose driver and general handyman he is-when last heard from, he seemed to be working for Beverly Blame-but that's our Willy, all right. Of course, jeeps aren't exactly scarce in this country, and a lot of them come with identical tires, but the tracks do look familiar. Maybe Warfel's putting into this San Agustin place simply to collect Willy, but it would seem even simpler if Willy just met him at Bernardo where he's got to land anyway. And who wants a big truck down by the shore tonight, and what's it carrying? Is Frankie's boat picking up another shipment we don't know about? If so, it can't very well be heroin. The world's yearly production would hardly take up that much room or be that heavy-hell, one kilo is a lot of H, I'm told, worth over a quarter million bucks; and that's only two and two tenths pounds."
Bobbie said, "Of course, it could just be coincidence. It could just be a Mexican rancher hauling feed to his cattle, or something."
"It could be, except that I don't see any cattle around or any ranches either, and there wasn't any sign of habitation in that aerial shot. Let me see the thing again."
She handed me the envelope, and I switched on the light once more and studied the photograph. It takes a little adjustment for a man brought up on topographical maps, as I was, to make sense of an aerial photo, but once you get used to the idea you can get a much better notion of the terrain from a print like that.
I said, "We'll be approaching from the northeast, but the road actually passes well inland and hooks back around to the south side of the bay where the land is fairly flat. On that side it looks like there are just some dunes running out into a long sandspit that more or less shelters the anchorage. But there seem to be some steep bluffs or rocky cliffs on the north side, terminating in a rocky headland and some reefs. If I were Tillery, I'd put myself somewhere on that northern cliff, where I could cover the whole beach. The only catch is, if I were Warfel, I'd put a couple of sentries up there first thing, just to keep guys like Tillery honest. Well, we'll see. Cross your fingers; here we go."
It was just as rough as I'd expected from my previous experiences with Mexican back-country roads, but the stiffly sprung station wagon took it better than I'd expected and only scraped bottom occasionally. My big concern was the people ahead who weren't supposed to know that there were people behind them.
I ran without lights as much as possible, a precaution that slowed us down considerably and annoyed Bobbie terribly. She'd started worrying that we'd be too late, and of course it was a possibility, but I was gambling that Warfel would have stayed well off shore, out of sight, as long as there was any light at all. The Fleetwind was no speedboat; it would take him some time to bring it in from beyond the horizon. Anyway, late or early, there was only one way for one man to handle three or more, and it didn't involve barging around carelessly with headlights glaring.
My precautions paid off after about five miles. Creeping over the top of a ridge in blackout status, we saw headlights in the basin below. They weren't going anywhere; and dark figures were moving around the dim shape of the stalled car that, in the weak moonlight, had something of the look of a stranded whale.
I said, "Well, there they are. I figured, if their transportation was an ordinary sedan, they'd stick it sooner or later. You can practically Count on it. City folks just never do seem to master this kind of driving." I studied the dim, distant scene. "My God, how many of them are there, anyway?"
"I count five," Bobbie said.