Afterward he immediately called another broker in Los Angeles and repeated the substance of the conversation; he repeated the short-sell order with half a dozen brokers across the country before he rang off and turned toward the front of the house, walking briskly on crepe-soled shoes, and saw Orozco looming darkly in the corridor. The fat man, vigilant and silent, held his troubled glance until Oakley felt uncomfortable enough to look away. When he came up, Orozco said mildly, “I went to call my boys to get working on the wiretap call-trace but you were on the line.” There was no hint of guile on Orozco’s dark bland cheeks. But Oakley knew he had heard the whole thing.
“Just keep it to yourself, Diego. It’ll be worth your while.”
“I’m sure it will,” Orozco murmured, and turned heavily back into the office. Oakley had to steel himself against the sound coming out of the office—Earle Conniston’s voice.
C H A P T E R Nine
Terry Conniston sat like a taut-wound watch spring in the shade of the sagging porch overhang. Near the perilous breaking-edge, she felt as if at any moment she might start screaming and not be able to stop; and so she kept herself rigidly under control, all her movements slow and cautious, all her decisions ponderous. Her slender fingers clenched and opened at regular intervals; she watched a domed anthill which squatted naked like a cancerous boil on the face of the ground below the porch. The brutal little monsters had denuded the surrounding earth of everything but rocks and sand.
Overhead little gray birds flitted soundlessly from rooftop to rooftop and the indifferent sun burned down like brass; the desert heat was thick and close. The young sandy-haired one called Mitch sat against the wall at the far corner of the porch, making a point of not watching her. His face was not cruel like the others’; he seemed willing to respect her desire to be left alone. At first she had been surprised by the casual way they had of keeping desultory watch on her but not confining her at all. Only gradually had it dawned on her that since she didn’t have keys to either car her only means of escape would be afoot across the desert, and they would be able to see her on the flats anywhere within a mile of the ghost town. It was a far more effective prison than bars.
About noon by the sun, with a look compounded of the irascible and the hangdog, Mitch uncoiled his length and went inside, leaving her alone. She didn’t stir. In a little while he returned with an army-style mess kit of cold food out of cans, handed it to her without a word and went back to his post.
Floyd, the dark evil one, came out and stood on the porch and stretched like a cat. When he glanced at her she felt mesmerized by his cold eyes. Floyd had a driving, brutal, elemental thrust of granite personality. His magnetism, in spite of it, was uncanny—repellent and fascinating at once: the charismatic impact of raw unshielded masculinity, erotic and frightening.
The pulse throbbed at Terry’s throat. She addressed herself to her meal, keenly aware that Floyd was watching her with cynical vicious amusement.
The girl, Billie Jean, appeared behind Floyd, filling the caved-in doorway with her body, all meaty thighs and bovine lactic breasts which bobbed and surged with her movements. She studied Floyd’s back for a while before she stepped out and passed Floyd with a slow flirt of the shoulder, grinning. Floyd casually reached out and rubbed her breast. “You’re a fire hazard, Billie Jean.” It made her laugh.
“How about a jab in the fun hole, Floyd?”
“Later—later.”
Disappointed, Billie Jean moved away, dropping off the porch into the sunshine and wandering aimlessly up the street. Floyd said, “Stay close.”
“I ain’t going nowhere,” she said petulantly.
“If you hear an airplane or a car duck inside a building and stay out of sight.”
“I know,” she pouted, and ambled away.
Floyd turned toward Mitch and spoke as if Terry weren’t there: “I’m going to make a phone call, arrange for the drop. Keep things under control.”
“What if I can’t?”
“That’s up to you,” Floyd said. “If you fall you break, Mitch. Law of gravity.” His unrevealing eyes touched Terry briefly; his mouth smiled frighteningly and then, according to his bewildering intricacy of thought, it was time to go: he jumped catlike from the porch and trotted across the street into the barn. Shortly he came out, driving the dusty Oldsmobile, and put it into the central powder of the street, rumbling away.
In the stretching quiet that followed, an overwhelming anxiety slowly poisoned what was left of Terry’s willed patience. Unable to remain still any longer she got up. Her knees felt weak. She stepped hesitantly toward the edge of the porch, waiting to see how Mitch would respond. He didn’t get up; only his head turned to indicate his interest in her movements. She stepped down into the sunshine and walked very slowly along the street.
She had gone twenty or thirty paces when Mitch caught up with her. He didn’t touch her; he fell into step beside her and said, “I hope you don’t mind if I walk along with you.”
A sharp report rose to her lips but died stillborn. When she looked at him, his eyes were kind. She thought, I need any friends I can get. Yet in the back of her mind she couldn’t help thinking of stories she had heard about policemen and confidence men and spies—evil men working in teams, one partner softening you up with friendliness while the other stood ready to pounce. She couldn’t see what they stood to gain by that kind of tactic in her case but just the same she couldn’t begin to trust Mitch. He was, after all, one of them.
She searched his face with an odd intensity. “You hate him, don’t you?”
“He makes it easy.” Neither of them mentioned Floyd’s name; it wasn’t necessary. Mitch said, “For seven cents he’d hang his own mother on a meathook.”
“Then why are you here?”
“To keep you alive.” He laughed dispiritedly. “This wasn’t my idea, this kidnaping thing. I want you to know that. I tried to stop them from doing it. Well, maybe I didn’t try all that hard, but I didn’t want them to. I wanted to get away. I didn’t want anything to do with it.”
The words tumbled out of him. She said afterward, “I’d like to believe you but you’re here. You haven’t run away. Nothing’s stopping you.”
“You are,” he said. “If I bug out who’s left to keep Theodore away from you?”
She held herself rigidly aloof from him. “You don’t know how much I want to believe you. But—”
She didn’t finish it, and Mitch said dryly, “Yeah.” They went on, twenty yards in silence. “Well,” Mitch said awkwardly, and trailed off again. Then suddenly he stopped and frowned at her. “You worry me. You’re not behaving according to Freud.”
“Having hysterics, you mean? I’m on the verge of it, believe me.” She stepped closer to him and glanced back toward the mercantile. No one was in sight. “He terrifies me, honest to God. The weight of his eyes can buckle you—that horrible cold look of his. Is there anything we can do?”