About three o’clock in the afternoon, when the big chap was down to his last stack, luck turned. He rode it hard. He bet the limit straight up and won time and again. The chips were scattered all out in a big pile. They changed croupiers half a dozen times. He just kept on winning and winning and winning.
Then when he must have had five thousand dollars in front of him, the chap with the watery eyes walked up and tapped him on the forehead.
The big man had just won a bet. His face was flushed with liquor and success. He turned impatient eyes as he scooped in the chips, and then froze into startled inactivity. His jaw sagged until I could see his pink gullet. The eyes bulged until the red rim seemed an inch wide.
“Pete Lucas!” he said, and his voice field nothing of welcome.
Lucas laughed, and the laugh was harsh.
“You’re not having to go out in the desert to-night, eh, Sam Slade?”
“Out in the desert — how — what do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.”
Slade scooped his chips toward the croupier.
“Quitting,” he said.
“Afraid you might lose some of ’em back?” the croupier sneered.
Slade’s eyes snapped cold and hard.
“You heard me,” he said.
I didn’t like the expression of his eyes. I’ve seen killers before, from outlaw horses to rattlesnakes. He had the look of a killer. The croupier saw it too, and he didn’t say anything. He rang a bell, and the money came in.
Then, when he had the money all laid out, Slade did a funny thing. He divided it into two equal piles, and Pete Lucas took one of the piles. Somehow or other, though, it was just what I’d been expecting.
Then they walked into a restaurant, the San Diego Bar and Café.
That suited me. I wanted eats, and they make ’em good at the San Diego. Chinese cooks and waiters, anything you want: venison, quail, doves, lobster, oysters. I sat down where I could see them when they went out. No use to try and see ’em while they ate. The booths had curtains up the side, and were built for privacy.
I had some broiled baby lobster, some quail on toast and a bottle of Tipo wine that dated back ten years — you can get it if you know the ropes.
Low voices came from the booth where the two men ate. Once I heard a sharp exclamation, and a chair scraped back. Then a voice talked low and fast, and I heard the chair being pulled back to the table. After that there was more talking.
Then the Chinese waiter disappeared, and a pair of jet-black eyes bored into mine over the top of a serving tray.
“Want some dessert?”
It was a girl. I’d place her at around twenty-three or — four. She knew her way about, and she’d lived. There was a snap to the jaw that was all business. Her eyes were like a couple of ripe olives. The complexion was clear and dark. The hair was a piled mass of midnight clouds that framed her face.
“Well?” she wanted to know.
I shook my head. “Nothing more.”
She dropped the curtain and went toward the other booth. I looked at her as she bent over, picking dishes off the table. As she reached for a dish across the table, there was the flash of a silk-stockinged leg as she kicked it out behind her to keep her balance, and I caught a glimpse of the heel.
It had a chip gouged out.
There it was, a little drama of life taking place right before my eyes, and yet I couldn’t get it pieced together.
I paid my check and sipped my wine until the glass was empty. Then I went out into the streets of the desert town. There was the usual crowd of tourists, and there was something else — low-hung black clouds, that scraped the tops of the mountains and sent black streamers trailing toward the ground.
Rain in the desert. It happens, but mighty infrequently.
The rain started within fifteen minutes, and the silt soil turned to a slick mud on top of a hard foundation that was like grease smeared on cement. People tried to walk across the street and their feet flew out from under. Automobiles skidded and slid into a devil’s dance that swept ’em against curbs with crushed wheels or crashed ’em into each other.
The rain came down in swift torrents for half an hour, and then there was a rift in the clouds, a patch of blue sky, and the sun was shining.
People who knew the desert stood on the sidewalks to see the cloud effects. The tourists lapped up the booze and plunged into the gambling games. The desert showed clear and sparkling, the clouds melted as by magic, and the sun’s rays beat down.
Then, right in the middle of my speculation as to what I was going to do next, there was the scream of a woman. It was a knife-like scream, thin and drawn with terror; and then the sound of a shot crashed out.
A Chinaman shrilled a staccato sentence in Cantonese, and scuttled out of the San Diego bar like a frightened quail scurrying for cover. Another Chinese followed on his heels. A tipsy American bellowed for the police. A bartender in a white apron came out and looked up and down the street. A khaki-clad little brown man with a heavy revolver swinging from his hip sprinted for the door, slipped on the wet mud that had been tracked to the pavement, skidded into the arms of the bartender. The bartender took him in.
I managed to be well in the lead of the crowd of gawkers that pushed in.
The girl with the black eyes was on the floor. There was a little pearl-handled gun near her right hand. And there was a red streak along her forehead. The eyes were turned way up into her head, and were fluttering nervously.
She looked as though she’d been creased by a bullet, and then slammed to the floor with a good punch. I made for the booth where Lucas and Slade had been eating.
It was empty. There was a litter of dishes and some wine bottles, and a couple of glasses still half filled with whisky. The two men had gone.
The Chinese began to filter back from shelter. They were furtive-eyed, utterly dazed. They shook their heads with lots of “no savvy’s” until an interpreter came up.
Then there was a lot of jabbering in Cantonese, and the interpreter told the story. It was painfully simple. The Chinese waiter had been approached by the girl, who asked him to take five dollars and let her wait on the tables for half an hour. He had done so. There had been a scream, a blow and a shot, and there was the girl. That was all he knew. He hadn’t seen any one who had been eating. The girl was waiting on them.
That’s the way with the Chinese. When they want to disguise the truth they always hang together and get a yarn that’s got just enough of truth in it to make a good foundation for whatever falsehoods they want to add.
The Mexican police took charge, the girl was taken out on a stretcher and things went on the same as ever.
I poked around the gambling halls trying to find a trace of the two men. Nothing doing. I made inquiries about the girl. They’d taken her across the line over into El Centro. She was seriously hurt with a concussion and possible fracture. She was unconscious. The doctor’s orders were against any visitors when she recovered consciousness.
The two men had disappeared as utterly as though they had been wiped out.
The desert settled back to its whispers, to the monotony of cloudless skies and sun-swept days. The last I heard of the girl she was conscious, expected to recover, but not saying anything as to how it all happened.
And there was another funny development. The night of the shooting a Mexican had sold a team of horses and a light cart to two men. They had driven off. Three days later the team had been discovered northcast of Holtville. The horses had been running. There was blood on the dashboard.
Apparently the horses had been wandering on their own for nearly two days. They’d struck some alfalfa and were feeding when discovered. But they were encrusted with dried sweat and had been traveling without water.