Forever Girl
The Conclusion of the Two Part Series

by Chris O'Grady

Eight

Outside, I picked my way carefully across the shack's littered front yard, making a racket by kicking all the tin cans in reach of my feet. In the utter darkness, I swung back some sort of gate and stepped into the alley where I had first run into Fats and Jeff at the far end.

Now I turned the other way, toward Florian's, wondering what all the excitement had been about, when the sirens went howling past, out on the highway. I headed that way.

Feeling tired, I didn't hurry. Maybe my day was done, and I could soon find a cab, get home, and grab some shuteye.

At the end of the alley, thinking of Roberta and her white, white thighs, I turned up toward the highway along the dirt driveway skirting the northern end of the row of brick stores.

Out on the highway, there was little traffic in either direction, but there was quite a crowd up near Florian's entrance drive. I was too far away to be able to see much, but I stood awhile, waiting for a cab. None passed, so I finally gave up waiting for one, and walked toward the crowd.

I might as well see what was happening, too.

For the first time, I saw some of the tenants of El Rancho Motel. Several pairs of them were gathered in front of the little corner office, talking to the manager and gaping up the road at the action in front of Florian's. From where they stood, there wasn't much to see, except the crowd and the cars, and the nearest roof-corner of the main casino's top deck, just this side of the towering hotel beyond it. The rest was concealed by the stretch of brush and cactus, which extended twenty or thirty feet in from the roadside.

I strolled on past the motel.

Almost all the car traffic had stopped, up near the casino entranceway. People inside the cars were staring up the entrance drive toward the casino. Once in awhile, one of the cars would ease slowly past a uniformed cop who was trying to keep the traffic-lighted crossover through the median clear.

Reluctantly, the cars he shooed on would drive a short distance, then park beside the stretch of wild brush and cactus. A string of about ten cars were parked in a line. Some of their occupants got out and craned their necks, still trying to see what was going on back there.

The uniformed cop noticed my approach and waved me along.

“No standing on this side of the highway, mister,” he told me. “You want to hang around, do it across the road.”

“What happened? Somebody break the bank?”

“You'll see it in the papers, what happened. Just move along.”

Crossing to the median, I paused and looked back. The cop was watching me. He waved me on. Continuing to the far side of the highway, I stood between two of the cars stopped at the roadside over there, and from that vantage point I could see up the entrance drive to Florian's floodlit front façade.

Except for an ambulance parked near the canopied casino entrance, there wasn't a thing else to see.

Some uniformed police emerged from the casino and disappeared around the building, out of sight.

For another minute or so, I stood there, watching, until I thought the hell with it and went back across the road to the median.

The vigilant cop saw me and yelled something. I shook my head and pointed down the road, toward town. He watched me suspiciously. He didn't want me to know any more about what was going on than he did.

Moving fast, a squad car came down the driveway, sweeping me with its headlights when it made the turn onto the highway and headed south. When it went by, I had to retreat back onto the median grass. Then I tried again, and finally got across to the west side of the highway.

Behind me, tires squealed. Turning along the side of the road away from the entrance drive, I kept walking. Ahead, the squad car had come to a stop, then it began backing up. Someone was leaning out a side window on the passenger side.

When the squad car came grinding to a halt beside me, I saw that the man leaning out was Brode.

“Get in here, Brandon ,” he called brusquely.

The back door of the car swung open. Sliding in beside a uniformed cop, I pulled the door shut behind me. The car started forward again, picking up speed so fast that the tires squealed again.

Beside the driver, Brode turned in his seat.

“What are you doing out here?”

He didn't so much ask it as bark it.

“Heard the sirens. I thought I'd see what the excitement was about.”

He stared at me a moment longer than he should have.

As we approached the city proper, the one at the wheel kept his attention on the road ahead. Beside me on the back seat, his partner kept his eyes straight ahead, too.

Facing forward once more, Brode spoke softly into the two-way radio. I heard my name mentioned amid the squawking of the box, but I couldn't make out any of the rest of it.

When Brode was through with the radio, he faced me once more.

“They sent someone out to where you live. You weren't there. Where've you been?”

“Why? What happened?”

“I asked you where you've been,” he snapped. His eyes were narrow and his mouth was clamped tight shut.

“What's the matter with you?” I asked, astonished.

The cop beside me stirred, but stopped himself from turning toward me and went back to gazing out his window.

“Never mind what's the matter with me,” Brode said evenly. “Where the hell've you been?”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Is this a pinch?”

“It could be, Brandon ,” he admitted, after a moment's pause. “It's up to you.”

“I've been in my office all evening.”

“Can you prove that?”

I thought back and nodded.

“Yes. Strangely enough, I can.”

“Good. You may have to.”

Without another word, he faced forward again and we rode on into town in silence.

The squad car slowed for the Strip, turned onto it briefly, then swung off it again and we were parking outside the Hall of Justice.

“Come with me,” Brode ordered.

I followed him into the police entrance, around at the side of the building. We passed the uniformed sergeant on duty at the desk and went along a hallway. Brode held an office door open and waited until I passed through. Following me in, he shut the door behind him and told me, “Have a seat. Someone will be back for you.”

He went out through another door in the side wall of the room.

A policeman seated at a desk in the little office pointed with a pencil. I sat in the chair he pointed at. He went back to whatever he was doing.

Ten minutes of staring at a desk, a busy policeman, four drab walls with dreary green filing cabinets shoved against most of their lower halves can become rather boring. I had to wait slightly longer than ten minutes before the side door opened and a detective beckoned me into the next room.

When I reached him, he held out his hand.

“Gun,” he said. “Sergeant Brode said you packed one.”

I handed over the revolver.

“License.”

Taking out my wallet, I worked the pistol permit out of its clear plastic envelope and handed that over, too.

“On your way out,” he said, “see the desk sergeant outside for both of these.”

I nodded.

Pointing across the room behind him with a thumb, he said, “Through that door, go left down the hall to the big door at the end.”

I went through the door, with him right behind me. I expected him to stay right behind me, but he remained in the doorway, watching until I opened the big door at the far end of the short corridor. As I turned to shut the door behind me, I glanced back in time to glimpse the last of him, as he swung his door shut.

Turning, I found myself in a large office with a rug on the floor. Five men were seated at a desk that didn't need an Executive sign on it. Four of the men faced the desk, behind which sat a large man with a white mustache and a ruddy outdoorsman's complexion.

Two of the seated men facing the desk wore uniforms of the State Highway Patrol, the third was plainclothes, and the fourth was Brode.

“Mr. Brandon?” asked the man behind the desk.

I nodded.

“Please take this seat,” he said, pointing to an empty chair directly across the desk from him. “We have some questions to ask you.”

I took the seat.

“I'm Sheriff Carroll,” he said. Nodding to the two men in uniform, he went on, “This is Inspector McKenzie and Captain Lake of the Highway Patrol, my Chief Assistant Deputy Dillon, and you know Sergeant Brode.”

For the first time, I noticed a fifth man, leaning against the wall, off to one side, beyond where Brode sat.

Taking the seat facing the Sheriff, I asked: “Don't I get introduced to him, too?”

I jerked a thumb toward the standee.

The Sheriff's eyes narrowed slightly.

He was a man who could smile in a right enough fashion to get as many votes as he needed to go on getting himself elected Sheriff. He was also a long-time law-enforcement public servant who knew pretty much anything he needed to know about modern crime-solving methods. And he knew people. He knew how to handle them. He handled me by sticking with the business at hand.

“I understand you can account for your whereabouts this evening.”

“Yes. Why should I have to?”

“Go ahead and account for yourself,” he said. “You'll understand the why afterward.”

He was still keeping himself focused on the business at hand, but his pale gray eyes had turned an icy shade-paler gray. His thick competent jowls seemed to bulge out a bit more than they had, on both sides of his wide clamp of a mouth.

I accounted for myself, using the insurance man in the front end of my office, and Ted Fenton for the rest of it. I left out the part about Mr. Mercator and his helpers.

For a moment or two after I finished, Sheriff Carroll gave some thought to what I had told him. His almost colorless gray eyes kept boring into mine. I hoped I was drilling mine into his half as well, but I doubt if I was.

“The insurance man part is all right,” he decided. “We can check with him. But who is this Fenton? What did he want?”

“He wanted me to go with him to see somebody who might want to hire me. I didn't like Fenton, or his proposition. I told him to send the potential client to me. Then I'd listen.”

“And…?”

“And he went away.”

“What time was that?”

I shrugged, and glanced over at Brode.

“A short time after I spoke with Sergeant Brode on the phone. Whenever that was. Seven? Seven thirty?”

The Sheriff looked at Brode.

“What time was that phone conversation, Sergeant?”

“A little after seven,” Brode said. “That doesn't leave him off the…”

The Sheriff held up his left hand, the palm toward Brode, and swung his head back to face me.

After a moment, he said, “Mr. Brandon, I am inclined to accept your story. We'll check into it later, but I think you're in the clear…”

“Clear of what?”

I felt the eyes of all of them staring at me. I had no choice but to hold onto my patience. They had their little games, and naturally they liked to play them. I was not accustomed to watching that much police brass playing the game all at once, but it could have been worse: they might have brought the Governor along to play.

“Tonight,” the Sheriff said slowly, “Leslie Wyatt was shot to death out at Florian's casino.”

It took a beat or two for me to take it in. Then I began getting angry.

“So right away quick you think, ‘Let's see if Jim Brandon's got himself an alibi.'”

Ponderously, the Sheriff shook his head from side to side.

“Not only Jim Brandon. Anyone walking around within fifty miles of this town we don't like the look of. Within thirty-six hours, there have been three homicides in this jurisdiction. We mean to find out about them. And we're going to find out about them, too.”

“So why me?”

“Sergeant Brode finally got someone to listen to him,” Sheriff Carroll said,“about the possible connection of some of these recent homicides with a certain unidentified victim of an assault, some weeks ago.”

The man leaning against the wall went around behind the desk and murmured into the Sheriff's ear. Carroll nodded.

“Apparently there has been an identification,” the Sheriff corrected himself.

“Fingerprints from the military seem to link one Benjamin Crane with the assault victim.”

“And you think he did these recent killings?” I asked.

“We don't think anything, Mr. Brandon. We're including this fellow Crane in the list of people we'd like to question. There are plenty of other people we intend to bring in on this, more than I like. But we want you here, in custody, to supplement Sergeant Brode's possible identification of that assault victim, Crane…if he gets caught in our net.”

For a drawn-out period, he stared across at me before continuing.

“As I understand it, there are about five people we can use to make the identification: yourself, Sergeant Brode, the doctor who handled his case at the hospital, and one, perhaps two, nurses who worked the ward he was on. We can't drag the doctor or the nurses into the station house to look at lineups for the next twenty-four or thirty-six hours, but…”

“Ah!” I said, finally catching on. “But you can drag me in for that long, or for as much longer as you might happen to feel like.”

The Sheriff's eyes twinkled slightly.

“Well, Mr. Brandon, you are by way of being an unofficial officer of the court, licensed by the State. Naturally, you wish to do everything you can to cooperate with your local law enforcement agencies, don't you?”

The son of a bitch had me beaten.

I nodded. Slowly. Five times.

“Sheriff,” I said, “you put it so much better than I could ever hope to. And you are absolutely correct. Of course I want to cooperate with my local law enforcement agencies. I always do.”

“It is gratifying to hear that, Mr. Brandon,” Carroll said. “Inspector McKenzie will be in charge of the lineups. You will take your instructions from him.”

The Sheriff and I both glanced over at Inspector McKenzie, who didn't look either happy or unhappy. He really didn't look anything but imposing in that uniform of his.

I assumed he was one of those who hadn't listened early enough to Brode's idea that Ben Crane, not gangs of intruders or local gamblers, had been responsible for killing Fats and hi-jacking the cash car from Florian's casino.

Swinging his gaze from McKenzie back to me, the Sheriff wound it up.

“The desk sergeant will have your weapon and pistol permit. He will tell you where to keep yourself in readiness, until the Inspector wants you.”

That ended my part of the interview.

Getting up, I glanced at Brode, and went out to get my stuff from the desk sergeant. He turned it over and told me to park myself in a little room, just the other side of the squad room. He would let me know when I was needed.

Nine

I didn't have to stay there thirty-six hours. I wasn't even needed for twenty-four hours. They made me go home after only nineteen hours of it.

They went out onto the highways, in amongst the hedges. They probably tore some of them away from banquets, or from lunch counters, anyway. Maybe some had been inspecting farms, or trying out new wives, when they got the call.

Others they got from gutters, or from alleys, or from whatever they're calling Bush-villes these days. Some were undoubtedly yanked out of whorehouses, whilst the majority had certainly been pried away from some game of chance or one-arm bandit around town or its environs.

They even brought in an old prospector who hadn't quite managed to get back into the hills fast enough. He kept worrying aloud about his burro, wanting to know why they didn't let him bring the beast indoors with him. I kind of wanted to see the burro myself. It would have been a change, after all those long lines of sleazy humanity I had to check out.

There were the weak, the average, and the strong; the clean, the middling, the dirty, and the abysmally filthy. They came past me in lots of six or eight, or sometimes in batches of ten. They could have been crooks or God-fearing zealots who just happened to forget to shave that morning, and maybe left their auto registration papers in the other suit, or the other car.

They came in an endless stream, angry or irritable or frightened or patient or giggling foolishly. But they came.

And they kept coming.

After looking over more than twenty lineups, I began to get the feeling that the entire population of the state was being herded in slow grumbling masses, waiting until they could file in through the back door of the Hall of Justice so I could take a look at each and every one of them.

I didn't get much sleep. I couldn't. After awhile, I told Inspector McKenzie that I had reached a point where I wouldn't recognize my landlord, I was so bleary-eyed.

He sent out for some coffee. I drank it, and went on looking them over.

Night ended. Around mid-morning, I was no longer the only one stuck with the detail. The hospital doctor spent awhile there. Early on in the afternoon, Brode joined me. He was hot and sweaty and tired. A bit later, we saw a stocky woman seated nearby whom I recognized as one of the nurses from the hospital.

Presently, Brode had to leave. The doctor had already gone. Awhile later, the nurse went out, too. But McKenzie kept me there until the bitter end.

The bunches of hapless humanity were taking longer to collect. Or perhaps the rest of the people roundabout had gone into hiding until I collapsed or went blind or just died of boredom from too much coffee and bad sandwiches and worse cigarettes.

The final group consisted of only three people: a teen-age kid in black leather jacket and cowboy boots; a ranch hand who just might have been one of the guys I was trying to pick out of the lineups, except his top teeth stuck out almost an inch farther than they should have; and a thin little man who liked the taste of wooden matches and was a numbers collector who apparently had the best fade-joint of anyone else in town to have kept clear of the dragnet as long as he had.

After I negatived those three, I still had to hang around another half hour.

Finally, they turned me loose, just before five in the afternoon. Inspector McKenzie instructed the desk sergeant to have me call in every two hours on the hour until he told me to stop, in case they could find any more people to drag up and across the platform.

Out on the Strip, I stepped back down from the bus I had almost boarded. I had forgotten my car was parked near my new office.

Whatever the bus driver yelled at me, I couldn't hear; my ears buzzed for sleep.

After floundering up and down the side streets near the office, I finally located the Ford and bumped my head sliding behind the steering wheel. Twice on the drive home, I nearly racked up. I couldn't seem to hear properly, and my eyelids kept falling down over my eyeballs.

After parking beside the isolated entrance to my furnished room, I think I left the car keys in the ignition. Going up the flight of stairs inside, I fell only once.

Somehow, I made it into the bathroom, dashed cold water onto my face, then washed myself thoroughly, from the waist up. I could have used a shower. I could have used a shave, too, but both would have to wait until after sleep.

I stared at my eyes in the bathroom cabinet's mirror. Tiny pink veins spoked outward from the eyeballs. They looked like pale pink lightning bolts. I was even seeing double. I closed my eyes, squeezed them tight shut, then opened them. Still seeing double…except one of the faces in the mirror was smiling.

A small pin-prick of pain hit my upper arm, near the shoulder. Automatically, I reached around to rub it. My fingertips came in contact with the needle coming out.

Starting to turn, I never quite made it. Whatever they shot into me either worked real fast, or lack of sleep gave it a booster shot.

A wave of warmth engulfed me. Grabbing for the edge of the sink, I held on with both hands, but it was no use. The torrent of warmth pouring down on my face pushed me down until I was staring into the bowl of the sink with my jaw hooked over the edge.

For a long moment, my chin caught and held on the smooth wet edge of the sink. Then my head tilted slowly upward until the weight of all that warm water pouring down onto my forehead just pressed so hard that my chin slipped off the sink-edge and I fell backward and downward beneath the foaming swirling warmth of the inundation.

For a time, bright colored lights skyrocketed all around. Then everything stopped. For a long, lazy interval, I floated on the comfortable foam. Then even that stopped.

Ten

“Hey, Brandon, you up yet?”

“Yes. Be right out.”

I put the breakfast dishes inside the disposal unit and started for the front door of the cottage. Halfway there, I paused, puzzled.

How had anyone known to call me Brandon, and why had I answered to the name? And answered as if I knew who called?

“Hurry up, will you?”

“Coming.”

I opened the front door. A tall handsome man with a dapper-looking mustache leaned against the porch railing.

“It's about time,” he smiled.

“Do I know you?”

Stepping away from the railing, he studied me, shaking his head.

“Every day we go through this routine, and every day I tell you my name's Larry Belton.”

Then I remembered.

“Yes, that's right. Belton. Your name was right on the tip of my tongue, but…I just couldn't seem to come up with it.”

He nodded patiently.

“That's the way it is every day. I hear you made another effort to walk out of here.”

“Another?” I couldn't remember a thing.

“Last night. Two of the zoo-keepers found you trying to pick your way around the big rocks, down below, at the edge of the lake. Fourth time. You never quit, do you?”

“Quit what? I don't even recall…”

Belton grinned.

“I guess that's the funniest part,” he observed thoughtfully. “You really don't recall any of it yet…but you keep reverting to type.”

“What type?”

Belton shrugged cheerfully.

“Whatever type you really are…or were, before all the hypos and pills and therapy and questions.”

He buttoned his light-brown sports coat.

“Come on, Brandon . Let's go down to the commissary. I'll buy you a cup of coffee.”

I followed him down hewn log steps and along a gravel path. Other cottages like mine were scattered among the trees, but no cottage was too close to any other. Each was partially sheltered by bushes and carefully tended hedges.

Ahead was a bigger building on a sloping lawn. From this high, only the red tiles of its roof were visible until we descended the slope along the gently curving path and approached it, when the remainder of the building appeared, tan-walled in a Spanish style.

“What is this place?” I asked.

Belton chuckled and shook his head.

“Again? Practically every day we go over the same ground, Brandon . When is Hancock going to cut down on your pills enough so you'll be able to remember things?”

I had to agree with him.

“You're right, Larry. I do seem pretty forgetful. How did you know my name was Brandon ?”

“They told me, when they brought you up here to dry out.”

“Dry out? Was I hung up on something?”

“Who knows? Most of the people old Townsend-the-patron-of-the-arts lets in here seem to need withdrawal time a lot more than they need peace and enough quiet to get some of their work done. You seem to be in quite a unique withdrawal category, although you sure don't seem like any kind of artist I ever saw.”

We climbed steps and went out of the morning sun into a shaded roofed-over terrace that ran along the front side of the commissary. A few people sat or stood in the cool shadows, alone or in small groups. Some were bearded and wore colorful hippie garb, others wore denims. Still others were in suburban shirts and slacks.

More people were inside the commissary than out front, but they were just as mixed a bag as the ones outside.

Belton paid for our coffees and led the way past a candy and cigarette counter to a south wall made entirely of glass. We sat at a table in the sun with a view of the far side of the canyon, which was still in shadow.

“Who's this Townsend you mentioned?” I asked.

Resigned by now, Belton smiled.

“All right, we'll do it all again, just as if I didn't tell you yesterday and the day before and every day for the last half of last week, too. Brockton Townsend, Philanthropist. His family made their start-up money generations ago. His grandfather formed what turned into Intertex. Brock periodically bleeds from the wallet, trying to buy the world's forgiveness for being rich…but he makes certain never to bleed too much. Not that he could. There's too many bucks stuffed into that wallet of his for any one man to give away, no matter how hard he tried.”

“And he runs this place?”

“He pays for it, so I suppose you could say he runs it. Sometimes I wonder if he even remembers that he set up this artists' colony to house homeless artists.”

“Is that what it's for?” I looked around, thinking about it. “It's a nice place to do art work, is it?”

“How should I know?” Belton laughed. “I'm no artist.”

“Then how come you're here?”

“I'm here because I qualify as an artist. I have exactly the correct prep school background, went to the best art school, and I have a technique that would make a troglodyte salivate. Andrea Del Sarto lives! Therefore, every so often I become eligible to come out here and spend six months or a year working on what we can call a sort of Brockton Townsend Fellowship.”

“What do you do when you aren't eligible to stay here?” I asked, fascinated.

“Then I'm pretty sure to be jungled up in some other posh little artists' nest, much like this one. The same in purpose, at least. None of them are quite as large-scale as this place.”

A tall, powerfully-built young man in slacks and T-shirt came gliding across the vast room and stopped beside our table.

Belton glanced at his wristwatch.

“Here he is again,” he murmured. “Good old Gilbert.”

“Time for your appointment with the Counselor, Mr. Brandon.”

I looked up at his wide smiling face, but I couldn't think what to say.

Seeing me hesitate, Belton said: “Go on along, Jim. You have an appointment every morning, same time. Doctor…I mean, Counselor Hancock thinks you'll soon be able to buckle down and do some of your best work.” To Gilbert, he murmured: “He still doesn't remember.”

Nodding, Gilbert reached down and took my arm. Pulling me gently to my feet, he smiled.

“Come along, Mr. Brandon. You don't want to be late, do you?”

Pulling my arm free, I stood there beside him, puzzled, looking up into his hard, smiling, pale-blue eyes.

“Oh, I'm so sorry, Mr. Brandon,” the attendant chuckled. “I keep forgetting you don't like me to take your arm when we're going anywhere. All right, you just come along with me, okay? Just like we do every day.”

“All right.”

“See you later,” Belton called.

I followed Gilbert out of the commissary, down the gentle slope past tennis courts and a swimming pool to a single-story structure, which was simply a smaller version of the commissary building we had just left.

Inside, Gilbert ushered me into an office where a distinguished-looking gray-haired man sat behind a desk.

“You can wait outside, Gilbert,” he said.

“Orders are still the same, Mr. Hancock,” replied Gilbert. “I'm to stay in here whenever Brandon is here.”

He sat me in a chair facing the desk.

“The man is harmless,” Hancock said impatiently. “There's no danger at all.”

“He made it down as far as the lakeside again last night.”

“Again?” Hancock watched me curiously. “Amazing how much the unconscious retains.”

“I think there was someone else down there with him,” Gilbert said, “but I couldn't find anyone but him. Somebody had to show him how to get down there without breaking his damn-fool neck.”

Hancock nodded, opening a folder in front of him.

“How's the memory today, Mr. Brandon? Anything coming back?”

I shook my head.

“Your memory is apparently going to require longer to return to its normal condition than is usually the case with the tranquilizer dosage we administered.”

Glancing up, he chuckled.

“We are all of us more or less the causes of our own discomfiture, aren't we, Mr. Brandon?”

I smiled slightly, but I didn't say anything, because I didn't know what he was saying.

“You remember nothing yet?” Hancock asked.

I shook my head.

“Mr. Brandon, will you please tell me that you remember nothing? Don't just shake your head in response to my questions.”

“I remember nothing.”

Hancock wryly smiled, glancing at Gilbert, somewhere behind me.

“Just like a parrot,” Hancock said. “An agreeable parrot.”

Gilbert laughed, quietly. The small sound seemed to irritate Hancock, but he kept his attention on the file in front of him.

Turning my head, I saw that Gilbert sat on a chair in a corner.

“You don't remember coming here to the Colony?” Hancock asked.

“No.”

“Do you recall yet what happened before you came here, what you did to one of the men giving you your initial medication?”

I shook my head, then remembered I should speak my replies.

“No.”

“You don't remember hurting the man seriously?”

“No, I don't remember. I'm sorry I hurt him.”

Hancock nodded, watching me with intelligent, sympathetic eyes from beneath bushy gray eyebrows.

“I believe you really are sorry, Mr. Brandon.” After studying the file for another moment, he closed it. “All right. Yours may only be a temporary condition. We've had late recoveries before, but seldom this late. It may be caused partly by the head injury you sustained during that…during the time you were first administered medication. Still, the doctor who attended you claims there was no severe injury. The laceration caused by the blow to your head has long since healed.”

He smiled.

“All right, time heals, too. We'll just have to give you a bit more time. How do you feel today, Mr. Brandon? Are you happy?”

After thinking a moment, I shrugged.

“I don't know.”

“I'm sorry. I should have asked, are you comfortable? Is your cottage satisfactory?”

“Yes, it's satisfactory.”

“Do you suppose you will be producing any work soon?”

“I don't know.”

“You're a painter, aren't you, Mr. Brandon?”

“I don't know. Am I a painter?”

“Perhaps you're a sculptor. Your hands look as if they have done their share of the hard work of a sculptor, rather than the more delicate tasks of painters.”

He waited, watching me. When I couldn't think of anything to say, he went on.

“Do you wish you could get to work once more, Mr. Brandon? To feel your hands holding hammer and chisel, to twist pliers and cut metal with a small acetylene torch again?”

I thought a moment. He seemed so curious that I told him: “I suppose so.”

Hancock laughed.

“That will be all, Mr. Brandon. I'll put you down for another appointment, same time tomorrow. The assistant counselor here will bring you your new medication at bed check.” He inclined his head toward Gilbert and rose behind his desk.

I stood, too.

“See you tomorrow, Mr. Brandon. Don't over-exert yourself. You haven't made a complete recovery yet, you know.”

“I won't over-exert myself,” I assured him.

Chuckling, Gilbert led me outside and back up to the commissary, where a dark-haired young woman was coming down the steps from the terrace.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” she said cheerily, smiling at us.

“Morning, Miss Barclay,” replied Gilbert. When I said nothing, he told me: “Say good morning to the lady, Brandon.”

“Good morning, lady.”

Grinning at Gilbert, she said to me, “See you at the pool this afternoon, Mr. Brandon. Remember, you promised you would pose for me today.”

I glanced at Gilbert. He nodded. So I called after Miss Barclay as she walked away along the path, “All right, Miss Barclay.”

Placing a hand in the middle of my back, Gilbert shoved me roughly toward the steps leading up to the commissary terrace.

“Go on inside, dumb-head,” he growled. “It's time for lunch.”

When I recovered and straightened, I turned and looked up at Gilbert. Seeing me look at him, he came over and once more shoved me toward the steps, using both hands this time.

“Go on inside, you son of a bitch,” he ordered quietly. “I think you're pulling a fake routine, you know that? But don't try the little kid bit with me. I saw you in action, remember? When they first brought you here. Get going.”

The second time Gilbert shoved me, I tripped on the bottom step. Sitting there on the third step up, I watched him walk off, uncertain what to do. I wanted to do what Gilbert told me to do: go on up the steps and inside the commissary. But I also wanted to do something else…except I couldn't think what it was.

Rising, I watched Gilbert's wide T-shirted back disappear around the nearest corner of the commissary building. After another moment of hesitation, I climbed the porch steps and went on inside.

I didn't have time to get confused about my next move. Across the flagstone lobby, Belton waved at me.

“Lunchtime, Brandon . We're having steak. Hurry up.”

“All right,” I said, following him into the dining area.

After lunch, we all took a dip in the pool. Miss Barclay came over to where Belton and I were lying at poolside, drying in the sun.

“All right if I sketch you now, Mr. Brandon?”

She held up her sketchpad. It was almost as big as an open newspaper.

“Okay.”

I rolled over on my back. I liked Miss Barclay.

She opened the pad.

“I only want to do your hands and arms,” she said.

I held out my arms.

Noticing that, she laughed.

“No,” she said. “Stay the way you were, just now. Don't pose. Simply lie down, and allow your left arm to just lie there.”

Lying down again, I raised my head and looked down at my left arm. Long, ropy muscles wrapped around the heavy arm bones. A thick rectangular wrist. A long bony hand.

I wondered why she would want to sketch any of it.

“That's the way,” she said encouragingly. “Simply relax. You're just right, exactly as you are.”

I turned my head. Through a notch in the nearby bare yellow hills, I could see flat blue water stretching away to more bare yellow hills on the far side, miles away.

I could hear the scraping sound as Miss Barclay drew the sketch on her pad. Once I felt a faint urge to get up and look at the picture, but after a minute I forgot and drifted off into sleep.

In the middle of half-asleep, she helped me put on my shirt and draped my trousers over my legs.

“Too much of that sun isn't good for anyone, Jim Brandon,” Miss Barclay murmured from beside me.

Insects buzzed and clicked nearby. A cool wind blew up from the water. I could hear people plunging into the pool. It sounded a long way off.

Larry Belton's voice woke me.

“Excellent, Barclay,” he was saying. “You've captured something there. Jackson Pollock's ghost would drool at the way you've gotten that arm.”

“Stop critiquing me, Larry,” she laughed.

“Come on, both of you,” Larry called, from farther away. “Let's get started. We'll miss the dancing…”

“Oh, is that today?”

I could hear sounds of her packing up her sketchpad and drawing materials. Opening my eyes, I rolled over.

Belton was partway up the slope, calling to us over his shoulder.

“A short walk will do both of you a world of good. Get up, Jim. The Dryads of Diana the Huntress await.”

Stumbling to my feet, I struggled into my pants, slipped my shirt on, and followed them up past the commissary to a grove of trees higher up.

It had gotten cooler as the afternoon advanced, but as long as we stayed in the sun, it remained warm. I felt too warm. I wished I had left my shirt off, until we went in among the trees to a grassy bowl. Then it was cool, and I was glad I had the shirt on.

Seated between the two of them, I watched the other people scattered around the dip in the ridge-side.

“Here they come!” Belton said.

“Oh, don't they look lovely!” Miss Barclay cried.

Six young women came out of the trees from the direction of the parking area behind the commissary and began to dance in a slow relaxing way. They moved gracefully, trailing long wispy gauze-like scarves behind and around their bodies as they pirouetted down there in the center of the grass-grown cup they were using as a theater.

Most of the dancers were tall and willowy. The one on the end of the flowing line was short, but easily as graceful as the others. Once, she came close to us and swept by where we sat, and she smiled down at me as she passed.

“Daddy-O!” she cried in delight.

Belton turned his head and grinned.

“Looks like you've got a friend.”

“Isn't she adorable!” Miss Barclay cried.

“Where do you know her from, Brandon, you old devil?”

“Larry, don't,” Miss Barclay cautioned.

“You're right,” he agreed. “I keep forgetting he can't remember yet.”

“He might have met her at the casino,” Miss Barclay speculated.

“Makes sense.” Belton nodded. “These girls probably work there in the main room. Florian's is very big on kulchuh .”

“Although something tells me this dance of the Dryads wouldn't go over too well at Florian's, not even in the lounge.”

Belton laughed.

“And sure as hell not in the main room, except maybe as backup to somebody's act.”

“Ah, they've finished. Too bad it's so short,” Miss Barclay said sadly. “It really is so lovely.”

We watched the line of young women stream up the gentle slope of the glade and disappear in among the grove of trees surrounding it. The tiny girl went last, and, just as she disappeared from sight, she turned her head and smiled at me, and waved her hand goodbye, too.

Belton shook his head in admiration.

“Whatever it is, Jim-boy, you've certainly got your share of it.”

He started off after them.

“Where are you going?” Miss Barclay called.

“Find out who she is,” he replied. “Be right back.”

Miss Barclay shook her head.

“The busy, busy man,” she murmured.

Most of the other people in the audience were drifting away, back down the way we had come, toward the commissary.

Gently, a bell tinkled in the distance.

“Supper time,” Miss Barclay sighed. “Well, James, it has been a hectic afternoon, hasn't it?”

“It sure has, Miss Barclay.”

I helped her collect her sketchpad and the boxes of pencils and nylon tipped pens that went with it, and we joined the others headed down the path.

Belton caught up to us partway there, in the open again. Even that late, the sun still felt warm.

“Her name's Bobbie,” he gasped, as he turned and walked along with us.

“Are they putting on another show this evening?” Miss Barclay asked.

Belton shook his head.

“No. They were taking off in a station wagon, when I caught up to them in the parking area. They're headed back down to the casino. That's where they work. This is an extra gig, I guess.”

“They are good,” said Miss Barclay. “So graceful!”

I went back to my cottage and got out of my clothes and the bathing trunks. After taking a quick shower, I joined the rest for supper.

Afterward, there was a lecture in a hall to one side of the front room of the commissary.

When I woke from my evening after-supper nap, Belton was there to accompany me over to the amphitheater, where everyone sang songs. When Belton nudged me, I joined in on the simpler songs, but mostly I just sat and listened, and watched the sun push the shadow-line higher up the barren yellow hills on the far side of the vast stretch of blue water far below.

At dusk, a heavy hand fell on my shoulder. It was Gilbert.

“Time for your medication and lights out, Mr. Brandon,” he said heartily.

“See you in the morning, Jim,” Belton said. “I'm going to stay awhile longer.”

“All right,” I said. “See you in the morning.”

“Don't do any more sleepwalking,” he laughed. “Gilbert gets annoyed when you sleepwalk, don't you, Gilbert?”

“Not annoyed, really, Mr. Belton,” Gilbert smiled. “I just can't figure out how Mr. Brandon manages to pick that lock on the front door of his cottage every night. Nobody can pick a good lock like that in their sleep.”

I stood there beside Gilbert, looking up at him, waiting until we were supposed to leave. His lazy eyes gazed down at me.

“Sometimes,” he said, “I think maybe Mr. Brandon is putting on a little bit of an act, with his sleepwalking routine. Are you, Mr. Brandon?”

“I don't remember sleepwalking,” I told him, frowning as I tried to remember.

With a laugh, Belton returned his attention to the singing, calling out, “Sounds like sleepwalking to me.”

Gilbert and I climbed up out of the amphitheater and went along the path to my cottage. The sound of the many singing voices became softer, the more distance we put between ourselves and the singers.

Inside my cottage, Gilbert handed me a pill.

“Here's your medication, Mr. Brandon,” he said. “Go on into the bathroom and take it with a glass of water. Then I'll leave you alone.”

Going through the main room into the bathroom, I put the pill down on the edge of the sink and ran some water into a glass.

“Fine, Mr. Brandon,” Gilbert said behind me.

Turning, I saw he was standing in the bathroom doorway, watching.

“Drink it down,” he said.

Putting the glass to my mouth, I drank the water down.

“I'll be going now,” Gilbert said, turning and crossing the other room. “I'm locking the front door, Mr. Brandon. No wandering tonight, okay?”

Still holding the water glass, I went to the bathroom doorway and said, “I won't wander tonight.”

Just before Gilbert closed the front door, he smiled at me, but his eyes weren't smiling.

He went on out, pulling the door shut behind him. I could hear him put the key into the lock, turning it in the lock.

Back in the bathroom, I put the empty water glass into its holder beside the rack for toothbrushes, and then I went back to try the front door. It wouldn't open.

Good! I couldn't possibly do any sleepwalking tonight.

Getting ready for bed, I fell quickly asleep.

A fist smashing into my face brought me awake.

Eleven

The punch sent me over backward. Stars and a half moon tilted in a dark night sky.

My back hit the ground. The breath whooshed out of my mouth.

It felt like soft sand under my back.

Blinking, I lay there, gasping, trying to breathe again, staring angrily up at the wide figure towering over me against the stars.

Rolling over, I tried to get to my knees.

“I warned you, Mr. Brandon. I told you not to pull any more of this sleepwalking.”

Dimly, I recalled whose voice it was. Gilbert. The attendant, or keeper, or jailer.

Struggling, I got to my feet, both hands clutching fistfuls of sand. When I was standing up, I turned to face Gilbert in darkness lit only by moonlight.

Gilbert laughed.

“Don't even try it, Mr. Bran…”

Flipping sand into his face, I went in low, drove two fists? up and into Gilbert's gut area. He bent over abruptly, wheezing. Bringing a right around, I clipped him in the side of his head.

Gilbert dropped and lay still on the sand, moaning softly.

Running footsteps approached out of the darkness.

“I couldn't find the other one,” he started to say. Then he skidded to a stop. “Gil, you ain't supposed to hit the guy!”

He stared down at the still figure of Gil lying in the sand.

I started over toward him. Halfway there, he looked up at me and cried: “You ain't Gil!”

He fumbled for something. Moonlight glinted on whatever it was.

Slapping his gun aside, I clipped him, twice.

He wasn't nearly as big as Gilbert. He dropped without a sound or a moan.

Looking around, I saw the edge of the lake nearby. Where I stood was a sort of beach, but the sandy stretch ended against big sheer bluffs that climbed straight up from the water's edge.

I didn't know what to do or where to go.

Distant lights glimmered across the water, but they were too far to try to reach swimming.

“All right,” I muttered into the night-silence. “Now that I'm here, what the hell did I want to get here for?”

No one answered, so I turned and tried to find a way along the shore, wondering who the other one was the second man had been unable to find.

Climbing up in a narrow crease between two huge shore-side rocks, I suddenly saw a figure standing above me, staring down at me.

My breath caught in my throat, and all I did was stare up at whoever it was.

“Daddy-O?” a girl's voice called. “Is that you?”

Swallowing hard, I managed to answer.

“Yeah. Who are you?”

“Bobbie. Don't you remember me? In that shack? With Mr. Mercator?”

Suddenly, I didn't have any trouble remembering anymore. I chuckled.

“Remember? How could I forget?”

“Come, let me help you, Mr. Brandon.”

Taking her tiny hand, I climbed on up out of the crevice I had been balancing in so precariously.

“Bobbie, what are you doing here in the middle of the night?” I asked, looking around at the desolation piled up all around us, above the edge of the lake.

“Trying to get you away from them,” she whispered. “Oh, Daddy, let's get away from those men. I don't want them to recognize me.”

“They won't hurt you, Bobbie,” I told her, trying to sound reassuring.

“But if they report me, I might lose my job. Hurry.”

I scrambled after her through the jumble of sandstone bluffs and enormous rocks, but we didn't seem to be getting anywhere. Finally, I stopped and called after her retreating back.

“Bobbie, will you tell me where we're hurrying to?”

She stopped and looked back at me, then all around at the desolation and the lake water below. She began to laugh, a light joyous tinkling sound that seemed to echo in the silence.

Hurrying back to where I stood, she put her arms around my waist and hugged me. Looking up, she stretched and kissed me, full on the mouth.

“I came here in a speedboat,” she whispered. “It's just ahead. Hurry. Let's get out of here, before those two come after us.”

That made sense. I had done a quick thorough job on both Gilbert and his buddy, but not so long-lasting a job that they wouldn't be coming to, fairly soon. I hurried along after Bobbie.

When she came up against what looked like an impassable wall, she turned and slid sideways down a sandy slope to the water's edge. I did the same. When I reached her side, she was already untying the bowline of a dark low-slung motor launch she had secured to a pointed rock.

Jumping aboard, she held out a hand to support me, when I floundered over the railing and tried to stay somewhere in the center of the thing. When she satisfied herself that I was settled, she busied herself with the motor, got it started, and we eased away from shore, first backward, then she swung us around, and we headed out into the vast lake.

“Won't they hear the motor?” I whispered in her ear.

To my hyped-up sensory condition at that moment, the launch's engine sounded as loud as a juiced-up jalopy with the cutout wide open.

“Hear this motor?” she asked, her eyes laughing up at me. “Herby says this used to go on smuggling runs, down in Mexico .”

I listened to the engine. She was right. In actuality, it purred softly. I had simply imagined it was making an ungodly racket.

“Who's Herby?”

“Runs the boatyard where I rented this beauty.” She reached over and squeezed my hand. “You'll meet him in a few minutes.”

Looking back toward shore, I couldn't see a thing. No sign of Gilbert and his co-worker, no lights, no nothing.

Facing forward once more, I spent the rest of our short boat trip admiring the way Bobbie handled herself at the wheel. She was splendid, interrupting her concentration now and then to feed me information.

“The newspapers had you missing…the police seemed to think you were trying to avoid answering their questions…so when I saw you this afternoon, I knew what those people were doing…”

“What were they doing?”

She shrugged.

“Keeping you zonked out on pills, right?”

I thought about it.

“Right. Wiped out my memory, too.”

“Different pills hit different ways,” she said, sounding as if she knew what she was talking about. “Here we are.”

She spun the wheel and the launch swung to the right and ran parallel to the shore a mile away. After awhile of that, she made another right turn, heading in toward the distant shore again.

Now, for the first time, I could make out landmarks.

Southward, to the left, a big, lighted sign spelled out FLORIAN'S. Straight ahead was a small cluster of lights, but nowhere near as considerable as the Florian's sign.

Beyond Florian's and above the edge of the approaching shore, a wide glow of lights were reflected from the sky. That would be the Strip.

“What's that Florian's sign doing over there?” I asked. Bobbie. “Did they open another casino up here, too?”

She chuckled.

“No, that's their yacht club. Florian's is turning into a pretty big operation.”

“Is that where Herby rented you this boat?”

“Oh, no. He's got his own place. It's small, but I like to use his equipment. He takes good care of it. There's his dock now, dead ahead. See?”

I had already noticed the small string of lights she now pointed at. When she eased the launch alongside a wooden dock, a tall slim teenager in a peaked baseball cap came along it from the landward end and helped her tie up.

I managed to crawl up onto the dock without falling into the lake.

“This is…a friend I ran into, Herby.”

I noticed she didn't give him my name. Herby noticed, too.

All he said was a casual, “Hi.”

They strolled ahead of me along the dock, talking desultorily to each other.

“No word about your pal, Ben Crane?” she asked.

“Nuthin',” he replied. “It's weird. The cops tell me they sent some equipment down to the bottom, right about where they found his boat adrift, but they never could locate his body.”

“The boat might have drifted,” Bobbie offered sympathetically. “From wherever he went overboard, I mean.”

Herby nodded.

“True. Coulda been anywhere.”

A thought suddenly popped into my mind.

“How long ago did your friend Ben Crane turn up missing? That name sounds familiar.”

I tried as hard as I could to recall where I had heard the name before.

They were both staring at me. After a moment, Herby spoke.

“Three or four weeks, I guess. He was gone a few days before I reported it, and another couple days passed before someone came across his boat adrift…out there.”

He gestured toward the lake behind me.

Three or four weeks seemed a long time. Then I remembered something Belton had said when he first picked me up at my cottage, yesterday morning, something about telling me the same thing over and over, all last week…

“Bobbie, have you any idea how long I was…” I tilted my head back up the lake.

“…there at the colony?”

She thought a moment.

“Let's see. Today's Tuesday. The news story about you being missing were, oh, not quite a week ago. I've still got it. We can check the date, when we get home.”

Three or four weeks might have been just around when my friend Assault had gotten his working-over by persons unknown, before they dropped him in the desert where I had found him.

Finally I had a name: Ben Crane. But why did it sound so familiar? Damn, I wished my memory would straighten out!

Bobbie settled with Herby for the rented launch, and I followed her out of the boatyard to a little sports car parked at the side of the dirt road that gave access to the landing. The sign above the door of the wooden shack that served as an office said, Herby's Boatyard.

Simple enough and easy to remember. It was something I could pass along to Brode, in case I needed extra material to beef up my tale of being drugged out of my skull for most of the past week, during which period I seemed to recall vaguely that I was supposed to keep myself available for Brode, twenty four hours a day.

“How do you like it?” Bobbie asked, sliding behind the wheel and starting the car's motor.

“If it's yours, I like it.”

Smiling up at me, she reached over and squeezed my hand.

“You like me, too, don't you?”

“Doesn't it stick out all over?”

She nodded, smiling, swung the car around in a sharp left, and drove up the dirt road, headed away from the lake.

“I can usually tell,” she said.

“Most women can.”

She went on smiling and driving until we reached the paved road. Turning left, she headed toward the distant glow in the sky.

I closed my eyes and tried to relax. Bobbie drove rapidly but smoothly. Once she made a right turn, and then shortly afterward, a left turn. Every so often I opened my eyes and looked around, then I'd close them again.

Before I would have thought it possible, the Florian's casino sign appeared ahead and approached swiftly. Just short of it, Bobbie glanced across at me.

“Daddy-O, would you mind doing me a favor?”

“Anything.”

“Scrunch down so no one can see you. When we pass…” She nodded ahead toward Florian's. “Some of the people there know my car…”

I squirreled down as far as I could, until we were past the stretch of lights.

Up ahead, El Rancho Motel looked familiar.

“There aren't that many jobs I qualify for, in a town like this,” she said, by way of explanation.

She drove past El Rancho Motel and then the string of stores in the brick building.

I looked at her curiously.

“You're not going to…your place?”

“My place?”

I jerked my thumb back toward the alley behind the row of stores.

Throwing her head back, she laughed, a rich peal of laughter, full of delight.

“No, Daddy-O, I don't live in that shack. I just…play there. Among other places.”

Nodding, I faced forward, feeling ridiculous.

She lived in the new part of town, in a garden apartment with a parking area behind it. Locking the car, we walked toward the rear entrance, her hand in mine as naturally as if we had known each other forever.

“I'm going to slip you in quietly,” she whispered, when we were inside, going up the stairs to the second of three floors. “Joyce…my roomie…well, it's best not to wake her up. She's…nosy. She might remember your face…from last week's newspaper picture of you.”

“Makes sense.”

We slipped into her apartment and along a hall past a closed door on the left, a living room, then a kitchen on the right, and finally a bathroom, also on the right, and the door to Bobbie's room on the left.

Inside there, we undressed like conspirators, which I suppose we were. Or at least I was. When I was ready for bed, I stood beside the only one in the room, a big double bed.

“Get in,” she whispered beside me, giggling. “I won't hurt you.”

I got between the sheets, and a moment later, she slid in from the other side. Then she was snuggled up against me, one arm wrapped around me. When she was comfortable, she sighed, as if she was finally home with the only person in the world who mattered.

I began to relax. I was so keyed-up and worried about what I was going to do next, that I didn't think anything could happen between me and this little friend beside me. But the old urge came out of nowhere, and she smiled with delight when I began making love to her.

“Daddy-O, you love me!” she chortled when I went in, sounding as if she were completely astonished that anyone could love her.

I couldn't help chuckling.

“You sound surprised.”

She nodded.

“You're right. I'm not surprised. I knew you loved me.”

When the love-making ended, she went out to the bathroom first. Then she was back and I used the facilities.

In bed again, she was snug up against me, whispering.

“Do you still love me?”

“It's only been a few minutes,” I protested playfully. “How could I not still love you, Roberta?”

“All right, then,” she murmured sleepily. “Just making sure. I want you to love me forever, Jimmy.”

“I will. I'll love you forever.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

“Say ‘I promise to love Bobbie forever,'” she insisted.

Very seriously, I said it.

“I promise to love Bobbie forever.”

“There,” she whispered faintly, stretching up and kissing me on the cheek. “Now I can sleep.”

And she did, falling asleep almost immediately. And shortly afterward, around two or three in the morning, or whatever it was, surprisingly enough, so did I.

Twelve

Vaguely, I remember Bobbie whispering something in my ear about me phoning for a cab. Then she was gone, and I drifted off to sleep again.

Once I heard the bedroom door open. A young woman was standing there.

“Oh, sorry,” she smiled. “I thought you'd gone already.”

She left, closing the door after her.

It took a few minutes, but the message finally got through to me. I got out of bed and used the bathroom across the corridor. The wash-up felt good, but I could use a shave. It would have to wait.

On my way out, I passed the open door of Joyce's room. She smiled out at me.

“Sorry I rousted you out,” she apologized. “But I've got to leave for work soon.”

“It's all right. I've got places to get to, myself. What time is it?”

She checked a clock across the room.

“Two-fifteen.”

“Wow! Later than I thought.”

“Bobbie left a number beside the phone,” she called, as I went along the corridor. “In case you want to call a cab.”

“Thanks, Joyce. I'll get one up on the Strip.”

The walk over to the Strip was more of a walk than I expected, but I was still accustomed to walking long distances, so it was no hardship.

First, I got a shave. That was a morale-booster. Then I had a late breakfast, right in front of a municipal bus stop.

Two-thirty or three in the afternoon would have been a strange time to be having breakfast anywhere else, but not in that kind of town.

I caught a bus down to the southern end of the Strip, before it begins making the big turn from southwest to due west. By some miracle, my car was right where I had parked it, a short distance from the end of my street, beside the adobe wall fronting the non-existent sidewalk, just short of the front door.

Instead of going on inside, I hesitated beside the Ford.

There were three things on my list of priorities: get into a change of clothes, pay my respects to Sergeant Brode before he had me dragged in to pay them, and take care of what had been nibbling away at the back of my brain, waking and sleeping, since Bobbie and I turned in at three o'clock that morning. I was worried about Herby, and I couldn't pinpoint exactly why.

Finally, sighing with resignation, I slid behind the wheel, fished under the dashboard for where I hang the car key chain on a knob under there, out of sight, found the keys already in the ignition, and started the motor.

It was only afterward, at the corner turning onto the Strip, that I remembered I had failed to check the heap for a bomb.

Grinning, I shook my head. Apparently I was no longer much of a priority with the crowd who had arranged for my little sabbatical, up at the Arts Colony.

After the Strip had completed its big swing westward, I turned north on the road to Florian's, hurrying along, passing the lumber yard, then the dirt road leading back past the south end of the brick building containing the row of stores…a no-name fast-food place, a hardware store, a pawn shop, and what casino the size of Florian's wouldn't have at least one pawn shop within easy walking distance, a deli with take-out for the lesser help up at the nearby casino, a dry cleaners…and at the northern end, the other dirt driveway giving access to the row of shacks back there, out of sight of the highway. Then El Rancho Motel fell behind, the stretch of brush and cactus, and finally the casino and hotel combination.

When all of it was behind me, I settled down to making mileage. At the east-west crossroad, I cut over past the northern end of the Strip to the lakeshore highway, opposite the lakeside state park for picnickers. Making a left, I presently passed the yacht club, slowing to read the metal plaque, which discreetly revealed what was behind the wide-open gate with the guard's kiosk beside it: Florian's Yacht Club, S. Preston, Chairman.

Okay, nice and respectable. Respectable is good, like greed.

Finally, I reached the road giving access to Herby's Boat Yard.

Turning in, I went slowly and carefully along the dirt drive, until I nosed the Ford down the final slope to the flat stretch, where Herby's cabin was perched at the shore-end of his wooden dock.

A gentle evening breeze blew in across the water.

I got out of the car, peeling the shirt and T-shirt away from where sweat had stuck both to my back, in the drive up from town.

No one was about. A few launches were tied up to the dock, but there was no Herby anywhere to be seen.

I peered inside the open doorway of his cabin.

“Herby? You around, man?”

No reply.

I strolled out along the dock, and just as I did, far off to the south along the lakeshore, the Florian's sign was lit at the yacht club. It wasn't too impressive, with the last of the daylight still competing with it, but later, in the dark, it would look like something special.

One of the tied-up boats wasn't tied up too well. Bending, I re-tied the line securing it to the dock post.

“Herby?”

Still no response.

I thought of my three priorities, and of having decided this was the one which was the most important. Now it looked as if I had driven all the way up here for nothing.

Turning to go back to shore, I noticed a line, out at the end of the dock. It was secured to the last dock post on the left, but there was no boat beside the dock that it was holding.

Strolling on out there, I examined the line. Sure enough, it was taut, stretching at a steep angle down into the clear lake water.

“Don't tell me one of Herby's boats went under,” I muttered.

Leaning over, I peered down into the water. It was so clear down there that you could see quite a ways. I followed my line of sight along the line until it revealed what it was tied to, twenty or thirty feet down: Herby.

I had sense enough to get out of my shirt, T-shirt, pants, shoes and socks. Then I went in and down, hurrying, trying to reach him, even as I realized there probably wasn't all that much of a hurry, not anymore.

I was right. When I got down to where Herby was, his open empty eyes told me Herby had all the time in the world now.

The line fastened to the dock above had been looped around his body, under both armpits. Another line fastened both ankles securely, and that one stretched down into the lake's depths, out of sight. Both his hands had been tied behind his back.

There wasn't anything I could do. I didn't touch him. I simply drove my arms furiously, trying to reach the surface, where I cursed steadily, while I got my shorts off and put on the rest of my clothes. Back in the Ford, I hooked the wrung-out, still-dripping shorts on a wall hook behind the seat back, on the passenger side.

Herby may have had a phone there, but I wasn't about to use it, not to call the police. If there were any fingerprints to be found anywhere in his cabin or out on that old dock, I wanted their forensics team to get nice clear copies of them, and find out whose they were, without any messing up from me.

The first phone I came to was in the picnic area beside the road, some distance past the Florian's yacht club entrance.

I called Florian's casino, asking for Joyce. They gave me the usual runaround they always do, when you try to contact one of the dancers, but I finally convinced them it was a legit call.

“Hullo?”

“Joyce?”

“Yes?”

“This is the man who slept too late this morning.”

She laughed.

“Hello. Bobbie's friend.”

“I've got two messages for you to get to Bobbie. Very important messages. Tell her the sailor she saw last night has left town and won't be back.”

“What's this sailor's name?”

“Joyce, you don't want to know his name. Bobbie will figure it out.”

“What's the other message?”

“Tell her to get down to the Hall of Justice and find a detective sergeant named Brode. He'll take care of her. Got that? The sailor is gone and won't be back, and she should find Brode. He'll protect her.”

“God, this sounds heavy.”

“It is heavy, Joyce. As heavy as it can get.”

Hanging up, I called the cops, told them what and where and who I was, and got back in the Ford and headed north for Herby's boatyard again.

A police car passed me on the way. I saw him turn in out of sight along Herby's entrance road long before I could do the same.

When my Ford dipped down the last slope and I secured a parking spot there at the foot of the hill, where I could get back up and out of there without a lot of official vehicles hampering a quick exit, both cops were already out on the dock, peering down into the water.

Thirteen

It was long after dark before Brode could find enough time to get back to me.

I waited in the same little office next to the squad room where I had put in all those hours between line-ups. When Brode finally opened the door and waved me out into the big squad room, most of it was empty. Everyone was out following leads, trying to work out what and who had happened, up at Herby's Boat Yard.

“Sit,” Brode said, slumping wearily behind his desk.

I took the seat facing him at the end of his desk.

“You look bushed,” I observed.

He nodded.

“I am bushed.”

Shaking his head, he sighed, then straightened and looked across at me.

“Funny,” he said, “there were some days when I just wanted to get my hands on you and toss you into the tank…when you didn't report to Inspector McKenzie the way he wanted you to.”

“I explained that,” I said quickly. “Some of Wyatt's strongarms stuck me full of drugs, and next thing I knew, I was pretending to be an artist or a sculptor at some artists colony, up near the northwest end of the lake…”

“I know, you told me,” he interrupted. “But how could we know? McKenzie was having kittens, for awhile there.” He stopped and stared at me curiously. “Are you planning on filing a complaint…about that artists' colony?”

“You think I should?”

He shrugged.

“Hard to prove, kidnapping. Everyone you saw up there was either an employee or a guest. Not likely either sort is about to back up your story of being kept under some kind of mind-stopping drug. It'd be a lot easier for them to prove you insinuated yourself in there under false pretenses, like you were an artist or something…”

“Sure,” I jeered. “And what was I doing with all this insinuating? Why was I doing it?”

Brode spread his hands.

“How should I know?” He grinned. “Maybe you always had a secret yen to paint, or sculpt.”

“So I guess I won't be filing a complaint, then, right?”

“Might be best not to,” he agreed. “It won't be a total loss. You've clued us in that there might be something a bit strange going on up there. We'll be able to keep an eye on them for awhile, see what happens.”

After thinking about it, I had to agree.

“Maybe it's a new way people like Wyatt take care of people they don't want around too much, making noises,” I speculated. “What better place for a potential witness to disappear in, for awhile, getting his pills and unable to remember his own name, unless people keep telling it to him every morning.”

“Better than killing the witnesses,” Brode observed.

“Oh, sure.”

Grinning, he held up a hand.

“All right, don't get ticked off about it. We might not be able to do anything about that place right now, but we know Townsend owns it, and it's a pretty good bet the hard knuckles who keep things under control at places like Florian's are tight as a tick, up at that artists colony.”

“And they might be a lot closer than that to Herby's murder,” I pointed out.

“I'll need clarification of that,” Brode said.

“When Roberta and I took off in the launch she brought, we went straight out from shore, then we turned to the right and headed down-lake. I was still half out of my gourd, so I didn't think about covering our tracks, and Roberta is only a dancing girl at Florian's. She wouldn't know the first thing about that sort of precaution.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning we left the running lights lit on the launch. Anyone back at the artist colony, one of those two I clobbered, all Gilbert and the other one had to do was watch our lights go straight across the lake partway, turn south two or three miles, and then turn back in toward shore.”

Brode nodded, staring across the nearly empty squad room.

“I see what you mean,” he said. “You practically drew them a map showing where you were going.”

“Right. We went straight in to Herby's Boat Yard. Florian's Yacht Club is some distance farther down the shore, south of there. Except for Herby's, there was no place else we could have been going.”

Brode nodded again. “And between the visit you and this Roberta paid Herby early this morning, and when you got back there late in the afternoon, unknown persons arranged for poor Herby to take a real long drink of water, right beside his dock.”

“By the way, have you heard from Roberta yet?” I asked.

Pulling himself out of his thoughts, he frowned.

“Why? Should I have?”

“I phoned the gal she shares an apartment with, here in town,” I explained. “They both work at Florian's casino, as dancers. Name's Joyce. I told her to tell Bobbie to get in touch with you, here, because of what had happened to Herby.”

“You told this dancer about the murder?”

“I told her in code,” I said quickly. “Something about the sailor Bobbie saw early that morning left town and wouldn't be back…”

“Oh,” he said, settling back in his chair. “Okay. For a second there, I thought you were telling civilians about a murder case before you even reported it to us…”

“You never heard from Bobbie, then?”

Reaching for his message box, he riffled through it. Shaking his head, he put the messages back.

“Nothing from a Roberta.” He eyed me for a moment. “You're really worried about her?”

I spelled it out for him.

“She works at Florian's. That means, they have access to her, whenever they want. They know where she lives, who her friends are…the works. The only one who can protect her is me, or you. Mostly you.”

He grinned.

“You better believe it. Okay, give me her home address. I'll have a car drop by there and bring her in…”

“And don't forget the casino,” I reminded him. “She's probably there at work right now.”

“Casino, too. I'll get right on it. Back in a minute.”

He went out the door at the far end of the squad room. In a couple of minutes, he was back.

Seated across from me once more, he shook his head.

“Although why you're so worried about her, I don't quite understand. How could they connect her with helping you escape their artist colony up there last night?”

Astounded, I stared at him.

“Brode, they had all the time they needed to ask Herby any questions they wanted to ask him before they sent him down into the lake tied up like a sacrificial capon.”

Brode slumped lower in his chair, nodding his head tiredly.

“Herby was a good friend of Roberta's,” I went on. “But from what I saw of him, I don't think he was tough enough to hold back any information they might have wanted out of him. Like who was it that dropped in on him at two or three o'clock in the morning…”

“You're right, Brandon . I didn't think of that. I guess I'm just tired. Things begin to slip past me, after a certain point.”

“What about me? What do I do now?”

“Hell, go along home. Stay out of this. You handled the murder okay. Don't spoil it by messing around anymore. We'll give more than a simple look-see at that artists colony, now you've made the connection about them being able to see where your launch went, after you and your girl friend got out of there.”

His phone rang. He picked it up and listened. His eyes began opening wider. Incredulous, he shook his head, even as he began taking notes.

When he hung up and stood, I stood, too

“What was that about?” I asked.

“Big Sal Preston just got a rifle bullet through his face, up at Florian's Yacht Club. Staring out his office window at the lights across the lake, he gets it, boom! right in the kisser.”

“Sounds familiar. Wyatt on the roof of the casino, the last time.”

Brode's eyes were angry when he glanced at me.

“You're damn right it sounds familiar,” he snapped. “It's that Ben Crane guy again. You wanna know what else went down, up there at that yacht club, awhile ago?”

“Isn't Big Sal getting whacked enough for one night?”

“That doesn't even start it,” Brode snarled, coming around the desk and heading for the far end of the squad room, with me scuttling along beside him, trying to keep up.

“When the security people ran down to the docks after whoever was out on the lake a few hundred feet, still blasting away with his rifle, one by one they jumped into the line of launches tied up there, and one by one they went tearing out of the marina after the bastard. And somewhere between the hundred and two-hundred foot mark, they blew up, one right after another. The son of a bitch must've rigged every one of those boats to blow.”

“That's why he stayed out a ways,” I gasped, “taking potshots at them the way he did. He was drawing them after him.”

“Huh?” Brode turned and looked at me as we burst through the doorway and hurried along the corridor. After a second's thought, he nodded, his mouth grim. “I wouldn't put it past that guy.”

“This time it really looks like Ben Crane,” I said. “Herby was a friend of his. Maybe this is his way of…expressing his disapproval of what was done to Herby.”

Brode stopped and thought about that.

“ Brandon , you may have something there,” he muttered. He nodded, his eyes fierce, his face dark and angry.

“It all fits,” I went on. “Crane went into those tunnels over in Nam , a work that certainly involved setting and defusing booby traps. Meaning explosives. Here you have, how many, four or five motor launches being rigged to blow up, almost by the numbers…”

Brode started moving again, still nodding.

“You bet. Crane fits this modus like a glove.”

“Okay if I go along with you?” I asked. “Maybe I can…”

“No,” he yelled over his shoulder. “Stay out of it. I mean that, Brandon . Keep clear. You've done fine. We'll do what's needed, from here on.”

“Okay,” I agreed, stopping where I was and watching him disappear around a bend in the corridor, on his way outside.

I felt the letdown. I wanted to go along, to follow the hunt for Ben Crane. Then I shrugged. Brode was right. I was a civilian. I had done what I could to help. Now all I had to do was stay out of it and let the cops do their job.

I headed on over to Bobbie's place. No telling how long it would take the cops to get there to see if she was home.

It wasn't a long drive, but I found myself exhausted before I was halfway there. Maybe I was catching Brode's over-worked syndrome. Or I could still be reacting to after-effects of those pills they'd been stuffing me with, up at the artists' colony.

When I drove into the street where Bobbie and Joyce lived, a squad car was just pulling away. A woman in a housecoat was watching them drive off. As I eased in to the curb, she was turning away, headed indoors again.

“Was Roberta home, ma'am?” I called.

She turned and gaped at me. Apparently not impressed by what she saw, with a suspicious look on her face, she asked: “Roberta who?”

I got out of the car, trying to look harmless, but not too sure how to manage it.

“I asked Sergeant Brode downtown to check and see if your tenant was home,” I explained to her. “I just now saw the police leave, so I thought perhaps they might have been the ones he sent to make sure she's all right.”

Her suspicions somewhat allayed, she came a step closer to where I was standing beside the Ford.

“No one was home,” she said. “Neither of the girls was there. Both of them are off working at this time of night. They're good girls.”

“You're sure they're not here,” I insisted.

“Positive,” she said. “I let the cops in. They wanted to be certain.”

“Okay, then,” I said, getting back behind the wheel. “It's best to be certain. I was worried. Glad to know the Sergeant got his officers out here this quick.”

“Are they in any trouble?” she asked, approaching the car. ”Joyce and Bobbie are both real nice girls.”

“I hope they're okay. Thanks, ma'am.”

Not wanting to have to give her any long-drawn-out explanations, I drove off.

The drained feeling was still with me, so I stopped and ate supper. That helped some, but when I parked the Ford at the end of my adobe walled building and got out, I still felt as if I'd been dragged behind a herd of stampeding buffalo.

Blowing at the top of the flight of stairs as if I had just climbed a rock face, I unlocked the door to my room and stepped inside.

Smiles was standing off to one side. When I shut the door behind me, he jammed a short-barreled revolver into my ribs, hard.

“Oooph!” I blurted. It was all I could think of to say.

“About time you got back, Brandon ,” he said. “You kept us waiting in this dump of yours a lot longer than I like.”

“Just once,” I gasped, rubbing my side, “I'd like to come in here and not find your smiling face waiting for me.”

He grinned cheerfully and said: “Don't worry, big guy. This'll be the last time.”

There was another one in front of me, a hard, pale, almond-eyed face. Its owner held a big .357 Magnum, which he seemed to be able to handle.

“Elephant season doesn't start till autumn,” I grunted.

“Huh?” Ridges and knobs under the new one's skin stretched it taut, all over his face, so that it seemed to have no flesh, just bone and knotted muscle and ligaments. He looked from me to Smiles.

“He means your cannon,” Smiles explained. “He's a comic.”

“Oh, that's it?” He turned back to me and his left fist lashed out and clipped the side of my jaw. I hardly felt it.

“Easy, Val,” chuckled Smiles. “They don't want any marks on the body.”

“If that's the hardest he can hit,” I said, “they've got nothing to worry about.”

“Oh, you want some more?”

Val stepped closer, peering up at my face, tense as a pulley cable, his peculiar eyes flashing.

Behind me, Smiles gave me a shove toward the door.

“Come on, let's blow,” he growled. “I'm sick of this hovel. Check him for metal. He carries under the arm.”

Val took my .38 and tossed it onto the bed. Sneering at me, he spat on the floor.

“A character,” he piped. Turning, he went out onto the landing and down the stairs.

“Follow along,” Smiles instructed cheerfully. “Don't do any yelling.”

I followed along.

The entire scene felt as if I had been through it before, and with almost the same characters playing the various parts. Except for Val, of course. He was new in the cast.

When I stepped out into the same evening I had thought I'd left behind me, two minutes earlier, there was the same sedan from before, with Jeff behind the wheel.

I couldn't help but laugh.

“Now the original cast is complete, almost,” I chortled.

For some reason, I felt giddy. Everything seemed funny.

“Except the budget's gone up. The backers have given us Val as a spear-carrier for this out-of-town production.”

Jeff got out, glanced quickly up the street toward the Strip, opened the back door and motioned me in.

“Move it,” he told me.

Inside, I sank back on the soft, comfortable seat. My eyes closed. The door slammed shut and my eyes opened.

Smiles went around the car and crawled in through the doorway on the right side, shoving me over on my side of the car.

“You take up too much room, Brandon,” he said good-naturedly.

Jeff swung the car smoothly around and headed toward the Strip.

Absently, I examined the back of his thin head with its dark gray straw fedora tilted just slightly to the left. My eyes closed again.

From what seemed like a great distance, Smiles said mockingly: “That's the way, Brandon . Just relax and enjoy the ride. It's gonna be a long one.”

I took his advice. I fell like a stone into something less than sleep, in which I was somewhat aware of the car going along smoothly through the night, and, at the same time, I seemed several removes from being one of its occupants. I would wake fitfully, lifting heavy eyelids now and then, to check and see where we were, as if I was taking a bus trip, and didn't want to miss my stop when I reached my destination.

The Strip went flitting by first, a kaleidoscope of lights whirling past. But I was used to the Strip. I saw it every day and most nights. I was used to it…wasn't I?

In my quarter-coma, I smiled wisely. Could anyone ever get used to it? All that glitter, slathered over the greed and grime of humanity?

On my right, Smiles sat holding the snub-nose gun with his right hand resting on his knee. He didn't seem specially alert, but with a single twitch of that hand, he could turn that relaxed-looking pistol and blow a hole right through me.

“Where we headed?” I murmured sleepily. “Florian's?”

“Not this time,” Smiles replied. “Down Mexico way.”

“Cut the talk,” Jeff growled. “The less he knows, the better.”

Smiles laughed.

“Why? Who's he gonna tell?”

Sure enough, when Jeff stopped for the light at the highway junction, and it changed to green, instead of making a right turn up to Florian's, he made a left, which led down past the gas station where Ben Crane had begun his war against these people.

“All roads lead to Florian's,” I pronounced, letting my eyes close again and drifting off. “Almost.”

When Smiles commented delightedly, I heard his voice as if it were coming from a long way off.

“Hear that, Jeff? The guy sounds like a press agent for the casino, don't he?”

The next time my eyes floated open, I stared through the haze of my eyelashes at the highway arrowing ahead, straight through the open desert, the darkness sliced far ahead of us by the headlight beams.

Up in the front, Val's flat Midwestern voice was going as a kind of permanent undertone, punctuated occasionally by the lower voice of Jeff. Most of it I heard clearly, but I paid no attention to any of it, not consciously, until Val brought up how Big Sal Preston had been killed.

“That I don't get,” Val said, puzzling over it. “After what happened to Wyatt on the roof of the casino, here Preston is, like the rest of us, on the watch for some guy, and he gets it from out on that lake, right there in his office, admiring the view. If I'd 'a been in Preston 's shoes, I wouldn't 'a gone anywheres near a window, any window. Not till they nailed that bastard. Him and his rifle!”

“Maybe Big Sal forgot,” Jeff suggested.

“Forgot?” Val shook his head, baffled. “Back east, they'll never believe it, when I tell them.”

His harsh laughter sounded not unbearable, inside the car. I wondered if there was some sort of sound-proofing built into the interior, or sound-suppressing system.

“They'll wonder how you guys manage to run things out here at all,” Val went on.

“Okay, okay, Val, lay off,” Jeff muttered. “We know how hotshot you Big City boys are, on account of you keep telling us.”

“Oh, hell, Jeff,” said Val. “I'm not razzing you, but don't it sound like one of them cowboy movies they used to make? Don't it? Be honest, now. Lone cowboy goes after the cattle rustlers, just him and his gun, all by himself! Hah!”

If Jeff replied, I didn't hear it. Time for my instant nosedive into oblivion again.

Way back in my conscious mind, I suspected that all I was going through here was withdrawal from the pills I had been taking, up at the artists' colony. There was also a hazy awareness that I ought to do something about this ride I was being taken on. What was it Smiles had said: this was the last time? Why wasn't I concerned about that?

Leaning back into the comfortable seat as the big car tore southward through the night, I filled my lungs with air. Every so often, I came out of my peculiar torpor, perhaps for only a second or two, and I would watch the ghostly sage fleeing past beside the road, and up in the sky, the stars remaining as far away as they always did.

Like a continuing refrain, which seemed hugely amusing to me, I would wonder how Jeff and Smiles and this Windy City windbag Val and all his out-of-town friends they'd pushed the panic-button for and brought in as reserves, how had they all managed to avoid getting stood up in those line-ups the boys at the Hall of Justice had kept me staring at, through a night and a day, a week ago?

I couldn't help thinking of all the special deputies and state police roping in everyone within fifty miles who wasn't carrying a sign saying Jesus Saves! while all the real specimens they were looking for were probably eating meals prepared by an imported slum gullion of a cook, probably whelped on stone waterfront steps at Le Havre and now calling himself a French chef. They weren't hiding in alleys, or crouching in cheap motels, not anymore. Now they were in the houses of the rich and famous. Some of them were rich and famous themselves. They didn't worry about line-ups anymore. They had too many lawyers platooned in front of them, taking care of that sort of thing.

My mind kept soaring off and circling around and then returning to that picture of the law running around, roping in jackals and coyotes, while the wolverines looked silently down from the heights, well above timberline.

For some reason, I could not seem to stop enjoying the humor of that picture.

The two men in the front seat droned on.

“How're those other creeps making out?” Val was asking.

“Most of them were nothing,” Jeff replied. “The cops did the work for us, marching them around in circles. Probably bounced half the bastards out of the state, by now.”

“What about that Mercator guy? I hear he's a shrewdie.”

“He's probably been dusted already,” Jeff said. “I heard it was tonight.”

Val laughed.

“DeMerra don't like Mercator. Got a screwing from him once, up in Dune City . Never forgot it. He in Wyatt's shoes for keeps down here?”

“If they want him there.”

Eyes wide open, now I was awake. No more drifting off into my dream world. Through my entire body, something wet and colder than liquid ice flowed and swirled.

Val laughed suddenly.

“I wonder if that Lanson guy uses a chopper on them in that shack they're holed up in?”

“In the alley, you mean?”

“I hear Lanson's been dying to break in that juice gun on someone. I bet he uses it on them.”

“Hell, no,” Jeff scoffed, almost under his breath, sounding exasperated. “How much do you characters think you can get away with out here?”

A sheet of flame went roaring through me. I swung the left around in a hard tight loop, smashing it into Smiles' breast-bone, where the nerve is. His scream sounded like it was trying to tear his throat apart getting out. He cringed back against the seat cushion almost hard enough to push himself right through it.

“Hey!” Val asked, glancing over his shoulder. “What gives back there?”

Smiles had tried to swing his gun around, but the pain from the punch stopped his hand in mid-air.

Both my hands grabbed his wrist and half his gun hand. Sliding down in the seat corner on my side of the car, I kicked out with my left leg over the top of the front seat. The heel caught Val in his forehead and snapped his head back. Without a sound, he dropped out of sight.

Sliding my left hand down from Smiles' wrist, I got hold of his snub-nose. The thumb of my right hand crunched savagely down into the rope of muscle between his thumb and forefinger, where it hump-stretches over the back of the gun-butt. His hand sprang open. Both my hands fumbled desperately with the gun. From the corner of my eye, I could see one of Val's hands clawing its way over the top of his seat-back, trying to get a grip on it.

Jeff was braking gradually, in an attempt to slow smoothly and not screw things up for Val. It worked. The snout of Val's Magnum came up, outlined against the headlighted? road beyond the windshield. Then his face appeared, streaming blood down from his forehead, where I'd kicked him. His voice was snarling incoherent sounds, thick with pain and fury.

Finally getting my hands on the .38 I had taken from Smiles, I leaned forward and shot Val twice through the seat-back. Both reports sounded muffled, and the interior of the car filled with acrid cordite fumes.

Val disappeared.

Beside me, Smiles came at me with a lunge. I slashed the snub nose at his face, and felt bone crunch under the impact. Smiles spun away, groaning, and fell off the seat.

Leaning forward, I shoved the still-smoking muzzle of the snub nose against Jeff's right ear.

“Wanna bet I can't put one in through this ear and bring it out the other one?” I whispered to him.

Jeff swallowed and licked his lips. His right hand froze, half out from under his jacket. The dash light glistered on metal in his hand.

“No bet,” he growled.

Reaching my free hand over his far shoulder, I plucked the long-barreled .32 from his frozen hand.

“Turn this load around and head back,” I ordered.

Down on the floorboards beside Jeff's foot pushing the footbrake, what was left of Val sprawled every which way.

Beside me, an occasional grunt came from Smiles, on the floor next to me.

Jeff slowed enough to swing the car around. Before he could get it moving again, I told him, “Open the door across from you and boot that bastard into the road.”

Jeff turned his head and looked at me with what may have been reproach, but he did as I told him.

“And make damn sure,” I said, as he was shoving Val out the open passenger doorway, “that you don't come up from down there with his .357. Right now, Jeff, I'm two-gun Brandon , and one of the guns is yours.”

“I'll make sure I don't, Brandon ,” he murmured.

He had to wrestle to get Val unstuck from the narrow space beneath the dashboard, but he finally tilted the last of Val out onto the concrete pavement and pulled the door shut again.

I stuck Jeff's .32 into my belt.

Jeff began picking up speed, heading northward toward the pink glow in the sky made by the lights along the distant Strip.

Reaching across Smiles on the floor, I opened the door on his side of the car.

Glancing over his shoulder, Jeff began reducing speed.

Swinging the snub nose at him, I snarled: “Faster. Speed it up.”

Jeff stared at me in the dim dashboard lights, shrugged and faced forward. He started to pour highway under us.

I sweated getting Smiles up from the floor. He was big and blocky. His face would never again look like it was smiling.

Shoving his head and shoulders backward through the partly open door, I used his body to try pushing the door wider open against the wind our forward speed poured relentlessly against it.

I was panting. A hot hating fire burned behind my eyes like a blowtorch.

It was no use. The outside wind, pressing against the door, held Smiles jammed in the opening. No matter how hard I shoved against him, I couldn't budge him.

Finally, furious, I lay on the back seat, braced the hand that wasn't holding the gun, and straight-kicked out at him with both feet.

Smiles was still alive, and conscious. When my feet punched into him, he grunted.

The double-kick did it. His body shoved out through the open doorway over nothing, and then he was gone. A single sickening slap when he hit the pavement was the last I heard of him.

“Okay, Jeff, faster. We've got a little girl to find alive up there under those pink lights, and you'd better pray we do find her alive.”

Still panting, reaching for air, I realized sleep and exhaustion no longer crowded in on my eyes or dulled my mind. I felt keyed up to the highest pitch, and I stayed that way, all the way back to town.

First I gave Jeff directions to where Joyce and Bobbie lived, but when he reduced his speed in among the side streets, I told him not to.

“I better slow down or cops'll stop us.”

“Don't worry about cops, Jeff. You've got me to worry about.”

“Suit yourself.”

He had to screech the tires a bit, to slow enough to make a turn. He was a good wheelman.

“One more block, then right for half a block,” I whispered. “Turn into the rear parking area.”

He saw where I meant and turned in, moving slowly now.

I had him park in the slot where Bobbie had parked her sport car.

We went inside the building. When we reached her apartment, I told him, “Open the door.”

His mouth crimped in slightly, but he didn't say a word, got out a pick and went to work. He had it open in twenty seconds, faster than I could have.

Inside, we found no one in the apartment.

“They're both at work, around now,” he suggested.

“Let's hope they're both at work,” I said. “Let's go. There's one other place, isn't there, Jeff? A shack in a block-long alley, just this side of Florian's.”

Back in the big sedan, we got out onto the northwest highway again, headed toward the distant Florian's sign.

An eighth of a mile short of it, Jeff turned off between the northern end of the row of brick stores and El Rancho Motel. When we had driven the block in from the highway, he was about to turn into the alley when I stopped him.

“Just park right here, next to the end shack.”

He went straight ahead and slid the car to a stop.

“Third shack in?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

There was light coming from inside the paper-covered windows. I hoped that was a good sign.

“Keep your hands where I can see them, Jeff.”

He nodded.

“Off with the motor. Give me the car keys.”

Switching the motor off, he handed me the ignition key ring over his shoulder.

Raising the snub nose with my hand wrapped around the barrel end of it, I clipped Jeff behind his right ear. The blow made a cracking sound I didn't like and hadn't been trying for, but maybe his head was harder than it looked.

Breath expelled from his lungs with a soft, drawn-out “Ugh!” His right hand leaped away from the steering wheel, down toward the seat beside him.

His sudden move startled me. I gave his head another one with the gun butt. This one did the job. His head sagged, then the rest of him tilted gently forward against the steering wheel.

Quickly, I reached over and grabbed him, pulling him back and to one side. I didn't want him falling onto the car horn and waking the entire area with the noise.

Leaning forward over the seat-back, I groped around under Jeff's loose form until I found Val's big .357 Magnum where it had settled in the crack between the seat cushion and the seat-back…or where Jeff had managed to ease it, somehow. A tricky guy, Jeff!

Taking the Magnum along, I climbed out of the car, leaving Jeff where he'd slumped against the door.

Making noise was unavoidable, getting through the tin cans and other junk spread over the third shack's front yard, but I kept it down as much as I could.

Listening at the front door, I heard no sound inside.

The night wind was as gentle as a zephyr on my right cheek, but I shuddered from its touch. My own sweat made it seem like an icy blast.

An insect buzzed around my head. I nearly ducked.

I felt as if eyes were on me, from all along the row of flimsy huts and shanties in the alley. But I saw no one, heard no sound. And the lights inside Chavez's shack, which Mercator was using as his base, were the only illumination nearby.

At least I had enough firepower. More than I could handle.

Leaving Jeff's .32 stuck in my belt, I pocketed Smiles' snubnose and held Val's .357 ready. With my left hand free again, I eased the front door open an inch and punted it softly inward with my foot.

The door swung all the way around, bumped gently against the inside wall, rebounded from it a few inches, and stopped moving.

Standing just short of the threshold, the Magnum cocked, I found there was nothing for it to shoot at.

I stepped inside. The room was empty, except for the body of Mercator sprawled on its back, over by the right-hand wall. His serious eyes, prominent nose and determined jaw all pointed up at the ceiling. If his mouth had remained closed and his eyes hadn't been fixed in an empty stare, he might still have seemed alive. No, there was one minute thing that was out of whack on his face: a thin line of blood had trickled from the side of his mouth. The blood had dried on his cheek.

Directly across the front room, the door to the rear half of the place was partly open. Swinging my own door shut behind me until the latch caught, I crossed the room and very cagily eased into the opposite doorway.

Chavez lay halfway between where I stood and the mattress over by the right- hand wall. One of his legs was stretched out behind him, while the other was bent high up, the knee almost tucked into his armpit. Both his arms were stretched along the floor in front of him. The point of his jaw was the only part of his head that touched the floor: the muscles of his upper arms touched both sides of his face and propped his head up. He looked like a man trying carefully to climb up a steep roof. A wide pool of blood extended from beneath him and had spread across the floor on both sides of where he lay.

Bernard was nowhere in sight.

Roberta lay on her right side on the mattress, curled up in a fetal position, both forearms folded tightly across her stomach.

Going over there, I stood looking down at her. I felt empty. Too late. Always too late for the most important things in life.

The big handgun swung from my hand, and I remembered that Jeff was right outside in the car, out like a light.

My hand tightened on the gun. It wouldn't do a damn bit of good, not anymore, but that didn't matter to me now.

I was half-turned away when Bobbie's eyes opened.

I sat on the floor beside her.

For a second, she stared up at me as if she couldn't remember who I was. A look of terror filled her eyes. They widened until the whites showed all around the washed-blue clarity of her eyeballs.

“It's all right, Bobbie,” I whispered. “It's me, Brandon.”

It got through to her. The fear went out of her eyes, and she murmured: “Oh, Daddy-O, you came. Much too late…much…”

“Where are you hit, kiddo?”

My voice sounded like the voice of someone else, hoarse, harsh, a voice I had never heard before.

“Tummy,” she gasped softly. “Doesn't hurt now, but…it did…just after they…but now it doesn't…not anymore…”

With a slight frown-wrinkle in her forehead, she stared up at me.

“Don't cry, Brandon Daddy. I don't care. I don't m-mind…dying.”

For an instant, her eyes became deep dark-blue. Her face squeezed up. She looked about to cry, but she didn't. She had cried already: tear-streaks had dried all around her eyes, and had left their glazed residue on her pale white skin.

Then her gaze returned from wherever it had gone for a moment.

She grinned defiantly.

“This living isn't so much!”

Both her hands pressed against her stomach, one hand against the back of the other, both held there tightly.

“Roberta, listen to me,” I said, trying to clear my throat. “I'm going for a doctor. Don't move from exactly the way you are. I'll be back with help before you can…before you…”

Once more, her eyes widened, but not as much as they had earlier.

“Brandon Daddy,” she begged, “don't leave me alone. I don't want to die alone.”

Tears spurted from her eyes and poured sideways down her face into the dark patch on the mattress where her earlier tears had fallen.

I tried to reassure her, tried to think of something to say, tried to make myself get up from where I sat on the floor beside where she lay on the mattress. Then it all went out of me. I slumped back and stayed where I was, and didn't say anything more about going for help. I knew there was no help.

Her skin had always been white, but now it was whiter than any skin ought to be, chalk-white. Her eyes had returned to the pale blue-green of a chlorinated swimming pool. There wasn't enough blood left inside her to give them the deep dark-blue they had been when she was still alive.

One of her hands groped toward me. Her eyes squinted, trying to see through the tears filling them.

“Daddy-mia, don't leave me alone,” she said in a faint soft voice.

I put my hand on hers. She grabbed my fingers and hung on.

“I won't leave you, Bobbie-O. I'll stay with you for the rest of your life.”

“Forever,” she sighed. Her eyes closed. She looked happy.

Twisting, I used my other hand to get out a handkerchief, using it to wipe her eyes.

She kissed the inside of my wrist, whispering something. I had to lean down to hear what she was saying.

“I'm a good girl, Jimmy. I'm really a good girl.”

“Yes, Roberta, I know you are. You're a good lovely girl.”

Her eyes popped open and struggled to open wider.

“No, I mean it,” she cried sharply. “That…the other time you were here…”

She glanced toward where Chavez lay dead on the floor nearby.

“…I was just teasing you.”

Her lips smiled at me, and her eyes smiled. The skin at the outside corners of her eyes crimped up. She watched me through the slits with eyes softer than any eyes have ever been.

“I know you were,” I grinned. “Just getting me jealous.”

“You like me, don't you?” Her eyes remained crinkled up, eyes full of mischief.

I nodded.

“You love me, too, don't you?” A sly little gleam peeped out of the crinkled-up slits.

“I think so.”

“I thought you did,” she whispered with satisfaction. “I can always tell.”

Then she stiffened. Her eyes closed. She waited, listening to her own pain.

Slowly, her face relaxed again, but her eyes remained shut, and her hand in mine was limp. It no longer gripped my fingers.

I sat there and watched her face.

Suddenly, her eyes flew open, looked around desperately, filled with fright until they found me.

“Oh, Daddy-O,” she whispered, her voice so soft that I had to lean my head close to her mouth to hear her.

“Yes, honey, I'm still here,” I assured her. “What is it? Don't be frightened. I'll stay right here with you.”

“Daddy-O, kiss me goodbye,” she wailed. “Oh, I don't want to die.”

Her lips were warm. They spread under mine.

I don't know when she died. After awhile, I realized that the hand I held was the hand of a tiny little dead girl.

For the first time, I could make myself look away from her face and down at the mattress.

Her other hand no longer pressed against her stomach. It had fallen limply. The knuckles and the backs of her fingers rested in the blood on the mattress. The palm of the hand was red with blood, too.

Her fingers were so tiny, compared with mine!

I hardly glanced at the three or four bullet wounds across her stomach. It didn't matter anymore.

Next thing I knew, I was out under the night sky once more, with the gun again in my hand.

I strolled across the littered front yard as if I had all the time in the world. My feet made an awful ungodly racket among the tin cans, but that didn't matter, either.

When I saw that the car was gone, I just stood there at the end of the alley, staring at where I had left it, with Jeff inside, unconscious…but apparently not unconscious enough.

It didn't bother me, particularly. There was plenty of time to do what I had to do now.

I don't really know how long I stood there, staring off at the back wall of El Rancho Motel, and beyond it at the lights of Florian's. I just couldn't seem to think what to do next. I knew there was something, but exactly what it was eluded me.

Finally, without thinking about it, I turned, went past where the car had been parked, past the end shack and out into the desert, in among the sage bushes.

I walked quickly, smelling the fragrant night-odor of the sage bushes high up inside my nostrils, feeling the wind blowing against me, once I was clear of the buildings.

I kept going, weaving in and out among the clumps of brush, squinting up at the high-flung stars.

Occasionally, aloud, I said, “Roberta?”

Fourteen

Sunlight streamed through a window.

Rolling over in bed, I tried to get back to sleep. When I realized I couldn't do it, I wondered why, until I opened my eyes and saw the room wasn't my room, and the sun wasn't coming through my eastward-facing window. It wasn't a morning sun, either, but a late afternoon one, and it poured at an angle through a big picture window that hadn't been cleaned in awhile.

I wondered if this was the next day, or two days later. Lying there, I let it all come floating back to me, wondering how I could kill two men and not feel a trace of guilt about either of them.

Somehow, I had made a wide swing south of town and approached my rooming house through the desert. Some people had been waiting. I stayed out there in the brush, and watched whoever it was. The .357 I had taken from Smiles hung from my hand while I watched.

It turned out to be the police. A second car joined the one already there. When the car door of the new arrival opened and its inside light went on, I recognized Brode getting out. His being there didn't make any difference to me. I remained where I was.

Lying now in the strange bed, I realized what had been in my mind, while I sat out there in the brush. If they spotted me out there, and had come on out after me, I would have shot them, Brode first, then the others.

Shuddering at that realization, I sat up in bed and swung my legs over the side. I didn't like thinking that about myself.

Gazing around the motel room, I was about to get up and cross to the window, to see if I could find out what motel it was, when I remembered.

I had gone all the way back through the sage brush to El Rancho Motel and gotten a room, and this was the room.

At the time, in the strangeness of last night, it had seemed enormously important to reach El Rancho Motel. Thinking about it now, sitting on the edge of the bed, I wondered why it had.

I remembered Roberta's face. Then I forced myself to stop remembering it.

Getting to my feet, I went into the efficient little bathroom and used it. Surprisingly, they had a razor and a new, or at least an unused-looking, razor blade.

Refreshed after a shower and shave, I got dressed.

The three handguns sat on the seat of the chair where I had thrown my suit coat.

I shook my head at sight of them. The guns complicated things.

At the side of the picture window, I peeped carefully out past the Venetian blind at the U-shaped motel court. A lot of cars were parked out there.

My unit was halfway back on the south row of rooms. There were five units directly across from me, five at the western end, and five more on my side, including my own. Three units almost closed off the eastern end of the square, leaving room for the entrance driveway and the corner office beyond it to complete the rectangle.

The sun went down below the roofline of the western row of units, but daylight was still everywhere.

I wondered why I hadn't thrown the three guns away in the desert. Now that I was relatively sane again, I had no idea what to do with them. In the words of Sheriff Carroll, I was by way of being an indirect officer of the court, a licensed private detective. I couldn't see myself getting rid of evidence, even evidence against myself. Maybe especially evidence against myself.

Parked over in the northwest angle of the court was the familiar old gray Chevy sedan, unmistakable because of the big smooth crunched-in two-foot-long dent in its left rear fender, well behind the wheel. El Rancho had at least one old resident besides the manager.

Perhaps all the newcomers were just trying to get as close as they safely could to the scene of the recent trouble out at Florian's, both the casino with Wyatt getting whacked, and at their yacht club farther north and east, by the reservoir, with Big Sal's dispatching.

Drinking some tap water, I sat near the picture window, smoking unsatisfactory cigarettes with a mouth parched and bitter-tasting.

I knew I couldn't leave the motel until after dark. Even just sitting there, watching late afternoon light gradually fade, and feeling the intense heat of the day slowly lessen, I had a hunted feeling.

And why shouldn't I feel that way? Jeff had witnessed the two killings. Even if he hadn't reported them to the police, somehow they must have connected me with the two bodies, out there on the highway to the south, or they wouldn't have been staked out at my rooming house the night before, waiting for me.

There was no way I could avoid taking the rap for wasting Smiles and Val, but there was one more thing I had to do before I could walk into the Hall of Justice with my fists full of dead hoods' guns.

I went on smoking and waiting for night to fall.

When it was dark enough for me to leave, I put the snub nose into a coat pocket and tucked the other two bigger handguns into my belt.

Watching at the window until a couple out there got into their car and drove out of the court, I slipped out my door and closed it silently, just as I heard another door open and close across the court.

I remained as I was, facing my closed door, as if I was fumbling with the key. I didn't want anyone to see me. But as the seconds passed, I heard no footsteps. After waiting long enough, I looked quickly over my shoulder and scanned the court. No one was visible.

Maybe I was still punchy from those pills, imagining I heard doors opening and closing.

Keeping close to the side of the court, I hurried around its inner square and down the driveway out the highway exit, glad no one was inside the manager's office. That was unnecessarily foolish, because he must have seen all of me he would ever need to see, whenever I had registered, the night before.

Very hazily, I recalled speaking to the man, a thin-haired, open-faced character who talked too much in a rambling, pointless way.

Now, out by the highway, I walked toward town until I was opposite the nearest end of the dirt driveway entrance to the alley behind the row of stores. I waited there until an empty cab came along, after it dropped a fare out at the casino.

As I climbed into the cab, I couldn't help wondering if the police had yet found the three bodies in the shack. And for some reason, I wondered what had become of Bernard. Had he been tagged by Lanson's machinegun, too?

Getting rid of the cab near the southern end of the Strip, I again approached my rooming house through the desert. I still did not want to find policemen waiting for me when I arrived home.

There were no policemen there.

Upstairs, I showered and shaved and fixed something to eat. Then I put the three weapons in separate paper bags, writing Smiles, Jeff and Val in ink on the appropriate bags. Then I locked all three in my leather suitcase, and took my time eating supper.

My own Police Special was still lying on the bed where Val had thrown it the night before. Stowing it in the sling under my left arm, I went back downstairs and got into the Ford.

Instead of turning right onto the Strip and going up through town, I hung a left. Where the road begins to swing toward the west, I turned straight east onto the first road going that way and stayed on it until I cut the lakeshore road going north, toward the upper dam. There might still have been law hanging around Herby's Boat Yard, and especially around Florian's Yacht Club, and I wanted to avoid them. The law could have me, but not quite yet.

The gate to the yacht club was closed and locked. Driving past, I saw no police cars in there, but they might have been farther in, close to the clubhouse, down near the water's perimeter.

Pulling onto the shoulder of the highway, I spent some time watching stars and an occasional light far off across the water reflected in the motionless lake. There was almost no wind. The mountains ahead seemed closer than they should, appearing to hang over my head, when I got out of the car. After locking the car, I walked back to Florian's gate.

Just inside the gate was a little kiosk with a miniscule porch covered with a pointed shingled roof. A bright white light shone down on the porch from up beneath the steep roof.

No one was in sight. Insects made crazy swoops under the light, flashing down in swift whipping circles, then climbing back up toward the light, out of sight under the angle of the pointed roof.

There was a metal rectangle with a big black button in it, attached to the wire fence beside the gate. When I pushed a thumb against the button, a buzzer sounded inside the little hut. Its door opened, and now the inside of the kiosk was lit, too. A heavy-set man stepped onto the porch, putting on a military-style garrison cap and straightening his tie. Leaning out of the light above his head, he peered out at me.

“Yes, sir,” he called. “What can I do for you?”

“I'm looking for Mr. Townsend, Brockton Townsend. I understand his yacht is moored up here. Is he around?”

Descending the two steps from the porch, he came over toward me. A revolver in a holster swung at his right hip.

“Mr. Townsend isn't at the club tonight.”

Past him, I could see along the curving private road beyond the gate. Above nearby trees, I could see window lights in the upper floors of the big clubhouse.

“How about on his yacht?” I asked. “Would he still be aboard?”

“What did you say your name is, sir?”

“James Brandon. An associate of Mr. Townsend, Ted Fenton hired me for him.”

He nodded, watching me impassively.

“I'm a private detective,” I added.

Again he nodded, but after a moment he asked: “Will you wait here, Mr. Brandon? I'll give Mr. Fenton a call.”

“I'd rather see Mr. Townsend himself,” I called, as he turned away toward the kiosk.

Smiling over his shoulder, he climbed on up the two porch steps imperturbably.

“You say Mr. Townsend isn't at the club, either?” I asked a second time.

“No, sir. He rarely spends nights on his yacht. He has his own ranch up in the mountains.” He gestured to the north.

“All right,” I said. “Don't bother Mr. Fenton. I'll try to contact Townsend himself. He's the one who hired me. Where is that ranch of his? How do I get there?”

“Best way is… You got a car?” He squinted past me, up and down the road, then back at me, his eyes narrowing.

“I left it parked up the road a ways,” I said, adding by way of explanation, “Thought perhaps the club wouldn't want…” I let it trail off a moment, before adding: “Being a private investigator, you tend to handle clients with kid gloves, after awhile.”

He thought about it. I hoped he went for the line. I was getting tired of making people do things at gunpoint.

He went for it.

“Townsend's ranch,” he said, coming back down the porch steps and approaching the other side of the gate. “You stay on the highway to the upper dam, make a right across the dam onto the county road. Turn left on that past the blinker light and go up into the foothills to the first left turn. There's a sign there, Toaquilla Springs. Make your left and go on up to the gas station, just below the pass. It's open all the time, Pete's Place. Just bang on the door, if old Pete doesn't hear you drive up. He'll tell you how to make the rest of the trip.”

“Thanks,” I said. “How's the fishing? I've never tried, up this way.” Or any other way.

“I wouldn't know,” he grinned. “I'm a gun club man, myself.”

His hand flicked. The big pistol wasn't in his hip holster any longer. He pointed it at the sky somewhere behind me, sighted along the barrel, grinned again, and put it away.

I thought of myself trying to get my Police Special out from under my arm quickly enough to make him do something he didn't want to do, and the hairs on the back of my neck stirred slightly.

“Well,” I chuckled heartily, “if you can hit as well as you can pull, you should be in the Nationals.”

“I have been,” he laughed. He turned back toward his miniature cabin. “Careful of those turns, up in the mountains,” he called over his shoulder. “They can be tricky at night. Or anytime, for that matter.”

“I'll watch them,” I said. “Thanks again.”

Following his directions, I reached the sign that said Toaquilla Springs, with an arrow pointed north. I followed the arrow. The road began to climb. My headlights picked up fewer clumps of sage brush near the roadside.

It was a well-paved county road, and that was just as well, because in a car as light as my Ford, some of the turns I had to negotiate higher up could have been really dangerous ones on a poorly-paved and -banked road surface. I kept my speed moderate.

The dashboard clock no longer told time, so I dug out my pocket watch. Almost midnight.

I was beginning to feel sleepy again, and I wondered what the hell kind of pills those bastards like Hancock had been feeding me at the art colony.

The road climbed on. In the deep black night, the stars were diamond-brilliant. The air was getting thinner, too. Not too thin, but getting there.

I wondered how high these mountains were.

The Ford's motor was sounding funny. Too much fuel going into the carburetor for the thinning air joining it.

Stopping at a wide spot in the road, I took a flash and a screwdriver and turned the screw that regulated the amount of gas being pumped into the carburetor. It helped. From there on, the motor didn't sound so labored.

Now the heights were closing in on both sides of the road. Timber silhouettes stood up clearly against the lesser darkness of the sky. The wind punched against the car fitfully, hitting suddenly when I would top a rise over a pass, or round a curved stretch and emerge from the lee of a slope onto its windward face.

Presently, the road left the heights and swooped back down into sheltered timberland. The air had gotten cold and penetrating. I could smell the pungent odor of pine and spruce and the dry night air. Just when I was about to turn on the heater, I spotted lights ahead.

It turned out to be the gas station.

Slowing, I pulled into its graveled clearing and stopped beside the pump.

A sign over the frame building said Pete's.

I tapped the horn. When no one came, I climbed out.

The cool mountain air bit through my lightweight suit, and the breeze, blowing through the hot seat of my pants, felt like a sudden dousing of ice water.

Going over to the cabin, I peered at the office inside through small window-panes in the top half of the door. Talking animatedly into a pay phone attached to the wall was a leathery little old guy. He saw me. His eyes smiled, crinkling the skin around them like a pie-crust cracking.

The air up there was blowing too cold to suit me, so I opened the door and went on inside, just as he said into the phone: “Call you back, Ed. Customer.” He hung up.

“Welcome to Pete's,” he said. “You want gas?”

“Yes. Better fill it up, Pete's.”

He went out grinning.

Shoving money into the cigarette machine, I got a pack. No matches came out the slot with the cigarettes, so I fished around in the breast pocket of my suit coat and found a book that still had a few matches left in it.

Out at the pump, Pete finished up with the gas and checked the oil and water under the hood.

Two bright fluorescent lights out there lit up most of the cleared space, but beyond, everything was black, far blacker than it ever was down in the desert. Up here, there were no other lights to see, in any direction you looked.

Pete came back inside.

“Your oil's okay. I gave her a little water. The climb up here gets it heated, some.”

“What's the damage?” He told me and I paid him. “How far is Townsend's place?”

“The fancy ranch? ‘Bout ten miles farther along. Just stay on the road you're on. There're no turnoffs. Trees, most of the way down, but they thin out enough so's you'll know when you're hitting low rangeland again. When you're running along the face of a mountain ridge in a long curve, you're near his place. Watch for the turn to the left, off the county road. You won't be able to miss it. Your lights will pick up the bridge.”

“What bridge is that?”

“His bridge,” Pete snapped. “Townsend's bridge.”

The bridge seemed to make Pete mad.

“Couldn't just cut himself a drive down the side of the ravine and across the wash and up the other side, no. He had to build him a whole bridge. Wanted privacy. Huh!”

He looked about to spit, but he didn't. His bright little black-button eyes studied me.

“You a friend of his, mebbe?”

He didn't look especially worried if I might be, but when I shook my head, no, he nodded with satisfaction.

“Kinda late to be goin' up there, ain't it? Townsend sometimes has some odd-lookin' friends up there, lately…”

“Odd-looking how?”

“Aah, city boys. Tough boys. Think they're tough…”

“If they're like some I've seen lately, they'll be tough, all right.”

“Hey, that's right,” he cackled. “I heerd they's been some fancy shootin' goin' on, down to the Strip. That right?”

“Too much shooting.”

Slapping his hands together, Pete howled with glee.

“Sure wisht I coulda seen some o' that shootin'. I was just hearin' about some of it, talkin' just now to Ed Granger. He's down on the dam. Reminds me.”

He went over to the phone.

“Wait!” I called. “Have you got a book of matches?”

While his coin clanged down into the phone box, Pete pointed to a little cardboard boxful of book matches on top of the tall cigarette vending machine. I hadn't noticed them up there. I took two books.

Brandon the detective.

“That's funny,” Pete said, staring at the phone in his hand.

I opened the door to leave.

“What's funny?”

“Line's dead. Wires must be down.”

He plunked the receiver prong down and up a few times, before giving up.

“She's out, all right.”

We stepped outside. Pete examined the dark sky.

“Don't seem all that windy,” he muttered absently.

“Your lights are still on,” I pointed out.

Pete shrugged.

“Got my own generator. Kicks in like that…” He snapped his fingers to emphasize his words like that. “…whenever there's trouble.”

I pulled open my car door.

“You notice if there was much of a wind, on your way up?”

I shrugged, holding the door open.

“Not too bad. In the gaps, it was pretty windy.”

He nodded.

“Mighta been what done it. I oughta get me one o' them cell phones. Been meanin' to. Goldang, now I won't be able to hear about the rest of them shootin's from Ed. You see any? Gunplay, I mean?”

“No,” I lied, sliding behind the wheel. “I live a quiet life, for the most part.”

I didn't want to be there for the rest of the night, telling him about all the shootins.

Waving, I drove out of the bright canopy of light there at his gas station into the high mountain darkness again, following my headlight beams in a long winding drive that went down and down until my ears popped.

When the road ran along the side of a mountain in a long easy descending curve, I sat up and watched for the turn Pete had told me about.

At the bottom of the descent, the headlights picked up a small sign with an arrow pointing left. Slowing, I negotiated the turn. Just ahead, my lights revealed a bridge built of oak-beams bolted together with steel connecting plates. It spanned a steep-sided dry wash about forty or fifty feet wide at that point, and maybe a little deeper.

Slowly, I drove across, the solid planking thumping beneath my tires. Just beyond the far end of the bridge, a steel gate stretched across the private road. There was so little space, that when I stopped at the gate, my rear tires were still on the planks at the end of the bridge.

Nothing moved. Beyond the chain-link gate, my brights showed that the road ahead swung to the right past a cabin and disappeared upward. My hand was on the door, ready to open it so I could see if I could get past the gate, when I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye.

Off to the left a few feet, a man wearing a dark suit, with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, stood well out of the beam of my headlights.

“Keep your hands in sight,” he called.

I left my hands where they were, on top of the steering wheel.

On the passenger side of my car, another man appeared. He wore dark clothes, too, but there was no cigarette in his mouth. I could tell the difference between the two of them that way, but I couldn't tell any difference between the submachine guns each of them held pointed directly at my head.

Fifteen

Midmorning sunlight shone through the open cabin door when one of them shook me awake.

Shivering in the chill mountain air, I watched him put a key into the big padlock that tightly held two links of the short chain with which they had held me secured to the steel cot I slept on through the night. The chain had been twisted just tightly enough above my left elbow-bones to keep me from sliding my arm out. Since one of the machinegun men had always been in the room with me through the last third of the night hours, I hadn't even tried. The first rattle of the chain against the cot's steel frame would have wakened him, anyway.

My left forearm tingled when the chain's pressure was removed. Holding that arm with my right hand, I sat up on the cot. The machinegun was under his right arm. He stood well away from me. His eyelids drooped, he had swarthy skin, and he hadn't shaved yet.

“I think they're going to give you breakfast,” he said, grinning mirthlessly. “Up at the main house on top.”

I glanced around at the cabin.

“I thought this was the main house.”

“Naah!” he scoffed. “This is where the hired help stay, when there's a dirty job that's got to be done. Come on. Get up.”

I got up. While I slept, my coat had fallen off me and the cot, both. Picking it up from the floor, I went through the open doorway, out into the sun.

The air was chilly and thin with altitude, but the sun warmed me in an instant.

Fifty feet downhill from the cabin, the solid-looking beamed bridge spanned the ravine. Its far end was still in shadow.

No cars were in sight. Nor was the second guard.

“Get in your car,” he directed me. “It's around in back.”

He followed me around the cabin to where they had pulled the Ford off the road, just this side of the now-open gate.

When I got behind the wheel, my keeper climbed in behind me with his juice gun.

“Go on up the hill.”

Although it was a well-maintained road, I drove slowly, climbing up the side of the rock-strewn ridge in a gentle grade until I reached the top, perhaps a quarter mile north of the bridge. There, the road swung left and went straight across the top of the mesa to a wide, rambling, ranch-like building, where it ended in a circular graveled drive.

Stopping my car, I got out on command and walked up a path paved with tiny white stones, which looked as if they were oval seashells, but weren't.

The path ended at the foot of redwood stairs. At the top of the short flight of steps stood Jeff, staring down at me. He nodded to my guard behind me. I heard the man's footsteps receding down the pebbled path as I climbed the stairs toward Jeff.

I was surprised that I reached the top of the steps alive.

Jeff must have noticed. He chuckled meagerly at the look on my face.

“Relax, Brandon ,” he advised quietly. “Everyone makes mistakes.”

Turning, he went back across a wide flag stoned patio, out of the sun beneath the shade provided by a calculatedly frontier-type lodge-pole roof, which was cantilevered out over the patio from the front of the ranch-building itself.

Jeff wore no hat. There were no bandages on his head where I had slugged him two nights before, but something glistened under his thinning combed gray hair.

Stopping beside a table laid for breakfast, he beckoned me over.

“Better get in out of that sun, Brandon . You know better than to go around without a hat in this country. Haven't you got one?”

“Maybe it's in my car. You want me to go get it?”

He chuckled.

“Always with the joke. Come over here. Mr. Townsend will be out in a little while. Better eat while you get the chance.”

Following him into the shade, I felt the morning chill again, the instant I was out of the sun.

Silver cozies covered the various dishes, keeping the food warm.

“Dig in,” Jeff urged. “And don't bother trying to leave. The way you came up just now is the only way down from this mesa.”

“Jeff, why would I want to leave? I came all the way out here to see Townsend. He sent Teddy-boy for me, awhile back.”

Jeff's scar-stitch of a mouth twitched. Turning his face away, he crossed the patio to go through the wide-open front doorway.

Hearing a splash, I glanced along the front façade of the house and noticed for the first time the aqua shimmer of pool water below patio-level, on the north side of the ranch house. As I watched, Jan Thornton swam lazily into sight, across the stretch of pool I could see, and then out of sight.

On the table, there were strips of crisp bacon, still warm. Two of the three eggs' yokes had not yet hardened. The coffee was hot.

I dug in.

When I was full, I refilled my coffee cup and tried not to think about condemned men and last meals.

I kept an eye out, but I didn't see the girl again.

Her skin had been bronze-looking, but perhaps it only seemed that dark because of the contrast made against her skin by the white bathing suit she wore.

I smoked, drank coffee, and studied the gradual slope of the mesa, north of the ranch house. The slope ended at the edge of the mesa maybe half a mile away. Beyond it, far below, distant desert was the next thing you could see, spreading for miles until it washed up against the foothills of a range of mountains whose sharp peaks formed the northern horizon.

Absently, my right hand massaged the upper part of my left arm near the elbow, where the chain links had pressed into the muscles and ligaments through the last part of the night in the cabin down by the bridge.

A short, stocky Indian-looking servant came, put the dishes on a tray he brought, and took them away. A few moments later, he returned and took whatever dishes he hadn't been able to remove on his first trip.

After watching him disappear through the open front doorway into the inner gloom, I rose and crossed the patio to the waist-high adobe wall that ran along the northern perimeter of the patio. Leaning on the top of the wall, I saw that the ground fell steeply away for fifteen or twenty feet, then leveled off to fine-graveled poolside territory, spotted with an occasional table sheltered from the sun by multi-striped canvas or plastic umbrellas, on poles sticking up through the center of the tables.

To the right, a stepped path descended the slope along the side of the patio to the pool area.

No one was down by the part of the pool visible to me, so I went back and sat down at the breakfast table, where I stayed until Brock Townsend came out and crossed the patio to me.

I got to my feet.

“No, Mr. Brandon,” he said, “keep your seat.”

His voice was low-pitched. His face looked grave and was somewhat lined, although he had gotten desert sun shining on it recently enough to give it a tanned healthy look. He wore an open-necked white shirt under a light-blue wide-checked sport jacket, dark blue slacks, and black comfortable-looking shoes.

He was not as tall as I am, nor as wide and deep in the shoulder area, but he carried himself well. He was a much more impressive man than size alone could have made him, although he had enough of that for convenience.

“Sit, please,” he said again, standing across the table from me, watching as I sat once more.

His full head of hair had a touch of gray sprinkled all through it, not just dabbed on where he wanted it gray and the rest blacked out. His eyes, though dark blue, appeared startlingly light-blue in the tan surround of his face, much as Jan Thornton's white bathing suit had contrasted so strongly with the bronze of her skin. His nose was straight-boned, with a medium nostril-spread. His mouth and jaw were set forcefully, as he watched me.

It went like that for a spell, the pair of us staring at each other.

Finally, he half-turned, and his eyes roved out under brows squinting against the noon sun, gazing across the sage-spotted mesa-top.

“Why have you come here, Mr. Brandon?” he asked quietly.

“Your man, Ted Fenton, told me you wanted to see me.”

“But that was several days ago.” He turned and stared down at me intently. I was beginning to see why he had insisted I sit. “And you refused to see me then.”

“I don't like Mr. Fenton,” I said. “And I didn't like the way he handled it. I've changed my mind…not about Fenton, but about coming to see you.”

“Why?”

“Conditions have changed, Mr. Townsend.”

“They have,” he agreed grimly. “They have indeed changed, and so drastically that there isn't much point in my seeing you at all. Not anymore.”

“Why did you send for me in the first place?”

He shrugged.

“At the time, it seemed a precautionary measure. Now…alternative precautions have had to be taken.” His eyes narrowed as they watched me. “I may say, Mr. Brandon, that you are very lucky to be alive, particularly since you were reckless enough to approach this place the way you did, unannounced, in the dark of night. I marvel at the restraint of the men on guard, down at the bridge.”

“So do I. And I also marvel that there is any reason for them to be on guard here.”

“Any reason?” He stared at me, disturbed. “After the way Mr. Wyatt and, more recently, Mr. Preston were murdered, you can ask why I have seen fit to guard my ranch?”

I stood up, tired of being looked down upon.

“Actually I'm asking why you are here at all, and why the young Thornton woman has been kept here. Just how many different kinds of damn fool are you, Mr. Townsend?”

His eyes became bleak.

“Ah, the woman,” he murmured. His lips tightened against his teeth, in what may have been a savage smile. “Always the woman. She's really the reason you came up here, isn't she, Mr. Brandon?”

“Part of it,” I said, “but not for the reason you seem to think…”

“Spare me your interpretations of my thoughts, Brandon ,” he interrupted.

Striding across the patio to the north parapet, he peered over it toward the pool for a moment before turning to face me. He remained there by the wall, watching me.

“She's what started all this, isn't she?” I asked.

“What?”

He had been staring at me, but thinking of something else. Now his attention was on me again.

“That's what began this whole deal, isn't it?” I persisted. “The young woman, and you, and the way you feel about her, and about any man who…”

Under the tan, his face paled. He strode toward me, and his eyes were no longer bleak. They were ablaze.

“I'm going to tell you this only once, Brandon ,” he hissed, from no more than two feet away. “Keep your cheap private cop mouth off the subject of Jan Thornton…”

“Do you want her dead, too?” I howled. “Is that why you've got her holed up out here? You think those two machine gunners of yours are going to keep that Ben Crane guy away from here?”

“He doesn't know we're here,” Townsend said flatly. “He can't know…unless you led him here.”

“Why can't he? Nobody has had to tell him a thing throughout this entire blood bath…except maybe Fats, when he needed basic information. Like a few names: Fenton's, for one, and maybe yours, for another.”

I waved an arm out at the sea of sage spreading away under the sun.

“He could be right out there, this minute,” I said, trying desperately to get through to this man. “Neither of us would know what hit us. He moves through brush like that as if he was born in it. Maybe he was.”

Taking a deep breath, I kept my eyes locked on his, trying to get past the anger behind them.

“Mr. Townsend, this may sound foolish to you, but I'm trying to help you. All of you. Yes, and Jan Thornton, too. Her, most of all. But I can't be much help if I don't know what happened. What caused all this killing Ben Crane has been doing?”

For a second, I waited. When he didn't reply, I went on.

“I don't know whether he's going to kill her, too. By now, he might be crazy enough to kill any of you he can get in his sights, including her…”

Drained, I stopped. I watched him, waiting, wondering how he was taking it.

It took several long minutes, but finally I knew I had gotten through to him.

At first, a touch of doubt appeared in those furious eyes of his. Gradually the doubt increased, the anger seemed to lessen, and suddenly a frightened look appeared to crumple the very bones under the flesh covering his face.

Trying to conceal it, he turned half away, lowering his head. He sank his teeth into his lower lip, in an attempt to stop its trembling. He bit down hard enough to make me flinch.

Forcing my glance out across the flat mesa top, I watched the midday breeze frisking across it and rippling the tops of the bushes.

“All these years,” he said softly.

I returned my attention to him. He was staring across the mesa toward its eastern rim, where the road turned out of sight at the start of its course down the ridge side to the guarded bridge.

“All the precautions I took,” he went on, “keeping myself in the clear, in my dealings with them, all of them, all the different kinds of them! The so-called legitimate business-men, and the other kind, too, Wyatt's kind, and Preston 's.” He waved a negligent hand, dismissing them. “All those years!”

On the last words, his voice rose in a shriek of fury and frustration, broke, and then he stood there, choking, furiously trying to clear his throat.

When he was reasonably composed once more, he stood there in the deep cool shade of the patio, staring out across the sun-beaten mesa, but apparently seeing many other things.

“To have been so careful of them!” he whispered, almost with wonder. “If I had been careless, and let them do me all the favors they're so good at, then I could understand. But I was so careful never to get too involved with any of them, in any deal…and now to have it end like this!”

He laughed, but it was laughter without joy, bitter as bile, harsh, angry laughter, as his eyes were angry when he raised them to the sky, as if he was staring into the face of a malignant fate only his eyes could see.

“It's almost as if all this was planned,” he said quietly, shaking his head, baffled. “That's the eerie joke of it. It's as if all the Wyatts and Prestons and Ted Fentons I have dealt with so carefully through the years had been preparing me for that…that lunatic animal!” He waved a hand out at the shimmering brush.

He spat the last words out, and then he stopped speaking, his eyes downcast, staring at the flagstones of the patio before him.

It was as if he were examining the words he had just poured out of his mouth with such bitterness, and the hatred he felt for whatever had made him say them, forced him to spit out.

“What happened to bring it on?” I asked, trying to keep my voice as gentle and unobtrusive as possible.

Sighing, he nodded.

“Oh, I started it,” he admitted, his voice husky. “I can't deny that. Of course, at the time, I wasn't aware I was starting anything. When I first heard what Wyatt had done, I wanted to…”

He raised his arms in front of him. Both his sun-brown hands clenched convulsively into fists.

His eyes closed. His face became weary, resigned. He shook his head from side to side.

“Wyatt!” he snapped, saying the name as if he hated it. “The cheap alley-fighting fool. He did me a favor, he said. He thought he was doing exactly what I wanted him to do.”

Again he shook his head in exasperation. Then he shrugged, as if it was hopeless to regret. When he went on, his voice was quiet, almost devoid of expression of any kind.

“I saw the two of them together, Jan and the boatman. A young man and a young woman, laughing, happy for a moment, the two of them. In the evening, you could hear their laughter for a considerable distance. They weren't trying to hide it. Why should they? There was nothing to hide. They were just fooling around on a boat at dockside.

“But when I heard that laughter of theirs, in my heart I hated the sound of it. I must have said something. Even Wyatt couldn't tell me later exactly what I did say. The only thing his dirty little gutter-snipe instinct knew was precisely how to handle a situation like that. He was used to doing that sort of favor for his associates. He told Ted Fenton to handle it. And Ted did. Oh, he handled it, all right. A stranger whose face I had only seen at a distance, in the dusk of evening!”

In quiet despair, he threw his hands up

“What can I say? They beat him. And now he has been killing them, one at a time. And I see at last that he will kill me, too, unless he can be stopped before he reaches me.”

“And maybe he'll kill her, too,” I reminded him.

Gloomily, he nodded.

“Oddly, I never thought of that possibility. But yes, I can see that happening. To him, Jan might appear to be a part of it, instead of an unknowing cause.”

“Perhaps he won't,” I suggested. “Trouble is, by now I don't think Ben Crane can be considered altogether sane. Not surprising, after what he was put through, and now after what he has put himself through…”

“Why should he be sane?” Townsend asked. “How can I deny him the right to vengeance?”

“I guess you can't,” I admitted. “I'm just surprised to hear you admit you can't.”

“But not vengeance against Jan,” he said emphatically. “She has never been involved in any of this. I was the cause. I'm responsible for all of it. Oh, don't worry, Brandon . I'm not going to stand up and wait philosophically for him to mow me down. I want to go on living. I'll do everything I can to protect myself, whether I'm right or wrong, responsible or not. But I want her safe. I can't take the chance he won't harm her, too. She's got to be safe.”

“She's not safe here,” I insisted.

“Then I'll take her away from here.”

“Wherever you are isn't safe, as long as Ben Crane lives.”

With eyes that were suddenly hopeless, he stared at me. His eyes hated me. He turned away to conceal the hatred. I was telling him what he already knew, but he wouldn't let himself believe it.

“Mr. Townsend, you're the target,” I said, pressing it home. “You and Ted Fenton. It was Fenton you turned him over to, wasn't it?”

“Of course,” Townsend said disgustedly. “I presume Ted wanted in on it. He wanted to see how professionals handled something like that. At least he wanted it for a little while. Ted Fenton is one of those folks who believe in trying everything at least once. Sensation is his karma.”

His smile was without mirth.

“Are you saying Fenton is crazy? I mean, legally crazy?”

Townsend snorted.

“Of course not.” But he paused, uncertain for a moment.

“If you had seen the shape they left Ben Crane in,” I said, “you might not scoff at that idea. From what I have seen of Fenton, he is a somewhat unhappy man, one of the people who like being unhappy, who are at their finest when they're miserable, the kind who sometimes take things out on people around them. Their unhappiness bursts out. It's got to, I suppose. With Fenton, perhaps he had to hold it in too long because of you. He wasn't able to take anything out on you, so he had to keep it bottled up inside. And every so often he would come across another outlet, some situation in which he could really cut loose.”

Townsend was staring at me, his face grave, thoughtful, even slightly surprised.

“Do I sound as if I'm describing Ted Fenton?” I asked him. “I'm not. I'm describing other people I have known. He reminds me of them. He is...probably capable of doing anything, to anyone. The things he did to Ben Crane, and to that poor teenager Herby, who ran the boatyard until Fenton reached him, are pretty clear measures of what Ted Fenton can do, when he has the opportunity, and sets his mind to it.”

Impatiently, Townsend turned away from me, gazing off toward the mountain wall to the southeast, looming beyond the ravine separating the mesa from the county road that ran along the base of the mountain, headed toward the wilderness area to the north.

“I'm somewhat surprised,” he said thoughtfully. “You show more penetration than one expects from a man like you, Brandon. You're right. Ted is almost a brilliant man, but he lacks control of himself, and therefore of others. Life must be a special kind of hell for those with considerable talent, but who lack that…that crucial something which would enable them to implement their talent. He should have been a great film director, but when he tried, they always had to replace him partway through the shooting schedule. Anything he tried to do, he should have done so well. But he never did. He couldn't. Partway through, something inside him would collapse.”

Shrugging, he spread his hands helplessly.

“To someone like myself, a man like Ted is invaluable. As long as I was there to control him, all went well. But on his own?” He shook his head. “What a waste! I suppose you're right in your analysis of him, Brandon. I'm not too tender a man, myself. Subtleties, shadings of character? Many of them escape me, even though they might be all around me, every day. As, indeed, they are, in Fenton himself. But things like that never disturb me. Perhaps if they had, none of this would have happened. I've been aware of them, but because I knew they didn't bother me, I could ignore them. I'm accustomed to dominating people, of contending with them, in a business way. In all ways, really. In short…”

“In short,” I helped him by saying it bluntly, “you use people.”

His smile was rueful.

“Someone always will, Brandon .”

“You could use Fenton's various talents, so you did, and probably still do. Whatever he was like in his private time was none of your business, was it?”

“Exactly,” he said, watching me as if he wasn't certain how I had meant what he was agreeing with. Shrugging away the moment of uncertainty, he asked, “Will you take Jan…Miss Thornton…away from here for me?”

“Miss Thornton will take herself away from here, Brock, my love.”

The nearness of her voice surprised both of us.

She stood at the top of the flight of steps which led down to the pool. She wore a white, calf-length terry-cloth robe, belted at the waist with a terry-cloth rope. A towel was casually draped over one shoulder. Blue and white sandals covered her feet.

Her eyes were fixed on Townsend's face. They were as remote and cold and impersonal as any eyes could be.

For a moment, Brock Townsend seemed to be about to say something, but the expression on her face stopped his words before he could speak them. A flicker of pain fled across his face and was gone. Squaring his shoulders and standing straighter, his jaw set. When he did speak, his words were casual.

“How was the swim?”

Ignoring that, she continued to stare at him. The silence between them stretched out, like an electric cable that carried too much energy for the insulation at either end to handle.

At last, she broke the silence.

“You've done quite a job, Brock. For some time, now, I've felt something strange was going on all around me, but you have managed to conceal it from me quite nicely. You're such a considerate man, Brock. Aren't you?”

He stood braced, as if he was waiting for anything she could throw at him, his lips pressed together, firmly set, saying nothing.

“Answer me,” she cried. “Now, at last, you don't have anything to say. Now you can keep your mouth shut tight, can't you? But you couldn't when it counted, could you? You sent that filthy mobster after that poor young man just because he and I could enjoy working together on a little sailing boat.”

“I sent no one after him, Jan,” replied Townsend quietly. “Wyatt took it upon himself to…”

“Don't tell me that, you poor fool,” she hissed. “You wanted him to. He knew you wanted him to do what he ordered his garbage people to do. You simply can't admit it to yourself. Oh, shame on you, Brock. You disgust me. What a terrible thing to do to anyone.”

“I couldn't help myself,” he said woodenly. “I love you. I can't help that. Yes, I suppose you're right. I did want them to…do what they did to him, in my heart. I couldn't help it, wanting them to hurt him. I love you.”

She nodded, her head thrust forward fiercely. When she spoke her next words, it was through gritted teeth.

“And I can't help despising you, now.”

She laughed, briefly and bitterly.

“You see? We can both use this I-can't-help-it line of yours. How dare you imagine that you owned me? I don't love you. I told you that. I wouldn't marry you because people like you think you can own. I wouldn't give my life to you. I'll never give it to anyone. I own myself. I'll talk to anyone I please. I'll laugh with anyone I want to laugh with. Yes, and I'll sleep with anyone I wish to sleep with. God damn you and your grabbing, owning kind of love. Look what it's brought you.”

When he still refused to defend himself, she swung her raging eyes at me.

“Tell him, detective. Tell him how many people have died because of one dirty little favor just one of his many dirty little gangster friends did for him. Tell him the count up to now.”

“I stopped counting awhile back,” I replied. “Around twelve, directly or indirectly, that I know of…”

“That he knows of,” she spat at Townsend. “And maybe there are more. All because of…”

She stopped, unable to go on. Turning, she ran into the house.

Townsend stood like a man facing a firing squad.

A sudden drumming noise took my attention away from Townsend. It was made by the hooves of a horse Ted Fenton rode past the pool below.

He went out of sight behind the patio's north wall, reappearing a moment later, riding into view again at the foot of the front patio steps, where he viciously pulled his lathered horse to a clattering stop.

Frantically, the horse stomped on the fine gravel, tossing his head, trying to ease the unnecessary pressure of the bit in his mouth, caused by Fenton's too-tight grip on the reins.

When Fenton saw me standing there on the patio, he pulled a small semi-automatic pistol from the side pocket of his brown leather-and-cloth riding jacket. The weapon didn't want to come out. He cursed it, and when it cleared the pocket, there was a sound of cloth ripping.

His mount refused to stand still, turning away under the heedless pull of Fenton's left hand on the reins, so that Fenton looked ridiculous as he tried to keep me in sight, while the horse kept turning away. That left Fenton's back to me. His twisted face tried to keep watching me over his shoulder. Continuing its turn, the horse went the rest of the way around, causing its rider to whip his head the other way until he was able to see me once again, still waving his pistol.

If it hadn't been for that pistol, the sight of his antics might have been funny.

I glanced at Townsend. He hadn't noticed any of it. He still faced the open front door of the ranch house, with his back to Fenton.

Stepping behind the breakfast table, I gripped my chair with both hands. I didn't have much faith in its stopping power, if Fenton began shooting, but it was the only thing within reach I could lay hands on that I could throw.

Fenton looked gaunt, wild-eyed. He had the inflamed look in his eyes of a man who hadn't slept in days. Unshaven, his whiskers weren't too noticeable against the taut brown of his skin, stretched too tightly over the narrow-boned face.

There was a look of desperation about the man. He was hovering on the edge of something, all set to go over the edge, too.

“So, Brandon, now you come up here,” he panted. “Does that mean you've brought along that murdering pal of yours?”

Jumping down from his horse, still clutching the pistol, he bellowed: “Mano!” The cords in his throat stood out like ropes, when he threw his bead back to yell.

The Indian servant came out in a soft shuffling run, moving across the patio almost without sound in his straw sandals. He went down the stairs, took the reins from Fenton, and for a moment, he stood there, gentling the animal, talking softly into its ear.

“Answer me, Brandon,” snarled Fenton.

His voice cracked. It was hoarse and harsh. He had done too much drinking recently for it to have done his voice much good.

“God damn you, Brandon, I told you to answer me. Is he out there? Did you bring him here, too?”

“Calm yourself, Ted,” Townsend told him, turning and facing us again. “ Brandon 's leaving soon.”

Silently, the Indian servant led the horse along the front of the ranch house and around the corner to the south side of the building, out of sight.

Fenton's too-bright eyes didn't leave my face. He ignored Townsend.

“How many more of us,” Fenton asked me in a voice little louder than a whisper, “is that bastard going to butcher?”

“I've advised Mr. Townsend to leave here,” I said. “Just get out of the entire region. Take a train, a car, or a plane, but go. And soon. Otherwise, you're all helpless. He knows you. You don't know him. He can pick you off at his leisure, here or anywhere. If you had any sense, you would at least make it difficult for him. You wouldn't just squat here on top of a mesa, waiting for him to come and get you in his sights”

Fenton went on staring at me, panting. He seemed to be waiting for me to say more. When I didn't, he roused himself, glanced over at Townsend, and said, “He's right, Brock. We should do what he says. Leave here. We can change our names, disappear, just the way he did…”

Without saying a word in reply, Townsend turned away in disgust.

“Brock, what else can we do?” Fenton screamed. “He'll slaughter us the way he did Wyatt and Preston . We'll never know when or where it's coming from…”

“That's why I'm staying,” Townsend replied coldly. “To finish it here, one way or the other. Either we'll get him, or we'll take our medicine like men.”

“Medicine?”

Fenton was astounded.

Trembling, he stood at the foot of the steps, the pistol hanging from his right hand, his mouth open, slack, his hair plastered to his forehead by his own sweat. He stood there in the beating midday sun, squinting, still panting, his breathing labored.

I wondered how long he had gone without eating, without being able to sleep.

“Brock,” he whispered, then stopped, apparently unable to think what more he could say.

For a moment, as the silence dragged out, it didn't register.

I was watching Fenton's face. His eyes sprang open, the whites showing all around the irises. Then the single report reached my understanding, repeated in flat, soon-gone echoes bounced back by the mountain wall, east of the mesa.

Townsend's head came up. His mouth tightened purposefully. Listening, he squinted across the field of cactus and sage bushes to where the private road turned at the edge of the mesa and dipped out of sight down toward the bridge spanning the dry wash ravine.

Fenton spun around, too, when the distant pop-pop-popping sound of one of the guards' submachine guns reached us faintly.

Then that stopped.

After the faint echoes died, all we could hear was the sound of the wind blowing from the northwest toward the source of the distant shots, carrying them swiftly away from us.

“Mano!” Fenton suddenly shouted.

Townsend went over to the open front doorway and called inside.

“Jeff, get out here.”

Jeff emerged from the dim shadows inside. He wore a dark-gray straw fedora but no jacket.

“I heard them,” he told Townsend.

Jeff's right hand held a long-barreled revolver, which could have been a twin of the .32 I had taken away from him, two nights before. The leather straps of his gun harness looked strange against the impeccable white of his shirt and his neatly knotted patterned light-blue tie.

“Think you'd like to chance a look down there?” Townsend asked him.

“Okay if I take him along?” Jeff flipped the pistol in my direction. “Kind of backup.”

Smiling, Townsend glanced briefly at me, and nodded.

“Why not?”

There was the sound of another shot, followed by a burst of faint-sounding machinegun fire, then a final single shot.

The three of us stood there, listening, gazing off toward where the road dipped…although whatever was happening was taking place out of our sight.

“What do you think?” Townsend asked Jeff.

“Can't tell much, this far away,” Jeff said, shrugging.

The sound of machinegun fire began again. Burst after burst, longer bursts than before.

“They'll jam the action,” Jeff said, pursing his lips in disapproval, as if to himself.

The sound of the machinegun firing stopped. We stood there, motionless, waiting.

A moment later, the machinegun fire began once more, this time coming in one long continuous burst.

Long after the firing stopped, I found myself holding my breath, waiting for another single rifle shot. It never came.

“That might have done it,” Jeff said to Townsend. “I'll go see.”

Turning to me, he waved me ahead of him downstairs to the circular drive.

“Okay, pistolero,” he told me, as he followed me down the steps.. “We'll take your car. You drive. I'll ride shotgun with this.” Grinning meagerly, he brandished his .32. “I'm your protection.”

At the foot of the stairs, I crossed the fine gravel drive and slid behind the wheel of the Ford. Jeff got in back, slamming the door shut before the motor caught.

Feeling like a convict walking the last mile on death row, I drove along the road to the turn at the edge of the mesa, and was about to drive on down when Jeff snapped: “Stop!”

Braking, I turned to see what the problem was.

Jeff was looking over his shoulder, back toward the ranch house. For a second or two, I couldn't see what it was that bothered him, but then I picked up a glimpse of something flitting across the sage flat a hundred yards from the driveway we were on.

Once more, Ted Fenton was on horseback, taking a shortcut to the rim of the mesa farther down, where he would be nearer to the bridge and the shack down below, where the guards had been posted.

“Ride ‘em cowboy!” Jeff snickered.

Turning back to me, he ordered: “Move it, Brandon . Drive down there, but slow. Be ready to stop on a dime. And when you stop, stay stopped, or I'll stop you, real sudden. Get going.”

I got going.

Driving slowly and carefully, we descended the eastern face of the mesa to the shack and the gate and the bridge beyond it.

Behind me, Jeff hunted with his eyes, ahead and on both sides of us, watching for movement of any kind.

As the road neared the bottom, it angled slightly away from the nearly perpendicular side of the mesa, and just short of the shack, Jeff muttered, “Stop here.”

The shack was on our right, and beyond it, the bridge spanning the dry wash.

“Now let's get out,” Jeff said. “We'll look around, but careful. I don't like all this quiet.”

We both got out of the car. The sun felt like a flat hot smothering fist beating down on the top of my head. Glancing back inside the car, I tried to find my hat, but it wasn't there.

Jerking his pistol, Jeff indicated for me to move ahead of him, and he followed me along the road down to the front of the shack.

One of the guards was sprawled face down across the porch with his head hanging over the edge, turned sideways, his left temple resting on the top of the step below. His eyes were wide open. He was dead. His machinegun lay on the ground near the foot of the porch steps.

Jeff followed me up onto the porch. The dead man's body had been raked from head to foot by machinegun bullets. He was a mess. So was the wooden porch around him. Bullets which had missed his body had torn into the thick planks in short curved lines.

I glanced at Jeff. His thin lips were invisible. His face was pale. But his eyes, though bleak, were always alert.

“Some piece of work, that guy is,” he said. “Empties a machinegun clip into a dead man. Go on inside, Brandon .”

No one was inside the shack. I found my hat on the floor in a far corner of the main room. Dusting it off, I put it on.

Jeff motioned me outside again.

“Take a look around,” he ordered. “Don't go near your car. That other guard must be somewhere nearby.”

All the while he spoke to me, his glance roved back and forth. He stepped back and squinted up along the face of the mesa.

I glanced up there, too. Close to the edge, up top, Ted Fenton rode his horse, which picked its way carefully along the edge. The slope below where he rode was steep, but a bit farther south of that point, the high ground swerved back to the west, and the incline in that area was not as steep as the rest of the eastern escarpment. That section was also littered with outcropping rocks and boulders, though. They looked bone-white in the sun.

Jeff and I separated.

I stayed away from the bridge, went past it into the dry-wash, south of its near end.

The ravine was choked with cactus and mesquite and dwarf-trees, and an occasional withered sage bush clinging to life in there, somehow.

Down in the wash itself, my footsteps raised dust from the hard ground. I could feel the heat of the ground through the soles of my shoes.

“Okay, Brandon ,” Jeff called from above.

He stood near the end of the bridge, waving me up toward him.

Picking my way back up through the tangled undergrowth, I climbed up the slope to where he stood on a slanted rock face, his legs spread wide apart for balance. His slitted eyes still ranged endlessly back and forth on the rock-covered slope above.

On the far side of the rock he straddled, in a natural nest of boulders, lay the second guard.

He had been dealt with summarily, much the same as the first one we had found dead on the porch of the cabin. This one's sub-machinegun lay nearby. It had been emptied into his body.

I was beginning to feel slightly sick. I could taste the bacon-and-egg breakfast I had eaten, up on the ranch patio a little earlier.

A sharp crack sounded on the rim above us.

We both looked up. Fenton sat his restless horse, his right arm extended downward toward the more gradual slope of the area below the edge where he was now. He was firing his semi-automatic, and he kept firing.

Running my glance quickly down along the face of the slope, I tried to see what he was shooting at.

Beside me, Jeff said something sharply, but I couldn't make it out. He raised his gun, but he held his fire.

Then I saw the other man up on the slope, too.

He was outlined against the pale sky. He ran up the rock-littered slope as if he was moving across level ground. His legs worked like pistons. His face was raised, up toward Fenton on his horse, up there on the rim.

The running man never looked at the ground. He kept his head thrust fiercely upward, never taking his eyes off his target, Fenton. He ran bent forward a little at the waist. His right hand held a rifle. On his head he wore a long-billed baseball cap.

Both he and Fenton were so far away from us that when the pistol Fenton had been firing was empty, we heard no other sound from either of them.

The man running up the rocky slope did not raise his rifle to reply to any of Fenton's shots. He didn't have to. He was still well beyond the range of the little pistol. He just went plunging on upward, in long furious leaps.

My stomach turned cold as I watched Fenton fumble with his handgun, trying to get a fresh clip into it. The horse he sat wouldn't stand still. All the shooting had panicked the animal, and perhaps the rider, as well.

As I watched Fenton trying to handle his horse and reload the pistol, I almost felt sorry for him. He showed much courage in being able to remain there at all, in full sight of the man racing up the side of the mesa toward him.

Fenton had probably been the one who enjoyed it most, when he and Smiles and Fats had worked over Ben Crane, before they left what remained of him in the desert for me to find, all those weeks ago. Fenton would have been the type who prolonged the victim's agony. That was why Ben wanted to get his hands on him. No quick rifle-shot would do for Fenton.

Thinking along those lines of probability, I gagged and had to turn away.

Beside me, Jeff chuckled.

“It's about time the damn fool took off.”

When I felt I could, I looked back up at the rim of the mesa.

Fenton was still having trouble with his mount, but now he was urging it away from the point of the rim from which he had been firing downward. The horse plunged, once or twice, tossed his head from side to side, but finally moved, gathered speed going along the edge of the rim for a moment, and then both horse and rider were gone from our sight.

Surprisingly close below the rim, I caught a final glimpse of the man on foot, just as he, too, went up and over the top of it and out of sight. He had almost reached the top at the same moment Fenton got away from there.

Jeff shook his head.

“No wonder the little creep is scared,” he commented casually.

I nodded. I still felt unable to open my mouth for fear of what more might come out of it.

“Come on, Brandon ,” Jeff said, sounding weary. “Back to the car.”

He hustled me along the road to the Ford. I turned it around, and we drove back up the mesa ridge road, turned at the top and leveled off.

Nothing was in sight across the sage flat, which stretched out ahead of us, to and beyond the ranch house, due west. I kept flicking my eyes off the road ahead, trying to locate Fenton on his horse, but nothing moved out there.

“Where'd he go?”

“What difference?” Jeff said laconically. “He's done for. They're all as good as dead. I can't stop a guy like that, not with just a handgun. Probably not with anything less than a battery of mortars, and I'd need a squad of trained men to handle them. And even then, I wouldn't be sure I nailed that bastard, no matter how much we pounded each grid out there…”

“Doesn't Townsend have any hunting rifles out here? Is he just going to sit and take it?”

“How should I know?” Jeff snapped. “Stick to your driving.”

At the ranch, I swung my car around at the foot of the patio steps just as Jan Thornton came out the front door carrying a soft carry-on bag for air travel. Dressed in a powder-blue suit, she wore no hat. Her light brown hair was combed and held by a powder-blue plastic clip on the left side of her head.

Walking right past where Brock Townsend stood, she stopped on the top step and put the bag on the flagstones beside her, just as Jeff and I were getting out of my car.

“Will you have Mano bring my car, Brock?” she asked, without looking at him.

Townsend ignored her.

“How does it look, Jeff?” he called.

“The sumbitch got both guards. Sprayed them with their own juice guns, after he'd put them down with his rifle.”

Townsend's eyes closed. His head sank, and he stood for a moment like that, silent.

The girl's eyes widened. She stared down at Jeff, swung her gaze from Jeff to me, then looked across the flat field of sage behind us. Her lips trembled, briefly.

Townsend's head came up. His face was calm again, as he told Jeff: “All right. Get her car, Jeff. Drive her out of here…”

“I'll drive myself,” Jan Thornton said, but now her voice was no longer strident and sure of itself. It was low, uncertain. She kept staring off into the distance toward the wall of the mountain, east of the mesa.

As if she had not spoken, Townsend continued issuing orders to Jeff.

“Get going now. Perhaps we can cut the casualties and end this, right here. I'm tired of it. Tired of all of it.”

His gaze ranged above our heads in a wide sweep, taking in the mountain and the endless desert wasteland to the north, and the line of faint purple jagged ranges of hills beyond.

Jeff went inside, and a moment later reappeared wearing his suit coat. He stopped beside Townsend.

“You don't want me to stay on here?” he asked. “Maybe the two of us can handle this…”

Townsend chuckled.

“Not a chance. We haven't got a prayer against someone like…that. No, Jeff, I've had enough. I've got a Mannlicher inside. What has to be done from here on, I'll do myself.”

“I mean it,” Jeff insisted. “I'll stay, if you want.”

He didn't look at Townsend when he said it, and there was no expression in his flat voice.

Glancing down at Jeff, Townsend almost smiled.

“Thanks, Jeff. No. It's over. Get them both out of here. Where's Ted?”

Vaguely, Jeff waved out toward the southern part of the mesa, without saying a word.

Townsend waited a moment for him to elaborate, seemed to understand when he didn't, and let it go.

Mano drove Jan Thornton's car around the corner of the ranch house and stopped it beside mine.

Jeff pointed at me, and then at my car. I got in and had trouble getting the motor started again. As I whined away at the starter, Jeff picked up the woman's bag and came down the steps to her car, putting the bag in the trunk in back.

Listlessly, Jan descended the steps. Jeff opened the door on the passenger side for her, and afterward went around her car and got behind the wheel.

Jan was almost seated inside the car when she stepped back out. Glancing up the steps at Townsend, she turned and faced the sweep of sage flat stretching away in front of her. The wind blew her hair forward on both sides of her face.

Putting both hands up to her mouth, she cupped them and called out strongly across the emptiness.

“Benny, what have they done to you?”

Her voice choked on the last word.

Her cry seemed so pitifully small. The wind swept the words across the flat land, seemed to disperse the very sound of them, to reduce all her anguish to something of no meaning under the immense pale blue sky.

When the words were gone and silence remained, she stood there, swinging her glance back and forth across the wind-ruffled clumps of sage bushes.

Tears streamed from her eyes, but she didn't sob, nor did her face twist from crying. It was as if only her eyes wept, without her knowledge or consent.

She tried again. Using all the strength she could put into her voice, she cried down the stream of wind, “Let them go. Not one of them is worth it. They have nothing but hate in their hearts.”

She stood then, beside the open door of her car, listening, waiting. But no answer came back to her. The only sound to break the early afternoon silence was the two motors idling, and even that seemed muted, raveled by the wind-sound.

Jeff leaned across inside her car and said something.

Impatiently, she shook her head, but a moment later, her shoulders slumped, shaking now with her weeping. Now her face was squeezed up. She stumbled into the car, pulled the door shut after her, and buried her face in her hands.

Jeff touched his horn, pointed at me, then straight ahead.

With a final glance at Townsend standing up there on the top step, I drove off, with Jeff at the wheel of Jan Thornton's car right behind me.

After descending the mesa, we passed the cabin with the body of the dead guard still stretched across the porch, partly in shade now, drove across the bridge with the planks under the car wheels sounding like shotguns going off, as the tires bounced over them, and around the bulge of the rock outcropping to the county road, where we turned right and began the long climb.

A quarter of an hour later, around one o'clock, I glimpsed something in my rear view mirror, after we had climbed through the first pass over the mountain. Sticking my hand out, I brought the Ford to a halt and got out.

Jeff stopped the other car and stuck his head out to yell at me.

“What are you stopping for? Get moving.”

“Take a look,” I yelled.

Twisting in his seat, he looked back the way we'd come.

A thick column of smoke rose from somewhere far below. From where we were, we couldn't see the base of the column, and up as far as we were, in among the mountain's ridges, we were looking down at the top of the column from high above it.

Even as we watched, the thick smoke column was quickly being dispersed by the wind, but to have reached as high as it did in that strong a wind, the smoke must have been very thick and dense at its base.

I found myself wondering which was burning, the cabin at the bridge or the sprawling ranch house, up on the mesa.

I also wondered if Mano would be killed, too.

Jeff faced forward again. His mouth was tight when he waved me on.

Taking one last look at the smoke, I got back in the Ford and drove on.

We didn't stop at Pete's gas station. We didn't stop anywhere until we came to Florian's Yacht Club, and there, only the other car stopped.

I slowed, and in my rear view mirror watched Jeff get out of Jan Thornton's car and cross the road to the gate leading past the gateman's kiosk to the clubhouse farther in.

Sliding behind the wheel, Jan started her car moving again. A moment later, she flashed past me. I noted her license number, wrote it down, watched her vanish toward the city far ahead, and took my own sweet time getting home.

Showered and shaved, I put on a change of clothes and lugged the suitcase with the three captured handguns in it down from my room and stuffed it inside my car. After a moment's thought, I opened the suitcase and took out the two larger caliber guns and stuck them in my belt, out of sight under my suit coat. Then I stuck the suitcase back inside the car. I left the shoulder holster hanging from the nail behind the dresser. They had taken the Police Special away from me at the bridge cabin.

At a restaurant whose food I knew was good, I had an excellent meal, took my time reading today's newspaper over coffee afterward, and finally realized the police had arrived.

I looked around. Except for me, the place was empty. In front of me, on the white tablecloth beside the glass of water, was the snub nosed revolver I had gotten from Smiles, and beside the plate, on the right, was the .357 Magnum.

Behind the customers gathered in the entrance foyer and peering in at me were two uniformed cops. Both had guns in their hands, as they worked their way through the knot of people.

“Get Brode,” I told them and went on sipping my coffee.

They took a step toward me.

Shaking my head at them, I picked up both handguns and pointed one at each of them.

“Get Brode,” I repeated.

I had no idea why it had to be Brode, but it did.

One of them quietly told the other, “Hold it a minute.” To me, he said, “You mean the detective downtown? That Sergeant Brode?”

“That's the one.”

Turning to his partner, he said, “Radio for Brode.”

His partner looked at him as if he thought he was nuts, but after a moment, he went out through the crowd in the doorway.

Putting both guns down, one on each side of the plate, I had some more of the excellent coffee. They didn't have coffee like that where I was going.

The remaining cop stood there, still holding his revolver, watching me.

In a little while, his partner returned and nodded to the one who had stayed.

“Brode'll be here in two shakes,” I heard him mutter. “Although why you let this…”

The other one shrugged.

“Look at his eyes,” he said quietly. “He's on cloud nine. We're just lucky he doesn't want to see the governor.”

The other one still didn't look happy about any of it.

“Relax,” the first one told him.

The next time I looked up, Brode was standing on the other side of my table, looking down at me curiously.

“Citizen's arrest,” I told him, nodding at the two guns on the table. “This is evidence.”

Brode was grinning. Glancing over at the watching cops and the restaurant's customers and waiters, his grin widened.

“All right, citizen,” he said, gathering up the two handguns. “Come with me. It's not an official arrest until we're in the Hall of Justice, where the jail is. Who should we arrest?”

“Me,” I told him, finishing the last of my coffee. “I meted out justice unlawfully. Summary justice, and it aint even summer.”

“Well, actually it is,” Brode murmured, “but why spoil a so-so pun, right?”

Getting up, I paid the bill, left a generous tip on the table, and followed Brode out past the two cops. Beyond the doorway, the crowd of onlookers melted before us.

Sixteen

They didn't keep me awake watching lineups that night. They gave me a nice clean cell, all to myself. I was the only inmate in that section of the jail, so it was nice and quiet. I slept more than twelve hours.

Three days later, after my fourth session on various carpets, Sergeant Brode was admitted to my cell. Sitting on the edge of the cot, I looked up at him. Brode waited until the turnkey was gone before he told me the news.

“They didn't get him.”

I nodded.

“I'm not surprised. You got any extra smokes?”

Absently, he handed me an almost full pack.

“Was it him? Ben Crane?” he asked.

I shrugged.

“It could have been him. The guy was a long way off, the only time I got a glimpse of him. It might have been him. Who else would it be?”

Brode grimaced.

“That buddy of yours, Jeff, wasn't much more help. He couldn't identify who it was, either.”

“You holding him?”

“Who? Jeff?”

I nodded.

“What for? What did he do?”

“He helped kidnap me. Twice. That's what for.”

“Where's your witnesses?”

“My…” I stopped.

“You killed those two guys. Upstairs, they don't like that.”

“I don't blame them for not liking it. I'm not crazy about it, myself. But I told them why I killed them. I was trying to save some lives. A man named Mercator, a chorus girl named Roberta from Florian's, two clowns…”

“I know, I know,” Brode broke in impatiently, “but they don't like you shoving Smiles out of a car going over sixty. To a grand jury, it won't look elegant.”

“By then, I was probably a little crazy. Can you blame me? Did you see that little girl, Roberta? One of the bastards stitched her right across the middle with a juice gun…”

“ Brandon , what difference does it make whether I can blame you or not? It's can they blame you? They're your problem, not me.”

Lighting a cigarette from Brode's CARE package, I dragged a couple of lungsful of smoke in and dropped the butt on the steel floor, where I watched it smolder.

“How about Jan Thornton? Did they pick her up?”

“Yeah, they did. There, you were lucky. She was halfway to Dune City in her car, belting away at a fifth of Teacher's as if it was the last bottle on the planet.”

“Did she back up my story? About what went on out there at the Townsend ranch?”

“Oh, yes, she said the same as you, for all the help that was. The guy still hasn't been turned up. He could've driven his car out of there after it was over, turned north on that country road, and he could be anywhere up in that wilderness area. No one but tourists and forest rangers ever go up there, not in this kind of weather. It's like a furnace up there now.”

“What about Townsend and Fenton?”

“Both dead. All they found of Townsend was bones in the embers of the ranch house. They identified him, though. The other one, Fenton, he was at the bottom of the west wall of the mesa. He might have been thrown over the edge, or he could have been trying to climb down from the top and slipped. Anyway, when he hit the rocks at the bottom, anything that might have been done to him before was pretty well covered up just from him landing. They didn't find him until yesterday.”

“How about Ben Crane?”

Brode shrugged.

“The highway patrols are still looking, of course, but…”

He didn't finish. He didn't have to.

“Did he kill the Indian, too?”

“The servant at the ranch? No. Townsend told him to stay with the horses. He did.”

“Well, that's something, anyway,” I muttered.

Standing, I stretched and yawned.

“Now what?” I asked. “What about me?”

“That's up to the grand jury. And them.” He jerked a thumb vaguely upward. “You'll be lucky if you don't have to kiss that P. I. license of yours goodbye.”

I started cremating another of the cigarettes out of the pack he'd given me.

“Hell with the damn license,” I said. “I just hope I don't have to forfeit the bond I had to post to get the damn thing.”

Chuckling, he stared at me.

“You don't turn a hair about knocking over two guys, but you worry about some crummy dough that you might lose…”

“Hold on,” I snapped. “Don't start sneering at crummy dough. You're on a salary. I'm not. I had to turn in that hundred bucks Mercator paid me to keep my eyes open for him. That leaves me with well below a hundred of my own money left.”

“Then you shouldn't have turned in Mercator's hundred. It didn't have any bearing on the rest of it.”

Impatiently, I tried to explain why.

“How could I keep it? I didn't earn it from the man.”

Brode's face was a study in perplexity.

“You blow away two hard knuckles, just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “But your conscience would hurt if you kept a bill you don't think you earned? Brandon , you're too fragile for this world we live in.”

“How do you know I could kill those two just like that?” I snapped my fingers back at him.

Brode threw his head back and laughed.

“Okay,” he said. “Forget I said that. Maybe they won't hang you, after all.”

Crossing to the cell door, he yelled for the jailer.

While we were waiting, he turned and asked, “Anything I can get for you? In case they keep you here awhile?”

“Newspapers, I guess. Something to read.”

He nodded and left soon afterward.

For awhile, though, it looked as if they really might hang me.

They dug into the whole thing from the beginning. They looked up my previous record, which wasn't spotless, I admit, but it wasn't previously littered with casual killings, either.

In the end, they let me off, making allowances because Val turned out to be a known no-good from Chicago with a long string of unproven, or un-provable, felonies on his arrest record, and Smiles had been up for assault on two previous occasions, for both of which his lawyers had gotten him off with plea bargains.

They didn't take my license, either, although I had been certain they would. That didn't help me any. I got no clients.

My money disappeared, as money tends to do. Or as my money tends to. I couldn't maintain even the desk-space pretense, and it wasn't long before I was scrounging around for another bacon-and-bean job. I found one shortly, unloading trucks at a shipping terminal.

However, I still had the Ford. When the whole thing had slid imperceptibly into the past, and people became less likely to remember seeing my picture in the papers in connection with all of it, I began to drop in at El Rancho Motel, out near Florian's casino.

I never hung around long, just a moment or two, while I bought cigarettes, or talked about local scenic stuff. One day when I stopped by, Chester , the manager, was busy with a family who were renting one of the units in mid-afternoon.

“Be right back,” Chester told me.

When he was out of sight, I went into his empty office and around behind the counter, where I got his registry book and quickly looked back through it, until I came to a page with the date I was looking for: the day I had found Ben Crane, when he was thrown from a car in the desert, southeast of town.

I skimmed down the names fast, looking for a Ben Crane. I got about two weeks prior to my starting date when I saw one of the pages had been very neatly razor-bladed out, close in at the binding.

It was far enough before my starting date to have gotten past any police who might have been looking for a man who had registered on or before the night of the assault in the desert.

Closing the register, I returned it to its place and got back out from behind the counter. There was no hurry. Chester was busy for a good fifteen minutes, settling the family in.

I hadn't discovered anything, really. But there was a remote possibility that El Rancho Motel was where the assault victim had been holed up before the crucial night, and perhaps even afterward. He could always have gotten another room in the place, if he suspected his attackers might have known about the one he had been staying in, prior to running afoul of Townsend, and whatever ill-advised wish he might have expressed, which had started Wyatt and his people on the opening move that had gotten all the mayhem going.

Strolling out of Chester 's office, I looked across the inner court. The gray Chevy with the smooth two-foot-long dent punched neatly into its left rear fender, behind the wheel, was no longer parked in its usual spot, back in the northwest angle. It hadn't been there since the final windup of the whole thing, up at Townsend's ranch.

Watching the traffic pass both ways along the highway, I was thinking that Ben Crane certainly had his nerve about him, if he'd stayed that close to Florian's. Maybe he wanted to be able to look out the north window of his motel room and be able to see the Florian's sign, to remind him…like he'd need reminding!

I wondered if he had picked off Wyatt on Florian's roof from the motel itself.

I wouldn't have put it past him.

Shrugging, I drifted back to town, feeling as if none of us would ever know how he had managed it, or where he had been holed up, all through it. The only thing I could do was guess.

That was until three months or so later, when I ran into Brode, over on the Strip.

“Seen today's paper?” he asked. Without waiting for a reply, he handed a copy over. “Front page. Chuck Macy's by-line.”

It gave me a jolt. The story contained a photo of the gray Chevy sedan, instantly recognizable to me because of the big smooth dent in the left rear fender.

“They got Crane?” I blurted.

Brode blinked.

“Man, you're sure a quick reader,” he said. “Yeah, it looks like your

friend came to the end of his rope, up north of that ranch of

Townsend's he burned down.”

I read the front page story.

It was brushfire season. Up there, the fires were busy all over the place, here and there in the wilderness area and national forests. The day before, a helicopter attached to a firefighting outfit spotted a car in the middle of nowhere. He couldn't investigate right then, but later he went back, landed, and instead of finding a damn fool camper who had gotten himself lost in the desert, it turned out to be…

I looked up at Brode. He was watching me, waiting, grinning.

“A skeleton!”

Brode nodded, delighted to be the first to sock me with the news.

“Well, he's been up there three months,” he pointed out.

Suddenly, I felt empty. Handing the paper back, I observed, “After

all that, to have him run out of gas and die like a careless tourist!”

“It may not be so simple,” Brode said. “That's what it looked like, at

first. But they handled it by the book, once they got the brushfire

under control yesterday evening. They sent in a forensic team. And

guess what they turned up?”

“I wouldn't have a clue,” I grinned. “And I also wouldn't want to

spoil your story for you by accidentally coming up with the right guess.”

He laughed sheepishly.

“They found a bullet,” he said, “on the seat underneath where the

skeleton was still propped up behind the Chevy's steering wheel.”

“A three-month old slug?” I was skeptical. “What good would that

be…?”

“It's in perfect shape, though. Not a mark on it. As clean as if they

shot it into cotton for a ballistics check.”

“Okay, could be,” I admitted. “Which would mean he caught one of the shots Fenton fired at him from the rim of the mesa.”

“Could be,” he echoed.

“Well, Fenton sure fired enough of them.”

I shook my head in wonder at the way it seemed to have turned out.

“Funny, that's the last thing that would have occurred to me, that one

of Fenton's shots actually hit the guy. While I watched him going up

the side of that mesa, he was never anywhere near within range of the

handgun Fenton was blasting away with, from up top.”

Brode shrugged. I really do think you need less shrugging

“Maybe shooting down could explain it? One of the bullets went

further than it should have, and by some miracle, it connected.”

I grinned.

“Okay, a miracle I'll buy. Nothing less.”

“Anyway, nothing's been proved yet. We'll have to wait for the

ballistics report. At least we've got the gun that Fenton guy was

shooting with. That will clinch it, for certain, either pro or con, with a

bullet that clean.”

Brode was busily reading the news story again.

“They still don't know how he could have gotten that far,” he

marveled. “This Chuck Macy was up there. He could hardly believe

a regular car could make it through the kind of terrain that old Chevy

was put through.”

“We should have brought Chuck in on the case,” I said. “Maybe he

could have figured out what we should have done back then, when it

mattered.”

Brode laughed.

“Macy's good, but he ain't that good. And as for whether it matters,

it's always good if we can bring in a case that's solved. I like it when

we can wrap things up nice and neat and get on to the other ones…”

“The ones that end like most cases,” I put in. “Unsolved.”

“Right,” he admitted. “All right, we'll see what ballistics tell us. And

the skeleton, too. His teeth should reveal whether it's Ben Crane

from those medical records the Army came up with.”

That's pretty much the way it turned out. The slug found with the skeleton, up there in the Wilderness Area, was a perfect match with Fenton's handgun. One of those many shots he had fired at his pursuer had somehow found a mark. It hadn't been enough to stop Ben Crane on the spot, nor to prevent him from doing what he ended up doing, to Fenton himself, and to Townsend and his magnificent ranch house, but it had been enough to kill him, thirty or forty miles north of there.

Sergeant Brode got his wish. They identified the skeleton found in the broken-down Chevy up in the wilderness area as that of Ben Crane.

Chuck Macy milked the story and the follow-up for all it was worth, and maybe a little more, and for him, it paid off. He got a ticket to Reno , and a job on a newspaper up there, with the extra bonus of a connection with the local TV news outlet. He was on his way. Or still on his way.

As for me, eventually work began to drift in. Not a lot of it, but enough for me to be able to quit the truck-loading gig and hire desk space and get a telephone again.

Now, every so often at night, I sit on the adobe wall at the end of the meager terrace outside my room. I go over it in my mind, trying to figure out how I should have handled things so little Roberta wouldn't end up dead in that shack in the alley near El Rancho Motel.

Bobbie-O, the girl who wanted to be loved forever.

She was buried somewhere out there, under the distant night. Her folks had come down and reclaimed her body and taken it away for proper interment, somewhere in northern California …much as I had reclaimed my .38 Police Special after the police found it locked in a metal file cabinet in the shack at the bridge, below Townsend's mesa.

I don't know where Roberta is buried. I don't want to know. I prefer to keep her the way she is in my memory, along with the night and the desert wind, the line of distant lights along the east-west highway, a mile or two north of my adobe perch. Even the nearer, harsher glare of lights thrown up to the high night sky by the Strip was a part of it, and the smell of the sagebrush nearby, musky and pungently aromatic, especially at night.

All those things still bring back my few brief memories of Bobbie-O. They left me with the one thing that counted, besides the memory of the desert, and the distant mountains, and the high, clear, star-filled night, where she rested somewhere safely in the ground: all of it left me with the memory of her delightful impudent face, a face I can never forget.

Maybe it's enough.