“You believe in telling the truth?”
“Yes,” Converse said. “Yes.”
“Are you scared?” Danskin was fondling his ass as though he were a woman.
“Of course,” Converse said.
“Where’s your wife?”
Converse turned to him in terror.
“I swear… I swear… I don’t know. She’s gone.” The tears were running down his cheeks.
Smitty seemed embarrassed. “We could fry your face all week, you cocksucker,” he said.
Danskin appeared sympathetic.
“You’re not lying, are you, John? You’re not lying to protect her ass?”
“Do you think I am? I’m not. I couldn’t.”
Danskin nodded.
“Of course you couldn’t. And if we had a deal for you — if you could help us, you would, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes,” Converse said.
They let him go. He walked out of the kitchenette and back to where the towels were.
Danskin shrugged. “Nothing there.”
“You’re not gonna make it, kid,” the television set said.
Converse was commencing another glide when Smitty went berserk. Smitty punched him repeatedly and he could not succeed in falling down. He found himself in the bathroom slipping over vomit; Smitty shoved him under the shower and began kicking him, the bathtub, and the walls. Smitty was upset about the lack of hot water.
But it was hot enough for Converse. It scalded his burned hand. He scrambled out of the tub in the face of Smitty’s blows and collapsed on the fouled tile floor.
After Smitty had gone out, Converse began to crawl toward the bathroom door. It was open, and he wanted to close it so that they would not notice him.
“Our land is your land,” the television set said.
Danskin turned it off. Smitty was on the phone. He handed the receiver to Jules.
“Antheil,” he said.
_
JUST BEFORE SUNRISE, HICKS HELD HIMSELF A STAND-TO. Hunkering close against the shack in the last darkness, he saw blue police flashers playing on the rimrock of the canyon’s far wall. He moved out of the shadows in a crouch so that he would not be visible against the lightening sky behind him. Dangling from a strap around his neck were a pair of the binoculars he had stolen from the Kora Sea.
He settled himself beside a dwarf oak tree on a rise above the house, and poked at the ground around him to start snakes. Across the oak’s dry roots he could see the length and breadth of the canyon. Its upper reaches were filling with pale daylight, but it was still night in the deep defiles where the police were.
At the canyon bottom, four cruisers were spinning blue light; there was an ambulance and four civilian cars, all balanced on the sloping shoulder of the lower canyon drive.
A line of men with lights advanced across the bottom, their beams picking up beer cans and rusted fenders in the thorny brush. There was a handler with two dogs and a second line of men with rakes, hacking at the chaparral.
Hicks rolled over and sprinted back to the shack. He found Marge still sleeping on the pile of blankets near the stove; he knelt down and tried to gentle her awake. Faint sleep lay on the weary angles of her face like thin snow on stone. She woke at once.
“How’s your need?”
She blinked and scratched herself; she had been scratching in her sleep most of the night.
“I don’t know yet.”
He held out two Ritalins and a sopor in the palm of his hand. She took the sopor and closed his hand on the Ritalin.
“We got to run.” he said. “The canyon’s full of cops. They’ll be up here any old time.”
“Oy.”
He grabbed a spade and a clean rag from under the deep sink and ran outside to dig up the stash. It was a cold morning, and his breath frosted on the air. He had no proper clothes for the weather, but the digging warmed him and by the time he had the airline bag above ground the sun was over the ridge.
He kept a Land-Rover, its distributor removed, parked under a tarpaulin in the brush behind the house. The airline bag went into the back of it, covered with a square of oilcloth. Security.
For a few moments he rested, shielding his eyes from the sun, then took the spade and began to dig in the dry earth along the rear wall of the shack. Buried there, contained within a metal footlocker and immersed in grease, he had the complete parts of an M-16 semiautomatic rifle, together within an M-70 launcher attachment. Clips for M-16 and the deadly little five-inch M-70 cartridges he kept in a sealed plastic envelope just under the locker.
He took a canvas seabag from the Land-Rover, wiped the weapon clean of grease, and dropped the lot into the sea-bag.
Marge came out of the house with a box of Kleenex. He waved her away from the canyon.
He went inside and secured. Whatever he thought they might need or might identify them, he stuffed into a back pack. There was no way to conceal recent occupation. When they came, they would know by the smell that the place had been inhabited. They would find the dug ground where he had buried his contraband, and the puke-stained mattress out back.
He loaded the Land-Rover and set about replacing its distributor. As he worked, he expected them to come up the road at any moment. Rat reflexes of flight. He struggled to keep his mind clear, his actions orderly. The Land-Rover started nicely. Marge sat beside him, her arms folded across her chest, her head turned from the sun.
“Hang in, Marge.”
He followed the road for a few hundred yards and then, gambling, turned down the first fire trail that wound down the seaward slope of the ridge.
“I saw them,” Marge said. “What are they after?”
“Bodies.” It was a pleasure to master the curves of the narrow fire trail. Four-wheel drive. “Sometimes they find a car off the road with nobody in it. They have to look for the driver.”
Marge nodded.
“Some of these freaks up here love to strip wrecks. They’ll see a drunk run his car into the canyon and they’ll creep out at night to take the guy’s wallet. They go for the credit cards.”
“Christ.”
“The big ones eat the little ones, up here,” he said. He flung his free arm toward the hanging gardens of the can yon householders.
“All summer these people sweat fire, all winter they sweat the floods. Shit creeps out of the night under those sun-decks, and they know it.” He was shouting at her over the wind and the engine. “Fucking L.A., man — go out for a Sunday spin, you’re a short hair from the dawn of creation.”
“It’s those girls,” she said after a while. “That’s who they’re looking for.”
“If it’s not them,” Hicks said, “it’s some other creature.”
He glanced at her; she looked limp and weepy, coasting on sopors and deprivation.
“Children,” he thought she said.
“Yes. Children.”
Less than a mile above Topanga Canyon Drive, they passed a man riding a brush-chopping machine. The man never glanced at them as they spun the Land-Rover around him, but looking in the rearview mirror, Hicks saw him staring after the license plate.
The fire road led to a driveway connecting to Topanga Canyon Boulevard; the sign facing the highway read Official Vehicles Only. Hicks looked up and down for police cars and rammed the Land-Rover out into the westbound traffic. A helicopter shot across the ridges overhead and disappeared into the adjoining canyon.
They followed the coast road as far as Carillo State Park. Just beyond the park entrance Hicks stopped the Land-Rover before a hot dog stand that had a dachshund in a chef’s cap over it. He bought three plain hot dogs and two cups of coffee. The young counterman thanked him and said Praise Jesus.
“Can you eat?”
She tried nibbling at the bulbous wad of meat and then at the toasted roll. She was holding the frankfurter near her eyes to blot out the morning sun; the ocean wind blew her tears across her cheekbones. She swallowed a little and took a breath.