I had then taken three figures – the Cadillac’s width at its widest point, height at its tallest, and length at its longest – to a friend of mine who teaches mathematics at Las Vegas High School. I have told you, I think, that I had prepared for this, and not all my preparation was physical. Most assuredly not.
I presented my problem as a purely hypothetical one. I was trying to write a science fiction story, I said, and I wanted to have my figures exactly right. I even made up a few plausible plot fragments – my own inventiveness rather I astonished me.
My friend wanted to know how fast this alien scout vehicle of mine would be going. It was a question I had not expected, and I asked him if it mattered.
“Of course it matters,” he said. “It matters a lot. If you want the scout vehicle in your story to fall directly into your trap, the trap has to be exactly the right size. Now this figure you’ve given me is seventeen feet by five feet.”
I opened my mouth to say that wasn’t exactly right, but he was already holding up his hand.
“Just an approximation,” he said. “Makes it easier to figure the arc.”
“The what?”
“The arc of descent,” he repeated, and I cooled off. That was a phrase with which a man bent on revenge could fall in love. It had a dark, smoothly portentous sound. The arc of descent.
I’d taken it for granted that if I dug the grave so that the Cadillac could fit, it would fit. It took this friend of mine to make me see that before it could serve its purpose as a grave, it had to work as a trap.
The shape itself was important, he said. The sort of slit-trench I had been envisioning might not work – in fact, the odds of its not working were greater than the odds that it would. “If the vehicle doesn’t hit the start of the trench dead-on,” he said, “it may not go all the way in at all. It would just slide along on an angle for awhile and when it stopped all the aliens would climb out the passenger door and zap your heroes.” The answer, he said, was to widen the entrance end, giving the whole excavation a funnel-shape.
Then there was this problem of speed.
If Dolan’s Cadillac was going too fast and the hole was too short, it would fly across, sinking a bit as it went, and either the frame or the tires would strike the lip of the hole on the far side. It would flip over on its roof – but without falling in the hole at all. On the other hand, if the Cadillac was going too slowly and the hole was too long, it might land at the bottom on its nose instead of its wheels, and that would never do. You couldn’t bury a Cadillac with the last two feet of its trunk and its rear bumper sticking out of the ground any more than you could bury a man with his legs sticking up.
“So how fast will your scout vehicle be going?”
I calculated quickly. On the open highway, Dolan’s driver kept it pegged between sixty and sixty-five. He would probably be driving a little slower than that where I planned to make my try. I could take away the detour signs, but I couldn’t hide the road machinery or erase all the signs of construction.
“About twenty rull,” I said.
He smiled. “Translation, please?”
“Say fifty earth-miles an hour.”
“Ah-hah.” He set to work at once with his slip-stick while I sat beside him, bright-eyed and smiling, thinking about that wonderful phrase: arc of descent.
He looked up almost at once. “You know,” he said, “you might want to think about changing the dimensions of the vehicle, buddy.”
“Oh? Why do you say that?”
“Seventeen by five is pretty big for a scout vehicle.” He laughed. “That’s damn near the size of a Lincoln Mark IV.”
I laughed, too. We laughed together.
After I saw the women going into the house with the sheets and towels, I flew back to Las Vegas.
I unlocked my house, went into the living room, and picked up the telephone. My hand trembled a little. For nine years I had waited and watched like a spider in the eaves or a mouse behind a baseboard. I had tried never to give Dolan the slightest clue that Elizabeth’s husband was still interested in him – the totally empty look he had given me that day as I passed his disabled Cadillac on the way back to Vegas, furious as it had made me at the time, was my just reward.
But now I would have to take a risk. I would have to take it because I could not be in two places at the same time and it was imperative that I know if Dolan was coming, and when to make the detour temporarily disappear.
I had figured out a plan coming home on the plane. I thought it would work. I would make it work.
I dialed Los Angeles directory assistance and asked for the number of Big Joe’s Cleaning Service. I got it and dialed it.
“This is Bill at Rennie’s Catering,” I said. “We got a party Saturday night at 1121 Aster Drive in Hollywood Hills. I wanted to know if one of your girls would check for Mr Dolan’s big punch-bowl in the cabinet over the stove. Could you do that for me?”
I was asked to hold on. I did, somehow, although with the passing of each endless second I became more and more sure that he had smelled a rat and was calling the phone company on one line while I held on the other.
At last – at long, long last – he came back on. He sounded upset, but that was all right. That was just how I wanted him to sound.
“Saturday night?”
“Yes, that’s right. But I don’t have a punch-bowl as big as they’re going to want unless I call across town, and my impression was that he already has one. I’d just like to be sure.”
“Look, mister, my call-sheet says Mr Dolan ain’t expected in until three P. m. Sunday afternoon. I’ll be glad to have one of my girls check out your punch-bowl, but I want to straighten this other business out first. Mr Dolan is not a man to fuck around with, if you’ll pardon my French…”
“I couldn’t agree with you more,” I said.
“…and if he’s going to show up a day early, I got to send some more girls out there right away.”
“Let me double-check,” I said. The third-grade reading textbook I use, Roads to Everywhere, was on the table beside me. I picked it up and riffled some of the pages close to the phone.
“Oh, boy,” I said. “It’s my mistake. He’s having people in Sunday night. I’m really sorry. You going to hit me?”
“Nah. Listen, let me put you on hold – I’ll get one of the girls and have her check on the…”
“No need, if it’s Sunday,” I said. “My big punch-bowl’s coming back from a wedding reception in Glendale Sunday morning.”
“Okay. Take it easy.” Comfortable. Unsuspicious. The voice of a man who wasn’t going to think twice.
I hoped.
I hung up and sat still, working it out in my head as carefully as I could. To get to LA by three, he would be leaving Vegas about ten o’clock Sunday morning. And he would arrive in the vicinity of the detour between elevenfifteen and eleven-thirty, when traffic was apt to be almost non-existent anyway.
I decided it was time to stop dreaming and start acting.
I looked through the want ads, made some telephone calls, and then went out to look at five used vehicles that were within my financial reach. I settled for a battered Ford van that had rolled off the assembly line the same year Elizabeth was killed. I paid cash. I was left with only two hundred and fifty-seven dollars in my savings account, but this did not disturb me in the slightest. On my way home I stopped at a rental place the size of a discount department store and rented a portable air compressor, using my MasterCard as collateral.