TWO
I LOSE MY CLIENT
I drove. Or rather I held the wheel of the big black car and let it drive itself. I was wearing a sporty light-colored overcoat and hat belonging to Lindley Paul. I had ten grand in hundreddollar bills in one of the pockets. Paul was in the back seat. He had a silver-mounted Luger that was a pip to look at, and I hoped he knew how to use it. There wasn’t anything about the job I liked.
The meeting place was a hollow at the head of Purissima Canyon, about fifteen minutes from the house. Paul said he knew the spot fairly well and wouldn’t have any trouble directing me.
We switchbacked and figure-eighted around on the side of the mountain until I got dizzy and then all of a sudden we were out on the state highway, and the lights of the streaming cars were a solid white beam as far as you could see in either direction. The long-haul trucks were on their way.
We turned inland past a service station at Sunset Boulevard. There was loneliness then, and for a while the smell of kelp, not very strong, and the smell of wild sage dripping down the dark slopes much stronger. A dim, distant yellow window would peek down at us from the crest of some realtor’s dream. A car would growl by and its white glare would hide the hills for a moment. There was a half-moon and wisps of cold fog chasing it down the sky.
«Off here is the Bel-Air Beach Club,» Paul said. «The next canyon is Las Pulgas and the next after that is Purissima. We turn off at the top of the next rise.» His voice was hushed, taut. It didn’t have any of the Park Avenue brass of our’earlier acquaintance.
«Keep your head down,» I growled back at him. «We may be watched all the way. This car sticks out like spats at an Iowa picnic.»
The car purred on in front of me until, «Turn right here,» he whispered sharply at the top of the next hill.
I swung the black car into a wide, weed-grown boulevard that had never jelled into a traffic artery. The black stumps of unfinished electroliers jutted up from the crusted sidewalk. Brush leaned over the concrete from the waste land behind. I could hear crickets chirp and tree frogs drone behind them. The car was that silent.
There was a house to a block now, all dark. The folks out there went to bed with the chickens it seemed. At the end of this road the concrete stopped abruptly and we slid down a dirt slope to a dirt terrace, then down another slope, and a barricade of what looked like four-by-fours painted white loomed across the dirt road.
I heard a rustling behind me and Paul leaned over the seat, with a sigh in his whispered voice. «This is the spot. You’ve got to get out and move that barricade and drive on down into the hollow. That’s probably so that we can’t make a quick exit, as we’d have to back out with this car. They want their time to get away.»
«Shut up and keep down unless you hear me yell,» I said.
I cut the almost noiseless motor and sat there listening. The crickets and tree frogs got a little louder. I heard nothing else. Nobody was moving nearby, or the crickets would have been still. I touched the cold butt of the gun under my arm, opened the car door and slid out on to the hard clay, stood there. There was brush all around. I could smell the sage. There was enough of it to hide an army. I went towards the barricade.
Perhaps this was just a tryout, to see if Paul did what he was told to do.
I put my hands out — it took both of them — and started to lift a section of the white barrier to one side. It wasn’t a tryout. The largest flashlight in the world hit me square in the face from a bush not fifteen feet away.
A thin, high, niggerish voice piped out of the darkness behind the flash: «Two of us with shotguns. Put them mitts up high an’ empty. We ain’t takin’ no chances.»
I didn’t say anything. For a moment I just stood holding the barricade inches off the ground. Nothing from Paul or the car. Then the weight of the four-by-fours pulled my muscles and my brain said let go and I put the section down again. I put my hands slowly into the air. The flash pinned me like a fly squashed on the wall, I had no particular thought except a vague wonder if there hadn’t been a better way for us to work it.
«Tha’s fine,» the thin, high, whining voice said. «Jes’ hold like that until I git aroun’ to you.»
The voice awakened vague echoes in my brain. It didn’t mean anything though. My memory had too many such echoes. I wondered what Paul was doing. A thin, sharp figure detached itself from the fan of light, immediately ceased to be sharp or of any shape at all, and became a vague rustling off to the side. Then the rustling was behind me. I kept my hands in the air and blinked at the glare of the flash.
A light finger touched my back, then the hard end of a gun. The half-remembered voice said: «This may hurt jes’ a little.»
A giggle and a swishing sound. A white, hot glare jumped through the top of my head. I piled down on.the barricade and clawed at it and yelled. My right hand tried to jerk down under my left arm.
I didn’t hear the swishing sound the second time. I only saw the white glare get larger and larger, until there was nothing else anywhere but hard, aching white light. Then there was darkness in which something red wriggled like a germ under the microscope. Then there was nothing red and nothing wriggling, just darkness and emptiness, and a falling sensation.
I woke up looking fuzzily at a star and listening to two goblins talking in a black hat.
«Lou Lid.»
«What’s that?»
«Lou Lid.»
«Who’s Lou Lid?»
«A tough dinge gunman you saw third-degreed once down at the Hall.»
«Oh… LouLid.»
I rolled over and clawed at the ground and crawled up on one knee. I groaned. There wasn’t anybody there. I was talking to myself, coming out of it. I balanced myself, holding my hands flat on the ground, listening, not hearing anything. When I moved my hands, dried burrs stuck to the skin and the sticky ooze from the purple sage from which wild bees get most of their honey.
Honey was sweet. Much, much too sweet, and too hard on the stomach. I leaned down and vomited.
Time passed and I gathered my insides together again. I still didn’t hear anything but the buzzing in my own ears. I got up very cautiously, like an old man getting out of a tub bath. My feet didn’t have much feeling in them and my legs were rubbery. I wobbled and wiped the cold sweat of nausea off my forehead and felt the back of my head. It was soft and pulpy, like a bruised peach. When I touched it I could feel the pain clear down to my ankles. I could feel every pain I ever felt since the first time I got kicked in the rear in grade school.
Then my eyes cleared enough for me to see the outlines of the shallow bowl of wild land, with brush growing on the banks all around like a low wall, and a dirt road, indistinct under the sinking moon, crawling up one side. Then I saw the car.
It was quite close to me, not more than twenty feet away. I just hadn’t looked in that direction. It was Lindley Paul’s car, lightless. I stumbled over to it and instinctively grabbed under my arm for a gun. Of course there wasn’t any gun there now. The whiny guy whose voice reminded me of someone would have seen to that. But I still had a fountainpen flash. I unshipped it, opened the rear door of the car and poked the light in.
It didn’t show anything — no blood, no torn upholstery, no starred or splintered glass, no bodies. The car didn’t seem to have been the scene of a battle. It was just empty. The keys hung on the ornate panel. It had been driven down there and left. I pointed my little flash at the ground and began to prowl, looking for him. He’d be around there all right, if the car was.
Then in the cold silence a motor throbbed above the rim of the bowl. The light in my hand went out. Other lights — headlights — tilted up over the frayed bushes. I dropped and crawled swiftly behind the hood of Lindley Paul’s car.