“Let me go after him.” His face was shining with a kind of buck fever.
“No.”
Helen climbed out of the car with the boy in her arms, struggling, and Seifel followed them. I followed Miner’s dust.
It was still very early, and there were no other cars. The trail of dust hung in the still air over the road like a curling white worm. It led south across the arid valley, back towards the wall of mountains. Their snow-capped peaks were dazzling now in the full sun.
Twice I caught sight of the Jaguar bouncing over the top of a rise like a low-slung brown rabbit. It was far ahead, and increasing its lead. Since the Lincoln did better than ninety in the straightaways, Miner’s car must have been doing well over a hundred. It struck me wryly that he was breaking the conditions of his probation.
I caught sight of it for the third time when it reached the southern rim of the valley, by now a tiny bronze beetle blowing a small derisive spume of dust. It raced below the leaning basalt slabs that buttressed the base of the mountain. Then it was lost in the trees on the shaggy mountainside.
Four minutes and five miles later I was at the foot of the basalt cliffs. Beyond them the road turned sharply and steeply upward. For a screeching, sliding instant the big car threatened to roll. I stamped the gas pedal to the floorboard, braking with my left foot. The rear wheels churned the gravel of the shoulder and pushed back onto the road. Miner’s dust was there ahead, obscuring the road and talcuming my windshield.
The desert flora gave way to scrub oaks and these in turn to larger trees, great pines and spruce. The road grew narrower and more treacherous, doubling and redoubling on itself. Far up ahead a patch of snow glittered like a medal on the mountain’s shoulder. The road curved round the end of an oval lake that mirrored trees and sky. The higher it went the narrower it grew. I began to hope that Miner, with all his speed, was in a dead end.
Then I saw a gleam of chrome through the trees, and heard him coming. There were no side roads above the lake. The single road we were on was just wide enough for two cars to pass each other. On my left the bank sloped up at an angle of forty-five or fifty degrees. On the other side the shoulder fell off sharply into a ravine where a mountain brook rushed downward from the snowbeds.
The Jaguar appeared around a curve, headed directly for me. Miner had come to the end of the road and turned back. I braked and jerked the steering-wheel to the right, skidding to a stop broadside across the road. He didn’t slacken speed. If anything, he accelerated. I flung myself backward across the width of the car and fumbled for the door button. But there was no impact.
The Jaguar swerved sharply to my left and climbed the bank. For a moment it looked as if the maneuver might work. Miner was poised above me, forty feet off the road, like a pilot in an open cockpit. Then one of his tires went out with a gunshot report. The Jaguar left the slope, turned turtle in the air, hung there for a long instant with Miner suspended head-down from the steering-wheel, and fell back to earth. Over and over it rolled, down into the road behind me.
Miner was flung out halfway down the slope. He was sitting up when I reached him, coughing bright blood and holding his chest together with one arm. His other arm hung loose, its sleeve soaked with blood. His brow was deeply ridged as if by a giant nutcracker.
His eyes saw me. “Mess. I could of held it with two good arms. Teach me to break the speed laws.”
“Why did you do it, Fred?”
“She told me to.” His voice was guttural, his breath beginning to bubble. “I know I broke my conditions. But it’s pretty rough when you fire on a guy for that.”
“It wasn’t for that.”
“What then? I was only protecting the boy. I brought him out here for his own protection.”
“Who told you to do that?”
“Mrs. Johnson. She’s the boss.”
Then his eyes lost their light, and he toppled. I caught him under the arms. His body was heavier than lead.
chapter 23
I took him back to the desert house, driving slowly because I distrusted my nerves. The wrecked sports-car had blocked the road until I had it removed. I finally found a telephone at the ski lift where the road ended, and got in touch with a tow service in Palmdale, forty miles away. It took over two hours altogether. It was midmorning when I reached the Johnson place.
A black custom-built Ford was nosed under the carport I parked behind it. When I stepped out of the car, the weight of the sun was palpable on my head. The landscape shimmered slightly like a painted curtain concealing a still more desolate reality.
Forest was standing in the doorway with a tall glass of something in his left hand and a revolver in his right hand. He returned the gun to its shoulder holster. “Catch him?”
“He’s in the trunk of the car, wrapped in a blanket.”
His broad face was impassive. “You had to shoot him, eh?”
“No. He cracked up, trying to get away. Where’s Mrs. Johnson?”
“I sent her back home with the boy. She’s been singing your praises, incidentally.”
My knees softened, threatening to let me down onto the concrete terrace. I turned and braced my back against the stone wall. The shimmering plain divided like curtains blown by a wind, and I saw the more desolate reality behind them: the mask of a woman’s face reflected in murky green water.
Seeing that I was in trouble, Forest pushed through the screen door and lent me his shoulder. “Come in, Cross. You’ve had a rugged twenty-four hours. What you need is a rest and a nice cold drink. Mrs. Johnson made iced tea before she left.”
We descended into a room with a low, beamed ceiling and heavily curtained windows. After the outside dazzle, it seemed as dark as a cave. I sat in a creaking cowhide chair. Forest introduced me to a colleague whose name I didn’t hear. We agreed that it was hot outside, but comparatively cool inside on account of the thick walls and the cooling system. Forest busied himself in another room and came back with a drink for me. When I had drunk it, I was able to distinguish between the sound of the air-conditioner and the whirring sounds in my head.
Forest gave my shoulder a friendly tap. “Feeling better now?”
“Much better. Thanks.”
“This heat is hard on a man when you’re not used to it.”
“It’s cool enough in here,” his colleague insisted.
Forest turned to him. “That reminds me, Eddie, we better call Pacific Point and ask them to send a hearse. Cross has Miner’s body in the trunk of his car.”
“We means me, as usual?”
“What do you think? The telephone’s in the kitchen.”
Eddie went out. Forest sat down opposite me on a Navajo-blanketed couch. “Miner died without talking, I suppose?”
“He said a little. His head was injured and he may have been irrational. He seemed to think I wanted him for violating probation.”
Forest began to laugh, but stopped when I didn’t join in. “Is that all he said?”
“He claimed that he was protecting the boy.”
“That’s what he told the boy.” A trace of Forest’s derisive laughter persisted in his voice. “He told the youngster he brought him out here for safety’s sake. Is that what he said to you, that the whole thing was done on Mrs. Johnson’s orders?”
“Yes, and I got the impression that he was sincere. When a man is dying–”
“Nonsense. He didn’t know he was dying.”
“I believe he did.”
“Even so, I don’t attach any special sanctity to a deathbed statement. A liar is a liar, under any circumstances.”
“I don’t believe he was lying.”