I wasn’t at all sure now that I was doing the right thing. Maybe I should have gone into the liquor store to check on the clerk, make sure he was all right; then I could have telephoned the local police and given them Paige’s name and that WALLY P license plate of his. But my instinctive reaction had been to give chase, to be able to pinpoint them when I finally did make the call. Wise or not, I had made my choice and I would have to stand by it.
When the VW neared Hillside Boulevard, I dropped back to see how it would go. They turned left. Daly City, then, and on into San Francisco that way. Or maybe they had another destination along the line.
I could still see the red glow of their taillights when I got to the intersection, but they were diminishing rapidly: the driver had opened it up now. It would have been dangerous for me to try driving that dark road without lights; I switched on my headlamps before I made the turn. And then bore down on the accelerator to match their speed.
As I drove, I thought about how wrong Mrs. Paige and I had been about her husband. He didn’t have another woman, or if he did she had nothing to do with these nocturnal outings of his. They were all explainable in the same way. There had been a string of liquor store holdups the past month, in a different Bay area city each time — two men, one to pull the job and the other to drive the car. I hadn’t thought of Paige in connection with the holdups; there was no reason I should have. I had been hired to investigate infidelity, not armed robbery.
So Paige and this other guy were the heisters; and that put an altogether different explanation on last night’s events. Paige hadn’t been waiting at the shopping center for anyone; he’d been casing the liquor store — the same thing he had probably done the past few nights, and on some or all of the other jobs they’d pulled. He would have been checking on how much traffic went in and out of the lot around this time of night, how many clerks and customers there were in the store, things like that. When he’d gone to the bowling alley, it had been to call his partner and make a report. It had looked good to them, and they were ready, and so they’d set it up for tonight.
The only things that weren’t clear were why the other guy had showed up at the parking lot on foot instead of meeting Paige and driving there with him, and why they were using Paige’s VW, with that easy-to-remember WALLY P license plate, as the getaway car. But I could find out the answers to those questions later on. They didn’t matter much at this point.
What mattered was staying with those two, seeing to it they were arrested and put away. What mattered was how Judith Paige would feel when she found out her husband was something much worse than unfaithful...
The VW was in Colma now, a small community that had the dubious distinction of being the primary burial grounds for the San Francisco area. There were a dozen different cemeteries along here, and one golf course — Cypress Hills — sitting there incongruously in the middle of it all. This stretch of Hillside Boulevard was very dark; no other cars moved on it in either direction.
Another tenth of a mile clicked off on my odometer. And then the VW’s brake lights came on ahead, and the car made a sharp right-hand turn into Cynthia Street — a narrow lane that marked the boundary between the golf course on the right and Mount Olivert Cemetery on the left. At its upper end, there were a couple of short dead-end streets and the looming black shapes of the San Bruno Mountains. Maybe the one guy lived there, I thought, and they were going to his place. Or maybe they were planning to stop for a few minutes and split the take from the liquor store.
I slowed, waiting until the VW passed behind a screen of eucalyptus lining the lane, then switched off my lights and swung up after them. The other car was better than a hundred yards ahead by then. We traveled a fifth of a mile with that much distance between us — and suddenly the taillights winked out, their headlights did the same and heavy darkness folded in on the road.
I punched the brake pedal, thinking they’d pull off onto the shoulder, getting ready to do the same thing. Only then the VW’s backup lights flared, and when I heard the sharp whine of its engine in reverse I realized what a damned fool I’d been. They knew I was there, they had known it all along; somehow they’d spotted me tailing them. So they’d maneuvered me up here, where it was isolated, with the idea of ramming me, forcing me off the road.
I said a short, vicious word and managed to do three things at once: jammed the gearshift lever into reverse with my right hand, found the headlight switch and flicked it on with my left hand, and brought my left foot down on the high-beam button on the floor. The car leaped backward, yawing a little. The VW was almost on top of me by then, a hurtling black-and-red shape; its rear end missed my front bumper by a foot or less, then veered off toward the fence bordering the cemetery on the left. The guy behind the wheel had to fight it around, straighten out again, and that gave me a couple of extra seconds.
Hunched around on the seat now, I leaned over the back to look through the rear window and pushed the accelerator all the way down. The high white glare of my headlights, the crimson wash from my backup lights, bleached the darkness enough so that I could see the road behind me. It was pretty straight, and I had a white-fisted grip on the wheel. I kept my eyes on the road, not looking to see where the VW was; the metallic taste of fear was sharp in my mouth. I wasn’t armed — I had not carried a gun since I’d been on the cops years ago — and these characters had at least one and probably two weapons. I had nowhere to go if I lost control of the car or they managed to get me off the road.
The intersection with Hillside Boulevard came up quickly, less than a hundred yards away now. Sweat half-blinded me, but when I dropped below the screen of trees I could see there were headlights approaching from the direction of South San Francisco — two sets of them. Relief dulled the edge of my fear. The nearest set of lights was maybe five hundred yards off: enough time, just enough time.
There was a sudden, glancing impact: the VW had rammed me, but not hard enough to do the job for them. I managed to keep the rear end straight as the intersection rushed up, held off using the brakes as long as I could; then I touched them lightly and laid my other hand on the horn ring and swung the wheel hard to the right. The tires screamed as I slid sideways, rocking, out onto Hillside Boulevard.
Another horn blared; there was more shrieking of rubber. The first of the oncoming cars swerved to the left, nosing off the road, to avoid a collision with me; the second braked hard and skidded around to the side of the first one — and in the next second a red light began revolving on its roof, sweeping the darkness with an eerie pulsing glow. It was a county police cruiser, a traffic unit that patrols Hillside for speeders at night.
I turned my head to see where the VW was, saw it right in front of me. They had swung out in the same direction I had, but the red light on the cruiser had made them quit worrying about me. The little car rocked as the transmission was thrown into a forward gear; rubber howled again. They had been half turned around on the road, as I had been, and they tried to come out of it too fast, with too much power. The rear end fishtailed and they started to slide one way, then the other. And then the VW spun around twice in the middle of the road, like a toy car in the hands of a playful kid; tilted and went over, rolling; finally settled on its top in the culvert between the road and the cemetery fence.
The county patrol car slid around mine and cut diagonally in front, blocking me off. One of the two cops who came out of it ran to where the VW lay in the culvert like a huge beetle on its back, wheels spinning lazily in the light-spattered darkness; the other cop came over to me with his service revolver drawn. He looked in through the open window. “What the hell’s going on here?” he demanded.