“I’ve got it. Who is this, please?”
I said, “Fourteen-eleven Freestone Street, Yuba City, don’t waste any time,” and hung up.
I went out to the car, leaned in for the Genie and pushed its button to raise the garage door, then tossed the thing onto a nearby workbench. Might as well leave the door up, make the cops’ job easier when they got here. I had the car started by the time the opener finished its up cycle; I backed out and drove off along the street without seeing anybody except a couple of housewives who weren’t paying any attention to me. Drove out of the neighborhood without seeing any police cars. If they used sirens getting to Tucker’s house I never heard them. But then, I might not have heard sirens if they had been a block away. I was too intent on my driving, on getting out of Yuba City, on covering the distance between here and Elk Grove.
Here I come, Brit.
Here I come.
NIGHT
Sixty-two Cordilleras Street, Elk Grove.
I had trouble finding it, not because Elk Grove is a big place-it isn’t-but because neither of the two Elk Grove Boulevard service stations I stopped at had a local street map and none of the people I talked to knew where the hell Cordilleras Street was. My third stop was a 7-Eleven store; the woman clerk said she thought Cordilleras was on the south side, by the cattle auction yard, but she just wasn’t sure. She did tell me how to get to that part of town, and once I got there I found somebody-a liquor store clerk-who could pinpoint it for me. It was 7:35, almost two and a half hours after I’d left Tucker’s house, when I made the turn onto the street where Brit lived.
It wasn’t much of a street. If he was mixed up with Rix and Tucker in their loan-sharking and child-porn scams, or into some other kind of crooked deal, he wasn’t making much money out of it. Two blocks long, Cordilleras, dead-ending in a fence beyond which was the cattle auction yard and some kind of rental facility for heavy equipment. Run-down, low-income houses and trailers on both sides, a couple with the rusting corpses of automobiles in their weedy front yards, one with a boxy-looking homemade boat up on davits. Number 62 was a squat wood-shingled cottage with an uneven roof line and the remains of some long dead flowering vine climbing a trellis to one side of the front door. On the other side was a plate glass window, undraped, so I could look into the lighted front room as I drove past. Nobody occupying it just now. But somebody was home: The light and a car obscured in shadow at the rear of a gravel drive made that plain enough.
I went on to the corner, U-turned, came back for another look. Still nobody in the front room. Across the street and a little way down was a vacant lot choked with weeds and high grass and a scattering of refuse; an ancient black oak grew at the near end, its gnarled branches overhanging a cracked sidewalk and root-buckled curb. I made another U-turn at that end of the block, came back and parked under the low-hanging oak branches. It was the best kind of place for a stakeout: dark, protected. And the angle was such that I could still see into most of Number 62’s lamp-lit front room.
I shut off the lights and the engine, rolled down my window to let some air into the car. It was warmer here than it had been in Yuba City, the sky clear and bright with stars and a three-quarter moon, but the night breeze was still cool. And I was tired, keyed up, stiff from driving and from the fight with Tucker.
I sat low on the seat, staring across at the cottage. What if he wasn’t alone? What if he had a visitor, or he was living with somebody? This thing was between him and me, just the two of us-beginning to end, just the two of us. No way I was going to hurt an innocent bystander. If I did that I would be no better than he was, no better than Tucker and Rix and all the other predators that walk the earth in human skin. Stupid to involve another person anyway-let somebody here get a look at me, maybe identify me to the police later on.
So before I could even think about bracing him over there, I had to make sure he was alone. Another few minutes, another few hours, even another day or two… what did it matter? Locating him had been the big job, and now that that was done, he wasn’t going to get away.
Five minutes passed. Ten.
And somebody walked into the lighted room-walked in and sat down in a chair and picked up a magazine. A woman. Thin, angular blond wearing a quilted housecoat and of an age that I couldn’t determine at this distance.
My hands were damp; I scrubbed them dry on the legs of Tom Carder’s Levi’s. Relative of Brit’s? Girlfriend? Barnwell had claimed the man was a homosexual, but Barnwell was a dimwit and dimwits make lousy witnesses. Was Brit in there with her, in one of the other rooms? Could be. But it could be, too, that he was out for the evening, or away from Elk Grove altogether, or even in another damn state. If he was on some kind of trip I could sit here waiting for days…
On impulse I started the engine, swung the car around, drove back to the same liquor store I’d stopped at a while ago to ask directions. There was a phone box out front; I put a quarter in the slot and punched out the number that had been in Tucker’s address book.
A woman’s low-pitched voice said, “Hello?”
“Is Brit there?”
“No, not right now.”
“You expect him back tonight?”
“I guess. He comes and goes.”
“What time do you think he’ll be home?”
“I don’t have any idea.”
“Who is this?”
“Midge.”
“Midge who?”
“… Do I know you?”
“I’m a friend of Brit’s.”
“Uh-huh. You want to leave a message?”
“No,” I said, “no message.”
I cradled the receiver. Midge. Girlfriend, probably. The important thing was that he wasn’t out of town or out of state, that he was due back home tonight. But how was I going to get him alone? Lure him out by phone? Foolish move; if I didn’t handle it just right it might put him on his guard. Chances were, he hadn’t been back to the Deer Run cabin yet. In which case he believed I was still chained up inside, and as long as he believed that he had no reason to be looking over his shoulder, to stay cooped up at home with Midge. Sooner or later he would go out again-sometime tomorrow, probably. Sooner or later there would be a time and a place where he was alone and I could take him the way he’d taken me that long ago night in San Francisco.
I debated finding a room for the night, coming back and staking out the cottage early in the morning. No point in returning to Cordilleras Street now, was there? No… except that I wasn’t ready yet to close myself up in some box of a motel room, do my waiting in absentia. I ached for a look at him, at his face without the ski mask to hide it. Maybe I could accomplish that much tonight, at least.
Back to Cordilleras, back into the tree shadows next to the vacant lot. The cottage’s front window was still un-draped, and the blond woman was still sitting there reading her magazine. Brit hadn’t come home in the brief interval between my phone call and now: The driveway still had just one car parked on it and the curb in front was deserted.
I waited. I have always hated stakeouts-the monotony, the dribbling passage of time, the tension-and this one was twice as bad as any other in thirty years. I was so tired my eyes ached and watered and I had to keep knuckling them to clear my vision. So wired already that my neck and shoulders felt as though they were being compressed in a vise. Hunger pangs under my breastbone, too… I should have bought something to eat at the liquor store. Still not thinking things out as carefully as I used to, still not planning ahead. But Jesus, I was so close to the end of it now, so close. It was like an obstruction in my mind that I had to keep squeezing past to get at anything else.