“What’s the matter, Sal?” Jake called to her from where he was sipping brandy and chopping away at various cheeses. “Don’t tell me our fire’s started again.”
“Nope, it looks pretty much out. The water’s halfway up and still coming.”
“Is that what’s bothering you?”
“I don’t know, Jake,” she called back listlessly. “I been watching churches going under. I never knew there were so many. Saint Pat’s and Epiphany and Christ and Saint Bartholomew’s and Grace and Actors’ Temple and Saint Mary the Virgin, and Calvary, where they started AA, and All Souls and Saint Mark’s in the Bouwerie and B’nai Jeshurun and The Little Church around the Corner and—”
“Hey, you can’t see all those from there,” Jake protested. “You can’t see half of them.”
“No, but I can see them in my mind.”
“Well, get your mind out of the dumps, then!” he ordered. “Hey look, Sal, our planet’s got King Kong on him and he’s rising over the Empire State Building. How’s that for a crazy gag? Maybe I can work it into the play.”
“I bet you can!” she said, the excitement coming back into her voice. “Hey, have you finished my Noah’s Ark song?”
“Not yet. Jesus, Sal, I got to relax after the fire.”
“You’ve relaxed half a fifth. Get your mind to work.”
Chapter Twenty-six
Doc shouted: “All out, everybody, for a stretch, and to answer Nature’s calls,” forcing a rudely jolly note into his hoarseness. “Wojtowicz, it looks like we’ve finally found the roadblock you deduced.”
The saucer students eagerly yet complainingly piled out into the cool, damp, high air. From almost behind them shone a strange greenish light from the setting sun — the party’s scientific consensus was that it was due to volcanic ash already crowding the stratosphere, though the Ramrod had ideas about planetary auras.
It was very clear they’d been through a lot in the day just ending and that the effects of last night’s lost sleep were showing up with a vengeance…
The yellow paint of the school bus and the white enamel of the panel truck behind it both showed flaring black streaks where they’d barely outraced brush fires. There was a heavy bandage around Clarence Dodd’s right hand, which the Little Man had badly burned holding up a tarpaulin to shield Ray Hanks, Ida and himself from the swooping, sweeping flames.
Hunter cursed as he almost fell out of the bus, stumbling over two spades carelessly left in the aisle after a wearisome two-hour stretch of digging sand and gravel to level a buckled stretch of Monica Mountainway enough for the two cars to get through. He shoved them under the seats with another curse.
Several of the wayfarers looked quite damp, and the black flame marks on bus and truck were runneled by the mighty rain which had come marching across the Santa Monica mountains in steel-gray waves out of the west, ten minutes after they had won their race with the fire. Its great dark curtain-clouds still obscured the east, though the west was clearing spottily.
They were almost twenty miles into the mountains and topping the next to the last ridge before the descent to the Valley, Vandenberg Three, and inland Route 101 leading north from Los Angeles toward Santa Barbara and San Francisco.
There were wet patches on the borrowed raincoat Doc had thrown over his shoulders, with the barest suggestion of a military cape, as he led the others forward, Rama Joan and Margo just behind him.
At this point the Mountainway traversed a half natural, half blasted step in a great slope of solid rock, which from a boulder-crowned summit ridge fifty yards up on their right ran down at an angle of thirty degrees and then, after the step holding the road, continued down at a slightly greater angle for a dozen yards or so and then plunged away precipitously, nothing visible beyond it but the side of another small mountain a half mile off.
The awesome gray rock-slope was patched with lichen, pale green, orange, smoky blue and black, and was scored and gouged with smooth-edged trenches and potholes, some of them holding boulders ranging up to panel-truck size.
One of the biggest of the latter lay squarely across the road, indenting it deeply. A lichen-free area just above showed the spot from which it had been dislodged, presumably by one of the quakes.
“Wow, I’ll say we’ve found the roadblock, Doc,” Wojtowicz called from behind. “She’s a bitch!”
Drawn up sideways just in front of the boulder was a top-down, four-passenger Corvette. Lipstick-red, freshly washed by the rain, it added a saucy touch to the sombre landscape. But there was no one in sight, and Doc’s cheery “Hello there!” was answered only by echoes.
Ida came hurrying up behind Doc, saying: “Mr. Brecht, Ray Hanks isn’t going to be able to take any more traveling today. We’ve propped his shoulders up a bit — it eases him, he says — but he’s in continual pain and has a two-degree fever.”
Doc rounded the red hood, then all of a sudden stopped dead and reared up and back as if invisible grapples had lifted him eight inches by the shoulders. He turned on those behind him a face that looked greener than the sunlight and swept out an arm, saying, “Stay where you are. Don’t anybody come any closer.” He whipped off his raincoat and drew it across something lying just beyond the car.
With a thin, wavery moan Ida quietly collapsed on the asphaltoid.
Then Doc turned to them again, leaning on the car for support and brushing a trembling hand across his forehead, and said in jerky rushes, with difficulty, as if he were fighting down an impulse to retch: “It’s a young woman. She didn’t die naturally. She’d been stripped and tortured. Remember, way back, the Black Dahlia case? It’s like that.”
Margo was half doubled over with nausea herself. She had just glimpsed, before the pale raincoat covered it, the bloodless mask of a face with cheeks slashed so that the mouth seemed to stretch from ear to ear.
Rama Joan, pressing Ann’s head to her waist, but her body on tiptoe as she peered ahead, called: “There are two sedans on the other side of the rock. I don’t see anyone in them.”
The Little Man moved forward behind her.
“Where’s your gun, Doddsy?” Doc demanded of him.
“Why, I can’t handle it with this hand,” the other retorted. “It’s all I can do to jot notes in my journal. I left it in the truck.”
“I got mine, Doc,” Wojtowicz called. He stumbled as he hurried forward through the press, but caught himself by driving the gun’s butt against the asphaltoid. As he recovered balance he was holding it for a moment by the muzzle, like a pilgrim’s staff.
At the same moment a voice from close by called out very sharply the trite words: “Don’t move. We’ve got you all covered. Don’t move a finger, anybody, or you’ll be shot.”
A man had stepped out from behind a boulder just above the road, and two more men from another just below it. These two leveled rifles at Wojtowicz, the other slowly wagged back and forth, only an inch or so either way, the muzzles of two revolvers. The head of each of the men was entirely covered with a bright red silk mask with large eyeholes. The man above the road had a jauntily collegiate black felt hat pulled down over the top of his, and he was slim and nattily dressed, but for all that he gave the impression of wiry, jigging age rather than of real youth.
Now he came stepping down, rather quickly and very sure-footedly. His eyes twitched as ceaselessly across the knot of travelers as did the muzzles of his two revolvers.
“That was a happy guess about the Black Dahlia,” he said rapidly but very clearly, enunciating every word with a finicky precision. “She was the masterpiece of my youth. This time everything will go much more pleasantly — and a chance of survival for each of you — if the man with the gun will just let go of it now.” Wojtowicz’s hand unclasped, and the gun teetered oddly for a second before starting to fall. “And if all the men will separate themselves from the women, moving back and a little downhill, so—”