“I guess you win,” he said to the threadbare carpet. Slowly he got to his feet.
I held my gun on him while he combed his hair and put on a green tweed coat. He blew out the alcohol lamp, replacing it in the drawer.
The girl was still balanced on the end of her spine, rocking blindly. I gave her a shove as I passed her. She tumbled sideways onto the bed and lay as she had fallen, with her knees up to her chin, waiting to be born into the world or out of it. Mosquito locked the door. I took his key away before he could pocket it. He backed against the door, the malice on his face canceled by fear into a kind of stupidity. The red corridor light shone down on him like a dirty little sun, sailed to the world in his head. His outstretched hand was questioning.
“You won’t speak to the night clerk, you won’t even look at him. Is it far to Speed?”
“He’s at Half Moon Bay, in a cabin. Don’t take me there. He’ll kill me.”
“Worry about him,” I said, “unless you’re lying to me.”
Behind one or another of the numbered doors, a woman cried out sorrowfully. A man laughed. Down the corridor, in the elevator, across the lobby, up the steep street to the empty square, I stuck to Mosquito like a brother. He walked as if every step he took had to be willed in advance.
Chapter 28
There were clouds in the hills along the skyline route, obscuring the winding road and spraying my windshield with fine droplets of water. I used my yellow foglights and kept the wipers metron-oming, but it was a long slow drive. Between the San Francisco limits and the bay, we passed no lighted houses and few cars. The city with all its lights had sunk behind us as if it had never existed.
The man beside me was quiet. Occasionally he uttered a little moan. Once he said: “He’ll kill me. Speed will kill me.”
“Small loss if he did,” I said to cheer him up.
“He’ll kill you too!” he cried. “I hope he does kill you.”
“Naturally. Is he alone?”
“Far as I know he is.”
“You’ll go up to the door. You’ll do the talking.”
“I can’t. I’m sick. You hurt me.”
“Buck up. I hate a whiner.”
He was quiet again, though he still moaned occasionally to himself. We crept on under the smothering gray sky, through the gray cloud-drowned hills. The sun and the other stars had burned out long ago, and Mosquito and I were journeying for our sins through a purgatory of gray space.
Eventually the road dipped below the cloudline. Below it to the right, a flat gray arm of the sea meandered among the hills like a slow river. The opposite bank was black with trees. I followed the shore for miles, losing it and coming back to it again as the road determined. In a narrow valley close by the forsaken shore, the road branched left and right.
I stopped the car. “Which way?”
“I don’t know.”
“Sure you do, Mosquito. Bear this in mind: you’ll take your chance with Speed, or have the certainty of a Federal pen. Now which is it going to be? Which way?”
“To the right,” he answered drearily. “It’s only about a mile from here.”
We crossed a long low bridge and followed a gravel road up the opposite bank of the bay. After a while we passed a dirt road that straggled downward towards the landlocked water. “That’s it,” he said.
I braked and backed, turning into the rutted lane. “How far down is it?”
“Just around the curve.”
I cut my lights, stopped short of the curve and set my emergency brake. “Get out and walk ahead of me. If you give him warning, I’ll drop you.”
“Speed will kill me,” he said slowly and distinctly, as if he was stating a theory I had failed to understand. In the dim light from the dashboard, I could see the water shining in his eyes. I took my flashlight out of the glove compartment, and tested it on his face. It looked sick.
“Get out.” I leaned across him to open the door, and crowded out behind him. I closed the windows and locked both doors.
“I’m afraid,” he said, “afraid of the dark. I never been out here at night.”
“You’ll never go back if you keep this up. Now walk ahead of me.”
He was clinging to the door handle. I pushed him upright with the revolver muzzle, and prodded him into the road. He lurched ahead of me.
Below the curve the lane broadened into a small clearing. A cabin of rough-hewn logs sat in the clearing, one square lit window facing us. A man’s shadow moved there, growing until it covered the whole window. Then the light died behind it. There was a long dark car parked beside the cabin.
“Call him,” I said to the man at the end of my gun. The flashlight was in my left hand.
His first attempt was a dry gasp. “Keep moving and call him. Tell him who you are. Tell him that I’m a friend.”
“Mr. Speed,” he cried thinly. “It’s Mosquito.”
We were halfway across the clearing. “Louder,” I said in his ear, and jabbed him in the kidneys with the muzzle.
“Mr. Speed.” His voice cracked.
I pushed him on ahead of me. The door opened inward as Mosquito set his feet on the plank stoop.
“Who is it?” a man’s voice said from the deep inside shadow.
“Mosquito.”
“What do you want? Who’s with you?”
“A friend.”
“What friend?” The hidden voice rose in pitch.
I’d got as far as I could with that approach. Even with tear gas, tommy-guns and a police cordon, there is no way to take a desperate man without risking your life. I had an advantage over Speed, of course. I knew that he was still convalescing from Blaney’s bullet, and was probably gun-shy.
I stepped around Mosquito. “The name is Archer. A Mrs. Henry Fellows” – I pronounced the name carefully – "hired me to look for you.”
Before I finished speaking, I pressed my flashlight button. The white beam fanned the doorway. Speed crouched there, a massive figure with a black gun in his hand. We faced each other for a long tense instant. Either of us could have shot the other. I was so sharply aware of him, I felt his gun wound burning a hole in my own belly.
The starch went out of him suddenly. Without seeming to move, he shifted from the offensive to the defensive. “What do you want?” His pale bright eyes looked down at his gun, as if it was the gun that had somehow failed him.
“You might as well drop it,” I said. “I have you covered.”
He flung it down in a gesture of self-disgust. It skittered across the rough planks toward me. Instinctively, Mosquito moved to retrieve it. I set my foot on the gun and elbowed him back.
“Go away, Mosquito,” I said, watching Speed. “I don’t want to see you again.”
“Where should I go?” He sounded both hurt and unbelieving.
“Anywhere but San Francisco. Start walking.”
“All by myself? Out here?”
“Start walking.”
He stepped off the porch into gray gloom. I didn’t waste a backward glance on him. “We’ll go into the house,” I said to Speed. “You better hold your hands on top of your head.”
“You’re exceedingly masterful.” He was recovering his style, or whatever it was that kept him upright and made him interesting to women. On the shooting level he was a bum, as useless as a cat in a dogfight. But he had his own feline dignity, even with his hands up.
I picked up his gun, a light automatic with the safety still on, and juggled it into my pocket, holding the flash under my arm. “About face, colonel. No false moves, unless you want a hole in the back to match the one in the front.”
He turned in the doorway. I stayed close behind him as he crossed the room and relit the oil lamp. The flame steadied and brightened, casting a widening circle of light across the bare floor and up into the rafters. The room contained a built-in bunk, a cheap pine table, two kitchen chairs and a canvas deck-chair placed by the stone fireplace. A pair of new leather suitcases stood unopened at the end of the bunk. There was no fire in the fireplace, and the room was cold.