Operation Deathmaker

by Dan J. Marlowe

  The attendant reached out a long, muscular arm and plucked a ticket stub from under the wiper. He studied it, then looked at his wristwatch. “That’ll be six-fifty,” he said.

  “For what?” No more than thirty minutes could have elapsed from the time of Cottonmouth’s first call that morning. Six and a half dollars for thirty minutes was inflation with a vengeance.

  “The car was here when I arrived at six this morning, sir. Customers can park and lock their cars when no attendant is here and leave them overnight. There’s a three dollar and fifty cent charge for the overnight parking, plus three dollars for the first two hours today.”

  He was pointing toward the sentry box where the bad news was printed on a sign.

  I paid him the six-fifty.

  Just one of the things grinding me down was that the wise-ass kidnappers had me financing the whole program right down to the parking fees.

  And, of course, their method of leaving the gray sedan without being observed kept me from asking the attendant for any information about who had left it. He hadn’t seen them.

  They still weren’t making any mistakes.

  I took the key from the door after the attendant left me. I carried it to the rear of the car and gingerly unlocked the trunk. I lifted the lid very slowly until I could just see inside. I ran my fingertips lightly around the narrow gap, feeling for wires. Finding none, I raised the trunk lid gently until it was fully open. The trunk was empty except for the spare tire, jack, and doubled-ended tire-changing tool. I didn’t slam the lid when I shut it. I pressed it down evenly and steadily until the latch clicked.

  I went through a similarly cautious procedure with the hood. I found nothing out of the ordinary inside. I peered through the driver’s window. Everything appeared to be as it should. I studied an unfamiliar-looking mechanism under the dash for a moment before I recognized it as a radio-telephone installation.

  Another bomb blast would be at cross purposes with the delivery of the ransom money, except for one thing. The man clever enough to rig the first one was undoubtedly clever enough to rig another, possibly with a delayed-action mechanism. On past performance I couldn’t expect to survive very long after handing over the cash.

  I opened the front door slowly.

  I examined the front seat and the floor thoroughly.

  I did the same for the back seat.

  There was still nothing out of the ordinary.

  Only then did I ease myself into the driver’s seat and reach for the note Scotch-taped to the face of the speedometer.

  The information was terse.

  It was typed in capital letters on a standard file card:

  TURN LEFT ON PUENTE

  CONTINUE NORTH HIGHWAY 39

  TURN LEFT ON HIGHWAY.

  I flipped the card over. The back side was blank. The kidnappers were too cute to give me all the necessary information at once. If they did, I might have been able to bypass some of their instructions and land on them all spraddled-out.

  The car radio began to play when I started the engine. The volume was unnecessarily loud. The announcer was rattling along in a foreign language. Then there was a familiar jingle and a recorded commercial: Pepsi Cola grande la de mucho más. Whoever had last driven the car preferred Spanish to English. I switched off the all-Spanish station.

  The cold engine caught and ran smoothly after a couple of false starts. An amber light glowed under the dash, indicating that the radio telephone had been left turned on. I held the headset to my ear and listened. The only sound coming from it was a faint power hum.

  I drove the sedan out onto the street and turned left. I watched the rear view mirror almost as much as the windshield, since I expected another car to be tailing me. I felt further contact would be made soon rather than later when I was out on the state highway.

  Traffic was beginning to build up. Three different times I focused on automobiles in the rearview mirror that could have been following me. Each time the car turned off. I wasn’t expecting it when the radio telephone buzzed. The sudden, unfamiliar sound coming from the dash near my right knee startled me.

  I grabbed up the phone. “Drake,” I said.

  The familiar voice, somewhat garbled now but still clearly recognizable, answered me. “Jus’ keep on doin’ like you’re doin’, man.” The false joviality set my teeth on edge. I actually preferred it when Cottonmouth sounded nasty. “We’re on a special preset radio frequency not normally used in the L.A. area,” he went on. “No police or citizen band types on this channel. Jus’ us chickens. Ain’t that cozy?”

  Cottonmouth’s flippancy suggested a growing confidence. The damn technician on the kidnapping team was giving them a real edge. A Spanish-speaking technician? I filed the thought away for future reference.

  “Y’all heah me?”

  “I hear you.”

  “Well, then, Mistah Moneybags, jus’ follow the directions I’ll give you. Like turn right at the next intersection.”

  I did so, noting that the street was Amarillo Avenue. It was a quiet residential neighborhood.

  Two blocks later more instructions came over the radio telephone. “Turn left at the next corner, Drake.”

  I couldn’t figure out what they had in mind. The directions had taken me away from Highway 39. The instructions continued, and they seemed to lead me aimlessly this way and that. It wasn’t until I noticed that I was proceeding along the same section of Amarillo Avenue for the second time that light dawned. I wasn’t being followed. Instead, I was being routed past stationary checkpoints where members of the gang could monitor the traffic behind me and in turn assure themselves that no one was tailing me.

  Half-formed images of the kidnappers were beginning to crystallize in my mind. There was Cottonmouth—was he really Melissa’s greedy, deceitful, foul-mouthed boyfriend? There was a skilled technician capable of fabricating a homemade pipe bomb and engineering a secure two-way radio-telephone system from a pair of mobile transceivers. There was a hairy-armed, flat-faced goon whom I half-remembered dragging Melissa from Hazel’s car at the airport.

  And if Stan Kirkman was involved, didn’t that increase the chance that his lawyer-uncle, the heavy-drinking Roger Kirkman, who surrounded himself with criminals, might also be part of the unholy crew? Stan Kirkman had made two long-distance phone calls to his uncle at a very critical time just prior to the kidnapping. Perhaps Roger Kirkman was the careful, self-protective organizer of the scheme I had instinctively rejected as being beyond the capability of his nephew?

  One of the group spoke Spanish.

  One was a cunning organizer.

  One was a vicious killer.

  One was an oily-voiced, cruel-sounding punk with a mock-Southern accent.

  Perhaps there was some overlap.

  Perhaps there were only three kidnappers involved, although when I began to assign parts to the players four seemed more likely than three. Perhaps—

  “Left again,” Cottonmouth’s semigarbled voice interrupted my thoughts. “Back to the freeway.”

  So the brain had satisfied himself that I wasn’t being followed. I drove for a couple of miles with no further voice interruption. A shadow flicked over the hood of the car, and a moment later I heard the eccentric, oscillating beat of a helicopter overhead.

  It was all too easy to imagine it as the base for my radio-telephone contact. A clever mind could set up a situation where I would be directed from the air to an isolated, rural field. The helicopter would hover overhead while I attached the money-laden briefcase to a line to be hauled up to the ‘copter. Then Melissa would be lowered. Such an exchange would only take minutes, and the kidnappers could be well over the Mexican border before I could even get back to town.

  But the helicopter banked steeply and whirled away, and I saw its police department markings. It was a reminder that I would do well to try to handle the situation as the need arose and not to fantasize problems and solutions.

  Something up ahead seemed to be slow
ing freeway traffic. Speeds in all lanes were reduced. I reached out and turned on the car radio again. The same nimble-tongued announcer was rattling off high-speed Spanish. I heard Alka-Seltzer mentioned a couple of times.

  I spun the dial close to the 1100 kilocycle mark to pick up radio station KNX. I caught the tail end of a weather report. Then the d.j. obligingly switched to a police traffic report. The d.j. informed me somewhat needlessly that I was heading into a jam-up where the Foothill, Pasadena, and Ventura Freeways converged in a limited area.

  The radio-telephone buzzer sounded again, and I turned off the car radio. “Have y’all passed the Santa Anita Racetrack yet?” Cottonmouth asked.

  So they weren’t all that positive about my position. It was comforting to know they weren’t infallible. I was tempted to mislead them in regard to the query to check on the accuracy of their surveillance, but they could be testing me. There was always Melissa to consider.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’ve just crossed San Gabriel.”

  “Y’all are doin jus’ fine. Turn right on Highway 118. That’s Foothill Boulevard goin’ northwest. Got it?”

  “I know the route. What then?”

  “Stay on Foothill until it runs into the Golden State Freeway north of San Fernando. You’ll see a Shell service station. It shouldn’t take you more’n half n hour.”

  The receiver returned to its power hum.

  I wondered why I hadn’t been directed before to the Golden State Freeway. Travel would have been much faster on the multi-laned highway. The older road threaded its way through well-populated residential areas of Pasadena, Glendale, and half a dozen smaller communities where travel-interrupting traffic signals controlled numerous intersections.

  Cottonmouth’s syrupy voice continued to irritate me. A fragment of half-forgotten information popped into my mind. The true Southerner uses “y’all” only in the plural, never in the singular. Cottonmouth’s frequent incorrect usage of the catchall phrase branded him as just as much of a phony as Blind Tom Walker had originally insisted.

  I figured I had another eight or ten minutes of driving to reach the Shell station when another call came through. “Can y’ hear me, man?”

  “I hear you. What now?” I made no attempt to conceal my growing impatience.

  “Don’ git snippy, frien’,” the fake-accented voice warned. “Y’all are about thirty-five miles from Palmdale. Go there. Use Highway 14. The Sierra Highway. Follow it at a steady forty-five miles an hour.”

  “You’ve had me driving almost an hour now,” I protested.

  “Yo’re doin’ fine,” Cottonmouth drawled. “We know the gas tank was lef’ full up. An’ you can piss down your leg if’n that’s yore trouble. When you git to the Palmdale exit, turn off an’ go east. Straight through town an’ out the road that leads across the dry flats toward Victorville. We’ll be in touch.”

  I tried to picture it in my mind. The runaround pattern was beginning to make sense, at least from the kidnappers’ point of view. Between Palmdale and Adelanto, a stretch of forty miles where there was nothing but a few scattered houses and flat desert land dotted with the outlines of dry lakes, the little-used road ran straight as an arrow. Any prominently marked car could be seen for miles. After midday, shimmering heat mirages could conceal anything on the road more than half a mile distant. Long-range visibility would hold good for perhaps another two hours.

  I had a feeling that the end of the trail was in sight.

  I wasn’t sure how the kidnappers planned to work the actual switch, but it made sense that the attempt would be made somewhere along that lonely stretch of road east of Palmdale.

  I knew now why I had been routed via the slower Foothill Highway. Cottonmouth and Company had abandoned their stationary checkpoints and moved ahead of me again, traveling by the faster Golden State Freeway, which roughly paralleled my own more circuitous route. Cottonmouth and Company were probably already waiting for me, one perhaps as far ahead as Soledad Pass, but one almost surely parked on a Palmdale side street to check me out as I passed through.

  I knew my hunch was correct when Cottonmouth came back on the radio telephone again when I crossed the eastern Palmdale city limits. “This is the las’ time I’ll be talkin’ to you, so pay attention. Don’t foul up.” The syrupy voice was louder, indicating that it was quite close.

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  “Seventeen miles straight ahead there’s a dirt road lead-in’ off to the south. Y’ can’t miss it because it’s the only real road you’ll come to. A mile beyond that there’s another road, off to your left, goin’ north. Turn left there, drive fifty yards, then stop ‘n park the car. Repeat it.”

  “Seventeen miles. Pass by a road to the south. Eighteen miles. Turn on a road to the north and park. What then?”

  “Leave the key in the ignition, but lock all the doors. Take the money an’ wait on the highway for a bus that’s due to come by in …” Momentary hesitation. “… forty-three minutes. It gives you plenty of time. Git on the bus an’ pay the fare to Perkin’s Junction. That’s where you git off, at Perkin’s Junction.”

  “You’ll meet me at Perkin’s Junction?”

  “No one’ll meet you,” Cottonmouth answered. “Leave the cash on the back seat of the bus.”

  “No way,” I said with as much force as I could muster. “No open-end deal like that. No Melissa, no cash.”

  “Don’ git uptight, man. You’ll be able to see her before the bus stops. Look out the right-hand bus window across the road as it comes up to where it’s gonna stop. There’s a store, an’ Melissa will be waitin’ inside. If’n you don’t see her, you stay on the bus an’ keep the money. Simple, ain’t it?”

  The tone was superior and rightly so. The plan was both simple and foolproof. The most ticklish part, making the switch between money and hostage, was to be accomplished without personal contact. Once I was off the bus, and with Melissa in tow, we’d be on foot in an isolated crossroads area where traffic probably consisted of twice-a-week delivery by a bread truck. Hot pursuit of the kidnappers would be out of the question.

  “Don’ mess up,” Cottonmouth warned me, and then he was gone again.

  I had time to turn it over in my mind during the drive through the barren countryside.

  I could think of nothing I might do that would help to turn the situation around in my favor.

  The infuriatingly smug Cottonmouth seemed to have all his bets coppered.

  The car odometer showed an additional 17.2 miles above the Palmdale reading when I sped by the first dirt road Cottonmouth had described. A couple of abandoned wooden buildings stood on the only occupied corner. Faded lettering on a road sign pointing south read PEARLBLOSSOM–3.

  A mile farther on was another T-intersection, and this time the gravel road went north, as Cottonmouth had said. There was no direction sign to indicate what was at the other end. From the appearance of the empty, desolate landscape visible from where I pulled the car onto the shoulder of the road, it could have been the end of the world.

  I picked up the headset. “I’m at the second intersection, but there’s nothing here,” I said. “There’s no sign of a bus stop or anything else. Am I at the right place?”

  There was no answer.

  “Are you there?” I tried again.

  Still nothing.

  I tried to think of a reason why the kidnappers would be out of contact. Had they shanghaied me out into the desert, planning to descend upon me like vultures? I decided I couldn’t be that lucky. If they came to me, I was in good shape. But their whole plan to this point had indicated an absence of contact. I hoped Cottonmouth was busy driving Melissa along a back road to Perkin’s Junction where the exchange would be made.

  I locked the car, leaving the keys inside as instructed. I did so with considerable misgiving. If I had been decoyed I was stranded now in the semidesert without water. And I was vulnerable to anyone coming along in a car. Except that with my 9mm. automatic in its belt holster
, I wasn’t as vulnerable as Cottonmouth might have thought.

  Briefcase and makeup kit in my left hand, I walked back to the corner and stopped at the sun-cracked macadam road. Nothing moved under the blazing sun which inched towards its zenith under a cloudless sky. The sun’s scorching rays were aimed at my unprotected head. I took off my jacket, draped it over my arm, and transferred the automatic from its holster to a side pocket of the jacket so that the weapon was easily available.

  I hoped it wasn’t going to be a long wait. I don’t perspire as freely as most people because of the many scars resulting from my extensive plastic surgery, so I overheat quickly.

  I had already looked up and down the road once. When I looked again, I saw a vehicle approaching from the direction I had come. It plowed steadily onward through a shimmering heat haze. I watched it expectantly until it turned into a paint-flaked pickup truck. The driver, an old man, started to slow down when he saw me standing there. I turned my back. I didn’t want to be picked up.

  My change of direction brought me face-to-face with a bus approaching from the other direction. It was obviously a converted school bus, now painted white with kelly green trim. I waited for the pickup to pass before I raised an arm and hailed the bus.

  I climbed up into the stairwell when the driver opened the door. A dozen people, a third of them middle-aged housewives, were seated on the shady side of the bus. At a quick glance the remainder looked like farm laborers.

  “Where to?” the driver asked. He was a lanky, pimply youth, the model of a high school dropout.

  “Perkin’s Junction,” I said.

  He stared. “Never heard of it,” he declared in a nasal twang.

  EIGHT

  “NOW, ROY,” ONE OF THE HOUSEWIVES SPOKE UP before I could react to the bus driver’s disconcerting statement. “He means the Pearlblossom stop. Folks used to call it Perkin’s Junction when Sue and Clyde Perkins ran the store there.” She smiled at me. “My, that was a long time ago.”