Double

by Bill Pronzini

  I felt a trickling on my upper arm and looked down. Blood oozed from a deep cut. Funny—the blood didn’t feel warm, the way it usually did when you cut yourself. But of course, my skin was heated to a degree far higher than ninety-eight point six. I brushed the blood away, wiped my hand on my jeans. Then I started along the wash.

  It curved and branched, as unpredictable as the flash floods that had helped to form it. I followed the branches that afforded the most protection from the sun, ever alert for the presence of snakes, trying at the same time to maintain my mental fix on the direction of the road. If the wash eventually came out closer to it, I would chance moving into open country and going for help.

  The terrain kept getting rougher. After a while I was stumbling over large rocks, then clambering over boulders. Periodically I glanced over my shoulder and up at the rim of the wash, but there was no sign of a man with a gun. Gradually the wash narrowed, and finally it ended in a rough V of sandstone.

  The V created shade, and I slumped down in it. My head was pounding, my tongue swollen. Sweat came out on my body, but dried almost immediately. Even the matted hair at the nape of my neck was barely damp. Dust caked my nostrils, making it difficult to breathe.

  Got to have water, I thought.

  A wave of dizziness swept over me, and I closed my eyes and leaned my head back against the sandstone.

  Can’t stay here without water, I thought. I’ll die without it.

  I thought of Don. His familiar, swarthy face swam in the darkness behind my eyelids. A couple of days ago I’d been worried because of an unknown woman named Laura, a lie he’d told me. Now I was worried I’d never see Don again. And what of my family? Or Wolf? What about my other friends, and the folks at All Souls?

  I pictured them all, and then the images blurred and were gone. The dizziness passed, and I opened my eyes. I was looking at the sharply sloping side of the wash above me.

  You’ve got to climb it, I told myself. You’re boxed in down here.

  I struggled to my feet and started up.

  There were very few hand or toe holds, and I kept slipping backward. For minutes it seemed I lost more ground than I gained. The knees of my jeans tore out and my already sunburned skin became scraped and bloody. Sliding on my stomach, I finally gained the rim of the wash.

  I lay there gasping, looking around. No one was in sight, and all around stretched the barren, sun-washed desert. It was dotted with spiny cactus, sand verbena, and ocotillo, but otherwise there were no signs of life. None of the little animals that lived out there were stirring, and there wasn’t even a jeep track to show that anyone had been here before me.

  I couldn’t see the house or the water tower. I couldn’t see the road to Les Club, or Split Mountain Road, or the utility lines that stretched along it. If those lines had been visible, I could have got to the ranger station and help. But they were nowhere in sight.

  I stared bleakly into the distance, realizing I was lost.

  I’d lost all sense of direction while following the curving, branching wash. The hills ranged around me, but I couldn’t tell if the ones I was looking at were the same I’d seen earlier as I’d lain on top of the sandstone outcropping within sight of the old water tower. I stood up and searched for a landmark, but saw nothing.

  How far had I come from the house? I wondered. How long had I been out here? Hours, it must be. My tongue clogged my mouth, my eyes were dry and sandpapery. How much longer could I last? I didn’t even know which direction to take to get to civilization.

  Direction. I could figure direction from the sun—the damned sun. It beat down on me in pulsing waves. I glanced up, shading my eyes, and noted its position.

  The unpaved road to Les Club—whatever its name was—ran southwest. Southwest. But that didn’t matter now. I needed shelter. And water.

  Once again I scanned the horizon, my eyes burning. There had to be something....

  And then I saw a gray-green haze. Clouds of smoke some distance away. Smoke? I strained my eyes. The clouds swam into focus.

  Trees. Smoke trees, named for the illusion I’d just witnessed. And other trees—tamarisks, and what could be desert willows. Trees that grew near water holes . . .

  They seemed an infinity away, across an endless stretch of rocky sand. How far? I wondered. Half a mile? More? It didn’t matter. Those trees meant shade—water.

  I began moving again.

  I went more slowly this time, to conserve my flagging strength. My breath wheezed in my throat, and wherever there was a little shade, I stopped and rested. Still my heart felt as if it would explode. My skin felt as if it might begin to bubble. I stumbled a number of times, fell twice. But I kept going, gasping and clutching my side, and thinking of water. The trees loomed larger, and then I reached them and plunged into them, down a rocky incline, to the bottom where the water would be.

  I fell flat, the shade of the trees coming between me and the wicked sun rays. I lay there for a moment, then pulled myself up and crawled on all fours to the water hole. Leaned forward, toward the precious water.

  Only it wasn’t there.

  At another time of the year it would be. But not in August. Not in the hottest month of the year.

  My throat constricted and a whine came from my lips. I crouched there, staring into the sun-cracked bottom of the water hole. My sight blurred and visions started to dance before me.

  Sugarman hanging on the cross . . . Elaine’s broken body ... Others, out of the past: bodies with strangled faces ... bloodied heads ... stab wounds . . . bullet holes . . .

  I would join them—all of them, this legion of the dead.

  Then the visions were gone. I lowered my head to the ground. And lost consciousness.

  40 “WOLF”

  It was bloody damned hot in the desert. It hadn’t been so bad in the San Diego area, after that liquid humidity of the Mexican coast, but out here the temperature must have been up over a hundred. Heat shimmered off the highway, glared off the metal surfaces of other cars, made the stark countryside look sere and fiery, and blew inside the rental heap like the breath of Old Nick himself. The car had air conditioning but it had conked out coming down the steep Banner Grade. Which figured. If I hadn’t insisted on the cheapest rental the National agency had, this sort of thing wouldn’t have happened. And I wouldn’t be roasting and dripping like a chicken under a broiler.

  The turn for Borrego Springs, off Highway 78, was called Yaqui Pass Road. It climbed, steep and winding, up a sagebrush-strewn hill, and from where it crested you had a pretty awesome view of empty desert spread out to the southwest. A short while later, I had my first look at Borrego Springs. The town was scattered over the floor of a brown, beige, and dull green valley, with massive, barren mountains ringing it in the distance. This entire area was part of the Anza—Borrego Desert Region—several hundred miles of state park that stretched almost to the Salton Sea on the east, almost to the Mexican border on the south.

  I was here because I didn’t want to believe McCone had gone to see Woodall yesterday, that he’d done something to her. And because I had nowhere else to look for her. Nowhere else to go period, except back to San Diego to see Tom Knowles. Which was what Knowles wanted me to do. I’d finally got in touch with him, by phone from the service station near Woodall’s house, and told him what I suspected. But I was in no mood for sitting around doing nothing while he made up his mind whether or not to put out an APB on Woodall and on McCone. When he’d told me to come in and talk to him in person I had pretended that there was something wrong with the line and hung up on him.

  Down in the valley I passed La Casa del Zorro, the resort hotel where June Paxton had seen Elaine Picard and Rich Woodall having dinner, but I couldn’t see much of it because it was hidden inside a grove of densely grown palms and tamarisk trees. The town, some distance beyond, wasn’t much to look at: plain desert-style buildings, most of them designed to cater to tourists and to the horde of motorcycle riders and dune-buggy drivers who
clogged a central green called Christmas Circle. I looped around the circle, drove past the Road Runner Realty Company, and stopped at a Union 76 station.

  Arthur Darrow was listed in the local telephone directory—a number on Pointing Rock Road. Darrow was the only lead I had out here; if McCone had come to Borrego Springs yesterday, she’d probably have looked him up. The station attendant told me how to get to Pointing Rock Road. He also told me that as far as he knew, there was no House of Slenderizing and Massage or any other health club in town. No clubs of any kind, he said, except for the De Anza Country Club and the new Ram’s Hill Country Club.

  The Darrow house turned out to be nestled up against the De Anza Country Club’s golf course, with its backside abutting one of the greens. It wasn’t quite what I’d expected, somehow: a smallish hacienda-style place, with a low brick wall in front that sported a couple of old wagon wheels for decoration. The yard behind the wall had a patch of lawn, some dwarf palms and yucca trees, a lot of prickly-pear cactus, and two orange trees heavy with fruit. Still, the place had the look of money. Whoever Arthur Darrow was, he didn’t have to worry about where his next meal was coming from.

  I parked the rental car in front. In the adjacent driveway was a newish Chevy pickup with the words MILNE GARDENING SERVICE painted on its door; a big man wearing a blue shirt with the same words on its back was kneeling in front of one of the orange trees, trimming the grass around it with a pair of hand clippers. I went up the path past him to the narrow front porch and rang the bell. Nobody answered. I rang it again, waited a while longer, and then turned and went down the path and over to the gardener. He hadn’t paid any attention to me up to then, and he didn’t pay much to me now.

  “Afternoon,” I said. “I’m looking for Arthur Darrow. Or his wife. Would you know where I could find either of them?”

  He stood up, dragged a handkerchief out of his back pocket, and mopped his sweaty face. He was in his sixties, sun-creased and in better physical condition than I was. A pair of mild gray eyes gave me a brief appraising look. “You don’t look like one of their friends,” he said. He didn’t seem to mean it as an insult.

  “I’m not. It’s a business matter.”

  “They’re not here,” he said.

  “So I gathered. Can you tell—”

  “Hawaii,” he said.

  “Pardon?”

  “They’re in Hawaii. Another vacation.”

  “When did they leave?”

  “Last week. They go to places like that three or four times a year—stay a month. Must be nice to have money.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said.

  “Neither would I.”

  There was something in his tone that indicated he didn’t like his employers much. Maybe because Darrow was rich; maybe for some other reason. Which was probably why he was so willing to tell a stranger—who might be Raffles, the international jewel thief, for all he knew—that the Darrows were away in Hawaii on an extended visit.

  I asked him, “Did you happen to be working here yesterday? I’m also trying to find a young woman who might have stopped by ...”

  “Nope,” he said. “Wednesdays and Saturdays are my days.”

  “I see.”

  “Ask Mrs. Flowers.”

  “Who would she be?”

  “Housekeeper. Lives in. She knows everything.” He didn’t like Mrs. Flowers much either.

  “She’s not here now,” I said.

  “No. Went shopping or something.”

  “Any idea when she’ll be back?”

  “Nope. Maybe she took the day off.”

  “When the cats are away,” I said.

  “Huh?” he said.

  I left him and went back to the rental car and sat there for a time. So the Darrows were in Hawaii and had been for a week; if McCone had come here yesterday, she’d probably have discovered the same thing. So then what would she have done? Hung around to check out that club angle, probably. But what club? Not the country club over there, or the other one in town; she’d seemed to think the club Beddoes and the Darrows belonged to was some kind of health spa. Only there wasn’t a health club in Borrego Springs, according to the gas station attendant....

  I kept sitting there, looking at the house. And pretty soon I realized why it wasn’t what I’d expected: those photographs I’d found in Jim Lauterbach’s office, in his file on Elaine Picard. An odd-looking house in the desert, at least semi-isolated, with an old spur track and the remains of a water tower and a loading dock not far away. When Darrow’s name came up, along with the fact that he lived in Borrego Springs, I had made the same kind of false assumption I’d made about Nancy Pollard being Timmy’s mother—that the house in the photos must be Darrow’s house.

  All right, it wasn’t. Then whose was it?

  I got out of the car again and went back through the front gate to where the gardener was. He wasn’t happy to see me back; but then he wasn’t unhappy either. He looked blank when I asked him about the place in the photos—until I mentioned the spur track and the ruins nearby. Then he rubbed at his creased face and began to nod.

  “You must mean the old Matthews place,” he said. “Funny-looking house, looks like a big toadstool grew up out of the ground after a rain?”

  “Something like that. You say somebody named Matthews owns it?”

  “Not anymore. Leonard Matthews built it back in the thirties. Crazy as a coot. Owned the Matthews Gypsum Mine not far away, up in the foothills; built the spur track, too, to get his ore to Plaster City—it used to connect with the old Gypsum Mining Railroad that runs down there. Mine petered out after the war, but Matthews stayed on until he died. Must have been thirty years ago, about.”

  “Who owns the house now?”

  “Nobody, far as I know. Sits up in the middle of nowhere, looks like a toadstool. Who’d want it? Not many people as crazy as old Matthews was, even these days.”

  “Where is it, exactly?”

  “You know where the U.S. Gypsum Mine is?”

  “No.”

  “How about Split Mountain Road?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you can’t miss Split Mountain; it’s smack in the middle of Ocotillo Wells. You know where that is?”

  “Not far from here on Highway 78, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right. You take Split Mountain past the Elephant Tree Ranger Station, almost to where it ends at the U.S. Gypsum Mine. There’s a dirt road branches off it to the south, up into the foothills. Follow that about seven miles and you’ll be at the old Matthews place.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You planning to go out there this time of day?” he asked.

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Better take some water with you, just in case,” he said. “That’s empty desert up around there and hotter’n the hinges of hell. Something happens and you get caught without water, you might not come back alive.”

  41 McCONE

  I was lying on my right side, arm folded under me. Sharp objects poked into my flesh. My arm tingled painfully. I moved off it, moaning with the effort, and opened my eyes.

  My cheek was pressed against the sandy ground. I was staring at the roots of a low green shrub that had a whitish sheen, as if it had been dusted with flour. I tried to push myself up and found my arm was nearly numb. Rolling over on my back, I looked up through tree branches at the sky. It was clear blue, and little patterns of sunlight shone through the dark tracery. Sunlight that slanted from the left.

  My lips were badly cracked and dry. I opened my mouth and tried to lick them, but my tongue was even dryer. It was very hot, and I hurt all over. What had happened?

  Images flickered in my mind. Sand . . . a rocky wash ... a high outcropping . . . hills ... trees in the distance . . .

  The desert. I had run across the desert in the blazing heat. And got lost.

  Something rustled in the dry shrubbery near me. A rattlesnake? Alarmed, I sat up, my body aching, and looked around. I was lying at the edge of
a dry water hole in the shade of a clump of stunted desert willows. Their branches were gray and brittle-looking, because there was no water....

  My thirst came back full force, along with a dull pounding in my head. My eyes ached as I studied my surroundings.

  I was at the bottom of a shallow wash filled with dormant vegetation. The water hole’s bottom was sun-cracked, without even a trickle of moisture. It was very hot, but nothing like what I’d experienced running through the sand. The slight drop in temperature and the shade from the trees had probably saved my life, slowing the rate of my dehydration so I’d regained consciousness.

  From the angle of the sun’s rays, I could tell it was sinking. The desert would cool off after dark. Perhaps then I could cross the wastes once more and find my way to civilization.

  But there was not much chance of that. For one thing, I knew I couldn’t travel any farther without water. For another, when it was dark I would run the risk of becoming even more disoriented. I knew nothing about the moon or constellations that would help me chart my course. My only real chance was to get to high ground now, while it was still light, to see if I could spot the water tower and the road. That was what I should have done before, but fear, exhaustion, and thirst had clouded my thinking.

  Shakily I got to my feet and moved up the slope to the rim of the wash. About a hundred yards off to the west was a rocky outcropping. If I could get to the top of it and pinpoint the old water tower or the utility lines along Split Mountain Road, I could move in the straightest line to Elephant Tree Ranger Station.

  A sudden wave of dizziness swept over me. I closed my eyes, waiting for it to pass. And knew beyond a doubt that I’d never get to those rocks if I didn’t have water.

  When I opened my eyes, I began looking at the plants around me, trying to remember my high-school biology field trips. This vegetation might look dead, but in actuality it was only dormant, waiting for the return of the life-giving moisture. Many plants stored water. But did any of these? No.