"She wouldn't confide in you?"
"No. She simply won't talk about it."
"Was it her idea to stop at the farm this morning?"
"No, it was mine. I made her promise. She owes her father that much. He was so angry and upset yesterday . . ."
"Too angry and upset," I said. "He had another stroke after you two left."
Her face went pale. "Oh my God," she said. "He's not . . . ?"
"No. Constanza Vargas and her husband found him and called an ambulance. He's in the hospital in Paso Robles."
"But Grady . . . she has to know. When she gets to the farm and finds he's not there, she won't know what to think."
"Try calling her there," I said. "If she answers tell her to come back here right away, you want to go with her to Paso Robles. Then keep her here until you hear from me. Will you do that?"
"Yes, of course, but I don't understand what—"
"I'll explain later." I was already moving down off the porch.
"Where are you going?" she called after me.
"To the farm. In case Grady doesn't answer the phone."
* * * * *
Her car, the light blue Geo Storm, was parked in the farmyard. I saw it from atop the railroad right-of-way, and because I didn't see any other car I kept on going up the farm lane and into the yard. Rolled to a stop behind the Geo.
When I got out I could hear the wild wind and Gus barking in the house and nothing else. The front door of the house was standing wide open. I ran over there and inside, calling Grady's name. The dog's barking got louder; that was my only response. I swept through the downstairs rooms, all but the kitchen, where Gus was, and then did the same with the upstairs rooms. She wasn't there.
Outside again, I looked into the Geo. Her purse was on the passenger seat and the keys were in the ignition. I reached in, took the keys; then I ran across to the bam and poked my head inside. Empty. I stood in the yard and yelled her name, but that didn't buy me anything either.
Where the hell was she?
The hills? Walking in the hills?
The thought was chilling and at first I rejected it. Comes back here this morning, finds the house empty, no sign of her father, doesn't have a clue of where he is or what might have happened to him, and instead of telephoning Constanza Vargas, instead of waiting, she wanders off" into the goddamn hills? She wouldn't really do something like that, would she?
Then I remembered how much time she'd spent in those hills as a child and since she'd returned to the valley, and the way she'd looked and talked in San Lucas, and the things she'd done before and since, and Mary Ellen Crowley saying, "She's like a zombie," and I thought: Yeah, she would. It's just what she'd do.
I fired up my car, swung it around the Geo and over onto the extension of the farm road that curved up the hillside beyond the house. The roadbed was rocky, heavily rutted, the earth loose in the ruts, and I had to go slow to maintain traction on the climb. Finally I nosed over the crest to where I could see down the opposite slope.
The hair crawled on my neck. I was suddenly cold outside, hot and tight inside.
Car on the downslope, drawn up at an angle near the bottom, blocking passage.
Dark brown Buick.
Blackwell.
Chapter 22
I put the brakes on hard and slewed to a stop ten yards from the Buick's rear bumper. There was nobody inside it that I could see, nobody around it, nobody anywhere in the vicinity. I bounced out, ran ahead past the Buick. Below it the road made a dogleg to the right and ended in a mostly flat area the size of a couple of football fields. Cattle graze once, Arlo Haas had told me. Now it was scattered clumps of sage and patches of dry, brown grass like ragged beard stubble and rocky, ash-colored earth—dead ground, as if a plague of some kind had swept over it and left it devastated. Void of human life, too, as were the windswept hillsides surrounding it. No Grady, no Blackwell.
I ran back to the Buick, thinking: She got here, went for her walk, then he showed and saw her car and hunted in the house for her and then drove on over here, all the same as I did. Left his car because he didn't want to risk getting it stuck out on the flat. But did he see her first or go tracking blind? And how long ago?
The driver*s door on the Buick was closed, but only on half-latch; I yanked it open, bent inside. The dash compartment contained nothing but a rental-company folder. The single item on the seats was a man's trenchcoat, in back. I caught it up, shook it, felt the pockets; empty. Trunk release, a quick look back there. Spare tire and a leather suitcase. I ripped the case open, pawed through it. No weapon of any kind. Whatever firepower he had, he was carrying with him.
I opened up the trunk of my car. All I kept in there that would serve as a weapon was a bow-shaped tire iron. I dragged that out and set off running again, out onto the flat.
There weren't any footprints for me to follow; the ground was too rocky and dry, too well scoured by the wind. So I had no way of telling if either of them had gone straight across or climbed the bare hillsides or veered off onto a barely discernible track—once a cowpath, probably—that angled into a crease on my left. I hesitated, trying to decide which route to take. The cowpath . . . it was closer and at the least it would take me to other vantage points.
The path was only a couple of feet wide through the crease, twice that on the other side. The swelling folds of the hills hemmed it in, so I had limited visibility ahead. Overhead, to the north, a hawk flew in slow, gliding circles, black and two-dimensional against the bright sky; there was no other movement. The sage-heavy wind made the only sounds, now loud, now soft; never silent. You couldn't have heard a human voice shouting more than fifty yards away.
Down into a dry creekbed, across and up the other side. The sharp urgency kept prodding me and I wanted to run, but the ground was uneven and I didn't want to take the chance of falling, twisting an ankle. There was a kind of vibrating weakness in my legs, a cinderlike grittiness that played tricks with my vision. Fatigue . . . the weight of it growing heavier by the minute. I was no longer thinking with complete clarity. But for now that was all right. This was not a time for thinking.
I'd gone about a hundred yards when a little rise came up ahead; the track climbed it and so did I. No sign of Grady or Blackwell on the far side, but another thirty or forty yards distant I could make out something else: a wood and barbed wire boundary fence that ran in a drunken line up the hillside on my right. Beyond the fence was an open area—ravine, gorge, something like that. The upper and lower parts of it were hidden by the configuration of the terrain.
Another twenty slogging yards, and the opening beyond the fence began to take on shape and contours. It wasn't a ravine or gorge at all; it was man-made—a deep, wide, U-shaped cut in the hillside. When I reached the fence I looked down a long bare-rock slope into about two-thirds of the pit, all the way to the bottom. Road down there, leading in from the west; and earth-moving equipment, and a couple of big dump trucks, and a rock crusher and a network of jutting conveyers stretched out to mounds of gravel, and a few small tin-roofed buildings. Up along the two visible sides of the U were rough-graded roadbeds and terraced shelves containing more earth-moving equipment.
Quarry. South Valley Gravel Company.
From this vantage point I couldn't make out any people or activity. Just the big Cats and skiploaders and trucks, like orange and gray creatures at rest in some prehistoric pit. Union outfit, probably: shut down for the weekend.
Even if there was a way down from here, I doubted Grady would use it. The quarry was private property and she'd shun any possible contact with strangers; and it wasn't her kind of place anyway, with all that heavy equipment. Across the flat was where she must have gone, her and Blackwell both.
Now I had even more impetus to run, and I might have except that when I turned from the fence I was looking uphill and something caught my eye—movement along the upper rim of the cut. I froze, squinting because the sun was up that way and its glare was dazzling. I ha
d to rub grit out of my eyes before I could tell that there was somebody up there, one person moving toward the edge, then stopping behind some kind of low rise in the ground.
Grady, that long black hair of hers whipping in the wind.
And then a second figure, a man, Blackwell, came into view and stopped a few feet away from her.
For a little time none of us moved. Me down here, the two of them above, braced against the buffeting wind not ten feet from a short, steep incline like the brow of a forehead; and below that incline a sheer drop of eighty or ninety feet down the quarry's scarred upper wall to one of the graded shelves.
There were more than a hundred yards separating me from them, all of it uphill. I started to run along the fence; there was nothing else I could do. The wind was gusting, blowing loud as well as hard, and a shout at this distance was no better than a whisper. I ran out in the open, waving both my arms when I didn't have to use the tire iron to help maintain my balance. I wanted to be seen, I wanted Blackwell to know I was alive and coming for him. It would take his attention away from her.
But it didn't happen that way. He had his back to me, and if she saw me—and she must have, at least peripherally—she did not react or say anything to him, because he didn't turn his body or his head. They kept standing in place, gazes locked, her with her arms down flat against her sides, him with his hands fisted on his hips. But there was nothing good in the frozen tableau; he was not having second thoughts about killing her, or even nerving himself up to doing it. Not him—not the executioner. Saying something to her, maybe telling her matter-of-factly why he was about to take her life. And her standing stiff" and soul-dead. Little Miss Selfish, Little Miss Stupid, waiting, no fight in her, no resistance, just waiting passively for him to put an end to her misery.
The angle of ascent and the footing weren't too bad at first; I was able to scramble along at a good clip, now and then digging the tire iron into the earth to keep from slipping. My grip on the iron was slick with sweat. Sweat encased my body, too, crawled under the bandage on my arm and made the burned flesh sting. I was aware of all that, and of the wind, and of the black hatred seething like acid inside me.
I came up over a humped section of ground, onto a short gradual slope. The boundary fence hooked toward me at that point, ran through a narrow fold between two rounded mounds, close-set, like ashy brown, nippleless breasts. I scaled the fence, snagging the tail of my coat on a strand of barbed wire, ripping it free with only one lost step. They were out of sight then, for the fifteen or twenty seconds it took me to climb the nearest of the mounds; and when I reached the crest and saw them again, he was moving toward her. Not fast, not slow —deliberately.
She held her position. Stood very still, hair aswirl, eyes fixed on his face, and let him come.
I was nearly parallel to the top of the cut, directly below where they were. The slope that parted us now was not steep, and there were less than fifty yards of it. I half-ran, half-slid down the mound and got my legs under me and plowed up the slope, my mouth open to yell so Blackwell would hear me. But I was short of breath and the wind took the sounds I made and tore them apart.
He stopped again up there, close to her. And looked into her face for two or three beats. And then he hit her—closed fist, a short solid blow on the point of the jaw. She crumpled, but he caught her before she went all the way down. Effortlessly, he swung her up into his arms. Then he started toward the foot-high earth wrinkle separating the edge of the hilltop from the incline and the quarry below.
Something happened inside me, a kind of tearing. My chest heaved, a roaring came out of my throat that overrode the whistling clamor of the wind.
"Blackwell!"
He heard it. And he quit moving, came to a jerky halt five feet from the edge; swiveled half-around to stare downslope. I'd covered half the fifty yards and was closing fast, and I could see his face clearly, the recognition and stunned disbelief that held him rooted, the sudden warping of his features as anger and fear and animal self-preservation took hold.
Less than twenty yards . . . and he dropped Grady. Didn't put her down, just spread his arms and let go of her limp body. She fell jarringly at his feet. He stepped over her, digging into the pocket of the light jacket he wore. But the wind had got under the jacket, filled and inflated it around him, and he had a little trouble getting his gun out, just enough so that I was able to cross another few feet of ground. Then he had the piece in his hand, a small automatic, and was bringing it to bear, and there were still ten yards between us and I knew he would fire before I covered half that distance.
I threw the tire iron at him.
Did it without thinking, just lifted my arm and threw it. He saw it coming, tried to dodge and shoot me at the same time, only his foot slipped and he overcompensated and stepped right into the path of the iron. The gun went off" . . . wild shot, nowhere near me . . . and the tire iron hit him on the right forearm with enough force that even above the wind I heard the crack of bone, then his thin piercing cry of pain.
The sounds, and the sight of the automatic falling at his feet, filled me with a kind of crazy exultation. In that instant I felt huge, twice his size, a great dark looming presence hurtling toward him at flank speed. Another sound came out of me—laughter, maybe—when I saw him drop to his knees, scrabble for the gun with his left hand. It didn't matter what he did now. All the maneuvering, all the sly stalking was finished; the hunt was over. And the quarry wasn't Grady, it wasn't me, it was him.
Then I was on him. Then he was mine.
I slammed into him while he was on his knees; hit him with my arms and body and my own knees, and bowled him over backward across Grady's inert form. He grunted, then squealed with pain when my weight came down on his broken arm; bucked and kicked his legs to roll me off. I tried to hit him in the face, hurt him, stun him, but the way he was squirming and kicking I couldn't get any leverage. He gouged at my eyes with his good hand, dug the heel of his shoe into my thigh hard enough to put us into a roll. Another squeal, then he was loose and starting to crawl away. Going after the gun, or if he couldn't get to that, the tire iron.
He was scuttling like a crab, digging his left hand into the dead brown earth, his right arm dangling crookedly, when I pitched myself at his backside, got grips on his belt and his ass and hauled him down. Drove a knee into his back . . . but he was writhing, twisting, and I lost my balance and fell off to one side. He pulled free again, set off scuttling again. This time I caught one of his trailing legs, turned it, and he flopped over onto his dead arm, yelling. I got hold of his other arm and the shoulder of his jacket, but I couldn't stop him from blindly rolling a second time . . . right up over the earth wrinkle, feet first onto the steep drop above the gravel pit.
As soon as he felt himself starting to slide, he screwed over onto his belly and dug desperately at the ground with his feet and crippled arm. But he couldn't stop his momentum; what stopped it was me, my two-handed grip on his left arm and shoulder. His weight yanked me up against the wrinkle, but I had my knees down and my shoetips dragging deep into the earth and I was able to hang on to him and keep myself from being pulled up and over.
And there we were, me sprawled across the wrinkle and him hanging at a sharp angle below, both of us belly down with our faces so close I could smell his sweat and the residue of the bacon and eggs he'd had for breakfast.
He was the first to move, working frantically with his feet, searching for enough purchase to propel himself upward. Futile: his feet weren't enough. He needed at least one hand and arm, and he couldn't use either of his. It did not take him long to realize this; to understand that he couldn't save himself, that it was all up to me. I saw the knowledge come into his face, dull the bright glaze of malice in his eyes.
"Pull me up," he said.
Sure, pull him up. The fight was out of him, most of it anyway; and if it wasn't, he was no match for me with that busted arm. Pull him up, clip him once or twice, go get the gun: easy. So hurry
up, do it, before the strain pops one of your shoulder sockets. Pull him up, take him to the law, be done with him. Not my worry anymore. The cops, the courts . . . yeah . . . and a high-powered defense lawyer saying "where's the evidence that my client murdered Mr. Savarese and set fire to his warehouse did you see him do it can you place him at the scene no? well neither can anyone else and as for Ms. Haas how do you know he intended to murder her on that hilltop or anywhere else she was overwrought even suicidal because he broke off their affair and he struck her to prevent her from harming herself picked her up in his arms to save her life not take it and you attacked him I submit you're the one who should be on trial here for aggravated assault. ..." and she wouldn't testify against him, not her . . . and all the things he'd done, to Arlo Haas, to Grady, to Kerry (Kerry!), to me, to any number of others . . . and if he got off scot-free, or even if he went to prison for a few years, he'd go right back to work at his trade and others would be hurt, more victims, unwilling victims, we don't care enough about the victims. . . .
"Pull me up," he said again.
One second. Two. Three. Four.
"Pull me up!"
I let go of him.
I just . . . let go.
Chapter 23
How do you rationalize a thing like that, an act of what society and society's laws consider to be murder? How do you come to terms with it?
The answer to both questions: You don't.
You don't rationalize it, you don't look for justification, you don't lie to yourself. It wasn't an accident; it wasn't the strain that caused you to let go. You did it deliberately, with a certain amount of malice aforethought, because in that moment of reckoning you saw no other choice according to your moral standards, your definition of justice. Society and society's laws don't matter. It isn't between you and society, this thing you did. It's between you and God, and He is the only judge who matters.
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