The truck lurched into motion, and Guinness drew tight the curtains in front of the windows before lying down on the cot opposite from the one occupied by Pfeifer’s jacket. The truck bounced around too much to make sitting in comfort possible—you got sick to your stomach. You got sick to your stomach anyway; apparently, the shocks were bad. If Vlasov didn’t kill him, he must remember to have the shocks in his own car checked.
He folded his coat into a pillow and closed his eyes, keeping himself entertained by trying to puzzle out which streets they were taking from the way they felt through the mattress.
If the idiot had any sense, they would follow Geary right out to the ocean and stick to the coast road after that. The inland route would have been quicker, but they watched you closer.
It wasn’t very long before he could feel them making the long, sweeping turn around Point Lobos Avenue that passed in front of the Cliff House and then fed into the Great Highway.
Once in a while Guinness was able to tune out the engine noises enough to hear the heavy pounding of the morning high tide against Fleishacker Beach. He had come up there once in the summer to do a little surf casting, and the beach had been littered with small jellyfish. He wouldn’t want to go swimming in those waters; things like that scared the hell out of him.
He tried to sleep, since there wasn’t much of anything else to do, but it was impossible even to close your eyes with the truck lurching over every pothole like some drunk on his way home from a bender. Every bounce made him feel as if his stomach had been pumped full of raw sewage. Objectively, however, on a purely rational level, he knew that he was hungry, and several times he attempted to calculate just how far south they were likely to have gone before his chauffeur would decide it was time to break for lunch; but each time the truck jolted he would lose the thread, and finally he gave it up entirely.
Perhaps it was just as well. Breakfast had been a skimpy business. Doris had been asleep when he got up, and he hadn’t wanted to disturb her. He had dressed as quietly as he could and then checked the kitchen, but apparently she didn’t even own a toaster. So he had had to settle for the inch and a half of orange juice there was left in a plastic pitcher in the refrigerator. He had stood by the sink, drinking his orange juice out of a highball glass, wondering if he would ever see Doris again. It didn’t seem very likely.
Well, hell. Even if he did survive to the end of the week, there wouldn’t be much point to picking up again with Doris. Not for either of them. Aside from an occasional spot of heavy breathing, they really didn’t have much to offer each other; it was strictly a terminal relationship, and they both knew it. He would never be able to love her, not in any sense that could be said to mean anything.
Had he loved Louise? At all? Doris’s mocking question came back to him, picking at his brain the way no doubt she had meant it to. Had he? Yes, he thought perhaps he had. Perhaps more than he had been perfectly aware of while she was alive. Perhaps even more than Kathleen, at least if love had anything to do with serenity. But probably the fine shadings of distinction he was attempting to draw were only functions of differences within himself. Probably he was a more loving person when he didn’t spend a part of his time murdering people he didn’t even know. God knows how he might have felt about Kathleen if his hands had been a little cleaner.
But he had loved Louise. Not that the affection of one Ray Guinness was much worth having, all things considered, but he had loved Louise. He would remember some trifle—the way she would sit talking to him while he had his lunch, with her sleeves rolled up above her elbows and her hair coming down in little wisps over her brow—and he would ache with the sense of what he had lost. He had loved her well enough.
Well, that sort of thing was all over with now, at least for the time being. Perhaps sometime again he might be up to it, but not now. Perhaps sometime.
He hoped not, though. God, he hoped not. His being in love was just too damned profligate of other people’s lives.
He drew the pads of his thumb and middle finger over his eyelids and tried to think about something else.
It was about ten o’clock when they pulled into a Chevron station somewhere just north of Santa Cruz. At least so he gathered from a billboard on the other side of the highway: “Jet Rt 20 &: Hw 1, Santa Cruz, 10 min, Jim Stackman, Datsun.” Guinness climbed out of the back of the truck and visited the men’s room.
When he had finished, he bought a grape soda from a machine by the side of the building and stood drinking it as he watched Pfeifer pay off the attendant with one of his fifty dollar bills. The attendant was the cautious type, turning the bill over two or three times and examining it carefully before he went into the office to make change.
Guinness shook his head ruefully. It was dumb to go around flashing a bill of that size; it made people remember you. Well, there was no point in worrying about it now.
Behind them, at the bottom of a slope covered with long yellowing grass, the Pacific Ocean twinkled in the harsh sunlight like a handful of colored sugar. He turned to look at it, sliding the by now empty bottle into one of the slots of a wooden case that was leaning up against the side of the machine. At that distance you could see the soft, feathery curls of the waves tumbling over one another, but you couldn’t hear them. Guinness shaded his eyes with a hand and searched the water for swimmers, but there didn’t seem to be anyone out yet. Perhaps they waited until the water was warmer; perhaps they swam somewhere else. It couldn’t have looked any stranger to him if he had come there from one of the dead moons of Uranus.
For days now he had experienced this odd sense of being an alien among the familiar, of having suddenly discovered that he and the rest of the human race belonged to different species, even to different worlds. A gas station by the Pacific, the lobby of a hotel, the line of people waiting to board a Greyhound bus into San Francisco. He knew how they all worked, knew the decorums governing behavior, but knew them the way one knows the answer to a riddle. Eventually it would be the wrong answer, or the wrong riddle, and they would find him out. It seemed he was a fugitive from more than just the police.
The attendant brought Pfeifer back his change and counted it out into his hand. Guinness walked back to the truck, slowing as he observed how friend Boyd had taken up a position by the camper door. His fingers were resting tentatively on the handle, and as he watched his passenger’s approach his eyes narrowed into puckered, speculative little slits.
“I don’t want you gettin’ out like that again,” he growled. “You stay the hell in the truck.”
Guinness tried not to let anything register in his face, tried not to let this being threatened and ordered about all the time reach him. After all, what did he really care? It was probably the poor bastard’s only mode of conversation.
“Right. When were you planning to stop for lunch?” Somehow the planes of light shifted slightly in Pfeifer’s face, as if a new possibility had just opened for him. He seemed to make a deliberate effort at unhardening a little. But just a little. “I guess around Monterey sometime. Sure, you hungry?” With his free hand he stroked his chin whiskers. Somehow it wasn’t a reassuring gesture.
“Not now, but I will be by then.” Pfeifer only nodded and gestured toward the inside of the camper. Guinness took the hint, and they were on their way.
Once the truck was back on the highway, Guinness lay down again. He closed his eyes and laughed quietly to himself, thinking how upset old supercautious Boyd would be if he had any idea who might actually be trailing along behind them. Lucky little Boyd, all he was worried about was the police.
And, of course, Vlasov would be back there somewhere. A man who can track you all the way from Italy to California isn’t likely to screw up between San Francisco and Los Angeles, not bloody likely. Not after seven years of finding his way from one shadowy little fragment of information to the next, sifting through them until they all added up to the same thing. Guinness tried to remember every slip he had ever made, everything that mi
ght conceivably have ended up in a KGB dossier somewhere. There couldn’t have been many.
Then of course there was the cap on the bottle—it was obvious enough how Vlasov had managed that.
The name. Once he had had Guinness’s name it would have been easy. In all those years of working for the British there had been two rules upon which Guinness had insisted: he had never allowed himself to be fingerprinted, never once in his life (the only ones on record anywhere would have been those at the police station in Belgrade) and he had never done a caper while traveling under his own name. Byron had made quite sure that the name had remained a secret.
Just to satisfy his own morbid curiosity, Guinness would have given something to have known for how much McKendrick had betrayed him. Probably not very much. Perhaps only the right to broker Vlasov’s defection to the Americans.
“Certainly, if you want him he’s yours. He buggered out on us, you know; so you can kill him with our blessing.”
McKendrick had always hated his guts, even more than he had hated Vlasov’s. And after Florence, Vlasov had probably ceased to be a major direct irritant.
It had to have been McKendrick. Sooner or later Vlasov’s inquiries would have led him in that direction, and from McKendrick’s point of view nothing could have been tidier than the deal Vlasov would have been ready to offer. Selling out Guinness would have been no skin off his ass, and God only knew how many debts to Uncle Sam he must have cleared by offering a prize like Misha Fedorovich Vlasov. It would have been irresistible.
So Vlasov was back there somewhere, bouncing along down Highway 1. So what? Vlasov would keep.
Guinness had by now become attuned to the erratic rhythm of the truck’s bouncing and no longer felt sick to his stomach, which meant, he supposed, that you could get used to anything. It was a thought worth keeping in mind.
After a couple of hours, he could feel the truck slowing down and turning off the road. When it came to a stop, the door opened and Pfeifer stuck his head in.
“We got a Burger King here,” he said, without noticeable enthusiasm. “What ’ll it be?” Guinness ordered a cheeseburger with fries and a 7-Up, if they had one. After a shorter time than one would have imagined possible, the camper door reopened and a white paper bag was set down on the floor. “You want to pay for that?”
Two dollar bills were produced and the door closed again without the subject of Guinness’s change even so much as coming up. The truck was moving again before he had had a chance to open up the bag.
He sat on the cot to eat, bracing both feet up against the edge of the other cot and his back against the wall behind him. Plastic top or no, he didn’t care to set the waxed paper cup down, so he had to keep putting his cheeseburger back into the bag every time he wanted a French fry; it was rather like trying to extract your door key from an inside pocket when both your arms are full of grocery bags. But after all, you couldn’t very well expect table service with a wine steward wearing white gloves.
It wasn’t more than two or three minutes before he began to notice it, and then it came on very fast. His arms, his legs, and his tongue all started at once to feel as if they were doubling in size every five seconds, and he stared down at his cheeseburger and his cup of 7-Up, looking stupidly from one to the other, wondering which of them the creep had doped up, and what he could have used. Have it your way.
Jesus, how could he have been so fucking stupid? It was such an obvious move—he must really be deteriorating in his old age. And by a flake like Boyd.
He tried to stand up, not knowing precisely what he would have done if he had made it. Anyway, he didn’t; his knees buckled under him before he could even straighten up out of his crouch. On the way down he hit his head against the metal edge of one of the cots—he couldn’t seem to decide which one—but the blow didn’t quite manage to put him out. He made one more attempt to get to his feet, then said to hell with it and let unconsciousness come down on him like a broken wall.
16
Guinness was still lying on the camper floor when he woke up. The first thing he discovered was that his hands were tied behind his back, and the second that his right eye wouldn’t open. Apparently, the blood from where the edge of the cot had cut his forehead had run down his temple and formed a crust over his eyelid. With a few seconds of frantic winking, however, he managed to work his lashes free, and finally to make the eye functional again.
The third thing he discovered was that he had a crashing headache, but that wasn’t until he tried to move. He wondered whether it was from the crack on his head or a hangover from the knockout drops Pfeifer had put into his cheeseburger. He was reasonably certain it had been the cheeseburger—all that ketchup and pickle relish would have masked the taste of snail poison. Jesus, his head felt like it was full of rusty tacks.
A little feeling around his wrists with the tips of his fingers suggested that friend Boyd had trussed him up with cotton clothesline. That was a break; the knots would be large enough for him to have a chance of working loose.
Slowly, so as to keep himself from shattering like glass, he worked himself up into a sitting position. The truck was stopped, fortunately, and the door to the camper was open. When he had turned himself around enough to look out through it, he could see Pfeifer sitting on a fallen log about twenty yards distant, looking through what appeared to be the contents of Guinness’s wallet. The guy displayed all the self possession of a park bear leisurely poking around inside an expropriated picnic hamper.
Apparently, they were parked in the middle of a red¬ wood forest somewhere. The only sound was the faint stirring of a breeze in the treetops—there probably wasn’t another soul for five miles in any direction.
“You find what you were looking for?”
Guinness had tried to shout, but it came out as not much more than a reedy whisper. He sat down in the open doorway of the camper, swinging his legs over the edge as he tried to catch some air in his lungs. How far had he come, two yards? It felt like two laps of the Santa Catalina channel. He Was going to have to rest up some before he would be in any shape for coming to terms with Mrs. Pfeifer’s cherubic man child.
As it turned out, though, he had only about half a minute’s grace before Pfeifer crossed the distance between log and camper, took a handful of Guinness’s coat lapel, and jerked him loose from his perch on the doorsill. The ground came up and smacked him painfully in the right shoulder, barely giving him time to develop enough turn to land rolling and with his collarbone intact. No, he and Boyd were just not going to hit it off.
Standing over him, Pfeifer was holding up in his right hand several small slips of paper. Guinness shook his head a couple of times to bring them into focus: They were the cards from his wallet.
“I never hearda nobody that had two social security cards.” As it usually did with his type, having the upper hand had thickened Pfeifer’s hillbilly accent. He was crouched down so that his face was about two feet directly over Guinness’s. “Course, you got two o’ everthing, don’tcha.” He held up the two driver’s licenses, both of which displayed the same photograph, so that Guinness could see them. “Lickweather ’r Guinness—which is it, sport?”
“Linkweather.” Guinness spat out the first syllable as if he didn’t like the taste of it. Certainly he didn’t like the taste of whatever had been in there with the Bermuda onion; it was as if something had crawled inside his mouth to die. He hoped to hell he was reading his guy right.
He was, at least so far. Pfeifer’s mouth opened into a cruel grin, displaying widely spaced teeth as square as bathroom tiles.
“Okay, Mr. Lickweather. Whatever you say.” Once again he took hold of Guinness’s lapel, this time pulling him up into a sitting position before he sat down himself in the now unoccupied camper doorway. “You wanna tell me who y’r runnin’ away from? Come on now, don’t be shy.”
Guinness glanced down quickly at his knees, giving it his best shot at looking cowardly and indecisive. Under the circumsta
nces, it wasn’t really very difficult; there is something profoundly unsettling about trying to provoke a man into kicking hell out of you, especially when you have your hands tied behind you.
“Suppose I decide not to,” he ventured, after what felt like an appropriate delay. As with every illusion, if you want them to think you’re bluffing, the timing is crucial.
His head cocked slightly to one side, Pfeifer made a number of disapproving little clicking sounds with his tongue as he hopped down from the camper. Guinness, who had managed to work himself around to a kneeling position, tried to prepare himself for what was coming.
The kick caught him just a little below the solar plexus, but by tightening his stomach muscles and turning enough aside at the last second, so that the blow glanced off at a slight angle, he contrived to keep at least some of the air under his ribs. It was a good kick, however, and several seconds passed before Guinness stopped making funny little grunting noises and could remember what it felt like to be able to breathe.
God damn the bastard. Damn—damn the son of a bitch.
It would just have to be with a pair of cowboy boots, wouldn’t it? And ones with pointed toes. Never once sometime could it be maybe just tennis shoes or something. Just for variety.
Well, what else was new. His guts might feel as if they had been mashed to pulp back against his spinal column, but otherwise everything was going great.
The Summer Soldier Page 19
