“Take it,” I said. “You have my blessing.”
“Thanks. Anything new on your end?”
“Nothing,” I said. “If anything pops out in Omega before you leave there, phone me.”
He nodded. “I think I’ll just cruise the town and maybe talk with some of my former classmates.”
He left.
CHAPTER 21
HARLEY HAD GONE HOME. Corey was spending his last day on the hunt. The Brotherhood’s soldiers were probably scouting all the terrain between Montevista and Omega. And the man who had the most to win or lose was sitting and stewing. McClune’s soldiers had come up with nothing. Something had to break, he had told me. Maybe…But it was probable my Chicano friends had more dedicated warriors in the field looking for Turbo than the sheriff’s department had. His boys were putting in their eight hours. My friends were on a mission.
Vigilante justice or courtroom law? In my present mood, as the victim, I was rooting for the Brotherhood. It is not easy to be objective when you are the victim. If one of us was doomed to die I preferred that it be Turbo.
Vogel came over to talk with me when he brought Jan home. “What’s your boiling point now?” he asked.
“About two degrees short of erupting.”
“Harris has been complaining again about the activities of your Chicano friends.”
“Tell him to hire some Chicano officers and maybe I’ll listen to him.”
“Brock, as you damned well know, I have complained to him about that. Often!”
“I know. I’ll be okay, Bernie. Did Jan tell you what happened last night?”
He nodded. “One against three—and you unarmed. You could have been killed.”
“It won’t happen again.”
“I’m glad to see you’re getting some sense.”
“Next time I’ll carry the gun.”
He shook his head. “You’ll never learn, will you? I’m tired of arguing with you!” He stared at me for seconds and then turned abruptly and walked to his car.
Jan came out about five minutes later, bringing a bottle of beer for me and a diet Coke for her. She had become concerned about her weight again lately.
She sat in the deck chair next to mine. “Bernie,” she said, “seems to think you have a death wish.”
“I have. But it’s not my death I’m wishing for.”
She said nothing, staring out at the road. A sheriff’s patrol car drove past slowly. The driver waved at us. I waved back.
Jan asked, “How long can they keep up the surveillance?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe I was wrong. Maybe you should have taken your gun with you last night.”
“And maybe not. They were talking about ammunition. That can include more than bullets or shotgun shells. I might have nailed one of them—and been blasted into eternity by one of the other two.”
“Let’s not talk,” she said wearily. “Let’s just sit.”
We were still sitting when Mrs. Casey came out to tell me I had a phonecall. It was a woman, she said.
It was a girl, Fred Taylor’s live-in girl friend.
“How is he doing?” I asked her.
“Good. He’s out of intensive care. He’s going to make it. Al Gertz came to the hospital to visit him last night.”
“I know.”
“Well, that reminded Fred about a place where he and Al and their buddies used to throw some wild parties. He told me to phone Mr. Raleigh. I did but he wasn’t home. Some woman there gave me your name.”
“I’m Corey’s partner. Where is this place?”
It was a deserted small house, she told me, at the end of a dirt road without a name. It led off Ridge Drive right opposite the pumping station at the Alcehama Reservoir.
“Should I have phoned the police?” she asked.
“Not yet. They might have been there already and it could be a wild-goose chase. I’ll check it out.”
“Isn’t that dangerous?”
“Yes. Hold your thumbs.”
“For you and Fred,” she said. “Good luck, Mr. Callahan.”
I told Jan to phone the guard service and tell the night man to come early. I told her to stay in the house and keep the doors locked. I had to see a man.
“We’re eating in half an hour,” she said. “What man?”
“A friend of Corey’s. I should be back before dinner. If I’m not, eat without me.”
“Brock—!”
“Damn it, Jan, I don’t have time to argue. This could be important!”
“And dangerous?”
“No,” I lied.
She stared at me as Vogel had. She took a deep breath and said, “I’ll phone the guard.”
A lie to be followed by a foolish move…But the adrenalin was pumping in me. I had reached the eruption point.
The Alcehama Reservoir wasn’t far from here, supplying the water for Montevista. Ridge Drive forked off our road two blocks below our house. Ten minutes later I turned into the rutted dirt road across from the pumping station and started the uphill climb.
This could be another of Turbo’s ploys. It was possible that Al Gertz had intentionally reminded Taylor of the house at the hospital last night. He and Turbo and Adonis Rey must know by now that Fred Taylor was no longer an ally. The three of them could be waiting for me to show.
That was the reasonable thought. I’d had too many days of anger and frustration behind me to leave room for reasonable thoughts.
The house was a small weathered frame house set in a grove of eucalyptus trees. Two dead orange trees were in the front clearing. There was no Chev pickup truck nor any other vehicle in sight.
I pulled into the grove well short of the house and walked in its cover to the crest of the hill. On the far side, a quarter of a mile below, a small yellow sedan was parked on Solono Road. I couldn’t tell from here if it was occupied.
There were two doors visible now, one on the side of the house, the other the front door. There was a pair of leaning laundry posts in the clearing at the side of the house. There might also be a rear door but the cover was too sparse to risk a look.
A house this small with three outside doors? And then the laundry posts reminded me that the side door could be the laundry room door, just as it had been in the small house I had grown up in in Long Beach.
That could be the safest point of entry. I took out my gun, stayed low, and headed for it.
The door was ajar. I pushed it open. It was a laundry room; I could see the galvanized iron tub. A stack of yellowed newspapers was in one corner, a three-year-old calendar on the far wall.
I waited, my heart pounding, my gun hand trembling, waiting for a sound, almost hoping the house was empty. But only almost. Up the one step and I was in the house.
The door in front of me now must open to a hall or a kitchen. A kitchen in the middle of the house? It had to be a hall. I turned the knob and started to open it.
The hinge creaked. I waited for a sound. None. I opened the door far enough to get a view of the other side. It was a hall. If the creep was in here he could be watching from either end.
A quick low glance revealed that he wasn’t. The kitchen was at one end, a small dining room across the hall, the front door at the other end. The bedrooms must be on this side. The living room archway was visible from here, opening off the hall.
There was the drone of a plane overhead but not a sound in the house. Only a portion of the kitchen was visible but I could now see there was a back door. That gave me three exits—if the need should arise.
I turned toward the kitchen—and a voice from the other end of the hall said, “I’m here, Callahan!”
I crouched and turned and aimed, and almost pulled the trigger. But he was unarmed.
He stood there, grinning at me, big and bald and ugly. He said, “A tough footballer like you? This time you brought your gun, I see.”
“I didn’t come to kill you,” I told him.
“No kidding? Why not?
”
“I plan to take you to the law.”
“How? You going to keep the gun on me with one hand and drive with the other?”
“There’s room for you in my deck. Move it, creep!”
“You gutless bastard!” he said. “I figured you’d want it like I want it, man to man.”
“Move it!” I repeated.
He shook his head—and stepped through the archway to the living room. Damn it! Why hadn’t I pulled the trigger? He probably had an arsenal in there.
“Come on, gutless,” he called. “I don’t have no gun. Come and get me.”
I thought of the dead Jasper and Jane Meredith being nibbled by rats and Fred Taylor now out of intensive care. It must have made me as loony as he was. I moved slowly to the living room archway.
He was standing at the far end of the room, still grinning, what looked like a grenade in his hand.
“Come in, sucker,” he said. “I haven’t pulled the pin. Not yet.”
“Pull it and throw it,” I told him, “and I promise you you’ll die where you stand.”
“And maybe you, too?” He nodded toward the front window nearest to him. “I’ll put the grenade on the sill there. You put the gun on the sill of that window near you. Man to man, gutless?”
I could have shot him twice before he pulled the pin. But would it kill him? And could I kill him? Those were my rational thoughts.
I wasn’t completely rational at the moment. I put my gun on the sill nearest me. He put the grenade on the sill nearest him. He made his move first, his arms dangling, his idiot’s smile still on his scarred face as he came toward me.
Jesus—a wrestler! A groan-and-grapple yoyo. This shouldn’t take long. Even underweight quarterbacks usually gave me more trouble than wrestlers.
When he was within reach his long right arm stretched out for my neck. I knocked it away with my left hand and put my right fist smack into the middle of his face. Blood spurted from his nose and seeped down from his lips.
The bastard didn’t back up. He crouched and kept coming and slammed the top of his bald head into my belly. Weight was one thing he had going for him; I bounced back into the wall. He kept coming, still low.
He was still looking at the floor when I jammed my knee into his face. He went down and grabbed my left leg. I tried to kick him with my right leg; but my balance deserted me. I fell over him, rolled clear, and got back on my feet at the other end of the room.
He kept coming, head down, like a bull at a matador. I waited for his final charge—and made my matador move, stepping clear of his charge. He slammed headfirst into the wall, went down and rolled over.
He wasn’t unconscious, not yet. He had strength enough to mumble, “You win, footballer.”
“Get up when you’re able to,” I said, and walked slowly and painfully, my belly aching, to pick up my gun, my back to him.
I was almost in the archway when I heard the rattle on the floor behind me. That tricky son of a bitch…It was the grenade.
I was through the archway and out the front door before I heard the explosion.
Smoke drifted out from the door but the living room windows had not shattered. Was he still in there and alive? If he was, did he have a weapon? There was none in there I had seen. But how could I be sure?
I waited too long. The smoke was cleared out and the living room empty when I came back into the house.
I ran the length of the hall to the back door in the kitchen and opened it. Far down the slope a man was running, a big man, heading for Solono Road. The yellow sedan was still parked on the side of the road and a man heavy enough to be Adonis Rey was standing next to it.
I had been outwitted by a nitwit. Why hadn’t I phoned McClune after Taylor’s girl friend had given me the message? I sure as hell couldn’t alert him now. What could I tell him? That Turbo’s new transportation was a yellow sedan? The town was loaded with yellow sedans. Could I explain to him how I knew it? Never!
At home, Jan asked, “Did Corey’s friend tell you anything I should know?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Your dinner is in the oven,” she informed me. “Mrs. Casey and I didn’t want to miss ‘Fawlty Towers’ on the tube.”
She went back to the den. I poured a half tumbler of Mrs. Casey’s Irish whiskey and had it with my warmed-over dinner. I have forgotten now what it was.
The man was still out there somewhere, waiting for another chance. Three of the chances had been mine and I’d lost all three. The next move he made could be the fatal one—for me.
Mrs. Casey and Jan were in the living room, playing gin rummy, when the phone rang at nine o’clock. I answered it. It was young Glen Turbo.
His uncle, he told me, had just phoned him and asked him to pick him up in San Valdesto early tomorrow morning. He had promised to pay him fifty dollars for the trip. Glen had assured him he would be there.
“What’s the address?” I asked him.
“He told me to meet him at a Mobil station on the corner of Avon Road and Locust Street. He told me how to get there.”
“I hope you don’t plan to meet him there, Glen.”
“Only if I had a gun, and I don’t. You can meet him there.”
I thanked him and went out to the living room. Mrs. Casey and Jan looked at me expectantly. “Good news?” Jan asked.
“I’m not sure. A lead.”
“You said something about somebody meeting him there. What was that all about?”
“A possible informant,” I told her. “I don’t want to talk about it. I have some thinking to do first.”
I went into the den, remembering the events of the day. I did have some thinking to do. It was decision time.
The station Glen had told me about was a former service station, now deserted. It was less than four blocks down the hill from our house. Charles Turbo could walk from there to here and back. He must have finally decided to make his move, now that the house no longer seemed to be guarded. He’d had other chances to get me, but not here, not at home.
It was possible he had planned all along to get me at home. And maybe Jan, too? He had left town only because the heat was on here. He knew where I was staying in Santa Monica, but not in which room. The rest of the time Harley and I were there we had been constantly on the move, doubtful targets.
And here? I would be the victim—but Jan and Mrs. Casey could be witnesses. Would he let them live to identify him? No.
Decision time…
I could phone McClune and his boys could take over. If Turbo was armed and made the mistake of resisting arrest, if he decided to play shoot-it-out with the deputies, the threat to me would be diminished. They would finally have a case they could take into court and he would wind up where he belonged—in jail. Or dead.
If his irrational brain turned rational enough to accept the arrest, what would the prosecutor have? Car theft? That should get him a light sentence. They had no previous record on the man.
I could phone Ricardo Cortez and let the Brotherhood wreak their vengeance or take my trusty Colt down to the service station and play cowboy. That last could put me in jail or in my grave. The first would be a final solution to my problem. The soldiers of Cortez don’t take prisoners.
It seemed clear to me that they were my best hope. But why should they risk their lives for me? This was my war, not theirs. To Sheriff McClune it would be another night of mayhem where some of his soldiers could be killed. From the conversation I had overheard between Gertz and Turbo, they were into the heavy ammo now.
I went out the back door and told the guard what I had learned tonight and what I feared. He said, “I’ll watch the back and this side of the house. You can take the front and the other side.”
“I’m not staying,” I told him. “Can you get another man or two up here quickly?”
“I can have ’em here in five minutes. I have a phone in the car.”
“Good. But don’t use your guns unless you have to.”
“I know what you mean,” he said. “I learned that the hard way the first year I was with the agency. I was lucky. I had a good lawyer. I suppose you’re going to take the women with you?”
I shook my head. “This is personal.”
He was silent for seconds, staring at me. “I’ll forget you ever said that. One man or two?”
“Two,” I said.
He went to his car to phone. I went into the house to get my gun. In the living room I told Jan what young Glen had told me—but without telling her Glen was my informant. I also told her I had sent for two more guards.
“I’ll be outside,” I told her. “The more men the better. Somebody has to watch the back of the house.”
“Mrs. Casey has gone to her room,” she said. “I’ll go up and sit with her. Aren’t you going to phone the sheriff?”
“The guard will handle that. I’ll come in when the deputies get here.”
“Brock, you be careful!”
“Of course!”
I waited until the other guards came before I started walking down the hill to the Mobil station. The night was dark; I brought a flashlight.
What would it be this time with that slob, another grenade or a purse-size revolver? Why was I assuming he would be there? He could be watching our house right now or on his way to the station. He could be anywhere. He had told his nephew to pick him up early in the morning.
I knew the layout of the station; I had been a customer here before the owner had retired. There were two doors to the toilet, one opening into the garage, the other one to the outside.
The door that led to the office was on the side of the building facing the street, and there was occasional traffic tonight. I didn’t want to be seen by any passing motorist.
When the road was clear I tried the office door. It was locked. I went back behind the building again before any headlights showed on the street.
The outside toilet door was not locked. That had to mean he was in here somewhere. But where? I opened the door slowly. A brief glow of my flashlight revealed that the toilet was vacant. I went in, gun ready, light out, and groped for the door to the garage. It was not locked.
Cat and Mouse Page 15
