Росс Макдональд - The Instant Enemy

“He really did. Do you know Davy?”

“I knew him in high school one year. He was a freshman and I was a senior. He wasn’t a delinquent back in those days. He was real little and small, before he got his growth, which is why I didn’t recognize him last night.”

“If you see him again let me know, Fred.” I gave him my card. “You can call my answering service any time, collect.”

He took the card, but the look on his face rejected it. “That isn’t really what I had in mind.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“The way things turn out in life. I mean, here I am pumping gas for a living and Davy’s turned into a criminal.”

Having put himself on record, he turned out the office lights and locked the door. He stayed around, politely, until Langston’s station wagon came in off the highway and pulled up beside his jalopy.

I said good night to Fred and climbed into the wagon. Langston’s sensitive eyes took in my face and head.

“You’ve been hurt. Do you need a doctor?”

“Not now. I’m at least half an hour behind Fleischer already.”

“How did he get into this?”

“He’s been in it from the beginning. You know that. I made the mistake of trying to work with him. That lasted about an hour. He knocked me out and left me on the highway.”

Hank whistled. “Shouldn’t you tell the police?”

“Then we’d never get away. Did you bring your flashlight and pistol?”

“In the dash compartment. I feel like a crimebuster’s apprentice.”

His humor sounded a little forced, but I went along with it. “Let’s go, apprentice.”

Langston turned onto the highway and headed north. He’d caught a few hours’ sleep before I called, and was full of energy and curiosity. He wanted to talk at length about Davy and his psychological problems. I was weary of such palaver. My answers got shorter and shorter. After a while I crawled into the back seat and tried to sleep. But every time a truck went by I woke up with a start.

Where the highway looped inland, we ran into a spatter of rain. Above the mountains to the north, the sky was very black, lit by occasional stabs of lightning. The highway brought us back to the coast. Here the night sky was still clear, and the moon’s white eye peered over the rim of the sea. I recognized the crossroads where we had picked up Sandy the night before.

The thought of the girl was heavy on my mind. She was swinging through all the changes of the moon. The moon was white and shining, the very symbol of purity, but it had its dark side, too, pocked and cold and desolate and hidden. The girl could tum either way, depending on the outcome of our journey.

If we could bring Hackett out alive, she’d have a chance for probation. If Hackett died, her future died with him.

IT WAS AFTER ONE when we got to Rodeo City. It was a seaside motel town strung out between the highway and the shore. We went down a ramp to the main street, which ran parallel to the highway and just below it. Three motorcyclists in bowler hats roared past us down the middle of the street. Girls with blowing hair clung to their backs like succubi.

We found the turning and the sign: CENTERVILLE 20 MIS., and we turned inland. The blacktop road passed rodeo stands which loomed like an ancient amphitheater in the darkness. Gradually it looped up through the foothills, then more abruptly into a mountain pass. Before we reached the summit of the pass we were in a dense cloud. It gathered like rain on the windshield, and slowed us to a crawl.

On the far side of the summit actual rain began to pound on the roof. The windshield and the windows fogged up. I climbed into the front seat and wiped them every few minutes, but it was slow going.

It rained all the way to Centerville. Every now and then a flash of lightning would show the timbered walls of the valley slanting up above us.

Centerville was one of those Western hamlets that hadn’t changed much in two generations. It was a street of poor frame houses, a general store with a gas pump, closed for the night, a schoolhouse with a bell housing on the roof-peak, and a small white steepled church shining wetly in our headlights.

The only lighted building was a lunch counter with a beer sign, beside the general store. The place had its CLOSED sign out, but I could see a white-aproned man swinging a mop inside. I ran through the downpour and knocked on the door.

The aproned man shook his head, and pointed at the CLOSED sign. I knocked some more. After a while he leaned his mop against the bar and came and opened up.

“What is this, anyway?” He was a man past middle age with a foxy weathered face and a talker’s mouth.

I stepped inside. “I’m sorry to bother you. Can you tell me how to get to the Krug ranch?”

“I can tell you, but it doesn’t mean you’ll get there. Buzzard Creek will be running by now.”

“So?”

“The wash crosses the road to the ranch. You can try it if you want to. The other fellow made it, leastwise he hasn’t come back.”

“You mean Jack Fleischer?”

“You know Jack, do you? What’s going on up at the ranch?” He nudged me confidentially. “Has Jack got a woman up there? It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“Could be.”

“It’s a hell of a night for a party, and a hell of a place.”

I called Hank Langston in from the car. The man in the apron introduced himself. His name was Al Simmons, and he made it very clear that he owned the place, as well as the store next door.

Simmons spread out a paper napkin on the bar and drew a crude map for us. The entrance to the ranch was twelve miles north of Centerville. Buzzard Creek ran, when it ran, just this side of the ranch. It rose very quickly in a heavy rain. But we might make it across, since it hadn’t been raining long.

Simmons said as we were leaving: “If you get stuck, I have a tractor that can pull you out. Of course that will cost you money.”

“How much money?” Hank wanted to know.

“Depends on how long it takes. I generally get ten an hour with the tractor. That’s portal to portal. But if your car gets carried away downriver, there’s nothing anybody can do. So don’t let that happen, eh?”

We drove forever up a gravel road that badly needed resurfacing. The rain came hissing down from the sky. The lightning made frightening meaningless signs.

We crossed several small streams which ran through dips in the road. Exactly twelve miles from Centerville by the odometer, we came to the creek. It flowed across the road, sliding brown and steady under the headlights, dappled by falling rain. It looked at least a hundred feet wide.

“Do you think you can make it, Hank?”

“I don’t know how deep it is. I’d hate to lose the car.”

“We might do better wading. I’ll try first.”

I got out my gun and flashlight and put them in the inside breast pockets of my jacket. Then I removed my shoes and socks and trousers and left them in the wagon. When I stepped out in front of the headlights, jacketed but trouser-less, Hank laughed out loud at me.

The water was cold, and the gravel hurt my feet. Still I felt a certain pleasure which went back a long way, to my first infantile wades in Long Beach, holding my father’s hand.

I could have used a hand to hold on to now. Though the water never rose higher than my thighs, it pulled at my legs and made it hard to walk. At the deepest part, in the middle of the stream, I had to brace my legs apart and lean into it. It was like a second force of gravity pulling me at right angles to the first.

When I got beyond the middle I paused for a moment to rest and get my bearings. Peering ahead to the far shore, I could see a grayish bundle lying beside the road. I moved closer. It was a man, or the body of a man, wearing gray clothes. I splashed toward him and got the flashlight out.